Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 118

becomes an encounter with the untenable real of the psyche and ghosts like those of Marx’s writings as
well as his ‘black period’ 119 ; consequently, he sees faces which Zizek discusses in The Parallax View,
marking haunting past but also the ‘hobgoblin’, in Marx’s terms, of class which continues to haunt the
sphere of Eros and the social body in order to emerge into a kind of recovered health. The experience is
an encounter with the haunted, the unacknowledged terrible: it reiterates the political which is not just
happiness fulfilling primitive libidinal needs but political transformation. That is, an encounter with the
abyss of subjectivity, with choice itself as well as the fluid dispersion and oneness and exploitation, with
political lack. Finally, there is the question of health in the sense of the whole journey, a passage
through acid, and then health with regards to the imbalance or excess of dispersion as well as of excess
consumption, allegorically dangerous without a grounding in structure, as with 'art' itself in Bobby's
words.
Pastiche and collage threatens to become the same, ahistorical. It potentially marks a late New
Labour legacy of desaturated commodified ‘One Dimensional’ politics, after the second-wave of
inwardly contradictory or tense poststructural politics of mobility and tenuous class identification
structured along subcultural lines, figured as a living wrestling over praxis. Yet technologies here can
also, in light of the encounter with buildings and thus the dark side of acid illuminate social
embeddedness itself- acid here refers, as before, to 'acid sight' rather than just the 'drug' as well as
saving from the power of the 'real' dreamwork, by providing a crack, a deconstruction after Marcuse
and Benjamin through Fisher
The Future(slight return)
In TSLS’ ending acid-excess and withdrawal mark a sublation of non-acid to occupy a higher-level of acid;
Bobby’s charitable distribution to Johnny becomes an exception, teetering upon the ethics of ‘prize’ yet
also communism of resource distribution, an equal share in psychic resources and imaginaries rooted in
the tradition of autonomism Skeggs (2011) discusses as well as Fisher. Thus, ‘Georgie wishes she could
get Bobby to a doctor/psychiatrist/ hippy spiritual healer’ (2010, 246), whilst he looks towards the
‘natural’ (2010, 249), emulating ‘the Dharma Bums’. Neither though, corresponds to full healing, that of
structural transformation, which the text suggests at in the reformation of the body-politic through
Johnny as well as rejection of the London art world in favour of autonomism. Consequently, in terms of
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‘This is Bobby’s black period’ (2010, 243)
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