Surrealpolitik: Surreality and the National Security State
Surrealpolitik: Surreality and the National Security State
by John Schoneboom
English | 2022 | ISBN: 1785359495 | 152 Pages | True ePUB | 1.44 MB
by John Schoneboom
English | 2022 | ISBN: 1785359495 | 152 Pages | True ePUB | 1.44 MB
Our times are not just weird, but literally surreal: we live in a paranoid, increasingly authoritarian culture in which the real, the presumed and the purported are indistinguishable strands of a dense hallucinatory web of mediated spectacles. Surrealpolitik takes up cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s challenge to expose capitalist realism’s 'realism' as nothing of the sort. To subject the symbolic order to a surrealist mode of inquiry is to transgress taboos, reveal biases and inconsistencies, test assumptions and investigate the extent to which the real is, like our dreams - a fungible projection of our unconscious expectations. The nexus of dreams, hyperreality, paranoia, totalitarianism, terror, art, myth and culture is where realpolitik becomes the surrealpolitik of the title.