(I was asked to give a talk about some aspects of Mark Fsher's work, so this is

what I said)

About a year or so ago I was briefly in contact with Mark about his book Acid
Communism, which I'd heard rumours about, didnt quite believe really existed and
finally succumbed to the temptation to ask him about it. Anyway he sent me the
introduction, which may have altered subsequently, and among the many striking
observations there was one section and one phrase that particularly struck me, partly
because I was thinking along similar lines and also because of what I was reading
and listening to at the time.

I wanted to ask Mark lots of questions about this project and this particular phrase
hes used but it wasnt the right moment to start burdening him with my insights so
they went unasked, and so I am taking the opportunity to reconsider them now.

Mark uses a passage from Danny Bakers autobiography to illustrate a moment that
he then characterises as expressing a sense exorbitant sufficiency.

Ill think about that phrase in two dimensions, political and aesthetic, because as we
are repeatedly told there is only aesthetics and political economy

First, heres the the passage from Bakers autobiography.

"It was July 1966 and I was newly nine years old. We had holidayed on the Broads
and the family had recently taken possession of the gorgeous wooden cruiser that
was to be our floating home for the next fortnight. It was called The
Constellation and, as my brother and I breathlessly explored the twin beds and
curtained portholes in our cabin built into the boats bow, the prospect of what lay
ahead saw the life force beaming from us like the rays of a cartoon sun. I made
my way up to through the boat to take up position in the small area of the stern. On
the way, I pick up sister Sharons teeny pink and white Sanyo transistor radio and
switched it on. I looked up at the clear blue afternoon sky. Ike and Tina Turners
River Deep, Mountain High was playing and a sort of rapturous trance descended
on me. From the limitless blue sky I looked down into the churning, crystal-peaked
wake our boat was creating as we motored along, and at that moment, River Deep
gave way to my absolute favourite song of the period: Bus Stop by the Hollies. As
the mock flamenco guitar flourish that marks its beginning rose above the deep
burble of the Constellations engine, I stared into the tumbling waters and said aloud,
but to myself, This is happening now. THIS is happening now. (49-50)
The preconditions for this experience of exorbitant sufficiency get spelled out in the
text essentially the high point of a post war social democracy and which Mark is
keen to emphasise are the general preconditions of this particularly personal moment
of rapture in order to deflect the criticism that it only represents a nostalgic reflection
on Bakers part or a typical, halcyon moment from childhood. This is of a piece with
many of Marks observation that the foundations for particular continuum of
working class art and music production, punk/post-punk/rave/ drum and bass were
based on the possibilities of a dropping out and/or going to Art school, having a
reasonably comfortable life on the dole, something which probably stops being
possible around the mid to late 90s in the UK.

there is something very specific about this moment, something that means it
could have only happened then. We can enumerate some of the factors that
made it unique: a sense of existential and social security that allowed working-
class families to take holidays at all; the role that new technology such as
transistor radios played in both connecting groups to an outside and enabling
them to luxuriate in the moment, a moment that was somehow exorbitantly
sufficient. (italics mine)

One of the things thats interesting in the book or at least in its opening section is
that Mark has returned to the Sixties. In some ways the Sixties for an earlier iteration
of K-Punk in its blogging heyday would have been anathema, the hippies and their
tree hugging, free-love organicist enthusiasms were everything that Punk and Cyber
punk stood against and one of the main currents that has developed out of a particular
strain of Marks thinking, Accelerationism, is still quite openly anti-Hippy in its
orientation.

One of the ways in which hippie culture is/was anathema is in its focus on the child
as symbol of nature and innocence and Mark was a famous early advocate of anti-
natalist positions, championing No Future by Lee Edelman and so on.
So I suppose my first question here would be; while we have to be careful to make
sure we are looking at the techno academic paradigm that make these highly personal
moments possible, can childhood and the experience in childhood, of continuous
levels of engagement and enlargement, the constant learning, the, if you like,
repeated epiphanies, be a good model for acid communist or exorbitantly sufficient
subjectivities? I am also thinking here little bit of a recent proposal for a National
Education Service in the UK, a non-neoliberal equivalent to the market demand for
life-long learning, because there is something psychedelic in the world-renewing
properties of theorizing and reconceptualising and thats consonant in some ways
with Marks interest in the notion of an outside; this space beyond current
conceptions and boundaries that we constantly push into.

Can we locate a radical version of the inner child? Can we repurpose it, move it away
from kind of wide-eyed avatar of some essential goodness and wonder, into a
questing and adventurous, intellectually omnivorous, polymorphous subject, one
that retains openness to an outside and that doesnt ossify into a realist adult or
highly individualized subjectivity?

