Márió Z. Nemes
HAPPY BABEL AND DIGITAL POMPEII. FORMS OF HYBRIDIZATION IN POSTMODERN CULTURE

In 1982, Victor Turner noted that phenomena of impurity lies at the core of postmodern thought.¹ This claim is both illuminating and banal. From an anthropological point of view, the characterization of social order in terms of hygiene, cleanliness and purity is not at all a new development. All social forms may be described along such lines.² It is also evident that the „mixed”, „impure” and „intermediate” qualities created by intersections of forms – accompanied by shifts in values – have always been present in cultural thinking. According to ancient sources, the Latin word hibridia denoted the offspring of mating between domesticated pigs and the wild boars, indicating the violation of the boundary between domesticated and wild animals. The theme of contamination is still a central part of the discourse of hybridity. The transgressive nature of the hybrid appeared most explicitly in the legal‑natural complex of monstrosity from the Middle Ages to the 19th century: the violation of natural boundaries, classifications and tables of laws also subverted civil and religious laws. A monster conceived as a mixture of the two worlds constructed within a system of categorization that has produced the very separation to begin with: „essentially, the monster is the casuistry that is necessarily introduced into law by the confusion of nature.” ³ Indeed, monsters and anomalies played a key role in the elaboration of normality, conceived as a naturalized state of regularity that may be scientifically known and measured.⁴ In this context, the hybridity of the monster and the monstrosity of hybridity mutually ground one other, an intertwining that – despite, or rather, because of its discursive polyphony– has accompanied the (post)modern cultural history of hybridity. The concept is introduced into biology by G. Mendel’s work Versuche Über Pflanzen – Hybride (1866), informed by Darwinism, according to which hybrids are the result of plants cross‑bred in such a way as to retain their disparate characteristics.⁵ This conceptual migration also determines the later fate of hybridity, since the wide reach of the term and the dispersion of its meaning is due to the original methodological transfer between the discourse of natural sciences and cultural studies. This translation, which oscillates between metaphor and identity, acquires particular significance in an era when biological discourse, mainly under the influence of Darwin, became a paradigmatic „style of thought” (Denkstil).⁶ This also applies to the early 21st century, as innovations in biotechnology are also contributing to the increased theoretical interest in hybridity.

However, Turner is correct in locating hybridity as an interdisciplinary „thought collective” (Denkkollektiv, Ludwik Fleck’s neologism) in the history of (post)modern (self-)critical reflection. In this sense, fusional practices originating from different discourses (anthropology, philosophy, aesthetics, film and media theory, etc.) can be classified in terms of combinative compilations, montages, collages, samplings, remixes, assemblages, bricolages, animated by mechanisms of liminality, mimicry, carnivalization, (super)syncretism, transversality, cannibalization, tropicalization, bastardization, contamination, creolization, cultural reconversion. The list may be extended indefinitely.⁷ However, the contents, histories and meanings of these concepts and their interrelationships are far from self‑evident. It is probable that in the cultural theoretical discourse of recent decades, non‑essentialist features of the postmodern concept of culture and subjectivity may be differentiated along the lines of a biological‑anthropological discourse of hybridity.⁸ These preliminary considerations are relevant from the point of view of fusion phenomena to be interpreted in the narrower context of pop culture research, since impure forms are always already characterized by ideological ambivalence (we refer here to the duality of hybrid euphoria and hybrid phobia), which is inseparable from the bio‑anthropological genealogy of „bastardization”, while also encompassing a number of other cultural‑critical contexts, needs and anxieties.⁹

