This essay originally appeared in Imago #1 (August 2021), the non-fiction/theory print annual published by the Locust Arts & Letters Collective. Social media image by Mike Linaweaver.
A Theory of the Imagination +/or an Imaginative Theory
1. THE ZOMBIFICATION OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
SAY THE words “normal” and “exceptional” next to each other enough and they become interchangeable. That is what American liberals – now firmly in control of events, at least in their own minds – are hoping for.
Leaving aside the question of whether this purported normal is even desirable, the idea that we might ever get back to it is prima facie ludicrous. We have seen and experienced things that can never be unseen or unexperienced. Hundreds of thousands dead in a pandemic. Millions are still unemployed. For many of them, their jobs are never coming back.
Though climate change is not directly to blame for the Covid-19 pandemic, it remains true that the widening of the metabolic rift, the increasing disruption and destruction of delicate ecosystems, is responsible for both crises. In this respect, Covid-19 is merely a prelude to the kinds of ecological and epidemiological disasters we can expect as the planet continues to warm.
As for American liberalism, and centrism more broadly, their renewed dominance is precarious at best. Tens of millions believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. That many of the far-right and conspiracist groups are currently on the back foot, chastened and in some cases fracturing, does not diminish their danger in the long term. As Trump and company continue to encourage their supporters’ delusions over the next several years, and as Biden’s Democrats repeatedly and stubbornly deliver disappointment after disappointment (which they already are), more vicious mutations of QAnon, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers will all find renewed hearings.
The simple and unavoidable fact is that we have crossed the Rubicon. What was true on one side will not be true on the other. 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.
A crisis of this magnitude has been in the making for some time. Commentators have repeatedly pointed out that the “normal” to which are now supposedly returning is exactly what gave rise to our current slow-motion tailspin.
When liberal, centrist, conservative, or even the far-right pine for stability in America, they are all gesturing in one way or another to the heydays of American industry. This stability was never quite so stable or free as it’s now made out to be – particularly for those outside the paradigms of whiteness, straightness, or masculinity. The best that could be said for the height of Taylor-Fordism is that the rhythms of manufacture, commodification and consumerism, the click-click-click of the assembly line becoming the hegemonic mode of life, provided minimal coherence and predictability. It was dismal, but at least one knew what was coming next.
Neoliberalism had already managed to uproot much of the monotonous rhythm of Taylorism that had dominated working-class life; that rhythm was replaced with this perilous anxiety that there is no bottom to the immiseration we can experience. Since the onset of the pandemic, this unraveling has accelerated past a point of no return. From one day to the next, we see multiple timelines unfold, different potentials becoming feasible depending on which social force captures the imagination: rapidly shifting between exterminism and abolitionism, authoritarianism to a newly ascendant zombie centrism, even occasionally between fascism and socialism. Capitalist realism, as a still-dominant cultural logic, turns itself inside out to maintain that dominance.
2. DEFINING CRITICAL IRREALISM
THIS IS the starting point for a contemporary critical irrealism. It is not a concept that we at Imago or Locust Review can take credit for, and we will often, for expediency’s sake, trade it out for more accessible terms like “the radical weird.” But with the need for a revolutionary imagination now more urgent than ever, we insist that it provides a supple analytical and aesthetic framework for both understanding our current moment and fleshing out a feasible, viable vision of a liberated future.
The term critical irrealism, as we use it, comes from Michael Löwy, who lays out a definition in his work “A Moonlit Enchanted Night.” [1] In an interview with Red Wedge in 2018, Löwy defined critical irrealism as an embrace of the non-realist – be it the fantastical, the uncanny, or simply the aggressively unreal – as a way of criticizing reality, a juxtapositioning through which we can see the gap between what could be, what should be, and what is.
Not all irrealist literature or art is critical. Fairy tales, for instance, can be quite conformist in their ethical and social values. Critical irrealism can be said of œuvres that do not follow the rules of accurate representation of life as it really is, but nevertheless are critical of social reality. Their critical viewpoint is often related to the dream of another world, an imaginary, idealized, or terrifying one, opposed to the gray, prosaic, disenchanted reality of modern (capitalist) society… The word critique should not be understood as a rational argument, a systematic opposition or an explicit discourse. More often, in irrealist art, it takes the form of protest, outrage, disgust, anxiety, angst… Sometimes the critique is only present in an indirect way, through the idealized images of a different, non-existing reality. [2]
Taking a cue from Löwy, it is important to highlight the non-rational, more romantic impulse as a weight against the determinist teleology of realism and capitalism. It is important to acknowledge this because it is this irrationality, this gap in realist approaches, that justifies use of the particular term “irrealism.”
