We’re back with a new reading group for 2022, reading essays that reflect the content of Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire lectures.
I’ve been planning on doing this for a while. Over a year, in fact. It was shelved after the death of Nine, who was so active in this group and who I knew was excited about this project, but I know many in our group are still interested and after so long reading new works together, I thought it might be fun and more engaging to draw on my own expertise for a change!
I edited together Mark’s final lectures because I believed they provided the best and most cohesive statement on where his thought was headed. So much poor and unfounded posthumous speculation was dragging the public perception of his thought in strange directions. Though incomplete, I felt the momentum and passion was there to engage people far better than another collection of unpublished and under-appreciated essays.
That being said, they’re out there. Fisher’s Acid Communism could effectively be reconstructed from various essays he wrote after the publication of Capitalist Realism, between 2012 and 2016. So, for this reading group, I suggest we read those essays, using the Postcapitalist Desire syllabus as a guide. Rather than turning to Mark’s own references, however, let’s read the essays he wrote that explore those same themes.
Of course, I’m very aware this project overlaps with the start of The K-Files over on the Zer0 Books YouTube channel. So there’s a lot of Fisher going around at the moment and I hope that neither you nor I get burnt out on him too quickly. But I do not think the material we discuss here will overlap with what we discuss there.
So, without further ado, here’s the discussion from our first session. We read Mark’s essay “Postcapitalist Desire”, first published in What We Are Fighting For, published by Pluto Press in 2012.