Where is the Post-Soviet in the “Post” of Post-Colonial? - Anna Englehart
Where in the frictions of post-colonial identity lies post-Soviet space? Can post-colonial and decolonial approaches help to account for histories of Russian colonialism and futures of its decolonisation?
Excerpt from the article originally published in Strelka Mag, New Urban Conditions
Post-colonial theory and Russia have existed for a long time as two almost parallel universes. Even though there were researchers in the post-Soviet space who were tackling post-colonial problematics—Ihar Babkov, a post-colonial scholar from Belarus, and Oksana Zabuzhko, a Ukrainian feminist writer, to name a few—Russian academia was successfully rejecting the mere possibility of questioning the status quo. Marko Pavlyshyn, a rare example of the earliest attempts (1992) of a Ukrainian-Australian scholar to start the conversation, was “ignored or ridiculed by the overwhelming majority” of researchers both from Russia and the West, according to Ukrainian post-colonial scholar Vitaly Chernetsky. If post-colonial work originating in the post-Soviet space could be silenced easily, post-colonial theory coming from the West was too trendy to be totally disregarded. In his article “On Some Post-Soviet post-colonialisms” Chernetsky shows how in the 1990s Russian intellectuals conferred various euphemisms to central figures of post-colonial theory to disguise their connection to post-colonialism itself. One instance is how seminal post-colonial thinkers such as Edward Said, whose book Orientalism became the foundational text for post-colonial theory, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose Can the Subaltern Speak? is the opening text for any post-colonial reader, were presented in Russia. In 1998, philologist Ilya Ilyin described them as a “well-known literary scholar of a leftist-anarchist orientation” and a “socially engaged feminist deconstructionist,” respectively. Such “strategic appropriation of post-colonial discourse,” as Chernetsky put it in 2006, hasn’t been radically questioned since then.
It is important to note at the same time that to transpose post-colonial theory on post-Soviet space is not a solution of any kind. The conversation that was started by US scholar David Chioni Moore in 2001 with the key article “Is the Post- in Post-Colonial the Post- in Post-Soviet?” made very clear the impossibility of taking any shortcuts when it comes to the topic of decolonization in post-Soviet space. Moore, Spivak, Ram, Tlostanova, and Chernetsky formulate the continuity of the argument that warns against the direct substitution of “post” in “post-Soviet” by “post” in “post-colonial.” Post-colonial theory has almost nothing to say about the Second World—it was born in the struggle of the Second World against colonization by the First World—or in new-old terms, the Global South against the Global North.
Its analytical tools cannot be used as universally applicable, as they were not meant to be universal in the first place. Post-colonial studies perpetuated the exclusion of the Second World, navigating through three main “post-” subjects.
Madina Tlostanova, a notable decolonial scholar from the south of Russia, describes it like this in her 2011 article “The South of the Poor North”: The “post” in “post-modernism” signifies the First World, and the “post” in “post-colonialism” the Third World. Meanwhile, the Second World is left with the “post” in “post-communism.” What might be the place of post-communism in the colonial North-South divide?
Instead of viewing the North and the South as homogeneous spaces, Tlostanova proposes a new complexity in the division. She offers the notion of differences—colonial and imperial ones.
Colonial difference substitutes the conventional division between the North and the South—an example would be the British Empire and India, which has been thoroughly reviewed by post-colonial studies and its subaltern strand as one of the most influential subdivisions.
The imperial difference sheds light on the distinction between the roles that different empires play in colonial relations. The imperial difference can be internal—such as the division between the North and South of Europe—and external. The external imperial difference goes between the First World and Second World empires. Russia, being part of the Second World, has always been the outsider of the First World or the “rich North,” as Tlostanova puts it. “Russia has never been seen by Western Europe as its part, remaining a racialized empire, which feels itself a colony in the presence of the West and projects its own inferiority complexes onto its colonies, particularly Muslim ones, which today have become precisely the South of the poor North,” she writes.
Tlostanova provides a fundamentally different view on the way Russian colonialism functions. In The Darker Side of Modernity, Walter Mignolo—one of the core Latin American decolonial thinkers—speaks of coloniality as the dark side of Western modernity which is inseparable from the whole. Enriched by Tlostanova’s analysis that the South produced by the poor North has no direct connection to Western modernity—versus the South of the Rich North that is connected even against its own will—this thesis leads to a conclusion that the space colonized by Russia is even darker than the darker side portrayed by Mignolo.
Being considerate of imperial and colonial differences one must learn with, not from, post-colonial theory. Instead of using post-colonial theory as the only valid reference point, post-colonialism is productive as part of the more substantial project of decolonization that mindfully points towards imperial similarities. Tlostanova points out these similarities: even though the Russian/Soviet empire aimed to position itself as an independent alternative to the West’s modernization through the Bolshevik experiment, the Soviet model was inseparable from it. Therefore, a post-colonial critique of Western imperialism must be treated as a tradition on which we can act to produce our heterogenous reflections. Post-colonialism is a struggle that doesn’t have ready answers, but which might inspire how we can search for them.
One of the points from post-colonial theory that resonates with post-Soviet space questions the limits of the “post-Soviet” or “post-communist” itself. Arjun Appadurai, a post-colonial scholar of globalization, who is of Indian origin, outlines the West’s “endless preoccupation” with itself. Chernetsky adds to Appadurai’s statement: “whether positive or negative value judgments are attached,” meaning that Western scholars tend to either praise the West or criticize it, but never speak about other geographies and contexts—so the West will always remain the centre of attention. Looking at Soviet modernization and its consequences, we see a similar preoccupation.
“Many memoirs and accounts have been produced since the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, and mine wants simply to ask the question ‘where are we now, after 23 years?’” Agata Pyzik, a cultural critic from Poland, states in her 2014 book Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West. “If the Soviet Union 23 years into its existence wasn’t called post-tsarist, why are we still defined as “post-communist,” and why is it relevant? Did history take a slower pace, or was it finished, as Fukuyama said, after 1989?”
How can we call our ongoing future that starts with the decolonial resistance rather than monstrous regimes of state violence?
Getting Personal with Peggy Huang; and a conversation on “Proper Asian Wife in Training – Volume 1”
In conversation with Peggy Huang
1.Could you tell us a little about “Proper Asian wife in training - volume I”, which is part of the “Proper Asian wife in training (完美人妻養成計劃 ).” project?
Proper Asian wife in training is an experimental video piece I created in the summer of June 2020, it’s an exploration of my personal identity as a contemporary Taiwanese woman I pondered over questions like who am I? Who do I want to become? After living in London for 3 years, it really helped me push myself towards deciding who I wanted to be – to think and challenge myself in part of a self-healing process. I then came up with "Proper Asian wife in training”, it’s a coming-out piece as a 'rebel'. It was a challenge. I wanted to push my boundaries to see what I could produce that comes from a place of my duality. I wanted to embrace my cultural self and upbringing (Taiwanese traditional rules) also finding the balance between these rules and the more contemporary self (perhaps the more western influenced one).
2. In your experimental piece, you naturally drift into different conversational topics such as “self-love or nursing your body”, “your fathers dream” and “marrying a good guy” all of these are discussed whilst tattooing yourself, what is this meant to portray?
There’s this ancient Chinese saying that is still rooted in my culture: “身體髮膚受之父母，不敢毀傷，孝之始也” It translates to “your skin is given to you by your parents, so you should do everything you can to protect it, and not injure or wound it.” This is the starting point of being a good son/daughter, now if we apply this on the idea of tattooing... stabbing one’s skin with ink leaving ‘scars’, it’s a mega rebellious action to commit. However, acupuncture, also something super traditional, heals patients by inserting needles into skin. Tattoo and acupuncture both practice penetrating the skin with thin, solid, metallic needles but are being tagged with a complete opposite attitude. If linking the two together, tattooing can be a therapeutic practice too?
With tattoos, it’s never about which flash I ended up choosing, but more of trying to record that period of lifetime. It’s like listening to songs, certain songs that bring you back to specific times in the past. I felt that with tattoos. It’s quite awkward, to talk about my honest feelings to my parents, so then having new tattoos is really a ‘right in the face’ way to push new boundaries between me and my parents, a way to redefine who I am to them, and to ‘come-out’ in loud silence. Lowkey therapeutic… also, I just really enjoy having tattoos.
3. A re-occurring theme explored in the piece was familial expectations, is this something you feel is a struggle for you?
The idea of family values is strong in East Asian culture. I think the struggle for me is trying to find the right balance in meeting both my own expectations for myself and my parents’ expectations for me too. One expectation I give myself is to be a ‘good daughter’ in return to all the unconditional love my parents have given and still are giving to me… and so there’s this impending pressure I feel, almost like an obligation that family comes first but this is in battle with the question “who am I?’ I suppose there’s a lot here I’m trying to learn and unlearn.
