New possibilities and developments seem to open up everyday, but almost never the ones we want. The visions that are offered — from those managing Joe Biden’s decline to those enabling Trumpian revanchism — offer inertia and politicized dementia. The arts — in procedurally-generated music, stolen images belched up by AI, much film and “prestige television” — appear to be stranded on a shore alien to inspiration.
How do you dismantle a conspiracy theory? Through simple logic? A counter delirium? How do you disrupt — or gesture to disrupt — bland technophilia? Do you point out how the dystopian dreams of the tech billionaires will fail? Or, that they will work all too well? For the well-heeled, does the uncertain future overwhelm the comforts of the present? For the rest of us, does precarity overwhelm efforts to salvage the future?
We go into more detail in the addendum below to explain our thinking. Regardless, send us your words and art that offer a different version of the world than that on offer. The deadline for submissions to Locust Review 11 is November 1, 2023. Publication is scheduled for late December.
Word counts for fiction and creative nonfiction are suggested at no more than five thousand words. For poetry, word counts are suggested at no more than two thousand words. Locust Review accepts all visual art submissions for consideration, but please keep in mind that our print edition is in black and white. Images should be in jpg format, at least eight inches in one dimension, and 300 dpi. Due to the volume of submissions we may not be able to provide feedback on all submitted work. All those with accepted work will receive contributor copies of the printed edition. Poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, visual art, and other work can be sent to locust.review@gmail.com.
Addendum: Another Multiverse is Possible?
There are “things” so big that they change our sense of self, challenge where we think “we” end and the “world” begins. These things can sometimes empower individual or collective subjectivities, fostering an outpouring of creativity. A revolution, a social movement, a strike, a riot. The flowering of solidarity in class struggle. Observing the terrifying-beauty of a storm from the safety of a warm home. The crescendos of sound in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet. Evoking differentiated totalities and discordant wills, these examples of the social and existential sublime make us conscious of the vast cosmos beyond ourselves while bringing our own personal universes to life.
But sometimes these immense phenomena sink us into melancholia and despair. The avalanche of digital imagery fostered by Artificial Intelligence and the social industry paradoxically shrinks the richness of our visual world. The existential threat of climate change calls into question the line between ourselves and the planet, stretching backward in time for decades, forward in time for centuries. What does it mean to make emancipatory politics, to make art, or to raise children under the threat of existential climate disaster? What does it mean to make an image when images “just happen.”
The philosopher Timothy Morton describes climate change as a “hyper-object” collapsing foreground and background — making us almost unable to conceive of affecting it. Georges Bataille’s concept of the “accursed share” relates to the excesses of class societies — surpluses once consumed by liturgies, art, and ritual sacrifice. This accursed share now festers as a wound for civilization itself, threatening a universal self-sacrifice. Metabolic rift. The ruin of the contending classes.
Multiverse vs. Multiverse vs. Multiverse
A world that is “too much” produces — or develops in tandem — a culture that is “too much.”
Daily life has become an arrhythmic confluence of images, labors, sounds, indignities, tasks, anxieties. Businessmen hold meetings inside the video game Red Dead Redemption around a virtual campfire — as real fires destroy the landscapes that once inspired Western movies and dime store novels. We no longer know if the incidental images we see are “real” or not, whether the papers written by college students are theirs or written by an hallucinating algorithm, whether we were laid off by another human or by a computer, whether we truly live in our town or whether we live in the apocalyptic plastic self-actualization of Barbieheimer. The once-fashionable academics told us to stop believing in metanarratives and history. And then capitalism created the greatest participatory metanarrative in history.
The multiverse of the political center — expressed in its streaming, its art galleries as public attractions, its flattened music as sonic wallpaper, its flammable but empty-clad architecture, its mainstream social industry, its apocalyptic and banal television spectacles — finds itself in contradiction to the crises of an immiserated working-class, an aggrieved petit-bourgeoisie, a declining US and western imperialism, and existential climate change. In response, fascism and the far-right have created their own cultural metaverse and metanarrative, a meta-conspiracy — of which formal conspiracies like QAnon are only a part. The fascist metaverse responds to real crises and provides answers turned upside down by heterosexism, nationalism, racism, and anti-Semiticism. The far right metaverse absorbs every new development — much like ancient Rome absorbed the gods of its conquered. Donald Trump mistakenly says he is running against Barack Obama in the current election. The far-right concludes Obama is still really the president and President Biden is an actor. Trump mistakenly says Biden will cause World War Two. The far right concludes that World War Two didn’t happen — while simultaneously harkening back to it as the apogee of US ascendance. The far-right prioritizes its version of ecstatic truth.
At the same time, the left has faltered in creating a compelling metaverse opposed to the neoliberal and fascist metaverses. Part of this is beyond our control. We are in opposition to the structure of social media, the repressive state, the ideological apparatuses of the academy and the traditional media. Part of it is practical politics — the surrender of the Left around the pandemic, the betrayal of elected “Socialists” who voted to increase police funds after the Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprising or who voted against the rail strike, the demobilization of left voters with Bernie Sanders’ abject capitulation to Joe Biden, the cynical dismantling of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. But it is also a cultural matter; and the left has failed to answer urgent social-existential questions.
Why do the flat Earthers insist the world is flat? To make the world small. To make it manageable. To salvage their sense of subjective importance. It is, of course, not enough to cudgel the flat Earthers with words like “science” and “evidence.” The underlying problem must be addressed. The world is round but no one is “small.” Everyone is important. When the fascist says that President Barack Obama was not born in the US, our answer is two-fold. Of course, we point out the racism of that conspiracy theory. But we might also point out the fact that the politician “Barack Obama” was not really born. He was made in capitalism’s ideology lab — built to gesture towards “change” and deliver nothing. When the western chauvinists — or the conspirators of a lost Tartaria — talk about the emptiness of contemporary architecture they do so in a reactionary way. But much contemporary architecture is alienating. We can’t answer real anxieties with a defense of the new Burger King or Chipotle being built on Route 13. We have to outflank the right’s cynical aesthetic critique. Responding only with “facts” as the liberals do — believing “facts” to have some kind of phantasmagorical power — is itself a defeat.
What is an emancipatory, left, socialist, and communist “metaverse”? What is our evolving mythology and pathos? How can we help create one? How do we counter the neoliberal and fascist multiverses? What is a left, working-class, and subaltern ecstatic truth? What does the gravedigger’s multiverse look like?
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