The term ‘Acid Corbynism’ has created a fair amount of intrigue since its announcement as part of the programme for The World Transformed (TWT) this year. The phrase lends itself to some misrepresentation and therefore we\u2019ll start by setting out a few points about the term before exploring how it might be related to possible developments within the UK dance scene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As Jeremy Gilbert notes in his recent Red Pepper<\/em> article<\/a>, the phrase Acid Corbynism is a development of Mark Fisher\u2019s term \u2018Acid Communism\u2019, which emerged out of conversations with Gilbert himself. While Fisher\u2019s book of the same name remains unfinished and unpublished, some of the ideas that were being developed within it were elaborated earlier this year by Plan C activist Keir Millburn in his article \u2018Towards Acid Communism\u2019<\/a> and by Gilbert in a set of personal reflections that can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These ideas fed into a set of discussions across dancefloors over the past summer and culminated in the idea of running the TWT panel on the subject. The central object of the discussions was the relation between \u2018post-capitalist desires\u2019, popular forms of cultural experimentation, and our own contemporary political moment. It is our hope that the TWT panel can be the starting point for widening those initial dancefloor discussions beyond a small group of friends. We should note here that while we will be pursuing the relationship between UK dance culture and Acid Corbynism, this by no means exhausts the concept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u2018Acid\u2019 of Acid Corbynism should not be confused with a simple reference to psychedelics. Rather, as Gilbert remarks, Mark Fisher was attracted to \u2018idea of \u201cacid\u201d as an adjective, describing an attitude of improvisatory creativity and belief in the possibility of seeing the world differently\u2019. It is perhaps helpful to think of this attitude as an antidote to what Fisher called \u2018Capitalist Realism\u2019: the loss of post-capitalist imagination that has accompanied the triumph of neoliberalism over the past 30-40 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The term \u2018acid\u2019 recalls the utopian counter-culture experiments of the 60s and 70s that preceded the neoliberal era but also more recent utopian traces within that era evident within UK dance culture \u2013 notably acid house. In either case the term is not meant as a nostalgic harking back to these lost cultural moments but a striving towards the reactivation of what Fisher called the \u2018popular modernist\u2019 imagination embodied within them. This would involve the production of genuinely new, innovative cultural forms which gain traction across society rather than in small enclaves of \u2018in the know\u2019 groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The renewal of such a culture (or counter-culture?) will require a fundamental change in the social conditions of cultural production. In opposition to the neoliberal myth that individualist competition drives innovation, \u2018Acid Corbynism\u2019 declares that collectivity is the condition of cultural experimentation and the development of \u2018the new\u2019. In a text called \u2018Reclaim Modernity\u2019<\/a>, Gilbert and Fisher set out a number of ideas that might enable the flourishing of popular modernist forms in areas of life such as broadcasting and schooling. Similar approaches might be taken to UK dance music (taken broadly) which we hold to still carry within them potentials for counter-cultural renewal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although often thought of as a pessimistic thinker, Fisher acknowledged that traces of \u2018the new\u2019 persisted within contemporary dance culture; see for example his review of DJ Rashad\u2019s Double Cup<\/a>, where he notes that \u2018footwork\u2019 (a recent sound coming from Chicago) is something genuinely alien to the traditional hardcore continuum. However, what he felt was<\/em> missing in contemporary culture was the essential \u2018circuit between the experimental, the avant-garde and the popular\u2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The missing circuit between the experimental and the popular that Fisher is describing is, we would say, already present \u2013 perhaps in embryonic form, obscured, dormant \u2013 in some sections of UK dance and grime music. In these circles, there is also a growing awareness of the cultural constraints of capitalism; Acid Corbynism is inspired by, and seeks to build on, these elements.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAcid Corbynism?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Popular modernist dance culture<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n