4. Your relationship with contemporary art, is it also intertwined with exploring your identity?
I’ve found that the contemporary art/fine art mindset is a means of allowing myself to explore my identity in a calm way. It’s not too hardcore but like slow cooking a dish, with time it cooks out the best aspects (like of oneself). With contemporary art there’s always this big direction I’m moving towards but I’m not sure where the destination is. So, then there’s space allowing the unconscious and unknown coming in, I suppose that’s also called opportunity. When new work is completed, it's as if I just woken up from a dream (this can be either good or bad). Looking into your dream and subconscious is the key to understanding your true self or what you’re battling deep inside, with that I get to consciously heal myself by understanding what I’m suppressing.
Suppression comes in the package of my upbringing essentially. We were taught to not parade big emotions or least not to burst out in emotion, as it doesn’t reflect ‘maturity’ - I’m trying to unlearn this. I feel like being able to express emotion and be honest with oneself requires strength and that also can be another definition of maturity.
5. How do you feel transitioning from an illustrative mindset to a conceptual art one?
Bit difficult but also quite liberating actually. A conceptual art mind set is a process of unlearning my habits of running away from my honest thoughts and learning to unbox and make peace with it. It’s a never-ending self-therapy session
Illustration/design allows me to be creative without having to dig into my soul. It reflected on who I was and my upbringing. Would say I grew up in a culture where we’re conditioned to suppress our authentic thoughts. Japan colonized Taiwan for 50 years from 1895 to 1945, which was the time my grandparents were raised. Right after that it was the intense 38-year -long martial law period which was the era where my parents grew up. Both generations were not given any space to express their feelings in order to survive. The shared incapability to express is the coping mechanism alongside such a traumatic upbringing. It’s then not a surprise that I’m an expert at unconsciously ignoring my true feelings knowing I was raised by these people lol. I remembered that one time when I was still back in London, my best friend (she’s not Taiwanese) told me that she made her second Taiwanese friend and then she said “I realized that you Taiwanese are very agreeable” . I laughed; I seriously think that is on point. Anyways, what I am trying to say is, Illustration is a reflection of my culture, my people and conceptual art mindset is something I learned in London -- to be free, to touch my honest thoughts. It’s a good balance like yin and yang in tai chi.
6. Identity is a conundrum for many. Did you have any theoretical influences for your work?
For sure I would say the work of Edward Said and the ideology behind Orientalism, is so relevant. The battle between east vs west culturally, economically, and socially. Also, Re-Orientalism, I’d say it’s something that I focus on --- Knowing that the impact from colonialism and imperialism is irreversible so how are we redefining our identity as Far East Asian or Taiwanese, this is something that plays a big role on my work. I also think Confucianism, ancient Chinese philosophy which still lives in contemporary East Asian veins, definitely influences my work and is also something I want to challenge.
7. Defining and pin-pointing identity can be difficult in a postmodern era, it’s somewhat a hybrid of so many societal and cultural elements. Postmodernists see identity as “not fixed” but a continual process of negotiating with different parts of yourself. What are your views on this?
I quite agree with the term ‘not fixed. 90s kids grew up on the internet, so we already had easy access to other worlds and cultures and quite easily were bombarded with information – in a sense it made me feel like I don’t belong to any culture to some extent. The existence of the virtual world has a huge impact on how one identifies themselves in the 21st century. It’s not as simple as it used to be, such as identifying from where you were born and raised.
I wouldn’t consider myself bilingual, I started learning English at the age of 4. My parents spent money sending me to English cram school, hiring native English speakers as my personal tutor just to play and talk to me in English because they think English is the ultimate tool to make me more desirable and hireable in a globalised world. They didn’t realize that might in a way backfire, language is a tool, yes, but it’s also the key to another culture and that adds as a big part to my identity. In a sense it makes it more complicated.
At the end of the day, home or what you belong to is where your loved ones are. Perhaps we don’t belong anywhere, we’re all floating. In a postmodern world people belong everywhere.
8. What is next for the ‘Proper Asian wife in training’ series?
For the next part for Proper Asian wife in training, I think I’d like to go in depth with Taiwanese elements and explore. About our beliefs or you can say philosophy and food too. Try to dig into the topic of ‘What is Taiwanese? Who are we?’. While also continuing to push and reset the boundaries between tradition and contemporary.
The Taiwanese identity is still quite unsettled, it’s something that we are still developing because of our historical background. We are still in the process of defining who we are and that makes it very exciting.
