Postcapitalist Desire by Mark Fisher

    It sometimes feels embarrassing to admit the amount of joy I feel in going to classes to learn. I’ve been profoundly enriched by discussions in classrooms where knowledgeable professors have disrupted my sense of the world by bending my perspective. Thus, when I began listening to the audiobook of Postcapitalist Desire by Mark Fisher, I was engrossed and pleasantly surprised by the record of Fisher’s last classes before his untimely death. Unlike, for example, the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, which was compiled by his students’ notes, we’re here provided with a direct transcript of Fisher’s lectures. In turn, the book preserves the little quirks of the classroom that preserve the authenticity. In the opening chapter, Fisher notes several times that the classroom technology isn’t working: the audio won’t play! Students’ questions and comments are included, alongside Fisher’s responses, and you get a sense of Fisher’s personality and humour (even though the audiobook isn’t read by him). Stylistically, reading the book is like being back in school—in all of the best ways.

    Each week, Fisher has students introduce the reading and then delves into the text. The conversations are meaningful even for those students (like me) that have not read the texts on the syllabus, and there are engaging tangents that feel as significant as what Fisher had planned. The syllabus, as planned, tries to grapple with what postcapitalism might be like before moving into ideas of psychic revolution, class and group consciousness, power, and libidinal Marxism. That’s as far as the recorded lectures go. From there, the course would have progressed into autonomia and the refusal of work, the destruction of democratic socialism in Chile and beyond, centrism, post-fordism, cyberfeminism, accelerationism, networks, and some work on tactile realities and a politics of alienation. I won’t list each of the readings for the course here, but I will say the list is impressive in its scope and absolutely cutting edge with respect to intellectual thought, forcing itself towards an alternative to capitalism. Of course, the tragedy of the text is its unfinished nature. Fisher delivers the first five lectures before the winter holidays, which are never to resume. In one of the appendices, the editors recount how Fisher’s students tried to continue classes after Fisher’s passing, and I can only imagine the weight of that seminar room in the weeks that followed.

    The editor of the text offers an introduction, which posits Fisher’s alternative to capitalism as accelerationism and acid communism—a concept which I’ll need to explore further if I’m to comment on it further. What I can summarize is that Fisher discusses our libidinal engagements and explores how we might elevate desire into a politics that would look different. I can’t speak to Fisher’s vision of postcapitalism as a whole, but there a number of concepts I found extremely engaging, particularly in the way that so many elements converge (or are subsumed) by capital.

    To outline the functioning of capitalism, Fisher discusses the idea of scarcity. We have an odd contradiction wherein we are in a time of mass production where scarcity is diminishing and yet everything feels more scarce. Ideas converge in an interesting way when Fisher extends the discussion to the idea of time. Paraphrasing Herbert Marcuse, Fisher notes that 

“Once the problem of scarcity is resolved, which it effectively is under late capitalism, the problem is not that there isn’t enough food to feed everybody. The problem is the distribution of the food. Scarcity isn’t the problem; it’s actually the maintaining of scarcity which is the problem for capitalism: the production of an artificial scarcity in order to conceal abundance, you could say, and a scarcity of time as much as a scarcity of goods, services, etcetera. Marcuse says once this scarcity is overcome, capitalism has to work extremely hard at avoiding the possibility that people could determine their own lives and behave in a more autonomous way.”

If we take seriously some of Marx’s points, we see the significance of time. For instance, people no longer sell their skills—they sell their time. So here, the idea of time being commodified as a scarcifi-able resource is extremely compelling. This passage also outlines the artificiality of scarcity; the problem is less about how much there is, but where it is. Misbalancing where commodities are helps to “conceal abundance” and to ensure that people do not behave autonomously. 

    Fisher discusses the “fusion of precarity and technology, the production of artificial scarcity; almost everyone is subject to an artificial scarcity of time, the sense that there is no time to do anything. So technology, rather than liberating time, particularly communicative technology, has exacerbated and intensified the sense that there is no time in its production of artificial scarcity.” Several lectures later, Fisher returns to the notion of scarcity of time. Fisher explains that “You might know things, but you’re not able to act on them.” I suppose this is similar to the  critique of people fighting capitalism whilst having iPhones. There’s a contradiction in our society that prevents us from actually creating change. But, Fisher says, “We can’t be hard on ourselves about it. Time poverty is real, and that’s what they’ve done. That’s why they want it: scarcity of time.” When time becomes the commodity by which we are able to enact change, stripping people of their access to time maintains the capitalist structure. Fisher continues, again summarizing Marcuse, “we could all be working much less now, but that’s the insanity of it: the full insanity of the capitalist system. They produce an artificial scarcity of time in order to produce a real scarcity of natural resources. That’s effectively what’s happening. It’s the production of spurious commodities that nobody wants—like slippers with the faces of alligators or whatever—imagine, you see those sorts of things and the amount of work that’s gone into them, the amount of effort that’s gone into transporting them [...] capitalism has to continually inhibit the capacity for consciousness.” We’re presented with an opportunity to mobilize around our anger, and yet we don’t: “we could all be working much less now.” Why is it that we could be living in more abundance—technology could leverage our work—and yet we are continually provided with more responsibilities. Everything feels harder despite the fact that life should be easier now than ever. Fisher gives the examples of superfluous production and transportation, but I think analogies could be drawn no matter your field. Why are you checking your e-mail 18 times a day, anyway?

