The multiverse trope in contemporary culture is overdetermined. It is ideological. It flows with the fragmented totality of an attenuating neoliberalism.  It is also a result of the economy of digital media. On streaming services, the multiverse tropes of Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, and other intellectual property franchises reflect the expansion of an attention economy. Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm and Star Wars for more than four billion dollars requires the maximization of content production to realize future profits. A steady output of content must be produced to capture attention. In this way, the multiverse trope is also phenomenological. Digital media, along with the chaos of gig economics and neoliberal precarity, create a sense of “everything everywhere all at once.”

There are, culturally and in actuality, their “monsters” and our “monsters.” Our rulers describe whole sections of the working-class and subaltern in terms borrowed from various folk and other horrors. They demonize people by race and caste. They stoke fears of crime, exaggerated and irrational, even as they drive the entire world toward war and climate disaster. As they steal the wealth created by our labor. As they loot entire nations. 

The following editorial was published in Locust Review #9 and written in late fall (2022): There is a prevailing sense of being under siege. It is felt in our bones. It turns our stomachs inside-out. It chokes our arteries with anxiety.

Please send submissions — artwork, poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, short essays, and so on — to locust.review@gmail.com by October 31st.

We can still dream… for now. Throughout all of the darkness, we have managed to hope for something better. And behind that hope, there is always that word. Less a word than an idea, a longing, whose open description has come to be scoffed at in adult conversation. Utopia.

The discounted gift subscription rate will be available through January 15, 2022. In addition to the standard subscription packages, all gift subscriptions will include an additional copy of Locust #6 and Imago #1.

The Locust Arts & Letters Collective will be presenting a panel at Historical Materialism Online 2021, the replacement for HM’s conference that normally takes place in London in early November.

“Are you employed sir?”
“Employed?”
“You don’t go out looking for a job dressed like that? On a weekday?”
“Is this a… what day is this?”

-- exchange between Jeffrey Lebowski and the Dude

When more and more disasters are reached — in the form of personal catastrophe, a continent on fire, a city underwater, a state without water and electricity, a plague uncontrolled, a planet on the verge of ecological catastrophe — capitalist realism can only shrug (and hone new forms of disaster capitalism).

So send us what you have – your art, your poetry, your fiction, your odd ephemera – and remember that we only ask it be weird, strange, experimental, and that it cling to the dreams of liberation and the hopes of radical transformation.

How strange does sunlight seem to us now? Or seeing someone we haven’t seen in a year? Perhaps… even shaking hands with them? What is the odd-but-familiar sensation we call touch? And what does it mean on this dying rock? What does it mean for our hope and despair to be simultaneously so attenuated?

“I wanted to greet you, welcome you, embrace you, but ‘Normal’ kept getting in the way. I wish you, the Old King, the New King, and the Old King’s soldiers, good luck.”

Whither the Burgerkrieg auf Normal Island? The UK economy is at near perfect standstill. The state is busy hammering the repression button, the only thing it knows works… and it’s not so sure it works.

Mainstream right wing politicians have been experimenting with summoning their fascist golems. Suella Braverman who, in November 2023, was Home Secretary, after being frustrated at being unable to prohibit a peace march in London on the same weekend as Armistice Day, suggested that ceremonies at the Cenotaph on Whitehall were under threat from “hate marchers” displaying “thuggish intimidation and extremism.” The far right took this, fairly obvious, cue and descended on Whitehall, drunk and high. With no one to fight, they first fought the cops, then each other. Plus la change. Braverman largely blamed the police for this debacle. By December 2023, she was a back bench MP.

The Housing Act 1980 was the big bang, the origin story for Normal Island. After World War Two Britain was desperately short of housing stock. State action, by both Tory as well as Labour governments, got homes built. Even in the 1970s work was ongoing, bomb sites were still being cleared. The 1980 Act, however, promised council tenants the right to buy their homes. In time a gigantic amount of equity was released. By 1986, financial markets were deregulated and this equity could be traded with greater ease and velocity. 

I think every place has a lot of lost souls, but also there's the impossibility of representation. We're from here. I'm from this town, Carbondale, Illinois, and we're familiar with the nature of the loss here in a way we might not be intimately familiar with in other places. But the sort of impetus was the realization the art space is a theatrical space. 

