Scott Jeffery - Notes towards a history of Re-enchantment as Resistance

Dr Scott Jeffery is a lecturer, artist, and author of The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics (2016). His latest publication, Difference, Repetition, and the Superhero Comic appeared in the collection Superheroes and Excess: A Philosophical Adventure (2021) and he was an artistic contributor to the recent Tool Box series of books providing creative games and activities for those in prison. Rumours that his role as keeper of The Fairy-Dog Calendar Count means he is an undercover warrior in the Lemurian Time-Wars are largely exaggerated.
Paper Presentation - Acid Communisms and Anarcho-Mysticisms: Notes towards a history of Re-enchantment as Resistance
The figure of the magician is one whose sleight of hand and word can confound and upturn the audience’s sense of “reality”. This paper explores this idea by blurring the lines between social theory and occulture.
Mark Fisher’s phrase Capitalist Realism described the ways in which the social and political imagination has become closed off to the possibility of other modes of life and social organization. By contrast, his later concept, Acid Communism, describes “a new humanity; a new seeing; a new thinking”.
Specifically, this talk would like to place the concept of Acid Communism within a wider Occultural context by mapping a brief history of what might be called Magical Marxisms and Anarcho-Mysticisms; movements where politics, art, activism and occultism have converged in a series of efforts to disrupt what Deleuze once termed the Control Society.
If Control seeks to make subjects of us, bound in the consensual hallucination of Capitalist Realism and its ‘slow cancellation of the future’, the movements discussed here linked altered states of consciousness with class-consciousness, activism and occultism, re-enchantment and resistance. Drawing upon a selection of historical examples, I want to map out an alternative history (and potential future) of Acid Communism by considering them as acts of deliberate ‘fictioning’; where myth-making combines with rituals and techniques that actualize new, collective subjectivities.
By drawing out these narratives we can reveal a history and a set of tools which demonstrate and encourage the possibility of (co-)creating new futures.
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