Forum for crossdisciplinary dialogue
Este es un poema visual hecho a base de experimentos con VHS, algunas técnicas de glitch y datamosh. Es un collage visual primitivo. Todavía no estaba de moda el vaporwave, pero si había una rehabilitación de la estética VHS como en Trash Humpers (2009) de Harmony Korine.
En esa época todavía existían los televisores.
by Kiyohiro Sen
Disclaimer: This is a raw translation of Kiyohiro Sen‘s article “Vapormemeとジャンクの美学：もう一つの（悪趣味な）Vaporwave史“. I found it after reading his article on “vaporwave” in the anthology 現代思想 from 2019. He also writes about analytical philosophy of despiction and photography. All credits go to him and, naturally, all responsibility for the translation lies with me. Please check out Sen’s blog for the original version of the article (I didn’t translate the footnotes) and further references.
Vaporwave is alchemy. From a methodological point of view it is a sound-collage of junk music. Old-fashioned pop songs, commercial BGM, unpleasant commercial sounds, etc. Before realizing it they create an imaginary nostalgia.
Shortly after , vaporwave died. Specifically, it seems that the two major creators, Vektroid and INTERNET CLUB, have left the scene and have spread inferior imitations, losing independence as a genre. Then, Luxury Elite, Saint Pepsi, and other artists that I call “second generation,” spawned Future Funk and Mallsoft, and ushered in the Post-vaporwave era with 2814, The Birth of a New Day. This is a rough history of vaporwave. At the very least, I wrote in every place a “history” full of such a view of progress. However, there are some things that come to my mind without remorse.
“Isn’t vaporwave ever evolving or developing in the first place?”
Some time ago, when I was featured in DOMMUNE‘s vaporwave Special Edition, I reflected briefly on the idea that vaporwave is an extremely postmodern practice based on plunder phonics and aesthetic appropriation. We should ask how it became what it is. In any case, the steam does not come from nothing but from boiling water
If vaporwave rides on the aesthetics of postmodernism “end of history”, “deception of creativity / authority”, and “simulation”, then no linear evolutionary genealogy could be traced. vaporwave is, in the ultimate sense, fragmentary, anonymous and ‘dejavú-esque’.
Anyway, today I would like to introduce you to a sub-genre of vaporwave called vapormeme. No, vapormeme is not a sub-genre. There are no methodologies here like in Eccojams and Future Funk, neither a distinctive concept like Mallsoft or Post-Internet.Vapormeme has nothing. Perhaps nobody in the whole Internet history has been obsessed with the term… Except me.
So what I want to do on the ghost web today is nothing less than giving the vapormeme phenomenon a category. However, as we will see shortly, it cannot be an autonomous and solid category.
What do I want to emphasize on by focusing on vapormeme? To be clear, it’s the intrinsic impossibility of concepts such as “vaporwaveness” or “vaporwave purity”.
There is a controversy that often arises around vaporwave, that is a categorization issue: “Does this work belong to vaporwave?”, “Is this image vaporwave?” Some people think that “Classic-vaporwave” is the only “true vaporwave”, and some people even say “vaporwave!” just as they see some strange Japanese signs on a street corner. Each has its own “vaporwave standard” and is often inconsistent. I wrote two contributions in order to clarify this question:
It must be admitted that both the “Vaporwave History Encyclopedia” and the “Vaporwave Virtual World Map” are normative recommendations rather than descriptive information. Rather than saying “Objectively speaking, this is what vaporwave is like”, it is more like “I think this about vaporwave, why don’t you do it too?” I was a modernist pursuing vaporwave’s autonomy, purity and a genre-specificity. However, the following focuses rather on the impossibility of such normative recommendations. In other words, vapormeme is the proof of this. It is positioned as something that erodes and frustrates dreams such as “vaporwave-likeness” and “vaporwave purity”.
vapormeme, as some kind of contamination, always threatens the autonomy of vaporwave. As a result, vaporwave has to undergo a postmodern revision. To dream about the idea of vaporwave as an autonomous genre is only possible by ignoring the whole vapormeme series. And ignoring vapormeme is not so easy.
