You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that fiddles with media ecology and non-structuralist semiotics. I hate to do this, but I’m posting an old essay from five years ago before I started this blog. It’s extremely long, polished, and no one bothered to read it, which is fine. I get it completely. There’s no reason to write a lengthy essay about why Derrida is bad or whatever in the 2020s, when deconstructionism has been considered passé for decades. As I indicated in the opening paragraphs, I think the guy has left a lingering presence in the humanities, and there are still (believe it or not) some rather old professors in the system who trumpet his absolute superiority. But all the same, they’ve mostly retired, he’s mainly read in grad departments today as more of a fossil than a living presence, and thus I appreciate the widespread sentiment that he’s no longer relevant, whatever this means. What I’ve done is therefore akin to writing a takedown of the “pet rock.” Still, I found it pleasant enough to write, and it’s an example of an intellectual exercise that I enjoy quite a bit, namely, discovering things about intellectuals that they themselves would not be comfortable with at all. It is also not merely a “takedown” piece, as the discerning reader will surely realize.

Sorry that this is a re-run, in any case. I’m still figuring my schedule out. I’ve got some great stuff coming down the pipeline, though, including a discussion on radical environmentalist Pentti Linkola, more on Carl Schmitt and particularly his “Hamlet or Hecuba” (which deals specifically with the concept of playing), some book reviews, more discussion on theater and acting in today’s post-liberal environment, and more. This blog is nowhere near out of steam. We are still performing scherzos — or scherzi, whatever you prefer. But for now, here’s an old essay from January 20, 2021 with only a few little edits and touch-ups thrown in.

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Prefatory note: I have never read any of Derrida’s work in the original French, and I don’t feel even the slightest bit of shame about it for reasons that will become clear if you care to read on. Nevertheless, this is a tainted paper, because I have read his work in translation. The ideal version of this essay would have been written by someone who never read any of his work at all, only the secondary literature. Oh, well. One cannot be perfect.

Introduction: The Head Trickster for the Postmodernist Movement

People have been declaring the death of deconstruction since the late 80s. That is, after all, when the excitement for it started to decline and the cult of Foucauldian power analysis began to take over — the same time in which postmodernity stopped being about having fun and playing games and started to be about emotionally incontinent women of color screaming about heteronormativity at their hapless white male professors. Yet the shadow that deconstruction’s inventor Jacques Derrida has cast over the humanities simply won’t go away. Its obstinacy ought to have been apparent in 2004, right when he died. Numerous outlets from the mainstream press put out an obituary both explaining and showcasing the strong opinions toward his philosophy of deconstruction that remained strong throughout his career, but each one demonstrated little understanding as to what any of it actually meant. The NY Times mostly quoted from his detractors, while The Economist, amid various other screw-ups, attributed the pun “logical phallusies” to him in an attempt to discredit him intellectually (he never made such a pun).

The same year, Stephen R.C. Hicks put out the book Explaining Postmodernism. It names Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Richard Rorty as its four figureheads, emphasizing their similarities and downplaying their differences, leaving an altogether mistaken perception as to how politically motivated each thinker was (Foucault was by far more political than Derrida, and Rorty’s mellowed-out, quasi-unitarian left-liberalism is downright compatible with the liberal pluralism of some of postmodernism’s most aggressive critics). That book, whatever its informational value, made an impact on the psychologist, professor, and viral internet sensation Jordan Peterson, who took from it that Derrida was the “head trickster for the postmodernist movement” and seemed especially bothered by Derrida’s (admittedly lame) coinage of the word “phallogocentrism,” which disapprovingly identifies the deep cultural association of reason and logic with masculinity. Claire Lehmann, editor of the centrist outlet Quillette, recently stated on social media, “The tragedy about poststructuralist theory is that it is a complete waste of time studying it, but unless one has studied it, one doesn’t really have a grasp on what we’re up against,” after which she cited Derrida as one of its foremost representatives. His name has been kept alive and well in the American university system, and people have continued to publish on him regularly since his death. Just last year, a new sympathetic biography on Derrida came out from Verso books.

Nearly everything has been said on Derrida that has needed to be said, from his detractors and apologists alike. Attempts to refute this or that aspect of his theory have been made over and over, but because Derrida’s theory often took the form of an elaborate performance that metatextually illustrates itself (that is, he likes to “show” the theory instead of “telling” it), anyone who has tried to corner him on some statement or misreading has only exposed himself as a brooding fuddy-duddy; a real no-fun-nik. This is something the aforementioned Richard Rorty figured out over forty years ago, and evidently, most didn’t get the message. Yet still, if we want to understand critical theory and its role in the university — have a grasp on what we’re up against, as Lehmann put it — Derrida is absolutely inescapable, though not in the way the critics tend to think.

With Derrida, people place too much emphasis on the “what” and the “who,” but never so much the “why” or “how.” His detractors have always had the tendency to focus on the figure of either Derrida or his theory but rarely the system they came to inhabit. This “theory/theorist-first” tendency follows for most accounts of postmodernism in general, wherein the American university assumes the role of a virgin maiden whose innocence has been defiled by some shadowy forest beast. Rather than asking “what exactly about the American university made itself uniquely vulnerable to these theorists?” such accounts always assume a total lack of agency on the part of university intellectual life, instead opting to emphasize the alien quality, the foreignness of the theorists whose ideas have apparently ruined it. Allan Bloom, one of the major critics of continental philosophy and existentialism during the late 1980s, made a point of highlighting the Germanic character of what he saw as the most destructive modern philosophers, Heidegger and Nietzsche. Noam Chomsky, a major critic of postmodernism, has speculated on the peculiarities of Parisian culture as a reason for why so many of the poststructuralists who ruined the humanities were French, and he has discussed it in various interviews. Frustratingly, it never occurs to anyone to ask him, “Well, if the Parisians are so backwards and confused, then why does anyone listen to them outside of France?”

This notion of Derrida and poststructuralism as quintessentially French thought goes both ways, because their supporters love the air of sophistication associated with Paris. And Derrida, for his part, embraced the role of the French outsider facing the hostile climate of Anglo-American philosophy for his whole career. In one study on Derrida’s rivalry with the American analytic philosopher John Searle, the author Jesus Navarro underscores the national character of the disagreement, constantly referring to Derrida as “the Frenchman” throughout the book, and insisting that his style is French — sometimes “very French” — in character. This is because Derrida’s essay attacking Searle, “Limited Inc.,” itself draws direct attention to the national character of their disagreement. Moreover, the phrase “French intellectualism” has become synonymous with the poststructuralist theory that Derrida was largely responsible for popularizing within the American university system, even though this style amounts to a mere fraction of French thought. When we think of French intellectualism, we don’t typically think of Henri Poincaré, Henri Bergson, Jacques Ellul, Bertrand de Jouvenel, or (God forbid) Alain de Benoist. No, we think of the goofballs. Jacques Bouveresse, one of the few French analytic philosophers, wrote an essay entitled “Why I Am So Very UnFrench,” reluctantly reinforcing the perception. And even until his death, Derrida evidently felt the need to keep reminding everyone that he isn’t American, he doesn’t see himself as American, and he is So Very French.

But the less-discussed aspect of Derrida is that his style had become exhausted of its potential in France by the time he took America by storm. The French intellectual milieu, once warm and receptive to his philosophy, had grown weary of his contributions and no longer wanted much to do with him. America, by contrast, greeted him with open arms, ready and willing to turn him into a superstar. Of course, being an Algerian Jew from France (and thus, as some have noted, doubly foreign) added a certain, ah, oh dear, how do you say, je ne sais quoi for his American peers who had been on the lookout for the next big thing. Yet few want to consider the possibility that Derrida’s thought and career, and even a large amount of poststructuralism by extension, weren’t really all that French to begin with.

Be advised that this essay makes no contribution to the metaphysics of nationhood, or anything like that. It only offers this humble proposition, if only to help the conservatives and centrists of the Anglophone world disabuse themselves of the myth to which they so tenaciously cling, viz. the myth of their beloved university raped by foreign scoundrels. Derrida did four decades of work in the American university system, navigating its vicissitudes like the championship surfer Kelly Slater riding a big, beautiful wave off the Malibu coast — which means, of course, that he was more successful in America than he ever could have been in France. And that is because Derrida’s philosophy was American to the core. It was just as American as apple pie, monster trucks, skateboards, breast implants, and Coca-Cola. As soon as Jacques Derrida embraced structuralism and allowed its internal logic to suffuse his work, little did he know that he was on the path to becoming a quintessentially American philosopher. And though most see him as an instrumental force in converting Americans to the French mode of thinking, it was really the Americans who converted him, for his success as a philosopher was only possible when the Americans first looked at him, saw themselves, and immediately fell in love.

This argument has been in some sense anticipated twice: first by Camille Paglia’s essay “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders” (1991), which accurately describes the economic exigencies of the academic system as the impetus behind French poststructuralism’s warm reception. And second, by Francois Cusset in his French Theory (2008), which analyzes the unique American interpretation of French poststructuralism, arguing that it was by no means the necessary or even correct reading of the theory itself. Both studies have their problems, however. In Paglia’s case, she sets up the French poststructuralists in opposition to some fabled authentic America that came together amid the zeitgeist of the 1960s. It consists of black church women clapping their hands and singing; smelly upper-middle-class Jewish guys with stained T-shirts playing the bongo drums; gay men fabulously prancing around in leather riding chaps; otherwise boring Irish Catholic girls refusing to shave their legs and getting into Buddhism; and a bunch of other non-WASPy things that have nothing whatsoever to do with America’s founding as an Anglo-Saxon commonwealth. I frankly have no time to dignify this sort of nonsense with a well-considered response. Now, as for Cusset, he is nothing like Paglia. Though he has written an informative and competent work, his problem is simply that he is too attached to the French theory he writes about. He has gone native; the poor guy! As someone who feels he must always bolster the value of the theory he discusses, he finds himself largely unable to look beyond the conceptual frameworks he has been tasked with historically contextualizing in order to perceive the material dynamics driving them forward, something Paglia does far better. Around two thirds through his book, he starts profiling theorist after theorist in a manner that resembles a mail order catalogue rather than an objective work of research. So this essay can be taken as the logical culmination of what those two and surely others have grasped toward yet ultimately failed to apprehend.

I. Why the French Got Sick of Derrida and His Nonsense

Though Derrida is remembered fondly by a bunch of French intellectuals today, it is a plain fact that by the late 1960s, Derrida was losing favor in France. It is also not terribly difficult to understand why. Even his most fervent supporters acknowledge that Derrida’s philosophical approach is parasitic by nature. He takes a text, finds some minor slippage, and then pushes its implications until the entirety of the author’s work, if not his whole oeuvre, has become undone — the author having been exposed as some garden variety metaphysician, as naïve as your average street corner mystic. Michele Foucault’s reaction to Derrida’s style is a telling example of how Derrida lost favor. In 1963, Derrida wrote an essay on Foucault’s History of Madness. Though “deconstruction” had not yet been officially invented, his critique was still essentially a deconstruction. In this case, he seized upon a citation of Descartes at the beginning of the second chapter, and then used what he saw as Foucault’s strained reading to infer the futility of his entire project of writing a history “of madness,” i.e. a history from the perspective of the mad. At the time, Foucault (Derrida’s former teacher) didn’t seem to mind. According to Benoit Peeters’s biography of Jacques Derrida, Foucault wrote Derrida a letter reassuring him of his excellent work. Among other things, he said:

“I was impressed […] by the rectitude of your remarks that went, unerringly, to the heart of what I wanted to do, and beyond it. This relationship between the Cogito and madness is something that, without the least doubt, I treated too cavalierly in my thesis: via Bataille and Nietzsche, I came back to it slowly and by way of many detours. You have magisterially showed the right road to take: and you can understand why I owe you a profound debt of gratitude” (qtd. in p. 40).

A mere nine years later, though, Foucault’s attitude had changed entirely. In a second edition to his History of Madness, he attached a lengthy appendix entitled “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” in which he thoroughly dressed down not just Derrida’s critique but his whole philosophical approach:

“I would not say that it is a metaphysics, metaphysics itself, or its closure, that is hiding behind [Derrida’s] ‘textualisation’ of discursive practices. I would go much further: I would say that it is a historically well-determined little pedagogy, which manifests itself here in a very visible manner. A pedagogy which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text, but that in it, in its interstices, in its blanks and silences, the reserve of the origin reigns; that it is never necessary to look beyond it, but that here, not in the words of course, but in words as crossings-out, in their lattice, what is said is ‘the meaning of being.’ A pedagogy that inversely gives to the voice of the masters that unlimited sovereignty that allows it indefinitely to re-say the text” (p. 573, emphasis in orig).

So essentially, Derrida, while posing as a radical who threatened to upend the entirety of western metaphysics, was doing little more than medieval hermeneutics, finding hints of the Christian logos within pagan or otherwise heterodox texts. There is probably no stronger way to insult the ego of these sorts of philosophers than to describe them as faithful continuants of the Western tradition, so we can infer that Foucault was really out for blood. Since he published this in 1972, and Derrida had already planted one foot in the United States with a few warmly-greeted conference appearances and guest seminars, one might surmise that Foucault was merely jealous of Derrida’s success. But at the same time, one also gets the sense that he had been waiting to say that for a good while.

After all, Derrida had established his whole shtick by that point, having deconstructed so many of his other friends, acquaintances, and influences in lengthy essays similar to the one in which he deconstructed Foucault (you can read some of them in the essay collection Writing and Difference, which came out in 1967, the same year as his two other foundational works, Of Grammatology, and Voice and Phenomenon). Even before he had fully refined his philosophical justifications, it is mainly with this frustrating sort of pedantry that Derrida had decided he would work. Various sociologists have written essays analyzing the cultural milieu that allowed French poststructuralism to take off, focusing mostly on the conditions that allowed intellectuals to gain their star status. But when reading Derrida’s correspondence with his peers, one can personally sense something obvious and thus seldom remarked upon, yet important all the same: the Parisian intellectuals were a tight-knit bunch. They formed a real society of letters oriented around the university, and appear to have been mutually supportive for the most part, at least until the intra-left wing political clashes of 1968 changed things. Because they were located in the same area and their communication had to be so intimate, it was probably not hard to take advantage of their good faith, as Derrida realized.

But ultimately, one can only endure so much. Just imagine some pipsqueak sending you a letter saying, in so many smarmy words, “Oh, hello, my friend. I sure am glad we are friends. Nice friend. Good friend. And by the way, friend, I just published an essay tearing your magnum opus a new asshole. Hope you don’t mind! Toodle-oo!” And then you talk to five other people the next day and learn that he did the same exact thing with them. Who in the world would want to put up with someone like that? Yet that is what they did. It is hard to speculate why exactly, but it took a good stretch of time before the French intellectuals turned against Derrida with open hostility. Finally, when the riots and protests of 1968 broke out, fracture lines began to emerge within the left, and some of Derrida’s greatest detractors apparently saw it as a ripe opportunity to push him out of their circle.

Derrida’s conservative critics today see him as an apologist of Marx and thus something of a crypto-communist, but to his credit, Derrida was not terribly partisan or dogmatic as a figure within the left. He did not issue attention-whoring political proclamations or pump his fists in tandem with convulsed mobs. Most would be surprised to learn that his unease with the political developments of the late 1960s into the early 1970s was what earned him, at least nominally, so much censure in France. Benoit Peeters’s biography illustrates the scene well. In 1969, the Communist philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye wrote an attack on the avant-garde literary journal Tel Quel, which had been so instrumental in promoting poststructuralism and deconstruction, and much of his attack implicated Jacques Derrida’s work above all. As time went on, criticisms from other Communists gradually mounted. Then, in 1971, Tel Quel formally broke all of its ties to the Communist party, turning toward Maoism and the Cultural Revolution. But Derrida did not go with them in this direction, and instead, he broke away from Tel Quel altogether, wanting no formal affiliation with either Maoism or the Communist party. The decision had to have angered its founder Philippe Sollers, since Derrida’s work was so often the unstated target of criticism even while Sollers would be the one receiving the brunt of the attacks. In 1972, Derrida’s friend Jean Ristat, a Communist, published an issue of the review journal Les Lettres françaises in homage to Derrida’s work, despite Derrida’s steadfast unwillingness to join the party officially. But this gesture, along with Derrida’s compliance, was enough to cause Tel Quel to publish an issue dedicated to attacking Derrida, their former friend. It was soon after this point that Michel Foucault decided to bash Derrida’s entire intellectual project, as mentioned above.

Though Derrida remained on good terms with Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot (two major contributors to Tel Quel), and he maintained friendships with others such as the young Jean-Luc Nancy, most of the big figures associated with what we now call “poststructuralism” turned against him, including Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jacques Lacan (the latter had had a previous unpleasant encounter with Derrida at a conference and eventually bashed him on the record a few years later in the mid-70s). It also did not help that Derrida hated the work of Foucault’s good friend, the up-and-coming Gilles Deleuze, calling his Anti-Oedipus “a very bad book” and “confused” in private company. Around this point, hostile questions started to surface at Derrida’s conference presentations, and cryptic political associations also started to emerge regarding his philosophical indebtedness to the Nazi Martin Heidegger (back then, the left was just as bothered by Heidegger as think-tank-funded conservative intellectuals are today). Derrida decided he would need to start over somewhere else, and America, which had greeted him so warmly before, seemed the best bet.

While this dryly recounted sequence of events appears to place political tension as the major reason for Derrida’s waning influence, others have seen the problem in Derrida himself. For his biography on Derrida, Benoit Peeters interviewed Jean-Marie Apostolidès, a Greek-French scholar, novelist, and playwright. Being no fan of Derrida and unashamed to admit it, his account did not find its way into Peeters’s work, which is certainly not fawning yet still errs toward measured admiration. And perhaps Apostolidès’s account is unfair. All the same, he was quoted extensively in a later biography on René Girard, and according to Apostolidès, Derrida

“was humiliated — belittled and passed over in France, probably because he was arrogant. Derrida’s obsession was success. He tried to place his spoon everywhere in America […] He had no success in France. He was a humiliated little Jew and he wanted revenge. He took to America as his field for revenge” (p. 142).

Many of Derrida’s acquaintances have adamantly stated that in person, Derrida was not arrogant at all; quite the opposite. But given the nature of Derrida’s philosophical style and its development over time, I suspect nevertheless that Apostolidès is onto something. Derrida’s reluctance to “take sides” politically may have proven to be the precipitating event in his rejection from the Parisian intellectual scene, but there is good reason to believe that politics served also as a convenient pretext. The parasitic approach to philosophy may have some real limitations when one needs to maintain friendships. Yet this reluctance to take sides is striking. As minor as it may seem, his even-handedness and hesitance to take action in that political moment when the correct action was unclear already brought him closer in temperament to the original WASPs of the American ivy leagues than to his teachers, Michele Foucault or Louis Althusser, or any of his rowdy Parisian colleagues. So while he may have been arrogant professionally, his approach to the political instead suggested something like the American statesman Henry Adams’s description of his Harvard University colleagues in the class of 1858. This duality evidently frustrated the French, but in America it would contribute to much of his mystique.

II. The American University and its Structural Exigencies

Derrida’s difficulties with the Parisian scene intensified in the early 1970s, but his first major breakthrough in America had already taken place in 1966. It was that appearance that really blew everyone’s mind, the presentation of “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” at Johns Hopkins University, in which Derrida deconstructed Claude Levi-Strauss for the first but not the last time. Then in 1968 and 1971, he took two extended stays there as a visiting lecturer for some seminars he helped prepare. At that point, he was presenting all of his work in French. He took on a visiting professorship at Yale in 1975, well after he had alienated his friends in Paris, and returned back there frequently. And then, in 1986, at the height of deconstruction’s popularity, he took on a teaching position at UC Irvine, made a point of lecturing entirely in English, and continued to teach there part-time until his death.

In 1987, right after Derrida took his new job at Irvine and right before the academic world was deeply scandalized by the revelation that his good friend and fellow deconstructionist Paul de Man had been (kinda, sorta, not really) a raving Nazi and unhinged anti-Semite once upon a time, the sociologist Michele Lamont wrote an article entitled “How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida,” analyzing the strategy Derrida used to conquer the American academic landscape. The basic difference between France and America, Lamont notes, is that in France, the intellectual-as-celebrity phenomenon was fueled by more traditional, relatively centralized cultural media, whereas in America, the ambitious intellectual would have to navigate through niche audiences via longstanding institutions and journals, and so Derrida made his mark in literary criticism via English and comparative literature departments. This is all basically correct, but the dryness and tepidity of Lamont’s argumentation fails, perhaps by necessity, to answer the essential questions: why the English department? And why was there such excitement for Derrida anyway? While Lamont is correct to assume there is nothing intrinsic to the theory of deconstruction itself to have earned its meteoric rise, he only posits the existence of structured, interrelated cultural and institutional systems that allowed for its explosion. He doesn’t go one step further and probe these systems to reveal the unique material and psychological dynamics that created not just a nice fit, but rather an intense thirst for this kind of thought.

Perhaps the half-formed nature of Lamont’s kind of analysis is why Benoit Peeters felt obligated to cite the essay and qualify it. He downplays the impression it gives of Derrida’s cutthroat careerist instincts, emphasizing instead Derrida’s good fortune — the unique circumstances that appeared as if by dumb luck that enabled deconstruction to thrive. I agree with that qualification and will thus elaborate on those circumstances. But it must be pointed out: the dumb luck that enabled his great success in America does nothing to hinder our revisionist mythology of Derrida the All-American. Rather, it only bolsters it, and a mere glance at America’s iconography should illustrate why. The American confidence man, the grifter, the traveling carnie, the robber-baron-in-miniature selling you the snake oil upon which he founds a dynasty — is it ever owed entirely to his cunning that he achieves such success? Of course not. It is precisely the ambiguity that defines his symbolic significance, the lingering mystery as to whether he ever really had a clue as to what he was doing or simply toiled and tinkered before finally striking gold. In America, John D. Rockefeller is a great businessman, and so too is Forrest Gump. In the Major Arcana of the Tarot, the Magician is placed next to the Fool.

To assess the serendipity of the situation, we must begin at the beginning. In 1957, the year Jacques Derrida made his first professional visit to America, got married, and was starting to think about producing a translation of The Origin of Geometry by Edmund Husserl — the philosopher on whom he had cut his teeth in the academic world — the Soviet Union launched a satellite called Sputnik around the Earth’s orbit. This event, taking place at a time in which the United States ought to have been the unquestionably supreme country following World War II, prompted national anxiety in America about the strength of its scientific research institutions. While America had already been expanding its research through funding initiatives following the war, the Sputnik launch proved the determining factor to eliminate all ambiguity about where the country’s finances ought to go. The baby boomers were about to become university students, which would mean a boom in enrollment, and the United States decided to take advantage of this by going all-in on research. Sputnik accelerated the demand for original scientific findings so that the United States could out-compete the Soviets, and the university system would be the way to get those findings. Consequently, all parts of the university system grew as a result of this increased funding. Private institutions, for their part, would accompany this expansion. Roger L. Geiger, the pre-eminent authority on the history of the American university, has called the 1960s its “golden age.” When Derrida gave his presentation on Claude Levi-Strauss at Johns Hopkins in 1966, he was doing so at the peak of this golden age.

Even at the crest of wealth in higher education, however, not everything was hunky-dory. In the humanities, questions began to emerge about what its output ought to look like. The post-Sputnik boom in higher education was primarily for the purpose of research, and when you consider how research works in the natural sciences, the process is fairly straightforward. A scientist reads up on the work from his field, finds an opening wherein he can build upon prior findings, comes up with a hypothesis, tests it through an experiment according to a rigorously defined standard method, and if it goes as predicted, he publishes the results. Since the natural world is an inexhaustible reserve of unsolved mysteries, and the study of each aspect therein is virtually self-justifying, this process can go on for quite some time without any problems. Edmund Husserl may have been right to argue back in the 30s that there is an epistemological crisis in the natural sciences, but if so, it wasn’t dire enough to impede their institutionalization and growth. But things are not so simple with the humanities. To put it simply, the concerns of the humanities do not resemble those of the natural sciences, and yet the humanities were swept along with them and held to comparable expectations for findings.

For those fields in the humanities concerning man’s historical accomplishments (i.e. political, cultural, and so on), the output thereof would be considered equivalent to the natural world as an endless source of novel research discoveries. Yet in this case, not every research “finding” justifies itself so obviously. In various fields of cultural history, there are canons suggesting which texts and artifacts deserve special attention, and one soon realizes that it is possible simply to run out of interesting things to say about them. The canon that westerners inherited largely gained its legitimacy from previous debates on aesthetics that grew out of the enlightenment. But none of those debates between the bourgeois intellectuals who so enthusiastically participated in them were ever definitively resolved. It was simply a friendly pastime for good-natured professionals in various societies of the 18th and 19th centuries who typically did other things to make a living. Some worked as merchants; others, as lawyers; others still, as government bureaucrats. So, when one considers that the United States was the first nation ever to achieve a system of mass, expansive secondary education, and thus the professionalization of dabbling in poetry, or art history, or whatever, all of those unresolved problems pertaining to the humanities would attain a dire new importance. For each new scholarly claim about a work within some cultural canon, it would thus be fair to ask what’s at stake in order to evaluate its significance. And if one might wish to break from the canon and examine something outside of it, there would need to be some additional justification.

Before the humanities had been steadily receiving more money for research than it apparently knew what to do with, these problems were not so immediately self-evident. But during the golden age of research, they quickly exposed themselves, and fierce debates erupted about how to approach the study of culture academically. These debates took place in the context of student rebellions from the New Left, which targeted research institutions for applying their scientific findings to the development of weapons used in the Vietnam War, leaving a profound impact on the culture of the college campus. The New Left failed miserably in preventing the business of the university system to continue as usual, but they were quite successful in advancing a confrontational moral agenda that would impact the university’s internal self-understanding for decades to come. The humanities did not fail to change as a result, as more and more politically active professors had been climbing aboard its ranks. In 1969, the MLA (Modern Language Association) members made a declaration in its annual conference that the MLA would encourage an antagonistic stance toward capitalism as well as widespread examination of latent social biases in historical literature. As the English professor Margery Sabin put it, “Confrontation became established as advanced intellectual style in 1969.”