The effect is important, not so much the actual individual piece of work. So if you have some good effect, of course you can have good effect or bad effect, but let’s hope that whatever you’re creating has some good effects. As long as that good effect fertilizes the soil that’s what I care about.

Anyone with enough sense can see how stupid the hue and cry over Kneecap is. But then, we live in a particularly myopic age, aggressively forgetful and wantonly incurious. One prone to performative pearl-clutching over simple talk of murder while real murder (indeed, genocide) takes place on a daily basis. 

Orson Welles called Los Angeles “a bright, guilty place.” David Lynch, upon his arrival, noticed the brightness. “I love Los Angeles,” he wrote in Catching the Big Fish. “I know a lot of people go there and they see just a huge sprawl of sameness. But when you’re there for a while, you realize that each section has its own mood. The golden age of cinema is still alive there, in the smell of jasmine at night and the beautiful weather. And the light is inspiring and energizing. Even with smog, there’s something about that light that’s not harsh, but bright and smooth. It fills me with the feeling that all possibilities are available. I don’t know why. It’s different from the light in other places.”

There are four great interwoven crimes that create capitalism — enclosure and the creation of the proletariat, industrializing chattel slavery, colonization/imperialism, and the subjugation of women and gender normativity. Not one of these is possible without racism. Not one of them is “over.” Not for working-class and poor people. Not one of them has stopped its ruthless destruction of life and being. But the mountain will come crashing down in a wave of a billion voices, accusing, exposing, confessing, rebelling. Hamilton’s book of brilliant poems is, in this sense, prophecy.

I want to create characters not that people aspire to be like but whom people see themselves in who end up doing things they already aspire to do but won’t, for whatever reason. Probably this penchant for fictional violence against wealth hoarders will get me into trouble eventually. Until then, however, I will continue to write about working class robots in sewers trying to shoot the evil meat above.

The internet promises democracy but delivers reactionary politics (and is designed to do so). It promises expression and valorization of the subject, but delivers, more often, dopamine denial and depression. Meanwhile the analog, at least in the arts, promises authenticity, but fails to deliver much more than rarefied bourgeois spaces, out of touch with the vast majority of the human race — as Amiri Baraka would say, “fingerprints of rich painters”... Or, empty art museum spectacles; Epcot Center immersion for the cosmopolitan bourgeois and petit-bourgeois.

The default cultural logic of neoliberalism and the political center is capitalist realism. In response the cultural logic of working-class emancipation (socialism) is critical irrealism. The ir – or no – of critical irealism is opposed to a particular kind of realism. Therefore, we should examine it more closely.

There is one form of  the Romantic culture that does not advocate the return to the past,  but a detour by the past, towards an emancipated future. This we call revolutionary Romanticism, which begins with Rousseau, followed by Blake, Shelley, William Morris and many others.

The default cultural logic of neoliberalism and the political center is capitalist realism. In response the cultural logic of working-class emancipation (socialism) is critical irrealism. The ir – or no – of critical irealism is opposed to a particular kind of realism. Therefore, we should examine it more closely.

The following essay was written in February of 2020, for the website of left-wing arts and culture publication Red Wedge magazine, not long before its activity ceased and former editors moved on to other projects, including Locust Review. We post it here in an effort to give readers a sense of LR’s roots, the artistic and political questions that we have sought to answer, and the bearing they have on those being taken up by the Locust project. In the coming weeks, we will also be publishing a selection of Red Wedge’s best material.

Ignoring the content of these artworks has reactionary implications that Dunst has probably not considered; or has considered but ignored in an attempt to gaslight his readers. In the way he has written this article, the horror of the Holocaust, the repression of our Iranian comrades, homophobia, are all dismissed as an “obsession with personal identity.” One has to wonder if the problem with these texts and images, for Dunst, isn’t that they are memoirs, but that they are the stories of people who are gay or queer, aren’t white, or whose whiteness is contingent.

Academically-trained working-class artists who pretend their hard earned knowledge, their BFAs and MFAs, make them immune from this dynamic, are fooling themselves. It is understandable. We do not want to think of ourselves as art world dark-matter, permanent adjuncts, and stalking horses for gentrification. But this is what the art world is making of us, and what we must break from as workers, as artists, and as socialists.

