The Anti-Future

“In theory, “affirmation” refers to every discourse, such as positivism, that silences the negative, the dark, the inassimilable, or the contradictory nature of the real. In practice, “affirmation” designates reconciliation with the world as it is, submission to so-called reality, moral resignation, political defeatism, and approval of the status quo in general.”
Theirry De Duve (Aesthetics at Large: chapter 7 Resisting Adorno, Revamping Kant)

“…let’s do ugly non-art pictures, let’s not be good. Let’s not learn from others. No talent is the talent.”
Edith Schloss (Letter to Jean-Michael Basquiat)

“I want to be a machine.”
Andy Warhol

What art means, what that word means, is a question that no longer has any sort of coherent answer. Not because there is no art, but because the social context for a public relationship to art has been largely lost.

Maybe not lost so much as a system of capital that is in crises, and a society of ever greater inequality, has meant that for painting, for *fine arts*, what exists now is akin to medieval Church dynamics — except it is a church of the solipsistic.

“Realism is . . . concerned with the artist’s perception of objects in space and their translation into iconic, or faithful, signs. However, Pop art deals with material that already exists as signs: photographs, brand goods, comics, that is to say, with pre-coded material.”
Lawrence Alloway (Popular Culture and Popular Art)

The insistence on a difference between realism and pop-art was a bit later to be tested by finding distinctions between Post-Pop and Pop. (Post Pop was expressed in more realistic technical styles). What matters here is only that suddenly in the contemporary western world the idea of realism is contested in new ways, I think. And my sense is that this has occurred over the last twenty years (roughly) where a significant change has been happening. I wrote a lot about Jonathan Beller’s new book (and I know many people found Beller very tough to get through and fully grasp — which it is, but arguably that is why it has such import) and how the invention and development of photography was built upon the assumptions and ideology of white supremacism and the European conquest of much of the planet. Over the last twenty years, though, the digital and electronic mass media has taken on its own history. We have lived long enough under the shadow of the giant telecom and social media platforms, and mass surveillance and data mining, to be able to experience it and ourselves within its historical continuum.

In the 1950s there was a good deal of theory accompanying the huge marketing of the *future*. It was often a Disneynification vision of a *tomorrowland*. It was The Jetsons (which actually premiered in 1962) or a kind of very white dreamscape of antiseptic labour saving appliances and it was underscored, always, with a profound trust in technology and kitsch science. Science in fact became not science but a pseudo cult of positivism crossed with Madison Avenue. That dream of a future has been inverted today, and there is a kind of anti-future being sold, but sold under the sign of a filmic vision of apocalypse. The alarmist environmental vision of submerged cities, mass desertification, and above all else a planet of too many people is now a normalized secondary background narrative. I read recently that immigration centers built for a hundred or so prisoners (sic) hold upwards of nine hundred. This level of overcrowding exists in state prisons, too, across the country. The vision of the planet then, is one that begins to resemble an overcrowded holding tank in an ICE detention center.

Running alongside the white supremacist nightmare is an updated vision of technology as our savior. Netflix has a new film due out, I am Mother. It is a bit like The Terminator in one sense, with machine parenting viewed as superior to the human version. Such projections have a kind of weird basis in some unconscious recognition of both actual defective caregivers and an unconscious (or maybe just conscious) recognition of fertility rates dropping dramatically across the Western world. As a semi side-bar note…speaking of Netflix… one could read this and ponder just how its all possible. https://www.vulture.com/article/best-netflix-original-movies.html

Part of this entire discussion has to do with the loss of public education. The loss of all education, actually. Recently I had a conversation with educators in Norway who were expressing how students now (high school) cannot follow verbal instructions. They can barely follow simple written instructions, but verbal instructions seem impossible for them. Nor can they find the means to ask for clarification because they don’t know what it is they are lacking in information.

The U.S. military shares the dream of a Jetson’s style future. A useful reminder of the delusions involved in this can be found in Jacob Levich’s 2007 piece here.

https://mronline.org/2007/01/19/a-counter-revolution-in-military-affairs-notes-on-us-high-tech-warfare/?fbclid=IwAR0uIfHbmWNeW_Xtlll-f8qKswBG-IJfpCwGXI_apvg1B9rZKsJEpWMzBAQ

Norbert Weiner’s 1948 book Cybernetics marked a sort of watershed in thinking about the future. It also influenced fine arts and painting and more, it heavily influenced art criticism.

