The art of George Grosz (1893-1959) provides bitterly satirical and haunting grotesque caricatures of the world in which he lived. Emerging out of the First World War, Grosz’s drawings display absolute disdain for capitalists, military officials and politicians alike. A leading figure in movements such as German Expressionism, Dadaism and New Objectivity, George Grosz was a controversial figure who was denounced by the Nazis as ‘Cultural Bolshevik no.1’. A member of the German Communist Party from 1919, George Grosz was nonetheless a controversial figure in the party itself. His biting satire seemed unable to fit in any institution or organization. Following the rise to power of the Nazi party in 1933, George Grosz emigrated to New York where he became an anti-Stalinist, while his art confrontationally responded to New York’s consensus around Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. In many ways, the art and life of George Grosz displays a unique and challenging engagement with the social upheavals that surrounded him.
In this session we are joined by Barbara McCloskey. She is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Her books include George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936 (1997), Artist of World War II (2005), and The Exile of George Grosz: Modernism, America, and the One World Order (2015). In this session she will be joining us to discuss  her work on George Grosz, his provocative art and the context in which he lived.

Podcast 24: The Art And Life Of George Grosz (audio only)

Amber A’Lee Frost is a writer and podcaster. She writes for publications such as the Baffler, Current Affairs, Jacobin and is a co-host of the political and satirical podcast Chapo Trap House. In this session we will be joined by Amber to discuss her work, and the cultural movement known as the dirtbag left. According to Amber “the cultivation of the dirtbag left” involves “the embrace of the vulgar and the irreverent, and an absolute zero tolerance for po-face humourlessness.” (Zero Squared #94: Free Speech for Dickheads) Fusing radical left politics with irreverence and vulgarity, dirtbag leftism attempts to reclaim traits often associated with Trump for the lefts own ends. Writing in Current Affairs Amber tells us,
“The left will always need its journals and polemic and academic writing, but there are times when it is both right and proper to terrify the bourgeoisie with your own feralness. Reclaiming vulgarity from the Trumps of the world is imperative because if we do not embrace the profane now and again, we will find ourselves handicapped by our own civility. Vulgarity is the language of the people, and so it should be among the grammars of the left, just as it has been historically, to wield righteously against the corrupt and the powerful. We cannot cede vulgarity to the vulgarians; collegial intellectuals will always be niche, but class war need not be.” (The Necessity of Political Vulgarity)
In this session, we will discuss a range of political issues raised in Amber’s work, the ways she integrates humor, satire, irreverence and vulgarity into her work, and the ways the “Dirtbag Left” could be seen as constructing a counterculture in our own time.

Podcast 27: The Dirtbag Left w/ AmberA'Lee Frost

In this Podcast, we were joined by lifelong revolutionary activist and writer, Ian Scott Horst to discuss his recent book, Like Ho Chi Minh! Like Che Guevara! The Revolutionary Left in Ethiopia (1969-1979). This book tells the story of the 1974 popular revolution of Ethiopia, exploring how events such as the American Civil Rights movement, the fight against imperialism in the Vietnam war, and figures such as Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, V. I. Lenin and Mao Zedong inspired Ethiopian revolutionaries. 

This was recorded as part of the Exploding Appendix Avant-garde Art Practice and Research Group, who meet fortnightly to explore art , culture and ideas. The sessions take place on Zoom (and sometimes in person too). The events are free and open. If you are interested in being involved in future events message me explodingappendix [at] gmail.com or check out our website at http://www.explodingappendix.com/exploding-appendix-avant-garde-art-reseach-collective-related-events/

Podcast 29: Like Ho Chi Minh! Like Che Guevara!  Revolutionary Left in Ethiopia w/ Ian Scott Horst

The Bauhaus was a renowned art, architecture and design school that pioneered elegant and functional design for the masses. The Bauhaus is now famous for producing objects that were elegant without ornamentation. These elements of the Bauhaus movement, as Elizabeth Otto notes, have come to be viewed as “the paradigmatic movement of rational modernism.” (p.3) Yet Otto’s book Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics challenges the view that the Bauhaus movement was simply a project of rational and utilitarian efficiency. Instead she proposes “that Bauhaus―through anti-utilitarian experiments in occultism and spirituality, communal and individual expressions of unorthodox conceptions of gender and sexuality, and radical politics―was equally engaged with a specific range of ideas that controvert this paradigm of rationality, and that these ideas were central to its project and have been systematically overlooked or relegated to the margins.” (p.3) Otto’s book takes us on a journey around a Bauhaus, whose haus is haunted. On this journey we are visited by the Geists of German idealism; the repressed and uncanny of psychoanalysis; double-exposed “spirit photographs”; nude gymnastics and breathing exercises; the masculinities of the artist-engineer and its dark side; the many women involved in the school and femininities in transformation; experimentations in sexuality and gender fluidity; and conflicts between communist and nationalist students.

