/lit/ - Literature

>‘Decopunk’ is the sign of a return. Its complexity can seem overwhelming. It folds back, exorbitantly, into that which had already folded into itself. Nothing expresses the cultural tendency of positive cosmopolitanism more completely, more cryptically, or more surreptitiously than the Deco modernist matrix thus re- activated. Its mode of abstraction is inextricable from an ultimate extravagance, intractable to linguistic condensation, and making of decoration a speechless communication, or ecstatic alienation, through which interiority is subtracted. Emerging from the fusion of streamline design trends with fractionated, cubist forms and the findings of comparative ethnography, it exults in cultural variety, arcane symbolism and opulence of reference – concrete colonial epistemology and metropolitan techno-science are equally its inspirations – as it trawls for design motifs among the ancient ruins of Egypt and Mesoamerica, Chinese temples, recursive structures, sphinxes, spirals, ballistic machine-forms, science fiction objects, hermetic glyphs and alien dreams. It is neither language nor anti-language, but rather supplementary, ancillary, or excess code, semiotically-saturated or over-informative, hyper-sensible, deviously circuitous, volubly speechless, muted by its own delirious fluency. It has no specific ideology, but only every ideology. If it ever existed, it always has.

>To speculate upon a future that unlocks time-travel technology is to re-open the past, with progression twisted into an opportunity to regress. In China, especially, where the super-massive gravity-well of tradition has historically absorbed the preponderant part of speculative imagination, this peculiarity offers science fiction a chance to insinuate itself, around the back. Futurism enters the culture cloaked as renascent antiquity.

>Though staged as a break from the cycles of time, modernization is more realistically envisaged as a flight into cyclicity. Its primary signature – accelerating change – is itself a product of non-linear functions (epitomized by exponentiation). The modern, industrial economy tends inexorably to the self- exciting circuit of the robotic robot factory, and its autonomization is accompanied by strengthening quasi-periodic oscillations – business cycles, and long waves. As its culture folds back upon itself, it proliferates self-referential models of a cybernetic type, attentive to feedback-sensitive self-stimulating or auto-catalytic systems. The greater the progressive impetus, the more insistently cyclicity returns. To accelerate beyond light- speed is to reverse the direction of time. Eventually, in science fiction, modernity completes its process of theological revisionism, by re-discovering eschatological culmination in the time-loop. Judgment Day. The end comes when the future reaches back, to seize us.