What interests me most about William Blake and Clive Barker is that they both hold the power of imagination in the highest regard. Through imagination we are able to transcend the restrictions of contemporary culture. Both writers, through the mode of fantastic literature, attempt to redefine humanity in a way that complicates and often eradicates the artificial limits we place on ourselves through various ideologies. They try to break the mind-forged manacles of culture. For me, culture (at least contemporary late-capitalist culture) is perhaps the most detrimental thing that has happened to the human condition. Our culture simultaneously promotes positivist thinking and discredits any discussion of what seems to be explicitly unreal. Better put, our society forces monologic ideologies and tries to discredit any engagement in subversive exploration of the human condition. Example -- Speculative Fiction is apparently not a legitimate academic pursuit.
I feel that Speculative Fiction allows us a unique insight to how culture forces concepts of self-creation/ identity creation to be little more than creations of rather complicated simulacra. What is real when everything around us is in some way tied to the nebulas workings of late capitalism? Both Blake and Barker's literature tries to decenter capitalism's hold on ideologies while replacing it with imagination. Imagination functions a both a subversive and transcendent force for new creations of identity outside cultural ideologies.
What I am trying to do now (in my Master's Thesis) is to look at Baudrillard's concepts of Simulacra and Simulation, Althusser's Ideologies and Ideological State Apparatuses, and Zizek's proletariatization of the Subject and apply it to Blake's work. In Blake's work I am looking at the question of how do we create a self inside culture? And does creation of unopposed ideologies force an apocalypse?
Any ideas?
