THE MULTIVERSE trope in contemporary culture is overdetermined.
It is ideological. It flows with the fragmented totality of an attenuating neoliberal capitalism.
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.
Paradoxically, the more content that is produced, generally speaking, the less cultural value the underlying product seems to have. There is an expansion and deflation of the cultural signs associated with each franchise. The more Star Wars there is, the less there is to Star Wars.
The logic of these reproduced forms feeds back into overall meaning. There are multiple Kirks and Spocks just as there are endless combinations of Ricks and Morties. There is no equality; even in limited social democratic terms. But neither is anyone truly unique or “special.”
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.” One’s relationship to this chaotic totality is determined in large part by social class, gender, race, nationality, and other matters of oppression and identity. At the same time this chaotic totality is seemingly estranged from historic and authentic contexts.
In the 20th century, for example, one might sit down and read a newspaper, or a stack of newspapers, to get a sense of the world. Each newspaper constructed a particular narrative.
Locust Review 11 (Winter 2024): Cover art by Laura Fair-Schulz. Social media splash image by Tish Turl and Adam Turl.
The New York Times presented the viewpoint of the liberal bourgeoisie. The Wall Street Journal presented a more conservative view from the financial-wing of the capitalist class. The Chicago Sun-Times presented the historic tabloid approach to working-class readers (sometimes veering left or right depending on what Gramsci called “common sense”) while The Chicago Tribune was both “respectable” and tending Republican; respectably repeating white suprematist nonsense well into the 1950s. The Chicago Defender presented the sometimes unified-but-contradictory politics of Black Chicago. On the fringes there were radical newspapers like The Daily Worker, The Industrial Worker, The Black Panther, the semi-left-wing weeklies born of the 1960s New Left, etc.
News — in the US at any rate — is now often consumed in fragments gleaned from their chaotic aggregation in social media. Each element in the “feed” is informed by a different ideological worldview. But, unlike the coherent orchestration of these ideologies and worldviews in the newspapers, they are organized in an entirely different manner, by algorithm. A kind of ideological multiverse appears.
Here is Q-Anon conspiracy, here is an intellectually sound Marxist essay, here is a crypto-fascist post about architecture, here is an adorable kitten, here is a cis-heterosexist meme about pronouns (they only have the one joke), here are tankie apologetics for the Chinese government, here is the State Department line on Ukraine, and so on. This ideological multiverse may seem natural and even incoherent, but it is the product of an ur-encoding of capitalist ideology.
Once upon a time, young punks combed through xeroxed zines. Now that encounter may be automated by Spotify. What was once a conscious effort — seeking out a sort of authentic musical expression — becomes an overdetermined introduction to this or that musical gesture. What was once curated by “Mike,” an older Jamaican gentleman with an encyclopedic knowledge of music who worked at the record shop on the high street, is determined by an unseen capitalist robot.
This is not to wax nostalgic but to articulate the differences in how these cultural products are experienced.
We engage with culture in 21st century capitalism as a meta-montage. Scrolling Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, image follows image, text follows text, video follows video, sound follows sound. The origin of each image and utterance may be distinct — an artist in Brooklyn, a journalist in Palestine, a paid propagandist for Israel’s apartheid regime, a single-mother in Dayton, an “influencer” in Los Angeles, a politician in Ottawa, a line-cook in Orlando, a queer activist in Texas — but their aggregation creates a new totality.
Superficially, this seems to have democratic, or even radical, potential. But it is coupled with a perverse devaluation of the individual subject, in terms of the individual’s digital and “in real life” (IRL) performance of their cultural being, but also in the value of human life to capital more generally. Capital has downgraded the value of its surplus populations, its surplus labor.
In this way, the meta- and multiverse tropes and concepts ratify an anxiety that we have ceased to matter. Just as Kirk and Spock have ceased to be characters created by Gene Roddenberry but commodities owned by Paramount, we have ceased to be individuals.
The degradation of this capitalist montage, in concert with the immiserations and oppressions of capitalism proper, ultimately compels us to invent our own counter-narratives in order to re-author our own being.
Another multiverse is necessary; a multiverse that elevates all individuals and social groups as unique and important — a multiverse of capitalism’s gravediggers.
IN SAM Esmail’s liberal-apocalyptic film, Leave the World Behind (2023), the United States suffers a series of cyberattacks that produce power outages, shut down the Internet and phone services, shipwreck oil tankers, and cause airplanes to fall from the sky.