    Fisher gives a particularly depressing hypothetical wherein a room exists with a machine. That machine can create and provide anything you can imagine. It’s the most wondrous thing imaginable—but if you don’t have the time to use it, it might as well not be there. Fisher says that that’s where human capacities are right now. 

    Dealing with these topics a little out of order, I find a tangential connection here to what Fisher presents as “The Big Question” of psychoanalysis: “why do we repeat things which are unpleasurable?” We continually do the same things, even when they make us unhappy or harm us. Tying this to a pathology of the Left, Fisher writes, “The melancholic subject identifies with lost ideals, experiencing their absence as feelings of desolation and dejection. We come to love our Left passions and reasons, our Left analyses and convictions, more than we love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter. [...] In our fixation on the past [...] there’s a clear relationship to paranoid total theory, which in effect says nothing can happen.” I see a little too much of myself in those lines. We have a wonderful machine that is capable of enacting change, and yet, it feels like time is frozen. I remember hearing a quote that essentially said that you either love individuals and hate humanity or love humanity and hate individuals. All of these ideas swirl around together for me. The real world gives way to idealism where we are committed to lost causes rather than the actually existing world—again, related to the idea of scarcity of time. When we are all trying desperately to hold on, we cannot let anything happen.

    There’s a contradiction that Fisher points out in this respect, as well, and I really appreciate that Fisher offers thoughtful critique of the currently existing Left, despite that that’s where I find myself. There’s a perception in the Left that power is forever coopted and compromised, so it has to distance itself from notions of power. He suggests that the Left sees power itself as pathological and that “to hold power is inherently to be oppressive, therefore it’s better to be wounded.” I think that even non-Leftists might support this idea (maybe even problematically…). The implication is that there’s a race to the bottom: “It’s better to be the wounded, the abject, because you’re not actually holding power, which is oppressive.” When people ‘compete’ to be oppressed seems to grow from this, however misguided that may be. Fisher points to this desire to avoid a position of power is “a kind of impossible desire in lots of ways.” He questions how a political project can exist which doesn’t aim at capturing power or building power in some way. It’s a thoughtful critique and hence the need for something post-capitalism. 

    In some of the later conversations, Fisher explores the ways in which mass society might develop consciousness of these issues. He notes, for example, the ways in which people complain about those on welfare and how what it truly reveals is that “People think their jobs are shit. People hate their own jobs and that is why they think it’s better to be on benefits than in work.” So, the idea then becomes how to mobilize positively and not cannibalize each other in the interest of capitalism. The class explores several options: class consciousness, group consciousness, and standpoints. He notes that “Ordinarily, before your consciousness has been raised, you will treat the mismatching of your experience from ideology as a failure in you: you must have thought of it wrong, you mustn’t have been thinking about it in the right way. After consciousness raising, you can see: of course it’s not going to match up; there are two fundamentally different ways of being in the world.” Fisher is very careful to avoid relativism, of course, and he explains that (in Hegelian fashion): “There are ways of the dominant group and the ways of the subordinate group. But precisely because the dominant group dominates, it can’t see that, because it lives inside its own structure of dominance. Whereas, because the subordinated group is subordinated, it has the potential to see the schism.”

    These schisms are important. It’s critical for advancing into postcapitalism to note the ways in which domination operates upon subordinated groups. I was reminded, too, of Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society—where technique comes to be The way of doing things, inherently reducing freedom. Ideology operates through reification. Fisher makes the case that “Ideology turns what is always a process of becoming, which is open-ended and therefore changeable, into something that is fixed and permanent.” Fisher recognizes a similar process at work to Ellul: for Fisher, the purpose of ideology is reification, for Ellul, technique leads to reification. In either case, “the very purpose of ideology is to close off the possibility that anything could be different” and to impose itself as nature.

    There’s a particularly interesting exchange between Fisher and one of his students in this respect. They discuss how as people raise their consciousness, they realize their position, and they change it as soon as they realize it because they are striving for de-reification. A student asks about the inherent reification of mapping, and Fisher pushes back to suggest that mapping does not presuppose a map: mapping does not presuppose reification. It’s an interesting premise of how we maintain that kind of jouissance of continual becoming.

    There’s a bizarre little aside where Fisher discusses the fact that philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s head was severed and stolen and is now on display. Everyone recognizes how bizarre the whole situation is. In the same way that people would theorize about the special importance of Einstein’s brain from a biological standpoint, people wheel out Bentham’s head and body (separately) to maintain his legacy. To the best of my knowledge, we have no such project in place for Mark Fisher—I suppose it’s inherent to Fisher’s project that the future is always unsettled. We can only hope that academics continue to take up his project. I don’t think that we can ever quite replicate Fisher’s genius, but I don’t expect that was ever the point. Fisher was pushing towards a collective action, so it only stands to reason that we engage one another collectively and develop understanding together. We don’t need Fisher’s head in a jar, we need our own heads to collectively think together and change the future.

