Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures
Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures
Mark Fisher, ed. by Matt Colquhoun
Repeater, 2021
9781913462482
Mark Fisher is a very generational thinker. Not just in the sense that he was so thoroughly engulfed in the pop culture of the ‘80s – as Tariq Goddard recalls, Fisher never really got over Japan’s Top of the Pops performance of ‘Ghosts’ – but in his hopes for the next generation after him. ‘What I'm hoping will happen in the next decade’, Fisher says in an interview with Rowan Wilson, ‘is that a new kind of theory will develop that emerges from people who have been deep-cooked in post-Fordist capitalism, who take cyberspace for granted and who lack nostalgia for the exhausted paradigms of the old left.’ And so it is in these lecturers, where he is fulfilling that pedagogical role among his students, that we can see him in his element; we see students engaging with Fisher directly in the classroom, along with students engaging with one another. But it is also here in this academic setting where Fisher engages more directly with previous thinkers than he does in Capitalist Realism, Ghosts of My Life, or his blog, K-Punk – with Herbert Marcuse, Georg Lukacs, and Francois Lyotard.
The lectures themselves are cut short as Fisher’s suicide came halfway through the course on the 13th of January 2017. Matt Colquhoun, a former student of Fisher’s who transcribed the lectures and introduces them in this book, describes the situation in the appendices:
Each of the five ‘Postcapitalist Desire’ lectures had been held first thing on a Monday morning at 9am. The sixth lecture never took place but, after news of Fisher’s death on Friday the 13th spread throughout the university over the weekend, many students chose to show up in his classroom anyway on the morning of 16th January 2017.
A class of twenty doubled, perhaps trebled, in size as faces familiar and unfamiliar, from both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, gathered together on an abjectly miserable Monday morning, waiting for Fisher himself to walk through the door and reveal his hoax. After some time spent in silence, an impromptu listening session began instead.
This book, Colquhoun writes of Postcapitalist Desire, is an attempt to piece together the ‘breadcrumbs’ that perhaps would have made up Fisher’s unfinished project, Acid Communism. And in their introduction, Colquhoun follows on from their own project – Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher – which was an attempt both to work through their own process of mourning Fisher and to move beyond an image of Fisher that reduced him to the catchphrase ‘capitalist realism’, to instead present him as a thinker of hauntology, left accelerationism, and consciousness raising.
In Fisher’s first lecture, he introduces the students to the 1984 Apple Super Bowl advert and a 1984 Levi’s advert that uses London as a stand-in for the Soviet Union in which a pair of jeans are smuggled through security. Each advert sets up the false dichotomy between a monolithic totalitarian society and a dynamic individualism embodied by desire itself. None of his students were alive to remember the Soviet Union, Fisher mentions as an aside. ‘Here he is in his dreary Soviet world. It’s all black and white. Look at his miserable flat that he’s going to. Oh, but look! (Laughter.) His life is redeemed because he’s managed to smuggle the Levi’s into the Soviet Union.’ And while Fisher immediately recognises the absurdity of this, he goes on to say that these adverts were more than prophetic – they were hyperstitional. Borrowing from his earlier lexicon native to the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, that contingent led by Nick Land that Fisher himself was a part of, hyperstition is the active creation of reality which outmodes both the categories of fiction and nonfiction. Yet this is a hyperstition that Fisher does not come up against but immediately accepts. ‘So, again, what is this pointing to?’ he asks of the TV adverts. ‘The fact that it’s not only that the Soviet bloc was repressive – politically repressive – it also inhibits desire and blocks desire.’ Capitalism recognises this, says Fisher, in a way that communism doesn’t.
Although Fisher recognises the hyperstitious elements of capitalism, in that it creates its own desire, this desire immediately supplants any concrete notions of politics themselves – becoming a failed substitute that entails a tailism in its attempt to speculate the desires of its caricatures. Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy becomes essential for Fisher here. We read that, supposedly, ‘the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they … enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it.’ Fisher notes that this could be an epigraph for the course. As his students struggle with the text, he reassures them that it isn't so much the text itself which is important to the course but introducing a set of arguments around desire. ‘What do we do about that? Do we reject it? Do we moralise about it? Or not?’ Lyotard is firmly of the position that it shouldn't be rejected, Fisher notes, but has no firm alternative. Fisher follows this position.
In Fisher’s discussion of Lukacs, particularly in which he references History and Class Consciousness directly, he actually comes closest to recognising the actual conditions that we find ourselves in today, how they developed, and the immediate steps necessary to move forward. Prior to the novelty of psychedelics, which he introduces later, he comes much closer to questions of where the working class found itself amid the ebbs and flows of class consciousness. In discussing the shift away from ‘Fordist’ capitalism, away from the ostensibly rigorous, nine-to-five workday, away from manufacturing, Fisher notes that this was desirable for the bourgeoisie. ‘[C]lass consciousness was strong! It was strong. It was manifest. People understood themselves in those terms. They had made gains – significant gains. Capital wanted a way of overturning that.’ He is even able to reflect on the possibility of class consciousness and its function in his own life, rather than through any number of pop-culture artefacts in his previous work.