Well, what is vapormeme? As I said, there is no such fixed category, but it does not mean that there is no discourse about vapormeme at all. Needless to say, vapormeme is not a term I came up with. By the way, if you search “vapormemme” in Google, the number of hits is 38,200. The total number for “vaporwave” is 11,500,000, so it can be said that by simple calculation its importance in the whole scene is about 0.33% . Don’t overlook the fact that with this stupid remark, the aesthetic of vapormeme has already begun.
In reddit someone posted this guide to the sub-genres of vaporwave. Here, I summarize the main characteristics of vapormeme mentioned there:
Well, this definition is quite tough. In the first place, vaporwave advocated a certain aesthetic about using junk sound sources, but vapormeme is a genuine junk. It lacks even the aesthetics of kitsch.
Let’s listen to a specific sound source.
Do you think “that is surprisingly good?”. It should be, since bl00dwave and bbrainz are the best of vapormeme. In the above sub-genre guide, it is also introduced as “the best of the worst”. It sounds like a royal road Eccojams piece as it loops through a twisted pop song. Here is a discussion on Reddit based on the aforementioned guide. The person who started the thread also said, “When I heard bl00dwave and bbrainz, it was surprisingly good” bbrainz also appeared and commented.
Anyway, I’m going to consider which aspect of these works is vapormeme later, first let’s hear “the lowest of the lowest”.
The RYM rating of “1.68 /5.0” would tell everything. In addition, the author has uploaded this unprecedented trash on the Bandcamp and evaporated, and takes no responsibility.
Well, there are plenty of worse things. Go to the bandcamp page of the lowest label, MAPL Labs, and you’ll find all these bad stuff. It is a superb view, so please visit it once. Just a hell picture. That’s why the Internet is called a graveyard.
Now that the outline of Vapormeme has been dimly seen, let’s summarize its features. At a high level, Vapormeme has three characteristics.
(1) Just a common image or effect pasted on a text
This includes bl00dwave and bbrainz. Another Vapormeme piece is the Stereo Component “Coastal Nostalgia”.
Vapormeme is born out of easy-to-choice productions, such as “What is Vaporwave?” An easy-to-understand Vaporwave-like image, a Greek statue, Japanese signs, and cheap CG stuck together likeペタペタ, a work that will satisfy you. And especially important, Vapormeme has no intention of moving the genre forward. It’s pure self-satisfaction, not in any way for the sake of the scene. It’s worth noting that the artists who make this kind of Vapormeme do usually make decent vaporwaves, or work as non-vapormeme artists.
bl00dwave has released not only Vapormeme work “Dream” but also songs from Eccojams to Future Funk, so it can be said that it plays some kind of secondary role in the Vaporwave scene.
bbrainz is currently working under the name of slythe and has released some interesting works, such as “jungle2000” with jungle elements, from good quality Vaporwave albums like “Echo”.
The identity of Stereo Component is apparently Yung Bae. Yung Bae is, of course, one of the beatmakers driving Future Funk. In short, vapormeme is the genre that these decent people cultivated as a ‘side job’.
(2) A parody of an already existing vaporwave work
In the Vaporwave subgenre summary at RYM, the notion of ‘parody’ is also emphasized. Naturally, the parody works of “Floral Shoppe” are overwhelming, but there are many parodies other than “Floral Shoppe”.
“Blank Goofee 0” is a parody of “Blank Banshee 0”.
Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 is a night core. How much do you like night cores?
Most of them are messed up samples of the original sound source. Needless to say, there is a duality between the fact that “the parody source itself samples and mess up the original sound source”. Vaporwave parody is often forced to be a parody of parody. Even more mysterious is the case where a normal sound source is released in a parody format for some reason.
For example, here is a mysterious person who claims to be a Macintosh Pro. It’s a waste of good work, but it’s a waste to parody the name and album name “FLORAL SHOPPE INFINITE”. Bandcamp’s sound source has now been removed, and YouTube views are tearfully low.
In his Reddit thread, someone commented: “I understand the inspiration but I don’t understand why you didn’t just make your own original album name and alias?” The fact that vapormeme is a parody does not contribute to the advancement of the genre. What is being done here is just recycling, and on rare occasions a work is made that is suitable for reuse, but most of it is just making garbage from garbage. There are also works that perform a parody with clear malice, such as THE DARKEST FUTURE “FLORAL SHOPPE 2”. This is a strange name by HKE, who has released many other anti-Vaporwave works.
