The Anti-Capitalist Orchestra

"The Anti-Capitalist Orchestra" is a novel that takes the form of a fictional Guidebook to the instruments and music of a fictional composer, Peter Smith. As such, it belongs to the 2,000-year-old literary tradition (or counter-tradition) known as Menippean satire, a tradition of changling texts that appropriate the formal elements of various texts (usually nonfiction) of their day and create from these element works of literary fiction.; The present work, this "Guidebook," is compiled by fictional members of a fictional scholarly society devoted to the study of Smith and his fictional works; however, it also draws into its text discussion of theories and figures from our non-fictional world of lived experience. Thus the fictional and the non-fictional exist alongside each other, in this book, under the auspices of fictional nonfiction.; Although the book is nominally---and to some extent legitimately---concerned with the instruments and ideas of the composer Smith, the primary actors are in fact the scholars who study him. This is a classic strategy of Menippean satire, which attacks philosophy and knowledge by shifting the focus away from Platonic ideals onto the mundane realities of the individuals who conceive of and hold those ideals. Truth, the Menippean satire seems to say, is to be found not in pure concepts, concepts without consequences; rather, truth is the reality of the interactions between individuals in our world. The humor of Menippean satire arises from the discrepancy between the ideals held forth and the realities of the lives of the ideal-holders.; But in this case, I did not want to make these characters complete buffoons---and this is perhaps where "The Anti-Capitalist Orchestra" diverges most from the classic Menippean tradition. Rather, the book is a catalog of thoughts and ideas that are almost logical, that exist just to the left of intelligence, that reside in the neighborhood next door to Reason's, and that do so willingly, self-consciously, even at times self-righteously---as if to leave open the conflict between reason and nonsense in our individual and collective quests for meaning in our lives.