by Alex McIntyre
The Locust Review is a project of the Locust Arts & Letters Collective, “published quarterly in an anachronistic newspaper format” and online. The collective defines itself as “an association of radical, critical irrealist and socialist artists,” and published the first issue of the Locust in Fall 2019. The editorial for that issue, “We Demand an End to Capitalist Realism,” declared that “The default mode of free creativity…among the post-digital, post-War-on-Terror, post-Great Recession generations, is what we and other radical thinkers call irrealism: a slipstream between the reality of the current moment and the subversive fantastic.”
As a young Marxist and a writer for the student newspaper of a dying liberal arts college, the Locust Review caught my interest from the outset. The question of how revolutionaries approach questions of human culture is a central academic, personal, and political interest of mine. It is the central focus of the somewhat stillborn column you are reading now. Accordingly, I reached out to the collective with a few questions, and got a lively and extensive set of responses numbering over 20 pages, the full length of which you can access in the web version of this article.
The following is my attempt to synthesize and reflect on those responses to provide readers of the Cooper Point Journal with an introduction to the Locust Review and critical irrealism as well as, ideally, an impulse to make their own creative interventions.
The Irrealist Imagination
“A century ago,” wrote the collective in their first editorial, “the idea of realism, of unflinching reflection of reality, still held a radical potentiality.” The aesthetic, cultural, and literary theorist Walter Benjamin once wrote that “the film,” in its depiction of human beings and their environment in a new lens, “on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.” Dziga Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera,” a silent depiction of the nooks and crannies of everyday life in the young Soviet Union, is arguably the apex of realism as a progressive form. Vertov’s film showed the motion of life in an active attempt at social transformation.
However, the Locust editorial argues that “Realism has become a tool of the bourgeoisie. The proofs of its barbarisms, the videos of its police racism, the images of its privations, instead of inciting the masses, now often serve to recapitulate trauma.” Further, “A realistic image of capitalist barbarism that incited riots three decades ago now functions as a threat and a warning.” Or, in Adam Turl’s words, “Reality has become too absurd to satirize in a realistic way.”
This conclusion begs the famous question, what is to be done? Turl wrote to me that “[The Locust Review] had come to see capitalist realism—the idea as Mark Fisher puts it, that nothing could be imagined in present society that didn’t jive with capitalist interests—as one of the main problems in contemporary culture. We counterposed this to Michael Lowy’s concept of critical irrealism, of using culture that rejected realism—speculative fiction, surrealism, absurdism, afrofuturism, magical realism, etc.—as a weapon against capitalist realism.”
Alexander Billet, another founding member of the collective, added “To me it’s no coincidence that these [artistic-cultural] movements had a strong relationship with various left-wing groups and movements. All rejected the parameters of reality as most working people had had them imposed on them. But they were doing so in the specific conditions of their time and place, and so the aesthetic responses were different, even as they held in common that rejection of impossibility.”
What does critical irrealism look like? It doesn’t. Adam Ray Adkins, collective member and host of The Acid Left podcast, states “Critical irrealism is not identifiable unless the content is engaged. It can not be summed up in a checklist of aesthetic criteria or points the world has to touch on. It is more in the way the work engages with both the world, the viewer, and the composition.” Or, in the words of Anupam Roy, “‘Critical Irrealist’ is a politicization of aesthetical tools in which we propose different approaches to problematize representational politics that talk on behalf of others.”
Paper in the Concrete
“…a considerable proportion of so-called left-wing literature possessed no other social function than to wring from the political situation a stream of novel effects for the entertainment of the public,” wrote Benjamin in “The Author as Producer.” Revolutionary works of art “must have, over and above their character as works, an organizing function, and in no way must their organizational usefulness be confined to their value as propaganda.”
It’s one thing to express radical sentiments and another entirely to take political action.
The collective’s members come from a variety of artistic and political backgrounds. Some had been involved in Red Wedge, which Turl describes as “an ecumenical clearing-house of Marxist and radical cultural theory and practice, organized under the rubric of what we called the popular avant-garde.” In terms of the collective overall, “Some of us come from Trotskyist traditions, some are members of [the Democratic Socialists of America], some from Maoist traditions, some of us became revolutionaries or socialists on our own. Some of us are probably anarchists.”
In short, as Mike Linaweaver writes, “[The Locust Review] aims to be fundamentally nonsectarian,” or not exclusive to any one political tendency or organization.
This nonsectarian orientation accompanies both participation in and a critical attitude towards existing socialist organizations. Referring to Guy Debord’s concept of the “alienated organization,” Billet asks, “Socialist groups go through these same motions over and over again, never questioning them just because it’s always how we’ve done it. Does it work? Does it even halfway work? Why are we not putting more effort into really teaching people’s critical and subjective faculties to flourish?”