(3) An image / sound source that has nothing to do with vaporwave and that claims to be #vaporwave
By the way, as a genre similar to vapormeme, there is (or is not) a category called memewave. Here a more general image of the internet is used and vaporwave music is added. “Simpson wave”, which has become popular locally, can be called a kind of Memewave. These retrospective vaporwave images also seem to threaten vaporwave’s purity. That said, Simpsonwave is still pretty cute. When things get worse, you can see stick-man-like images drawn with Paint on Instagram, and you’ll also see the tag #vaporwave.
“Vaporwave as a Meme” has created a lot of misunderstandings, and has produced a lot of bad taste images and works. About a year ago, George Clanton, founder of the label 100% Electronica, made a modest move to #takebackvaporwave (regain Vaporwave). According to him, “It corrects the wrong image of Vaporwave and restores the radiance of the old scene”
That is, Vapormeme / Memewave is the hated enemy of #takebackvaporwave. Simply by uploading these vulgar sound sources and images to Bandcamp and Instagram, and attaching the #vaporwave tag there, Vaporwave’s image is increasingly distorted. That was exactly what George Clanton was concerned about. He clearly presupposes the purity of the Vaporwave genre, and fights against an image that defiles it.
A statement from the Vaporwave label Elemental 95 summarizes the desires of this type of exercise. In other words, we want to keep only those works that activate and make the genre grow. However, this statement is displaced, and seems to be paying a high price given the intuition that “many Vaporwaves were simply plagiarism”. The #takebackvaporwave movement involved several artists, and a compilation album was released. However, it is ironic that this work itself seems to be a Vapormeme-like product of poorly image selection. Their enemy was “③ Vapormeme, an image / sound source that has nothing to do with Vaporwave” but the result was “① Vapormeme”.
Tweets by chris ††† (label Business Casual) are more honest. He himself supports #takebackvaporwave, but he confesses that he is also making works based on memes. Perhaps he sees that Vaporwave and Vapormeme are two sides of the same coin. Eventually, #takeback vaporwave evaporated, scattered and disappeared. I think the (temporary) setback of the movement should be taken more seriously. This may be the moment when the dream of Vaporwave, the genre of genres, is broken.
Another reason for the bad reputation of vapormeme is the abuse of vaporwave images by the alternative right wing, the so-called “Fashwave problem”. Click here for more information on the Alterna Right Wings. Characterized by its support to Trump, the right-wing alternates its racist ideology with memes and scatters it around the Internet. By chance or inevitably, the vehicle of choice was Vaporwave.
Recall that Adam Harper mentioned accelerationism in his DUMMY article and the story makes sense. It would be too late if the alternative right wing was not only using Vaporwave imagery as a mere meme, but also conscious about its accelerationist aspects. The only way to grudge is to grudge Adam Harper, who first connected Vaporwave to politics
In this way, vapormeme images that “can not be called”, “should not be called”, and “do not want to be called” have been accumulated as vapormeme. It’s the dark side of the scene called vaporwave. I would like to avoid overgeneralization, but this phenomenon is not limited to vaporwave, but is widespread on the Internet. Furthermore, all arts may have gone through such a fight against impurities, but I guess, today I will stop here. (to read about how MTV killed vaporwave click here)
Well, how should vaporwave deal with vapormeme as such a contaminated element? As we’ve seen, it’s not enough to shout out the genre’s purity as in the hashtag #takebackvaporwave. For artists, label owners, listeners, and other players who participate in the art world of vaporwave, the issue is not strange.
As a mere listener (at least not a vaporwave artist), I try to remain a spectator. And “bystanders” are in this case extremely political. I mean, “If vaporwave dies, let’s die”. Perhaps vaporwave won’t die so easily, and in some ways it’s dead. Rejecting popularization preserves vaporwave’s criticism and extends the genre’s life. I can’t do that. That’s just snobish. With the inclusion of Future Funk, a subgenre with very different methodologies and visuals, the category vaporwave has been put into risk. Just as you couldn’t stop the appearance of Future Funk, you can’t stop anything from happening in the future.
