Cyberpunk, Devoid of all Punk
Cyberpunk, the science fiction sub-genre proclaimed by Frederic Jameson as the supreme literary expression of the postmodern (Jameson, 1991) has come to occupy a dominant foothold in the aesthetics of contemporary pop culture. In cyberpunk, the future came crashing into the present and was presented with all of its decadent decrepitude and corporate domination. In William Gibson's Neuromancer, one need hardly perform any imaginative feat at all to see the futuristic orbiting space colony introduced later in the novel as a contemporary mall - a long irrelevant shrine to mass consumerism. Are we in outer space, or simply Dubai? And now the present moment goes back to cyberpunk, to the 80s and 90s, for its vision of the future1. The future, not content with colonising the present, has continued and gone on to colonise the past. There is no escape from its retrograde motion, no recourse from our anterograde amnesia, no release from the chokehold of postmodernity.
The "freshly" revived cyberpunk genre, now reanimated purely as an aesthetic, stripped of all context and cultural meaning, to be worn like a fashion among all the other detached, floating symbols of the past that characterise the postmodern, is only the crest of a wave that sees the exhumation of humanity's final decades - the 80s and the 90s. Final, because while postmodernity was in full swing at those times, it could still be felt as a trajectory among a modern current, characterised as a cultural dominant, but still distinguishable as such. Final, because after that time, the postmodern became absolute. Final, because with the ascendancy of the Internet, the last vestigial limbs of culture that had been rooted in the resistance of reality, became virtualized2. It has been noted by some observers that while the reanimated corpses of past decades, paraded out and dressed up as if new, have been brought forward before, dating back perhaps to the 70s exhumation of the 50s with George Lucas' American Graffiti and the introduction of la mode rétro3, that this wave is likely to be the last. The last for practical reasons, because after the dominance of the Internet, all of past culture became available at a click so that the very notion of a mass culture as distinct from recombinations of prior mass culture evaporated. With no mass culture to mine, no identity to assign to the decades following the 90s, the cultural regurgitation is at an impasse. To proceed beyond this point is to diverge into tangential subcultures whose cultural resonance is necessarily limited; tangents where the assurance of mass appeal is no more.
The Postmodern President
Trump is in many respects the postmodern follow-up to Ronald Reagan, himself emblematic of the then apex of postmodernity, a hyperreal president who was all image. For Trump the image has turned inward: it has colonised and completely effaced the subject. Trump obsessively watches television and makes no bones or pretences about his preoccupation with the public perception and portrayal of him in the media4. Trump watches the news not to discover how people are impacted by his policies, but to see how they feel about him. While Reagan was a television actor of sorts prior to his presidential career, Trump followed an even more fully postmodern trajectory: a fake businessman who parlayed his false success into a brand name and then traded on that brand to become a false television "personality" - a reality-TV star playing the role of successful businessman.
In a world of images the appearance substitutes for the reality, so that the image of Trump sitting behind or atop a desk in a studio made to look like an executive suite becomes the currency upon which rests the "proof" of his business acumen. Trump is the perfect product of postmodernity, a chaser and purveyor of images who makes banal all that he touches. He requires constantly to be plugged into the system - there is little sense in even distinguishing between him and the system itself - in order to await its instructions for him to impulsively react to. Recognising that it is not even the images themselves that matter, but what is agreed to be understood about them, Trump does not even offer the weakest attempt at continuity with past images. Trump's inaugural turnout was "the biggest ever" and by leaving the photographic proof that this was in fact not the case, he has let everyone else in on the secret: appearances don't matter, or, if you prefer, the images lie. It is little wonder then that Trump has singled out his greatest enemy as the image makers - the media.
In questioning his own legacy, Barack Obama has been quoted as saying that he was not sure if he was ten years or twenty years too early (Packer, 2018). The truth is far stranger, Obama was not too early, he was in fact far too late. Exuding all the dignified aura of an erudite professor, Obama conducted himself with a composed, measured, and thoughtful demeanor of which the United States is completely undeserving. Arriving at a time when it seemed the liberal subject had almost been completely effaced, the last hangers-on sullen and quiet, there he was, implausibly, incarnated in flesh, fulfilling a non-existent prophecy of biblical proportions - the liberal subject lived! And he was... black. What Obama said only made sense in the context of a still living liberal subject, in a populace of thinking and reasoning subjectivities. But rather than mending the past and reconstituting the fragments of the broken collective memory, Obama's presence served only to - as all messianic figures are wont - precipitate further schism. His blackness brought to the fore the irreconcilability of his message of universality and the ugly reality of difference evidenced by the past four decades of inter-American antagonism. Faced with the prospect of a returning subject, but one of increasing inclusiveness, the American heartland erupted into spasmatic seizures of putrescent revolt and looked frantically for a way out. Trump offered the off-ramp they were looking for: a tearing up of images, a complete rejection of all that those pesky ideals had come to mean and an assertion of the barest, blankest, emptiest ideology: power belongs to the powerful.
