Why Fantasy Matters Too Much

Abstract

In his article "Why Fantasy Matters Too Much" Jack Zipes proposes that fantasy in contemporary culture functions as a celebrity and money-making machine. Fantasy mobilizes and instrumentalizes the fantastic to form and celebrates spectacles as illusions of social relations based on power. Thus, spectacles violate and drain our imagination by glorifying social relations of power made spectacular and involve the magic of fetishism. Generally, the results bring about delusion and acclamation of particular sets of social relations that are commodified, sold, and consumed. We acclaim commodities that we do not know and products not of our own making we consume mentally and physically. We reproduce images consciously and unconsciously not of our own making. The media and the corporate world occupy our psyches and manipulate our fantasies even when we dream. Our relations are mediated through the spectacle of fantasy and the fantastic spectacle and through fetish abetted by the latest technology that connects us while disconnecting us from our minds and feelings. Simultaneously, we seek to project our desires in the form of fantasies onto reality and endeavor to occupy a space in which our most profound wishes and desires can be realized. We seek cognition and recognition. In each instance -- in the tension between corporate determination of the fantastic and individual projection of desire -- we seem to anchor our understanding of reality in artworks dependent on the fantastic such as the Bible and fairy tales.

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