ENTER; SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM by Akin Askinoglu
ENTER;SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM
Glossary:
AO : Anti Oedipus (D&G)
ATP: A Thousand Plateaus (D&G)
SM: Signs and Machines (Lazzarato)
SC: Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff)
Surveillance capitalism plugs us into its omnipotent extraction architecture without any possibility of logging off. Can we escape the masked machine lurking in the subterrain beneath the ones and zeros? In 1994, Nick Land dubbed Capital as an alien Artificial intelligence coming from the future that is poised to eat your TV, infect your bank account, and hack xenodata from your mitochondria. While today most of these overblown technophilic fictional claims made by the father of accelerationist theory-fiction (with the help of 90s techno-euphoria accompanied by meth abuse) falls flat, it still gives a good idea of the pervasiveness of capitalism in our lives. Our actions, thoughts, and identities produced by our desires in our private, social and work lives are intrinsically linked with the capitalist machine.
In “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”, Deleuze and Guattari draw attention to the widespread pathologisation of desire, as well as desire’s revolutionary potential of creating new “lines of flight” which are able to call the status quo of a society into question and at the same time demolish established social sectors (AO, 139). They name the amalgamation of all social and economic relations “the socius'' which are produced through the flows of desire.
A flow of desire for example, can be a sexual act or gender expression that, if out of the accepted norm, would have been overcoded and corrected by the despotic state apparatus. Up until the recent past, any deviation from the christian marital norm of a “union between one man and one woman” or deviation from the “biologically” and socially accepted ways of gender expression would have been penalised and the subject would have been tried to be “corrected” through the combination of punishment (castration) and mental asylum imprisonment, as well as being overcoded and inscribed as “mad and perverse” upon the socius (and this still happens in many places around the world). However, the objective of capitalism being capital accumulation, as a system it is tasked with decoding and deterritorialising the flows of our desires, (AO, 47) meaning it accommodates any identity category for the sake of accumulation.
The integration of the radical roots of Pride, of queer culture, and identity in general into rainbow capitalism is a prime suspect in this case. Of course you can slap a rainbow on your brand logo, sponsor the Pride Parade, and most of us will eat it up because many of us in developed countries can exist in an assimilated fashion and are spoon fed commodities and content that reinforce our “authenticity” in addition to having historical amnesia. At the end of the day the firms laugh their way to the bank while the anti-capitalist, anti-police and pro-black roots of Pride are buried under a rubble of shattered hopes of liberation.
The task of wealth accumulation requires the deterritorialisation of the old socius - that being the dissolution of old social norms, values, religions, traditions and economic relations as Marx famously said in the Communist Manifesto that with the advent of private property and industrial capitalism “all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, were swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” However the dissolution of the old socius by the capitalist machine into a new dismembered one is not absolute, in fact, there are many reterritorialisations in the various segments and strata of the socius in the form of the state, laws and family structures, and socio-economic phenomena such as racism and fascism which all function and must function as regulators, generators and recorders of the flows of desire within the socius for the proper operation of the capitalist machine. On the one hand, we perceive and experience our own identities and the world from the images and ideas we find around us in our engagement with media, technology, politics and the economy, and on the other hand, we reflect those ideas and images - for some partly, for most entirely - when we express and behave ourselves in regards to our identities and the tools we use, making us a “collective assemblage of enunciation” in the capitalist semiotic operator where there is no longer an identifiable subject (ATP, 144). We are rendered to machine organs in the full body of capital.
Nonetheless, being “a machine organ” does not mean you as an individual do not exist, it only means that a subject exists in an assemblage with objects around itself, meaning there is no subject/object binary in the concept of the “machine”. Machines are thus not products of technics but parts of what makes humans humans, or post-humans in this case and they are required as a prior condition to the creation of technics. Lazzarato explains this excellently: “Guattari's machinism does not oppose man and machine, "in order to evaluate the correspondences, the extensions, and possible or impossible substitutions of one for the other," but instead brings them into "communication in order to show how man is a component part of the machine, or combines with something else to constitute a machine. The other thing can be a tool, or even an animal, or other men." ” (SM, 81). The machinism that flows through us is nevertheless a double edged sword as it can be as easily hijacked by cybernetic control mechanisms to integrate human behaviour, health and culture into the functions of the capitalist apparatus, as it can be utilised by us for our own liberation - or so we thought.