In his book The Imaginary, Jean-Paul Sartre uses the word “irreal” for a specific and necessary component of the human imagination. To imagine an object is to posit it as irreal, imbued with qualities we ascribe to it, regardless of whether those qualities are indeed a characteristic of said object, based on past knowledge and dependent on our intention toward that object. When we perceive a chair that is in front of us, we can only see one side at a time. When we imagine the chair, however, we conceive all its sides and angles. Even when we see the chair in front of us, the fact that it is standing upright prompts us to picture the angles of it we can’t see (a different but not altogether unrelated psychological phenomenon). Our prior knowledge is called upon, creating an image that fills the gap of perception.
Navigating the world requires a synthesis of lived experience, knowledge, and any number of resulting images of what might be. In order to experience the real, we must employ the unreal. Artists rely on this process, but so do architects, physicists, computer programmers, and just about any occupation that requires some kind of change in the world around us. That much of this labor (or most of it) is “robbed of its charm,” as Marx put it, does not negate the essential kernel of imagination required for the labor to be performed.
Sartre also argues that this is what makes the human imagination a central component of human freedom. A being that could not imagine would be by necessity trapped in “the real,” incapable of changing it. Ergo, true subjectivity of any kind is impossible without imagination. Already, this imagination is constantly interacting with – and therefore reimagining – the world around it in order for us to move forward in life. Sartre elaborates:
From this point of view, we can finally grasp the connection of the irreal to the real. First of all, even if no image is produced at the moment, every apprehension of the real as a world tends of its own accord to end up with the production of irreal objects since it is always, in a sense, free nihilation of the world and this always from a particular point of view. So, if consciousness is free, the noematic correlate of its freedom should be the world that carries in itself its possibility of negation, at each moment and from each point of view, by means of an image, even while the image must as yet be constituted by a particular intention of consciousness. [3]
In this respect, the irreal may be considered the atomic unit of human subjectivity and creativity. To add the “critical” designator is to in turn look at this formulation in terms of radical social change. And in fact, the function of art in tracing a connection between these granular psychological movements and grand historical movements for revolution has been a point of focus for revolutionaries both artistic and political for some time.
As Leon Trotsky, Andre Breton and Diego Rivera argue in their “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art,” the internal life of human beings in a world that so willfully atomizes, exploits and crushes them is inevitably in conflict with that same outside world, causing a psychological turmoil that longs to be reckoned with. “[T]he role of the artist in a decadent capitalist society,” they write, “is determined by the conflict between the individual and various social forms which are hostile to him.” [4] This understanding is echoed by Angela Davis when she writes that art is a “sensitizer and a catalyst … a special form of social consciousness that can potentially awaken an urge in those affected by it to creatively transform their oppressive environments.” [5]
The next question that arises, however, is how these conflicts between subject and society – the turmoil, the anguish, the hope, the inevitable conflict between dreams and actually existing nightmare – are rendered artistically. This isn’t to be prescriptive, to say that one style of representation should be favored over another by revolutionaries. It is merely to point out how many past aesthetic movements – certainly from modernism on, but also apparent going back at least to the days of revolutionary romanticism – have turned to the marvelous or fantastical to convey humanity’s striving for freedom in the context of capitalism’s myriad degradations and alienations.
Consider this long list of well-respected creative expression: William Blake’s illuminated poetic mythos; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Brecht’s epic theatre; Dada; Russian futurism; surrealism from the poetry of Andre Breton to the fiction of Leonora Carrington to the paintings of Remedios Varo; the works of Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, Gil Scott-Heron and the rest of the Black Arts Movement; Sun Ra, free jazz and Afrofuturism; the experimental feminist films of Maya Deren; B movie horror and the grotesque gothic of EC Comics; the more experimental sides of punk, hip-hop, and graffiti art.
None seemed satisfied to simply relay reality back to the audience, but rather, and at dramatically different times in history, sought to valorize the irreal impulse, the moment when what is becomes what might be. Critical irrealism, therefore, is less a specific movement than a constant creative urge, a recurring – some might say essential – through-line in artistic expression, at least since the spread of capitalism.
