Punk Anarchism

Sean Parson is Professor in the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Northern Arizona University, USA. They are the author of Cooking Up a Revolution: Resistance to Gentrification (2019) and the co-editor of four edited books includingRepresentations of Political Resistance and Emancipation in Science Fiction (2020).

Punk Anarchism is a meditation on negation, a reminder that capitalism cannot cure the catastrophe it creates and that reason grounds its destructive force. Refusing to accept the world ‘as it is’, Parson exposes its idiocy and uses impermanence to urge resistance. The enduring lesson is that the passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!

• An Anti-Introduction: A Leap Into the VoidI. Anti-Theory: Dada, Situationism, Stirner, and PunkII. An Outline of Things to Come: An Anti-introductionChapter One: The Crisis of Representation and the Collapse of the Liberal Order I. The Mediated Reality, the Hyperreal, and the Crisis of RepresentationII. The Collapse of the Post-war SpectacleIII. The Current Crisis of RepresentationIV. Concluding Thoughts: Past, Present, Future and the End of HistoryChapter Two: Industrialism is a Death CampI. Industrial Objects and the Materiality of Symbolic AnxietyII. A Genealogical Analysis of the Gas Mask: From Plague Doctors to Anti-state ProtestorsIII. Industrialism as Suicidal BlackmailChapter Three: The Climate isn’t RealI. The Simulacra and Disaster Management: The Environment and ClimateII. The Politics of Models: Administrative Rationalism and the state regulation of Illusions:III. Accepting the Nonidentity of Nature: Solaris, Cthuhlu, and the Masterless ObjectIV. Anti-World Politics: Revolutionary Demonology and the Destruction of Enlightenment OrderChapter Four: A Rising Tide Sinks All Art GalleriesI. Art, the Economy, the State:II. Negation as an Artistic Medium: Activism as Performance ArtIII. Mausoleums of our Extinct CultureIV. Art as Resistance and Resistance as ArtChapter Five: No Future, No Hope I. What the End of the World Means…II. Temporal NihilismIII. “The Revolutionary is a Doomed Man”: Towards Political Nihilism in the 21st CenturyChapter Six: Without Gallows Humor There is Only the GallowsI. “Dancing on the Corpses Ashes”: Russian Political Nihilism and Clearing the Rubble of Social CollapseII. “The Goal of my Activities is the Destruction of all Living Things”: The Revolutionary Nihilism of Kaneko Fumiko III. “We All Die in a Yellow Submarine”: Resentment and the Tragi-comedy of Dead BillionairesIV. Conclusion: Cabin in the Woods and the Politics of Armed JoyChapter Seven: Towards A Nihilistic Politics of AttackI. “The Revolutionary Handbrake": Walter Benjamin on Revolution and the FutureII. A Strategy of Attack: Against Accelerationism and WithdrawalIII. “The misplaced optimism of the doomed”: Snowpiercer (2013) as Destituent Power and An Insurrectionary HandbreakConclusion: A Requiem for Our World