The Locust Arts & Letters Collective will be presenting a panel at Historical Materialism Online 2021, the replacement for HM’s conference that normally takes place in London in early November. Readers may remember that we also presented a panel at last year’s HM Online conference, which can be viewed here.
This year’s online conference will be held from November 4th through 14th. Our panel will be held on November 5th at 9pm Greenwich Mean Time (5pm Eastern, 4pm Central, 2pm Pacific Standard). Register here.
Cultural Resistance Under Post-Human Capitalism: A Locust Review / Imago Panel
Covid-19 has brought late capitalism’s exterminist impulse into sharp relief. Globally, experiments on the part of both capital and the state -- some of which would have been unthinkable before the pandemic -- aim to determine just how much of the working-class is necessary and how much of it can be tossed aside. Even states that have intervened strongly in the welfare of their citizenry seem willing to engage in this dark calculus to some degree. The increasing dominance of cybernetic and algorithmic technologies continues to shape and interact with human subjectivity even well short of its elimination. More and more we are forced to reckon with the possibility of a political and cultural landscape of a vicious and reactionary post-humanism.
As others have argued, the only way out is not around, but through; not a rejection of myriad cultural technologies but a reimagination of radical subjectivity and temporalities in relation to them. This panel aims to examine what this means for contemporary strategies of emancipatory cultural resistance. It coincides roughly with the launch of Imago, a new annual journal dedicated to exploring questions of critical irrealism, published by the Locust Arts & Letters Collective. Subjects addressed will include the impact of online life on Brechtian alienation effect, surrealist critique of the currently-very-trendy genres of cyberpunk and synthwave, and how the left should understand the regroupment of the far-right on various online platforms.
Alexander Billet speaking at Historical Materialism Montreal in 2018.
Adam Turl outside the Born Again Labor Museum in Carbondale, Illinois in 2021.
Tish Turl at the Born Again Labor Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2020.
Toward a Brechtian Cybernetics
By Adam Turl
The relationship of working-class and oppressed subjects to capitalist-mediated mass culture and information has been dramatically altered by digital and social media, paralleling a broader growth of the cybernetic in everyday life. Living a life that is at once digital and analog, at once enmeshed in physical constraint and a seeming expansiveness, the working-class subject lives a bifurcated existence.
Using a lens of Gothic-Futurism, as discussed by Locust Review as well as many Black irrealists, this paper will reject the teleological determinism that new technologies invariably lead toward emancipation, while also rejecting crude nostalgias for the analog/IRL past. An increasingly cybernetic existence both liberates and constricts the working-class subject. Digital online spaces create room for those rejecting gender normativity. They also create room for a burgeoning new fascism. The digital promises democracy but, as Jodi Dean notes, is by its very nature as communicative capitalism unable to deliver that democracy. The digital promises the elevation of the auric self (in Benjaminian terms) but actively reifies that aura. Analog and IRL spaces provide a seemingly unmediated expression, but are increasingly out of reach for proletarian majorities, and more and more shaped by an empty bourgeois ethos. The analog promises “authenticity” but this is more and more a bourgeois authenticity. Digital and analog are both mediated, in different ways with different outcomes, by capital.
This paper will outline as a cultural strategy — drawing on Marxism, Queer theory, cyberpunk, the work of Christian Fuchs, Jodi Dean, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, and various critiques of cyber-utopianism — the potential for a Brechtian Cybernetics, that uses, alternates between, and exposes both the analog and digital, to recoup individual and working-class subjectivity, social meaning, and criticality.
Androids Leaping: What Were (and Are) Cyberpunk and Synthwave?
By Alexander Billet
Starting with Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and William Gibson’s Neuromancer, “cyberpunk” has slowly seeped into the fabric of the late capitalist zeitgeist. Currently, it is impossible to escape, not just in art and culture but in the world at large. Climate catastrophe and the pandemic, along with the tightening grip of authoritarianism, have brought cyberpunk’s “high tech, low life” aesthetic into reality. Little wonder that films and TV shows gain such wide fanbases by employing aspects of the subgenre. The current popularity of synthwave in music – even finding its way into tracks from Taylor Swift and the Weeknd – mirrors this dominance.
But if these subgenres’ current popularity reflects the uneven and combined collapse of the 2020s, then their former imaginative and predictive capacities appear to have diminished. Synthwave’s fetishization of the 1980s often drifts into rote nostalgic celebration rather than critique. Cyberpunk’s own critique is frequently swapped out for a bland technophilia or morphed into cloying, solipsistic offshoots like “hopepunk.”
This paper will argue that what is missing from current iterations is a sense of historical continuum and contingency. Drawing on recent work of Mark Fisher and Matt Colquhoun, which uses the “salvagepunk” ethos to synthesize the hauntological and accelerationist, I argue that what imbues these subgenres with critical potential isn’t mere anachronism or fetishization of the future, but the realization of simultaneity and human agency within it. I will illustrate this citing some of the more original recent synthwave and cyberpunk works, such as Seth Ickerman’s Blood Machines and Carpenter Brut’s soundtrack for the same.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Again): Digital Retrenchment of the US Far Right and Fascists After the January 6th Putsch
By Tish Turl
Since the January 6th putsch at the US Capitol, the far right has been in a period of regroupment, retrenchment, and retreat. The threat the far right poses, however, continues to grow, as it attempts to clarify its politics and organizational plans.
Largely driven off mainstream social media platforms, far-right “discourse” has been recentered on platforms like Telegram. The largest forums on Telegram, consisting of 300,000 to 400,000 persons, focus on QAnon and election conspiracies. The largest ideological Nazi forums reach about three to four thousand persons. There is a clear attempt by organized Nazis to recruit from the broader milieu, but they face a number of difficulties, particularly in deviations between American and European forms of fascism. Despite their cultural racism, many QAnon adherents reject the overt “scientific” racism of the Nazis. Evangelical Christian support for Israel, prevalent among QAnon supporters, also tends to put them at odds with actual Nazis.
Nevertheless, a common fascist logic animates this broader far-right. This includes: militant hostility to Covid vaccination; consensus that the 2020 election was stolen; support for an idealized nuclear family and the subservience of women; hostility to “elites” (which has, consciously or not, an anti-Semitic logic); hatred of immigrants and Black Lives Matter; and antipathy to an ill-defined socialism and communism. While QAnon, prior to January 6th, tended to rely on action from Donald Trump as a sort of messianic savior, discussions are increasingly demanding the self-activity of the far right.
This presentation will examine primary source evidence taken from these platforms, in order to assess the current state and trajectory of far-right online organizing in the US.
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