Accelerationist longings
It must be a mere coincidence to finish reading the transcript of Mark Fisher’s final lectures at the University of London precisely on May 1st.
Whenever I remember the man, I make the not-at-all-good joke that I do not know whether he would have been able to bear being among us, with the world becoming even worse than the one he diagnosed in his most famous work, Capitalist Realism. Or perhaps he might have developed a morbid taste for the “machine,” at such an obsessive level that his fate would be the one that Anthropic’s supposedly cutting-edge model carries out “independently”: constantly citing his name in philosophical discussions.
This book, Post-Capitalist Desire, is simply Fisher and his students discussing some of the texts from his master’s-level media analysis course. It would be nothing remarkable were it not for the fact that Fisher was, besides being an excellent analyst of things as they are and of the future we would have if the course did not change — and it did not — a teacher who would make many others in the field jealous.
I very much wanted to know what his students went on to do after having had these classes with Fisher. Considering the way things are, it is quite likely that they are now working for the BBC supervising story agendas for its news channels, doing their work as diligently as possible so that anti-Israel narratives do not get broadcast out there.
Because the students’ interventions are indeed relevant. And I, as a student from a course more geared toward numbers, but who still wants to meddle in the humanities, have never seen classes as participatory as the ones described in this short and yet rich book.
Inevitably, the book made me reflect quite a lot on my own path. I still have in me the “bug” of pursuing my studies in my field, even if in a branch and direction different from the traditional one, so that one day I may be a doctor. Here, as a still-anonymous person, I will never be afraid to admit that I want to massage my ego with audiences, discussions, and also official titles. If I already lack such inhibitions outside these lines of text...
As for the discussions in the classes themselves, they are fairly typical of humanities classes in a master’s course. Fisher assigns some texts for his students to read, which, under some pressure, they end up doing, not least because the proposed texts are not at all easy to read and, consequently, to summarize. From those summaries begin discussions about the texts themselves and the theme of the course, which in this semester of Fisher’s classes was something about desire and capitalism — hence the title of the book.
The context is also Fisher’s unpublished book, Acid Communism, which was presumably an attempt to reclaim the countercultural movements of the 1960s for the contemporary left. This was a counterculture Fisher had once strongly criticized, but now saw with different eyes. That is something that appears very clearly in the lectures transcribed here, especially in relation to the anti-work and anti-capitalist attitudes that the hippies proposed at the height of their “movement.”
There are five lectures in total, with central texts by different authors. We begin with an introduction to post-capitalism from three different points of view, and move from there to counterculture and its consequences, group and class consciousness, the power of the individual and the collective, until arriving at the fateful lecture on Jean-François Lyotard and a chapter from his book Libidinal Economy, where desires and longings merge with literary critical analysis, Marxism, and probably a great many drugs in the mind.
The list of topics can be intimidating. But Fisher, as the good teacher he is, does an excellent job not only of synthesizing the ideas of the texts and authors he assigns, but also of gracefully keeping the ball moving among his students. I repeat: I wish I had had, in my short academic career, a professor like this, one who made me think about what I read and what I say, and who even admits that his initial reading of what was assigned may be wrong.
It really is unfortunate that the text ends with a “leave them wanting more” feeling that will never be satisfied. Fisher died by suicide three days before the sixth of the fifteen classes proposed in the course syllabus, and the subsequent classes were not cancelled but taught by various people who probably did not have the quality of the original — however hard they may have tried to come close.
At the same time, I even think it is good that this book is a “loose end.” For anyone who wants to keep exploring the theme of what Fisher wanted to investigate and eventually turn into a concise and well-conceived book, Post-Capitalist Desire includes the list of materials for the subsequent classes, which follow a line similar to this first third of the lectures Fisher gave. We simply do not have his interpretations, syntheses, and conclusions, which in my view enrich these texts far more than the originals themselves.
I also do not doubt that both this collection of lectures and Fisher’s unpublished book itself would have been calls to action for a “left” that is increasingly apathetic, lazy, and even defeatist. Not that Fisher himself could not be seen as all of these things. His masterpiece is a book about the inevitability of capitalism. Only now was Fisher beginning to develop a path out of it. Something that Matt Colquhoun’s introduction describes as a mistaken interpretation of accelerationism — a concept that is also central to the lectures — but which I would say is quite solid, considering the point of view of the professor/author/transcribed figure.
This same accelerationism is what we now see in the hands and proposals of the other side of the coin. A side that wants to see the world culminate in what Marx and many others warned would be the end of the current system. Which would be deeply ironic: post-capitalism being brought about by those who emerged from capital and cannot live outside it.
Rest in peace, Mark. Or in fury, because we urgently need it.