read “Never Very Far From What Is Happening Right Now” a review by Steven Shaviro in LARB
Author: materievie
1788 – Shanghai Fortress 上海堡垒 (2019 movie)
timespace coordinates: near-future Shanghai, China
directed: Teng Huatao
The movie was based on the Sci-fi novel from 2009 Once Upon A time in Shanghai by novelist Jiang Nan. From what I understand Jiang Nan was born in 1977 and although relatively unknown in the West (in comparison with Cixin Liu let’s say) has a huge reputation in China, and a huge following among teenagers. He wrote one sprawling feudal saga (completely unknown to me) – situated in the Novoland universe (where a series of kingdoms are situated respectively on the Eastern or Northern continent and named Xiantang kingdom, Li kingdom etc). Novoland forms a true Chinese media franchise (a Chinese response to the Lord of the Rings) that also includes his Novoland: Eagle Flag a successful Chinese TV series based on a fantasy book that used the province of Xinjiang (a place of uighur re-education/labor camps) as a set. He is also CEO of Beijing Smart Dragon Cultural Development Co, Ltd.
From the start I want to say that Shanghai Fortress is interesting for what it is not. After airing, it was heavily criticized by Chinese moviegoers and fans. So much so, that the film director had to publicly apologize online after so many found it so disappointing and gave it low cringy ratings. The phenomenon of powerful ‘entitled’ fandoms is not typical to the West nor new, altough it has gotten extreme of late. Fans have been actively involved in culture wars, disputes about ‘wokeness’ or targeting and hacking to pieces big-budget movies. Fandom won’t join the bandwagon all the time and movies that aim to rouse up feelings of nationalism or stand out as gung-ho patriotic are not without risks. Today there’s is more and more need to speak of related fandoms and inter-related media convergence phenomena m, even more so that in the 1990s cultural poachers era encapsulated by Henry Jenkin’s foundational text. Considering the fact that a lot of joint capitalist huge franchise products movies (Mulan comes to mind) as well as big brands (such as Dolce Gabbana racist adds) have been boycotted in China because of their cultural insensitivity and even neglect of local context one should always factor this when considering a sci-fi movie’s balancing act. Mulan & Gabanna have been accused of being openly racist and for promoting whitewashing & stereotypical media portrayals in a commercial context. Although the question still remains – if it is a case of users data (complaints) updating a multinational commercial monolith to their customer’s new sensibilities, buying power and valid cultural critiques. It seems like everybody involved in the production apologized for this film (including the author Jiang Nan) for being such a downer with fans, reflected in box office collapse and most online Chinese critics agreeing that is is mainly a bad melodrama love story between army officers with very few sci-fi (decorative) elements (compounded by bad FX that sometimes look as coming from another era).
It is sad indeed that the first movie to shift the – Alien Invasion – (probably inaugurated by Independence Day blockbuster) view from visible highlights of US (Washington, NY) towards other cosmopolitan vibrant cities of the Global South – especially the new sino-futuristic Mecca Shanghai with its newly recognizable skyline, has fared so bad. This is why a South African situated District 9 (2009) sci-fi is such a treat and why all the kaiju movies made Tokyo city into such an apocalyptic emblem. In this perspective even Moscow has fared better with Fyodor Bondarchuk introducing hood ‘sleeping quarter’ backdrops, with ‘othering’ narratives that are recognizably local (Chertanovo hood), taking anti-migrant violence or Russian transhumanism as starting material for his Invasion franchise. Shanghai is still being portrayed better in smaller productions and even gets a better chance apparently in Western US futuristic ones (Looper altough with Chinese backing and a hungry eye for the Chinese moviegoer market). I don’t want to trash the concept art and especially the SparkWarrgon work on HUD interfaces, system keyboards, the general’s seat, and control rooms that has lots of details and interesting aspects.
Aliens have always were a place-holder for colonial ‘others’ (be it foreigners, minorities, emigrants or the so-called ‘uncivilized’ or their superior exploitative others or in rare mostly Soviet and Posadist – better, peaceful and more cooperative ETs) and where such movies as Avatar can provide a stark example of post-human eco-utopian ultrahumanism and mysticism (as per Claire Colebrook) or reverse identification (Dave Higgins) fantasies after identifying with agents of imperial conquests became untenable in both countercultural as well as more mainstream (Avatar being a clasic example).
Already the term Fortress – Shanzhai– is historically charged, almost like a polity, a polis in itself, one that is autonomous, proud and even rebel. In the literary classic – Water Margin the Fortress (“Shanzhai”) in Shandong was the governmental double, a state within a state, the centrifugal force of the Chinese ‘haiduk’ marshland provincial resistance. The Fortress was harboring the discontented, the disgraced army members, the petty criminals, defrocked Buddhist monks etc all united by the distaste (not for the Son of Heaven mind you!) but for the corrupt officials, the leeching, profiteers at the Imperial court. Shanghai is not the sinofuturist smart model city, it is also the place of the 1st Congress of the Communist Party that traces its origins to a meeting in the Shikumen (typically Shanghaiese architecture style) building inside the French concession taking place during July-August 1921.
In the Shanghai Fortress- Scifi the city of Shanghai becomes the last resistance of the Earth against a rote – script of usually more technologically advanced and rapacious Aliens. And in China’s case “aliens” – and technologically advanced ones, have been mostly foreign European powers including the British Empire. ‘Alien powers’ that have humiliated China and who’s gunboat politics have remade China into an Opium addicted dragon, opening its ports to unequal trade and even making the Imperial government hand over several territories including concessions in Tianjin as well as the placid fisherman village of Hong Kong. Although it is important to track this anti-foreigner – xeno- alien- phobia in China’s history, these particular (US, British, French, German, Japanese etc) ‘foreign devils’ were the ones who forcefully opened and brutalized China, while bleeding it for resources.
