post-capitalist desire (mark fisher)

Mark Fisher has acquired guru status, something one suspects he would never have really desired. Desire being an actionable word, as this collection of the last lectures of his life in 2016 makes clear. Transcribed verbatim from recordings of said lectures at Goldsmiths, Post-capitalist Desire sees the academic wrestling with the failure of the counter-cultural movement that emerged in the sixties, as it fractured into representative silos, and the possibilities for hope for the future at the dawning of the age of Trump. One of the key aspects of the lectures is the way in which capitalism both constructs and satisfies the desires of its subjects, rewarding them for their obedience with shiny toys and the serotonin rush of purchase. Fisher sets out to investigate, looking at a wide range of references, how these desires are made and how the innate human yearnings of desire might be reconstructed within a society more concerned with ideas of fairness and empathy. (At one point he discusses why he is wary of words like Communism which have become tainted by their twentieth century associations). The series of lectures, punctuated by interventions from the students, are an inclusive format for entering into and understanding a discourse which so often blinds with its science. The discussion of Lyotard’s vision of different versions of Marx, for example, has a clarity which helps to unveil the complexity of the text being discussed. More than anything else, it feels as though this series of lectures, which remained unfinished due to the Fisher’s suicide, offers some challenging but bizarrely optimistic guidelines for emerging from the stasis and hangover of twentieth century political thinking which still afflicts us, as we move towards a world whose underpinning philosophical, epistemological and even erotic concerns are rapidly evolving. Permitting discussion of the way in which capitalism has succeeded in constructing a matrix of desire which, no matter how unjustly, serves to ensure it’s continued procreation, feels like an essential step in beginning to evaluate how we/ the world/ society might go beyond this reductive matrix and transform it into something more joyous and communal.