ROBOTIC and SYNTHETIC PERFORMANCE: Steps Toward a Culture of Liberation a Manifesto of the OmniCircus
XXII. ANTI-GENRES
Each of the bourgeois ideological genres has led to a DORIAN GRAY - a decrepit mirror image, an anti-genre that exposes the obsolescence of its own underlying assumptions. When this is done more or less self-consciously and critically these modes can be a bridge to the creation of progressive subject genres. If the bourgeois portrait idealizes the individual, the anti-genre reveals loathsome articulations in the hyper-individualist skeleton, more or less preparing the way for an expression that places the individual in a collective and social context. The advent of the 'FRANKENSTEIN monster' horror genre in literature and theater, with its display of gigantic and deformed individuals built from body parts using electricity and science to bring it to life, or representing nature and the supernatural spinning out of control (i.e. Dracula/Exorcist) simultaneously exhumes and creates our distrust of dark forces edging out of control. When Bill Gates can have more personal wealth than the poorest 103 million Americans combined, according to the NY Times, these unconscious fears are quite possible rooted in the abuses of hyper-individualism, power and science under a capitalist system. Similarly, modern day nationalism, racism, sexism, and commodity fetishism have inspired anti-genres which act as signposts in the disintegration of bourgeois culture.
The danger lies, of course, in the potential for hyperextension of the lifetime of the anti-genre until it becomes its own grotesquely aberrant epoch. The life-support system for these genres should be kept plugged in only until a Social Surrealist robotic transplant becomes available.