Elizabeth Otto is an art historian and author of Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Maianne Brendt, the co-author Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective and the co-editor of five books including Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School. This podcast was recorded as part of the Exploding Appendix Avant-garde Art Practice and Research Group which runs regular free online art salons.

To watch with visuals visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cH-CEPqpebc

For more on the sessions visit http://www.explodingappendix.com/exploding-appendix-avant-garde-art-reseach-collective-related-events/ or email us at explodingappendix [at] gmail.com

Podcast 30: Haunted Bauhaus w/ Elizabeth Otto

According to Leon Trotsky, “even a successful solution of the elementary problems of food, clothing, shelter, and even of literacy, would in no way signify a complete victory of the new historic principle, that is, of Socialism. Only a movement of scientific thought on a national scale and the development of a new art would signify that the historic seed has not only grown into a plant, but has even flowered.”  For  Trotsky, and a range of very different figures such as Mao Tse-Tung, Alexander Bogdanov, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Oscar Wilde, Adorno, Horkheimer and Jean-Luc Godard, a Marxist revolution required not merely a political and economic transformation, but also a cultural revolution. In this session we will be joined by Shalon van Tine and Doug Greene, who are currently collaborating on a book on Marxism and Cultural Revolution in order to discuss themes and issues related to this topic.

Shalon van Tine is a PhD student in cultural and intellectual history at Ohio University and an adjunct professor in the humanities for University of Maryland’s Global Campus.

Doug Enaa Greene is an independent communist historian, who is the author of Communist Insurgent: Blanqui’s Politics of Revolution and A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism.

This session was recorded as part of the Exploding Appendix Avant-garde Art Practice and Research Group on the 9th March 2021. If you would like to be involved in future sessions send me a message at explodingappendix [at] gmail.com.

www.explodingappendix.com
Facebook @theexplodingappendix
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Podcast 33: Marxism and Cultural Revolution w/ Shalon van Tine and Doug Enaa Greene

Christopher Lasch was a writer and cultural critic, who is best known for his 1979 best-seller, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. In this book, Christopher Lasch diagnoses a social pathology in American life where “the American left had played into the hands of corporations, which find it all too easy to exploit a radicalism that equates liberation with hedonistic self-indulgence and freedom from family ties” and where modern life had become an “enormous echo chamber, a hall of mirrors.” Decades later, whether we are talking about Donald Trump or influencers on social media, Lasch’s critique still feels prescient. Yet this feeling of prescience invites crude interpretations. As Lasch himself notes in his following book The Minimal Self, “Narcissism is a difficult idea that looks easy—a good recipe for confusion”. Countering this confusion, Shalon van Tine and C. Derick Varn’s rigorous and impressive research returns to Christopher Lasch’s entire oeuvre and situated his critique alongside his life-long critical thought.

C. Derick Varn is a teacher, poet, and podcaster. His video channel, Varn Vlog, can be found here.

Shalon van Tine is a Ph.D. candidate in American cultural history at Ohio University and an adjunct professor at University of Maryland Global Campus. Her website can be found here.

Derick and Shalon are co-writing a book on Christopher Lasch.

