Thoughts on 'Acid Communism'

[Full version of the final part of my contribution to the Sydney Review of Books discussion of the blogosphere, Mark Fisher and the k-punk book, focusing on the 'Acid Communism' fragment. This was understandably edited for the article, but the original (written in July 2019) is more of a self-contained blog-style piece so I thought it was worth putting up here.]

Formulating thoughts about this unfinished introduction is not easy as it was obviously meant to be the beginning of a large project, expanding historically and theoretically in parallel with the buried collective consciousness it was going to bring to the surface and set free, and we have to imagine how it was going to get there. It is also desperately sad. The fragment is bubbling with optimism – much more so than most of Mark’s other writing - and however sceptical I am about some of the claims made in it I am sure that over the course of a whole book Mark would have argued me around and made me realise how my horizons are being limited.

To throw a deeply uncool pop reference into the mix: although the focus of the intro was the culture of the 1960s and 70s, the group that came to my mind while mulling over Mark’s idea of a new form of psychic and political consciousness-raising was indie-dance act The Shamen. You could even imagine them dropping the phrase ‘acid communism’ into an interview circa their album In Gorbachev We Trust. Way before blogs, from 1989 to 1991, The Shamen were my first almost-political awakening: they talked about hallucinogenic drugs and “altering your consciousness” in a very contemporary way (they only got really hippyish about it later, when they teamed up with Terence McKenna and lost the plot somewhat) and En-Tact was a sort of Iain M Banksian program for a psychedelic techno-socialist utopia. These days of course The Shamen are remembered as a cheesy novelty act (culminating in 2015's Peepshow Super Hans debacle), but they were a huge influence on me and not in the way you’d expect. They were also one of the few acts at the time to try to intellectualise rave culture and connect it to broader social and political trends.

And this reminded me that Mark wrote an essay called ‘Baroque Sunbursts’ for an anthology in 2016, which I haven’t read as disappointingly it isn’t in the k-punk collection or available online, but it’s been discussed and quoted, for instance here. In the essay Mark apparently applies some of the same arguments made in the Acid Communism intro with regard to 1960s-70s counterculture to rave culture: the latent utopia glimpsed in the otherworldly club environment; the spectre of collective freedom exorcised by a process of “psychic privatisation”, the loss of that freedom and its incorporation by capitalism.

The writer of the piece linked above has some reservations about Mark’s utopian reading of rave, which on the limited information available (like not being able to read the original article!) I suppose I share. On this topic the Jeremy Deller documentary Everybody in the Place that’s been mentioned on here was indeed a breath of fresh air, but what was significantly underplayed in it, beyond the cautionary tale of Paul Staines, was the entrepreneurial side of acid house which was actually the embodiment of Thatcherism. But at the same time rave was maybe the last instance of a genuinely transformative and disruptive, rather than reactionary, positivity.

I’ve always been wary of calls from political activists that ‘revolution’ is probable or even possible, and I am not sure I agree with the assertion that material conditions are more oriented towards revolutionary change now than they were in the 1970s, especially if you include time as a ‘material’ element. Nevertheless, the suffocating effect of the present “existential and emotional atmosphere” is crucial. as well as being immersed in pop culture, as Owen says, another thing that distinguished Mark from more conventional theorists was his grasp of how the external, material environment created by neoliberalism has in turn cultivated a particular interior, emotional state – a sort of overstimulated misery and resignation which, while individualised and for the most part unspoken, is still experienced collectively. Part of how the regime exercises its power is to shut us off from each other in the guise of ‘connecting’ us. This is obvious in any workplace. It is also noticeable at home, when one’s digital device lists all the other wifi connections in the vicinity: technologically a minority of these connections is probably powerful enough to supply everyone in the building, and yet capital dictates that we each buy our own ‘package’ and keep our neighbours out. Uninhibited, the signal literally travels through walls, between households. It’s there, we’re just not able to collectively utilise it.

Given the reasons why the book never got further than this fragment, the ending of the introduction is heartbreakingly poignant, pointing as it does towards a subsequent section which would analyse Capital’s machinery of “consciousness-deflation” as a first step towards reversing it and igniting a collective desire for action. And this is one of the areas where we should concentrate our energies, because the liberation of psychic space is a necessary precondition for any attempt to dismantle the system of power which threatens our material survival.