The Politics of Weird Aesthetics Fictionality in New Forms of Protest

As public spheres today are dominated by securitization, biopolitical control, and authoritarian politics, this essay probes how fictionality is (re)entering public space through forms of protest that mobilize fictional modalities and what I call a weird aesthetics. The weird is a hybrid genre that uses speculative fiction, multiple scales, and human-nonhuman entanglements to ‘twist’ rationalism, realism, and normative constructions of common sense. In recent years, I argue, we can trace a weird turn, whereby forms and modalities of weird fiction spill over into other domains, beyond literature and art, often inflected through posthuman and new materialist theory and philosophy. This essay traces such a spillover of the weird in public space through recent forms of protest and activism from the margins and periphery of Europe, which engaged in strategies of ‘weirding’ the dimensions, scale, and ontological standing of the body in public space. Forging unexpected alliances between human and nonhuman forces (monsters, aliens, ghosts, toys), these interventions involved spectral, miniaturized, undisciplined, oversized, monstrous, and fictionalized bodies, through which they projected the entanglement of fiction and reality as a world-making force without collapsing the boundary between the two. If post-truth populists, (neo-)fascists or conspiracists often use fictional, excessive scenarios to normalize controversial worldviews, how are the fictional and the weird mobilized for critical, emancipatory projects that reclaim public space as an arena for inclusive, democratic politics? Can the weird aesthetics of these events ‘outweird’ contemporary public rhetoric marked by intersecting crises, populism, nativism, and securitization? While I take the local contexts of these protest events into account, I focus on the ethical political, epistemological, and ontological implications of studying them together, as a constellation under the heading of the weird, in order to probe the forms of subjectivity and agency they put forward. Unsettling the boundaries between fictional and real, materiality and immateriality, active and passive, human and nonhuman, these protests reintroduced the entanglement and tension between fiction and reality as a condition for critique, democratic politics, and public world-making today.
This article is part of a special issue on "Literature and Public World Making," edited by Maria Boletsi, Marc Farrant, Divya Nadkarni, and Marco de Waard.