“John McHale,co-convenor of the second series of seminars organized by the Independent Group, validated both Alloway’s and Riesman’s understanding of the mass media’s essentially pragmatic role. In his view, the more complex function of mass communications is that of providing: “‘usable images,’ ‘configurations of human experience,’ [and] ‘symbolic constructs of reality,’ which enabled man to locate in, and deal with, his environment – both internal and external.”
Sylvia Harrison (Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism)

“At the limit of this process of reproducibility, the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced.”
Jean Baudrillard (Kellner’s Baudrillard)

“The industrial capitalist mode of production inseparably enmeshes the state with a definitive character of capital—policing the social order. The state disciplines labor and creates a disciplinary society. The state’s role remains fundamental because it defines private property. By defining private property through law, the state becomes a separate entity, apart from civil society (Marx and Engels 1846). “
Geoffrey Skoll (Social Theory of Fear)

It was Gramsci who theorized about an extended state. Government, but also church, unions, and especially institutionalized culture. One of the things that has occurred (or occurred more dramatically) over the last twenty years is the merging of mass culture and state, of entertainment and social control.

“By the 1980s, it had turned the tide against equality, democratic control, and public welfare. That success became symbolized by the Reagan presidency, and the Thatcher premiership, and global and domestic neoliberal political- economic policies. Neoliberalism had two measurable effects among the metropolitan ruling class. With an uptick in the rate of profit, they regained and expanded unequal distribution of income.( ) An important part of the elites’ counteroffensive depended on the popular and political construction of crime and fear of crime. Barry Goldwater had first raised it as a national campaign issue in 1964, but Nixon capitalized on it. On the eve of 9/11, Americans believed interpersonal street crime presented a major threat (Altheide 2002), and they generally supported increasingly repressive and invasive policing with exceptionally harsh sentencing (Beckett 1997; Beckett and Sasson 2004; Glassner 1999).”
Geoffrey Skoll (ibid)

The U.S. became the nation of mass incarceration. And this coincided with an enormous uptick in jingoism from Hollywood. The arc began with Dirty Harry, but the Rambo franchise cemented it. Dario Mellosi makes a congent observation (following Walter Benjamin actually) that “[i]t is the representation of crime, much more than the repression of crime—as we believed in the 1960s—that plays a key role in social control.”(Mellosi: Transcarceration: Essays in the Sociology of Social Control. Edited by John Lowman 1987 ). Unsurprisingly the ascension of pop (Warhol and Lichtenstein, Wesselmann, Allen Jones, et al) coincided with new government strategies of population management. Public schools, of course, since at least the start of the 20th century, in the U.S. anyway, emphasized waiting in lines, waiting your turn, following strict codes of behavior. The vision that came out of this was aligned with simplified personal narratives, the subjective interpretation of the world was simple and unambiguous — and by the post WW2 era the Jetson/Disney vision of a clean and wholesome technological utopia was echoed by Warhol despite his ironic reproduction of commodity images. It was an irony that I suspect was functionally silent. Warhol may actually have been much better than he seemed or seems. (like the old joke about Wagner, ‘he’s better than he sounds’). But in the case of Warhol it is likely true. And in the case of a Jasper Johns it is very much true.

And this is very interesting, I think. Painters today, such as Rackstraw Downes and Marc Trujillo, the new figuration is actually nothing like hyperrealism. Trujillo, who teaches at Santa Monica college last I looked, and who is a big admirer of Downes, paints what are actually almost anti ironic paintings of modern commodity culture. Downes, too, paints this realistic landscape that is never quite really realistic. (reproducing Downes here does him a disservice. In person these large canvases are much more impressive and disturbing). Both of these painters though are working against that idea of imitating the machine, imitating photographic images. They paint realism as if the camera never existed. And consequently the uncanniness of their work is strangely mystical almost. Looking at Trujillo and even more, at Downes, is to experience something akin to Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey, with all the hand painted stars and planets and spaceships. There is an uncanny at work in the Kubrick which was just before the onslaught of CGI.

