I do not have much to add to what Zimbabwean writer, filmmaker, and leftwing cultural critic Charles Mudede noted in his The Stranger column (this is how I basically found out about it) titled “What Is More Surreal, Boots Riley’s I’m a Virgo or Capitalism?”. Read it!
Boots Riley is another one of those directors that straddles the divide btw musical video and cinema, smuggling technologies from one media into the other with various visual styles, animation and practical effects. A the same time I wonder if it actually manages to play with instances of what Steven Shaviro has calledpost-cinematic affect a while ago. In short:
Post-Cinematic Affect is about what it feels like to live in the affluent West in the early 21st century. Specifically, it explores the structure of feeling that is emerging today in tandem with new digital technologies, together with economic globalization and the financialization of more and more human activities.
Post-Cinematic Affect, 2010
DIVIDE AND REBRAND
What can we add after more than 10 years? And why bother in 2023 with the “affluent West” that doesn’t give a hoot about the vast majority living on the planet (especially read Dean Baker’s recent sanguine article “The Chinese Need to Stay Poor because the United States Has Done So Much to Destroy the Planet“? Why make MARXsplaing a superpower in a world where knowledge about exploitation and anti-unionization by the Big Tech is not novelty nor is it chains: it is all widely available. I enjoyed this series like I never enjoyed any other lately, but I am also puzzled by how little it expresses of the wider concerns of a world in which we today. Is it just me or is Oakland, and California in particular – left as the only microcosm of everything everywhere? This is why I need to look what is missing or what does not fit into this patchwork.
Today it is easy to think the Euroatlantic as one single bloc (precisely because of Sweden and Finland joining NATO) but lines of demarcation are becoming clearer and clearer. The funny shitty thing is that Romania (together with Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) joined this military alliance in 2004. This was the reinvention of this military alliance – having the former East join not just EU but a Cold War relict. The East was happy and willing. Nowadys this “security measure” does not fare well at the moment. We know that the US is awash in guns and that violence and the militarization of the police. After 9/11 War Come Home is here to stay. But now Ukraine and the whole region is bound to become a sort of Texas awash in cluster bombs, mines and weaponry. In a sense NATO was in need of a facelift, either expansion or going to the history’s “dustbin of history”. My point is that what is happening with NATO nowadays is also happening with the Big Tech nowadays. They are in bad need of a rebrading to prove their worth to their shareholders.
MUSKISM AND TOY FOUNDERS
We live in a world of founders. They dominate our mediaspace, our news, even the most extra-terrestrial spaces. They are the biggest polluters on the planet, wrecker of civilizations, SF fans and longtermism sponsors. What to make of the recent baptizing of Google into Alphabet, and Facebook into Meta or Twitter into X. Are they tired or bored with themselves?
On a larger scale, there is talk about trade wars, about decoupling and moving SC manufacturing back from ASia and dressing up evrything as “de-risking”. In the liberalized, privatized and fragmented East, in the meantime, the questioning of so-called Western values did not come out of nowhere. The East has been leading the far right and Euroskepticism wave, adopting anti-immigration policies, anti-abortion ethno-politics with Poland and Hungary being the closests examples and this should also be seen as part of the economic globalization and financialization of the planet. This brings the East closer to the US, but not primarily because of NATO integration or via military bases & black sites, but by joining the right wing culture wars from across the Altantic and their anti-woke measures.
Clearly the East is not sticking to the rules, or to the role it has been dealt by recent history. Instead of being this pacified, at the Portal of Balkans, the Milk and Honey (in a Karl May turn-of-speech) region where freedom and pacifism follows automatically from free markets, it is now producing havoc on the world markets and famine in Africa. it is bombarding its own people. It is split in a hundred nationalisms. It still does not want to get compared with the Near East, with the Syrian War or the Lybian post-Ghadafi warlordism, altough Eastern Europe (specifically Eastern Ukraine) makes everything look like a unsuccessful series of Orange Revolutions.
What is hard to accept is that the East stopped being the orphan street child glue sniffer or the problem-child of Transition years – and now appears in the Western media as either the bombarded, abused, victimized of war-crimes or the criminal hoodlum. Is the East affluent? Not really but it is a place where the ner-equivalent of the Big Tech founder is the oligarch (or the seller of SHIT in Triangle of Saddness movie), that most despicable of the plutocrats, basically the nouveau riche to the West’s old money. Yes, the CEO figure founder is also one of the most memorable villains in recent history, and he a Bezos and Musk turned vigilante, or Batman being the good capitalist. But in the end all of them are Mattel CEOs – toy figure, precious collectibles that is actually completely absurdly concentrating immense wealth and power.
BLACKOUTS IN THE WEST AND EAST
When I’m a Virgo speaks to Eastern Europes it speaks in fast foods. It is not the place of where the poor eat shitty unhealthy food, but places of luxury. After 1989 the MacDonalds and Burger Kings where received like Kings and ambassadors in the East, people of the rising middle classes enjoyed having a burger there. It was American Living – the highest standard of living in the world no?
Meanwhile the wheels have turned and the fragmented East pays back the US, inspiring the anti-woke US conservatives and crack-up capitalists. Boots Riley cannot address these things, yet we can ask why they ring closer to home? In the 1980s, basically my teenie years, in Socialist Romania, severe austerity measures where imposed in order to pay out the external debt incurred by the state in the 1970s. Blackouts where part of this and using candles or not having heating became normalized. There is a grim kind of blackout solidarity, of course not addressed by the series, but a very familiar to me and others.
After the 1989 revolutions, blackouts continued, and they even affected entire hoods at the time. They where also part and parcel of a decaying public infrastructure that could not keep up with the demand. What was evident to me at that time was that the new malls and their parking lots had electricity during the blackouts. The Blackout did not have to do with an energy crisis, with green transition or rising prices but had to do with development in some part and unequal and simultaneous underdevelopment in many others. The distribution of the blackout followed a strange map drawn by the market economy and the way infrastructures responded to various stresses.
Like Cootie, in Eastern Europe we have been fed on US goods since early childhood and have been using all sorts of clothes, mostly recycled from the West (Germany, US, Italy etc.) in my case. Nothing fits, and nothing seemed to fit for a long time. Everything had to be adopted, changes. Everything had to be refitted and customized, and the effect is often hilarious or embarassing. People where drawing their own versions of superheroes in the early 1990s (like a comics from the mountain city of Brashow with Bravman as a local hero). T-shirt with band names such as AC/DC got drawn by hand and worn because everyone secretly wanted to be part of the sports or music culture of the US. This ended up with various mismeasures, and while this whole series is about black bodies and the systemic racism of today, it is also about the feeling like a contemporary Alice in a US Capitalalaand.
After 1989, in the East (and not he East Coast) but in Eastern Europe, everything was made to feel Pantagruelic and not only in the sense of Bakthin. We started riding huge SUV, Jeeps and HUMMER cars. Cars that where bigger than our badly maintained streets. Bigger than the available parking lots, and mostly pushing a lifestyle dependent on a fossil economy that prioritised car culture over public transport, highways over biking or pedestrian walking. I also remember basketball truly arriving at our shool and breakbeat. It also arrived with the “popular kid” pressure – being popular started being important in the early 1990s and the most popular kids in the class where vying for Chicago Bulls vs LA Lakers (they also had the T-shirts). Everything started being upside down, oversized or undersized. You went to Pizza Hut to celebrate with mom and dad. Houses started being built up for luxury real estate reasons not for housing purposes. It got important to have luxurious facades, luxury elevators in run-down communist bloc trying to attract the “proper” clientelle. This brings me back to entire buildings go up and down while the CEO does not move an inch. The CEO figure in the East is actually someone who is allied with the American-Romanian University.