This ambivalence appears in the heyday of modernity. Cornelia Zumbusch locates the immunological paradigm shift in the 1800s, when the aesthetic ideals of Weimar Classicism were delimited along biological‑medical metaphors. Zumbusch reconstructs the desire for unity of „immunized classicism” through an idiosyncratic reading of the theoretical writings of Goethe and Schiller, allowing for the reconstruction of a poetics of self‑care wherein affect‑dietetic prescriptions („distance oneself from addictions considered contagious”) are transformed into aesthetic norms.¹⁰ This has not only thematic but also genre‑theoretical implications, since Goethe, in his 1797 Einleitung zu den Propylän, shows himself to be a supporter of strict isolation between genres, while naming „mixing” (Vermischung) as the central cause of artistic decline. Simultaneously, the practices of commitment to purity, tranquility and unity prescribe not only exclusion and occlusion, but also necessitate the latent preservation of hybrid productivity, namely in the form of aesthetic „grafting” (Impfung).¹¹ The sentimental/Gothic novels which propagated the cult of emotions inspired by Rousseau, causing „fanaticism” (Schwärmekrankheit), the works of dilettantes characterized as degenerate misbegotten products of nature, and all representatives of „sickly” romanticism, i.e. monstrous (counter)traditions, codes and alternative canons (i.e., sources of popular culture), are all but synonymous with the impure, unhealthy and formless in Goethe’s thinking.

In the art philosophy of Jena Romanticism, the possibility of genre‑genre mixing appears in a far more positive sense, however the concept of heterogeneous „mixture” (Mischung) is not interpreted in a biological manner, but rather in the context of metaphorical transfers from chemistry and Schelling’s natural philosophy.¹² In Ästhetik des Häßlichen (1853), Karl Rosenkranz legitimizes ugliness as an aesthetic quality that, while opposed to artistic beauty, appears as a self‑mediating unit. The basic aspects of ugliness, formlessness, asymmetry and disharmony, are generated by „hybrid contrasts” that deform the organic, unitary structure of the beautiful from within. In this regard, they too are productive forces. Differently put, Rosenkranz’s assertion – to the effect that ugliness is „negative beauty” (das Negativschöne) – entails not only that it is a quality contrary to beauty, but also that the intensity of ugliness arises, as it were, from hybridization –distorting diversions – of beauty.¹³ By comparison, the later cultural crisis rhetorics of the fin de siècle were dominated by overwhelmingly negative interpretations of hybridity, as the parallel discourses of social Darwinism, eugenics and racial anthropology identified the uncontrolled mixing of ethnic groups or races with different biological „qualities” as one of the central causes of socio‑cultural degeneration (cf. polygenesis theory). A highly influential representative of this view was Eugen Fischer, who, during the course of his socio‑anthropological study of „bastards” born of mixed marriages between Boers and Africans, came to the conclusion that racial mixing always goes hand in hand with a decrease in physical and mental capabilities.¹⁴ This approach, which (also) informed colonial biopolitics, later became one of the cornerstones of National Socialist racial hygiene, with its focus upon biological phenomena of „degeneration” (Entartung) and cultural phenomena of „degenerate art” (Entartete Kunst), which could both supposedly be traced back to the intrusion of foreign elements „infecting” the collective body (and mind/s, taste/s) of the „people” (Volk).

In post‑World War II structural anthropology and postcolonial theories, the desire for a deconstruction of Western essentialist anthropology emerges, interpreting phenomena of transculturalization, syncretism, and creolization along the lines of a reimagined positive concept of hybridity. The key figure in this regard is Homi Bhabha, who in The Location of Culture outlines the operations of „fetishistic” colonial cultures in the way the identity of subjugated ethnicities is integrated into coloniality. From the standpoint of power this hybridization is ambivalent, because it can also serve decolonization, wherein signs of authority are subverted and transformed into codes of difference in the „liminal” space of translation and reconciliation.¹⁵ This indicates the reciprocity of of purity and impurity, since hybridization is cyclical in nature.¹⁶ Classification systems constantly attempt to (re)fix transfigured, fluid identities, but this is not always successful, and can even be reversed. Postcolonial discourse owes much to the positive reinterpretation of hybridity by linguist and literary historian Mikhail Bakhtin,¹⁷, according to whom „hybrid constructions are utterances that belong to a single speaker according to their grammatical (syntactic) and compositional characteristics, but in which two horizons of two utterances, two modes of speech, two languages, meaning and evaluation are mixed.”¹⁸ Bakhtin’s most important theoretical legacy in this context is the distinction between „intentional” and „organic” hybridization. Organic hybridization consists in the unconscious mixing of languages, traditions, and codes, ultimately resulting in a new, dominant, and synthetic regime of purity, while intentional hybridization, a feature of artistic fusion practices, attempts to avoid this reconciliation with power in order to remain an eventful, dialogic, and anti‑synthetic structure. For the self‑interpretation of postmodern culture, this subversive hybridity becomes one of its central „analytical allegories.”¹⁹