“In her column in The Nation, Patricia Williams (2001 cited in Welch 2006) referred to a CNN poll taken shortly after 9/11, which showed that 45 percent of Americans would not object to torture if it provided information about terrorism. Public opinion has changed little subsequently. In contrast, more than 80 percent of people in Western Europe reject torture under any circumstances (Pew 2007:25; World Public Opinion 2008). Revelations of torture—including graphic imagery from Abu Ghraib, televised on 60 Minutes II April 28, 2004—became public in the intervening years. Nonetheless, the stability of sentiment suggests a deep-seated view- point.”
Geoffrey Skoll (ibid)

The above quote touches on an important aspect of U.S. culture. Again, over the last twenty years there has been a shift to a cultic frame of mind. And it is a cultic thinking that has deep ties to sado/masochism and which is expressed in forms of entertainment and leisure activities. Fine arts has remained somewhat outside this, though not entirely. The mass propaganda coming out of Hollywood is deceptive, however. There are two branches of influence, as it were. One is overt proto-fascistic titillation, sexual violence and militarism. The second is the far more pernicious expression of contentment and pleasure, especially as it appears in *prestige* films. The stuff that is partly, always, about real estate and clothing and style. What I read one critic describe (favorably) as *aspirational*. Big Little Lies, 2017 HBO, is a prime example. Shot as if it were the retarded grandchild of Douglas Sirk, crossed out with some Telenova by way of a Sotheby’s real estate listing, the show is a soap opera version of film noir, with most of the noir removed. It is also cast with recognizable Hollywood insider B listers. But of a certain stripe. The real story is real estate, is big homes with views of the Pacific ocean, and with exclusive elementary schools and ambitious husbands. The alibi is always inserted, the poor girl who is an outsider but isn’t, the infidelity and the abusive husband.

The point is that this milieu — which is sort of the west coast version of The Affair — is representative of how genre elements have been embedded in material presented as serious drama. The Sirkian quality is unsettling because Sirk has always been the most complex of Hollywood auteurs and man who was revolted, personally, by the Hollywood studio system. And yet the Sirkian elements linger on. This is a series about not just aspirational homes, but about the idea of desire and of pleasure. The tension in the plot is not about sexual violence but more about that which disrupts the equilibrium of contentment and satisfaction that feels so close…but seems to always just slip from your grasp. The target demographic for this and other prestige drama is one that feels completely at home with scenes of the affluent chatting away the morning at the local Starbucks.

“Sometimes Adorno will attempt to redeem the abstractness of modernism directly; for example, he argues that abstractness in art signals art’s withdrawal from objective reality on the grounds that nothing remains of the objective world save its death’s head: ‘New art is as abstract as the real relations among men.'”
J.M. Bernstein (The Fate of Art)

“The essential difference between sadism and masochism is thus (1) the shift from another person to oneself (shift of object) and (2) a shift from active to passive.87 That means that in both sadism and obsessional neurosis the division between ego and others remains much more clear than in masochism. After all, in obsessional neurosis others are excluded from the self-punishment. The obsessional neurotic needs nobody else in order to torture himself. The sadist wants to seize and torture someone else, thus clearly not himself. In masochism, however, another person is very much involved in the self-punishment.”
Herman Westerink (A Dark Trace; Freud and the Sense of Guilt)

The cultic is today something that has been, at least in part, shaped by the very sophisticated marketing of fear and anxiety. The inverted future, the anti-Jetsons: and Francois Debrix (quoted by Skoll) wrote after 9 11…

“The war on terror . . . is a violent rejection of the unthinkable and intolerable. It is a disgusting revulsion against something (that America calls ‘terror’ or ‘evil’) that does not make sense, that was/is still horrifying, that allegedly comes from ‘elsewhere’ (although it was and may still be within ‘us’), that cannot be identified as a traditional object of geopolitics…As media pundits and intellectuals of statecraft have reminded Americans, the war on terror is a different war, with no really distinguishable home and away fronts. “
(Tabloid Terror: War, Culture, and Geopolitics)

The future is, then, tied in with this escalation of sadism, and with all the latent sadism of nostalgia and sentimentality, of kitsch syrupy painting and TV soaps — and with the normalizing of a reconstructed future, after the apocalypse. I can’t help but notice that the figure of Greta Thunberg has seemed so perfect as the Joan d Arc of environmentalism. She is special (autistic and not neurotypical) and she has magic powers (seeing carbon dioxide, and no doubt more is to come). Whether Greta fades quickly from public memory is beside the point, for this is the future code embodied in a pubescent European youth — blond and cherubic. The future, the anti Jetsons future, is one tinged with the archaic and primitive. And there is a tension, then, with the idea of science. (again I am reminded of Beller, here), for generalized *images* of science are remote, really, from actual science.

