No More Heroes 3: D. H. Lawrence - He Will Always Be a Priest of Love

No More Heroes (D. H. Lawrence)

(SA/2026)

 

 

I.

 

Despite my best attempts over the last thirty odd years to portray Lawrence as a perverse materialist and sulphurous iconoclast, his romantic idealism and fundamentally religious nature cannot be denied: "I shall always be a priest of love," he once famously declared in a letter [1] - and that, for me, is the issue here.

 

My disappointment (and frustration) with Lawrence lies in the fact he could never quite abandon this self-assigned role, nor move beyond his old-fashioned and deeply conservative sexual metaphysics upon which he erected his own phallic creed and ideology. 

 

 

II.

 

Lawrence recognises that the model of Love offered by Jesus founded upon self-denial and self-sacrifice has been fatally mistaken, invariably leading to the Cross: "Remember I think Christ was profoundly, disastrously wrong." [2] 

 

Lawrence also understands how an active process of the healthy human soul can quickly turn reactive and become malignant if we are not careful; how love becomes a disease when insisted upon as a transcendent spiritual ideal in which individuals merge into oneness. He strongly criticises the Romantics for precisely this.  

 

But although he rejected the exclusive truth of Christianity, he was always a theist at heart; "ceaselessly and energetically pursuing God, with the aid of the Holy Spirit", as Catherine Brown says in the third of her Oxford podcasts on Lawrence [3]. 

 

And although he often sneered at the Romantics for making a girl think she wants a mixture of sentiment and spiritual fulfilment when actually what she desires is to be fucked seven ways to Sunday in a world of rain showers, insects, and gamekeepers [4], Lawrence's literary roots are clearly in the English Romantic tradition. His love of nature, his irrationalism, his opposition to industrial modernity, kind of give the game away. He simply likes to pose as the darkest of all dark romantics [5]. 

 

 

III. 

 

One is almost tempted to say of Lawrence what Hannah Arendt once said of Nietzsche: he is basically just a reflection or a reversal of those thinkers he stands before and declares to be his enemies [6]. Although he wishes to relentlessly challenge moral and rational idealism and climb down Pisgah, Lawrence ultimately relies on the same tricks of the trade - the same metaphysical assumptions and dualistic frameworks - as his opponents.   

 

Conceding that, like Melville, he is perhaps "a mystic and an idealist" [7] at the core, Lawrence nevertheless insists that, unlike the author of Moby Dick (1851), he abandons his "ideal guns" [8] and looks for new weapons. 

 

But does he? 

 

Does he "let the old guns rot" [9] - or does he simply repair, polish and repurpose the old guns in the hope of passing them off as new? 

 

I am increasingly of the view that just as Lawrence will always remain a priest of love who makes Foucault smile by positing sex is the great clue to being [10], so too he's something of a fraudulent gunsmith who has ground off old serial numbers and the 19th-century dates of manufacture in order to make his firearms look like newer models.  

 

  

Notes

 

[1] See the letter to Sallie Hopkin, dated [25 Dec 1912] in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 492-3. 

      Lawrence not only promises to remain forever a priest of love - and a glad one at that - but that he'll preach his heart out, insisting: "Once you've known what love can be, there's no disappointment any more, and no despair."

      This self-description and his defence of (heterosexual) love in face of modern scepticism has proved very popular with his devotees. Personally, however, I have always rather regretted the phrase and the way in which it's been interpreted by those who insist on viewing Lawrence's work as a type of moral idealism - which, let's be clear, it isn't (even if his writing repeatedly falls back into such).            

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence writing in a letter to Dorothy Brett, dated [26 Jan 1925], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 205. 

      Later, just to clarify his (quasi-Nietzschean) position, Lawrence will write in a letter to Else Jaffe (Frieda's sister): "I am with the antichrist." See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 332. 

      For my post on Lawrence's sympathy for the devil and Luciferianism (10 April 2020), please click here. 

 

[3] Catherine Brown, 'D. H. Lawrence 3: Christianity', University of Oxford podcast (28 Feb 2012): click here. 

 

[4] I'm primarily thinking here of the conclusion that Connie arrives at in chapter XVI of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), after a night of sensual passion in which Mellors takes her in the Italian way: "It was not really love. [...] It was sensuality sharp and searing as fire, burning the soul to tinder." 

      But I'm also thinking of what Lawrence writes at the opening of his essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), sneering at the more soppier forms of Romantic literature in which "rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it's always daisy-time". The line can be found on p. 81 of the Cambridge Edition of this work, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (2003) - oh, and the line from Lady C. can be found on p. 246 of the Cambridge Edition of that work (1993).   

 

[5] For those (like me) without a degree in literature, Dark Romanticism is a 19th-century movement that explored the more sinister and irrational aspects of human being. Unlike mainstream Romantics who believed in the inherent goodness of people and nature, Dark Romantics believed mankind is inherently fallen and lives in an outrageously cruel and violent world. It's a little less spooky than the Gothic tradition (i.e., not so reliant on supernatural elements). 

      Several of the American authors admired by Lawrence - Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne - are often seen as representative of the genre. 

 

[6] In 'Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture', Arendt writes: 

      "The quest for meaning, which relentlessly dissolves and examines anew all accepted doctrines and rules, can [...] as it were, produce a reversal of the old values, and declare these as 'new values'. This, to an extent, is what Nietzsche did when he reversed Platonism, forgetting that a reversed Plato is still Plato [...]"

      This essay is in Social Research, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Autumn 1971), pp. 417-446. The paragraph quoted is on p. 435. She later incorporated this idea into the first volume of her (unfinished) work The Life of the Mind (1977) although she's essentially just echoing Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche as remaining within Western metaphysics, despite his best efforts to overcome such. 

      Obviously, Arendt is right to say that simply reversing values paired in binary opposition isn't enough - though it's important to also note that it's a necessary first step toward deconstruction and revaluation. Derrida argues that to effectively dismantle a philosophical hierarchy, one must follow up reversal with displacement; a second phase that aims to disrupt the oppositional structure itself via the introduction of new concepts - such as différance - that resist clean categorisation and cannot be easily placed on either side of the binary   

[7-9] D. H. Lawrence, 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo', in Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 132

 

[10] See the post titled 'Lady Chatterley's Postmodern Lover' (9 Sept 2013), in which I adopt a Foucauldian position to argue - contra Lawrence - that the metaphysical notion of sex as the great clue to being cannot be allowed to pass without close critical examination.