My views on the proverbial “party question,” among other things, are likely in contrast to those of most at the Locust collective. That’s part of the point. “In terms of our main practice as Locust Review,” Turl states, “what we would like is for comrades in all the left groups to read Locust, debate with us, engage with us, patronize the comrade-artists and writers we network with and publish.”
There is a tangibility to both the Locust itself and the task it has embarked on. As a sniveling Trotskyite I am compelled to repeat Lenin’s point in “Where to Begin?” that “A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organizer,” akin to “the scaffolding round a building under construction, which marks the contours of the structure and facilitates communication between the builders.” Beyond that, as Turl says, “There is a contradiction in the art object. On the one hand it is a commodity fetish in the Marxist sense. But it is also an artistic fetish, given cultural value as a record of human performance.” A print journal like the Locust, according to Turl, can weaponize the artistic fetish against the commodity fetish.
“When I think of why we publish physically, why we embrace a medium that might seem antiquated by some standards today, I think immediately of Walter Benjamin when he was writing about unpacking his library. Yes, books are a commodity but they are also objects with which we have a very specific imaginative relationship. There are memories and dreamworlds we’ve attached to them over time, both collectively and as individuals,” adds Billet.
Doom, Disease, Defiance
An elephant in the room of almost every conversation in this foul year of our lord, 2022, is the plague.
Tish Turl states succinctly, “The existential dread has not been helpful to my writing process. But my writing has helped me process small portions of that dread.” Collective members describe the psychological weight of the plague with a familiar immensity. “It has forever changed the topography of my unconscious,” says Adkins.
When one thinks of the plague one tends to think of doom. Death. Decay. I asked the collective if we were doomed.
Adam Turl answers “Everyone is doomed. We are all going to die.” How reassuring! I kid. There’s more to it than that. He says of doom and death, “There is an unequal distribution of doom…Because we are alienated from each other we experience our individual mortality in a far different way than we would without that alienation. In an egalitarian socialist society, our individual deaths would still be tragic, but part of us would live on in the collective. We are denied that in capitalism.”
“Living with the absurd, the unthinkable, the tragic, the heartrending, is what too many people have done every day in an exploitative world,” adds Laura Fair-Schulz. “Enter Sisyphus, cursed to roll a boulder uphill day after day. The embodiment of living with the absurd. But a Marxist might say, there are millions of us, living after the unthinkable, let’s band together and take down this fucking mountain.” If you’re going to die anyway, die trying.
Linaweaver writes “Are we doomed? Maybe. Maybe everyone is. But, despair doesn’t suit a Marxist.” To him, a central question Locust addresses is “What will we be on the other side of our despair? Who will we be? What will be possible? And, how do we get there together?”
“It is true that in the end we might be left with only ashes,” he says. “But on the other hand, we have a whole fucking world to win. And, goddamnit, that’s worth a fight. It’s worth a struggle.”
The locusts embrace their doom with defiance.
There Is No Conclusion.
The reader may be asking the famous question, what is to be done? Or, more succinctly, so what?
If you happen to still be reading this particular article in this particular issue of this particular student newspaper, the Locust Review has advice for you.
“My advice is sincere and simple. Just keep creating,” suggests Adkins. “Share your work, but not immediately. Sit with something a bit and let it stare into you- see how that feels. Develop a rhythm, or several and play with them. Continue to experiment, once you have found a rhythm, find a way to disrupt it—a new material, a limitation, collaborate with something that has a different style. Push your artistic limits.”
“Also, stay the fuck off social media. I know it makes me sound old but everything we’ve learned over the past year should make it clear why those digital cesspools are death for the imagination,” adds Billet.
“You always come back to where you started,” to a first gesture or impulse, says Adam Turl. “I always dreamt of a giant kiosk with the voices and hands of thousands of people marking it in some way. Some art teacher told me I needed to focus on something specific. But that was wrong. That was positivism and bourgeois ideology talking. I needed to hone in on the democratic chaos that spoke to me. Cultivate it. Make it messy and jumbled and ramshackle.”
Be weird, fateful recipient of the Cooper Point Journal. Create futures. Be partisan, tendentious, obnoxious, unapologetic. Be something, do something, make something. If you do, you might send it our way. Or to the locusts.
What else are you gonna do, die?
Read more from the Locust Review at their website, locustreview.com, and if you like the anachronistic print publication you’re currently reading, you may want to pick up theirs, too. I have not been bribed nor intimidated by the locusts. They are not at this time attempting to devour me. I have signed this article in blood.