Now, let's explore how capitalism as a semiotic (visual and signifying) operator produces wealth and points of subjectification through functions that Deleuze and Guattari dub “machinic enslavement” and “social subjection”. Social subjection assigns us with various identity categories such as a nationality, a gender, a profession and more, manufacturing our consciousness, behaviours and representations as “individuated” subjects for the necessary social division of labour in capitalism. Whereas, under the grips of machinic enslavement the individual is not seen as an individuated subject but rather as a functional and operational machine part of the assemblages of finance, politics, media, business and their institutions (schools, internet, television, corporations, etc.). Throw in a dash of state sanctioned user data extraction and Google’s Artificial Intelligence algorithms, and we have the newest kid in the block; Surveillance Capitalism, or as I’d like to call it the surveillance and control stage of capitalism with its almost magical behavioural prediction and manipulation which utilises the twin functions of machinic enslavement and social subjection. So, every bit of our identity, be it private, social, or economic is and can be utilised for capital accumulation with the grace of these twin functions and surveillance capital as its operator. Afterall, “the strength of capitalism resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never saturated, that it is always capable of adding a new axiom to the previous ones.” (AO, 287).
The next dish on the menu for capital: you.Shoshanna Zuboff observes a new function of capitalism that has mutated surveillance elements into its DNA - which she calls Surveillance Capitalism. By extracting ‘the human experience’ as a raw material to translate user behavioural data that is collected through our various online engagements with content and is processed by artificial intelligence algorithms, which can then accurately predict our future purchases and content engagement behaviours both online and in real life producing a continuous machinic - and behavioural surplus value. This means that capitalism now anticipates, predicts, and coaxes our behaviours and feelings towards profitable outcomes. So, at the present stage of capitalism both our private and social identities are in the process of being anticipatingly pre-packaged and literally sold to us. Our desires that we deem as our own are in the process of being animated, functionalised and enslaved into the machinic extraction architecture of capital. A new form of capture apparatus unique to surveillance capitalism is looming and it just might be bound to swallow up all the lines of flight necessary for a radical break.
“There where the flows are decoded, the specific flows of code that have taken a technical and scientific form are subjected to a properly social axiomatic that is much severer than all the scientific axiomatics: the axiomatic of the world capitalist market. The flows of code that are "liberated" in science and technics by the capitalist regime engender a machinic surplus value that does not directly depend on science and technics themselves, but on capital—a surplus value that is added to human surplus value and that comes to correct the relative diminution of the latter, both constituting the whole of the surplus value of flux that characterizes the system. Knowledge, information, and specialized education are just as much parts of capital as is the most elementary labour of the worker.”
Unlike human surplus value, machinic surplus value is neither quantifiable nor is it assignable because it is extracted through unquantifiable variables such as knowledge, information, and specialised education which in the sphere of societies of control begins from a very young age. I have personally seen toddlers probably not older than 2 years fully holding and operating a smartphone to watch kids shows on apps and play games. All of this is a part of the unassignable specialised education and accumulated knowledge that capitalism requires from us to operate and understand its complex technical operational language besides our native language. If we want to be a part of this world and the society - not that we are given any choice in - we need to be able to understand the “language” of the semiotic systems created by the present social and technical modes of production which are interwoven and indivisible from each other and from our lives and identities. As Lazzarato, also expresses the productivity of capital depends on the mobilization of our body parts (fingers, arms, eyes and hands for the iPhone operating toddler) and our human faculties (perception and muscle memory of the toddler), as well as on the intellectual and physical performance of machines, analytics, algorithms, artificial intelligence, organizations, or systems of signs.
It is inevitable, after all, it is capitalism that creates machines with its hegemony on science and technology, which in turn introduces breaks in the technical modes of production. In this case, the axiomatisation of the entire online terrain to the world capitalist market brought new means of production in the form of “means of behavioural modification and production.”
Yet, it appears to be that to most academics including Zuboff, that the perversion of “real capitalism” is a heinous crime and betrayal to humanity, as if the logic of capital accumulation ever cared about anything “human”.
At the intersection of surveillance capitalism and the postmodern identity crisis something very peculiar is starting to develop. With hundreds of millions of teenagers and young adults’ part of Gen Z - myself included - glued to their phones and regularly on social media where they look for a place to belong to and construct the majority of their identities by engaging with each other and with social media content, machinic enslavement kicks up a notch. In the sphere of social media, artificial intelligence algorithms utilised in marketing and targeted ads generated by the socio-technical machine of surveillance capitalism recommend us commodities and content associated with the specific subcultural-, racial-, and political identity categories that are being constructed for us by extracting and processing our behavioural user data. The cherry on top is that the illegally extracted user data is also illegally bought and sold between ‘Big Tech’ and other parties who consequently start to construct a speculative “machinic identity” based purely on the data processed by AI algorithms, that can merge with and take over our existing self.
We become flowing capital personified.