      For rather than simply being an ideal anchorage point that supports the various manifestations of what we term sexuality, sex, says Foucault, is a complex and tyrannical type of agency formed by regimes of power. The Lawrentian belief that it somehow eludes and resists power and resides deep within us over and above the material reality of bodies and possessing its own intrinsic properties and laws, is simply a piece of modern romance.  

      As much as I love Lawrence, I have to admit that I get tired of the austere monarchy of sex ruling over all our thoughts and actions. And I agree with Foucault that what is really peculiar about modern societies is not that they kept sex locked away in darkness, "but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret" [35].  

      In a time to come, after the orgy, so to speak, readers will be unable to fathom Lawrence's sex mania. And they will smile, says Foucault, when they recall that there were once a people who believed that in sex resided a truth "every bit as precious as the one they had already demanded from the earth, the stars, and the pure forms of their thought". 

      See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 35, 159.    

 

 

Other posts in this No More Heroes series include: 

 

Malcolm McLaren: Stuckism and the Quest for Authenticity (14 July 2026): click here. 

 

Nietzsche: The Man Who Failed to Die at the Right Time (15 July 2026): click here. 

 

 

No More Heroes 2: Friedrich Nietzsche - The Man Who Failed to Die at the Right Time

No More Heroes (Friedrich Nietzsche)

(SA/2026)

 

 

I. 

 

Having in the previous post examined the source of my disappointment with my punk mentor Malcolm McLaren [1], I'd like now to turn to my philosophical hero - and I use that word with reservations [2] - the untimely thinker Friedrich Nietzsche ... 

 

What is it about him that ultimately leaves me feeling a little let down? 

 

Actually, the answer to this question is pretty straightforward: Nietzsche didn't die at the right time ...

 

 

II.  

 

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), Nietzsche famously preaches the gospel of voluntary death and praises the difficult art of dying at the right time: "Many die too late and some die too early. Still the doctrine sounds strange: 'Die at the right time.'" [3] 

 

Do this, and death becomes a festival and a triumph; a perfect death which serves as "a spur and a promise to the living". 

 

To die in battle and thus to squander a brave soul is good, says Zarathustra. But to die freely at a time of one's own choosing and most advantageous to one's goal, surrounded by friends "filled with hope and making solemn vows", that is the best death of all.

 

Anyone who wants glory and to be remembered with fondness long after their death must take their leave in good time and not hang "withered wreathes in the sanctuary of life", or lie around just waiting for death to creep up on them.      

 

Perhaps this is doubly true for those fuck-ups who have made a failure of their life; they more than others need to see to it that their death is a great success. 

 

But again, timing is the crucial thing here; for whilst, as we have said, many die too late, there are those who die too soon. Zarathustra names Jesus at this point: "and that he died too early has since been a fatality for many" - something that D. H. Lawrence absolutely agrees with, thus his insistence on mortal resurrection as being far more important than the crucifixion or any ascension unto heaven [4].      

 

But, mostly, the problem is one of people dying too late, not prematurely; of hanging on like apples on a tree even when full of worms and overripe to the point of rottenness. Zarathustra - and let's concede that he's pretty much Nietzsche's philosophical mouthpiece and alter ego - says he would hate to be one of these individuals.

 

He wants to die when at the height of his physical and intellectual powers, so that, in death, his spirit "should still glow like a sunset around the earth" with which he joyfully reunites, so that he may know peace in the material world that bore him.       

 

 

III.  

 

Unfortunately, Nietzsche doesn't die at the right time. After collapsing in Turin, aged 44 [5], Nietzsche lived on for eleven more agonising years in a state of severe physical and mental decline. Thus, in a disappointing twist of cosmic irony, Nietzsche utterly failed Zarathustra's ultimate test.

 

Never in the best of health in bourgeois terms, Nietzsche had nevertheless possessed an extraordinary vitality (what he termed die große Gesundheit). So, it's regrettable that he didn't die defiantly with his arms around the neck of a horse in 1889, but became this vegetable, cared for by his elderly mother and anti-Semitic sister who put him on display for visitors like a living museum exhibit. 

 

Worse still, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche took control of his archives, systematically falsifying his letters and editing his Nachlaß in order to present his philosophy as a form of proto-fascism [6]. Thus, not dying at the right time was not only a personal catastrophe, but by failing to leave his affairs in order Nietzsche enabled his philosophical legacy to be hijacked, distorted, and weaponised by the reactive forces of ethno-nationalism he spent his life combatting. 

 

If only Nietzsche had learnt from Socrates or Seneca before being overtaken by biological fate! They provided masterclasses in how to die and shape their own narratives. As it is, however, his end contrasts as the tragic antithesis to these highly controlled, theatrical exits [7]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] 'No More Heroes 1: Malcolm McLaren - Stuckism and the Quest for Authenticity' (14 July 2026): click here. 

 

[2] The word hero derives from the Ancient Greek term ἥρως which referred to one such as Heracles born of divine ancestry, or to one who was awarded divine honours for their deeds. Whilst Nietzsche retained the concept in his work, he was unhappy with the way it is used in the modern world, often taking on a moral aspect and tied to notions of self-sacrifice, for example. Others may disagree, but, for me, to call Nietzsche a hero would betray a fundamental misunderstanding of his philosophical project.    

 

[3] See Nietzsche, 'Of Voluntary Death', Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 97-99. All lines quoted in section II of this post are taken from this edition of Nietzsche's text.  

 

[4] See Lawrence's vitally important short novel The Escaped Cock (1929), which can be found in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 123-163. 

      One of the earliest posts on Torpedo the Ark was written on this work by Lawrence (29 March 2013): click here. 

 

[5] On 3 January 1889, Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown and was briefly detained by two policemen for causing a public disturbance in the streets of Turin. What happened exactly remains unknown, but an often-repeated tale from shortly after his death states that Nietzsche witnessed the flogging of a horse in the Piazza Carlo Alberto, threw his arms around its neck in order to protect the animal and then collapsed to the ground. 

