I regret to say I have a couple of personal connections to this scene and man is everything in here right on the money. I somehow find the intellectual arrogance/regression the most maddening, the openness to literally any idea (except, obviously, psychoanalysis) as long as it's not in a book, and then the trumpeting of it as a game-changing discovery. Reconciling religion with reason? READ A FUCKING BOOK, THEY GAVE THAT A WHIRL. Ether? Spiritualism? THEY LOOKED INTO THAT FOR LIKE FORTY FUCKING YEARS. I don't know, man, I hate the the mainstream bourgeois consensus and the A-student correct-opinion having on the left as much as the next person, but there's got to be another way.
Not sure where else to post this, but I saw your write up of the Bard Hannah Arendt Center controversy in 2017 and, as someone in the world of German Studies, I thought that you did a fantastic job. Kudos, really--the blend of academic insider baseball with real knowledge of Arendt's ideas was so excellently done.. I remember some weiner giving a talk on "thymos" that year when I was getting my Ph.D. and someone challenging him to explain how that was any different than Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment and it was oh so sweet to watch him squirm.
Yeah, I think that's exactly it. I think that the whole point of the mysticism and occultism is to say that all of one's desires, feelings, and instincts are objectively real and existing out there in the world, which is obviously a worldview that psychoanalysis strenuously contents by, in these people's view retrivializing the trivial sentiments that drive this whole thing.
Also, going off what John says here, it seems to me that the whole thing isn't just politically and intellectually regressive, but also the emotional regression to the infantile omnipotence of thoughts and feelings--kind of an ur-resentment at the scars inflicted not just the world as it is in 2022 but at the civilizing process more generally.
Ancedotally I can also say that I went to an Urbit party out of morbid curiosity and saw a bunch of Wall Street-type dudes in expensive suits all wearing large crucifixes and doing ketamine while bragging about how many times a day they prayed. It was this weird kind of groupthink where, instead of all being on the same page, everyone had their own individual, highly particularized line of bullshit to sell. Truly a sad scene.
Seems right. For all of the hand-wavy aspects of analysis that turn me off in the end it is, I think, a rationalist and secular enterprise aimed at tolerating reality as it is, and certainly would oppose to projection of aggressive impulses into politics and social movements in the ways described above.
Yeah, agree completely. I guess from the Marxist perspective psychoanalysis' political sin is quietism not... whatever the fuck this stuff is.
I also feel, on a tangential note, with regard to John's last point, that what's distinctive here is the total lack of cultural production *or* political action, since the contemporary attention economy lets people become pseudo-celebrities without having to write a novel or make any art or even run a blog. I remember an interview with one of these people who said that she went to Bennington to become a Brat Pack-type author. I guess she gave up that noble goal.
I do think there are many genuinely interesting avant-garde artists working in America today, but they aren't take as seriously as this whole vapid crew because they don't live in NYC, and therefore, to tastemakers, they don't really matter.
Far as I can tell, we’re a bit short on these vibe-shifters in rural Québec, but it sounds like the kind of cultivated silliness that a bit of personal heartbreak usually shitcans fairly early on in most people’s lives - like, late-teens or so. Interesting though, as you indicate, that when they do suffer something, they sometimes take solace in the rituals and certainties of Catholicism (now *that’s* something we do have here, if only ritually at Easter or during the fête nationale). In any case, a worthy avant-garde, in the end, has to actually *make* or do something worth remembering, and it doesn’t sound like this cadre, whoever they are, are doing much of either.
As someone who has deleted twitter over the past several months, and feels at some distance from much of which previously felt more imminent, this seems right to me: "just the pure product of the struggle for recognition as emerging artists seek to distinguish themselves, journalists hunt for new narratives, and critics look for labels and emblems"
I liked this a lot, but I feel like I could have used some background and explanation about what these people are and how they are connected to each other and to larger social currents. I read one article about Dimes Square once and it seemed like some people with a zine who went to bars a lot? And now they're connected to Thiel and have a new approach to art?
As a geriatric Millennial who hasn't lived in New York for five years my perspective may not amount to much, but what this comes down to for me is that anyone who sets up camp in lower Manhattan that isn't in Zuccotti Park comes from money and can't be taken seriously as an avatar of counter-culture. It's like a reboot of Girls that recast Hannah's apolitical selfishness as oh so political.
Very well done, though also dispiriting. The only aspect that seems possibly redeeming is the hedonism…although in the context you describe in your essay, it doesn’t seem like people are having much fun.
Thanks for including references to "Dimes Square" and "Remilia". Googling those brought me to articles in Fast Times and The Verge that allowed me to flesh out a bit of the backstory (I think?), without which I found your essay hard to follow.
