Acid Utopianism: Mark Fisher, Ernst Bloch & Oneohtrix Point Never

Abstract

How can music help, or enable, us to formulate ways of being and understanding that move beyond our current imaginative constraints? This paper examines the relationship between music, temporality, and political imagination through an analysis of Daniel Lopatin’s (Oneohtrix Point Never) album Again. The album is brought into dialogue with the work of Ernst Bloch and Mark Fisher. This essay engages with Lopatin’s description of his work as a ‘speculative autobiography’, to reflect on the imaginative and critical relevance of music. I subsequently examine how music can following Mark Fisher, serve as a mode examining unactualized revolutionary potentials from the past. By turning to Fisher however, one quickly runs into theoretical problems regarding temporality, specifically the future. To circumvent these issues I draw on the work of Ernst Bloch, who elaborates a vision of the present as composed of multiple and contradictory temporal layers. Music then becomes a central medium for exploring the non-synchronous existence of time. I conclude that Lopatin’s work, when read through Bloch rather than Fisher, demonstrates how musical practice can articulate futural possibilities without being constrained by either nostalgia or a negation of the present.