During the infamous Cultural Revolution, Zhang, Yao and Wang three party leaders of the later -infamous “Gang of Four” (that included Mao’s wife Jian Qing portrayed but also sadly caricatured in Adam Curtis last documentary) secured the city of Shanghai for Mao.
Subsequently, they represented a threat to the power struggles following Mao’s demise and clashed with other shards of the petering Cultural Revolution – even before the winning faction finally taking over: the central reformist path of Deng that took the lead towards accelerationist economic policies. One can keep this background in mind when watching the movie if it makes it less boring and stiff that is.
That being said it is increasingly apparent that such Scifi movies – as Shanghai Fortress- may represent a visual cinematic exemplification of actual new concepts officially introduced by the CCP in order to challenge older notions of inter-departmental separation in previously loosely bound economic and defense spheres. It is a move away from the former centralized planned economy and defense and into a joint “military-civil fusion” (军民融合, jun-min ronghe) that is fast becoming the force behind economic planning as well as Chinese corporations. This is something not really well understood outside of China, and it is a shifting and evolving policy. During the recent talk of US-decoupling from the Chinese economy and trade wars – Huawei has been targeted as such a (nefarious as described by detractors in the US, Australia etc) high-tech long arm of the CCP & and infrastructural implementation in convergence with Chinese state security and incurring backdoors, security breaches etc being strategically planted. This of course tends to blandly paste over all the post- Snowden 2000s NSA reveals that show how much high tech (mainly Silicon Valley) Big tech is also being infiltrated (or in-grown by US state security apparatuses), invested in Chinese rare minerals/open markets or coopted by openly right-wing vested interests.
In this Scifi movie – the hightech military alliance is very important as preparation for any worst case scenario. There is a shield (a kind of Chinese Wall Dome that covers the city) but also under the city there are vast technological operations securing its energetic autonomy (via independent generators) and ability to last a long siege. The film also touches upon an important diplomatic fact – importantly in my view – it remains somehow doggedly international – it has this planetary stance (a bit like the Zion last Human city in Matrix) and makes efforts to portray its military brass as human(humanistic?) as possible, with romantic interests, coffee brakes etc and such and not too many enhancements.
1784 – “Shanzhai”, Future Mutations, Cosmotechnics and other books about China now
First some things about “Shanzhai” subculture and ethos.
Paperback, 224 pagesPublished February 20th 2020 by Pluto Press
‘Shanzhai’ from Cantonese slang, refers to the production of fake goods in China, which enjoy an anti-authoritarian-like dissemination across the global market. Starting with mobile phones, now fashion brands are subverted in this way, with many women at the helm of design and production. Fashioning China looks at the women designers simultaneously subverting and reinforcing the nationalist-developmentalist, masculinist and technocratic dream of brands that are ‘Made in China’.
Broadening the digital labor debate beyond typical masculine and techno-utopic readings, Sara Liao studies the precarious practices of women trying to create sustainable and creative lives, vividly illustrating a fashion culture that exists online as a significant part of the digital economy.
Drawing on material from interviews, participant observation, archives, policy documents, films and advertisements, Liao takes a multi-disciplinary approach to the topic, charting out the politics of intellectual property rights, globalization, technocracy, patriarchy and nationalism in a non-Western context.
A study of Samuel Butler, cybernetics and emerging technology in Shenzhen, China.
“A brilliant and empathetic guide to the far corners of global capitalism.” –Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing
From FSGO x Logic: stories about rural China, food, and tech that reveal new truths about the globalized world
In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today.
From pork farmers using AI to produce the perfect pig, to disruptive luxury counterfeits and the political intersections of e-commerce villages, Wang unravels the ties between globalization, technology, agriculture, and commerce in unprecedented fashion. Accompanied by humorous “Sinofuturist” recipes that frame meals as they transform under new technology, Blockchain Chicken Farm is an original and probing look into innovation, connectivity, and collaboration in the digitized rural world.
FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.
How did China’s mass manufacturing and “copycat” production become transformed, in the global tech imagination, from something holding the nation back to one of its key assets? Prototype Nation offers a rich transnational analysis of how the promise of democratized innovation and entrepreneurial life has shaped China’s governance and global image. With historical precision and ethnographic detail, Silvia Lindtner reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007-8, shaped the rise of the global maker movement and the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation.
Lindtner’s investigations draw on more than a decade of research in experimental work spaces–makerspaces, coworking spaces, innovation hubs, hackathons, and startup weekends–in China, the United States, Africa, Europe, Taiwan, and Singapore, as well as in key sites of technology investment and industrial production–tech incubators, corporate offices, and factories. She examines how the ideals of the maker movement, to intervene in social and economic structures, served the technopolitical project of prototyping a “new” optimistic, assertive, and global China. In doing so, Lindtner demonstrates that entrepreneurial living influences governance, education, policy, investment, and urban redesign in ways that normalize the persistence of sexism, racism, colonialism, and labor exploitation.
Prototype Nation shows that by attending to the bodies and sites that nurture entrepreneurial life, technology can be extricated from the seemingly endless cycle of promise and violence.
Cover image: Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers
essay on Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics by Yuk Hui
notes on reading Cosmotechnics
This volume reflects on the meaning and the implications of Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics, which opens up an anti-universalist and pluralist perspective on technology beyond the West.
