A portal denotes a threshold which denotes an event, e.g. the crossing of said threshold. It is also, by something deeper (?) than definition, what we curiously call “in” the singular. Singular what? Mode, I guess. This mode is the way in which the word occurs, and it’s curious because the mode itself is “of” the word, while it denotes that which the word is referencing— that is, it isn’t the mode of the thing, but the mode of the word for that thing (or things).
Over a year ago I wrote about Arundhati Roy’s disappointing use of “portal” as a metaphor for whatever it is we thought was happening toward the beginning of this pandemic, specifically the whole fantasy of the discreteness of it as an event (Or really of any “event,” really, but specifically whatever this pandemic is). Today I walked past the television as talking heads discussed the ever-changing flux of events that populate this pandemic, how it’s over but not over, and/ or changing; how it’s becoming epistemologically more complicated and viscerally more dangerous; how loved ones and strangers are proving themselves committed to being enemies of life; how twisted the meanings of big important ideas like “freedom” have truly become in practice, how there is no end, how things don’t end anymore, how time just contracts and expands and distorts and on and on.
Relatedly, a perennial question of mine involves understanding just what futurism is, or what it means to be a futurist. As I see it, futurism is, broadly speaking or course, the embodiment of a politics that works to claim the future. It doesn’t simply believe in, or hope for, or even simply refuse to not hope for a better future—no, I don’t think “belief” or “hope” have anything to do with it, strictly speaking, though refusal does. What futurism refuses is to agree, “in the now,” to a present that promises with every fiber of its being that “we” do not have a future. I place the “we” in scare quotes precisely because defining futurism in non-broadly written terms is the important (futurist) act of specifying the specific ways in which specific people are denied their futures by the present. Furthermore, it should be noted that futurism in its most vital form is that which actively antagonizes the very concept of the future, which is how dwelling on futurism actually seems to have presented me with a question: how is it possible to be a futurist in the apocalypse?
The answer is, of course, in the question. Like a portal nestled inside a portal. First, the question of the “we:” a universalized (liberal, white/ european, sentimental, ideological) WE (the “human race”) exists to obliterate difference, which is why the we is often a problem. This is evinced in the definite article of that particular apocalypse: THE apocalypse. *This* isn’t ~the~ apocalypse, it’s an apocalypse. After all, for how many peoples was the onset of European colonialism already the beginning of the apocalypse? How many folk have been living it their whole lives?
Secondly and relatedly, this big white we-pocalypse is figured as an end, but an apocalypse isn’t an end. In theological terms it’s “outside” of time. In experienced, historical, material time it is something like a distortion or a re-arrangement of the temporal. The felt differences, the lived differences, the remembered and thought-through differences. The end of time “as we know it,” which amounts to the end of time only for those who control it as it exists in the brutal now.
After the second paragraph above I took a walk to the bodega, during which I wondered if I was correct in my critique of Roy’s portal, I mean we do enter into the eschaton at some point, right? At another point we are pressed with making our metaphors fit that which we’re trying to show is true or real, even when we’re critiquing a metaphor. I mean that’s the point: it doesn’t make sense to say “We are now walking through a portals,” and that’s the point and heft of my point, rendered very satisfactorily by the contradiction in grammar. A portal into portals? More like a portal without another side, without an exit. Or even better, like when you’re playing minecraft and step into the Nether portal but stop right there on the threshold, and everything becomes purple and wavy and you don’t really go anywhere, but can see glimpses of both “sides.”
Anyway, let me know if you want to join my apocalyptic futurists club. Just know there actually isn’t a “toward” an apocalyptic futurism, only an “in” one.