Introduction: The story so far…
I want to begin this paper under the shadow of one of the most famous questions from French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s 1974 Libidinal Economy: “Why, political intellectuals, do you incline towards the proletariat?” (155). Through which you, the intellectual, gawk at, obsess over, and fantasise over the proletariat, who embody the potential of what Herbert Marcuse called “the spectre of a world which could be free” (67). You obsess while simultaneously retreating from the streets, the foundries, and the mines, into ivory towers brimming with comfy armchairs, book deals, and late-night TV political discussions. You give up any façade of solidarity and willingly exorcise Marcuse’s spectre. Wait. I’ll be fair; you’ve never been active, let alone political; everything action you take is a performance. It’s not your fault, of course, it’s not, of course; you’ll say it’s administration or job security or pressures about government funding; you’ll bemoan that “I’m just a tiny cog, turning and turning in the monstrous gyre of capital”; perhaps, not the last part out loud. You’ll cry and scream out, “[h]ang on tight and spit on me” (Lyotard 111). You secretly yearn for the Lovecraftian tentacles to coil tighter and tighter, their suckers to engulf you and drown you in songs of soma; there is no possibility of imagining or achieving postcapitalism without its retched inky taint.
In a rapidly warming world, where southern Italy and Greece are on fire at the time of writing this, the individual process of recycling and collecting your Pfand is nothing more than piss in the wind. Similarly, any critique of what Andreas Malm calls Fossil Capital or the “fossil economy” (#) repeats the mistake of Critique. By this, I emphasise the capitalisation of Critique, as it encompasses all critiques of capitalism into a monolithic entity. Critique, as Lyotard argues, implies an objective outsideness to capital and outsideness (12) which Lyotard maintains cannot exist under the current constraints of capitalism. Therefore, we must engage in the form of non-Critique; we must delve into the quagmire of capital’s shit and generate something from the inside of the capital’s duodenum. The time for writing and action is over; the two must hybridise into a figurative concept I term the “postcapitalist intellectual”, as both writers and active participants in a climate vanguard. In constructing this figure, I propose a synthesis of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy and the unpublished writings of Mark Fisher’s “Acid Communism” as a new form of vanguardism, one that is a collated libidinal intensity – orientated and driven by a necessity of achieving a post-carbon, postcapitalist future.
The Problem with the Intellectual.
Before engaging directly with how Lyotard wrestles with the failures of intellectualism, I would like to briefly touch on the context and style of what Lyotard later sardonically called his “evil book” (Peregrinations 13). Libidinal Economy was written as a response to the failures of the French May 1968 protests, where infighting led to a failure of the left to replace Charles de Gaulle’s nationalistic government. The result of this failure led to a surge in Gaullism, the dissolution of socialism in France, and arguably the beginning of neoliberalism.
This rejection of leftism, Marxism, and communism, led Lyotard and other French philosophers to abandon the hope of a “world which could be free.” (Marcuse 67), and in doing so, abandoning the validity of Marxist dialectical critiques. Libidinal Economy, like Jean Baudrillard’s Symbolic Death and Exchange or, more famously, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, represent what translator and editor Iain Hamilton Grant calls a “short-lived explosion of a somewhat naïve [Nietzschean] anti-philosophical expressionism” (xvii). By which the style and content of post-1968 French philosophy represented the bitterness felt towards the failure of actualising a socialist France. For Lyotard, he directed this bitterness at Marxist intellectuals, as the failures of 1968 displayed that unalienated and objective Marxist critique was an impossible and untenable goal. He claims that “every political economy is a libidinal economy” (104); by this, he maintains that libidinal forces drive all political economies, and therefore, critiques of political economies are also driven by a similar puissance (force). Therefore, there can be no possibility of a Critique existing outside of the libidinal forces of capitalism because, for Lyotard, there is no outside region to formulate a critique. To form Critique, the political intellectual should abandon any “phantasy of a non-alienated region” (Lyotard 107).
Let us look at an extract from Libidinal Economy, in which Lyotard tangles with the libidinal intensities of capitalism to form what I term as non-critique:
Why, political intellectuals, do you incline towards the proletariat? […] a proletarian would surely hate you […] because you are bourgeois […] but also because you 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 – and because instead of saying this, which is also what happens in the desire of those who work with their hands, arses and heads, ah, you become a leader of men, what a leader of pimps. (Lyotard 115-116).