That being said, in order to make sense of the world we live in, maybe there is less and less sense in taking refuge from in Marvel superhero blockbuster (where you might end up being the villain), but find some sort of communal hysteria living beside and with the wacky, the mindfucked and the mad surreal absurdist wokers of Sorry To Bother You (2018) that manage to make a parody of a parody. All certitudes are left behind in this unhinged and normal abnormal world of bullshit jobs and false consciousness we live in. Including the sense and the remaingin fact that Amazon Prime has made I’m A Virgo another toy in its toy collection, an inhabitant of Amazon (sub)Prime-land that togheting with Netflix, Apple+ Disney+ making it more difficult for all of us to inhabit the world.
Suffice to say Josphine Decker (Butter on the Latch 2013, the erotic thriller Thou Wast Mild and Lovely 2014, the coming-of-age drama Madeline’s Madeline 2018, the semi-biographical thriller Shirley 2020) has made some of the most memorable and amazing movies to come out of the US lately. She keeps being higly experimental and refreshingly improvisational, without appealing to the usual cognitive estrangement devices typical to the modernist tradition. Her movies keep on being deeply involving and moving like no other director I know. She appears to be (a rare gift nowadays) uninhibited and unchained by production pressures from vested interests, rankings or audience approval. Josephine Decker is unique without the need to deliver a kind of identifiable signature, a recognizable handle – typical of many ‘male’ author cinematographers. Or at least I have not been able to find one other than her being always surprising each time around and this speaks to her advantage I think.
Her last movie is quite banal and complex at the same time, and i am willing to try and give you (without spoilers) hints of its overall contradictory effect on me or why I think it is as important as her previous ones even if completly at odds with her other work (pls take the following as disjointed notes on the margins of J. Decker’s last movie):
The way it foregrounds nature – this movie is not naturalistic in any conventional sense. You can almost see it as a very stylized version of a natural surroundings, full of magnificent trees and resplendent flower gardens. Here you have a specifically post-hippie Californian US West Coast enchanted forest – but one that is highly specific and situated. Its artifice is not so much flower power as Pre-Raphaelite painters (William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti etc.). Californian high weirdness is a rich humus that has been nourishing both cyberfeminist Donna Harraway and sci-fi author Ursula K. LeGuin. The old growth redwood forest grove from The Sky is Everywhere may seem pretty far from the concerns of Silicon Valley Big Tech giants and its (annoying) bro-culture. This ‘natural’ surrounding is one that Erik Davis has been busy exploring in his Burning Shore series of Californian High Weirdness and at the same time one that somehow resurges even in the most mathematically abstract – quantum computing enviroments (such as the DEVS TV series directed by Alex Garland). There is a lot of animation involved – and all of the animated part, even genuinely disturbing imagery fits perfectly well with the rest (almost like the wonderful 1977 Hausu japanese horror extravangaza). There is also a kind of theatricality or even a puppet theatre feel to it – almost like Japanese No theatre – where Nature (capital N nature) is embodied by invisible or slightly visible dancer bodies (here dressed as flower beds, earth spirits?) that seem to animate, enhance or intensify the overall feelings expressed. All the time, the most absurd and zany events seem to contradict the overall ‘holiness'(sacred Grove) and the subvert the natural by introducing ‘unnatural’ aspects in these surroundings (‘wire fu’ floating flying while playin music or listing to it). Wind blows the messages and loveletters (to a dead sister) written on leaves makes everything feel a litle comedic, tragic, flipped out, full of unecessary bathos. If nature is animated as part of an ‘Animatic Apparatus’ (Deborah Levitt), kin relations are wonderfully biotech and still wrenching – the dead sister is the result of an IVF involving a presumably unknown sperm donor (I think this small detail is also part of this general postnaturalism of the movie).
There is no way I can explain (nor would I want to) the timing of this movie. It comes at a very disconcerting time – one could say that at no other time in the history of the human species have we been more aware of our disproportion, the disproportion of the tasks at hand & our abilities. Time seems to tick against us, and even our meager attempts at climate deadlines may keep the false impression that there’s still time or that we still haven’t got there (as in Mark Bould’s book “Anthropocene Unconscious”). We live at a time in which we can not deny any longer the disproportionate impacts we have on our enviroment in terms of both energy use or resource depletion and unequal distribution of costs. There’s no way we can ignore how disproportionately this has impacted those already at the brink, especially non-white, non-Western cultures (in comparison with the average Euroamerican – average – hiper consumer). It is overtly clear that no forecast, nor doomsday scenario comes as a suprise nowadayse. Climate reports, UN warnings fall on deaf ears, everything has been already said. All the previous modernist devices (the literary burgeois fiction tradition, the realist tradition etc) show their incapacity in front of the unbelievable realities confronting us and the disproportionate planetary issues at hand. These issues are no secrets, no conspiracy in this sense, they are common, yet there is no possiblity to have a coordinated effort or apply any common framework to address them. The world of early 21st seems to slide towards a myriad of isolated and detached private spaces (Conspirituality, QAnon, luxury bunkers being just a few of these) at the same time that there is talk of a new Cold War and nationalist economics (new economic and strategic blocs or the end of Globalization), especially when everything impacts everything else. Everybody else seems to be cought in fhe crossfire. There is this larger sense that nothing can be ignored, nothing can be detached, that nothing is easily disconnected or disentangled while people still hang on to their sadly dysfunctional worldview or consumer patterns(say online shopping) that are being daily contradicted by the fact that everything else depending on everything else. There is an incredible cost in loss of lives, both in terms of COVID 19 mortality and the fact that wars, both in Yemen and Ukraine have been either been ignored or suddenly made accute. The Sky is Everything comes at this particular juncture – and offeres no philosophy, nor easy answers, no redemption, yet it l somehow integrates immense personal loss and senseless death into everything, pulling everything together. On one level it is just a bland US coming of age -young adult (Grace Kaufman) mourning for her much beloved dead sister. On this level – everything seems selfish, indidualistic, very personal and quite detached from everything else happening in the world. One’s whimsical quest for love, or the misshaps of love – can easily appear as the most abnormal thing today – or really completly lost among these world changing events mentioned above.
It is a incredible anti-romantic movie – ‘romanticism’ (as a movement, a sensibility and philosophical current) is almost like a thing one needs to get vaccinated against and one is never immune to. Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë is referenced troughout this colorful and pleasantly unhinged movie. Iteself Wuthering Heights is a corny piece of literature (like this movie?) and this seems to be remarked on serveral times by Grace Kaufman’s character. It is corny because it is a pastiche of a pastiche in a sense influenced by both Gothic fiction and Romanticism. In a sense she’s the picaresque heroine of 18th century. To me The Sky is Everyhwere draws comparisions with the earlier Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (written in 1803 but published posthumously in 1817) that does not get mentioned in the movie so far as I know. It is almost like a parody of the Gothic genre and its 17 year old heroine Catherine Morland coming of age and even on the consumption of doom, withouth being a condemnation of frivolous anguish and pain. There is also a necrophiliac sensibility in the air that one should not ignore or condemn. There is in this movie a scene where the romantic literature and pathetic love – is all being ritually bannished, or even being faulted for all the uncessary tourmoil happening in the movie’s heroine’s soul or all the subsequent (female) generations. Is this a pun on the whole movie? Are there any larger aspects to consider here? It feels like this to me. What are we to make of this strangely empty stylised gesture – working perfectly to somehow underscore that one cannot detach or feel immune against the strange tugs and pulls that link a 21 st century teenager heart with the invisible strings of ‘older’ history of (Modern Western?!) affects or literary models.
