Acid Rider. Mark Fisher’s Idea of “Acid Communism” and Experience of Outerness

Abstract

Acid Communism remains an intriguing but regrettably unfinished introductory sketch to the Mark Fisher’s unwritten historical reconstruction of those radical political projects which grew up out of the psychedelic culture. This compelling idea is a consequence of Fisher’s prior theoretical endeavours. The article attempts to embed his idea of “acid communism” in a broader context, focusing on Fisher’s reflection on psychedelic experience, defined as a form of contact with the Outside. I argue that there is a striking convergence between the conception of “acid communism” and matters discussed by Fisher in his last book, The Weird and the Eerie, where he analyzed potentially transformative shock of an encounter with radical Otherness. For that reason I will address briefly two musical and cultural phenomena which came into being after the psychedelic era and use them as exemplifications of the “weird” and “eerie” modes of experience, unfulfilled promises of post-capitalist future, which did not find political representation and sank to the level of unrealized and “haunted” future of modernism. In the concluding part of my article I would show how the idea of “acid communism” is tied to the question regarding the so called post-capitalist desire and to the Fisher’s idiosyncratic version of futurist-accelerationism.