” ‘I believe in science’ is an homage given to science by people who generally don’t understand much about it. Science is used here not to describe specific methods or theories, but to provide a badge of tribal identity. Which serves, ironically, to demonstrate a lack of interest in the guiding principles of actual science.”
Robert Tracinski (Why I Don’t Believe in Science, essay The Bulwark, 2018)

The new apocalyptic future, it has occurred to me, no longer inspires dread or fear. It is the new pastoral, in a sense. None of the studio TV or film product (or not very much, anyway) paints a future without hope. It pays lip service to the loss of civilization (but the audience today has no particular interest in preserving civilization) but the simple agrarian future is one that lines up with the frontiersmen mentality of most of America. These are profoundly western capitalist-centric shows, without much concern for what happened to Central America or India or China or the Arab world. This is about a white future.

But there is another aspect, too. For this notion of future is now a kind of repurposing of the revisionist past. The US entertainment industry rewrote the past and now samples that rewritten past to construct a fake future. Throughout this, though, a growing authoritarian state increases restrictions on daily life. And these restrictions serve to further emphasize the class demarcations. Many Americans are moving to Mexico for example. But this means many Americans who have some money are moving to Mexico. The poor stay and work temp jobs alongside those who fled Mexico (and Central America) in order to feed their families.

“Freud emphasized more strongly that human drives are not exclusively directed towards gaining an advantage. He simultaneously increasingly emphasized the formation of the conscience via identification. This shift was announced in Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, where he noted that as morality was lost, raw forms of hate and disgust surfaced. The question this calls forth is: how can morality be so easily lost?”
Herman Westerink (ibid)

“…the painter paints a picture rather than what it represents. Implied here is the idea that every work of art spontaneously aims at being identical with itself, just as in the world outside a fake identity is everywhere forcibly imposed on objects by the insatiable subject. Aesthetic identity is different, however, in one important respect: it is meant to assist the non-identical in its struggle against the repressive identification compulsion that rules in reality. “
Theodor Adorno (Aesthetic Theory)

Of course Freud saw the denial of death as a significant factor in the flattening out of lived experience (which leads to neurosis). But in some sense today the screen addictions of the populations of the West is a form of belief in immortality. The more life is lived on screen, the more the identification with society and others is vis a vis the screen, the more death is repressed — for nobody dies on screen. Humphrey Bogart is still alive. The bourgeoisie of Freud’s Vienna gravitated toward psychoanalytic models for the mind partly to help account for the societal trauma of the period, and german expressionism is a kind of validation of Freudianism. This was a cultural navigation through narcissism and human capacity for cruelty and organized destruction.

There is, then, I think, another inversion going on today. This deep cultic denial is tied into a world in which daily life is ever more repressed, and in which the compensations of screen technologies is encouraging a more and more superficial model for life. There is a clear connection, foundationally, between racism and Imperialism. And both under the manufacturing banner of capitalism. Today the non white populations of the U.S. (and certainly this is true in France, too, and in a different form England) are directly targeted by state strategies for control (and elimination). This began in its current phase under Nixon. And it only grown.

“…ghettos— whether Black or Latin in the United States or the immigrant banlieues of Paris—create imprisoning residential barriers. Especially in the United States, the ghettos suffer from policing strategies that turn them into catchment areas for filling the nations prisons, not unlike the Nazi ghettos did for the concentration camps.”
Geoffrey Skoll (ibid)

The representation of this is completely absent in Hollywood. The p.o.v. is always that of the authority structure, which is humanized and made heroic in the face of the threat of invasion. This is all pretty well established. So the new future is one without class, essentially. There is no underclass for they have conveniently been eliminated — though how and by what means is always unclear. The new faux-environmentalism is increasingly volkish in its imagery and the tenor of archaism is growing, too. There is a kind of ambivalence with regard to science throughout this.

