Mark Fisher and Postcapitalist Desire in Matt Colqhhouns Egress FULL 1

This is Acid Horizon, a theory podcast which confronts global crisis and the specter of a world that could be free. This is Episode 5, Mark Fisher and Post-Capitalist Desire, a reading of Egress with Matt Cocoon. Thank you for joining us. Hey, folks, this is Craig. Before we start our episode, I just wanted to let you know that our interview with Matt

Cahoon on Mark Fisher and Post-Capitalist Desire went about two hours. Now, I trimmed the episode down a little bit, I cut it in two, and I put the latter half on our Patreon page. But I understand not everybody's in a position right now to fork out extra money. So if you really want to grab it, please hit me up on Twitter or hit us up on Instagram and we'll just send the episode to you. Maybe one thing that you can do is just share the podcast on your social media or just connect with us on social media too. That helps us out. Well, in any event, let's get started with today's show. Welcome to Acid Horizon, the theory podcast. On today's show, we have Matt Cahoon, author of the lovely, haunting, and eminently philosophical

biography of Mark Fisher entitled Egress on Morning, Melancholy, and Mark Fisher. Matt is both a writer and photographer, and he also produces content for his blog, Xenogothic.com. Also with us are hosts, Matt and Will. Matt, thank you for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Matt, maybe you could offer a bit more on your background and current projects. Yeah. Well, as you say, I've been blogging at Xenogothic.com for about three years now, and that's given birth to quite a few things since then. At the moment, I'm trying to get some photography back on the blog. I was trained as a photographer originally and used to have a photo blog for a long, long time. Writing's kind of took over. Just finished a second Mark Fisher project that we'll probably talk about in a bit.

It's an edited collection of some of his lectures. And got a few other things in the oven. A book on accelerationism, which I'm hoping to finish soon. Something else in the American West and something on philosophy and adoption. And recently, I noticed on your blog that you've conducted a virtual lecture on K-Punk and its ongoing legacy. And as you might already know about us, the existence of this podcast is derivative of this massive global event we're all part of. I'm just curious, how have recent events shaped the community surrounding your work? Yeah, it's been a very strange time. I suppose my book Egress is concerned with one community quite explicitly. And that community was always quite amorphous and in some respects doesn't even exist anymore.

But it was a community that kind of offered a glimmer of another way of life that sort of couldn't exist beyond the event horizon of returning to the world of work after graduating from university. and like so many things you know lots of things can't really escape that event horizon of the working world but there's um i think there's something else here now that is resonating with that in my mind quite explicitly from the sort of new communities that have arisen online and elsewhere around the coronavirus pandemic and um kind of revitalized politics that's come out around that i feel like it's it's not really a coincidence that black lives matter has got um It feels like it has a lot more resilience as a movement now, this year, than it did in 2014, precisely because we're already all quite used to the fact that normal life has

been suspended. And it's a lot easier to suspend other things as well. I suppose we'll see how long that lasts and how far those ripples travel, I suppose. Could you tell us what immediately led you to focus on Egress as a writing project? and what did you think the biggest challenge was in approaching that project? Yeah, so Egress was initially my master's dissertation, which is quite a strange thing to acknowledge, I think, in orbit of a kind of writing project like this. And it feels like a strange book to me because it's constantly narrating its own existence. And it's usually quite, it's not common for a dissertation, whether that's any kind of degree, any kind of level to then, you know, reach bookshelves and still retain the mark of its birthing from the academy.

In a way, that's kind of the tension that the book's about, really, the strange in-betweenness of certain projects or events, political projects, cultural projects. And yeah, the death of Mark Fisher, which is kind of the book's central event, is kind of precisely that moment. It was a moment experienced for me, at least in the explicit context of university. but it's an event that's continued to have implications and ramifications for my life and other people's lives far beyond that context. And what happens to an event like that, the experience of an event like that, the memory of an event like that, and what those kinds of events can change into after the fact is partly what I wanted to explore. So in that sense, in terms of what the biggest challenge is in writing that project,

I guess it's hard to really pick one. It's been a, the whole project was a challenge from start to finish and it kind of continues to be. It's about, it's more or less a year since I finished it and submitted it for publication, even though it came out, yeah, just a few months ago in March this year. And it's already changed, yeah, a great deal, in my mind anyway. And I think that partly the desire to finish it and put it out in the world, make it what was quite a private thing, make that public was, I think it was a I had this strain of desire that it would bring some sort of closure which in hindsight is probably the is the last thing it was ever going to do but that's kind of you know it's raised new challenges and kind of kept it going so it's a book that tries to narrate an existential shock in a way and that shock is still rippling out into the future for as far as I can

see so in the wake of that existential shock as you say there's also an aspect to your book that I think is quite enabling for us as philosophers, activists, and readers of theory. In what ways do you think that maybe other people who experienced this existential shock became enabled maybe in the same way that you were, or maybe positively transformed despite the tragedy that was Mark's death? It's almost an impossible question. I feel like to some extent that it's a book that's given me a great deal of hope and it did at the time of writing it but that hope's constantly being challenged and I guess that's partly what I mean in saying that it's a the challenges of the book have only just gotten more intense even after the fact of writing it that what the book is now

capable of doing what Marx thought is capable of doing what philosophy in general is capable of doing and how it's able to stay resilient despite the sort of ebbs and flows and deaths and births of various different projects and people even is yeah something that is very difficult to put to put into words really and i think that if there's anything that i hope that the the book can provide to people it's a way of showing how that kind of project can be held open i guess despite the world around you sort of telling you otherwise i love the way that you put that

I wanted to jump in there because one of the things, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you've said before that one of the reasons you wanted to write this book and one of the reasons why you continue to write about Mark Fisher is a kind of frustration with the ways in which he gets distorted and misused and almost turned into a caricature of other self by others. and so one of the things I read on your blog recently which I really really liked was the capitalist realism of capitalist realism is ending which I really really liked because there is this habit right where every time we go through some sort of regular cyclical crisis every single time the answer is capitalist realism is finally ending and of course at least so far it never has so

are you trying to sort of provide a sort of corrective to the popularly accepted vision of who Mark Fisher was and what his work represented? In a way, it's an attempt to just elongate out that process, in a way. I feel like there's a habit that, I think it's a habit that everyone has, in a way, especially when discussing things online. And even in forums such as this, really, you know, I think that the strength of this sort of, and this is something that I found with my own blog, I think the strength of offering this kind of conversation and this sort of content, for lack of a better word, that allows people to kind of hear quite casually, really, what various people, whether in their circles or not, are thinking about and about the world around them. I think the casual nature of that can sometimes lead people to

make assumptions and rush into sort of final opinions in a way. And I feel like that there's a strange tension between holding a thought open and allowing sort of new uses for it to come into being. It comes down to a fundamentally philosophical question, right, of like the what is truth? I feel like that kind of spectre of something that can be true it's to sort of delay the, to acknowledge that that is the goal, but to sort of also delay the speed at which the systems that we're in, particularly what Mark would call communicative capitalism, want to kind of reduce that truth down to some sort of very basic superficial notion that can be easily

assimilated, really. And I think that's kind of one of the defining questions for a lot of people trying to get into philosophy. It's like, why does it have to be so difficult? That could be anything. Why is philosophical language often so technical, so full of jargon and so unruly as if it doesn't want to be understood is it just pretentious or is it something else and I always feel like the only argument the best argument for that is that yeah it's to sort of hold off assimilation and for me as soon as Mark died there was a process that started where this thought that the thought of this man who you know has been in himself and in his writings had been such a bugbear for the left for a long time that had many of his own controversies that had never really, you know, had struggled to kind of make a name for himself in a way,

which seems bizarre to say that now, since he's sort of so in vogue. But yeah, Mark was not a popular thinker in the way that we usually, you know, I think I remember seeing something somewhere that some of Mark's friends saying that, you know, the main thing he wanted to be was to be a pop star. In every sense of the word, that's, you know, musically with his various projects. And I think that was even, you know, they're sort of saying that that was even true of him as a philosopher. but I think that the thing that comes with that, and that's true of all pop stars in a way, is that when someone becomes so known, the work that they've done can be reduced down to some sort of glib reduction. And that happened with Mark very immediately. So I think that part of why I wrote Egress and why I've continued to write about Mark in a way

is to try and almost slow down the assimilation of his writings into some sort of popular discourse. So that, you know, not to say that Marx should remain a cult figure, but so that the idea of him that we have is, you know, at least a well-informed one. And, you know, it stays true to the challenges that his thought wanted to bring into popular discourse. He wanted to be a part of the conversation and disrupted at the same time. And I think that that's what people find so commendable about his writing. but I think there was a review of my book in Trivia Magazine that kind of said it quite clearly it's often been the case in the last few years that there's been no sort of figure that Marx needed more protection from than Mark Fisher fans as sad and as quite provocative as that is to say