According to Wolfgang Welsch, modernity and postmodernity are not two mutually opposed entities that can be discreetly separated and contrasted with each other. Their difference is not absolute”, because postmodernity is not „post‑modern” or „anti‑modern”, but rather „a form of redemption of the contents of radical modernity”, a connection which Welsch attempts to express with the adjective structure of „postmodern modernity”.²⁰ This non‑discreet distinction or „inclusion” could already be described as a parasitic and/or symbiotic relationship in the context of hybridity, according to which postmodernism does not simply „abuse” modernity, but rather transforms the exchange of signs, codes, and structures into a new kind of cultural (currency).²¹ According to Welsch’s train of thought, the result of incubation is radical plurality, a key concept which informs recurring tropes of postmodern discourses, such as the end of Great Narratives, the dissolution of the essentialized Western rational masculine subject, the decentering of rationalism, and the simultaneity of non‑simultaneities.²² Plurality already appears as a latent possibility in modernity, however, following Adorno’s interpretation, there it manifests as a symptom of metaphysical‑political decline, a negative sign, in contrast to the desire for a lost „whole”, an unproblematic „unity”, which constitutes the other side of modernity. Postmodernism undertakes to expose precisely this utopian desire for unity as a totalizing instance of power, while also transforming plurality into a positive value precisely because of its chaotic potential: „Why should one have to discredit the coexistence of constructivistic and surrealistic works as a state of alienation? Might not, to the contrary, precisely the development of the many constitute its vision of happiness for itself and the future? Unity – of approaches, executions and criteria – would, at the level of modernity as it evolved, be attainable only by means of repressive measures anyway. Even Adorno admits this. But why then ban the state of plurality? Why should salvation have to exist entirely in unity? If there is anything that differentiates postmodernity from pre‑modernity and modernity then it is a fundamentally different vision: the utopia of plurality as a figure of happiness.”²³ Comparing the thought of Adorno and Lyotard, Welsch emphasizes a shift in the „evaluation sieves”, according to which the „oppressive measures” of the desire for unity can be contrasted not only with a negative but also an affirmative aesthetic. Modernity – no matter how self‑critical or reflexive it may be – always condemns multiplicity, while postmodernism finds a new normative utopia in the form of „joy of multiplicity”, constituting the ideological precondition of hybrid euphoria.

The expression „joy of multiplicity” echoes Barthes’s „joy of the text”, which is an important basis for Welsch’s pluralist concept of (post)modern culture, and can also help us understand how the postmodern aesthetics of affirmation positions hybridization as a positive – „subversive” – transgression of boundaries. In Barthes’s work, the joy of reading comes from fractures and cuts, from „redivisions” of language, which become an erotic phenomenon at the periphery between the erasure and maintenance of conventional cultural codes: „pleasure’s force of suspension can never be overstated: it is a veritable epoche, a stoppage which congeals all recognized values (recognized by oneself). Pleasure IS a neuter (the most perverse form of the demoniac).”²⁴ In demonic redistribution, multiplicity does not appear as a mere juxtaposition, i.e., an extension of the field of operations, but rather as a mixing, collision, and differentiation. Multiplicity is legion. Unity does not simply enchant into several unities, because in terms of its boundaries and (self-)identity, it cannot remain untouched in the othering event of becoming‑multiple. Simultaneously, the traces of original codes, languages and identities cannot be completely erased, since it is precisely the unconsolidated competition of accumulation and dissolution that creates hybrid vividness, generating an eccentricity of meaning that, similarly to Bakhtin’s intentional hybridization, characterizes the aesthetic experience of fusion practices.²⁵ In a Nietzschean vein, Barthes connects this eccentric liveliness with the „disposed opposition” of plaisir and jouissance along the lines of a methodological hedonism.²⁶ The hedonistic text, read as the multiplication, collision and mutual interference of languages, opens up a deterritorialized („atopic”) space for manoeuvre, a „Happy Babel” wherein the „interacting languages” are characterized by tonal instability, a fading, liminal, interstitial blurring.

