Tag: Postcapitalist Desire

Picture It

When I picture

Acid Communism, it’s

being-with-others, it’s

becoming-with-others

beyond laboring, beyond

reproduction, it’s

us

RUNNING RIOT

reclaiming Time,

claiming,

“There seems to be plenty of it,”

as does Huxley

in his mescaline book,

The Doors of Perception.

And in this picture, I

picture as well

a sexual component.

Visions of Red Plenty invite

dreams of Red Love.

What might that mean? How might we

practice that?

I imagine

multi-partnered

many-headed

combinations &

encounters;

“time together”

kissing and giggling,

co-living, co-parenting, if we wanted, and

if wanted or

when needed,

“time apart”

amid.

Add to Olson

Haraway’s “response-ability”

and arrive at

“Terra-

polis is this.”

Tuesday April 27, 2021

Friends and I plan an in-person gathering: three of us, outdoors at a brewery, discussing chapters from Mark Fisher’s final book Postcapitalist Desire. The book ends disappointingly given Mark’s untimely end, leaving it to all of us, the book’s readers, to complete the course ourselves, as did Mark’s students. Or we could accelerate the narrative onward, well beyond what was previously conceived, by reading “Experimental Time Order” from Rasheedah Phillips’s book Recurrence Plot (and other time travel tales). Through Phillips, we encounter ideas from Robert Anton Wilson’s book Prometheus Rising. Desired futures create their own pasts.

Thursday April 22, 2021

My eyes travel across spines of books, searching, seeking ways to proceed. Parenting, though, leaves little time to read. As Mark Fisher notes in Postcapitalist Desire, “In order to raise consciousness, you need time” (265). Time is the terrain of struggle. Time is what capitalists steal from those who labor. Stolen time equals stolen consciousness.

Saturday April 3, 2021

There were deer in the yard when I arrived home from “the Teet.” And a stinkbug that needed rescue, and a toilet that whines and may need a new valve. Tomorrow, weather permitting, I’ll mow the lawn and grade. In the days ahead, we hope to build our garden. As Roy Morrison said of the Mondragon cooperatives: “We Build the Road as We Travel.” Let these trance-scripts be spaces of hope. Signposts to an alternative modernity, like the one reported from firsthand by Richard Fairfield, reports gathered in his book The Modern Utopian: Alternative Communities of the ’60s and ’70s. If I could time-travel, the countercultural communes would be a destination to which I would journey. Let us be drawn toward collective living, enriched by conversation with others. We can begin by taking Fisher’s course on Postcapitalist Desire. Read the assigned readings, including work by Ellen Willis. Fisher gets his assessment of the reasons for the failure of the communes from Willis. Fellow ’60s rock critic Richard Goldstein included Willis among Emma Goldman and Abbie Hoffman as members of a lost tradition of “radicals of desire.” Somewhere in my basement is a collection of Willis’s writing on rock music, Out of the Vinyl Deeps. Also the book with the material Fisher assigned: Beginning to See the Light.

Monday March 29, 2021

I’m reading Postcapitalist Desire, the transcripts from Mark Fisher’s final lectures, and thinking again of “Acid Communism.” I await insight into Fisher’s thoughts on psychedelics. Did he work with them? Or did the anti-hippie sentiments that Matt Colquhoun unearthed from early-2000s K-Punk lead to Fisher’s demise?