Nothing is neutral. There is a sense where everything kind of sings or is part of a bigger coreography. All the loves and all the encounters are magical – everything is magick in a very corny yet effective way. I love actually the fact that one cannot eliminate or psychologize nothing in this movie. One cannot somehow debunk all the love interests in this movie as empty romance, basically an exagerated set-up, wishful thinking or the result of hallucinations or trauma. In fact this is one of the best recent movies about – that overall and coverall term “trauma”. It is a very difficult to approach because it has became so overused and emptied out as to basically say everything and nothing at the same time (almost the same as “creativity” or “innovation”). In some sense a new reality and new materiality vibrates (with unmistakable corny accents) and contradictory feelings that circulate and envelop everything that swirls around.
It is the first time I have seen a movie about death – and even afterlife, or let’s say the possiblity that death is not final that does not repelling, where the afterworld is coexisting or immanent with this one. It is not final in the metaphysical sense of why “perpetual perishing” offers (in AN Whithead organic philosphy) a porose boundary between subjective immediacy and objective immortality. For me, this movie does not find a place in Mark Fischer’s important distinction between the eerie and the weird, because it is neither weird nor eerie, even if it deals with things that should not be there or with familiar things that feel discomforting or uncanny. For Fisher, places of ruin or the eeriness of natural surroundings (think A Field in England) is where the outside stays outside, where an eerie empty cry echoes in a countryside that should be empty but is not. This is not a hauntological movie yet it deals with hauntings in a peculiar YA way – one that is very colored, entranced, intoxicating and almost suffocatingly over the top. Poltergeist and spiritualism – are an American species one might argue – yet it is one that is almost exclusively seen as distinct from the weepy dramas. Horror has to stay horror, it cannot join romance or melodrama. Yet as we know since William’s essay about body genre’s (pornography, horror, melodrama), they all appeal to affected and affecting bodies. This movie is not at all horrofic or dark in any sense. One could only characterize it as something necro-uplificting, as something fruitfully floridly putrid!
There is a peculiar tradition of communicating with the netherworld or the afterlife via mostly female mediums etc. Somehow mediums have been the early modern US feminist shamans. In the midst of rapid technological change and gaslight patriarichy, they appear to mediate between private worlds and also to somehow keep us in communion with relatives long gone or with presences that have been denied or excluded from official histories. It is typical that to communicate with the invisible or talk about the invisible, to give it presence and bring the potential and virtual into existence has been (in the artistic realm proper see Hilma af Klint) part of why patriachy has been denying the role of such women in the history of arts. The Sky is everywhere manages to not make an appeal to any traditional images of an afterworld or any kind of limbo. It is all happening in this one world. There is no communicating with spirits or departed dear ones that involves the usual trappings (oujia boards, ceremonials, rituals etc.) etc. At the same time there are plenty remains, residues of the dead in the living and part of the living. There is a sense in which agency is not clearly defined as ending with death. There is a lot of going on’s and free flow with the dead, their clothes, their perfome and even their lovers. Nothing stops at the threshold and everything overflows, engulfs in the most embarrassing & outrageous way.
I very recently (this year) discovered the following study and this discovery has made me very happy – indeed it has brought me back full circle to other pursuits I have followed these last years. It has been a daunting but also incredibly satisfying and slow-moving adventure to unravel Whitehead’s organic philosophy year by year. I have read ANW in German, English and Romanian and I am grateful to these translators and editors and popularizers of his works. I am thankful for all those that have listened to and communicated on the margins my continuing yet uneven advances – Gabi, Julia, Nae, Felix, Akira, amongst others. This post deals only in its end section with the above mentioned book in trying to add more context to A N Whitehead’s process philosophy and panpsychism. In the end I point out why I think The Outward Mind adds (for me) a few important missing ingredients that allow for much larger historical width.
There is a sense A N Whitehead is always historically aware of the philosophical precedents of what he coins ‘organic philosophy’ (be is Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza or Hume and Kant) authors he mentions repeatedly and often quotes, even as he makes clear one has to read them against their own conclusions and their (later) systematized traditions. Whitehead makes sure he can always rescue and scavenge significant bits – odd turns of phrases that he transforms into something significant against the intentions of their authors. He picks up on strange discontinuities, missteps or non-systematic intuitions in the well known works of all these named predecessors which are not actually his direct predecessors in fact, nor is he a direct succesor. In Science in the Modern World (1925) he jumps directly to a phrase from the founder of scientific method – Francis Bacon(1561 – 1626). These remote references are indirectly shaping up his own organic philosophy almost by what they are not saying, and only because he makes something else out of them and spells out what they could have said but aren’t saying. He takes great care that he carefully weaves his own elaborate metaphysical reconstructions in a patient way, twisting and upgrading a jagged intellectual continuum. ANW almost always appreciates the unorganized side of major thinkers, appreciates their incipient striving and lacunae more than what they would have ever admit. He picks as important – certain odd tidbits or whatever did not make it into the ‘final draft’ or settled into a recognizable and canonical Tractatus. With this patient, only slightly pedantic nit-picking, ANW makes sure that he and us (his possible readers) are in constant contact with others and kept involved with their inherited list of ideas developed under a very different and disjunct historical period (somehow detached fron his or his immediate predecessors). The impact of several Western authors is felt at a distance and without their accord, it feels. The result is that what does not get mentioned or lies outside of their conclusion – feels much more important.
He is hailed as the only modern philosopher that has developed with insistence and detail the most complex metaphysical project to date – responsive to the most relevant scientific theories of his day (relativity theory and quantum mechanics). I am wondering about the atmosphere that has shaped such interests – the “penumbral” historical background that sustained and nurtured ANW’s mature metaphysics – outside the range of names he dutifully mentions in his key books (Process & Reality or Science and the Modern World, etc) and the philosophical idiom he uses.
One of the best things in reading him is that one is not dragged down by genuflection in front of such a heavyweight philosophical inheritance (or lack of reading all these fundamental texts). No jungle of footnotes, nor lengthy, winded polemics. His polemics (if they exist) are not so much with authors, but with certain aporias of Western thinking. His engagement is a long shot wrestling with meta-theories of mindmatter or directions of research. Even when he is always mentioning what organic philosophy is not, he skips dense webs of references – and this is an integral part of his low profile tone and no name-dropping style.
Yet I am left with all these residual questions – of why Aesthetics is thephilosophia primafor him? How come there is this easy (and surprisingly contemporary) involvement with en-minding matter or the building blocks of reality? Why is mind or experience so central to his cosmology? Why does he find this en-minding of matter as fundamental to our understanding the most recent theories of physics? These are important questions and I am always feeling a nuub in relation to ANW – but somehow they are related to him.
What I appreciate is his evolutionary and bottom-up or rather the bottom is tbe new up perspective. Where does his non-anthropocentrism or his physiological interest stem from? Another unusual convergence allows him to share these preoccupations with various philosophers of mind. Whiteheadian panpsychism (the most developed modern panpsychism we have probably) needs engagement whatever they might say. Yet it is very rare that he ever gets a mention in recent books on the subject of consciousness or the ‘hard problem of consciousness (apart from William Seager or David Ray Griffin). The same thing happens with other authors – Galen Strawson, whose mentalistic physicalism comes close to Whitehead (but rarely mentions him) reviewing a book (Philip Goff’s -Galileo’s Error) by fellow panpsychist philosopher Philip Goff and chiding them over not mentioning a larger and more complete list of processors beside Arthur Eddington and Betrand Russell. A list that according to Galen Strawson should perforce include: W K Clifford, CA Strong and Durant Drake.
