Remembering Fisher. Towards Psychedelic Politics
5 Aprile 2023 - #psychedelia - Alessandro Y. Longo
This text reworks the contents of Alessandro's talk at the Ricordando Fisher meeting on 17 March 2023 in Turin at the Casa del Popolo Estella. We thank Casa del Popolo Estella for the invitation, Serena Doe Mazzini for the dialogue, and Anna Fasolato for her constant support.
Remembering the legacy of Mark Fisher is not an easy task nor one for which I feel particularly prepared. It is a matter of pulling the threads of a multifaceted and complex thought, far more than what a superficial reading of his seminal works might suggest. I refer of course to the very Italian tendency to read solely Capitalist Realism, the Englishman's best-known book, brought to Italy by Not with a major publishing operation in 2017. The volume contains a bitter diagnosis of the state of English society around the end of the 00s: an island where social life is dominated in every aspect by the market and where there is no longer an alternative, neither political nor subcultural, to this dominance. It is fair to note that Mark Fisher, as well as the lap associated with him, suffers from a blatant Anglo-centrism, and in his analyses, he struggles to see beyond the Anglophone world. In my opinion, this applies to Capitalist Realism as well as his later works. Let us bear this in mind.
Average effects of Capitalism Realism
On the other hand, what I really appreciate about today’s invitation, is the attempt to approach another angle of Fisher's thought: the phase leading up to his tragic suicide in January 2017 and articulated in his last course for Goldsmith and the notes for his unfinished book, Acid Communism. These texts have been collected in the volume Postcapitalist Desire, published in Italy by Minimum Fax in 2022. Let us start with the name Acid Communism to frame this phase of Fisher's thought. Already from the name, we can understand where Fisher is going: the English critic, post-punk and jungle theorist, shortly before his death, turns to the hippies, the '68 counterculture, and the dreams of Woodstock. This is a move that causes astonishment in all those familiar with the Englishman's musical and cultural tastes. As the preface to the Minimum Fax volume, written by his former student and scholar Matt Colquhoun (known to most as Xenogothic) reminds us:
Privileging the mental life at the expense of the fleshly dimension, a fideistic attitude towards substances, and flattening politics to an emotional plane. Fisher's criticism of the hippies is harsh and shares point with the criticism that was made 'from the left' of countercultural movements, which were incapable of channeling their energies towards real political change. We are a long way from the 'street avant-garde' such as raves and punks, so dear to Mark and his fellow music critics like Simon Reynolds or Adam Harper.
But are we really sure? Mark Fisher, towards the end of his life, began to doubt this belief. As Colquhoun reminds us, he never softens this judgment but begins to see beyond it, to look for something else in this subculture so innocuous to him. He notes germs of post-capitalist desire. Trivially, the hippies are already trying to overcome the limitations of capitalist society in the present. They do not wait for the revolution but invent new forms of life and autonomy in the present. In that subculture, they move ideas that change the collective consciousness and ideas of which the ruling class is horrified.
«Fisher had previously been scathing about the legacy of the counterculture. He had once declared on his k-punk blog, for instance, that “hippie was fundamentally a middle class male phenomenon” defined by a “hedonic infantilism”.1 For him, the hippie’s characteristic sloppiness, “ill- fitting clothes, unkempt appearance and Fuzzed-out psychedelic fascist drug talk, displayed a disdain for sensuality”.2 For Mark Fisher, there was no greater crime. The hippies, as if trapped in an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type scenario of their own devising, were guilty of passively and mindlessly giving in to the pleasure principle, and the “price of such ‘happiness’ — a state of cored-out, cheery Pod people affectlessness — [was the] sacrifice of all autonomy”».
Privileging the mental life at the expense of the fleshly dimension, a fideistic attitude towards substances, and flattening politics to an emotional plane. Fisher's criticism of the hippies is harsh and shares point with the criticism that was made 'from the left' of countercultural movements, which were incapable of channeling their energies towards real political change. We are a long way from the 'street avant-garde' such as raves and punks, so dear to Mark and his fellow music critics like Simon Reynolds or Adam Harper.
But are we really sure? Mark Fisher, towards the end of his life, began to doubt this belief. As Colquhoun reminds us, he never softens this judgment but begins to see beyond it, to look for something else in this subculture so innocuous to him. He notes germs of post-capitalist desire. Trivially, the hippies are already trying to overcome the limitations of capitalist society in the present. They do not wait for the revolution but invent new forms of life and autonomy in the present. In that subculture, they move ideas that change the collective consciousness and ideas of which the ruling class is horrified.
Hippies at their most dangerous
The cultural revolution can pave the way for the political revolution. This is the truth that Fisher rediscovers in the movements of '68 and wants to reactivate by stripping historical memory of the forms of commodification into which it has fallen. Make hippies dangerous again. In this operation, Fisher cannot but become interested again in psychedelia, which plays a fundamental role in the cognitive earthquake of those years.