Now that I have my bearings, I agree with you: we have seen these cultural malaises before. And they do not offer us a path forward.
I was blissfully unaware of all of this, but it somehow reminded me of the past decade of mild reactionary turmoil inside the sub-sub-culture known as the OSR (Old School Renaissance), inside the sub-culture of D&D / tabletop gaming. A genuine movement to rescue actual modes of play that had been mostly forgotten by the hobby became saturated with a deluge of nostalgic-aesthetics-over-substance style content (Art Punk), and became a nexus for "embrace tradition" types who used that community as a bully pulpit against "woke gaming". It never ceased to also be an actual, productive community of game creators, and eventually, I believe, the most notorious toxic elements were cast out and the obsession with aesthetics curbed. However, those wars are still being waged, and I have always been fascinated by whether or not the fascination with "old school" aesthetics fed into its attempted use as a reactionary Trojan horse, or if it was just coincidence.
Nice post. Did you ever link your posts about irony and its deployment in modern philosophy to Richard Rorty's take on politics? These people are more less anti-Rortyans, and he'd probably excoriate them for allowing their drive for the a particularly putrid notion of the 'sublime' to shape their public engagement. I know you mentioned him in the old posts, but I can't recall a deep dive on anything related to his conception of the ironist as a sort of liberal vanguard for certain cultural mores (not saying slurs in public and making the children of Evangelicals read liberal-leaning novels in general literature courses were examples he gave) and how the center-left seemed to be struggling forward in its own way after the Cold War. It might be worth re-reading Rorty as he's an able writer and I think he really captured the ethos of many middle-class progressive people who are not radicals.
I have to say that I did not find this to be one of your more interesting pieces. You haul out too much intellectual firepower for such a meaningless target. And, after your bracing posts from Europe, you now let a certain NY-centrism take hold of you. As someone who lives on the other side of the country, someone who trained as an intellectual and cultural historian, someone who spent a career writing about the arts, I have to tell you that nothing could interest me less than what some cultural journalist has tagged as the latest downtown thing. Culture scenes are all inherently tedious. And your talents as an intellectual and writer are wasted on such efforts.
I regret to say I have a couple of personal connections to this scene and man is everything in here right on the money. I somehow find the intellectual arrogance/regression the most maddening, the openness to literally any idea (except, obviously, psychoanalysis) as long as it's not in a book, and then the trumpeting of it as a game-changing discovery. Reconciling religion with reason? READ A FUCKING BOOK, THEY GAVE THAT A WHIRL. Ether? Spiritualism? THEY LOOKED INTO THAT FOR LIKE FORTY FUCKING YEARS. I don't know, man, I hate the the mainstream bourgeois consensus and the A-student correct-opinion having on the left as much as the next person, but there's got to be another way.
Not sure where else to post this, but I saw your write up of the Bard Hannah Arendt Center controversy in 2017 and, as someone in the world of German Studies, I thought that you did a fantastic job. Kudos, really--the blend of academic insider baseball with real knowledge of Arendt's ideas was so excellently done.. I remember some weiner giving a talk on "thymos" that year when I was getting my Ph.D. and someone challenging him to explain how that was any different than Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment and it was oh so sweet to watch him squirm.
Why not psychoanalysis? Not irrational enough?
Yeah, I think that's exactly it. I think that the whole point of the mysticism and occultism is to say that all of one's desires, feelings, and instincts are objectively real and existing out there in the world, which is obviously a worldview that psychoanalysis strenuously contents by, in these people's view retrivializing the trivial sentiments that drive this whole thing.
Also, going off what John says here, it seems to me that the whole thing isn't just politically and intellectually regressive, but also the emotional regression to the infantile omnipotence of thoughts and feelings--kind of an ur-resentment at the scars inflicted not just the world as it is in 2022 but at the civilizing process more generally.
Ancedotally I can also say that I went to an Urbit party out of morbid curiosity and saw a bunch of Wall Street-type dudes in expensive suits all wearing large crucifixes and doing ketamine while bragging about how many times a day they prayed. It was this weird kind of groupthink where, instead of all being on the same page, everyone had their own individual, highly particularized line of bullshit to sell. Truly a sad scene.
Yikes
Seems right. For all of the hand-wavy aspects of analysis that turn me off in the end it is, I think, a rationalist and secular enterprise aimed at tolerating reality as it is, and certainly would oppose to projection of aggressive impulses into politics and social movements in the ways described above.
Yeah, agree completely. I guess from the Marxist perspective psychoanalysis' political sin is quietism not... whatever the fuck this stuff is.
