Others vacation when and where they want. This, too, is a form of inequality. Worse still, my city is livable, but unmemorable and unattractive. Is my miserabilism the effect of my impoverished personhood or its cause? I am being asked to fail and fail again. And it’s okay: I’ll keep going. I know I somehow will. Please do not be frightened. It’s just that I’ve become deeply unhappy with myself. My writing is a testament to the failure of my ability today to enjoy. The thing is, it really felt like I was pulling out of the spiral there for a moment. What happened? I try not to tell myself that I suffer from depression, as I’m wary of the theoretical presumptions embedded in that label. (My thinking has been partly shaped on this score by Susan Sontag’s Under the Sign of Saturn. But see as well Eric G. Wilson’s Against Happiness.) But, look, let’s be honest: my moods are seasonal and affected by work. I go through patches of good and bad over varying durations. One consequence is that I drive people away just by being myself. My work, if it is truly to be mine, will have to attest to this. And so, without further ado, let’s return to the work itself. The construction of a Marxist theory of psychedelia will have to build upon the insights of critical geographers like David Harvey and Edward W. Soja (and before them, Henri Lefebvre). Psychedelics intervene in and directly modify socially produced space, by changing what we might call cognitive space or mental space. “The presentation of concrete spatiality,” as Soja notes, “is always wrapped in the complex and diverse re-presentations of human perception and cognition, without any necessity of direct and determined correspondence between the two. These representations, as semiotic imagery and cognitive mappings, as ideas and ideologies, play a powerful role in shaping the spatiality of social life” (Postmodern Geographies, p. 121). As we continue to think about the relationships between psychedelics and space, we’ll also have to consult Alastair Gordon’s book Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties. Following Fisher, I see capitalist realism not just as an ideology and an aesthetic that situates subjects within a narrowed or foreshortened horizon of political possibility, where there can be no future utopian alternative to the present; it’s also a shaping and debasing of the way subjects experience space and time. Psychedelics thus possess a certain radical potential under such circumstances, as they provoke immediate (albeit temporary) modification of inner experience beyond the forms imposed by capitalism. When under the influence, one is no longer the Self as defined and designed by the current order. One can drift and linger, now that one has restored to oneself that which capitalism had drowned in what Marx called “the icy water of egotistical calculation.” Anxieties, begone! Pot allows us to see again reality constituted through veils and unveilings, everything both inwardly-lit and haloed. All of which is to re-invoke through transcendence upward from the profane a sense for the sacred, although I’m not sure I wish to do that, as emotional, perceptual, and symbolic spaces are all still immanent to the dialectic of nature. Picture, through perceptual refocusing, the circle-shape and the yin and yang struggle contained therein. No need to delve into those questions just yet. Think, after all, of how much of our lives is invested in staring at illusions of depth onscreen! Games of perception are the very magic by which the system operates. Business is, along with whatever else, a religion imposed on conquered subjects.
Category: Acid Communism
Thursday August 10, 2017
A house I pass while out walking in my neighborhood wears a mask with a sideways haircut. I am asking you to read me as a destitute Utopian realist, friend, inflated with chemicals and making it up as I go. It is nice to have loved ones you can join on walks. And neighbors who are radical anarchist gardeners. How easily, though, that can slip into radicalism reduced to a mere lifestyle. Sarah hips me to the hedge-jumping acid-folk Utopianism of Van Morrison’s divine transmission, “Sweet Thing.”
She and I live out the prophecy of “We shall walk and talk in gardens all misty and wet with rain.” So much of Astral Weeks is like that. We Acid Communists need to dip in finally to Ernst Bloch’s multi-volume The Principle of Hope. And maybe also Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, with its group of revolutionaries, the Accelerationists. (And no, for those who are wondering: I do not consider myself an Accelerationist. The only thing I wish to hasten is the coming of the Utopia of Acid Communism; but for me, that means labor’s exodus from capital, not the latter’s acceleration.) As for the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, it was founded at the University of Warwick in 1995 by Fisher, Sadie Plant, Nick Land, Robin Mackay and others, and had ceased to exist as a functional entity by the turn of the millennium. Major downturn here as the dog started pissing on the bed. I cope by practicing intuitive breathing exercises. The depiction of existential dread through a montage of found media in the Zero Books channel’s “Kill All Normies” video speaks fluently of my current predicament.
