The Spectre of a World that Could Be Free: On Acid Communism (Fisher's Ghosts, part 6)

The book that Mark Fisher was working on at the time of his death was to be entitled Acid Communism. Its introduction is available in the K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher. There has been a lot of speculation about this subject since his passing, especially in conjunction with the last course that Fisher was going to teach on “Post-Capitalist Desire.”

The general theory is that Acid Communism was his name for a future political project, marrying the psychedelia of the 1960s to Marxist thinking, bridging the divide between two strands of leftism, a divide that (in America) is traced to the division between Noam Chomsky and Terrance McKenna. In the introduction, Fisher calls this the “spectre of a world that could be free” and equates it with the Italian Autonomists of the 1970s and the failed program of the “New Left”.

I’m in the minority on this one: I don’t think that Fisher was talking about a program-to-come. I think he was describing the shadow of something that appeared for a time and has since disappeared. Acid Communism, in my reading, is an always-already (or never-not-yet) hauntological figure, a prophetic mode that points towards something still over the horizon. The idea here is that Capitalist Realism set up a problem, and with Ghosts of my Life and The Weird and the Eerie, he is laying out tools to get at the solution. Capitalist Realism is the diagnosis, Acid Communism is the treatment.

My issue is that I’m not sure that one book could serve as a treatment.

One of the best Hauntological Works, in my opinion, is William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops: old tapes destroyed in the recording process, transformed into digital ghosts, and paired with images Basinski took on 9/11 from the roof of his studio. It is an effective and affective pairing, evoking the sense of what Hauntology is. Pitchfork has more.

In my reading, Acid Communism is a strand of Popular Modernism, something that in Fisher’s thinking is a “wide and interconnected network . . . a kind of infrastructure for disseminating and distributing theory and culture” (“Hauntology, Nostalgia and Lost Futures: interviewed by Valerio Mannuci and Valerio Mattioli for Nero”). The reason I think this is that I’m not sure that the middle two books — Ghosts of my Life and The Weird and the Eerie — are 100% separate from the diagnosis. In my read, Hauntology isn’t about the aesthetics of abandoned futures – it’s about the program put forward by abandoned futures. It’s about looking at what they were trying to do and figuring out how to get to the same place: keeping the goal but changing the means.

The root of my disagreement comes from The Weird and the Eerie (previously mentioned here), which is supposedly a book on literary criticism, but I was an English Major – literary criticism can have political and sociological implications that are necessary to consider. Most notably, there is a passage that struck me, two paragraphs from the end of the introduction to this work:

So far, we are still left with the impression that the weird and the eerie have primarily to do with what is distressing or terrifying. So let us end these preliminary remarks by pointing to examples of the weird and the eerie that produce a different set of affects. Modernist and experimental work often strikes us as weird when we first encounter it. The sense of wrongness associated with the weird — the conviction that this does not belong—is often a sign that we are in the presence of the new. The weird here is a signal that the concepts and frameworks which we have previously employed are now obsolete. If the encounter with the strange here is not straightforwardly pleasurable (the pleasurable would always refer to previous forms of satisfaction), it is not simply unpleasant either: there is an enjoyment in seeing the familiar and the conventional becoming outmoded — an enjoyment which, in its mixture of pleasure and pain, has something in common with what Lacan called jouissance.

The eerie also entails a disengagement from our current attachments. But, with the eerie, this disengagement does not usually have the quality of shock that is typically a feature of the weird. The serenity that is often associated with the eerie — think of the phrase eerie calm — has to do with detachment from the urgencies of the everyday. The perspective of the eerie can give us access to the forces which govern mundane reality but which are ordinarily obscured, just as it can give us access to spaces beyond mundane reality altogether. It is this release from the mundane, this escape from the confines of what is ordinarily taken for reality, which goes some way to account for the peculiar appeal that the eerie possesses.

Current cover image for the Facebook group “Acid Communism”.

This suggests to me that something is being missed in the popular conception of Acid Communism. While it is possible that Fisher was completely compartmentalized, he passed away as this book was coming to press, he was working on Acid Communism at the same time, working on the Post-Capitalist Desire unit. I feel the three of them are connected, and I’m not sure that “Acid Communism” is the best name for the complex of the three. I’m not sure we’ll ever know what it all fits together under.

All of this being said, I’m not against the general theory of Acid Communism: if it can bring us to a better place, I’m all for it. Hell, if it can bring us to a better place, I’m all for it. I’ll even come along if it’s just a different place.

But I think it’s important for Acid-Communism-as-political-program to be thought of as separate from Acid-Communism-as-popular-modernism. And I think that the best thing that an Acid-Communism-as-political-program could do – in addition to agitating for the poor and for the environment – is try to reestablish a true popular modernism, a system or just a general means that supports working-class, disenfranchised, and extra-institutional artists, commentators, and thinkers of diverse perspectives.