Are you really into K-Pop? Or was it the Google algorithm that led you into that rabbit hole of K-Pop content and “BTS” merchandise purchasing spree? Can you really be sure? How much of your political identity is influenced by the dominant discourse? Is representation and diversity going to save us? If you browse online and are a regular user of social media platforms, it is most likely that your user data was illegally processed into behavioural data by the omnipotent online extraction architecture that influenced your identity formation.
A PRELIMINARY ON MACHINIC IDENTITIES AND THE FERAL ESCAPE THEREFROM
I call these types of artificially manufactured identities “machinic identities” which are a special type of capitalist point subjectification in the process of becoming. They are artificially produced and marketed to the individual by AI algorithms (or “means of behavioural modification”) for the profit motive creating the individuation of machinic identities around vectors of commodification. As well as enslaving those artificial commodity-identities to the machinic forces of the markets of behavioural futures through a process of de-subjectification as functional and productive variables, to manage them for the proper functioning of the whole technical profit machine (or the “extraction architecture”). The consequences of an identity which exists in the form of pure data for the profiteering parties look bleak for those of us who still want to shake up and demolish entire social sectors with our radical desire to break through every categorisation. Sadly, generation Z (and most millennials) cannot even help it, we are hooked on social media and online browsing, as we are the first generation of digital natives who possess no memory of life before the rise of surveillance capitalism and rely on a range of social media for psychological nourishment. It’s debilitating domestication and cyclical catatonia in Cyberia.
Capitalism’s capture apparatus - in this case the extraction of user data and accompanying AI algorithms - has found a conveniently profitable way of sublimating any radical political or artistic act into vectors of commodification and pure aestheticization. Just a semiotic jungle of emptiness. The revolutionary potential of our desiring machines is being properly integrated into the extraction architecture of capitalism as functional and operational parts for profit’s end… and are being turned into commodities to be bought and sold by third parties. It is not possible to assign or quantify how much or from whom we were being animated by. I am not implying someone at Google or Facebook is puppeteering us in an Illuminati-esque fashion by sending us subliminal messages and symbols. This is much less human. Technocapital’s cyber voodoo is already leaking into reality but it won’t give us the future we saw in Cyberpunk 2077. Land might have been right about the importance of AI, yet capitalism in reality is much cruder and less sophisticated than what the technophiles thought of back then, as well as now. What these AIs lead to is our machinic integration into cybernetic control mechanisms and biopolitical governance for the shareholder dividends at Big Tech and rather than a post/trans-humanist liberation and the Singularity. Hence, almost all participation in political and cultural life has become nothing more than a collection of meaningless gestures that prolong spectacular society and techno-capitalist anaesthesia. Since all perceived radical identities can be recuperated by capitalism, for me the answer was to completely negate all the identity categories I fall into towards a nothingness that is itself ultimately creative because it defies anything that is not my own property, so any categorisation assigned by the outside. Afterall, to break away doesn’t mean just producing difference and affirming it anymore, but to set on a journey for the queerest, most feral attack of negation to smash the black mirror, an all-out offensive to set every branch of capital ablaze with our desires armed.
ARTWORK: by Mitch (@mp5pm on IG)
Digital Exhibition ‘Epiphanies’ by Najah Rizvi
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About The Artist
Rizvi is an interdisciplinary artist and writer currently working with performance, drawing and photography. Drawing from the subconscious, her latest works are an exploration of mark making and symbolism through expressions in mixed media. Through her residency in Lahore, Pakistan (February, 2024), Rizvi formulated the style and artistitic process which went into Epiphanies.
"The visual language I am developing now has come out of my attempts to draw from my subconscious. It's an honest expression, quite removed from the conceptualisations I was formulating in London. I like thinking from this place, I believe that the symbols and colours are communicating intuitively and it's far more accessible to the audience I want to speak to, namely the global majority."
Rizvi continues to argue that Epiphanies is a collection of drawings, not paintings, despite the use of wet mediums. Between brightly coloured shapes are mysterious glyphs derived from lost memories of ancient scripts.
"I made the gouache myself, with vibrant pigments, I see my works as drawings. I receive the colours, shapes, letters and lines like sudden visions, this is where the word epiphany becomes
relevant. It's very different to the way that I've drawn before. I learned this from my friends at Mantiq of the Mantis in Lahore "
Xeno’s Review
The paintings by Rizvi are a profound journey into the realms beyond our material existence. Created in a meditative, spiritual state, each piece is an invocation of the spirit, a direct communication with the unseen forces that shape our reality. The boldness of the colours and forms is merely the surface; beneath it lies a deep connection to other dimensions, where the veil between worlds thins, bridging the gap between the conscious and subconscious, the known and the unknown.