There are several categories that Mark identifies as being essential to this sense of
exorbitant sufficiency, light and space are two of them, but the most essential is
perhaps time, free or unpressured time, and the sense of unpressured time comes of
course from being a child, but also from a lack of anxiety about the future.
Exorbitant sufficiency has an ambiguous relationship toward the future as the space
into which we project both anxiety and hope, but both those projections occur only
if the present is intolerable, fallen, and will be redeemed in some way by the yet-to-
come.

You might want to say that in exorbitantly sufficient moments the experience is one
of time being in-joint as opposed to being out-of-joint. Ill tentatively suggest that
perhaps the time is always out-of-joint but that there are positive and negative
modalities of that disjointedness. And Id also suggest that theres something slightly
bittersweet in Bakers passage which is perhaps why Mark says that it could only
have happened then as it takes place just as a shift of a certain kind is occurring and
that shift is symbolized here by the transistor radio that Baker takes up onto the bow
of the boat.

One of Marks most influential formulations or projects was Hauntology,

Hauntology expressed a time out-of-jointedness in its negative mode, a certain future
should have appeared, a better present should exist but has failed to come into being
and the remnants of this better present are scattered around us, provoking us,
reminding us of the lost possibilities.

This idea is given a certain kind of empirical base by economists like Carlota Perez,
who's essentially a long wave theorist of Capitalism and who argues that a shift
toward a different type of post Fordism, a production regime not based on oil, mass
production and disposability should have occurred around the 1970s but the spatial
fix, essentially the opening up of China and the economic power of big oil to
suppress alternate technologies, among other factors, have kept us trapped in an
unnaturally elongated slowly and unevenly differentiating Fordist moment.

Interestingly the subject that Perez imagines as the new consumer of this deferred
future/present is very similar to the figure of the Hipster, she believes that elites lead
the way culturally, so these would be moneyed connoisseur, interested in the
specialized, high quality, durable goods. interested in recycling and reclaiming and
oriented toward vintage and low energy intensive forms of commodity
accumulation, creativity, up-cycling if you like.So to a degree the 2000s in which
Mark formulated Hauntology was haunted both by the remnants of the Utopian
promise of an early order, Modernsim intersecting with these kind of harbingers of
a Perezian future, temporally stranded and wandering around Dalston waiting for
solar panels and vertical farming to arrive.

.
Time can also be out of joint in a good way however and Id think here about
Marks complaint that with regard to modern technologys role in music, you cant
hear it anymore, using the example of Brian Enos synths and tapes and the way they
irrupted into Roxys often quite standard, pastichey pop and rock tunes inducing in
the listener an exhilarating frisson of Future Shock. Here the time is out of joint
because the future is forcing its way back into the present, opening a passage in
space-time and allowing the ghost of the yet-to-come, more an angel than a ghost
perhaps, to come floating in.

In the passage with the young Danny Baker on the boat we have a couple of key
interrelations, firstly the surrounding countryside offering an image of the eternal,
the pastoral and sublime, the boat and its engine, an older classical form, an
established type of technology and the emergent, the future, as symbolized by the
radio.

As it notes though, the radio is tiny and portable and moment therefore captures
something of an inflexion point in terms of the possibilities of Future Shock as an
affect or an experience, and its a notion which disappears from the culture probably
from the late 70s onward and is, to some extent is an addiction that people of a certain
generation have never been able to wean themselves off and indeed you might want
to argue that a lot of the accelerationist project both aesthetically and politically is
redolent of Future Shock envy on the part of a younger generation.
For this Future Shock to occur I think the technology has to be visible in the same
way as they have to be hearable in music hence in a kind of vulgarized or at least
popularized Hauntology and in Steampunk we have a fetishization of clunky,
monolithic early versions of technology with huge, glowing cathode tubes,
gramophones, vast banks of synths and so on. So as technology miniaturizes, blends
in with its surroundings, becomes invisible, becomes more of a discrete frame, as
architecture does too around this point, then this kind of juxtaposition, the eternal,
the residual, the emergent begins to disappear. Even though cyberpunk, extropian
and to some extent accelerationist fantasies focus on seamless integration, technical
augmentation, the man-machine and so on, in a way a certain affect a certain
dramatic temporal tension is lost with miniaturization, the future side of the
relationship falls away, becomes invisible and the present feels lopsided, dislocated,
out of joint.

So I suppose another question I would have there is whats the relationship of

exorbitant sufficiency to time? Is it only possible at a given historical moment a good
out of jointedness? Is this why it cant seem to come again?
The term exorbitant sufficiency expresses that one has enough yet that enough feels
luxurious, far in excess of whats required. So, this paradox or an oxymoron, and
this sense of completeness in the moment, this lack of orientation to the future puts
me in mind of Todd McGowans recent work. McGowans a Lacanian, which makes
reading him a rather forbidding prospect at least it does for me but essentially
McGowan tries to build a politics, an anti-capitalist politics of the death drive.

