Have We Forgotten How to Dream of the Future?

With the extraordinary availability of television programming, running hours and hours of content, with millions of songs at your fingertips, streamed and forgotten on a whim, you’d be forgiven for thinking that our cultural climate was teeming with originality. It isn’t.

One World. One Mind.

Photo by michael steinberg from pexels

Perhaps it began with the neo-liberalism of the early nineties, the political force that sought to unify the entire earth beneath a single umbrella of trade and corporate control. A homogenization of culture was necessary if we were all to sing with one voice in Coca Cola’s utopia (Fruitopia?). Technology became affordable, global communication became easier than ever. Perhaps some of us felt free.

This was the solidification of the Deleuzian “society of control” that we now find ourselves in. Where freedom takes on the appearance of a free flow of information and a seemingly border-less world. But the price of this freedom is the data harvested by every tech company and every airline which in turn is readily shared with governments for purposes of social control. We stopped dreaming of the future because, so we were told by our leaders, the future was already here.

The End of History

Photo by lucas pezeta by pexels

Another remake. Another Carpenter-esque synth-laden retro futurist soundtrack. 32-bit graphics, butterfly clips, yet another remake. Same story, different spandex. It was once thought that the 2000s would see flying cars and automation replacing drudgery creating a society of leisure. Instead we got seven different Spider Man films.

The new millennium began with revival: garage revival, post-punk revival. Artists like Amy Winehouse, the Arctic Monkeys and Lana Del Rey have built careers on being living musical remakes, monuments to the past. Corporate entertainment continues to feed the pap of childhood to us well into our adult life so that we remain forever infantilized, forever dependent. All potential forever neutralized.

If you are looking backwards, you will never move forward. What are “Ready Player One”, “Stranger Things”, “Blade Runner 2049” and the undying popularity of “Star Wars” but a kind of MAGA sublimated into aesthetic. A desire to return to an inaccessible past, using the language of genres that have historically pointed forward.

No Future for You

Mark Fisher, the great theorist of all lost futures, firmly demonstrated the link between late capitalism and corporate nostalgia (what Simon Reynolds calls “retromania”) when he wrote that:

 “neo-liberal capitalism has…systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new…as public service broadcasting became “marketized,” there was an increased tendency to turn out cultural productions that resembled what was already successful.” (Ghosts of My Life, p. 15)

As corporations gradually colonize every aspect of our lives, as control becomes de-spatialized and we carry the office, the school, the prison around with us, there becomes less and less room for the new. We are sold the past and so the past is what we come to expect. We are taught to fear the strange, the unsettling and take comfort in the bosom of familiarity.

Utopian Dreams

It is up to us to demand the unfamiliar, the strange, the uncomfortable. We deserve a future, not the eternal prison of the past. If we’re ever to emerge from the suffocation of control, if we’re ever to breathe a breath that hasn’t come at a price, we need to remember how strange the future can seem and forget its false familiarity.

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline

The Other Side Breaks on Through to Here: Poltergeist Phenomena as Capitalist Resistance

Zhupel of the revolution (1905) by boris kustodiev

“The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong. Therefore, the destructive character is reliability itself.”

— Walter Benjamin

Get Out of My House

Floorboards creaking while everyone is asleep. Cupboards swing open before your eyes. The iPad levitated for thirteen seconds before slamming to the ground. The poltergeist behaves like a neglected child, upsetting order to grab attention. It moves unseen through the corridors of the newly renovated town house, starting the Vitamix well before you’re ready to make your maca smoothie. When the front door opens and the family pours in, arms filled with shopping bags, the poltergeist is there, petulant, hurtling a Fitbit against the wall.

image from pixabay

And even in moments of silence, when you do not know you have a ghost in your house – it is there. It’s in the simmering uncertainty held down by another Netflix binge. It’s the cold sweat of what have I done? I don’t want to be a policy analyst. It’s in the silence as you drive the family to the water park. It’s the noise beneath the placid surface of the capitalist dream. The incorporeal shade haunting the hallowed homes of a material world.

“The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way.”

— Walter Benjamin

Bring the Noise

Poltergeist, from the German “poltern” (a sonic disturbance) and “geist” (spirit), might be translated as “knocking ghost”, or “noisy spirit”. However one renders it in English, the meaning is plain: it is loud and restless. Indeed, poltergeist phenomena are always associated with sounds. From the spectral Drummer of Tedworth beating out an unseen cacophony in 1682 , through to the disembodied voices and wall pounding of the notorious Enfield poltergeist which tormented a single mother in England in 1977; the hauntings are uniformly a sonic barrage described as a “disturbance.”

image from pixabay

And what, exactly, is being disturbed? What is the purpose of all this noise? Writing of harsh noise in music, Csaba Toth defines noise as that which “disrupts both the performer and listener’s normal relations to the symbolic order by refusing to route musical pleasure through the symbolic order.” Pleasure is easily commodified and the vectors for pleasure (art, alcohol, drugs, sex) are monopolized by both government and corporation as a means of social control.

But noise resists commodification: it does not appeal to the pleasure principle, experience of it is not mediated by any centralized authority. The poltergeist is then not so different from transgressive sound artists like Whitehouse and Throbbing Gristle. Noise as a form of social disruption. Discomfort to short circuit the forces of control.

The Ghost in the Gadget

“But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere… Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads.”

— Walter Benjamin

The poltergeist unleashes a sonic assault on everything we have been taught to believe is sacred about a domesticated, capitalist life. It is important to note how, aside from a few spectacular tales, accounts of poltergeist activity involve only damage to property. In fact, much of the violence inherent in these manifestations is directed against physical objects best representing the private domicile: doors, beds, cupboards, and tables.

Like a protest that turns to smashing the windows of a Starbucks, the poltergeist expresses the rage of an anarchic soul confined by capitalism. It may even possess the symbols of capitalism itself: I am become the floating smartphone, destroyer of stability. In the 1960 case of the Baltimore poltergeist, the spirit exploded Coca-Cola bottles from within.

The poltergeist operates spontaneously, it is unpredictable, capricious, and angry – it is ungovernability itself and, by insinuating itself directly into the home and freely using objects therein, it attacks the very concept of private ownership that lies at the heart of capitalism.

A Spectre is Haunting

“No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble – not for the sake of rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.”

— Walter Benjamin

Skeptics will say that poltergeist phenomena, often emanating from a human “focal point,” usually in the form of a teenage or pre-teen child, is simply either conscious or unconscious mischief. The child, lacking attention, projects a fantasy spirit to achieve power over the household and assault the hierarchy of the family unit, within which they’ve been rendered powerless. To this I say, where does the projection end and the haunting begin?

image from pixabay

The only thing more ungovernable than the poltergeist is the willful child, to whom property is confusing and rules made only to be broken. Like the youth led innovations of punk, hip-hop and industrial noise, which obliterated capitalist notions of class, race, gender with explosions of sound, both child and poltergeist raise the volume to make themselves heard over the willful silence of the status quo.

Silence is violence but noise destroys.

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline