Dark Matter Archives

Series PrefaceMarxists frequently point out the crisis of the present and proclaim “We’ve neverhad it so bad—now is the time for revolution.” And here we go again. But,by any account, the events of the past couple of years have been turbulent andcritical. Bank bailouts, meltdowns in major financial institutions, long-establishedbusinesses going to the wall, the collapse of economies and economic zones,rising world unemployment, humanly-induced ecological disasters, and thatperennial feature of the post-war world, ongoing war and occupation. There isa widespread perception of systemic instability and many fear worse to come. Inthe realm of culture, there are concrete threats ahead—the arts, which in suchtimes of crisis are perceived as a luxury, face a period of cutbacks. Universitiesare slashing courses in the Arts and Humanities, now defined, under currentfunding regimes, as “of no financial value”—the only legitimate measure today.Our series, Marxism and Culture, continues in this bleak context, in which thereis less and less to lose.Eighty years ago, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht planned a journal, inorder, as they saw it, to seriously wage the intellectual civil war against theirmany reactionary or incompetent fellow critics. It was to be called Krisis undKritik [Crisis and Criticism] and drew in figures such as Lukács, Adorno, andMarcuse. Its character was political, “standing on the ground of class struggle,”and “its critical activity anchored in clear consciousness of the basic criticalsituation of contemporary society.” At that moment, the many forms of crisis—social, economic, political—appeared to be ever more manifest and they pressedthemselves in to become part of the context of criticism. The critical moment is,precisely, the moment of the splinter, the shattering. Critical is derived, of course,from crisis. It is defined as a turning point, an interruption, a change in quality.This sense is most explicit when it is used in chemistry or physics: where it relatesto the value of a measurement, such as temperature, at which an abrupt changein a quality, property, or state occurs. The critical moment proposes a before andafter or a wavering on the cusp of those two moments.Our book series would hope to address such a critical moment. It is a decidedly“post-post” one. The delusions of the 1980s, which took on concrete “critical”form in Post-modernism, seem otherworldy now. Post-marxism, post-feminism,“the third way”—these appear as the concerns of another epoch. It is notuncommon to hear talk again of that oldest of Marxist bugbears, Imperialism.And today Capitalism—and its anti-, are even part of the media’s vocabulary.ix