So, you might ask, what is Acid Communism?

There’s a Medium piece by that exact title: “What is Acid Communism” by Stuart Mills. In it, Mills interprets Fisher’s words, arguing that that:

Acid communism is about ways of imagining a world after capitalist realism, and for Fisher, one of the ways to escape this reality is psychoactive drugs. The programme of acid communism is not to condone psychoactive drug use, but as an example this activity captures the philosophy of acid communism excellently.

To imagine new futures, we have to find ways to break out of our present myopia. Fisher’s acid communism is unique primarily for placing this goal above all others. For example, Marx’s call for class consciousness is a very acid communist idea, but the means of achieving class consciousness (the critiques and contradictions of capital) dominated much of Marx’s contribution. If Fisher had had more time, perhaps this would have been the fate of acid communism too, attempting to imagine new ways of achieving acidic or post-capitalist realist thought.

Instead, acid communism leaves us with a simple message. The future has been cancelled because we are unable to imagine anything other than the present. To invent the future, to escape our myopia, we have to go beyond the present bounds of our imagination. This is acid communism.

Much like the Taoist assertion that “the way that can be spoken of is not the way” — there is a longstanding idea that a concept that can be described has been fenced in and becomes powerless. As someone who describes things on the internet (here) and in work (at a college) I find this assertion suspect, but still interesting.

This, I feel, is just a contrarian restatement of the ideas of Capitalist Realism. We are told that there is no alternative to Capital, and Acid Communism is just “what if there is, though?”

It’s a phrase that evokes a mood, suggests a particular affective connection. This exact difficulty of pinning the damned thing down is what draws people to it. Let’s see what someone else has to say. Writing for Krisis, Matt Colquhoun writes that:

In truth, Acid Communism resists definition. The word ‘acid’ in particular, by invoking industrial chemicals, psychedelics and various sub-genres of dance music, is promiscuous. With so many uses and instantiations in various contexts, it is as difficult to cleanly define as ‘communism’ is in the 21st century. This textual promiscuity is no doubt what attracted Fisher to the phrase, but this has not stopped recent attempts to concretely define it in his absence.

In short, Acid Communism is not a definite program, it is instead a polysemous void in language, a point to which other ideas can attach, other structures can root and form and branch off into the ether. The closest thing to an actual definition that Colquhoun references is the statement that “Acid Communism is a project beyond the pleasure principle. It is not only a project for the recuperation of the counterculture’s lost potentials but also the expression of a desire for an experimental (rather than prescriptively utopian) leftist politics.

Let’s look to the point of origin. Did Mark Fisher ever say what Acid Communism was? The introduction to the book of that title exists, in preliminary form. It is available if you look hard enough.

In a typically Fisherian style, the introduction is clear without ever coming out and saying that Acid Communism is one particular thing. The closest thing is the pair of paragraphs which read

Acid Communism is the name I have given to this spectre. The concept of acid communism is a provocation and a promise. It is a joke of sorts, but one with very serious purpose. It points to something that, at one point, seemed inevitable, but which now appears impossible: the convergence of class consciousness, socialist-feminist consciousness-raising and psychedelic consciousness, the fusion of new social movements with a communist project, an unprecedented aestheticisation of every day life.

Acid communism both refers to actual historical developments and to a virtual confluence that has not yet come together in actuality. Potentials exert influence without being actualised. Actual social formations are shaped by the potential formations whose actualisation they seek to impede. The impress of ‘a world which could be free’ can be detected in the very structures of a capitalist realist world which makes freedom impossible.

He references “Psychedelic Shack” by the temptations in his explanation, voicing that it is a place of both consciousness-expansion and community.

So it’s a hauntological project, imagining the exact opposite sort of world to the one which we live in. A world where the consciousness revolution led to collective liberation instead of social atomisation, where the Keynesian impulse towards shorter work days accelerated until all labor was dead labor, and living people were freed from toil, and where sex and gender identity no longer painted a target on anyone.

He saw it as a call for “a new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving.”

I reiterate, while I’m a fan of the Acid-Communist project, I don’t think Fisher intended it as such. I think he was using it as a name for a tendency that was beginning to emerge in the 1970s and competed with neoliberalism, before being forced underground – if we don’t consider it to have been strangled in the cradle. While Acid Communism called for these things, it called for them decades before I was born: in Bologna in 1977, when a “Mass Avant-Garde” began to emerge, and there was discourse between labor, art, and philosophy

But I’m not sure that theory will make Acid Communism clear. Oh, it may provide the bones, but if we view Acid Communism or something like it as a thing-to-come, let’s take a drunkard’s walk through some things that might contribute.

From Disco Elysium: The in-game symbol for the Revacholian Communards.

