Week 12 (March 19-25)
cut thread | a chain of shattered signifiers; leaves; no room for peace; the broken record keeps playing an outro over and over again
Fredric Jameson’s seminal work Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late-Capitalism offers a critique of modernism and postmodernism from a Marxist perspective. Examining the role of mass media in the formation of contemporary cultures, mass cultures, he describes postmodernism as an imposed but pervasive field that forces us to shape our beliefs in accordance with cultural hegemony and brings us under the influence of media culture.
Mass culture is essentially a spectacle—an image of reality that subjects living humans to its own will and desires (Guy Debord). To uphold and reinforce this spectacle of reality, mass culture must constantly produce images and media which its subjects are condemned to consume. Jameson argues that within postmodernism, our selves become fractured and fragmented in having to deal with this schizophrenic nature of Capitalism, one that is rapidly shifting, often inconsistent, and contradictory to itself. If personal identity is some sort of amalgamation of the past, present, and future of the subject, then within postmodernism we are reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers—a simulacrum—a series of unrelated presences in time, detached from the past, and unable to imagine a distinct future—the present replaying itself endlessly.
March 19
old gods, new gods
As a part of his critique, to study the transition from one form of cultural hegemony to another, Jameson introduces the concept of the Vanishing Mediator. A vanishing mediator intercedes this transition—it is a particular characteristic of the former system that becomes universalized under the latter.
He gives the example of Max Weber’s discussion of the protestant work ethic, which is visible even within the supposedly secular Capitalist society’s hustle culture. However, in a secular Capitalist society, owing to its universality, it no longer needs active structures such as the church to keep reinforcing it—in this transition from a protestant society to a secular Capitalist one, this work ethic previously distinct to Protestant communities, the vanishing mediator, becomes universalized and therefore fades away from consciousness, but remains ever-present in it.
The vanishing mediator, I think, is that mythic tale passed on between old gods and new gods. It’s like the drops of water on a window that disappear more the more they appear.
Philosophy is at once the power of alienated thought and the thought of alienated power, and as such, it has never been able to emancipate itself from theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion.
- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (20)
In his writings, Mark Fisher builds upon Postmodernism, retaining a lot of its characteristics such as the weakening of history, and suggests a variation to the concept—Capitalist Realism.
Here, he also notices that Capitalism has a tendency toward “secularism”:
Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing’, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance’. When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture.
As he continues, though, he asserts that even though the transcendental codes of previous social systems have been dismantled, they are still invoked under a new kind of transcendental entity—not god, not religion, but capital:
It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis. The limits of capitalism are not fixed by fiat, but defined (and re-defined) pragmatically and improvisationally.
— Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, p. 23
If the transcendental codes of the past were keeping Capital from gaining complete control, warding them off in advance, then the atrocities of colonization and imperialism helped it gather exactly this control—they remove any alternative codes that exist elsewhere, swallow them and digest them, and then re-install a new code in the image of the capitalist spectacle.
This dismantling of transcendental codes of the past, and their universal ad-hoc re-installation causes them to disappear from view. Yet, even when invisible, these universal codes police our wills and desires; hiding beneath a seemingly secular and godless world is the new god that governs our being, a new god that appears to be omnipresent and omnipotent—Capital.
After my tattoo, yesterday, I spent all day roaming around the city and writing. In the evening, Prime, Sim, Shiv, Sav, Pix and I got dinner at Masti in Williamsburg. Pix was visiting the city for some time so I went to hang out with her a little bit. She was struck with a child-like excitement when I showed her my spray paint and wanted to do a little street art herself. Today, I spent most of my day listening to old records and playing music with them. It was like jamming across space-time. My tattoo has started healing. Sid and Nav came over.
March 20
a lost past and lost futures
The book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism began as an article written in 1984 and was published in 1991, merely two years after the demolition of the Berlin Wall and a few months before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Almost a couple of decades following this, Mark Fisher argued that we have now entered a period of culture that is better characterized by Capitalist Realism.
