Identity is the Crisis

Counter-Signals 4

edited by Jack Henrie Fisher and Alan Smart

The fourth issue of Counter-Signals assembles texts and images to query the claims and break the chains of “visual identity” in capitalism. What is an identity and what can we do about it?

Alight upon and confront in these pages:

proletarian negativity, IBM design managers, RAF red flag color tests, German workers’ cinema in the 1970s, 

new demands for wages and working conditions, the body with erogenous holes, pixel infinities of double queerness, 

evil chop suey cheap wasp workers, the formal condition of possibility for the production of communism, sensationalized crinoline violence,

zine-as-dildo, spectral laundry comrades, scare drag and dazzle make-up, the libidinal economy of reproducible totems

the daily coercion of design labor, serious problems in local gender translation, 

The Political Program of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, infrastructure for smuggling and the hidden contents in the gender-migrant’s luggage, 

José Carlos Mariátegui and the abolition of gamonalismo, class recomposition in Indonesian punk, kaleidoscopes masquerading as binoculars in the spectacle of woke capital,

graphic design as an intractable script of the nation-state, and more much much more. 

contents

1. Jack Henrie Fisher
   Identity Crisis, Take One
2. Nathan Brown
   The Proletariat
3. Ulrike Jordan
   Looking at Workers, Working with Workers: Struggles and Experiments in Collaboration in West German Arbeitfilm in the 1970s
4. Gerd Conradt
   Farbtest, Die Rote Fahne
5. Lisa Vinebaum
   New Demands? Part II
6. Samo Tomšič
   “Enjoying Substance”: Between Anatomy and Language
7. Bea Walker
   The Fearless Queer
8. Verónica Casado Hernández
   Broken China and Mangled Bodies: Gender, Class, and Crinolines in Victorian Britain
9. Nat Pyper
   The World and Words Fuck Each Other
10. Werker Collective
    Reading Gender and Sexuality through Selected Images from the Domestic Worker Photograph Network
11. Evan Fusco
    We Each Go through So Many Bodies in Each Other: an identification and how to become not nonbinary
12. Intermission: Red and Black Camouflage
13. Michalis Pichler
    Bibliophagia
14. Andrea García Flores (Gato Negro Ediciones / miau ediciones)
    Vze. Pez Mejur Wamon
15. Angel Gonzalez
    Selections from a Militant Archive, in Red and Black
16. Chris Lee
    Squid Labor Toyota Garment The Evil Chop Suey Cheap Wasp Workers: A Type Specimen
17. Mahmoud Keshavarz
    Reconfiguring the Border
18. Hannah Bruckmüller and Michal B. Ron with Noa Ginzburg
    From i-dentity to ur-dentity: An Odyssey to Uranus with Paul Beatriz Preciado
19. Jorge Cano Febles, Anuar Portugal, Carlos Quiroz
    Identidad es Crisis
20. Erin Madarieta
    Indigenism Meets Internationalism: Print Workers, Publishers, and the Birth of Peruvian Socialism
21. Alex Lahr
    Soul Branding
22. Sean Martin-Iverson
    Anak Punk and Kaum Pekerja: Punk and Class Recomposition in Urban Indonesia
23. Jacob Lindgren
    The Art of the State: Making Identity Visual
24. Michalis Pichler
    Page Pieces