seduce me, fantasy
just a girl hoping for insignificance in a neoliberal world
I recently watched Palm Springs, a movie starring Andy Samberg (best known as Jake Peralta from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the comedic cop show (propaganda)) and Cristin Milioti (who you may know from How I Met Your Mother as The Mother). You should stop reading if you don’t want spoilers, but I doubt any of you will actually watch it so I don’t really care.
The central premise of Palm Springs is basically a Groundhog Day scenario, where the two main characters discover a glowing thing in a cave that blows up in their faces, and it throws them into a time loop where they relive the same day over and over again. They are both cynical people who feel terrible about their lives so they don’t really want to get out of the time loop. The reason for this is very simple: in the time loop you can fuck around and do whatever you want. Every day is a new day. The damage you do to yourself and other people is erased as easily as falling asleep.
There’s this scene of Andy and Cristin (yeah, I don’t really care what their characters’ names are) are driving through some iconic desert-y American landscape. Cristin is in the middle of a self destructive bender because she’s arrived at a personal epiphany: everything is meaningless if your actions have no consequences. They kind of get arrested (again, ACAB, we do not support the carceral state or prison industrial complex here) and are sitting in handcuffs on the side of the dusty highway. Cristin gets this manic look in her eye and starts laughing, like it’s a joke, because “It doesn’t matter, right? Nothing matters!”
Andy shouts at her, says something oddly profound like, “Pain matters. What we do to other people, matters. It doesn’t matter that everything resets and that nobody remembers. We remember. We have to deal with the things that we do.” Then Cristin goes and stands in the middle of the highway and gets run over by a truck. Oops.
A thought:
My brain decided to (very bizarrely) interpret the time loop as a metaphor for my inability to achieve significance within our capitalist hellscape, and that their attitudes towards the time loop in the movie in fact reflect the emergent millennial nihilism that has arisen in response to the impending climate crisis, neoliberalism, corona, late stage capitalism, etc.;
But also:
This scene brought me to the uncomfortable realization that I have, in my own mind, excessively and callously devalued my relationships with other human beings so much that my instinct is to always turn within myself whenever I have an existential crisis. We always consider ourselves and our self worth in relation to the capitalist economy and the GDP, but rarely do we consider our self worth in relation to the people who love us, and who we love.
Cristin, in my interpretation of this movie, is like me, in that we are so conditioned by the short-term gains of capitalism and the attention economy that we are unable to comprehend the significance of our existence as human beings if it is not demonstrated by immediate, tangible metrics.
In the City Arts and Lectures webcast by Jenna Wortham and Jia Tolentino from May 2020, they spoke about how it’s easy to become quickly frustrated when our (“our” as in we youths, and those of us who have had the privilege to be unaware for the longest time) efforts to resolve racial and social injustice do not create seismic change overnight. There is a myth that singular moments of brilliance have enabled earth-shaking change, which, sometimes they do. Sometimes it takes ten seconds of limitless courage to change the world forever, but more often than not, bravery and resistance are muscles that are stretched across generations. Decades of work are reduced to a moment, centuries of suffering are condensed into seconds, and millennia of history are compressed for our swiping thumbs and avaricious eyes, a singular square in the endless doomscroll of human attention.
There was a historic election we had in Malaysia back in 2018, when we really thought something had shifted for just a moment. We thought we had resolved centuries of racial, capital, political conflict, in this one moment of glorious transformation. It felt like we had been in a cocoon for decades, and were finally ready to emerge into a brave new world of possibility. I sat in my school library half a world a way and cried in a way that I know I will never cry again, half out of my mind with worry that race riots would burst out back home, half hysterical from the euphoria that comes with witnessing a moment in history I thought I would never live to see.
I took the 1 train downtown that night to find my friends waiting for me, elated, with a Malaysian flag on their shoulders and random white people passing by on the street were staring at our unrestrained display joy. All our eyes were bright that night; all of us were feverish. I went home and cried and wrote some shitty poetry and cried some more, because sometimes that is all you can do when you see the impossible happen. I have never deluded myself about the messy (for the lack of a better word) nature of Malaysian politics, and I think we know that the 2018 election was motivated more by petty personal conflict than a genuine desire for change. But it felt like, even if one did not enjoy the v. problematique driver at the wheel, at least there were people in the car committed to something bigger than themselves, who knew how to do their jobs with minimal corruption and zero murders of Mongolian models.
