The following editorial for Locust #4 was largely written in early 2021. Subscribe here. The artwork and poetry on this page - from Adam Ray Adkins, Jit Natta, Octavio Quintanilla, Adam Turl, and Tish Turl - accompanied the printed editorial.
THE LAND was sick because the Old King wanted to fuck his daughter. The New King just wanted to sniff her hair. Just as decrepit and doddering as his predecessor, he promised to restore the land to “Normal.”
But it was too late. Nobody remembered what normal was supposed to be. Too many of the people had lost friends and relatives to the plague. Or the King’s police. Or to the conspiracy theories whispered in the ears of the anxious, gullible, and bigoted.
The more respectable gentry responded:
“The world will get back to Normal.”
“We’ll have Normal days again.”
Every time this was recited, masks slipped further and further. People would stop mid-sentence after saying it, struggling to remember what they’d been talking about.
“Business as Normal.”
Adam Ray Adkins (@art.o.dirt)
Jit Natta
The nothing of that word became a gap into which people saw their Future slowly sink.
Then came the putsch, the soldiers loyal to the Old King, storming the palace, stinking of sickness and gunpowder-flavored Doritos. And with that, the gap of Normal became a widening chasm, a canyon separating people from Future.
Future waved from the other side.
“I would say good-bye,” said Future. “But every time I said hello, you would just repeat the word, ‘Normal.’ I asked what it meant, but your eyes glazed over.”
“I wanted to greet you, welcome you, embrace you, but ‘Normal’ kept getting in the way. I wish you, the Old King, the New King, and the Old King’s soldiers, good luck.”
THE PUTSCH on January 6th was, in one sense, a fight between two normals, the normal of a recent status quo and a “new,” insurgent normal.
There was absurdity and a kind of irrealism in the January 6th carnival of the oppressors. They battled their police siblings. They shouted enough insurrectionary slogans that they confused a few addled “anarchists” and “socialists;” those most prone to celebrate form over content.
But, in overall being and consciousness, the working-class, the weird, and the anti-fascist went unrepresented in this particular grotesquery.
We were left out of history. Of course some of the rioters were working-class, but they were led by petit-bourgeois mini-leviathans, state legislators, cops, the CEO’s of small corporations, first class passengers and persons with private jets.
The poles of contestation were between a far-right (that seeks to re-establish the terms of capitalism and imperialism through an intensified racism and nationalism) and an “extreme center” (that aims to stabilize capitalism, racism and imperialism as historically constituted, maybe with a minor reform here or there).
This dynamic was captured well in Steve Edwards’ short piece in Spectre, “The Rabble and the Door,” discussing the “uprising” of assorted fascists and “boomerwaffen” as “one set of supremacist fantasies” facing “off against another imaginary order.”
“Insiders in business suits and outsiders wearing denim and camo struggle over the same set of signs,” Edwards wrote.
Those signs, the neoclassical pillars and domes, the marble floors, the stately paintings and sculptures of slave-owners and genocidal leaders that adorn the hallways, have always carried an intrinsic imperial pomp. Whatever democracy there is to be found in them is profoundly limited by design. The putschists, though caught stealing a few flags and a speaker’s podium, weren’t interested in tearing down these symbols of entrenched settler colonialism as much as they were in making them their own.
THE MEANING of words like normal and weird are, of course, contested, nuanced, and contradictory. But the ultimate source of normal in capitalism lies with capitalism, with the ruling-class.
Normal is ideology; experienced life turned upside down in a camera obscura, as Marx famously describes in The German Ideology. It is also common sense (as Gramsci would put it). Normative is also the counter to queer in queer theory.
As Holly Lewis notes in her book on the intersection of queer theory, feminism and Marxism, The Politics of Everybody, normativity is actually, in part, an expression of class. For example, the critique of “homonormativity” is often a queer critique of middle and upper glass gay men. This critique is, in part, about the mutually reinforcing and distorting process by which hetrosexism and class interests meet, disrupting solidarity among the oppressed as its upper layers are incorporated into the norms of capitalism.
This is not to say normalcy is not reproduced by working-class people. It obviously is. But, normalcy is, in its class origins and inclinations, alien. Normalcy must be constantly imported into our class and renewed by ideological action; as it is now being done by the aggressively normal Biden administration.
To the extent that socialism embraces normativity it adapts to capitalism. This is not original or mortal sin. We all adapt to the terrain because we have to live in this world. But it is something to be overcome, not celebrated. The working-class is, in its being, weird. We stand outcast and starving amidst the wonders that we have made.