Now, at the heart of vaporwave there is a postmodern rift, where the malignant virus that spread was vapormeme. The “progress” and “expansion” of vaporwave can only be described by distinguishing vapormeme from other genres. Our early calculation of “importance of about 0.33%” is the result of such rejections, exclusions, and ignorance. And, as I’ve pointed out throughout this article, vapormeme is nothing more than the other side of vaporwave, not something different. vapormeme cuts and pastes past works and bad taste images that have become relics without purpose. And isn’t that what vaporwave has done? Isn’t junk aesthetics a pure garbage foundation for vaporwave as well as vapormeme?
Rather than actively rejecting and ignoring vapormeme, my point of view is to accept it as the other side of vaporwave. Again, in this genre, it is almost impossible to make non-normative descriptions. In short, don’t worry about anything. If you get tired of asking what is vaporwave, stop asking. If you don’t like the bad taste of vapormeme, stop listening.
I’m looking forward to seeing vaporwave continue to fade away like vaporwave.
Indonesian experimental music scene has been growing. I mean, for an outsider, Indonesian music appears itself as something fresh and extreme. Most people know about puppet-shadow theater. There are some basic characteristics of this kind of performance that are fascinating. First, against the traditional division between the stage and the spectators, in the shadow theater you can sit on any side of the screen. That is, you can watch the puppet-master at work. This results not obvious if you are trained in the classic idea of fiction, where the mechanism should remain hidden. In a wayang kulit performance, then, the shadow is not meant to be an illusion. Plato’s cave is the best counter-example. His allegory is a paradigmatic illustration of the shadow-theater where the ‘true objects’ remain unknown to the spectator chained on the floor. On the contrary, in a wayang kulit performance you can see the backside of the screen. Spectators are allowed to eat, smoke and chat during the performance. Their attention is not required as fixed, they are now chained to their seats. The orchestra also plays a central role. Both the tuning and the articulation of voices and rhythms in gamelan is extremely complex. Instead of leading melodies, it could be said that it has a dramatic function.
Anyway, noise seemingly stands on the antipodes of conventional music. Nevertheless, it shares some features with traditional Indonesian music, maybe the emphasis in performance over organic “melodity”, or the fact that it values community over the figure of the individual musician. In any case, it is something disruptive. Noise goes one step forward: it seeks to provoke the spectators, to rearrange their perception of sound. It’s aggressive, that’s what distinguishes noise from, let’s say, ambient.
As I said before, in Indonesia the noise scene has been blooming since the mid 90s. A documentary called Bising (interview here) is responsible for bringing this movement to a wider audience outside Indonesia (for example appearing in VICE). However, it would be hard to find one single common denominator. Since Indonesia consists of more than seventeen thousand islands, there are different cultural layers that enrich the scene. Also, noise is kind of postcultural, since it moves toward an absolute deconstruction of music in chaos. The question that remains is if technology itself could be seen as something attached to a certain type of culturality. You can find also this two sides within the Indonesian scene, with groups as Senyawa experimenting with self-made or modified traditional instruments. The tendency of noise toward experimentation and deconstruction makes it hard to conceptualize.
Reflecting on these things I got into a noise duo from Samarinda called Sarana. Even if noise comes to existence as a response to the phallocentric idea of the lead-guitarist (one male with his big phallus on the stage showing his virtuosity), there are some elements in noise that remained quite patriarchal. The Power of the Voice, which Derrida called phonocentrism, is based somehow on the authority of the male leader. In this sense, feminised noise would be an answer to it. (If you are interested in reading more about a feminist interpretation of noise, check out Marie Thompson’s work). As she writes in ‘Feminised noise and the ‘dotted line’ of sonic experimentalism’ (2016):
“If dominant histories of noise and sonic experimentalism have typically been characterised by a patrilineal ‘dotted line’ of innovators and pioneers, then these counterprojects respond with a nexus of new lineages involving both connections and disconnections”.
Anyway, as Sabrina says in the interview, noise should have no gender at all.
Now, the music of Sarana is a great example of how noise can disrupt the normative discourses. They create dense atmospheres of imperfect geographies. Noise is anti-mimetic. There is nothing to imitate, nothing to represent. Even the cultural references are blurred. The form is also emptying itself constantly. No content and no form. As a philosopher I try to conceptualize noise, but noise is always a step forward.
