Editor’s Note: The following editorial for issue #2 was written in January and February 2020; before the full scope of the Covid 19 disaster had become clear.
“BE REALISTIC” we are told. The weather is rejecting us, fascism has resurrected itself, pogroms rage, new pandemics knock on our doors, and yet, “be realistic.”
“Be realistic.” The favorite refrain of those who, in their blindness to history, allow history to be changed in ways they cannot understand. “Be realistic.” The slogan of those who love their power and privilege while denying they have any of it. “Be realistic.” The bootlicker’s mantra, chanted when the independent thoughts they have repressed begin to surface.
“Don’t vote for the socialist” we are told. “The proto-fascist we were all sure was going to lose may have won, but we are sure that electing a socialist is neither possible nor practical.”
“Don’t let your protest disrupt anything” we are told. “Don’t you know that civility, despite covering for centuries of atrocity, is the only way? We cannot afford to lose the middle ground.”
Tangled up in these is the “realistic” argument that we can rely on those who have dithered every single chance at resistance to somehow resist. It is the realism that tries to reason with the hangman.
AFTER OUR first issue, Locust Review received some feedback – some helpful, some unhelpful but quite entertaining – regarding our mantle of critical irrealism, our embrace of the radical weird. Why, our critics ask, must we insist on being so odd, so brazenly camp, so didactically crass? In short, because “realism,” the insistence to “be realistic,” has put us right here.
Capitalist realism – the notion illustrated by the late Mark Fisher in his 2009 book of the same name, the cultural logic of “there is no alternative” codified into a severe narrowing of people’s sense of possibility and imagination – has hit a wall. Some might say it is breaking down. Neoliberalism, the dominant form of capitalism for the past several decades, began to falter, but was not defeated, with the crash of 2007-08. The “sensible” centrism that had been its caretaker, with its “common sense” that the market must predominate, that unions and wages and the expectation to a decent working-class life must be tempered, can no longer carry the day without contestation.
Keeping the system afloat has meant, in one instance after another, turning to a vicious authoritarianism. Modi in India, Duterte in the Philippines, Orban in Hungary, Trump in America, and most recently, the triumph of Boris Johnson in the UK. All have notable differences, but what they have in common is a few things: First, for the most part, they won’t do anything to keep the crisis and chaos of people’s lives at bay. In some cases, as in Poland, a limited expansion of social welfare policies is tied to revanchist and racist policies by the far right. In most other cases, Trump included, the far right paeans to the “working-class” are devoid of material substance. Second, they have weaponized the fears of those terrified of losing their privileges. Their outlandish, often cravenly thuggish declarations show their followers just how much they can get away with. This aestheticization of violence is designed to preserve power with the illusion that the status quo is being upset. These are clearly appeals to the classic middle-class constituencies of fascism. This takes place against the backdrop of Anthopocene climate emergency. Indeed, it is fueled by it. The petit-bourgeois, like the bourgeois, depends on economic growth. As growth itself faces existential limits, the middle-class psychology screams. “We are wealthy,” the petit-bourgeois cretin will reckon, “but we are not wealthy enough for the apocalypse!”
A sane system would see this as the existential crisis it is, an event horizon in which the very idea of a human future is thrown into question. We have ten years now. So says every scientist worth their diploma. But from the deniers of the right (Trump, Johnson, et al) we are given shrugs. The tailspun center (Macron, Trudeau, etc) tell us to shoulder the weight. In France, Macron literally tried to “solve” the climate crisis on the backs of workers, provoking the gilets jaunes uprising.
This same flailing center – this establishment phalanx that had for the past thirty years worn the face of smug triumph, be it the Clintonoid centrist Democrats in the US, Blairites in the UK, or their co-thinkers across the globe – now pleads for a “return to normalcy.” As if “normal” isn’t exactly what brought us here in the first place. As if their brand of rationality offered us much anyway. As if their brand of rationality is not experienced in daily working-class life as profound and often cruel absurdism.
In other words, the cultural logic of the past three or four decades has broken but not been replaced. Out of the wreckage emerges all manner of symptoms and narratives that already test our notion of the possible, all manner of “morbid symptoms” to borrow from Gramsci. We have the most dismal, disturbing, and hopeless varieties. Dystopia becomes the order of the day. References to Children of Men and Blade Runner become trite.
IT IS understandable that, among the new and burgeoning radical left, there is an adjustment to this freefall in futurity, those who emphasize socialism as a “rational” system against the profound irrationality of what they see in front of them. However, this logic – this arid variety of leftism, hankering for some sense of normalcy – also carries with it the implicit belief that those who fight for a better world must make themselves amenable to the current one. Don’t be “too weird,” lest we alienate those who we are told make up the majority.
Locust sees itself as part of a different left-wing lineage. A lineage that sees the chaos and carnage as part-and-parcel not of capital’s irrationality per se (though that is part of it), but also of its drive to rationalize, to turn the human into a number measured more-or-less by the amount of profit they can help produce. It is a lineage going back to the revolutionary romantic tradition of Shelley and Blake, who railed against the “dark Satanic mills” that stripped laborers of both life and agency in the English countryside.
It continued in the Marxist, socialist, anarchist and communist movements, particularly as the twentieth century gave rise to a modernity that promised prosperity with one hand while squeezing the life out of whatever it could grab with the other. It is a lineage encompassing not just the surrealists but the situationists of 1960s France, of the more radical currents of the Black Arts Movement, and thinkers as diverse as Walter Benjamin, Silvia Federici and Carlos Mariategui, as well as artists and writers like Franz Kafka, Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, China Miéville. Simply put, this is a lineage that tends to see the re-enchantment of life as a mandate of communism.
