Spectres of Mark Fisher: On Post-Capitalist Desire

Natasha Roy

Around a year ago, we got another window into the mind of the cult cultural theorist Mark Fisher, four years after his 2017 suicide. Postcapitalist Desire, published by Fisher’s own imprint Repeater Books, is a collection of transcripts from Fisher’s final lecture series— abruptly ended following his death—at Goldsmiths, University of London, in late 2016. Edited and introduced by his former student, Matt Colquhoun, Postcapitalist Desire ekes out a new dimension of Mark Fisher. In it, you can hear his voice—so to speak—and watch him theorize with his students in real time. The collection owes its dynamism in part to the fact that it pays homage to each of Mark Fisher’s many selves. There is,

most famously, the Mark Fisher who gave language to capitalist realism. This he described as the inability to conceive of a coherent alternative to capitalism, though (as he spent his career arguing) a better world is always possible. There’s also the cybernetics Mark Fisher, who wrote singularly about digital cultures and ran the beloved blog k-punk. And then of course, my favorite iteration of Mark Fisher: the idiosyncratic music theorist whom I will always thank for getting me into Burial. All these versions of Fisher collide in these lectures, as he riffs off his students with a dynamism that makes the book both heartwarming and also sobering, in the context of his abrupt death. Edited and published posthumously, Postcapitalist Desire thus draws our attention most dishearteningly to another Mark Fisher: the great writer of hauntology. Fisher popularized hauntology (i.e., haunting-ontology), as a means to deconstruct “the hauntological ‘stuckness’ of the twenty-first century” (24) . He borrows the term from Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, and in the wake of his death it lends all of his writing a distinct ghostly quality. The “stuckness” gets exacerbated during the pandemic, which has produced a sort of dizzied atemporality. To best understand hauntology we can turn to my most beloved iteration of Mark Fisher: the faithful electronica fan. He argues that the ghostly sounds of artists like Burial and Philip Jeck reflect the inability of electronica to deliver any kind of futurism. For Fisher, music under capitalist realism reflects the regime’s ideological quietism: it delivers a mourning of lost futures, rather than “the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live” (2012, 16-17). It feels impossible to read these lectures without dwelling on the lost future of Mark Fisher: the remaining lectures in this series that neither his students nor we will ever hear, and the unfinished manuscript we will never read. These lectures were to provide the basis for Fisher’s unfinished project, Acid Communism. Their very strength begs us to ask how this eccentric critical project of “psychedelic reason,” would have helped us further deconstruct capitalist realism (2). Postcapitalist Desire leaves you with a series of woulds that highlights the importance of yet another iteration of Mark Fisher: the blogger who wrote consistently about depression— his own and at large. It stings to

reconcile his abrupt death with the fact that he conceived these lectures as an opportunity to address “the localised crisis of depressive anhedonia that had engulfed the university in that moment—a pervasive mental health crisis, during which Fisher’s suicide was sadly not an isolated incident” (217). A few years ago, it was one of Fisher’s blog posts that gave me the language to frame depression not as an individualized tragedy but as a “result of the ruling class project of resubordination” on a mass scale (2014). Fisher saw his own struggles with mental health as the “internalised expression of actual social forces, some of which have a vested interest in denying any connection between depression and politics” (2014). So perhaps I should stop referring to his death as “abrupt”— as though it were some kind of localized accident—and instead frame it in his own terms: as a bleak appraisal of his own politics and proof that his project survives him. In his magnum opus, Capitalist Realism, Fisher assures that “we already possess everything that we need to escape the confines of capitalist realism” (2010, 3). If that is true, then he also gave us everything that we need to reconstruct his lost masterpiece. Postcapitalist Desire thus asks Fisher’s readers to continue his projects of consciousness raising and critical dissent.

