Bahar Noorizadeh in conversation with Júlia Nueno
In Bahar Noorizadeh’s film Teslaism: Economics after the end of the end of the future, we find Elon Musk in his self-driving Tesla (which also acts as his AI assistant and lover) going to the company shareholders meeting in a post-gamified Berlin landscape. The car speeds through an environment reminiscent of Mars, but it’s rugged and peppered with derelict buildings. All is enveloped by textures of techno and a fantastically weird sense of humour. We had a conversation with Bahar about the world she has imagined.
JN: Your film sits between three productive periods. We start with Elon Musk prompting shareholders to leave post-fordism and enter Teslaism, which is the era of creditworthiness, where the future can be controlled through controlling shareholder value. Sensorially, the environment recalls the end of fordism, through the textures and reverie of techno and the images of rubble in an industrial city. You create an unreal world where the three co-exist. Desire, imagination and speculation are intertwined. What can you tell us about this (un)real world?
BN: The idea of Teslaism emerged out of a segment of my PhD work that was trying to demarcate financialization as an era distinct from what’s commonly known as neoliberalism with its post-fordist mode of production. The transformations in the automobile industry have historically provided that storytelling device to read ideological shifts in societies and their modes of production in parallel, and the car becomes somewhat of a narrator of this history. We don’t need to think too far to notice there’s something different about Tesla to Toyota, which provided a prototypical image for the post-fordist paradigm. In line with political philosophers like Michel Feher, I think sharpening this distinction between what neoliberalism purported to be and what its real-world manifestation as financialization is, is quite important. Feher suggests that in theory, original neoliberal figureheads were trying to summon the profit-seeking entrepreneurial subject, but in the path to the formation of this subjectivity they accidentally gave birth to the credit-seeking portfolio manager. The difference is that the latter plays in the arena of speculation, whereas the former is driven by rational incentives that lead to present gains.
Following this, with Teslaism, I wanted to playfully describe what financialization is – not merely to future markets or Wall Street, but to systems of production, namely the car factory. And as its subjective account, Musk really personifies this shift that Feher outlines from an entrepreneurial ethos, to one that sees the allocation of credit – directly linked to image production – as the primary vocation embodied by the “CEO”. In this sense he is really a DJ or curator of a set of images (mostly rehashed versions of hackneyed 80s cyberpunk and space travel imaginaries). Just like figures like Trump, Musk understands how to use his online representation towards raising Tesla’s shareholder value, part of this mechanism being the erratic bad boy behavior who assumedly constantly disgruntles the shareholders.
JN: We find one of today’s anti-heroes, Elon Musk, practising his discourse for the shareholders meeting with his AI/lover. He wants to inaugurate a new era: the end of the end of the future. Boasting about his ability to control endings he says: “Losers try to find their ways into others’ consensual futures, but the visionaries, they create storytelling machines for people to play with”. Deleuze and Guattari define the storytelling machine not just as a representation of the world, but as a way to create, and maintain certain types of social and political order. Has speculation contaminated imagination to create preset narratives?
BN: I’m still not quite sure about the distinction between speculation and imagination, it seems like we often take speculation as the determinate form of imagination, which is supposed to be open-ended and generative. But the argument I’m trying to make in reading art and finance along one another is that this distinction is way more porous than it seems at first sight. On the one hand, artistic imagination often finds itself on the side of speculative capital – in beautifying gentrification projects and aestheticizing urban regeneration – to the point that it becomes difficult to separate the generative political forms from the aggressive tendencies. On the other hand, speculative finance does look quite artistic, especially since both the conceptual and the performative turns in art: the subject of speculative finance “performs” the protean artistic subjectivity, while its labor has become more and more disarticulated from its object like conceptual art has.
To add to what I said previously about storytelling machines, especially those at the service of the radical left, we should remember that we’re tackling both political and economic constructs (maybe a Gramscian take here), so as much as political provisions matter for the left’s counter-storytelling machines, it also matters how these stories are funded. Tesla is a powerful narrative machine with access to unbounded resources, this should be factored in as we’re constructing other narratives from the perspective of the struggle. With BLM and the pro-Palestine social media movement in the summer of 2021 however we saw that a certain mobilization of citizen journalism can create a similarly powerful media apparatus.