      In the following few days Nietzsche sent several letters - known as the Wahnbriefe - to a number of friends including Cosima Wagner and Jacob Burckhardt. Most were signed Dionysus, though some were also signed der Gekreuzigte (the Crucified). He ended his days physically and mentally paralysed and in the care of his sister (i.e., a fate worse than death; see note 6 below).  

 

[6] Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche physically curated her brother's final public image by transforming his living death into a highly orchestrated spectacle. Rather than hiding his vegetative state, she paraded it, meticulously staging his environment, dress, and physical presentation before a carefully selected audience. 

      Thus, for example, she would routinely wheel a silent, uncomprehending Nietzsche dressed in a flowing, heavily pleated white robe that closely resembled a classical philosopher's toga out onto a prominent first-floor balcony, allowing visiting disciples and curious tourists to look up and venerate him from the garden below like a tragic prophet. She also meticulously groomed his famous, oversized moustache in an attempt to maintain the fierce, recognisable profile of his lucid years and disguise his frailness. 

      At the same time, Elisabeth established the Nietzsche-Archiv and - in collaboration with Peter Gast - forged and spliced together entries from his notebooks to create what was intended to be his magnum opus - Der Wille zur Macht. The first German edition of this spurious text, containing 483 sections, was published a year after Nietzsche's death in 1901. This version was superseded in 1906 by an expanded second edition containing 1067 sections and it was this edition that was translated into English as The Will to Power, by Anthony M. Ludovici, in 1910.  

 

[7] Condemned to death by the Athenian court, Socrates refused flight or compromise, choosing instead to drink hemlock as a final, supreme act of obedience to the laws of the state that shaped him. He spent his final hours calmly debating the immortality of the soul with his grieving disciples. 

      Similarly, Seneca - ordered to commit suicide by Emperor Nero - embraced his fate with Stoic equanimity, using his final moments to dictate philosophy and comfort his family while bleeding to death in a bath. Both men transformed state-mandated executions into ultimate proofs of concept, ensuring their deaths perfectly authenticated their life's work.

 

 

The next post in this series - on D. H. Lawrence as inveterate priest of love - can be read by clicking here.  

 

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Four

 

Image via the Acid Horizon 

YouTube channel [a]

 

 

I. 

 

Okay, Lecture Four of Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire [b] - 'Union Power and Soul Power' - a little bit of American labour history (do try and stay awake at the back). 

 

Have y'all done your preliminary reading since I published the post on Lecture Three, the key text being Jefferson Cowie's book Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (The New Press, 2010), particularly the chapter 'Old Fashioned Heroes of the New Working Class' (pp. 23-75)?

 

Well, don't worry, neither have I; but I'm confident Fisher will bring us all up to speed ... [c]  

 

 

II.  

 

How does group consciousness practically develop in the historical moment? And what might we learn with reference to our own time?

 

These are the questions Fisher wishes to address here. Along with: why did it all fail; why was there no working class revolution in the US in the late 1960s / early '70s? 

 

Or to put it another way, why did Nixon win - and win big - in '72 and why have the neoliberal Right in the shape of the Republican Party continued to win, often with popular working-class support (think Reagan and Trump, for example)?   

 

I think the answer is pretty clear - though not one the Left will ever concede; as a rule, working class people do not like countercultural hippies and radical activists who want to destroy the American way of life - liberty, the pursuit of happiness, apple pie, etc. They don't want "unprecedented ferment" and "diverse leftism" (154). 

 

Some left-wing commentators say this makes certain elements of the working class reactionary and resentful (deplorable as Hillary Clinton would say). Today, young white working class males are invariably demonised as racist and misogynistic. 

 

To be fair to Fisher, however, he never bought into this. Indeed, he frequently pushed back against condescending stereotypes and rejected broad, pejorative characterisations - such as the term chav - arguing that left-leaning intellectuals needed to empathise a little more and moralise less [d]. 

 

Having said that, he does not deny working-class resentment as the "driving force of reaction" (156) in the 1970s and after, defining the term as "a form of anti-solidarity" and "anti-consciousness" (156) that keeps people divided.  

 

 

III.     

 

The idea that there's no class system now - that we're all either middle-class or, in Lawrence's view, one vast proletariat that has become quite literally robotic [e] - is interesting and worth looking at a little more closely. 

 

Technically speaking, Fisher is right that we can't all belong to the middle - "That is an impossible typology" (157). He's amused, however, by the doubleness of the idea: 

 

"It's both disavowing class at the same time as it's assuring the impossibility of completely overcoming it. Because if we're all in the middle class then, really, there is no such thing as class struggle anymore. But hold on! We're still talking about class [...] we still have to use the term class but in the very attempt to eliminate the concept." (157) 

 

That's true, I suppose, but doesn't really say a great deal and I feel as if Fisher has forgotten his Deleuze and Guattari from back in the day when Anti-Oedipus was his main point of reference. If one turns to the section titled 'Capitalist Representation' in chapter 4, one finds a detailed explanation of how a simple idea of class no longer cuts the conceptual mustard:

 

"That the State is entirely in the service of the so-called ruling class is an obvious practical fact, but a fact that does not reveal its theoretical foundation [...] from the viewpoint of the capitalist axiomatic there is only one class, a class with a universal vocation, the bourgeoisie. [...] This proposition contains something other than an ideological blindness or denial. Classes are the negative of castes and statuses; classes are orders, castes, and statuses that have been decoded." [f]

 

What I think that means is that there is no fundamental difference between the banker, the baker, and the candlestick maker; they are subjugated as functionaries into one and the same flow of capital. And ultimately, only the bourgeoisie remains as the decoding and decoded class. Deleuze and Guattari continue (and I'm quoting several paragraphs at some length here as it seems to me important): 

 

"The generalized slavery of the despotic State at least implied the existence of masters [...] But the bourgeois field of immanence [...] institutes an unrivaled slavery, an unprecedented subjugation: there are no longer even any masters, but only slaves commanding other slaves [...] The bourgeois sets the example [...] more utterly enslaved than the lowest slaves, he is the first servant of the ravenous machine." [g]  

 

"It will be said that there is nonetheless a class that rules and a class that is ruled [...] the distinction between the flow of financing and the flow of income in wages. But this is only partially true, since capitalism is born of the conjunction of the two [...] and integrates them both in the continually expanded reproduction of its limits. So that the bourgeoisie is justified in saying, not in terms of ideology, but in the very organization of its axiomatic: there is only one machine, that of the great mutant decoded flow [...] and one class of servants, the decoding bourgeoisie, the class that decodes the castes and the statuses [...]" [h]     

"In short, the theoretical opposition is not between two classes, for it is the very notion of class, insofar as it designates the 'negative' of codes, that implies there is only one class. The theoretical opposition lies elsewhere: it is between [...] the class and those who are outside the class [les hors-classe]. Between the servants of the machine, and those who sabotage its cogs and wheels. [...] If you will: between the capitalists and the schizos [...] at the level of decoding [and desire], in their basic antagonism at the level of the axiomatic [...] [i] 

 

 

IV.