To very crudely summarize his argument, we have suffered an originary loss and we
try to replace this loss all through our lives by pursuing an object that will stand in
for the loss, here, commodities, which promise us a sense of completeness but only
lead us to experience disappointment, because what we actually want is the
disappointment itself, the loss that allows us to desire again. The chase is better than
the catchm as Motorhead succinctly put it

McGowan believes ALL orientation toward the future is inherently bound up in

capitalist desire, that the constant search for and repetition of failure maps onto the
structure of capital accumulation, orientation toward the future as a salvationary
space are caught up in the logic of the profit motive, commodity production etc. All
of this is expressed through the kind of counterintuitive and paradoxical
formulations of which Mark was fond, the title of his big book being enjoying what
we dont have. What we should stop doing for McGowan is precisely thinking
about the future, seeking out boundaries and limits to overcome in the belief
that beyond them there is a true satisfaction possible as we already have
everything we need or possibly everything we dont need already. Or perhaps better
still we already dont have everything we dont need.
There are problems with McGowans work in that it fails to address the body and
material needs, poverty and so on. Its hard not to be oriented toward the future and
accumulation if you dont know where your next meal is coming from or you face
crop failure this summer, and so there is an extent to which McGowan is really
perhaps addressing, in a more rarified register the Affluenza that bedevils his
students and hi peers. Either way, this refusal of the future overlaps in some ways
with Marks exorbitant sufficiency at the moment burgeons into a sense of plenitude
because in some ways its been bracketed off. The relationship with acid here might
be fairly clear. Acid shuts down the memory and the sense of anticipation, the music
critic Simon Reynolds likening its results to one being dazzled by the moment.

So the next question I would have asked is whether a post capitalist desire is at odds
with a demand for the future and whether an exorbitantly sufficient renunciation of
the future isnt also an option to be considered? Does the idea of exorbitant
sufficiency map in some ways onto the idea of Communal Luxury more than Luxury
Communism.
Thinking about exorbitant sufficiency as an aesthetic, one of the songs Mark
mentions as exemplifying this is the Kinks Lazing on a Sunny afternoon, free time,
a certain luxuriousness of surroundings, life devoted to the ludic, but also crucially
a loss or a sense of being unencumbered.

I am going to suggest a series of qualities that I think are required for a work to add
it to a canon of the exorbitantly sufficient and do that on the basis of some of my
interpretation of the phrase I have already outlined.

I think it should it contain a sense of the good childlike, in the sense that it must have
a certain numinous quality, a sense not of breaking into new territory/overcoming
boundaries but of transformation or enlargement.

It should concentrate on a concentrated moment and that moment should be,

paradoxically, illuminated by the eclipse of the future

Should have a sense of ease and lassitude.

Should formally express a relation and tensions between deep time and the
traditional and the defamiliarizing possibilities of technological but without aiming
at the sense of the ruptural that characterized Future Shock

It should have something of the reverie and the epiphany.

I am going to nominate a song for this and that's Estuary Bed by The Triffids from
an album with the interesting title, Born Sandy Devotional.
The song title is also relevant. Estuaries are as much a combination of forces pulling
in different directions as they are a confluence an arresting of motion and a
deepening of it, rich, teaming environments alive with growth, ancient and yet also
densely populated, worked over by humans in some ways undermined by them.

Here are the lyrics.

The children are walking back from the beach/ Sun on the sidewalk is burning their
feet/Washing the salt off under the shower/And just wasting away, wasting away
The hours and hours and hours
Come on, climb over your father's back fence/For the very last time we'll take the
shortcut/Across his lawn/Then lie together on the estuary bed/Perfectly still,
perfectly warm
Sleep no more/Sleep is dead/Sleep no more on the estuary bed/Ache no more/Old
skin is shed/Sleep no more on the estuary bed
I see you still/I know not rest/Silt returns along the passage of flesh/ I hear your
voice/I taste the salt/I bear the stain, it won't wash off/I hold you not
But I see you still/What use eyesight if it should melt? What use memory covered in
estuary silt?
I know your shape/Our limbs entwined/I know your name, remember mine
Sleep no more/Sleep is dead/Sleep no more on the estuary bed/Ache no more/Old
skin is shed/Sleep no more on the estuary bed

There is an emphasis on childhood, un-hurried time, sunlight, nature, the sense of

rebirth, sloughing an old skin, awakening, mutual embrace, a mutual transformation.
The track itself is essentially a pretty straight, folk-rock track given a particular
brightness and ambient edge through the production, and as it progresses the lead
vocal becomes increasingly detached from the background , swimming of into a kind
of overlapping, multi tracked, oneiric drift, urging whoever the songs addressee is,
perhaps the singer themselves to awake, to face life replenished. There is nothing
but two people lying together in the sun, in a particular favourite place and yet the
song implies this is everything, more than anything one could want, exorbitantly
sufficient.

So, I suppose all of this would just have been a long preamble to the question, What
do you think of this song, Mark? Do you like it?
To which his answer would almost certainly have been no.