INTERVIEW // ALGIERS
se revolutionary “I’m not sticking to the past and not sticking to the eat themselves, but at the rep t jus uld wo y the t tha ing hop and s ent vem mo dernism that kind of tried same time there had been a trend called postmo tique just general.” to neutralize these discussions of power and cri future... That’s the worst kind of damage that can be inflicted upon people in a psychological sense, in a political sense. Obviously there’s physical violence and terror, and all that stuff that happens to people, that is obviously brutal, but if I’m talking about psychological terms that shutting off that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel... I think people need, I need that personally. I need to have a sense that potentially things can get better, and that we have some sort of agency within that, as naïve that might sound I think that’s fundamentally important for us to live and to imagine. It’s just important to imagine. Now, in real terms that’s really difficult to achieve because we don’t see it, and none of us have a party program, or a political
program to achieve that justice, but we have to hold on to this like [Albert] Camus talks about in The Plague [book published in 1947]. I mean, the fundamental thing in the book The Plague is that we all know that is the end of the world, basically, so what we’re going to do about it? Are we going to fight each other? Or are we going to find some sort of sense of humanity? What are we going to do? I don’t know about America, but here in Portugal we are used to say, “It could be worse.” It’s funny because it’s never, “It could be better.” Ryan: [laughs] You know, that’s the kind of... I mean, there’s like this huge trend in American popular culture with all these different kind of apocalyptic scenarios. You get
zombies, you get something like The Road of Cormac McCarthy where there’s this unknown natural disaster, and most of the time is “This is hell!” because somehow capitalism has collapsed and now it’s just person against person in this Machiavellian struggle, which from my perspective is like, “Wait a second. Surely we can imagine an apocalyptic scenario where we actually come together.” David Harvey talks in one of his books that after 9/11 there was a space in time where everything stopped and for a few days people came together in the streets of New York, and they communed, and they convened, and they talked, and they interacted on a level. On those shows, like The Walking Dead, there’s also this really dark picture
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