At this juncture, it is worth thinking about why and how the multiple of joys of hybridization can appear utopian. This possibility creates contradictory possibilities regarding the temporality of hybridity, according to which fusional multiplication and proliferation generate lines‑of‑flight, without any eschatological‑historical endpoint, an indifferent „desert” of infinite differentiation, which at the same time also entails the (self-)elimination of hybridity. The possibility of re‑stabilizing hybridization as an (anti)unit – as a kind of infinite transition point – haunts both euphoric and phobic discourses, a situation which may also be described as the tension between cyclical‑organic hybridity and unfixable heterogeneity. But the connection can also be characterized by interlocking discourses of „trauma” and „carnival”, according to which the loss of unity does not overwrite, but rather only intensifies or, better yet, zombifies the desire for unity, which constantly attempts to stage the mourning story of lost unity through the dual practice of ghost‑evoking and ghosting, while the nostalgic cultural „dance of death” is capitalized upon by mechanisms of global capitalism as an emancipatory carnival. This would be the discourse of post‑histoire (which Welsch sharply distinguishes from postmodernism),²⁷ although the degeneration of the joy of multiplicity into multiplicity‑weariness has provoked a negative backlash, most recently in the form of hauntology, indicating a Gothic turn within critical theory. In recent decades, especially in various workshops of pop culture studies influenced by ideology critique, hybrid‑phobic voices have become increasingly loud, interpreting the utopia of joyful multiplicity as a static, nostalgic dystopia, referencing a mournful modernity, purporting to expose the negative consequences of Roland Barthes’s „Happy Babel” as a symptom of „capitalist realism.”²⁸

If we attempt to further concretize the above train of thought regarding the joy of hybrid multiplicity, we need another narrative. We think here in particular of Bruno Latour’s concept of (a)modernity or nonmodernity, which carries ontological ramifications. According to Latour, we have never really been modern, at least not in the way the moderns interpreted themselves. Modernity does not play with open cards, as it builds a latent structure – its „Constitution” – on a double practice, only acknowledging and communicating one side. This is the interrelated practico‑theoretical complex of purification and translation practices, covered over with the fundamentally ideological basic premise of the desire for lost unity. Purification seeks a pure, ontological separation between culture and nature, between human beings and non‑human beings, the made and self‑generated, the symbolic institution of which Latour calls the „Great Divide.” In tandem, beneath the apparent separation of nature and culture, there is a multitude constantly proliferating that abolishes the boundaries of these distinctions, the ignorance of which only worsens this overproduction: „the moderns think they have succeeded in such an expansion only because they have carefully separated Nature and Society (and bracketed God), whereas they have succeeded only because they have mixed together much greater masses of humans and nonhumans, without bracketing anything and without ruling out any combination! The link between the work of purification and the work of mediation has given birth to the moderns, but they credit only the former with their success. In saying this I am not unveiling a practice hidden beneath an official reading, I am simply adding the bottom half to the upper half. They are both necessary together, but as long as we were modern, they simply could not appear as one single and coherent configuration.”²⁹ Alongside purification, there is always translation at work, which constantly overrides the Great Divide to create newer hybrid networks. In other words, modernity does not simply reject and outsource difference, but rather produces the hybrid multitude hidden within itself – as a kind of „internal” enemy and immunized Evil: „What link is there between the work of translation or mediation and that of purification? This is the question on which I should like to shed light. My hypothesis — which remains too crude — is that the second has made the first possible: the more we forbid ourselves to conceive of hybrids, the more possible their interbreeding becomes – such is the paradox of the moderns, which the exceptional situation in which we find ourselves today allows us finally to grasp.”³⁰ In Latour’s interpretation, the Modern Constitution does not allow for self‑knowledge or reflexivity, and postmodernism only radicalizes this unknowability, so we should not celebrate the „end” of the Great Divide or mourn its inexorable demise, but rather recognize that it never really began in the first place.