It is almost as if this amnesia about Whitehead helps their own project along and keeps them free of what Thomas Nagel has called (in 1986): “the faintly sickening odor of something put together in the metaphysical laboratory”. What I am trying to say is that everyone is allowed to have favorite genealogies or mention his own chosen predecessors, yet when it concerns panpsychism – the ‘pan’ is historically eliminativist, always tends to choose certain authors over others. Whitehead’s is a difficult inheritance. One can get lost mired in his verbiage or become outright dismissive of his entire metaphysical edifice. If mentioning him one might risk attracting the wrong attention, loose face, loose readers, respectability etc what do I know – it seems. What if one’s own carefully thought-out theories of mind would get doomed by mentioning him repeatedly or giving him due credit. Maybe it is the usual academic risk or careful tip-toeing , a normal fear of being convicted as guilty by association or of being treated as (dangerously) ‘speculative’ or even (damning) humbug.
I will pick up on A. Nagel’s (pejorative) mention of the “metaphysical laboratory” and its slight air of slight superiority. Yes, maybe it is good to cut straight to the chase, yet I consider the problem exactly the opposite. It is not a problem of clear-cutting, but of allowing more largesse. Otherwise, everything feels like miraculous birth – and we might miss a certain underlying commonality or an impetus from a completly different set of theories. In fact, I do miss this laboratory feeling, that there was a certain vaguely related but varied and diverse range of authors that could have prepared A N Whitehead’s arguments at a distance and up close. I think that his particular and quite original approach suffers from this lack of historical density or having a wider range of domains (outside the strictly philosophical) to chose from. A dialogue that is not primarily even between philosophers and so does not enter the canonic mind philosophy list.
For me Whitehead is the tip of an unseen iceberg of largely ignored or only alluded to free speculation anchored in embodied research. It smells of a long term involvement with mindmatter, enlivened materialism, transmissible, diffuse and active affect, “sensuous knowledge” (like in Adorno or Ranciere). Instead of ignoring the body and objects it sees them as affecting and being affected, prolonging scientific and artistic interests with low-end organisms and non-human emotions. Let’s say this could range from Darwin’s letting his kids play music to worms or feeding carnivorous plants in his hothouse or William James’s (he gets ample mention in Whitehead) interest in empiricism, physiology, embodiment, nervous tissues and a graded/gradual evolutionary view of mind.
Whitehead is eminently a dispositional thinker even if when he talks about the intrinsic nature of things – because he puts you in a certain mood, and partakes of a certain disposition (perspective) of inquiring mind towards the possibility of other minds existing inside yet also outside the preferred bipedal cranial boxes. Consider this: in order to make you sensitive to certain things that would have left you indifferent, he takes on the perspective of an elementary particle (also recently discovered) electron – what is it like to be an electron? Does this sound so different from Einstein trying to imagine what it is like to be traveling like a photon on his bike? Yet this ability of inhabiting the elementary should point us towards non-scarcity in regard to AWN complex ideas since his own system does this on a regular basis. It searches for this granularity, this gradient – something that is not miraculous, exceptional, nothing special but usual, ‘mere’ and primary. Consciousness or higher-level faculties of the mind are not isolated, insular or put on a pedestal. They are just a special case out of a much more varied non-special, available readiness for experiencing of the world by the world. He is very keen on making sure that we accept this pervasiveness of mind and explore under-explored semi conscious avenues of feeling and becoming.
Let’s apply this pervasive gradient-thinking approach to his own system, as a system that is being nourished by other domains. It interested with the new, becose it is growing out of or exploding the bounds of a much larger epochal context (in tune with his cosmic epochs there is this larger missing history).
What I felt was missing from both Whitehead’s account of his own ideas as well as from others mentioning their own Whiteheadian engagements is this relevant and disconsidered (till now) historical background noise. I appreciate this dim largely experimental aesthetic background radiation because it puts things in contrast and proves to be a laboratory of philosophical ideas & stimulants.
Here I place this recently discovered wonderful study – with a role in filling in these gaps. This book by Benjamin Morgan is called The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature. Again, Benjamin M does not mention ANW directly, because ANW is somehow outside of the scope of this historical study of experimental and materialistic aesthetics, but at the same time, ANW is one of those that have enjoyed and absorbed & engaged with a lot of what The Outward Mind aims to be about. This book, I think, reconstructs a missing historical Gedankenkollectiv that offers many other gradations, graded ways in which the late Victorian era (I get more and more convinced this is so) has transmitted disparate and conflicting(even paradoxical) interests with developments from the physical sciences, mathematics etc or concerns with the naturalization of mental processes. Heidegger for me is a key philosopher and contemporary of ANW that somehow willingly obscures this Victorian background noise. He is closer to the Critical Idiom in his refusal to engage with these scientific pursuits, since he often openly disparaged technology and science. In a sense his own anti-scientific stance manages to produce a tabula rasa in regard to all these previously very rich cross-overs and intellectual climates that (according to Benjamin Morgan) characterized experimental or laboratory aesthetics in both Germany (since Helmholtz) and Great Britain (US and France and other places?!). Looking fwd to reading this book.
Benjamin Morgan Introduction sums up numerous such cases in order to show us that there was much more appetite from the 1850s on for this sort of hybrid preoccupations that seem to dwindle afterward or get lost with the two cultures split (arts vs sciences). This externalization of mind, this en-minding of matter, or the generalization of the feeling process across the vastness of a newly discovered universe is very similar to what Whitehead is keeping alive and reinforcing with new ardor. All these necessarily fresh additions have been osmotically traveling across the scientific membrane into art theory. One such example is the lecture “What Patterns Do to Us” by Scottish art theorist Clementina “Kit” Caroline Anstruther-Thomson(1857–1921).
there is actually slime mold linking, growing and tracing the title of this book
I think Steven Shaviro should be something like one of the patron saints of timespacewarps and I will briefly state why here. Happy to be able to introduce him together with Darko Suvin over here.
I think, of all the various cultural theorists, whatever-hip-thinkers or walking talking encyclopedic humans out there – he is one of our most important purveyors relating to lived time, of how feeling relates to time, and is almost a creature (entity – to put in ANW terms) of time flow. He is a weird processualist, a tireless sci-fi enthusiast/reviewer and proponent of his own brand of speculative realism, a supporter of relational-panpsychist (or pan-experientalism), a critic and theoretician of music videos and post-cinematic affect and one of the most intellectually generous people I know of on the whole of Internet (most of his stuff is found for free online under digital form or on his blog). He interests go far afield, from the extremity of Maurice Blanchot, Kathy Acker, William Burroughs to third kind philosophical encounters btw Deleuze, Kant and Whitehead. He might be (in his own words) a “misanthrope”, “highly dissociative”, an unapologetic “kitsch Marxist”, living in ‘Motor City’ Detroit and teaching at Wayne State University, yet he is to be found on both E-flux discussing Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption (2013) or Extrapolation, fabulation and speculation (as of October 2021) at Russian Moscow online courses. His numerous books have been instrumental imho in moving continental philosophy away from postmodernist/linguistic turn or deconstruction/ text-centered hermeneutic models towards the ontological or the very nature of reality, thus allowing for a widening reception of the so-called ‘speculative turn’. His huge and always nourishing reading list is open for everyone.
