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.
Trance-Scripts 