The proliferation of hybrids overloads and saturates the Constitution, and modern technology has „overcome” itself to such an extent that it is no longer able to govern the unintended effects generated by translation and purification practices. One of the signs of this may be the (counter)revolution of hybridization, wherein intermediate spaces emerge in the processes of a globalization that imagines itself as smooth space. The globe holds caves and secrets, impenetrable fugitive localities where, beyond purity and impurity, hybrids confront each other. But in this context, various posthumanist theories can also be mentioned, which link the proliferation of natureulture hybrids to the collapse of the purified humanist Western image of Man. From the point of view of our present interest, Andreas Huyssen’s position is of special relevance. Huyssen positions the Great Divide as the cultural ideal of modernity. The heterogeneous Other, mass culture and „lowbrow” art are contrasted with „pure” high art.³¹ Huyssen situates this exclusion as being fundamental in understanding the shift between modern and postmodern cultural concepts, from which standpoint French poststructuralist linguistic theory is not particularly helpful, since it emphatically applies its methods of analysis to examples from modern fiction and not the facts themselves.³² Both Latour and Huyssen, in their own ways, reject the postmodern alternative as not going far enough.

Huysen és Latour koncepcióját továbbgondolva a történeti avantgárd lehetett az egyik köztes mező, ahol a hibridizációs aktusok végbemehettek, mely aztán a pop art kisajátító gyakorlatai mentén, illetve az Adorno‑féle kirojtosodási folyamatokban vezetett el a modern Alkotmány eróziójához. If we reflect further upon these insights, the historical avant‑garde may have been at one point an intermediate field where hybridization acts took place, which could have resulted in the erosion of the modern Constitution. ³³ We may reference here the exploitation and recycling practices of Pop Art for example. The avant‑garde attempt to circumvent, even end, the hegemony of the art system has succeeded, perhaps even more so than originally intended.³⁴ The moderns and postmoderns alike are perpetually in the process of ending that which never began. Despite the fact that Latour interprets postmodernism as being a prisoner of the ideology of modernity, on a cultural level we can still link the „triumph” or „emancipation” of hybrids to this discourse, one of the most important symptoms of which is the experience of cultural hierarchical transformation: „in music, after Schonberg and even after Cage, the two antithetical traditions of the „classical” and the „popular” once again begin to merge. In the visual arts the renewal of photography as a significant medium in its own right and also as the „plane of substance” in pop art or photorealism is a crucial symptom of the same process. At any rate, it becomes minimally obvious that the newer artists no longer „quote” the materials, the fragments and motifs, of a mass or popular culture, as Flaubert began to do; they somehow incorporate them to the point where many of our older critical and evaluative categories (founded precisely on the radical differentiation of modernist and mass culture) no longer seem functional.”³⁵ The distinction between „citation” versus „assimilation” indicates a qualitative change in intertextual practices, as well as ontological modifications that are systemic because, on the one hand, they refer to a spatial reduction that can be grasped as the horizontal „flattening” of cultural verticality, while on the other hand, since they are precisely symptoms of a shift from purity‑based organicity to heterogeneous inorganicity, also change the status of artworks. The difference between modernist citation and postmodern hybridization can thus be described as the damaging or penetration of the autonomy of the purified art field, since in the aftermath of the avant‑garde there is no longer a hierarchical metaphysical center of value or cultural hegemony in relation to which the movements of art works could be ideologically stabilized or homogenized. The paradox of assimilation is that the aesthetic instance organizing the art process has a high degree of systematization, which, however, is a regulated system of contingency‑reduction. It follows that the transparency of meaning created by layered, unsynergable allusions, signs, and quotations, i.e. hybrid liveliness, cannot be recentralized according to the value preferences of a single cultural context or canon. The latter’s importance is fading, while interference also illuminates the hitherto unthinkable parallelism of the historicity of individual systems, hitherto masked by the Great Divide of nature/culture and art/non‑art.

