As government and state policy-making are ‘steered’ by left hyperindividualist and right neoliberal forces in tandem, they become ever more incapable of addressing the unprecedented transformations of social life now occurring.
The eeriness of the non-human encounter is transformed into evil by the realisation that this presence means to be mean. It is the recognition of a mind that enjoys cruelty.
Miller plays with the classic trope of an environment that actively rejects settler incursion and updates the tradition for the Capitalocene, an era in which capitalism has provoked Mother Nature’s ire.
It has become an academic Psychoanalysis 101 cliché to invoke, as the exhibition text does, ‘ideas of surrealism, desire and the fetished or abject body’, but it’s hard to think of better words to describe the tasteful perversion on show here.
Understanding what it means to be social, and how this has been reconstituted by markets, technology and academic theory is central to any future politics.
As Pakistan tells ‘illegal foreigners’ to leave, half a million Afghans must return to a country now in the tight grip of the Taliban and shunned by the world.
‘Blowback’ has become a useful myth to obscure the United States’s decades-long assault on independent nationalism of any type. A more realistic assessment is needed.