Those behind the cyberattacks are not disclosed. Instead, the film focuses on the personal responses of a family from Brooklyn vacationing in a rented house on Long Island when the attacks begin — and on the family that rented them the house. The vacationing couple, Amanda and Clay Sandford (Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke), and their two kids, Archie and Rose (Charlie Evans and Farrah Mackenzie), are thrown onto a metaphorical life raft with the father who rented them the home, G.H. Scott (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter, Ruth (Myha’la).
Several cybernetic questions are raised by the film. “Cybernetic” refers here, as it does in much of the literature, not only to the bodily fusion of human beings with technology but also the growing social and psychological fusion of individuals with technology and mass media, particularly digital media. When the movie begins, Rose, the Sandfords’ thirteen year old daughter, has been binge-watching the sitcom Friends (1994). The cybernetic attacks occur as she is about to stream the series finale. As the United States collapses into chaos and civil war, Rose is frustrated that she is unable to watch the finale.
In the final scene of the film, Rose stumbles upon a wealthy family’s doomsday bunker. The bunker has electricity and a massive supply of DVDs. She, of course, decides to watch Friends. The show’s theme-song plays over the movie’s closing credits.
In much of the critical discourse on the cybernetic, there is a concern of the obliteration of the self, the end of human subjectivity. In Leave the World Behind, as Rose presses play on the Friends DVD, Ruth and Amanda have just witnessed — from a distance — several large explosions in New York City. As the world comes unraveled, Rose takes refuge in a banal television show. It is, of course, understandable escapism. But there is also something greater linking mortality and the cybernetic; something that raises death and possibility of escaping death. This is because the cybernetic asks us where one’s subjectivity ends and media/technology begins.
The digital should ease the creation of a world without material constraint for the vast majority of the human race.
This brings to mind ideas like Russian Cosmism, the esoteric philosophy of 19th century Moscow librarian Nikolai Fedorov. In the 20th century, cosmism influenced the early Soviet avant-garde, science fiction (SF), medicine, and rocket science, mingling with the revolutionary socialist impulses of Bolshevism before its eventual marginalization and repression following the Stalinist Thermidor. Fedorov believed that the human race should unite around the common goal of abolishing death and resurrecting all lost generations.
Tish Turl + Adam Turl, Born Again Labor Tract 3: Shawnee Forest Automation, digital prints, collage, acrylic painting, coffee, trade union pins, glitter, wig hair, cotton and ash on canvas (2024).
Tish Turl + Adam Turl, Born Again Labor Tract 3: Shawnee Forest Automation, digitally altered drawings and collage (2024).
From a Marxist perspective, the cybernetic represents an increasing fusion (or blurring) of dead labor and living labor — or fixed capital and variable capital. This contradiction can be seen in several ways. On the one hand, dead labor (accumulated capital, means of production, etc.) may be experienced as a kind of enslavement of living labor (the living, breathing, worker). On the other hand, as noted, its overgrowth — abundance — is the material basis for a democratic post-capitalist society. But, as the joke goes, artificial intelligence (AI) writes poetry so you can work at Jiffy Lube.
Borrowing from a more Romantic tradition — as well as the Aforsurrealists and Surrealists — Locust Review has noted that the cybernetic fusion of living and dead labor is a fusion of the working-class with its ancestors. This can be either a vampiric relation (as described by Marx) or the beginning of something like the Bolshevik-Cosmist dream.
Bolshevik-Cosmism — as expressed in the SF of Alexander Bogdanov — proposed a literal version of Walter Benjamin’s Marxist-theological apocatastasis that the revolutionary generation redeems all previous generations of the exploited and oppressed. In his short story, “Immortality Day,” Bogdanov describes a future communist society in which immortality has been achieved.
AS OF writing, the official death toll in Gaza has far passed thirty-three thousand — a tally that has been morbidly questioned by President Joe Biden. We see a video from the Palestinian journalist Motaz Azaiza in which a child trembles uncontrollably after surviving Israel’s aerial massacres of the Gaza Strip. The image of the child underlines the seeming impossibility of attempting to recoup artistic and political subjectivity in the face of overwhelming digital and social phenomena.
If writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, what is it to write during Israel’s mass re-enactment of a Warsaw Ghetto clearing? How does “absolute reification” — in the Marxist sense of making concrete social relations abstract and objectifying the human — play out in a mushrooming cultural overgrowth turned digital “content?”