Anupam Roy
3. BORING MARXISM ISN’T MARXISM:
CRITICAL IRREALISM + THE SOCIALIST TRADITION
THERE’S A challenge that always comes up when these kinds of non-realist representations – no matter what they might call themselves – arise. These challenges can come from the right, from the center, the establishment, and even from others on the left. The challenge is, to a certain extent, understandable: such non-realist representations aren’t real. They don’t show us something as it really is. One gets the sense that such critics are fearful that, in indulging in the fanciful, art like this essentially deceives its audience, disarming their critical faculties rather than strengthening them.
There is an easy rebuke to this, at least among those on the left. That is, Marxism is not a strictly realist philosophy or political framework. What’s more, that is why it is uniquely armed to explain and thusly change the world. It is uniquely prepared to face the insanities and often absurd unpredictabilities of capitalism and empire, far more than the strict adherence to static and Manichean conceptions of logic or science that we often see among modern capitalist ideologues. Isaac Deutscher, in his 1955 criticisms of Orwell, lays this out well:
Marxism is not at all rationalist in its philosophy: it does not assume that human beings are, as a rule, guided by rational motives and that they can be argued into socialism by reason […] The class struggle, as Marx describes it, is anything but a rational process […] But the authentic Marxist may claim to be mentally better prepared than the rationalist is for the manifestations of irrationality in human affairs […] He may feel upset or mortified by them, but he need not feel shaken in his Weltanschauung, while the rationalist is lost and helpless when the irrationality of the human existence suddenly stares him in the face. If he clings to his rationalism, reality eludes him. If he pursues reality and tries to grasp it, he must part with his rationalism. [6]
Rationalism, as we experience it under capitalism, is increasingly instrumentalized for the system’s needs. Its rules are portrayed as ironclad and self-justifying. Such a view obviously leaves no room for historical contingency, for explaining the bizarre and unexpected in such a way that change becomes possible. It also explains away capitalism’s worst crimes. More and more, rationalism gives way to reification, the presentation of everything – inequality, degradation, unforgivable opulence – as eternal and natural. As Guy Debord writes, “that which appears is good, that which is good appears.” [7]
The usefulness of strict realism is, in this context, incredibly limited. If we are to extend the example used by Sartre, realism privileges the empirical to the detriment of what may come to be but is not directly in front of us. The motion between the two is rendered static, if not forgotten entirely. It shows us the chair, but hobbles our ability to better understand the other angles of the chair, let alone the forces of life and labor that are embodied within it.
Debates over the real versus the irreal are nothing new within Marxism. Predating Deutscher’s words by almost twenty years are the debates around expressionism, a profoundly influential aesthetic in irrealism’s evolution. On one side was Hungarian literary critic and theorist György Lukács, on the other was Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin. One almost feels sorry for Lukács given how badly he was ganged up on.
It is important to acknowledge the context of Lukács’ suspicions of expressionism and his cleavage to realism. Lukács was by this point, through some combination of coercion and choice, firmly wedded to the line of a thoroughly Stalinized Soviet Union and Communist International. More and more, the needs of the global workers movement were subsumed into the diplomatic and political needs of the USSR. Revolutionary movements were strong-armed into holding off lest they disrupt the iron laws of the transition from capitalism to socialism. The dimensionality of social conditions that made them ripe for explosion were traded for a flat, teleological view of history that mimicked that of the establishment.
Though there is a legitimate debate over the degree to which he accepted and internalized Stalinism, Lukács’ thoughts on expressionism reflect its stodgy historiographical method. By this point he and his family were essentially trapped in the USSR while they watched other Hungarian revolutionaries swallowed and liquidated by the Moscow trials. In defending his dismissals of expressionism, he goes so far as to disavow his essential masterpiece History and Class Consciousness as immature and reactionary. And even with the heyday of Franz Kafka and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari more than a decade in his rearview, he criticizes the movement as solipsistic, sophomoric, decadent, even susceptible to fascism (this despite the Nazis’ howling denunciation of expressionism as “degenerate art”). In Lukács’ view, any artwork which didn’t strive to encompass the totality of reality was simply unworthy of support from Marxists:
If literature is a particular form by means of which objective reality is reflected, then it becomes of crucial importance for it to grasp that reality as it truly is, and not merely to confine itself to reproducing whatever manifests itself immediately and on the surface. If a writer strives to represent reality as it truly is, i.e. if he is an authentic realist, then the question of totality plays a decisive role, no matter how the writer actually conceives the problem intellectually. [8]
If Lukács’ primary concern is grasping the totality, then his attention to subjectivity is at best wanting. Again, this is not unrelated to the politico-ideological needs of Stalinism, in particular its view of human beings as an inert mass to be pointed in one direction or another. The concept that, say, a worker’s highly subjective experience of exploitation and immiseration might itself be a doorway to an understanding of the totality and the chaos of its extreme historical contingencies is, ultimately, treated as inconsequential.