“The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression.”
Horkheimer & Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment)

There is an acute racism, in short, operating in new Green discourse. And operating behind this discourse is the entertainment vision of this new pastoral. There is, though, in the best new art, suggestions of resistance. It is really no longer useful to juxtapose abstract and figurative because the authentic work today in either category, transcends those designations. There is an ever shrinking audience that can actually tell the difference, though. And there is also very much less good writing about art.

“To paraphrase Walter Benjamin (who was describing an earlier era), for us at the threshold of the twenty-first century, the out-of-date ruins of the recent past appear as residues of a dreamworld. If his characterization of the turn of the last century is true as well of our own time, this should come as no surprise. The disintegration of cultural forms is endemic to modernity.”
Susan Buck Morss (The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe)

Benjamin noted that exploitation was not only economic but cognitive. He was writing of the factory worker but today the cognitive exploitation is hugely intensified. Benjamin described the ‘sealing off from experience’ of the worker, and that daydreams were curtailed.

“The dialectical reversal, whereby aesthetic perception changes from a cognitive mode of being “in touch” with reality into a way of blocking out reality, destroys the human organism’s power to respond politically…”
Susan Buck Morss (ibid)

For Benjamin there developed under capitalism a kind of anti-aesthetics. It is interesting that in this short essay of Buck Morss she mentions the role of photography at the turn of the 20th century. That photography allowed the metropole, Europe, to view the exotic Orient (sic). Which was true, of course, but what is missed here is exactly what Beller illuminated in The Message is Murder. The colonial racialist foundation of optical discoveries in this era, most especially photography. And it is useful to view both abstraction today and the figurative in light of a kind of rejection of optical technology. Hiroyuki Hamada (who I should note is a personal friend) as much as Rackstraw Downes or Marc Trujillo, is returning to something like sincerity in his work. But in an age which has erased sincerity, in the age of post irony (as it were) the sincere must be dialectically approached.

“The rulers themselves de not believe in objective necessity, even if they sometimes call their machinations by that name. They posture as engineers of world history, Only their subjects accept the existing development, which renders them a degree more powerless with each prescribed increase in their standard of living, as inviolably necessary. Now that the livelihood of those still” needed to operate the machines can be provided with a minimal part of the working time which the masters of society have at their disposal, the superfluous remainder, the overwhelming mass of the population, are trained as additional guards of the system, so that they can be used today and tomorrow as material for its grand designs. They are kept alive as an army of unemployed.”
Horkheimer & Adorno (ibid)

Horkheimer and Adorno wrote that sixty years ago. One of the changes is that this army of unemployed is going to have to be culled. The paradox is that the transferring of blame to the victims of industrial Capitalism comes at a time when, in reality, the white populations of the West face demographic collapse.

But I want to return briefly here to the relationship between narcissism and cultic thinking. Freud made interesting connections between narcissism and schizophrenia. And without going into great detail here the relevant aspect is connected to what Paul Nacke (in 1899) described, in speaking about criminal youth, as the creation of the self as an idol that must be worshipped.

“This degeneration can later develop into criminal behaviour. In general it is true that “the youth sees himself as an idol”, an idol that others must worship. The idea of grandeur is generally expressed in a “limitless vanity and overestimation of the self”: “He wants and must rule”. He hates those who resist or fail to recognize him, the Übermensch. He only acts in accordance with his own moral framework.”
Herman Westerink (ibid, quoting Paul Nacke)

The screen addicted culture of selfies and social media is a constant tinkering with the creation of an idol. And the insistence on the photographic image of the self is a curious aspect here that obviously Nacke was not aware of. The creation of media phenomenon (such as Greta, but there are many examples, including celebrity gossip etc) is going to be tied into the persistent archaism of contemporary media creations. And I suspect this new archaic comes in two forms, or two registers. One is just the Lord of the Rings infantilism, the sorcery of children’s books and fairy tales. The other is the actual regression to tribal violence and extreme exclusionary sensibilities. A return to strict expressions of class hierarchy and fatalistic oaths of allegiance.

