Acid Communism and the American Civic Religion

Acid Communism and the American Civic Religion

By dying before finishing Acid Communism, Fisher freed us up not just to argue about what he really meant by Acid Communism, but also to argue ahistorically about what the best possible version of Mark Fisher would have meant by Acid Communism, and that’s a silver lining.

Leaving a mysterious gap in the most important part of an idea is a good way to haunt people, and haunted people can be very productive. What’s the left’s equivalent of Fermat’s Last Theorem?

It gets me thinking about american civil religion. We americans get indoctrinated into this really idealized version of “the founding fathers” that’s totally ahistorical (and usually less interesting than real history). It’s propaganda, but it can be positive in some ways. For instance, we can reason about what the ‘pure’ version of Thomas Jefferson might have wanted — the version of Jefferson who fully believed the things he said about philosophy, instead of the one who raped his slaves and genocided indigenes.

The ‘pure’ version of Jefferson would have useful things to say about topics like “should people be forced by circumstance into zero hour contracts” (“no, what the hell, why don’t you all own farms by now? something has gone terribly wrong, you need UBI to replace the farms”). The actual Jefferson would not have sensible things to say about these things, because the actual Jefferson was a hypocrite. By making this fake, deified version and, critically, keeping the two distinct in your mind, you can keep the real Jefferson from ruining the good version.

By all accounts, Mark Fisher was not nearly as much of a shithead as Thomas Jefferson, but at the same time, his thought and work is anchored in a very specific time & he has been criticized for not seeing certain things due to bias — for instance, he was literally in adjacent social circles to members of PC MUSIC, but he didn’t take hyperpop into account in his cultural criticism because he came from an era when the relationship between music and the record industry was very different. (Whereas previously, the record industry would court weird experimental fringe scenes and give some of the artists involved distribution in order to inject novelty into pop & only signed artists got heard beyond local live gigs, now people distribute themselves globally. This global distribution can affect more people than a poorly-selling record without interacting with any of the mainstream channels or interacting with the institutions or metrics that previously were ‘all of music’ for most people. So top 40 is even slower to recuperate. Somebody who was 20 or 30 in 2016 rather than 40 was already plugged into totally different channels for ‘new’ music.) We can basically agree that the ideal Mark Fisher would have addressed this dynamic in some way, and it’d then be harder for casual readers to interpret Ghosts of My Life the same way casual readers interpret Adorno’s comments on jazz.

We should keep the real Mark Fisher in mind, for sure. His corpse is barely cold, and he has many living friends. But, at the same time, we should be very careful to keep the ghost of the historical Mark Fisher from getting in the way of the ghost of the Mark Fisher That Could Be. It’s exactly because his project is so important that we need to allow this expansion. Acid Communism is already indelibly associated with Fisher, and if it is to succeed, it needs to be associated with a Fisher who could not have possibly existed.