 

Now, I've no idea why Fisher - who must know this material intimately - didn't bother to refer to it and discuss it with his students. By his own admission in week one, although not on the official reading list, Deleuze and Guattari remained the spectres behind the course - so why not summon them here?

 

Perhaps he simply felt it was time to move on with his thinking; to find more practical points of reference and prioritise different conceptual frameworks - more socio-historical and a little less theoretically sophisticated. 

 

In his late work, as he formulated his ideas around acid communism, Fisher seems keener to figure out the material reasons why the liberatory potential of the late-60s and early-70s collapsed rather than re-engage with the philosophical abstractions of poststructuralism. 

 

And so, if for strategic (and pragmatic) reasons only, Fisher remains committed to the idea of class: class struggle, class solidarity, and the raising of class consciousness - regardless of what Messrs. Deleuze and Guattari write [j]. 

 

Though Fisher also wants to tie class to other things, such as race and gender, and promote the possibility of "an intersectional class politics" (158). Class structures may no longer really exist thanks to the capitalist axiomatic doing away with all traditional social and cultural codes and forms, but it can be reproduced in order to create a little unity and solidarity. 

 

Ironically then, it's communism - not capitalism - that wants to keep class in place; for class "goes against the actual dominant tendencies" (159) of capitalism: to decodify and deterritorialise and to ensure all that is solid melts into air [k].     

  

 

V. 

The danger, of course, is if you bring class back - particularly in an intersectional form - you reify it and it becomes identitarian - that is to say, "defined not by its consciousness or by its agency but by particular identity characteristics that are prescribed to it" (160). 

 

Fisher wants class back in the picture. And he wants intersectionality. But he doesn't want identitarianism. The question is: can he have the first two things without the third today, when everyone is obsessed by identity politics? I doubt it. And he seems a little naive in hoping that people will see that class consciousness is all about working people recognising they share a common position and have common interests "in spite of whatever cultural, personal, subjective qualities"(161) they possess. 

 

For Fisher, it isn't that class is "more important than those other forms of identification or forms of struggle" (160), it's just that "when class is no longer there [...] the given picture is necessarily incomplete" (160) and everything is fatally distorted. 

 

But, for my next door neighbour, being a Muslim matters more - way more - than anything else; including acid communism. Fisher might say that this shows a concern only with his present and his past [l] - that my neighbour lacks a form of consciousness that is "different from identity" (165) and which is about the subject's future becoming as it has a transformative dimension and has hyperstitional effects. 

 

Unfortunately, my neighbour - newly arrived from Pakistan with his wife, parents, children, and brother - probably wouldn't understand wtf Fisher was talking about and would care even less. He just wants to extend his kitchen and perform his obligatory daily prayers (Salah - the second pillar of Islam). 

 

What is more, I suspect that if you were to ask him what needs to be done to resolve the crucial antagonisms that divide society he would doubtless argue for the imposition of Sharia - again, I'm pretty sure he'd not call for acid communism. 

  

 

VI. 

   

Fisher closes Lecture Four with a series of what ifs ... 

 

"What if "countervailing forces hadn't managed to assert themselves in the Seventies?" (170) What if a "new alliance of workers, the counterculture, etc., had come together in a sustained way?" (170) What if neoliberalism hadn't triumphed and everyone had demanded the abolition of work?    

  

To me, this is pretty desperate stuff - but Fisher feels these are some of the key questions of our age and which open up a vision of the future and a "potential route into postcapitalism" (170). 

 

Does anybody remember the scene in an episode of The Inbetweeners [S2/E3] when Will, exasperated by the views and behaviour of French exchange student Patrice, launches into an anti-French rant? Challenged by Simon on its racist content, Will exclaims: "He's made me racist!"

 

Well, that's kind of how I feel when reading Fisher at times: I don't want to be cynical - but he's made me cynical! 

 

"What if there was no 1973? What if there was no recession?" (170) What if we could turn back time and reverse the conditions of the late 1960s and early '70s into the current moment? Arrgh! So many hypotheticals on one page! 

 

Posing such questions is not a sign of resistance - more a sign of political hopelessness and philosophical exhaustion. Fisher has nothing else to say other than what if and nowhere else to go other than yesterday; no wonder he suddenly starts listening to The Beatles when all his troubles seemed so far away.   

 

 

VII. 

      

Actually, Fisher does have one additional point to make in Lecture Four - and it concerns aesthetics ... 

 

Fisher thinks that what carried the revolutionary forces along and sustained the necessary conditions for change was the counterculture; "and the counterculture the was primarily driven through music" (171). It was pop music - as much as politics - that offered the "vision of a liberated world" (171) [m]. 

 

As Dewey Finn taught his students at Horace Green: One great rock show can change the world! [n] 

 

Or as Fisher puts it, music feeds into the revolutionary struggle, man; and the revolutionary struggle feeds into the music, creating a "positive feedback loop" (171) and a "vector for the dynamics of transformation of the social world" (171) - which is nice, but nowhere as catchy and explains why his career as a Hollywood script writer never really took off. 

 

For Fisher, culture leads the way; "in lots of ways" (172) and the counterculture is "not just a counter-politics; it's a range of forms of cultural expression" (172) that allowed us "to imagine a completely transformed world" (173) in an act of performative anticipation. 

 

As Miss Brodie would say, in her best Edinburgh voice: For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like. [o]   

 

But for those like me, made cynical - and yes, even a little irritated by Fisher's utopianism - this is just tiresome. Particularly as he knows as well as I do what happened: 

 

"It failed. It went wrong. There were moments of rupture. There were glimmers. There was a sense of something that could have been different. But it didn't work out that way." (172)

 

And rock 'n' roll rebellion - whether led by hippies wearing Afghan coats or punks in their leather jackets - was just as commodifiable as anything else.  