Martin Heidegger’s famous analysis of the essence of technology as enframing and as rooted in ancient Greek techne has had a crucial influence on the understanding and critique of technological society and culture in the twentieth century. However, it is still unclear to what extent his analysis can also be applied to the development of technology outside of ‘the West’, e.g. in China, Africa and Latin America, particularly against the backdrop of receding Western domination and impending global ecological disaster. Acknowledging the planetary expansion of Western technology already observed by Heidegger, yet also recognizing the existence of non-Western origins of technical relationships to the cosmos, Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics calls for a rethinking – in dialogue with postcolonialism and the so-called ontological turn in contemporary anthropology – of the question concerning technology which challenges the universality still present in Heidegger (as well as in Simondon and Stiegler) and proposes a radical technological or rather cosmotechnical pluralism or technodiversity. The contributors to this volume critically engage with this proposal and examine the possible implications of Hui’s cosmotechnical turn in thinking about technology as it becomes a planetary force in our current age of the Anthropocene.
ebook, 289 pages
Published 2019 by Amsterdam University Press B.V.
With its emergence as a global power, China aspires to transform from “made in China” to “created in China”. Mobilised as a crucial source for solid growth and “soft power,” creativity has become part of the new China Dream. This anthology engages with the imperative of creativity by aligning it to three interrelated phenomena: boredom, shanzhai, and digitisation. How does creativity help mitigate boredom? Does boredom incubate creativity? How do shanzhai practices and the omnipresence of fake stuffs challenge notions of the original and authentic? Which spaces for expressions and contestations has China’s fast-developing digital world of Weixin, Taobao, Youku and Internet Plus Policy opened up? Are new technologies serving old interests? Essays, dialogues, audio-visual documents and field notes, from thinkers, researchers, practitioners and policy-makers, contribute to explore, examine and problematize what is going on in China now, ultimately to tease out its implication to our understanding of “creativity”.
1778 – The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (book by By Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant 2020)
After watching Part 5 — The Lordly Ones the last series docu by Adam Curtis episode I felt like finally posting this study here that I have not read but sounds very compelling. The archival materials Curtis assembles and edits trace the shifting contours of another underlying pattern that emerges from his centrifugal (vaguely non-linear) history VJing (?!) kaleidoscopic rush towards now. His initial giveaway – from recently departed D. Graeber – takes history, memory and future as something made and in the making. All the unnerving loose-ends, valuable archival footage fragments, documenting both personal trajectories and ebbing planetary emotions keep chasing each other and keep producing new contradictions and dynamics that one may refuse to acknowledge but cannot ignore. I am not a historian nor an academic, but I am keen follower & curious seeker of repurposed, remade, salvaged neo-worlds, of the joy of invention and imaginative play that is always risky stuff, whenever and wherever we imagine various pasts, or whenever one in order to have a tradition invents it. This also implies courage as well as response- ability (as D Haraway said). No idea is innocent and what was once invented might seem eternal, or gets enshrined as national tradition under strict gatekeeping. So how the past or how ‘nativism’ gets to to be roleplayed now, commercialized, weaponized or how folklore gets radicalized counts.
This post is not to debunk or ridicule the dreamy, fairy (elvish), fantasy invented- worlds that abound online and offline nowadays, or their dedicated publics, history buffs or LARPing fans, nor is it an attempt to bury the neo-medieval. In fact the Middle Ages have transformed our understanding of the past and in turn we have been transforming our understanding of this period regarded and banished as dark-side, obscurantist, superstitious intermediary btw Antiquity and Renaissance. All what followed, all what was inherited from the antiquity has been already imprinted and further elaborated during those subsequent medieval times. The Middle Ages are being constantly revolutionized (enough to check the Medieval Twitter!). Games, novels, tatoos, and even Middle Age lifestyle gatherings make it something eerily alive and very active in the weirdest places and corners of the net. Still, under current circumstance this practice also includes toxic manifestos extolling neo-medieval glorious pasts (as in Breivik’s case and others) as well as organized nationalist tribalism (as in Jacob Mikanovski’s survey of the Great Kurultáj) or the ethnopolics of Romanian neo Dacian White Wolves – thus making it mportant to delineate a certain strain and specificity that has defined this reconstruction of the past since 1900 under certain artistic and historical circumstances. This peculiar dream of a lost countryside, of happy peasants dancing their dances, obedient to their good, fair and noble overlords is a very modern (middle class) hackneyed back-to-country pastoral Middle Age idyll. It starts to animate the oeuvre (operas, literature, ethnological research) and arts of an English (and probably globally Westernized – if we consider the German, Slavic and Romanian neo- Medieval volkish movements roughly parallel with it) middle classes. It coincides with the whole white fear eugenics & demographic panic (Sax Rohmer, Madison Grant etc) the whole Twilight of the West (Untergang des Abendlandes by Oswald Spengler). This European medievalist trend has been growing in contrast with and as a reaction/retreat in the face of the rapid impact of industrialization, colonialism overseas (immigration at home), humiliation by non – European armed forces (Russo-Japanese War) and of changing power relations in the wake of tremendous productive forces being unleashed, the rise of robber baron monopolies as well as the collapse of the British Imperialism. Retreating to the countryside has had an appeal for those who could afford to retreat in comfort and not face the horrors of city life, industrial squalor as well as the growing bargaining power of the worker (mostly miner) masses.
