POST-CAPITALIST
DESIRE
Built upon the intricately sketched landscape of
Capitalist Realism, at the heart of the naturalised
order of appearances assumed to render all alternatives
impossible, ‘Post-Capitalist Desire’ is a climax in
Mark’s commitment to envision a future for the left. It
calls into question capital’s long-established monopoly
on desire.
Why should a desire for technology and consumer goods
appear necessarily to mean a desire for capitalism?
The conflation, Mark argues, results from capital’s
opportunist aligning of technology and desire. This
occurs on capital’s own terms when “anti-capitalism
entails being anarcho-primitivist”: finding solutions
in a self-organizational ‘organicist-localism’ while
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maintaining a stance that is anti-technological, antimass production. An explicitly antagonist left falls short
of gaining traction on the libidinal flows of social drive
that are already animated by capital and are further
enabling its processes in return.
A post-capitalist politics begins with affirming that this
structural antagonism should therefore be reconsidered
because of its being heedless of capital’s programmed
reality. But it also refuses to remain caught up in ideology
critique, circumscribed under the crust of complaint
and denunciation. To strategise against capitalism is to
summon and reclaim the possible “Real(s) underlying
the reality that capitalism presents to us”.1
Mark identifies the challenges that a future-oriented left
needs to face by tying conservative, reactionary statements
that hold up capital’s techno-libidinal conflation to
a certain strand in the writings of Nick Land from
the 1990s. Via Land—the ‘avatar of accelerated
capital’—Mark exposes how the prime mandate of
capitalism is to capture libidinal circuitries and channel
public desiring in certain directions rather than others.
As Mark calls them elsewhere, “libidinal technicians”2
have embedded their parasitic mechanisms into everyday
1
2
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No
Alternative? (Verso, 2009), p. 18.
Mark Fisher, ‘How To Kill a Zombie: Strategizing
the End of Neoliberalism’, in openDemocracy. 18
July 2013.
Determined to break from Landian thanatophoric
fatalism, Mark incites a post-capitalism commensurate
with the ‘inorganic nature of libido’—the death drive.
This is not a desire for death or for the extinction of
desire, which is characteristic of both the apocalyptic
acceleration of deterritorialising processes and of the
‘ascetic-authoritarian’ measures imposed by communist
states. Rather, it is a desire to push an organism’s life
out of obdurate homeostasis, away from a life forcefully
lived along the lines of preservation and protection.
In ‘Utopia as Replication’, Fredric Jameson turns to
Marx to restate that destratifying forces of capital tend
toward “the centralization of the means of production
and the socialization of labor”.3 In other words, capital
tends towards the emergence of the General Intellect
and the growth of monopoly, of a reterritorialised
extremity after ultimate deterritorialisation. Jameson, in
a self-admittedly perverse move, tends to identify this
monopoly, best exemplified in the post-Fordist context
of late capitalism by the largest company in the world,
Wal-Mart, as a utopian phenomenon.
3
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Penguin, 1976), p. 929.
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life and grown their ‘semiotic excrescences’ on the
bodies of individuals. It is then made clear that a
traditional ‘leftist-Canutist’ attitude is incapable of
desire-engineering. It is fundamentally opposed to
such engineering in its anti-libidinal insistence on
conservatism: “preserving, protecting and defending”.
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Mark argues for a turn from the anti-capitalist ‘no logo’
call to a post-capitalist ‘counterbranding’ via Jameson’s
outlining of a utopian method, where a logical operation
of inverted genealogy was attempted—a genealogy of
contingent futurities. To locate utopian impulses in the
preconditions that are already reserved in the present
is to target that which was promised by the cultural
revolutions of the left and yet was never delivered;
spotting the ‘residual’ only to leave it in search of the
‘emergent’.
The demand of this pursuit of abandoned promises is
to address and rework substructures that lend support to
the apparent reality, away from the underlying Real(s)
and fundamentally designed against the fulfillment of
desires—only feeding and stimulating them enough to
be always worthy of capture, ready to be milked. Hence
the recovered evocation of ‘designer socialism’, in the
absence of which the design of capitalist realism has
been made to appear unrivaled.
It is then evident that the Landian take on the death
drive and the ‘historical-machinic force of libido’
is biased against taking the reterritorialising turn,
deeming it impossible, or its possibility insignificant.