I think it's definitely true and that's true of anyone who enters the kind of popular imagination in the way that he has recently I think while you're on that I'm just wondering Egress is such of fascinating work, particularly because right after you provide such a striking personal analysis that leaves a pretty heavy impact on anybody who reads it, you jump right into some of the more subtle influences that are only tacitly present in Mark Fisher's work. And I was wondering what pushed you to engage with, say, thinkers like Bataille and literary theorists like Blanchot, when generally, like you say, so much of the discourse surrounding

Fisher is sort of this reworking of Deleuze and Qatari, a sort of blending of various post-structural figures from Baudrillard to Foucault. I'm wondering, part of what makes this text so interesting to me, and I think to many, is the way in which you engaged in kind of an archaeology of Mark's thought, was that a difficult process to do to connect these dots, given what the general consuming public has access to? Because Bataille is present in texts like capitalist realism and the weird and the eerie, but not explicitly. Was that kind of a central tenant of your project? Can you explain maybe what was going on there? I think in a way it was the resonance between

this understanding of what Mark wanted to do, right? This sense of a popular disruption or like a popular dissensus, I guess. And how a lot of Marx's writings in a way and a lot of his neologisms, these really sly combinations of paradoxes, really. I mean, it wasn't a conscious decision to openly challenge Marx's thought and this sort of sense of who his influences were. In a way, the inclusion of Bataille in particular, he's so central to the book, and yet wasn't the fact that the few times that Marx does write about Bataille explicitly, he's quite scathing and dismissive of him. I just didn't think about that, to be honest. Bataille was just hugely important to me. And I was reading a lot of Bataille and Blanchot, specifically, right before Mark's death. It was sort of serendipitous in a way.

I'd been working with Bataille and Blanchot explicitly because whilst as a student, I had a separate essay project that I'd started before Mark died that was about the performance art group Coombe Transmissions, who later became better known by the name Throbbing Gristle. Coombe Transmissions were from my hometown of Hull and in early 2017 there was an exhibition organised in Hull just sort of a quite maligned coastal town in the north-east of England and there was an exhibition there that was to sort of celebrate their work and to provide a sort of retrospective of their performances before they kind of became these pioneers of industrial music. it was at that time that cozy fanny tutti who's a member of top and gristle she'd written this

autobiography about her time before joining the group whilst she joined it and then a lot of what happened afterwards and in that book there were a lot of quite shocking accusations made against her former partner and bandmate the recently deceased genesis pioridge and that just raised quite an interesting question for me that this that in this moment that was celebrating this work done, these two people were coming back together in, you know, in the shadow of these quite serious accusations. And it just, it made these questions emerge of, you know, how can a group that was so renowned and so defined by its transgressive performances and its transgressive artworks be re-understood in this quite, an accusation of this quite abusive relationship? On the most obvious level, that's not really a difficult thing to untangle. There's a great

difference between you know the consent given in a piece of artwork and the lack of consent that you know in an abusive relationship but at the same time you know there's there's still a sort of complex dynamic there and especially in the context of putting on this exhibition of how to ethically celebrate what one of the people what i mean the curate of vanity curated this exhibition for herself so what's the you know what are the what's the ethical approach of um of engaging with an archive of transgressive artwork that's so defined now in many people's minds by this other sort of the shadow of this abusive relationship and batai was the most obvious person to turn to there you know what's the if his project can be defined as anything it's like it's an ethics of transgression and i think that that's true of mark's work as well you know

despite what mark has written about batai and to a lesser extent blanchard on his blog i personally just see as incorrect. I don't think that Mark was right in his appraisals of those people. And that in the situating Mark in the history of the ideas that he's actually he himself's engaging with, Bataille lingers there in the shadows. He's sort of the missing link between two of Mark's most central influences, Spinoza and Lacan. He's written a lot about, you know, for Deleuze and Guattari, Blanchot plays a huge role in The Thousand Plateaus. Bataille is a sort of central thinker for a lot of black metal theory, which is arguably the most productive cultural theoretical synthesis that kind of came out of two of Marx's key interests, Hauntology and Accelerationism.

And for Accelerationism, the central text of that philosophy was Jean-Francois Lyotard's Libidinal Economy, which is a reading of Bataille with Marx. so yeah I got some flack more recently for you know even thinking to include Bataille in this book just because of Mark's opinion of him over someone like Stuart Hall for me it wasn't something I even considered as far as Mark's own projects were concerned and as far as my own project was concerned to do something to write a book that I wanted to be in a very generic sense an ethical project that was nevertheless seen as by many people around me as being a transgressive project in it being initially quite a private thing that I was working on, the sense was seen, why are you using this moment of quite horrific trauma

and grief to get a degree? How can you write about one thing in service of something so institutionalised? And that's a question that continued after we'd graduated. Why should I be the one to write this book about Mark's work, to narrate the circumstances of his death as if it's some sort of cash grab or clout grab? But in a way, the tension is the same, the tension that I really enjoy about Bataille's work, the frankness with which he engages in an ethics of transgression. That was the question that I found in reading Bataille, in looking at the culture of the city from which I'm from. and the immediate circumstances around Mark's death in a university.

I think it's really important that you included Bataille in the book for two main reasons. I think when it comes to writing a monograph and a eulogy like you have, there's a creative element to it, right? And I think of Deleuze here, who feels that a blend of fidelity and novelty is crucial to doing philosophy. And I would argue that there's even a creative element in writing a eulogy to someone like Mark. And I also think the inclusion of Bataille is opposite in this case, given Bataille's own particular way of thinking egress, and especially as you talk about limit experiences. And for Bataille, I think of how, for example, Bataille's notion of egress involved a critique of the political insofar as it was only incidentally capable of providing

ruptures that afforded enlivening possibilities. And so I think by you doing that, it very much invokes the spirit of Mark's work. Yeah, I mean, that's great. And that's the hope, really. But in a way, that's kind of, again, it extends the question outwards, the fact that, you know, I hadn't even considered this before publishing the thing. But the fact that this questions now been raised um is actually something that i've kind of perversely enjoyed um as perversely as writing the book itself that it could be keeps these questions going and it keeps the uh i think it sort of demonstrates how mark's thought in itself is not settled that we can have already this sort of this this opposing opinion that some people will see the the use of patai

as being a great way to extend mark's project and some will see it as a step too far in um mutating Mark's project. But the capacity that we all have for doing that and what that can do, not just to Mark's thought, but to thought more generally, is, to be honest, the sort of question that I wanted the book to ask. So as difficult as it's been to say, I didn't expect that question to be reflected back on me quite so pointedly in some instances. But yeah, I can't complain. In Igris, you detail your own struggles with mental health in conjunction with those Mark experienced. And you also mentioned how Mark believed that our engagement with politics can be at least partially an antidote to the atomization and dislocation we experience in our world.

Has adopting this premise availed you in your own struggles? To be frank, no, not at all. But in a way that that's, it just further complicates the relationship, I think, between mental health and politics. There's a topic that Mark became, and for some people really well known for talking about, I think it again just demonstrates how much tension there still is within that kind of formulation. I think it should be made clear that at the time of Mark's death, and this is something that was been told to me by those that, you know, were very aware of what he was going through in the last few months of 2016. At the time of his death, he was not thinking about his final depression politically at all. I think it was Tariq Goddard, who runs Repeater Books, said it was actually all too personal in the end.

mark and i think that in a way that's a it's quite a harrowing truth but in a way it's a an important one because i think that it's been all too easy to for some people to to read into mark's death as if to say that mark's death is a failure of his thought and in a way that my my own book asks that question at one point but i think it's a question that when you know given any sort of serious engagement very quickly falls apart but it's an important one to deal with and I think that part of that comes from Mark's ardent critique of what he calls the therapeutic imaginary, which gets a bit of discussion in egress, which I think we've seen take on a sort of new form on Twitter recently. I can't remember who it was. It was one of the sort of usual gobshite Twitter leftists sort of saying that, you know, therapy should be mandatory under socialism.

