Between Worlds

The following editorial was written in the spring and early summer of 2021, and appears in Imago #1. To subscribe to Imago subscribe to Locust Review.

On the Tenth Day - Collective 17. Detail. Mike Linaweaver (2020)

WE ARE well acquainted with the unease by now. It’s that feeling that nothing we see in front of us is eternal, that at any moment it could all be thrown off balance. The streets and buildings in front of you that once seemed so immovable and impregnable begin to slide into each other, becoming pliable and ephemeral, responsive to greater forces. 

This revelation of history is neither good nor bad. It simply is. Liberals and conservatives alike fear its existence, hoping to quell our anxieties by insisting that that which exists is good and that which is good exists. Fascists and the far-right, for their part, insist on their own telos, chiding us to feel our despair as hope, to accept a newly mythologized -- and more brutal -- capitalism as the best we can do.

Few voices encourage us to deal with these constant chimerical moments. Again, without ascribing any moral judgment, these moments are chances to look for parallels, coincidences. Scrambled in the previews of wreckage and disaster, there has to be a way to map for ourselves a future worth living. 

These buried temporal topographies — gothic futurist ley lines — are key among our obsessions at the Locust Arts & Letters Collective (LALC). To us a coincidence is never just a coincidence. As we say in the editorial for Locust Review’s fifth issue (which subscribers should be receiving around the same time as this first issue of Imago):

Coincidence often illuminates a great deal about a historical moment. Several months into the pandemic, one of our editors submitted a poem to Locust Review with the title “Two Minutes Past Midnight.” Another editor replied that they had been working on something with almost the exact same title. Both had, apparently, been preoccupied with the way in which apocalyptic collapse had been made tangible again: the Cold War’s Doomsday Clock suddenly remade relevant. Days later, yet another member of our collective stepped in to say that they too had a poem in the works ruminating on the possibility of the world’s end. 

It isn’t difficult to see why, as cases of Covid-19 continued to climb, without any meaningful social safety net to catch most of us, and with gun-toting fascists demanding that economies be reopened whatever the cost, these were our concerns. 

If the quote often mistakenly attributed to Fredric Jameson — “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” — had become trite before Covid 19, we suddenly no longer had to imagine. Apocalypse had become tangible. You could witness it, even touch it.

As partisans of the weird, we couldn’t deny this. Imago’s first issue comes at a time when it is starting to sink in that “normal” is not coming back. The world that existed before the first patients got sick won’t be returning. Naturally, a great many liberals and centrists haven’t come to grips with this reality, but nevertheless, it persists. It percolates death throughout the Indian subcontinent as we write.

Shifting Worlds

COMRADES HAVE long noted that “we” are in-between worlds; in-between our goals for a post-capitalist society and the depravations of capitalism, in-between a class conscious proletariat and a working-class that is atomized and alienated, in-between the possibility of emancipation or utter fascist reaction.

This observation of being in-between, however, is not some cliché. It is born of the nature of being exploited and oppressed in a racist and heterosexist capitalism; a capitalism that is in constant flux, paired with emancipatory movements that are also in constant flux; the former now bringing us close to existential planetary crisis.

There was the late Daniel Singer’s paraphrasing of Walt Whitman ­— “between things ended and begun” — that was once cited in an unfortunate perspectives document by one of the now defunct US socialist sects. This was meant to explain the contradiction between the potential revolution that animated that organization and the paucity of revolutionary struggle that surrounded it. This substitute poetics was meant to sustain comrades in a capitalist wasteland. 

There is the famous passage from Antonio Gramsci, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Our comrade, Anupam Roy, hung this quote from Gramsci in a red banner in the 2018 New Museum Triennial. Anupam’s act baffled even supposedly Marxist art critics. Surrounded by the wealthy and hermeneutical art world they could not fathom the depth of the morbidity represented by politicians like Modi and Trump; how such titular revanchism and fascism were rooted in a million diseased flower beds. Aspects of capitalism were polluting themselves. The working-class and the socialist movement could not adequately respond. Monsters were being made in a planetary resident evil.

