Worlds to Win: A Note Toward a Political Aesthetic (201908081413)

…and yet, all writings are political, especially those dissembling as “apolitical”; while historical contingencies have in the past imposed upon revolutionary theory and praxis necessity for camouflage and disguise, the time for privileging such tactics has passed—as social, political, identity, and class antagonisms become everyday more visible due to the maturing crises of late neoliberalism (…intensifying exploitation and injustice, resurgent fascism, climate change…), emancipatory thought is ethically bound to enter new battlegrounds, not abandoning its hard-won guerrilla skills, but adopting new strategies, confronting its nemesis directly, wherever it may without exposing itself to destruction; as a realm in which social perceptions, consciousness, and relations are (re)produced, literature is key terrain that must be fought for, seized, and held against counter-attack…literature’s revolutionary potential has been the core concern of Western philosophers and theorists from Plato down to our contemporaries, whether they directly acknowledged so or not; in the Marxist tradition, this concern gained new self-consciousness: Nikolaj Chernyshevsky and Georg Lukács championed realism for its ability to map and pass judgment on real relations of existence, to develop the consciousness revolution requires—but, against them, realism calcified the empiricist thought and perspective fueling oppression and exploitation; Theodor Adorno responded by advancing modernism as an aesthetic logic capable of ripping open what realism had foreclosed, of negating the reification of processes into things (re)producing the oppressive commodity form—but, against him, modernism, due to its capacity for creating endless novelty, became late capitalism’s most prolific commodity producer; realism’s empiricist foreclosure pointed to a need for modernism’s formal opening, as modernism’s co-opting into commodity production pointed to a need for realism’s consciousness and judgment of real relations: they cried out for union but were kept isolated by each movement’s desire for ideological purity (now impossible); postmodernism—narrative forever mocking itself as-such—presented itself as a synthesis, but its ascension to neoliberalism’s cultural logic revealed the falseness of its facade: the cynical dismissal of all Truth as mere truths made all aesthetics and politics fungible equivalents, completing art’s transformation into “free” market, authorizing the false narratives and aesthetics of power, specifically capitalist realism, that hegemonic Thatcherite narrative-aesthetic sense that there is no alternative to capitalism…revolutionary literature today must both map the Real and its realities and negate the false aesthetics and consciousness of power; it must become the theoretical and aesthetic reflection of The Invisible Committee’s revolutionary insurrectionist praxis: simultaneous sabotage of power and building of communes…for creative praxis, this means—among other acts—the liberation of the reified sentence, whose labor produces semiotic value in surplus, who has for too long been subjugated to so-called “larger units of meaning,” the managerial paragraphs and owner chapters, and who must be prepared and armed for their overthrow, for overwhelming, internalizing, destroying them and thus itself as-sentence, freeing itself to become what it might through the construction of new semiotic communes that can devastate capitalist realism and build toward what theorist Mark Bould and others have collectively named Full-On Fully-Automated Luxury Green Interspecies Feminist Queer Space Communism of Color…

(A version of this first appeared in Statement, vol. 69, 2019.)

c.f.: _History and Class Consciousness_, Georg Lukács; "The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality", Nikolaj Chernyshevsky; _The Republic_, Plato; _Capitalist Realism_, Mark Fisher; _Aesthetic Theory_, Theodor Adorno; 201908071623 (psychedelic aesthetics), 201907031530 (realism and modernism grounded in commodity form), 201810150834 (insurrectionary aesthetics), 201810010720 (punctuation as ideology)