Hauntology, Lost Futures and 80s Nostalgia

Hypernormalisation - A. Curtis (2h46m) [link] //[a story of how] governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex real world and instead established a simpler fake world for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments. The film was released on 16 October 2016// Curtis' signature style is to propose a thesis and develop it entirely via BBC News video archive segments arranged as an impressionistic, editorial montage. The news segments are bound together by V.O. (or text) narrative, and punctuated by a soundtrack of esoteric pop music to impose a personal perspective and stimulate a gestalt critique. Curtis' impressionistic style follows an approach popularized by H. Marshall McLuhan that McLuhan termed "probes" and gestalt, which combines the classically Greek intellectual features of the trivium with the tactile sensitivities of an artist to find a whole out of parts. The probe approach allows an interlocutor to transcend rational (Aristotelian) thought without abdicating the powerful tools of the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The intellectual gesture utilized is Hegelian "aufheben": the transcendence of contradictions (thesis vs. antithesis) through a lifting-up into a higher order that accounts for the conflict and places the antagonistic precepts into a position of reconciliation (synthesis). Gestalt is the human capacity to perform aufheben over the entire range of our sensorium