To pen a piece that one describes as a “manifesto” can-and usually should-be viewed as an act of pure pretense. This is especially true when said manifesto represents no organized group or body; only the thoughts of one person. I hope, however, that you’ll bear with me, and perhaps even agree that framing this piece in the way I have will be of some utility.
None of us are defined by one trait. We all occupy different roles as we, and as others, perceive them. One of the roles which I sometimes occupy is that of fiction writer.
I’ve struggled for several years to determine what I want to “do” with my writing. That’s not to say that I’ve experienced “writer’s block” or a shortage of ideas; rather, what I experienced was a lack of artistic direction. I might imagine a premise or interesting idea, but have little insight as to what I want to do with that idea. I found that this tended to result in stilted, leading, and uninteresting writing.
My aim in penning this “manifesto” is, first and foremost, to help me organize my own intentions regarding fiction. This is an exercise in sorting my thoughts and committing them to paper so that I might understand them better. However, I’ve decided to post it in hopes that someone else might find some value in it, too. This work will come in sections as I complete them.
Part 1: Why Can’t We Imagine the Future?
Dystopian literature is nothing new in the field of speculative fiction. There is a long history of artists imagining failed societies in order to explore different ideas; to forecast what negative ramifications might develop from certain practices or circumstances. In the first two decades of the Twenty-First Century, though, the dystopian trope came came to occupy a prominent position within genre fiction.
We’ve had dystopias that cater to every predilection across different mediums. Tech-accelerationist fantasies like Black Mirror and The Matrix; warnings of creeping theocracy like Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale; spunky teenagers standing against repressive state apparatuses à la the Hunger Games and Divergent trilogies or the Red Rising series. We even have a variety of choices in post-apocalptic hellscapes brought on by human action, from Mad Max: Fury Road to I am Legend or the Resident Evil games. Each of these stories present visions of a worse world imagined with varying degrees of sophistication and plausability.
I would not be the first to suggest that the growing fascination with failed societies has a great deal to do with our own existential pessimism. The hegemony of global capitalism, existing under the looming shadow of a climate catastrophe which it precipitates, makes it difficult to imagine that a better-or even survivable-world could be possible.
In his 2009 book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Mark Fisher posits that the force he dubbed “capitalist realism” has stripped us of our ability to imagine a future. “Capitalist realism, as I understand it, cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions,” Fisher explains. “It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.” The quotation “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism,” which has been attributed alternately to both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, encompasses the essence of what Fisher discussed.
Francis Fukuyama famously pronounced in 1994 that we had reached the end of history. If that’s the case, the implication is that all we have to look forward to is what we have now. The future will, in effect, be more of the same, but progressively worse.
Is there any way to escape this trap? Of course; however, reclaiming the future it will require a coordinated, mass political struggle which occurs across multiple converging social fronts. It will take time and effort exerted in both digital and physical space to build the fights for fair housing, labor democracy, food security, environmental protection, anti-imperialism, and social justice into one mass movement.
None of us can pretend that we know how to unite these struggles and build a mass movement that is hundreds of millions strong in the present moment. We can look to history and to theory for guidance. However, the answer is something we will have to discover through both historical analysis and spontaneous response to material conditions as they develop.
What we can know is that an important point of struggle will be the creation of art that facilitates the imagining of a liberatory future. For my own purposes, this is art that I’ve dubbed “acid fiction.”
A Few Points of Clarification…
Before proceeding, I want to address the term “acid fiction.” This is not a direct reference to LSD or any other substance. Rather, it is a reference to Mark Fisher’s conception of “acid communism,” a term which he coined shortly before his untimely death in 2017. Fisher was in the process of fleshing out his concept of acid communism into, what I believe, might have been one of the most revelatory works of critism written in the Twenty-First Century. Unfortunately, he was able to provide only a vague sketch of what he intended acid communism to be. The phrase was, in effect, a placeholder; a variable that represented the negation of the concept of capitalist realism.
Furthermore, a distinction must be drawn between acid fiction and psychedelia. While psychedelia may play into acid fiction, the two are not necessarily related.
Proponents of the psychedelic counterculture that came to prominence in the late ’60s saw the expansion of consciousness, through whatever means, as a potential path forward. They believed psychedelia could take us beyond bourgeois existence and deliver us to a higher mode of being. Of course, the problem here is that any method which relies on inward-focused, individuated experience would be incapable of driving a universal, social change. Subjectivity, informed by both ideology and material interests, would hamstring any attempt to revolutionize society by making it a revolution of the self. This made it easy pickings for the forces of capital.
Psychedelia’s aesthetic might have been perceived as revolutionary when it arrived on the scene, but it was quickly recuperated by capital. It devolved into nothing more than recreation for the bored bourgeois youth haunting our suburbs. With many of the genuine revolutionaries of the 1960s either jailed or assassinated, and everyone else lost in their own individualized daydream, it’s no surprise that any revolutionary potential had already been wrung from the counterculture by the end of the decade.
In contrast, acid fiction seeks to avoid recuperation and reduction to an aesthetic devoid of politics. That which defines a work as acid fiction is not primarily aesthetic. Rather, the emphasis is on themes of liberation, transcendence, and above all, universality. Something which is psychedelic, but ultimately without these aims, would not qualify.
As we will see, the contest between capitalist-realist fiction and acid fiction is more than just a question of different approaches to creating art. In short, it is a struggle for the soul of art.
Acid fiction presents an opportunity-perhaps the last opportunity-for a truly liberated and liberatory mode of conveying information.
To be continued…
Originally published at https://arguechat.substack.com.
