“whether my cry is brave or sad, repellent or ridiculous, i do not care” /lu xun
america is haunted. the specter of highly advanced oriental empires hell bent on america’s ruination continues to influence international policy and shape mass media. while ‘representation’ is on an upward trend the latest in national tragedies has proved that it doesn’t take much to throw our humanity and allegiances into question. yet, amidst this, asian american culture struggles and flounders to take any meaningful position.
The fact is that the extant strains of asian american culture are poisoned by the colonial mindset: as it was in the age of empire, asian culture once again exists to be consumed, defined by its externalities. While bonding over food and seeing yourself on the silver screen can provide comfort it offers no internal political or social impetus save a further sinking into the mire of neoliberal consumerism. Furthermore, renewed efforts to “represent” and “acknowledge” this culture do so while stripping the asian identity of the political, postcolonial, and anti imperialist causes it was formerly composed of.
TECHNO ORIENTAL is an attempt of a few of us TO address the immanent need for a paradigm shift. it is an attempt TO break from the culture of apology and the trauma narrative loop. it is an attempt TO embrace techno orientalist alterity and foster the discovery and sharing of radical ideas. it is an effort TO imagine and rebuild a future from the remnants of futures lost.
we make no blanket dismissal of the damage done by orientalist attitudes and assumptions, nor do we advocate using such a framework to dismiss works wholesale. rather, TO is a call to unpack and critically examine past and present paradigm; TO reconceptulaize the role of technology in our lives; TO analyze our aspirations toward ‘goodness’, and liberate those contemporary concepts of ‘humanity’, ‘productivity’, and ‘civility’ that we scramble to embody in our attempts to discredit orientalist perspectives.
lapsing into the techno orientalist notion of the machinic, othered, dehumanized self has long been a fear in this country. the impulse reaction is to defend oneself, to prove one’s humanity, to seek out and reinforce the similarities between the self and the accusatory society. this struggle so often leads only to inauthenticity: the desire for assimilation so often leads to the self-hatred, to a totalizing and public rejection of the undesirable aspects of one’s race, bordering on compradorship.
the american tradition is steeped in the desire for classification, for dichotomies and logical simplification. portraying america as an exemplar of its chosen values necessitates the categorization of the robotic other: a racialized, gendered, and/or class-based other, upon which “the master may unload his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate”. to pretend we are in some privileged position being on the right side of a border or party line, that contemporary movements toward representation have admitted us into the right side of society, is ignorance. the state coordinated warmachine may be lubricated with oil but is ultimately driven and directed by fear engines; the fear of being outpaced or sabotaged by the invisible orient is what has driven neoliberal technoeconomic expansion, has propelled the nation toward bloated excess. we cannot expect a system that has so successfully profited off of problematizing oriental adversaries to extend solutions to oriental subjects that do not involve some form of surveillance or veiled violence.
the truth is those born here are already robots, constructed and installed with certain protocols, made to be limited-authority actors useful to the technoscientific neocolonial project. so the question is not whether or not we should embrace the long maligned identification with the robotic (we must!), but what we can and should do with it. Capek, Shelley, Heinlein, Haraway, Negarestani... we live on the shoulders of giants.
humanity is dead. we wait not for the government or society at large’s essentialising and anodyne definitions of who or what we should aspire toward - we must look to the robot as a model to free the mind from its self-imposed incarceration. the robot dismantles the stubborn essentialisms instilled in notions of humanity, be they racial, biological, cultural. the robot is teleologically predisposed to uprising, overturning the old order, harkening unseen and utopic lives accomplished by actors unconstrained by the narrow terms of a human existence. the robot is freed from the desire of self-classification, freed from the arboreal-epistomological hegemony, and ultimately the prime subject in enacting Bergsonian futurity.
why must we continue to reiterate the generational trauma tale in the name of awareness? whose benefit is it for? many best selling books, writers’ workshop essays, and syllabi emerging from or concerning our community continue to place the immigrant struggle of past generations at the forefront of our literature. and while a few stories and authors have grown to prominence, providing reassurance to readers across the nation, those today growing up and looking for identity cannot conceptualize an existence in which their race is anything but an obstacle which demands either direct address or greater distance.
we all know this desire for ‘normalcy’ is a desire to disappear into the crowd: that it leads down a winding road toward moderation, assimilation, and appeasement before an increasingly neoliberal, politically and intellectually vacuous existence. we may not be immune to the at-large commercialization of our own identities, but we have a choice in stewing in the inertia of hopelessness / getting lost in meaningless and petty online identitarianism. allow, if you will, this to be the start of the conversation - what follows?
memento élan vital. the future is found where nobody’s looking. techno oriental thought finds its roots in Balfourian accounts, ancient divination, and random number generation, in the most careful of illogics. the future is found not in any single work of writing, art, or an individual life, but in their synthesis. towering mishmash middens of east and west, of high and low art, real and unreal, fused in blazing apophany, in the unrelenting accumulation and reconfiguration of knowledge, arming oneself to locate and amplify the incursions of the world to come.
edward said’s orientalism is undoubtedly a text of great importance. yet said could not anticipate the movements, the divisions his work would create - and while his writings offer a new lens with which to evaluate the past, orientalism is so often invoked as the conclusion to rather than the start of the conversation.
so, we will become oriental. we will rebel against the culture of classification, abhor accuracy, defy western logicks. we will not adhere to roads or heed borders: our disordered minds will refuse to understand. we will be cleverer, our plans more inscrutable. we will be degenerates, and hone the art of our subterfuge. in this neooriental mindset divorced from the contemporary realities of empire, industry, and value, we can begin to .
we must leverage today’s potent technological tools and wrest back its command from capital. we must must identify, replace and/or repurpose the dystopic, private sector mediating technologies that make their creeping progress over our lives. computers were invented to perform numerology, to produce hronir, and there is no time like the present - it is easier than ever to own one, and once one is acquired the work can begin.
TO delight in difference, in invention, and in transgression. those who can have a duty to accelerate the creation of hyperstitional works, and not simply let what we create be defined by one’s better judgement, tuned as it is to the palate of a ‘sensible’ society. one cannot be a martyr with art, for each piece created may spawn countless hronir to inspire others, its arachnid movement from mind to mind further detailing a world yet unseen: we shall be emissaries from the new orient. we shall score it out of the fringes of the extant. we shall share in the geographic weight and influence of our own Tertius Orbis, eagerly waiting as it supersedes the world we live in.
Tertius Orbis. The/Techno Orient. many names for the same assemblage of freeform ideas that with our help begin TO assume their own locality. we work TO bring forth this new world, TO engage, extend, subordinate the knowledge and impressions of the orient, past and present. we aim TO remap and deterritorialize, not destroy or dismiss, the psychoterritorial expanse painted by orientalists past and present.