I also feel, on a tangential note, with regard to John's last point, that what's distinctive here is the total lack of cultural production *or* political action, since the contemporary attention economy lets people become pseudo-celebrities without having to write a novel or make any art or even run a blog. I remember an interview with one of these people who said that she went to Bennington to become a Brat Pack-type author. I guess she gave up that noble goal.
I do think there are many genuinely interesting avant-garde artists working in America today, but they aren't take as seriously as this whole vapid crew because they don't live in NYC, and therefore, to tastemakers, they don't really matter.
Very clarifying read this morning. I like your writing style. thanks
Far as I can tell, we’re a bit short on these vibe-shifters in rural Québec, but it sounds like the kind of cultivated silliness that a bit of personal heartbreak usually shitcans fairly early on in most people’s lives - like, late-teens or so. Interesting though, as you indicate, that when they do suffer something, they sometimes take solace in the rituals and certainties of Catholicism (now *that’s* something we do have here, if only ritually at Easter or during the fête nationale). In any case, a worthy avant-garde, in the end, has to actually *make* or do something worth remembering, and it doesn’t sound like this cadre, whoever they are, are doing much of either.
As someone who has deleted twitter over the past several months, and feels at some distance from much of which previously felt more imminent, this seems right to me: "just the pure product of the struggle for recognition as emerging artists seek to distinguish themselves, journalists hunt for new narratives, and critics look for labels and emblems"
Parochial…and provincial.
I liked this a lot, but I feel like I could have used some background and explanation about what these people are and how they are connected to each other and to larger social currents. I read one article about Dimes Square once and it seemed like some people with a zine who went to bars a lot? And now they're connected to Thiel and have a new approach to art?
As a geriatric Millennial who hasn't lived in New York for five years my perspective may not amount to much, but what this comes down to for me is that anyone who sets up camp in lower Manhattan that isn't in Zuccotti Park comes from money and can't be taken seriously as an avatar of counter-culture. It's like a reboot of Girls that recast Hannah's apolitical selfishness as oh so political.
Very well done, though also dispiriting. The only aspect that seems possibly redeeming is the hedonism…although in the context you describe in your essay, it doesn’t seem like people are having much fun.
Joyless hedonism: it's a real thing, and it's bad
Thanks for including references to "Dimes Square" and "Remilia". Googling those brought me to articles in Fast Times and The Verge that allowed me to flesh out a bit of the backstory (I think?), without which I found your essay hard to follow.
Now that I have my bearings, I agree with you: we have seen these cultural malaises before. And they do not offer us a path forward.
I was blissfully unaware of all of this, but it somehow reminded me of the past decade of mild reactionary turmoil inside the sub-sub-culture known as the OSR (Old School Renaissance), inside the sub-culture of D&D / tabletop gaming. A genuine movement to rescue actual modes of play that had been mostly forgotten by the hobby became saturated with a deluge of nostalgic-aesthetics-over-substance style content (Art Punk), and became a nexus for "embrace tradition" types who used that community as a bully pulpit against "woke gaming". It never ceased to also be an actual, productive community of game creators, and eventually, I believe, the most notorious toxic elements were cast out and the obsession with aesthetics curbed. However, those wars are still being waged, and I have always been fascinated by whether or not the fascination with "old school" aesthetics fed into its attempted use as a reactionary Trojan horse, or if it was just coincidence.
Nice post. Did you ever link your posts about irony and its deployment in modern philosophy to Richard Rorty's take on politics? These people are more less anti-Rortyans, and he'd probably excoriate them for allowing their drive for the a particularly putrid notion of the 'sublime' to shape their public engagement. I know you mentioned him in the old posts, but I can't recall a deep dive on anything related to his conception of the ironist as a sort of liberal vanguard for certain cultural mores (not saying slurs in public and making the children of Evangelicals read liberal-leaning novels in general literature courses were examples he gave) and how the center-left seemed to be struggling forward in its own way after the Cold War. It might be worth re-reading Rorty as he's an able writer and I think he really captured the ethos of many middle-class progressive people who are not radicals.
excellent piece.
I have to say that I did not find this to be one of your more interesting pieces. You haul out too much intellectual firepower for such a meaningless target. And, after your bracing posts from Europe, you now let a certain NY-centrism take hold of you. As someone who lives on the other side of the country, someone who trained as an intellectual and cultural historian, someone who spent a career writing about the arts, I have to tell you that nothing could interest me less than what some cultural journalist has tagged as the latest downtown thing. Culture scenes are all inherently tedious. And your talents as an intellectual and writer are wasted on such efforts.
well just focus on the other ones then i guess
You could write about anything and make it interesting.