However, it is in the course of this turn that the left
needs to implement its ‘counterlibidinal’ politics.
“[D]isarticulating technology and desire from capital”,
while simultaneously intensifying the processes of
deterritorialisation only in the manner of “de-anchoring
with which they are arbitrarily articulated”, as Mark
prefigured in ‘Digital Psychedelia’, an essay on The
Otolith Group’s Anathema.4
To march toward and build (around) an Acid
Communism requires “a new use of digital machinery,
a new kind of digital desire: a digital psychedelia, no
less. [...] It dilates time; induces us to linger and drift”
as it “rediscovers the dream time that capitalist realism
has eclipsed”.5 To host post-capitalism is to expand the
presumably unaffordable spans of time from the side of
the future. As Jameson maintains, “[s]uch revival of
futurity and of the positing of alternate futures is not
itself a political program nor even a political practice:
but it is hard to see how any durable or effective political
action could come into being without it”.6
Mahan Moalemi
4
5
6
Mark Fisher, ‘Digital Psychedelia: The Otolith
Group’s Anathema’, in Death and Life of Fiction:
Modern Monsters – Taipei Biennial 2012 Journal
(Spectormag, 2014), pp. 160–166.
Ibid.
Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso,
2009), p. 434.
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[...] the libidinal fragments from the capitalist sigils
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Soon after the Occupy London Stock
Exchange movement had begun, the novelist
turned Conservative politician Louise Mensch
appeared on the BBC TV programme, Have
I Got News For You?, mocking the protesters
with the claim that the occupation had led to
the “biggest ever queues at Starbucks”. The
problem, Mensch insisted, was not only that
the occupiers bought corporate coffee—they
also used iPhones. The suggestion was clear:
being anti-capitalist entails being an anarchoprimitivist. Mensch’s remarks were ridiculed, not
least on the programme itself, but the questions
that they raise can’t be so easily dismissed. If
opposition to capital does not require that one
maintains an anti-technological, anti-mass
production stance, why—in the minds of some
of its supporters, as much as in the caricatures
produced by opponents such as Mensch—has
anti-capitalism become exclusively identified
with this organicist localism? Here we are a long
way from Lenin’s enthusiasm for Taylorism, or
Gramsci’s celebration of Fordism, or indeed
from the Soviet embrace of technology in the
space race. Capital has long tried to claim a
monopoly on desire: we only have to remember
the famous 1980s advert for Levi jeans in which
a teenager was seen anxiously smuggling a pair
of jeans through a Soviet border post. But the
emergence of consumer electronic goods has
Mensch was not alone in taunting the occupiers
for their consumption of chain coffee and
their reliance on consumer technologies. In
the London Evening Standard, one columnist
crowed that it “was capitalism and globalisation
that produced the clothes the protesters wear,
the tents they sleep in, the food they eat, the
phones in their pockets and the social networks
they use to organise”.1 The kind of arguments
that Mensch and fellow reactionaries made
in response to Occupy were versions of those
presented in Nick Land’s extraordinary
anti-Marxist texts of the 1990s. Land’s
theory-fictional provocations were guided by
the assumption that desire and communism
were fundamentally incompatible. It is worth
the left treating these texts as something other
than anti-Marxist trollbait for at least three
reasons. Firstly, because they luridly expose the
1
Ian Birrell, ‘Why the St Paul’s Rebels Without a
Clue Can’t Simply Be Ignored’, Evening Standard,
18 October 2012.
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allowed capital to conflate desire and technology
so that the desire for an iPhone can now appear
automatically to mean a desire for capitalism.
Here we think of another advertisement,
Apple’s notorious ‘1984’ commercial, which
equated personal computers with the liberation
from totalitarian control.
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scale and the nature of the problems that the left
now faces. Land fast forwards to his near-future,
our near-past, in which capital is totally
triumphant, highlighting the extent to which
this victory was dependent upon the libidinal
mechanics of the advertising and PR companies
whose semiotic excrescences despoil former
public spaces. “Anything that passes other than
by the market is steadily cross-hatched by the
axiomatic of capital, holographically encrusted
in the stigmatizing marks of its obsolescence.