When people have common experiences and can talk about them, then you’ve got the potential for developing consciousness very quickly. That’s why workers aren’t allowed to talk to one another! One place where I worked, when I worked in Further Education, the Head of Human Resources, who was exasperated by the development of some sort of class consciousness amongst their teachers, was like, ‘Well, you can’t just sit in the pub and talk to each other!’ (Laughter.) She actually said that! What do you mean?! It was like the usually unspoken rule – you’re not supposed to do that. You can go to a pub and just talk rubbish, but you can’t go to a pub and talk about the conditions of your work together. Don’t do that. You can’t do that.
Class consciousness was strong, yet outmoded by the hyperstitious culture industry and its long legs as once again Fisher fails to interrogate this. Although this is some time after Fisher’s previous work, seven years after Capitalist Realism, in which we find some development in Fisher’s politics such as his more explicitly political work with Plan C, we nevertheless come up against the same issues once this is incorporated into his own project. On why he’s used the term ‘Postcapitalism’ at all, as opposed to socialism or communism, he says ‘first of all, it’s not tainted by association with past failed and oppressive projects.’ This term has a ‘neutrality’ absent with communism and socialism. ‘Although this is partly generational, I think’, he notes. ‘The word “communism” has lots of negative associations for people of my age and older.’ Postcapitalism also ‘implies victory’, that there’s something beyond capitalism that can be only attained by going through capitalism.
It’s not just opposed to capitalism – it is what will happen when capitalism has ended. It starts from where we are. It’s not some entirely separate space. … The concept of postcapitalism is something developed out of capitalism. It develops from capitalism and moves beyond capitalism. Therefore, we’re not required to image a sheer alterity, a pure outside.
Yet, ever since communism’s first formal conceptions in Marx, it was the case that capitalism established its own internal contradictions that would be its gravedigger. And the necessity of capitalism as an essential stage was a core question for both the revolutions of Russia and China. The only categorical difference from this use of postcapitalism rather than either socialism or communism is its separation from both its historical struggle and the struggle of actually existing socialism against imperialism. And as the Right are labelling anything they even vaguely dislike as Marxist and communist, how long will this separation work for? How is this not a concession to the Right at the expense of internationalism and solidarity? In fact, even solidarity itself becomes tainted. Fisher suggests ‘fellowship’ instead.
In looking back to the psychedelic counterculture of the sixties and seventies as attempts that tried to live communally and collectively, as attempts to raise consciousness not just through class but by gender and race, Fisher sees this as the period in time in which the prospect of revolution and the possibility of living differently was most immediate. But not because the Black Panther Party organised and armed members of the working class and lumpenproletariat, the leaders of which were assassinated and exiled one by one, but because of the ‘Psychedelic consciousness plus class consciousness’ of The Beatles and their ostensibly anti-work music. ‘That’s what capital feared in the late Sixties, early Seventies: what if the working class become hippies?’ And so you had on the one side, says Fisher, the counterculture claiming that organised labour wasn’t necessary, and on the other organised labour saying desire is disruptive and will ‘undermine the unity and resolute will and the organisational capacity of the existing labour institutions.’ Fisher then attempts to find a neat synthesis of these two elements, between desire and class consciousness. But when class consciousness cannot remain a question of removing what is contingent to view the structure of history as one of contradictions between classes, and instead attempts to incorporate immediate desire into it, this is only ever at the expense of the class consciousness itself that exposes cultural products as exactly that – products. That any object of desire is absent from the theoretical discussions in these lectures is no coincidence; any object of today’s culture industry cannot justify the gravity granted to it by Freud’s death drive. Desire under capitalism today has become increasingly exposed as superficial and infantile, hijacked by social media and identical to addiction itself.
Fisher asks, ‘Is it possible to retain some of the libidinal, technological infrastructure of capital and move beyond capital?’ This has become a central question that shaped his own thinking, he mentions to his students. But from the very beginning this is an attempt to bargain with capitalism and its wrong desires. Theodor W. Adorno is only mentioned offhandedly, in a dismissive air, when Fisher remarks that Adorno does not offer a vision of life without capitalist domination – instead choosing to focus on the liberatory elements of the unconscious found in Marcuse. Yet Adorno’s suspicion of desire is its most determinate critique, particularly in the scepticism of its function in capitalism and the culture industry. If the unconscious is not confronted, not dismissed outright but laboured against, Adorno writes, ‘one gratifies the unconscious by mechanically reproducing it, then the unconscious degenerates into mere ideology in the service of conscious objectives.’ (Adorno, Theodor W. Critical Methods. p. 56) And within the advanced culture industry that we find ourselves in today, these conscious objectives have never been more acute or sinister. What is necessary for Fisher and for Colquhoun is the creation of counterculture, a counterlibido, to ‘smuggle’ radical ideas into popular culture. But when Fisher refers to two television adverts as hyperstitious moments that produce desire, to even attempt to incorporate this desire into class consciousness is to move in terms not just set by capitalism but the culture industry itself. Fisher laughs at the ridiculousness that it was an objection to communism that it was bleak but immediately takes it up as a rallying cry. But what is it to smuggle radical ideas into popular culture against Disney and its conscious coupling with the US military? What does counterlibido do against the National Endowment for Democracy? Hyperstition against Raytheon?