Our Alluvium special issue ‘Futurity in Crisis’ is now here! We’re very excited to share this edition with you which contains the work of 8 fantastic authors and features photographs by our very own Benjamin Horn.
We’ll be holding a virtual launch event to discuss these incredible papers and the topic more generally of futurity in crisis. The event will be held online Thursday 24th June, 1-3pm (BST). If you’d like to join us, just get in touch.
Here’s a list of what’s included in this special issue:
Footnotes for our final two sessions are very belated indeed! But better late than never. These final two sessions, like the rest of the series, generated fantastic discussion, and even better reading lists! In particular, Fisher’s final lecture transcript ‘Libidinal Marxism’ had a lot to unpack, including his exploration of masochistic desire in Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, (“hang tight and spit on me” anyone?). Fisher asks his students, what do we do about
“the complication of desire and capitalism, […] a kind of capitalist desire that is immanent to the working class.”
– Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire
This lecture challenges us to acknowledge and explore the relationship between capitalism and our problematic desire in order to understand us what desire might look like in life beyond capitalism.
We decided to finish at the beginning, having our final session on Matt’s fantastic introduction to the book. This provided an excellent opportunity to reflect on all that we’d uncovered over the past 5 months, and the ideas and discussions which most spoke to us. This reading group has been an amazing opportunity to continue in our own small way the dialogue that Mark started for us, and begin to actually engage in the practices of group consciousness raising we have read and spoken so much about.
The series may have ended, but the conversation absolutely hasn’t!
We look forward to running many more events and series like this in future. But in the meantime, join us on Discord where the conversation continues.
Session footnotes are below, and the original reading list can be found here.
Robert Costanza, ‘Four visions of the century ahead: Will it be Star Trek, Ecotopia, Big Government, or Mad Max?’, The Futurist, February 1999
What’s Next?
Our Postcapitalist Desire series may have finished, but we’re planning something special for the summer, so watch this space. In the meantime, our first ever guest editorial for Alluvium journal has now been published! You can find our ‘Futurity in Crisis’ special edition here. We hope to see you all at the launch event later this month – we’ll be advertising details soon!
We’re under a week away from our monthly Postcapitalist Desires reading group session, which will cover the fifth (and final) of Mark Fisher’s final lecture transcripts on Tuesday 23rd of March 1-3pm (GMT). If you haven’t yet registered for a link to the sessions, but would like to, please email or DM us on Twitter and we’ll set you up!
As always with our Postcapitalist Desires sessions, it’s up to you how far you wish to delve into each lecture as there’s a wealth of material in each, but we do ask as a minimum that you read the relevant lecture transcript before the session.
In addition to lecture transcript #5 – ‘Libidinal Marxism’, should you wish, the extra reading for this session is:
Jean-François Lyotard, “The Desire Named Marx” in Libidinal Economy (London: Athlone Press, 1993), pp. 95–149
Registration
Like all of our series, these events are online and free. If you haven’t yet registered, there’s still time – get in touch and we’ll add you to the list. We’ll be sending out a Zoom link to everyone on the list nearer the time. Once you’ve registered, you don’t need to confirm attendance for each session – we’ll send you a fresh link every month. You also don’t need to commit to every session – just attend what you fancy (even if you miss the first session, there is more than enough material in each lecture for discussion).