So when Derrida was giving deconstruction a test-run in the mid-60s, the warm welcome was itself the perspiration of both the anxieties regarding how to professionalize and scale up the study of culture, as well as the growing ideological unrest of the New Left. On the one hand, Derrida’s assertion that even the quasi-scientific veneer of anthropological structuralism still rested upon pseudo-scientific metaphysics reassured American professors that their interests were no less valid than those of the professors of hard sciences. Moreover, his added solution of using “play” to navigate the tensions within anthropological structuralism, and by extension the broader study of culture, stoked the professors’ imaginations to consider what might be possible for publication. But, on the other hand, the warm response also reflected a shift in moral priorities away from those of the general population and toward a certain kind of confrontational personality that would increasingly become dominant in the decades to come.

Without a doubt, the chic nihilism implied in a word like “deconstruction” added to all the excitement surrounding Derrida. But Derrida’s conservative critics go a step too far when they connect the program of deconstruction to any distinct left-wing ideology such as Marxism or Anarchism. No one has to be reminded that 1960s was a time of left-wing ideological exuberance, some of it whimsical and utopian, some of it violent and chaotic. But the post-war economic boom was an essential condition for the inflammation of these tendencies, and the ideas that won out (such as deconstruction) did so because they fit perfectly within the machinery of liberal society — boring, procedural, milquetoast, limpwrist liberal society. In a recent short piece for First Things, Mark Bauerlein correctly states that deconstruction wasn’t essentially political at all, recalling a claim by Derrida himself, made much later during a Q&A, that “there can be a deconstruction of the left and a deconstruction of the right.” But the provocation of the word made it certainly seem politically left-wing in some vague sense, and that was enough to increase its notoriety and success.

There is also something to the native disposition of academics that lurks behind all of their radical posturing, and it precedes the political, or even the ideological. Nietzsche went to great pains to perceive it in the late 19th century, while the uneducated perceive it effortlessly. Academically inclined individuals lead sedentary, often lonely lives, and with the waning influence of a church or religious institution to keep their emotional excesses at bay, some of the particularly alienated among their ranks will feel possessed by the urge to lash out against the happy and well-adjusted people around them. When institutional crises erupt, such people feel emboldened to seek out attention for themselves by expressing their hostilities for not just the beautiful and healthy, but even beauty and health as such. Yet, knowing that their resentment would be rather easy to detect if expressed straightforwardly, such people camouflage it with fancy words and circuitous rhetoric. Their disposition may find its expression through the vehicle of ideology or politics, but its essence is better understood through mundane, physically-grounded considerations: does this person get enough Vitamin D? Did she call her mother over the last couple months? Does she have a husband? A boyfriend? A dog? Does she at least have a dog? And how frequently does she walk it? Does she drink enough water daily? Does she drink alcohol? How about sports? Does she play a sport? Or does she just “jazzercise” once every three months in a futile attempt to feel physically active?

There is moreover a paradox at the heart of these academically-inclined radicals. While they do want to watch the world burn around them, they also simultaneously want everyone in that world to love them. It just can’t be helped. Off they go, putting out one long treatise after the other, releasing them into the competitive arena of ideas and abstractions like soldiers at war lobbing grenades onto the battlefield. Watch as they rail against a world whose indifference to them feels burdensome and oppressive. And yet, while they indirectly extend their scorn toward all of those indifferent bystanders and civilians who are unfortunate enough to penetrate their field of perception, they still yearn to direct such people’s attention toward themselves, eliciting from them unending praise and flattery. Like a kitten, nothing would satisfy the embittered intellectual more than to have a crowd of attractive people gather around him, petting him gently and speaking to him in baby-language as he flops about the floor and purrs and purrs in mirthful gratitude, wiggling his little hands and feet.

So all of this is to say — at that time of 1960s, the ideal solution for the ideological crisis in the humanities would be to contain the excrescences of these pampered would-be radicals through a simple bait-and-switch. Allow them to feel like they are blowing up the earth as they express themselves in a manner impenetrable to the rest of society, but then give them what they really want: a pat on the head for their efforts. The true purpose of the institutionalized humanities is often mystifying, because one can always ask, “Why did it need to be institutionalized in the first place? Are the humanities not what we humans just do spontaneously?” But the intense debates regarding what the humanities ought to be about wound up creating a new purpose for it — just not the purpose any of the participants in these debates had in mind. That purpose was not to spread knowledge for its own sake, or encourage responsible behavior within society, or to think critically to make the world a better place, or anything silly like this. It was to nullify the potential harm of the perennially resentful intellectual.

The university would achieve this nullification by dividing the intellectuals’ various potential fields of interest into discrete units, which would work effectively as little cages, each containing a hamster wheel connected to a rotor, which would spin a power generator. Then, the institution would reassure the intellectual that he is indeed quite radical and offer him a career in one of these cages as an incentive to run on the hamster wheel for the rest of his life, either not seeing the mechanism for what it is, or being satisfied enough not to care. And then, the energy generated from the rotation of all these hamster wheels would be enough to fuel the system! Of course, not everyone drawn to the humanities wanted to “stick it” to “the man,” but enough of them did to where the pretense of radicalism had to be assimilated into its constitutive structure, and so deconstruction served this purpose starting in the mid-70s as more and more people became career-oriented.

III. The Literature Departments and the Appeal of Deconstruction

This bait-and-switch that characterized Derrida’s work will be discussed more in a bit, but for now, it must be established that in order for it to thrive, the humanities first needed to take a beating. And that’s what happened; the golden age of research funding did not last. By the beginning of the 1970s, it was already apparent that the high hopes of endless enrollment and expansion would have to be reconsidered, and by the mid-70s there was some uncertainty regarding the future of the research university system as a whole, because while it was still continuing to grow, it was doing so below prior expectations. The humanities were disproportionately impacted. The 1970s was a time of overall slowdown for university growth, and this led in particular to reductions in students pursuing a humanities major as well as stagnancy in the job market for new faculty. In 1974, one year before Derrida took his first visiting professorship in the United States, new enrollments for bachelor’s degrees started to plummet, and this relatively low number would persist for about a decade. The reason owed largely to the lowered expectations for career opportunities in college graduates, prompting a gradual shift toward vocationalism in student attitudes, which meant choosing more profitable majors. As Geiger notes, the percentage of freshmen considering it “very important” to be “well off financially” was in the low 40s at the beginning of the 1970s, it went up to 50% in 1975, then shot up to 71% in 1985 (2006, p. 66). But the reason surely also owed plenty to the new attitude of the humanities — its feminism, its pseudo-Marxism, and, yes, increasingly after some time, its deconstruction. Derrida’s Voice and Phenomenon was first translated into English in 1973 (as Speech and Phenomena), while Of Grammatology was translated into English for the first time in 1976, and these translations were the way through which most American academics would read his work.

At this point, Derrida’s philosophy, for most of his followers, became synonymous with deconstruction itself, which would become “a literary exercise,” not a strictly philosophical discipline. At any rate, that is how it was treated by the American academic establishment. When Derrida was visiting American universities in the 1960s, he was doing so as a philosopher. But by the 1970s, it was increasingly clear that he would not be able to hack it as one. In philosophy, a field in which it does not suffice merely to work as an intellectual historian, the threat of a potential legitimacy crisis has always lingered in the background more prominently than in other humanities subjects. The philosophers must therefore routinely take care to ward off this threat. So as higher education expanded in the Anglophone world while the job market became increasingly competitive, in order for new philosophical claims to be made, the requirements for clarity in each statement (and in the definitions for the words therein) became rather stringent. Plus, the questions a philosopher could ask and answer for publication became increasingly rarefied to the point where, typically, no one with prior training would even think to ask them. Finally, expectations tightened for the philosopher to show competence in formal logic. In such a field, Derrida never could have succeeded. His disposition was too aloof; his attitude too playful; his contributions too negative; his terminology too imprecise. So his philosophy transformed, as if by magic, into literary theory, while philosophy actually wound up being the only department in the humanities actively hostile to his work.

The tightening of standards that impacted philosophy accompanied similar stringencies in other departments. In order to get a job as well as secure tenure, publishing one’s scholarship became increasingly important. Each field in the humanities, in order to meet this expectation, would drift off into its own niche territory as the work became more voluminous, each department with its own set of obscure standards to determine the quality of new scholarship. And even within each department, one’s work would have to become increasingly compartmentalized. If you look at the art historians of the early twentieth century, for instance, you will notice that they could publish on a wide range of time periods. As the decades went on, that became increasingly difficult. Consequently, the departments would become increasingly noncommunicative with one another, the communication among the divisions within each department would grow increasingly tense, and the output would grow altogether more distant from the interests of the average person. The 1970s was when scholarship on literature could be produced from various new theoretical vantage points. All the while, Kenneth Burke’s metaphor from 1941 depicting scholarship as an unending conversation at a parlor became increasingly favored, not merely as a description of how scholarly endeavors tend to work under undisturbed conditions but as the prescription for how the institutionalization of scholarship must proceed forward. Ubiquitous as the metaphor may be, it rarely dawns on anyone to wonder, “If the participants in this parlor conversation have to be paid to keep talking, how interesting could the subject matter possibly be in the first place?” The very absence of such a question is a testament to the success of America’s mass institutionalization of intellectual life.

For English departments before the 1960s, the main working theory to meet the demands of America’s institutionalization of the study of literature had been New Criticism, a sort of formalism that assessed the text alone, shorn of all other considerations, to determine its literary value. We will say more about New Criticism later. But for now, it will suffice to say that it did not last as a basis for scholarship because it relied upon naïve aesthetic assumptions that could easily be questioned, and it eschewed important considerations such as historical context and authorial biography. It also was devised as a way to justify the pre-existing literary canon while selecting newer entries (these would largely include the modernists, such as Pound, Eliot, and Joyce). It was inherently limited, and so it would not suit the growth of the university system that was occurring throughout the 1960s, nor would it suit the ideological demands of the New Left. Once researchers felt freer to dismiss New Criticism during that decade, another theoretical approach emerged in historicism, the study of the surrounding historical circumstances of a text. Then psychoanalytic criticism came along. And then, when the pressure increased during the 70s, a whole bunch of theories exploded onto the scene, with deconstruction being among its most fashionable.

Derrida’s elevation could not have happened without the influence of Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller, two Yale literature professors who became the most well-known American defenders and advocates of deconstruction. Their application of Derrida to literary criticism would later come under heavy fire from the small handful of career philosophers writing on Derrida, particularly Rodolphe Gasché, who felt that using deconstruction as a tool of literary criticism undermined its radical philosophical implications. But this critique only came along when the practice was already losing some steam. In its formative days, deconstruction was so attractive because it offered a way to produce new scholarship on just about any text the scholar could think of, so long as she used that text to buttress Derrida’s underlying philosophy in some way, however perfunctorily. With deconstruction, a literary scholar would never actually make a new philosophical argument. She would instead use the corpus of world literature as a store of evidence to show the validity of Derrida’s work, “proving” it over and over with a new text each time. When Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction came out in 1983, the approach had been fully proceduralized, as he provided a readable recapitulation of deconstruction as a reversal of binary hierarchies found within the text (like man vs. woman, speaking vs. writing, etc.), and this reversal would be done not to create a new hierarchy but rather to expose the contrivance of the distinction that supposedly separates the two poles. So, basically, you find some binary oppositions and screw around with them to prove that they’re phony. And all the while, the deconstructor would disclaim any personal agency in this sort of maneuvering, because according to Derrida’s philosophy, one does not singlehandedly deconstruct a text. The deconstruction is not done by any one writer — which is to say, there is no “deconstructor” (I’m still going to use the word anyway) — because the work deconstructs itself.

Now, of course, since literature does not propose to accomplish what philosophy does, one approach to deconstruction would involve not deconstructing the work of literature per se, but rather some ideology, tradition, or “discourse” to which it might be attached. The work of literature, in this arrangement, would act as the locus of contradictions that expose the artifice of its discursive background. This method of deconstruction could be relatively easy to do, especially any grad student putting together some slapdash MA thesis. The literary critic wouldn’t need to be particularly careful with the text as a standalone document, since one could play a bit fast and loose with defining its textual parameters. As long as you copied some of the techniques Derrida used to deconstruct stuff, then applied them to your stuff, this would be good enough.

Alternatively, for many literary critics, relying on Derrida meant making an argument that the author of some literary work was keenly aware of the same philosophical problems that Derrida had uncovered, even if that author predated him by hundreds of years. This sort of scholarship would usually involve establishing that the poet was secretly writing a poem about the process of writing a poem, or the novelist was secretly writing a novel about the process of writing a novel, or the playwright was secretly writing a play about the process of writing a play, and the scholar could “prove” it by searching for moments of self-reflexivity in the writing — that is, moments where the writing seems to acknowledge its own contrivance as a work of writing. As curious as this approach might sound, plenty of ink was spilled over a whole bunch of books by so many writers who had identified that basic strategy and decided to implement it.

My favorite example of this approach is a book by R. Howard Bloch called The Scandal of the Fabliaux (1986) about a style of humorous, vulgar, often sexually perverted French poems from the 12–13th centuries. His argument is that the real “scandal” of the fabliaux wasn’t that they’re dirty and perverted, but rather that they’re really about the instability of language in determining meaning. So, Bloch interprets various images, such as clothes or dead corpses, as linguistic signs that create confusion or other interpretive problems. In one passage, he discusses the anonymous poem “The Piece of Shit” (La Crote), about a man whose wife hands him a turd she produced and tells him to guess what it is. Bloch points out that feces are, technically speaking, food divested of their nutritional value, which corresponds to the notion of a signifier divested of any connection to its proper referent. The piece of shit is a “dead letter,” so to speak, without any connection to its assumed meaning, i.e. the spirit which quickens the text (as in 2 Corinthians 3:6). Ah… yes. Of course. Now, one might ask: does this claim have any historical legitimacy at all? Was the author of “The Piece of Shit” aware of such a possible interpretive association? Would the audience have been? Could they have been? If a piece of shit deconstructs itself in the forest, and no one is there to read it, does it make a smell? Well, it really doesn’t matter; what matters is that this argument fits with Derrida’s theory, and the critic was clever to have made such a metaphoric association, and that’s all that anybody cares about.

So despite its appearance of being the great obliteration of western philosophy, deconstruction was instead that bait-and-switch alluded to at the end of the last section. A young graduate student might get into deconstruction, thinking, “I’m going to do the yippies proud! Maybe Bernadine Dohrn from the Weather Underground will think I’m cool! Far out, man!” but then as soon as the work begins, she would find herself hooked onto an altogether different enterprise, even while thinking herself to be a real badass all the while. And of course, once it became clear that there is nothing even remotely subversive about this sort of work, the scholar’s blood would have cooled down enough for it not to matter anymore. On the back of the 1997 paperback edition of Of Grammatology (trans. Gayatri Spivak), a blurb by one Roger Poole says of Derrida’s work, “A handy arsenal of deconstructive tools are to be found in its pages, and the technique, once learnt, is as simple, and as destructive, as leaving a bomb in a brown paper bag outside (or inside) a pub.” Radical, dude. This description is most definitely part of the bait-and-switch. It’s pure fantasy — about as representative of the product as the pictures of McDonald’s hamburgers in the advertisements. Just open the book, consult its pages, and one will find nothing so chaotic as what Poole describes.

Of course, Derrida was invoked at times for political reasons, particularly as the 1980s progressed. Jonathan Culler’s aforementioned work was instrumental in drawing attention to the possible usages of deconstruction in the context of feminism (though the feminists, too, would eventually stop caring about Derrida). And Derrida himself would make various ambiguous statements as to the political utility of his work, allowing people to see in that possibility what they wanted. But little in Derrida’s writing suggests the outright iconoclasm these ideologues saw in him. This statement requires some explanation. Derrida’s critique is always just as open to the same criticisms it levels against all other works. At best, it might allow the reader the ability to psychically neutralize a text’s powers of persuasion — not a bad thing, until one realizes that it can do the same to just about any text, including that same text that once seemed like a weapon. This means the reader, should she pursue the implications of deconstruction, will eventually be brought back to square one, recognizing that “deconstruction” can be applied so diffusely as to be harmless. Nothing, ultimately, is at stake. In Explaining Deconstruction by Kathleen Wheeler, the author concedes that Derrida did not ultimately escape “logocentric” writing himself, even though this was the kind of writing deconstruction is meant to target. Unsurprisingly, she doesn’t seem to mind.

This aspect of deconstruction is actually quite obvious to the person hearing about it for the first time. The stoned third-year English student in his “Introduction to Literary Theory” class raises his hand and asks the professor, “Wait a minute, like… if you can deconstruct all this stuff, then can’t you also just, like… deconstruct… the deconstruction?” And he finds himself quite confused when his teacher, rather than acknowledging the futility of the whole enterprise, instead widens her eyes enthusiastically and replies with a nod, “Yes, that’s right! And you could deconstruct the deconstruction of the deconstruction as well!” The student then thinks to himself “what the fuck” before looking out the window, distracted by a bird who just flew by. A day later, he has forgotten the exchange took place, and in fact, just about everybody forgets this exchange including the most attentive students, because they have thought to themselves, “Gee, I believe that this is a question that I will need to revisit later,” only to be swept up in the cognitive demands of deconstruction as a literary discipline. The mental exertion that goes into doing it proves so distracting that the diehard deconstructionist can go her whole life without once feeling compelled to return to the question, “Why does any of this stuff matter, exactly?”

Now, if so many texts are equally susceptible to being deconstructed, can Derrida’s technique erode the legitimacy of any single one above all others? Not really, because it is meant to be a never-ending process, and so that one text is just one text of indeterminate importance, it’s whatever. But, according to the philosophy, this means deconstruction also cannot radically equalize all things, either, as with dialectical monism or, I don’t know, Communism or something like this. Even its reversal of binary hierarchies can only take place within a bounded context, as they are never allowed to produce a synthesis or negotiation and actually go somewhere, progressing toward something definitive. Deconstruction is thus not even allowed to have a final moment of victory in which it has successfully salted the earth, forcing all its inhabitants to take every book from that point onward with one grain each. This lack of finality one way or the other robs its critics of the ability to impute to deconstruction an apocalyptic agenda, and it also robs its politically zealous followers of the ability to pooh-pooh some text or “discourse” in order to enact social change — at least not with any real philosophical justification. When a text is deconstructed, it is both affirmed and denied, and there could be no other way.

But if it seems that deconstruction can make one text look uniquely bad, as it evidently did to many of Derrida’s acolytes, it was because the true power of deconstruction is pragmatic in nature, and this pragmatic power lies at the caprice of the deconstructor. Derrida’s philosophy claims that no single point of departure is justifiable to make its case. But of course, one can’t just accept that for what it is and find something else to do, like fly a kite, or learn to crochet. One must go ahead and choose somewhere all the same. Thus, wherever the choice is made, the object of analysis in that direction will feel as though it takes on a new level of importance simply by dint of the fact that it was chosen. In 1991, Dinesh D’Souza, in his book Illiberal Education, attempted to show that deconstruction is used one-sidedly as a weapon to attack the legitimacy of a text when he said, “Deconstructionists treat some works with uncharacteristic respect, and their authority is left unchallenged. Marx, for instance, never seems to be deconstructed, neither does Foucault” (p. 182). Well, Derrida had already deconstructed Foucault’s History of Madness long before 1991, and he did so in a way that effectively delegitimizes the book’s stated purpose. Then, just two years after D’Souza said that, Derrida deconstructed Marx in Spectres of Marx while extending to him the highest praise and compliments. So, rather than a radical punk rockin’ anarchy bomb used to blow up the corporate narc pub run by fascists, it is perhaps better to say that deconstruction works like a magnifying glass. Being a device of contemplation, the glass reveals previously unnoticed or unseen details in whatever the viewer holds it up against. But if he so chooses, the viewer can tilt the glass just a bit and concentrate the sunlight upon the object so acutely that it slowly burns to a crisp. Just so, in deconstruction, it is up to the verbal stylist if she wants to delegitimize the text or playfully redeem it throughout the course of writing about it, her words having the power to tilt the lens or keep it steady.

But here, the similarities end, and a qualification is in order: we are only playing with words. There is no real burn or “violence.” Few people would bother to look through the glass anyway, and the only ones who can understand the vision are other low-risk academics — academics who fantasize of revolt and uprising but nevertheless prove unwilling to endure the burden of martyrdom, opting for cushy careers instead. So regardless of what the deconstructor wants, the deconstructed remains in circulation and continues to take up rent space in the heads of intellectuals. Whether they choose to do so with nice words or mean words, they are still talking about the text. And, as the American business maxim goes, no publicity is bad publicity.

But for the diligent Derridean scholar, such an act of “violence” was usually not the goal anyway. Many of them would deconstruct texts within the literary canon because publishing on the literary canon was (and perhaps surprisingly still is) the easiest way to secure employment for literature students, and as a bonus, they actually would come to enjoy the material. Moreover, the scholarship wouldn’t constitute mere mental taxation. Deconstruction, at its absolute best, meant the joy of thoughtfully untangling its puzzles and trickery as well as producing one’s own for the next person to untangle. That deconstruction had to focus so closely on the expressive modes and strategies of its target while remaining constantly mindful of its own mode of expression meant that the actual deconstructions would often be riddled with paradoxes and ironies that practically summon themselves. So for plenty of Derridean scholars, the long process of combing through these tangled writings would have a soul-cleansing effect and prove to be its own reward. When a self-described “theory-head” — let’s just say it’s an aging ex-hippie professor in her 70s — tells her students that she “gets high on theory” as a way of enticing them to study it, undoubtedly she is being sincere, attempting to describe to them a sort of satisfaction that lies beyond the mundane realm of experience. In the 87th exercise (verse 111) of the Vijñāna-bhairava-tantra, an ancient book of spiritual practices for Hindu Shaivites, the would-be adept is instructed to spin himself around and around in a circle and then fall onto the ground while very dizzy. At that moment, if performed with the right spiritual readiness and intent, he will achieve a state of awareness of the all-pervading divine consciousness. The next verse and practice says that overcoming an intellectual task of great difficulty can create the same exact effect.

And difficult it could be. During its heyday, if a scholar really wanted to deconstruct something well, she would need to be capable of A) demonstrating at least some erudition in the history of philosophy, B) flaunting an understanding of more than just one or two languages, C) engaging in counterintuitive lateral thinking, D) actually knowing something about the literature she’s discussing, and perhaps E) making obnoxious postmodern puns by manipulating a word’s morphemic structure with parentheses, or playing on its etymology to make a point relevant to the argument. All this, plus showing mastery over Derrida’s notoriously difficult prose. So, before it meant revolutionary political chaos, deconstruction at its core meant job security, because it functioned as a rough surrogate for determining both verbal intelligence and conscientiousness. Deconstruction was primarily a tool of business in a newly competitive field. In the parlor of the never-ending scholarly conversation, some of the occupants had found a way to set aside for themselves not more contributive discussion, but rather, a parlor game.

Being influenced by Marx, and thus more sensitive to the material realities of the university system, Terry Eagleton, just when deconstruction was getting big, looked upon it with greater perception than Derrida’s conservative critics have done all the way up to now. Eagleton, in his Literary Theory, calls Anglo-American deconstruction “a power-game” with the same fundamental pattern of “orthodox academic competition,” and he associates it with “liberal skepticism.” Plus, he acknowledges that Derrida’s philosophy is not nihilistic, and it does not deny the existence of meaning or reality. He even attributes to Derrida the view that some of the American reception of his work effects an “institutional closure” that serves the dominant interests of the American political economy. But of course, Eagleton’s conclusion from all this is that the hope of a rising embrace of more aggressively political poststructuralists like Michele Foucault is an encouraging development. That’s sort of funny. Go watch a viral video of the affluent cult-like students of Evergreen State College screaming about white supremacy during their notorious meltdown, or that video of the crowd of Yale girls berating their professor while half of them click their fingers in the background as if they’re watching a beatnik poetry recital. Go do that, and then ask yourself: was Derrida really so bad when he was on top?

What Eagleton failed to see is that Foucault’s newfound dominance in academia did not ultimately amount to a strong-armed critique of American imperialism, capitalism, or liberalism — Foucault’s defenders will argue that most of today’s campus radicalism is just a bastardization of Foucault’s work — nor did it, for that matter, leave any kind of net positive impact on political affairs from practically any vantage point save that of a university professor. On the contrary, it reflected a newfound anger in the students and professors. But rather than put this anger to productive use, Foucault’s ideas were absorbed within liberalism’s own internal machinery, and the flames of radicalism that his writings would eventually play some role in stoking have since been met with enthusiastic approval by both the managerial class and the economic elites who run the world’s most profitable corporations.

Derrida’s work, too, wound up assisting in the business dimensions of the university system, as I’ve shown. But unlike with Foucault and others, the effect of Derrida’s writing was that it did comparatively little harm. While true that various political activists claimed (and to some extent still claim) to be influenced by Derrida, such influence always had to be buttressed by some other French theorist to make it stick. The main downside to Derrida was that the radical bait-and-switch he represented proved too obvious to the academic soldiers of ressentiment who really did want their books to be weapons and their words, violence. And so it was their hunger for vengeance that ultimately won out, prompting a shift in moral priorities for the humanities once again in the late 1980s as the university system’s overall financial situation worsened, administrations became increasingly bloated, tuition costs had to be raised, and — this is just a tad important — a new generation of affirmative action beneficiaries, particularly women, proved the determining factor in bailing out the universities, thus allowing for more and more expansion and bloat. The right-wing critic Niccolo Soldo calls his publication brand “Fisted by Foucault,” alluding to both Foucault’s status as the number one cited writer in modern scholarship, as well as Foucault’s real-life penchant for anal fisting. But if it’s true that the university system got fisted by Foucault in some spiritual sense, then Derrida was the one who supplied the lube. If deconstruction had somehow managed to stay on top, the scholarship would have continued to be a blissfully aimless pageant of cerebral eggheads performing daunting feats of abstraction for one another. And perhaps you’ve noticed this already, so I’ll just put it gently: the soldiers of wokeness are not exactly cerebral eggheads.