As an example, we may mention the aesthetic hybridity of Pascal Laugier’s film Martyrs (2008), which swallows up not only the codes of the French neo‑brutalist art film, but also the politically motivated torture porn of the 2000s, while at the same time, through a redistribution of cinematic language, also reopens the avant‑garde sensory poetics of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and the body perception of the French libertine tradition: the mutual citability of Kant and De Sade becomes meaningful on the stage of contemporary visual culture.The postmodern hybrids of David Cronenberg, Quentin Tarantino or Guillermo del Toro, which build on the intersection of art house and grind‑house aesthetics, accumulate and disperse their meanings in the interplay of countless genre fabrics, leaving no cultural source code, archive or canon untouched: „The idea of traces, which disembeds all signs from the context in which they emerged, into new contexts (storing the former); competes with the idea of atomized meaning in contact with other signs.”³⁶ This does not necessarily entail value relativism, but rather alternate possibilities of complexification and meaning as sensual meaning‑making, because the infusion, cross‑cutting and rearrangement of canon maps or genealogies attempts to ensure the continued eventfulness of culture. What is questioned here rather is static hierarchy and autonomous systems implied in Jameson’s model of citation.³⁷ The Great Divide between high art, high modernity on the one hand and mass art and pop culture on the other is replaced by the hybridization fields of mass subcultures, where the mico‑politics of infra‑thin differences between minority and majority canons can become decisive.

This process is also accelerated by the digitalization of culture, as the technological fundamentalization of the database as a new symbolic form makes remixing a manifest practice of both cultural consumption and production. The importance of forces and energies released by the crossing of mediums was already recognized by Marshall Mcluhan, but the rapid development of the complexity of the technomedial environment entails an exponential acceleration in the production of hybrids. ³⁸ According to Lev Manovich, with the digital revolution, hybridization reaches the state of „deep remixability”, since not only medial „contents” are mixed, for fusion also takes place on the level of fundamental technological structures, transforming the moving image into the digital fabric of medial composites.³⁹ In this meta‑hybridity composed of „software species”, the ontological differences between different visual media become irrelevant, because the new media of 3D computer animation seamlessly absorbs all analog media (photo, film, video, etc.). This process radically transforms visual culture, as seemingly self‑identical image forms are generated as different outputs of the same metahybrid production. The interactive nature of digital archives embedded in software architectures and the political economy of social media platforms only deepens hybridization, as „the political economy of the archive is connected to production in one more sense: remixing as one key feature of digital aesthetics is reliant on there being something to remix, and the appreciation of repositories as potentials for novel repurposing, remixing and remediation.”⁴⁰It is also worth emphasizing that the circumstances of digital postmodernism or „digimodernity” (Alan Kirby) do not discover the hybrid as something metaphysically new, but only emphasize its coming to the fore through cultural restructuring: the modernist Constitution is no longer able to efficiently and transparently coordinate the related processes of production, value assignment and interpretation along (illusory) universal principles of purity. The revolution of hybrids overthrows the Constitution of modernity, but at the same time the question as to what kind of Law will govern the cultural system from now on remains open. If we return to Latour’s standpoint, we can also say that this revolution does not lead to a change of regime, since the Constitution was never in force, or rather, never operated according to the text of modernity’s Law, because it always assumed and exercised its own obsolescence. The hybrid, thus far excluded or immunized (e.g. in culture, as „middlebrow” or „camp”), is now characterized by an overproduction crisis. The result of this could easily result in temporary, albeit insincere and inherently ideologically suspect restitutions of the modern Constitution. Hybrid overproduction– in the form of cultural boom‑bust cycles– can easily animate alternative modes of purity, with hybridity itself appropriated as a counter‑revolutionary tool of oppression (enforced complexity‑reduction). The „anti‑hybridity backlash” of postcolonial discourse responds to this very possibility when it describes hybridization practices as „neo‑colonial” in the context of transnational capitalism.

