Edward Bond died on March 3 a cumbersome cultural figure. Always controversial, but celebrated in the 1960s and 70s, no major British stage has taken on a new work from him in decades. He died as Israel inched into its fifth month of its massacre in Gaza. And he died at a time when theatre matters less than it has at probably any point in human history.
Read MoreCritical Irrealist Reading List
A single mother is driving past an abandoned factory on her way home from a low paying job. She is hungry. Above the factory a billboard floats in the sky advertising a succulent feast. But it does not strike her — or us — that this is odd, that her hunger has manifested itself above the factory ruin in an image of unavailable food. When we step outside ideology we see this absurdism for what it is.
Read MoreTheir Weird vs. Ours: Critical Irrealism vs. Fascist Occultism
While the critical irrealist ties the emancipation of the constrained subject to a collective fight against the forces that constrain that subject, the fascist occultist seeks unity with the constraining forces. Each responds to the disfigurement of individual subjectivity under the “normal” workings of capitalism; each rejects, to some degree, the profound lack of imagination engendered by capitalist realism. How they are opposed, in irrealist cultural performances, gestures, artifacts and media, is largely in the different ways they position/construct/code subjectivity in relation to the sources of this disfigurement.
Read MoreUnder Covers
Tingle glosses past the wider implication of a spell that gives everyone exactly what they need when they need it, choosing only to say that it was banned for destroying the economy, upending governments, and ruining the game show industry.
Read MoreTheir UFOs and Ours
The dominant UFO visitation myths echo popular occultism in capitalism. The individual is abducted or visited -- in a secular-but-not-secular epiphany -- enweirding their life with either trauma or good fortune, or both; even if the good and bad fortune is a mere valorization of the formerly discarded individual within a cruel social totality. This is the ufology of “normal’’ bourgeois capitalism; the kismet of the UFO encounter.
Read MoreIntroducing Imago
How to break out? From the isolation, the despair, the stultifying routines? We are surrounded by the alien, the uncanny, by that which promises the freedom of a good life but inevitably leaves us empty and disappointed. Barbarism disguises itself as stability, and though more and more of us see through the veneer, we often have no idea what to do about it.
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Against Hopepunk
Salvagepunk and hopepunk share an antipathy for many of the so-called “realisms” that have come to dominate our culture.
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