Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 111

as a species of faith 81 . Alongside this, of course, larger scale technological autonomization 82 and an
engagement with discourses of post-work following Marcuse. Gilbert himself leans into the
decentralizing tradition, on the grounds of a historical ‘de-autonomization ’ inherent to the welfare
state, whilst Fisher’s work [reads as] more agnostic on the issue.
In terms of understanding this Acid at a literary level we may briefly examine the broader
trajectories of action, and specific incidents within specific locations in relation to their aesthetic
focalization; collective space; consciousness and health; and, briefly, the future. Marcuse in the 1960s
argued for a history of the literary 83 and art whose virtual possibilities were to be liberated in their anti-
utilitarian alternative-assemblage of desire, through and beyond their ostensible historical context -
prefiguring the procedure of empirical abstraction Zizek proposes in his Sublime Object 84 , after readings
of Hegel, that moves towards the ‘real’: Marcuse’s virtualised past and future novel form - against
obliteration of the oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in the higher culture’ (1964, 57) –
serves as a repository of alternative lifeforms 85 liberated from wage-time in production and reception.
81
The question of desire reverts back to the framing of hauntology which Fisher’s work engaged in, with the
question recalling hauntological residue alongside Robert Eaglestone’s notion of ‘possession’ (2013) alongside
Fisher’s discussion for relation ‘to’ the object in weird and eerie as well as unhomely terms.
82
Fisher refers to cybernetics and informatics( 2019, 501) that are free to do, and free ‘from’ the old labour
modes, whilst also engaging with that which has [ shifted beyond all recognition since then is the existential and
emotional atmosphere’ (2019, 502) and where technology has been perverted from its potential usages in
terms of re-enforcing state of satiation and incapacitation. This draws upon Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ 2013
work Inventing the Future on post-capitalist automation as well as harkening towards Aaron Bastani’s similar work
Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019) in this field and that of Paul Mason (Postcapitalism 2015, Clear Bright
Future 2019), whilst referring back to Marx’s own Grundrisse (1861).
83
A ‘protected realm in which the tabooed truths could survive in abstract integrity’ to be unleashed (Marcuse
1964, 64) as virtualities. Within the technology of the novel were immanent radical potentials; the very broadening
out not only of literacy and consciousness but of production promises literature, in Marcuse’s conceptualization
and Fisher’s revival (or ‘fidelity’ to borrow the French Platonist-Marxist philosopher Alain Badiou’s phrase), which
build upon those ‘glimmers to counter-readings , drawing upon Walter Benjamin ‘against the grain’ (from his
Illuminations (2011)) and Marx’s own valorisation of the bourgeois novel (Balzac) of exposing the mercantile
social ‘cobweb’ (to use Zizek’s frequent phrase in this regard, relating to class
84
‘When we observe a thing, we see too much in it, we fall under the spell of the wealth of empirical detail which
prevents us from clearly perceiving the notional determination which forms the core of the thing. The problem is
thus not that of how to grasp the multiplicity of determinations, but rather to abstract from them, how to
constrain our gaze and teach it to grasp only the notional determinism (Zizek 2019, xi)
85
Characters constituting ‘alternative ways of life’ (the ‘outcast’ from the poet to the thief in the ‘lumpenprole’
and bohemia which characterised the milieu of communism from the first, as accounts of Marx’s encounters with
socialism bear out) these are viewed as now qualities of the ‘same’, affirming the existing ‘order through
subsumption of revolutionary energies and thus anticipating the image-economy of postmodernism ‘same’, its
incorporation of difference as explicated within Fredric Jameson’s seminal Postmodernism (1991) (just as
periodically the advent of ‘postmodernism;’ can be traced to those 60s in which Marcuse wrote, including those
features of economy, sub epochal outsourced and capital-flow work which gradually undercut the postwar
settlement
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