What we call critical irrealism – not our term, but one first used by Marxist cultural critics like Michael Löwy – is an attempt to distill the radical democratic essence of these radical non-and-anti-realist cultural movements. All, in one way or another, reflected contradictions between desires for value and meaning versus a chaotic and (ir)rational social and existential condition.
Art by Anupam Roy
THE MOST widely-distributed cultural artifacts of late neoliberalism claim to be rational or real, to have some purchase on reality: reality television shows, social media performances, formal narratives, and empty conceptual art gestures. But today the working-class subject, scattered and fractured as we are, experiences the rational and real as chaotic insanity. In this admixture of realistic horrors, paradoxically, it is in the absurd that the proletarian subject can begin to reimagine purpose. As we argued in our first editorial:
Our irrealism must be, at punctuated moments, absurdist. The contemporary invocation of absurdism is an assertion of tricksterism. This is a representation of how a precarious working-class experiences events as cosmic randomness: 9/11 and the “War on Terror”, the economic collapse of 2008, the rise of Trump, the vagaries of online mobs in a world in which every online person has become a public figure, the sudden growth of socialist organization in the U.S., etc. Or, more prosaically, the sudden loss of health insurance, employment, housing, a sudden death at the hands of the police, the sudden demise of a bourgeois politician caught in a pedophilia ring.
In this cosmic random variable lies hope as well as tragedy. The trickster is not good or evil. It is creation and destruction. This is not to say the aforementioned events are truly cosmic or random. They can be explained by Marxism and science. However, they are often experienced in a manner the recalls the randomness of everyday life among our hunting and gathering ancestors.
With the crisis of capital comes the crisis in its cultural logic. The crisis of capitalist realism is that it is increasingly unable to make sense of the world capital has made. Hence those journalists and commentators who are utterly unable to explain why a self-proclaimed socialist is up in the polls in the midst of crushing inequality; or why anyone might see physical resistance as necessary against armed bigots who want them dead.
At the same time, irrealism (of a sort) is part and parcel of the culture of capitalist realism. There is the “realistic” space opera that eschews the telltale signs of the genre’s historic artifice. We are given faux cinema verité in outer space. When we miss the less sophisticated iterations of things we are missing the human elements, the hands of the artists, the clumsy (but beautiful) interior lives of previous generations hobbled together on sound stages and studios. Total Recall (1990) vs. Total Recall (2012). Robocop (1987) vs. Robocop (2014). We are given art with nothing new to say but a million ways to say it, speaking the language of fantasy while depriving us of any actual fantasy, any dream of a future we help shape.
While the culture gets “real,” of course, reality gets less “real”; almost living beyond what can be satirized. Observe some of the headlines from the past few months:
“Self-driving Mercedes will be programmed to sacrifice pedestrians to save the driver”
“Thousands of penis fish appear on California beach”
“Mask that has your face printed on it allows you to unlock your phone during viral epidemics”
“Taste the ash, see our pink sun: Sydney’s dead future is here”
“Trump team released a video of him as Thanos, the villain who commits genocide in the Avengers movies…”
“Ohio House passes ban on local bag bans”
“People in Japan are wearing exoskeletons to keep working as they age”
“US Army Worries Humanity is Biased Against Deadly Cyborg Soldiers”
Moreover, the idea of the “normal – be it on the left, right, or center – is related to the problem inherent to all “realisms.” The lifting of the “realistic” fragment out of its greater narrative and social totality immediately cedes ground to bourgeois compartmentalization and abstraction. That overarching rationalization already atomizes and isolates us. Even the most demographically “standard” worker is only “normal” when abstracted from their actual biography, psychology, and inner narrative. In other words, they are only “normal” when their actual subjectivity is ignored or repressed.
With the collapse of the socialist left, the defeat of much organized labor, the neoliberal turn, the rise of capitalist realism, and the mushrooming of endless critical theory, left-cultural production turned increasingly toward what we could call court jesterism. Our critiques of capital would be secretly coded in cultural products that could find expression in the spectacle. But we were often too clever by half. Much critique was so coded that it failed to criticize, became easily reified, and became tropes absorbed by bourgeois metanarratives. Indeed, the emphasis on secret coding echoed the general retreat of the class and the socialist movement.
While court jesterism sometimes produced good art – especially in pockets of speculative fiction and pulp film genres where it could be the most open – it failed spectacularly in the weak avant-garde.
Here, we take the lessons from so-called “Outsider Art;” in which artists do not usually attempt to hide or secretly code their philosophical worldviews, good or bad. We take from these artists the lesson that we need an overdetermined socialism in our art. This does not mean our work should consist of hagiographic portraits of Lenin or other such nonsense – although we are not against portraits of Lenin that, say, get at the contradictory legacy of October as it relates to the socialist movement and working-class lives. Regardless, our overdetermined socialism focuses on the individual and collective agency of working-class subject(s). This includes overt political organization. It also includes dreams and nightmares, spells and curses, angels and demons, aliens and monsters, failures and libidinal impulses.
That is to say: Our socialist irrealist art will intentionally jump the shark. Old notions of plausibility and convention – be they aesthetic or political – are dead. We see no need to revive them. In the face of a system that has policed and regulated our affects and emotions, we will dare to be over the top, ridiculous, absurd, silly, grotesque, obscene. Somewhere in the swirl of it all, our worst fears and highest hopes will break from capitalist realism’s constructed cages. And if it is possible for that to happen, in any collective sense, then we think it is also possible that something new and free might be imagined. Perhaps even made real.
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