Counter-Signals #4: Identity is the Crisis

The fourth issue Identity is the Crisis 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?

‘Identity is the Crisis’ features 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.