Hang on Tight and Spit On Me: A Review of Postcapitalist Desire by Mark Fisher (Fisher's Ghosts, Part 8)

The class, Postcapitalist Desire, for which you can easily find a syllabus online, was something of a workshop where Fisher was talking through the concepts that were going to go into his last book Acid Communism and it was going to meet for fifteen sessions but Fisher passed away after the fifth one. He took his own life in January of 2017. This fact, for me, hangs over the whole of the book: this brilliant man, who seemed to be an enthusiastic and gentle educator , talking about the possibility of a world that could be free, died before the sixth lecture could be held.

A Light Through the Cracks (Fisher's Ghosts, Part 7)

The people currently in power see this as an opportunity to give a blank check to people who think you deserve nothing. For them, a crisis is nothing but a way to make the system function worse for the average person. It’s the disordered thinking of an addict. The worst thing you can do in the depths of an addiction is feed that addiction. Feeding that addiction is also the easiest decision to make when in that state. So what happens if we go cold turkey on capitalism? Chain ourselves to a metaphorical radiator and try to sweat it out?

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 Its introduction is available in the K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher.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,

Mapping the Vampire Castle: An Analysis of Rhetoric and Concepts (Fisher's Ghosts, 5)

Analyzing this piece is difficult for me: “Exiting the Vampire Castle” was my introduction to Mark Fisher. It seemed brilliant and insightful at the time. Now, it does not for a variety of reasons. I love Fisher’s longer works, but this essay is riddled with problems. The purpose of this piece is not to defend Fisher’s assertions (though I will be doing a bit of that, more due to rhetorical issues with the critiques than anything else,) but to try to recuperate some of what is valuable in the piece itself.

So, now that everyone involved is alienated, let’s get started!

An Infliction of Sacred Wounds: On Mental Health Under Capitalist Realism (Fisher's Ghosts, part 4)

The system, which supposedly generates prosperity for everyone to an unprecedented degree, doesn’t. We’re told that it works, we’re told that doing all of these things should help, and we internalize this narrative. It becomes a subconscious mantra, the way that an Orthodox monk is encouraged to say the Jesus Prayer in time with his heartbeat. You see: we’ve been sold a fantasy that does not map on to reality. Human beings are smart enough that you don’t have to actually give us the reward. You just have to convince us that the reward is there.