Every financial derivative is a narrative device, so far as it signifies a sense of continuity, but in a twisted way the production of continuity is the sole purpose of derivative finance, that is, continuity as the main plot line: the very idea that a future exists in which such and such asset may have such and such value. In playing the game of valuation (which is always futural) finance quite literally fabricates the future as a real space. This is also where the derivative logic approximates the first-person racing game: As you stare at the car driving at the center of the screen it’s hard to imagine a real termination or a real event of illiquidity (which Robert Meister compares to the revolution.) This binging logic is built into pretty much every interface we use on a daily basis, its most obvious example being Netflix, the original inventor of the binge: the ending credits from one episode smoothly transition into the next, with the new episode set to skip opening credits so as to remove that momentary experience of intermission.
But it’s also important to take note of the micro-narratives, and micro-injections of volatility that’s essential to the creation of that smooth continuum: Here I agree with someone like Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (sociologist) who argues in his recent book “Speculative Communities” that we can’t simply say financial narratives are necessarily preset or deterministic, but that living with volatility and uncertainty has also become an inseparable feature of our social interactions across the political spectrum. I take from him that the temporal continuity (the inability to imagine revolution as a radical break) is itself dependent on the reign of volatility and the injection of micro-illiquidity events, be it the sale of twitter to Musk, his routine shenanigans, or co-star’s daily poetry. So to go back to your question I think speculation and imagination are both poetry-generating operations with different degrees of vulgarity.
JN: In the second part of the film, as Elon leaves his car and is running relentlessly to fulfil missions as in a video game inside his dream, he tells us to shed all of our possessions – in a very Silicon Valley guru style. Earlier on in the film, he tells us he has sold his house to become a tenant, just like us. It’s a bit ironic, since one should at least have access to possessions in order to get rid of them. At the same time, despite getting rid of material possessions, he is driven by the idea of domination and extraction, and ultimately possession. How are rentism and speculation intertwined in Elon’s project?
BN: This segment is from an actual interview Joe Rogan conducted with Musk, where Rogan was trying to challenge him (in his own way) to admit that selling his properties and banking the cash doesn’t change his status as a billionaire – the context being Musk throwing a fit that people don’t take him seriously since all they see him as is a rich boy. But there is something novel here: In the place of the most solid asset real-estate used to be, now the 1% who are epitomized by Musk are seeking total and absolute liquidity. Once you’re secured “financially”, the precarious lifestyle is the ultimate desirable American dream. That is, the freedom to be unbounded, nomadic and irresponsible towards the material means and land you set foot on. Underneath Musk’s fantasy of course lies another fantasy of tax evasion. He quite literally wants to be on Mars if the opportunity hits.
We know that rentism is quintessential to what production has become in the financialized times. Brett Christophers’ latest book “Rentier Capitalism” is very helpful on that. Looking at the landscape of UK’s leading corporations he shows that the largest market value is shared by companies that are designed to generate rent. This, again, is yet another demonstration of Feher’s distinction between the entrepreneurial risk-taking ethos of neoliberalism on-paper, and the actuality of their programs as generating a risk-avert monopoly capitalist class happy with collecting safe rents from what they own.
One could say with Musk there’s something else at play though, more like a reverse renter fetishism to set himself apart from the rest of the 1%. But his performance is also in congruence with the image he tries to give of himself as the “return of the old-school entrepreneur”, or the tech-nerd, who’s not content with merely cropping passive income through rent but is willing to constantly put his safe position at risk. It’s always interesting to look at which aspects of the working classes under their legislation populist leaders try to mimic: the conventional socialist populist leader had to emulate a humble lifestyle to appeal to his constituency, (Chavez or Ahmadinejad) whereas with Trump this class performativity shifted to a more camouflaged portrayal of white supremacist masculinity. In the age of tech-bros and techno-tourists taking pilgrimages to Berlin, Musk is impersonating a certain precarious class position that sits well with his fan base.
JN: For me the idea of getting rid of possessions is more directed to the undercommons idea of Harney and Moten. The undercommons are a space where people can take possession of their own lives and communities, and resist the forms of possession that are imposed on them by the dominant order, by creating new forms of knowledge, culture, and politics. A bit like techno?