In response there has been an incredible growth of a idealized Middle Ages with its aesthetics be it in literature (yes J R R Tolkein is also part of it), in music – and part of it was also the Glanstonbury Festival (1914-1925) inspired in part by Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth example altough the history is more complicated and winded then an episode’s mention can deal with. Adam Curtis makes the central claim that a lot of intellectuals and prominent archaeologists involved in the formation of the state of Iraq (state nationhood) have constructed and supported the same type of tribal mythology in the context of the Gulf States and the Near East. So archaeologists (among them Getrude Bell as mentioned by Adam Curtis) have been attracted by this romantic image of the Orientalist view of tribal traditional leaders (what they saw as the local tribal aristocratic version of their – “The Lordly Ones”), encouraging and establishing the power of local authoritarian oil sheikhs of the future. This was done against those very populations that had to be ruled & perforce suffer the ill effects of this rule. This romantic nativism & exalted tribalism had quite destructive effects on the local secular and already developing middle classes of Iraq, Syria and other former parts of the Turkish Ottoman Empire that where on their way towards modernization.
The West has been active in seeding somehow and sustaining this purified & cleaned-up image of an oldskool entitled ‘noble aristocracy’ – something completely at odds with the situation on the ground. The aristocratic neo feudal turn is also visible in popular pulps. Tarzan is a new type of hero: written by an American, its about the physical feats of a lost white male heir of the Lord Graystoke fortune. A (via his stay in the African jungle) rewilded British scion raised by apes combining the ‘noble savage’ with a good lordly pedigree. With the waning of fhe British Empire, a kind of neo- medieval return to hallowed hierarchies – was taking root in the States as well around 1900 – for example considering the habits, Christian Crosses, pires, rituals, cultural bricolage and costumes portrayed in the viciously racist neo-Templar knight proto-KKK version of US history, especially as portrayed in D W Griffiths movie The Birth of a Nation. In fact the whole knightly made-up cosplay (‘klan’ Highland -clan) look from this movie was copied by actual klan-members later on, was being inspired by an earlier literary description from the Romantic adventure novels of Walter Scott – itself an invented version of the Middle Ages in tune with the new Romantic ideals. In Romania itself the protochronist movement has embellished a particularly ethocentric version of the past and its purportedly socialist dictators have identified(helped by historians) themselves with particular rulers, built monuments and have been depicted (even in paintings) as kings of yore & fathers of the land. It is this kind of hauntological truth that comes to haunt us, a past that we have otherwise actively cosplayed, contructed, or reconstructed. It is important to think and revisit not just to cynically trash the whole revival mood – but enable a more diverse, dirty, grotesque, multifarious and complicated Middle Ages, one where we may even find empowering (that do not give in to the lure of exceptionalism nor purism) and cherish the core of ‘progressive’ elements (even if it sounds anachronistic) therein as an insistence of possibilities (in Isabelle Stengers words).
I want to make a note in saying Adam Curtis mentions in his documentary this brooding opera by Rutland Boughton (1878-1960) called The Immortal Hour (1914) in connection with the Celtic revival, the neo-pagan movement of Europe, of rediscovered traditional dances, of inventing and introducing dark and eerie forces (of anti-modernity?) that where in fact very modern. Neo-paganism has always had these National-Socialist and anti-semitic undertones (or at least bulk anti- Judeo-Christian) which have deeply tainted its follow-up. At the same time it is important to recognize that Rutland B. was considered a socialist and his work’s reception suffered because of his communist leanings (he was member of the communist party). Nothing is simple or easy to categorize. The Middle Ages was not a terrain just for imagining oppressive, hierarchical racial fantasies – in fact a prominent utopian thinker, socialist activist, designer, William Morris and a major figure of the British Arts & Crafts movement was involved in the Middle Ages revival. In a footnote to their Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer adopt the critic of Disenchantment voiced by such neo-pagan animists as Ludwig Klages but stop short of his embrace of the primordial magical communion with nature. The fragment quoted by Jason Ananda Josephson Storm (in his Myth of Disenchantment) is worth citing in full in regard to the increasing commercialization of a pure, more ecological “dark geen” Middle Ages as well as the taunted union with a Gaian healing power that rings more truer than ever (see wellness industry or greenwashing fossil fuel extractive industries):
“Klages [and company] recognized the nameless stupidity which is the result of progress. But they drew the wrong conclusion… The rejection of mechanization became an embellishment of industrial mass culture, which cannot do without the noble gesture. Against their will, artists reworked the lost image of the unity of body and mind for the advertising industry.”
Glastonbury in the sprawling & interminable Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys reads more like the attempt to muster all these diverse alternative (alternate) and incompossible temporal perspectives into a comprehensive anarchist- Jacobin-Marxists miner- pilgrimage/Middle Age eco-commune at an intersection of ley lines. In solidarity with the miners General Strike, Boughton the composer produced his Bethlehem nativity opera with Jesus born in a miner’s cottage and King Herod as a top-hatted capitalist and roman soldiers in police uniforms and duly lost his funding (not sure yet how this avoids the current anti- elitist populism and anti-semitic discourse or keeps converging towards it). There’s much to be said about dormancy – and residual feelings and a past that is not past. The residual has been always inviting us to search for traces (Ernst Bloch) of the future in the present (and also without proto chronist bias in the past) and unassimilated and unassuming remnants might always lie around as well as giving rise to new emergent cultural forms that go unnoticed. Sven Lütticken quotes Marxist cultural critic Raymond Williams and his 1970s remarks on why we should not treat “feudal culture” or “bourgeois culture” as monolithic blocs by focusing only on their dominant features – and this comes to the fore especially in regard to a continously forming and emerging Middle Ages. There’s a sense that at key historical moments (and Raymond Williams has a truly procesual understanding of his examples) wherever and whenever new and emerging cultural forms, experiences, values get generated “there is always other social being and consciousness which is neglected and excluded: alternative perceptions of others, in immediate relationships; new perceptions and practices of the material world.” At the same time we are reminded how different is the dawn of a newly dominant computational emergentism and ‘other pasts’ during 1970s or 1980s neoliberalism (an important reference period for both Adam Curtis as well as Raymond Williams) in regard to ’emergentism’ as understood under the auspices of 1920s by someone like Whitehead or Powys.