The symbols here are portals, blending intricate symbolism and guiding the viewer through a spiritual exploration. On the surface you can see figures in hollow spaces, bold colourful energies engulfing them and cryptic lettering allowing us to take in the hybridity of art and abstract meaning in these paintings.
The presence of symbols in these works is not merely decorative, it is an invitation; the more the viewer is well immersed with esoteric knowledge the more they unlock from the images crafted by Rizvi. Much like in the imagery in Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot deck, both Crowley and this artist channel archetypal energies, colours that represent the elemental energies of earth, fire, water and air.
In these paintings, the artist becomes both a creator and a conduit, offering us a rare opportunity to connect with the mystical forces that underlie all creation. Each piece is a testament to the power of art as a medium for spiritual awakening, inviting us to step beyond the material and into the sacred.
Horror never exists in a vacuum; fears emerge from the cultural consciousness as manifestations of our collective anxieties that the horror genre reveals and exploits. While normally confined to the maligned category of ‘genre fiction’, horror is in fact a powerful tool to peer into the subconscious mind of society; whether it be the gothic literature of the Victorian era or the low budget slashers of the 80s, there is something to learn from the things that scare us. In contemporary horror, this is reflected through the focus on social realism and genre-awareness. These films weave the collective knowledge of their genre into their narratives, using horror as a metaphor, but with an awareness of our desire to confront our own fears through the lens of cinema. This self-awareness is further applied to society as a whole. As contemporary filmmakers use horror to evaluate and often criticise the foundational principles of modern society, a society that champions a specific social ideal and casts anything outside of that as the undesirable other.
One of these foundational principles that contemporary horror seeks to dismantle is capitalism. Critic Paul Buhle suggests that the genre is “the natural concomitant to the socialist critiques of Capitalism” through its exposure of western capitalism. Marx describes communism as a ‘spectre’ fighting against the parasitic, ‘vampire-like’ power of capital, imbuing his theory with the language of horror and mythos. Here, Marx casts 20th century economic theory as horror performance of its own and allows the genre’s ability to carry metaphor to emphasise the terror and power of capitalism. Horror writers in literature and film have used the same imagery to explore the alienation of those deemed different to normative society. The horror genre shadows popular culture as a platform to criticise political and patriarchal structures by representing those who are repressed within them. Horror takes what haunts society the most and personifies it, often holding up a mirror to ourselves in terror and disgust. Jameson writes that:
“Gothics are ultimately a class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised: your privileges seal you off from other people, but by the same token they constitute a protective wall through which you cannot see, and behind which therefore all kinds of envious forces may be imagined in the process of assembling, plotting, preparing to give assault.”
Indeed, horror exists always in service of the status quo, constantly redefining its dominant social structure. It is through horror that we can consolidate hierarchy. Stephen King said, “Monstrosity fascinates us because it appeals to the conservative Republican in a three-piece suit who resides within us all”, the reinforcement of order, the prevailing of the normative good, over the unfamiliar other. The horror genre feeds off of prejudice and historically much of it has been inescapably xenophobic due to the monsters they present who possess an inherently hostile attitude to humanity, as an outsider, as different, or as ‘The Other’. Horror revolves around various iterations of ‘The Other’, whether this be as the Devil, a ghost, a woman, a vampire, or a zombie. Zygmunt Bauman writes that ‘otherness’ is central to the way in which societies establish identity categories. “The Other” highlights how societies create a sense of identity, social status and belonging by constructing social categories as binary opposites. Historically the has been used to define social identity as well as repress and alienate that which does not fit with a particular concept, culture, or institution. This includes women, the proletariat, the queer community, and ethnic minorities.
It is clear how social othering shapes our ideas when considering the inherently unequal relationship between the two categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. These two identities are set up as opposites, without acknowledging alternative gender expressions that do not fit within this binary. In the early 1950s, Simone de Beauvoir argued that: “Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. Thus, it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself.” She argues that The Other is constructed in western contexts as anything outside of the hegemonic ‘universal human being’ - that being the white, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied cis man. Films such as Rosemary’s Baby and Stepford Wives defined the female social horror which was followed by the iconic Carrie which came to inspire a great number of female centred horror narratives.
