Join us on Thursday, November 12 (18:30 GMT, 1:30pm EST, 12:30pm CST, 10:30am PST) for a Locust Review panel discussion at this year’s (virtual) Historical Materialism conference. Our panel, focusing on “Irrealism as Socialist Cultural Strategy” will feature Locust editorial collective members Alexander Billet on “The Case for Critical Irrealism,” Holly Lewis on “How Collective Dreams Can End the Sleep of Reason,” Adam Turl on “Their Weird and Ours: Socialist Irrealism vs. Fascist Occultism,” and Anupam Roy on “Representational Impossibility: A Propagandist’s Urgencies and Crisis.” More information follows below.
The event is free (donations are encouraged) but you must pre-register here.
Equisapien from the 2018 film, Sorry to Bother You, written and directed by Boots Riley.
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Los Caprichos), Francisco Goya. Etching, aquatint, drypoint, burin (1799).
Afrosurrelaist poet and communist Aimé Césaire.
Vivarium Annex (Born Again Labor Museum), Detail, Tish Markley and Adam Turl. Acrylic, ink, marker, mixed-media and found materials, prints, stickers on collaged canvas with coffee, cotton, and ash (2020).
Resistance Land, Anupam Roy. Black pigment and distemper on paper (350gsm, acid free, hot-press) pasted on cotton cloth; 10ft x 16ft (approximate, paper size) (2018).
The Locust Arts & Letters Collective (LALC), founded in 2019, is a project dedicated to fleshing out critical irrealist strategies and strengthening the revolutionary imagination. Against the zombie of capitalist realism, we posit what Michael Löwy and others have called “critical irrealism” — the use of the weird, the fantastical, the other-worldly, to estrange the machinations of capitalism and challenge us to think beyond them.
Locust Review publishes art, poetry, fiction and other ephemera dedicated to just that, while our podcast, Locust Radio, seeks to examine questions posed by the framework from a theoretical perspective. This panel introduces the LALC’s work to the Historical Materialism conference, and unpacks questions related to the project of building a working-class critical irrealism.
Against its slow cancelation, how does one imagine a future? In the imploding temporalities of new authoritarianism and climate collapse, is there something, some small fragment of rubble, that can point the way toward an emancipatory way of life? Is there room for a new totality to be imagined even as reality repeatedly undermines itself?
All of these questions are borne of a present and deepening crisis in capitalist realism. The impact this crisis has had on working-class people’s subjectivity has been profound: their sense of time, of place, of being and becoming. While aesthetic and cultural approaches of the past four decades have feebly accepted, either explicitly or implicitly, the cynicism of No Alternative, there nonetheless persists an impulse of future poetry that must be fully unearthed. One that is loyal less to empirical reality than truthful futurity, less to “realism” than to what Sartre identified as the irreal; a notion that placed the human imagination as a key part of a fully human subjectivity.
As Michael Löwy has argued, there is a strong lineage of this critical irrealism running through the aesthetic approaches of radical movements. One that hews closely to both libertarian communism and dissident Marxism; from Kafka to surrealism, from the Brecht-Lukacs debates to situationism and its myriad offshoots of the radical imagination. What’s more, the outlook of today’s working class is by default irrealist, as evidenced by the popularity of the “New Weird” in literature, film, and music -- including outwardly communist recent works such as Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You. These point to what is necessary in order to continue the process of rebuilding a fecund and robust socialist imagination capable of conceiving a material utopia. This paper will examine the relevance of this strain of critical irrealism and “the radical weird” in relation to the dramatic spatial and temporal ruptures brought about by both the current pandemic, the uprising for Black lives in the United States, and the rise of the new far-right.
Alexander Billet is a writer, poet, and editor at Locust Review.
Supplementary reading: Michael Löwy, Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, anarchism, situationism, utopia. University of Texas Press, 2009. * Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of the Imagination. Citadel, 1991. * Michael Löwy, “Franz Kafka and Libertarian Socialism,” New Politics, summer 1997, available at the Anarchist Library * Presentations I and II in Aesthetics and Politics. Verso, 2020, in which Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukacs, and Bertolt Brecht debate the meaning of realism and Expressionism.
Francisco Goya’s “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” can be interpreted in two ways. The Spanish word “sueño” means both “sleep” and “dream”. That which generates monsters, then, is not only the sleep of reason, but also the dream of reason. This contradiction captures our conceptual bind: both rationality and irrationality generate political nightmares. What’s a comrade to do? On one hand, we have the instrumental rationality properly denounced by 20th century Western Marxists, the Western rationality properly denounced by anti-colonial revolutionaries, the masculinist rationality denounced by feminists and queers; on the other hand, we have the barbarism of Holocaust denial and the loopy fantasies of fascist occultist projects like QAnon.
I would like to argue that our solution lies in the distinction between critical faculties and rationality, in the materialist conception of history, and, in part, lies with building our capacity to recognize and combat rationalization.
To make my point, I’ll be contrasting two diametrically opposed modes of collective sense- making: the methods of the politically universalist, anti-colonial project of early Black surrealist poetry versus the deranged far-right “democratic” collaborative project known as QAnon. Neither of these projects adheres to bourgeois Enlightenment ideals of knowledge production.