In understanding the shortcomings in Lukacs’ argument, it is important to return to the question of temporality. Introducing these debates in Aesthetics and Politics, Perry Anderson, Rodney Livingstone and Francis Mulhern make just this distinction:
For Lukács, literary history composed an ordered and univocal past whose meaning and value were fixed by the wider history that determined it; the tradition handed down to the present by the “progressive” epochs of the past was a set of compelling norms, a mortmain that literary legatees must honor on pain of disinheritance. For Bloch, on the other hand, this history was… a reservoir in which nothing was ever simply or definitively “past,” less a symptom of precepts than a sum of possibilities. [9]
This is a key distinction. For while capitalism had indeed reshaped the totality of human society and experience, it was not experienced the same way by all. In fact, given the devastation of the First World War, economic collapse, and the rise of fascism, it was all but assured that daily life was vastly different between nations, cities, even neighborhoods and individuals. Grasping totality was no less important, but Lukacs’ arguments failed to successfully refute exactly why the subjective was a starting point, an egregious error given that it was only a collective subjectivity of working-class and oppressed that had the potential to bring down capitalism. The realist novel, undoubtedly essential in illuminating a relatively monolithic capitalism, proved incapable of keeping up with a totality that was increasingly fractured, variegated, and particular.
Brecht points to this in his rejoinder to Lukács. Not only does he expand the debate’s understanding of realism, he illuminates the challenge of portraying historical movement – a challenge he attempted to meet in his aggressively anti-realist methods of Epic Theater:
Realistic means: discovering the causal complexes of society / unmasking the prevailing view of things as the view of those who are in power / writing from the standpoint of the class which offers the broadest solutions for the pressing difficulties in which human society is caught up / emphasizing the element of development / making possible the concrete, and making possible abstraction from it. […] For time flows on, and if it did not, it would be a bad prospect for those who do not sit at golden tables. Methods become exhausted, stimuli no longer work. New problems appear and demand new methods. Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change. Nothing comes from nothing; the new comes from the old, but that is why it is new. [10]
These complexities and complications of “the real” reveal it to be far more multi-faceted and unpredictable, each wrinkle hiding a hidden agency that has yet to emerge and leave its mark on history. This isn’t merely a question of alterity, but of alternative temporalities found within that alterity. Poor, working and oppressed people in capitalism are what we could call “anachronized,” displaced from the timeline of progress, deprived a seat at what Brecht calls the “golden tables,” and therefore from availing ourselves of the full breadth of what any given moment of time has to offer.
The gothic posture of the romantic – existentially displaced, seeking out different rules of cause and consequence from the linear and positivist – provides a unique prospect for weaponizing this exile from history: bringing it to bear on the triumphalism of capital through the redemption of the oppressed. Following Bloch, the discarded human material, “left in the past,” is not truly discarded but has the agency required to remake the future. To move into history in such a way is to force a change in the trajectory of that history, to avail ourselves of the explosive dialectic of what Benjamin calls jetztzeit – “now time,” a time weighted with the disasters of the past but pregnant with multiple futures.
The process of social transformation is therefore one of “en-weirding,” making strange, reckoning with the unfamiliar. In fact, if the goal of Marxism is to reveal the world as both terrifyingly inhuman and ultimately changeable, then we might say this vindicates the assertion of radical social change as an art.
4. IMAGINATION + ORGANIZATION
THERE ARE plenty today who inherit Lukacs’ unfortunate position. Just as unfortunate is that they populate far too many in the left’s ranks. A generous assessment would reveal that this is due mostly to the newness of the new left. Elated at having grasped the basics of a framework that is both more egalitarian and more rational, the rationality easily becomes a cudgel, ill-fitting with chance or contingency.
On the other hand, there are far too many experienced organizers across the spectrum of the left – social democrat, post-Trot, post-Mao, and the more anarcho-leaning varieties – who should know better. They cling to the linear, amalgamating a paint-by-numbers Marxism that is utterly unprepared for the chaos and absurdity of the world as it is. Their models and conceptions of social change almost always boil down to “first this happens, then we can do this” or “the likelihood of this happening is slim and so we best not think of it.” Translation: “this has never happened before, which means it will never happen in the future.” Never mind that the same thing was once said about virtually every surprise history has ever delivered.
