Post-Bullshit: Leah Sandler’s Field Guide to Embodied Archiving
Reviewed by Alex Gurtis
A multi-modal book rarely transcends both literature and art to become an experience. Yet, Leah Sandler’s The Center for Post-Capitalist History’s Field Guide to Embodied Archiving (Burrow Press) does just that. Starting with the captivating cover art, Sandler’s work grabs the reader and prepares them to move the dial of progress forward to escape our consumer capitalism model through a thought experiment known as Embodied Archiving. Embodied Archiving aims to “broaden our understanding of history and plant the seeds of a better future.” It is an ambitious book that fights back against the absurdity of the current decade by providing a dry, clever escape out of the “everything is fine while the room is burning” meme mentality that has gripped the nation.
Borrowing the structure of a field guide, the book juxtaposes text and images to provoke readers into digging deeper into the world around them. Embodied Archiving is broken up into sections titled “Welcome to CPCH,” “Embodied Archive, Interpretation, Training, and Methodology,” “The Embodied Archives,” “The Body Archive,” “A Note from the Archivist,” and “Post-Capitalist Future.” At times the sections almost read as hybrid poems. One passage from “The Body-Archive” stood out to me as a section filled with figurative language and sound, and I found myself returning to it to repeatedly:
“Many hard decisions are exacerbated by hunger acquisitions. Sometimes, the body-archive eats itself. Repetitive stress injuries are unintentional methods of inscriptions. These inscription injuries are entries into the body-archive detailing the physical function and repercussion of repetitive gestures associated with labor under Late Capitalism.”
Embodied Archiving invites readers to “consider your own body and subjectivity in relation to the writing of history. As a field guide, this publication has a goal of helping you identify your body as a valuable archive of information that “reveals inconsistencies between Capitalism’s promises of infinite progress and the reality of the unsustainable and destructive nature inherent in its systems of production.” At the core of the project, Sandler believes our bodies are literal “archives” that carry “inscriptions” that show how we “have been exploited as resources, sites of oppression, and inseparably, necessary laborers and consumers.” It is a thought that resonates in a time when Roe v. Wade has been overturned, inflation has reduced even the professional class to near poverty, civil rights are under threat, and the onslaught of trauma feels unacknowledged as we merely try to survive. Sandler makes an important case for a society that seems hell-bent on trapping itself in a doom cycle of capitalism despite the recent pandemic, climate crisis, and rising inflation.
The work is heavily influenced by Italian Communist philosopher France “Bifo '' Berardi's post-industrial society theories, particularly his work with Autonomist Marxism, which is referenced throughout Sandler’s Field Guide and refers to the theory that the working class can force change to the capitalist system outside of the traditional institutions such as political parties and unions. The Post-Industrial Society in Autonomist Marxism refers to a time when the service industry sector generated more wealth than the manufacturing sector, which in Marxist tradition was historically the backbone of the working class. Berardi is known for his theory that our emotions and embodied communication have come to dictate the production and consumption patterns that sustain capital flows in the post-industrial society that we inhabit. Sandler thus makes an argument to the cognitariat, or Knowledge Worker, that they need to “reconsider the epistemological violence that led to the acceleration and collapse of Capitalism,” which the Center for Post-Capitalist History hopes, in turn, will lead to an intentional structuring of our society. Sandler further places the book within this context through an epigraph by Berardi, “After the death of the system, the extra-systemic organisms will be allowed to start a new life. Provided that they survive, of course, and this is not certain.” Juxtaposing the ending with the book’s epigraph, which usually appears at the beginning of a text, mirrors the book’s takeaway – only once capitalism’s hold on subjectivity has been exposed and broken can we start anew.
As the guide looks toward a post-capitalist future, Sandler tells us that, “We recognize the fragility of our basic human needs, and the necessity of caring for one another. We recognize the urgent needs to dismantle the hierarchies and systems that prevent us from doing so. We begin with our bodies in context. Where do we go from here?
We urgently desire
and create a better world -
our heads, our hands, our hearts, our labor
We will nourish one another
We hold one another close
and breathe deeply
We will let the profiteers drown
In shallow water
We plant the seeds of the future
in the present.”
Maryland born but Florida bred, Alex Gurtis is a poet and journalist based in Orlando. His work has appeared in W&S Quarterly, EcoTheo Review, Rejection Letters, and others. Alex is a MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida and currently serves as the reviews editor for HASH. Find him on Twitter @AlexGurtis.
Leah Sandler is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in Orlando, Florida. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Rollins College in 2014 and a Master of Fine Arts from University of the Arts in 2017. Recent exhibitions include the Corridor Project Billboard Exhibition, the 2020 Florida Biennial, Interstice at MOTOR (curated by the Residency Project) Los Angeles, CA, Utopian/Vermilion, a solo exhibition at ParkHaus15 in Orlando, FL, and CPCH Staging Area, a solo exhibition at Laundromat Art Space in Miami. Sandler’s writing and projects have been featured in publications including Textur Magazine, Salat Magazin, SPECS Journal, and Mapping Meaning Journal.
Center For Post-Capitalist History - Leah Sandler