Let us try to clarify. Psychedelia becomes an interesting object of study when we abandon its 'familiar aesthetic form' (Colquhoun again), composed of tie-dye T-shirts and Grateful Dead concerts, and approach its deeper truth, its 'dormant function'. The term itself, which comes from the Greek, means 'that which manifests the psyche'. Psychedelia catalyzed and manifested the germs of post-capitalist desire in hippie culture, making an entire generation realize that living as one had lived until then was no longer acceptable. The very ideas of psychedelia were seen as dangerous and underwent a violent process of repression, one only has to think of the treatment that the likes of Timothy Leary suffered.
In my opinion, Fisher's interest can be summarised in the following series of questions.
What happens when the desire for a non-alienated life, which overcomes disenchantment and detachment from reality, develops at a mass level? What must politics do to respond to the emergence of these tendencies? How do we bridge the gap between the structure of socialism and the magma of the desire for widespread autonomy? How is an emancipatory culture elaborated at the political level?
A classic example of how the unconscious tendencies of the masses can be interpreted politically is provided by Fisher himself. The idea of autonomy and the rejection of the fixed factory job was distorted by the neo-liberal right and translated into the precarisation of the labour market and widespread entrepreneurship. The left had already failed once to understand what was happening in the collective consciousness, and the late Mark Fisher - a great interpreter of that failure and the ghosts it generates
- is convinced that it is precisely from that error that we must start again in order to understand the desires of the present.
I will now attempt to briefly articulate some of the points that can be articulated in the proposal for acid communism.
Radical Empathy
Psychedelics are known to increase the intensity of the sensations of those who experience them. Aldous Huxley had spoken of doors of perception opening and there is both scientific and poetic literature on the power of this new feeling that is released through these practices. There is an interview by Gilles Deleuze with his friend Claire Parnet in which the French philosophe connects the idea of expanded perception with being leftist:
In this response by Delueze, we can already find the connection that Fisher would draw thirty years later. Once one's perception is expanded one becomes more aware of the swarming of other minds and other perspectives all around us. The radical, cosmic empathy of psychedelia is the cognitive prodrome to the consciousness of oppression, be it class, gender, etc. When I feel differently, I develop a consciousness of who I am, what position I occupy in society, and what role I play in power dynamics.
Fisher talks about it explicitly in Postcapitalist Desire in lesson n°3. Here, the English critic provides a psychedelic interpretation of a text by Hungarian philosopher György Lukács on the formation of consciousness that links his Marxism with the feminist experience of self-consciousness. The consciousness of subaltern groups is first and foremost an awareness of the mechanisms (cultural, political, existential) that produce subalternity, of the mechanisms that normalise th dominant group and create a sense of inferiority in the subaltern ones. Secondly, however, it is also the consciousness of the strength of the subaltern group, a strength that depends on the level of awareness achieved. Feminist self-consciousness is an example of this cognitive process.
However, this process must not be fixed in the formation o clearly distinct and conflicting identities - this is what Fisher criticised in his essay against 'identity politics', called Exiting the Vampire Castle. What Fisher desires is a creation of consciousness that is an ongoing process of becoming, what Lukacs already calls "history of the uninterrupted subversion of the forms of objectivity that shape
man's existence". If we think of the ways in which social media, for example, profit from our identification in a 'subaltern' category, processing our data to sell us products designed specifically for our condition as oppressed and militant.
Let us try to clarify. Psychedelia becomes an interesting object of study when we abandon its 'familiar aesthetic form' (Colquhoun again), composed of tie-dye T-shirts and Grateful Dead concerts, and approach its deeper truth, its 'dormant function'. The term itself, which comes from the Greek, means 'that which manifests the psyche'. Psychedelia catalyzed and manifested the germs of post-capitalist desire in hippie culture, making an entire generation realize that living as one had lived until then was no longer acceptable. The very ideas of psychedelia were seen as dangerous and underwent a violent process of repression, one only has to think of the treatment that the likes of Timothy Leary suffered.
In my opinion, Fisher's interest can be summarised in the following series of questions.
What happens when the desire for a non-alienated life, which overcomes disenchantment and detachment from reality, develops at a mass level? What must politics do to respond to the emergence of these tendencies? How do we bridge the gap between the structure of socialism and the magma of the desire for widespread autonomy? How is an emancipatory culture elaborated at the political level?
A classic example of how the unconscious tendencies of the masses can be interpreted politically is provided by Fisher himself. The idea of autonomy and the rejection of the fixed factory job was distorted by the neo-liberal right and translated into the precarisation of the labour market and widespread entrepreneurship. The left had already failed once to understand what was happening in the collective consciousness, and the late Mark Fisher - a great interpreter of that failure and the ghosts it generates- is convinced that it is precisely from that error that we must start again in order to understand the desires of the present.
I will now attempt to briefly articulate some of the points that can be articulated in the proposal for acid communism.
