Call for papers

Eleusinian Press is a small publishing company working in an interzone, a space that is part of and separate from, on the edgelands of; academia, music writing, mental health activism and left-wing politics. We are looking to curate a new collected volume on unrecovery. 

What is unrecovery? It is the practice of living with one’s distress, one’s mental health history in a time of austerity, where ‘choice that is no choice’ is rammed down our throats on a daily basis. Whe new are asked for support and given CBT. When we are told that we ‘can recover’ and rather than a ‘personal journey’, it is a pre-navigated outcome measure. When the possibility of recovery fought for against the bio-medical model has turned around and bitten us on the arse and become a means to explain why we failed the WCA whilst our housing situation turned shit because of the bedroom tax and the subsequent homelessness is a lifestyle choice. It is being sanctioned because you missed your appointment because your voices made you agoraphobic five minutes before you were due to leave the house. When the constant nudge unit in charge of nudging units makes our inner worlds a shit shower of dystonic buzzing. Unrecovery is a reaction to this. It is practices, like making noise, walking an erratic path to escape the microfascist nomos police, cooking up a Storm, researching the hex-files, scatting back at the top down semio-therapies, unflagging the behaviourist order word semaphore, rewriting the signing in-book. It is about solidarity, building mad unions, it is about training up the activist community to help with ever more punitive benefit forms, it is looking at housing, it is looking at protesting policy. It is looking beyond individualist psychology that is designed to turn us into efficient working subjects for capital. It is about biopolitics, it is about Das Swamp Dog Ding, it is about eluding control. It is about making a stand. It is about fighting back. It is about respecting our concrete situations. It is about the lay of the land. The map not just not the territory, the territory is not the terrain. Territory is about capture. It is no longer the fish getting off the hook from the Mental Patients’ Union, it is escaping the trawler’s net. As Daedalus said, as Nemo said, keep swimming down, down, down. And wrestle the Minotaur to the ground. The Minotaur is the language of profit, and its stench has saturated the ideological labyrinth. It has saturated the language of mental health recovery. And in the crisis of capitalism that is intentional, permanent austerity, the Minotaur is fascist. 

The Eleusinian Press is looking for stories and articles from 4,000 words up. The pay is 4p a word based on work published in the volume. We will be having a kickstarter next year, but we are looking for articles from now. 
Please email alastair@eleusinianpress.co.uk