Abstract

In the present work we intend to focus on the creative potential of weird, with a particular focus on the possibility of imagining, through it, alternative futures, profound cultural alterations, original possibilities of coexistence between the human and the non-human. Therefore, the declination of weird to be taken into consideration will be the temporal one: a very precise manifestation of strangeness, arising from the juxtaposition of elements that can be traced back to different times, from the disquieting mixture of re-actualisations and anticipations. Beginning with an examination of the phenomenon of “retromania”, straddling the reflections of Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher, we intend to show how the constant re-actualisation of cultural products of the past – common in the culturallandscape of the new millennium – is a symptom of the feeling of “having lost the future” (Mark Fisher, 2019). Anoutcome, this, of “capitalist realism” (Fisher, 2018a), within which pop culture becomes the bearer of a nostalgia for times when imagining an alternative still seemed possible. In this context, we will identify certain artistic manifestations, such as vaporwave music, that make use of an explicitly weird aesthetic: this is the so-called“hauntological art” (Fisher, 2019), which takes temporal weirdness to extremes in order to bring out the putrescent face of retromania and, at the same time, open up possible alternative futures that break the pattern of eternal cultural recycling. We will note, then, how the same creative potential of weird is harnessed by speculative realism and by Timothy Morton’s theory of hyperobjects: it is intended to show that the phenomenon of hauntology, between pop culture and philosophy, embodies and expresses the restlessness of an era, using weird as a powerful tool.