Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 109

locates glimmers within specific epochs, in this case the seventies, with structures of finance, certain
guarantee like the ‘big other’, allied to boredom of not- over-saturation, as well as media forms, which
allowed through this ‘boredom’ to think beyond it, traversing the uncanny into the overtly political
towards a promise which has been betrayed but lingers hauntologically to be resurrected in the move
from criticism to developed praxis - hauntology’ to acid communism 70 . Similarly, his erstwhile Plan C
collaborator Owen Hatherley in his Militant Modernism (2010) looks towards promise of architecture
from the twenties as functional and dazzling, filled with promises which now are Benjaminian, optimistic
around faculty to design and to live, manifest in the libidinal and subliminal but also in living 71 .
After Fisher and Gilbert Acid practices are what Michel Foucault terms ‘technologies of self’, a
potentiality (2019, 497). Thus criticism traverses the history not just of communism, but those pathways
towards neoliberalism 72 by ‘sixties’ acid 73 moving towards flexi-labour 74 which contain seeds of fulfilling
desire but obfuscated material pressures, as well as the ‘aestheticizing’ tendencies of subculture like
Jamesonian postmodernism 75 . Acid’s unity can be a gateway, then, to reorientating the self outside of
big-other guilt and repression 76 but one attentive to not valorising lines of flight for themselves or
postmodern bodies bereft of spatial coordinates, feeling the danger as well as potential promise of
70
Fisher ‘found imaginaries in music and art resembling ‘the energy of a bazaar. For all [their] carnivalesque
departures from everyday reality, however, this is no remote utopia. It feels like an actual social space’ (2019, 496).
71
Within the erection of buildings and their usages – in what seemed in stereotypically uniformly drab style
associated with minimizing subjectivity in favour of arbitrary plans, minimizing creativity in favour of prescriptions -
- can be found evidence of thinking towards the future, alternative domestic arrangements, the power of
architectural aesthetics to mobilize optimism about planning, the power of reproduction, architectural
construction and habitation responding to, in anthropological terms (after Marx) creature needs rather than
weighed down by false practical realism, and thereby also precipitate a new subjectivity ; in Gilbert’s terms: “a
new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving” (2017, 6).
72
One way of expressing this procedure would be that the self, rather than liberating itself from the Lacanian ‘big
other’ or ‘father;’, the noumenal in order to desire, fell into the superego as well as flight from class and then
reterritorialization in liberal plasticity rather than acceleration to the end to abolish capital through exhausting it
(as provocative post- 68 readings of Deleuze and Guattari suggested) or orientation towards affective practices, e.g
Benjamin Noys’ 2013 Malign Velocities upon Accelerationism .
73
As well as the ‘liberal’ philosophy of Thatcher: '‘Economics are the method: the object is to
change the heart and soul’ Thatcher notoriously declared
74
There is a Zizekian and earlier Fisherian suspicion, referenced by Gilbert, around 'acid’s emancipatory
potential”(2017, 3) or the sixties-hippie acridity compared to revolution. What is found in sixties tradition
archaeologically unearthing and reading within fabric of existing imaginary, was homology between it and
communism which Gilbert's reading makes even more explicit.
75
For Gilbert: ‘The amount of bullshit associated with every spiritual and meditative tradition, not to mention
psychedelic culture, is more than enough to put off any self-respecting, intellectually-alert radical intellectual. But
the same could be said of Marxism, frankly, if you were only to respond to the
worst that has been written, said and done within that tradition’ (Gilbert 2017, 22)
76
One upon which a politics can be built a mindset which Acid Communism seeks to rekindle
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