IV. The Underlying Americanness of Deconstruction

Back in 1984, Derrida said, “Were I not so frequently associated with this adventure of deconstruction, I would risk, with a smile, the following hypothesis: America is deconstruction” (emphasis in orig). We should not fail to appreciate his effective use of apophasis here. It’s not that he’s really making that point. He would be making it, except that he, a Frenchman, is associated with deconstruction, and besides, such words and concepts are characterized by instability anyways, so it simply cannot be made. But this point would not go away. After some time had passed, he became the subject of the documentary Derrida (2002), and in it, he seems aware that the Americanization of his philosophy has become just about finalized. He also betrays some mounting anxiety about it, though it is not so obvious in the main feature itself. Sure, he comments on America here and there, and he jokes a bit about having become Americanized, but there is nothing too striking. The same, however, cannot be said of the bonus interview footage in the special features. At one point, he goes on at length criticizing one of the interviewers for interviewing him in an “American” style because she asked him some (admittedly stupid) open-ended questions about love some time beforehand. And elsewhere, he continues discussing the issue of America and him:

“This film is an American film, which means that some images in the states will be granted some privilege over others. And my life in the states is just a small part of my life — it came late, it’s just a few weeks a year — so I have a feeling that the American image will erase a lot of other things, quantitatively and qualitatively. And then finally, the virtual audience of this film will have the image of someone who is — not American, of course (it’s obvious that I’m not American) — but who spends a lot of his life in the States […] This film will in any case survive me.”

Well, yes, that’s exactly right, monsieur — and he would know! It is an observation perfectly in line with his own philosophy. For after all, what is this essay if not a loving homage to this undeniable point that the writer as an historical subject will inevitably be eclipsed by that which he leaves behind — a point most certainly found in deconstruction? In rearranging the red, white, and blue on his flag while Uncle Sam stomps some mudholes in the face of the Marianne, converting Derrida to the cult of America — and, in doing so, revealing his underlying arche-américanisme, that inner vegetable-oil-grease flame that guided his actions all along — do we not pay the greatest tribute to Jackie that one could possibly pay? But in order to achieve the final part of this tribute, we must go beyond simply pointing out that Derrida helped fill the structural lacuna left behind by the expansion of the university system and the urgent need for the humanities to produce scholarship with the same rapidity as the natural sciences. We must look closely at his career in America specifically and how it corresponds to the Americanism in Derrida’s actual writing.

Though Peeters and Cusset both downplay Derrida’s strategic cunning in seducing the American universities, perhaps for good reason, the direction his career took after the 1960s nonetheless suggests an early awareness as to where his bread would soon be buttered. Derrida didn’t really convert the Americans to a different way of thinking, but they certainly converted him to an approach more in line with what they wanted from him. He first came up with the idea for his Glas (1974) in 1971, a highly experimental commentary on Hegel and the French novelist Jean Genet, after he had taught two guest courses at Johns Hopkins and had befriended Paul De Man and J. Hillis Miller. Though Glas was not wholly without an argument, it was still much more literary than his previous work, resembling the kind of experimentation one might find in the modernist novels of Joyce or Beckett. Without the friendship and encouragement of the American literature professors, it is hard to imagine that the book would have been written. In 1980, after Derrida’s success in the American university was an established fact, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond came out, written in the style of an epistolary novel. When a conference was arranged in 1988 entitled “Deconstruction is/in America,” inspired by his ironic comment mentioned above, Derrida contributed to it by presenting a paper that ignored the question of whether or not deconstruction really is America, and instead focused on a single line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “the time is out of joint,” which would later become a motif in his Specters of Marx. In other words, when asked to talk about America, he did some literary criticism.

But although Derrida didn’t care to address the question, and few of the other presenters had anything interesting to say about it, there is one major reason as to why Derrida was so revered in America that hasn’t been addressed up to now, and it had everything to do with how his career evolved once the Americans accepted him: he became an aspirational figure. When people pitch a multi-level marketing scheme to a fresh acquaintance, they’ve typically been instructed to try and entice that person to join by mentioning the fabulous wealth and success of someone near the top of the pyramid, maybe the company’s founder, or his nephew, or whoever. The same basic strategy can be seen when sex workers with OnlyFans accounts will mysteriously “go viral” when they make a social media post about how much money they have, despite the fact that exceedingly few camwhores will make a livable income. And the same thing happens in the academic system. While deconstruction was flourishing in America, Derrida was showing everyone that his theory, diffuse as it is, could allow him to write about whatever he wanted. In other words, he achieved the dream that so many humanities scholars have. After all, who, at the age of 23, wants to become some mopey Edmund Spenser expert, spending his whole life working on Edmund Spenser, adorning his office with Spenser-related memorabilia, occasionally doing an interview with NPR about something vaguely associated with The Faerie Queene, and so on? How could this be anyone’s dream? Derrida the Chad, by contrast, was winin’ and dinin’, wheelin’ and dealin’, delivering paper after paper on just about any cockamamie thing that came to his pea-pickin’ mind, and everybody was going positively apeshit for it. With his theory, he became the icon of the fully free, fully self-actualized, and — most importantly of all — paid in full intellectual, capable of doing whatever scholarship he wanted, however he wanted to do it.

Even when Derrida’s influence began to wane in the early 1990s, he had already been doing professional photoshoots, so his visage would loom enticingly over the heads of those who looked up and said, “Some day, my theory might allow me to be as free as that man.” After all, what could be better than reaching the status of the fully emancipated cosmopolitan public intellectual, free to globetrot about the international conference circuit, free to discuss whatever topic happens to suit your fancy? Could there be anything more American than this dream? When Derrida said, “This film will […] survive me,” his work had already “survived” him, and the phantasm of his presence in America was already helping to recruit new drones to the big scholarship factory of academia. So this broader notion of the “real person,” the historical subject, being obscured by his own works, or works about him, illustrates the crux of Derrida the American quite well, for it points to a deeply American question. It is the question of the individual — the very thing that Jordan Peterson and the other conservatives felt that Derrida was trying to erase — and it is to that question that the rest of this discussion must turn.

Now, you will perhaps have noticed that up to this point, I have refrained from explaining what deconstruction actually is, hoping that the implications of the word “deconstruction” itself would be enough to suit the context. But to explain why the technique, and Derrida himself, ought to be taken as American, that will not do. One major component of deconstruction must be explained, namely the critique of the metaphysics of presence and its accompanying, closely related critique of logocentrism. This explanation will not exhaustively discuss every aspect of Derrida’s deconstructive practice, such as the reversal of binaries and other neat tricks. Deconstruction involves a bunch of different tactics more or less irrelevant to its Americanness, and thus outside the scope of our discussion. So be advised that the following will be a reasonably technical account of one incomplete aspect of deconstruction. I will try to make it as painless as possible.

In the simplest possible terms, Derrida’s philosophy aimed to demonstrate the total instability of meaning — not that there can be no meaning, or that meaning doesn’t exist, or that everything is meaningless. Just that meaning, i.e. the way we apprehend and make sense of things, doesn’t work the way we would like to assume; it is slippery and eludes our grasp. Though this point could be demonstrated in various ways, in his most widely read and most straightforwardly written works, Derrida focused on how we attribute meaning to signs. The question of “what constitutes a sign” is itself a bit complicated, so for our purposes, we’re just going to restrict the discussion to man-made signs, like cultural products or texts, which is mostly what the American deconstructionists did anyways. For Derrida, there can never be a situation in which a sign transmits information from its source to its interpreter while absolutely maintaining its integrity, from the moment of its conception to the moment of its reception. This point is worth dwelling on for just a moment. When we convey our ideas through language, we typically want our words to work like a teleportation platform, as in science fiction, so that the idea jumps instantaneously from the deliverer to the recipient, both parties understanding the message as though in perfect unison. Or, to put it another way: when we convey a message, we want the language or symbols we use to express it to function as a vehicle so light and compact as to be virtually weightless and invisible, so ideal in its role as a transmitter that it practically doesn’t even exist. We want it to contract the passage of time so that when we have finished taking in a message, it will have arrived unblemished and will remain perfectly intact in our minds from its point of origin, the very instant that it came out of whoever or whatever conveyed it. This sort of semantic unity is referred to as “presence,” and we like to think that we take in signs as if what they convey is, in fact, “present” to us.

But the problem is that when we assume this presence in what we encounter, we have already succumbed to an unsubstantiated notion of how the world presents itself to us, spatially and temporally. Martin Heidegger, one of Derrida’s major influences, identified this assumption of presence to be a consistent feature of metaphysics — i.e., explanatory systems that philosophers construct to explain the nature of objects and things in the world, including how they relate to one another and to the person who encounters them. Increasingly, metaphysics was taken to be an unscientific area of inquiry that depended upon baseless assertions, and so philosophers after the enlightenment, particularly in the 20th century, put in a concerted effort to philosophize without metaphysics. The natural scientists, for their part, were thought not to rely on metaphysics at all. Derrida, following Heidegger, took the assumption of presence in philosophical systems as a symptom of metaphysical thought, and much of his early work would try and demonstrate that some writer who was trying not to be metaphysical had failed. For instance, one of the major works that cemented Derrida’s status as a serious philosopher (Voice and Phenomenon) was a demonstration that even his greatest influence of all, Edmund Husserl, a philosopher who attempted to eschew all metaphysics from his work, was unable to free himself from its clutches (whether or not Derrida succeeded in his critique of Husserl is another question entirely, but never mind that).

To understand Derrida’s thinking, here, one has to be familiar with the concept of “logos,” a complicated and multi-faceted word from the ancient Greek. Logos, originally from “legein” (λέγειν, to gather), has come to carry many meanings, but in ancient metaphysics, it often refers to the immaterial binding force that holds things together in a unity, like a cosmic adhesive. Most accounts of logos state or at least imply that its essence can be elucidated through intricate symbolic systems including especially language but also mathematics, music, and formal logic. Though the concept of the logos had been discussed very early in Greek philosophy, at first rather elliptically in the fragments of Heraclitus, logos received its first comprehensive account by the Stoics, whose account of it indirectly influenced the Christians via Philo of Alexandria and Justin Martyr (see Hiller 2012). For them, the logos was an immanent principle contained within a universal living spirit (pneuma, πνεῦμα) pervading the world, distributed and accessible through all things in the world. The Stoics were the first to say that the logos shapes and creates everything from itself, and in fact is the seed of the universe, which gives to humans their own “seed powers” (spermatikoi logoi, λόγοι σπερματικοί) that participate in it, meaning that each person has his own distinct “logos” that forms a part of the larger universal logos. When Christianity arrived, the logos became synonymous with Christ (as in John 1:1), but many of the Stoics’ previous metaphysical assertions about it remained, like the idea that the logos was there in the beginning alongside God even before finding its material instantiation on earth. Both accounts thus suggest that logos is the subtle, primary ordering principle of the material universe through which the latter’s essence can be grasped, and in Derrida’s account of logocentrism, the purity, proximity to language, and primariness of the logos was therefore key.

For Derrida, the metaphysics of presence is logocentric. The metaphysics of presence suggests that you can have immediate access to the underlying essence of what the sign merely conveys, and that essence belongs to the logos, nature’s great hidden binding force, which one might perceive in its totality when consulting the philosophical account that gets things just right. So in other words, if I believe that a message has given to me the idea it conveys so directly that this idea is “present” to me, then it must belong to the logos, unblemished and immaculate as it is. To show that a thinker had fallen into the metaphysics of presence, Derrida would find instances in which that person showed a preference for a maximally “immediate” type of sign or communication, something that would seem to convey the original idea in a more direct way than through some other method.

According to Derrida’s thinking, if you prefer a more seemingly immediate form of communication, then this preference indicates that you have fallen prey to the belief that there can be a type of sign that could possibly allow for the achievement of presence in one’s apprehension — because otherwise, why even care? And, furthermore, an “immediate” mode of expression will be something more supposedly proximal to the logos, its most subtle and distilled possible form. Many of Derrida’s critics were vexed when, in his seminal work Of Grammatology, he claimed that phonocentrism (the preference for the spoken word over the written word) was a clear indication of logocentrism. But given his own premises, it makes at least some degree of sense. In Derrida’s view, western philosophers had shown a preference for the spoken word over the written word time and time again — from Aristotle to Plato to Rousseau to Husserl to even the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure — and this was because they felt that the best mode of expression must be as close to the logos as possible. The written word was just a highly contaminated approximation of the spoken word, which was a contaminated approximation of the original thought within someone’s mind, which was an approximation of the most refined possible presentation of what this thought might be in all its purity, and that maximally pristine version, its logos, would belong to the universal logos that is coextensive with universal pneuma, or God, or whatever. Derrida believed this was the prejudice from which the philosophers were operating.

The association of the logos with a text’s voice of origin could perhaps lead some to suspect that Derrida was equating the logos with the individual, whereas in, say, classical Aristotelian rhetoric, ethos would be more closely associated with the individual. But this would be an overly hasty assertion. Although each individual has his own logos — at least, according to the Stoic treatment of the subject, which Derrida’s implied definition of logos most closely approximates — Derrida was more concerned with the bias toward the universal logos, the supposed origin of everything. So even if someone expressed the desire to read another’s thoughts directly, this would not be a straightforward demand to grasp the logos, though it would imply such a desire. Derrida’s approach was quite loose, you see, because it assumed that when given two options, the preference for something closer to the universal logos amounts to a yearning for it — whether or not the chooser shows any awareness of logos in the first place.

This implied-but-not-direct association of the logos with the person who first thought up any sign or text would prove quite valuable to the literary critics. Although it is not quite appropriate to identify the individual qua the individual with the logos in an absolute sense, it is in any case clear that Derrida’s philosophy did not treat a text as a straightforward creation of its author, the mind that supposedly thought it all up by itself. Derrida was interested in destabilizing the concept of the author, and this interest was enough for the American deconstructionists to follow suit in seeing a reader’s concerns about the author’s intentions and motivations as logocentric in nature. Derrida was not the first Frenchman to criticize concerns over the author, however. Roland Barthes, a friend and decisive influence on Derrida’s work, published an essay (in America) entitled “The Death of the Author” in 1967, the same year Derrida’s three seminal works came out, but Barthes’s basic idea had already been put into practice in 1963 for his work On Racine. The “death of the author” means that we should see the text as a depersonalized collection of linguistic signs, part of a broader array of texts that contributed to its formation, as well as a product whose discursive meaning will inevitably change based on the circumstances surrounding those who read it for themselves. We should therefore not see the text as the product of “the author,” some deity-like creator with perfect originality and precise control over each of his creative decisions, for in Barthes’s view, “the author” is more a myth than a reality.

Derrida’s stance was more or less identical. In Of Grammatology (1967), he says,

“It would be frivolous to think that ‘Descartes,’ ‘Leibniz,’ ‘Rousseau,’ ‘Hegel,’ etc. are names of authors, or the authors of movements or displacements that we thus designate. The indicative value that I attribute to them is first of all the name of a problem” (p. 99).

And later, when Derrida responded in Limited Inc. (1988) to the American philosopher John Searle’s criticisms of him, he refused to address him as “Searle,” claiming that he is only responding to the writing Searle has left behind. Instead, he opts to call him “Sarl,” an acronym for Société à responsabilité limitée, which is a kind of French limited liability company that occupies an ambiguous legal position between a privately owned company and a joint-stock corporation. The point being not just that Derrida will condescendingly put his criticism toward an American in the language of business and finance (as if that’s all the Americans can understand), but also to say that the author has a similarly unstable, ambiguous position in relation to his work as the owners of an LLC to its capital. So conservatives are not wrong to say that postmodernism, which some see as epitomized by Derrida’s thinking, includes a critique of the individual, if we understand this critique to take place via the author. But how radical is it, really? And how new?

As mentioned above, before a whole bunch of literary theories exploded onto the American university in the 1970s, the main one was New Criticism, which aimed to analyze the literary text alone, shorn of all other considerations. New Criticism had been going on informally and organically for a while without a proper name, but it was codified into a system sometime in the late 1930s by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, who were building on the work of other critics and making room for others. One of the big literary criticism mistakes that the New Critics sought to get rid of was named in the title of their essay “The Intentional Fallacy,” first published by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in 1946. When a critic had committed the intentional fallacy, he would read a work while trying to determine what the author was attempting to accomplish, and then judge the work based on if the author had achieved his goal. The so-called intentional fallacy was a major component of the neo-Kantian approach to aesthetics and was perhaps epitomized by the critical work of Benedetto Croce (interestingly, Wimsatt and Beardsley also criticize the perennial traditionalist/weirdo occultist Ananda Coomaraswamy as a representative of this fallacy).

According to the New Critics, the intentional fallacy was a fallacy because it ignored the question as to whether or not the work was any good. Think of it this way: everyone agrees that murder is bad, so should we give a lesser sentence to those who achieved the murder precisely according to their own intent? No, because bad is bad, no matter how perfectly achieved a bad thing might be. According to the New Critics’ line of thinking, the question of author psychology might be valid as a separate consideration for intellectual history, but it ought to be removed altogether from the question of aesthetics, which they saw as the heart of academic criticism. But this was not the only reason to ignore authorial intent. It was also criticized because it undermines the extent to which the author is always influenced by other works that precede him, thus making a naïve assumption about personal agency. This contention of the New Critics certainly did not come from out of nowhere, for it was already understood by the English-speaking poets themselves. D.H. Lawrence, in his “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through,” cried “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!” And T.S. Eliot, in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), argued that great poetry is achieved when the writer opens himself up to the tradition that informs the work he is trying to write, allowing it to pass through him and answer to the work’s own unique demands, putting his own emotions and feelings aside. These, too, are critiques of the individual.

Critics of Derrida and the poststructuralists tend to oppose their ideas to the political philosophy of liberalism, and they typically characterize liberalism as being primarily individual-oriented, because liberalism defends inalienable individual rights. But placed under scrutiny, this is something of a gross vulgarization. Of course liberalism does show concern for the rights of the individual. But people forget all too quickly that liberalism always carried a tension between, on the one hand, the individual as the primary consideration of its political philosophy, and on the other hand, its actual practitioners: the tight-knight Christian communities, with their benevolent and selfless acts of Christian charity, without whom liberalism could not have happened. When the New Critics began to draw criticism from the MLA in the 1960s, the left-wing radicals saw them as the self-appointed Brahmins of the bourgeois liberal establishment. And in many ways, that’s correct; they were! But as we have seen, their attitude toward the individual was clearly not that of the many conservatives who nowadays label themselves “classical liberals,” a largely meaningless phrase. The New Critics represented the other, hidden attitude toward the individual within liberalism that is so often swept under the rug by today’s conservatives, centrists, and libertarians.

To grasp liberalism’s ambivalence toward the individual, it is necessary to understand the religious faith accompanying it in both England and America. In Calvinist theology, which played such a key role in the northern half of America’s early development, there is an understanding that God’s divine providence not just accounts for but predetermines life’s outcomes. It’s the idea that if you happen to be filthy rich, it’s not just because of your own excellence or “merit,” but also partly because God has incorporated your success into His own inscrutable vision, His great plan for how the story of the world will inexorably unravel. Essentially, God’s divine providence means that you cannot take credit for everything you have accomplished, because it was already preordained even before your parents conceived. This deeply ingrained attitude was partly why the so-called robber barons such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie felt morally obligated to set up big philanthropic foundations and put some of their resources back into the community with public libraries and other useful services. Whereas by contrast, the charity of today’s secularized tech oligarchs is largely given to NGOs and nonprofits, some of which prove highly divisive according to public opinion polling, and from whom the benefit provided to the average person is questionable at best.

Despite the secularization of America, however, there are still lingering vestiges of this aspect of liberalism that remain in the university system even today. For instance, in Lynn Z. Bloom’s “Freshman Composition as a Middle-Class Enterprise” (1996), Bloom notes that when students in those classes use the first-person pronoun “I” for their final papers, it typically causes the teachers to lower their grade in proportion to the amount it is used (pp. 660–661). In Bloom’s view, the first-person “I” is stigmatized by composition teachers (even while being hotly debated by rhetoric and comp specialists) because it violates the middle-class values of decorum and propriety, which were established by bourgeois liberal rhetoricians trying to approximate the rhetoric of the aristocracy. This is all correct, and perhaps surprisingly still true despite the article being twenty-five years old. And it was in the context of Anglophone liberal middle-class values that the “I” initially became an obscenity. Just recently, the bow-tie-wearing former libertarian Anglo-Saxon uber-liberal himself, Tucker Carlson said, “Since this show began … I’ve really tried not to talk about myself on the air or even use the first-person pronoun. The last thing this country needs is more narcissism” (7/20/20). When the religion of Rastafarianism was formed in the slave-holding island of Jamaica with more than a tinge of (justified) resentment toward the British colonists, they made a point of emphasizing the first-person pronoun as integral to their mode of expression, removing the object form “me” altogether, and creating a bunch of words with “I” shoehorned into them (see the dialect Iyaric). This was, in part, an act of rebellion against the Anglophone bourgeois sensibility. And elsewhere, the libertine occultist Aleister Crowley, for his part, was so right to observe that English is a great language for making the graphic representation of the first-person pronoun a phallic symbol, obtrusive and shocking as phallic symbols tend to be. So what is all of this university-ordained pushback against the “I” if not a way of tempering the excesses of individualism within a liberal discourse?

Given that qualification, the “intentional fallacy” of New Criticism begins to make sense. But if it negated the individual on some level, it did not do so altogether. After all, it belonged to a middle-class liberal way of thinking. One of the major distinctions that separated the New Critics from the poststructuralists was that the former were humanists, and their criticism was done in the name of fortifying the literary canon. When the New Critics encouraged readers to forget about the motivations of the author, the exercise was just meant to be a temporary suspension. Ultimately, the reader would be expected to come back to the author and praise his brilliance, having gone through the preliminary discipline of forgetting about him and focusing solely on his work as a fully exteriorized product. Because New Criticism, and American scholarship more broadly, took the idea of a unified, standalone “text” as a given, it follows that the text’s authorship would be held in a similarly unquestioned position. For this reason, when the young Milman Parry sought to prove during the 1920s that Homer’s epic poems were the product of a deeply ingrained oral tradition rather than the result of Homer’s individual genius, he had to publish those works in France alongside the early structuralists despite obtaining his M.A. at UC Berkeley. The classics departments in America were much less tolerant to an argument that sought to decenter both the standalone text and the author who produced it.

And yet, though it was Barthes’s “Death of the Author” that made structuralism’s critique of the individual crystal clear — and Barthes did indeed identify the preoccupation with the individual as part of bourgeois capitalism — he was not the one who would go on to become the great American superstar. Part of the reason is that his essay could only make sense in France. As Clara Claiborne Park notes in her essay “Author! Author!: Reconstructing Roland Barthes,” when Barthes “killed” the author, he was writing in revolt against a French literary and educational culture that allowed little innovation to the French language (still the case today), had 40 canonical authors (still the case today), and each of those authors wrote with a relatively limited vocabulary, less experimental and polyglossic than that of Chaucer, less rich and worldly than that of Shakespeare. As noted before, the school of French structuralism had already been questioning the sanctity of authorship outside French literature, but Barthes had used those techniques on Racine, a French author. That usage was much more shocking, and the shock was inseparable from the French nation and its own self-conception. Much of what Barthes announced with revolutionary flair had already been said quietly and modestly by the New Critics about their own literature, within an Anglophone literary culture that was already less linguistically stable. And so it was Derrida, whose stance regarding the individual would prove more complex and ambivalent, that would become the American icon.

Even while denying the importance of the individual as the creator of the text, one of the tensions common to both Derrida and the New Critics involved dealing with the matter of individual psychology, since both camps perhaps unexpectedly engaged in such speculation to make their points. Consider the case with New Criticism. When you hear about something like “the intentional fallacy,” you might be inclined to think that these critics would want to remove all psychological considerations from their analyses, since the author’s own psyche would be off-limits (and the subjective reaction of the reader was, too, according to what they called “the affective fallacy”). But psychology came into play nonetheless. For the New Critics, analyzing literature could involve as much psychological speculation as you wanted, so long as you made sure to say that some sort of narrative persona was resting between the author himself and the actual work. You didn’t need to cite Freud to execute this maneuver. For a novelist like Nabokov, known for his unreliable narrators with their own carefully constructed motivations and complexities, such an approach makes sense; it is downright necessary. Nabokov was working with the novel in the age of print, a particularly hospitable genre and time for characters and narrative personae so believable as to be almost three-dimensional. But this approach could get quite thorny when dealing with earlier literature that bore traces of the oral tradition and for which the idea of an altogether separate narrator was still undeveloped and hazy.

Under the influence of New Criticism, scholars would approach medieval literature this way, particularly Geoffrey Chaucer. The idea was that because Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, a frame narrative in which each pilgrim tells a tale, every tale must represent an ethos that is distinct from Chaucer’s. This approach makes plenty of sense for stories like The Wife of Bath’s Tale, but makes very little sense for stories like The Knight’s Tale, which was likely composed before Chaucer had even thought of the idea for Canterbury Tales. Most of the early tales, in fact, were almost certainly not written with any particular narrator in mind. Yet nevertheless, a psychological portrait of Chaucer would emerge from these critics via negativa, wherein he would become the embodiment of everything his pilgrims were not. This same unreliable-narrator-oriented critical approach would later spread to other medieval writings without frame narratives, justified only by the narration sometimes making conversational “asides” to the audience, interrupting the plot (typical among stories designed for oral delivery). And over time, these interpretations increasingly were done to affirm 20th century liberal prejudices. As one medievalist notes, under this critical approach in which the “narrator” would belie the work’s true meaning, “texts that apparently celebrate a warrior ethic turn out to be really pacifistic, those that apparently express misogyny turn out to convey feminist values, those that apparently satirize ‘unnatural’ sexual behavior turn out to sympathize with it, those that apparently admire powerful rulers turn out to condemn them as tyrants, and so on” (Spearing, p. 4). The point is, one cannot cleanly avoid “the intentional fallacy” when analyzing narrative voice, since the analysis will always imply at least some degree of authorial intention. And as soon as one identifies a usage of literary irony that reveals an altogether different message than what the text seems to suggest, the implication becomes unmistakable. So even when attempting to sidestep the problem of authorial psychology, the New Critics and their descendants eventually wandered right back in.

