All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
I turn to Marx as a poet, rather than an economist, to give me any hopes for the past. The turbulences of the epochal capitalist accumulations of the 18th and 19th centuries help me to gather an internationalist understanding of where we find ourselves in the 21st century. I feel we suspected the Modern as a slick mediator of capitalist expansion far too late. I scrutinise Modernism’s relation to architecture; the slave trade and industrialisation; grassroots religious, class and folk histories; and the proliferation of informal economies. I scour back through time to unearth quasi-utopic pasts and depend on proxy histories from esoteric religions, alchemical processes, collective bargaining and oral revolutionary narratives to garner scraps of salvation. I see no futures only the past. Haiti is my sole speculative.
