HERE COMES TROUBLE:
AN INQUIRY INTO ART, MAGIC AND MADNESS AS DEVIANT KNOWLEDGE

Author: Alex Head
Published by ZK/U Press
English
300 pages, 20 x 14.5 cm
ISBN 978-90-6906-049-1

Price: 72 lei


Imagine the infinitely tiny size of an atom. Focus on the size of this microscopic particle in relation to your own human body. Now scale up to the size of the planets, galaxies, to the solar system as a whole. The weight of your body exists between these vastly different scales.

Here Comes Trouble, An Inquiry into Art, Magic and Madness as Deviant Knowledge, is not about thermodynamics, negative feedback or refrigerators. Neither have I written a book about geology, black holes or migration, yet each of these material systems offer insights into the slippery topic of deviancy.

So what is deviancy? What forms does it take historically and what, as it were, does it do? Read more below...

In this work, I have tried to analyse the way in which deviancy has been historically ascribed and how the treatment of those bearing its title has been legitimised. Parallel to this, I have offered the reader a series of reflections upon a pressing, European, socio-political arena, within which the traits, fears and repressive violence which historically contextualise the ascription of deviancy, have begun to increase.

The methodology I have used sought to identify two or more ‘stable states’ and an area of transition between these two spatio-temporal, or political fixities. Between the feudal and capitalist systems of organisation I have argued, as others have before me, a process of violent political consolidation occurred across Europe. The evidence for this is written into the very language we use, such as in the word faggot, as well as in state/public, citizen, and cultural records.

Furthermore, the repression and servitude installed within the human psyche during this period, haunts many of us in the continuing bourgeois economic, colonial relation of master and slave, abstracted for the West in the form of the debt fuelled working day. Where credit or money performs as the ‘intercalary element’ (in place of dialogue, questioning and material communication), these pitiless labour relations, that would drive you and me to the slave-master relation given the slightest opportunity, can only worsen. Yet, there is always the potential to do things differently, providing a meaningful space exists into which new, deviant forms may proliferate.