Though there is asymmetry between the approach of the New Critics and that of Derrida, this same ambivalence toward authorial psychology can be found in the latter’s work. Recall that one of Derrida’s key assumptions in Of Grammatology is that a preference for a more “immediate” mode of expression is itself indicative of logocentrism. Now, when you were reading about that a few paragraphs above, did you buy it? After all, why should it be so? Let’s say you talk to someone who thinks that communication is done better through interpersonal conversation rather than written letters, and then she explains that this is because oral dialogue allows for clarifications to be made more easily. Is her claim logocentric? And how, if it bears directly on the pragmatic differences between each medium, differences that Derrida would never have denied? Well, it really doesn’t matter in the end, because if he wanted to, Derrida could simply “read” between the lines of that person’s statement to conjure up “evidence” that she is logocentric. And though Ferdinand de Saussure’s reasoning for preferring the spoken word was a bit murkier, this is still essentially the treatment that Derrida gave him.

The linguist, semiologist, and father of structuralism Ferdinand de Saussure, in his Course in General Linguistics, made it clear that linguistics must always privilege oral over written communication. Saussure, quite wrongly, claimed that the sole purpose of writing is to represent spoken language, and that the only true bond between a sign and referent should be understood as one of sound. He also famously discussed examples of the “tyranny of writing,” in which academics and grammarians with no substantive linguistic knowledge will pedantically overvalue the importance of how words are written, failing to observe the long history of indifference toward punctuation and standardized spelling in even the highest intellectual institutions. He even, as Derrida notes, described as “pathological” the shifts in word pronunciation stemming from the establishment of spelling conventions (the English Great Vowel Shift being a good historical example). Now, let us put these prejudices in context for a moment. It is worth bearing in mind that Saussure spent most of his career tracking shifts in languages throughout ancient history by determining their phonetic articulation. He did this by examining how words were rendered orthographically, then delicately made his conclusions through a sophisticated and logically precise comparative method. He even, going beyond the comparative method, conjectured that the proto-Indo-European language probably had some laryngeal consonants that couldn’t be reconstructed merely through the comparative method because they weren’t assigned a letter or character, such as word-initial H’s (aspirates) that preceded what only appeared to be vowel-initial words in early Indo-European languages. When Hittite was discovered and translated, he was proven right. So this was a man who surely spent many nights in solitude seriously thinking about how ancient words would have been pronounced, trying to look past the mere letter of the text to make stronger contextual inferences and deductions. For him, lack of standardization in spelling was useful, and as a scientist and historian, the idea of obscuring the pronunciation of his own day with a written record that has an over-refined spelling system was probably unsettling, given the difficulties it might create for later historians and linguists (and during his time, the possibilities of the newly invented phonograph were still unclear). So if his stance on writing was a bit over-the-top, his feelings probably came from pragmatic concerns rather than metaphysical ones. At least that would be my quaint, unsophisticated guess.

Now, when turning to Derrida’s account of Saussure and his stance on writing, we find a somewhat different picture emerge. According to Derrida (comic-book-style emphases mine), “Saussure’s vehement argumentation aims at a more than theoretical error, more than a moral fault: at a sort of stain and primarily at a sin” (p. 34). Elsewhere, we learn that for Saussure, writing is a “garment of perversion and debauchery, a dress of corruption and disguise, a festival mask that must be exorcised.” His science of language must “restore its absolute youth, and the purity of its origin, short of a history and a fall which would have perverted the relationships between inside and outside” (p. 35). Saussure wants to “punish writing for a monstrous crime” and place it within an “intralinguistic leper colony” in order to “contain and concentrate the problems of deformation through writing” (pp. 41–42, and cf. Freundlieb, who uses the same quotations to make a different point). Even without all the emphases, his interpretation, I hate to say it, is utterly unhinged. But it must be so in order to show that Saussure is concerned with purity and cleanliness; that he yearns for a prelapsarian state of affairs when Adam had just named the beasts and God still walked in the garden. Derrida must show that Saussure’s emotions are high because he is enthralled by the logocentrism and metaphysics of presence that has come to him from the philosophical tradition, whether directly or perhaps through a strange osmosis. Otherwise, we are simply looking at a gifted language expert showing a bit too much passion when emphasizing the validity of his robust research methods. And that’s really not too interesting.

Clearly, in order to demonstrate the logocentrism of a preference for some supposedly “prior” category, like oral communication over writing, the person identifying it must engage in psychological speculation regarding whoever has the preference. The reason for this preference is everything. Otherwise, with no way of showing that the person is invested in the deepest origins of whatever he prefers, the deconstructor would have to conclude that the human voice, or the human mind, or whatever, is itself the logos, which makes no sense — or he’d have to stop the charade altogether. Derrida uses the language of impurity, contamination, and disease when describing Saussure’s motives, but one can see clearly that he himself must identify Saussure’s motives by treating the latter’s preference symptomatically. So where is the real logocentrism? Is it there in Saussure, or is it merely a figment of Derrida’s imagination, a prejudice that he has projected upon the author, whose psychological availability he takes for granted? And, moreover, isn’t it curious that at the very same moment that Derrida pounces upon the logocentrism of another writer, he himself uses language that most conspicuously seems to suggest a literary voice, a distinct and unique style underlying his own writing?

Of course, Derrida’s many defenders will respond to these question with something to the effect of, “No, don’t you see? That’s the whole point. The indeterminacy of the sign’s ontological status is precisely Derrida’s concern — of course you can deconstruct him just as easily as he did Saussure, because the ‘Saussure’ he describes is merely the instability of the deferred moment of textual semiosis, the ‘trace’ as it were, which he himself acknowledges later on when blah blah blah, BLAH blah blah, blah-BLAH-blahblah,” yes, yes, OK, I get it. I’ve seen the eyes of his aficionados and enthusiasts light up this way before. I also, incidentally, have seen the part of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure in which Pee-Wee Herman attempts a trick with his bike, falls off of it, and tells a group of onlookers, “I meant to do that.” But the point here is not to refute the philosophy, nor is it to defend Saussure. It is merely to highlight the ambiguity pertaining to the status of the individual in Derrida’s work, which in turn resembles the same ambiguity that pervaded the approach of New Criticism. When Derrida, much later in Limited Inc., responds to John Searle by renaming him “Sarl,” he reassures us,

“I hope that the bear­ers of proper names will not be wounded by this […] device. For it will have the […] advantage of enabling me to avoid offending individuals […] in the course of an argument that they might […] consider, wrongly, to be polemical” (p. 36).

How nice. But everyone knows of course that he’s doing polemic against one person: John Searle. There’s a wink and a nudge implied throughout the whole essay. This is why if you look up the reviews for Limited Inc. on Goodreads.com, the reviewers are quite excited to see how catty their intellectual hero could really be. And perhaps the cleverness in his approach is enough to ignore the bloviating quality of his prose style (hence all my ellipses; sorry if they were a distraction), extend a warm compliment on account of his self-awareness, and avoid asking the uncomfortable question as to whether such a degree of self-awareness in writing is advisable to begin with. Perhaps.

In any case, this same indecisiveness pertaining to the individual would resurface in different forms throughout Derrida’s later career. Consider his aforementioned decision to pose for professional photographs. As Peeters notes, some of Derrida’s longstanding French acquaintances such as Bernard Pautrat were disappointed to find that he had allowed himself to be photographed in America, whereas in the 1960s and 1970s, he refused it as a matter of principle (pp. 442–443). This decision is significant because Americans are uniquely preoccupied with the human face; it is a peculiarity essential to understanding the culture in both its highbrow and lowbrow forms. In professional wrestling, for instance, Mexico and Japan are perfectly fine with their champions wearing masks. In Mexican wrestling (lucha libre), it is actually preferred: El Santo, its most famous wrestler, donned a mask that tapped into a deep Roman Catholic mythological current wherein the conflict between Christianity versus the forces of Satan is its central ongoing struggle. As a wrestler, El Santo could play the allegorical role of the good saint, and his mask was so important to this end that he was actually buried wearing it after he died. And even today in lucha libre, to lose one’s mask is still considered a major humiliation; one can no longer belong to the distal realm of perennial archetypes. In America, by contrast, one’s naked face is absolutely paramount; it really is the money-maker, as they say in show business. I have long suspected that its heightened importance in America, with its ability to both suggest yet also obscure a distinct personality depending on the circumstances, may have corresponded to America’s instant enthusiasm for psychoanalysis and the therapy industry in some way. In the WWF/WWE, only two masked wrestlers have won the company’s highest championship title: Kane (who only held it for one night) and Mankind. And when Mankind won the title, the audience understood that the dark and brooding character, with his stage name befitting a warped medieval morality play, was just an alter-ego — a narrative persona, one might say — of the real Mick Foley (his actual name) whose facial appearance the fans knew well. So whereas masks for non-Anglophone countries amount to a transference into a depersonalized world of symbols, in this case the mask was appreciated as a supplement augmenting the complexity of Mick Foley’s psychological profile. Even in day-to-day life, the importance of the naked face is significantly greater in America than most other countries. When the coronavirus pandemic occurred, the Eastern hemisphere was very comfortable with masks, as always, with Japan leading the way in mask compliance even when they initially resisted lockdowns. The Catholic countries in Europe (like France and Hungary) were the most compliant with their mask regulations. Africa, wild as it may be, was surprisingly accepting of mask mandates where they occurred. And yet the United States and Canada, particularly conservatives mostly of Anglo-Saxon stock took unique umbrage at the idea that masks would have to be worn in public. It was the opposite of lucha libre: putting on the mask was taken by many to be a form of humiliation. (Of course, the masks turned out to be worthless as all of the major epidemiologists had originally stated before they bowed to group pressure, so this turned out to be a major win for the Americans who didn’t tolerate such nonsense.)

So, anyways, when Derrida started posing in photo sessions with professional photographers, this decision could not have been lightly made, nor would the photographs fail to take on their own symbolic importance in light of his philosophy. While he claimed that the first public photos were taken of him by the press at a conference in Sorbonne in 1969, and that he only gradually became more accepting of professional photography as part of the profession, it is clear that by the 90s, he had become an absolute pro at bearing the countenance of the contemplative intellectual. He didn’t just stand there uncomfortably like in those daguerreotypes from the 19th century. He was playing for an American audience. He really took some photos, you know. This was Hollywood-grade stuff. Some of those photos, by the way, were made into posters that would adorn the walls of so many English professors’ offices. You can bet that they were all aware of the irony and were quick to acknowledge it if prodded, perhaps even with a tinge of enthusiasm in pointing out yet another matter of controversy — but they still looked up to Derrida as their aspirational figure of freedom all the same. So although Derrida’s success in the United States may not have been the fruit of any methodical shrewdness or cunning, it is undeniable that he played his success to the hilt once he got it.

As time wore on, a handful of deconstruction apologists began to argue that the notion of the naked face was actually an integral component to understanding Derrida’s whole philosophical project (see summary in Hägglund 2008). Recognizing that Derrida turned his attention to political theorists such as Karl Marx and Carl Schmitt with a newfound interest in ethics toward the end of his career, a small handful of commentators started to claim that all of deconstruction contained an ethical bent from the very beginning. They made this argument by linking Derrida to Claude Levinas, whom he discussed on several occasions, most notably in his long essay “Violence and Metaphysics.” Derrida’s work on Levinas, though critical in key ways, never quite shot him down with the same eagerness as in his treatment of Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Husserl, Saussure, and others. Levinas held in high regard the practice of the face-to-face encounter, because the naked face, in his view, compels one to confront and hold oneself accountable to the Other [sic] as truly “other,” not merely as an extension of one’s own self. This claim from Levinas amounts to a rejection of the common metaphysical notion that one must strive to see all things as participating in an essentially unified self (e.g. this is the meaning of the Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7 from the Sama Veda, which tells us “Tat Tvam Asi,” or literally “That thou art.”) For those who say Derrida endorses the “face-to-face encounter” of Levinas, the indeterminate nature of deconstruction constitutes, for them, a hesitance that affirms alterity itself, or “the otherness of the Other [sic].” Those who disagree argue that the face-to-face encounter is, for Derrida, always discriminatory by its nature, since it must exclude the Third [sic], and so therefore the face-to-face encounter with the Other [sic] cannot be understood as fundamentally ethical. Given that the answer to any question regarding deconstruction is usually something like “yes and no,” or “it’s both this and that,” or “it’s complicated,” one senses the debate will never reach a sound resolution.

But whether or not this scholarly conundrum ever gets resolved, the mere fact of the controversy is instructive. As Derrida began to take professional photographs, allowing the possibility for a cult of personality surrounding him to spring up and surely aware of it, he began writing more on ethics and politics. So it is quite fitting that the academics observed this shift in his writing, read it back all the way into the origins of deconstruction, and said that this whole time deconstruction was a celebration of the face-to-face encounter as per Levinas. The truth is that one cannot really know the extent to which Levinas influenced Derrida in that area, for the question amounts to another point of ambiguity regarding the latter’s stance on what the face really entails — its status as vehicle of ethos, the preference for it as a possible symptom of logocentrism, its ontological meaning as either an extension of the self or the uncompromising Other [sic], and so on. And this ambiguity regarding the status of the face corresponds to the same ambiguity regarding the status of the author — and by extension the status of the individual — that was always there in New Criticism, only now repackaged with maximum potential for additional research, coupled with verbal impenetrability, which is to say, job security.

More importantly for our conservative and centrist friends who worry that the French invasion is what sullied the virginal institutions of higher learning, those same ambiguities were always there in Anglophone middle-class liberalism. Some will say, “But Derrida himself repeatedly criticized liberalism. And he hated how his philosophy was turned into a formula. And no one was more critical of the university’s appropriation of his work than he!” But when Derrida was brought in as the mascot of these essentially liberal tensions within the literature departments, his own “authentic” opinions — philosophical, political, or otherwise — ceased to matter. The author was being represented on different soil to a different crowd as a supplement to himself, just as one would expect from his own theory. After all, it was the English translations that proved more influential than Derrida’s original French writing, not only within America, but all over the world as he became popular because of his American reception, and what is a translation if not a means to supplant one’s words? America was the vortex of swirling energies that summoned Derrida with its irresistible lure — beckoning him like a bitch in heat to form a single beast with two backs — and if Derrida hadn’t existed, America would have simply invented him.

We will conclude by contrasting two quotations characterizing not just Derrida but the whole school of poststructuralism that dominated American academia in the wake of his success. Jacques Ellul, in his Humiliation of the Word (1981), tells us from France,

“In our day, in this place, a sort of social discourse flows endlessly and is repeated twenty hours out of every twenty-four, expressed by individual mouths. The discourse is completely anonymous, even though it may sometimes be affirmed with force and conviction by a particular individual. (On the intellectual level, of course, l consider the books of Jacques Lacan, Foucault, Jacques Derrida, etc., utterly typical of this anonymous social discourse. These writers constitute in themselves a demonstration of what they say about all individuals who speak.)”

While Camille Paglia, in her Sexual Personae (1990), tells us from America,

“The English language was created by poets, a five-hundred year enterprise of emotion and metaphor, the richest dialogue in world literature. French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text. Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisian intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe.”

Two entirely different characterizations from two entirely different vantage points — one French, one American; one male, one female. But can either statement be judged incorrect, exactly? While the French intellectual is aggressively and iconoclastically tearing down the idol of the “I,” he is stylistically anonymous and absent — he is a shade, or maybe even a trace. And yet, by the same token, as he assiduously, even mind-numbingly reassures us that there is no author behind the text, there he is nevertheless, with all of his narcissism, all of his gratuitous self-awareness enshrined into his needlessly wordy prose. The only error here is in claiming that this paradox of the individual was a “French import,” when in fact it was both anticipated and aggravated by the uniquely Anglo-Saxon, and especially American value system all along. Old Jackie, the great destroyer of the humanities, the head trickster for the postmodernist movement, was never French at all, not for one second, I’m sorry to say. It’s a shame that the burden falls upon my shoulders to play the role of the 911 operator in that old urban legend who tells the blonde, bronzed, and buxom cheerleader, “The phone call is coming from inside the house,” but the muddle-headed conservative establishment has left me with no other choice. Jacques Derrida was an American export. And that is that.

Some books and papers mentioned:

A.C. Spearing, Medieval Autographies: The “I” of the Text. University of Notre Dame Press, 2012.

Anselm Haverkamp ed., Deconstruction is/in America: A New Sense of the Political. Conference proceedings. NYU Press, 1995.

Benoit Peeters, Derrida: A Biography (trans. Andrew Brown). Polity Press, 2013 (first published 2010).

Camille Paglia, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 1.2 (1991): 139–212

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Yale UP, 1990.

Clara Claiborne Park, “Author! Author! Reconstructing Roland Barthes” pp. 318–329 in Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent eds. Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral. Columbia UP, 2005.

Cynthia L. Haven, Evolution of Desire: A Life of Rene Girard. Michigan State UP, 2018.

Dieter Freundlieb, “Deconstructionist Metaphysics and the Interpretation of Saussure” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 4.2 (1990): 105–131.

Dinesh D’Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race & Sex on Campus. The Free Press, 1991.

Francois Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (trans. Jeff Fort). University of Minnesota Press, 2008 (first published 2003).

Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. trans. Samuel Weber and Geoffrey Mehlmann. Northwestern UP, 1988.

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology trans. Gayatri Spivak. Johns Hopkins UP, 1997 (first American ed. 1976, first published 1967).

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference trans. Alan Bass. University of Chicago Press, 1980 (first published 1967).

Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word trans. Joyce Main Hanks. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001 (first published 1981)

Jaideva Singh trans. Vijñānabhairava or Divine Consciousness: A Treasury of 112 Types of Yoga. Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2006 (first published 1979)

Jesus Navarro, How to Do Philosophy With Words: Reflecions on the Searle Derrida Debate. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017.

Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Cornell UP, 1982.

Kathleen Wheeler & C.T. Indra, Explaining Deconstruction. Macmillan India Limited, 1997.

Lynn Z. Bloom, “Freshman Composition as a Middle-Class Enterprise” College English 58.6 (1996): 654–675

Margery Sabin, “Evolution and Revolution: Change in the Literary Humanities, 1968–1995” pp. 84–106, in What’s Happened to the Humanities? ed. Alvin Kernan, Princeton UP, 1997.

Marian Hiller, From Logos to Trinity: The Evolution of Religious Beliefs from Pythagoras to Tertullian. Cambridge UP, 2012.

Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford UP, 2008.

Michel Lamont, “How to Become a Dominant French Philosophy: The Case of Jacques Derrida,” American Journal of Sociology 93.3 (1987): 584–622.

R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux. University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida” New Literary History 10.1 (1978): 141–160

Roger L. Geiger, “Demography and Curriculum: The Humanities in American Higher Education from the 1950s through the 1980s” pp. 50–72, in The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion Since World War II ed. David A. Hollinger, Johns Hopkins UP, 2006.

Roger L. Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowlesge: American Research Universities Since World War II. Oxford University Press, 1993.

Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. Scholargy Publishing, 2004.

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (2nd ed.), Blackwell Publishing, 1996 (first ed. published 1983).

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that heaves, hefts, and hoists the principles of media ecology into the same loading dock as that of non-structuralist semiotics. Sorry this one’s a little late. I got a new job, and the hours are a little weird. You will forgive me.

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I just realized that “technological determinism” has its own Wikipedia page. According to it,

Technological determinism is a reductionist theory in assuming that a society's technology progresses by following its own internal logic of efficiency, while determining the development of the social structure and cultural values.

That’s actually how they introduce the entire concept. The whole page is kind of a mess, it might be written be an LLM, and it should probably be deleted, but hey, there it is. It also is presented as a section under “Marxian economics,” and much of its writing seems poised to show that it is little more than the theory of “hyperglobalists” whose thoughts are clearly inferior to those of Marx. Of course, Karl Marx was a guy who thought that all of history is driven by economic relations, which seems, I dunno… a little reductionistic in its own right. But then again, check out the Wiki page for Marxism:

Marxism is a political philosophy^[1] and method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a dialectical materialist interpretation of historical development,^[2] known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict.

As you can see, it is a “political philosophy” instead of some mamby-pamby “theory.” And it doesn’t “assume” anything, either. Instead, it “uses a dialectical materialist interpretation.” And is it reductionist? Nah, get outta town. That word isn’t used anywhere on the page, and it’s not even used in the Wiki for economic determinism, which, for some reason, also exists. It is similarly noteworthy that the same charge of “reductionism” or being “reductive” is not made in any of the Wikis for Freudian/psychoanalytic theory, which is just as sexually deterministic as Marxism is economically determinist.

The Wikipedia page for “technological determinism” is dumb and it probably will be changed at some point. But at the very least, it demonstrates something I’ve noticed about media ecology, media studies, the philosophy of technology, and other related fields. The people who specialize in such areas are deeply concerned about being labeled “technological determinists” or “reductionists,” and thus the accusation is always made in a far more pronounced way than with other fields, even ones that are just as flagrantly reductive. To be labeled a technological determinist is a stain upon one’s reputation in a way that being an economic reductionist is not. And being called a “sexual” or “erotic” reductionist is a laughable thought; the person making the charge would only look silly.

Of course, the best-known and most enduring theories are typically reductionist. As John Durham Peters wrote in an essay1 on the same subject, “A less single-minded Marx or Freud would not have been Marx or Freud.” The same could be said of Charles Darwin. Meanwhile, the guys who resist being reductive only wind up as footnotes in turgid academic pieces; they just don’t have a whole lot of punching power outside of the university. Niklas Luhmann, to give just one example, was successful in creating a wide-ranging theory of just about everything that concerns modernity, but there’s a reason he failed to spark a flame in the minds of the intelligent-but-not-credentialed. His stuff is just too complicated.

On some level, everyone kinda knows all of this. Yet still, there remains the question: why is “technological determinist” the great academic insult when, at the same time, so many distinct schools of thought within the humanities are themselves based on a single core observation to which the entirety of man’s affairs is shamelessly reduced? One reason is that the people being accused of technological determinism really hate being put inside that box. If you call Walter Ong or Marshall McLuhan technological determinists, their defenders will protest vehemently. The same could be said for Jacques Ellul, despite some of the all-encompassing claims he makes in The Technological Society (1954). It’s even true for basically secular thinkers and secular people like Lewis Mumford. When the critics strike the blow, the technological determinists don’t “no-sell” it. Instead, they writhe about on the floor, yelping and yowling in pain.

Perhaps they should learn something from the Neo-Darwinists. Whenever the New Age hippies, environmental activists, biosemioticians, Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) advocates, and other colorful characters accuse those guys of “reductionism,” they just shrug and say, “Yeah? Well, being reductive is what makes us right.” And that’s that. It’s like watching bullets bounce off of Superman’s bulbous chest. But the Neo-Darwinists proudly come from an entirely different background. They aren’t men of letters, they don’t belong to the liberal arts or humanities, and they have no problems with jettisoning thousands of years of accumulated wisdom if they feel that a chic new research paper gives better answers. Richard Dawkins once remarked that everything ever written concerning human nature prior to 1859 is worthless. Clearly, these people don’t care about making enemies.

The alleged technological determinists, however, aren’t in that position. They’re largely humanists of various backgrounds (Roman Catholic in the case of McLuhan and Ong, nonconformist protestant in the case of Ellul) and want to show people how to overcome the sway of technics. They don’t want people to submit. The blogger Clinton Ignatov recently wrote a lengthy post on McLuhan, denying that he was a technological determinist in any way, and it’s precisely because of his humanism and belief in the possibility for man’s spirit to prevail that he isn’t. Here’s a key passage:

The act of ordinary perception; the act by which each of us makes sense of the world, is a poetic act. I think this phrasing is far more elegant, and rich in potential, than the mechanistic term “constructed.” And the study of centuries of techniques of poetry, and sermon, and pedagogy, and exegesis—culminating in the techniques of modernist poetry—informed McLuhan’s techniques for most-gently shaking people up from their modern mechanized sleep. They’re comfortable in their rationalizations, their short histories, their group affiliations. And for loss of that, they’ll cling wildly to the next thing that comes along offering stability.

[…]

Among the techniques he demonstrated, thinking by analogy with great formality and precision was the most important. It was an art largely lost and discredited with scientific positivism. This is where he most gets into trouble: the analogies he perceives in history, which he offers as evidence for large systems in action beneath the threshold of conscious human awareness, are often artifice. They are poetic. He might stretch them to fit the proportions of the grand design he is painting.

But when it comes to perceiving complex systems—systems of non-linear causality which are irreducible to simple flow charts of cause and effects, poetry is the compression algorithm we need to think about them at all.

McLuhan’s goal was to expand our minds; the gaps in his thinking in his “cool” prose provide space for us to bloom. Space which eventually meets the outer world at some actionable interface not some fantasy catchment. The things he does mention: telephone lines, trade routes, satellites, etc. are the infrastructures around us which try, so hard, to remain behind the scenes. Today, as bezels recede behind our high definition touch screens, it is all the more important for those of us who understand technology to reveal what is hidden.