Why have we talked ourselves into such a dreadfully degraded form of consciousness? How do societies respond to pervasive nihilism? Surely that signals the approach of our show’s finale, no? Are our peers, even the most devout, all secretly traumatized by the death of God and the subsequent purposelessness of existence? I’m barely able to continue to process this. It uses brainwashing techniques such as subliminal messages and emotional association through imagery. Their claim to have control of my mind frightens me. Is “meme magic” legitimately a thing? I feel like I’ve crossed a threshold, and the world has crossed it with me. The interregnum between paradigms. Whose dream am I in if not my own? “Relax, it doesn’t matter,” the shadow self whispers. “Commit yourself only to Being.” Can I square that with the implied monism of “Nature as system of systems”? I feel like I’ve become a person who talks beside himself in public. Angela Nagle’s shamefully ill-informed critique of the politics of transgression in Kill All Normies resembles a student pretending to speak with smug disdain on a topic known only through ideologically-driven potted online summaries, ideas from the Nietzschean / Sadean Left of the 60s and 70s cherry-picked and drastically oversimplified in an attempt to prove a point — that point being that the time has come to lay to rest the entire paradigm of resistance through cultivation of counterculture. To claim as Nagle does the cultural dominance of the Left during the Obama years is to ignore in one’s conception of culture the culture of business, as well as the cultures of the religious right. This is what happens when analysis of culture sidesteps participants’ relations to means of production (including but not limited to means of consciousness-production). The Right transgresses, yes, even under capitalism — but only by falsely hypostasizing the part for the capitalist whole.
Wednesday August 9, 2017
Will I be beaten for mistranslating my mission? Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance in Okja clutches and fills my heart with fear. I have difficulty translating. Signs go unread. Associative logic is too advanced and moves too rapidly for full trance-scription. The Spectacle has become immersive and sonic and fractal. Characters even play their own twins. Methods of cultural study have been outpaced by media. The film performs a devastating act of cognitive mapping. Psychedelic consciousness teaches us to hold all creatures close to our heart. Revolutionaries should build into their program the abolition of carnivorism. (Live as I say on this score, not as I do.) When tracing the origins of Acid Communism, one has to tell the story of the University of Warwick’s Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, delving especially into the Unit’s fondness for mind-altering substances during its heyday in the 1990s. One could note the progression of Sadie Plant from a 1992 book on the Situationists to 1999’s Writing on Drugs. Before this, of course, one’s narrative would have to discuss the interwar self-experimentation documented in Walter Benjamin’s On Hashish. Meanwhile, a search for “Acid Communism” on YouTube reveals the following: Acid Womble’s “When the class consciousness kicks in… [wombles 4 communism],” and a collection of videos by someone named Aaron.
And man, what a treasure trove of mindbenders it is. Fisher had moved in the year or so before his death to a definition of capitalist realism as a form of “consciousness deflation,” or “the receding of the concept of consciousness from culture.” Forms of consciousness were developing in the 1960s that were dangerous to capital: class consciousness, psychedelic consciousness (key notion being “plasticity of reality”), and (thinking here of early women’s-lib consciousness-raising groups) what we might call personal consciousness (self as it relates to structures). Of course, the important and perhaps most controversial point, is that “Consciousness is immediately transformative, and shifts in consciousness become the basis for other kinds of transformation.” Recognizing the threat this could pose, capitalism adopted a project of Prohibition, or what Fisher called “libidinal engineering and reality engineering.” The goal of consciousness deflation is to cause us to doubt what we feel. Anxiety is enough — that’s all it takes to control us. But consciousness remains malleable, and the tools for raising it are finding their way back into the hands of the people. “What is ideology,” Fisher asked, “but the form of dreaming in which we live?” Patches of green through a haze of condensation in the windows where the walls meet the drop ceiling in my basement. Are stories and games not the ways we navigate space and time? Seize control of them! Invent new games, even if only games one performs in solitude. Send minds careening away from the narrative of identity in space and time imposed by capitalism. Take yourself, even if only momentarily, to a new reality. And then draw audiences with you into labyrinths of pleasureful indeterminacy, drawn out spectacles of release from the hegemonic consensus. Trope-scrambling helps, as does appropriation and montage. General ontological indeterminacy is our goal. And we should recruit out there as many people as will join us, subtracting prefiguratively into our psychedelically enhanced Acid Communist MMORPG, our free 3D virtual world. Go play yourself FACT mix 613 by Wolf Eyes / Hanson Records noise maven Aaron Dilloway while brushing up on Marcos Camacho, better known by his nickname Marcola, the leader of Brazil’s Primer Comando de la Capital. Altered states, baby! Beware the nightmarish spread of the void.
A Note on Acid Communism
I never met Mark Fisher, nor was I much of a fan of his work during his lifetime. Sure, I had seen some k-punk posts over the years, and I read Mark’s book Capitalist Realism at some point a few summers before his death. Given the work I had done exploring the intersections of Marxism and cultural studies, as well as the dissertation I had written on the fate of utopian thought from the Cold War to the present, much of Mark’s theory of capitalist realism struck me as welcome, but nevertheless a retreading of ground I’d already encountered elsewhere.
However, I also remember feeling challenged in a more productive way both by Mark’s piece on Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy in The Accelerationist Reader, and by his controversial 2013 polemic, “Exiting the Vampire Castle.”