And that's been a tweet that spawned a thousand memes. But, you know, it's an ethic, the critique of that tweet, whoever sent it, I can't even remember the source now, which is the case with All Good Memes. But I think it's an important thing to interrogate because that's an argument that flies in the face of a lot of post-May 68 radical leftism that Mark was engaged with. The writings of Deleuze and Guattari engaging with the anti-psychiatry movement at that time, trying to precisely undercut the sense that mental illness is something to be solved through a kind of magical voluntarism, as Mark called it, or that it was, you know, that it should be seen through the lens of, again, what Mark called a mandatory individualism, to say that your problems are yours and yours alone

and that you should therefore, you know, we should take a will to kind of come out of them. In a way, Mark made that point himself to sort of say that we need to socialise our sense of mental illness, but socialising our understanding of depression is very different from institutionalising it through a form of, you know, therapeutic psychiatry. it's a socialized you know it's not a kind of therapy gulag as some people have put it but it's a socialized treatment doesn't it doesn't other madness but it it works with uh i should say neurologically atypical in a way to you know build new ways of community living for everyone and that kind of project you know doesn't emerge from that kind of psychoanalytic relation and a lot of those you know the the likes of lecan and whoever else made you know that's that's the the Lecunian turn in psychoanalysis to really interrogate the implications of that relationship

between analysts and analysands. This is something that you highlighted in the book as well. Mark's lens of the weird and eerie as perhaps being part of the positive ethical program that he proposes. One of the things that I really appreciate about that, it's almost like an operationalization. Did I say that right? It's almost like operationalizing Sartre's notion of absurdity in a way and kind of drawing it into a collective political project that manifests itself through art, music, and so forth. Is that an ethos that you have engendered in your own work as a writer or photographer? Certainly in the writing of this book. I feel like in a way that that's kind of the difficulty that kind of now defines it afterwards. I mean, the fact that,

I think that's part of the reason why it has to be made clear that the book emerged from a university because in a way to summarize it most cynically would be to say that it's you know it's a kind of memoir of a student experience I hope it's much more than that but in a way that's true that's what it is it's a but in a way that that's kind of what's really important about how it was able to emerge from that moment the fact that 2017 for me was not only the year that Mark died that was defined by a lot of grief and pain but it was also a year without work It was a year when I was sort of alleviated of a lot of the more general worries and concerns that dominated a kind of quote unquote normal life. And the grief of Mark's death in a way allowed, it produced, it was weird and eerie in the sense that it produced a very real glimmer of a world transformed.

And I feel like our experience on campus was quite distinctly different from those people that mourned Mark, you know, whilst going about their day-to-day lives. And a lot of people have been cynical about that. And I think it's very easy to be cynical about that. But in a way that that's the same reason, that's the same, for the same reasons that we're cynical about students more generally. Or the working class more generally, or the unemployed more generally. as if to say that, you know, to the experiences you can have when you slip out from underneath that kind of capture, to celebrate them is derided as sort of being idealistic or hedonistic or irresponsible or whatever else. But I think for us, if that wasn't the case, you know, we kind of managed to find this exit through the Academy. And yeah, in that moment, we kind of saw another way

of living our lives. And I think a part of what then defines the rest of the book after that moment's kind of over, because the book covers a time period from 2017 to 2019, which for the most part, for those three years that the book was written through, two of those years were spent in more or less full employment. And I feel like part of the melancholy of the book, in a way, is trying to hold on to the instances where that glimmer of that other life kind of re-emerged in that otherwise normal day-to-day capitalist existence. I've read some of the responses to your book. I mean, you mentioned the one about Bataille earlier, right? And one of the things that strikes me, you know, I asked you earlier about how you, how to prevent Mark Fisher's ideas from being simply, you know,

recuperated back into a kind of undangerous sort of way of thinking of discourse. But, of course, I know I knew Mark, you know, personally, but I know two things from, you know, reading about him, speaking to people who did know him. one was that he was an educator an educator in many ways he spent his entire adult life teaching in different institutions and trying to explain these things to him in ways that made sense to him and encourage him to go out and do things with it and so to me, one of the things I really like about it is that you don't simply say here's what Mark Fisher thought, let's just leave it there, let's sort of cast fat in stone and worship at that altar From everything I know about Mark, that probably is the last thing he'd want, right?

If someone could go out there and do something productive with what he's done, go further or critique him or have new ideas, that's basically following in his spirit, I think, and that's why I think it's a good thing to do. But on that note, one of the things I was wondering about is that one of the similarities I've noticed in both your book, Egress, and his writings, particularly capitalist realism, is the huge variety of sources, different thinkers, different ideas, different traditions. And one of the problems I've seen raised with Mark Fisher is the way in which he'll sort of flip between, say, Zizek and Lacombe, and then move straight over to Deleuze and Gattari, and then back to Freud, and then over to someone else.

And as fascinating as all that is, and it draws out new intuitions and things, do you think there's an issue there of sort of cohesion or do you think there is a kind of underlying cohesion in what Mark was trying to do with his work? I think that what I like about Mark's work in that regard and I mean I feel like it's a fair point and it's something that's definitely true of me too I think but and again this is probably something that a response that Mark would have really despised because it depends on my love of an author that he also really didn't like um but one of my favorite books is wg sebal's the rings of saturn um which as i understand it was one of mark's least favorite books um because it's written about the suffolk

coastline that he knew so well and uh actually when finishing um egress i had the opportunity to to um do a sort of final proofread of it in uh my my girlfriend's um one of her relatives of the house in Suffolk and we stayed there and I managed to read it over a weekend um and as we've been staying at this house in Suffolk a few times I'm I decided to read Seybold sort of in situ which is a a sort of rite of passage that's been fetishized by a lot of people particularly sort of the Robert McFarlane sort of psychogeography um crowd and I actually found myself understanding what Mark hated about Sebald the most. And Sebald has this really depressing, quite cruel description of Felix

though. And what Sebald describes is this quite just a bit of a hellscape really. But what I saw, and I can assume what Mark saw, was frankly just a working class town down on its luck. And so I think it's Sebald's lack of a sort of social context in that regard that Mark really hated. That being said, what I love about that book more than anything is the way that it meanders in much the same way that the Sabord does, and not just physically, but, yeah, in the psychogeographic sense that as much as he's walking along this coastline, his mind wanders. And the very first chapter of that book is this kind of long mediation on death that I think I've read over and over and over again

because you just get totally lost in the movement of his thought. Um, it's as if you're sort of reading his, you know, this, this, this incredible thinker lucidly, just like a, it's a stream of consciousness that's, you know, truly philosophical, not just some sort of like, it's, it's considered and incredibly well informed. Yeah. There's this strange tension between a cohesive sort of argument and just, yeah, the very nature of thought moving. and I think I've read that book so many times that it's probably quite both conscious and unconscious influence now that that's the kind of writing that I really love and it's the kind of writing that I love to write I like trying to reconstruct the movement of thought as it sort of passes through things and I feel like in a lot of ways

Mark's writing does the same thing and I feel like it's not just the pretension of referencing Sebald there is probably a bit over the top when really it's just a question of that's just it's just blogging um i think that's the that's the that's the impact of blogging on writing really is that it and it's and it's kind of what what blogging has taught me that my you know no academic degree ever could do i think that the amount of right that i think when i clock up the amount of words that i've written on my blog and post it and people just go well i think people think that regardless of whether i post numbers so how the fuck do you write so much but it is literally just a case of writing what having a thought and just writing it down and sometimes those thoughts lead to other thoughts and just doing that leads to it what what's not in my mind a sense of productivity it's just thinking and i

feel like that's what yeah i learned that as much from mark as i did from any other kind of literary projects and i feel like that comes across in yeah in his books for better and for worse um but personally the fact that yeah he managed to capture the movement of his own thought in that way is something that's really refreshing and it's done well even less frequently. Yeah, so I was wondering, you know, is there an underlying unity or system which you can see in Mark's work? Because I've seen attempts to draw out some in the past. Because of the nature of his writing is so, you know, it has that sort of train of thought style to it. Do you think that's there or is it...? I think it is there, but not in the way that we're maybe used to seeing.

Because I feel like this is kind of part of the project that I'm trying to work on at the moment on accelerationism and where it came from and kind of what happened to it. And part of this, I think, is what I found is that the moment that accelerationism as a term and as a kind of blogospheric topic is born is around a series of interviews that Alain Badiou gave and which Slasov-Zuzek also commented on. about what Boudou calls the crisis of negation. And maybe we can go into that a bit later. But I think the one thing that I found in reading some of Boudou's stuff that was very influential for the early blogosphere that Mark was a huge part of was that Boudou has this argument in, I think it's his book called

