Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures

Author: Mark Fisher (edited and with an introduction by Matt Colquhoun)
Year: 2020 (Repeater Books)
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/fisher-2020-postcapitalist-desire.md

Summary

Fisher's final Goldsmiths lecture series ("Postcapitalist Desire," 2016–17), the workshop for his unfinished Acid Communism, explores the "nefarious and entangled relationship between desire and capitalism" — the extent to which our desire for a postcapitalist future has been "already-always captured and neutralised by capitalism." Rejecting both primitivist refusal and Landian accelerationist capitulation, Fisher argues that the "libidinal attractions of consumer capitalism need to be met with a counterlibido, not simply an anti-libidinal dampening," and develops concepts of psychedelic reason, consciousness-raising / subjugated group consciousness, and a left-accelerationism that accelerates history rather than crisis.

Key Claims

• Postcapitalist desire: the question posed by Mensch's Starbucks/Occupy jibe is taken seriously: "To what extent is our desire for postcapitalism always-already captured and neutralised by capitalism itself?" The consumer-capitalist libido must be met with "a counterlibido, not simply an anti-libidinal dampening."
• The failed counterculture and psychedelic reason: Fisher re-evaluates the 1960s–70s counterculture as a "prefiguration"; its "dormant function" of psychedelia — making manifest what is in the mind (Marx's Spinozist "change the world") — matters more than its aesthetics. Spinozist "psydelhic reason" as emotional engineering against the "capitalist ego."
• Consciousness-raising / group consciousness: "consciousness of one's material existence is ... not immediately self-evident. It must be constructed." "Subjugated group consciousness" (class plus minoritarian struggle) "creates a new subject — a we." The "petit bourgeoisie which dominates the academy and the culture industry" deflects class as "a breach of etiquette."
• Libidinal economy and the desire for subordination: following Lyotard, Fisher takes seriously the enjoyment found in one's own oppression ("one can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital") while insisting on the "resources of negativity" ("the No of hatred, anger and frustration") the left must contact.
• Accelerationism as acceleration of history: against both the cliché ("things have to get worse") and reactionary capture, Fisher's "left-accelerationism" accelerates "the process of history" (Lukács: to disrupt reified structure by relating concretely to contradictions). Hauntological "stuckness" / "frenzied stasis" stalls action.
• Class and hauntology: "the disarticulation of class from almost all cultural and political discourses" defined the late 20th century; Britpop and the YBAs as "an atrocity exhibition" of "neoliberal spectres and zombies." The establishment feared "the working class becoming hippies."

Connections

Concepts: Postcapitalist Desire · Capitalist Realism · Ideology · Noopolitics
Authors: Mark Fisher
Debates: Critical vs. Projective
Related source notes: Capitalist Realism (Fisher 2006)

Direct Quotes

"[T]he libidinal attractions of consumer capitalism [need] to be met with a counterlibido, not simply an anti-libidinal dampening."

"[C]onsciousness-raising is productive. It creates a new subject — a we that is both the agent of struggle and what is struggled for."

"Not far beneath Lyotard's 'desire-drunk yes', lies the No of hatred, anger and frustration ... These are the resources of negativity that I believe the left must make contact with again."

"[W]hat must be accelerated is the process of history."

Open Questions

• Can a "postcapitalist desire" (a positive, counter-libidinal project) be articulated for the built environment, or does architecture remain bound to the business ontology Fisher critiques in Capitalist Realism?