Fisher wrote Capitalist Realism in 2009 when even the older person in his classroom would’ve grown up entirely in a post-USSR era. Herein lies the key difference between Postmodernism and Capitalist Realism—though at the time of Jameson’s postmodernism, alternative modes of organization might have existed in the cultural consciousness, Capitalist Realism is distinguished by the ubiquitous belief that the only way to organize society is through capitalism—people are unable to imagine alternatives.
…the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.
This makes capitalism very much like the Thing in John Carpenter’s film of the same name: a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact.
We stand here void of identities, removed from the past that presented us with them,
We stand here void of imagination, with a future permanently in crisis.
March 21
history whomst
Though Postmodernism and Capitalist Realism differ in some small ways, a common artifact of the analyses presented by Jameson and Fisher is that of a cultural detachment from history. Their reasoning for claiming this is vast, and perhaps deserve their own in-depth discussion on a different day. However, it suffices to just mention it—naturally, a detachment from history acts as a hindrance to any contextualization of the present or any possible imagination of the future.
Fisher and Jameson allude to something that’s going on with our cultural memory—if a global outrage is all you can see on Instagram on one day, and is forgotten by night; if every day a new language is dying out; if everything could be from the 70s even though nothing anymore belongs there; if we remember vastly contradictory histories of the same regions, perhaps (as Fisher does) we can say that we are suffering as a culture from a version of the same problems as the protagonist of Memento—unable to clearly remember the past outside a small set of unreliable memories, unable all the same to create any new reliable memories. Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia.
In late capitalism, owing to a constant reproduction of the present as an aesthetic, being immersed in this endless stream of images that aim to recreate the capitalist spectacle, any sense of temporality can be lost. To Fisher and Jameson, therefore, the sense of detachment from the past is a cultural detachment from the past. However, since the publication of Capitalist Realism in 2009, we might also be facing the risk of subjective separation from our past altogether.
I awaited the end of the work day all day. I think the worst stint of this project is behind us, though, as most things seem to be operating well. Regardless, spending my hours typing code can only feel so good when I don’t want to be typing that code. It’s like those writing assignments in school that even the biggest language enthusiasts among us turned away from.
At night, after dinner, I went to hang out at Nav’s. Sid and San were there for their Spring breaks. We watched a lesbian film—But I’m a Cheerleader—I had so much fun!
March 22
the end of the english major
On one hand, we have the weakening of history as Fisher or Jameson describe it, where there is a sense in which cultural production starts to become detached from history thereby constantly reproducing the present—it is here that the notion of modernity becomes a mere aesthetic, and enters a stasis.
On the other hand, perhaps an equally dangerous potentiality—the complete detachment of individual subjectivity from any conceptions of history, historicity, and indeed even with their own histories. We step into an enter an age of simulations, measurable intelligence, and efficient methods. Where are intelligence and efficiency being used? No one knows. Maybe no one cares! But everyone is still fucking obsessed with them! Our subjectivity is merely subjectivity in the image of an ominous spectacle, where the only relevant history is the recent past, and the only relevant future is the immediate future, where the attention span of a whole generation has disappeared, not only for time as it comes but also for the time that has always been.
A few weeks ago, I found a few articles that discussed the decline in humanities scholarship across the globe and tried to examine the possible effects it will have (or perhaps even those that it has been having) on our culture and society. In one of these, The End of the English Major, an earnestly written and rigorously researched piece by Nathan Heller that appeared in the March 6 issue of the New York, Heller dives deep into this issue. He opens with a troubling fact:
The crisis, when it came, arrived so quickly that its scale was hard to recognize at first. From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors. Women’s studies lost eighty per cent.
This trend, as he emphasized, has been a global one.
The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade.
Conventional wisdom might suggest that this decline in the humanities may have something to do with the state of the economy, given that this was shortly after the crisis of 2007, but this is easily ruled out:
For decades, the average proportion of humanities students in every class hovered around fifteen per cent nationally, following the American economy up in boom times and down in bearish periods. … Enrollment numbers of the past decade defy these trends, however. When the economy has looked up, humanities enrollments have continued falling. When the markets have wobbled, enrollments have tumbled even more. Today, the roller coaster is in free fall.
