Situating Mark Fisher’s spatiality?

Abstract

The work of the late Mark Fisher, one of the revered British cultural critics of the past 20 years, is implicitly spatial, yet remains largely absent from geographical scholarship. Callum Sutherland's paper provides a timely and long-overdue corrective to this disciplinary lacuna. This short response aims to build on Sutherland's exposition by bringing the work of the Situationists International into its orbit, as well as musing about how we can think Fisher – via Sutherland – ethically, given how urgent the need is for a more actualised post-capitalist politics.

Introduction

In the emerging post-COVID world of intersecting economic, cultural, social, and ecological planetary crises, it is the rallying call of many activists from all over the world that system change is vital, literally. The vita activa (Arendt, 1958) of politics in the current capitalist conjuncture has become less a discussion between Left and Right, but between the continuing life of our species and mass extinction (Klein, 2017). Capitalism, turbo-charged by neoliberalism has rendered the planet – and the abundance of human and non-human life that it is entangled with – a resource like any other; a balance sheet of disposable surplus value to the sacrificed on the altar of profitability (Mould, 2021). To counter this, a politics of agonistic dissensus (a la Mouffe, 2013) is no longer an option; nothing but entire system change – that is, the emergence of a post-capitalist world – will do.

It is with this in mind that Callum Sutherland's (2023) expert engagement with the late Mark Fisher's work on post-capitalist desire seems achingly timely. Fisher's writings have been part of the landscape of critical Left politics in the United Kingdom for some time now. But, as a collective yearning for a world beyond a climate-destroying capitalism gets ever more vociferous, so too is the need for further interrogation and augmentation of Fisher's important work on post-capitalism. For that reason alone, this paper by Sutherland is important enough, but because it integrates Fisher's work into contemporary geographical scholarship of post-capitalism, for me the paper is vital; it is firmly part of the vita activa.

In this short reply piece to Sutherland's wonderful exposition of the spatial leanings in Fisher's oeuvre, I want to build on the exciting theoretical work done in the paper by connecting with my own musings on post-capitalism in two related ways. The first is by adding into the mix the role of Situationism and the practices of unitary urbanism which seem to complement the ideas that Sutherland exports from Fisher's work in ways that could augment an exciting post-capitalist and prefigurative politics of place. The second is to think through the tripartite ‘models’ of spatial hauntings that Sutherland has – with exemplary surgical precision – extracted from Fisher's work in a more grounded and empirical way so as to think about how Fisher's motifs can be operationalised.

Situating Fisher

It is part of Fisher's most iconic of text Capitalist Realism (2008) that capitalism of contemporary age appropriates counter-cultural and resistive movements before they have a chance to gestate into alternative forms of social organisation (Haiven, 2014). Furthermore, capitalism has perfected the practice of reconstituting libidinal desire itself; it has provided an arena in which all forms of human desire can be crafted into practices that sustain the status quo of capitalist extraction. As Sutherland notes with the lexicon of ‘precorporation’, ‘capitalism must precorporate desire as a way of suppressing the spectral libido of these countercultures’. But long before Fisher penned Capitalist Realism that explains this precoporation so vividly, the radical Marxist philosophers of the Situationist International (SI) were busy probing the limits of capitalist life and fermenting the counter-cultural fervour of the 1960s and 1970s that Fisher refers to. Most acutely, the SI, through the main protagonist Guy Debord, where creating radical artistic practices that sought to disrupt, dislocate, and disjoint their own (and indeed other Parisians’) experiences of urban capitalist life. Through the now rather tired tropes of psychogeography, detournment, derive, and other forms of ‘unitary urbanism’ (Plant, 1992; Pinder, 2005), their explicit aims were to see the alternative worlds in-between, beyond and within ‘the society of the spectacle’ (Debord, 1967). There has been hitherto a great deal of geographical scholarship on Debord's work particularly around the turn of the millennia (see Pinder, 2000; Swyngedouw, 2002). Within this body of work, it is the city – and the Lefebvre (1968) inspired reclamation of it – that is the focus of attention. In so doing (and to summarise this work rather crudely), it articulates not only the potential emancipation in SI activities but also the way in which modern capitalist urban life actively embraces counter-cultural motifs via the materiality of the city; thereby resulting in very real, physical, and ‘place-based’ forms of capitalist realism (such as corporate advertising, social media, and consumption-saturated forms of urban life).

Within this in mind, Sutherland's explanation of ‘Grotesque stratigraphy’ (the second spatial imaginary that he draws from Fisher's work) rang with the echoes (or perhaps, hauntings) of unitary urbanism – and the geographical framings – in my own head. Sutherland states that ‘grotesque stratigraphy … connects desire – as it moves towards the grotesque weirdness of place – with alternative futures; the “other worlds in the cracks and gaps” of place’. The overlaps of these theoretical musings are stark, and while qualitatively different, for me there is a great deal to be learned from each other. The main thrust of this learning it appears is the reinvigoration of collective politics that Sutherland notes. One of the disarming techniques of capitalism's co-option of desire is the very neoliberal trait of individualising post-capitalist desire; dividing and conquering. And we see this very much today in the legacy of the SI with psychogeography undertaken as a sole endeavour that has become more about soul-searching, well-being, and Guardian column inches than a radical act of political consciousness-raising (Rose, 2021).