I would add two more names to the mix – the study of Middle Ages and Renaissance by famous (1895-1975) Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin Rabelais and his World. As part of his research Bakhtin identifies the carnival as a collectivity that is defined and organized in a way that defies socioeconomic and socipolitical organization. According to Bakhtin’s celebrated analysis “[A]ll were considered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age”. Exaggeration, hyperbole and excessiveness constitute the meat and bone of grotesque realism aesthetics that he helped identify across the ages (including the Mardis Gras carnivalsque celebrations). Other contemporary writers have drawn on such egalitarian and progressive anticipative moves for example – in peasant utopias – sources of re-imaging this world as another world – as China Miéville put it in a 2018 article: “In the medieval peasant utopia Cockaigne it rains cheese. Charles Fourier imagined the seas turned to lemonade. The Big Rock Candy Mountain. These are dreams of sustenance out of reach of the dreamers, of the reduction of labour, of a world that will let exhausted humanity rest.”
Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant examine the many ways in which the medieval past has been manipulated to promote discrimination, oppression, and murder. Tracing the fetish for “medieval times” behind toxic ideologies like nationalism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, and white supremacy, Kaufman and Sturtevant show us how the Middle Ages have been twisted for political purposes in every century that followed. The Devil’s Historians casts aside the myth of an oppressive, patriarchal medieval monoculture and reveals a medieval world not often shown in popular culture: one that is diverse, thriving, courageous, compelling, and complex.
1777 – Can’t Get You Out Of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World (2021 documentary series by Adam Curtis)
directed by Adam Curtis (Pandora’s Box, The Century of Self, The Power of Nightmares, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace + many more)
Synopsis
Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World is a six-part series that explores how modern society has arrived to the strange place it is today. The series traverses themes of love, power, money, the ghosts of empire, the history of China, opium and opioids, the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, and the history of Artificial Intelligence. Inspired by the 2016 apex of populism—the political ideology which presents The People as morally good, and The Elite as morally bad—the underlying aim of the series is to show why the critics of Donald Trump and Brexit were unable to offer an alternative vision for the future.
Part 1 — Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain
We are living through strange days. Across Britain, Europe, and America, societies have become split and polarised. There is anger at the inequality and the ever growing corruption—and a widespread distrust of the elites. Into this has come the pandemic that has brutally dramatised those divisions. But despite the chaos, there is a paralysis—a sense that no one knows how to escape from this. Can’t Get You Out of My Head tells how we got to this place. And why both those in power—and we—find it so difficult to move on. At its heart is the strange story of what happened when people’s inner feelings got mixed up with power in the age of individualism. How the hopes and dreams and uncertainties inside people’s minds met the decaying forces of old power in Britain, America, Russia, and China. What resulted was a block not just in the society, but also inside our own heads, that stops us imagining anything else than this.
Part 2 — Shooting and F**king are the Same Thing
This next part traverses the story of what tore the revolutions in the 1960s apart. Jiang Qing in China, Michael X in London, Afeni Shakur in New York believed that millions of people’s minds were haunted by the corruption and the violence of the past. They wanted to show people how to escape those ghosts. But they hadn’t reckoned with the fact that the old structures of power still haunted their minds too. They too had been scarred by the past, and some of them wanted violent revenge. While psychologists and neuroscientists were starting to discover what they said were hidden forces inside the human brain that really controlled what they did. But the people weren’t aware.
Part 3 — Money Changes Everything
This is the story of how in the 1970s, those in power set out to create a world free of the dangerous big ideas of the past. They banished the grand dreams of changing the world. And replaced them with money. People would live from now on in their own heads—in their own dreams. And the banks would lend them the money to create those dreams. While China would supply a wave of cheap consumer goods on a scale never seen before in the world. But then money broke free across the world. And people started to get frightened that things were out of control. Not just money—but the world’s climate too seemed to be behaving in a strange, unpredictable way. The systems seemed to have a life of their own. Beyond the ability of anyone to shape and predict.
Part 4 — But What If the People Are Stupid?
No one trusted politics or politicians any longer. Instead we were all one world of free individuals. And we could intervene to save other individuals around the world without bothering with old politics and power. And people became what they as individuals truly were—emotionally and sexually. But power was mutating and finding ways to work its way back into our heads. The politicians realised that they no longer had the support or the trust of the people. So they switched sides and gave up being our representatives who would challenge the powerful on our behalf. Instead they began to tell us what to do on behalf of the powerful. And they made new alliances—with the psychologists who said that human beings were irrational and needed to be managed. But we didn’t notice because we were too busy shopping.
It wasn’t just the Slave Trade: 150 years ago Britain had wrecked China by forcing opium on the country. It made Britain the richest and most powerful country in the world. But it enslaved the minds of millions of the Chinese and helped destroy the society. But then the British got frightened of what they had done and created a dream image of a Britain that had never existed, to hide from the fear. This film tells the story of how from the end of the 19th century a magical vision of Britain’s feudal past was created by artists and writers. How folk music and folk dancing was invented to create a kind of safe dream of the nation that could hide the violence and the horrors. The dream persisted under the surface of the 20th century. But as the fears and uncertainties and the chaos of the last few years rose up millions of people started to believe that dream: that it was real.
Part 6 — Are We Pigeon? Or Are We Dancer?
