What Is Even Happening?

Post-Historical Daze

Mask Off or On? Kanye appears on Infowars

Shortly after the election in 2016, a friend remarked to me, “It feels like the whole country has taken LSD.” It’s true. There has been something hallucinatory and psychotic about the past half decade or so: a sense of reality melting and a stomach-churning, vertiginous glimpse into the abyss. It’s not exactly an everyday thing, some periods of time feel normal, but every month or so the psycho-dimension breaks through. People like to talk about the “epistemological crisis” brought about by the Internet, but sometimes it feels more like an ontological crisis, a rend in the very fabric of being itself, as if we are on the verge of entering a Who Framed Roger Rabbit-world where cartoons will walk among us. A game-show host billionaire president beloved by Nazis living in a dark tower with his name stamped on it in Midtown? A Black rapper turned Hitler-lover? An army of electronic trolls” that use frogs and toads as their ensign? It’s all getting so stylized as to approach caricature.

People register this sense of reality-breakdown all the time in different ways: following the news, it’s become cliché to speak of an invisible writers’ room composing a kind of show. While the term “cancellation” suggests a sort of continuity between TV and the world, images and words in culture are felt to have immediate, real-world consequences. Look at how people react to “problematic” content: as if it’s something that will contaminate and harm. Or the way Balenciaga is being QAnonized: the imagery chosen hinting, for some, to a hidden, dark reality. (QAnon in general is a pretty good emblem for this overall tendency: psychosis as politics, politics as psychosis.) Or Alex Jones and Infowars for that matter. Tucker Carlson’s show, too, has started to tip from the merely repulsive into the utterly bonkers. It’s also been widely remarked how cartoonish and exaggerated antisemite Nick Fuentes appears, that he seems to be an A.I. art simulacrum of a Jew hater. I wrote earlier that antisemitism itself could be understood partially as a “cartoon ideology,” offering a simplified, caricatured explanation of reality. The fixation of incels and groypers on memes and propagandistic comics—Pepes, soyjaks, Chads, Staceys, etc— as true representations of underlying social reality or totems of identity also suggests this process of ideological cartoonification. We should also not forget that one of the first signal moments of this strange era, Gamergate, happened when critics irritated the boundaries of a totally imaginary world.

Kanye West’s appearance on Infowars was yet another moment where the psycho-dimension broke through. I’m not gonna recap the entire interview, but let’s just say the words “I like Hitler” were prominent. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. In a way, by departing from reality, West has put his finger directly on the real. “Though this be madness, yet there is method in't,” as Polonius said. While all these far-right goonies play constant games, equivocate, make bad faith disavowals, or employ euphemisms, Kanye doesn’t have the time, inclination, or ability to do all that. He just says the underlying truth of this kind of politics: he likes the Nazis! Yes, he pretty much said this verbatim, “I like the Nazis.” It was too much even for Jones.

But there are darker possibilities that need to be taken seriously. Not that Kanye West will necessarily mainstream Hitlerism; I don’t see things being that cartoonish, but what does it mean when an artist who for so long seemed to be able to channel or embody the zeitgeist takes this turn? Real fascism had Ezra Pound and Céline as its bards, I guess our second-time-as-farce fascism has Kanye West. I used to half-joke that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was real science because you could use it to predict what Kanye West was going to do next. (In a way, Hegel’s book is itself a kind of abstract, cartoon outline of all human history.) Having exhausted the possibilities of his pretensions to Romantic genius and finding his desire for recognition as an utterly free and self-creating individual frustrated, I believed Kanye would necessarily found a kind of insular, hippy cult to satisfy his desire for unconditional self-worship. I didn’t guess until very late he would go Nazi, but maybe I should have: Hitler still represents the fullest possible extent of the morbid distention of the ego that Kanye has been undergoing.

A while ago, I wrote a Hegelian a little gloss on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s piece on Kanye West. Coates wrote: “West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom — a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next.” This immediately sounded to me like the defective form of freedom that the Master wins through conquest in the Self-Consciousness section of the Phenomenology: he thinks he is free because he can do what he like, but he actually relies on the recognition of the subjugated, so he is not really free. True freedom comes through mutual recognition, not domination. When we accomplish this, history ends, we will all be free. What will we do then? Well, nobody knows. Maybe we are there already.

Nazism has always posed a problem for Hegelians. The final stage of history was supposed to be democracy and freedom: this was accomplished in principle, if not in practice, and everything else is just a mopping up operation as it spreads over the world. But then,what of fascism? For some, like the Frankfurt School, Nazism breaks the whole system. For them, the existence of Auschwitz destroyed forever believing sincerely in the possibility of progress. For others, like Francis Fukuyama, Nazism is just kind of a historical accident. He says, in essence: yes, it was very terrible, but it was just a nasty, acute case of nationalism, and didn’t throw anything essentially off course. “It can slow down, but not derail the locomotive of history,” Fukuyama writes. And even if it returns, it will be matter of some unfortunate accident brought on by the vagaries of chance, not a sign that there’s anything broken on the level of the dialectic itself.

The problem of Kanye’s madness implies a similar set of questions: is this just an accident brought on by temporary mental illness, or does this reflect something deeper or more problematic going on in the culture and society? Is this a real thing or a spectacle? Is fascism in our era merely chimerical or a living political reality? My answer is, “Well, Why not both?” It’s worth paying attention to the breakdown between fantasy and reality, art and truth, itself. This is why Hannah Arendt’s descriptions of totalitarianism as an attempt to change the whole texture of reality frequently feel haunting. We should recall the old chestnut about Hitler being a failed artist: unable to express himself aesthetically, he turned to politics. Today, the vanguard of neo-fascism today seems to be once again among those whose creative urges are trite or tasteless, forcing them to lash out in hatred. We should also think about Walter Benjamin’s famous statements about fascism’s introduction of aesthetics into politics: “Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.” Alexandre Kojève, whom Fukuyama followed for his famous “end of history” thesis, envisioned two possibilities for post-historical humanity: either a return to a bestial state, or highly aestheticized forms of snobbery made the general condition, essentially the paradigm of the Japanese tea ceremony but for all human activity. One thing that fascism represents is a possible synthesis: aestheticized barbarity.