“The American dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now…”
—J.G. Ballard, 1983
RIP Raoul Vaneigem
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But what if the American images and fantasies that resonate are the nightmares? Seems a bit early for Ballard to be this pessimistic. Did he foresee Asian pop culture picking up the slack?
ReplyDeleteEarly? Ballard's Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan came out in 1968, and it's very hard to see it as a optimistic tale.
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