Ignatov, as some of you will already realize, knows pretty much everything about McLuhan that there is to know. He is way more educated on McLuhan than me. And accordingly, all of this is correct. He knows McLuhan’s underlying motivations extraordinarily well. But right off the bat, the problem I’m seeing in the denial is the acknowledgement that McLuhan himself used the “techniques” of poetry, sermon, pedagogy, and exegesis. These techniques, of course, belong to rhetoric, the most comprehensive academic subject that there was for about two thousand years. In Orality and Literacy (1983), Ong explains it like this:

In its Greek original, tékhnē rhētorikḕ, ‘speech art’ (commonly abridged to just rhētorikḕ) referred essentially to oral speaking, even though as a reflective, organized ‘art’ or science – for example, in Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric – rhetoric was and had to be a product of writing. Rhētorikḕ, or rhetoric, basically meant public speaking or oratory, which for centuries even in literate and typographic cultures remained unreflexively pretty much the paradigm of all discourse, including that of writing.

So even when we consider McLuhan’s approach, there is a McLuhan-ish explanation for what he’s doing and why it proves valuable, and it boils down to rhetoric, or tékhnē rhētorikḕ. In other words, it’s a flavor of technics; or τέχνη, if we wanna get fancy. And Ignatov, being a smart guy, will know that τέχνη and ποίησις (poíēsis, from where we get poetry/poesy) mean remarkably similar things, as Martin Heidegger famously pointed out. So even if we call McLuhan’s approach poetic, we’re still pretty much knee-deep in the world of techniques here.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with using certain techniques to liberate people from others, and there is absolutely something qualitatively different about the technics of the ancient, pre-print world compared to the technics of the electronic age (something McLuhan himself wouldn’t have been able to fully recognize in his time). In fact, I’ve specifically advocated for using arcane technologies to diminish the parasitic effects of modern ones in my much earlier blog post “The Techno-Expansivist Manifesto” (easily the best technology-related manifesto from the month of October, 2023). So if, for instance, you want to restore a sense of community from the atomizing effects of the digital age, you might want to consider harnessing the power of social rituals and the organization of human capital necessary to form clubs and societies like, y’know, the Freemasons, or whatever. That would help solve your problem of digitally-induced social isolation and allow you to put your hands on the steering wheel, so to speak. But let’s harbor no illusions about what you’re doing, here. On the one hand, your uniquely human spirit can prevail by recruiting certain tools to fight against others, while on the other, τέχνη still plays a starring role, even if it isn’t the newest and hottest variety.

There is a certain irony to the fact that McLuhan-inspired media ecology has become such a moralizing enterprise promulgated by humanists who insist upon the ultimate triumph of human agency (see Neil Postman, Ivan Illich, everyone on social media who complains about social media, et al.), especially when McLuhan presented himself as a totally secular, amoral figure. And when you consider McLuhan’s private Catholicism in contrast with his public persona, he does comes across as quite impressive, and it’s easy to see why he would inspire such people. In his private life — to the extent that such a thing still exists — he was a man of faith. But when he “descended into the maelstrom” and faced the public, he adopted the vernacular of the people and navigated his way around with them. This is a very Christlike gesture, of course. Yet the problem with such a descent is that the new environment into which one falls will always tincture the manner in which one’s message is received, even when one speaks it with the purest of intentions. McLuhan knew this very well, and he also knew that whatever his humanistic intentions, he was still leaving behind an approach for understanding the world that would surpass him. With the help of a slew of prior scholars like Albert Lord, Millman Parry, Eric Havelock, Harold Innis, et al., he created this approach, and it resembled a potent intellectual game, one which people would decide to take up and play for themselves. And this game, of course, relied upon a distinct perspective that treated technology as the engine of human development.

This game basically consisted of the following: you identify some social phenomenon or situation (new or old) and find a way to characterize it as a second-order effect of a hidden or taken-for-granted technological process or artifact. This process or artifact would typically take the form of an information medium like print, digital video, the radio, or plain ol’ literacy, but it could also include a technological device in general, which you would simply redefine as an information medium and thus part of the world of media. Sometimes the game would involve trying to find the most creative classification of “medium” that you could get away with, expanding “media” far beyond what people would have imagined. (In fact, in at least one case I can think of, the “media” are not technological at all but rather simply parts of the natural environment, like the sky and the sea; I reviewed it here). But for the most part, media just means technology, and that’s what everyone’s really talking about. Finally, in this game, you don’t cite McLuhan if you want to be taken seriously by the tenured professors — though if you must, you should do so with heavy qualifications and apologetics. If you don’t care about being taken seriously as a scholarly mind, however, you can cite him all you want, as many bloggers and editorialists do. And that’s about it. Now, when we reduce this game to its bare essentials, it sounds so silly, quaint, and formulaic… but then again, it has actually led to some great scholarship, like Brian Stock’s Implications of Literacy (1983), to name just one example off the top of my head.

The problem with this game, of course, is that it was and remains too caught up in the world of academia, and no one in that world can play it with McLuhan’s sense of playfulness. McLuhan, as everyone recognizes, said all sorts of crazy things — crazy to the point where it feels like if you try to argue against him, then you’re turning into the butt of some joke that you’re too dense to understand. But at the same time, I’ve found that if you talk to enough McLuhaniacs, McLuhanatics, McLuhantards, McLuhantoids, and McLuhany Toons, you discover that for the most part, they genuinely do believe in most of the principles he laid out (e.g. “hot” and “cool” media, the emphasis on the phonetic alphabet as opposed to literacy in general, his rather rigid late-career model of tetrads) and use them as the foundation of their own public and private speculations. So perhaps it’s fair to say that we should take McLuhan “seriously, but not literally,” as today’s popular saying goes.

All the same, however, media ecology extends far beyond McLuhan, and although people typically find themselves incapable of playing the game well, it is still basically a game. McLuhan was and is the biggest name associated with it, but he certainly didn’t invent it, and indeed it moved beyond him, finding new purchase outside the anglosphere, passing through such figures as Gilbert Simondon, Friedrich Kittler, and Bernard Stiegler. All those guys, not coincidentally, are associated with French post-structuralism — another sort of game, or assortment of games. But the beauty of the game of media ecology is that unlike, say, Derridean deconstruction, you actually have to say things that could possibly be wrong. You can’t be a coward, in other words. You’re making statements that people will think about and even ask to themselves, “Is that true?” and you’d better be comfortable with that. The gonzo journalist Tom Wolfe once posed the question about McLuhan, “What If He's Right?” No one who “got” Derrida ever asked that question about him, because they understood that there wasn’t too much that was actually being said.

So, when you compare media ecology to some of the other intellectual parlor games, there is a bit more at stake. If you’re outside the establishment, you can throw more things at the wall and see what sticks. If you’re inside of it, you’ve gotta be a bit less playful. But the main thing you have to do is take a technologically deterministic approach, stick with it, and with that limitation you’ve imposed upon yourself, you are now free to razzle and dazzle the world with your style, wit, lateral thinking, resourcefulness, and erudition, and there’s also the off-chance that you might actually be right once in a while. You might be a Christian humanist in your private life, or you might be a Hindu nationalist. Who knows. But for God’s sake, man, we’re playing a game here, and games are to be taken seriously. Not everything is about you.

And if you’re not yet fully convinced and still want to protest on behalf of the flexibility of media ecology, media studies, the philosophy of technology, and so on, then let me try to make one last point before I go. Man came into this world as a technological being, and he will leave this world in much the same fashion. He evolved with crude axes firmly in his hand and the flames of the hearth cooking his meat. Yes, he had a penis and some testicles, and yes, he would take private possessions for himself and covet his neighbor’s goods, but technology was always at least one guiding force that would determine the contours through which his libido and his lust for wealth might find their expression. And if we’re being real here, it was probably the most important one. There is thus no shame in putting on the “techno-determinist” cap, playing that role, and making some astute connections. You have plenty of solid ground upon which to stand. And when we want to discover “the real you” and peel back the layers of the onion, then we may somehow, someday find a beautiful soul that believes ultimately in man’s freedom. But no one will know that beautiful soul better than your dog, maybe your spouse, and almost certainly your grandma. A small few will piece it together from tertiary sources. The others will judge you only by what you leave behind. If you want to play this game, then you can partake in its regal dignity, but you’d best be sure to play it well. No crying allowed.

edit 8/5/26: some stylistic fixes, including a new sentence thrown into the fifth-to-last paragraph about whether or not you choose to be taken seriously when playing the game of media ecology

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that fiddles around with media ecology and non-structuralist semiotics. I occasionally discuss jazz and jazz-related media.

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In the past, I’ve remarked that Japan carries a privileged perspective when it comes to exploring jazz strictly as an art form, since the Japanese don’t have to spend any time focusing on the genre’s deep sociopolitical underpinnings. Which is to say, being neither white nor black, the Japanese don’t have to assume the standpoint of either the aggressor or the aggrieved — a condition that affects even the Europeans despite their distance from American history. Still, however, there are political elements to Japanese jazz (just as there are to all art forms), and Japan’s relationship with free jazz is particularly rich with them. Kōji Wakamatsu’s Endless Waltz (1995) is one example of a jazz film with a strong political subtext, though it has nothing to do with the trans-Atlantic slave trade or American racism. Instead, it deals with the phenomenon of Japanese free jazz, which blossomed in the aftermath of the 1968 student protests worldwide and whose attitude was largely formed by the student left. At least for a while.1 The film’s main purpose is to tell the story of the romance between feminist sci-fi author, actress, and nude model Izumi Suzuki and the legendary free jazz alto saxophonist Kaoru Abe, whose mythic status grew ever-more steadily following his death from a drug overdose at age 29. But the subject matter allows the film to explore the atmosphere of the time more generally, along with its artistic sensibility and sociopolitical dynamics as captured largely through Suzuki’s rather than Abe’s point-of-view. What results is a story that, whatever its director’s intentions, acts as an indictment not only on Abe’s disturbed personality but also, indirectly, the entire student left mentality that allowed it to indulge in its worse excesses.

Before I get into the details, I will freely confess something about Kaoru Abe: I never enjoyed his music. In fact, Kaoru Abe and guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi were two figures who kept me from exploring Japanese jazz more thoroughly for quite some time, since their collaborative live albums “Mass Projection” and “Gradually Projection” (both recorded in 1970) were considered essential gateway releases — depending on whom you’d ask, of course. Unfortunately, I found of them both boring, underwhelming, texturally flat, and largely devoid of artistic merit.2 Beyond those records, a metric ton of tape was recorded of Abe’s solo performances at various venues (“Winter 1972” being among the most respected), and most of them were released after his death. Again, from what I heard, I found them ponderous and self-indulgent. They sounded more like aimless practice sessions than actual performances, though Abe’s stamina is certainly impressive. If this is Japanese free jazz, I thought to myself, I think I’ll stick to its American counterpart. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered a ton of excellent Japanese free jazz, “post-bop,” and fusion musicians who seemed to have much more to say. First, a friend recommended Yamashita Yosuke, then I discovered Masahiko Satoh. These guys were good, and frankly a lot more varied in their sounds. Masahiko Togashi’s material was also solid and contemplative. More recently, the “J-Jazz – Deep Modern Jazz from Japan 1969-1984” compilation series from BBE Records has been a godsend for me, and frankly anyone who might want to know just how rich and varied the sounds really were from that time. Thus, from my perspective, Kaoru Abe and Masayuki Takayanagi were little more than obstacles, blocking my path and preventing me from getting to the good stuff.

Having the perspective that I do, I took Wakamatsu’s film as a pleasant surprise. Far from being mindless idolatry, it actually confirmed some of my worst suspicions about Abe’s character, and it even provided context for some of the stories that I had heard about how egotistical he was as a performer. For instance, when the American free jazz drummer Milford Graves toured Japan, he recorded the album “Meditation Among Us” and intended to include Kaoru Abe in his band for the entire outing. However, when the tour took off, Abe refused to stop playing at some point during a gig, leading to an impromptu war of attrition between him and Graves, who eventually gave up and stopped playing while Abe kept shrieking, skronking, squealing, wheezing, and screeching away on his horn. Although there is some dispute as to what happened afterwards (some have said that Graves promptly kicked Abe off the tour, though Graves later denied it), the situation created at least some friction, as Abe triumphally remarked that he had “won” while Graves left the stage. In Endless Waltz, that particular episode isn’t recounted, but we do see Abe show up to a club during a performance and try to overwhelm the entire band with his playing in similar fashion, making it seem that this sort of stunt was a routine occurrence for him. If you’re a serious Abe fan, you could perhaps watch the movie and find your faith in his artistic brilliance shaken but not altogether broken. But if you never liked him in the first place, you will find it fascinating to see just what a monstrous and shameless hack he was.

What the film makes clear right from the beginning is that his approach to playing is at root philosophical. According to him, he composes hundreds of pieces, sometimes forty in one night. He doesn’t write them down, though, because his music must exist only once. The main thing about free jazz, for Abe, is its emotion in the moment. “Sometimes,” he tells Suzuki when they first meet, “it can take several minutes for the sound to appear.” Other times, however, he can’t find the sound at all, and so he simply waits for it to come while playing, because it cannot be dishonest; it must be pure. Later on, we see him correct an attendee at one of his performances who explains to his girlfriend that Abe’s performance was an “idea.” “Free jazz is a metaphysics shaped as an Husserlian ideality,” he explains, and then identifies Husserl as a French philosopher who wrote Speech and Phenomena. Abe overhears him and corrects him: Derrida is the one who wrote Speech and Phenomena, not Husserl, and furthermore, “ideality is rather music flooding the world. Free jazz tries to dismantle this ideality and to structure it.”3 He then fishes out his copy of Speech and Phenomena from his backpack (he just happened to have it on him at the time), lends it to the attendee, and punctuates the gesture with a final dismissal: “Let Glenn Miller deal with the idea!” Thus, the true enemy is named.

That particular scene wouldn’t be too damning, but the problem is that Abe is wearing a rather ridiculous schoolboy outfit that Izumi Suzuki (now his wife) has made for him, with even a beanie hat and some garish rouge applied to his cheeks just to complete the look. Apparently, he did wear a similar outfit once to a performance, so this story has a grain of reality to it. And we see this sort of thing happen numerous throughout Endless Waltz: Abe’s pretense is regularly undercut by the humility of the actual situation he’s in. But the exchange also highlights the intimacy of the free jazz scene in Japan during this time. Everyone involved seems interested in theoretical concepts, aesthetics, or politics, they’re educated, and they’re tight-knit enough to lend each other books at venues (lend, not give), even when they’re complete strangers. Wakamatsu never shows Abe playing a show for more than thirty people at most, and this is probably an accurate portrayal.

It is interesting in itself that such a musician, one who rarely if ever played for a large audience, would attain such a legendary status, enough to where people have discussed him for decades after his death and still do now. This is unquestionably because of jazz’s proximity to the written word, which has always held the ability to create and develop the musician’s mystique. A good write-up can add some metanarrative weight to that musician’s playing, so that it isn’t just his music that has to “do the talking” for him. And such a fortunate proximity to the written word isn’t only a characteristic of Japanese jazz but jazz everywhere. For example, one of the most famous jazz clubs of all time is New York's Five Spot Café. It’s where Cecil Taylor was booked for an historically important extended stay, then later Thelonious Monk (his “Mysterioso” album was recorded there). It’s where Ornette Coleman made his official debut in New York, and every composer, writer, and music critic worth his salt made sure to attend the date so that they could say something about it in print. But even though it solidified its reputation as a game-changing venue, its official seating capacity was only about 75-76 people. It wasn’t about how many people showed up, but who, and what kind of symbolic power they held. The importance of the written word to jazz is not lost on the musicians, either. When the avant-garde alto saxophonist Henry Threadgill moved back to Chicago after his time serving in the Vietnam War and joined his friends in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, one of the first things he did was pen an piece entitled “Where are Our Critics?” which showed up in the inaugural issue of the AACM’s official ‘zine (1968). It wasn’t just Threadgill — that whole organization knew how the bread gets buttered.

Not for nothing, the relationship between Kaoru Abe and Izumi Suzuki is in some sense a relationship between the sound and the written word. More pointedly, it’s the relationship between the ideal of the purely authentic utterance — which can only occur once and never again, according to Abe — contrasted against the steadfastness and reliability of writing, and particularly writing to make ends meet. And if we should see the film that way, then we’d have to conclude that it is also a comment on the absurdity of the former, whose entire existence depends so subserviently upon the latter. Abe may have commented on Derrida and been an avid reader of his deconstructionist philosophy, but he didn’t appreciate the lesson that Derrida was trying to express. Namely, Abe’s belief in the irreplicability of the “pure,” authentically expressed sound constitutes an example of everything that Derrida criticized. It’s what Derrida referred to as “the metaphysics of presence.” Kaoru Abe’s perspective is the misguided “phonocentrism” of all western philosophy which occludes the “différance” that characterizes all communication.

Whether Wakamatsu intended Abe’s misreading of Derrida or not, it is undeniably consistent with how he portrays Abe’s principled but ultimately foolish commitment to his ideals (which he doesn’t consider “ideals,” of course, because deconstruction rejects ideality) and how much chaos it causes around him, not to mention the consternation it inspires in others. At one point, even the real Keiji Haino (playing himself) shows up to attack Abe’s character:

“My father is Eric Dolphy, my mother is Billie Holliday.” He would say this all the time. Nonsense. Music is a courtesy towards musicians you’re playing with. One who lacks politeness can only create an impolite sound. One who is confused can only make disordered music. To me, putting on airs is not having style.

His point is ultimately that Abe can only play alone because he has no ability to show decency towards others. And this same point carries into his romantic life, since he has no capacity to appreciate the same woman whose work is actually supporting him financially. Throughout their relationship, Abe insults Suzuki for writing stories for various publications that he doesn’t like, even going so far as to throw one of her manuscripts into the trash. In that particular scene, when she confronts him about it, he defends himself by calling her a “slave to consumer culture” and further explains that “consumer culture is but an illusion forced upon us by false intellectuals!” To which she responds, “We have to live, so that you can play the sax in pathetic clubs … if it’s going to buy my manuscript, then long live consumer society!” He then starts beating her.

And with that exchange, which occurs fairly early on in the film, the tone is set. Suzuki and Abe have passionate sex and violent fights, and Abe gets more and more drugged up while his live performances grow increasingly pretentious… all the way up until he finally overdoses and dies. While Suzuki is by no means level-headed in her own right — she actually committed suicide nearly a decade after Abe’s death, and the film does chronicle a scene in which she slices off her own toe while horrendously drunk, apparently to show off her intensity to Abe — it is hard to depart from the movie with any other conclusion than that she was the better person between the two of them.4 However, the movie’s criticism doesn’t just seem to affect Kaoru Abe but the entire milieu that allowed him to continue in the way that he did. It is permeated with elements of left-wing politics: Suzuki’s ex-boyfriend is a militant socialist protester, political discourse comes up frequently, and toward the end, while Abe is filled with drug-induced delusions, he grows stricken with paranoia from excessive news consumption. It’s as though Wakamatsu is using Abe to make a statement on that entire moment in Japanese history, similar to the way Christopher Lasch focused greatly on the post-68 New Left in his Culture of Narcissism (1979).

This may seem like a strange claim on its face, because director Kōji Wakamatsu was a committed leftist throughout his entire life. As an underground sexploitation, or “pink” film director whose career began in the 1960s, he was heavily intertwined with the left-wing counterculture, and so he spent his time present at the heart of not only the ‘68 student movement but the free jazz scene was well. He knew both Kaoru Abe and Izumi Suzuki personally, and he even featured them in his movies: Abe makes a cameo in Serial Rapist (1978) and contributes to its soundtrack, while Suzuki was an actress who performed in several of his films, even playing the starring role in Violence Without a Cause (1970). Nevertheless, however, Wakamatsu was willing to engage in self-critique (a very Maoist thing, you know), and so he did make at least two other films that attack the New Left: one being Ecstasy of the Angels (1972), and the other being the much more comprehensive, three-hours-long United Red Army (2007), often cited as one of his best. Whatever his intentions may have been, I would make the case that Endless Waltz should be included as another example of Wakamatsu’s works of critical political self-examination and re-evaluation of the past.

edit 7/29/26: some minor typographical and stylistic fixes

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that fiddles about with media ecology and non-structuralist semiotics. Yes, it’s true. Even when I’m discussing issues that seem wholly disconnected from these things, I assure you, they are always present, lurking ominously in the background.

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I. Some Remarks on Carl Schmitt

I’m far from a Carl Schmitt expert, and as with most things on this blog, this argument will be just a bit tentative, and just a bit impressionistic — something performed in the name of experimentation. Steam Calliope Scherzos is nothing if it can’t reserve the right to punch above its weight. But one thing that encourages me in writing this post in particular is that the state of popular discourse concerning Schmitt couldn’t possibly get any worse. Its lousiness, however, has been longstanding. His most enduring work is The Concept of the Political (1927, then 1932), and this is largely because of the meme-ified version of its argument that frequently surfaces on social media whenever people need to either a) rationalize their most destructive impulses, or b) rationalize others indulging in their most destructive impulses. The meme-ified version of Schmitt is also probably why so many people hate his guts. I can’t even count how many times I’ve spoken to educated people who, whenever I mention his name, will recoil and start reflexively denouncing him, even without having read any of his actual work. From such interactions, I’ve deduced that the widespread perception among the generally educated class is that Schmitt was a theorist who, like Marx or Freud, built a body of work centering upon a single point of emphasis. In this case, that point of emphasis would be the friend/enemy distinction, the value scale which he held at the core of all political considerations. Furthermore — so the perception goes — Schmitt wrote his works in order to encourage everyone to use his friend/enemy distinction to politicize innocent things like art, music, and philosophy, spreading rancor and hostility wherever they might go.

Fortunately, neither of these assumptions is right. If you’re not a fan of his work on the concept of the political and its accompanying friend/enemy distinction, then you can rest assured that much of his other work doesn’t depend upon it as an inextricable lynchpin. As for the second assumption, Schmitt’s presentation of the friend/enemy distinction is easy to caricaturize, so I’ll just get a couple things out of the way before I move onto my main point. First, Schmitt was attempting to be as descriptive (rather than prescriptive) with it as possible, so he wasn’t advocating for open conflict. His work definitely carried an argumentative edge to it which culminates in a critique of liberalism, but the way he characterized the nature of politics doesn’t necessarily lead to any of the conclusions he reaches. Second, the friend/enemy distinction is not a binary but rather a spectrum. So much confusion could be eliminated if people recognized this configuration. Third, Schmitt didn’t present the friend/enemy distinction to characterize petty conflicts between individuals who hate each other for various reasons. Rather, he takes pains to distinguish between the Latin hostis or the Greek πολέμιος (an enemy specifically of the state), and inimicus or ἐχθρός (a personal, relational enemy), arguing that political enmity occupies the former category, not the latter. Essentially, political differences are structural and existential rather than psychological and moral.1

However, it should be stated that the misconceptions about Schmitt’s idea of politics aren’t entirely the fault of bad reading. There are problems in the way Schmitt established the category and how it operates. Schmitt recognized that there are many different categories of human activity through which we assign different values to things, so he starts from the question: what is the value scale that politics provides for us? The area of aesthetics, for instance, determines what’s beautiful and what’s ugly, while the area of economics determines what’s profitable and what’s unprofitable. The area of ethics, for its part, determines what’s good and what’s evil. And so, analogizing from this model, Schmitt determines that the area of politics determines who’s a friend and who’s an enemy.

He establishes this proposition as a pretext for a broader critique of liberalism, which he sees as attempting to eliminate the political from civic life. If liberalism, with its universalistic pretense, could actually achieve such a thing, then Schmitt might not have had such a problem with it.2 But by eliminating the friend/enemy distinction as a matter of consideration, liberal ideology only allows it to sneak into public affairs through the backdoor of economics or morality. For Schmitt, this is very dangerous, and we’ll discuss why in a moment. But first, we have to look at why his configuration was a bit messy, something that his contemporary Leo Strauss understood immediately after the publication of the text’s first edition. An essay from the American Affairs journal explains the controversy well:

As Leo Strauss pointed out in his commentary on the text, Concept of the Political defines the relationship between values and politics in an inconsistent way. On the one hand, Schmitt took from Weber the idea of a realm of values divided into distinct regions, of which the political is only one. By this light, the error of liberalism was to have ignored a particular region of the realm of values, and Schmitt’s task in Concept of the Political was to draw attention to this neglected area. On the other hand, Schmitt argued that any values can become political if they become intense enough to create the distinction between friends and enemies. This means, as Strauss observed, that in fact every act of value-setting is potentially political and a cause of deadly strife.

Schmitt took Strauss’s critique to heart, as Heinrich Meier has shown. He made changes to the subsequent edition of the text to move away from his earlier formulation of politics as one domain of the realm of values, stating more clearly that all values can acquire a political dimension. These revisions did not, however, address the most important implications of Strauss’s comments. If, as Strauss suggested, what Schmitt was really working towards was the notion that all value-setting as such is political, then there was little basis from which to criticize liberalism for moralizing political conflicts. Schmitt’s critique of liberalism depended on the possibility of keeping areas of the realm of values distinct from each other. But, as Strauss observed, this is impossible if all values can become political. Schmitt’s attempt in Concept of the Political to limit the intensity of political conflicts by keeping them distinct from moral issues is thus absurd.

Strauss’s criticisms were right. Schmitt was a strong theorist, but he was no logician. When writing The Concept of the Political, he was obviously motivated by the observation that liberal states engage in a sort of hypocrisy whereby they can declare war like any other state while hiding behind the claim that their war is somehow exceptional — a “war to end wars” or a “war for all of humanity.” If everyone could only recognize that the political is an irrepressible category that belongs to all states including liberal ones, then perhaps such propaganda might not be so effective. But as Schmitt understood, because liberalism is a political ideology that claims to be rooted in all of man’s ontological nature, liberal state representatives accordingly claim to speak for everyone and more easily obscure the discriminatory nature of their politics.

Despite his theoretical flaws, Schmitt’s criticisms of liberal ideology were spot-on in this regard, and they’re in fact more correct today than when he first voiced them.3 He was observing something very real and very enduring. But nevertheless, his preliminary work on the political as such was imprecise and convoluted. Perhaps this is why Schmitt fans seem especially annoying when they go around accusing people of “depoliticizing the political” when it could just as easily be stated, in the same terms that Schmitt laid out, that they are actually the ones who are trying fecklessly to politicize the apolitical. After all, they are usually private individuals engaging in emotionally loaded rhetoric amid petty personal disputes, not representatives of the state making dispassionate judgments about what’s best for its future. They aren’t gearing up for war.