Hard to write a review on this one – because it is such a favorite. While I have just started reading his new 2021 Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life I realised I had to pay my due to this one. Here are a number of things that might make Discognition unavoidable reading for our times. Of course, you could just read Steven Shaviro’s short dense book as a direct shortcut to key ‘thought experiments’ in mind philosophy (hard problem of consciousness, Mary’s room or the knowledge argument, cognitive eliminativism etc) and the various philosophical responses to them (Churchland, Nagel, Churchland, Dennett, Brandom, Brembs, etc.) as well as Shaviro’s own. If you are interested in the original volume with a lot of the original essays that he uses as source materials feel free to check There’s Something about Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument. What makes Discognition completely different from most cognitive science & countless mind philosophy books is that he will make us enjoy mind philosophy as an exercise in science fiction (or paraliterature as Samuel “Chip” Delany calls it). And if we manage that, we will rather sooner (than later) realize that mind philosophers can hardly keep up with speculative fiction’s proclivity and SF’s daring adventures in matters of cognition, consciousness, affect, physicalism, subjectivity, reason, responsiveness, sentience etc. in imaginatively devising thought experiments that would be practically impossible as a program for cognitive sciences or within the preserve of cognitivist paradigm. Steven Shaviro makes no secret about his own pan-psychist leanings, or rather his pan-experientialism orientation (in line with both William James pragmatism or what Alfred North Whitehead metaphysics tried to probe), yet this position comes forth after giving due attention to many other perspectives or philosophical currents. Speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, as in his previous books The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, remains a point of reference. The title “DISCOGNITION” is a great way by Steven Shaviro to try bend our cerebrated (yet dualist and disembodied) and vaunted capacities further and further, to be able to try and circumvent the heavy toll of constraining cognition as well as to switch tables on our faltering human exceptionalism. Cognitivism has been listing a growing list of human biases and fallacies, confirmed by research – all largely expanding on critical philosophy’s founding gestures: Kant’s categories and forms of thought. Yet the fundamental tenants of cognitivism (u could also call them metaphysical presuppositions) get more entrenched than ever. As ‘neurobullocks‘ has been infusing much of neuro pop from TV series to criminal psychology – or be it advertising and neuro -marketing, nowadays only neurodivergence manages to question the neuropolitical underpinnings of neuronormativity.
In the end, we have nothing to lose (he seems to tell us with every chapter) – but our embittered speciesism, a narrowing cognitivism-only path that allows only brains, higher functions of the human mind or consciousness to act like proper scientific models, exquisite literary presences or proper philosophic objects – at the dispense of everything else, with the risk of ignoring various instantiations of “what would be thinking like”: a machine, an artificial intelligence, a computer, a murderer, a slime mold, an alien etc. (a list that could be potentially endless). We are bound to central nervous systems, and yes, sapience is a wonderfully rare thing, yet this comes at a heavy price of ignoring the largest majority of our experience as well as other (for us largely speculative) modes of thought. Recent SF, carefully chosen examples by S. Shaviro – put consciousness in proportion and show how human thinking processes might be themselves just a narrow sliver – a wonderful but limited and limiting way to even define experience as such. He brings all these examples to roost and many others – including Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects or Peter Watts Blindsight or R Scott Bakker’s Neuropath. To his merit, Shaviro always emphasizes that he is neither a philosopher nor a science fiction writer – though to my knowledge, he is uniquely poised to enjoy doing what he does and never make the authors and thinkers he reads cry (as Deleuze said). He is one of those very rare raconteurs that never disparages his material, offering an attentive mind and affective stance that takes science fiction and philosophical speculative bets very seriously, pushing them to their ultimate ends. He is never tone-deaf, never forcing himself on the medium but letting it speak loudly and clearly. His close-reading discipline works almost as a direct how-to example in helping delineate difficult questions posed by the authors themselves. He redefines and refines complex relations and attempts making difficult distinctions by contrasting philosophy with science fiction or with science proper. There are always differences as well as deep resonances here, and there is always the potentiality of mutual learning from each other:
Fictions and fabulations are often contrasted, or opposed, to scientific methods of understanding the world. But in fact, there are powerful resonances between them; they are both processes of speculative extrapolation. In other words, constructing and testing scientific hypotheses is not entirely different from constructing fictions and fabulations, and then testing to see whether they work or not, and what consequences follow from them. For science is far more than just a passive process of discovery, or a compiling of facts that are simply “out there.” Rather, science must actively approach things and processes in the world. This is the reason for making hypotheses. Science needs to solicit and elicit phenomena that would not disclose themselves to us otherwise. It must somehow compel these phenomena to respond to our questions, by giving us full and consistent answers. All this is necessary, precisely because things in the world are not cut to our measure. They have no reason to conform to our presuppositions, or to fit into any categories that we seek to impose.
(wiki) SH is a South Koreanwebtoon written by Kim Carnby and illustrated by Hwang Young-chan. First published in Naver Webtoon, the webtoon ran for a total of 140 chapters plus one prologue from October 12, 2017 to July 2, 2020. It centers on a suicidal high school boy who, along with a group of fellow apartment residents, tries to survive a “monsterization” apocalypse (goemulhwa) where people turn into monsters that reflect their innermost, most desperate desires.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
spacetime coordinate: somewhere in the near future Poland
Original title: Sala samobójców (Suicide Room). Hejter
SPOILER AHEAD!
The Hater is perhaps the first film to tap into what has been regarded as one of the ruling negative affects of the early 21st century, repeatedly denounced as the true viral scourge of our times (in a rare case of unanimity) as “haterizm”, “cultures of hate” or “digital hate culture” and try and individualize it as such, zooming in on the Eastern Front where everything is not as quiet as we think.
In a way selecting the former Eastern bloc zoomer-doomer is not a matter of choice. He seems even more difficult to track than its former Wester IT world counterpart. Infamous Eastern hackers such as Romanian Guccifer that broke into Bush’s JR mailbox seem frivolous in regards to the resolve of WikiLeaks founder or the heroic (or tragic depending) stature of Russian exiled ex-US NSA subcontractors or ex-army intelligence analysts exposing the horrors of The Longest War in US History and abuses of Surveillance Capitalism. Guccifer in return acted almost like an art curator craving fame – by releasing into the public sphere formerly unknown naive paintings and self-portraits of George W Bush of himself naked or lying in the bath tub. Pieces almost completely at odds with the larger political world and seemingly completely disconnected from the larger involvement of the US president in the War on Terror or logic of insecurity permeating contemporary neoliberal condition (Ontopower, Brian Massumi 2015). Guccifer origins lie in Pauliș commune, east of the town of Arad in Banat. Timișoara the biggest city of the Banat region supposedly had a successful bid for this year’s 2021 EU cultural capital, that is if it weren’t for the pandemic aftermath. It’s a region, like many in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, with a rich multi ethnic past, with a long tradition of industrialization and unionizing, where a plaque on a Timișoara building still commemorates the first delegation of workers to the first International (1864-1876). Some of the small towns still retain Serbian/Hungarian/Romanian place names. Guccifer’s handle name itself invites derision, an example of East European poor taste in clothing, wannabe – high class nouveau riche upstarts. From one hell into another. Better ruling in tabloid hell than a good ally in NATO heaven.
