Mark Fisher’s 2014 lecture “Anti-Vital” ended with what we consider to be an elegant capturing of the current state of Leftist struggles:
If there are drives, then they’re reprogrammable – and capital knows this, that’s the key thing. Capital knows that desire can be produced, manipulated, captured, channeled, etc., and that is why it puts so much energy and resources into libidinal engineering. That’s one of the reasons it’s so difficult to struggle against capitalism, because we don’t have the same resources of libidinal engineering at our disposal … at least on the face of it. @ 1:01:50
This affirmation of reprogrammable drives, drives that can be hacked by libidinal engineering, is what we aim to do. Not necessarily for the purpose of anti-capitalist resistance – perhaps enjoyment of the now is what ought to be strived for –, we want to engage in a séance with the non-existent CCRU of the late 90s; to dig up the corpses of Bataille, Acéphale, and the Collège de Sociologie of the 30s; to have an orgy with Oulipo. We want to attempt to actualize the latent resources of libidinal engineering that we can make disposable to us in the service of creative subjectification.