Philosophy for Militants or something like that. And he talks about the way that a new philosophy is always needed to kind of help birth a new science. Science in a very general term. And he has this list where it's like, you know, Plato helped birth mathematics. Kant helps birth Newtonian physics. Marx and Hegel help birth history. Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze help birth biology. And the question for Bidou is what comes next? I think a large, the blogosphere initially, maybe because of not just in terms of it being sort of a gathering of big egos like Bidou, but just the fact that it was philosophy being done on a new space, being done online in the blogosphere. And whether that's the right place of philosophy to be done is a worthy question. Ray Brassier, who was also part of that whole

contingent, definitely doesn't think so. But that initial moment that we kind of now know as being the sort of speculative realist movement was an attempt to bring out a new philosophy that could support and kind of help develop the new sciences of the age, specifically our kind of new cosmic perspective on ourselves. So in that respect, I feel like that's the underlying project that mark was initially a part of um he had his own niche within that and developed his own sort of ideas and theories but he was kind of part of that wider tapestry in a way and that's not really like a cohesion uh it's a movement that lacks cohesion explicitly um there's so much disagreement but in a way it's like all parts of this kind of uh whether that's you know speculative realists or object-oriented ontology or Prometheanism or Accelerationism, all of these things emerge

from that moment. And despite them being so disparate, they kind of all have this same, in their initial instance, this same sort of thrusting towards the new. And that's, you know, for Marx, best known for engaging with that culturally and more explicitly politically later on. But for people like Brasier, it was the case of doing that scientifically. for someone like graham harman it's arguably sort of metaphysically or even aesthetically and a combination of the two and yeah the kind of you can keep listing various different names of people in there but i guess that's kind of what i mean when mark talks about this sense of a popular dissensus it's strange to think about the the cohesion of that moment is precisely a lack of cohesion but in a way the thing that's the only way of thinking about it considering how it's still such a you know we're still in this moment it's a moment that's not over yet despite you know

capitalism as a sort of system hoping that it will be and sort of always dragging the system. And accelerationism is kind of what I'm interested in drawing out in this new project is precisely how accelerationism has been the victim of its own critique in a way. Accelerationism wanted to address the fact that politics always slides back into a reactionary state of inertia in the present moment. And all of these thinkers wanted to precisely find a way philosophically out of that. And now with Accelerations of Itself, what we've found is that it's fallen on its own sword. It has succumbed to that very same process of violent reactionary inertia in its far-right variant. That's something I wanted to... I was hoping we'd have a chance to talk about, because it's that exact question which you find in so much of Mark's work.

I know actually all three, me, Will, and Craig, wanted to talk a little bit about post-capitalist desire. And me and you talked about that earlier this year in Huddersfield a little bit, because part of my paper was on that, and then we had some great chats about that weird long table thing. And one way of sort of putting that question was, I noticed in Egress, there's actually quite a few references to Marcuse, which is great. I mean, I love the guy. He's a brilliant thinker. So what I wanted to do is, there's a quote I came across by Marcus, and I thought I'd put it to you and see what you think Mark would make of this idea and what that means for accelerationism or for some form of a left-poller.

So in the preface to Eros and Civilization, I'll sort of truncate the quote, and he says, Whereas previous revolutions brought about a larger and more rational development of the productive forces, In the overdeveloped societies of today, revolution would mean reversal of this trend, elimination of overdevelopment and its repressive rationality. The rejection of affluent productivity, far from being a commitment to purity, simplicity and nature, might be the token and weapon of a higher stage of human development based on the achievements of the technological society. As the production of wasteful and destructive goods is discontinued, a stage which would mean the end of capitalism in all its forms, the somatic and mental mutilations inflicted on man, bioproductive force may be undone. I read that earlier today, and that seems to me to be the sort of, perhaps, perspective which Mark is actually criticising in post-capitalist desire,

and others like it, when he talks about designer socialism and things. So, I'm wondering what you make of that. I think that that's something that Mark would, in a way, maybe in some, when he's got some certain hats on, agree with entirely. And Mark liked Marcuse a great deal, and saw him as a kind of proto-accelerationist, precisely for those reasons. Yeah. But in a way that that's... Accelerationism in its kind of affirmation of that kind of thinking isn't an ejection of the crisis that is at its heart. The question of a post-capitalist desire, of capitalist desire even, is something that Marcus quite explicitly introduces into popular

political thinking, specifically in Eros and Civilization, his book on Marx and Freud. And yeah, that's, that lineage is kind of what Marx wanted to attach himself to, and that lineage that goes from Marcuse to Deleuze and Grattery to Jean-Francois Lyotard to Nickland to whatever comes next. And they all, each instance, it's a question of, yeah, do we really want what we say we want? And to what extent is what we want even something we can have any sort of control over? I feel like the Landian and the Leotardian and Landian intervention in that kind of thinking is that,

which in a way is kind of been, is still necessary today. It's an attempt to think desire in itself without, you know, devoid of any relationship to the human. In a sense, it's a Kantian move. The way that Kant's philosophical project is one that, no matter what topic he's talking about, it's a sort of rational system where every theory is kind of commensurate with each other. So his theory of time and his theory of causation both kind of overlap. They might seem distinct on face value, but they're kind of both in time with each other. And I feel like that's something that continues in thinking of the speculative realists and the accelerationists and everyone else and Marx thinking in that Brassier sort of introduces the idea that philosophy

needs to think the universe in itself, which science has kind of made it unavoidable. For him, nihilism wasn't some sort of pathetic edgelord sort of disavowal of your own agency, but it's the only realistic position that you can take under the scientific advances that we've seen that demand, you know, we see ourselves in a way of a diminished sense. And we kind of have to think the world in terms of physics and dynamics and all these other forces. I mean, I'm not a scientist, but that's my understanding anyway, in themselves, you know, sort of devoid of us. And that's kind of the demands on thinking in the present. And that kind of thinking is then, you know, is for Alex Williams, who is most famous perhaps for co-authoring Inventing the Future with Nick Cernick. Initially on his blog in 2007,

under the influence of Ray Brassier and Nick Land, Alex Williams wanted to put forth a left-landianism that didn't just give a cosmic perspective on the planet, but tried to look at capitalism in itself. What is capitalism devoid of in a relationship to the human? And I think in lots of Mark's work, I mean, Alex Williams would kind of scrub all of that landianism from his, I mean, the blog doesn't exist online anymore. You can find it via the Wayback Machine, but he's kind of scrubbed that quite fortuitously, considering how land is seen now, not undeservedly. But Mark, I think, takes that a step further in taking this sort of strange Freudianism and Spinozism and not just asking what the planet is in itself or capitalism in itself,

but also asks what is desire in itself? What are our desires beyond any fidelity to our own thought processes? And that sounds maybe kind of like a useless task and even a bit of a fantasist one. But in a way, I feel like it's what's demanded of the moment. That seems to be the common thread, doesn't it? Desire is what runs through these different thinkers and trying to think through, at least someone like Marcuse and also with Mark, is how do we think about desire beyond capitalism, right? That seems to be where it's going. Yeah, but it's even like it's, I mean, I think the nature of that question is so twisted. It's kind of like a quantum desire sort of analysis or something.

I feel like, I mean, again, a part of this trajectory kind of emerges specifically from sort of Anglosphere in that the most important influence on all this thinking is the English translation of Freud's use of the word trebe. I think I'm pronouncing that right which is initially translated as instinct and then it's translated as drive and both of those things can also be understood as desire but the importance of choosing drive over instinct is it kind of jettisons the biological association Tree can also be used to translate as sprout as in the growth of a plant emerging from the soil But that biological way of phrasing it kind of limits our thinking after the Industrial Revolution.

So calling it a drive gives it a more mechanical and machinic quality. The introduction of that thought is going to follow through to its end as capitalism and industrialization has progressed to the point where you get, you know, land's most famous proto-accelerationist text being machinic desire, which in a way is just an elongated way of saying drive. But the implications of thinking drive in that way, of any drive, whether that's, you know, the infamous death drive or something else, is that, you know, our understanding of that keeps developing and becoming more and more complicated as capitalism and industry in themselves develop. So that for Mark, it becomes, in his PhD thesis, flatline constructs. It becomes not just machinic in terms of cogs and gears, but, you know, cybernetic.

and that's something that you know that continues to you know i mean i think land's most recent projects on bitcoin and philosophy has a great deal to say about the next development of that thinking whether anyone will even bother to give it a look in considering what he's done to his reputation it's another question personally i'm kind of tentatively still interested to read what he has to say because that project in particular i think could be hugely important across the political spectrum. And the questions that he raises and the things that he makes possible in thinking Bitcoin philosophically are really important to revitalizing the sort of what now seems like the dead product of accelerationism. Well, now that we've broached the topic of accelerationism, I would like to turn the focus back to your book, where you do talk about

accelerationism and Mark and Nick Land's relationship. Of course, Land applauds the triumph of capital as the zenith of desire and its history. Marx certainly opposes that view, but with the qualification that post-capitalist futures remain emergent within the spaces produced by neoliberal capitalism. But one of the things that I wanted to touch upon were the objections to accelerationism, whether it were a right or a left variant. A common objection to accelerationism from the left is that it has the potential to be catastrophic and could harm underserved communities, for example. Now, recently, David Harvey cautioned the left about the dangers of a catastrophic disruption of capital, which then, of course, drew criticism

from all sectors of the left. But in the book, you attempt to vindicate Marx's brand of accelerationism with the claim it does not mean accelerating any or everything in capitalism willy-nilly in the hope that capitalism will thereby collapse. Rather, it means accelerating the processes of destratification that capitalism cannot but obstruct. So in view of our current historical moment and the possibility of revitalizing accelerationism, how might have Mark or you yourself imagine the project of refurbishing accelerationism to proceed? Yeah, it's a really great question. On the one hand, the objection that capitalism, sorry, accelerationism from the left being sort of potentially catastrophic is a non-starter for me,

