Spectropoetics of the Commons

Abstract

The horizon of socialist, let alone communist thought can be conceived as a problem of psychic scope. Mark Fisher said that artists nowadays no longer have access to the materials necessary to produce the New, and that this is less so a problem of psycho-physical materials but of a larger historical confluence of conditions and the de/construction of possible environments and futures. There are two poles to Fisher's thought: Capitalist Realism and Acid Communism. Capitalist Realism is the pole we live within, the social sphere of capital's all-pervasiveness, within which "no-one can even think revolt." Such a psychic conjuncture does not occur overnight, but it moved in quickly. The rise of global neoliberalism after the US-backed Allende coup carved away a probable socialist horizon that was emerging in the sixties and seventies. The installation of Pinochet enforced a militarized forgetting of the Chilean socialist horizon, erasing the worlds Allende made thinkable. Allende was experimenting with a form of socialism which provided an alternative to Stalinist economic austerity. This coincided with the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant economic ideology. As its embodied in the Thatcherite and Reagan regimes, it must first be understood as a project which aims to destroy — "to the point of making them unthinkable" — global experiments in democratic socialism and libertarian communism like those that were beginning to take hold at the turn of the sixties and seventies. Fisher says that the "military destruction of the Allende regime, and the subsequent mass imprisonments and torture, are only the most violent and dramatic example of the lengths capital had to go to in order to make itself appear to be the only 'realistic' mode of organising society." Capitalist Realism must be understood as a symptom of neoliberalism, a dissolution of any utopian or collective desire that could be beginning to be felt in those years. The retreat of a once approaching horizon. Fisher's unfinished text, Acid Communism, describes a way out, a probable escape hatch, or a potential remedy for the reflexive impotence and psychic terminal velocity of Capitalist Realism. Fisher discusses the way in which the role of art, specifically during a time which saw the proliferation of psychedelics and hallucinogenics, was useful in performing new conceptual social relations, that it could give a "taste of what the world might look like once the movement had succeeded." His text, however, remains unfinished, and we are left only with the imperative that "Understanding how this process of consciousness-deflation worked is the first step to reversing it." The task of my project is to continue at the horizon where Fisher left off, using the poetics of Sean Bonney, Arthur Rimbaud, and Ben Lerner to work toward the disintegration of use-value in poetry, toward the withering away of poetry itself.