On Other Dystopias

It seems like every day I get on the subway, or go to the movies, I see a promo for some new dystopian film. And what, really, could be duller at this point. The plucky band of teenage heroes, the cruel overlord, the pleas to human freedom that every political group from far left to far right will find sympathy in.

This isn't to denigrate the “dystopia” as an artistic trope. It has its place – in some fine novels, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things, and in some fine films, Brazil, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Mad Max: Fury Road and the like. But it has gotten so overplayed, so transformed into the most banal of cultural artifacts that the mere mention of a dystopia automatically triggers my bullshit radar. Compare David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas – a monumental story of the invisible threads running through history – to the godawful film version by the Wachowskis, which feels like it was written by a 15 year old that just discovered Buddhism.

Of course, the notion of the dystopia, particularly in its cyberpunk forms, has been an essential component of literary and cultural theory since its 1980s heyday, especially in how these cyberpunk fictions reflect themselves in our reality, often to the point of absurdity – Giorgio Agamben's claim in Homo Sacer that modern life was indistinguishable from Auschwitz is perhaps the most offensively bourgeois notion I could imagine, and pretty much anything written by Jean Baudrillard comes off as borderline parody today. Sure, we don't have flying cars or AI romantic partners, but in other respects – Snowden, Bezos, facial recognition software – we are living in a world that would be familiar to Philip K. Dick or William Gibson.

By the 1990s, with books like Mike Davis' City of Quartz or Edward Soja's magisterial Postmetropolis, Los Angeles was being called the postmodern, cyberpunk city par excellence – after all, this is the city whose economic fortunes are inextricably entwined with the image industry, a city without center that arose in the high-capitalist age, and the place where Rick Deckard and Roy Batty had their final showdown in the rain.

But recently, attentions have turned more towards East Asia, perhaps best articulated by Ian Buruma in his essay “AsiaWorld.” Particularly, the monster cities of China, for which the prototype is Shenzhen (population, 1980: 30,000, population, 2017: 12.5 million, well-known as the place where all your shit comes from).

And it's hard not to accept this notion – walk down Nathan Road in Kowloon on a rainy night, and tell me you don't feel like chasing a replicant or two – but I question the singularity of this vision. When I look at the great cities of East Asia, while I do see a pattern, even if it takes on myriad forms, all of them distinct, all still shaped by their own localities.

The first thing you might think of is the cartoon-scape of Tokyo, especially as it is in movies like Akira and Enter the Void. This is the world of postmodernity at its shiniest and most superficial level, the geospatial equivalent of cotton candy. This is a city of English text overlaid on ancient katakana and hiragana, themselves overlaid on even more ancient kanji, a snow crash of signifiers, bright neon signs, oddball fragments of traditional East Asian architecture, sex for sale, particularly in its most commodified and fetishistic form.

Or you could draw your attentions to Hong Kong, the interzone that is neither Chinese nor Western, postcolonial but not national, with its looming high rises (more than three times as many buildings over 100 meters tall as New York), its migrant workers living in warren-like housing on the Kowloon side and in the New Territories, its role as a vital artery in the system of global finance and banking, and in the dingy hallways of Chungking Mansions, where backpacker guesthouses, bootleg watches, and its Nepali and Nigerian vendors hustling every manner of goods you could imagine.

 

For a darker perspective, you could look at Phnom Penh, a city of wage slaves working to produce the goods that even China wants to outsource, still suffering under the collective post-traumatic stress disorder in the wake of the Khmer Rouge, with its capitalists completely indistinguishable from its politicians, its firm-handed authoritarian rule firmly in the hand of global capital and its local compradors, its cheap hookers, its armies of begging gangs and ragpickers.

But perhaps it is Singapore that most reflects the cinematic vision, at least, of the cyberpunk city. It is the place that no less an authority than William Gibson called “Disneyland with the death penalty, ” and it should be remembered that Germany's current chief philosophe and noted mustachioed crank Peter Sloterdijk said that if statues of any political leader of our time will be put up, it will be Lee Kuan Yew. The reportage of the marriage of Confucian and Victorian rigidity is nothing new – people have been doing it for 30 years – but as authoritarian capitalism seems to spread over the world like a dark pall, it seems like too many of us in the rest of the developed world have accepted the Singaporean worldview part and parcel. The prioritization of the image of the city over the content, the embrace of the security state, the reduction of politics to ritual, the reliance on massive pools of cheap labor while keeping that cheap labor invisible and damn near stateless, its superficial claims to the multicultural masking a profoundly regressive racial dynamic. 

 

Tokyo, Hong Kong, Phnom Penh, and Singapore, each of them expressing different modalities of the global city as it occurs in the early years of the 21^st Century. And yet two of these – Tokyo and Hong Kong – are cities I utterly adore, despite some of the underlying horror. Repeat for Bangkok, Seoul, Fukuoka, Penang. It reminds me of that beautiful bit from Baudelaire's Paris Spleen:

“In the evening, a bit tired, we wanted to sit down in front of a new café that formed the corner of a new boulevard, still strewn with debris and already gloriously displaying its unfinished splendors. The café was sparkling. The gaslight itself sent forth all the ardor of a debut and lit with all its force walls blinding in their whiteness, dazzling sheets of mirrors, the gold of the rods and cornices, chubby-cheeked page-boys being dragged by dogs on leashes, laughing ladies with falcons perched on their wrist, nymphs and goddesses carrying on their heads fruits, pies, and poultry, Hebes and Ganymedes presenting in out-stretched arms little amphoras filled with Bavarian cream or bi-colored obelisks of ice cream – all of history and all of mythology at the service of gluttony.”

So, as in Baudelaire's Paris, I take the position of the flaneur, the wanderer, making some attempt to process what I see, to correlate.

Which brings me around to film representations. What could be duller and more simplistic than the current cinematic representation of grim futures. What does it say about us that we would rather consume fictional dystopias, and express ourselves vicariously through fictional revolutionaries than actually taking any kind of stance in a moment of rising authoritarianism? Or postulating a “rebel” stance by flogging conspiracy theories, faux-leftist stances that Karl Marx would shake his head at if he were alive today, or any of the many moronic flavors of adolescent edginess on social media. Or perhaps even more horrifyingly, presuming that the more populist flavors of that said authoritarianism are in some way superior to the more universalized, neoliberal versions, and throwing our lot in with Putin, Erdogan, Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Shinzo Abe, Duterte, or any of the other absolute cocksuckers whose supporters think they're sticking it to the man?

And so instead, I look to the city around me. The Burmese graffiti and the stubbed-out green cheroot at the construction site on the corner tell me far more about the world around us than anything in Hollywood ever could.