Rosa Luxemburg posed a choice between barbarism and socialism; not so much a degeneration of society to pre-industrial forces of production, but a struggle between a nascent fascism and the struggling socialist movement.

The experience of being between worlds, however, is also molecular, happening among individuals and small groups of workers; and in the heads of the non-capitalist subject. 

In this inert town this strange crowd that does not congregate, does not mingle; adept at finding the moment of disengagement, of escape, of evasion. This crowd that does not know how to behave like a crowd; this crowd, you understand, that is so completely alone under this sun, like a woman you would have thought to be wholly in tune with her lyric cadence, who brusquely calls out to a hypothetical rain and commands it to not fall... -- Aimé Césaire, Journal of a Homecoming (79-81)

Aimé Césaire, the Martiniquais communist and Afrosurrealist, describes, in poetic form, the contradiction between the class in and for itself; the latter being the summoning of the exploited and oppressed subject by capitalism, the former being the consciousness of that collective subject. On his return home, Césaire laments the “crowd that does not know how to behave like a crowd,” the powerful woman who could bring rain with her voice but who “calls out to a hypothetical rain and commands it to not fall.” This is not a moral judgment as much as the observation of a tragedy. They (and we) are trapped, for the moment, somewhere in the mediated and conflictual space between being and consciousness, between being a class in and for ourselves.

In terms of the working-class, there is, in the mind of the worker, a contradiction between normative common sense (in the manner by which Gramsci describes “common sense” as hegemonic ideology) and class consciousness. Each is tethered to, shaping, and shaped by, a material relation of exploitation and production. Similar “mental” or “symbolic” competitions are expressed, for example, in W.E.B. DuBois’ concept of “double-consciousness,” or in the contradiction between “kitchen consciousness” and “public consciousness” in certain totalitarian societies. 

As we have argued elsewhere, the intolerability of everyday life under capitalism — and its metanarrative of capitalist realism —  compels subjects to engage in their own counter-world building. Young users of Tik Tok have taken to the practice of “shifting,” posting videos in which they claim to be residents of various speculative worlds, such as Hogwarts, who have suddenly and traumatically brought to “our” reality. More insidiously, the adherents of QAnon shift actual trauma into fascist imaginaries. While real-life children are kidnapped by ICE gestapos at the border, they imagine, instead, a cabal of celebrities and politicians harvesting children’s adrenochrome in an effort to achieve immortality.

In other words, when the subject encounters the current world as both familiar and alien it is, in part, because each of us already contains both. To borrow from Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie, the bleeding of such competing worlds, like the bleeding of cities in China Miéville’s novel, The City and the City, are a perturbation. The perturbations mount with each intersection of the worlds; each trascendental trauma, each new breach. Whether these breaches produce criticality or reaction depends on many things, most of all the organization and combativity of the anti-capitalist subject, the organization and combativity of the working-class.

Praxis: Worlds in Conflict

AS WE started writing this editorial, clashes between Catholic and Protestant had returned to Northern Ireland, triggered by the UK’s crashing out of the European Union. Minneapolis police killed another Black man (say his name: Daunte Wright) even as the murderer of George Floyd was convicted. New laws in the UK are essentially making protest illegal. General strikes roll through Myanmar, as do massacres carried out by the coup government. Israel has accelerated its ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem and its war on the Gaza Strip. India gasps for breath. History keeps happening, keeps returning to our consciousness events that we, as little as ten years ago, were told were in the past. 

In the midst of all this, the left finds itself in a quandary. Just two years ago, in the English-speaking world at least, we were able to point to a revival of sorts, perhaps even the return of mass organizations willing to engage in struggle. Electorally there were the campaigns and successes of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and Jeremy Corbyn, and the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the left wing of the Labour Party. Now the Corbyn and Sanders projects have run aground, AOC and the rest of the Squad are isolated voices under massive pressure from the Democratic machine — to which they have sometimes unnecessarily compromised. The Labour Party is back in the hands of an inept center, and is failing to put up even the most cursory opposition to Tory disaster capitalism.

