If we assume a priori there is such a thing as an objectively “good poem” — but do not unpack what that means — do we not risk making normative evaluations of other poets’ work?
It’s been a year now. A year of declaring, forcefully, repeatedly, that the history of Israel and Palestine didn’t start on October 7th, that Palestinians deserve to live dignified and free, that rejecting Zionism is not antisemitic. That what is happening is indeed genocide.
A year of warning that this was bound to spin out into a wider regional conflict. As it now has. Lebanon. Yemen. Syria. Volleys of missiles between Israel and Iran, the possibility of all-out war creeping closer.
I want to create characters not that people aspire to be like but whom people see themselves in who end up doing things they already aspire to do but won’t, for whatever reason. Probably this penchant for fictional violence against wealth hoarders will get me into trouble eventually. Until then, however, I will continue to write about working class robots in sewers trying to shoot the evil meat above.
The internet promises democracy but delivers reactionary politics (and is designed to do so). It promises expression and valorization of the subject, but delivers, more often, dopamine denial and depression. Meanwhile the analog, at least in the arts, promises authenticity, but fails to deliver much more than rarefied bourgeois spaces, out of touch with the vast majority of the human race — as Amiri Baraka would say, “fingerprints of rich painters”... Or, empty art museum spectacles; Epcot Center immersion for the cosmopolitan bourgeois and petit-bourgeois.
FOR SOME reason, impenetrable to any German leftist, there seems to be the strange US-American liberal assumption that Germany is a lederhosen-wearing, beer-sipping liberal paradise, where we hug refugees all the day, care for mother nature, and organize a perfect ‘socialist’ (in the liberal use of the term, meaning social-democratic) society, and with the guidance of a dear and democratic government, we care for our people and the world. While it will forever be a mystery for me how anyone could believe this in the first place, I am going to debunk this assumption in this article. My wager is that, by observing the current situation in Germany, we might find tendencies and latencies that elide developments within capitalist realism that are elsewhere still not fully feasible.
BCDT reminds the screen reader they aren’t reading paper. It reminds the print reader they are reading paper. It reminds the print reader they aren’t reading a screen. It reminds the digital reader they are reading on a dream stealing machine. It reminds those holding the physical design of ephemerality.
The Irrealist Combat League is for the construction of performances — for aberrant departures from the motions of everyday life, for the active imposition of proletarian will on space and time, for the enrichment of the political-imaginative capacity of the revolutionary class.
Rationality tends to be sutured to the concept of realism, so instrumental rationality in particular presupposes a proper epistemological mapping of the territory of “the real,” for the goal of controlling it. Mark Fisher’s idea of “capitalist realism” describes the totalizing phenomenon, that form of aesthetic and intellectual dominance.
We want a record of the real in the work — as in the cotton and ash — as well as reclamations of our history and imaginaries constructed against the limits of working-class imaginations by capitalist realism. So the individual pieces are sort of vignettes of class pathos and poetry, often in an irreal idiom, and all together representing, as much as we can, the limitless expansive nature of these stories in aggregate.
Edward Bond died on March 3 a cumbersome cultural figure. Always controversial, but celebrated in the 1960s and 70s, no major British stage has taken on a new work from him in decades. He died as Israel inched into its fifth month of its massacre in Gaza. And he died at a time when theatre matters less than it has at probably any point in human history.
In our quixotic attempt to map, explore, and preserve the gravediggers’ multiverse, the Born Again Labor Museum has created the third Irrealist Worker Survey.
A single mother is driving past an abandoned factory on her way home from a low paying job. She is hungry. Above the factory a billboard floats in the sky advertising a succulent feast. But it does not strike her — or us — that this is odd, that her hunger has manifested itself above the factory ruin in an image of unavailable food. When we step outside ideology we see this absurdism for what it is.
While the critical irrealist ties the emancipation of the constrained subject to a collective fight against the forces that constrain that subject, the fascist occultist seeks unity with the constraining forces. Each responds to the disfigurement of individual subjectivity under the “normal” workings of capitalism; each rejects, to some degree, the profound lack of imagination engendered by capitalist realism. How they are opposed, in irrealist cultural performances, gestures, artifacts and media, is largely in the different ways they position/construct/code subjectivity in relation to the sources of this disfigurement.
THE MICHELISTS, who renamed themselves the Futurians in 1939, were a group of mostly working-class and precarious middle-class science fiction (SF) fans, largely centered in New York, who, in the 1930s, aimed to take over SF fandom for Communism and the Popular Front.
Tingle glosses past the wider implication of a spell that gives everyone exactly what they need when they need it, choosing only to say that it was banned for destroying the economy, upending governments, and ruining the game show industry.
The dominant UFO visitation myths echo popular occultism in capitalism. The individual is abducted or visited -- in a secular-but-not-secular epiphany -- enweirding their life with either trauma or good fortune, or both; even if the good and bad fortune is a mere valorization of the formerly discarded individual within a cruel social totality. This is the ufology of “normal’’ bourgeois capitalism; the kismet of the UFO encounter.
On November 12th, 2020, Locust Review editors Alexander Billet, Holly Lewis, Anupam Roy, and Adam Turl presented at this year’s Historical Materialism conference. As this year’s conference was online — due to the plague — it was streamed live on YouTube. Our presentations dealt with various arguments regarding critical irrealism as a key socialist cultural strategy.
Salvagepunk and hopepunk share an antipathy for many of the so-called “realisms” that have come to dominate our culture.
In our quixotic attempt to map, explore, and preserve the gravediggers’ multiverse, the Born Again Labor Museum has created the Irrealist Worker Survey. More surveys with be forthcoming. If you want attribution in any future exhibitions or educational material, please fill out your name in the fields at the bottom of the survey. If you wish to remain anonymous…
The Irrealist Combat League is for the construction of performances — for aberrant departures from the motions of everyday life, for the active imposition of proletarian will on space and time, for the enrichment of the political-imaginative capacity of the revolutionary class.
Rationality tends to be sutured to the concept of realism, so instrumental rationality in particular presupposes a proper epistemological mapping of the territory of “the real,” for the goal of controlling it. Mark Fisher’s idea of “capitalist realism” describes the totalizing phenomenon, that form of aesthetic and intellectual dominance.
We want a record of the real in the work — as in the cotton and ash — as well as reclamations of our history and imaginaries constructed against the limits of working-class imaginations by capitalist realism. So the individual pieces are sort of vignettes of class pathos and poetry, often in an irreal idiom, and all together representing, as much as we can, the limitless expansive nature of these stories in aggregate.