A pervasive negative advertising delibidinizes
all things public, traditional, pious, charitable,
authoritative, or serious, taunting them with the
sleek seductiveness of the commodity.”2 Land
is surely right about this “pervasive negative
advertising”—but the question is how to
combat it. Instead of the anti-capitalist ‘no logo’
call for a retreat from semiotic productivity,
why not an embrace of all the mechanisms of
semiotic-libidinal production in the name of a
post-capitalist counterbranding? ‘Radical chic’
is not something that the left should flee from—
very much to the contrary, it is something that
it must embrace and cultivate. For didn’t the
moment of the left’s failure coincide with the
growing perception that ‘radical’ and ‘chic’
2
Nick Land, ‘Machinic Desire’, in Fanged Noumena:
Collected Writings 1987–2007 (Urbanomic/
Sequence, 2010), pp. 341–2.
The second reason Land’s texts are important
is that they expose an uncomfortable
contradiction between the radical left’s
official “commitment to revolution, and its
actual tendency towards political and formalaesthetic conservatism. In Land’s writings, a
quasi-hydraulic force of desire is set against a
leftist-Canutist impulse towards preserving,
protecting and defending. Land’s delirium of
dissolution is like an inverted autonomism, in
which capital assumes all the improvisational
and creative vibrancy that Mario Tronti and
Hardt/Negri ascribe to the proletariat/the
multitude. Inevitably overwhelming all attempts
by “the human security system” to control it,
capital emerges as the authentic revolutionary
force, subjecting everything—including the
structures of so-called reality itself—to a process
of liquefaction: “meltdown: planetary chinasyndrome, dissolution of the biosphere into
the technosphere, terminal speculative bubble
crisis, ultravirus, and revolution stripped of
all christian-socialist eschatology (down to its
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are incompatible? Similarly, it is time for us to
reclaim and positivise sneers such as ‘designer
socialism’—because it is the equation of the
‘designer’ with ‘capitalist’ that has done so
much to make capital appear as if it is the only
possible modernity.
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burn-core of crashed security)”.3 Where is the
left that can speak as confidently in the name
of an alien future, that can openly celebrate,
rather than mourn, the disintegration of
existing socialities and territorialities?
The third reason Land’s texts are worth
reckoning with is because they assume a terrain
that politics now operates on, or must operate
on, if it is to be effective—a terrain in which
technology is embedded into everyday life
and the body; design and PR are ubiquitous;
financial abstraction enjoys dominion over
government; life and culture are subsumed into
cyberspace, and data-hacking consequently
assumes increasing importance. It may
seem to be the case that Land, the avatar of
accelerated capital, ends up amply confirming
Žižek’s claims about Deleuze and Guattari’s
work being an ideology for late capitalism’s
deterritorialising flows.4 But the problem with
Žižek’s critique is twofold—firstly, it takes
capital at its own word, discounting its own
tendencies towards inertia and territorialism;
and secondly, because the position from which
this critique is made implicitly depends upon
the desirability and the possibility of a return
3
4
Nick Land, ‘Meltdown’, in ibid., p. 442.
See Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and
Consequences (Routledge, 2004).
Part of what makes Deleuze and Guattari’s
work continue to be a major resource in the
current moment is that, like the work of the
Italian autonomists who inspired it and who
were in turn inspired by it, it was specifically
engaging with this problem. The point now isn’t
to defend Deleuze and Guattari per se, but to
accept that the question that they raised—the
relation of desire to politics in a post-Fordist
context—is the crucial problem that the left
now faces. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and
the retreat of the workers’ movement in the west
wasn’t only or even primarily due to failures of
will or discipline. It is the very disappearance
of the Fordist economy, with its concomitant
‘disciplinary’ structures, which means that
“we can’t just carry on with the same old
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to Leninism/Stalinism. In the wake of the
decline of the traditional workers’ movement,
we have too often been forced into a false choice
between an ascetic-authoritarian Leninism
that at least worked (in the sense that it took
control of the state and limited the dominion of
capital) and models of political self-organisation
which have done little to challenge neoliberal
hegemony. What we need to construct is what
was promised but never actually delivered by
the various ‘cultural revolutions’ of the 1960s:
an effective anti-authoritarian left.