He points to the lack of funding, financial support, structural support, etc. as possible reasons, certainly as influential forces, for the sharp drop in the bustle in the humanities departments.
Soon enough, though, at the culmination of his journey, at his alma mater, he has an eerie realization that this detachment from the humanities runs much deeper in our culture. In theory, a school such as his—Harvard University—with all its riches should be a place where the possibilities for a holistic education remain unharmed. However, as Heller reports:
In 2022, though, a survey found that only seven per cent of Harvard freshmen planned to major in the humanities, down from twenty per cent in 2012, and nearly thirty per cent during the nineteen-seventies.
It was not just Heller who reported this. And it was not just after the pandemic either. In 2018, Benjamin Schmidt writes for the Atlantic: The Humanities Are in Crisis. What happens in a world where the average human is more and more detached from the questions and explorations of the humanities, and focused instead on the quantifiable hard sciences?
Well, my honest answer to this is that I guess we’d become better and better at solving problems but we’d keep losing track of which problems we should care about. Heller discusses some other potential and real issues associated with such a turn in society.
He retorts, if one majors in business to get rich, it doesn’t necessarily follow, but is easy to believe, that majoring in the humanities will make you poor. He thinks that it is for this reason that humanities are now largely viewed as an after-thought, a passion project, or even as a kind of joke. It is largely believed that what is learned in the communities that study the humanities can be learned individually, making the degree a seemingly worthless prospect. And for those who do enroll in the humanities even despite all of this, a disdain for history still lingers:
English professors find the turn particularly baffling now: a moment when, by most appearances, the appetite for public contemplation of language, identity, historiography, and other longtime concerns of the seminar table is at a peak.
…
“There’s a real misunderstanding that you can come in and say, ‘I want to read post-colonial texts—that’s the thing I want to study—and I have no interest in studying the work of dead white men,’ ” [Tara K.] Menon said. “My answer, in the big first lecture that I give, is, If you want to understand Arundhati Roy, or Salman Rushdie, or Zadie Smith, you have to read Dickens. Because one of the tragedies of the British Empire”—she smiled—“is that all those writers read all those books.”
He notices that this belittling of the humanities also causes a change in the subjectivity of students, in the fundamental modes of thinking they use, and likewise in their vernacular:
It struck me…statistics is now everywhere, our language for exchanging knowledge. Today, a quantitative idea of rigor underlies even a lot of arguments about the humanities’ special value. Last school year, Spencer Glassman, a history major, argued in a column for the student paper that Harvard’s humanities “need to be more rigorous,” because they set no standards comparable to the “tangible things that any student who completes Stat 110 or Physics 16 must know.”
His correspondent, a graduate student at Harvard told him that “all the stem concentrators have this attitude that humanities are a joke.”
In a quantitative society that is obsessed with measurability and efficiency, where optimization is seen as inherently good, and students first have to ask the question of “is the degree worth it” or “if it’s a good investment,” the values of Capitalist Realism appear clear before us—one which treats seeking an education like an investment and dictates educational institutions like businesses.
What’s being lost when we lose our ties to history or the humanities? I would think that it is our humanity that we lose in the process.
I read the Heller article a few times when I first saw it in the New Yorker. I flipped the pages back to that article two or three times only to slowly flip through the end of it. Two and change, to be precise. On my third full read, having a better sense now of the prognosis, something Heller wrote sent a shiver through my spine and stopped me in my reading. My mind held this phrase long after I shut the magazine and put it away with the rest of the stack.
In other contexts, though, the government’s investments [to support the partnership between the university system and the military industrial complex] could be seen as having backfired. Most institutional-opposition movements of the past sixty years, from Vietnam protest to today’s defund-the-police efforts, have been amplified on campuses. That’s partly because fields like literature and history teach close, fact-based study and critical analysis with the goal of pulling up the rug to understand what’s going on beneath. When students graduate and seek changes in broader society, they carry those practices with them. If they’re young, their language is still the current language of the university, so the causes bounce back to professors and students at a convivial angle. That feedback loop is partly how youth movements grow.