I think. You know, any political project has the potential to do people harm. That's the risk that you have to take when you embrace change. And that's not to say that, you know, a bunch of, you know, largely white male theorists should advocate for radical change at the expense of other communities. Should we denounce Black Lives Matter because it's a movement that might lead to the further persecution of black lives. You know, that's precisely what's happened. State capitalism threatens and indeed enacts further persecution as a response. So they enforce the status quo through fear of repercussions. And I feel like as far as acceleration is concerned and how it can proceed, acceleration is happening whether we like it or not. But this is the question of where, you know, it's a fact of taking some sort of charge of what we can do in the process. Acceleration is happening, change is happening, but, you know, the question is in favour of whom.

um silicon valley's monopolized what mark and jody dean called community of capitalism um and the point is that we have to do what we can if anything to sort of assuage capitalism's co-option of these like new desires so it's you know it's worth emphasizing that black lives matter is incompatible with capitalism and the structures that keep it in place precisely you know the police in military industrial complex first and foremost the problem that accelerationism throws into this equation is that it is precisely again it comes back to this question of the the crisis of negation which is i mean marx carl marx puts this forward first of all in um the first volume of capital and he relates it to i think it is anyway was it second i'm not that i don't know i'll get so get lost in page references for capital but anyway um marx talks about the

negation of negation as a sort of fundamental process within capitalism. And it's a really knotted process that leaves with a lot of confusion. And I think because of this, confusion has been ejected from the question of acceleration altogether unnecessarily. But for Marx, it's essentially a question of, he uses the example of individual property. So feudalism has to abolish individual property. You have to facilitate the class struggle. The proletariat cannot own their own property. That's left to the bourgeoisie, so the proletariat have to work. It's one-on-one stuff. But Marx argues that when we transition to capitalism, capitalism necessarily has to reintroduce the possibility of individual property. In theory, everyone under capitalism is capable of owning their own home.

It's stress in theory. But the issue is that in doing that, again, this is what Marx argues, that if the ownership of individual property is universalized, then there's no such thing as individual property. You just have social ownership. You have capitalism leading necessarily to socialism. But capitalism has to then, you know, that's the negation of negation. But the capitalism, as we've seen more recently, has to, you know, put drag on its own project. And we can see that coming in the form of rent. you don't, you know, you abstract the feudal relation so that you're no longer just doing work initially, literally for the feudal lord. You go to work so you can make money that you then pay to your landlord. You put an extra sort of degree of separation in there.

And now what we see is that we see rent sort of becoming the standard way of engaging with the world, not just in the sense that you rent, like most people rent, I assume rent where they live, But now we also see that cutting into culture. So you don't just rent where you live, you rent the media that you watch. You don't own movies anymore, you rent access to them. And the same with music. That's a really interesting thought that the proliferation of subscription culture is a kind of anti-production within capitalism. Yeah. And there's a few people that have written about this. I think Peter Fraser's one, he has a book on Verso called Four Futures. and one of the features that he puts forth is this idea of rentism that you know rent will just take

over that that we'll have nothing you will rent you'll have to rent everything you'll rent food even or something which again you kind of can see that you can subscribe to you know have food delivered to your house and with that becoming the norm you completely you you know you get again almost back into feudal relation you abolish the idea of individual property that's kind of the perfect example in marx's initial formulation the universalization of individual property leading to socialism. That's the kind of thing that capitalism produces for itself, but then it has to obstruct for itself. Otherwise, you know, it's signaling its own demise. So when Mark talks about accelerationism, in terms of this crisis of negation, they're talking about, in a way, they're talking about staying aware of how that process works and the ways that capitalism

necessarily tries to stall it. And that's not just true economically, but, you know, again, politically, then that's something that we see right now with Black Lives Matter. The way that that movement lost its momentum in 2014, we saw the exact same sequence of events as we're seeing now. It was all these protests, riots even, where individual property was destroyed. And then the response to that comes from media concomerals that says, well, okay, we'll remove instances of blackface. or I just saw before joining the podcast, there was an Indian skin lightening cream that's decided to change its name. So it makes it seem like it's less of a taboo to have dark skin, even though, you know, but the product still exists. And the way, you know, it's totally superficial,

but that's the process of, you know, what Deleuze and Guattari call re-territorialization. And the benefit of that happening now is that we saw all this happen previously in 2014, and it worked to an extent, and then we kind of went back to our inertia. But now that it's happening again, we're very aware of what's happening. We see it for what it is, which is a superficial kind of attempt to assimilate radical protest back into capitalism and corporations. And there's a sense that it's not working. What more can that movement do to reject those processes and kind of push further beyond them. We've gotten to the point of talking about police abolition or police reform even in a sort of soft left version.

And now we get to the point where we have the left, especially in the UK, with like Keir Starmer, the Labour Party sort of denying, calling that idea ridiculous. But of course he would because he's a QC and he's a human rights lawyer for so long. He's part of that establishment. depends on the systemic structure of capitalism and everything that comes with it, racism, classism, et cetera. So yeah, I guess just the point being that that crisis of negation where it is pervasive and it's everywhere. And that was always what accelerationism initially in its first instance wanted to attack and kind of draw attention to and produce consciousness of. But that's waning, I think, more and more. I think that's the one thing that, you know, that project needs to revitalize for itself again, not just for the sake of a few internet bloggers, but, you know, for all of us.

With the recent spate of uprisings embedded within the context of the COVID-19 world, there was about six to 12 days in June after the killing of George Floyd, where it seemed like we were to, well, first of all, we all took on a sense of seriousness and urgency about the matter. And it seemed for a short time to create this rupture where something could and did in fact happen. But like you said, it wasn't very long after that. And I think right now we're kind of in the beginning stages of the bourgeois class reappropriating this narrative, making these superficial sorts of changes. I mean, for me, pulling down Confederate statues, Christopher Columbus, all of that is great

stuff. But it seems that the urgency and seriousness skirted class analysis. In short, I don't think these protests were too big for the apparatus of capture. And the ensuing effect, like you suggest, is this re-territorialization of capital. And we're back to business with inter-left feuding on places like Twitter. And this exchange of resentments is arguably enhancing the vampire castle that Mark Fisher talked about. And I'm wondering what Mark's brand and style of analysis would have brought to this moment. Yeah, I mean, this again, it's a symptom of that same crisis of negation. And again, to affirm that the crisis of negation is a phrase that Bajou uses in this interview.

I think it's on lacan.com, and it's called the crisis of negation. But the way he puts it there is that it's essentially, it's like a line that Mark would say himself. the crisis of negation is that we are capable of destroying the old, but we're incapable of producing the new. And then in a way, that's the, I think, the issue that comes from some of the destructions of statues. In the UK, at least, when Producers tore down the statue of Colston in Bristol and threw him in the harbour, that was an instance that to me felt quite different from, You know, it was the first instance of tearing down a statue we'd seen in this country. I think that, yeah, there's somewhat of a precedence for it now in the US.

But when that happened in the UK, there was sort of a sense that, I think in a way it felt more important because it was so un-British. It was so impatient. It was so unruly in a way that I think we're nationally not known for. That's what made it quite a sight to see, I think. And actually, you know, it seemed to ignite a certain sort of moment where the destruction of the old in the terms of that statue gave birth to a new kind of consciousness that had been suppressed by, you know, the bureaucratic discussions that had previously been held around that statue going on for sort of 30 years, all solved with some collective action. Whether that's to what extent that's capable of actually sustaining itself and producing class analysis is certainly, I think, the question that Mark would want to ask himself.

And I think that our capacity to do that remains diminished. But that, I think, was what he wanted to do with Acid Communism, his book that he was next working on, quite explicitly. And it's evidence for that, I think, is what's going to come out in this new editorial project that's just been finished, that's called Postcapitalist Desire, that should be coming out on Repeater Books as an e-book in a couple of months, possibly September. Well, that's perfect because I was just going to transition to that part of our interview here. I'd like to finish up by talking about post-capitalist desire and the essays that you're working on or the unpublished writings. They're unpublished, correct, currently? Yes. Okay. And my question is, what are maybe some things that you've seen in this unpublished body of work that have stood out to you in the process of organizing them?