The extract above displays Lyotard’s provocative and Nietzschean style, as he is not writing an argument in the traditional philosophical sense. Instead, He is engaging in a quasi-literary-philosophical style that disregards any notion of logical objectivity as an attempt to reinforce the problem with intellectualism. For Lyotard, the political intellectual assumes a hierarchical, fatherly position that patronisingly inscribes moralism onto the proletariat, as if they are naughty children to be scolded. The intellectual, in 1968, for Lyotard, assumes and continuously reinscribes the notion of revolution onto the worker, whereby their lives will be better in the absence of capitalism. Furthering this, the political intellectual maintains that only the worker can be the means to achieve communism through the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the context of 1968, this is problematic, as the intellectual can return to their ivory towers, but for the worker to return to work, they find their jobs replaced or their previous rights destroyed. The political intellectual assumes that workers’ suffering is incompatible with the jouissance (enjoyment) generated from their labour. This is because capitalism as a libidinal economy necessitates a form of unconscious jouissance from the worker’s labour. Moreover, the proletariat will only realise their oppression and “spontaneously” revolutionise through the intellectual’s writings.
For example, an oil worker on an oil rig in the North Sea will not “spontaneously” erupt into revolution because the political intellectual reveals their alienation; they will not become disgusted by the intensities of their labour. They/we enjoy their/our iPhones, plastic Coca-Cola bottles, cheap flights to Mallorca in the summer, diesel 4×4 cars, the internet, iCloud services, and the innumerable facets of libidinal distractions capital provides to exorcise the “spectre of a world which could be free (Marcuse 67). The political intellectual expresses disgust at these distractions whilst simultaneously enjoying their jouissance; the intellectual must join the worker in admitting to enjoying the shit of capital as the only productive step forward.
In this age of pervasive capitalism, non-critique must be founded from the freeing of what Lyotard calls the “libidinal band”. The band is a collection of intensities that cuts through social hierarchies, identities, and structure. It can be considered similar to the DeleuzoGuattarian concept of the “body-without-organs” from Capitalism and Schizophrenia. However, the “libidinal” band is a much more dangerous and unpredictable force, as it emphasises a destructive intensity of desire that emerges from within the “inside” rather than from deterritorialised states. It encompasses both what Deleuze and Guattari call “good” revolutionary desire and “bad” fascistic desire. However, the libidinal band is restricted by another of Lyotard’s terms, the “great zero”. Lyotard chooses Marx’s Capital as a seminal example of this sin to elucidate the impossibility of Critique existing objectively outside capitalism. Lyotard claims that Marx finds himself “in the grip of an obsession with the great Zero, when, at any cost, one wants to produce a discourse of so-called knowledge” (12-13). For example, Capital as a critique of political economy can only engage with the intensities of the libidinal band, a concept that the great Zero denies. Like the libidinal band, the great Zero is incredibly difficult to define; however, I will try and explain it. It is a dispositif, which re/constitutes the inside/outside of representation through a basis in the Lacanian lack. In the case of Marx, capitalist political economy, Lyotard is attacking the idea of Critique or critical theory’s understanding of itself and the object it is critiquing. Marx employs a cold, cut-off, and detached form of critique of what is ultimately a “thing” that cannot be approached objectively, as it invades every aspect of the critiquing subject (in this case, Marx). Further still, Marx, as the critiquing subject, is ontologically necessitated by his obsession with capital; without capital, Marx has nothing to critique, no books to write, and, therefore, no referent for existence. Without the critiquing object, the critiquing subject, you, the intellectual, have no referent for existence as a so-called “intellectual”. So, when Marx critiques capital from the “outside”, Marx is simply reaffirming the borders of the great Zero, and maintaining the status quo, as there is no distinction between an in/outside of capital. Therefore, for Lyotard, there can be no critique, there can be no arguments, and there can be no end to capitalism from the outside because there is no “[un]alienated region” (107).
The Problem with the Activist/Proletariat.