This session was recorded as part of the Exploding Appendix Avant-garde Art Practice and Research Group on the 26th January 2021. If you would like to be involved in future sessions send me a message at explodingappendix [at] gmail.com.
www.explodingappendix.com

Podcasts: Podcasts – Exploding Appendix
Facebook @theexplodingappendix
Instagram @exploding_appendix
Twitter @explodngappend
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Podcast 37: Christopher Lasch, Narcissism & the Politics of Culture w/ Shalon van Tine & Derick Varn

In her writings on both 1960s post-colonial Lebanon and the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) Zeina Maasri has produced numerous fascinating books exploring the development of posters and graphic design in Lebanon. Her book, Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties, uncovers the transnational circuits that animated Arab modernist pursuits and sheds light on the forgotten trajectories and graphic design practices of its protagonists: Egyptian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian artists who wove through Beirut, in and out of its flourishing art galleries, publishing industry and political movements. She conceives of Beirut’s long 1960s “as a liminal juncture, an anxious time and space when the city held out promises at once politically radical and radically cosmopolitan.” Likewise, in her book, Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War Zeina Maasri explores the history of poster design in Lebanon during the civil war from 1975-1990. Acknowledging the absence of a singular hegemonic voice, and critiquing the discourse of ‘propaganda’, Maasri explores how aesthetic styles and themes of leadership, commemoration, martyrdom and belonging are portrayed in posters.  Although Maasri is keen to emphasise that there is no singular cohesive style, or singular ideological binary, posters nonetheless became  a symbolic site of struggle that often drew influence from Palestinian struggles, Iranian revolutionary politics, modernist aesthetics, graphic design, post-colonial struggles, communist revolutionary imagery, and traditional Arab art, such as calligraphy and two-dimensional Islamic miniature paintings. In this session we will be talking to Zeina Maasri about the history of Lebanon, its posters, visual art and design, and how this might help us think about Lebanon and transnational solidarity today.

Zeina Maasri is a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol. Her books include Off the Wall: Political posters of the Lebanese Civil War (2009), Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties (2020) and she’s co-editor of the recently published Transnational Solidarity: Anticolonialism in the Global Sixties.

This session was recorded as part of the Exploding Appendix Avant-garde Art Practice and Research Group on the 26th January 2021. If you would like to be involved in future sessions send me a message at explodingappendix [at] gmail.com.
www.explodingappendix.com

Podcasts: Podcasts – Exploding Appendix
Facebook @theexplodingappendix
Instagram @exploding_appendix
Twitter @explodngappend
Youtube https://www.youtube.com/c/ExplodingAppendix/videos
Soundcloud: @explodingappendixpodcast
Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/exploding-appendix-40341144033?_gl=11792ok1_up*MQ..&gclid=be116b90192417c4279e091a0a0b38a3&gclsrc=3p.ds

Podcast 38: Arab Art & Posters in 1960s Post-Colonial Beirut w/ Zeina Maasri

The City of Brighton and Hove is renowned for its breathtaking contributions to art and culture. The many artistic and cultural groups, events and their interplay with the universities and other organisations help make Brighton a unique city to live in. The recent closure of the CCA at Brighton University, the proposed compulsory redundancies that look set to decimate the humanities at the University of Brighton, as well as more general issues around cuts, funding, and a cost-of-living crisis seriously threaten the artistic achievements of this city as a whole. For this very reason we are organising an emergency panel discussion and conversation aimed at bringing together an array of artists, art groups and organisations, independent researchers and anyone who contributes to, or benefits from, the cultural make-up of this city.

The Panel will include:

Cath James: Artistic Director at South East Dance. Originally from Australia, Cath’s background is in dance, having been a dancer at Rambert Dance Company and Siobhan Davies amongst others, as well as an international dance teacher, before moving into producing and management. She has curated, written about and choreographed dance during her 40 year career.

Lucy Day is the Executive Director at Phoenix Art Space, an arts charity based in the centre of Brighton housing 100+ artists’ studios, three exhibition spaces and a very active community engagement programme. Prior to this Lucy programmed a central London gallery as part of the independent curatorial partnership Day+Gluckman for over a decade. She is a mentor, arts consultant and Founder Director of A Woman’s Place Projects, a contemporary arts organisation which takes equality as its starting point, exploring it creatively through exhibitions, projects and events. She is Chair of Devonshire Collective /VOLT Gallery in Eastbourne, which recently became an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, an alumna of the Clore Leadership Programme (Clore50 2017) and a former Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. 

John Marchant: John Marchant’s Gallery (The John Marchant Gallery) can be found in Ship Street Brighton. John Marchant is a gallerist, curator and art director currently living in Brighton, UK. Having worked for many years with internationally renowned artists such as Nan Goldin and Gary Hume, Marchant now represents celebrated and emerging contemporary artists as well as the Jamie Reid Archive.