The weirdness of the working-class is not simply a matter of dialectic totality and contradiction; that the working-class is the gravedigger of the normal bourgeois. The working-class is weird because its very existence is, to borrow from Mark Fisher, a “perturbation”:
What is the weird? When we say something is weird what kind of feeling are we pointing to? I want to argue that the weird is a kind of perturbation. It involves a sensation of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here. Yet if the entity or object is here, then the categories which we have up until now used to make sense of the world cannot be valid. The weird thing is not wrong, after all; it is our conceptions that must be inadequate,” (Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 15)
There is a danger of flattening and confusing categories here. Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie is in large part about encounter; the subject encountering the strange and out of place. It was not, for the most part, about the weirdness of the subject per se.
Nevertheless, what is working-class anxiety if not the sensation that our very lives are wrong? That we should not exist here, that the conceptions imparted to us by capitalist ideology -- the common sense that permeates daily life -- are inadequate to explain our very selves?
Jit Natta
Tish + Adam Turl, Little Egypt Mass Burial #3 was the first product of remote viewing from the new southern Illinois BALM headquarters. From a meditation on Courbet’s Burial at Ornans we saw the future mass graves of southern Illinois. (@adamturl_art)
The working-class is weird because the truth of our existence is alien to capitalist ideology and its vulgar common sense. This is true both in an everyday phenomenological sense and in the totalizing politics of Marxism; the theory and practice of working-class self-emancipation.
We experience ourselves as weird because our class is not fully conscious, because we accept capitalist ideology, and to the extent that we have rejected it, to the extent that we are “sane,” we experience daily life as a kind of madness. Capitalist ideology is a form of gaslighting.
The working-class subject is repeatedly exposed to what Fisher describes as “transcendental trauma” or shock. It is shocking and traumatic because it is violence on our bodies, minds, futures. It is transcendental because each blow also cracks the ideological edifice.
The worker lives with the grotesque. We see the grotesqueries of both existential existence and social class in the bathrooms we clean and the bodily wastes we dispose of; in our proximity to plagues, police bullets, hunger, disease.
We are surrounded by the melancholia of disposed futures and forgotten pasts. We have a gothic-futurist relationship to history and time. We are out of time.
Fisher describes the ontological displacement of the weird; the displacement of the nature of being. Whose being is more displaced than that of the exploited and oppressed; being always on a tightrope of its own precarious reproduction?
The above is precisely what the typical bourgeois excises from their life, keeps beyond the walls of wealth and privilege.
Their cravenness is what makes them normal.
It is only after we transmute, through our weirdness and social genius, the trauma of the bourgeois world, only after we turn the disaster of history into poetry and art, that it is then appropriated and reified by the stultifyingly normal, dull and prosaic bourgeois.
The reified facsimiles of social genius are sold back to us as commodities called “culture.” This enweirds once again. We stand outcast and starving amidst faded copies of the dreams we once made.
THE WORKING-CLASS subject is always sui generis. But the working-class subject is also unas multorum. Therefore we are not, to echo Peter Frase, concerned with opposing normal so much as abolishing it.
When we talk about weird and normal we are not talking about subculture per se -- although subcultures are historic episodes of cultural rebellion, contradictory if eventually reified -- so much as what it means to be working-class.
“Normal” is a set of mostly impossible expectations imposed on the working-class, as Frase put it, by a “patriarchal capitalist system.” And, as Frase notes, “normie socialism” often attacks the necessity of particular and sectional class demands, often around oppression.
For the working-class, in the final analysis, there is no universal or particular; not in isolation from one another. A universal class demand sequestered from particular queer or Black demands is not, in fact, a universal demand. A particular queer or Black demand that eschews universal class demands is ultimately not a particular queer or Black demand.
Why? In the first case, the universal demand is undermined by the unequal inclusion (often tantamount to exclusion) of queer and Black workers. In the latter case we have the exact same problem: The specific demand is undermined by the unequal inclusion of queer and Black workers.
Each, in isolation, is willing to sacrifice a section of the class, or a section of the specifically oppressed, often the very same group of people, thereby sabotaging both the universal and the particular.
For the working-class -- Black, Latinx, Asian, queer, immigrant, male, female, non-binary, white trash, redneck, skilled, unskilled -- in terms of class consciousness, the universal and particular are always a mutualy reinforcing whole.
