Bolshevik,Worker,Revenant|Absent Cause
I’m not even sure how I started reading Absent Cause, or discovered redguard. Maybe redguard discovered me, we crossed paths online somehow and an issue of Absent Cause found its way into my hands about a year ago. And it was very cool: honest confessional writing, candor, examination. Body image, beauty, recovery, trust, pressure, conformity, identity, depression, parenting. redguard is, above all else, open. He lays it out, puts himself in there to be looked at as he examines himself. redguard explains the title, Absent Cause: “While reading Reynold Humphries’ excellent book, The Hollywood Horror Film, 1931-1941: Madness in a Social Landscape, I became fascinated by the formulation of history as the “absent cause” under capitalism – the “Real” that cannot be acknowledged, especially in the U.S., at the cost of exposing to the working class the exploitative (and unnecessary) nature of the whole system.
It is a great description of a phenomenon that every politically aware person has experienced: the disavowal and ridiculing of the impact of slavery on people of color; the training by which the population “forgets” the lies that were used to start the last war, just in time to accept them for the next one; the phenomenon of otherwise sensible, progressive people being sucked into voting for the “lesser evil” every election cycle; and so on, and so on.”
Absent Cause examines both the lies we hear, and the lies we tell ourselves. It becomes a challenge to engage with truth in either case, sometimes we move in and out of different realities, rejecting fixed notions or returning to them again, maybe with new eyes. We see this in the themes: mental illness, duality, gender and identity.
redguard:
“I created AC to explore topics that resonate with me and many of the artistic and political people whose work I respect and admire: underground cultures, hidden histories, feminist and queer sexualities, chosen families and radical politics; vampirism, the gothic, horror and paganism; surviving abuse, coping with mental illness, self-harm and suicide.”
Tags: absent cause, redguard, Zines