On this blog I’ve waxed rhapsodic about the video game Disco Elysium several times, and I think that this game can one view on the (re)emerging tendency of Acid Communism. I don’t necessarily think that its creators, Studio ZA/UM are familiar with the work of Mark Fisher, but they’re roughly analogous to myself in age and live in a post-soviet state. I don’t think that they need an introduction to Capitalist Realism, because they’ve seen it take hold in their native Estonia, strangling local thinking like kudzu.

(Note: spoilers for Disco Elysium follow.)

I recently listened to an episode of the podcast Waypoint Radio which dealt with this game, and I’m going to paraphrase a discussion from it and use it as a springboard into something else.

Throughout the game, the central character, Harry, is plagued by nightmares related to the contents of his lost memory. Immediately prior to the game he went on a self-destructive bender instead of inspecting the dead body he was brought in to investigate. According to one character, deep in the bender, before he engaged in the most self-destructive behavior, he cried out that he “didn’t want to be this kind of animal, anymore.”

Despite her name’s meaning, the portraits of Dolores Dei always have a somewhat self-satisfied air — and visible lungs, but that’s another conversation altogether.

This was spurred on by memories of his fiance leaving him, a woman described in some places as a beautiful, middle-class woman (the game is firm on the middle-class element of her identity.) She looked like a historical figure, Dolores Dei (“Sorrow of God” in Latin, but there is no Rome in Disco Elysium,) who was a sort of Saint-like figure for a secular religion. A humanist religion.

These nightmares are memories leaking back into Harry’s mind, warped by dream-logic. The last of them is his ex-fiance reappearing in the guise of a stained-glass image of Dolores Dei, and reenacting her leaving him. Harry’s behavior is a typical sad-bastard effort to try to get her to stay.

Now, here’s the thing: Harry is a communist. Oh, sure, you can play it other ways, but it’s very easy to fall into the Communist character type and the makers of the game quoted Marx and Engels in an acceptance speech for an award. Fascists and racists are depicted as laughable twits and dangerous assholes; libertarians are depicted as rapacious and disingenuous. The Moralists (the achievement associated with them is called “World’s Most Laughable Centrist”) are represented by the Sunday Friend, who utterly lacks all imagination, and sexually exploits an impoverished young art student. The Communists are depicted as morally gray. Harry is a Marxist. Or “Mazovian” in the parlance of the game.

What this dream depicts is the breakup between Marxism and middle-class humanism. It depicts middle-class humanism abandoning the Utopian dreams of communism. It hides this depiction behind a man being unable to let a woman go. What we are crying out for him to do – let her go – is what the writers of the game want us to think about the split between Marxism and old-school humanism.

What we need, instead, is a new species of Marxist Humanism, something that focuses on feeding the body and mind (or soul, because I’m not sure that you necessarily need to be an atheist to give that particular answer on the ownership of the means of production.) A true bread-and-roses sort of socialism.

Which I think is what Acid Communism can and should be, should you think of it as a political project.

This turn, towards combining the psychedelic and the materialist strands of leftism, are important, but it leaves out other tendencies, and I think that a true, complete Acid Communism (if “completeness” is the goal,) or whatever hauntologically-lost future thing Fisher would have strove towards had he lived longer, would need to draw in those other strands.

In addition to being revolutionary, Afrofuturism is also one of the more interesting movements in the arts at the moment.

For one example, let’s dig back into the early 70s, a bit before the Mass Avant-Garde in Bologna, and let’s look at Space is the Place by Sun Ra. I asked some people if Fisher ever wrote on this film, and it doesn’t appear that he did – though Kodwo Eshun has, writing a review entitled “Cosmic Overdrive” for Frieze magazine. I watched the film last weekend, and think I may have to again at some point to understand it. My own introduction came from the Weird Studies podcast, which recently released an episode on the movie (I also encountered a first pressing of the soundtrack, going for $80 at a local record store, which put a rock in my shoe about actually watching it.)

The film follows Sun Ra’s attempt to convince black Americans to travel to another world he has found, to free them from the grip of white America. The tension between the races is presented in Gnostic and Kabbalistic terms: slavery, Jim Crow, the tense and unequal post-Jim Crow era of race relations, are all depicted as an inversion of the proper order.

The nemesis in this game is the Overseer, a large, confident man dressed in a white pimp’s outfit. The conflict between Ra and the Overseer is fundamentally a gnostic one. The Overseer wants to keep black people enslaved (or, at the very least, imprisoned in the real,) while Ra wishes to release them. They play a card game with Tarot cards, and the Overseer holds the World (everything) and the Chariot (an unstoppable force, the strength to defend it.) Ra, however, has Judgment – which may mean the Last Judgment, the apocalyptic judgment at the end of time, but can also be read as representing the faculty of Judgment.

Self-Liberation requires that the one to be liberated reclaim the faculty of judgment, of discernment, of deciding-for-oneself. It requires that they decide for themselves what must be done. This, I feel, is one of the more powerful early images in the film.

