Why is it so hard to talk about wokeness? According to Merriam-Webster, "woke" means "aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)," but it rarely seems that's all it means. If one asks the right, "woke" is a pejorative term for someone pushing identity-only politics. If one asks the left, it's a signifier one isn't a bigot. If one asks Peter Coffin, author of Less Sucks: Overpopulation, Eugenics, and Degrowth (and producer of the documentary of the same name), "wokeness" is an ideology used to obscure power and funnel people into left/right political fandoms - ensuring culture war arguments that solve nothing. Woke Ouroboros is a grounded criticism of "wokeness" built on top of a materialist conception of the relations of power through production - a thorough-but-accessible examination of one of the most fraught political conversations Americans are having and the implications it has via the imperialist world order. "Woke Ouroboros takes a different and humanizing approach to criticism on liberal and neoliberal ideas of identity. Coffin does not downplay the real marginalizations and inequalities that exist along social lines, however nor is there a mincing of words when it comes to how the capitalist class co-opts these issues to perpetuate itself at the expense of the majority of people. The solutions put forth by ruling class ideology, in a nutshell, serve power, even when they claim they do not. And power plays all sides, so both pro and anti woke teams end up serving a similar function. Everything from representation to imperialism is examined using a truly dialectical Marxian analysis without moral judgement. And as the title suggests, it is primarily framed around how Wokeism, in the identity politics sense, ends up in a similar place as the right-wing ideology it claims to critique, and how this fits into a larger capitalist structure by design. I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to dig deeper into the sinister nature of our system in order to understand it." - L.W.

Woke Ouroboros: Segregation and Essentialism

Politics & Social Sciences

Coffin, Peter

Sociology

Independently published

Nothing has changed more in the last few decades than our concept and perception of reality. The effects have manifested in our news, entertainment, and Google searches; we’re finding that a lot of things we thought were objective aren’t automatically so.Reality is not a concept we want to flush down the toilet with yesterday's food, though. However, we must begin to understand how it works in a world where profit is the driving force. Revised, Expanded

Custom Reality and You

Philosophy

Downtown Los Angeles’s Colby Poster Printing Co. famously churned out their iconic “show print” posters from 1946 until 2012. Peter Coffin’s Imaginary Concerts grew out of experimenting with the print shop’s patent eyeball-attracting inks and exhibiting a series of eighty text-less posters in Colby’s tricolor gradient style, allowing the viewer to “what if…?” imaginary line ups into existence. After displaying the posters worldwide, Coffin enticed a handful of artists, authors, and otherwise daydreamers to depict their wildest concert bills in black letterpress. Imaginary Concerts collects and displays over 70 submissions against the hazy, horizontal color bands encouraging your cranium to creep its deepest concert fantasies.

Imaginary Concerts

Arts & Photography

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Anthology Editions

Artist Peter Coffin began his work with the iconic designs of LA’s Colby Poster Printing Company in 2008. Over the years, he solicited friends to contribute their dream concerts―invented lineups for impossible gigs―and combined them with the print shop’s famously eye-popping poster backgrounds, resulting in Imaginary Concerts: a stirring, two-volume celebration of music’s vast conceptual universe. Featuring 160 concert lineups from a roster of artists, authors and daydreamers including Yoko Ono, Larry Clark, Quasimoto, Genesis P-Orridge and dozens of others, Imaginary Concerts: Volumes One and Two transport the reader into an uncannily evocative, nostalgia-tinged and personally revealing realm of musical what-ifs.

Imaginary Concerts Volume 1 (Imaginary Concerts, 1)

Imaginary Concerts Volume 2 (Imaginary Concerts, 2)

Cancel Culture: Mob Justice or a Society of Subscriptions?

Politics & Government

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Books by Coffin, Peter