Sarana has a long c.v. of gigs. They played with the support of the Goethe Institut in Jakarta (It should be recognized that Goethe Institut around the world usually supports this kind of music, they do a good job in this regard); They played in Berlin last year; and they are even mentioned in the Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art.
Sabrina kindly agreed to be interviewed and here is the result:
Ferner: First can you tell me a little more about you. How did you start doing experimental music? How did Sarana begin?
Sabrina: Around early 2014. Hanging with friends in the noise scene, I messed around jamming with their music equipment e.g. guitar pedals, contact mics, small synths. Without me noticing, one of my friends recorded my jamming session. He told me afterwards that they’re gonna put the track into a compilation they were planning. They encouraged me to go further with an experimental musical journey saying that what I do is different, against the style in the scene. In June 2014 was my first time performing in a show. The show was called ‘loudness war judgment day’. (photo attached. credits to https://www.instagram.com/faturrahmanarham/)
I was called to perform another show a few months later. That’s where I brought two of my friends to join as Sarana. It started as a trio with Istanara and Annisa. Ara left a few years later to complete her studies. Sarana is currently a duo with Annisa.
F: Since you were touring in Berlin, what would you say it’s different in the noise scene from Berlin and Samarinda? What is special about doing music in Samarinda?
S: From what I’ve noticed for that brief period when I was there, I think that the Berlin style has more electronic digital equipment with organized sound, Samarinda still incorporates a bit of traditional musical instruments and sound e.g. the tingkilan and dayak musical style. In Samarinda, getting a venue to perform or organise an experimental show is quite hard. The noise and experimental scene is not recognized yet. Traditional music and art is more looked upon.
F: I come from Argentina, where the noise scene is also quite underdeveloped. I think that noise music in third world countries is especially interesting and powerful because you have to fight against many obstacles to do it. I would say that that noise is “noisier” than European “technoclean” noise. I don’t know if that makes sense for you.
I don’t think the genre is specific to a regent. I feel more that the person who’s making those noises takes inspiration and is influenced by their upbringing and their surroundings. There are always obstacles, it’s whether you wanna do it or not.
F: I read on the internet an interesting statement: Lintang Radittya, DIY synthesizer builder and musician says: “To call a specific music noise is artificial. Noise is nothing in itself. It’s running in our blood, it’s a part of us. It is not an isolated phenomenon that can be separated from anything else. What is noise? Gamelan is, for example, also noise”. Do you also think in that way? Is there a cultural element in Indonesian noise that makes it special? What is particular in Dayak and Tingkilan music that you could not find in the rest of Indonesia.
S: I think that noise is something you feel and make out from anything. Any instrument can be used in any way. The right and wrong way is only perceived by people, but it shouldn’t be that way. Dayak and tingkilan style of music is what I am brought up with and is my surrounding. That is special.
F: I’m interested in the conceptual side of experimental/noise music. It is a hard experience for the listener but also aesthetically very intense. How would you describe the experience of going to a noise performance? What are you looking for?
S: After a couple of time going to experimental/noise shows, I realized that there are a lot of different styles in the way the performers portray what they do. Interesting in a way that there’s always good and bad changes with something new. Most of the performers I’ve experienced show their hidden inner emotion. Everything is let loose with no boundaries.
F: Are there “bad” noise performances? why? What ruins a noise performance?
S: Personally I don’t really like it when artists throw and thrash around their equipment while performing. That kind of act shows that the sound is not primary.
F: Then as a performer, what do you want to transmit during a performance. You have a rather quiet style (instead of jumping or screaming on the floor). Is there a connection between experimental music and the body? How do they interact?
S: In my performances, I bring out the sounds within my alter ego. My experiences and inspirations from around. Quiet… haha. I’m always nervous when performing. I think that it’s a good thing as I’m focused on what and how the sounds should come together as all sounds in my shows are performed and mixed live. Experimental sounds can trigger sensations beyond what is normal because of time signatures and the unexpected quality it brings.
F: I’m also very interested in the role of women in noise. At the beginning, with Japanese noise and so on, noise was very aggressive and masculine in the way they performed. This changed for good. Of course women can also perform aggressively (for example I like the energy of Nic-Endo). How do you think that women disrupt the logic of noise?
