Novelist China Miéville joins Evan Calder-Williams to launch Calder-Williams’ book Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (Zero Books) by announcing the death of the “Salvage punk” theory it presents.
Salvage Punk from Mute Publishing on Vimeo.
“If Benjamin’s Angel of History is flying backwards over a vast pile of rubbish, rather than getting mawkish about that fact, as leftists have for 60, 70 years, instead say, ‘Well, if we suture this bit of junk to this bit of junk, we’ve got a Gatling gun. That’s awesome.’ That was the idea. It was really nice. We enjoyed it. But it was an aesthetic project … I don’t want to preclude enjoying ourselves in the libidinal economy of shared hipster taste, we will be allowed to talk about awesome salvagepunk things … In a camply specific and overt way, Salvage punk is the creation myth of capitalism itself.”