“The proscribing of superstition has always signified not only the progress of domination but its exposure. Enlightenment is more than enlightenment, it is nature made audible in its estrangement. In” mind’s self-recognition as nature divided from itself, nature, as in prehistory, is calling to itself, but no longer directly by its sup- posed name, which, in the guise of mana, means omnipotence, but as something blind and mutilated. In the mastery of nature, without which mind does not exist, enslavement to nature persists.”
Horkheimer & Adorno (ibid)

Now when Freud wrote of the ‘ego ideal’ he made clear the role of conscience — the critical agency that measures the ideal against the self is the conscience. In a society in which the conscience is withered (the conscience is developed vis a vis the parents) then there is no measuring agency left. The idol or ego ideal demands huge amounts of psychic energy to sustain. The new future, the anti-Jetsons future, this new pastoral of post annihilation and apocalypse, is a world of idols with nobody to worship them.

The globe continues to be proletarianized. The deep seated and indelible racism of white america is most acutely expressed in the ruling elite. Which belies the cliches of a racist underclasss of red neck NASCAR loving white supremacists. The actual number of white supremacists is relatively small. There is another class of small business owner, which shrinks all the time, and is mostly white, and is mostly default racist. And there is a managerial educated class of white liberal who are also racist but work very hard to not so self identify. And much of the new Green movement is from that educated class. The new archaism is tied this class and there are contradictions at work, to be sure. For these are also the non scientists who “believe in science”. Much of the left are also prone to this kitsch science. None of the people I know who espouse these pro-science beliefs are themselves scientists. In fact none of them know much of anything at all about science.

At the top of the class ladder is the sadistic and self loathing ruling elite. And its curious because if one goes to the real estate listings for any luxury agency –Sotheby’s or James Edition or Global Mansion, you will find various fluff pieces on which celebs are or have bought what luxury penthouse or villa. And as an example…I read a piece about the drummer for Metallica….I mean I can honestly say I’m pretty sure Ive never heard a single song by Metallica. And this is the DRUMMER. And he has put up for sale his twelve million dollar houses overlooking San Francisco and the Tiburon Hills. That may fall short of Trump’s Mar Lago, but that is still pretty elite real estate. Who is this person? Now, as another side note, the Showtime series Billions, about an aggressive Hedge fund manager, featured Metallica as a guest star. The Hedge Fund king, played by Damien Lewis, takes his friends to Quebec (go figure) to see Metallica and hangs backstage with the band. I confess a certain semiotic confusion here, but of one thing I feel certain, the neutralization of rock n roll, that began almost as soon as it started sixty years ago, has now reached completion. Its also interesting that it was this same drummer, Lars Ulrich, who sued Napster for playing his music for free (and turned over the names of three hundred thousand Metallica fans…so I guess hanging with a hedge fund king actually makes sense). It should be added that Billions represents something of a treatise on the crises of white masculinity. But thats for another time.

I want to finish up here with Adorno, writing in Negative Dialectics, about the law.

“Law is the primal phenomenon of irrational rationality. In law the formal principle of equivalence becomes the norm; everyone is treated alike. An equality in which differences perish secretly serves to promote inequality; it becomes the myth that survives amidst an only seemingly demythologized mankind.”

This quote is often criticized … mostly by academic readers of Adorno. One of the most consistently recurring themes in art criticism today is diversity, or multiculturalism. One cannot open an art magazine and not read about queer artists or artists of color, or Asian women artists or whatever. The art is often highly reactionary, or just solipsistic. Its also invariably institutionally influenced. This is trained art product. And this is the same promotion of inequality that Adorno noted above. And when I write about sincerity in art and that this is only possible dialectically, I feel this quote has relevance to that, too.

“At the technological level, when images chosen and constructed by someone e e have everywhere become the individual’s principal connection to the world he formerly observed for himself it has certainly not been forgotten at these images can tolerate anything and everything; because within e same image all things can be juxtaposed without contradiction. The flow of images carries everything before it, and it is similarly someone else who controls at will this simplified summary of the sensible world; who decides where the ow will lead as well as the rhythm of what should be shown, like some perpetual, arbitrary surprise, leaving no time for reflection, and entirely independent of what e spec­tator might understand or think of it.”
Guy Debord (Comments on Society of the Spectacle)

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