This imaginary digital beast is mostly invisible, hidden away in distant post-production studios and CGI FX for movies probably filmed for a fraction of their Western price in Prague, Bucharest, Croatia (as the current Tribes of Europa), Budapest or Warsaw. He can be as elusive as the famous troll farms involved in “BlackPeopleVoteForTrump” Instagram accounts exhibiting “inauthentic behaviour” (and belatedly shut down FB usually after they’ve dkns most of the damage). By being as elusive as they seem ready for hire, Eastern European trolls, like their cracker brethren, have acquired a sort of undead status among technologically mediated hate- related topics. They have also stimulated overnight punditism – and like with Corona, there’s no lack of experts giving advice on combating them at the level of forgotten, derelict or previously unknown postindustrial regions and small towns (or “Cybercrime Capitals” as the CIA brands Râmnicu Vâlcea cca 2012). Pundits have been prepping in advance, with countermeasures 101s ready at hand from blogs, manuals, YT channels, TEDx lectures etc with more and more people not only theorizing haterizm but also from actually being deeply scarred and marked by the unwanted attention this has brought them in return. At the same time, we have still very crude ways of representing its East – West – East mechanisms, its technological underpinnings, its economical and social background and means of assessing its convoluted dynamics – with populist movements externalizing costs towards their poorer Eastern relatives but also avoiding close scrutiny at home. It has become easier to map its routinely automated nature and platform migration routes – than the massive reversals of agency they entail – enabling locally unknown, minor, previously ridiculed (say the typical 4chan user) and unimportant historical actors a darker and stranger role than they could have imagined or carved for themselves. While generally speaking, there is this sense that it’s still too hot a potato to be tackled on screen.
Hate has a rightfully terrible curriculum in both past and present. While it’s completely senseless nowadays and outright vicious to minimize the role of hate mongers and hate campaigns – it also becomes nowadays harder and harder to follow its calculus. Its quantified and quantitative thrust takes it far from the crude, ravaging negative passional flow of chaotic impulses – into a tested way to target enemies, sway opinion, isolate and demonize others, driving policy and even fusing desire to politics in the most devious ways.
A sign we’ve reached peak Influencer is its mirror image, the anti- Influencer, or the Defluencer. In the artworld this bad cop curator version was anticipated by many, including a proposal from some years ago by Sebastian Big, a fictive proposal for a De Appel art curating program as a gesture that would have professionalized art haterizm (more of that below). S Big would have instituted a way to de-rogrammed artists, to make them abandon their work, scrap their artistic plans and even make them completely renounce art. Probably we will have to wait some more time in order to help initiate art for the sake of art purging – something more akin to the Korean Internet addiction camps where artists (think here also concept art, CGI, after FX artists, graphic design etc) can get de-motivated & re-educated into non-productivity. It would have been certainly a good way of reviving Gustav Metzger’s and Stewart Homes ideas of an ‘art strike’. In the meantime the actual the rise of a such a hate /Defluencer class has still not been televised.
Hate is being fed, stocked up, tapped into mainly using post-cinematic post-Internet memetic means of reproduction: smartphone apps, social platforms, meme warfare, BBS chats, and the unstoppable force of the commenatariat. This makes hate nearly impossible to track mentally as it jumps bodies, ravaging devices, flaring on platforms – extolling some of the peculiar signposts of the post-spectacular meltdown: mainly as a pervasive footprint of online mercenary trolling. How to sample such on demand toxicity ready for hire haterizm still remains an open issue.
Who gets prime time minutes, and who gets to depict incoming cycles of victimhood and victimization? How to repress and represent without repeating via millions of re-watchings – the invisible interior and very actual turmoil of trauma offline and online, the bleeding influences that work across the spectrum of conjoined cyber/meatspace. How to regulate and temper the inflamed material-immaterial boundaries, auto-immune, constantly irritated membranes?
Allergenic affective flows seem to populate, overflow and animate political campaign bubbles, inflame neural networks and depressed brains, cooking feedback loops of fake news, making radical-right extremism a migratory swarm target beyond the reach of both cinema and the best human analysts aided or not by AI machine-learning & an army of underpayed+mostly unwaged content curators.
I would compare or rather contrast Hejter/the Hater with another movie – Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, a dark and unique film on its own but fully drenched in Fox Rupert Murdoch media Bermuda triangle where everything’s gets reformatted, turned into smear campaign & blackmail tool. In a sense we witness the growing up of Empires of Entertainment (Jennifer Holt 2011) and their coming of age – reaching already new conspirative heights with 1970s The Network. This was the ontogenesis of global media conglomerate convergence culture started when the TV 24 h news cycle started spinning, cable networking expanding & interconnecting with movie franchises, clasping everybody in a relentless TV reality embrace. With the advent of the hyperreal the triumphant Fox News quickly became a yardstick, of smooth videogrammatic and videocratic instrumentalism that everyone on the left or on the right, alternative or mainstream, seems to envy, imitate or take for granted. Nightcrawler depicts an insatiable trophic chain of sleep deprivation, staged violence as antidote for attention deficit and multitasking frenzy. At nighttime, stocked up by various accidents and planned Ballardian crashes, an insatiable hunger for sensationalism explodes under a regime of sensorial deprivation. Discarded industrial workers and play-worker nerds turned into human capital were tuning in fast. Their self-valorization into slasher media producers churned hate- offers on demand. Nightcrawler is brim full with remorseless predatory instincts honed by white joblessness, destitution and labour within a regime that Jonathan Beller aptly described as the Cinematic Mode of Production (and ruled by what he more recently calls computational capital).
We are slowly and shockingly becoming aware that there are forces at work, but not in the restricted conspirative paranoid sense of high classes showing class solidarity (as per Mark Fisher in Vampire’s Castle). Nor in the pulp fictional-level Dan Brown style cabal of satanists or psychic vampires (as per QAnon). What we are witnessing is an almost bad black magick pay per view, an immediate cascade of results via a simple click or tipping point hate upload. In a way it’s again the reflective surface of the spherical monad and what it means to pupate in the 2000s Network Society (Steven Shaviro 2003). A stance that enables spontaneous mimicry, mirroring and amplifying what is already out there already dispersed, ready at hand.
In an unreasonable age of impossible risk management, “save diesel” stickers, peak oil Sehnsucht and open coal mines – fracking Hate is the only limitless resource – offering an almost Sith agency that is lacking in currently deflated philosophies and/or -religions. A cheap method in times of disillusion, clicktivism and political apathy, as palpable as Jediism in a sense, only more so, even if not registered as religion in the national census.
In the sense it delivers what it promises, not only that, but it also seems to work on all sides, on all political levels, from attack to counter attack, from action to reaction, behind enemy lines and across the political spectrum. It also, perhaps, rides on the back of some of the mostly ignored, under-theorized darkside tendencies – the actual Schadenfreude fashion collection of emotions, secret delight, unrecognized enjoyments taken from sneakily humiliating, bashing, canceling and constant slamming of others.