II. The Ludic Nature of War

I often think about whether or not there is a way to mess around with Schmitt’s theoretical model, though, because its central point gives rise to some fascinating implications. One of them, which Schmitt explicitly states, is that the declaration of an enemy and thus the initiation of war is ultimately what gives man’s public affairs their greatest sense of meaning, in the same way that the recognition that we will die is what compels us to seize upon life with vigor and purpose. This point recalls Heraclitus, who saw war as not merely a destructive event but rather an ever-present universal law — “the father of all things.”

Another point of fascination is that the “friend/enemy distinction” was conceived as a way of demonstrating the danger of when moralism oversteps its boundaries. In other words, crypto-political moralism is what can lead to devastating outcomes, not naked politics. For Schmitt, liberal universalism could potentially elevate mundane conflict to a level of enmity that exceeds the relatively modest boundaries of politics. Whereas naked politics don’t necessitate the total eradication of the opponent, only his surrender (at which point the war ends), moralism can verge on the apocalyptic. Clearly, he was observing the state of Germany following the Treaty of Versailles, reeling from the aftermath of World War I. But in postulating war as a primarily amoral activity, Schmitt was, I believe, groping toward an understanding of politics that was essentially ludic in character. That is, he was inadvertently presenting politics as a form of play, however extreme. Schmitt was seeing the danger of liberal morality taking the gamesmanship out of war, turning it into something more invasive and all-encompassing than the game of human chess that it had become since the birth of civilization.

Now, this claim should raise some red flags if you know the history of how the ludic, or the play-element of life, has been theorized in the twentieth century. Schmitt wrote his essay some years before Johann Huizinga put out Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1938), and Huizinga’s work — as he reveals in the very end — turns out to be not merely a study of play, but in fact a polemic directed against Germany’s move toward national socialism and the various conservative revolutionary figures of the post-Weltkrieg milieu, the most important of whom turns out to be none other than Carl Schmitt. For Huizinga, who specifically mentions Schmitt by name, his theory of politics is a “horrible creed,” and his “delusion” about the friend-foe distinction is “barbarous and pathetic,” so much so that Huizinga knows of no “sadder or deeper fall from human reason” than it and it alone. Schmitt is guilty of holding “inhuman cerebrations” which “do not even hold water as a piece of formal logic” and “merely take us back to the savage level.” Huizinga is particularly mortified by Schmitt’s concept of the Ernstfall, usually translated into English as “the extreme case,” the point at which politics intensifies to such a degree that war must break out and politics thus realizes its true function. For Schmitt, the Ernstfall demarcates the line at which pure seriousness is attained, and Huizinga, being an advocate of play, doesn’t like that notion one bit.

But Huizinga’s rejection of Schmitt’s description of the Ernstfall is rather strange and counterintuitive, and it’s largely why Schmitt strikes me as a ludic thinker — a proponent of fair play in a purer way than Huizinga was. The Ernstfall, for Schmitt, is the high point of seriousness, but for Huizinga, as he puts it, “It is not war that is serious, but peace. War and everything to do with it remains fast in the daemonic and magical bonds of play.” (He says this, by the way, mere paragraphs after praising the game-like nature of the old parliamentary debates in the House of Commons.) To make sense of Huizinga’s point here, one might turn to an earlier book of his. Huizinga had already written a work of criticism addressing what he saw as the troubling direction in which Germany was headed called In the Shadow of Tomorrow (1936), in which he also criticizes Schmitt in an extended discussion attacking Lebensphilosophie, or what he derisively calls “the worship of life.”4 His attacks on Schmitt, by the way, are no less intense than in Homo Ludens, for he calls his friend-foe distinction “a defection from the spirit leading far beyond the sphere of a naïve animalism to a Satanism which sets up evil as a beacon and a guiding star for a misguided humanity.” But in this book, he doesn’t attack Schmitt for contradicting or minimizing the element of play. Rather, he attacks Schmitt for trying to separate the political from the ethical, and then, later on in the book (and only indirectly), for endorsing a “false play” in which the element of play becomes so overwhelming and expansive that it drowns all of society and consigns it to a sort of permanent adolescence. In his chapter entitled “Puerilism,” he explains it like so:

The most fundamental characteristic of true play, whether it be a cult, a performance, a contest, or a festivity, is that at a certain moment it is over. The spectators go home, the players take off their masks, the performance has ended. And here the evil of our time shows itself. For nowadays play in many cases never ends and hence is not true play. A far-reaching contamination of play and serious activity has taken place. The two spheres are getting mixed. In the activities of an outwardly serious nature hides an element of play. Recognised play, on the other hand, is no longer able to maintain its true play-character as a result of being taken too seriously and being technically over-organised. The indispensable qualities of detachment, artlessness and gladness are thus lost.

So, Schmitt is bad because he mistakenly sees war as the high-point of seriousness, when it is actually play… if done in a civilized manner. By making the violent play of war into the consummation of all politics, Schmitt is guilty of perfusing play into the serious world of political affairs, which turns it effectively into a false play. After all, if everything is play, then essentially nothing is. It’s all just play, play, play, and thus it’s fake play.

Now, there are a couple ironies to Huizinga’s denunciation worth mentioning. The first is that by attacking Schmitt in the way that he does, he entirely confirms Schmitt’s argument about the liberal hypocrisy concerning politics. Schmitt is outed as the enemy, and in the most radical possible terms: his ideas are horrible, inhuman, barbarous, savage, and even Satanic! He is “the outlaw” (Schmitt’s term) that Schmitt saw liberalism as uniquely inclined to designate. And Huizinga doesn’t do a whole lot to hide this fact — there’s even a section in Homo Ludens in which he declares… well, go ahead and read it:

International law between States is maintained by the mutual recognition of certain principles which, in effect, operate like play-rules despite the fact that they may be founded in metaphysics. Were it otherwise there would be no need to lay down the pacta sunt servanda principle, which explicitly recognizes that the integrity of the system rests on a general willingness to keep to the rules. The moment that one or the other party withdraws from this tacit agreement the whole system of international law must, if only temporarily, collapse unless the remaining parties are strong enough to outlaw the ‘‘spoilsport’’.

So, basically, if a party starts flouting not the actual laws but “certain principles” founded in metaphysics that indicate a general willingness to observe international law, then all the other parties who participate in international relations should band together and collapse the whole edifice of international law to punish the inhuman and Satanic party — but only temporarily! — because, well, they’re being spoil-sports. Boy, that idea doesn’t sound like it could ever go horribly wrong! And it’s exactly the kind of thinking that Schmitt feared. But more to the point, Huizinga is completely ignoring that Schmitt was a strong advocate of the Ius publicum Europaeum, the system of international law that emerged with the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648. One of the major reasons that he conceptualized politics the way he did was that he was worried about liberalism being the very ideology that upends that system, namely by using moral universalism to justify its wholesale suspension. And hey, wouldn’t you know it… along comes Huizinga to completely legitimize the concern.

The second irony in Huizinga’s critique is that for all of his over-the-top rhetoric opposing Schmitt, his concept of play is structurally configured very similarly to Schmitt’s concept of the political. In the same way that Schmitt saw politics as a category that precedes the state, Huizinga saw play as a category that precedes culture. He didn’t feel that play functions like a technique or that it “evolved” at some point during man’s development, since we can see that even animals will play with each other. He also didn’t feel that culture evolved out of play in the same way that Schmitt never says the state evolves out of the political, which is treated as a similarly metaphysical concept. But Huizinga did argue that civilization rises in play and through it, and that moreover it is always there with man as an inextricable part of his being, whether or not it can find a proper purchase.

Like Schmitt with politics, Huizinga saw play as something that occupies man’s affairs as a potentiality, even when it lies dormant. After an unsuccessful first printing of his work (the one that Leo Strauss criticized), Schmitt eventually decided that economics, aesthetics, and morality could become politicized. Well, Huizinga felt the same, but his topic was play, and so he wrote about how economics, philosophy, aesthetics, and even war itself can become permeated with its spirit. The political and the ludic, as both thinkers conceived them, were therefore not really independent properties but rather second-order categories, or modes. I’m not a big fan of the word “orthogonal,” but it applies here: the political and the ludic both run orthogonal to the properties of the economic, the aesthetic, and so on.

Additionally, Huizinga’s concept of play suffers from the same logical problems that affect Schmitt’s concept of the political. Basically, Huizinga had no idea how to resolve the relationship between play and seriousness in the same way that Schmitt had no idea how to resolve the relationship between politics and ethics. This matters because both thinkers were concerned about their respective subject of study being contaminated by other sensibilities. In Schmitt’s case, the biggest concern was with moralism; and in Huizinga’s case, seriousness. Huizinga didn’t fail to anticipate the problem, however. He realized all along that play is often taken very seriously in practice, like when children stay tenaciously committed to the rules of even the most frivolous games, or when two men agree to a musket duel and walk ten paces from one another before turning around and firing. To resolve the problem, he decides — following Immanuel Kant — that seriousness is essentially ethical in nature, and in the very end of Homo Ludens (the very last page!), he winds up stating that play should ultimately defer to the seriousness of ethics. Yes… play needs to go on time-out and let ethics handle the big-boy stuff. This resolution proves highly unsatisfying to say the least, since it undermines his book’s entire argument that play has been so essential to civilization in the first place. For a book whose putative purpose is to elevate the play-element, Homo Ludens turns out to be pretty dismissive of play.

Because of this weak attempt to resolve the tension between play and seriousness, though, the real essence of the dispute between Huizinga and Schmitt was at last made clear: it was, at its heart, a dispute about whether or not politics should be ethical. Play was only the shadow of Huizinga’s real concern. Schmitt didn’t want politics and its attending Ernstfall or “extreme case” to be contaminated by morality, while Huizinga at first indicated that he doesn’t want play to be contaminated by seriousness, but then, in a stunning reversal, revealed that it was actually seriousness (i.e., ethics) that he didn’t want to be contaminated by play!

Now, in pointing this out, I don’t want to say that Huizinga secretly hated play, or that his opposition to “false play” was a rejection of real play, or anything like that. He wrote a couple hundred information-dense pages on the greatness of play because he clearly thought it was great and worth preserving. But the same point could be said regarding Schmitt and the category of ethics. For all of his concerns about politics being polluted by moral considerations, it isn’t quite right to say that Schmitt was opposed to morality as such. For one thing, he was a devout Catholic writing urgently about the danger of secularized universalism threatening to upend the global order that came as a respite after the deadly religious violence of the Thirty Years War. For another, he was clearly motivated by an ethical need to keep the rules of the game we call war clean and unalloyed. What else would explain his insistence upon the matter? Autism?

After all, why else would he approvingly cite Pierre Joseph Proudhon’s praise of prudence and restraint during war in La Guerre et la Paix (1861), wherein Proudhon characterizes it as a “bloody game of battles” (jeu sanglant des batailles)? And why would he build upon that idea by modifying Proudhon’s thought, saying [with my emphasis added],

The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.

It seems clear that Schmitt’s desire to preserve the gamesmanship of war from the encroachment of morality was truthfully motivated by morality. Perhaps it was a morality both deeper and more intense than the secularized liberal universalism that Huizinga represented.

III. Savagery

Despite the confusion that Huizinga leaves us with regarding the relationship between play and seriousness, he does get one thing at least partially right about Schmitt: he endorses a kind of war whose casus belli would resemble the wars of savage tribes. The interesting thing about Schmitt being a hard-edged and world-weary Catholic (someone you’d want to place alongside the Christian existentialists like Kierkegaard or Dostoevsky) is that he ultimately defends a kind of international pluralism that resembles the pluralism of pagan tribes prior to the birth of Judaism. As the Egyptologist Jan Assmann has pointed out, one of Moses’s great innovations is in introducing the conceptual possibility of war being declared out of strictly religious intolerance.5 Before the Israelites, wars were declared sometimes because of petty personal disputes, but mainly for materialistic reasons. And even the petty disputes often had material causes: you want your neighboring tribe’s food, or their women, or their shiny things, or whatever. But by declaring that one God must stand above the rest, all of whom are false, monotheism turned spiritual prejudice into a new source of violence and even quickened its adherents with a newfound zeal for conquest, as the rapid expansion of early Islam makes clear.

There is one decisive way in which Schmitt was not merely arguing for a simple return to savagery, however. As recent research has shown in great abundance, under conditions of savagery or primitivism, wars are essentially total wars in which potentially anyone can be killed, while organized battles on designated battlefields are relatively rare. Only with the birth of agriculture and the invention of land-locked states with organized armies did war stop being a stream of relatively disorganized raids, ambushes, and massacres and start to become “the bloody game of battles” that Proudhon described, with its banners, flags, coats of arms, and marching music. In other words, civilized war started to take the form of game-like play that was lacking beforehand.6 Starting in the 1940s, a steady stream of bad anthropology helped obscure this fact, but both Huizinga and Schmitt seemed to understand it quite well. Huizinga, in fact, largely identifies the game-like nature of war with the growth of civilization in his chapter on war, so it is quite strange that he accuses Schmitt of wanting to plunge mankind back into a state of savagery when he ought to have known better. He even singles out Schmitt’s distinction between hostis (public enemy) and inimicus (private enemy) for criticism in this regard, even though the invention of the state and thus the concept of hostis is indispensable for civilization, while all primitive wars are much more personal and thus more inimical in nature. Actually, that is precisely the reason why their violence is so ghastly and perverse.

If anything, he ought to have criticized Schmitt for the naïvety of thinking that the international order could adopt the non-universalist ethics of the pagan mind while simultaneously keeping a civilized and cordoned-off approach to the conduct of war. Such a compartmentalization could never maintain, and perhaps this is why Schmitt later on realized that the liberal pretense of depoliticizing all aspects of life was in fact the best hope for preventing an apocalyptic war, not the greatest pathway towards one. Thus, in his later works, he identified the liberal international order with the katechon, the mysterious force mentioned in Saint Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians, whose job is to withhold the arrival of the Antichrist, who in turn prepares mankind for the final Revelation.

IV. Post-Liberalism and Play

So far, the apocalypse has not yet come, and it may never come, but the world has become unquestionably less liberal. Though the topic is still fiercely debated among political theorists, I’m of the belief that liberalism started to decline in the west at the end of World War II, which placed the United States as the leader of a new international order with only the Soviet Union as a credible contender. Then, the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the emergence of America’s newfound unipolar dominance only weakened liberalism further. The expansion of state surveillance through the NSA starting in the early 1950s forms just one example. Surveillance intensified greatly following the terrorist attacks of 2001 and steadily grew under presidents Obama and Trump through the Department of Homeland Security. Another clear example of liberalism’s decline is the tendency of western states to regulate public discourse through “hate speech” laws, which have steadily grown more invasive and punitive since their introduction.

Additionally, politics has grown less accountable to its citizens due to more executive decisions being made by unelected bureaucrats who operate through large managerial state organs, a trend anticipated by James Burnham. But this may not even matter too much, since the state, the education system, and the corporate media apparatus have gradually inculcated the general public into accepting infringements upon its “inalienable” rights as a matter of routine. If the emergence of a novel coronavirus at the tail end of 2019 was able to terrify the public into surrendering its rights to both free speech and free assembly as effectively as it did — even when publicly available, mainstream information from the U.S. government indicated that an infected patient had a 99.98% chance of surviving — then this fact alone should indicate the ease with which western governments will be able to declare a “state of emergency” (i.e., a time in which more civil rights are suspended) the next time they feel like doing so, no matter how flimsy the pretext.

And yet, despite the diminishment of liberal principles from 21st-century statecraft, the kind of moral universalism that Schmitt both criticized and connected with liberalism has only grown more widespread and more intense in application, often being invoked to justify various assaults on liberal values and civil rights. This has been true since the 1960s and 1970s, in which affirmative action and disparate impact laws were introduced in the United States, which either treat the men and women of different races differently under the law, or assume that examples of different racial outcomes must be the fault of systemic discrimination, which then requires adjustment to prevent the “disparately impacted” race from facing consequences. At first, these laws were justified in the name of equality, albeit a kind that requires corrective measures. But now, such measures are justified under the principle of “equity,” since school intellectuals and public commentators no longer feel pressured to endorse the concept of liberal equality.

Perhaps these are all conditions that Huizinga could accept. But somehow, I doubt it, since alongside the growing invasiveness of post-liberal humanitarian morality has been the accompanying disappearance of free-play as a cherished element of civilization. When the comedian Sam Hyde satirized the tendency of venture capitalists and self-proclaimed thought leaders to invoke “the spirit of childlike play” and the “studies” which show that “we don’t play hard enough” during his Ted Talk prank, he was mocking what has become both the impotence and the pervasiveness of the idea in today’s business economy. At no point in history has play been celebrated as an ideal, even when it is nearly altogether absent. In contemporary life, the “gamification” of everything has led to games, games, and more games seemingly everywhere, but with almost no actual play. Huizinga recognized this development and cited the professionalization of sports as one example along with a few others. But today’s environment of games without play doesn’t resemble the “false play” or “puerilism” that Huizinga wrote about. As we’ve discussed, Huizinga was describing phenomena such as life under the German NSDAP as well as fascist Italy, whose adolescent mentality was well-satirized in Fellini’s Amarcord (1973). But the erosion of play seems to come from another trend that Huizinga identified but didn’t give enough analysis; namely, its technicization.

Gamification represents an extreme version of everything that Huizinga observed about the decline of play in Homo Ludens, since it exploits the play-impulse within human psychology but then redirects it toward mundane, goal-driven ends. Under a gamified society, daily life is weighed down by a superfluity of digitized points, tokens, coins, ribbons, badges, and other reward mechanics for activities that were once either self-motivated or straightforwardly obligatory. The logic of gamification now informs workplace productivity software, fitness tracking, K-12 education, language acquisition, healthcare compliance, tax filing, chain store and restaurant consumption, financial savings, and even social and romantic life. Social media web sites and dating apps present their users with profile pages that resemble gaming leaderboards, while follower counts and engagement metrics serve as perpetual scorecards. Meanwhile, the workplace grows increasingly gamified through cell phone apps that employees are required to use. When workers complete a mandatory task, they are “rewarded” with tokens or badges, and they can even “earn extra points” for punctuality or accuracy. All of these optimization schemes are almost perfectly designed to contradict Huizinga’s description of play, which characterizes the act as autotelic, self-directed, and separate from the drudgery of ordinary life. The gamification of society is absolutely a symptom of puerilism, since it blemishes adulthood with the pimples and pustules of adolescence. But it’s a puerilism that Huizinga did not anticipate, since it stems not from the atavistic impulses of fascism but rather the cold hand of managerial technocracy.

Meanwhile, even proper games themselves are increasingly devoid of real play. Video games (played through personal computers and consoles) are bigger than they’ve ever been; the industry is massive. But the thought process behind game production is extraordinarily sophisticated in ensuring that “gameplay” has nothing to do with the authentic play that Huizinga describes. In the planning of major games, a great deal of thought is put into the question of how best to maximize the number of hours spent gaming per player, and this is typically done by exploiting his or her neurological vulnerabilities. The result has been an explosion of games that critics increasingly call “Skinner boxes,” named after the operant conditioning techniques of the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner. The “free-to-play” (derisively known as “pay-to-win”) model of mobile phone games and, increasingly, PC games is a particularly damning example. The industry stays profitable by exploiting every known manipulation technique to convert a small fraction of users into “whales” who will spend disproportionately large amounts of money on microtransactions. The metric of a game’s success thus comes from its total daily users and the average revenue per user, not the amount of fun or excitement a gamer is having. Moreover, live-service game design is meant to dissolve the boundary between what Huizinga called the “magic circle” of play and ordinary life to the greatest possible extent. For instance, if a user does not regularly and consistently log into his gaming account, he will often be punished for his absence through a reduction on his game progression. Using the game thus turns into an obligation not unlike brushing one’s teeth. Additionally, limited-time gaming events are designed to impose external pressure from the outer world onto the game, thus exploiting what’s often called the “fear of missing out.” Given the conditions of the modern gaming industry on the whole, it is highly appropriate that video game enthusiasts typically call themselves “gamers” rather than players, since what they’re doing isn’t really playing at all.

It should thus come as no surprise that war has also grown increasingly gamelike, though with none of the violent, daemonic play that characterizes its earlier manifestations. Like I mentioned before, civilization is what allowed war to achieve a maximally gamelike structure while retaining its sense of play. As Lawrence Keeley notes in War Before Civilization (1996), following the medieval period, western nations

more and more preferred to conduct war purely between proportionally smaller forces of specialists — first armored nobility, then mercenaries, and, later, professionals or regulars. They took what had been a nasty free-for-all, often literally a struggle for existence (like that between Rome and Carthage), and turned it into a chess game with highly specialized units, stylized movements, and constrained rules.

The international law that emerged in Westphalia (which, again, Carl Schmitt endorsed) established a body of customary principles and rules that determined how war ought to be conducted, with distinct entry and exit conditions. Crucially, the sovereignty of each state was respected with none declared as an “outlaw” for ideological reasons, while the treatment of prisoners and wounded soldiers became standardized. None of this violated the spirit of play, since all games have rules and standards.

But with the advent of industrial modernity, the nature of war changed once again to eliminate the element of play altogether. Though Ernst Jünger spent the better part of his career trying to show the value of participation in war, he freely admitted that modern warfare has essentially nothing to do with the agonistic heroism of the Classical world and far more to do with impersonal amassment of technological capacities and big-bodied steel monoliths. In the digital age, this trend has only intensified further, with the military now at an advanced level of corporatization, functioning as a viable career path for, among others, women who would otherwise gain employment as H.R. professionals at major businesses or law firms. Additionally, the depersonalization of combat has rendered war into something of an ersatz-video game, with soldiers operating aircraft vehicles thousands of miles away from the area of combat. The growth of technology combined with the preference for long-range bombing campaigns and drone strikes over boots-on-the-ground combat indicates that this approach to war will grow more common. But although this style of warfare may represent a video game, even one in which real play is involved, it still does not involve actual play between two opposing combatants who are equally aware that a contest is going on. Drone strikes occur suddenly and out-of-nowhere, while drone operators experience their targets as pixels on a screen. They use digital software to perform technical functions with no mutual acknowledgment. The practice is closer to administering a colonoscopy or performing pest control than engaging in the genuine agon of pre-modern warfare.

Even today’s system of rules for combat is a good example of how the play-element of war has disappeared. As I’m writing this piece, international humanitarian law has never been more elaborate or extensively codified, even while the conditions that make rules meaningful have been eroded beyond repair. The recognition of the enemy as a legitimate adversary (hostis rather than inimicus) has grown extraordinarily weak, since the engagement of war has increasingly taken place through modes of conflict that seek to lessen their standing as an equal player. Counterterrorism operations, drone assassinations, hybrid warfare, and even lawfare are routinely practiced during times of “peace,” all of which are designed to shift the contours through which an actual war might take place in the aggressor’s favor. The paradox here is that the more rules you codify, the more of an opportunity a state can have to exploit them to gain an unfair advantage. By seizing upon the rules, you can declare the enemy outside of the protection of the framework that is meant to establish the fairness of war in the first place. Thus, the rules of war can themselves become the weapons of absolute enmity. This is a situation that Schmitt foresaw with much greater clarity than Huizinga, the latter being too narrowly focused on the “spoil-sport” who questions the rules. Actually, the over-eager embracing of rules has turned out to be the much bigger problem.

The foregoing summary of the conditions of games under post-liberalism will hopefully have shown that an excess of games and game-like structures have eroded the element of play in society in a manner rather different from what Huizinga imagined, even though his description of play as a concept was fruitful and his concerns about its disappearance were right. The advent of today’s post-liberal order should make clear that Huizinga’s opposition to Schmitt was historically misplaced. What he revealed instead is that the political concept that Schmitt was trying to postulate actually carries strange synchronicities with the realm of the ludic. In fact, it might have been just a bit too ludic for Huizinga.

Perhaps it’s only appropriate that the most important theorist of the play-element would, in the end, back off from fully embracing it. For much of the twentieth century, play has been a suspect phenomenon, and the freer it is, the more dangerous it seems. The Marxist left has actually been among the most scandalized by its ever-present possibility, as shown in the opposition toward avant-garde and surrealist literature from critics such as György Lukács, or the outright hostility toward jazz music — America’s greatest contribution to pure play in the arts — from Theodor Adorno (who also once said rather absurdly that it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, thus making a strong case for the barbarian mind). Only a few sordid and anarchic thinkers during the early twentieth century like Georges Bataille — himself influenced by Huizinga and, funnily enough, often labeled a crypto-fascist — could recognize that play contained within it an element of true scandal, something that would prove increasingly disruptive and thereby threatening to a well-organized technical society. And the reason for such an observation is deceptively simple: when the logic of optimization encroaches upon all facets of life, then there is no longer a commons. And if there is no longer a commons, then there is no room for the magic circle of play. And if there’s no room for the magic circle of play, then the magic circle must trespass upon declared territory.

But perhaps there is no better expression of play’s disruptive qualities than — as strange and unexpected as it may seem — Carl Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction, even despite its conceptual problems, because it shows most forcefully that play does not need to sacrifice even an ounce of seriousness or existential potency to remain play. I can take aside my best friend and play a round of chess with him, thus simulating a war. Or I can declare a nation my enemy and start a real war. In either case, I choose play.

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that handles media ecology and non-structuralists semiotics. Occasionally we discuss literature. Occasionally we dance and prance.

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I recently read Wuthering Heights (1847) for the first time. It was quite good. In fact, it was so good, I read it twice. Maybe at some point I’ll finally do Jane Eyre, the other big novel from the Brontë family. It got me thinking a lot about the condition of being perpetually sickly, which its author Emily Brontë was throughout her life until she died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty. Sickliness isn’t just the condition of having this or that sickness but a kind of condition that encompasses one’s world. It can influence one’s mental state. It’s a mode of being that tinctures one’s thoughts. Over time, it turns into a lens through which one views the world, and to me, Wuthering Heights feels like one of its grandest expressions.

