Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today

’Like a pastry chef who can MacGyver a five-star dessert out of a Twinkie or a Jell-O packet, Anthony Galluzzo confects something special from the unlikeliest of industrial products: the 1974 Connery-Rampling vehicle Zardoz.’ Matt Tierney, author of What Lies Between: Void Aesthetics and Postwar Post-Politics

Alongside scientific knowledge and collective effort, building a degrowth ecological society will require a different set of stories and myths than the big and fast Promethean fables we’re accustomed to. Using Boorman’s Zardoz as a tool, Into The Vortex unearths the artistic and intellectual output of a decelerationist 1970s, with an eye toward imagining a very different sort of future.

Anthony Galluzzo is a writer and academic from New York, whose work focuses on degrowth utopias and a constellation of thinkers he dubs Critical Aquarians, offering an alternate route out of the current social and ecological crisis.