Anupam Roy
An embrace of human creativity and imagination by revolutionary organization is therefore, to be glib, a simple matter of being prepared. The obstacles of a late capitalism turning to authoritarianism in the midst of a collapsing climate will not be predictable. To face them with confidence and zeal will require a vision of liberation that is collectively generated, that is built by the creative and critical faculties of as wide a swathe as possible. Our map from subjugation to liberation will not be readymade. It will only be achieved as a result of collective critical and creative initiative, honed and unleashed through a process that has consciously nurtured it.
Is there anything to disagree with in this assessment of the role of organization? More to the point, is there any good reason that, along with organizing meetings and reading groups and all the other well-worn activities of modern socialist groups, the encouragement of art should be so quizzically excluded? For decades, and having much to do with the decimation of the left over the past forty years, our organizational routines have become rote, often aping the alienation working and poor people experience daily already.
Correcting this would not be an innovation to organized Marxism as much as a revival. Looking through history, we find movements and formations with the strongest conceptions of communism, the boldest paths to liberation, are in close conversation with producers of often fantastical irrealist art. There are of course the examples of futurism, constructivism and suprematism at the height of the Russian Revolution, but we can find more recent examples.
Italian operaismo in the 1960s and 70s was closely intertwined with the Arte Povera movement. This was during Italy’s last great industrial push; the gap between underdeveloped countryside and crowded city was stark. Young people from rural backgrounds were pushed into automobile plants and other heavy manufacturing. By the end of the 60s, many of these same workers were openly rebelling, striking and sabotaging their assembly lines, demanding they control the factories, stating proudly that their aim was the elimination of work.
Arte Povera (whose ranks included former auto workers and the children of auto workers) responded by reenchanting the ordinary. Their materials, simple objects used in the home or the workplace, took on unconventional shapes, were festooned with bright revolutionary slogans. Just as operaismo valorized the human over work, Arte Povera showed the commodity transformed by human imagination.
A similar dialogue took place almost simultaneously in France with the rise of autogestion and its embrace by the situationists. Though it would be crude to simply describe autogestion as the French operaismo, what both concepts had in common was an attempt to re-center workers’ control of production for the sake of work’s abolition and the spread of workers’ creativity into the world, remaking it along egalitarian lines. [11]
The situationists, whose understanding of autogestion was highly influenced by the libertarian Marxism of Socialisme ou Barbarie, saw it as bound up with what they called “the transcendence of art.” In this respect it may seem contradictory for other situationists to have engaged in art shows, but many did just that, employing industrial materials and techniques as a critique of the society of the spectacle. And of course, there were attempts to turn the streets of Paris into a living, dynamic art gallery during the events of May ’68: slogans on walls, posters, theatres occupied and transformed by their employees, Godard turning his nose up at the Cannes Film Festival, pleas for workers to rediscover the beach beneath the paving stones. [12]
The point here is not just that avant-garde artists were in touch with radical workers. It is that in the heat of radical struggle, the line between artist and militant blurs. This is what Davis is describing when she writes about art’s “sensitizing role.” In an organizational sense, it is an accelerant in understanding one’s own conditions and the potential for their transformation, not just in an intellectual sense but in an emotional and psychological one. Those who make and those who take in what is made enter into a democratic exchange of ever-evolving ideas. The anthropological barriers between art, work, and everyday life imposed by class society begin to dissolve, and visions of a world of democratically unleashed creativity become tangible. It is a freeing experience, and undeniably strange, ultimately adding to the excitement that comes with finding a new world.
A similar impulse – synthesis of imaginative praxis, an irreal embrace of the fantastical – already undergirds the discourse in much of the left’s most important (re-)discoveries. It is not uncommon to hear the works of Marge Piercy, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler and other feminist sci-fi writers referenced in discussions about social reproduction. And why shouldn’t they be? Why, if the goal of social reproduction theory is to reinvent the domestic sphere more equitably through the framework of radical democracy, should we deprive ourselves of the insights provided by authors whose books attempted this reimagining decades before?
We might pose the same questions of “the right to the city”-work and radical urbanism. How often are the Blade Runner films or other dystopian critiques referenced when radicals survey the modern city? By this point it’s become almost trite. However, it is also entirely (and depressingly) appropriate to do so. Between the complete collapse of infrastructure, the increasing commodification of housing, combined with serious discussion among idiot tech moguls like Elon Musk seriously talking about colonies on Mars, we are faced with a terrible multiplicity of visions and futures for the city. Considering the immensity of the role they play in human history, it is understandable that we find ourselves turning to art and literature so that we can wrap our heads around the possibilities. And indeed, there is a wealth of radical and Marxist artistic engagement that seeks to reimagine the city, from William Morris to Italo Calvino to (returning to the situationists) the practice of psychogeography and its encouragement to question the design of every street corner.
