The future of the future - Alan Moore and the challenge of reimagining culture
Alan Moore has described the current trend of superhero films as a "tsunami" that is "not doing our culture any good at all", "power fantasies" that "refuse to take responsibility" for the current and future world. He also uses the, now very trendy, word "infantilization". When an old man tells other people to "grow up", when they are cranky about someone having fun with comics, superheroes, science fiction and toys, of course it sound like he's just missed to go with the times himself. Eco has labeled this tendency to refuse anything new as "apocalyptic" and Debray has identified is as a form of gatekeeping the cannon, practiced since the very moment when Socrates refuses to use the new medium of writing.
Moore, however, does not fit the profile of the apocalyptic. He is rather fond of counterculture and is known first and foremost for his own work on superhero comics. His critique of the genre therefore cannot be based on its inherent characteristics, or on the clichés used by the dominant culture of ignorance that labels itself as "mature". "Infantilization" is a wrong label, as most trendy labels tend to be. Although I am no expert myself, I believe that the problem is real, but relies somewhere different.
Decades before, Moore described an intricate politic-economic strategy through his character Veidt "the smartest man on earth". Veidt's brand of cosmetics is designed specifically to appeal in the times of hopelessness, to be desirable in the shadow of the atom bomb. And by no coincidence, it is called "Nostalgia". The longing for an idealized past is intense when the future becomes impossible to comprehend.
Disney and Netflix have built a much wider cultural industry on the capitalization of nostalgia. They control every second blockbuster and construct it as a piece of rehash, not only out of laziness, but because it knows that the imagining something new would cost a comodified audience more effort than ever. Thus, established communities try to reaffirm the identities they have built so far instead of considering new possibilities, even closing on any too creative variations on the fanboy canon. The problem, therefore, relies in the exact opposite end of infantility: Even youths are not open to experiment new things, but bound by the cult of what they literally call canon. Nostalgia is not an infantile, but a senile culture.
Where do I stand, then, immersed in the trends of uchronia and retrofuturism. These ideas sure do reduce the concept of future to a matter of the past and remove themselves from actually imagining a progression into further possibilities. Future is a trope, not a work in progress. I justify this by calling it postmodern, by claiming that alternative forms of time need to be explored and, in particular, by calling for a revision of how History has been told by the powers that be. These are all as true as they are questionable.
A sidenote on the chart attached: I consider its divisions quite silly, trying to build an entire genre on the slightest innovation, a distinct aesthetics out of each single decade. What all these "different" forms have in common, however, is quite telling. They are linked to specific dates of the past and determined by something that already happened. Is this what "punk" means nowadays, is all that is left of rebellion the adherence to a fixed memory?
A couple of weeks ago, a friend asked me why all futures imagined nowadays are grim. Of course, this was a hard question for me to even grasp, since everything about me is always grim. It was clear that she didn't mean the fancy and ironic retro-futures either. Back in the days, during the cold war even, it was still popular to believe in utopia. In the recent years, however, every hope has faded away. Moore relates it to the internet, which has left society startled and in a dynamic of repetition. One might as well blame the cynicism of a broken capitalist system which cannot think outside itself, or the failure of the communist revolution - they have failed us both. Capitalism, in its situation, tells us we'll have to keep going with the same dysfunctions, degrading bit by bit but never reaching a limit; the left would have us believe a change is still possible, a change that breaks the system and, maybe this time, will take us to a promised land, or at least not be a total mess. Maybe what we need to realize is that we cannot keep promising ourselves the same thing, that the choice is not between an old, nostalgic future and no future, that we need to update and reimagine what we truly want.
Moore, however, does not fit the profile of the apocalyptic. He is rather fond of counterculture and is known first and foremost for his own work on superhero comics. His critique of the genre therefore cannot be based on its inherent characteristics, or on the clichés used by the dominant culture of ignorance that labels itself as "mature". "Infantilization" is a wrong label, as most trendy labels tend to be. Although I am no expert myself, I believe that the problem is real, but relies somewhere different.
Decades before, Moore described an intricate politic-economic strategy through his character Veidt "the smartest man on earth". Veidt's brand of cosmetics is designed specifically to appeal in the times of hopelessness, to be desirable in the shadow of the atom bomb. And by no coincidence, it is called "Nostalgia". The longing for an idealized past is intense when the future becomes impossible to comprehend.Disney and Netflix have built a much wider cultural industry on the capitalization of nostalgia. They control every second blockbuster and construct it as a piece of rehash, not only out of laziness, but because it knows that the imagining something new would cost a comodified audience more effort than ever. Thus, established communities try to reaffirm the identities they have built so far instead of considering new possibilities, even closing on any too creative variations on the fanboy canon. The problem, therefore, relies in the exact opposite end of infantility: Even youths are not open to experiment new things, but bound by the cult of what they literally call canon. Nostalgia is not an infantile, but a senile culture.
Where do I stand, then, immersed in the trends of uchronia and retrofuturism. These ideas sure do reduce the concept of future to a matter of the past and remove themselves from actually imagining a progression into further possibilities. Future is a trope, not a work in progress. I justify this by calling it postmodern, by claiming that alternative forms of time need to be explored and, in particular, by calling for a revision of how History has been told by the powers that be. These are all as true as they are questionable.A sidenote on the chart attached: I consider its divisions quite silly, trying to build an entire genre on the slightest innovation, a distinct aesthetics out of each single decade. What all these "different" forms have in common, however, is quite telling. They are linked to specific dates of the past and determined by something that already happened. Is this what "punk" means nowadays, is all that is left of rebellion the adherence to a fixed memory?
A couple of weeks ago, a friend asked me why all futures imagined nowadays are grim. Of course, this was a hard question for me to even grasp, since everything about me is always grim. It was clear that she didn't mean the fancy and ironic retro-futures either. Back in the days, during the cold war even, it was still popular to believe in utopia. In the recent years, however, every hope has faded away. Moore relates it to the internet, which has left society startled and in a dynamic of repetition. One might as well blame the cynicism of a broken capitalist system which cannot think outside itself, or the failure of the communist revolution - they have failed us both. Capitalism, in its situation, tells us we'll have to keep going with the same dysfunctions, degrading bit by bit but never reaching a limit; the left would have us believe a change is still possible, a change that breaks the system and, maybe this time, will take us to a promised land, or at least not be a total mess. Maybe what we need to realize is that we cannot keep promising ourselves the same thing, that the choice is not between an old, nostalgic future and no future, that we need to update and reimagine what we truly want.
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