This overgrowth is contradictory because this digital matrix is participatory and penetrates distances and borders. Israel’s clumsy online propaganda falters in the sheer weight of the easily researchable facts and evidence. While Israel enjoys the bias of most traditional forms of western mass media — particularly in the US — there has been an avalanche of memes mocking the obviousness of their digital propaganda.
When complaints were made that TikTok’s algorithm was converting young people to support Palestine, company spokespersons argued that their younger user base just happened to be pro-Palestinian.
Particularly in moments of acute crisis (the current genocide in Gaza, the Black Lives Matter uprisings, the Arab Spring), social media is unable to contain the rebellious communications of the masses. However, in contradiction to the cyberutopianism that accompanied the early Internet, in the final instance, its algorithms are shaped by capital. These often have a depressive impact on both political and artistic subjectivity.
The social industry may ease the initial formation of resistance and counter-narratives in some cases, but it often sabotages long-term coherence (particularly for the left) by placing them into a matrix overdetermined by capital.
Our Instagram feeds are full of banalities but also art, communism, capitalist deprivation, and sometimes resistance. They can also conceal — by volume and algorithmic censorship —the “never again” happening right now. What capital is unable to do so in the first instance, it will do over time.
Israel and its proxies are now flooding feeds with paid advertisements that paint apartheid Israel as a victim. A Human Rights Watch report shows that there has been a systematic repression of pro-Palestine material on social media.
The online left of the 2010s has been further confused by shifts in algorithms — ostensibly to curb “Russian” propaganda and favor “official” media. There is a prevailing sense among socialists that their “world has shrunk.” They simply no longer see the posts of their comrades on social media.
The Left outsourced parts of its communications — its “scaffolding” to borrow from Lenin — to capitalist social media. When capitalism shifted its algorithms it threw parts of that left into isolation.
After the January 6th (2020) putsch, major social media platforms were tasked with combating disinformation. This led to platforms like Facebook boosting the algorithmic reach of legacy media like CNN and The New York Times, and reducing the reach of alternative media. At the same time, under pressure to monetize platforms, posts from “friends” were downplayed in favor of sponsored content (advertisements).
In the 2010s, it was common to discuss the existence of “LeftBook,” an informal, national and semi-global network of Leftists facilitated by social media. Debates were had by thousands of persons in real time on platforms. These debates were sometimes productive. For example, our comrades at Red Wedge Magazine helped push back against the “Left” anti-immigrant and anti-queer arguments of Angela Nagle who had briefly been championed by Jacobin.
The mass Palestine solidarity protests and resistance around the world are a central and necessary part of the answer to apocalyptic drift lit by digital spectacle. The attempt to make Palestinian solidarity taboo (in the US) or illegal (in Europe) is part and parcel of an authoritarian shift in mainstream politics. Resistance for Palestine is, in this way, resistance for the entirety of the exploited and oppressed. This is the classical Marxist understanding of class-conscious solidarity and internationalism.
However, in our “official culture,” including its social media and streaming, doom is often idle chatter. Or doom-scrolling. Various apocalypses and dystopias have become clichéd entertainment — as if to make redundant Walter Benjamin’s note on alienated humanity experiencing “its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”
The Left, and the working-class and oppressed overall, continue to fail in cohering or imagining a counter-totality to Adorno’s “total that society has become” — or an alternative to what Mark Fisher called, with different emphases and at a different historical conjuncture, capitalist realism. There are many important gestures at counter-imaginations — both IRL and online. But, as individual elements, they become constituent in a labyrinth of capitalist cultural signification.
It would seem axiomatic that the Holocaust would not have been possible in a world with smartphones or mass digital media, but what if there is a version of the world in which it would be possible despite (or even partially because of) mass digital media? We had video, photographic, and textual access to the unnecessary mass deaths of millions due to COVID-19 and it happened anyway.
Ailene Pasco, Plastic Earth Project, sculpture and installation, plarned plastic bags and other material (2023).
Consider the problem of the weather as it relates to climate change. Timothy Morton argues that the most banal of all conversations becomes either a denial or acknowledgement of climate disaster. But, unlike a scab or a racist, you cannot punch the weather in the nose. You can’t have a sit-in at the weather’s office. You can’t usually protest the meteorologist. Every time someone brings up the “weather” you are now reminded of the gap between what must be done and your own subjective capacity.
This is another aspect of what Jodi Dean describes as a contradiction of participation in communicative capitalism. On the one hand, to develop an informed war of position (in the Gramscian sense) or war of maneuver (in the Leninist sense), one must be informed and participate in some form of mass communication. On the other hand, digital political statements are often separated from actual organizing. Images of trauma can become disciplinary images.