BN: Yes, undercommons stands in contradistinction with “loss”, loss was very much on my mind making this work, and it figures most vividly in Harney and Moten’s latest book “All Incomplete”. There they attribute the shared affect the wealthy experience as a continuous sense of loss. But this is also exactly where a figure like Musk becomes interesting: In artificially producing the conditions of his loss Musk signals that he’s got the better of this attachment to ceaseless loss. His losing is a kind of defensive reaction to losing continuously, and so again falls under the rubric of controlling-personality-disorder in the face of volatility.
JN: Elon dreams of a world, a fully automated factory which he realises is pulling its energy from an archeological site, “he feels a mark from it, a texture but the beat is gone”. Techno is seen as the sound of Detroit factories infiltrating music. Later Elon wonders, “what is the sound of Teslaism, the sound of one million likes? What is the sound of the fully automated factory and the self-driving Tesla car?” Techno emerged as a subversive resistance to the fordist factory, as a response from within a crumbling system of production: [think of] the drums of techno characterised by Underground Resistance. What sound emerges from the resistance to the speculative production system?
BN: This was the quintessential question for the project when Tresor – a revered techno club central to the post-wall cultural narrative in Berlin – commissioned the work. Tresor curators tasked me with the question of imagining the future of Techno in the city. But as we know Techno is a multi-billion dollar industry now in Berlin, and the motor of various other tourist businesses banking on the kind of trendiness and coolness that attracted Musk to move his operations there.
I think this story is helpful if Tesla’s reliance on the image of Berlin is not clear for anyone: The Brandenburg district was clearly the party in negotiation with Musk throughout the building of the Gigafactory, but despite their insistence for Musk to call the project Giga-Brandenburg, Musk took the liberty in the original announcement, to the dismay of Brandenburg officials, to call the project Giga-Berlin (as a soft mistake!). I’ve recently heard that since the now-memed incident of his rejection by Berghain bouncers, Musk is opening his own techno club in Brandenburg for his employees.
This all to say, along with music analysts and thinkers, I don’t think Techno in Berlin holds any emancipatory potential as it once did in the context of post-industrial Detroit. I’m not a music specialist so I don’t think I have the right answers to what this new sound of resistance to the speculative production system is, but listening and reading people like DeForrest Brown Jr. I’ve learnt that the most progressive radical sound today is coming from certain regions in Africa, not surprisingly so. If we consider the supply chains of finance at this advanced stage of globalization, and the delegation of risk to planetary racial-economic margins, we’d know that this culture of resistance must also, as always, emerge from there.
JN: At a certain point Elon starts to get pissed, his bot can’t answer his questions and he realises that this is not the world that he dreamed of. Then his bot answers: “A dream? You have no wish to fulfil. Only speculation.” Has desire, the potential to create and transform, been replaced by speculation, by the need to control and exploit resources?
BN: At this point maybe we should discuss the influence of psychoanalytic discourse on the project. So I’d maybe replace desire in your question with drive. Drive theory I believe gives us a better toolkit to think about financialization than desire does. Of course in the film drive is also present quite literally, in the formula of the racing-game, the centered moving car arresting our attention, not much different from a scrolling phone screen. In this sense, the film is very much an exploration of this conversation between psychoanalysis, finance, and the medium of the video game.
Death drive for Freud was a disposition tightly connected to repetition compulsion, he was thinking about it both ontologically and phenomenologically: nature repeating itself in patterns towards the natural extinction of things, (but it doesn’t mean essentializing this tendency towards death) again, not very different from the human inclination to repeat a painful experience. In financialized societies death drive is manifested in the idea of growth, the delusional possibility for endless expansion as we discussed before in relation to finance’s temporal continuum. But growth itself manifests as a set of finite loops – the infrastructural patterns covering the planet as Keller Easterling describes, Gigafactory as this clinical factory-shaped mirror to iphone’s minimal box replicating itself in different metropolitan zones taking on different flavors, a bit of techno culture in Berlin, a bit of cowboy ranch presence in Texas.