The rallying cry of the rioting Parisian students in May 1968, heavily influenced as they were by the SI, was ‘sous les pavés la plage’ – beneath the pavement, the beach. So to read in Sutherland's paper that ‘a sense of nearness to other possible worlds can be intensified by emphasising the recursive conflict between capitalism and desire that has raged “beneath our feet”’, was a poignant reminder that there is still potency in the SI's work. Indeed, Debord and his band unmerry men ‘haunt’ the present with an ‘atmosphere of unsettled (and unsettling) desires’; hence to recombine the ‘cultural detritus’ of SI practice would be to reweaponise their collective desire in an age in which urban life has become stiflingly chaotic and very much in need of the kinds of emancipatory desires that both the SI and Fisher (via Sutherland) proffer.

Grounding Fisher

The other way in which I wanted to engage with Sutherland's searing prose is to think it through with a grounded political and perhaps an even ethical epistemology, that is, what are the are ways in which this tripartite articulation of a post-capitalist reading of space can ‘come alive’? The paper's conclusion speaks to the political legacy of Fisher's work, coming as it did and helping to catalyse a radical socialist big P politics that nearly became a pan-Atlantic governmental force (with the emergence of Sanders and Corbyn). But given the sordid end to that story, with the forces of capital fighting tooth and nail to discredit this movement via unsubstantiated personal smears and orchestrated media campaigns, it becomes clear that Fisher's musings on recalibrating desire in and of itself becomes even more important. For me, this ‘recalibration’ is a political and ethical undertaking and something which (if you’ll allow the momentary introspection) I have grappled with in my most recent work, Seven Ethics Against Capitalism: Towards a Planetary Commons (Mould, 2021). Fisher's work was important for me in attempting to collectivise disparate examples of anti-capitalist praxis that can break through (or perhaps break free) from capitalist realism, an attempt which like all scholarly articles, papers, books, and op-eds, is not finished just because it is published. As such, the ‘spacing’ of Fisher's work done in Sutherland's paper excitedly adds to the ethical contributions of my own work. For example, one of the ethics ‘against’ capitalism is slowness, in which I argue that that time itself has been captured by capitalist relations, constantly working to replicate its own future in the present conditions of the workers. To counter what Sutherland has called the ‘precorporation’ of capitalism is to dwell, to experiment, to explore the cracks of life, to meditate, to engage as Fisher would argue ‘psychedelically’; to simply be. For me, post-capitalist desire (and hence slowness as part of that desire) is summed up by Fisher when he wrote (and quoted in Sutherland's paper), it is ‘[a] new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving’. In analysing the ethic of slowness, I focused on ‘slow movements’ such as slow fashion, slow cinema and the like. However, reading Sutherland's exposition of the spatialites of Fisher's understanding of ‘slowness’ (which I see most readily of course in his unfinished Acid Communism text with the ‘aestheticization of everyday life’) adds another layer of potentiality to the ethic. Sutherland asks the very poignant and important question:

Would not piquing a libidinal taste for cultural experimentation, and making it clear that more – not less – of it exists beyond capitalism, be a way of redirecting desire towards a more sustainable green politics, where material sustainability equals aesthetic and social abundance?

I would answer emphatically in the affirmative. As Sutherland notes in explaining ‘acid topologies’, there is a great deal of work to do in connecting the disparate and often unconnected parts of post-capitalist praxis that exist in the world, into a coherent network of alternative movements. But in my own work on analysing anti-capitalist movements and thought on mutual aid (see Mould et al., 2022), then influencing big P politics is not, and perhaps, never will be enough. Acid topologies then aligns excitingly with anarchist geographies of horizontalism and international (or at least cross-border) solidarities (Springer, 2016), autonomous geographies of post-capitalism (Pickerill and Chatterton, 2006) resistance and activist scholarship (Hughes, 2020), commoning (Tsavdaroglou and Kaika, 2022) and other critical and post-capitalist forms of geographical inquiry.

The post-capitalist geographies that came to the fore during the pandemic in terms of mutual aid praxis (Firth, 2022) and hitherto unheard-of levels of socialist governmental policies (such as bailouts and housing the homeless. Mould (2021) have brought a post-capitalist world tantalisingly into focus. And it is with that glint of optimism that I read Sutherland's paper. Mark Fisher's untimely departure from our world is unfathomably sad; his work was of monumental importance and it was clearly unfinished; he had a lot more to give to the world. But in the spirit of the collective praxis he so often extolled, it is up to the rest of us – including this brilliantly evocative, expertly researched and vividly written paper by Sutherland – to pick up Fisher's mantle, work with his haunting, and build the post-capitalist world that he so incandescently imagined.