In a way, I guess it goes back to a question that Pat had before about the consistency of Mark's project. Postcapitalist Desire, the collection is called that because that was the name that Mark gave to a course he was teaching at Goldsmiths at the time of his death. He planned for a 15-week course that was to interrogate the very questions associated with that phrase, do we want what we say we want. Only five of those lectures went ahead, but all five of those lectures were recorded. those recordings were made available pretty soon after mark's death i took it upon myself to transcribe the first of them and in a way i mentioned this in egress it was kind of uh beyond mark's death that doing that um was part of the it was kind of the galvanizing moment that made me want to write the book and in a way it kind of shows that the the book may have been

slightly premature or even not premature but you know i got caught up in the rest of the year that unfolded there was um uh i translated one lecture and then life just got in the way so in a way it's a this project's an opportunity to not just be a tease and to you know share that those recordings um there's five transcriptions or lectures i should say that deal with in order they deal with the concept of post-capitalism and the tensions around that phrase is that a phrase that gets trapped in the post of postmodernism? Is it right to have a project of capitalist abolition in a way that is so tied in its name to capitalism still? Mark asks those questions and he goes on to address the rise and fall of the counterculture. Gregory Lukács, he looks at Gregory Lukács' book

History and Class Consciousness and puts forward that Lukács' project is quite explicitly a psychedelic Marxism and it's kind of in predicting a sort of consciousness raising. He goes on to the disavowal of class of the working class that followed the 1972 US election. And then finally, he talks about Jean-Francois Lyotard's writings on the bidon economy. And I think what's becomes, I think it's a, I tie all of this together in quite a lengthy introduction that situates these different lectures in the context of Marx's other writings. So as much as I think the assumption is that Asset Communism was a lost project that only had an introduction written and then was lost to, lost with Mark himself. In fact, a lot of the discourse can be seen, I think, quite evidently to be a sort of a workshop for that next book. And Mark draws on a lot of writings

that he already has out in the world, but actually aren't that widely disseminated. For the most part, none of them appear in the K-Punk Reader that was put out a few years ago. And I think what becomes clear in that is, yeah, the consistency of his project in terms of what happens after we become aware of capitalist realism. I think that Mark, that book succeeded hugely and it's become a phrase that everyone who's engaged in some sort of left-wing politics seems to have a popular awareness of. But that's only the first step. And that's communism is kind of, I guess, the sequel of what comes next. And even an analysis of why previous attempts to establish that kind of group consciousness failed. and it's a it's a quite obviously a very complicated and inevitably unfinished document

it's immediately apparent that there's hidden depth in there and it goes a long way to clarifying mark's project i think beyond its uh it's kind of reductive appropriation by a few sort of soft left corbinites in the uk i don't take for granted that people who are coming to this podcast or to mark's work have read Post-Capitalist Desire. So I'm going to frame a question in a way that positions you as the avatar of Mark Fisher. I'll be the Terminator. How's that? That's a terrible pun. But when I imagine someone encountering this essay, Post-Capitalist Desire, for the first time, I imagine them asking themselves what Mark Fisher means by desire, just the word itself.

I think one of the reasons I put forward this question is the very example illustrated in the opening lines of the essay. Is it possible to disentangle things we think we want from the very system that provides us with them? I think if we get tripped up by a facile notion of desire, Marx analysis is a non-starter for us. But perhaps this question seems basic for folks like you and I and Will and Matt who've been immersed in this discourse community for a while. But it seems to me, as it did for Mark Fisher, to be important to return to the question raised by Deleuze and Guattari, which is, what is the relation of desire, as Mark Fisher sees it, to politics and advanced capitalism? And why is that question important to us if we're going to move beyond capitalism?

I mean, I think partly, I guess we've touched on this a bit before in terms of for Mark, it's a complicated term, perhaps in the fact that it's heavily weighed down by Freudian associations. So, you know, desire is one word of many. We can call it libido. We can call it eros. We can call it instinct or drive, as Freud did, or well, as English translators of Freud did. but yeah in the point that before that in in using drive to refer to this kind of unconscious uh uh yeah desire or want for well x some unknown object often unknown object the use of drive makes

this gives this kind of mechanical and machinic bent and that immediately complicates desire with capitalism and i guess the question becomes for mark and many other photographers photographers philosophers i'm getting my disciplines mixed up for many other philosophers uh is the fact that um it's becoming increasingly difficult to separate desire in whatever sense we mean it from the mechanisms of capitalism and i think that one of the things this is true of libido especially of libido or eros are kind of words for other words for desire that i think in a lot of people's minds have a certain sexual connotation um but it's something far beyond

that in a way that you know even sex itself as that most fundamental biological process of production but i guess reproduction even even sex cannot be thought outside the politics of capitalist exchange and relation. You know, desire is literally, in its mechanical sense, you know, the way that we talk about desire of being, you know, the turnings of a cog or even being turned on, like we are some sort of sexual machine, kind of complicates all of these questions into not just what we want on a conscious level, but what we unconsciously desire, thanks to, or no thanks to, the sort of nefarious pervasiveness of capitalism.

And so for Jean-Francois Lyotard in Libidinal Economy, his 1972 book that he famously called his evil book, Lyotard kind of takes challenges all the philosophers that came before him, particularly Deleuze and Guattari and the philosophers of May 68, and kind of confronts them with their own failure. The death of the counterculture was so quick, really, that we can go from the summer of love in 69, the protests in France in May 68, by the time of 1972, those dreams are completely demolished. And for Mark, that was most clear in the fact that May 68 in France was famous for it being a series of anti-capitalist protests that combined workers and students. And together, the blockades that were built around the city, it brought France to

its knees nearly completely crashed the economy and then you four years later in the u.s you have the election in 72 which was obviously most famously nixon um and i'm always forget he was running against which is kind of a telling point really this guy's forgotten but he so he you know he was the the democratic candidate in that election going up against nixon right before the watergate scandal so it wasn't as if nixon kind of in his second term had a great you know reign of terror. What was notable in the left's opposition to Nixon's second term was that they completely denounced the counterculture and this sense of a sort of group consciousness that could bring together anti-war concerns in the working class. So the working class were kind of weaponized as a kind of reactionary working class, the kind of working class that we're now

painfully familiar with, the sort of stereotype of, you know, a reactionary conservative working class that for some reason desires its own oppression. But Mark would sort of trace this back to that election that would disavow radical politics and working class politics. And that being the same year that Leotard publishes Liberal Economies, no coincidence. And Leotard's main argument in that book is that the one thing that the radical Marxists of the academy can't accept is that the working classes might actually enjoy not just their oppression, you know, they enjoy the things that capitalism brings them. We are capable of desiring what he calls the shit of capital, the sausage pâtés, the iron bars, the slaving in the mud and

in the mines. And this is something that he particularly suggests of the English proletariat at that time, or at least in the lead up to that 70s moment, to actually return to your question on desire. Desire for Mark Fisher is a term that's kind of entangled up in all of this. the sexual relations and the capitalism, and even just the sense that our understanding of what the working class is, who the working class are, what do they want, are we the working class? Has it become this strange imago that's sort of distanced from any sort of actual subjective position? It's become such an abstract concept. The desires of the working class that Marx kind of tried to rally a whole movement behind have been abstracted,

And in a way that Marx predicted for himself, you know, the processes of abstraction that define exchange under capitalism now don't just affect how we, you know, the things that we buy, how the things that we buy are produced and how much value they're assigned. But that applies to people as well. And this is something, again, that comes up from Pierre Koslowski. His book, Living Currency, was only recently translated into English a couple of years ago. he makes the same argument that would be a huge influence on Deleuze and Guattari and on Lyotard and many people since, but it's kind of a neglected part of French intellectual history. Which is to say that people are commodities, not in the basic sense of slavery, but in the sense of our very subjectivity

is something to be bartered for and exchanged. And that's incredibly obvious now in the age of social media. But this was something written, you know, in the 60s, incredibly prescient. And those questions, in a way, this is kind of what I think Mark's project was getting at. It wasn't to say as a lot of the sort of soft left in the UK have kind of driven towards the asset communism as a kind of return of the potentials of the counterculture. It's far more complicated than that. It's not just the return of the potentials, but the return of those questions that were first asked and have still not had an answer and been resolved. Precisely questions of desire. On the point of desire, it seems pretty apparent to me that Mark gets his understanding of political economy from figures like Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari. And part of this formulation involves the concept of death drive, which is initially formulated in Freud's work, but then gets reworked in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, for example.

