Retort is a community of about forty writers, teachers, artists, and activists, all self-styled opponents of capital and empire, which has been based for the past two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area. Retort is a collection of Antinomians. This is not a typical team, there is no clear program. Retort is a motley crew - writers, artists, teachers, artisans, scientists, poets - entered into the web-to maintain friendly relationships, they share the same antagonism to the present order of things.

The retort holds its meetings on a regular basis over the past two decades, for the most part, to eat and drink together, but also to talk about politics, history, aesthetics, and the conditions and tactics of the root and branch opposition in the capital of the Empire and various versions of the barbarism currently on offer. There is a deep appreciation of the old cafes and taverns of the city, competing with the trend in favor of the outdoors - walking, wilderness, tidepool, picnics, wild swimming.

The Assembly has prepared boards and brochures for special occasions and from time to time they also organize social events - reading, conviviums, movie nights, and so on. Cooperation of many kinds in the environment. The name "retort" recognizes that the project is engaged in a broader dialogue whose terms and assumptions, they reject, and that Retorters stand on the ground, rhetorical and otherwise, not of our own choosing. Some feel that you have to spend a lot of time - too much - in denials, demurrers, objection. In short, distillation.

The name of the gesture in a strange secular 1940-ies of the magazine with the same name, which first new retort seriously thought about the revival. It was edited and published from a cabin in bearsville, a hamlet near Woodstock, new York. Retort pouch with printing houses belonged to the eloquent wobbly agitator Carlo crash before he was murdered on the streets of Manhattan, perhaps agents of Benito Mussolini. Journal of the retort was anti-statist, anti-militarist and published essays on art, politics, and culture. Poetry is also the first issue published Kenneth Rexroths poem, which begins: "Now in Waldheim where the rain / Has fallen careless and unthinking / For all an evil centurys youth, / Where now the banks of dark roses lie."

Retort press also published prison etiquette convicts compendium of useful information compiled by opponents of the war, particularly in prison for refusing to cooperate with the government or with the Anabaptist "peace Church", which was agreed with the US government to run rural work camps for conscientious objectors. Finally, in the retort, as the alchemists vessel, which are fermented, distilled, transformerait. Its fragile, needs to be fired, there may be problems with the basic theory, but sometimes magic.

Retorts wide angle neither war nor peace was prepared for distribution at the demonstration against the impending American invasion of Iraq in spring 2003. It was later expanded in the book afflicted powers: capital and spectacle in a new age of war, written by Ian Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael watts and published on the back of the book. In the paper "all quiet on the Eastern front" was part of the installation of the retort at the second Seville Biennale.

Associate members include the British geographer Michael watts, an Irish social historian Ian Boal, a British art historian T. J. Clark, the radical attorney Joseph Matthews, labor historian cal Winslow, editor Eddie young, economic geographer Richard Walker, art historian Anne Wagner, Victor Serge translator James brook, microbial ecologist Ignacio is shapely, poet and writer summer Brenner, Balkan anarchist Andrej Grubacic, and the Italian literary scholar Franco Moretti.