There is a proliferation of intensive existential material crises that seem to dwarf the responsive capabilities of the existing left (let alone specific individuals). This is accompanied by a mass overgrowth of the cultural superstructure. This reinforces a crisis of subjective imagination. While seemingly democratic in access, the digital culture not only shifts the forms of specific artworks and political gestures, it is structurally biased toward a kind of philosophic idealism. What specifically is said — while still important — has become less determinant than the fact that something is being said.
Content! It is Moses and the prophets!
Discrete forms of culture (the painting, photograph, film, poem) have come to mimic the neoliberal commodity and financial form. This meming of culture — and its reconstruction by Artificial Intelligence (AI) — ape the production and financial networks of contemporary capitalism.
In this way the AI generated digital image is not unlike the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and similar financial instruments that enabled the 2008 financial crisis. CDO’s — comprising hundreds of thousands of “real life” mortgages — were compiled largely by computer programs. They became so complex that even their Wall Street creators had little idea what was in them. Like their financial counterparts, digital images are placed into a seemingly unknowable montage; or remixed into “new” Frankenstein images by AI (like a CDO built of other CDOs).
This digital montage has a meaning and aggregation that is, in the end, mostly shaped by the needs of capital. In the case of financial instruments this was to maximize the profitability of investments and discipline productive capital. The holy grail for digital finance, as Edemilson Paraná notes in Digitalized Finance: Financial Capitalism and Informational Revolution, is the eradication of latency (the delay in computer network communication). The digital memeification of finance, increasingly free from delay in human or computer-decision making, automates the best possible investment outcome. Capital flows where it is “needed” when it is “needed.” Human intervention is minimized.
If the primary economic motivator of digital finance is capital accumulation, for social media it is engagement and information accumulation. This is the commodity that the social industry then sells back to the remainder of the capitalist class.
DIGITAL GESTURES SEEM to float separate from material and political crises. But this is an illusion. A movie about atomic weapons is fused with a two-hour feminist toy advertisement creating the Barbienheimer meme. Barbienheimer “floats,” however, above a world about to accelerate the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, a world in which abortion rights have been suspended for millions, a world in which European and American “leftists” defend the use of depleted uranium munitions against Russian imperialism in Ukraine.
We refer here, of course, to the Barbienheimer meme rather than the discrete meanings of the films, Oppenheimer and Barbie. It is not that the meanings of those two films are unimportant — a biographical film about a problematic scientist and a mainline feminist appropriation of the Barbie-toy (albeit under the aegis of the corporation that owns it). It is to compare and contrast those discrete meanings with a related — but also different — participatory capitalist montage created in the digital gesamtkunstwerk of social media.
Barbeinheimer meme (2023).
While this clearly had marketing benefits for the movie studios the meme was overdetermined by several cultural and structural factors and heavily conditioned by capitalist ideology. How do we read, in retrospect, the glossy fusion of “feminist Barbie” and scientific mass murder in light of the “diverse” Biden administration’s support for a racial genocide? Karine Jean-Pierre is the first openly gay person — and first Black woman — to serve as a presidential press secretary. On October 30th she compared Palestine solidarity protesters — many of whom are people of color and Jewish — to white suprematists.
Marxist subjects find themselves in a bind. Mass democratic emancipatory politics necessitate mass communication. However, the structure of communicative capitalism often contradicts those goals.
Conditioned by communicative capitalism’s neoliberal individuation, the US Left bathes in a meme culture semi-separate from the actuality and “authenticity” of IRL organizing. It is “semi-separate” because this relationship is in flux. In the early days of the Gaza genocide the distance between organizing and digital gestures closed rapidly. It has since begun to widen once more.
The primacy of exchange-value has overcome use-value in mass media. In Marxist economics, use-value refers to the use of a commodity. Bread is for eating. Exchange-value refers to the money-value of the commodity in the market. Bread is for sale at the bakery. In capitalism, as Marx argued, commodities are produced primarily for exchange value.
However, even in capitalism, there have been partial exceptions. Because the ideological apparatus of the media was central to maintaining class rule, facilitating debates within the bourgeoisie, and promoting certain conceptions of society, the state interfered with the media to direct its activities in a particular way, subsidizing or financing certain forms of media or proscribing its mandates and actions.
In communicative capitalism, as noted, what is being said is often less important than the fact something is being said.