S: I don’t think noise should be based on gender. It all depends on the personal style.
F: What I like about noise is that it is a “post-band” phenomenon. Bands are something of the past, now people get together with friends and work more collectively. Do you have any thoughts on this?
S: Maybe because in a band, everyone needs to be thinking the same. Doing a solo project is much more free and I am able to really portray what’s personal. like-minded people come together by themselves.
F: You talked about the unexpected quality of a performance. That is something very important in noise. It’s unexpected, like a virus. Noise somehow reveals the limit of technology, is like using technology to produce something that wasn’t included in the functionalities of the machine. What do you think of your relation with technology? Is it hard for you to get the gears in Samarinda? Do artists there care a lot for the “quality” of the equipment?
S: It’s hard to get gears that we want in Samarinda. What we have locally is quite expensive. much cheaper to order online. Always research first. Quality is as long as it works haha.
F: Who makes the covers of your cassettes? I really like them.
S: Thank you. the cover for “heal” is designed by annisa , the cover for “grow” is designed by eka.
F: Finally, a classic during this times….. how are you living the corona outbreak there? are you doing some music?
S: A lot of roads are closed. A lot of food places closed. I’ve been spending more time at home jamming and recording materials for an upcoming solo album and splits.
For a long time I wondered how the postdigital spaces and discourses are articulated with the socio-political dimension of the lower classes. In other words, noise, queer theory, bdsm and even cyberpunk seem to emerge from the middle classes and respond to their individual aspirations. At least with at first sight. Can something that originates from the middle classes be called revolutionary (in a radical sense)? Does it truly originate there? The true revolution can only come from the grassroots. Many years ago I even shared this doubt with Mercedes Bunz, when in 2008 I wrote a presentation on the concept of the subject on the internet. There I actually asked her what sense it made to reflect about digital theory in an economically and technologically backward country as Argentina. She replied that this was a political mistake of the left, the rejection of technology. Omar Acha shared my table, and in addition to having to endure my postmodern dilettantism, coincided to my surprise with Bunz. I guess they were both right. Poverty is digitalized. Access to the internet, cell phones and television reaches all social strata. In this sense, no person living in a city is free from the influence of digital capitalism.
Now, the question is: how is it possible to appropriate cyborgs, cyberpunks, noise, posmo-sadomasochists, etc., so that they really serve to build a revolutionary alternative to advanced capitalism? With each victory on the left the right regroups. Capitalism does not want to be associated with the right. It is more clever than that. For neoliberalism, the incorporation of minorities into the juridical system means the incorporation of consumers in the market. Equal marriage and gender identity do not go against the great Capital. They feed it. They might not totally change anything, it is true, but they introduce a bug that can later explode: a dislocation. That is what it is about. As Donna Haraway puts it: from new forms of oppression new forms of unity and organization must emerge. “Cyborg writing is about the power to survive,” she says. It is about writing, or dancing, as Pina Bausch and Kazuo Ohno would say. It is time to think about the post-digital as something opposed to the “virtual”, precisely, as post-virtual. The logic of interruptions is not a dream, a fiction. Intellectuals who underestimate the problems of the media and the body, as if they were subjects for science fiction, are blind to the true evolution of Capital. Marcelo Tinelli appropriated the homosexual body reducing it to a physical instance. The newscasts reduce the body to the corpse, the body to the crime: the victim’s body. They are the two bodies that television gives us: pornography and the corpse. That gays, lesbians and transgender people can appear on television and speak does not mean that our sexual customs are going to be revolutionized overnight. We must re-ask ourselves the big questions about production systems. There is nothing to take for granted. Pleasure seeks to overflow. But why think that there is something emancipatory in pleasure? Or in extreme aesthetics? What does it mean to suppress libidinal energy? Before, sex was not profitable. Sex is the topic of money. The current openness to sex is the incorporation of sex as an ideological commodity. Can we deconstruct sex without selling it? Can we live without selling? Is there a non-repressive or non-mercantilist sexuality? Aesthetics and sex come after the means of production. But this genetic asymmetry is not an ontological asymmetry. Post-digital logic is the logic of dislocations.