The final episode tells how the strange paralysis that grips us today was created. How all the different forces of our age—that started out as separate have come together to create what is a block against imagining another kind of future than this. How, money and debt, melancholy over the loss of empire, the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, the history of China, opium and opioids, Artificial Intelligence, and love and power have all fed into creating the present time of anxiety and fearfulness about the future. And whether modern culture, despite its radicalism, is really also part of the rigid system—in the West and in Russia and China—where those in power have run out of all ideas. The film also lays out what are the different possible roads from here into the future, and the choices we will have to make about the very different futures we will have to choose very soon.
1776 – A Glitch in the Matrix (documentary 2021 by Rodney Asher)
timespace coordinates: the holographic universe (or one of its beta versions)
One of this year’s most ambitious documentaries just out of Sundance. Definitely a must see. I will be drumming the same tune as other reviewers when saying that indeed it is gripping, courageous in its portrayal of inner/outer worlds, incredibly audacious in tackling the new mystagogue-gamer-philosopher-entrepreneur-shooter-zoomer-doomer-loner-continuum. After Room 237 we find Asher as disposed to accepts all the wildest theoretical and philosophical speculative claims at their face value. Nowadays, altough the experiential dump sounds hollow, the performative dumpster is there for everyone’s diving. From its most excessive (and consequently numb) the LIFE INTENSE: A modern Obsession (book by Tristan Garcia) to the “how does it feel to be a…”(fill in the dotted line with whatever lies at your heart) experience is omnipresent, defining almost what all the locked-in quarantined brains intensely dream about. How can we preserve what experience makes important to us in a world where everything of importance is transformed into an illusion and disqualified (dismissed as either folk psychology or irrational atavism filling up a growing listicle of cognitive fallacies etc)?
As easy as it is to acknowledged a truly post-cinematic drive (in the sense of how Steven Shaviro has coined and helped defined this new post-cinematic affect) overlapping and overflowing canonical cinema, jumping platforms as easily as exchanging genres, juggling low or high brow (William Blake, silent era Jesus movies, various hi rez action games, various real and crafty mutating glitches and uncanny 3D CGI scenes) is never an easy task. A torrential rain of multiple movie edits from various PKD-based Scifi’s or VR +false memory +replicant dreaming classics (Total Recall, Minority Report, Blade Runner) feed into a mental & cultural & pop theoretical swirl pool sucking everyone into The Matrix Gospel & Simulation Theory. A Glitch manifests tremendous amounts of leaky weird realism – at a time when reality turns out to be much weirder than ur run-of-the-mill safety valve fiction. Yet there is some major absence in the midst of this plenty. Please read so u can accuse me of higher expectations or being just a pedantic bore.
In spite of its eagerness to not ignore and to include, I find A Glitch in the Matrix lacks something important – especially when it comes so close to pointing out why Philip K Dick’s imaginary worlds are so important – insisting on their inherent mood, or the way they give us a feel of futures inaccessible and improbable or follow characters into closed private odd worlds we always get trapped into. Maybe because of all this, I find it peculiar that its grasp ends where it ends and its digital dragnet is pretty mono. Maybe mono is key to the movie – to actualize and show too much of the trappings of sporting a white, male, 40+ and hetero “dude” subjectivity. Shortly: too much effort, too much computing power to make us (presumably different others) feel how it feels to be an isolating-isolated, self-sufficient, solipsistic and fairly desperate funny-sad-scary Euro-American roleplayer (i wonder how does this – diverge or converge with what Adam Curtis tries to unwind again and again in his documentaries using other means & stylistic choices – this time our current emotional, atomized inner prison mental-block-freeze).
Also there is more to simulation theory during algo-capitalism than the risk of actually being in one. There is also the deep kind of theoretical affinity of such a theory including the holographic universe to larger trends towards higher abstraction and financialization. The “real subsumption” of labour under capital and disruptive strategies that seems to favor the 1% or at least the long hand of Big Tech. There is more to the whimsical affirmation of Elon Musk about the possibility that everybody living right now is part of a simulated world – and the proliferation of self-serving stsrtupedelusions actually proffered by actual CEOs and real bosses. There is a difference there. Thus, a simple A Glitch in the Matrix syllogism might mean that although some can afford computing power (and fossil fuel to burn) to run the simulation, everybody else can be dealt with in alt deleted terms or stay at the receiving end of just ‘poor data, let her/his itchy glitch stick permanently’. Something that post-cyberpunk already made clear (Noir by K W Jetter comes to mind): we still leave in a very patchy wetware world – where exploitation intensifies, and where the lack of coordinated public health measures have aggravated & incubated COVID-19. Where fixing and debugging is simply not an option for the needy & those who simply can’t afford.
Asher was always interested in fanboys, in paraeidolia, in intensely jarring otakus and fandom effects, in relating to a very peculiar type of obsessive individual and an inner worlds inhabitant that has stopped being just nerdilicious trivia hoarder & seeker. What is important is that he is not being judgmental, he is not trivializing, nor pathologizing, in fact non- neurotypicality (even if unmentioned) seems to be one of the strengths of the documentary. Another one is exposing this underlying fear of the moderns – as W James said once: their biggest fear is just the fear to be duped.
Yet when all is said and rendered and screenshot, I wonder about the much larger non-actualized virtual world out there, virtualities as sensed and explored by many Balkan, African, Asian, South American, hell Oceanian gamers, freaks, blerds, more ways that do not suffer from the same starting point or set & setting or how does that relate these (monads?!) to the specific situation over there. I understand the need to document a timeless time, our time, to document a timeless frozen place: the room you are in (which has a very precise shape, furniture, lightening even in games). I feel there is reason to expand focus and dwell more on the aesthetic choices (call them permanent mood boards) of how various geographic ‘otherings’, imaginings and cultural zones (say largely abandoned factories, farms etc from the disaffected, post-industrial Eastern Europe now used for Leningrad siege Lazer tag) or literally larger areas of the planet (the Global South) are and have been portrayed or simulated in present or future settings (just one example: the filter of dusty, dun, yellowish, burned look in movies and games playing in Iraq, South East Asia, etc). Outside of a Mexican -other, A Glitch in the Matrix has very few to show and that’s significant. A more truly globalized, wider realization of virtual cosmopolitics and “virtualisation” is severely needed imho.