How is this experienced by most individuals? The volume of communication, in tandem with constant crises, seems to collapse time and geography. But the exploited and oppressed subject is still constrained by geography and time.
In 2018 and 2019, Locust comrade Adam Turl borrowed Boris Groys’ argument that the former Soviet Union acted as a kind of “total installation” — a gesamtkunstwerk in which people “performed” the idea of socialism (in contrast to the reality of a one-party state capitalist dictatorship). Turl argues that digital media — particularly social media — acts as a kind of “total art of neoliberal capitalism.” It is also participatory. Its structure decontextualizes the avatars of its users — much as the “white cube” decontextualizes the artworks placed within in the gallery.
This places the performance of our selves into a montage shaped by capitalist algorithms. By montage, we mean that the images and texts we place into social media become part of a larger artwork. Just as the images around other images in a film impact the meaning of those images, the overall social media feed has its own particular meaning. We contribute to that montage but we cannot determine its overall meaning. Therefore, our individual contributions — conditioned by the constraint of our proletarian selves — attempt to find and create meaning in a “space” that performs a symbolic and individuated lack of constraint; a capitalist utopia (in form).
The artistic subject — in the Romantic and modernist tradition, the artist — finds themselves in a related bind. Art is both a spiritual and social practice, the existential negotiation of individual and collective subjectivity. The burgeoning of social dangers, coupled with the devaluing of the individual artistic gesture, call into question the historic functions of art.
HOW SHOULD we — or could we — approach Marxist cultural praxis in the face of existential threats facing both historic Marxist subjects and the subjectivity of art? While these threats are myriad, reproducing and contingent, the largest could be described as what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects” — complex interrelations of networks that tend to overwhelm pattern discernment and historic cultures of subjectivity.
Climate change threatens to undermine the abundance necessary to create an equal and democratic post-capitalist society. Contemporary Marxists, for example, are engaged in a debate on “economic growth” — divided between those who argue economic growth is still possible and desirable versus those who argue that growth is no longer necessary to create socialism — that there is already more than enough “abundance” to allow for a post-capitalist society — and that further capital accumulation will compound metabolic rift, calling into question the viability of civilization itself.
Amy Madden, All That is Solid/Hyena Sticker, drawing.
This growth/degrowth debate overlaps (albeit not identically) with those who argue for a reconstitution of social democratic norms and those who argue for more revolutionary strategies. Andraes Malm has called for a “war communism”-type mobilization to mitigate climate change — referring to the mass mobilization of the Bolsheviks from 1918-1920 to defend the October Revolution during the Russian Civil War. More social democratic Marxists tend to argue that capitalism can produce growth and greater social spending while also minimizing climate change.
Regardless of who is right it seems clear that the ideologues of capital have decided (at least in the west) that growth and social policy are incompatible. Recent crises seem to indicate a ruling-class that is comfortable with large numbers of human beings — particularly those who are seen as surplus population — being written off.
AI threatens labor, recapitulating the dream of “cybernetic masters and robot slaves” that animates Silicon Valley ideology. AI also threatens the subjectivity of art, while feeding back into the sense that subjectivity has been displaced more globally.
While art always dealt with the social and subjective, in modernity the subjectivity of the artist — and the expression of that subjectivity — became central. This reflected bourgeois ideology. But it also elevated the idea of human subjectivity more generally. The Romantics put this individual subjectivity in opposition to the utilitarianism of the industrial revolution and capitalist commerce.
In the 20th century, the artist Joseph Beuys could democratize that Romantic impulse by arguing that everyone is an artist. The possibility of fusing individual subjectivity and social equality animated many in the historic avant-gardes.
In Ways of Seeing (1973) John Berger could predict with utopian and emancipatory hope the advent of platforms like YouTube. Those platforms, however, have failed to deliver on that utopian promise. Participatory but overdetermined, this overgrowth of superstructure seems to make the individual subject “small” while disappearing collective subjects in a web of Horatio Alger-like memetic performance.
The world is full of objects and images. What might have once represented God or the emancipation of humanity becomes digital wallpaper. The masses are denied the substance and actuality of subjective expression while at the same time given access to a simulation of subjective expression.
The contemporary artist lives in a stalled teleology, a gothic-futurist relationship to cultural signs and gestures, floating in a world of often meaningless possibility. The artist can do anything. But it doesn’t seem to matter anymore.
Marxism is concerned with both individual and collective human subjects. This has been obscured by various determinisms. It has been, at the level of studying Marx himself, obscured by a divorce of the economic and philosophic.