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forms of political institution, the same modes
of working class social organisation, because
they no longer correspond to the actual and
contemporary form of capitalism and the
rising subjectivities that accompany and/or
contest it”.5 Without a doubt, the language of
‘flows’ and ‘creativity’ has an exhausted quality
because of its appropriation by capitalism’s
‘creative industries’. Yet the proximity of some of
Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts to the rhetoric
of late capitalism is not a mark of their failure,
but of their success in gaining some purchase
on the problems of political organisation under
post-Fordism. The shift from Fordism to postFordism, or in Foucault-Deleuze’s terms from
disciplinary to control societies, certainly
involves a change in libido—an intensification
of desire for consumer goods, funded by credit—
but this doesn’t mean that it can be combated
by an assertion of working-class discipline.
Post-Fordism has seen the decomposition of
the old working class—which, in the Global
North at least, is no longer concentrated in
manufacturing spaces, and whose forms of
industrial action are consequently no longer as
effective as they once were. At the same time,
5
Éric Alliez, in ‘Deleuzian Politics? A Roundtable
Discussion: Éric Alliez, Claire Colebrook, Peter
Hallward, Nicholas Thoburn, Jeremy Gilbert
(chair)’, New Formations 68:1, Deleuzian Politics?,
p. 150.
This entails that politics comes to terms with
the essentially inorganic nature of libido,
as described by (among others) Freud, the
Surrealists, Lacan, Althusser and Haraway, as
well as Deleuze and Guattari. Inorganic libido
is what Lacan and Land call the death drive: not
a desire for death, for the extinction of desire in
what Freud called the Nirvana principle, but an
active force of death, defined by the tendency
to deviate from any homeostatic regulation. As
desiring creatures, we ourselves are that which
disrupts organic equilibrium. The novelty of
the Anti-Oedipus account of history is the way
that it combines this account of inorganic libido
with the Hegelian-Marxist notion that history
has a direction. One implication of this is that it
is very difficult to put this historically machined
inorganic libido back in its box: if desire is a
historical-machinic force, its emergence alters
‘reality’ itself; to suppress it would therefore
involve either a massive reversal of history, or
collective amnesia on a grand scale, or both.
For Land, this means that “post-capitalism has
no real meaning except an end to the engine of
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the libidinal attractions of consumer capitalism
needed to be met with a counterlibido, not
simply an anti-libidinal dampening.
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change”.6 This brings us back to Mensch, and
we can now see that the challenge is to imagine
a post-capitalism that is commensurate with
the death drive. At the moment, too much anticapitalism seems to be about the impossible
pursuit of a social system oriented towards the
Nirvana principle of total quiescence—precisely
the return to a mythical primitivist equilibrium
which the likes of Mensch mock. But any such
return to primitivism would require either an
apocalypse or the imposition of authoritarian
measures—how else is drive to be banished?
And if primitivist equilibrium is not what we
want, then we crucially need to articulate what it
is we do want—which will mean disarticulating
technology and desire from capital.
Given all this, it’s time for us to consider once
again to what extent the desire for Starbucks
and iPhones really is a desire for capital. What’s
curious about the Starbucks phenomenon, in
fact, is the way in which the condemnation of
the chain uncannily echoes the stereotypical
attacks on communism: Starbucks is generic,
homogeneous, it crushes individuality and
enterprise. At the same time, however, this
kind of generic space—and evidently not the
mediocre and overpriced coffee—is quite
6
Nick Land, ‘Critique of Transcendental
Materialism’, in Fanged Noumena, p. 626.
as a thought experiment—not, after
Lenin’s crude but practical fashion, as
an institution faced with what (after
the revolution) we can “lop off what
capitalistically mutilates this excellent
apparatus”, but rather as what Raymond
Williams calls the emergent, as opposed
to the residual—the shape of a Utopian
future looming through the mist, which we
must seize as an opportunity to exercise
the Utopian imagination more fully,
rather than an occasion for moralizing
judgements or regressive nostalgia.7
The dialectical ambivalence that Jameson
7
Fredric Jameson, ‘Utopia as Replication’, in
Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2009), p. 422.