When we betray the universal we betray the specific. When we betray the specific we betray the universal.
HOW DO we, as exploited and oppressed subjects, experience “normal”? We experience it as an albatross of expectations projected by capitalism, racism, heterosexism, into our psychologies and daily lives.
You are exhausted. But you must work more because of various “worth ethics.”
You are queer. But you cannot express that querness because of familial expectations.
You are an immigrant. But your behaviors and relations must conform to a certain standard of assimilation lest you and your family be subject to the terror of “being illegal.”
You are Black. But you must proscribe your everyday personality out of fear for the white oppressor.
And, of course, these cultural norms provide ideological support for the even more violent oppressions of the state and more direct economic punishments and privations.
Capitalism will, depending on its needs, make some room for the oppressed. But this room always comes with a further price.
Take the contradictory nature of equal marriage rights. On the one hand it is a concession to an oppressed population. On the other hand it incorporates that population into the norm of privatized social reproduction.
Adam Ray Adkins (@art.o.dirt)
Octavio Quintanilla
Take another example of repressive normality, closely related to questions of feminism, queerness, and social class during the same post-war period.
In the 1950s, the mass media reproduced the idea that juvenile delinquency was caused by mothers who weren’t affectionate enough. That same media informed mothers that if their sons were gay it was because they were too affectionate.
There was no solution for working-class mothers that wasn’t -- from the standpoint of a normal capitalism at the time -- weird in some manner. Distance meant crime. Warmth meant queerness.
The fully class-conscious, queer, and feminist response to this imossible conundrum, impossible particularly for working-class mothers, only came generations later in meme form:
BE GAY AND DO CRIMES.
Of course, normal does not operate on a purely ideological level, only on the level of consciousness, or superstructure. It also operates in the contradictory material position of the subject, as with the contradictions of same-sex marriage.
Take the example of subsidized home-ownership for white workers after World War II. This gave certain workers a “stake” in the system, connected, of course, to the extension of “whiteness” (and the nuclear family ideal) to ethnic European American workers.
The horrific normalcy of the suburb was created. Mostly for the middle-class and upper-class, but for a section of the working-class too. When the children of the suburbs fled that normalcy, moving “back” to the cities, they brought suburban stultification with them in the form of gentrification, displacing working-class communities and people of color, and planting new seeds of banality in our cities.
Usually, however, the material offerings of normalcy are more meager, and norms are more often than not in contradistinction with the lived experience of the exploited and oppressed.
For example, when WASP progressives invaded working-class immigrant neighborhoods in the late 19th and early 20th centuries aiming to teach working-class immigrant women the proper way to decorate their homes (simple and cold, not chaotic and warm), and the proper way to raise their children (disciplined and controlling, as opposed to free and open), they offered little or no actual material aid.
Much of the time normalcy is a cultural or symbolic stand-in for the “unacceptable” solution of class emancipation. We will not free you. But you should look like us. Act like us. Then maybe, someday, you can be free. This is what the plantation owners told landless white hillbillies and rednecks. It is what the liberal racists told the freedmen and women after the Civil War.
ONE OF Mark Fisher’s counters to capitalist realism was his argument for a kind of “psychedelic reason,” related to his idea of Acid Communism, based in part on the work of Herbert Marcuse and Baruch Spinoza.
We are not all in agreement on this concept, but key here seems to be the idea of “dissolving in flows;” there are the social, psychological and aesthetic aspects of being. These aspects flow, change, and move over time. And part of that flow is beings passing through other beings; a subjective interpiercing.
“Psychedelic reason” seems to be, in part, an understanding of these flows.
Some of us think that what Fisher may be getting at is more of an anti-logic than logic, a rejection of reason as constituted by bourgeois norms, as capitalism as well as its antithesis are both flows.
In revolution, the antithesis to capital, labor overwhelms the “original flow.” It pulls the emergency brake. In this case Acid Communism’s liberation through the mind may require more than the individual rational mind.
One commentary, in relation to psychedelic reason, asks the question, “how do you get through your head without giving your head an unnecessary Cartesian level of credit?” The vicissitudes of capitalism should be enough to disprove Descartes’ solipsistic “I think therefore I am,” but nonetheless, we are thinking beings. Our ability to reason is a key characteristic of our humanity. How might our thinking subjectivity be brought onto a collective platform? How do our thoughts, indeed our very patterns of thinking, change when they are both interpierced and interpiercing with others on a vast scale?
