Postcapitalist Desire

So, the idea there is, then: that power itself is pathological. To hold power is to inherently be oppressive, therefore it’s better to be wounded; it’s better to be the wounded, the abject, because you’re not actually holding power, which is oppressive. This becomes the name for a kind of impossible desire in lots of ways. Who are these appeals aimed at? What is a political project which doesn’t aim at capturing power or building power in some way? I think we can recognise the ways in which this form of desire has shaped a lot of left-wing politics recently. Brown’s essay is highly profound; both of those: “Wounded Attachments” and the one on left melancholia, which builds on [Walter] Benjamin’s discussion of left melancholia.19

The emergence of things like “Luxury Communism” as a formula, because it’s immediately… Maybe we’ll talk about Luxury Communism later on in the course…13 I think what’s powerful about that is it deflects or defuses — or not defuses but its opposite: explodes — the current conceptions of things or the standard stereotypes — exactly what we looked at with that dreary, grey imagery associated with the communist Soviet system.

He’s saying, OK, once the problem of scarcity is resolved — which it effectively is under late capitalism: the problem is not that there isn’t enough food to feed everybody, the problem is the distribution of the food. Scarcity isn’t the problem, it’s actually the maintaining of scarcity which is the problem for capitalism. The production of an artificial scarcity in order to conceal abundance, you could say, and a scarcity of time as much as a scarcity of actual goods, services, etc. Marcuse says, once this scarcity is overcome, capitalism has to work extremely hard at avoiding the possibility that people could determine their own lives and behave in a more autonomous way. This is, in a way, the driver of the emergence of capitalist realism, I would say — and neoliberalism is a part of that — is constantly having to thwart the potential emergence of postcapitalism, of people living in ways that are beyond the imperatives of capitalism. We’ll see that Gibson-Graham argues that we’re already doing that, most of the time in fact.

he working class of the twenty-first century are as entangled in their subordinated desire / desire for subordination as they were in the twentieth. But this apparent paradox of sadomasochistic desires is not without its uses. As Fisher continues: “Not far beneath Lyotard’s ‘desire-drunk yes’, lies the No of hatred, anger and frustration: no satisfaction, no fun, no future. These are the resources of negativity that I believe the left must make contact with again”.37

The left at large may not be ready for this at present — and Fisher himself may have softened his lust for negativity in the years to follow — but, just as the developing counterculture repeatedly foreshadowed the political sea-changes of the era, Lyotard’s provocations find themselves encapsulated in much contemporary music and culture. Indeed, what is a counterculture if not a cultural hegemony recast in negative?

eading aloud from Jean-François Lyotard’s viciously difficult 1974 book, Libidinal Economy, Fisher relishes the work’s most polemical passages, as Lyotard seems to prophesy the patronising gaze cast upon James Turner Street, putting the producers on blast, who “dare not say the only important thing there is to say, that one can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pâtés, swallowing tonnes of it till you burst”.34

Fisher explains:

To have one’s consciousness raised is not merely to become aware of facts of which one was previously ignorant: it is instead to have one’s whole relationship to the world shifted. The consciousness in question is not a consciousness of an already-existing state of affairs. Rather, consciousness-raising is productive. It creates a new subject — a we that is both the agent of struggle and what is struggled for.

consciousness of one’s place within a structure of inequality — be that capitalism, patriarchy or white supremacy — must be constructed; it is never given. The best way to construct such a consciousness is with the participation of others who share a similar material existence.

In disarticulating class from the identitarian struggles of the day, capitalism no longer appeared to be the enemy. We were, instead, all too prone to impotently turning on one another.

To what extent is our desire for postcapitalism always-already captured and neutralised by capitalism itself? How are we supposed to combat the “intensification of desire for consumer goods, funded by credit”?21 Should we even try? For Fisher, the response to this problem cannot be, as Mensch suggests, a reactionary striving for a pre-capitalist primitivism; the “libidinal attractions of consumer capitalism”, he suggests, need “to be met with a counterlibidio, not simply an anti-libidinal dampening”.22

If we are to take our psychedelic dream of emancipation seriously, and if it is to have any contemporary relevance whatsoever, we have to realise that nothing can be achieved by getting off your head on drugs. This was not a moral point, however, but an acutely political one. The point was, instead, “to get out through your head”, through the application of a “psychedelic reason”, “auto-effect[ing] your brain into a state of ecstasy”.5