 

Nevertheless, we are, I suppose, encouraged to try again (for if at first you don't succeed ...) - to desire anew and find our mojo once more (or transformational libido as Fisher calls it). And that means turning to Jean-François Lyotard and falling back into French theory ... 

 

See you for Lecture Five ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This podcast from the Acid Archives - Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures of Mark Fisher (Full Episode) - was uploaded to the Acid Horizon YouTube channel in December 2022, but first put out in September 2020. Matt Colquhoun guest stars. Those who would like to listen can click here.  

 

[b] Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. with an introduction by Matt Colquhoun (Repeater Books, 2021). All page references to this book will be given directly in the post.   

 

[c] Amusingly, when Fisher asked his class to share their responses to Cowie's book he was met with silence, which tells us either they were naturally reticent, or that quite a few of them hadn't read it either.   

 

[d] See, for example, his important essay 'Exiting the Vampire Castle' (2013), which can be found in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), pp. 659-667. 

      I believe that Fisher got a lot of shit from some readers for this text, in which, amongst other things, he champions Russell Brand and sticks up for Owen Jones. It can be read online here. See also my post on Torpedo the Ark (30 Sept 2023) in which I discuss this essay. And readers who are interested might like to also check out Em Colquhoun's xenogothic website where they have mounted a spirited defence of the piece on several occasions. 

 

[e] In the second version of his final novel, Lawrence writes: 

      "There was no longer any such thing as class. The world was one vast proletariat. Everything else had gone. The true working class was gone, as much as the honourable bourgeoisie, or the proud aristocracy [...] a vast homogeneous proletariat made up the whole of humanity." 

      See The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 492.   

 

[f] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (The Athlone Press Ltd., 1984), pp. 253-254.  

 

[g] Ibid., p. 254.  

 

[h] Ibid.

 

[i] Ibid., p. 255.

 

[j] Actually, Deleuze and Guattari would support him in this as a matter of praxis. The task, they write, of any revolutionary socialist movement is to organise a "bipolarity of the social field, a bipolarity of classes" and to both embody the idea of class interest in consciousness and actualise it in an organised political party "suited to the task of conquering the State apparatus" (Anti-Oedipus, 255). 

       

[k] This phrase - 'all that is solid melts into air' - is famously found in Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto (1848). 

      Funnily enough, this was Nietzsche's main gripe against capitalism too; that it made society and culture impossible. From his earliest writings, such as 'The Greek State' (1871/72), Nietzsche argued that capitalism undermined the 'internally sturdy and sensitive bonds' that existed between rulers and ruled in noble society. This essay can be found in On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 176-186.

          Readers might like to note that I examined Nietzsche's critique of capitalism in my doctoral thesis, Outside the Gate (University of Warwick, 2000), written during the same late-90s period in the philosophy department from which Fisher himself emerged.

 

[l] Fisher says that if minority race and religious groups understand themselves only by the features which they already possess, this is a form of reification: "You are already what you identify with." (167)

      Unfortunately, it's not these features - as positive as they may be - that define a people as a revolutionary class: "It's their structural and antagonistic position and the potential for transformation that occurs once consciousness develops that makes them potentially revolutionary agents." (167) 

      This, I think, explains why it is the radical Left likes to flirt with Islamists and secure the Muslim vote; it sincerely believes that one day the Muslims will see that their best interests are not served by Muhammad but by Marx. It's a fantasy, of course, and - ironically, one might even say a form of false consciousness.   

 

[m] So you see, my remark about The Beatles with which I closed section VI wasn't just inserted to be humorous or to take a pop at Fisher for the sake of it.    

 

[n] As I'm sure most readers will know, this line is from the film School of Rock (dir. Richard Linklater, 2003), starring Jack Black as Dewey Finn.  

 

[o] As I'm sure most readers will know, this is a line from Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Macmillan, 1961).  

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture One can be read here.

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Two can be read here.

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Three can be read here. 

 

 

Musical bonus: The Beatles, 'Revolution', B-side of 'Hey Jude', a single release from 1968: click here.

 

  

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Three

 

Front cover of the Italian edition of Mark Fisher's 

Postcapitalist Desire (2021) [a]

 

 

I.

 

When Mark Fisher asks his students if they have heard of György Lukács and his ideas of reification and totality [b] he is met with a proverbial wall of silence.

 

And, to be fair, who in 2016 would reasonably be expected to be au fait with a long-dead Hungarian Marxist whose major work - History and Class Consciousness - had been published almost 100 years earlier in 1923? 

 

Especially when, according to Fisher's own theory, his students - along with the rest of us - have been completely subsumed by capitalist realism, making the work of thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School - which includes Lukács - feel completely alien and not just dated.   

  

Fisher, however, insists that the above book remains extremely valuable (113) - once one gets to grips with its difficult language (although he concedes that it's "infuriating to read" (112) due to its dense, unyielding Hegelianism). 

 

It is also, says Fisher - keen to parade his acid communist credentials by adopting hippie terminology [c] - an "extremely trippy" (113) book, by which I think he means that it's a work that appears to be written by someone who has taken powerful mind-altering drugs and likely to induce strange effects in the reader. 

 

For Fisher, Lukács describes a world that feels like a hallucination, yet is terrifyingly real; he shatters the illusion that forces us to see the manufactured, exploitative reality of capitalism as the natural condition of man. In other words, his work acts like a psychedelic agent, destabilising the common-sense of capitalist realism. 

 

Far out, man! 

 

 

II.  

 

The best way to understand what Lukács is driving at, argues Fisher, is to read his work in relation to a more recent essay by the feminist scholar Nancy Hartsock. 

 

In 'The Feminist Standpoint' [d], Hartsock performs an act of theoretical translation by taking Lukács's concept of class consciousness and applying it to the field of gender studies, developing in the process what we now know as standpoint theory [e].

 

If, for Lukács, the bourgeoisie cannot (and will not) see the true nature of capitalism because their class privilege depends on maintaining the illusion and only the proletariat has a structural interest in perceiving reality, then, for Hartsock men, as a sex, also view the world through an idealised lens that is blind to the shit that women have to accept and deal with. 

