Pomophobia

The postmodern automonitor

Pomophobia names CCRU's attack on postmodernism as a practical inhibition rather than merely an intellectual position. The essay describes automonitoring PoMo as a machine that routes actions through representation, epistemology, and signification before allowing them to occur. Every input is asked what it means and converted into a textualized, quotation-marked object suitable for canonical processing (Texts/Essays/CCRU- Pomophobia.pdf, pp. 1–3). The problem is not that postmodernism disbelieves in stable meaning; it is that compulsive reflection becomes a security system against unprocessed effects.

The essay's name for the resulting disposition is “transcendental miserabilism”: the sense not only that nothing can be done, but that nothing could ever have been done. Irony, revival, and historical saturation produce a culture in which apparent movement remains trapped in rerun and retrospective self-recognition (Texts/Essays/CCRU- Pomophobia.pdf, pp. 3–6). Nirvana, slacker culture, Baudrillard, and the first Gulf War are made components of this account, not as a cultural survey but as demonstrations of action arriving already scripted by media and theory (Texts/Essays/CCRU- Pomophobia.pdf, pp. 4–7).

Historicism without contingency

Pomophobia distinguishes obsession with the past from historical openness. Retro culture mixes and revives styles precisely after stripping them of contingency; the past returns as an “already known” museum of forms, while ironic distance protects the present from immersion or embarrassment (Texts/Essays/CCRU- Pomophobia.pdf, pp. 6–8). The transcendental apparatus then supplies its own ground: once foundations collapse, subjects internalize surveillance and police their actions against anticipated interpretation (Texts/Essays/CCRU- Pomophobia.pdf, p. 8).

This is why the essay opposes its target to cyberpositive synthetic culture. Technocapital's decoding does not stand outside commodification, but it breaks objects, signs, and inherited codes into operational elements that can be recombined in unfamiliar systems (Texts/Essays/CCRU- Pomophobia.pdf, pp. 9–12). The criterion is whether a fragment functions in a new circuit, not whether it reflects knowingly on its lost context.

Sampling against citation

The central aesthetic distinction is between citational juxtaposition and machinic composition. To a PoMophile, sampling looks like one more ironic bricolage assembled from exhausted cultural debris. The essay instead treats hip-hop, jungle, and video games as synthetic systems: samples are decomposable components relocated into new temporal and somatic architectures, where they produce effects before the automonitor can classify them (Texts/Essays/CCRU- Pomophobia.pdf, pp. 10–12). Sampling unlocks surplus potential in what has already happened and reprograms it across nonorganic speeds and slownesses.

This puts Pomophobia beside swarmachines and abstract culture. All three privilege asignifying operation, bodily effect, and recombination over retrospective interpretation. The opposition is deliberately polemical: “abstract culture” is not the rejection of popular or commercial material but its release from the object-system that assigns each element a proper place (Texts/Essays/CCRU- Pomophobia.pdf, pp. 11–12).

Y2K and the death of PoMo

Datastream 2 carries the critique into calendrics. Its title, Y2K as Death of Pomo, positions the millennium bug as a collision between machinic dating systems and a culture that can imagine only commemoration, simulation, or narrative closure. The text moves from postmodern temporal exhaustion toward K-Goth digital hyperstition, promising Iris Carver as the route into fictions that operate rather than merely represent (Texts/Ccru Datastream/Ccru Datastream 2 - Y2K as Death of Pomo.pdf, pp. 1–4).

CONTRADICTION: Pomophobia attacks postmodern citation for neutralizing action, yet the essay itself is densely assembled from Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Jameson, Deleuze and Guattari, music criticism, and popular media (Texts/Essays/CCRU- Pomophobia.pdf, pp. 1–12). Its answer is functional rather than purist: borrowing becomes objectionable when it preserves reflective distance, but productive when fragments are made to work inside a new machine. Whether the essay fully escapes the academic automonitor it diagnoses remains unverified.