There have been many attempts (not in the sense of something ‘unfinished’ but in the sense of ‘ongoing’ achievements) to think and articulate new futures and futurities. Afrofuturism is one of the most powerful and representative examples. The concept itself, in its origins, wanted to emphasize the lack of representation of black people in the discursive universe of science fiction (SF) and technology. SF in its beginnings was not seen as a genre fittable for black literature. To begin with, black characters were rarely depicted in those narratives. On the other side, due to the white monopoly of technological clusters, technology itself was seen as something belonging to ‘white culture’. Alondra Nelson writes: “In popular mythology, the early years of the late-1990s digital boom were characterized by the rags-to-riches stories of dot-com millionaires and the promise of a placeless, raceless, bodiless near future enabled by technological progress” (Nelson 2002, 1). Hard core science fiction and space opera in general was characterized by an immaculate image of high-tech imaginaries. It was in the 80’s with William Gibson and the cyberpunks, that the optimist idea of SF started to fall permitting the space proletariat to show off its pain. Racial prejudices were however deep-rooted and if we think for example about some popular american cyberpunk films from the 90’s-2000’s, we still encounter there mainly white main characters. The concept of afrofuturism aims to destroy that epistemic illusion and re-appropriate technology and SF through new scopes.
Notwithstanding it would be a big mistake to state that SF was always a monolithic phenomenon. Cyberpunk has found in Japan a very fruitful soil. Some of the early cyberpunk productions like Akira (1988) or Tetsuo (1989) are asian-futurisms in their own right and a crude reflection of the Japanese Bubble-economy.
There are other kinds of futurisms. For example, within Latinxfuturism, we have Chicanxfuturisms that transforms the heritage of Aztec imagery into symbols of empowerment, as Laura Molina’s comic The Jaguar shows. Gulf futurism inhabits the inhospit techno-landscapes of oil-centered societies. Aesthetic serves here to imagine alternative topologies of power and to subvert the normalized hierarchical relations. Like post-digital aesthetics, I will argue that these new futurisms, although conceived in the field of art and literature, can play an important role as philosophies on their own.
The case of Sinofuturism has its own characteristics. As Lawrence Lek shows in his video-essay on Sinofuturism, China has become a economical and technological global power. On the other hand, as a counterpart of the West, Chinese people, as other Asians, did suffer different kinds of colonialism and discrimination. Symbolic violence also reached a new peak after the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, reinforcing the traditional stereotypes of the exotic and the oriental Other of the West. This same stereotype forecludes the multiplicity and the tensions inside China itself. The task of a self-consciouss Sinofuturism should therefore consist in articulating these multiple layers in a critical way. As Yuk Hui states in his book The Question Concerning Technology in China: “A sinofuturism, as we may call it, is manifesting itself in different domains. However, such a futurism runs in the opposite direction to moral cosmotechnical thinking. Ultimately , it is only an acceleration of the European modern project” (Yuk Hui 2016: 297).
I will call all these ‘-futurisms’ ‘subaltern-futurisms’, because they aim to rehabilitate the way in which marginalized groups deal with the future. These futurisms allow us to imagine alternative ‘futurities’, challenging at the same time the status quo of the future placed as an horizont by capitalism. Under a traditional linear representation of time, a present is open to many – if not infinite – futures. The word ‘futurity’ offers a wider meaning. If we think of it as ‘the quality or the state of being future’, we could state that the present belongs to a futurity: even if it is not future, it has the quality of being future. Thus, a futurity includes the present and should not be thought as a multiverse of infinite roads, but rather as a ‘nepantla’ of possibilities. Of course, the image of a crossroad implies already choosing something in the present that will produce a change in the future. But the futurity implies not a single decision, but a framework of a collective imagination where multiple dislocations can happen. As Laclau writes in Dislocation and capitalism, social imaginary and democratic revolution (1990): “The imaginary is a horizon: it is not one among other objects but an absolute limit which structures a field of intelligibility and is thus the condition of possibility for the emergence of any object” (Laclau 2015, 48.)
There are at least 3 objections that could be made against this co-existence of subaltern-futurisms: a) relativism, b) eurocentrism and c) techno-pessimism.