Of course, now we know the ending to that story. We know what happened in the Sheraton Hotel in February 2020, and what has come to pass. The most painful thing has never been the chaos -- Malaysians are used to chaos, if you've ever taken the NKVE highway at 5.45pm on a weekday you will know this -- but it has been the feeling of powerlessness, the paralysis that was forced upon us by the necessities of this stupid fucking plague has seen fit to unleash upon us. Also, I guess, the general collapse of electoral politics. It could be the many moons of lockdown taking a mental toll on us, and it could also be the general Bad Vibes of 2020, but it feels like a lethargy has descended over us all, a perpetual blanket of apathy that we have taken to dragging around with us as we pace the four walls of our homes like caged animals. Are we grieving? Are we just dead inside? Are any of us even still alive? Is the simulation glitching?
The capital, seismic Event of 2018, the one that we thought would change the world, has ended. The fumes of euphoria have passed, and here we are in 2020 arresting students and police brutality do be happening time and again. Reporters are being arrested and civil liberties are knocked aside like they are nothing. There is a tendency amongst Malaysians to demonize our own optimism, as if being hopeful is something to be mocked: What did you expect? Malaysia is like that, won't change one. It is somehow passe to care, a defense against hurt before it happens. In the wake of the anti-Omnibus protests in Indonesia and the outrage in Thailand, Malaysian Twitter is rife with ~hot takes~ about how Malaysians are "too complacent," "not active enough" to take to the streets, as if Bersih was a dream that had never happened.
Maybe they are right. Maybe we simply have yet to reach a critical breaking point in our mutual suffering. Maybe the socioeconomic and racial landscape of our country is so stratified that it is impossible for many us to recognize our shared humanity. Maybe we are just lazy. Or maybe we are paralyzed within a system so perfectly set up to suspend each of us under a sheet of amber, so that we (well, I) observe without action, thought without movement.
Some days I wake up and am suffocated by this paralyzing pessimism. It is a terror that nothing will ever change, that we shall stagnate in this state of discontent forever. Without me knowing, this national malaise had crept its way into my body from the water. It took root in my mind, manifesting in my own individual psychology, affecting my everyday actions, taking me to United States where I found a whole new kind of communal pessimism (Wesley Morris puts it like this: “Each person here carries a native negativity towards their presence on this land”). This new, fresh, flavour of strife reminded me that problems do not go away when the immigrant leaves home. They merely outrun it.
Malaysian Chinese people who leave Malaysia searching for a "better life" elsewhere always amuse me (as one of them myself), because there is so little investment in rethinking what it means to be part of a community. The multitude of wealthy Malaysian Chinese students who study and settle in Australia do not ever seem to think that the land they are occupying were stolen from indigenous Australians, because it is easy enough to settle in a new place where you get to be the oppressor with more ease, less ancestral accountability, and further alignments with whiteness. My aunt is overjoyed that her grandchild was born in the USA, because, to quote her, "He can become president! In Malaysia he cannot become president, but in America he can!" First of all, Malaysia doesn't have a president. Second of all, to quote Wesley Morris (truly so wise): "It [is a powerful myth that] only requires you to buy into the fantasy as being simultaneously ahistorical, but also very rooted in a particular way of being in this country." Which is to say that you ignore entire history of anti-Asian racism, which is a cornerstone of the USA, and also act like democracy actually exists anywhere.
I keep having to remind myself that there are a lot of good people doing good work, who have been doing this work since the forever times, and maybe we should ask ourselves what it is about the nature of Malaysian life that discourages the rest of us from even the most shallow investments in The Movement(TM). We desire radical change without intending to commit to radical sacrifices for the people around us, expecting structural change in our name but not individual divestments from privilege. I want racial equality for myself, says the Chinese girl posing for Instagram pictures outside yet another chic cafe franchise, but I also want to hold migrant workers at a distance, so I can continue to see them as vectors who produce my food and cheap property, but nothing more. And I also want to say racist things about my Indian friends. #equality tho.