Libidinal Marxism

Fisher’s treatment of desire under capitalism really begins in the fifth and final collected lecture, titled “Libidinal Marxism,” which borrows its title from Jean-François Lyotard’s famous provocation that “Every political economy is libidinal.” Libidinal Marxism, then, is Fisher’s response to Libidinal Capitalism—we know this as the consumer economy’s endless loop of new wants. Given we spend our lives participating in a libidinal economy, Fisher argues that any changemaking project must take libido as its central principle. He writes that “the Left’s incapacity to transform itself in the face of new forms of desire to which the counterculture gave voice” led it to lose out on crucial opportunities to raise consciousness (12). Thus Fisher’s call to activate a “counter-libidinal future” and to re-energize desire for the left’s purposes (11). We do so only when we meet the “libidinal attractions of consumer capitalism…with a counterlibidio, not simply an anti-libidinal damp-

ening” (11, 10). I wish Fisher had lived to read new fiction like Paul Takes The Form of a Mortal Girl (2017) and Confessions of the Fox (2018), which reify theories of libido, capitalism, and gender into aesthetic form. Such fiction takes for granted the ideas that Fisher plays with throughout these lectures. In fact, Confessions of the Fox, which marries sex, romance, and revolutionary uprising, helps clarify what Fisher may mean by Libidinal Capitalism. It reconfigures “the savage adventure of accumulation” as “capitalism’s desire:” In other words, the consumer economy instills in its victims an appetite that is nothing short of sexual (94). The novel materializes capitalism’s desire as the sexual overtones of merchandising in a shop window—or in lines like “Genitals [are really] about enclosure and privitization (202). These currents of libidinal politics in the left spheres that outlive Fisher prove that his project survives him. The ideas woven through these lectures— however opaque at times—have real anchors in the culture that survives him. And where central to Fisher’s work is the treatment of despondence (as catalyst of political impotence), his ideas about desire and libido point to an alternative of “abstract ecstasy” (5). In working out how political affects translate to political change, we again find some clues in my most beloved Mark Fisher: music theorist and playlist-maker.

No More Miserable Monday Mornings

Colquhoun explains that, towards the end of his career, Fisher “took it upon himself to move beyond his barbed critiques and work towards the construction of a positive political project” (5). He had developed a clear vision to transform “his negative critique into a positive project of consciousness-raising” (15). Apply that logic to desire and the takeaway is clear: libido can breed a political positivism strong enough to cut through our miasma of political impotence. Fisher’s positive political project required the fusion of positive and negative affects: of anger and hopefulness. He writes, regarding libidinal capitalism: “Not far beneath Lyotard’s ‘desire-drunk yes’ lies the No of hatred, anger and frustration: no satisfaction, no fun, no future. These are the resources of negativity that I believe the left must make contact with again” (20).

The positive and negative affects collide in an appendix that ends the book: a tracklist titled “No More Miserable Mondays.” It takes its title from the Penultimate post on Fisher’s beloved k-punk blog, which contained an audio mix with the same title. He was toying with the anti-work adage “You don’t hate Mondays, you hate your job,” playfully recasting it with the acknowledgement of how much he adored working with his students. The Postcapitalist Desire lectures met on Monday mornings at 9am, and Colquhoun retroactively identifies them as Fisher’s effort to “raise the consciousness of his students that another world is possible” (33). On the first Monday morning after his death, a “deeply negative moment took on a perversely affirmative resonance” when in Fisher’s absence, the students began an impromptu listening session as if to say: we will continue your work (217). This particular tracklist fuses together positive and negative potentia—of work, of desire, and of cultural objects. Fisher leaves us with homework: to make contact with both collective fury and collective joy, and to birth a hybrid affect that can overcome our hauntings and take us into the future. Mark Fisher, No More Miserable Mornings: track list from Post Capitalist Desire and then some

Works Cited

Fisher, Mark, and Matt Colquhoun. Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures. Repeater Books, 2021. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2010. Fisher, Mark. “Good for Nothing.” Free, Non-Profit Newspaper Dedicated to Social, Economic and Environmental Justice., 19 Mar. 2014, https://theoccupiedtimes. org/?p=12841. Fisher, Mark. “What Is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 1, University of California Press, 2012, pp. 16–24, https://doi. org/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16. Rosenberg, Jordy. Confessions of the Fox. Atlantic Books, 2019.