Eshun writes:

What holds everything together is Ra himself. His dreamy yet determined personality gives the movie its distinctive mood of mysticism and militancy, riddle and confrontation. The pivotal scene that epitomizes his dialectics of liberation is set in an Oakland youth centre. Posters of Angela Davis and Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver are on the wall; the kids are unimpressed with Ra's silver striped shoes and want to know if he's 'for real.' His answer stops them in their tracks; you see their bravado give way to the pain of recognition. 'How do you know I'm real?' Ra responds to their taunts. 'I'm not real. I'm just like you. You don't exist, in this society. If you did, your people wouldn't be seeking equal rights. You're not real; if you were, you'd have some status among the nations of this world. So we're both myths. I do not come to you as reality. I come to you as myth, because that's what black people are: myths.’

I do not wish to appropriate Ra’s words. I wish to take a page from his book. But there are few more powerful things that Ra’s gentle trickster smile as he says “I’m not real. Just like you.” Perhaps the proper response to Capitalist Realism is a sort of collective self-mythologization, of abandoning the pretense of realism. This is a turn towards the spiritual.

“We Are the Halluci Nation” — A Tribe Called Red feat. John Trudell

For another example, and one that touches upon the spiritual as well, I think that a reckoning between the developments of post-colonial or anti-colonial politics and the leftism of the “overdeveloped world” (to borrow McKenzie Wark’s phrasing) would be necessary. I don’t know much about the struggles of Africa, and only slightly more about India and South America. I know a reasonable amount about the American Indian Movement and the Black Power movement, though obviously not enough. In my mind, a true Acid Communism would have to be amended to be in conversation with John Trudell’s idea of the Halluci Nation – articulated in the Tribe Called Red album We Are the Halluci Nation – which articulates a vision of two states (possibly crosshatched as the cities in China Mieville’s The City and the City, coterminous and coextensive in grosstopology, but separate in truth,) the Halluci Nation and the ALie Nation (representing this outside nation is “a lie”, that it is “alien” and that it is a state of Alienation), where the latter has subjugated and subjected the former, but the power it wields turns back on itself, harming the wielder as much as the target.

The album is, I feel, an essential text for understanding the post-colonial condition in North America, especially with the added perspective brought by collaborators Yasiin Bey, Narcy, and Saul Williams – the former two providing a vision of a syncretic Native American-Islamic alternative in “R.E.D.” and the latter framing colonialism in terms of a plague that spread by Missionaries and which turns the features of the natural world into commodities that act as vectors of transmission.

Speaking about the concept behind it, one of the members of the group, Bear Witness told a story to Exclaim about meeting with John Trudell, which ended with him reading a notebook given to him. According to Bear Witness, the notebook:

talks a lot about remembering what it is to be human and remembering how to treat other people as human beings. The Halluci Nation is anybody who's willing to step away from the way we're dealing with things right now and look at it through John's lens. When I realized that John had given us this thing, this nation to make into something real, we could offer it to our fans: this is the way you can participate, as long as you're willing to come be a part of what we're doing.

Japanese Shinto is an animistic religion — possibly the most established surviving one. This is the image of Meoto Iwa, rocks believed to host divinities. The common belief in the existence of a “primitive communism” means that there was a time when the world was seen as alive with spirit and significance and the needs of all were met by the efforts of all. I see no reason why those things cannot recur in the contemporary period.

The gap between the Marxist and the Post-Colonial/Indigenous seems to me to be the gap that necessarily needs to be bridged. As difficult as it is for many in the upper left of the political compass to acknowledge, political attempts at a Marxist project have tended towards the imperialist. On the insistence that there is one particular way of being that needs to be embraced or pursued. Dogmatic Marxism – framed by Fisher as the “Leninist Super-Ego” – could be abandoned, and the gap could be crossed: maybe a spirit dwells in everything, but peoples lives are still shaped by their material conditions.

If we accept that people’s lives and behaviors are constrained by their material circumstances, but reject that it is solely our relationship to modes of production that defines this, where does that leave us?

If we accept that our consciousness gives us only a narrow slice of reality, and that the job of our perceptions is to filter the information that comes in – and that there are means to loosen or remove the filters for a time – but reject that the sole highest good is to explore unfiltered perception, where does that leave us?

If we accept that the world is alive with spirit and significance, and that the natural world requires reverence and respect, and that all peoples have intimate knowledge of the world-as-presented to them that likely surpasses our own, but reject that our behavior reaps a reward to come in some kind of after-world, where does that leave us?

I’m still thinking through that myself, but I think that the edges of the thing are beginning to resolve.

Perhaps, to use a line from John Trudell to alter a throw away line from Disco Elysium, making it in to a rallying cry, the slogan of Acid Communism should be “No War but the Class War; No Nation but the Halluci Nation.”

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