 

It is only the latter who, from their marginalised and subordinate position, are able to form not merely a different perspective, but see things as they really are.

 

In sum: Fisher wants to show his students that desire (and reality) look radically different depending on where you stand in the world. The dominant class mistakes its narrow view for universal truth, while the marginalised see both the illusion and the underlying machinery at work.  

 

That's the theory at least - one that would leave Nietzsche laughing his head off! [f]   

 

III. 

 

For Fisher, standpoint theory is a way to break from postmodern relativism and to ground truth back in material practice. A standpoint is so much more than merely a view or perspective, precisely because it is constructed in material practice and what Fisher calls group consciousness. 

 

And unlike the Titanic, group consciousness can actually be raised - and the higher it's raised, the better you'll feel about yourself. Why? Because you'll be freed from self-responsibility born of bourgeois individualism: 

 

"Once workers realise the problem is capital, not them [...] when women realise the problem is patriarchy, not them [...] then their consciousness has immediately shifted. You feel better! [...] You'll feel relief from the guilt and misery of having to take responsibility for your own life, which you shouldn't have to - despite everything neoliberal propaganda tells us." (119)

 

Obviously, I find this pretty objectionable - not as a liberal keen to defend personal agency, but as a Nietzschean for whom nothing is more contemptible than seeking relief from suffering via the construction of a feel-good philosophy founded upon herd morality [g]. 

 

I understand why it's so important for Fisher's critique of capitalist realism to deconstruct bourgeois individualism and the privatisation of misery, etc. But I find this blame-shifting to external systems problematic to say the least. Nietzsche would identify this anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal shift as simply another unfolding of the slave revolt in morals; something that ultimately results not in feeling better about yourself, but in hating others.

 

Acid communism may be Fisher's attempt to heal and empower - to raise consciousness among the proletariat - but, unfortunately, it more often than not traps its adherents in a mindset of reaction and ressentiment and ends with fantasies of punishment: "I don't know if anyone ever has fantasies about this - I know I do - about getting very powerful people sent to jail." (127-128)

 

 

IV.

 

I don't want to give the impression that I don't agree with many of the things Fisher says, because, actually, I do. Or, at any rate, I sympathise with some of his points (ironically enough from a shared class standpoint). 

 

For example, I think he's right to say that capitalism always prevents awareness amongst people that they could "live differently and have more control over their own lives" (132). And I think his concern about the mobile phone is spot on; essentially, it's a device designed to endlessly distract and make you available to the imperatives of capitalism anywhere and at any time (134).

 

People think they need a phone "in order to communicate" (135) with other people; that is to say, they need to buy an expensive product in order to relate to (and function within) the world. Fifty years ago, no one would have believed this. But today, this is the "level of domination" at which capital has encroached "on people's minds" (135).   

 

As Fisher concludes: "Nobody makes you own a phone. And if you do own it, nobody makes you go on social media. And, of course, if you're on social media, then you are producing for capitalism." (135-136)  

 

Today, we produce ourselves and we curate our own subjectivity [h]. 

  

 

V.

 

Fisher ends the third of his lectures on postcapitalist desire by reading out a series of passages from Lukács, all of which he seems to agree with; all of which seem rather dated to me. 

 

His hope in reading them aloud is that it makes them clearer: "It's not that I think, having read those out quickly, we can go home happy." (145). 

 

And next week (next post) ... more on consciousness raising and the last days of the working class in a lecture titled 'Union Power and Soul Power'. I've said it before and I'll say it again: we're a long way from Flatline Constructs ... [i] 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This Italian edition of Fisher's text was trans. by Vincenzo Perna (Minimum Fax, 2022). I will, of course, be reading the original English work, ed. and with an introduction by Matt Colquhoun (Repeater Books 2021). Page references will be given directly in the post. 

 

[b] György Lukács (1885 - 1971) was an influential political philosopher and literary critic whose concepts of reification and class consciousness shaped Western Marxism and inspired members of the Frankfurt School, including Marcuse. 

      By reification Lukács referred to the process in which social relations and institutions are transformed into abstract independent things that take on a life of their own, dominating individuals and preventing them from seeing the underlying realities of capitalism. By totality he refers to the methodological principle that frames society as a dynamic, historically evolving whole in which individual phenomena can only be understood through their relationship to the overarching social system. Interestingly, Lukács uses the latter to critique the former. Fisher thinks both concepts are crucial. 

 

[c] In his attempt to salvage the lost emancipatory desires of the 1960s and '70s counterculture, Fisher - rather embarrassingly - adopts the slang of the time. This strikes me as performative and, as indicated, a bit cringe and he deserves to be gently teased about it. 

      Further, by relying on words like trippy to discuss History and Class Consciousness, Fisher risks trivialising a deeply disciplined, militant text. Lukács was not advocating for a passive, drug-induced distortion of perception, but for a rigorous, collective, organisational awakening. I understand that Fisher views consciousness-raising as a fundamentally psychedelic act and that theory acts like a mind-altering drug, but, on occasions, his acid communism treats critical thinking as if it were all about the vibe.    

 

[d] See Nancy Hartsock, 'The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism', in The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays (Westview Press, 1998), pp. 105-132.   

 

[e] Standpoint theory (also known as standpoint epistemology) is a philosophical and sociological framework arguing that an individual's social position shapes their understanding of the world. It posits that marginalised groups possess unique, valuable insights into societal power dynamics that dominant groups often miss. 

      Rather surprisingly for someone who has read Nietzsche, Fisher claims that he found standpoint theory mind-blowing when he first encountered it (again, note his irritating use of hippie terminology). This reaction feels somewhat naive. I would suggest that the idea that all knowledge is shaped by a specific viewpoint is what the German philosopher famously called perspectivism. 

      However, if pushed, one might concede that Nietzsche's concept is shaped by his aesthetics, whereas standpoint theory is more political in character. And also, of course, for Nietzsche there is no truth as such - only competing interpretations; standpoint theory, rooted in Marxism, maintains a stubborn commitment to objective truth. It doesn't simply say everyone has their own truth, but that the oppressed have a truer view of reality than their oppressors - which is all very flattering and all very comforting, but false.  

