Nihilist Optimism

To say that Rancid’s second album Let’s Go is the punk equivalent of James Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners might initially sound like either overreach or playful provocation. It is meant neither way. Rather, it is an attempt to take both works seriously as realist cartographies of working-class life: as composite portraits in which the true protagonist is not any singular character but the city itself, understood as a collective subject and structuring space of experience. James Joyce gives us Dublin not as romantic capital but as dense social atmosphere: clerks, daughters, drunks, minor political operatives, each moving through the muted light of empire’s periphery. The stories of Dubliners are individually modest. Their power lies in accumulation. Paralysis is not simply a theme; it is a climate. The famous snow of “The Dead” falls “general all over Ireland,” dissolving the distinction between living and dead, success and failure, into a shared condition. Rancid’s Let’s G...

A Parable About Unpaid Labor... Composed After Being Asked to Peer Review Too Many Times... And written after the Author Was Caught Engaged in Labor During A Strike Day... The last unpaid reviewer died on a Tuesday, sometime after the armistice bells began to ring across the Perseid Belt. No one knew their name. The archives listed them only as External_Reviewer_7, field of expertise: “science fiction, trans* studies, or both.” Cause of death: exhaustion induced by recursive footnotes. Time of death: indeterminate. They had been revising their comments for thirty-six standard cycles when the war finally ended and the galaxy abolished the practice that had sustained it. For decades, the Intergalactic Consortium of Journals had broadcast its calls into deep space: We are looking for reviewers with publication experience and expertise in either science fiction, trans studies, or both…* The calls traveled faster than light, faster than mercy. They slipped through wormholes and into the sof...

BREAKING NEWS! Carnivorous “Death-Ball” Sponge to Assist in Addressing University Financial Crisis In a bold demonstration of Essex’s legendary rule-breaking spirit, the University is delighted to announce a breakthrough in both oceanic science and HR innovation. Amid the ongoing financial crisis that has made traditional redundancies regrettably unaffordable, researchers have instead discovered a more cost-effective— and far more carnivorous — solution: a newly identified “death-ball” sponge. This compact, spherical organism, bristling with hooks and an admirable appetite, will be repurposed as part of our revised staffing strategy. Employees previously marked for redundancy will now be “absorbed” into the University’s structural transformation in a more literal sense. While most universities timidly rely on consultations and severance packages, Essex is once again ahead of the curve, pioneering symbiotic approaches to workforce reduction. The discovery team, led by Essex scientist Dr...

On 16 December 2023 the Marxist philosopher and militant Antonio Negri passed from this world. As someone who has been inspired by his work and ideas – particularly his ongoing emphasis never accepting defeat, always looking for new spaces and routes of class struggle – this really affected me. In the English speaking world he has always been the most visible face from the autonomous movements from the 1960s and 1970s. There is always sadness when a comrade departs, even if they have lived a full and vibrant life, especially one filled with more than enough epic moments and drama to fill more than a few blockbuster movies. For this essay I do not want to respond to Negri’s passing and life more generally, as there have been many tributes to him, not to mention an academic cottage industry devoted to responding to his writing and ideas. Rather I want to reflect upon a much less aspect of Negri’s life, namely his relationship with football. Negri was a lifelong supporter of AC Milan, so ...

What would it mean to begin not from what we know, but from what we must unlearn? That is the provocation that runs through Annette Krauss’s long-term work on unlearning – through her projects, through her earlier book Unlearning Exercises: Art Organizations as Sites for Unlearning , and now in this new collection, Unlearning Routines of the Impossible . These books are not manuals so much as they are scaffolds for thinking and acting differently. They emerge directly from Krauss’s collaborations, many of them rooted in the Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons , a site where artistic practice, pedagogy, and institutional experiment intersect. Casco becomes not simply a container for art but a testing ground for the very question of how we might unlearn institutional habits, reorient resources, and hold open the possibility of commons. Unlearning here is not an abstract gesture. It is about undoing the sedimentations that prevent cooperation: the ingrained routines of whiteness,...

“The geography of the imagination should have a little bit more wilderness to it; I hate it when it becomes subdivided.” – Tom Waits Tom Waits performs less as a troubadour of the present than as a smuggler of fragments, a hobo archivist cutting through the sedimented strata of history. Each song, lifted from a bootleg from the Glitter and Doom Tour in Edinburgh in 2008, is not merely performance but excavation: a shovel swung down into the dirt in search of voices buried, lost, but never silent. “Lucinda / Ain’t Goin’ Down to the Well” is a holler that carries the dust of the road and the sound of chain gangs, voices echoing out of dry wells where labor was exhausted but never pacified. It is here that Waits finds a kinship with the Wobblies – those migrant organizers and singers who weaponized song as collective memory, as itinerant strike pamphlets sung rather than printed. But there is something singular about this happening within the carved interior of a theatre in Edinburgh, far...