It is wrong, Fisher argues, to understand the phenomenon as a game played only by the left. Take, for instance, his analysis of so-called “identity politics”. Fisher charts a line of decent from the 1970s – through counterculture, trade unions, and the birth of neoliberalism – to the contemporary, where Fisher’s insights really shine through. Billed as “somewhat theoretical, somewhat journalistic, also some cultural and political history as well”, each week introduces a different perspective relating to the overall theme of postcapitalist desire. As lecturers go, one gets the sense that Fisher was probably a good one.
Reading each discussion, it is easy to see why. In January 2017, Fisher’s death brought his series to an abrupt halt – at least, in its intended format the second appendix to the text notes how the class size “doubled, perhaps trebled, in size”. Of the 15 scheduled lectures, only the first five are transcribed in this collection. Rather, it is to be achieved by moving through capitalism, adopting practical and political transformations to prioritise “working less and determining your own needs”. This “escape”, Fisher is keen to stress, must not, cannot, be figured as a return – to a romanticised fantasy of a society before capitalism. It examines the consequences of late capitalism, boring deeper into the antagonisms that seem to plague the contemporary human condition, or “the nefarious and entangled relationship between desire and capitalism, and the extent to which the former can both help and restrict us in our attempts to escape from the latter”. Postcapitalist Desire is then, an extension, or mirror-image of that previous work. These lectures provide the substance of a module of the same name, taught within the university’s then-newly formed MA in Contemporary Art Theory. In his capacity as a lecturer, Fisher coaxes his students through the questions explored and raised by the concept of postcapitalist desire, described as the “shadow” to the ideas explored in-depth in Fisher’s earlier, unexpectedly successful work, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009).Ĭapitalist Realism drew attention to a burgeoning paradigm, in which (as per the brief summary Fisher here offers his students) “the idea that there’s no alternative to capitalism becomes the ambient political assumption”.
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