A digression: Is Malaysia neoliberal? I remember reading this Facebook summary of Parasite as a critique of neoliberalism where the OP (who was Malaysian) kept comparing Malaysia to South Korea, but insisted that Malaysia is in no way close to the stressors of late stage capitalism in South Korea. I think OP used the main markers of education inflation and wage deflation, saying that Malaysia is still a developing nation that doesn't have these problems (they admit we have other problems, but not the ones the characters in Parasite do). It occurs to me that maybe OP and I occupy such different strata of Malaysian society that we are completely oblivious to each other's understandings of this environment.
Maybe, if we think about it, there is a segment of Malaysian society (thanks to colonial segregation and also our own racism u kno) that is secure in the knowledge that the welfare state can and will always provide for them, while the other segments live in the precarity defined by neoliberalism's disregard for security and support. But this is to also think that maybe neoliberalism does not develop as a direct consequence of industrial capitalism. In regions coerced into models of extractive colonialism, local economies were pushed to develop at hyperspeed. Having seen what centuries of collective bargaining and community could do in their own countries, the colonizers sought an easier target in the global South, where they could export the best models of industrial production with a minimum of consideration for their workers’ dignity. The economy of a colonized nation is inherently built to preserve monetary profit over human life, because colonists are not invested in the survival of a foreign people, only what they can provide before dying. This is what happened in Haiti, when the European colonizers wiped out the indigenous population with disease before replacing them with enslaved people from African countries to work in the fields to the point of death.
The thing about neoliberalism and this current moment of late stage capitalism is, as German-Korean philosopher extraordinaire Prof. Han Byung-Chul writes, that it is seductive. I keep coming back to his essay, "Why revolution is no longer possible" that I read at the start of 2020 (lol it was THIS YEAR 2020 IS STILL NOT OVER ALDNASLKDNSA).
Why is the neoliberal system of domination so stable? Why is there so little resistance to it? Why does the resistance that does occur so quickly come to naught? Why, despite the ever-expanding divide between rich and poor, is revolution no longer possible?
...
In disciplinary and industrial society, system-preserving power was repressive. Factory workers were brutally exploited by factory owners. Such violent exploitation of others’ labor entailed acts of protest and resistance. There, it was possible for a revolution to topple the standing relations of production. In that system of repression, both the oppressors and the oppressed were visible. There was a concrete opponent — a visible enemy —and one could offer resistance.
Identity politics proposes to us that it is desirable to replace the existing power holders in our system with people who "look" like they are aligned with our suffering, who we share similar characteristics with. We are told that looking like them provides us with some measure of safety, because they will represent us and our needs. But is it precisely their similarity that is the danger?
The neoliberal system of domination has a wholly different structure. Now, system-preserving power no longer works through repression, but through seduction — that is, it leads us astray. It is no longer visible, as was the case under the regime of discipline. Now, there is no longer a concrete opponent, no enemy suppressing freedom that one might resist.
Mary Retta's essay about white feminism and electoral politics points out is female capitalists are still capitalists, and cops of colour are still, well, cops. But at least when they don't look like us, we recognized them enough to develop a healthy apprehension against them. Prof. Han thinks that the seduction of neoliberalism started only recently, but I really do think it started in the 1930s, when the British realized Ambedkar was afoot, and that they could never win against him with force. Gandhi was the preferable option, because Gandhi believed in preservation of capital and caste, and Ambedkar did not. TAR was preferable to Chin Peng; LKY to Lim Chin Siong.
Colonizers, when they retreated, were simply replaced by men who had been inculcated in their systems. (Gandhi, TAR, and LKY all went to Cambridge!! Coincidence? I think NOT!!) The spectre of empire morphed into ambiguous shadows of "foreign investment" and "global corporations," delivering persuasive speeches to us through the mouthpieces of politicians that look like somewhat us. 2.5 million people in India are currently striking because Modi wants to enact laws that strip the agricultural sector of all its protections for farmers, to facilitate "foreign investment." The Omnibus law in Indonesia too, has been set up in service of "foreign investment." Singapore's food stays mediocre and dialect languages continue to die, also because of this craven need to seem desirable to "foreign investors." Digi, one of the national telecommunications companies in Malaysia, is in reality a front by the government of Norway. Many brands we associate with Malaysian national identity - Milo, Bata, 100 Plus, etc. are all owned by European corporations who are happy to slap the image of a smiling Malaysian child onto a drink packet if it means we will forget their . I have also bitched a lot about the whole musang king debacle in Malaysia that's essentially serving foreign interests as well, so, you know, we are all tragic here.
