Hi. The purpose of this activity isn’t to prove that ‘things were so much better in the past’, I don’t want to encourage the creation of a rose-tinted perception of the near past. But I think ‘reality checks’ are important, not just for individuals, but also for societies. Mainly because ‘reality’ is a constantly changing thing, but we can have a perception of reality being ‘fixed’, be it a perception both created by, and within institutions of power, but also reproduced by anybody and everybody.
When I read the now ‘classic’ cultural theory book ‘Capitalist Realism’ by Mark Fisher, sat in a cafe in 2010, it was almost identical to a moment in George Orwell’s 1984, where the protagonist finds himself reading a book that explains back reality back to him as he knew he knew it but could NOT articulate. I’d just read the first chapter; a sobering reminder of how ‘reality’ can shift whilst appearing to have remained the same.
Fisher compares the 2005 Alfonso Cuarón film ‘The Children of Men’ to the then current ‘war on terror’. The film uses the idea of a humanity which can no longer have children, as the symbol for a world that has lost all hope, but upkeeps a weird ‘keep calm and carry on’ normality, as “internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist.”
“What is unique about the dystopia in Children of Men is that it is specific to late capitalism… …democracy is suspended and the country is ruled over by a self-appointed Warden, but, wisely, the film downplays all this. For all that we know, the authoritarian measures that are everywhere in place could have been implemented within a political structure that remains, notionally, democratic. The War on Terror has prepared us for such a development: the normalization of crisis produces a situation in which the repealing of measures brought in to deal with an emergency becomes unimaginable (when will the war be over?)“
Now, many many comparisons have since been made between our world and the film as we encroach upon 2025, the year in which it was set. Despite whether the war of terror is still ongoing, or whether it has transformed into a set of new indefinite emergency states, I set up this ‘activity’ (?), in what I see as the spirit of the ‘Capitalist Realism’ book; which is to neither give in to despair, submit to hopelessness, nor nostalgia, but to most importantly not to succumb to the state of the ‘amnesiac’ – somebody who has no historical compass, no sense of being in a world that was different, and could be different again.
I’d like this activity to be a way of asking ourselves to put ourselves back into 2010 (if we’re old enough!) and say “would this have shocked me at the time?”
Anyway, the exercise itself is simple, and like many aspects of the online work our collective have been doing in the past 3 years, it still remains, potentially forever delayed, but always on the way to becoming something, in spirit.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zHzUVE-j_xi3qaFM_cVXHAzaDISr4H_sd1ww3a0c7-o/edit?usp=sharing
The Retro Bar at the End of the Universe 