    Read Mark Fisher. He’s great and I wanna form a network with you.

History of Ash by Khadija Marouazi

    History of Ash by Khadija Marouazi transports the reader to Morocco following the Years of Lead in the 1970s and1980s, focusing on political prisoners Mouline, Leila, and a range of other figures that occupy the jail, suffering torture at the hands of guards and the isolation endemic to their confinement. Marouazi’s work finds itself in a particular literary tradition of prison novels, sidling up beside the likes of Fyodor Dostoyevski’s The House of the Dead, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Herta Müller’s THe Hunger Angel, or even Assata Shakur’s autobiography.

    What History of Ash does, essentially, is demonstrate the impossibility of the prison novel as a genre.

    Prison novels like History of Ash are trapped in a paradox: by definition, prison restricts the agency of its occupants. In order to do justice (as it were) to the nature of prison, it requires characters in the story not to be able to effect changes in their circumstances. Unfortunately, the more accurate the representation is, the less characters are able to drive a narrative—which might, in my mind, explain why so many prison novels are episodic in nature, offering these brief slices of prison life without a grander narrative regarding liberation. To do otherwise might tend toward the glorification of fundamentally inhumane practices.

    Similarly, the characters in the novel are reduced to numbers in the eyes of the state. Marouazi replicates that feeling for the reader, somewhat, in that most of the characters are decontextualized from their circumstances. For instance, the book gives very little information about why the characters are actually imprisoned (perhaps to value their identities and avoid making their crimes the defining feature of their identities). Narratively, it serves some purpose—as a reader with no knowledge Morocco’s Years of Lead, it makes it difficult to connect. As much as it should have felt like an intimate look at their lives, what ended up happening is that the characters often fell flat; I needed more to latch onto so that they didn’t feel like empty signifiers.

    That said, there are some moments that are genuinely beautifully done that provide a glimpse into the hearts of these figures. For instance, the first chapter sees Mouline in his cell being routinely taken out in order to be tortured. When a mouse comes to occupy his cell, he starts screaming in terror, concerned about infection and disease. Over time, though, Mouline starts identifying with the mouse, gives it a name, and treats it as a kind of secret friend. Then, when the guards are interrogating and torturing Mouline, he gives the mouse’s name as a secret informant. It’s a wonderful moment of humour and rebellion—nobody knows the name of Mouline’s mouse (or that it even exists), and then the politicians are sent on a wild goose chase to apprehend this high level leftist that doesn’t exist. There’s also an entertaining scene where the prisoners arrange a heist of sorts to ensure that married prisoners are able to meet surreptitiously to time their sex with the woman’s ovulation to guarantee a child.

    On the opposite side of the emotional spectrum, there’s a fracture in a relationship that feels devastating. Mouline fractures his relationship with Leila while in prison—it’s actually darkly funny because the premise seems to be that Mouline would like to be polygamous but hypocritically denies Leila the same opportunities. The sexist hypocrisy isn’t funny, but it’s a little ironic that the man in prison is insisting on having multiple women—it seems amusing and impracticable. In any case, Leila stops visiting him in prison, and Mouline does not know the reason for it immediately. The implications are devastating: he is abandoned for reasons unknown and that lack of knowledge is heartbreaking. The existential implications are somewhat understated—when you’re a prisoner, you don’t have the freedom to see people by your own choice and you have no control in trying to remedy a situation if the relationship has been fractured.

    Stylistically, the novel is often beautifully written. One of my favourite lines I feel can stand on its own without context: “That’s how all beautiful things are in my country … they only come as echoes and rust” (4). Some of the beauty emerges in the discussion of characters, as well. When describing Leila, Mouline says, that “I was constantly putting off trying to catch her, because once you caught this woman, she would just slip away again. Leila would slip away like water from the palm of your hand, or like air you won’t be able to breathe in a second time, or like a wave you can’t dive into twice. [...] Leila was the lily of the soul, and I was the sad desert thorn” (37). It’s a beautifully constructed passage that combines water imagery and floral imagery. The idea of Leila slipping away like water is lovely, and then the idea of him being a “sad desert thorn”, with the implication of being deprived of water, is a powerful turn.

    It’s in these small moments of beauty that History of Ash really shines. In a novel made bleak with isolation, confinement, and torture, it’s as though these poetic moments are what express the indomitable spirit of the characters in the text. Despite their lack of agency and despite their reduction to being numbers, there is still something that remains. 

    In that respect, the ending of the book is an interesting turn. A lot of the time in prison is glossed over and then we are able to witness the return home. It’s a moment with very little fanfare and great anxiety. The moment of the key being used in the lock is a powerful one and the recognition of all that has changed and all that has been preserved is a poignant note on which to end the text.

    Overall, it’s hard to grapple with the paradoxes of prison novels and History of Ash in particular. I feel like I have misunderstood a number of details or missed out on some of the nuances. As an overall text, I think its main highlight is its style and its main detraction is the episodic nature of the text. In some ways, reading the text feels as if I’m as adrift as these prisoners: a sense of the unknown becomes the darkest cloud.