If the poets are all dead, and if being an artist doesn’t pay enough, and if history is losing the war, what do students who graduate from the university system carry with them, then? What are the desires these students develop and cherish?
A student he interviewed commented on her progressive thought:
“People involved in the humanities may not even need to go to school for what they’re wanting to do,” she said; she didn’t see what studying “The Waste Land” had to do with making it as a poet. “Also, because of the world we’re living in, there’s this desperation for being able to make money at a young age and retire at a young age,” she added.
I asked her what she meant.
“A lot of it has to do with us seeing—they call them ‘influencers’ online,” Harmanian said, pronouncing the word slowly for my benefit. “I’m twenty-one. People my age have crypto. People have agents working on their banking and trading. Instead of working nine to five for your fifteen-dollar minimum wage, you can value your time.” She and her peers had grown up in an age that saw the lie in working for the Man, so they were charging out on their own terms. “It’s because our generation is a lot more progressive in our thinking,” she told me.
To me, this is a grotesquely humorous situation—the thinking that is labeled as progressive is in fact the oppressive desires of the capitalist spectacle taken for granted as progressive. Trying to be an influencer or trying to accumulate enough wealth to be able to retire early are the very desires that the mass culture tries to impart to us, they are indeed just facets of capitalist desire, of the hustle culture of a burned-out society, even if they appear different from the oppressive roles of the past, even after getting an education at one of the premier universities in the world.
The end of history, so to speak, gives way only to alternative dominant (and dominating) modes of knowledge such as statistics that have been void of the valuable context of history and literature, and thereby to prevalent misunderstandings of historical contexts and narratives. We are increasingly detached from history, yet more and more influenced by hegemonic forces that have emerged as a result of the past. Thus, we are also increasingly incapable of understanding our present and of imagining alternative futures. Our subjective selves get enmeshed in this seemingly unmalleable plastic spectacle—even the desires we sometimes label as progressive are somehow caught up deep in this mess, even after getting an education at one of the premier universities in the world.
Kat arrived. We hung out for a bit and caught up on each other’s lives. I didn’t end up working much, obviously, much like the last time this happened. Found an exhibit that instantly reminded me of T. It’s funny and cute and weird. I think we might go check it out next week!
March 23
history’s fractured self
History and literature immediately provide useful context when confronting lackluster statistics. Due to the very nature of statistics, with how complex interactions and dynamics are often reduced to computable numerical representations, vital information can be lost.
If you ask the question “how many people are in the middle class in India,” you could get any answer ranging from 125 million to 300 million people. This discrepancy is large enough to suggest that the stats are operating on different definitions of the middle class—the middle class is a notoriously malleable concept. If you’re only handed any one of these statistics, perhaps it would seem correct given the operating definition of the middle class. However, what’s lost in the single statistic is this very discrepancy in the conception of the middle class, a discrepancy that can never be resolved from within statistics (for example with more samples or averages), but must take help from analysis outside. What statistics can never explain is the reasons behind such choices and assumptions being made to compute those statistics, perhaps one of the most critical parts of any analysis.
Statistics is also a discipline that is (reductively speaking) set up to analyze everything with respect to some central tendency. It is a science of expected outcomes. As such, it is very good at identifying outliers in any given system, however, does little to explain the behavior of the outliers—for this, one often needs a qualitative analysis of the system and the outliers. A single statistical measure will often fail at painting the whole picture of an intricate process—it just cannot carry this much information.
A statistics enthusiast1 (or perhaps a classical economist) might walk up to you and claim that the Indian economy is booming due to its steady GDP growth rate. A spectacular marvel of statistical economics—the metric of GDP or Gross Domestic Product, to my surprise, is ubiquitously used to measure the economic standing of a nation. Its apparent legitimacy within a use case is even taken for granted most times. In this case, as convincing as the argument may initially sound, a malicious truth is covered up by this simple metric.
