Posts tagged fantastic

Politically the fantastic would give voice to the oppressed, the excluded, the marginal – to all those who were deemed outside the sublime world of economic security, the illusory world of the powerful, the rich, the visible. The poor and outcast of society had become invisible and it was the power of the fantasist to make visible what was now invisible in the social body, what had been rejected and left to fend for itself in the darkness of societies morbid, and obscene slums and decaying systems of crime and punishment. One can see this in many of the stories of Dostoevsky, Gogol, Kafka, Lovecraft, Machen, and on through those such as Borges, Bioyes, and later authors too numerous to name here. Against the realism of society one will discover in the fantastic terms such as the impossible, the unreal, the nameless, formless, shapeless, unknown, invisible. As H.P. Lovecraft famously noted, “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown.”

via https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2016/07/30/the-new-fantastic-the-wound-in-the-real/

unlike science fiction, it has little interest in ideas. Instead, it moves into, or opens up, a space of possibilities without / outside the cultural or symbolic order. It strips us of our anchors in either secular of religious systems of meaning, allows the unknown to shock us into new forms of awareness and modes of being. Distortion, deformation, the disintegration of our normal modes of apprehension and reasoning release and trigger the darkness in objects, things, and entities to reveal itself through anamorphic displays of disgust, grotesque, and macabre formlessness and namelessness. Unlike marvelous secondary worlds, which construct alternative realities, or the uncanny psychological realms of repetition and death, the shady worlds of the fantastic construct nothing and leave us in the abyss of uncertainty in-between the marvelous and uncanny unable to choose one or the other. They are empty, emptying, dissolving. Their emptiness vitiates a full, rounded, three-dimensional visible world, by tracing in absences, shadows without objects. Far from fulfilling desire, these spaces perpetuate desire by insisting upon absence, lack, the non-seen, the unseeable.

via https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2016/08/01/toward-a-non-conceptual-fantastic/