The panel will be hosted by Bradley Tuck. Bradley Tuck is a researcher, writer, filmmaker, performer and the Founder of Exploding Appendix. Exploding Appendix run salons every three weeks on a Tuesday from January to June and from September to December exploring the history and future of avant-garde art and radical counterculture. Alongside this they produce films (The Cake Tasting Society) and recently made a dance show for Brighton Fringe (Disrupted Rhythms).

For more information or to get involved please contact explodingappendix@gmail.com

www.explodingappendix.com

Podcast 39: Defending Arts and Culture in Brighton: An emergency Panel Discussion

We are joined by poet and scholar Keston Sutherland to discuss the poetic language used in the works of Marx. In an essay entitled ‘The poetics of Capital’,  Sutherland contrasts Marx’s use of language with that of Henry Mayers Hyndman’s bungled translation of Marx’s Capital, published in 1881, as England for all. As Sutherland notes:
“Marx assaults his reader with the image of beloved limbs ripped up and darling heads crushed flat. Hyndman softens the mental lighting so that these same beloved bodies instead more agreeably just ‘fade away’, ephemeral as an enchanted fairy in a forest dim by Keats. The workers who in Marx are crushed, sucked out, laid waste, decertified, elasticated, tortured and distorted into human specks, stumps and fractions, are by Hyndman regenerated in the language of literary respectability as lyric poets, ‘who now rejoice in the gleam of a transient prosperity, only to be cast into a deeper despair on the next stagnation.”

Keston Sutherland, ‘The Poetics of Capital’ in Capitalism: Concept, Idea, Image. Aspects of Marx’s Capital Today.

It isn’t simply enough to understand the intellectual and critical content of Marx’s writings. To fully grasp Marx’s ideas we have to understand Marx’s poetics. As Sutherland notes, Marx’s “Capital is both critique and poetics at once”.

Marx and Poetics: A Live Conversation with Keston Sutherland

The Situationist International (S.I.) was a political and social movement that ran from 1957 to 1972 that attempted to synthesise elements of Marxism and anarchist themes with ideas from avant-garde art movements such as Dada and Surrealism.  Although the Situationists cannot be reduced to an avant-garde art movement, Tom Bunyard notes that their “unabashedly utopian goal was to infuse lived experience with the passion, creativity and imagination that had previously only been articulated within the cultural realms of art and poetry.”

“For the Situationists, whose political goals had developed from their early concerns with avant-garde art, the modern revolution would afford a ludic, creative relation to lived time: art would cease to function as a means of representing and commenting upon life, and would instead become one with life itself. This would be achieved through using society’s previously alienated technological and creative powers to consciously create the ‘situations’ that compose lived time. Within modern society, they claimed, all such situations are dull, rationalised components of the spectacular social order; the all-encompassing revolution that the S.I. envisaged would, however, afford a social existence within which these moments of experience would take on more festive qualities.” (Bunyard, p5)

The Situationists imagined a revolution where the line between art and life would disappear. Rather than experiencing the world as passive spectators, we would become active agents engaged in shaping our own history.

Due to their utopian ambitions and deployment of aesthetic devises, the Situationist International has often been seen as an art movement, and their seminal text, Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967), is frequently viewed as a piece of media theory. Tom Bunyard challenges these assumptions. Although the Situationists emerged from a set of concerns with avant-garde art and culture, the ideas and ambitions of the S.I. extended far beyond the arts; Likewise, The Society of the Spectacle’s claims are not reducible to the contention that advertising and mass media constitute  pacifying spectacles. Bunyard argues that The Society of the Spectacle is more generally a book about time and history, in the sense that it “describes a society that has become detached from its capacity to consciously shape and determine its own future.”  In his book Debord, Time and the Spectacle, Bunyard provides an impressive reconstruction of Guy Debord’s political thought that centres around Debord’s preoccupations with temporality, and which demonstrates its connection to the writings of Marx, Hegel and Hegelian Marxism. In this session, we will be talking to Tom Bunyard about his work on Debord and the Situationists and exploring connected themes of avant-garde art, Hegelian Marxism, strategy, history, spectatorship, revolution and temporality

Guy Debord and the Situationist International with Tom Bunyard

On August 9th 1969, Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian broke into the gated home of the actress Sharon Tate, which she shared with film director husband, Roman Polanski. Sharon Tate was eight and a half months pregnant and spending the evening having a small party with friends. The group broke into the house, murdering them and using Tate’s blood to smear ‘PIG’ on the wall