Neoliberalism turns the oppressed worker into a free contractor, an entrepreneur of the self. Today, everyone is a self-exploiting worker in their own enterprise. Every individual is master and slave in one. This also means that class struggle has become an internal struggle with oneself. Today, anyone who fails to succeed blames themselves and feels ashamed. People see themselves, not society, as the problem.
To personify the “nation” as a “person” in this metaphor, the postcolonial nation, having replaced colonizers with their own, becomes the master and slave in one. The class struggle, the global inequality, foreign policy, military intervention, become internally deflected onto the nation itself. The nation who fails to succeed blames themselves and feels ashamed. People see their country, themselves, the men who look like them, as the problem, not the centuries of exploitation.
We allowed ourselves to be seduced, because the oppressor became invisible. We expected that replacing white men with non-white men would solve our problems, but instead we sit here in a soup of capitalism and exploitation, having not dealt with many central issues of structural inequality put in place by the white men. Sharing this tragic moment together! And now we have American imperialism masquerading as cheerful little squares on our phone screens, every second of every day.
Today, power that maintains the system assumes a “smart” and friendly guise. In so doing, it makes itself invisible and unassailable. The subjugated subject does not even recognize that it has been subjugated. The subject thinks she is free. This mode of domination neutralizes resistance quite effectively. Dominationthat represses and attacks freedom is not stable. The neoliberal regime proves stable by immunizing itself against all resistance, because it makes use of freedom instead of repressing it. Suppressing freedom quickly provokes resistance; exploiting freedom does not.
Tech companies tell us that they are our answer to inequality. With the gig economy on the rise, we are told that it is reasonable for us all to work three jobs to make ends meet, signed up across every single app imaginable that will allow us to make money every moment of every day. We no longer see "a boss," we just see a glowing brand icon who we cannot fight because we are so busy trying to survive. Shopee and Grab, modeled after Amazon and Uber, have allowed us to exploit ourselves and each other, pushing out promo codes for free delivery and discounts like the cost of human labour is a negotiation and not a right.
Even though such competition heightens productivity by leaps and bounds, it destroys solidarity and communal spirit. No revolutionary mass can arise from exhausted, depressive, and isolated individuals.
We are distracted from the glowing wealth piled at the top of this pyramid of capitalism, jostling to push each other out of the way in some relentless pursuit of minute privileges. We are told that we have no one but ourselves to blame if we experience poverty (looking @ u chinese parents who teach ur kids to look down on garbage collectors), never mind the fact that it is somehow legal in this country to pay our workers less than RM1000 when the estimated living cost is RM2700/month. Prop 22 in California has set a precedent that allows Uber, DoorDash, and other gig economy companies to treat their workers (who they hoodwinkingly call "partners") as disposable contracts, without minimum wage, healthcare, or benefits, which is already happening in Malaysia because unions are so stringently policed and harassed. (Petition to abolish the contract system pls)
And yet corporations tell us they are making our lives better. They pretend to be our friends, and we believe them, because the alternate reality is too terrifying otherwise. As we continue to move through the post-COVID-19 swamp of civilization, governments worldwide have already begun rolling out a predictable rhetoric of austerity, enacting various repressive laws supposedly for the sake of “the economy,” such as what has happened in India and Indonesia. We need this so that we can return to normal, they say. Normal being the operative term, normal being a fiction, normal being a normalized state of repression and exploitation.
From the DemocracyNow article about the general strike in India:
... the inequalities are deepening. The unemployment figures...have come down as some amount of opening up [after the COVID-19 lockdown] happens, but people are returning to much worse conditions as workers. We have tampered with the gold standard of labor law, which used to be eight hours a day. Now you can have 12 hours a day without overtime for the last four hours.
Eugene Debs, founder of the American Railway Union, did not die for this!!! (He died because they convicted him under the Sedition Law eoeoeoeoeoe doesn't this sound familiar HMMMMM)
Now I think about the 2018 election times, and wonder at my own (delusion) optimism. Evil, as I know now, waits for no one and no thing, not even a global pandemic. Or maybe it is precisely during a pandemic when it is easiest to strike, like how, somehow, we have been living under a coup government in Malaysia for close to a year and somehow... it's still happening? As they say, strike them when they are on their knees.
