Postcapitalist Desire

Definition

Postcapitalist desire is Mark Fisher's project of re-imagining and re-building desire beyond capitalism — the necessary affirmative complement to his diagnosis of capitalist realism. The central question is: "To what extent is our desire for postcapitalism always-already captured and neutralised by capitalism itself?" Fisher argues that the "libidinal attractions of consumer capitalism need to be met with a counterlibido, not simply an anti-libidinal dampening." The project draws on the failed counterculture's "dormant function" of psychedelia (making manifest what is in the mind), consciousness-raising as the construction of a "we" (class consciousness plus minoritarian struggle), and a "left-accelerationism" that accelerates history rather than crisis — against both primitivist refusal and Landian accelerationist capitulation.

Key Thinkers

• Mark Fisher — developed the concept in his final lecture series (2016–17), the workshop for his unfinished Acid Communism.
• (Related, not yet paged: Jean-François Lyotard — the libidinal economy and the enjoyment found in one's own oppression; György Lukács — acceleration of history through relating concretely to contradictions.)

Related Concepts

• Capitalist Realism — the closure of the political imaginary that postcapitalist desire must break through.
• Ideology — the mechanism that captures desire for capitalism; consciousness-raising as its undoing.
• Noopolitics — the governance of attention and affect that postcapitalist desire contests.
• Semiocapitalism — the semiotic-economic regime that produces and captures desire.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures
• Capitalist Realism (Fisher 2006)
• The Everyday as the Site of Postcapitalist Desire — the synthesis connecting postcapitalist desire to everyday-life theory.

Open Questions

• Can a "counterlibido" be constructed without falling into the same capture mechanisms it opposes — given Fisher's own admission that desire for postcapitalism is "always-already captured"?
• How does Fisher's project relate to Lazzarato's "indebted man" — is postcapitalist desire compatible with the passive subjection of debt, or does it presuppose a subject already capable of active re-desiring?