When the news arrived, then, of his suicide this past spring, I noted with some surprise the many comrades of mine who testified to the profound influence of Mark’s work upon their thinking. Given this reaction, I promised myself that I would set aside time this summer to look at his two most recent books, Ghosts of My Life and The Weird and the Eerie.
And for the most part, that’s where matters stood, until a few days ago, when I learned that Mark’s next project, left unfinished at the time of his death, was to be titled Acid Communism: On Post-Capitalist Desire. “In particular,” writes his friend Jeremy Gilbert, Mark was “exploring the connections between the idea of ‘raising consciousness’ in the political sense — be it class consciousness or the other forms of collective political consciousness promoted by women’s liberation, gay liberation, and black power — and the consciousness-expansion promoted by the psychedelic and anti-psychiatry movements in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.”
Imagine my mixture of emotions upon reading this: mixed, first and foremost, because of the undiminished sadness of Mark’s passing, but also because my own work has arrived independently at a similar place. As I wrote a few days ago, I’m interested in creating “an openly, unashamedly Gnostic-themed, psychedelia-inflected Marxism, one that presents the raising of consciousness as the relay switch between previously competing or previously antagonistic codes.”
In the months since Mark’s passing, a number of his friends and colleagues have launched Egress, a collaborative archival site collecting Mark’s scattered early attempts to theorize Acid Communism. Over the next few weeks, I plan to work my way through this material, looking for further confluences of ideas (as well as, I assume, some divergences), and posting notes when time permits. My hope is that, as these trance-scripts unfold, they might serve among other things as expressions of an attempt to prefigure through daily self-experiment an as-yet undefined philosophy and practice of Acid Communism.
Wednesday August 2, 2017
Lest I be accused of mere nostalgia, let me begin today’s post by explaining how I see the relationship of our moment to what some are now calling “hippie modernism.”
Following the logic informing the Walker Art Center’s exhibition of that name, I take “hippie modernism” to designate a countercultural formation of unsurpassed Utopianism that flowered unevenly in a wide range of national contexts in the 1960s and early 1970s. This formation was never just a reflection of its time; rather, it actively dreamt and desired a future that, by remaining unrealized, continues to make demands on us today. Postmodernism, meanwhile, is that which emerged in hippie modernism’s aftermath. A product of post-60s Prohibition (here in the Americas, the moment of the highly militarized War on Drugs), postmodernist culture coincides with active state suppression of hippie modernism’s technologies of consciousness. Of course, drug wars have never had much success in eradicating supplies of psychedelics, and so the ongoing era of Prohibition has long been haunted by revivals of hippie modernism’s ghosts. Nevertheless, when I look to hippie modernism today, I see a cultural formation the totality or full international breadth and extent of which has only just now become mappable by individuals, thanks to the art-historical archival efforts of reissue labels and museums. As a result, the time is right, I think, not just for a Marxist account of the history of psychedelia, but for the creation of an openly, unashamedly Gnostic-themed, psychedelia-inflected Marxism, one that presents the raising of consciousness as the relay switch between previously competing or previously antagonistic codes. But enough of that. In what follows, I will not think but do. Returning home after visiting my family, I arrive briefly at the impression, before self-correction, that neighborhoods in the places I’ve lived all look the same. With that, I prepare myself for admission before the court of my town’s public pool. And the self I prepare is a mischievous little child. A scheming little imp. Well, not really. I’m just a sun child. And it feels good, I declare, to lay out in the sun while high — if not for you, then at least for me. I associate all of this, in fact, with the photo on the cover of Kantner and Slick’s otherwise unmemorable — indeed, practically unlistenable — Sunfighter (“Million” being the only song on Sunfighter that I would recommend to others).
There were many pictures of me worshipped like that as a baby. I ate strident dreams of that sort for breakfast. The Guitar Army peered at me with its harmonicas at the ready. Hence my love of sun and pool. Watch me swim now: a swamp thing, a rangy plant-like consciousness, floating at the water’s surface. Hold fast to this image, for in it lies the key. The sunlit sky, the cool body of water, and the public at play: these three shall form the pillars of my religion’s temple. My Hippie-Communist Temple of Joy. It is THIS for which we strive. Justice has been and so will continue to be our rallying cry — but a justice on behalf of pleasure. The world must be made pleasureful and fully present for all those who want it so. To the haters, I reply with the immortal words of Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayyam: “Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring / Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling: / The Bird of Time has but a little way / To flutter — and the Bird is on the Wing. […] Some for the Glories of This World; and some / Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come; / Ah, take the Cash, and let the Promise go, / Nor heed the music of a distant Drum!” And one more for good measure, to drive the point home: “Waste not your Hour, nor in the vain pursuit / Of This and That endeavor and dispute; / Better be merry with the fruitful Grape / Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.”
Trance-Scripts 