The information that gets lost in the GPD growth rate is that this growth in the Indian economy has been limited only to the services and heavy industry sectors, in a country where most of the population is still reliant on the low-paying light industry and agricultural sectors of the economy, which continue their downfall since the very establishment of India as an independent nation-state. In such a condition, perhaps citing the GDP growth rate as a sign of the health of an economy is equivalent to admitting allegiance to the privileged minority that is currently benefiting (or not-yet-suffering) from the economic organization.
A loss of touch with history and increased reliance on the sciences and technology can contribute to reinforcing the spectacle that capital creates. The choice of the word spectacle should probably be clearer now with the examples of the GDP metric, the construction of the middle class, or the endless production of images to recreate this spectacle. I think what sets this in stone for me, the example that I think best justifies this word choice, is the concept of the country, the nation-state, and mechanisms that reinforce these ideas under late capitalism.
To me the idea of the nation-state is inherently linked to the imperial/colonial ideas of property—the borders of a country are akin to signifiers of the private property of a nation or colony in the context of foreign affairs, rivers, forests, resources, and subjects on which the state can exercise complete control. As nation-states are established, the spectacle holds up their false narratives, reinforcing the presence of nation-states as an unchangeable prescribed necessity, rather than as a changeable construct that has emerged out of history.
The case of Kashmir and the popular narratives that exist around it simply illustrate this. Though the Indian subcontinent has a complex history pre-partition, that makes it hard to draw any meaningful borders around nations, the borders of Kashmir as they exist now are a result primarily of the partition of 1947, followed by a few wars in contention of the Kashmiri territory. Now, like the subcontinent previously, Kashmir has been split into two parts—one controlled by India, the other by Pakistan. Unsurprisingly enough, both sides lay claim to Kashmir as their own, each calling the part they control “free” and the other “occupied” territory.
There has been little progress that has been made on the Kashmir issue. It seems to only keep getting worse. The only solutions to this problem largely discussed in media and mass culture, clashing as they may be—clashing enough to cause a few wars, all rest on the assumption of nation-states as a solution. Whether the slogans cry ask to hand Kashmir to India, to hand Kashmir to Pakistan, or to let Kashmir be “independent” what they have in common is the idea that a nation-state grants some sort of sovereignty to the people. In as much as a nation-state of ones own is better than a colony, the nation-state itself, as it exists right now is a colonial construct. The creation of this illusion—this spectacle of the reality of these nation-states—requires an organized productive effort. This identity of the nation is reinforced through nationalist media, the faux allegiances of sports, and elaborate demonstrations like the one at the Wagah Border.
Not only do these proposed solutions presume the nation-states, their historical understanding, as a consequence of being caught up in this spectacle, often begins with the establishment of the Indian or Pakistani nation-states, failing to extend further. This biased sense of history that exists in dominant cultural narratives fails to even examine the issue well enough to propose a viable solution, instead it also fuels antagonism between the states. The partition as an event, therefore, not only severs the whole sub-continent from a past that extends beyond the event of partition, but it also functionally installs a new value system in the image of the colonial powers that created these borders.
Indeed, this observation concurs with the work of Vinay Lal on the conception of “India” that exists in popular sentiment. Though once, before partition, the word was used to refer to the concept of India as a civilization (unified multiplicities; one civilization where many cultures could coexist), we have started moving into the age where India (and Pakistan) has actualized itself as a nation-state (divided unity; two states where one national identity is enforced). Our historic selves become fractured.
The enforcement of national boundaries feels somewhat like alienation, from the Marxist dictionary. While alienation acts to reinforce the subjectivity of the individual-self, nation-states limit subjectivity in accordance with the nation-self, both often acting in opposition to any sense of collective-self, a sense of self that could be realized through historicity of thought.
Shayari night! Khan picked me up and we made our way to Flatbush.
The stars played a funny game with us—Ramadzan and Navratri coincided! I am an atheist, I wasn’t fasting, but it was really beautiful to see all my Hindu and Muslim, and other non-believing friends who were fasting break their fasts together, especially in light of what I’m writing about. It reminds me that there is a way out of the spectacle, a way to see beyond it, one that functions on the values of love and community. As a matter of tradition, we discussed Sufi poetry on our first session during Ramadzan—this time, it was the iconic queer Punjabi poet Bulleh Shah.