In pop culture research, this hybridphobic approach is represented by hauntology – best exemplified by Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher, which attacks the joy of multiplicity from the direction of post‑histoire discourse.⁴¹ An implicit presupposition of posthistoire is the postulation of a tendency of cultural (history) to „crystallize.”⁴² Proponents of this paradigm conclude that we have entered a state of ending‑without‑ending, losing our ability to produce a future. Post‑history, which had its last heyday around the 1990s and the turn of the millennium, had optimistic representatives who, like Francis Fukuyama (based on Kojeve’s reading of Hegel), celebrated the end of history as a global victory for liberal democracy, according to which globalism had become legitimizable in the form of a collective free market of ideas and goods, a permissive, smooth meta‑utopia. This self‑deceiving liberal euphoria – a foil for hegemonic American economic power aspirations – was quickly dispelled on the political plane by the advance of neo‑nationalisms and religious fundamentalisms, while the cultural/political/social phenomena of have nonetheless post‑history remained with us. From the point of view of pop culture production, this entails that cultural evolution turns into involution, a stasis from which nothing new develops, but only „takes place” within algorithms and programmatic sequences of operations. In the age of crystallization, only that which has already been formed can crystallize. Apart from the development of certain sub‑fields of the natural sciences, basically nothing new will happen – claims Gehlen.⁴³ In the absence of future anticipationd, humans turn to the past as a consolation or compensation. There is nothing to lose by being nostalgic. All that remains is „taking stock” (Gottfried Benn). This is the moment of the emergence of historians, the time of great historical prospects, the founding of museums, the time of the „archaeology of knowledge” (Michel Foucault), the recording of traces, the spreading universal, antiquarian collecting.⁴⁴ In other words, a state of stasis is created that produces movement, the exchange of trends and codes, a Digital Pompeii, which takes the place of the Happy Babel, determined by the nostalgia of forms and a cybergotic aesthetics on the ruins of modernity. Ghost evocation, intensified with the appearance of database‑like structures of technoculture, differs from intertextual postmodernism, which according to Fredric Jameson is still charged with libidinal energy, dissipates the subversive energy of the joy of multiplicity in the perpatual repetition of remakes, reboots, and relaunches, which increasingly moves remix culture in the direction of retro culture.

The pop‑culture version of Digital Pompeii is most vividly presented in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011). In this dystopian geek novel, the virtual reality of the future (a ludic cyberspace called OASIS) is defined by the subcultural archaeology of the Eighties and Nineties, i.e. speculative dreams of the future are absorbed by the retrotopia of the nostalgic past. In OASIS, seemingly „everything is possible”, while these desires, opportunities and fantasies are programmed by algorithms of the designer of the cyberspace dream world – as well as the cultural archive that defines it.⁴⁵ Even though the characters of the novel have the potential to subvert the logic of the dream world with intentional hybridization, the system only rewards variants consolidated by a subculturally and historically determined archive. For example, the world of the novel is completely devoid of any reference to high culture, a phenomenon that may also have a cultural‑critical meaning, according to which a generation has grown up that develops its set of identities completely independently of the Bildung of bourgeois modernity, while at the same time this restriction of hybridization reinstitutes the Great Divide, preventing or short‑circuiting reflexive trans‑canon interpenetration. More precisely, it creates a pop culture immanence, an empty „superhybridity”⁴⁶ or nostalgic purity, which does not take into account the possibility of the Other, erasing all genealogical traces of difference.

As can be seen from the above considerations, the alternation of positions and evaluation screens related to hybridity can be described as a force field generated by two opposing intensities, euphoria and phobia. In my view, significant methodological and ideological problems stem from the fact that all apparently extreme or subversive aesthetic positions today structurally reproduce the Constitution of modernity, insofar as they commit themselves to the utopia or dystopia of indifference through their presuppositions, desires and traumas. Cyberpunk is both dystopia and utopia, negative and positive, a space of play and a space of struggle, lacking in futurity. The creation of a differentiated – never completely closed – alternative to notions that homogenize hybridity negatively or positively can be an effective alternative within cultural theory. We must go beyond the dystopian and utopian, as these categories too are beholden to the binary codes of modernity. A nostalgia for utopia is still replete with the petrified staticness of the nostalgic. A true cultural shift would need to incorporate the aesthetic liveliness of the hybrid, true to Barthes, further differentiated along the lines of the continuous rearrangement of predisposed oppositionalities, thus establishing transversal meaning⁴⁷within interhybrid relationalities, generating the creative deformation of forms.