Some notes on the Multi-Dimensional Psychedelic Aesthetic of Mark Fisher's unfinished introduction to _Acid Communism_ (201908071623 )

Mark Fisher's unfinished introduction to _Acid Communism_ seems to argue in favor of an aesthetic that reverses capitalist realism's "consciousness-deflation" through producing psychedelic experience capable of offering "a perception of the systems of power, exploitation and ritual that [is] more, not less, lucid than ordinary consciousness" (_K-Punk_ 770, 764). This aesthetic revives what Fisher identifies as Marcuse's "spectre of a world which could be free," which Fisher dubs "Acid Communism":

The concept of acid communism is a provocation and a promise. It is a joke of sorts, but one with a very serious purpose. It points to something that, at one point, seemed inevitable, but which now appears impossible: the convergence of class consciousness, socialist-feminist consciousness-raising and psychedelic consciousness, the fusion of new social movements with a communist project, an unprecedented aestheticisation of everyday life. (_K-Punk_ 757-8)

I would underline that this definition leaves space for including every struggle for social justice, including racial, environmental, and so on. His definition, in other words, rather than being final, is expansive, easily encompassing any struggle or movement whose end goals do not contradict its own, meaning that the only social movements which would be anathema to it would be counter-revolutionary, regressive movements, such as those of white supremacy.

With this introduction, Fisher challenges the received wisdom that the 1960's were the pinnacle of a lost promise that necessarily fell before the might of neoliberalism's onslaught, instead arguing that neoliberalism's violent ascent in the 1970's--he identifies the Pinochet counter-revolution against Allende as capitalist realism's "founding event," if it were to have one (754)--revealed the threat capitalism faced and detected in new visions of "Red Plenty" woven by the 1960's collective dreaming. Meaning that rather than writing off the 1960's as a lost opportunity, the social and aesthetic movements that emerged in that decade and flourished in various ways into the 1970's should be revisited, learned from, and revived and reinvented as methods of engaging and perhaps even defeating the villain that their coalescence summoned forth. The lengths to which neoliberal cultural production went to incorporate the aesthetics and cultural products of those decades should be seen not as a fatal judgment against them but as evidence of the threat they posed, and continue to pose.

Fisher explores the features of this aesthetic through engaging with a few texts that he seems to offer as touchstones, texts saturated with the content and aesthetic features of the psychedelic. These include the songs "Tomorrow Never Knows," "I'm Only Sleeping," and "A Day in the Life" by The Beatles, "Psychedelic Shack" by The Temptations, and the BBC's 1966 Jonathan Miller television adaptation of _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_. The latter's unique adaptive strategy was its "rendering of the characters not as animals, but as human beings," which caused "the ordinary world [to appear] as a tissue of Nonsense, incomprehensibly inconsistent, arbitrary and authoritarian, dominated by bizarre rituals, repetitions, and automatisms. It is itself a bad dream" (_K-Punk_ 765). Reading through Fisher's analyses of these texts, what begins to emerge is a sense of the psychedelic's potential through its capacity for rendering worlds which negatively critique the mundane world in which we live and--sometimes even through--positively articulating rich alternatives. These alternatives need not be fully-fleshed utopias, but rather can be heterotopic alternative space-times locatable in pockets of the mundane present, such as The Temptation's psychedelic shack in the song of that name, or the state of leisurely reflection and metaphysical drift of The Beatle's "Tomorrow Never Knows." Something that these psychedelic space-times seem to have in common are a multi-dimensionality absent from the capitalist world, where life is reduced to the simple variables associated with the commodity, namely value (abstract labor time), work, consumption, and reproduction.