Hollow Brands
In a social construct that insists on stripping everything of its meaning, of hoisting things up by their images and calling that substance, it is inevitable that those images too will come to be meaningless. When social currency hinges purely on images, those images become meaningless, fleeting, and arbitrary. This is exemplified by Supreme, a brand whose stores command long lines during the short intervals that they are open so that lobotomised consumers can pay exorbitant prices for ordinary attire with a gaudy and hastily designed logo emblazoned across them. Not only does it not matter whether Supreme clothing is of a markedly superior quality, it need not even look as though it is quality; the signifiers of value are to be discarded and laughed upon - only "chums" are still playing that game. It is an attitude that is embodied by Kayne West's white t-shirt. No wonder Kayne sees something in Trump, he recognises someone else who "gets it": nothing matters, not the substance, and not even the images, it's about asserting a set of relations until they become twisted into truth.
The phrase 'brand identity' is scarcely comprehensible anymore, brand having come to supplement and then almost entirely replace the notion of identity in an influencer culture that necessitates so much time managing one's images that apart from the social media fictions we weave there is hardly any substance remaining. And who do social media influencers try to influence? Individuals? Potential customers? No, simply the culture. The culture is the subject in a society that has effaced subjects.
What Do You Mean 'Peak'?
But how are all these manifestations of the postmodern, held up as extreme examples of a now long-running trajectory emblematic and deserving of a designation such as 'peak'? Isn't this simply the natural progression of a system of detached signs, of a relentless "changeless change" that must continuously escalate and reinvent itself? In many ways yes. The allusion to 'peak oil' is done for just this reason, as any declaration of 'peak' is sure to be proven wrong as the postmodern marches on, defining yet a new peak. Yet in a crucial respect, things are different. Times... they are a' changin'. It is peak postmodernity because for the first time since the dawn of neoliberal darkness there is the possibility of a glimpse of the outside. Peak because we can hear and feel the pangs of a still disorganised yet growing disenchantment, a reverberating pounding against the heavy steel barricades of There Is No Alternative. This is not a true peak, the postmodern will barrel ahead, and there will be many early efforts to take hold of the reigns of history that will stall and falter. But now there is a building momentum in the drive to invent, to envision, to effect change.
Footnotes
1 The retro-futuristic aesthetic of the 80s and 90s that has become the inspirational well for Synth-wave, Retro-wave, and Vapour-wave musical subgenres and more mainstream cultural products such as 2017's Thor: Ragnarok is of course not used unironically. That these are not genuine visions of the future serves to reinforce the lack of belief in any kind of future.↩
2 Agent Smith's claim in the 1999 classic The Matrix has proved prophetic when applied to culture: in the film Smith says that the early twenty-first century marked the peak of human civilization as afterwards it became the civilization of machines, and indeed as our culture has become virtualized we have lost the sense of narrative that is characteristically human.↩
3 La mode rétro, or the nostalgia film is for Jameson characterised by the conveyance of "pastness" by image; the attributes of fashion, rather than by a representation of the past. It sees History as an aesthetic toy to play with (Jameson, 1991).↩
4 He does so in a characteristically Trump fashion, using a "Super-TiVo" that is supposed to be exclusive to him, either because he is the president or because he is Trump. Of course, this is just another lie of which it is tiresome to keep track of, as he uses a plain DirecTV (Patel, 2018).↩
References
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Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Nagle, A. (2017) Kill All Normies: The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-Right and Trump. Winchester: Zero Books.
Packer, G. (2018) Witnessing the Obama Presidency, From Start to Finish. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/06/18/witnessing-the-obama-presidency-from-start-to-finish (Accessed: 12 February 2019)
Patel, N. (2018) Does Trump have a 'state-of-the-art Super TiVo' or just regular ol' DirecTV? Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/15/17979502/trump-super-tivo-directv-state-of-the-art (Accessed: 12 February 2019)
Roderick, R.
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