The DSA remains the largest socialist organization in the US since the Second World War, with a large number of talented organizers, old and new, in its ranks. It also failed to respond in any substantive way to the pandemic at the national level, and its mobilization around the Black Lives Matter uprising in the summer of 2020 was uneven at best. DSA’s activities are still quite hemmed in by the limits of electoralism, to say nothing of the petty infighting that hobbles the organization’s larger chapters. Overall, the new socialist movement in the US seems to be pulling to the right, while the remaining revolutionary organizations are fragmented and show little interest in regroupment or common action. As long as this state of affairs continues, DSA and the smaller revolutionary groups will likely stumble as they try to relate to an increasingly chaotic world. 

Gramsci was, of course, right. The morbid symptoms are mushrooming. And they will continue to metastasize until the left and the working-class abolishes the interregnum; pushing a “constant present” into a future, jumping from this old and literally dying world into a new one. It bears repeating that nobody else, absolutely nobody else, is going to be performing this task for us. 

These political and organizational questions are not altogether separate from the aesthetic ones that Imago seeks to tackle. On the whole the radical left is bigger than it was just a few years ago, and the nature of its shortcomings can (and should) be approached from a myriad of angles. But for us, the primary blind spot remains one of imagination. This has been our enduring preoccupation. Confronting the gap between an increasingly bizarre reality and the utopian blueprints and dreams for a better world is a political and organizational-strategic question. But these inevitably synthesize with the question of whether we can conceive of a present in which we start to build a future out of the wreckage. This takes knowledge and strategy, yes; it also requires creativity, and a sensibility unafraid of the strange. The worlds we see projected on top of each other must inevitably be navigated. 

Those familiar with the Locust Collective, or who have read a previous issue of Locust Review, will be unsurprised to read that we posit critical irrealism as a framework that can help answer these questions. Up until now we have tried to prove that largely in practice, through the art, poetry, fiction and other creative ephemera we publish. The warm reception of our projects such as Locust Review, our Locust Radio podcast, and others, reveal that others similarly see an imaginative gap in the left that needs to be bridged. Nonetheless, theory remains central for any praxis. 

For this reason we have dedicated Imago’s maiden issue to better understanding critical irrealism as praxis, in both politics and aesthetics. It seems worth repeating here that this concept is one we are building rather than originating. In some respects we are trying to further clear a path for the long history of revolutionary romanticism, the preoccupation with the marvelous and fantastical, and the belief that humans can make them possible. This stretches back to the moments of William Blake and Mary Shelley, but includes thousands of gestures from every corner of the Earth. It is our belief that a left better acquainted with this lineage will be better able to envision and fight for a fully liberated, radically democratic society. 

Theory and Practice in This Issue

THE FIRST three essays in this issue are adapted from a panel the authors helped present at the Historical Materialism conference, held online in November of 2020. As such, they work in tandem and take cues from each other, often making overlapping arguments. 

Alexander Billet’s essay aims to provide an overview of critical irrealism, the origins of the term and the practice, and its place in relation not just to past radical arts movements but revolutionary politics writ large. Holly Lewis’ short piece seeks to situate critical irrealism philosophically, particularly in regards to various notions of rationality, and differentiates the weird irrealist rejection of Western rationalism from the lunacy of contemporary right-wing conspiracism. Lewis examines, in particular, the “rationalist” aspects of the uber-conspiracy theory QAnon.