Although he never uses the term, the concept of multi-dimensionality seems extremely relevant to Fisher's project. I am here working with the delineation of the concept derived from Eugenia Cheng's _Beyond Infinity_, wherein dimensions are defined by the number of variables taken into account (_Beyond Infinity_ 168). The more variables, the higher the dimensional space created. For example, borrowing one of her examples from chapter 12 "Infinite Dimensions", different modes of transportation illustrate different levels of dimensional movement: trains can only move forwards or backwards and so move one-dimensionally, while cars can also turn left or right and so move two-dimensionally, while planes can also dive or climb and so move three-dimensionally. A character in a novel is one-dimensional when they have only one defining quality or motive, and the plot is one-dimensional when it has only one end-state and only one path from beginning to end. The more defining qualities and motives a character has, the more potential end-states and paths from beginning to end a plot has, the higher their dimensional count (especially if those dimensions exist in tension, meaning that the further development of one requires the negation of another, e.g. when a character has competing motives and must choose the fulfillment of one aim at the expense of another). As Cheng explores in chapter 13 "Infinite-Dimensional Categories," further dimensions are created by examining the relations between dimensions. So, for example, in a novel with a character with several motivations and aims, further dimensions are created through examining the relations and conflicts between those motivations and aims (e.g. exploring the historical and biographical reasons for the existence of those motivations and aims, evaluating the relative sacrifices and gains each entails, and so on), and yet further dimensions are created through interrogating the relations and conflicts between those relations and conflicts (e.g. exploring the broader social context that creates those motivations and aims, the social structures and ideologies that condition the motivations and aims and imbue them with significance, features, meaning, and consequence, and so on). There is no limit to the number of dimensions that can be thus created. From reading Cheng, it seems to me that creating and exploring these higher-dimensional spaces are not only interesting but pleasurable because they overcome the cognitive alienation and reduction wrought on the human mind by capitalism's specialization of labor and reduction of life to production of value (as examined throughout the Marxist tradition, but here I have in mind Moishe Postone's analysis of the commodity form in _Time, Labor, and Social Domination_). In short, creating and inhabiting multi-dimensional spaces is itself a radical act in that it seeks the negation of capitalism's hegemonic thought modes, which require reduction. Of course, this tendency of multi-dimensionality can come into tension with works that seek to put multi-dimensions to work to "explain" or "justify" or "validate" extant ideologies. But multi-dimensionality can never be fully identified with regressive cultural production for the simple fact that every act of ideological production ultimately demands that there be some curtains behind which one must not peer, that there be some facts which are simply true and valid and should not be questioned, such as white supremacist myths about the inherent superiority of whiteness, which remain fantasies, no matter how much they dress themselves in the rainments of science.

Cheng's multi-dimensionality resonates profoundly with Fisher's psychedelic aesthetic, for a quality immediately recognizable in each of the texts he addresses is the way in which each simultaneously explores higher-dimensional spaces bounded by variables, categories anathema to capitalism, such as--as Fisher reads in "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "I'm Only Sleeping"--space-time unbounded by neoliberalism's temporalities of urgent, incessant production and consumption, free time that is truly free and not merely for "spending" on neoliberalism's ever-proliferating "enjoyments" for the "individual" endlessly hungry for "the new" (which is of course never *that* new, but only the approved, the authorized re-skinned as something novel, but whose clothes are really those of the nude emperor). It seems that multi-dimensionality is crucial means by which the psychedelic engages with its "question of consciousness, and its relationship to what is experienced as reality" (_K-Punk_ 763). The psychedelic becomes psychedelic through creating higher-dimensional space-times which reveal the jaundiced paucity of neoliberal reality and its forms of consciousness while reveling in the possible realities and consciousnesses repressed by neoliberalism but very much alive and ready to overrun and replace what has kept them contained, if only they have the chance. All the better if the images, icons, signifiers, and representations blooming into the psychedelic themselves perform this operation, as in the best of science fiction, fantasy, or other speculative fictions. Psychedelic imaginings composed of psychedelic renderings. A fractal-psychedelic, infinite all the way down and all the way up. An infinite that reveals the sickly limits of neoliberalism's "endless growth." The psychedelic is simultaneously descriptive, critical, and speculative, each operation feeding into and supporting the others. Even when what is represented is something as seemingly mundane as the dance party of "Psychedelic Shack" or the scenes of daily public life in "A Day in the Life." Even when the psychedelic works with apparently mundane figures and representations, its dominant modes are negation and speculation.

Thus, as the infinitely-dimensional psychedelic seems to call for, and indeed can thrive with, science fictional material--as in the works of Philip K. Dick, Nalo Hopkinson, and numerous others--Fisher's psychedelic aesthetic demands no specific content. No material is anathema to it. As with the political project of Acid Communism, this psychedelic aesthetic welcomes all what would join its project of rendering, breathing life into, reveling in, and realizing the infinite-dimensions beyond neoliberalism's flattened world of hollowed-out shadows shuffling between home, work, and sites of exchange. The psychedelic knows no genre boundaries, nor does it respect distinctions between high- and low-culture, between "Art" and the popular. However, it simultaneously becomes what Theodor Adorno named in _Aesthetic Theory_ the Authentic Artwork--perhaps somewhat ironically, given Adorno's use of the term to dismiss certain modes in which the psychedelic thrives, such as science fiction--a work so anathema to ideological (re)production that it denounces what is and champions what-could-be-but-is-not-yet by merely existing. The psychedelic provides one means of realizing the Authentic Artwork while simultaneously overcoming the latter's limitations.

