Page 91 - Art Review

Acid Communism

In his unfinished book ‘Acid Communism’

(2016) cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote,

‘The past has to be continually re-narrated,

and the political point of reactionary narratives

is to suppress the potentials which still await,

ready to be re-awakened, in older moments…

so to recall these multiple forms of collectivity

is less an act of remembering than of unforget-

ting, a counter-exorcism of the spectre of

a world which could be free’.

The spectral force of Mark’s writing still has

the power to galvanise and embolden us, particu-

larly in this strange time of realignment and

reconfiguration. This notion of unforgetting
can be deployed as a strategy in order to identify

moments, past and future, when futures previously

imagined can be rekindled. We need this more

than ever, a social imaginary that can summon

radically new ways of thinking and organising.

This desire to reactivate moments of emancipa-

tory potential, to summon flashpoints of militancy

and collective euphoria, is not about archiving

or documenting, but willing them into the present.

– Laura Grace Ford

Frontiers 91