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clearly at the root of Starbucks’ success. Now, it
begins to look as if, far from there being some
inevitable fit between the desire for Starbucks
and capitalism, Starbucks feeds desires which
it can meet only in some provisional and
unsatisfactory way. What if, in short, the
desire for Starbucks is the thwarted desire for
communism? For what is the ‘third place’ that
Starbucks offers—this place that is neither home
nor work—if not a degraded prefiguration of
communism itself? In his provocative essay
‘Utopia as Replication’—originally titled
‘Wal-Mart as Utopia’—Jameson dares us to
approach Wal-Mart, that emblematic object of
anti-capitalist loathing,
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calls for in respect of Wal-Mart—“admiration
and positive judgement [...] accompanied by [...]
absolute condemnation”—is already exhibited
by the customers of Wal-Mart and Starbucks,
many of whom are among the most trenchant
critics of the chains, even as they habitually use
them. This anti-capitalism of devout consumers
is the other side of the supposed complicity
with capital that Mensch sees in anti-capitalist
protestors.
For Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism is
defined by the way it simultaneously engenders
and inhibits processes of destratification.
In their famous formulation, capitalism
deterritorialises and reterritorialises at the same
time; there is no process of abstract decoding
without a reciprocal recoding via neurotic
personalisation
(Oedipalisation)—hence
the early twenty-first-century disjunction of
massively abstract finance capital on the one
hand, and Oedipalised celebrity culture on the
other. Capitalism is a necessarily failed escape
from feudalism, which, instead of destroying
encastement, reconstitutes social stratification
in the class structure. It is only given this model
that Deleuze and Guattari’s call to ‘accelerate
the process’ makes sense. It does not mean
accelerating any or everything in capitalism
willy-nilly, in the hope that capitalism will
Building on the whole tradition of
socialist dreams of household collectivism,
Sabsovich imagined the coordination of
all food producing operations in order to
transform raw food products into complete
meals, deliverable to the population in
urban cafeterias, communal dining rooms,
and the workplace in ready-to-eat form
by means of thermos containers. No food
shopping, no cooking, no home meals,
no kitchens. Similar industrialization of
laundering, tailoring, repair, and even
house cleaning (with electrical appliances)
would allow each person a sleeping-living
room, free of all maintenance cares. Russia
would in fact become a vast free-of-charge
hotel chain.8
8
Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian
Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution
(Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 199.
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thereby collapse. Rather, it means accelerating
the processes of destratification that capitalism
cannot but obstruct. One virtue of this model
is that it places capital, not its adversary, on the
side of resistance and control. The reactionary
elements within capitalism can only conceive of
urban modernity, cyberspace and the decline
of the family as a fall from a mythical organic
community. But can’t we conceive of consumer
capitalism’s culture of ready meals, fast food
outlets, anonymous hotels and disintegrating
family life as dim pre-echo of precisely the
social field imagined by early Soviet planners
such as L. M. Sabsovich?
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The Soviet system could not achieve this vision,
but perhaps its realisation still lies ahead of us,
provided we accept that what we are fighting
for is not a ‘return’ to the essentially reactionary
conditions of face-to-face interaction, “a line of
racially pure peasants digging the same patch
of earth for eternity”,9 or what Marx and Engels
called “the idiocy of rural life”, but rather the
construction of an alternative modernity, in which
technology, mass production and impersonal
systems of management are deployed as part of
a refurbished public sphere. Here, public does
not mean state, and the challenge is to imagine
a model of public ownership beyond twentiethcentury-style state centralisation. There were
clues, perhaps, in the architectural marvels from
the dying years of the Soviet bloc, photographed
by Frédéric Chaubin: “buildings designed at
the hinge of different worlds, in which sci-fi
futurism conjoins with monumentalism”, “quasipsychedelic, crypto-Pop”.10 While Chaubin sees
these buildings as a temporary efflorescence
brought about by the rotting of the Soviet
system, can’t we grasp them instead as relics
from a yet-to-be-realised post-capitalist future
in which desire and communism are joyfully
9
10
Nick Land, ‘Making it with Death: Remarks on
Thanatos and Desiring-Production’, in Fanged
Noumena, p. 281.
Frédéric Chaubin, CCCP: Cosmic Communist
Constructions Photographed (Taschen, 2010), p. 15, 9.
11
Ibid., p. 15.
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reconciled? “Neither modern nor postmodern,
like free-floating dreams, they loom up on the
horizon like pointers to a fourth dimension.”11