Wuthering Heights is one of those novels from which everyone seems to depart with his or her own big takeaway, perhaps because its message isn’t straightforward by any means. It confounded critics when it was first released and continues to befuddle students who have to read it for school. I fully sympathize with any teenager who is assigned to read it and doesn’t like it; their reaction is historically common, anyhow. One reason for the novel’s polarizing effect is that it lacks a clear voice of moral righteousness or reason. The closest figure who represents one is Edgar, the husband of Catherine whom she marries more out of convenience and class expectation than love, but he’s not exactly flawless for his part. On the whole, the novel does a good job at making just about everyone seem like either a jerk or a potential jerk, or just sort of a dullard, and this is why the character of Heathcliff towers above every other element in the text. Heathcliff is a real jerk. But in a world of jerks, you might as well take the side of the most confident, well-spoken, competent, and successfully manipulative jerk of them all. And it doesn’t hurt that he’s driven by a stop-at-nothing romantic obsession that so many of the novel’s readers have found entrancing, if not straightforwardly arousing. Wuthering Heights is, simply put, the Heathcliff novel, and the way most people react to it will depend on their reaction to Heathcliff.

A swart gypsy orphan inexplicably adopted by a well-to-do family (the Earnshaws), Heathcliff is despised by all of his peers but one, Catherine, his adoptive and thus biologically unrelated sister. They fall in love, and this doomed love carries them through their pubescent years, but it drives Heathcliff to a state of white hot rage once she chooses to marry Edgar Linton, a wealthy but feeble and effeminate heir to the manor of Thrushcross Grange. This rage quickly freezes over into a sustained state of malevolence that remains within Heathcliff for many years, putting him on a mission to completely ruin Edgar’s life. At first, once Catherine decides to marry Edgar, Heathcliff disappears altogether, becoming mysteriously rich after three years’ absence (the novel never explains how). This newfound fortune lets him manipulate his way into purchasing the Wuthering Heights property from his adoptive brother, Hindley Earnshaw, whose gambling debts and alcoholism have caught up with him. After Heathcliff moves back to his new property and torments Edgar with his presence, successfully disrupting their marriage, Catherine dies of illness (her sickness exacerbated by her enduring love for Heathcliff), and so for most of the novel’s second half, Heathcliff is free to meddle in the affairs of the Linton family and torture everyone involved just for the hell of it. He even marries Edgar’s sister Isabella, knocks her up, and abuses the hell out of her (at one point he throws a knife at her neck). This prompts her to abscond with her unborn son to the south of England. We’ll discuss her son in just a bit.

It has been said that one’s reaction to Heathcliff will depend upon the age at which one reads the novel. If you’re eighteen, you’ll think of him as a passionate romantic hero, but in your thirties, you’ll view him as an irredeemable monster. Perhaps that’s true. But your reaction to the novel will also depend on what parts of it you focus on more. I suspect that throughout most of its circulation, the majority of readers have read and reread the first half of it while largely ignoring the second half, perhaps just getting through it once and then refusing to treat it as more than an afterthought. The novel’s various movie adaptations at least suggest as much, with a whole lot of focus on Catherine and Heathcliff’s passionate interactions, and not nearly as much on Heathcliff’s seemingly inexhaustible well of hatred whose depths only present themselves after Catherine has died. An adaptation of only the novel’s second half would tell an altogether different story than sticking just with the first. You would get to know Heathcliff mainly as a world-class hater rather than lover.

For my part, though, I appreciated the novel’s second half. In the second half, Heathcliff’s malevolence starts to become so over-the-top that it reaches the point of black comedy. Time and time again, he delivers the most heartless and abusive speeches imaginable to just about everybody, and the precision with which he chooses his words is too well-tuned not to be funny. And yet, to my mind, Heathcliff doesn’t wind up being the most compelling character, because he really isn’t the most horrible. The most horrible character actually winds up being his son, Linton Heathcliff, a horribly abused and sickly boy.

All the way up to arrival of Linton Heathcliff, sickness is treated as one means of establish its gloomy and gothic atmosphere, and in some cases, it pushes the plot forward. When a character needs to die, some sickness is there waiting to take him or her. Consider everyone who dies of illness or disease:

• Mrs. Earnshaw (Heathcliff’s adoptive mother) dies early on in the novel of an unspecified illness

• Mr. Earnshaw dies partly of old age, but a fever hastens everything along

• Frances Earnshaw dies from tuberculosis (“consumption”) following childbirth, which helps establish the sickly atmosphere that pervades the novel

• Mr. and Mrs. Linton, Edgar and Isabella’s parents, die almost instantly after taking care of Catherine, sick with fever. She becomes sick after spending the night out on the moors in the pouring rain, searching for Heathcliff, who has just left Wuthering Heights to seek his fortune. This episode demonstrates how Catherine’s love for Heathcliff leaves behind a wake of destruction, with her basically indifferent to its effects.

• Catherine later dies of a mixture of disease and lovelorn obsession, as mentioned before, putting the events of the novel’s second part into place. But her death is also quite convenient, because it happens just hours after giving birth to her daughter Cathy (often referred to as Catherine, confusingly enough).

• Isabella dies of an illness over in London, giving the Linton boy a reason to go back to Thrushcross Grange, then back with Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights

And up to this point, sickness elicits sympathy every time. The speed with which Edgar’s parents die is a little disconcerting, and upon a second reading, it becomes blackly comedic. But for the most part, this principle holds. Sickness almost always elicits sympathy in general, doesn’t it? A sickly and pathetic person must be good in some sense, right? After all, just look at how much they suffer. Entire moral outlooks can emerge from this assumption, and indeed they have, but Emily Brontë’s writing makes clear that such a morality is not one that she shares.

We get to know the Linton boy only when he reaches his teenage years. When he finally returns and Heathcliff regains custody of him (the first thing he tells Linton after meeting him is that his mother was a “wicked slut”), the latter soon grows disgusted with his son’s physical maladies and poor health. Linton is constantly experiencing chills, he coughs frequently, and he is alarmingly frail and diffident. Despite Linton being his son, Heathcliff acts quite brutal towards him, and his abuse only compounds Linton’s weak inner-constitution. It seems as though Linton has inherited none of his father’s traits, resembling instead the effeminacy of Catherine’s husband Edgar, or Isabella’s brother.

That conclusion is actually what Camille Paglia reaches in her sprawling survey of western literature, Sexual Personae (1991), with a reading so ingenious that I really would love to agree with it more than I do. In Paglia’s view, Brontë writes herself into the text as Heathcliff rather than (as many would assume) Catherine, and so Heathcliff should be taken as a Romantic hermaphroditic figure, a slightly effeminate seducer like Lord Byron or the fin de siècle dandies of England and France. Therefore, it is altogether appropriate that the Linton boy would seem to be totally unlike his own father. As Paglia explains,

In Romanticism, we have seen, the masculine is always qualified or impaired, a principle applying to Wuthering Heights for new and startling reasons. The difference between Heathcliff and Edgar first seems, in street terms, the difference between a real man and a sissy. But Heathcliff, a force of nature beginning with his craggy name, is strangely infertile. His marriage to Edgar’s sister produces no vigorous offspring. Quite the opposite, the weak blood of the Lintons surmounts his, resulting in “a pale, delicate, effeminate boy,” feeble and sickly, “more a lass than a lad.” Heathcliff contemptuously rebukes his son: “Thou art thy mother’s child, entirely! Where is my share in thee, puling chicken?” There is some impediment to the transmission of virile energy in Heathcliff. He is seminally vitiated. [emphasis in text]

All of this is correct insofar as Heathcliff is — besides maybe the maidservant (and one of the story’s narrators) Nelly Dean — the physically healthiest character in the novel, while Linton is the least. But the problem is that Heathcliff really is the father of his child, and it’s only as the novel continues to move forward that we can start to see the buried resemblance.

Perhaps the strangest thing about the Linton boy is that Cathy, Catherine’s daughter, seems to be earnestly in love with him despite his wimpiness. Linton certainly doesn’t act like someone you’d fall in love with. Quite the opposite, he acts about as pathetic as humanly possible. We can chalk this situation up to the fact that Cathy might be interpreting her own pity as genuine attraction, not to mention the near-total isolation she experiences in the manor of Thrushcross Grange, with no brothers or sisters to play with. But in their mismatched affections, you start to see early signs that Linton’s weak condition doesn’t necessarily imbue him with moral greatness. For one thing, he seems to exaggerate his own sickliness at opportune moments to win Cathy’s attention whenever they spend time together. Linton’s manipulative behavior at this point is still subtle, and any reader unfamiliar with what happens next can excuse it.

Eventually, though, we get to know Linton a bit better when Heathcliff kidnaps and imprisons Cathy and the maidservant Nelly Dean, locking them in his home and beating Cathy across the face until she agrees marries his son. At the beginning of this episode, she actually tells Heathcliff that she would have married him anyway (they are first cousins, by the way, but whatever), but Heathcliff has become impatient since Linton’s health is in decline, and so he has kidnapped her. Heathcliff’s motivation here is that when Cathy and Linton marry, his son will become the heir to all of Thrushcross Grange and thus Heathcliff will own both estates and all of Edgar Linton’s hard-earned wealth. His revenge will have been complete! One would think that the Linton boy might see the harm in his abusive and hateful father’s act of savagely kidnapping a girl, beating her, and forcing her to marry him, but he somehow remains so thoroughly self-absorbed throughout the entire ordeal that any sympathy you might have felt for him disappears entirely.

An exchange between Nelly Dean and Linton makes his selfishness apparent. Nelly has been able to leave, but Cathy is still held prisoner at Wuthering Heights, so when Nelly returns, she finds Linton sitting around, apathetically sucking on some hard candy (a nice touch from the author). She asks him if he has let Cathy go, and Linton says no before announcing that he is too bothered by all of her screaming to go near her. Moreover, Heathcliff has convinced him that she must hate him if she is so opposed to marrying him and wants to escape. Here’s part of the exchange, as Nelly tells it:

‘Is Mr. Heathcliff out?’ I inquired, perceiving that the wretched creature had no power to sympathize with his cousin’s mental tortures. ‘He’s in the court,’ he replied, ‘talking to Doctor Kenneth; who says uncle [AKA Edgar] is dying, truly, at last. I’m glad, for I shall be master of the Grange after him. Catherine always spoke of it as her house. It isn’t hers! It’s mine: papa says everything she has is mine. All her nice books are mine; she offered to give me them, and her pretty birds, and her pony Minny, if I would get the key of our room, and let her out; but I told her she had nothing to give, they ware all, all mine. And then she cried, and took a little picture from her neck, and said I should have that; two pictures in a gold case, on one side her mother, and on the other uncle, when they were young. That was yesterday—I said they were mine, too; and tried to get them from her. The spiteful thing wouldn’t let me: she pushed me off, and hurt me. I shrieked out—that frightens her—she heard papa coming, and she broke the hinges and divided the case, and gave me her mother’s portrait; the other she attempted to hide: but papa asked what was the matter, and I explained it. He took the one I had away, and ordered her to resign hers to me; she refused, and he—he struck her down, and wrenched it off the chain, and crushed it with his foot.’

‘And were you pleased to see her struck?’ I asked: having my designs in encouraging his talk.

‘I winked,’1 he answered: ‘I wink to see my father strike a dog or a horse, he does it so hard. Yet I was glad at first—she deserved punishing for pushing me: but when papa was gone, she made me come to the window and showed me her cheek cut on the inside, against her teeth, and her mouth filling with blood; and then she gathered up the bits of the picture, and went and sat down with her face to the wall, and she has never spoken to me since: and I sometimes think she can’t speak for pain. I don’t like to think so; but she’s a naughty thing for crying continually; and she looks so pale and wild, I’m afraid of her.’

The characterization here couldn’t be better, particularly the way he keeps milking his own suffering to try and curry sympathy even while he likens this girl to an animal and presents her feelings only in terms of how they affect him. One senses that if he were as physically healthy as Heathcliff, his father, he would actually be worse, because unlike Heathcliff, he isn’t even motivated by love, however psychotic that love might be. So, when Heathcliff eventually stops caring about his son’s illness and lets him die (having gotten all of the use out of him that he can), the attentive reader can’t help but feel relieved. Thank God that accursed lineage has been wiped out.

Even today, readers really want to love Linton and care for him simply because his situation is so dire. Here is a Reddit post from r/brontesisters, written just four months back from the time of my writing this piece. The writer says,

Every time I re-read Wuthering Heights I'm like, "This time I'll be sympathetic to Linton" and every time I fail. How did Emily Brontë do it? How did she write a dying, abused teenager who is so utterly repulsive? He is The Worst in a novel full of despicable people. Yes, he is sick, yes he lost his mother, but he's such a self-centred whiny brat about it. I don't think we ever see him have a single thought about the needs of anyone else, except I guess when he lets Cathy 2 escape WH to see her father, but I'm almost convinced he did that because she was too loud and he wanted to sleep...

Almost convinced? The text seems to suggest pretty heavily that this would have been his primary, if not sole motivation.

He almost gets me when he’s having a panic attack over his father in the heath, but then he gets his father to assault his newly kidnapped wife because SHOCKING! she won’t stop crying while her father is dying and then is angry at her for making him feel a pang of conscience. How DARE she make Linton feel badly when she has a mouth full of blood! And then this is the final nail in the coffin of my possible sympathy:

“Now, Catherine, you are letting your tears fall into my cup. I won’t drink that. Give me another.”

I don’t need him to be some sort of suffering saint, but I just cannot get over his total and complete disregard for everyone else.

I’m totally with Nelly here: “Like him!” I exclaimed. “The worst-tempered bit of a sickly slip that ever struggled into its teens. Happily, as Mr. Heathcliff conjectured, he’ll not win twenty. I doubt whether he’ll see spring, indeed. And small loss to his family whenever he drops off. And lucky it is for us that his father took him: the kinder he was treated, the more tedious and selfish he’d be.”

Nelly Dean, by the way, is commonly presented as an unreliable narrator, but I think that people make a little too much hay out of this notion. It’s true that she participates actively in the story’s development and often intersperses her opinions into the events which transpire, but at no point does it make any sense to doubt her actual telling of the events, or to think that she’s mangling the dialogue on purpose, or choosing to omit certain details, or shift the focal emphasis to present a grossly different version of what’s really happening. This isn’t Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” or anything like that. But I think part of the reason people emphasize such an interpretation is that it makes the book more reader-friendly, especially if you’re a teacher trying to sell this thing to your hapless students. One may want to think positive thoughts about Catherine, or Linton, or whomever else. The notion of an unreliable narrator will help with this.

But no — in all reality, the sickly and pathetic Linton Heathcliff actually is the worst character in the novel, and there’s no way that Emily Brontë didn’t know what she was doing in presenting him as such. And I must admit, I find the fact that she was able to conceive of such a morally non-dualistic relationship between him and his father completely fascinating. When Heathcliff lets him die, or rather kills him through neglect essentially, we’re now in a realm that stands beyond good and evil. We’re in the thick of the darkest jungles of the psyche. Personally, I suspect that Brontë’s own poor health may have had something to do with her ingenuity. As I stated above, she was sickly throughout her life in a manner quite similar to Linton. She even died of tuberculosis, and the symptoms she gives to Linton seem to correspond with the same disease (modern readers believe that this is indeed what Linton suffers from). Rather than placing herself inside of the character of Catherine, or even Heathcliff, might she have invented Linton as an expression of the darkest elements within her own psyche? Does Linton tell us something about how Brontë can correctly assess the malevolence of which even the most downtrodden man is capable?

The figure of Linton, I would argue, amounts to a wholesale rejection of what Friedrich Nietzsche would later2 call “slave morality,” a system of values borne from the resentment of the weak towards the strong. Under such a moral framework, the lamb is superior to the wolf simply because the lamb is the prey and the wolf, the predator. Similarly, the slave is superior to the master simply because she’s enslaved, and likewise the sick is superior to the healthy for the same corresponding reason. If you’re in a down position, basically, then you simply must be morally superior to those in a higher position. How could it be otherwise? Everybody loves an underdog. And it is easy to rationalize why this must be so: well, if you’re suffering, then you can empathize with others who suffer, while those who haven’t suffered are incapable of such empathy. These kinds of claims are commonly made all the time, probably more often today than back then, though they remain long on theory and short on real evidence. Of course, if you’re truly able to empathize with the suffering, then you can see just how human they remain. But Brontë knows that few possess such unflattering empathy, and so she’s able to anticipate a sympathetic reception of Linton and thus force the reader instead to stare the more sordid, complex truth in the face.

The comparison I’m drawing to Nietzsche isn’t just frivolous name-dropping, by the way, since his and Emily Brontë’s lives had at least two compelling parallels. First, they both were incredibly sickly people who struggled with health issues throughout their brief time on earth (Nietzsche with bowel problems and constant migraines), and second, they both were the offspring of ministers, Lutheran in Nietzsche’s case and Anglican in Brontë’s. Brontë didn’t formalize what her novel merely suggests about morality into an elaborate critique of Christianity or anything like that, but the world she depicts is so lawless and savage that one can’t help but suspect that her thoughts were hovering around that same territory. It’s the territory that the existentialist philosophers and novelists would occupy decades later, including the Christian ones. Even though Wuthering Heights eventually does calm down and regain the trappings of a moralistic social novel, its refusal to indulge in conventional moral sentiment for such a protracted period is what makes it the most enduringly significant work from the Brontë family. At least, that’s what its legacy seems to suggest. And, at least in my reading, the constant illness and disease that pervades it also seems to be the hidden source of its great power, and perhaps even one significant source of its author’s elevated insights into the human condition.

There’s a certain irony whenever the topic of sickliness is taken up, because both slave morality and the harshest critiques against it seem to stem from the same condition. The disabled, for instance, can (and often do) become aggressive advocates for as many privileges as possible while presenting themselves as maximally oppressed, and yet occasionally, from their ranks, you also get history-changing men like Frederick “Hotwheels” Brennan (1994-2026), the co-founder of 8chan, the most controversial message board of all time, and a one-time advocate of eugenics who wrote a piece about the topic for the recently-defunct Daily Stormer blog, the most controversial political blog of all time. Like I said earlier, constant sickness is a medium. Physical deformity is, too. These are environments in which one swims, and if circumstances align in a certain way, these environments can propel people towards transcendent, uncharted modes of thinking.

Still, though, the topic of health is regularly misunderstood by those who should understand it best, at least in theory. These days, I’ve noticed that internet-Nietzscheans are obsessed by health, though they seem to come away with underwhelming conclusions about it nonetheless. I’ve even personally seen one of them misrepresent Nietzsche himself by saying that he treated good health as an obvious, unambiguous concept. But his notion of health was anything but straightforward, as his explanation in The Gay Science (1882) shows:

Deciding what is health even for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your powers, your impulses, your mistakes, and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul. Thus there are innumerable healths of the body; and the more one allows the particular and incomparable to rear its head again, the more one unlearns the dogma of “the equality of men,” the more the concept of a normal health, along with those of a normal diet and those of a normal course of an illness, must be abandoned by our medical men. Only then would it be timely to reflect on the health and illness of the soul and to locate the virtue peculiar to each man in its health — which of course could look in one person like the opposite of health in another.

Because no two men are equal to one another, there cannot be a uniform understanding of good health. Yes. And this excellent point, believe it or not, should actually be kept in mind when evaluating the persistence of slave morality. In our time, it isn’t always the “weak” or the “strong” who represent their own interests. Sometimes when they do, they do so in a counterintuitive way. It is occasionally the “masters” who most zealously express slave morality, and sometimes even natural “slaves” who most aggressively reject it. Surely, there are complex socioeconomic factors that help explain this strange state of affairs. But one underestimated influence upon the moral attitudes that permeate our era is health — and physical health is a far more compelling influence than “mental health,” a term whose exact meaning seems always just beyond our grasp. For certain individuals under certain circumstances, what we might call “poor health” — i.e., following its clinical, normative definition as the absence of pathologies — can actually be the greatest aid in reaching uncomfortable truths and defying conventional thought. Consider Wuthering Heights just one example of this possibility.

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that fiddles about with non-structuralist semiotics and media ecology. And today, you can enjoy this fashionably belated Fourth of July post.

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Five years ago, the right-wing blog Revolver dot news published an attack on the Black Rifle Coffee Company, describing its all-American conservative-catnip messaging and imagery as both hypocritical and empty. Their CEO had just done an interview with the NY Times disavowing various elements of the conservative right, claiming that they want nothing to do with racists, “Proud Boy-ish” people, and others that glamorized the actions of Kyle Rittenhouse, who was at the time pending a trial verdict for the three Antifa supports he shot during one of those “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests from 2020.1 The reason for the CEO’s interview is evidently that Rittenhouse had been a fan of Black Rifle, and at the same time his trial was taking place, the company must have been slowly figuring out that those who actually buy their coffee weren’t necessarily the same people to whom it was being marketed. In February of the following year, they became a publicly traded company.

Black Rifle at first spread its name around using a certain kind of conservative-presenting buffoonery in its advertisements, a style that will form the topic of this blog post. This ad makes for a pretty good example of what I’m talking about:

It’s got more hackneyed, minstrel-show Americanisms than you could shake a stick at: a muscular tatted-up guy fires a gun that blows the clothes off of two sexy women. Some more firing of guns ensues. A couple of guys sit in an all-terrain vehicle and set off smoke flares while a fat black guy fires a flamethrower, propelling it backward. Another guy takes a tomahawk to a bag of coffee beans instead of just opening it like a normal person. Two more guys play the national anthem on electric guitars. Everyone swears a lot. This is some real dad-core stuff for Republican-voting baby boomers. And it’s a pretty wild marketing gambit for a company that couldn’t possibly be using American-grown beans, since outside of Hawaii America doesn’t grow coffee.

Revolver’s criticism of the company’s apparently hypocritical politics was what you’d expect, but the more interesting part occurs over halfway through the article when they go after Black Rifle’s aesthetics:

In many ways, the imagery that Black Rifle indulges is actively harmful. Male-to-female transsexuals famously have a cartoonish, porn-influenced, stereotypical idea of what being a woman is like. That’s why drag queens have such a garish, over-the-top look. BRCC ads evoke the same idea, but for men. Their target demographic is, in a sense, male-to-male transsexuals. The ads reduce veterans from citizen soldiers to a pantomime of desperate masculinity, guys who need tattoos, whiskey, and twenty-seven different guns to feel like “real men.” BRCC ads are supposed to trigger “snowflake” liberals, but they’d be just as crass and ridiculous to a World War 2 veteran in 1946.

It’s interesting to see a more dissident and “off the reservation” type of blog request more solemnity and seriousness from a company that was (from what I can tell) pretty well-connected to the conservative mainstream and continues to be even today. Its critique isn’t totally right, either: male-to-female transsexuals aren’t really the same thing as drag queens, and both groups seem to have a different idea of femininity from each other. But that last point is spot on. Most World War II veterans in the late 1940s would want nothing to do with such nonsense, and they would indeed find its overly macho self-presentation off-putting and forced.

Black Rifle Coffee, for their part, got the memo — or at least some version of it — and started toning down their promotional videos. Just a bit, anyhow. They probably intended on doing so as soon as they disavowed Rittenhouse’s vocal supporters. But they haven’t quite abandoned the overall feeling of Americana that their ads give to the consumer. This very recent video from a couple days ago is less trashy, but still garish and over-the-top:

Here, we’ve got supposedly the largest American flag ever towed from a vehicle on record (that’s their claim, anyhow), a helicopter, more ATVs, monster trucks, a bluecoat on horseback carrying a flag, a guy playing “The Star Spangled Banner” on electric guitar in a truck with a stack of amps straight out of Mad Max: Fury Road, we’ve got vintage American muscle cars, some more seemingly random gun fire, a ton of smoke flares shooting off red, white, and blue colors, and even some hot chicks — tastefully dressed, this time (after all, BRCC is now a publicly traded company whose stocks aren’t doing too great!), but present all the same.

Black Rifle makes heavy use of what I’ll call — just for the sake of giving it some kind of name — “American vulgarity kitsch.” It isn’t just American kitsch, because we already know what that includes. Normal American kitsch is stuff like Velvet Elvis paintings, various paintings of dogs playing poker, plastic lawn flamingos, and those gigantic 25-foot-tall fiberglass Muffler Man statues that you’ll sometimes find driving across the country. It’s just kitsch, simply put. There’s also a distinctly patriotic form of American kitsch that you’ll find in the paintings of Norman Rockwell and the great Art Nouveau stylist, J.C. Leyendecker. But what we’re talking about here is different. American vulgarity kitsch revels in America’s vulgarity, its crassness, its excess, its gigantism, and its grotesquery, and it suggests that the essence of true American patriotism is to be found in all of these things. It is also, as the Revolver blog understood, aggressively macho to the point of absurdity. Absurdity is the point.

This type of kitsch isn’t as easy to find in twentieth-century mass media as it is in the 21st. Elements of it were always there, but never as acutely combined into such a patriotic pastiche as now. It is a distinctly video-centered style, and I think one of the greatest contributions to it was the “American Bad Ass” music video from the rap-metal artist Kid Rock, released in the year 2000:

Here, you’ve pretty much got the template figured out. You’ve got explosions, motorcycle gangs, mud wrestling, adult film stars in cowboy hats and American flag bikinis, a midget, a muscle car, and more. Some of the stuff in this video is no longer viable for mass media consumption: you can’t have confederate flags any longer, the mud wrestling might be going a bit too far, and the appearance of disgraced male porn actor Ron Jeremy would now be regarded as unfortunate. And Kid Rock’s fashion choice of wifebeaters combined with 1970s pimp attire heavily influenced by Rudy Ray Moore probably wouldn’t be welcomed on anyone else. But the basic ingredients are all here. What really makes it work, though, is the brief appearance of a lawn gnome at 1:30 into the video, an iconic figure from the world of kitsch. That inclusion couldn’t be more deliberate, as it tells the viewer that yes, Kid Rock knows what he is doing. Everything here is fully self-aware.

