The Point of No Return
If the schizoid children of modernity are alienated, it is not as survivors from a pastoral past but as explorers of an impeding post-humanity. Cyberpositive (1994) — Saddie Plant + Nick Land
I remember my school days pretty well. We were exposed to an idea of the present, a present that showcases itself as the plasticity of a liberal status quo- one of unending capitalist feedback loops coupled with heteronormativity. As kids, at least here in India, one would aspire to grow up to seek the ‘settled life’. A life with a steady job, a home, with a spouse and preferably kids. In between classes, homework, evening cartoons, and other privileges that came by, life seemed alright. I think the education system made us wager and aggressively hope that this status quo remains. We would grow up to aggressively defend it should the chance come. And in the chase for a reproductive futurism, we would hope our kids would do the same. The system was appealing because irrespective of its abstraction and its state of cybernetic and cultural impasse, we were promised a future. The settled life was the future. One might argue that it is a viable possibility and I would hand it to them. Some people I know personally are for the settled life and some have already settled. The problem is, the promise of the future. A promise that gave the liberty to take things for granted.
Fast forward to 2020. I, alongside quite a few people (maybe even you, dear reader) thought that this would be the year we would get our act together. This was going to be our year for the lot of us. 2020 had other plans. From the threat of a new war to wildfires to the horrible and tragic COVID-19 global pandemic, if there was anything to take consensus of was that something was awfully wrong to begin with for a massive series of disasters to roll out. There is something cross temporal about this experience and yet incredibly dissociative. It is in this past, this idealised setting where our nostalgia lies and finds its bedrock. This is the foundation of a yearning for a simpler time and yet the super structure on this foundation is of of massive alienation and industrial scale neurosis. Life’s joys don’t stem from the evening cartoons any more. The joy is now debatable with cartoons being replaced for the evening news- which in its almost factory like production weaponizes our collective nostalgia or makes one for us. The idealised past will never be ours to experience again not simply because of the passage of time but because of the inevitabilities of the current status quo. Unsurprisingly, these are normalised. It seems odd that modernity is passed off as cultural cross roads at this point and not as an impasse. What vindicated modernity was its humanism. Capital, of course, has little or no reason to vindicate humanism. To view an idealised past as a possibility without the humanism, is to view a Norman Rockwell or a Raja Ravi Varma painting without colour.
One cannot deny the aesthetics of a brilliant Norman Rockwell or a Raja Ravi Varma painting sans colour but that’s where one might find vindication of deeper sensibilities- in colour representing humanism. It is art like this suggests that there is a past to return to. If recalling the past was a journey, art also acts as milestones into a long journey into the past. The chase, is that life could be like these paintings with its idyllic setting. There is a normalcy somewhere in the past and in our immediate experiences, in the immediate past. What’s there to hope for a return to a time where one could take their days for granted relatively more? But there were always problems.
Saddie Plant and Nick Land points out in a brilliant opening in their essay ‘Cyberpositve’ (1994),
Catastrophe is the past coming apart. Anastrophe is the future coming together. Seen from within history, divergence is reaching critical proportions. From the matrix, crisis is a convergence misinterpreted by mankind.
Normalcy today is the defence of catastrophe. Capital holds itself together with its plasticity projecting itself as a make believe for humanism. At the time of writing this, the ongoing COVID-19 tragedy remarkably demonstrates this. It took one viral outbreak to point out that a couple of decades of neoliberal economics is remarkably delicate irrespective of how overreaching the experience was. In the midst of this crisis, we want to go back to the normal, like how life was. Imagine the horror, no, actually imagine internalizing the potentially crisis ridden harbinger of doom so much, that now it seems like a past worth returning to. Even though, it was the same system that made a disaster of a pandemic quite terrible. The problem is that the perceptions of recoveries and of a flattened curve never promised a radically new future. It is all about things returning to the way they were. What happened to the ‘settled life’ now? What is with the idea that we have a place to return to, or even that we should even return somewhere? Is being separated from the past with a possibility of no return a guise of an alienation? While I did characterise humanism earlier in a positive sense, its embodiment of capital’s plasticity is problematic. This is of course, the idea that we still have an incentive to be hopeful. The appeal in an idealised past lies in the sensibility of humanism. It feels like home. Plant and Land beautifully points out a problem with this in ‘Cyberpositive’ (1994)-
Alienation used to diagnose the condition of a population becoming foreign to itself, offering a prognosis that still promised recovery. All that is over. We are all foreigners now, no longer alienated by alien, merely duped into crumbling allegiance with entropic traditions.
We are at a no point of return. The experience of the status quo, of plasticity of capital, of repetition is in the likeness of a black hole Spaghettification. There is no escape. We as an embodiment of our experiences in time and space are stretched. Stretched to the point where we have no future to really imagine. In all of this, it is finding a unique articulation of a present is hard. Of course, I cannot but help remember the late Mark Fisher again.
In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.
-Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014)
The future is slowly cancelled again. The stretch is a long and elaborate Hauntological disaster. It is saddening at the very least. With our pasts stripped of its romanticized ideals, what is left but the bones of countless appropriated experiences on a desolated cyberspace? Our associations with our present as an unique experience is all but gone. Our present has no anchor point with our past. Our present serves as vehicles of a reproductive futurism for an abstraction that has been running amok for a long time. A pathological simulacrum holds us tight and reproduces another copy of our experiences. In the larger scheme of things, this will probably be appropriated again.
This is a point of no return. Everyday is a point of no return. The tension in all of this, with all the points of no return, one cannot take anything for granted either. We are after all, “explorers of an impending post-humanity”.