 

[f] See note [e] above for why Nietzsche would find this amusing (philosophically naive and absurd). 

 

[g] Nietzsche being Nietzsche, he can't help taking things to the extreme in the opposite direction and actively affirming the necessity of misery and pain for the achievement of greatness. In an amusing note found in The Will to Power which provides sharp contrast with what Fisher desires, Nietzsche writes: 

      "To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities - I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not - that one endures."

      See The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1968), Book IV, § 910, p. 481.   

 

[h] This is essentially Byung-Chul Han's argument in The Burnout Society (Stanford University Press, 2015). This English translation by Erik Butler is based on the original German text titled Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (Matthes & Seitz Verlag, 2010). I have written a two-part post on this work; part one of which (published 7 November 2021) can be accessed by clicking here.   

      As far as I'm aware, Fisher never directly cites Han's work. However, there is significant overlap between his analysis of neoliberal society and contemporary culture and that given us by the South Korean-German philosopher and because of this commentators frequently group their books together (although I'm not sure that's entirely appropriate or advantageous to either thinker). 

 

[i] Flatline Constructs was Fisher's PhD thesis submitted at the University of Warwick in 1999. It was published by Repeater Books in 2025, with a Foreword by Adam Jones. I think it's my favourite work by Fisher and I have written a series of posts on it: click here. 

      For me, there's a real pathos of distance between that work and the lectures in Postcapitalist Desire, although some of his followers insist that there is a strong, underlying level of intellectual (and structural) continuity. I'll let readers decide on that question.  

 

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Two

Repeater Books (2021) [a] 

Design by JohnnyBull.uk 

 

 

I. 

 

One of the things I like about Fisher's work in the 1990s - I'm thinking here of his PhD thesis Flatline Constructs (1999) [b] - is that it offers a new conceptual terminology and synthesises ideas from philosophy, cybernetics, and science fiction into a theoretical framework designed to analyse contemporary culture. 

 

It feels so urgent and exciting because it has its finger on the digital pulse and rather than just speculate on the future, it attempts to actively generate it. 

 

I have to admit, therefore, that if I'd been an MA student at Goldsmiths in 2016 taking Fisher's 'Postcapitalist Desire' module, I would have been disappointed to discover we were going to be talking about Herbert Marcuse [c] and the countercultural bohemians of the 1960s and '70s [d] - i.e., a long-dead Marxist and a group of long-haired hippies.

 

For a thinker who once championed the cold, non-human vectors of Gothic Materialism, this trip down memory lane feels (initially at least) like a retreat ...

 

II. 

 

Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955) is certainly a fun and deeply Romantic reimagining of Freud, but as I said in an earlier post in this series on Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire, it's not a book one can take entirely seriously. For even when framed within Marxist materialism its libidinal utopianism is simply too good to be true and, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, when it comes to the question of desire and society it falls short [e].

 

Fisher, however, likes the fact that Marcuse places "a high value on the importance of art" (80) and - perhaps more importantly - gives a real sense of what "life beyond capitalist domination could provide" (80); namely, a non-repressive civilisation where work transforms into play, scarcity is eliminated by technology, and culture is driven by pleasure, creativity, and freedom. 

 

It is as the feminist cultural critic Ellen Willis says, "'a social and psychic revolution of almost inconceivable magnitude'" [f] - so what's not to love?

 

 

III. 

Instincts and drives: Fisher, like Marcuse, wishes to think desire in terms of the latter, not the former, which he rejects as a "quasi-biologistic naturalisation of currently existing desires" (81). Drives, on the other hand, have a more machinic ring - they are non-biological and can, at least in principle, be reformulated and redirected.

 

At this point, Fisher dives into Freud's great work of metapsychology Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930), which tells the pessimistic (even tragic) tale of how repression is the foundation of civilisation: "And that's why a lot of Marxist revolutionaries simply reject Freud out of hand, because they say it's just conservative" (88-89). 

 

But Marcuse provides a reading of Freud (in terms of drives) that attempts to find a way out of the tragic impasse suggested by Civilisation and Its Discontents - and a way to finally exorcise the ghost of the murdered Father; "the agency of mortification" (91) and "the basic form of repressive authority within society" (91). 

 

It's not so much that we're not allowed to sleep with our mothers, it's more we're forced into performing unpleasant labour: "There's repression so that people work, so that people can be made to work." (92) This seems a question of sheer necessity - even if the dead dad is done and dusted and even when (thanks to technology) scarcity is no longer such a pressing issue. 

 

In sum: Fisher reads Marcuse as more than a Romantic - he's also "a kind of accelerationist!" (97). That is to say, a thinker who argues that postcapitalism must be built through and beyond capitalism and that by fully automating labour it will enable us to liberate human desire and create a civilisation based not on repression, but the pleasure principle. 

 

Post-work is a crucial aspect of postcapitalism for Fisher, as for Marcuse, as for "members of what you might call the 'bohemian class' [...] inspired by this notion that you can both work less and determine your own needs and satisfactions" (98). 

 

And this, of course, was the "basis of the so-called counterculture of the 1960s" (98) with which Ellen Willis - mentioned earlier - was involved ...

 

 

IV. 

 

For Fisher, there's "some kind of resonance" (99) between Marcuse and Willis - although the latter, writing in the late 1970s, is "already trying to explain what went wrong" (99) and why countercultural revolution in the name of Eros didn't work out as desired.      

 

For Fisher, Willis "overturns a lot of the stereotypes about what the counterculture was and what its unachieved ambitions were" (100). In other words, she helps him understand why he and so many other people still care about the Sixties (man):

 

"Why does it haunt us at the level of iconography and why do its cultural forms persist? I'd say it has something to do with the unrealised desires that were inherent in those forms [...]" (100)

 

The counterculture demanded a total revolution: the overthrow of capitalism, the demolition of the work ethic, and the dismantling of the nuclear family and what Fisher calls domestic realism (i.e., the idea that there's no alternative to the mummy-daddy-me matrix). 

 

Rather surprisingly for a married man and father living in the quiet coastal town of Felixstowe, Fisher openly mourns that "domestic realism is even more powerful than capitalist realism in today's world" (101) and that the countercultural mission "to have done with the family [...] has almost entirely disappeared" (101). 