Radical Empathy
Psychedelics are known to increase the intensity of the sensations of those who experience them. Aldous Huxley had spoken of doors of perception opening and there is both scientific and poetic literature on the power of this new feeling that is released through these practices. There is an interview by Gilles Deleuze with his friend Claire Parnet in which the French philosophe connects the idea of expanded perception with being leftist:
«So how to define what is it to be “from the left”, I would say it in two ways. It’s firstly a problem of perception. A problem of perception that is to say what is it not be “from the left”. We can see that with the postal address. Not be from the left means starting with myself, my street, my city, my country, the other countries further and further. We start by us, and as we are privileged, we live in a rich country, we wonder how we can do to sustain in time this situation. We can feel that there are some dangers, that this situation can’t last too long. […] To be from the left is the opposite. […] You first see the horizon and you do know that it can’t sustain itself in time, that it is not possible, that those millions of people who starve from death, that can still last for a hundred years, but eventually we cannot stand this absolute injustice. That’s not a problem of moral, that’s a problem of perception. If we start by the whole, that is it to be from the left. It means that we can call and consider that those issues are the one to be solved. And that does not mean at all that we should say that we should diminish birth rate etc. because saying that is just another way to conserve Europe’s privileges. This is not it. It’s really about finding the worldwide arrangements that will solve those issues. In fact, to be from the left it is to know that the Third World’s issues are closer from us than our neighborhood’s issues. It is really a problem of perception, it’s not a problem of beautiful soul. That is mainly what is it to be from the left for me.».
In this response by Delueze, we can already find the connection that Fisher would draw thirty years later. Once one's perception is expanded one becomes more aware of the swarming of other minds and other perspectives all around us. The radical, cosmic empathy of psychedelia is the cognitive prodrome to the consciousness of oppression, be it class, gender, etc. When I feel differently, I develop a consciousness of who I am, what position I occupy in society, and what role I play in power dynamics.
Fisher talks about it explicitly in Postcapitalist Desire in lesson n°3. Here, the English critic provides a psychedelic interpretation of a text by Hungarian philosopher György Lukács on the formation of consciousness that links his Marxism with the feminist experience of self-consciousness. The consciousness of subaltern groups is first and foremost an awareness of the mechanisms (cultural, political, existential) that produce subalternity, of the mechanisms that normalise th dominant group and create a sense of inferiority in the subaltern ones. Secondly, however, it is also the consciousness of the strength of the subaltern group, a strength that depends on the level of awareness achieved. Feminist self-consciousness is an example of this cognitive process.
However, this process must not be fixed in the formation o clearly distinct and conflicting identities - this is what Fisher criticised in his essay against 'identity politics', called Exiting the Vampire Castle. What Fisher desires is a creation of consciousness that is an ongoing process of becoming, what Lukacs already calls "history of the uninterrupted subversion of the forms of objectivity that shape
man's existence". If we think of the ways in which social media, for example, profit from our identification in a 'subaltern' category, processing our data to sell us products designed specifically for our condition as oppressed and militant.
Identities’ commodification on Instagram.
Consciousness is always in motion and our awareness must become agile enough to evolve accordingly, first and foremost to avoid being categorised and captured by the precise gaze of capital's algorithms. Psychedelia provides us with a cognitive training ground to prepare us for this political act:
«Habit dulls perception and mental liveliness, makes us efficient but repetitive and unwilling to the unexpected: psychedelics add entropy and freedom in the movements of our synapses, bringing us closer to the freshness and plasticity of the brains of children and creative people.».
Hugo Ball, founder of Dada, quoted by Edoardo Camurri in this article, evokes similar concerns:
«It dominates a kind of economic fatalism that assigns to every individual, whether he wants to resist or not, a certain function, and with that an interest and its character [...] The deepest question, day and night, is: is there somewhere a power, sufficiently strong and above all alive, that can undo this condition? And if not, how can one escape it?».
Can psychedelia be this power?
A new healing
Mark Fisher has been among the leading observers and critics of capitalism's treatment of mental health issues. Since blogging and then with Capitalist Realism, he has consistently spoken harshly about the privatisation of mental health issues and the absence of a social paradigm toward treatment. Here, in my opinion, it is not implausible that in his renewed interest in psychedelics, Fisher saw another possible way to approach mental health. As we know, for a decade now, psychedelic are being rediscovered as a treatment for depression, addiction and other disorders. These new methods promise a paradigm shift from the current pharmacological system, of which Fisher was a bitter detractor. So, while the
psychedelics can be read as yet another palliative to endure lif under an unjust system, on the other, I believe that Fisher may have seen in this culture a new idea of a radical cure, something that could
marry with the critical and reformist demands of the anti-psychiatry movement, which he knew well.
In his last months, I imagine Mark tracing a connection that links precisely European anti-psychiatry, with its critique of the institution of the asylum, to the psychedelic movement overseas, to Leary, Hofmann, and all those who understood the therapeutic potential of the new entheogenic molecules. This alliance is actually recounted by Piero Cipriano, an Italian ethno-psychiatrist, who elaborates a counter-history of psychiatry starting from the psychedelic repressed and who speculates on the possible alliance between the political critique of mental illness with a new paradigm of treatment that could replace the 'chemical asylum' in which we have ended up in the age of psychotropic drugs. This is a suggestion but I believe that Fisher saw something similar, a politicised and explicitly anti-psychiatric psychedelia that would break the bank of the “chemical asylum” and widespread mental illness. A therapeutic and cultural revolution towards Acid Communism.