Follow the trail of their dead – is nothing altogether new, just one more weapon in the vocabulary of bodycount cynicism (a long way from the Greek cynic’s self deprecating stance) and scapegoating (as per René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred). We know it has been always around and been used by those in power to select easy targets by those who never own up to their major predatory acts and fuckups. This being said it is infinitely more easier to modulate, feedback loop, automate, and mobilize hate than any other (meager, scarce) resource out there. As many have repeatedly pointed out – customer obsession, loneliness, abuse, Internet addiction is now easy to monetize. There is no better terrain for it to seed & grow more hate than in the desolate fields of TINA. One can say it has become the most direct way to leave a decidedly dark imprint, but still an imprint on the drained space of lacking possibilities. At the same time this ‘personal level’ of what has became stock human capital should not blind us to the intimate processes of cybernetic feedback, negative and/or positive – already a big part of the speculative mode of production (as per Marina Vishmidt 2018) in the loopy 2010s. A computationally leveraged and managed risk that financial capital overflows in an ever greater flush of complexity and flash trading non- access for a much-too-human majority. That is where the affective becomes a marker of tracking impossible runaway effects and scars felt viscerally even if they have planetary seasoning on top and impersonal dimensions all around.
I am not saying the Hejter movie actually depicts or manages to convince or convey the multiple ducts and channels of haterizm that encompass many histories, local contexts, drawing from unceasing economic inequality, coronavirus austerity economics coupled with individualist ‘survavalist’ panics. The various accumulated injustices, systemic racism – have long stopped being a default blindspot.
Even cyberpunk cautionary tales have somehow overtaken the 2021 present as technologically empowered anti-Democratic ideologies start uniting role-playing gamers with anarcho capitalists and a return to the gold standard with ethno-political populists. In fact I am highly skeptical of accepting one single face to match all this, and here the difficulty of actually choosing someone, a young “typical” white poor disenfranchised individual from Eastern Europe taking revenge on the ‘entire’ world around him, almost from hack to hack or exploit to exploit. It is almost like taking impossible revenge on the capitalist oligarh winners, the ‘transition’ masters that pushed their kids trough the best schools the west has could offer and feel completly entitled in the new economy.
Mind boggling no? How different a creature is this young Polish post-communist Tomasz Giemza Zoomer and law school plagiarist from the (average) young male hacker-cracker heroic prototype of the 90s movies or even the US high schooler David Lightman playing Thermonuclear WarGames (1983) with Cold War AIs? In fact this did not change even in regard to the recent Wallstreet gamer driven fluctuations.
Giemza is almost a natural born spiteful troll for hire in the new economy, from his first scene when asking for an autograph from an esteemed teacher that just kicked him out of the system for not obeying the rules of law school. Then the harrowing prying & almost state security- listening tapping into the closed doors nastiness of class privilege while still entertaining a vague dream of upward mobility. Currently (even if not much different than in the Sackler family sponsored West) – post communist societies have a very particular class structure – with new oligarch sponsors of high culture and high brow new music festivals. Biennale art collectors and art auction houses (in Romania for ex) and an underclass of cultural workers, scholarships, foundations and talent scouting, volunteer internships and charities for the loosers of the market economy. But hell, oligarchs are never alone! Robber barrons and tech innovation were always tightly coupled with these sponsorship of future expansion, J P Morgans and Thomas Alva Edisons have been around since the industrial revolution striking gold in the inventive-speculative economy whenever they recruited young Tesla’s. T-Ford was not just about cars, but roads, petro-chemical plants and much more as well as about becoming neighbours with the luxury bunkers. As Charles Mudede said recently in a talk about speculative fiction & speculative finance that we’re not surrounded just by our rich in those cities we live in, but by all the rich on the planet, no matter where they live, their origin or their fixed address. Wherever we are we still live next to their luxury bunkers. At the same time it is high time to follow the trailblaze of this specific Eastern European mogul arch villain – the oligarch- nemesis of the Western media.
A troll army is being groomed & recruited out of this jobless majority supposedly mostly provincial or small town regional centers where job opportunities are rare or close to none and most involve degrading forms of brutal self exploitation. It’s either a quick mechanical turk buck or performing via video chat room channel, filtering anal into anal on Youporn, sweating the call center grape wine, moderating the online casino requests or a life of constant misery and unpaid rates. Hejter is not blind to the inbuilt gender-insensitivity in such ‘innovative’ ‘incubator start-up work environments, where most of the young female employees can and are being subjected to abuse. Places were abuse, bullying and unequal pay are rampant and entrenched. This culture of bullying at play inside the gaming (IT) industry is a long way from being reckoned with, as abuse itself generates profits. Only after #Gamergate and 4chan meltdown we have suddenly seen the rapidity of changing demographics and how important the politicization of the fandom (even considering the unlikely case of K-pop Stans) has become.
While this recent Polish movie does not point any fingers – it manages in a remarkable way to show how such xenophobic hate lives in symbiosis with the neoliberal elites culture and the arts. How it grows at the margins of lavish VIP charities, whitewashing glam curator art events with symbolic works surreptitiously dedicated to refugee crisis and rapidly absorbing LGBTQ+ causes. Same families supporting the liberal mayor candidate within the narrative (Rudnicki) – a streamlined and completely typical post-1989 political class defined mostly by tehnocratic solutions & populist agendas. In the pretty obvious outing ‘smearing tactics’ scene with Rudnicki the son of a former communist apparatchick – rings a bell in a Poland (or for that matter Romania). The East is still shaken and ultra sensible to such ‘reveals’ by the simple historical fact that the first free market entrepreneurs where all former high level members of the various oppressive security forces or children of the party high cadres schooled in the private schools of the West – just in case.
There’s is also a strange feeling that the dark net is prolonging the black labour market of the 1990s privatization – the real training ground of the first entrepreneur class, the first brokers and for a peculiar talent in human capital exploitation. A world were paid bonuses still count in spite of fully automated bot weaponized haterizm. In fact, as an insider friend mentioned recently, NGOizm in the East has sometimes managed to somehow stoke up hate and xenophobia in spite of their own best intentions. The point being that paradoxically – that religious organizations orientated against discrimination, against racism, for the alleviation of poverty have been scoring higher success rates under the same conditions. An aggressivelybound up with the ‘new optimist’ camp are also likely to be quite insensitive to the local concerns and affective or spiritual needs. Delusional QAnon type of ‘conspirituality’ as aberrant or damaging as they are have been growing on the back of broken unlimited progress narratives, ineffective emancipatory projects, dysfunctional religiosity and total in-satisfaction with the current explanatory frames of realism capitalism. Probably NGOizm and paliative & pacifying initiatives will never be abandoned even if they are mostly completly enimical both to working class as well as various educated dropouts with degrees and no jobs. The simple fact that results did not match expectations of years of ‘charity capitalism’ investments and constant nurturing of democratic values should ring a giant bell.
Compared to surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman in Copolla’s path breaking The Conversation 1974 movie), Tomasz does not seem to have any technical background and is just using the tools provided by company (Big Tech?), hustling his way up. He almost chances upon his innate ability to cyber bully given targets. What is missing in this movie is also the fact that most of these clients and data analytics for hire companies (akin to the notorious Cambridge Analytica) work across national or territorial borders, across organizations and political lines. They give of the highest bidder, be either for UN or NATO mission, UKip or whomever. Here humanitarian reasons somehow easily blur into military & counterinsurgency, easily bypassing European legislation, acting transnationally in deed if not in name (=global-local clients indistinguishable). Data does not want to be free – and data analytics functions with impunity across all supposedly distinct statal, identity or private business lines. New entrepreneurial and business models are born from the ugly fact that a shifty (bedroom and cubicle) tele-worker class has become the playwork of capitalist outsourcing networks best nested in Eastern European IT heavens.
Staunchly identitarian claims and hate campaigns go very well hand in hand with the overall national branding campaigns or election memification. The troll farms manage to make a living out of these temporary hate campaigns – using studios in say Romania to work for AFD campains in former East Germany or Macendonian Veles crews for Trump elections because ir pays to hire the East. They ethnostated politics at the beat of clickbait coache able to dodge FB checkups and incentivized their dark net recruits, mostly in places that do not even exist for the majority of Europeans.