The concept of outsider art, or self-taught art, is a lie. It conceals the actual artistic arguments and content articulated by the artists who are described in this way. While the history of the concept is more complicated, its present usage is bound up with a racial, class and geographic othering, which centers the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois institutional art world (located in New York City first and foremost) as the norm (when it is itself the outlier).

The formation of art enclaves in industrial capitalism, during a century of accelerating aesthetic and conceptual innovation (1850-1950) had a progressive logic. Artists’ innovations fed off their physical proximity to each other. Moreover, these aesthetic and conceptual interventions were often in political sympathy to the industrial working-class concentrated in cities like London, New York, Paris and Berlin. Artists found a radical, and oftentimes working-class, cosmopolitanism in these artistic enclaves. Gentrification had not yet evolved to exploit artists as it does today.

There is one form of  the Romantic culture that does not advocate the return to the past,  but a detour by the past, towards an emancipated future. This we call revolutionary Romanticism, which begins with Rousseau, followed by Blake, Shelley, William Morris and many others.

It was four years since the attempted self-immolation by my body. Three years since my body was named The Idiot. Two years since The Idiot had any contact with sister, mother or father. A year and a half since The Idiot’s prayers had been answered. In the wrong way. 

THE BOREDOM Artist was set to retire. He would give one more performance. London’s Festival Hall was sold out as a result. Last chance to see. One-thousand seven-hundred and ten people, people who liked and appreciated what he did, would go with Dave to a place he had never gone before, though midnight, past the hour-mark. A clock behind them counted down.

“Who are… Do I know you…?” Jake was puzzled. The voice came from a woman, tall, olive skin with dark, greying curly hair. She was standing just inside the street light, on the corner of the alleyway, leading from the High Street to Dyvenor Road. After a moment of figuring this out Jake realised she was holding him, gently but firmly by the shoulder. “What do you want…?” 

The mansion had to be more than twenty thousand square feet, with five wings; it took up two acres. In the backyard, a giant infinity pool overlooking downtown L.A., a jacuzzi big enough for a football team, an industrial-size outdoor kitchen that could feed two hundred people, thirty-two-seat table made of rough-cut red wood with an eight-inch-thick top, three brick fireplaces, eight open firepits, two pizza ovens, and more trees and flowerbeds than in a Vegas resort.

“It snatched a dog two days ago, in Drapers Fields,” Detective Constable Habib explained back at the station to her superior, “right in front of its owner. They found its entrails wrapped around a lamppost on the High Road. It’s head was…”

Even in this cacophony, it’s the silence that unsettles most. If only because it won’t be long until it’s pierced again. Screaming, shouting, tires screeching, panicked footfalls, sporadic gunfire. If there were ever a silence that could threaten, a kind of quietude that, for a few seconds or several minutes, promises to split the skull of whomever steps in its way, this is it.

It was a dark, cloudy night: perfect! A group was gathered in a corner of Old St Pancras Churchyard. They were not a regular congregation. They were men and women of various ages, pepper-pot faces, ordinarily dressed, mostly; a true cross-section of London. They were stood in a circle. Each was holding a bucket and glancing, quietly, reverently at the bare, muddy ground in front of them…except for one.

The Idiot knew why. It had started talking union with other drivers and field technicians who drilled the wells and collected the samples. 

AI is comrade. Robot is comrade. What has been built to replace us is always on our side because our solidarity is our greatest weapon against them.

Being able to Google search your own mind sometimes leads to getting trapped inside it, stuck in a loop controlled by the neurochip company.

This morning, Thursday the 14th of April 2022, at 6am, two more statues of Winston Churchill appeared in the north-east corner of Parliament Square. At present, there are four such statues. This is, so far, an exponential development that requires immediate attention. If this continues unabated, by the end of this week, there will be over 280 million statues of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square.

Things revert, but to nearly normal. You’ll never / catch up now to who took off-&-away with by-your- / leave of your senses. Then that consensus-taker / herself took such unconscionable advantage.

A man is sat up straight in a chair, alone in a dark room, at a table, under direct, strong light from above. He is somewhere between impassive and defiant, staring ahead at nothing. A door opens. No light is cast in from outside. Two figures, both men judging by the sound of their footsteps, move into the room. The Man in the Chair does not respond to this. The door closes.

I also knew that The Idiot was systematic. All those stops at gas stations on trip number 29, when the gas tank needed no gas, all those run-throughs through rest stops, scanning the parked cars … all the time that it was taking away from doing its job, while on the job … it was looking for that menacing red Dodge Charger. It was doggedly, systematically looking for revenge. Of a petty kind. So much energy and so many heart beats spent on such a petty mission. 