I'm curious, how is Mark using this concept in the essay Post-Capitalist Desire? Is it the same as, for example, what Deleuze and Guattari are talking about when they talk about death drive? And maybe are there any sort of relevant examples of the operation of death drive that we can use to illustrate that concept? Yeah, I think it's one of the most complex and kind of difficult parts of that essay. and I think what Mark means by death drive is never it's not clear because he uses it in so many different ways I think there's certainly examples of this in his PhD thesis which is available, you can get it for free from the University of Warwick website if you search their archive that they've now digitised

in search for flatline constructs Mark Fisher, it should come up with fairly easily, but I think for Mark it kind of goes a bit beyond that in a way that he never quite dealt with in as much detail as he did then. But I think that the way that Mark talks about death drive, especially in that essay, in the orbit of Nick Land, is kind of a key example of his kind of left-landinism. Nick Land has a famous, well, I mean, maybe not so famous essay in his collection, Fang Numenor, called Making It With Death, which kind of interrogates how fascism is essentially a desire for death on a social level. But I think beyond that even, this left-landingism doesn't

make that association entirely to fascism exclusively, but is instead a return to Ray Brassier's project of nihilism. It's his first book called Nihil Unbound. Again, I mentioned nihilism for Brassier isn't a kind of cliched suspension of all meaning. at least not in a sort of pathetic anthropocentric sense. For him, nihilism is kind of the end point of a rational and scientific realism. We live in a time when our minor position in the universe is more apparent to us than ever before. So we know that in a way that the only response to all the scientific knowledge that we now have our understanding is a kind of nihilism, a rational nihilism,

not a passive nihilism that kind of falls back on the sort of the cliché of a depressive inaction but rather the universe's indifference to us makes our actions all the more significant really and I think that what's important about Brassier's project is that he affirms the extent to which we are capable of intervening in our own development there's there's been a lot of talk around the fact that you know this comes back to the philosophical discussions since Kant Kant's understanding of of noumena um of things in themselves of trying to think um you know what a table is without any relationship to us we have no we've got no it's impossible for us to think things in themselves we're always uh mediating

everything through our own subjectivity and then there's the sort of the further development from that in the lots of German idealism and nature philosophy that, you know, well, it's not just the fact that we are not sort of distinct. There's not this clear subject-object distinction. We in ourselves, we also don't know ourselves in ourselves, if that makes sense. And that's kind of the initial drive of psychoanalysis in a way to kind of interrogate the point that we don't know ourselves as much as we think we do. We have a thing called an unconscious, which is kind of, that is the self in itself devoid of any relationship to you know our own sense of self and trying to untangle what that means is a kind of approach that's never been resolved and so i think when but yeah but none of that's to say that um there comes this sense that when we see ourselves as being a part of nature not just that there is nature and there is us but

that we ourselves are a part of nature there becomes a kind of logical fallacy in that which is to say that you know everything that humans do is natural and for brassy that's not the case It's precisely our reason and our capacity to reason that allows us to intervene in our own development. It's not to say that we would get to this point simply by following nature's rules. We've interjected, we've invented things. This is his argument of Prometheanism. We've stolen fire from the gods. We've intervened in the laws of nature and changed ourselves in some senses for the better and some senses for the worse. And so that kind of is part of what ends up influencing accelerationism. And that point's kind of brought back to the fore in xenofeminism, where there's their infamous cry, there's nature is unjust, change nature,

which actually in that context isn't as radical as it sounds to many sort of, I guess, frankly, basic political ideologies. Our capacity to change nature is the divining lesson that we've learned from the 20th century. But what stands in our way now is capitalism, which doesn't want change, but wants inertia. And so, yeah, accelerationism, in Alex Williams' initial formulation, which is explicitly inspired by land, but also by Brassier, is that Williams tries to take Brassier's view of reality and apply it to capitalism explicitly. Again, I was talking about before, it's all these different theories are commensurate with each other. If we're capable of imagining, of trying to think ourselves and ourselves, thinking the world in itself without us, we have to be able to think capitalism in that way as well. And I think, so again, it's the death drive in that sense,

is a way of, I think it has a certain attraction to us because it sort of defines this strange impulse that we often have, an all-too-human impulse to kind of do things that don't help ourselves. We are sort of destructive creatures in a way, and, you know, self-destructive. And in that sense, you know, what's the relationship then between our own sense of self-destruction, our own desire for death, the fact that we've wrought capitalism on ourselves. And I think that that's, for Mark, it's kind of, again, it's Mark's way of trying to think desire in itself. You know, a desire without any relation to the human is a kind of death drive. That's what the death drive is, I think, in a way.

It's a drive for things, an unreason, an unconscious unreason that has no sense of care for the subject that it is kind of within. I think the one thing that you touched upon that really has piqued my interest is your discussion of Kant. I never thought to think about Kant in the context of the death drive, and I'm just totally riffing here, but just the idea that there might be something like the thing in itself, and our unknowability of that thing could propel the anxiety that is the death drive or is somehow connected to it. I'll have to go back and listen to everything that you just said because you really just gave us a cornucopia of

of interesting figures and references I should say that I mean that if you if you want to know more about that kind of thinking I think the best place that it's encapsulated is actually and I mean it's the best place but also the most frustrating place is by Jacques Lacan in his seminar the ethics of psychoanalysis and Lacan draws upon Kant and talks about the thing in itself, Das Ding, an explicit relationship to desire within psychoanalysis, as if that this is what he calls the pity object R, or this unknown want, this desire in itself. And that's where Mark uses Lacanian terminology quite a lot and talks about the real. And that's what the real is for Lacan, this kind of true unconscious, the consciousness in itself,

in terms of this symbolic order that he constructs in his philosophical psychoanalysis, is precisely the kernel for him of all of these different questions. That's why, again, Lacan's importance for Mark, which is quite understated, I think, because Lacan is such a difficult thinker. But these are the sorts of questions that Mark sort of popularise, because it's the kind of thinking that, as difficult and as counterintuitive and as frustrating as it might be, it's the kind of thinking that the current capitalist crisis demands of ourselves. If we're going to think beyond it, these are the kind of difficult things that we have to be capable of thinking at a collective level. After reading a post-capitalist desire for the umpteenth time prior to this interview,

I sketched out a little formulation of what I see as Mark Fisher's praxis, a little thumbnail sketch. And you, playing the avatar of Mark Fisher, I want you to tell me how accurate it is, or maybe there's a way that we could elaborate this. So I've written in Post-Capitalist Desire and in many other places in Mark's work. Mark invokes the work of Frederick Jameson, with whom, as I see it, he shares a similar practical methodology, and it's in three steps. One is identify spaces created by capital, such as Starbucks, Walmart, and what have you, particularly those lambasted for their grotesqueness, such as Walmart, Starbucks, and so forth. And maybe even for Jameson, the American military, thinking about his book, American Utopia.

Step two is consider how those spaces organize desire according to the putative ends of a revolutionary anti-capitalism. So thinking of Starbucks, for example, as the manifestation of a thwarted desire for communism. And then step three, dismantle their stratified components and amplify their potential for inclusivity of other forms of desire. Do you think this is an accurate formulation? Yes. But I think again, I think what that formulation does is I think it ties together a lot of the concerns of, yeah, not just Mark, but again, it's the concern of accelerationism. It's the negation of negation. But I think that going beyond that, you know, it's the sense that these business models

and Walmart's the famous one for Jameson, the sense that their business model inadvertently reveals glimmers of socialism or communism sort of within capitalism's own sense of its progressiveness. And again, it's the negation of negation as Mark describes it. that sense of, you know, if you universalise individual property, you just end up with social property. And, you know, I think the sense is that now, though, however, is that I think maybe what Jameson was talking about, I think, well, Jameson's work is so important, I think for Mark especially, is that not only does he kind of put that forward as a praxis, but at the same time, he also diagnoses the obstacles that are in the way, the obstacles of postmodernism, like the cultural logic of late capitalism, which I think is just the, that should be the be-all and end-all definition of what postmodernism is,

because it's, you know, that's so abused, sort of, again, and it's a term that's entangled in its own critiques, being, you know, it's a sort of, again, that Leotard suggested, Leotard as being the thinker of this, you know, ultimate negation of this question of post-capitalist desire. Yeah, Leotard's the postmodern condition, Jameson's postmodernism, all of these things, yeah, they describe a similar process, but in a way that is, for better or for worse, entangled within the obstacles that are kind of a part of it. And this is kind of a problem with Marxism more generally, right? I think that it's Leotard's argument in the middle of an economy that the problem with Das Capital in Marx's writing

is that it's an unfinished project, but also a project that maybe Marx could never finish, to give a total view of capitalism in a way if he'd succeeded. And he already did a pretty good job of anticipating everything that's come to happen with that system since. It's such a good description that it's almost impossible to think outside of. As if to say that, in a way, Karl Marx inadvertently gives rise to a sort of capitalist realism. I was just going to say that, in a way, that the one thing that has to be bore in mind, I think, in dealing with a lot of these thinkers like Jameson and like Boudou and especially, I think, Zizek, who's, you know, I think probably the case point of someone whose books are still, I think, really worth reading and really insightful, but

it's a man whose thoughts kind of become, he's become the very thing that he often critiques. And that's kind of, you know, it's the old Batman adage of you either die a hero or become the thing that you sought to critique. And in a way, Mark Fisher is a figure who potentially will avoid that fate. But plenty of others who were initially influential to him have kind of fallen on their own sword. And I think one thing to bear in mind, at least with Jameson, in terms of the result of the Walmart example, Starbucks, I think from the perspective of today, I mean, we don't have Walmart in the UK, but I think the company that owns some of our shops is far from an example of a nascent utopianism, but kind of shows how we need to keep refreshing these kinds of thoughts.

