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.