What a weird general election…
Many have noted the disappointment, the frustration, with welcoming in the end of 14 years of Tory governance and not being able to feel any excitement or hope for the future.
I wanted to write something about it, but someone else got there first (if tangentially), and I’m glad for it. Vincent Jenewein sent over his latest blogpost yesterday, which is an excellent meditation of Mark Fisher’s work and its relationship to the dancefloor. The opening also perfectly captures the post-election malaise I am feeling, and which the rest of the British left is undoubtedly feeling too:
From this vantage point, while not everyone is, strictly speaking, medically depressed, certain characteristics of the depressive experience have become almost universal features of the 21st century’s cultural atmosphere. Chief among these is a kind of generalized disbelief in the possibility of a “capital F” Future that is able to positively differentiate itself from the present. From within the midst of the depressive present, depression itself feels like something infinite and unavoidable. If today is marked by depression, then so will tomorrow, and the day after, and so on. For the depressed person, what the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls intentional threads — the successive, goal-oriented projections through which a “normal” subject pulls itself into the future (I will do this, and then that, and then this…) — are severed. As a result, the future as a temporal category itself appears meaningless, no longer able to differentiate itself from the present, since there are no novel goals or developments to look forward to, only the dark fog of the ever-same, dreary present.
There are some intentional threads for us to pull on, to follow, even if they are frayed. The Green Party’s successes, going from one parliamentary seat to four, gives the left something to rally behind, to organise with and hopefully shape more in its image. (I have always been somewhat skeptical of the Green Party in the past, and have never voted for them before, although I did on Wednesday, as there is clearly something here we can all work with. I’m half-tempted to join the party as a member.)
But green hopes aside, we still have a steep uphill battle on our hands, as the tandem success of the Reform Party paints a grotesque picture of a country so enthralled by fear (and fear of the Other most damningly). The left is once again on the rise, but what it must contend with is a vicious sentiment of reaction that has had a natural head-start — at once new and horrifying, building on the strangeness of 2016 and its aftermath, but also familiar and even quintessentially British in character.
We must work together to drown it out, or at the very least, work together to produce an alternative that shows how the desires of the masses can find fulfilment along other paths.
I was recently commissioned to write a new introduction for the K-Punk collection, soon to be translated into Russian and published by comrades at Ad Marginem. (I will share more information about this in due course.) It ends with a brief reflection of “acid communism” that feels all the more imperative now, albeit inchoate and unformed, but the promises are real, as is the work necessary to materialise them:
… it was Fisher’s belief that we must push our habits of “denunciation and critique” into new arenas that can more forcefully reverse “the magical operation” of communicative capitalism, “whereby changing the system entails strengthening the system.” He continues:
What that means is taking seriously the promises capital makes, but cannot deliver on. Militant ascesis is only a partial answer to capital’s libidinal engineering. Yes, we will need, as Fredric Jameson has put it, “to relinquish the compensatory desires that intoxications we have developed in order to make the present livable.”
What this project entails more specifically remains an unanswered question, at least in the context of Fisher’s published body of work. At the time of his death, he was working on his fourth book, to be titled Acid Communism – the draft introduction to which concludes this volume. Nevertheless, the essays that precede it constitute an invaluable document that traces Fisher’s thinking up to this point. We find descriptions of our world that highlight the vast network of “compensatory desires” that both make this present liveable and also reinforce our complacency within capitalist realism. But the promises of the blogosphere remain important here. We live in a time of incessant communication that is fertile ground not only for new ideas but also new methods of disseminating them. We live more emphatically in community with each other than we have at any other point in history, and it is for this reason that the potentials of communication, communization and, indeed, communism are more enticing than ever before.
We are already actively rethinking the possibilities of our world, and we need only work harder to steer ourselves in the right direction. “A new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving: this is the promise of acid communism”, Fisher writes. “Of course, we now know that the revolution did not happen” – or indeed, various revolutions, which have all made promises regarding the new ways of living tantalisingly available to us. “But the material conditions for such a revolution are more in place in the twenty-first century than they were” previously, Fisher insists. These conditions include the fervent atmosphere of discontent that pervades all of our working lives, as well as the multitude of new technologies that promise us new ways of living and loving, beyond the orthodoxies of capitalist realism.
Thinking outside of the capitalist enclosure in nonetheless difficult, even terrifying. “There are more than enough terrors to be found” beyond the bounds of capitalist realism, Fisher writes in the introduction to The Weird and the Eerie, “but such terrors are not all there is to the outside.” There is a whole other world out there, and as we go out looking for this other world, we could ask for no better guide to its possibilities, to its spectral presences and possible sites of emergence, than Mark Fisher himself.