Perhaps I wanted too much to believe in the fantasy. Like Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti in Palm Springs, I wanted to lose myself in the time loop in which everything is fucked but nothing matters, and all I need to do is enjoy myself in the hellscape of the world. I want the fantasy that neoliberalism can save me!! I want the freedom to exploit myself and other people. I want the fantasy that nothing matters beyond my own enjoyment, that posting a single black square on Instagram can resolve structural racism and anti-Black violence. I want a single election to overhaul Malaysian history. I want one moment of blinding change, followed by days of a mindless haze in which nothing ever changes and I can go on doing whatever the fuck I want, because nothing matters.
But then I think back to the start of this pandemic, all the way back in March, and our collective realization that we matter to each other. I know, of course, that many have suffered. But I also think of the openness we found within ourselves at that moment of suffering. Even though there was terror, there was also so much kindness. Professors who talked us through the fear, and peers who were out on the streets buying medical supplies, the countless people who came together to provide mutual aid to strangers and friends.
The owner of an independent bookstore near campus spray painted a smiley face on the sidewalk in front of his store with bright yellow paint. That one guy in Hungarian Pastry gave me a cheesecake for free because I had forgotten my wallet. My roommate's mother hiked to the top of a mountain to get cell reception in Hawaii, just to tell me that I was welcome in their home if our school tried to evict me. One by one, friends left me food, so much food, enough to survive the zombie apocalypse. A friend who stayed behind helped me push a broken cart of my things across campus, and we ate noodles together watching it rain outside. Between depressive bouts of crying, my roommate and I banged pots outside our window at 7pm. And all of it fucking mattered.
Jenna Wortham and Jia Tolentino's discussion highlights the myopic approach many of us (maybe just myself) have towards activism and change. We (or at least I) see the easy and simplified versions of resistance. The experience of consuming it on our screens is already so frictionless, so to participate in it must also be easy, yes? As a result we feel inadequate and disempowered if our own, tentative efforts do not immediately bring about structural change in a world where the odds are always stacked against us.
In a world where everything is determined by enormous data sets, we are encouraged to forget that each of us is a tiny, significant data point. A conversation that I've been having with my therapist and myself is how, because I have so little sense of self, I allow myself to be carried by the tidal wave of statistics and aggregated data. We are constantly told that the data determines how the world will run - "because our data shows that 72% of our consumers want this, we will be continuing to provide this" - so whatever we do is insignificant and meaningless. Only the majority matters. But, u know, for every person out there, there is a tortured data scientist trying to fit you in their dataset. For every data point, there is someone for whom it made a difference.
This terrible metaphor is just to express that people matter. What we do to other people, matters. The road towards justice is a long and tiring one, a cumulation of our everyday beliefs, thoughts, actions. What we contribute today matters. What we do tomorrow matters. What we do for the rest of our lives, that will matter, too. Capitalism wants us to believe otherwise, so it invented things like GDP and unemployment rate and the gig economy as distractions. It wants us to live in the timeloop fantasy, where we can fuck around and hurt each other and not care. But what if, like Ross Gay said, we joined our sorrow together?
For a brief moment in time, it seemed like the world was becoming a gentler place, less concerned with hustling to exploit oneself, more willing to accommodate the wildernesses within us. The world seemed to shift ever so slightly, just enough that it jolted us out of the fantasy. We were brought back to reality, this reality where kindness matters, not the one constructed to make us think that revolution is no longer possible. Revolution is happening - in Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, America, India, and countless other places. Revolution is happening because of individual people, bent under the weight of the world, are in the streets joining their sorrows together.
The day I left New York, in the way that only happens in New York, my taxi driver to the airport turned out to be a fellow, Canto-speaking countryman from Ipoh who had moved to Flushing in the 90s. He found out that I didn't have gloves to wear on the plane to protect me from the dreaded germs, and scolded me - "aiya, dim gai nei mou dai, hou ngai him aa" - before giving me the only pair he had left. "Xiu sum ah! Gei dak yiu mut jiong toi ok? Bai bai!"
Sorrows merged, was annihilated, and in its place rose joy.
This is to say: I want Professor Han to be wrong.
This is to say: Fuck the fantasy.
This is to say: You matter.