POST-CAPITALIST DESIRE by Mark Fisher
by Dank Audio Stash
17:27 - 208 views

POST-CAPITALIST DESIRE by Mark Fisher

What Are We Fighting For: A Radical Collective Manifesto
Eds., F. Campagna, E. Campiglio (Pluto Press, 2012)

https://fisherfunction.persona.co/WEEK-ONE
download PDF: https://goo.gl/Eb8lU0

http://www.lloyd-wilson.co.uk/PDF/37_Pieces_Newspaper.pdf


The kind of arguments that Mensch and fellow reactionaries made in response to Occupy were versions of those presented in Nick Land's extraordinary anti-Marxist texts of the 1990s. Land's theory-fictional provocations were guided by the assumption that desire and communism were fundamentally incompatible. It is worth the left treating these texts as something other than anti-Marxist trollbait for at least three reasons. Firstly, because they luridly expose the scale and the nature of the problems that the left now faces. Land fast forwards to his near-future, our near-past, in which capital is totally triumphant, highlighting the extent to which this victory was dependent upon the libidinal mechanics of the advertising and PR companies whose semiotic excrescences despoil former public spaces. "Anything that passes other than by the market is steadily cross-hatched by the axiomatic of capital, holographically encrusted in the stigmatizing marks of its obsolescence. A pervasive negative advertising delibidinizes all things public, traditional, pious, charitable, authoritative, or serious, taunting them with the sleek seductiveness of the commodity." [Nick Land, 'Machinic Desire', in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007 (Urbanomic/Sequence, 2010), pp. 341–2.] Land is surely right about this "pervasive negative advertising"—but the question is how to combat it. Instead of the anti-capitalist 'no logo' call for a retreat from semiotic productivity, why not an embrace of all the mechanisms of semiotic-libidinal production in the name of a post-capitalist counterbranding? 'Radical chic' is not something that the left should flee from—very much to the contrary, it is something that it must embrace and cultivate. For didn't the moment of the left's failure coincide with the growing perception that 'radical' and 'chic' are incompatible? Similarly, it is time for us to reclaim and positivise sneers such as 'designer socialism'—because it is the equation of the 'designer' with 'capitalist' that has done so much to make capital appear as if it is the only possible modernity.

The second reason Land's texts are important is that they expose an uncomfortable contradiction between the radical left's official "commitment to revolution, and its actual tendency towards political and formal-aesthetic conservatism. In Land's writings, a quasi-hydraulic force of desire is set against a leftist-Canutist impulse towards preserving, protecting and defending. Land's delirium of dissolution is like an inverted autonomism, in which capital assumes all the improvisational and creative vibrancy that Mario Tronti and Hardt/Negri ascribe to the proletariat/the multitude. Inevitably overwhelming all attempts by "the human security system" to control it, capital emerges as the authentic revolutionary force, subjecting everything—including the structures of so-called reality itself—to a process of liquefaction: "meltdown: planetary china-syndrome, dissolution of the biosphere into the technosphere, terminal speculative bubble crisis, ultravirus, and revolution stripped of all christian-socialist eschatology (down to its burn-core of crashed security)". [Nick Land, 'Meltdown', in ibid., p. 442.] Where is the left that can speak as confidently in the name of an alien future, that can openly celebrate, rather than mourn, the disintegration of existing socialities and territorialities?

The third reason Land's texts are worth reckoning with is because they assume a terrain that politics now operates on, or must operate on, if it is to be effective—a terrain in which technology is embedded into everyday life and the body; design and PR are ubiquitous; financial abstraction enjoys dominion over government; life and culture are subsumed into cyberspace, and data-hacking consequently assumes increasing importance. It may seem to be the case that Land, the avatar of accelerated capital, ends up amply confirming Žižek's claims about Deleuze and Guattari's work being an ideology for late capitalism's deterritorialising flows. [See Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (Routledge, 2004).] But the problem with Žižek's critique is twofold—firstly, it takes capital at its own word, discounting its own tendencies towards inertia and territorialism; and secondly, because the position from which this critique is made implicitly depends upon the desirability and the possibility of a return to Leninism/Stalinism. [...]

Windows96 : One Hundred Mornings
by Vapor Memory
32:4 - 1,329,539 views

---Windows96 : One Hundred Mornings---

01. Caligula
02. Visage
03. Abstract
04. Visions I
05. Visions II
06. Bliss
07. Languages
08. Rituals
09. Mind Mirage

---released in July 2018---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bandcamp: http://music.businesscasual.biz/album/one-hundred-mornings

Bandcamp: https://windows96.bandcamp.com

Business Casual: http://music.businesscasual.biz

Discogs: https://www.discogs.com/artist/4258482-Windows%E5%BD%A196

Last.fm: https://www.last.fm/music/Windows96

Official Site: http://win96.xyz

RateYourMusic: https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/windows96/one-hundred-mornings/

SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/windows96

Twitter: https://twitter.com/whitegavriel

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/NoxxyDJ

Vapor Memory: 1900