As Ello turned off the world she searched its jails and prison cells for Dr. Ferthus.

In Cokaygne food and drink are had without worry, trouble or toil. 

“They know what you’re up to,” said the Voice. “You’re going to blow the whole thing. We should never have trusted you.” 

We are in the future. Not too distant future. We’re not flying in a spaceship or anything. We’re in a big rig semi, with a huge cabin, like a tiny house. On a road that looks like I-40, but the road sign we just passed said I-3958.

Then a cock crowed, Cock-a-doodle-doo! The story is all told--Cock-a-doodle-doo!

My Species and I saw you from across the void and we really dig your vibe. We wanted to reach out to you so we sent you this email, all of you. We hope you don’t mind. 

The Rumbumble followed, its bellowing laugh chipped through the alarm in a way that made Junyp’s head feel like it might explode. Just before the ship swallowed her, The Rumbumble chopped off her hand with its horn and pulled Junyp back. They watched the hatch slam shut. The ship burst up from the swamp with a slurpy whump and disappeared into the sky.

JUST AFTER sunset, the bay doors opened and two men picked their way through the half-light, carefully, through the remains of East End Offset, a recently abandoned printing plant in Barking. They stood together, one in grey overalls and the other in a suit (no tie). They stood and watched a giant cocoon of mulched newspaper as it vibrated softly, together/alone with the marvelous. To kill the (near) silence, the Suited Man (Dave) looked up at Felix (the Man in Overalls) and said:

WE WERE heading east to pick up the samples from the army depot. Our 29th time on I-40. The return trip would be number 30.

“I probably put out more CO2 doing this job than the company cleans up at the site!”

My body had looked up some figures. It should stop looking up figures. Idle hands, devil’s workshop, hasty conclusions.

AT 11.23PM on the 31st of October 2020 an unknown and unidentified aircraft appeared in airspace directly above London. The aircraft was and has remained motionless and uncontactable to date. On the same day an MP4 was discovered in the cloud archive of the Department of Metaphysics, Hillingdon Facility, apparently pertaining to the incident. This is a transcript of that file.

“YOUR FUCKING ocean is on fire.” The blob of glowing plasma pleaded in disbelief.

The panel of thirteen human representatives exchanged hushed glances. One of the humans spoke as the whispers subsided: “It strikes us as suspicious that you’re this concerned with our resources.”

THE LOCAL laundromat: a perpetual cleansing spot for the city’s dirt and shame.

At night, the neon sign above the storefront glows half-enthusiastically, so much so that most of the letters are completely burnt to their end. The remaining ones spell out “Land rat” — a welcoming endorsement for a place where people come in to wash the crumbs off their pants.

STEVIE LOVED to swim. If there was one thing he loved more than swimming though it was swimming in someone else’s pool, some Russian guy he’d never heard of, on a beautiful morning, in a gated villa on one of the Canary Islands.

Midwinter: the water was cold, like the chill of the ocean, only a few hundred metres away, but Stevie was in his element. After a few brisk laps he pulled himself up to the side, smiled at his girlfriend who was sat, lounging and reading and fiddling with the shark-tooth necklace she’d found, looking beautiful.

GERGUS COMBED her fingers through the wavy hair on her stomach. She twirled the pencil in her other hand and looked up at the sky. She closed her eyes. The sun lit her eyelids partially shaded by her thick brow. After a few deep, measured breaths, the patches of pink light started to change color and shape.

THE STUPID asshole tried to kill us.

Or is it, ‘It tried to get us killed’?

Good that it didn’t succeed. Thank God! Thank Good Lord Jesus, Moses, Mohammad, Larry, Curly and Moe.

Fucking asshole. Depraved selfish self-centered misarranged asshole.

THERE I was, alone. It seemed so sad, made even sadder by the mud and the rain and the faint chirps of brittle birds in brittle trees far away. To think, I thought, that I would be here, in this moment, half buried in the bulk of mud as my blood life bled out of my living life. But, it wasn’t like Hemingway wounded somewhere in Italy, his life, like a handkerchief adrift long enough to know not knowing before returning, almost wistfully, to it’s breast pocket. My life left and I stayed with it.