Adam Turl’s expansive essay mines the gulf between “their irrealism and ours,” at a time when both the far-left and the far-right are attempting to relate to an increasingly absurd world. What is the difference between a numinous left and the right’s use of strangeness and irony? Turl looks at the divergent paths between fascist occultism and the radical left’s different relationships to the spiritual and estranged. They  critique historic Marxist approaches to occultism and science fiction, compare the nature of Nazi occultism and working-class esotericism, contrast Popular Front and Nazi science fiction, as well as counter contemporary right-wing mythologies and Locust Review’s “Irrealist Worker’s Survey.”

Continuing to weave together questions of theory and practice, in particular practice as it relates to mass struggle, we are excited to include works that deal with the physical transformation of our lived environments. Elia El-Khazen’s piece on the ups and downs of struggle in Lebanon since the mass uprisings of late 2019 reveals such social enweirding, as does Kira Woodworth’s essay on the experience of the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) in Seattle during the height of last summer’s rebellions.

Aelita Cain Torrent reviews A.M. Gittlitz’s I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs, and Apocalypse Communism, looking into the roots of what has become socialist ufology, and comparing these to fascist UFO myths. Tish Turl’s review of the Harriet Porber series examines Chuck Tingle’s queer literature, embodied in an irrealist subversion and repurposing of the romance genre, all the while sticking it to the transphobic hack JK Rowling. Maisa Herrick reviews Rochelle Spencer’s recent book on contemporary AfroSurrealist literature, examining in particular how AfroSurrealists reject within their work a racist teleology of progress. Aaron Werner reviews the Arthur Jones and Giorgio Angelini documentary about the creator of Pepe the Frog. 

We are also including in Imago #1 a suggested reading list from the editors, to provide readers with an overview of some key texts  on critical irrealism. And, lastly, we are reprinting the 1937 Michelist manifesto, “Mutation or Death!” — written by young communist science fiction fans and writers who aimed to take over the genre for the Popular Front.

Imago

IN ENTOMOLOGICAL terms, “imago” refers to the final adult stage of a winged insect’s development, the state into which it emerges after its final transitional development. In psychoanalysis, the word refers to the idealized mental image of someone, most often a parent, that influences a human being’s development. Not unrelated to this is the word’s similarity to “imagination,” an indispensable component in radical social transformation.

But we would be truly out of line if we didn’t also tip our caps to the great radical Black science fiction author Octavia Butler. Her book Imago is the third and final in her Lilith’s Brood trilogy (also known as the Xenogenesis trilogy), in which a postapocalyptic humanity is visited on Earth by a nonviolent and egalitarian alien race, the Oankali. At first viewed as parasites, their transformations to what is left of humanity dramatically shift the outlook of the first novel’s protagonist, Lilith.  

Imago is told from the point of view of Lilith’s child, Jodahs, a human-Oankali hybrid, who chooses to live their life in the form of the Oankali’s third sex, ooloi (whose pronoun in the book is “it”). Jodahs finally provides humanity — crossbred and otherwise — with something of a future, a promise that settlements and towns will grow into ships that will allow them to escape bare subsistence and explore space. The novels are filled with deconstructions of race, gender, disability. Jodahs and others like it can literally shapeshift, and identities are viewed as performative, malleable. 

None of this is without moral conflict. Butler was uninterested in neatness and cleanliness of conscience. We by no means intend to look at the Oankali as untainted saviors. As Bogi Takacs at Tor.com puts it, many of the protagonist’s actions read as “a continuation, a spreading of life… but also invasion, colonization at its utmost extreme. Yet the narrative doesn’t label it as such; it allows the reader space to consider the question, and be quietly terrified.” 

We are also in a moment of quiet (and not-so-quiet) terror. We make no claim to moral purity, though we remain, as Butler was, opposed to exploitation, empire, and anything else that might deny humans of their collective subjectivity. But we are also, like Butler, swayed by the vision of humans becoming something more, something better, giving into our more communal instincts that see borders and limitations as the fictions they actually are. 

Nobody can seriously deny that there are dark times ahead. Nonetheless, we cling to the idea that utopia is possible, that we, as humans, can still be and build something better.