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.
Read MoreTheses on the Theatrical Party
The Theatrical Party embraces the organization of pessimism in contrast to the false optimism of the left. To be a revolutionary pessimist is to separate the political actor from their role. It is this separation which, in the epic theater of Brecht, invited a critical outlook on the performance from its participants and spectators — the first step in the transformation of spectators into collaborators, a task integral to both theater and the forging of a revolutionary party.
Read MoreConstructing Counter-Imaginaries
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.
Read MoreCommune vs. Cathedral vs. Bazaar
What is the liberal bourgeois approach to this apocalyptic exposure? In terms of policy the response seems to be defined by absence — a bewilderment of futurism interrupted by the supposed incoherence of Trumpism and random social failure.
Read MoreToward the Theatrical Party
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.
Read MoreFlogging a Dead Android
IT COULD just as easily come from the world outside our window as it could the screen of our computer. By now cyberspace and meatspace are inextricable, intertwined and mutually dependent. Where just a few decades ago we would look at the Los Angeles of Blade Runner or the Detroit of RoboCop as cautionary tales, today they are cousins of the present. The sight, the sounds, the smell, the structure of feeling of uneven and combined apocalypse – high tech, low life – these are with us right now, staring us in the face.
Read MoreIrrealist Worker Survey #3
In our quixotic attempt to map, explore, and preserve the gravediggers’ multiverse, the Born Again Labor Museum has created the third Irrealist Worker Survey.
Read MoreBeing with the Prophets
Many of the best Marxist cultural interventions come from an intersection of Marxism and the Romantic/Gothic, either intentionally, or among Romantics moving into Marxism (even as they reject the Romantic),12 imparting a kind of working-class messianism. Because art cannot change the world — only the class can do that — this messianism often takes on a displaced character. Aaron to Moses. John the Baptist to Christ. Bodhisattva to Buddha.
Read MoreThe Case for Critical Irrealism
In the face of this, appeals to normality are, in essence, the toxic optimism of American exceptionalism, the belief that America is somehow above time, above consequence. And though the reality of President Joe Biden has breathed some new life into this myth, make no mistake, it nonetheless wobbles like a drunk trying to walk a tightrope.
Read MoreCritical Irrealist Reading List
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.
Read MoreTheir Weird vs. Ours: Critical Irrealism vs. Fascist Occultism
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.
Read MoreMutation or Death
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.
Read MoreOut In the Open, a Hidden City
Wandering through the areas of London – Marylebone, Stratford, Lewisham, Hackney Wick -- one gets the sense she is pensively but frantically trying to piece together a history-from-below of every street-corner and underpass. Her descriptions digress into memories, often several layered on top of each other, rabbit-holes within rabbit-holes: 1989, 1996, 2003, friends, strangers, acquaintances, piss-ups, drunken brawls, bonfires, people who fell in-and-out of love, bored afternoons, demonstrations and riots, previous drifts that will bring her back into the moment in front of her. “The polychromatic riot of London’s histories,” she says, “travel in shimmering, tangled lines.”
Read MoreAelita vs. Elon Musk
What the cosmos -- and space exploration -- were part of a great utopian impulse, positioned against war, against privation, and against death itself? What if this imagination was projected onto the surface of Mars instead of Elon Musk’s banal acquisitiveness? This is, in part, the history of Russian Cosmism, an esoteric philosophy that claimed not to be an esoteric philosophy, nurtured by a 19th century Moscow librarian named Nikolai Fedorov. He called it the philosophy of the Common Task. In the 20th century, cosmism would influence the early Soviet avant-garde, science fiction (SF), medicine, and rocket science, mingling with the revolutionary socialist impulses of Bolshevism and the October Revolution, before its eventual marginalization and repression following the Stalinist Thermidor
Read MoreHow Collective Dreams End the Sleep of Reason
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.
Read MoreCandyman 2021: Art Reveals Horror
To the fading and warping strains of Sammy Davis Jr.’s “Candyman,” the opening scene of the 2021 version of Candyman emerges with shadow-puppets, silhouetting a Black man being chased. A very aware little Black boy, named Billy, plays out this theme on the wall of his home in the Cabrini-Green projects of Chicago.
Read MoreUnder Covers
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.
Read MoreTheir UFOs and Ours
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.
Read MorePink Parasols at the Barricades
A massive crowd of mostly black-clad protesters faced off with an army of police in riot gear. As yet another tear gas cannister was fired, a bright spot of pink emerged on the front line. One single bright pink umbrella opened, defiant against the horde of jackbooted thugs. This was perhaps the beginning of the curiosity that was the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) alternatively known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP).
Read MoreIntroducing Imago
How to break out? From the isolation, the despair, the stultifying routines? We are surrounded by the alien, the uncanny, by that which promises the freedom of a good life but inevitably leaves us empty and disappointed. Barbarism disguises itself as stability, and though more and more of us see through the veneer, we often have no idea what to do about it.
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