Edward Bond died on March 3 a cumbersome cultural figure. Always controversial, but celebrated in the 1960s and 70s, no major British stage has taken on a new work from him in decades. He died as Israel inched into its fifth month of its massacre in Gaza. And he died at a time when theatre matters less than it has at probably any point in human history.
Read MoreIrrealist Worker Survey #3
In our quixotic attempt to map, explore, and preserve the gravediggers’ multiverse, the Born Again Labor Museum has created the third Irrealist Worker Survey.
Read MoreThe Case for Critical Irrealism
In the face of this, appeals to normality are, in essence, the toxic optimism of American exceptionalism, the belief that America is somehow above time, above consequence. And though the reality of President Joe Biden has breathed some new life into this myth, make no mistake, it nonetheless wobbles like a drunk trying to walk a tightrope.
Read MoreCritical Irrealist Reading List
A single mother is driving past an abandoned factory on her way home from a low paying job. She is hungry. Above the factory a billboard floats in the sky advertising a succulent feast. But it does not strike her — or us — that this is odd, that her hunger has manifested itself above the factory ruin in an image of unavailable food. When we step outside ideology we see this absurdism for what it is.
Read MoreTheir Weird vs. Ours: Critical Irrealism vs. Fascist Occultism
While the critical irrealist ties the emancipation of the constrained subject to a collective fight against the forces that constrain that subject, the fascist occultist seeks unity with the constraining forces. Each responds to the disfigurement of individual subjectivity under the “normal” workings of capitalism; each rejects, to some degree, the profound lack of imagination engendered by capitalist realism. How they are opposed, in irrealist cultural performances, gestures, artifacts and media, is largely in the different ways they position/construct/code subjectivity in relation to the sources of this disfigurement.
Read MoreMutation or Death
THE MICHELISTS, who renamed themselves the Futurians in 1939, were a group of mostly working-class and precarious middle-class science fiction (SF) fans, largely centered in New York, who, in the 1930s, aimed to take over SF fandom for Communism and the Popular Front.
Read MoreUnder Covers
Tingle glosses past the wider implication of a spell that gives everyone exactly what they need when they need it, choosing only to say that it was banned for destroying the economy, upending governments, and ruining the game show industry.
Read MoreTheir UFOs and Ours
The dominant UFO visitation myths echo popular occultism in capitalism. The individual is abducted or visited -- in a secular-but-not-secular epiphany -- enweirding their life with either trauma or good fortune, or both; even if the good and bad fortune is a mere valorization of the formerly discarded individual within a cruel social totality. This is the ufology of “normal’’ bourgeois capitalism; the kismet of the UFO encounter.
Read MoreIntroducing Imago
How to break out? From the isolation, the despair, the stultifying routines? We are surrounded by the alien, the uncanny, by that which promises the freedom of a good life but inevitably leaves us empty and disappointed. Barbarism disguises itself as stability, and though more and more of us see through the veneer, we often have no idea what to do about it.
Read MoreIrrealist Worker Survey #2
In our quixotic attempt to help create the gravediggers’ multiverse, the Born Again Labor Museum is releasing the second Irrealist Worker Survey. More surveys with be forthcoming. All survey fields are optional. Fill out as much or as little as you like. We eagerly look forward to your responses! And please share the survey widely with your friends, comrades, neighbors, and families. It is up to all of us to build the gravediggers’ multiverse.
Read More(Video) Critical Irrealism as Socialist Cultural Strategy
On November 12th, 2020, Locust Review editors Alexander Billet, Holly Lewis, Anupam Roy, and Adam Turl presented at this year’s Historical Materialism conference. As this year’s conference was online — due to the plague — it was streamed live on YouTube. Our presentations dealt with various arguments regarding critical irrealism as a key socialist cultural strategy.
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Against Hopepunk
Salvagepunk and hopepunk share an antipathy for many of the so-called “realisms” that have come to dominate our culture.
Read MoreIrrealist Worker Survey #1
In our quixotic attempt to map, explore, and preserve the gravediggers’ multiverse, the Born Again Labor Museum has created the Irrealist Worker Survey. More surveys with be forthcoming. If you want attribution in any future exhibitions or educational material, please fill out your name in the fields at the bottom of the survey. If you wish to remain anonymous…
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