The weather was remarkable on my way home. There was a hint of moisture in the cold air that gives it the scent of rain without the hassle of it. I had to get home fast and was almost an hour away on foot, but I swear I could’ve spent that hour walking home in the silence that night.
March 24
colonization and dehistoricity
In many ways, the colonial project severed the ties of a whole people with their history. To retrain/re-educate whole groups of people, across the world, indigenous languages, cultures, and traditions were trampled. New laws, new languages, and ways of being were imposed on these people through various processes of cultural genocide, from the seemingly harmless control of language to the heinous genocidal rape during the Bangladesh liberation war (again, arguably, the nation-state system only continues the colonial project).
It can be said, then, that Postmodernism or Capitalist Realism are not just cultural characteristics of late-capitalism in a post-colonial world, but rather, they show very much how colonial relations are still present in late-capitalism even after explicit colonization seems to no longer exist. These are symptoms of the peak power of colonialism—as colonies disappear, the colonial logic—the colonial codes of Capital, consumption, and conquest become universalized.
Kat left in the morning. I finished as much work as I could. Hung out with Rach in the evening, and she told me a story about her ex. I don’t wanna assume they’re a monolith, but also, jeez straight-people-problems lol. Came back home and watched some of Raees. It was..kinda boring. Started reading Manto in Urdu at night. Manto is beautiful, and reminisces the idea of a lost India, continuing in the tradition of the lost lover. Kat would’ve said Manto is longing for a non-sovereignty. Sent Khan some poems for monsoons.io.
March 25
post-colonial historicity
To trace ourselves to the pre-colonial origin can be a slippery slope, though. A part of the reason is that most of history operated under the power of hegemonic structures akin to colonizers, so there’s no rosy past that stands behind the colonies—and this is something that is often missed by those nationalists that attempt to take this route. However, aspects of the past such as culture, queerness, and language, can be used as a force to actively oppose the ramifications of the colonial project. It is important to remember that no de-colonial goal can be pre-colonial. The construct of the nation-state is insufficient for this, as it hinges on a false-historical idea of a nation (nation) and uses it to impose a false unity on the subjects (state), contributing not to the affirmation of differences, but to its erasure.
The better de-colonial goal, therefore, is not a goal for an imagined past, but for a constructed post-colonial future, one that does not hinge on colonial assumptions such as that of the nation-state or capitalist accumulation.
Another example of this sort of “assumption” happens in the case of advocacy for gay marriage—though this is a law that seemingly must be enacted to provide the queer community with (i) the ability to get married (ii) the benefits that come with it, such a movement often stops with this goal being met. It fails to question the institution of marriage entirely, and it fails also to challenge the legal limitations placed on certain civic benefits for unmarried individuals but merely manages to assimilate into the existing oppressive institutions—this is what Fisher meant when he said that “Capital is…
a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact.
Instead of erasing differences like in the colonial project, or assimilation in the neo-liberal era, instead of providing a new universalism like the communism of the USSR, the de-colonial goal should try to build upon the affirmation of differences, and as Deleuze and Guattari often suggest, with a critical reading of history and a close reading of the minor literatures.
The nation of the nation-state refers to a sense of shared identity or historicity of a populace. To reuse Vinay Lal’s distinction of civilization and nation-state—If, after 1947, instead of India/Pakistan as a nation-states, if India as a civilization was maintained, without the Radcliffe line that cuts across the chest of the sub-continent, perhaps the narrative underlying our shared national identity would be one of freedom and cultural multiplicity and not one of partition and hegemonic unity. What a beautiful daydream this seems to me.
Spent the afternoon reading Manto. I’m still quite slow at reading Urdu, so it routinely takes a couple of days to get through a single short story. Ordered barbecue for lunch! In the evening, I revived my iPad so I could organize my language learning notes better. Now I have folders for each language and tagged notes!
I initially wrote “a statistician,” but I think that label should require a deep understanding of these very flaws and failures of statistics, so I changed it.
Love this love you