Marx describes the alienation of the worker as an alienation from “reality,” in which the worker is — in the Lukácsian sense — reified or thingified. In pre-class societies, this labor is unalienated. The worker can imagine themselves abstractly but has conscious control, or at least partial control (as part of a collective) over that abstraction. In class society, the worker becomes an unconscious object. Marxism is, in this sense, a struggle to regain both collective and individual subjectivity.
It is a betrayal of this Marxism when latter-day Marxists re-thingify the working-class as a political object sans agency. For Marx, alienated and exploited labor attenuated the worker from “nature” and the “sensuous external world.” This alienation separates the worker from the collective genius of human species-being — the great leap forward in social knowledge that allowed for the creation of language, poetry, literature and art.
Man [sic] is a species-being, not only because in practice and theory he adopts the species as his object (his own as well as those of other things), but — and this is only another way of expressing it — because he treats himself as the actual, living species, because he treats himself as a universal and therefore free being.
Class society — and capitalism with its intensive divisions of labor — estranges workers from that conscious being. From being a master of the object of labor the worker becomes an object of labor. In this way, the contemporary memeification of culture and art, in the absence of social revolution, ratifies this alienation across all aspects of the culture.
The culture becomes, as a totality, alienated. Art becomes “text” and text becomes code. Culture becomes math. Math becomes accounting.
The machines — human and digital — make the “paintings.” You work at UPS. The machines write poetry. You work at Starbucks. The machines become actors. You are an adjunct. The machines make movies. You have a diabetic seizure in your studio apartment.
Every artistic gesture becomes, by the erosion of its discrete meaning — like the erosion of individual subjectivity — another tautophrase. Everything “is what it is.”
THERE IS an overwhelming weight to present social, cultural, economic, and political phenomena. And an unbearable lightness of subjective being; collective and individual.
This is experienced as a kind of impossibility of daily life. A student hasn’t shown up to class for weeks. When notified of their coming failure, they reveal that family members have died.
More than one million people died from COVID-19 in the US alone. But this has almost zero social acknowledgement. There is no collective mourning by which the social consciousness or subconsciousness can process the loss.
The experience of social media, new fascisms, climate disaster, the decline of western imperialism could all be described as hyperobjects — conceptual cousins of the multiverse. According to Timothy Morton, hyperobjects are “massively distributed in space-time” and therefore tend to overwhelm distinctions needed for pattern discernment (a key aspect of our species-being).
For Morton, a hyperobject collapses foreground and background and unravels the Burkean sublime (in which the terror of subjective smallness gives one a renewed sense of mastery over other aspects of being), and the Marxist differentiation of subject and object.
As noted, the most banal conversation (the weather) becomes either a denial of climate change or another apocalyptic moment. For Morton, apocalyptic art and films cease to be prophetic and become a sort of apologetics. We argued something similar to this independently at Locust Review. Hyperobjects defy subjective action because their “local manifestation,” according to Morton, is not the hyperobject itself. Our moment of climate change is not climate change. Climate change stretches backwards in time for decades and forward in time for centuries.
Morton roots his arguments in something called “object-oriented ontology.” This has been criticized by many Marxists, including Andreas Malm. Morton is, much like the best postmodernists and poststructuralists, providing a good description of a cultural phenomenon but over-naturalizing it.
Object oriented ontology’s argument that objects can have agency only appears true because of the overwhelming dominance of certain kinds of objects in our everyday lives (smartphones for example). But these objects are shaped by human subjectivity and contested by class (and other aspects of oppression). They do not, as of yet, have autonomy or true subjectivity and agency.
At any rate, if hyperobjects seem to preclude or minimize individual and political subjectivity, there are other concepts that hold out the chance of recouping subjectivity with and against large phenomena.
FOR EDMUND Burke, the nature of the sublime (the feeling of smallness in the face of overwhelming phenomena) pivots on how it makes the subject feel small. The storm, mountain, symphony, may make the subject “small” but it does not displace subjectivity or obliterate it. Instead, it recasts other aspects of life (we might include, perhaps against Burke’s politics, the social aspects of life).
The storm is terrible and beautiful but it underlines that the more mundane aspects of life are mailable. In this way, for Burke, the overwhelming objective character of the sublime invigorates subjectivity. There is arguably something of this sublime in the experience of a mass uprising, protest, or strike. The individual participant becomes more through their social collectivity.
Anupam Roy, Land Guards, drawing (2023).
