The Real Grotesque

The aesthetic of punk was anticapitalist in its celebration and glorification of the unmarketable. Unmarketability is at the heart of the artistic left’s fascination with the grotesque.

But as Mark Fischer points out, capital is incredibly adept at marketizing. “Punk is dead” announced the moment that capitalists learned how to market to punks. The last inroads of attack on capitalism must remain the Lacanian “Real”:

The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us. Environmental catastrophe is one such Real.
— Capitalist Realism, p. 18

The aesthetization of the grotesque is not so much an uncovering of the Real. It’s a way of taunting capital by flaunting territory it can’t conquer. But the grotesque Real, the unmarketable grotesqueness which capital produces in the world, is not a kind that any humanist could celebrate.

Crust punks might hold some last little bit of territory. But I hear there are nice (somewhat expensive) skin probiotics you can get to manage the healthy ecosystem of your eternally unbathed skin.

And with that, Merry Christmas! 🎄