Postcapitalist Desire
UNDOING THE END: THE COURSE FISHER DIDN’T TEACH
With Clara Serra, Laure Vega, David Caño, Núria Gómez Gabriel, Antonio Gómez Villar, Amador Fernández-Savater, Joan Yago, Alberto Santamaría, Carolina Yuste, Marta Echaves, Alicia Valdés, Laura Llevadot and Marcelo Expósito.
James Graham Ballard wrote that what we had to fear about the future was not that something terrible would happen, but that nothing would happen, that we would live in a boring world and that our powers of imagination would atrophy.
In saying so, he presciently foresaw exhaustion by repetition. Whereas Fordism established the dream of a classic system of work, family formation and aspiration to greater shares of ownership as the necessary means to reproduce life, post-Fordism seems to limit our ambitions to nostalgia and to looking back at a past that never was, or to numbing forms of tedium via compulsive and insatiable consumption, from doomscrolling on our mobile phones to marathon television series sessions and narcotics, whilst drifting between ghostly ruins and relics, blurring the lines between the present and the future.
Within a system that assigns value to exchange and not to use, which tries to capture and subsume every form of possibility as a commodity, it seems that the power of an imagination capable of breaking with rectilinear time has simply given up. Capitalism is not desired in itself, but it wins by default and through forms of hyperstition. This gives way to a zeitgeist that tries to impose itself with pastiche, remakes and farcical repetition of political, cultural and other kinds of products that are no longer harmless because they have been captured, but are defined by the capture itself, neutralising themselves in advance with regard to anything that might involve breaking with a pre-established reality self-defined as immutable.
Mark Fisher diagnosed “capitalist realism” as the fundamental ailment of post-Fordist societies where any last shred of hope for change was redirected to uphold the languishing status quo as natural and everlasting, thereby cancelling the future. There would be no alternative—not only on the physical plane, but also in terms of imagination and desire. An affective structure and a symptomatology would correspond to each form of production and Fisher was willing to address the phenomenology of apprehended uncertainty and precarity. To do so, he analysed society through culture. He did this not as an aesthetic exercise or merely as a chronicler of the status quo from the outside, but by understanding each text as an artefact that could also provoke a call to movement, in its own way of becoming, in its impact on individuals and in shaping their subjectivity.
His dissection of contemporary reality revealed to him a way to name the symptoms that define it: from depressive hedonism that prevents any action other than the pointless pursuit of pleasure, to reflexive impotence that programmes self-fulfilling prophecies of the impossibility of change. And yet he did not stop there.
He analysed the forms taken by culture and counterculture, the social and the symbolic, their promises and their abandonments, from a popular and uncompromising perspective, far removed from melancholy and focused on hauntology as the ghostly ontology of lost futures—that which never happened and yet could very well have come to pass. In this way, Fisher’s work integrates what is real to go beyond it.
As postulated by Horkheimer, Fisher understood that the aesthetic can be a form of internal repression in which social power enters the very bodies it dominates, thereby operating as an effective mode of libidinal discipline. However, as Eagleton writes, when presented as a feeling or impulse, the aesthetic can go hand in hand with political domination. And yet, to the extent that these phenomena approach passion, imagination and sensuality, they are not so easily incorporated. Deep subjectivity—insofar as it is solipsistic—can be traced and promoted by the form of the dominant order, but in the aesthetic as artefact, the possibility of an unlimited impulse is also at play that cannot be eradicated without also uprooting the capacity for authentication of power itself.
Fisher created two projects aimed at discovering the other side of the coin of capitalist realism. The first is his unfinished work entitled Acid Communism; the second is his course, also unfinished, called Postcapitalist Desire. The interplay between them is evident and revealing—not only because of the chosen themes, but also because of the path they try to chart from the question and the search for what could be.
It is from this hauntology of what could have been possible that we set out on a new journey to revisit his work through his thought and methodology, his questions and intuitions. We do so not to raise a crystallising tribute, rendering it inoperative except to be looked at, but with the understanding that an open political artefact can add to what it already contained with new, situated contributions.