This sense of subjective empowerment, however, may falter in the face of something like climate change. Unlike a beautiful storm witnessed from a safe house — or an uprising witnessed from the solidarity of its collective center — you cannot weather climate change from a safe objective point.
Immanuel Kant divides the sublime into the mathematical and dynamic. The mathematical sublime is a matter of quantity (the sheer volume of stars in the sky). The dynamic sublime is a matter of threat to the individual. For Kant, reason is the answer to the sublime — our rationality can figure out both the mathematical or dynamic sublime. This is a form of positivism. It reminds one of the bourgeois who acknowledges the existential threat of climate change but is assured that technological development will “save us.”
Arthur Schopenhauer uses the sublime as a vehicle for something more or less like “art for art’s sake.” He believed that humans can never truly be fulfilled — even when their desires are met, as this simply produces new desires. But art is, for Schopenhauer, a human activity that can short-circuit this “condition” by reasserting something like Platonic forms. A painting of a tree that makes us think not of a specific tree but the abstraction “tree.” This supposedly shocks us from our utilitarian and endless pursuit of our desires. The sublime exists when that beauty works in concert with a threat against our problematic will/self. Burke’s storm, in this case, promises a kind of freedom for Schopenhauer.
There is some truth to this argument — dovetailing with the Marxist art critic Ernst Fisher’s understanding of art’s social-spiritual origins. But this is not the result of memetic relation to Platonic forms as much as it is a reaction against the utilitarianism of class society (particularly capitalist class society).
Jean-Francois Lyotard’s conception of a postmodern sublime is situated as a “silence imposed on knowledge” rooted in a failure of modernity. He called Auschwitz an “inverted sublime.” In all, this seems to jibe with his arguments in The Postmodern Condition that rationality is just another form of irrational rule making.. But modernity fails for Lyotard because he judges it on his own terms. It is because he believes in the modernist telos that it fails him.
By way of contrast, in Romantic art and poetry, the sublime was often considered “impossible” to capture. However the attempt to capture this sublime was considered a kind of noble act or performance. See, for example, the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich or the Hudson River School.
Often read as a reaction to modernization and industry, the Romantics weren’t necessarily against “science” or emancipatory politics, but often were against the inhuman forms that science took, or the failures represented by the French Thermidor. See, for example, the enthusiasm Romantics like William Blake, Francisco Goya, and Beethoven initially had for the French Revolution before their disillusionment upon the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars.
Georges Bataille argues that the economy produces an excess beyond that which can be economically recuperable. The artist Anupam Roy seems to note this in terms of emotive-being (as a sort of by-product of the economic excess) that can either be directed toward something like socialism or something like fascism. That excess — the “accursed share” — is spent on luxury or war, etc. (or in terms from Capital — department III), or even spent on catastrophe more generally (for example, climate crisis as a result of metabolic rift). A sort of ritual sacrifice is necessitated. Or, what would have been ritual sacrifice in earlier forms of class society. However, in capitalism, this threatens the system overall.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome is eclectic and often described as post-structuralist — a sort of “nonlinear” network or pattern. Rhizome refers to the interrelated root system of trees, etc. It is seemingly non hierarchical, etc. The popularity of this idea made sense during the neoliberal turn, the rise of postmodernism, globalization, and networked computers, etc. This describes a pattern of being and aspects of production — and related cultural expressions — but can miss the materiality beneath the patterns (and their ongoing hierarchies).
This bears similarity to Focault’s conception of power, and a rejection of vulgar Marxist and Hegelian teleologies. But it is largely a descriptive theory. Things flow but the determination of their flow becomes an unknown abstraction.
WHAT DOES it mean to make art in a world of seemingly endless viral reproducing digital images and growing social crises and existential threats?
In the 2010s, against postmodernism and vulgar Marxism, a few Marxists around Historical Materialism and in the journal Red Wedge began discussing the concept of differentiated totality (a non-reductive totality). Rather than a fragmentary rhizomatic network we argued that an overall pattern of identities, exploitations, and oppressions was overdetermined by the conflict between capitalism and nascent class consciousness. A similar concept is outlined in Holly Lewis’ comparative philosophy of queer theory, feminism and Marxism in The Politics of Everybody. Because we found little on the concept of “differentiated totality” we borrowed a great deal from Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. The poet Richard Hamilton describes something similar to “differentiated totality” in their work as “discordant will.”
Omnia Sol, Qwerty, video installation (2023).