 

Admitting that the family as an empirical fact is under massive pressure, he insists that as a normative transcendental structure it remains powerful - one that he clearly believes must be overcome by alternative, communal modes of living and collective child-rearing [g].

 

 

V.

 

There is, I feel, a tragic paradox and hidden tension at the heart of Mark Fisher's life and work. It is not simply that he was a square peg in a round hole - a headless and homeless philosopher trapped by a mortgage and a boring teaching job - but that his profound commitment to communism and collective desire prevented him from acknowledging that the lost future he was chasing was ... his own.   

 

Rather than accepting himself as an exceptional individual, Fisher translates his depression into a class issue and mistakes it for a pathological symptom of capitalist realism; a fatal misdiagnosis and category error. To generalise from one's own starry singularity in this manner is, Nietzsche would argue, not only fallacious reasoning, but the hallmark of a herd moralist [h].

 

VI.

 

Fisher likes the old Situationist idea of it being perfectly reasonable to demand the impossible. It fascinates him how, at one time - in the 1960s and early '70s - it was realistic, for example, to propose abolishing the family and have everyone move into communes: "Obviously that was ridiculous. But it didn't seem ridiculous at the time!" (102)

 

What happened to this Promethean ambition to bring about a complete transformation of everyday life? Why did the Revolution fail? For Willis, there are several reasons, but for Fisher "the key thing she points to is impatience" (104). 

 

Those damn hippies were conceited and complacent enough to believe that they could replace the family overnight - in a generation at most! "But [communes] didn't have the persistence that families did. [...] So even relatively successful communes only lasted a few years." (105)  

 

If they had read their Nietzsche, they would have known that great change cannot be created at a single stroke; that if a change is to be of a profound nature, then the means to it must be administered in the smallest doses but unremittingly over long periods of time [i]. 

 

In other words, as Willis says, it takes patience - and the exercising of caution; not qualities one associates with privileged middle-class brats who are used to immediately getting their way and who know deep down that having dropped out, they can drop back in again whenever they choose to do so [j]. 

 

Also, just because these hippies claimed to hate their families, the fact is it's simply not that common. And even those who do hate their parents, usually still retain some attachment with them. Willis is right to point out that the family structure is not only powerful, but is ultimately one that meets real needs.      

  

Still, not wanting to end on a slightly sour note ... Fisher suggests to his students that they "reframe what was happening in the 1960s not as some Golden Era where everything was great and then all went wrong" (106), but as a stalled project that can yet be brought to fruition - with a little patience and by making alternative lifestyles accessible to more people (not just the young and relatively privileged).   

 

As I said in the opening section of this post, if I'd been in Fisher's class on 14 November 2016, I'd have left feeling a tad disappointed.  

 

Next week (next post): 'From Class Consciousness to Group Consciousness' (with György Lukács) ... 

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. Matt Colquhoun (Repeater Books, 2021). All page references given in the post (in round brackets) refer to this text. 

 

[b] Mark Fisher's Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction was published by Zer0 Books in 2025. I have published five posts on this text on TTA, the first of which (discussing the Foreword by Adam Jones) can be accessed here. 

 

[c] Herbert Marcuse (1898 - 1979) was a prominent German-American philosopher of the Frankfurt School whose sharp critiques of capitalism, modern technology, and consumer culture made him a leading intellectual figure for the New Left in the 1960s. Key text: One Dimensional Man (1964).

 

[d] Even Matt Colquhoun admits that Fisher "surprised friends and fans alike by writing positively about the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s" in his late work. In his k-punk days, he had been scathing about the hippies and their hedonic infantilism, but in his acid communist phase he's effectively telling us all to mellow out. See Colquhoun's Introduction to Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire (2021), p. 1.

 

[e] See section III of 'Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture One', Torpedo the Ark (19 June 2026), where I explain why this is so: click here.  

 

[f] Ellen Willis, 'The Family: Love It or Leave It', in Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p. 158. The line is quoted by Fisher on p. 101 of Postcapitalist Desire and he was great admirer of Willis (not least for her writings on pop culture). 

 

[g] Fisher insists that collective child-rearing has got to be better than child-rearing within the context of the nuclear family model. Indeed, even the traditional extended family is preferable to the latter, he says, though without getting too nostalgic for it. Basically, his argument is that if you have a bigger group of people involved in child-rearing, "the odds of it going badly wrong or of very specific neuroses being passed on are surely much less" (104), but provides no evidence for this, allowing me - with no evidence to the contrary - to simply disagree.

      For me, communal living is simply a form of neo-primitivism; it may have been the historical norm for our species, but I would have absolutely hated it as a child. Further, I suspect that stability and access to resources - including fresh air and open spaces, not just toys and technology - is key to successfully rearing happy children rather than the family structure per se.  

 

[h] I'm aware that this is a provocative and controversial interpretation and I'm more than happy to be shown why it's a crass misunderstanding of Fisher. 

      I'm willing, for example, to concede that his having a job, a mortgage, and a traditional family life does not invalidate his political critique of those institutions; that it may in fact prove his point that capitalism forces everyone - even acid communists - into these structures in order to survive (that there is no outside).

      On the other hand, I wish to make clear that my reading is Nietzschean in character not neoliberal and that Nietzsche's concept of the individual in terms of starry singularity is not the same as found within bourgeois ideology (which Nietzsche, like Fisher, also despised - if for different reasons).  

      Nietzsche criticised those exceptional individuals who on the basis of their own exceptionality called for universal emancipation and I'm saying Fisher does something similar; he thinks his desire for a life less ordinary is one shared by everyone who happens to belong to the same socio-economic class and that no one can be free and happy until all are free and happy. 

      If, for the neoliberal there is no alternative to capitalist realism, for Fisher there is ony one possible alternative - communist collectivism. He seems happy to ignore entirely Nietzsche's radical aristocratism and opts to suffer in solidarity with the masses and gradually become the roles he was forced to take on (teacher, husband, father) whatever the personal cost.       

 

[i] I'm paraphrasing Nietzsche writing in Daybreak, Book V, § 534. 

 

[j] Willis, as Fisher reminds us, pointed out the important role played by wealth and privilege in the counterculture. Those who dropped out could, in most cases, afford to do so and "didn't have that base level of anxieties about the risks of leaving behind conservative structures" (106).