Similarly, ‘sexual others’ figure prominently in horror films as the classical Hollywood narrative system imposes heterosexual romances on the stories they create. The monstrous other is the embodiment of a force that attempts to block that romance. When the horror genre was first being established homosexuality was considered a mental illness or an evolutionary defect and generally identified as a rejection of traditional masculinity. The connection then of monstrosity and homosexuality was considered a reasonable one at the time, because it reflected the American view of the homosexual as an unnatural outsider that threatened to corrupt gender roles and sexual values. Furthermore, sexuality, whether gay or straight has often been punished within horror to reaffirm Christian ideology by killing deviant sinners. (Think Scream’s horror movie rule: You may not survive the movie if you have sex). The ‘queer other’ has permeated horror culture to the point of becoming significant within itself through the popularity of cult queer horror such as Dracula’s Daughter, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or more recently, Jennifer’s Body. Horror is transformed and becomes culturally significant as powerful iconography for the disenfranchised.
Ultimately ‘the other’ most often refers to the perceived ‘racial other’. Minorities have historically been subjected to tokenism throughout western media and have habitually been misrepresented within the horror genre. More often than not, minorities are cast as violent, criminals or villains. The attention that minorities do get within the horror genre often is a misuse of their cultural as a plot device. Mythologised and twisted to fit into the idea of the horrific unknown other, minority identities are reduced down to the black magic medicine man, the vengeful Native American spirit, the black guy who will not make it to the end of the movie. These cultures are often portrayed as aspects of the past, simultaneously acknowledging the erasure of minority identities within western imperialism while reinforcing the conception of contemporary hegemonic culture as distinctly without this cultural otherness.
Entering the 21st century, the endless reviving, recycling, and repetition in mainstream horror, along with the confluence of postmodern thought has led to an acute awareness of its context, allowing it to evolve and change while providing more complex sociological critique. Encroaching upon Y2K The Blair Witch Project shook up horror establishing the found footage genre and raising the bar for horror film marketing through its mythos. Unable to compete, Scream became a parody of itself, Scary Movie came along to parody…well everything, and it seemed the genre had become old, tired, worn out, and cheap. A decade later Cabin in the Woods (2011) successfully unravelled the played-out slasher film and provided a metacritic of what horror had become. Once again, the genre evolved for age, no longer able to stand on the procedural nature of mainstream franchised horror that now failed to scare.
Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) redefined horror cinema for a new decade and coined the term ‘Social Thriller’ to describe a new sub-genre. Get Out uses absurdist satire to reflect contemporary racial issues. The family’s black body snatching represents the white ownership of black bodies through slavery. The film, littered with imagery reminiscent of the old American south, signals how white people co-op black culture as their own while still treating them as the social other, forcing them to assimilate to the dominant norm. Simultaneously the film challenges the narrative that the covert, assimilationist racism of liberal America is just as dangerous as the overt racism of America’s past, all while using the iconography of southern sensibility to remind you of the historical weight of the issue.
While the term ‘social thriller’ has been slapped onto a number of projects across genres, what Get Out has inspired, is an influx of horror which offers the perspectives of minority identities finally giving a voice to that once horrifying social other. Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) has less overt racial themes but generally deals with America’s misplaced fear of outsiders. Ari Asters blinding Midsommar (2019), has gained popularity as a ‘good for her’ movie, a title prescribed to horror that acts out female revenge fantasies and often centres around female rage. Assassination Nation (2018) attempted to attack a series of themes, most notably the abundance of gun culture in the US. The Invisible Man (2020) tackles themes of domestic abuse. Even Bong Joon-ho’s widely successful Parasite (2019), although not technically a horror film, incorporates horror elements in the perspective of the Kim family and their class struggle. Social issues find themselves at the centre of horror, finally presenting multiple perspectives on real fears shared by the majority. These films guide to root for these main characters and their reclamation of power. These people escape their societal trauma but are ultimately still just as present within its confines by the end of the film. These narratives provide a catharsis however are still aware of the reality in which this catharsis does not always come.
Otherness is innate to our capitalist society structures but at least horror is starting to get the message. While horror has always somehow addressed societal change, in the last decade the medium got self-reflective, aware of its power as a critical medium. Contemporary horror is elevated through both its creator and audience awareness. No longer distancing itself from the monstrous other through fear, but instead making horror the space for addressing these issues in a thought-provoking, politically charged manner. The genre provides a playground of tropes to subvert and explore overshadowed by the anxieties of late capitalist doom. Contemporary horror builds on the history of the genre but also the presence of postmodern culture and the current desire we have to dissect and reengaging with old ideas. It embraces the other whilst reflecting the current cultural zeitgeist, illuminating our collective fears through the perspectives of those who were once projected as fear itself.