However, I will argue that, although it seems like an anti-rationalist project, QAnon is, in fact, a hyper-rationalist project that undermines capitalist realism through capital realism’s own dark logic. QAnon, a product of capitalist rationalization, operates as a an element of capitalist realism despite its delusional character. I will compare Mark Fisher’s meditation on capitalist realism to what the surrealist poet André Breton called the “realistic attitude” to demonstrate how claims to “being realistic” tend to mystify their subjects-at-hand in the name of rationality.
The Black surrealist legacy, by contrast, while consciously anti-rational, profoundly sharpens the critical faculties of its practitioners and enriches the lives of its audience. The difference in the two projects is not just a matter of political content, but a product of the very distinct “methods to their madness.”
Lastly, I will show how “the realistic attitude” can distort even Marxist emancipatory projects. I will describe how critical irrealism can navigate a path away from what I call rational stupefaction and towards a demystified universal brilliance.
Holly Lewis is the author of The Politics of Everybody, and an editor at Locust Review.
Supplementary reading: Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism * Robin D.G. Kelley: “Keeping it (Sur)real: Dreams of the Marvelous” in Freedom Dreams: the Black Radical Imagination * Aimé Césaire: Discourse on Colonialism * Suzanne Césaire: “The Domain of the Marvelous” and “Surrealism and Us” (available in translation - Manifesto: a century of isms)
The space between what was possible before and what could be possible after a crisis, or a major historical event, provokes me to think about the appropriate territory for my art practice. Crisis makes more precise the complex nature of our contemporary discourse. The privilege of “I” and dialectical relationship with “we” creates incompleteness, inarticulateness, fragile feelings, and precarious identity. Critically interrogating the question of representation pushes me towards the idea of limit. And this point ‘representational impossibility’ is the basis of my praxis. I believe allowing incompleteness, inarticulateness, failure, and precarity, can be understood as a militant possibility of a propagandist. And the work of the propagandist is urgent. If the truth of contemporary reality lies in much-censored narratives of violence and suffering, the political task is not merely to report, or represent, from a comfortable outsider’s position; but to leave one’s self exposed to the brutality of the world while maintaining the possibility of transforming it.
However, without parallel and continuous critical engagement with the question of representation, we will fall into repetitive historical failure: cultural appropriation and misrepresentation. In other words, who represents whom, even when power shifts happen? In this venture/presentation I would like to share some of my observations and attempts towards these ideas/contradictions and try to interrogate the contemporary role of propagandist and propaganda.
Anupam Roy is an artist, activist and editor at Locust Review.
Part of the central logic of critical irrealism is an emphasis on the individual subjectivity of the working-class person; that the working-class individual is not reducible (as seen in vulgar Marxist depictions), or beyond class or generalizable shared traits. Not only does the individual working-class subject represent a variety of categorical identities and oppressions, each individual worker creates, both in everyday life and their conscious and subconscious processing of that life, a creative-social-psychological universe building (a conscious and subconscious narrative of their life). Within this everyday alterity the subject negotiates their own uniqueness, actuality, existential mortality, desire for a valued life, with the dominant culture of capitalist exploitation and oppression.
If each gravedigger of capitalism creates their own universe, the working-class as a whole creates, in terms of culture and the social subconscious, a gravedigger’s multiverse. In contrast, far right occultism – both historically and in the present – also engages with constrained individual personality, but seeks to reconcile the deformed individual by their subordination to cosmic abstraction: race, fatherland, etc. This dynamic could be described as social kismet vs. totalitarian cosmology.
Indeed, Nazi occultists complained about pedestrian occultism precisely because it focused on the fate of individuals -- as well as criticized the cosmopolitan, “Jewish,” and international character of popular esoteric practices (tarot, palm readings, etc.). Socialist irrealism / social kismet and fascist occultism / totalitarian cosmology are in a cultural and psychological competition for the dream life of the masses. When André Breton said “we are in desperate need of a myth to counter the myth of Odin” this is the process to which he referred. This presentation will sketch and unpack the conflict between their “weird’ and ours.
Adam Turl is an artist, writer and editor at Locust Review.
Supplementary reading: Adorno, T. (2001) “Theses against occultism.” In Adorno, T., The stars down to Earth and other essays on the irrational in culture. (pp. 172-180). Routledge. * Miéville, C. (2009). “Cognition as ideology: A dialectic of SF theory.” In Miéville, C. and Bould, M. eds, Red planets: Marxism and science fiction. (pp. 231-248). Wesleyan University Press. * Boer, Roland. (2014) “Religion and socialism: A.V. Lunacharsky and the God-builders,” Political theology, 15 (2), pp. 188-209 * Michel, J. (1937) “Mutation or death.” Speech delivered by Donald Wollheim for John Michel, at the Third Eastern Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia, October 1937. - The Michelists, later called the Futurians, were a group of science fiction [SF] fans and writers, many from working-class and precarious middle-class families in New York City, who aimed to take over SF for the Popular Front during the Great Depression.
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Social media splash image a mix of work by Adam Turl, Tish Markley and Anupam Roy.