We are also forced to reckon with the way in which irrealist art, broadly defined, has come to dominate our cultural moment. It’s reflected in everything from the almost unassailable popularity of Twin Peaks to the current (and well-warranted!) trendiness of Afrofuturism and Afro-surrealism. Hollywood already relies heavily on non-realist genres. Much of this output, though, while certainly irrealist, is the opposite of critical. It’s a status quo irrealism; properties like The Avengers or The Walking Dead which seem dedicated to contenting us with disaster, immiseration, militarism, rather than questioning or voicing discontent.
On the other hand, there are plenty of genuinely critical irrealist works that have also found critical acclaim in the mainstream: Boots Riley’s Sorry To Bother You, Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us, Random Acts of Flyness, vaporwave music, the work of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, Alan Moore’s graphic novels, the music of Protomartyr, Clipping, Algiers, Flying Lotus, Zeal & Ardor.
These are not only genuinely critical, they are popular. They also exhibit, in one way or another, both an existential displacement and the disruption that results when the displaced push back into history, which is why they resonate so much with young working-class people. To label all of these works critical irrealist – despite massive differences between them across genre and medium – isn’t to dilute the term. Rather, it is to identify a common ontological thread, re-establishing a lineage of popular avant-garde critique and reclaiming that lineage as a living one, playing a role in contemporary utopian impulses.
Socialist artist, writer and Imago co-editor Adam Turl, during his time teaching compositional drawing at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, assigned his class – all young working-class people, mostly people of color – to draw their life in comic form. All notably dealt in fantastical representations, very few were straight realist. One in particular stuck out to both of us. The artist was a queer woman of color, who envisioned her life as sentient tentacles grew out of her back, exhibiting a will of their own. The tentacles were so strong-willed that the only way she could control them was to retreat to the surrounding Nevada desert, where they became dehydrated. Faced with a choice between civilization and exiled autonomy, she chose the latter.
This is the anxiety and anger that Locust and Imago seek to weaponize. In a world that is increasingly making existence impossible, every working-class person is creating their own, not necessarily to escape the impossible but to mediate it, to make sense of it, to hold on to some semblance of a future. Of course, that future can only be collective, and it’s hoped that in opening up these spaces for people to communicate these futures to each other, they can become the starting point for such a collective future. Making liberation weird again, if you will, isn’t just about fun or catharsis. Fundamentally, it’s about a mass rejection of impossibility.
Alexander Billet is a writer, artist, and general layabout based in Los Angeles. His writing has been featured in Los Angeles Review of Books, Salvage, Jacobin, Radical Art Review, and other publications. He is a founding member of the Locust Arts & Letters Collective and is a producer of Locust Radio.
ENDNOTES
Löwy’s essay appears as chapter 12 in A Concise Companion to Realism, edited by Matthew Beaumont. WB, 2010.
“Illuminating Reality From Within,” interview with Michael Löwy, Red Wedge, August 22nd, 2018. http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/illuminating-reality-from-within
Sartre, Jean Paul. The Imaginary. London: Routledge, 2004 (185-187).
“Manifesto For an Independent Revolutionary Art,” written by Leon Trotsky and Andre Breton, signed by Breton and Diego Rivera, 1938. https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit/works/rivera/manifesto.htm
Davis, Angela. Women, Culture & Politics. Vintage Books, 1990 (199-200).
Deutscher, Isaac. “1984 – The Mysticism of Cruelty,” appears in Heretics and Renegades and Other Essays. Hamish and Hamilton, 1955. https://www.marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1955/1984.htm
Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm
Adorno, Theodor, et al. Aesthetics and Politics. Verso, 1980 (33).
Aesthetics and Politics (13-14).
Aesthetics and Politics (82).
For more on the relationship between operaismo and Arte Povera, see Nicholas Cullinan’s essay “From Vietnam to Fiat-Nam: The Politics of Arte Povera,” appearing in October, issue 124, Spring 2008, pp. 8-30.
An excellent overview of the situationists’ relationship with autogestion and Socialisme ou Barbarie, as well of the situationist movement generally, is provided in The Situationist International: A Critical Handbook, edited by Alastair Hemmens and Gabriel Zacarias, Pluto Press, 2020.