Interview with Mark Fisher

CM: Hello Mark, the current debate surrounding Accelerationist Aesthetics seem to oscillate between two ostensibly separate formulations – in your opinion, does an Accelerationist aesthetic lies more in a process of ‘cognitive mapping’ – combatting our phenomenological discontinuity within globalised capitalism – or with an affective cartography of the latter, an experience of what it feels like to be a late-capitalist subject?

MF: I think this question points to a difficult problem with the very concept of accelerationist aesthetics. If accelerationism is about the inadequacy of experience as a category, then how is it possible to render accelerationism aesthetically? Cognitive mapping would seem to be compatible with a leftist accelerationism, but the issue here for me is: what is the aesthetic dimension of this process? It can’t be merely an illustration of a set of propositions that can be apprehended cognitively; the aesthetic has to be doing something in its own right.

For me, a leftist accelerationism could be partly about showing how the “experience” of late capitalism is very different from how it is ideologically rendered. That rendering is not something superimposed over experience, after the fact; it is more that experience (and the subject of experience) is first of all ideological. The problem then is how do we deal with what Ray Brassier has called “the myth of experience”. I think this is an experimental problem, and I guess from my point of view the most important task for a left accelerationist aesthetics is to produce and/ or simulate an “experience” that is beyond capitalism. What would a post-capitalist world feel like, and what kind of being would function in it?

Jon Lindblom, a PhD student in Visual Cultures, has done some interesting work on this area. One important emphasis in Jon’s work is on what he calls the drug-tech interface. Thinking about drugs in relation to technology, about drugs as a technology, gives the whole discussion on accelerationist aesthetics an important twist. In common with recent tendencies in my own work, Jon has been thinking about the psychedelic again, and the way the psychedelic opens up different forms of experience, time, etc. I would say that capitalist realism has suppressed the psychedelic – because the idea of a fixed and immutable reality is a kind of super-reification that is incompatible with psychedelics. Psychedelic ‘experience’ is productively paradoxical, in that it de-reifies both ‘experience’ and ‘reality’, both of which come to seem what they are – provisional and plastic.

CM: Many argue that an Accelerationist Aesthetic must utilise the vernacular of late-capitalist imagery in its work – stock, commercial and brand images; digital-rendering and -editing software; sci-fi and cyberpunk visuals, such as from video games and movies; references to contemporary social media trends etc. – presumably anchored in the belief of re-engineering capitalist technologies and tendencies against themselves. Do you agree at all with this sentiment?

MF: Not really. I think this misses the point of the accelerationist critique of capitalism – that capitalism essentially inhibits acceleration, continually reterritorializing on the familiar and the familial. All of the examples you gave have an exhausted quality; they are “futuristic” only in some long-established generic sense – they don’t relate to any plausible future. The whole emphasis on IT and communicative capitalism is a symptom of capitalist exhaustion. That was the future in the 1980s – it isn’t the future any longer, just as Kraftwerk is no longer the future of music. Social media and smartphones have already happened; extrapolating them into or as the future is surely a mistake. This is the point of all my work on hauntology – capitalism increasingly can’t deliver the future, because it arrests the potentials of technological modernity.

CM: Do you think we have seen a clear manifestation of Accelerationist ideas in some contemporary music production? I am thinking here of artists such as Holly Herndon, PC Music, Kode9, Ryoji Ikeda or even someone like FKA Twigs?
MF: To some extent, though I think there has been a slowing of the accelerationist tendencies in music culture. Up till the end of the 1990s, there was a proliferation of new sonic modes, which opened up whole new phase spaces, new terrains which were experienced by the listener in terms of an enjoyable future shock. Kodwo Eshun describes this brilliantly in his talk “Abducted By Audio” http://www.ccru.net/swarm3/3_abducted.htm It’s hard to think of much 21st century music which delivers this future shock in the same way.

CM: Is it possible that the recent ‘return to the body’ in contemporary art production – specifically through a technological lens – could be understood as an Accelerationist critique – in that it attempts to expose the material and affective infrastructures of a fully libidinised capitalism? One which is ubiquitously offered platitudes of dematerialisation?

MF: Yes, it could – but I think the emphasis on “the body” has a tendency to re-incribe a dualism in the attempt to too quickly overcome it. I suppose I would say that the focus on conditions which produce what is ‘experienced’ as embodiment. There isn’t any “natural” form of embodiment: all “experiences” of embodiment are produced by machineries of one kind or another. Which means that “the body” doesn’t exist. There is a material set of receptors and relays, plugged into and potentiated by various virtual and actual machines, but this isn’t the same as “the body”, which can only ever be a reification. So in many ways, I think the same goes for “the body” as for “experience”. The emphasis should be on material and conceptual dismantling of the way in which they are both naturalised/ reified.