By way of forcing myself to come to an end, rather than allowing myself to spiral on for hours more, I will conclude by briefly considering some formal strategies which might produce the psychedelic in literature, for this question is one that Fisher's unfinished introduction leaves largely untouched, his analyses focusing primarily, although not exclusively, on content. From exploring his concept of a psychedelic aesthetic, I propose that the following formal strategies might be highly useful in psychedelic literary production:

1. Rather than short, straight-forward sentences, obeying conventional syntax rendering description, narration, character, and plot in what might be termed the "journalistic style" that seems to dominate the marketplace, let us instead make sentences weaving long flowing complex constructions which perhaps do not obey conventional syntax but explore the possibilities of syntax itself, taking nothing for granted about semiotic production but venturing into ways of making meaning seemingly foreclosed by and contained beyond the walls convention has constructed to imprison language, sentences which perhaps loop back on themselves somehow, which describe and narrate and develop character with clauses not segregated by neat punctuation but clauses which rub against one another as in a drug-fueled dance party sweating nuance and ambiguity and possibility all over each other as they explore their connections not only to character and plot but to each other and to themselves, sentences too often derided by grammarians or editors or whoever because they are not "correct" or because they seem to have too many subjects or predicates, as if there were some natural reason that a sentence have only one subject, as if the atomization of the subject within the sentence was in no way related to the atomization of the subject in waking life, as if the correct question were not "How many subjects can a sentence hold?" to which the answer might very well be, we might discover, should we dare to venture in this direction far enough, infinite? Literary history abounds with instances of such semiotic "monsters," with William Gaddis' _JR_ and Samuel R. Delany's _Babel-17_ coming immediately to mind.

2. Rather than descriptions which seek to fix a thing in the world, let us make descriptions which unfurl the vibrant multi-dimensionality of things as they co-mingle with other things, none of which can be fully fixed as anything but through authoritarian convention, which is not to say that such a description would renounce knowledge-of as such but instead reveal, explore, and problematize "knowing" through rendering the dialectic of subject and object that remains the inescapable cognitive condition of commodified life, the foundational fissure endlessly wounding modern existence.

3. Rather than narrations that settle for relating how something "is" or "was," let us make narrations which veer into exploring how things could-have-been, should-be, might-be, narrations which relate not only characters and events but also the relations between the characters and events and themselves, constructing ever higher-dimensional spaces which can approach, without ever becoming, some Archimedean point for apprehending the literary work and the realities with which it is forever entangled and which it (re)produces.

4. Rather than narrative structures that begin at the beginning and end at the ending, allowing only occasional flashbacks or internal monologues or musings, let us make structures that loop, dive, soar, and weave through time, coming now and then to alight once more on already-visited moments, (re)narrating the past as constitutive of the unfurling present, dreaming and narrating futures which might or might not come to pass, perhaps even beginning and ending in the same place, creating loops that through looping prevent foreclosure and refuse to ever settle.

These strategies are not without their flaws, I am sure, and I by no means offer them in a programatic or dogmatic mindset, but rather as points of departure for considering how writers, including myself, might produce the psychedelic, for as Fisher convincingly demonstrates, the tighter neoliberalism's grip, the more potent the psychedelic, for our being, for our becoming. Sadly, we will never have Fisher's completed _Acid Communism_ to help guide us further, but the words of his that we do have are a powerful concoction that we need only to imbibe and remember that we aren't dead, not yet.

c.f.: _Babel-17_ by Samuel R. Delany; _Midnight Robber_ and _Sister Mine_ by Nalo Hopkinson; _Beyond Infinity_ by Eugenia Cheng; _K-Punk_ by Mark Fisher; _JR_ by William Gaddis; _Time, Labor, and Social Domination_ by Moishe Postone; 201908081413 (insurrectionary aesthetics), 201907031530 (realism and modernism grounded in commodity form), 201810150834 (insurrectionary aesthetics), 201810010720 (punctuation as ideology)