I wonder how we can think about a futurism that does not fall into the trap of idolizing subjectivity. I am not saying that afrofuturism or chicanxfuturism do this, but both depart from concrete embodied experiences. It would be therefore possible to argue that these futurisms guide us to a dead-end of perspectivism. But this is not the real problem and the possible counter-proposal of universalism seems to be also a bad option. Nevertheless, to think about intersectionality in a radical way we need some trans-subjective alliances. The problem is hard, because to reduce the multiplicity of futures to a meta-futurity of any kind without reducing the uniqueness of each futurism could be seen as another plain strategy to re-introduce whiteness and colonialism in a space that should stay completely free from these discourses.
I do not want to offer any solution to this dilemma. An usual objection against intercultural philosophy is that it presupposes what it actually condemns: culture. But this is a superficial claim. Interculturality is already a critic of culture. The difference is that intercultural philosophy is aware that this critique is always embodied and therefore, that there is not possible to criticize culture from outside. Subaltern-futurism, in this sense, allows us to theorize technology from the bottom up.
It could be said that supporting this multiplicity of futurities is just an evasive strategy. It is nothing more than what Sorel called an utopia, i.e. an intellectualist construction intoxicated with a blurry vision of the future that will never be actualized. Those who crave for distant futures become reformists. On the other side, the obsession with futurism, with post-apocalyptic aesthetics could also be understood as a symptom from a mind infected by the capitalist logic itself. In Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Futurist Manifesto, the group Indigenous Action states that:
“Apocalyptic idealization is a self fulfilling prophecy. It is the linear world ending from within. Apocalyptic logic exists within a spiritual, mental, and emotional dead zone that also cannibalizes itself. It is the dead risen to consume all life.
Our world lives when their world ceases to exist.
As Indigenous anti-futurists, we are the consequence of the history of the colonizer’s future. We are the consequence of their war against Mother Earth. We will not allow the specter of the colonizer, the ghosts of the past to haunt the ruins of this world. We are the actualization of our prophecies”.
A similar critique is made against afrofuturism here.
In this sense, to ask for a post-apocalyptic consciousness seems like an eurocentric-eccentric behaviour. In the best case, it is nothing else than pristine naïvity. It is true that post-industrial futures arise from industrial realities. The construction of alternative, intercultural post-world futures seems to suppose exactly that what we are supposed to fight against. Only assuming that capitalism is an universal logic would be possible to preach the need for subaltern-futurisms. Nevertheless, this critique does it’s own thing by putting on the same niveau technology and capitalism. The contribution of subaltern-futurisms would be, on the contrary, to create new concepts of technology.
In-between is not the center. 間柄 (aidagara) is not 中心 (chûshin). Futurism is not only about alternative futures, but about alternative presents. In this sense it works as an intellectual device for augmented reality.
The Gegenkritik to this last objection would be the accelerationist one. For example, it could be said that imagining multiple ‘broken futures’, rehabilitating ‘primitive technologies’ and having a playful approach to technocapitalism are reactive strategies with nothing to do with the real global condition.
Franco Berardi gives a great characterization of accelerationism in his Text: Accelerationism Questioned from the Point of View of the Body (2013):
“The train of hypercapitalism cannot be stopped, it is going faster and faster, and we can no longer run at the same pace. The only strategy, therefore, is based on the expectation that the train is going to crash at some point, and the capitalist trajectory is going to lead to the subversion of its own inner dynamics”.
Here lies a different type of futurism, perhaps, one that resembles the first Italian futurism. For accelerationism, we don’t need to dislocate weird futurities within our own present, but to advance within the capitalist logic itself toward the future. That is, bringing the future nearer. Subaltern-futurisms, by proposing non-standard logics of technology will prevent underrepresented communities from participating fully in public global development. It could be said that subaltern-futurisms do not even decelerate development, they just obstruct it.
Nevertheless, Berardi concludes: “This is an interesting proposition to consider, but it is ultimately untrue, because the process of autonomous subjectivation is jeopardized by chaotic acceleration, and social subjectivity is captured and subjugated by capitalist governance, which is a system of automatic mechanisms running at blinding speed”.
Then, without idolizing subjectivity, subaltern-futurisms should narrate the histories of those subjectivities. In the meanwhile, the space created by those micro-narrations, should be the horizont of broken futurities, the nepantla del post-mundo.
F. Wirtz, March 2020