In this section, I’d like to shift this paper away from Lyotard and onto the second part of my synthesis of the “postcapitalist intellectual”, the unpublished theories of Mark Fisher. In contrast to his earlier 2009 monograph Capitalist Realism, the unpublished theories of “acid communism” and Postcapitalist Desire by Mark Fisher can be considered antithetical to the fatalistic acquiescence of Lyotard’s conclusions. As Lyotard concludes, Libidinal Economy is almost embracing the fatalism of neoliberalism by concluding that we should “stay put, but quietly seize every function as good intensity-conducting bodies” (262). Fisher, instead, proposes a positive exercise in theory, one that comes from the inside, what he terms “acid communism”, through which he tries to move beyond the fatalism of the famous proclamation attributed to Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” (qtd. in Fisher Capitalist Realism 2). It speaks to the collective inability to imagine a post-carbon future without the tendrils of capitalism.
In contrast the Lyotard, Fisher does not look to past (failed) revolutions like May 1968 as abject failures but rather as potentials for what Ernst Bloch would term “concrete utopias” (144). This is due, in part, to Fisher’s physical and temporal distance to 1968, and as Lyotard was a vocal participant of 1968. Using 1968 as a positive example would be too difficult for Lyotard in Libidinal Economy. Fisher temporally ties the failures of past revolutions as utopic functions for envisioning a world beyond capitalist realism. For Fisher, “acid communism” is utilising what has already happened to project a supposedly brighter tomorrow. While one can interpret the failures of 1968 as the catalyst for capitalist realism and neoliberalism, Fisher instead proposes the “violent destruction of the Allende government in Chile by General Pinochet’s American-backed coup” (1079). This occurred because Allende “was experimenting with a form of democratic socialism which offered a real alternative to both capitalism and Stalinism” (1079). However, Fisher maintains the example of “democratic socialism” is not a strict hermeneutic to achieve postcapitalism; it is rather a shard of a broken picture, one that could be used as a projection for generating futurity from the inside. Fisher is implicitly engaging with Lyotard, as he is proposing a fluid riding of the various intensities of failed revolutions into something that can go beyond capitalism from the inside of the “great Zero” (Lyotard 12).
Part of the beauty and sadness of “acid communism” is due to Fisher’s tragic suicide in 2017, which opens up and problematises the term’s ambiguity. As it was unpublished, we “as good intensity-conducting bodies” (Lyotard 262) must find new hopeful ways of imagining an end to the fossil economy. Consequently, one might interpret Fisher’s usage of acid, be ignorant of all notions of nuance, and believe that Fisher is proposing taking LSD as an alternative to capitalism and climate change. He is not suggesting we all consume soma and ejaculate ourselves to the purest form of jouissance. He is, instead, leaving it as an open thought experiment, a reverse exorcism of what Marcuse called the “spectre of a world which could be free” (67).
For me, “acid communism” is a new form of consciousness-raising, or perhaps more accurately phrased as multi-temporal consciousness-raising. Whereby through a careful examination of leftist failures, one can collect the intensities and use them as a drive towards an alternative to capitalism. For me, and many others, this drive is necessitated by the current climate catastrophe. And I find myself coming to similar conclusions to Andreas Malm, that a radical violent reaction is necessary to the so-called “slow violence” (Nixon) of capitalism. Whereby the left must reject what I term “depressive” forms of activism that emerge as tools to reaffirm the status quo of capitalism. I look towards groups like Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil, which, while their message is important, their methods fall short. Pure pacifistic activism will become invariable, co-opted, and neutralised as nothing more than a rabble of troublemakers. In order to construct postcapitalism, we must first confront intellectualism and then activism and hybridise the two into something that not only disturbs but degrades and eventually destroys capitalism. While I term this intellectual “postcapitalist”, I enjoy the loaded multi-temporalities within. It implies a with and against capitalism by reconfiguring collective desire against the totality of the great Zero. Therefore, this “postcapitalist intellectual” must be ready to be violent; it must be ready to take action; it must be ready to bomb pipelines, graffiti SUVS, and destroy the animal-industrial complex. They, you, we, and I must be ready to destroy our own corporeal body and release the libidinal band.
Works cited:
Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope, translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. MIT Press, 1959.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Bloomsbury, 1977 2013.
Fisher, Mark. k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher 2004-2016. Edited by Darren Ambrose. Repeater, 2016.
Lyotard, Jean-François. Libidinal Economy, translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. Athlone, 1993.
—. Peregrinations. Columbia UP, 1988.
Malm, Andreas. How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Verso, 2021.
—. The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. Verso, 2018.
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilisation. Routledge, 1987.
ether writes 