The next day the group broke into the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, brutally murdering them and scrawling  ‘DEATH TO PIGS’, ‘RISE’ and ‘HELTER SKELTER’ around the living room and kitchen. Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel and Kasabian were members of commune-cum-cult, ‘The Family’, led by criminal, con-man and musician Charles Manson

Drawing upon Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), the Scientology of L. Ron Hubbard and the Beatles’ White Album, Manson had set out to incite an apocalyptical race war. Set against the context of a thriving counter-culture committed to love and peace, these murders seemed to jar

The humanitarian spirit of the sixties counter-culture had been upset by a dark and haunting intruder. Yet this ‘intruder’ seemed somehow to have emerged from the counter-culture itself. Manson had been living in the Haight-Ashbury area, home to many radical communes and counter-cultural dropouts, and his influences seemed to emerge from similar origins

Charles Manson and the Tate/LaBianca killings seemed like mythic renditions of the darker side of the Sixties dreams of Love and Peace. Fifty one years after these murders we will be joined by James Riley to discuss the darker side of sixties counter-culture

James Riley is the author of The Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties, which tells the story of the 60s through a plethora of references covering Charles Manson, the British Beat scene, Timothy Leary, LSD, Kenneth Anger, Jeff Nuttall, Peter Whitehead, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Roman Polanski, the Beatles and many more

Riley is Fellow of English Literature at Girton College, University of Cambridge, working on contemporary literature, popular film and 1960s culture. He has lectured internationally, makes film and performs spoken word shows

His blog
https://residual-noise.blogspot.com/

The Bad Trip: Charles Manson and the end of the Sixties with James Riley

"…there is a trade union version of entryism also being practised. And I think where C.L.R. James even turns away from that, and also turns away from Trotskyism and Leninism, is that he truly does something that we are trying to name our podcast after, which is this thing where he faces the autonomy of the working class. He recognises that the working class, they express themselves autonomously, they express themselves on their own, in self-manifested groups, and they don’t need a party bureaucracy, they don’t need a union bureaucracy and, in fact, a lot of those old left formations do a lot to suppress the free and unsuppressed and autonomous expression of working class politics."
Zara Richter, Podcast: Who are we and what is Facing Autonomy? https://facingautonomy.com/podcast/who-we-are-and-what-is-facing-autonomy/
 

The Facing Autonomy collective take their name from both the 1956 book Facing Reality, co-authored by, amongst others, C.L.R. James and Cornelius Castoriadis, which brought together anarchistic ideas of organisation with Marxist theory, and Italian Autonomist Marxism, which emphasised the political strategy of workers self organisation independently of unions and party bureaucracy. In this session we will be joined by Facing Autonomy to explore worker self-organisation, especially in relationship to C.L.R. James, Italian Autonomist Marxism, Left Communism and Anarchism, and to explore what it might mean to us today.
https://facingautonomy.com/

Facing Autonomy: Autonomist Marxism and Worker Self-Organisation with Zara Richter

The Cinema of Wong Kar Wai with Anna Warren

In January 2021, Exploding Appendix published the first volume of the Exploding Appendix Dossier. The volume focused on the triad of themes REVOLUTION*ART*MANIFESTO and was comprised of manifestos, music, illustrated poetry, a podcast, personal reflection, creative essays, art history, photography, film, prose and short fiction.  

In this special episode, Robert Jones leads an informal discussion with readers, contributors and the team behind the issue in order to discuss themes in the volume, catch up with contributors and share work. 

Part party, part conversation, part variety show.

Check out the dossier: http://www.explodingappendix.com/2021/01/10/dossier-revolution-art-manifesto/

REVOLUTION*ART*MANIFESTO The Exploding Appendix Dossier #1.0

Podcast introducing Exploding Appendix. In this episode, Bradley Tuck and James Marcus Tucker discuss cinema, counter-culture, the left-right divide, political correctness and cultural innovation.