In this post-cinematic attempt at making sense of chitter – chatting apps, chatrooms, story integration is always a problem. Only visual effects via effective live texting and screen capture can give a feel without wokeness or reveal – of what is going on. Only 3D gaming comes to rescue – the real terrain of both other worlds mapped into ours as well as of political recruitment and affective possibilities morphing into serious play mobilisation. This risks again blaming the gaming industry as such – its dark den of the geek and opaqueness as breeding ground for all social ills, alienation, terrorism and mass shootings. This being said – it is important to introduce this double consciousness (powerful avatar online/powerless nerd offline) coupled with an abundance of parasitic, invited, multiple sandwiched identities (being a game character, an online gold farmer, nationalistic Cosplayer, member of the precariat and truth seeker & purveyor of conspirative theories). This double consciousness seems to allow for movements and allegiances that are unthinkable, bridging gaps and encompassing apparently unsolvable contradictions. The whole gameplay 3D adventure needs to be unpacked. Monsters inside this fantasy game seem to be placeholders for invaders/foreigners, and even a mountainous face with gigantic rock sculpted bearded patriarchs (founders of the nation? heroic ancestors?) seem to point into this direction. With increased commodification of the self, of gold farming and plenty of crypto-coin exchanges – players commune in a cyberspace where cultural values and ideas have been “hardwired” into a well known geography and landscape.
I am somewhat puzzled at same time even slightly annoyed (amused?) at the last metamorphosis of the young reptilian hater at the end of the movie. A romantic figure that could come from a Caspar David Friedrich painting, or a Russian nihilist manifesto such as Sergey Nechayev Catechism of a Revolutionary. Marching on top of cadavers, trough contemporary political campaings, or as astro turfing commander-in-chief blackmailing his female boss, Tomasz strikes one as a long shot from the Zoomer/Unabomber Kaczyski look he at some point adopts to steal ammunition and a Kalashnikov and murder a local hapless guard (his first true Karamazovian crime).
This Silicon Valley potential keeps eluding him till he realizes that the various co-working, maker spaces and innovation hubs or “incubators” have also been very good at reproducing and normalising racism, sexism, colonialism and labor exploitation for personal gain.
This Polish movie almost transforms him into strange & dark (aesthetically NKVD but politically alt-right) avant-garde theatre director, with an ability to surf on the whims of silent disko eroticism, queerness, arrogant high class privilege. He is a better apparatchick than all ex undercover agents, lame 007 Cold War spies or secret service True Lies recruits Hollywood has produced. Here the Soviet US cold war binome or even the liberal democratic obsessive #RussiaGate (or for that manner eastern European red scare) fixation doesn’t lead us anywhere. There’s a lot of fear surrounding this new entrepreneur of hate. Maybe this is the new face of fear – maybe this is what the democracy-sick ‘ok boomer’ is faced with at the end of Empire or when they speak about Civilisation crumbling behind closed doors in salons.
Hajter is hateful because he can be easily be pilloried as a ‘Gang of Four’, but maybe not so easily made to step down, sent to the provinces or the back country after he played his role. This is no Chinese 20th c story. He’s free to exercise his guerilla marketing only as a trendsetter of 21st c Maoism. Tomasz is almost, if not the embodiment of Kang Sheng (Mao’s pistol), then a cultural lower class young mercenary of current cultural wars – able to do political LARP, mobilize, harass and vectorialize Red Guardist terror at will against the managers, former teachers and most significantly against his hated patrons who are his intelectual and economic superiors.
Probably this final roleplay would be the most horrific dream of almost all of the centrist or right-winger neo-liberal tek savvy #rezist (in Romania for example) groups mushrooming after 1989. Their whole attack motive is based on a constant red scare (“ciuma rosie” literally red plague), with virulent anti-communist and anti-corruption slogans fusing together. Tomasz sports a strange neo-Stalinist aesthetic indeed, since the movie does not consider the fact that most of the money for these campaigns and recruitment (+models) come from the doomsday-religious-right-US continuum. Maybe here we are getting closer to the Politigram_postLeft wave dynamics that implodes the identitarian and political phase-space into impossible political hybrids and temporary identity formations: ex-neo-Maoist-Stahanovist-Amazon-delivery-synarchy, ex-neo-Dacian-quantum-LARPing-monarchist, ex-Marxist- now Max Stirnerian-bedroom-food-delivery guerrilla and such…
This also raises the question of how Franchise nations from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk Snow Crash span across nationalistic attachments after 1989, with gated communities and identities congealing in cyberspace around consumption patterns, Gucci shirts, common passions or interests, rather than around supposed ethnic or geographical continuity. This indeed requires new strategies of resistance since a transnational age (as Sheryyl Vint put it in Funk Not Punk review of The Souls of Cyberfolk) is far from what ideological Cold War disputes were about. As a 21th c chameleonic netizen, with no particularties (not even attachments of his own) Tomasz appeares as a tired eyes passive bystander that burns with unseen passion – the next smooth operator that manages to thwart his own recruited terrorist right wing-extremist accomplice. Managing to get himself stabbed and thus self-victimizable, he is able to save the day and heroically pose for the next Selfie. He is a much too profligate adept of Sun Tzi Art of War, itself a favorite tome of Wall Street Gordon Geckos and guerrilla marketing campaigners. On the defeatist side, involuntarily maybe, the Hejter movie also hints at the sort of impossible translation of rage into hate or hate into rage, or how feelings of dis-empowerment, growing debt, turbo consumerism and precarity don’t automatically allow for a greater solidarity (say with such causes as #BLM), making ex-communist Eastern Europe a hotbed for EUrabian racist propaganda even if decolonial thinking or intersectional politics are on the rise. We have to still see how this pans out.
I understand the choice of the director for this creature of new malefic maleness as much as I appreciate the incredible effort and talent of his main actor, although I am still wondering about the designed law school inevitability of this first person-Shooter Zoomer. Youth – as Sam Kriss wrote in his in his magnificent Teenage bloodbath text- is a phantom, one mostly conjured up by old people, world pensioners and those who have no fucking idea where the youth gets its skillz honed or dreams broken. Hejter could well be recycling the same weaknesses plaguing early cyberpunk imagery in general – the reinforcement of crass stereotypes and the recentering of the young male, white subject as the new “abject”.
Talking about the artistic side of hate production is also important – the film seems to also be an in- joke on the Polish art scene that started experimenting with social engineering and spectacular social-Darwinist identity politics early on – such is the case of Artur Zmijewski and his 2007 schock tactics work study/documentation Them at Documenta 12. The difference btw devious prankster, hate influencer, bad curator and social engineer get blurred in Artur Zmijewski’s work, invited on purpose to produce mischief and to curate a Berlin Biennale of protest groups. ‘Curating protest’ like Diesel Protest for Mom’s campaign – is staging and creating political extremist clashes at big art events inaugurating outrage curating. It is important to recognize that this has become a job already for some, before such topics even reached the mainstream cinema. The jump from neo-Avant Garde experimental theatre or even speculative fiction to non linear politics has been also been alluded by Adam Curtis especially in regard to Russia some years ago. If Michael Bay Transformers is emblematic for this unmooring of time, of disjointed flows and of sudden reversals – of discontinuous time & it is also proof that Avant-Garde & its legacy is now evenly spread out.
TimeSpace Warps 