In the early 2010s, Locust comrade Adam Turl started burying their own work in a series called Dead Paintings. They would leave paintings in the ground, usually for a period of eight months, exhume them and display their rotten corpses. When Turl transitioned back into making work that was not meant to be destroyed — in the mid 2010s — they started with paintings that they considered to be “anti-memes.” They coupled text and images in a manner similar to the then ubiquitous meme formats circulating online, albeit heavily influenced by expressionism, art history, and a sense of (not particularly memetic) social and individual pathos. But, re-reading Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and Boris Groys, among others, they started to think about the totality of digital images; how they are combined in a kind of meta-montage by social media and streaming services. Turl and other comrades began to suspect we needed to think of a kind of counter-montage, a counter metarverse, a counter multiverse.
Locust Review was started in late 2019 by a group of artists and writers who had previously been associated with Red Wedge Magazine. Red Wedge had been an ecumenical Marxist art and culture website and journal throughout the 2010s. It aimed to produce a kind of “regroupment” of leftist and Marxist cultural strategies — borrowing from Surrealism, Constructivism, film montage, Russian futurism, Brechtian theater, the theater of the oppressed, early Punk and Hip Hop, the Mexican muralists, and so on — under the idea of trying to recreate a “popular avant-garde” that incorporated lessons from the aforementioned artistic movements.
Locust Review, however, was based on counterposing Mark Fisher’s concept of “capitalist realism” — as the broader cultural default of an attenuated neoliberalism, holding that nothing could be imagined that didn’t fit into the logic of the free market — with Michael Löwy’s concept of “critical irrealism” — the idea of using irrealist cultural gestures (speculative fiction, absurdism, Surrealism, science fiction, etc.) to create “critical estrangement” and counter-imaginaries.
We also wanted Locust Review to be a platform for socialist and working-class artists, where the work of each artist remained their own unique work, but was part of a “larger” collective artwork (the journal itself). Everyone’s writing and art was, in a sense, “talking to each other” in the pages of the journal.
This was related, for us, to certain aspects of Epic Theater (Brecht) and modernist “all-over aesthetics” (Diego Rivera, Abstract Expressionism, Gustave Courbet, punk, early Hip Hop, Jazz), etc. The implicit hope was that a class-conscious proletariat would be, in itself, not unlike Burke’s storm, terrifying and beautiful while also activating the artistic and Marxist subject. Like the romantic sublime — or the exact forms of a truly democratic post-capitalist society in Marxism — this differentiated totality would not be easily mapped or deduced in form.
We also wanted each issue to include both digital and hand-made material, to acknowledge our present technological existence, but also evoke — in a gothic sense — the handmade marks of human beings. We called this “Brechtian cybernetics,” referring here to Brecht’s “interruptions” of his own theatrical productions in an effort to encourage critical space.
While “doom scrolling” and dystopian and post-apocalyptic television shows can act as a kind of disciplinary apologetics, and while the saccharine banalities of Hallmark movies and cat memes conceal IRL dystopias and apocalypse, the contradiction between the lived experience of the class and this digital gesamtkunstwerk (and the contradictory inclusion of that experience online) undermines the ideology of the liberal political center. This produces rejections of that center — left, right, and in confused mixtures. These rejections happen both online and IRL. In other words, the rejections to the status quo are also cybernetic (both analog and digital).
When the center cannot hold, people look for alternatives. In the absence of a class-conscious alternative social layers will drift toward fascism. Jefferson Cowie once told the story of a truck driver who claimed during the 1968 presidential election that he would either vote for the Communist Party or the racist populist George Wallace.
The impossibility of daily life, combined with the overall inauthenticity of the digital gesamtkunstwerk, compels persons to create their own cultural alternatives. For good or ill. Conspiracies are reinvented or reborn. There are retreats into “communes” and cults. Social layers slouch toward new fascisms and pyramid schemes.
We — as socialist artists — are left, like the Romantics, with a contradiction. We must create a counter-montage. We must begin to construct a proletarian multiverse to house the worlds that folks are compelled to create.
It is impossible for us to do this as individual comrades, as individual artists. The ultimate creation of a counter-multiverse will be the task of the working-class itself. But, if we begin to stitch together our version of it we may help facilitate the eventual construction of the gravedigger’s multiverse proper.
As artists, the best we can aspire to be, are prophets. The class itself is the messiah.
That messiah is universal class-consciousness. And it is also a vast and hitherto unknown phenomenon.
Subscribe to Locust Review for as little as $1 a month.
Submit work to Locust Review by e-mailing us at locust.review@gmail.com.