The Mysticism of Retrofuturism: Undead Futures & Animatronics

Or, thoughts on the emotional and psychic logic of retrofuturism.

The late anti-capitalist cultural theorist, and veritable anti-hero Mark Fisher was disturbed by what he saw as Western culture’s waning capacity to imagine the future. Fisher came of age immersed in the creative subcultures of punk and post-punk music scenes in the 70’s and 80’s, and was also influenced by the imaginative work of hacker culture and the cyberpunk aesthetic that provided critical expositions on the spread of personal computing.

As the new millennium dawned, Fisher was increasingly troubled by what he witnessed as a pervasive trend of nostalgia—or an obsession with the ‘retro’—in popular culture. From pop music to blockbuster science fiction, he saw old visions of the future simply being remade or ‘upgraded’, but not fundamentally changing or producing inspiring and subversive narratives with a diversity of futures. Fisher worried about what this portended for political imagination & the culture’s ability to imagine alternative futures.

We lost him to suicide a few years ago, rest in power. Some sort of inflection point happened then. Because that's when I lost the most friends to suicide, in a very short few years, many of them queer visionary types. Fisher also wrote about depression and mental health, saying that it was an under-represented cause in his fields (critical theory) and corners of marxist politics. There are precious few people in academia who talk about their own depression. Hell, there are precious few thought leaders who talk about their own depression or struggles, too often it happens after some sort of public conflict or 'call out.' One of the only other ones I know of is the queer literary scholar Ann Czetcovich in her book "Depression: A Public Feeling,' which is excellent and totally third-university/heretical.

I like Fisher’s diagnosis of *mainstream Euro-centric* Western culture as experiencing a crisis of imagination (keyword; mainstream & euro centric -- did the comrade read Octavia Butler or get off the internet now and then to play a good tabletop fantasy RPG or two?) But I don’t completely agree that retro aesthetics are simply a symptom of that crisis and 'nothing more'. Fisher did hold a level of jadedness that ultimately was tragic and seemed to be intertwined with some sort of rejection he experienced from various parts of leftist culture. And there is something oddly prophetic about Fisher's jadedness, though interpersonally unpleasant, it seems like the canary in the coal mine of an inevitable fate that many of us share in an era of eroding social trust and info-warfare. I see it in a lot of people who internally identify with the promise of queer & liberatory imaginaries, but may not feel welcome in what they see as an ideological Thunderdome. I do deeply relate to his despair and the world is worse off without him, whether or not he would have liked me in "real life."

I digress. For me, listening to music like synthwave which recaptures an 80s sonic aesthetic is part of my measuring of a past imaginary (or what Fisher might call a “lost future,”) against the present, not due to nostalgia chiefly (as he seemed to see and define it), but out of curiosity, too, out of ritual, even out of prayer. One could even call this a mystical practice. It’s a huge source of creativity for me.

Primarily due to the advent of digital technology and the continued miniaturization of personal computing, we *do* live in a world that feels very different from the world of the 80s. Because the synthesizer music of the 80s was so much about evoking and creating hymns to a science-fictional future, listening to it during the decades since helps expose for me both the ways that some aspects of these futures have come to pass, while others have not, or may still lie on another horizon. Funny, a charge of nostalgia leveled by Fisher, a gen X-er who seemed to experience his own fair share of nostalgia (which included him lamenting how the word "queer" used to be more "punk" and had since lost its magic and meaning). I mean fuck, Gen Xers have a lot to be nostalgic about. They basically witnessed neoliberalism fail in an epic arc. But from a therapeutic/trauma perspective, how is pushing aside nostalgia and saying it is intellectually useless helping anything?

So it [retrofuturism] is not totally melancholic for me and it does not make sense for me to call it personal nostalgia since I was a toddler in the 80s, and did not therefore possess political agency. However, it could make sense to say that it’s a way of tapping into a collective nostalgia and investigating the memory of hope and anticipation of otherness that seems to be emotionally embedded in this music. From a psychotherapeutic perspective (zoomed out from the nuclear family level to the eco level) it seems extremely fair to track these dynamics into which I was born.

To me there is something that retrofuturist aesthetics evokes right now that has to do with the splintering of time and futures. That has picked up pace now, in the years since Mark passed. It could certainly evoke melancholy. But for me it evokes relief, like an infection being lanced and drained. *shrug* Because for better or worse, time IS kinda a construct and mutual agreement and with how diverse humans are, 'futures' are legion, too. Sure, it's messy, but it's more real than a monocrop garden of imagination being tended by fossil fuels, cheap labor, and machines.

The fantastical, cyborg otherness anticipated in 80s synth culture did come to pass in many ways for me personally in the interim, as I went from a 12-year old computer junkie fascinated by the mysticism of the cursor and command line to a genderweird adult immersing myself into the world of natural science and place-based skills. In fact, the latter realm is no less “cybernetic” than the former. As others have pointed out, The original meaning of the word “cybernetics” refers to the mechanisms of energy flow and feedback through systems—which could be living or not, artificial or not.

To me, it’s a story that in some ways inverts the eschatological cyberpunk dream/nightmare of moving further into the machine (I contend it was variously a dream or a nightmare depending on one’s social location and capacity to be subjected), yet it does not invalidate or take away any of the transformative power of this story. My own experience, lived against the backdrop of the precise (yet emotionally vague) sound of the synthetic, provides a mythic entry point into my future, my ability to co-create worlds.

There is a queer / weird sort of hope still in this music for me, because my peers and I—the ones who connect with the virtual and the digital as well as with with dirt and magic—are living proof that even when imagination of the future seems colonized or overtaken by one story, it can still turn out differently.

I also wonder about cyberpunk imagination’s connection to animism. Was not the 80s, after all, also the heyday of animatronics—were we all not enchanted by Labyrinth and the Dark Crystal? The robotic puppets in these films had an appeal to the senses that has never been recaptured by CGI. The worlds they helped build were alive and animated in a way that for me, must have sparked an incipient curiosity about animism itself, despite the fact that I grew up in a version of society where animism had been suppressed through various processes of empire.

Deus ex machina, indeed.