Time Out of Joint

I don’t think the heart of the book is the four levels of reality, as in the long analysis of Yves Potin. Time Out of Joint is about today, through the lens of the schizoid weirdness of that what was the 1950s.

In a way, the 1950s might be the ultimate metaphor for the promise, and the shock, of the new. It might be the very first decade in which modernity had truly arrived, on the rubble and the corpses of World War 2. The fifties are filled to the brim with new consumo-techno-stuff, birthing free time, and birthing mass media, coupled with a fixation on sex via Freud and the Kinsey reports and Marylin Monroe, and death via the threat of the H-bomb. As such, Time Out of Joint is not unlike the Louis Paul Boon novel I recently reviewed: a book about a delusional culture that keeps entertainment flowing, while nuclear weapons are being tested on Bikini. Plastic America has become a template for the world.

A lot has changed, and not really. People are still trapped in suburbia, more so, as inequality has grown and the American Dream is dead. Making sense of reality has become a full-time job. New stuff keeps on being spawned, new mass media too, there is more free porn than ever, and the number and severity of threats might have never been higher: geopolitics is unstable, and ecological and thus societal collapse looms large. And still lots of people put their faith in technology to fix all that, one day, soon – even if that technology still scares us: AI is an ominous, blinking red eye.

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Full review on Weighing A Pig