Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 107

ordinary consciousness (2019, 496) - or ‘common sense’. Or the real. Subjecthood, 60 which realizes
potential of the commons, Communism and Acid are rooted in consciousness as well as breaking out of
liberal logic, out of capitalism, challenging the organization and purpose of labour. They posit false
consciousness and higher consciousness. Health here is in the sense of non-repression, but that which is
not-repressed itself requires education; this includes sexual desire and other libidinal economies. There
are ideological presuppositions, against which one is ‘cured’ (supplemented, like Zizek’s recurring
ideological ‘glasses’ motif or the Derridean supplement) in what within Marcuse’s earlier work Eros and
Civilization (1955, 1966) he termed ‘“curing” the patient to become a rebel” (258): this notion of the
‘cure’ (a cure for ideological ‘wellness’ 61 . Hence serving the desire of subject who is multiple, who,
nevertheless, must be led towards their desire. Or as Fisher turns to Marx’s phrase: ‘man produces
man. […] For me, what must be produced is not man identical to himself, exactly as nature would have
designed him or according to his essence; on the contrary, we must produce something that doesn’t yet
exist’ (2019, 499); in this it is rooted within hauntology, in part founded within Marcuse’s ‘ 62 “The spectre
of a world which could be free”. This constitutes the dream within buildings of taking the future into
one’s hands 63 , identifying and meeting new needs, revealed by Fisher’s hauntological discussion of 64
‘luminous ’ strange terrains within The Weird and Eerie’s cultural work, the late 60/70s liminal where
‘drudgery’s dreary repetitiveness gave way to drifting explorations of strange terrains alike’ by class
subjects and radical politics worlds beyond work 65 . Eliding this sci-fi real with Acid then, both become
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dependent all the time upon interaction with the rest of the ecosystems we inhabit for their ability to function at
all; that even our dreams are not merely our own’ (Gilbert 2017, 12)
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Marcuse in this vein asserts that the project of emancipation one has to ’find their way from false to true
consciousness, from their immediate to their real interest’(1964, xlv-xlvi),
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“The spectre of a world which could be free” (Fisher 2019, 434)
“[T]he closer the real possibility of liberating the individual from the constraints once justified by scarcity and
immaturity, the greater the need for maintaining and streamlining these constraints lest the established order of
domination dissolve. Civilisation has to protect itself against the spectre of a world which could be free.[…] In
exchange for the commodities that enrich their lives […] individuals sell not only their labour but also their free
time. […] People dwell in apartment concentrations — and have private automobiles with which they can no
longer escape into a different world. They have huge refrigerators stuffed with frozen foods. They have dozens of
newspapers and magazines which espouse the same ideals. They have innumerable choices, innumerable gadgets
which are all of the same sort and keep them occupied and divert their attention from the real issue — which is
the awareness that they could both work less and determine their own needs and satisfactions.” Herbert Marcuse
Eros and Civilisation (1955, 66, cited Fisher 2019, 435)
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What he describes as ‘The remains for the lost futures buried within [buildings and us]. Similarly, we are in a
political landscape littered with “ideological rubble” ( 412)
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In this regard “luminous new landscapes” were worlds beyond work, where drudgery’s dreary repetitiveness
gave way to drifting explorations of strange terrains.
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It is mystical and materialist - a materialist mysticism which acknowledges the complex potentialities of human
embodied existence’ like with Mythico-Marxism: Psychogeography may thus be one type of acid practice.
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