More Schoneboomery
Surrealpolitik: More than a site dedicated to the book of the same name, it's a searchable repository of amazing quotes related to delusion, reality, and the symbolic order.
Magic Stories: A unique digital platform for reading and creating highly randomized (yet not arbitrary) stories that are (probably) never the same twice. Go on. Try it out.
Bratum Books: Publisher of the Uncommonalities series of short story collections bound by a common first line.
Bonkworld: Stop it. Bonk is a cartoon sound effect, not a dirty word. Lots of interactivity and japes, not entirely unliterary, occasionally informative. A rarely updated playground for me and a co-conspirator or two.
Wossafocken Point: What indeed?
Surrealpolitik: Surreality and the National Security State
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.
"Amazing...a fierce, lucid intervention against the regime of an exclusionary 'realism' which, in its marginalization of the dreamlife, not only starves us with a deadly-dull aesthetics but forms a lid clamped on the imaginative urgencies required to fight our way into a post-capitalist, post-surveillance future."
Publication date: Sep 22, 2022
ISBN: 9781785359491
Publisher's page: https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/zer0-books/our-books/surrealpolitik-surreality-national-security-state
About the Author
John Schoneboom is an award-winning writer of fiction, non-fiction, and plays. His work usually has something to do with fungible realities constructed out of unreliable perceptions. It's usually good for a few laughs.