Same issue I have with the (not only) philosophical temporal flattening – or peculiar insensivity for certain shifts (i repeat for a documentary that celebrates such sensitivity for how does it feel to be locked in). Ok, you will say philosophy is only tangential to the doc, but I think it is key, since various personal philosophies and self-made cosmologies are being recorded, corroded, animated, discussed and described in this documentary & taken very seriously. In fact I would even add – expanding on a pet idea i have been thinking and writing about since some years- what i call “scavenger cosmologies” is quite central to the whole monadic Matrix-worldview of the documentary. A Glitch in the Matrix is not under-theorized, it does not suffer from lack of theoretical positions. It basically cuts trough the whole history of Western (Greek & Judeo-Christian) philosophy, and cannot help itself but visit BIG commonplaces such as Plato’s Cave myth as ultimate source of the virtual and cinematic experience. Yet when it makes all these wider (if impossible to ignore) generalizations it looses I think touch with the feel and bumpiness of historical and temporal dimensions.
Ok, now u can say it is just a perfunctory info-tainment introductory level dive into mind matters. I say it is not, since it dwells with care & a lot of attention to these histories. Nevertheless, how such important things get transmitted, changed and how they differ from period to period gets lost. To take one example – how such platonic or historical neoplatonism got transmitted is left for others to ponder, but as some philosopher said, statues u can remake (simulate?) but antique minds u cannot. The Greeks of Renaissance are not the Greeks of the Golden Age of Pericles. The Greeks of Classicism are not the Greeks or Renaissance and so on. All these instances of virtualisation are time-based, suffering the modulation transmission noise and alteration ebbing towards different ends and forms of receptivity. Virtualisation is specific and has a pathway that has some relevance and importance. I would argue (with respect to Asher and the effort of his team as well as the various well-chosen guests invited to back up his vision) that Descartes 1600s story about the demon simulating and duping him differs from the group sit-in flickering lights of the (V-th c BP) cave myth fire in significant ways. I am not just trying to reintroduce some technological determinism here but only to see how such experiences might differ and make a difference. In Science and the Modern World (1925) which I reread recently, Whitehead makes a point to emphasize how this sensibility to thinking moods, expressions and subtle differences is a key advantage for philosophy (catching the particular flavor of thinking at a particular time juncture, a certain school take on a concept, of not loosing sight of how abstractions abstract from the where and whom). Lets just say that in Descartes’s case “experience” as such was virtualized (or disjointed or ‘bifurcated’) in a very modern way, completely detached from the outer or inclusive cavernous drama of Greek natural elemental forces, Promethean fires and looming shadows. As many point out – cartesian inner feeling is really an intensely privatized ‘illusion’ in a very peculiar way. In it we encounter a very particular divisive I (Decartes “I”) colored by very specific internal doubts, something that does not even have a larger inside or outside. His is own dissected interiority, as we understand it, colored by a jumble of qualia, of a disordered play of sensations: heat, coldness, of various sense inputs that can only be verified by consciousness – only by his cogito.
His involvement with physiological sciences (even if he mostly understood ghe body and head pneumatically in terms of physics: heart as a pump, pineal gland as pouch) where sense perception takes precedence is torn by a particular kind of perceptive inaccuracy reflected by his chosen enumeration. This is quite specific to Descartes in tandem with a rise of plethora of scientific evidence based now not on human perception and subjective verification but on ever more refined instruments & constant external testing of an objective world. Don’t want to get into more detail just making sure there’s no confusion here.
Also, as much as we need a tribute to PKD (Philip K Dick) his incredible inheritance and wild SF contributions still to be cherished, repeatedly filmed and enjoyed everywhere and all around, I again feel this focus (a hangover from the prophetic accolades, the drag of his celeb predictive powers?!) on his 1970s Cold War paranoia era multiverse takes precedence over how this might differ from other times and places. If we take PKD seriously and enjoy his multiverse hypothesis to the max – then where are some of the other Earths, authors or virtual believers that do not stick to the US or Euro-US Western block template? I ask where is for example Stanislaw Lem? A contemporary (and one might say one of his most ardent Eastern block admirers), Lem (otherwise a big skeptic of larger trends within US sci-fi) is also an explorer of various ‘other’ imaginary worlds, of brain-in-vat impossible isolation tanks and even Cold War Futurologic excess. It would have been so nice to contrast the Cold War MK Ultra LSD-tinged paranoia of PKD to the Lem diving into not just personal hells and broken paradises, larger sentient planetary oceans talk. The impossible to comprehend alien intelligence, closer to a planetary consciousnesses it act in mysterious ways, reshaping, amplifying or selectively embodying their visitors, countering them with their own dreams of unsettling (getting them out of their selves) space exploration passion. Outside of this caveats highly recommeded!
1771 – Weitermachen Sanssouci (film directed by Max Linz 2019)
timespace coordinates: somewhere in the present or near-future Berlin (or close to you)
Attempts at reviewing this movie might fail miserably. It is an incredibly – very dry though very funny – slapstick movie about some really serious shit. It is many things – for one it is probably the best recent German (and probably contemporary) film on the increasing corporate interests and pressures encroaching upon students, assistants, researchers, postdocs, universities and high education institutions.