But mourning and melancholia were also key to the creation of the piece. I took the very classic essay of Freud as a preamble to think about this new Musk-subjectivity as a subject incapable of mourning the loss of exterior objects, which is related to this subject’s attachment to the temporal continuum. In the absence of mourning, as Freud says, the loss turns inwards and is expressed as a loss of one’s self, i.e., melancholia. It’s a great sense of loneliness shared by the depressives, and Musk finds himself alone in his neurotic drive to reach a shareholder party that’s already emptied out of the social. A politics of mourning I think is crucial in dealing with the planetary environmental crisis.
JN: The idea of tokenizing oneself or of projecting a chosen image for self-valorisation is spreading in our world as creditworthiness spreads in the Teslaism of your film. You have also mentioned before this phenomenon in the broadcasting of the Iranian revolution and the rise of an Instagrammer culture. Can you tell us more about self-valorisation in revolutionary contexts?
BN: It’s now a mainstay of media theory academic research to read the Arab revolutions of the early 2000s in juxtaposition with transformations in internet culture. Each social platform played a role in mobilizing street movements and broadcasting and disseminating calls for demonstrations. With the ongoing revolution in Iran, this time we’re observing – perhaps for the first time – the emergence of instagram as the primary virtual space mirroring an image of the “social”, linking the Iranian diaspora with one another and with the people inside the country. What’s really fascinating to me is the simultaneous rise of counter-revolutionary forces completely emerging from the language of instagram culture. To be specific, this movement’s counter-revolutionaries are primarily influencers: celebrities, Hollywood actresses, footballers with a very high follower count, not unlike what we saw with figures like Trump and Musk himself. What’s significant however in the Iranian case at this point is to have this situated analysis of influencer culture in the context of a revolution. Once you come to terms with the immense leverage that influencers possess at this moment – especially when they come together in publicity stunts, posting the same tweet at the same time in an exhibitionist circus of unity – you realize the commonplace division between the “street” and the “virtual space” is no more conducive to a leftist counter-strategy. Rather, that leverage needs to be co-opted for the radical left as well. Someone like Feher discusses the media operations of grassroots activists during BLM protests as one such way of working on raising the creditworthiness of a people in struggle. For him, this is not a vain temporary solution, but to understand the role that the politics of rating plays in our societies is to work towards making that progressive literature and imagery “attractive” to a broader crowd. I’d say this other revolutionary dynamic is also at play simultaneously in Iran’s social media space right now: Instagram pages like “The Voice of Baluch Women” and “Hengaw” (reporting on the struggle in Iran’s Kurdistan) have been extremely significant in constructing an “image” of previously invisibilized groups, and the forms of violence these communities undergo, that most Iranians living in more privileged urban areas didn’t even have a clue about. Magnifying and platforming their literature seems to be one of the key activities that the radical left has to take on for the realization of a social revolution, rather than a mere political revolution, i.e., the reactionary regime change, reminiscent of the Bush Jr. era, that the influencer culture advocates for.
JN: I find overlap in my own research with the idea of gamified environments. While talking with delivery riders in London, one of the questions we explored was whether delivery work on platforms would be attractive to them if there wasn’t a certain level of gamification – bonuses, surge prices, broken down tasks, a controlled degree of choice – in taking orders through platform businesses. How is the digital gamified world spreading its tentacles to our physical world?
BN: With Teslaism, it was the first time in my video-making practice that I engaged with game engines, and it really blew my mind grasping this connection between the worldbuilding projects of Musk and Bezos, mirroring the logic of game design platforms.
Game engines embody the paradox of limitless scaled affordances of worldbuilding, together with all the technical limitations they impose on truly imaginative socialist designs. For one, the first-person narrative overrides many aspects of these engineering devices. But at the same time, to reduce all their potentials to this atomistic architecture is also false, as we know some of the most interesting forms of community-building happens across the gaming culture worldwide. Instant messaging platforms like Discord that are now co-opted by many radical groups and projects as their main means of communication were invented by and for the gamers. I think there’s immense potential there to think about how digital gaming contributes to the formation of “speculative communities”, to use Aris’s words again, that we want to foster, as well as the kinds of hacking that’s needed to break out of their isolationist. atomistic algorithmic designs.
Bahar Noorizadeh is an artist, writer and filmmaker, examining the conflictual and contradictory notions of imagination and speculation as they suffuse one another. She is a fellow PhD candidate in Art at Goldsmiths, London.