I think making the point before about rentism of like, you know, we're getting to a point where platform capitalism is so pervasive and we've had the imposition of streaming and subscription culture over ownership in the cultural industries that actually, you know, it's no longer Walmart and Starbucks that actually have any resonance for the features that we may want, but maybe something like Bandcamp which I think has been instrumental, especially in supporting certain communities not just creatives, but communities more generally under the the present coronavirus crisis and also for Black Lives Matter. And I think that, you know, if Jameson's writing a new book and he ever listens to Asset Horizon podcast, I'd like to hear him write a book on Bandcamp for the future. That's right. That's the book we need. We'll have to send it to him, make sure he listens. I have to agree. My album is on Bandcamp. I'm going to plug it right now.

But they've been great. They have been fantastic, especially with waiving the fee that they normally charge for artists during these times. I mean, compared to other ways that companies have tried to capitalize on the crisis of COVID-19. Yeah. I mean, they enact, you know, it's capitalist exchange, but it's done in a way that is just, and, you know, arguably is going to contribute more to, is going to contribute to a consciousness of, you know, alternative ways of doing things rather than entrench the model that, you know, they're making money from. I absolutely agree. Yeah. And that's, you know, that's rare these days, I think. And I think, you know, looking at that kind of project, like the James is not the only one but yeah the example of Walmart you know yeah we have to keep refreshing those

examples because otherwise we just you know they will get reabsorbed and yeah got to keep on the crest of the wave as it were Great I think we're going to start wrapping up a little bit Will you had a question I do but I'm actually going to put that off for a second and talk about maybe a little bit about In Post Capitalist Desire, we see Mark Fisher providing kind of a way forward aesthetically for left praxis. And particularly it relates to kind of the co-option of the appealing aesthetics that capital can provide, whether it be the concept of the platform.

but then just a year later we get a very different essay we get the vampire castle which is kind of this intense polemic against kind of radical internet discourse the branding of particular leftist progressive you know that that huge homogenous term when it comes to left media or anything, you know, to the left at all. And I was wondering, you know, what is the, where's the night and day between radical chic and, because I'm sure there is one, I was just wondering, you know, considering today, in a certain sense, because of the nature of your book, you have to play a little bit of the stand-in and the professor here, where these

differentiations lie and where maybe these actors in these media spaces might have fallen away from radical chic i think that that's that's actually the unanswered question you know i think of everything that um mark would have wanted to say and had said previously um the aesthetic question was the one that troubled him the most and what's most tragic about the this collection that's coming out of these five essays is that, you know, they end right before the Christmas break. So they have five lectures and then there's a break at Christmas and then they have 10 more lectures after that. And Mark never came back for those lectures, unfortunately. But one of the last things he says to his students is that, you know, and also throughout the course is that he wants to draw out this question of aesthetics.

And he wants to try and encourage the students to, you know, I mean, technically it's an arts course. It's an arts degree that he's teaching on. He wants to draw that out and ask that question. Because in a way, that's the most pressing thing, I think, is how quickly, how important aesthetics is to any political movement, or at least, well, cultural movement at least, socio-political maybe, but also how quickly those things are co-opted. And I think that's true. The example I always think of is Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band being sort of retained as this kind of canonical instance of pop maximalism that revolutionized, you know, studio practice and recording technologies and things like that. But, you know, it came out in 1967, and most politically conscious critics,

I'm thinking of people like Grail Marcus, who was one of, you know, Mark's favorite music writers, would argue that, you know, that album came out, but its political stakes were irrelevant less than a year later with the protests in 68. And despite that, you know, political redundancy, it's continued in a cultural sense and been wholly co-opted by, you know, yeah, a complete disavowal of radical chic. It's just, it's made inert. And I think the question, the one thing I would say, at least regarding the, exiting the vampire castle, I'd say, the tension between

that and post-capital desire I think is less explicit than the tension between Exit and the Vampire Castle and an essay from the same year in 2013 which is called A Social and Psychic Revolution of Almost Inconceivable Magnitude, Pop Culture's Interpret Accelerationist Dreams. It's an article that Mark wrote for issue 46 of E-Flux Journal in June 2013 I'm trying to give as much information so it's Google-able but that's an example of one of these lost communist essays the argument that Mark puts across in that text is the same argument that he discusses in the third lecture of his Post-Capitalist Desire course

which is precisely concerned with the way that the 70s in particular, more so for Mark than the 60s it was the 70s that uh that where this this sense of a cultural revolution was uh uh combined with a political revolution and that really the two have to go hand in hand but they have never done so quite to the same extent um as they did then uh you know is especially look at the uk in the 90s with sort of brit pop being this sort of uh kind of the the absolute inverse of um of of that previous countercultural moment. It was the zombie of the counterculture come back to service a soft nationalist neoliberalism. I'm aware as I keep talking

that this isn't answering your question, but I think this is precisely the question that Mark wanted to answer, because it was, I think, for him, the most important one. I think it's the most difficult though to answer because it's one that can never be... we only get a sense of it in hindsight, I think. Um, uh, Mark kind of wrote about that in terms of horn, his whole ontology writing, um, which I think some people hold onto a bit too firmly and some people ridicule it for having their relevance left at all anymore. Um, and I feel like the fact that it's ridiculed is ridiculous precisely the point, you know, the fact that it's no longer necessary kind of shows our distance from it, which is all Mark wanted was to sort of end that moment. Um, um,

And producing that kind of analysis, I think, whether that's Mark's own analysis or me doing it secondhand, I've not figured out how best to do that yet. But I think it is, yeah, it's the most important question, I think, for how his work needs to kind of continue having a sort of lifeblood and agency. I have just one final question then, maybe to wrap up our recording. First, before we end, I just want to say thank you for coming on this podcast. You have been the first author and the first anyone that we have interviewed outside of anyone who's been deemed a host on the podcast. So thank you for that. This takes us into some new territory. I loved your book. I'm actually not completely finished with it yet, but it's been an amazing ride.

Like I said, lovely, haunting, lucid, and philosophical are the four words that I might apply to it. Maybe the last question would be this. We didn't see the end of Mark Fisher's acid communism, but you have maybe perhaps some stronger intimations of what that might look like going through this unpublished work. Perhaps you could give us a thumbnail sketch or a maxim or two that has come out of the work that you have done that gives us a sense where his project might have gone. oh wow well first of all thank you very much for having me it's been a real pleasure to talk to you all that's a yeah one hell of a question I think

my main takeaway from this project as Mark was developing it was I think it was his attempt to sort of thread together a confluence of factors we've just discussed the aesthetic one um but you know more broadly even cultural um and political um and sort of see how they all kind of come together i think i think that mark's last book um uh the weird and the eerie um is kind of a good sense of where of a jumping off point really i mean it's a it's a collection of writings that you can find drafts of still on the k-punk blog um that date back to the mid-2000s but in a way, and I think it was Kojo Eshin, Mark's colleague at Goldsmiths who first put it this

way, because we read the book in a reading group not long after Mark died, that what the weird and the eerie as concepts are not just aesthetic modes, but ontological modes. And I feel like that kind of movement is precisely what Mark wanted to achieve more fully with acid communism. that how we think about the aesthetic nature of our lives, our creative industries, our relationships to each other, our social relations, our cultural relations, are innately psychedelic in the sense that, you know, psychedelia being a really strange sort of word in that it's the modern English word psyche, or I guess it has a Greek root.

you know, that's the modern term, with Delos. So psychedelia is literally manifesting what is in the mind. And I feel like that was the end goal of Marx's project. It wasn't simply, you know, the idea of raising consciousness, which is hugely important, but, you know, going further than that, taking Marx's adage that philosophers have gotten too hung up on describing the world or interpreting the world, but the idea is to change it. And I think Mark took that very seriously, that what we are capable of thinking, that alone can change the material conditions of our lives, not just in the sense of our understanding of how we exist and what we do, but in terms of aesthetic possibilities,

scientific possibilities. All of these things are still developing, but you know if we commit to a full understanding of the new things that our age is bringing to the fore being able to think these new things can allow us to think new worlds and there's something fundamentally psychedelic and weird about that Now if you haven't checked it out already you will probably want to read Egress on Morning Melancholy and Mark Fisher by Matt Cahoon. It's published by Repeater Books and it's available on their website. Go ahead and check out Matt's blog at xenogothic.com. We'll put the information in the show notes. I just want to say thank you to the patrons

who've supported us since the beginning of this podcast. Also, maybe you got this podcast for free and now you're going to share it on social media. We thank you too. In any event, we'll see you next time. For our next recording, I think we have Ben Burgess from Zero Books on. We're going to be talking about analytic philosophy and the Marxism of G.A. Cohen. I hope you're excited about it. Take care of yourselves. Thank you.