Part of the solution may be that psychedelic reason is not just a rational process, but a somewhat irrational combination of multiple heads and subject flows -- both in terms of class action but also in terms of cultural/aesthetic production.
Fisher talks about what he calls the Alien Parasite Entity (APE) -- the ego in capitalism. He argues for a “cold rationalist program” to dissolve the APE.
Here is a point of a potential debate.
What if this APE can only be fully dissolved through the inference of the masses into politics? Class struggle. Revolution. The problem may be that neither class struggle nor revolution are cold rationalist programs. They are as warm and intuitive as they are thoughtful and critical.
Indeed, much of Fisher’s own unfinished research on Acid Communism points to this prospect. In the posthumously released Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, Fisher looks at the “consciousness raising” exercises and other similarly utopian experiments of the 1960s through the lens of György Lukács’ work on class-consciousness. The process of becoming fully class-conscious, conscious enough to recognize one’s interests as both diametrically opposed to the dominant ideology and as collectively manifested, cannot simply be solved like arithmetic.
Dominant ideologies, precisely because they never “announce themselves” as ideology, because they present themselves as eternal and immutable, cannot simply be thought through individually. Realization of these interests is a collective process of education, experience, of struggle, camaraderie, and mutual aid. Through this we start to see a society’s unjust shape for what it is, and reimagine it in a new shape that rationally corresponds to the needs of our individual and totalistic selves, the specific and particular.
When Fisher calls this process “psychedelic,” he is revealing a parallel between the way in which ideas change through struggle and the much-commodified concept of “reaching a higher consciousness” that ran through the counterculture of the 1960s. The reimagined world, though not yet real, is potentiated in our individual but cross-pollinated egos.
Perhaps a better phrase, some of us think, would be a collective psychedelic anti-logic, or dialectic. Perhaps we do not dissolve the APE but mutate it. The Alien Parasite Entity -- or ego -- becomes collectivized. It becomes a Collective Symbiotic Entity. A CSE.
In this case we would argue that we do not want to deny the ego of the masses. Instead we want all personalities to be fully realized. This brings us back to both romanticism and classical Marxism. Or, as Brecht put it, “[m]an [sic] does not become man [sic] again by stepping out of the masses but by stepping back into them.”
SOME OF our collective members have talked before about the weak avant-garde, a term that was coined by the theorist Boris Groys, to describe institutional contemporary art; art that avoids the strong images of popular culture and classical culture, and the strong politics of modernism.
We part with Groys by arguing that this weakness doesn’t arrive out of a social-existential inflection point so much as the bourgeoisification of contemporary art and the end of modernism.
Contemporary institutional art seems to hate, among other things, as Mark Fisher and John Berger pointed out in different contexts and moments, seduction and expression. And this institutional anti-art, quite different from the anti-art of Dada or Fluxus, is bound with neoliberalism and gentrification.
Hostility to sensual meaning is combined, therefore, with a utilitarian relationship to finance capital and the displacement of working-class communities and people of color. This produces an avant-garde art that is aggressively normal, hostile to the weird; an aesthetic echo of the radical center.
As some of us have argued elsewhere, working-class, socialist, and anarchist artists must turn away from this institutional avant-garde.
One solution for the anti-capitalist producers of “unique art objects and gestures” -- sculptures, paintings, installations, and so on -- is to turn toward the way so-called “outsider art” is both constructed and situated.
When we say looking at the way “outsider art” is constructed we do not mean the construction of the idea of “outsider art,” the arbitrary manner in which certain artists are designated in or out by a snobbish art world. “Outsider art” has been, unlike other art, categorized not by form, content, geography, or time, but by the fact it is produced by artists who aren’t part of the so-called art world.
Working-class and socialist artists must understand that even if we have been trained academically in that art world, that art world as presently constituted will not accept us. More to the point, what much “outsider art” actually is and does is of value strategically if it is demystified:
It often has an overdetermined meaning; even when heavily coded. These artists are actually trying to say something, something large. They are not tinkering with semiotics. They are speaking in whole visual sentences and paragraphs. This strikes the weak-avant-garde as “weird” because these artists still believe in things. The weak avant-garde generally speaks in single words and syllables -- like medieval priests debating angels on the head of a pin. They use narrow specificity to say as little as possible; in both form and concept.
Such work -- so-called outsider art -- is often physically sited and conceptually oriented to working-class and pedestrian middle-class audiences first and foremost. The “official” art world is oriented on itself and its bourgeois patrons.