Exploding Appendix "Towards a New Counter-Culture"

In this episode Bradley Tuck will be joined by Richard Barbrook to discuss his 2014 book Class Wargames, which explores how the avant-garde artist and radical theorist Guy Debord developed a wargame. We discuss Guy Debord's influence on the punk movement, and art and politics more generally. We discuss how Guy Debord was influenced by council communism, how Guy Debord drew strategic and tactical insights from Carl Von Clausewitz's On War and the battle tactics of Napoleon Bonaparte. We discuss this in relation to Richard's own fascination with hobbyist wargaming, the Class wargames art project, his interest in cybernetics and his involvement in the labour party. We explore how gaming can yield artistic provocations, tactical insights, and teach us how to avoid becoming little Stalins. In many respects, this podcast is continuous with our previous one where we discussed Richard's previous 2007 book Imaginary Futures, the development of media theory and the cold war origins of the internet. 

In what follows you will hear an interview between Bradley Tuck and Richard Barbrook conducted on 01/03/2018 interspersed with snippets from the short film Class Wargames Presents Guy Debord’s The Game of War, which can be viewed in whole by visiting the Class Wargames website at www.classwargames.net. 

Thank you for listening, if you liked this and would like to hear more visit our website at Www.Explodingappendix.com

Podcast 11: Class Wargame: An Interview with Richard Barbrook

"We affirm that the beauty of the world has been enriched by a new form of beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car with a hood that glistens with large pipes resembling a serpent with explosive breath … a roaring automobile that seems to ride on grapeshot that is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace."
F. T. Marinetti, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism

From as early as Marinetti’s Manifesto from 1909, the avant-garde has been drawn to speed and acceleration, and in the case of Italian Futurism, willing to tear down anything that stands in its way. In this session, Bradley Tuck will interview Benjamin Noys about his 2013 book Malign Velocities, which charts the darker history of the avant-garde, focusing on its embrace of the cult of speed, technology and capitalism. Tracing the story through Italian futurism, communist accelerationism following the Russian Revolution, fantasies of integration with the machine, the cyberpunk phuturism of the ‘90s and ‘00s, the apocalyptic accelerationism of the post-2008 moment of crisis, and the negative form of terminal accelerationism. Drawing upon a miasma of references, Benjamin Noys critically challenges this tradition, calling instead for a new politics that challenges the supposed pleasures of speed without simply countering acceleration with the desire to slow down.

Benjamin Noys is Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester and author of books such as The Persistence of the Negative (2010) and Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (2013).

Podcast 15: Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism: A Live Interview with Benjamin Noys

"The concept of acid communism is a provocation and a promise. It is a joke of sorts, but one with very serious purpose. It points to something that, at one point, seemed inevitable, but which now appears impossible: the convergence of class consciousness, socialist-feminist consciousness-raising and psychedelic consciousness, the fusion of new social movements with a communist project, an unprecedented aestheticisation of everyday life.”
– Mark Fisher ‘Acid Communism (unfinished introduction)’ in K-Punk, Repeater, 2018

Before his untimely death in 2017, writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher had been working on a book entitled Acid Communism. Rejecting the idea that the neoliberalism of Thatcher and Reagan was inevitable, and that the counter-culture of the sixties and seventies would merely lead to a culture of narcissistic consumerism, Fisher sought to recover the radical promise of sixties counterculture, the term signalled the fusion of psychedelic mind-expansion with radical politics.
Outside of Fisher’s own work, the concept continues to be developed and explored, not least with the emergence of the term “Acid Corbynism” that links themes of countercultural radicalism to current Labour activism. The podcast #ACFM has been at the forefront of Acid Communist and Acid Corbynist research, exploring topics such as collective joy, consciousness raising and the weird left. In this session, Bradley Tuck is joined by Jeremy Gilbert, a member of the #ACFM team and friend of Mark Fisher, to discuss these themes and topics. Jeremy Gilbert is Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at University of East London, his books include Discographies: Dance Music, Culture, and the Politics of Sound (1999), Anticapitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics (2008), Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (2013), Twenty-First Century Socialism (2019), Hegemony Now: Power in the Twenty-First Century (2020) and The Last Days of Neoliberalism: Politics, Culture and Society Since 2008 (2020).

Podcast 17: Acid Communism: A live Discussion With Jeremy Gilbert

Harvey Barrett's contribution to the Exploding Appendix Dossier

I Stood Facing The Sea by Harvey Barrett

Art & Research Group led by Bradley Tuck dedicated to exploring the history and future of avant-garde and radical counterculture.
📍Brighton, UK & Online

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