Most probably one of my favorite movies lately. It is a very low budget looking movie. Its made-up and unreal low aesthetic serves its scope perfectly – toning down the huge investments and media craze behind variously hyped “technological fixes” and gimmicks (as this TechNO-fix book argues) that seem to worsen up things the more they juggle quick ‘solutionism’ with hidden costs and a big price-tag. The most ridiculous fixes and exploitative solutions abound in such a desperate situation (dire annual reports, accelerating ecological collapse). Although there are probably very good reason to attempt large-scale geo-engineering, there is also the feeling that there is no grand plan and that everybody is trying to circumvent, ignore or redirect the increasing flows of climate migrants. Blue screens only makes the VR developers attempts at making the forest fires or hurricanes more realistic, more close to home seem impractical and plainly wrongheaded. Everything is muddled, completely detached from anything outside holodeck. The main character is Phoebe (Sara Ralfs) who is not an actress – and this helps bringing some real picaresque cine verite – as well allowing all the other proper actors to play ham (and quite hateful) roles. Phoebe is completely enmeshed in Academic exploitative situations. Instead of a “quant” role – she gets mired into the machinations of higher faculty members. She lands a university bullshit job (David Graeber with a smile in heaven) that isn’t even a part-time (25%?!). A precarity that proves what Universities risk becoming, and how insecurity and exploitation go hand in hand.
At no other time in history has Innovation, A.S. (artificial stupidity), VR/AR founder magic leaps, transmedia festivals or generally VR development (dah! experience economy!) – felt so just-in-time, just simple cover-up gimmicks (that is why we need apud Suzanne Ngai a Theory of the Gimmick). Expensive gadgetry that seems to basically exists just in order to secure badly needed (and dwindling) research funds. There is nothing to predict, there is nothing to anticipate, since it all seems crystal clear from the point of view of the scientists (and a good part of humanity as well as various other species that are forced to adapt as well as they can) that the current situation is untenable and leading only to an increasing sense of doom.
And yet almost in symbiosis with the above, lots of initiatives are bound up in the same display (rut) of smartness & innovation. There’s lots of money especially in desperate times – funding is not lacking if you’re in the high-tech Demo branch. In fact the core team in the movie has so much unspent money from the previous assignments that they feel one should buy new furniture, new lamps (more decor for more meetings and farcical brain storming!). Yet, funding bodies themselves seem oblivious, complacent and bound up with the same carousel of justifying their own investments – encouraging high-tech low concept toys and exercizing market pressures to outdo any competitors by promising better tomorrows. It is a Welt am Draht (1973) without the wiring and with visible strings attached.
Both the university, the creative sector and the NGO environment seems to veer towards what amounts to a cognitive sweat shop (“concept sweathops” mind you – which u could extend to anything: from corporate boardrooms to neo-Stakhanovite (стахановец) brainstorming- heartstorming workshops.
This is a movie about the huge arrogance and cynicism of (how else can u call them without espousing the same balmy anti intellectualism & anti-science tropes?!) specialists, elites and (even worse) tech gurus & pundits everywhere giving paid advice on how to motivate depressive and increasingly loan-dependent and indebted students. Weitermachen Sanccouci is about how to incentivize and still keep all hierarchies intact (the constant joke of the movie is nudging – a sort of neo-behaviorist Pavlovian methods dressed as evolutionary cognitivism, behavioural economics or hokey evo- psychology). Let’s pretend and keep things afloat during austerity economics via minimal positive reinforcement (cookies, medication, drugs, gamifictation? or anything else in btw) with a theory behind: Nudge Theory. The abstruse self congratulatory language of seminars, bizarre surreal PowerPoint presentations is also being fully explored and ridiculed.
It is not a dark or spiteful movie – and it is easy to identify with the main heroine that seems to stray off beaten paths and genuinely try something different. She teaches math that actually listens to the problems of her students (not much younger than her) and tries not to transform everything into a Monopoly game.
A VR or augmented reality that fails to augment is a basic glitch – (not only in the sense explored by Asher in his recent documentary A Glitch in the Matrix) but also as a feature of post-cinematic, post-phenomenlogical media apparatuses (Steven Shaviro). Glitches, bugs, technological failures should not be seen just as breaks of an otherwise smooth technological progression but as valid manifestations of what lies beyond current capabilities of technology. A ‘demonic realm’ featured in recent paranormal found footage horror (Paranormal Activity series) and recent meta horror sci-fi (Resolution or Mandela Effect) movies seem to communicate with hapless humans correspond more often than not with new technical devices that stand outside of the human sensorium. What is untouchable, inaccessible – peers trough the boundless technological promises where another reality might find itself excluded, junked and reduced to the status of a blindfolded audio walk. The unreality of our current hell gets simulated because we don’t seem to take notice, leaving us immersed as before, Sanssouci -like the title. No worries. Keep going as if. The air cooling systems in the main university building goes crazy starts an artificial snow storm almost in solidarity with the planetary climate system. The same chaotic effects of a buildings thermostat that augment the student strike (as most student strike go gets shut down or gets described as minor nuisance by the VR faculty staff). The climate change inside faculty hallways unexpectedly makes it finally experienced and touchable.
This slapstick situation becomes almost our default way to express harsh truths. Weitermachen S – humorously retrieves another forgotten or slowly emerging backlog – the history of Socialist computing via its Chilean Cybersyn Project. A decentralized computer vision that was never fully implemented (stopped short by the military CIA backed coup) and that was not trained on War Games but on managing economic emergencies red blinking in a slick room designed almost like a futuristic planned-economy example of a Star Trek-like spaceship deck.
TimeSpace Warps 