Such work -- so-called outsider art -- prizes the unique subjective “voice” of the artist; re-establishing the importance of the expressive and individual. The “art world” avoids expressive subjectivity with a narrow conceptualism and technological fetishism.
The above provides inspiration for what socialist art and art spaces can do.
Present an overdetermined socialism; even if coded; speaking in whole visual sentences and paragraphs rather than tinkering with semiotics. This does not mean all our work needs to be crudely didactic but that our work is shaped by the existential-social reality of the exploited and oppressed subject.
The possibility of siting work in relation to working-class audiences in a manner that does not further the gentrification process. This is both physical and conceptual. We can create aesthetic and conceptual spaces for our class.
The goal of weird socialist art -- of critical irrealist art -- is not the eradication of subjective expression, or the elevation of singular genius, but the elevation of universal subjective expression, of universal social genius.
This logic was part of the reason two of our editors, Tish and Adam Turl, moved back to southern Illinois, to create a sited project, the Born Again Labor Museum (BALM), aiming to be a site of anti-practical solidarity with the working-class of that area; a region that is possessed, far too much, by the new American fascists, but also peopled with the ghosts of communist miners and union organizers. To be a space to meditate on lost and regained futures and pasts. Of course, this plan was delayed by the pandemic.
Adam Ray Adkins (@art.o.dirt)
Tish + Adam Turl. Making protest signs at BALM. (@adamturl_art)
Regardless, what else can such spaces be?
They can be a utopian space; not in a crude didactic manner alone, but also a psychedelic manner. As Marcuse notes in his essay on liberation, while Marx had to, in the context of his day, criticize utopianism, we need to reject auto-anti-utopianism in our Marxism, because of the more developed evolution of capitalist society. The “[d]ynamic of [high] productivity deprives ‘utopia’ of its unreal content…What is denounced as ‘utopian’ is no longer that which has ‘no place’ and cannot have any place in the historical universe” [the seas turned to lemonade, for example] “but that which is blocked from coming about by the power of established societies.”
Our spaces can present a counter-morality. For example, Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, based on John Gay’s’ Beggar’s Opera, each presented what Walter Benjamin called counter-moralities. Borrowing from Fourier, Benjamin notes that as soon as a “hypocritical” morality is disseminated by a ruling-class, countermoralities begin to develop among the oppressed. These countermoralities are related to the “weirdness” of the oppressed subject. And this is related to both the real and imagined criminality of the working-class and oppressed; their literal violation of bourgeois norms. This criminality is not necessarily progressive. It can be (and for us it must be). But can also be quite reactionary if it seeks to establish (or re-establish) a new version of the old normalcy, a revenge of the normal, i.e. fascism. Our counter-morality is something else; it is Johnny Cash stealing a car one piece at a time, the once common knowledge among working-class people that you never cross a picket line, never call immigrationm, never betray other workers. Our art can understand the need for counter-morality. It understands the emotional inflection of Brecht’s “Pirate Jenny.”
Our spaces can be oppositional, egalitarian and subaltern; with steeples and minarets that claim the skies. They can present a valorization of “folk devils;” an inversion of the fascist hue and cry against antifa, BLM, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, communism, socialism, queerness; an inversion of the demonization of a conscious and myriad working-class. Our work can celebrate the folk devils of the people, past, present, future. Folk devils that make the high low and make the low high. For example: If impossible burgers™ make us queer then we will make impossible burgers ™ our class eucharist. We can also invert the folk devils of the liberal bourgeois. For example: If you hate “white trash” -- an “acceptable” hate for the neo-Victorian bourgeois and liberal middle-class -- our possums will piss in your [rich person drink]™.
And while there is more, weird socialist art can help solve the Cartesian problem of “psychedelic reason” via the representative inter-penetration of subjectivities. Differentiated totality, excess, a multiplicity of voices, myths, stories, aesthetics; leading to the push and pull of epic theater, the push and pull of compositional equality. In other words, embracing a multiplicity of voices and the representation of that multiplicity in our work, at the same time acknowledging the impossibility of that representation.
Our art spaces, sites of visual and conceptual art “IRL,” our spaces of literary and musical creation, can aim to be sites of evolving counter-utopias, counter-moralities, in practical and impractical solidarity with the exploited and oppressed, simultaneously temples to a multiplicity of folk devils, temples to all of us.
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