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When Fisher died, he was working on a new book describing ‘Acid Communism’. Looked at in a particular light, we can see in the three books he published during his lifetime fragments of a negative image of this theory, and when we see these fragments, it is difficult not to become haunted by it in precisely the way described in his second book, Ghosts of My Life.
Capitalist Realism rather straightforwardly describes the state that ‘Acid Communism’ is supposed to alleviate: it tells us why there is no future, and why having no future is a bad thing. Of his books, it is the most direct in its thesis — the most obviously political, because it engages with recognizable elements of exactly the gamified politics it diagnoses and rejects, and operates with exactly the cognitive and rhetorical tools it deems insufficient. Nevertheless, it shows us the entire silhouette of this new thing, ‘Acid Communism’, albeit in low resolution. It also tells us how to get there, although it is speaking to the part of us that could not understand such instructions even when directly told.
Ghosts of My Life and The Weird and the Eerie appear, at first glance, to be literary criticism with occasional political asides. Taken backwards — that is, taken from the perspective of someone already haunted by the fragmentary edges of ‘Acid Communism’ — they are technical manuals, and collections of case studies.
‘Acid Communism’ is a future cut off before it could develop any conventional aesthetic forms, and is…
