Critical Irrealist Reading List
This survey of irrealist books first appeared in Imago #1. To subscribe to Imago subscribe to Locust Review.
Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings From Africa and the Diaspora, edited by Robin DG Kelley and Franklin Rosemont
“Our revolution has been stolen from us.” - Aimé Césaire.
THE INTRODUCTION to this anthology of AfroSurrealist writing, written by Robin DG Kelley and Franklin Rosemont, is not only a brilliant primer of AfroSurrealism, but of Surrealism overall. In its origins, as Kelley and Rosemont note, Surrealism “inherited and expanded the revolutionary Romantic disdain for Progress, Modernity, and the ecodidal technological devastation that smugly persists in calling itself ‘development.’” These insights were developed further by AfroSurrealists throughout the world, connecting a Romantic rebellion against so-called “progress” to anti-colonial and anti-imperialist resistance; positioning both against racist European assumptions that progress and civilization were white, while primitiveness and barbarism were non-white. Kelley and Rosemont’s anthology includes work by dozens of AfroSurrealist comrades, including Aimé Césaire, Wilfredo Lam, Juan Breá, Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil, among many others. But this book, as brilliant as it is, is just an overall survey. It should be used to begin or help index an exploration of 20th century AfroSurrealism, not conclude it. — Adam Turl
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher
IF YOU want to understand a strategy, you must first understand the enemy you’re fighting. Few are as widely mourned on the radical left like Mark Fisher, and this short volume (less than 90 pages) gives you a good sense why. Two of his other books are also on this list as they pertain directly to the critical irrealist mission, but we may as well recommend all of them. When it came out in 2009 Capitalist Realism was a shot across the bow. It declared that the neoliberal model -- then experiencing its worst crisis of legitimacy in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis -- was not simply about immiseration of people’s lives but a narrowing of our horizons, a privatization of the imagination. Building on Fredric Jameson, Fisher insists that a specific logic of the possible inherent in neoliberalism has achieved a hegemony other eras in capitalism have not. And while his prognosis is bleak, his diagnosis is spot on, and encourages a notion of liberation that honors the full potentials of a free human imaginary. — Alexander Billet
Combined and Uneven Apocalypse by Evan Calder Williams
THIS, DEAR readers, is the bible of salvagepunk. Today it seems common currency among the left that we are living through some form of end times -- be they the end of a world of exploitation or just the end of the world. Evan Calder Williams identified this before the signs were so glaring. Written in 2011, three years after the financial collapse but well before the famed IPCC reports, the rise of the current far right, and before any of us knew what a modern global pandemic would look like, Calder Williams argued that if we are approaching apocalypse, we deserve to ask whose apocalypse. Will it be “the end of all things”? Or will it be, as he passionately traces, a chance for humanity’s collective creativity to finally come into its own, to cobble together a future worth living out of the rubble and wreckage? In examining a wide array of filmic artifacts -- from The Return of the Living Dead to WALL-E -- he illustrates this vision, the vision of luciferian communism, has already been with us for some time. — Alexander Billet
Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul by Leila Taylor
“BOTH GOTH and Blackness,” Leila Taylor writes, “are performative identities with foundations in transgression, a familiarity with death and aestheticized mourning, and a keen awareness of the darker side of human nature.” The United States is, on the one hand, an inherently gothic country, all the more so for the descendants of the African diaspora. The gothic, as Taylor notes, is not merely a genre or style -- it is more a “mode of thinking” or “sensibility;” relating to a contradictory past. “America is built over the bones of brown people who were here first, and built by Black people brought here against their will,” Taylor notes, “and the fear of retaliation is real.” But if the bones of the US are gothic, the ethos of American capitalism is amnesia; a constant forgetting of the past. “The gothic is a retrograde form of romanticism,” she writes, “but America is a forward-looking country.” The gothic — and all the more the Black gothic — tend to interrupt the amnesiac American consciousness. At the same time the gothic image can be reified — as Taylor observes of ruin porn — or used in reactionary narratives and imaginaries — as with southern Gothic nostalgia for the antebellum. — Adam Turl
Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ by Michael Löwy
TRUE, READING this book is best done in tandem with Benjamin’s classic text. But “Theses On the Concept of History” can be an opaque read to those unfamiliar with him. The virtue of Löwy’s short book is that it goes through each of the theses, one by one, explaining them in historical and theoretical context. Ergo, in reading Fire Alarm, you also get to read the original text! What one walks away with is a sense that to look at history in a dialectical materialist way is to look at it like a poet, understanding that it is more than a simple, linear (and frankly boring) sequence of one thing after another. The past contains moments and narratives that are worth revisiting and redeeming, the future is undetermined, and each present moment is a place where revolutionary rupture is possible. — Alexander Billet
Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situationism, Utopia by Michael Löwy
THIS, ALONG with the opening chapters of Robin DG Kelley and Franklin Rosemont’s book on Black surrealism, is perhaps the best introduction to Surrealism. Long misunderstood as a narrow avant-garde movement in Europe, surrealism is better understood, as Löwy makes clear, as a rebellion of the human spirit. Surrealism’s “myth in perpetual motion” as Michael Löwy writes, is “always incomplete and always open to the creation of new mythological figures and images.” Through the construction of dream images and strategies to tap into subconscious creativity — such as automatic drawing and automatic writing — Surrealism aims to counterpose a potentially liberated subject against the constrained and false rationality of bourgeois society. The ultimate goal of this expression is to reclaim the marvelousness of the world. This focus on the free or liberated subject is central to both Surrealism and critical irrealism more generally. — Adam Turl
Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, edited by China Mieville and Mark Bould
IT HAS long been wrongly assumed by a number of Marxist scholars that science fiction (SF) is inherently progressive. This is not historically correct. At the same time SF, like speculative fiction more generally, does have a great potential for critical estrangement. Because SF positions an imagined world against the accepted reality of bourgeois society, it carries the possibility of criticality. Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, a collection of essays edited by Mark Bould and China Miéville, hits on a number of historic debates among Marxists and scholars about SF, many of which pivot with and against what Miéville calls the “Suvinian moment:” when Darko Suvin, the first Marxist scholar to seriously analyze SF as a genre, argued that SF produced a critical cognitive estrangement in the reader. China Miéville’s essay, “Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory” argues that Suvin is right about the critical estrangement potential of SF, but that it is not science that creates this possibility, rather it is created by the author’s approach to ideological questions. — Adam Turl
The Situationist International: A Handbook, edited by Alastair Hemmens, and Gabriel Zacarias; Constructed Situations by Frances Stracey
LIKE FIRE Alarm, these books are best read in tandem with the classic situationist texts (Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and his follow-up Comments On the Society of the Spectacle), and with each other. The texts of situationism can be confusing to those lacking the context in which they were written. The Situationist International fills in these gaps on this often misunderstood group of mid-century communist revolutionaries. Much like the surrealists, the situationists saw the mechanization and commodification of life as a fetter on the human imagination. Also in the manner of the surrealists, they saw the breakdown of barriers between art, work, and life as essential for revolution. Though this would not be achieved within the boundaries of art, it did have a profound impact on artists and creatives who identified and organized as situationists. This is why Frances Stracey’s Constructed Situations is as essential to read; it addresses the question of how artists looking to relate to wider struggles that seek to explode the confines of art itself.
— Alexander Billet
The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher
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. A bizarre curse. At the same time, the gothic quality of daily life in capitalism often overpowers ideology. When it does so we are often confronted with what Mark Fisher calls a “perturbation” — we are confronted with the weird and eerie. Faced with this “transcendental shock” of the weird and eerie -- we may further step outside capitalist realism. And yet we also step further into the neglected corners of ourselves. This is what The Weird and the Eerie examines. Even that which feels unfamiliar, is nonetheless rooted in the human. — Adam Turl and Alexander Billet
Alexander Billet is a writer, artist, and general layabout based in Los Angeles. His writing has been featured in Los Angeles Review of Books, Salvage, Jacobin, Radical Art Review, and other publications. He is a founding member of the Locust Arts & Letters Collective and is a producer, with Drew Franzblau, of Locust Radio, co-hosted by Tish and Adam Turl.He screams into the void at alexanderbillet.com. Adam Turl an artist and writer from southern Illinois — by way of Wisconsin, Chicago, upstate New York and Las Vegas. They are an artist and editor at Locust Review, a quarterly irrealist journal of art and literature, and a member of the Locust Arts and Letters Collective (LALC). They have had solo exhibitions at the Brett Wesley Gallery (Las Vegas), the Cube (Las Vegas), Project 1612 (Peoria, Illinois), and Artspace 304 (Carbondale, Illinois); and group exhibitions at Core Contemporary (Las Vegas) and Gallery 210 (St. Louis). In 2016 Turl was awarded a fellowship and residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, France. They received their MFA from Washington University in St. Louis at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, and a BFA from SIUC. Turl is working on an evolving conceptual and visual art project, Born Again Labor Museum, with their partner Tish Turl, a writer and fellow LALC member. They host the monthly podcast Locust Radio along with Tish Turl.Social media splash image by Anupam Roy.