The truth is that whatever one might think of it, America cannot and will not abandon this mode of self-representational kitsch. It is simply too pervasive within the depths of mass media culture to get rid of. Conservatives and Republicans have had de facto ownership over it for a long time, and they probably will continue to for a good while, but even the Democrats have started to recognize its power. Such growing recognition is probably what the Revolver blog was trying to warn its readers about. We saw the Dixie Chicks “infiltrate” country music back in the early ‘00s, and then Beyoncé Knowles recently did the same thing with her flamboyant “Cowboy Carter” country album in 2024. Prominent Democrat voters can inch their way towards the American vulgar sublime if they feel like it, and no one will mind. But for the time being, you can associate this sort of imagery with the Republicans.

What makes this association especially clear is in the way President Donald Trump took ownership over the style with supreme aesthetic mastery, as this image from his recent (BRCC-sponsored) Freedom 250 event demonstrates:

Just look at that bad boy. Its lighting has all the elegance of a Thomas Kinkade painting, and the streams from the fighter jets are beyond perfect. The scene looks like something you’d expect to find in a snow globe or some other kind of hand-painted miniature diorama, only it’s a little too macho for that — as per the intent. The choice of motocross, followed by mixed martial arts for the event is in fact what makes the whole thing really work. Its gaudiness sets the whole scene apart from conventionally upright, stately patriotism, and its violent and death-defying manliness is what sets the whole scene apart from conventional kitsch.

It also signals a different attitude toward violent spectacle from the political right specifically. Back in the early ‘80s, the perennially pencil-necked conservative columnist George Will had this to say about the fine sport of boxing:

It will be said that if two consenting adults want to batter each other for the amusement of paying adults, the essential niceties have been satisfied, “consent” being almost the only nicety of a liberal society. But from Plato on, political philosophers have taken entertainments seriously, and have believed the law should, too. They have because a society is judged by the kind of citizens it produces, and some entertainments are coarsening. Good government and the good life depend on good values and passions, and some entertainments are inimical to these.2

Well, in the year 2026, his viewpoint could not be any less relevant. The coarsening of America has been probably the greatest success of its own corporate entertainment industry, and its corporate entertainment industry has helped fashion an understanding of America that is singlehandedly defining its current patriotism.

In addition to its sheer power of spectacle, part of what makes the style work so well is that it doesn’t aggressively shun any of the critiques that have been made against America. Instead, it picks the ones that make America seem cool and incorporates them. When you look at these American vulgarity kitsch videos, you’ll hear many renditions of “The Star Spangled Banner” performed on electric guitar, a distant reference to Jimi Hendrix’s legendary performance of it at Woodstock 1969. Hendrix, of course, was a military veteran… but he was also discharged after it became apparent to his superior officers that he had no interest whatsoever in being part of the army. And his version of the national anthem, far from being a straightforward celebration of America, was instead performed as a protest against the Vietnam War, as the sounds of bombs and gunfire simulated atonally through the gain and distortion on his amplifier make clear. But does any of this matter? Well, no, not really. Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” can also be found in this presentation of American kitsch, and the same goes for CCR’s “Fortunate Son.” They’re also protest songs, and that doesn’t matter, either. What matters is that they rock, and they’re about America, and therefore they can show up on American car commercials and whatever else. In the same way that left-wing cultural commentators such as Slavoj Žižek and Mark Fisher have observed that capitalism will both absorb and commodify the various critiques against it, the same largely goes for American patriotism. The kitschified version of it does so splendidly.

This shouldn’t even come as too much of a surprise. I’ve spoken to people who lived in Communist Europe during the 1980s who practically worshipped Bruce Springsteen, and when they’d hear “Born in the USA,” or even something a little weirder, like David Bowie & Pat Metheny’s “This Is Not America,” they’d think to themselves, Yeah, America! Boy, America is great! and if anyone were to say to them, “You know, these songs aren’t pro-America, right?” They’d only respond, “Then all the better! We’re not allowed to make any songs like that about socialism!” And that would be that. The point is that America’s inherent allowance for self-critique is what enables kitschified patriotism to keep things on the surface without any problems. If the protest song rocks and it’s about America, then it’s a friend to America. As Meister Eckhart once put it, “Anyone by blaspheming God Himself, praises God.” So it goes for Uncle Sam.

The other big thing that makes this type of kitsch work so well is its relationship to the concept of irony. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells us, “In the realm of kitsch, everything must be taken quite seriously.” Kundera wrote this in 1984, and I’ll be the first to admit I’ve never bothered to read it, but even back then his claim was already dated. The seriousness of kitsch, its childish melodrama, had been a frequent target of critics for quite a while. Back in 1939, in his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” the art critic Clement Greenberg attacked kitsch for the immediate and unreflective emotional relationship it has to its audience, but he never envisioned a world in which kitsch could be appreciated ironically. But then the Pop Art movement came along and got big during the 1960s, and all of a sudden, kitsch was OK, so long as you can pretend that you’re “in on the joke.” What made all of this so exciting was that the best pop artists themselves left the matter open for ambiguity. Is Andy Warhol a genius…? a true connoisseur of the arts might ask himself. Or is he as dumb as a box of rocks….? No one knew. But the idea is that you could appreciate things made in poor taste while operating on multiple levels of awareness, and this response was soon championed by respected intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Umberto Eco. With time, people started to recognize that kitsch didn’t need to be so serious.

Nobody picked up on that message better than corporate entertainment culture, particularly the advertising industry. In my earlier blog post “In Defense of Conservative Philistinism,” I observed that most of the philosophical questions about consumption and commodification posed ironically by the Dadaists and Pop Artists have been explored more successfully — especially nowadays — through the capitalist marketplace, and this same point holds for expressions of patriotism. Take, for instance, this ten-year-old Carl’s Jr. ad for something that they were calling “The Most American Thickburger”:

What’s more American than a cheeseburger? This cheeseburger… loaded with a hot dog and potato chips… in the hands of all-American model Samantha Hoopes… in a hot tub… in a pick-up truck… driven by an American bull rider… on an aircraft carrier… under the gaze of Lady Liberty… as she admires… the Most American Thickburger.

So, what the fuck is this, exactly? Is it a joke? Is it mocking patriotism? Or is it a genuine celebration of America? Even the cheeseburger itself seems like a joke — what kind of psycho would put a split hot dog and kettle chips on a perfectly good burger? And yet, you can buy this culinary abortion and even eat it, so we can’t accuse them of not having skin in the game, here…

The point is that the irony and sincerity are a package deal. You can experience both things at once, and there’s no contradiction in any of this. Yes, it’s hokey and ridiculous, and yes, it’s grotesque and postmodern, and yes, it undermines the dignity of America. But then again… all this stuff is pretty awesome. Pick-up trucks are cool, bull riding is cool, the Statue of Liberty is cool, chicks with big boobs in American Flag bikinis are cool… and, while we’re at it, hot dogs are cool, cheeseburgers are cool, and kettle chips are cool, too. So why not just throw ‘em all together into one big thing?3

People have referred to the multi-layered feeling that American vulgarity kitsch elicits as an example of “post-irony.” If you can laugh at something’s silliness while also agreeing with it, then you’ve gone beyond mere irony into some kind of new realm of “hyperreality,” or whatever. But I don’t think this is a useful characterization, since irony has always held this quality from the very beginning. Language is itself an expression of detachment, since there’s no motivated connection between a sign and its referent. All linguistic signs are thus, we might say, not really “sincere” in the absolute strictest sense, even though we can fully take them that way depending on the situation. The anthropologist and linguist Dan Everett wrote a book called Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes (2008), named after the way the primitive Pirahã tribesmen whom he studied would say goodnight to one another. Everett sees no irony in their goodnight message, but it is clearly ironic. They realize that the person is about to sleep and thus their advice won’t be heeded, but they are nonetheless making a serious point about the importance of sleeping lightly, since there are actual venomous snakes slithering around. Here in America, it took Pop Art, then corporate consumer culture, then vulgarian kitsch to exploit the same complexity that has always undergirded irony. First it was done as a deliberate statement, and then, over time, an involuntary reflex.4

Liberal Democrats, it seems, never really got the memo about the multiple levels of appreciation that kitsch can elicit. At least, not when it comes to their own propaganda. Take, for instance, this absurd image from the Coronavirus era:

Just look at this monstrosity. Back in April of 2020 when this thing was first posted, you were actually expected to react by going, “Wow, oh my God. It’s so true. Doctors are the real heroes. Just wow.” Anything less sanctimonious would be taken for blasphemy.

But in the world of politics, the vulgar kitschification of patriotism has worked like a charm for the Republicans. Well, anyhow, it’s been working well enough for them to stick with it. Take, for instance, this 2016 ad by Rand Paul about “killing the tax code.” This is something about as likely to take place as hens growing teeth, but it does give Paul an excuse to show off his chainsaw and woodchipper while wearing some blue jeans and a baffling T-shirt that reads “Detroit Republican”:

And look — Rand Paul remains a senator to this day! You can also observe this more recent ad by the would-be congressman Teddy Daniels:

Alright, well, Daniels didn’t win and become a congressman. But he still nailed the style.

The thing about these sorts of ads is that they’re incredibly hard to make fun of. You can bring up the movie Idiocracy (2006) and the scene with President Camacho firing an automatic rifle up at the ceiling, and the people who enjoy the ads will just laugh and go, “Hell yeah, that movie’s hilarious. President Camacho kicks ass!” And, well, that is that. What more is there to say? As I’ve suggested, there’s an air of self-awareness to the vulgar kitschmongers that precludes all mockery. It even succeeds in making left-wing attempts to satirize them look comparatively stiff and humorless.

Now, for all its merits, the question still remains: what is the future of this style? It is certainly possible that American vulgar kitsch will disentangle itself from direct politics in the future. The problem is that American Republicans have been running around presenting themselves as antinomian libertines, even while there are still religious elements within their party that aim to pass various acts and reforms which stifle rather than grant freedom to the citizens. The Republican-approved KIDS Act — a massive legislation package that diminishes internet freedom while expanding the government’s ability to surveil its citizens — is as good an example as any. There’s a point in which such hypocrisy might be too much for people to take, although I’ve been surprised at how far it can go.

But whatever its future in politics, American vulgar kitsch itself doesn’t seem to be going anywhere more generally. American identity has become too divested of ideological, religious, or even historical substance to express patriotism through anything weightier. Most of America’s major historical figures elicit sharply divided responses, and even when people feel uniformly positive about an American figure, their reasons might differ vastly. If you’re a Democrat, you can appreciate Alexander Hamilton, for instance, since he did have a highly successful hip-hop musical made about him. But it better not be because of his views on immigrants, or his creation of the electoral college. The same principle extends to most of the founding fathers, and it’s true for informed voters in both parties. So, if you can’t really get specific about anything, and much of the American sense of history has been aggressively dismantled by the education system as well as the mainstream news media, then what can you do? Well, you can celebrate the fact that America has a world-dominating arms industry, a world-dominating sex industry, some great vintage cars, rock music, extreme sports and pugilism, and an all-around flair for the gigantic and the grotesque. We can all agree that these things are undeniably powerful. They generate intense feelings, whether you want to experience them or not.

As with most things aggressively American, I’m ambivalent about this style. American vulgarity kitsch is a poor substitute for a deeply felt sense of identity, one that comes with the feeling of belonging to a collective that knows its own origins and strives toward its shared destiny. But it also celebrates the things that America does better than just about anyone, and it’s refreshingly honest in the way it portrays itself. Plus, there’s always a dim chance that the style, notwithstanding its shallowness, could actually point toward something that extends beyond itself in its current state.

I’ve written about the concept of collective mnemotechnics on a couple different occasions. Collective mnemotechnics, to give it a concise definition, is the externalized, institutionalized set of practices through which self-conscious and distinct groups of people remember themselves, preserve a sense of their common history, and stay mindful of their shared evolution. For Americans, self-remembrance has always been a bit tricky, since the country is so young. And to make matters even trickier, right from the start, Americans made a point of distancing themselves from their deeper genetic connection to England, even going so far as to reform their spelling and grammar, something that the equally Anglo-Saxon nations of Australia and New Zealand never bothered to do. For that reason, unique figures of American mythology, being so new, have survived through commercialism and the culture industry, often without any other means of sustenance. For instance, Paul Bunyan is an American folk hero that did come from an oral tradition, but after about thirty years of unmediated tall tales, his legend was co-opted by a lumber company advertiser, he was given a distinct image, and this changed his presentation and collective understanding forever. Other American folk heroes have met with the same treatment. Davy Crockett, once a real guy, is now mostly known through the live-action Disney show about him. Samuel Adams is the guy on the beer packages. In the collective imagination, he’s about as real as Bigfoot, which is the name of a huge pizza you could get at one time.

So, when you’ve got a country that lacks shared values,5 a shared sense of heritage, a shared understanding of its own history, and a shared folklore, the corporate entertainment industry is the main thing you’ve got, and American vulgarity kitsch — even with all of its self-awareness and irony — is ultimately the most powerful statement you can make with it. And indeed, it does constitute a statement. Patriotism currently expresses itself through this style because it is the boldest one available, and no other contender has managed to come close. But more interesting than its boldness is the fact that it isn’t exactly neutral — no vehicle of expression is. It sure is saying something… but no one is exactly sure as to what its message might truly be. As Black Rifle Coffee puts it, “Because America, that’s why.” Oh, OK, thanks for clearing that one up. In this presentation, America is the tabula rasa, and it’s waiting for you to write the text. Perhaps one of the underappreciated virtues of kitsch is that when a people has been denuded of its more elevating and demanding characteristics, kitsch can at least preserve its iconography, keeping its constitutive images on life support as they wait to be quickened once again.

I’ve often thought about the possibility that over time, American vulgarity kitsch could wind up engendering its own substance, perhaps its own values and metaphysics. This notion might seem absurd now, yet less likely things have happened. However, given the disjunction between the messaging and the follow-through of America’s corporate culture, its advertising, and its politics, the latent substance of American vulgarity kitsch might only ever point to a mode of being that remains consigned to the world of images and reflections. And there, it just might remain.

edit 7/6/26: fixed a couple minor typos

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that violently bashes together the assumptions of media ecology with those of nonstructuralist semiotics to create a new genre of theoretical analysis. Which may seem strange given this week’s topic, but one must understand man’s nature before one can understand the world of signs and technics in which he swims.

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Last week, in a post on martial arts and the technical innovations of spectator combat, I wrote a paragraph on the nature of war that I suspected to be flawed. In a nutshell, it draws up a difference between primitive tribal violence and the twentieth-century concept of “total war,” claiming that the latter is more all-encompassing since it requires total ideological enmity and thus involves all of society, recruiting every aspect of it toward the concentrated goal of victory. However, I then contended that intertribal violence was still probably worse because it was pretty brutal, and it was additionally a constant, ever-present feature of normal life despite its lack of organization or designated armies. While the paragraph didn’t exactly commit the error of “noble savage” romanticizing, it still didn’t quite capture the nature of violence among primitive hunting-gathering bands, horticultural tribes, and similar uncivilized societies. Realizing that I would need to educate myself on the subject a bit further, I decided to read probably the most important book on the topic from the last thirty years, the archaeologist Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (1996).

As it happens, my point was indeed flawed, since primitive war is not a constant, never-ending thing, and when it happens, it is just as all-encompassing as “total war.” In fact, moreso. To make this clear, Keeley demonstrates that primitive wars can involve fighters from a much larger pool of volunteers than modern ones. The average male in an uncivilized society would be far more likely to fight in a war than the average male from the ancient civilized world all the way into modern societies, and even though women have rarely fought in battlefields at all times and in all societies (including this one), it wasn’t exactly out of the question for women to fight in some primitive tribes, like those of northern South America. Additionally, even in a modern “total war,” various civilized practices and features will remain, like the possibility of one side surrendering, as well as the taking of POWs from enemy battle (rather than just killing them), not to mention open channels of communication for diplomacy. These are far less likely to be observed in primitive wars. For this reason, reading Keeley’s work actually has wound up making me rethink the modern concept of “total war” altogether. Keeley says bluntly, “Primitive warfare is simply total war conducted with very limited means,” though its limited means are more than compensated for by the intensity and destructiveness with which its combatants fight. Such information should prompt the question as to whether “total war” is really the most destructive war that could be fought in modern society, or if humanity might be capable of moving toward something even more extreme on a global scale.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, though, Keeley’s study has been a long overdue contribution not just to anthropology but military history and theory as well. The mid-1990s was a time in which it still wasn’t altogether clear within academia if primitive cultures are capable of engaging in something like “total war,” or if the kind of violence they engage in could be considered “war” at all. Of course, the archeological record couldn’t have been clearer that primitive war is, in fact, war, and that it could be not only damaging but existentially threatening to entire communities. But Keeley’s main hurdle in writing War Before Civilization was not one of epistemology but rather ideology.

By the mid-90s, the field of anthropology had gone through two distinct phases that had impoverished the academic understanding of savage violence. The first treated primitive war with an air of condescension marked by ethnocentric assumptions. This attitude was best exemplified by Harry Holbert Turney-High and Quincy Wright, who composed their seminal works during the 1940s. They each understood primitive violence as a sort of pastime to alleviate boredom, or even a sporting affair. Actually, the idea that savages engage in war as a sport persisted in western culture for a surprisingly long time, and the educated would often refer to the idea in passing. In one interview from 1977, for instance, Marshall McLuhan says, “Tribal people — one of their main kinds of sport is butchering each other. It’s a full-time sport in tribal societies.” This characterization owes a lot to Turney-High and Wright, who not only minimized the seriousness of primitive war but also seriously undervalued the skill and ability with which primitives fought while overestimating the significance of civilized military organization.

But eventually, this sensibility grew to pass in favor of the second phase of anthropology: the politically correct phase. Instead of using the phrase “politically correct,” Keeley describes this sensibility as Rousseauist in nature, citing the enlightenment-era dispute between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes in which the former posited that primitive man is a “noble savage” incapable of violence as a response to Hobbes’s view of man’s natural state as a “war of all against all.” Anthropology was in an unusual situation during this time because although field reporting had revealed that primitive tribes absolutely do engage in violent conflict, many anthropologists still preferred to maintain that these tribes were essentially peaceful.

To do so, they would come up with various explanations for why tribes engage in war that could avoid the conclusion that they possess a violent nature. One was the materialist explanation, which posited that tribes engage in war for demographic and economic reasons, and thus these wars are high risk/high reward. A corollary to this view was the notion that when societies grow more demographically and economically complex, wars are more likely to break out. This position was essentially Rousseauist, and it was sometimes accompanied by the view that anthropologists doing field research can themselves inspire wars to break out because of their very presence. That is, the primitives could see their modern clothing and various modern items, and their new awareness of such things could motivate them to fight each other. Although the materialist position broadly upheld the idea of the primitive as a “noble savage,” it also echoed the assumptions of Turney-High and Wright, since they felt that wars increase in intensity and skill as society grows more complex, even though they had different reasons for why.

There was a different position among the anthropologists, though, and it was neo-Hobbesian. This position argued that for primitive peoples, war is a constant, endless state of existence because it occurs so often and lacks the organizational rigor of civilized war. This was the basic assumption that I had until about a few days ago, and Keeley does not like it, either. Although it comes closer to the psychological temperament of primitive man than the Rousseauist view, it ignores the fact that these wars could have serious, permanent consequences for any group involved. A neo-Hobbesian might admit this when pressed, but the problem with conceiving of primitives as engaged in a never-ending state of war is that it muddies the water: if everything is war, then basically nothing is, and primitives really do have wars, even if they’re not writing history books to record them. The refusal to acknowledge any meaningful distinction moreover echoes Turney-High and Wright’s view that primitive war is essentially low risk/low reward — a sporting affair, in other words. Actually, toward the end of the book, Keeley dedicates an entire chapter to the data that has been collected about how primitive tribes themselves see these wars, and it’s clear that they really hate them. War, for them, is a terrifying and miserable phenomenon that results in the death of family and friends, it depletes resources, and everyone would prefer to do away with if possible. It’s more like a parasitic social contagion that breaks out from time to time rather than a permanent state of existence, let alone a sport.

Still, though, the Rousseauist position has probably done more damage to our understanding of war in uncivilized societies. Early in the book (quite a bit of it is dedicated to explaining the controversy), Keeley goes through example after example of how anthropologists during the 1970s would interpret historic remains of weapons from the neolithic era and the Bronze Age as being purely ceremonial or trade-oriented objects, not actual weapons used for fighting. Does that thing look like a battle axe? Well, it’s just a symbolic token; no one actually used it for any reason beyond that. Oh, was that guy buried with a sword and some armor? Well, it was all just a symbol for how noble he was, or something. He didn’t actually fight with the sword or anything, let’s not get ridiculous here. I was already familiar with this bizarre moment in anthropological history from the writings of Nicholas Wade and others (who were probably getting their material from this book), so I found Keeley’s restraint somewhat charming when dismantling these interpretations, although he does let a few witticisms slip out from time to time. And though Keeley characterizes this squeamish academic sensibility accurately, if anything he doesn’t go far enough in demonstrating just how epistemically destructive it could really be. Perhaps this is because it didn’t seem necessary at the time.

For instance, he briefly describes the controversy that the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon generated when he wrote about war among the Amazonian Yąnomamö peoples, which could not be explained through materialism (at least, not the simplified version that the soi-disant materialists of the time preferred). There was quite a bit of controversy in the 1970s about Chagnon’s findings that Keeley apparently didn’t feel the need to cover in detail. However, Keeley wrote his book in 1996, and therefore he could not cover the sheer amount of hostility that Chagnon encountered for his findings just four years later. Because, you see, in the year 2000, the journalist Patrick Tierney published Darkness in El Dorado, a polemical and politically-motivated hatchet job which accused Chagnon of deliberately exacerbating a measles epidemic among the Yąnomamö people, manipulating their local politics, and encouraging them to commit violence against one another. It was an utterly baseless book with fake citations to sources that don’t even exist (Alice Dreger discusses it in her book Galileo’s Middle Finger from 2015), but it caused the American Anthropological Association (AAA) to initially accept Tierney’s findings, and then, when pressured, create a task force to investigate Chagnon in 2002. The whole episode resulted in Chagnon’s early retirement. Eventually, once it was made abundantly clear that the book was baseless in 2005, the AAA rescinded their support of it, but the stain upon Chagnon’s reputation remained (I remember in my elective high school anthropology course, Chagnon was presented to us by the teacher as a very controversial figure, and this was years after his name ought to have been fully cleared). So we can conclude that although Keeley’s book was influential in 1996, it apparently wasn’t influential enough!

But again, not being able to predict the future, Keeley couldn’t have known that all of this would occur. For the most part, he stays devoted to his main task of demonstrating that, yes, war happened and still happens all the time among primitive tribes, and it’s quite brutally violent and destructive. Among others, here are some interesting facts and points I found throughout his book:

• One reason for the historic attitude of condescension regarding primitive war is that the war parties suffer from the problem of a weak command structure, in large part due to the egalitarian or loosely stratified structure typical of their societies. This means that cowards in battle will be shamed temporarily, but they will rarely be physically punished for their cowardice. Meanwhile, total obedience to a war leader can and will occur, but it will be generally done in a voluntary way, not through specialized training.

• Keeley completely rejects the once-popular claim that neolithic groundstone axes and other similar tools were exclusively for woodworking, not used as weapons. For one thing, remains have been found of relatively old men buried with these axes, suggesting that they had more importance than mere tree-chopping. Additionally, remains were found at Talheim in which various skulls had traumatic ridges and holes in them that were pretty much the same size and shape as these axes. The same principle about woodworking tools can extend to contemporary primitive tribes, such as the Mae Enga men of New Guinea who claimed to feel “naked” without their hand axes stored under their belts.

• Although “shock” or mêlée weapons (if I can borrow from role-playing game terminology) like clubs, spears, and sometimes axes are by far more useful than long-range weapons due to the latter’s inaccuracy, long-range weapons are still often used, and tribes will occasionally poison their arrow or javelin tips with plant alkaloids, snake venom, crushed venomous insects, or even putrefied flesh and blood (to cause infection).

• Fortifications tend to be pretty rare (another reason why earlier anthropologists didn’t take primitive war seriously), and when they’re constructed, they’re either used as extensions of shields, or ways of screening action from enemy view. Sometimes they materialize as lookout platforms.

• Battles (i.e., with some preliminary agreement or structure established beforehand) are by far the most studied form of combat in primitive war, and they’re largely why anthropologists have described such primitives as sporting, since they’re rife with ritualistic and symbolic actions (much like civilized battles prior to the twentieth century). Primitive battles can also sometimes be called off after only sparse casualties, and sometimes there are no fatalities at all. However, Keeley also cites examples of battles in which an entire side will be completely wiped out, which amounts to a massive amount of losses when compared to the overall tribal population — unthinkable percentages by modern standards. So, when it comes to the deadliness of battles, there’s a bit of a range.

• Raids and ambushes are less studied, though they appear to be where the majority of casualties come from. Ambushes in particular could easily bleed over into full-blown massacres, and there’s much grey area between the categories. A large amount of data from the Native Americans (including the existence of mass graves from before the arrival of Christopher Columbus) shows that massacres, which included both women and children, could involve over half of a village’s population.

• Complete annihilation of enemy social units (or genocides) is rare, but not unheard of within primitive societies. For the most part, primitive tribes aim for the submission of the enemy, not the wholesale destruction. If something like this occurs, it is typically because a commander has lost control over his warriors.

• Humiliation of the enemy is a common practice, one that betrays an attitude of serious enmity. Perhaps the most extreme example is through the practice of ritual cannibalism, which is different from culinary cannibalism. In the vast majority of primitive societies, the latter is considered taboo, and yet even within societies that have this taboo, war parties will still devour some body parts of their slain foes as a way of establishing total dominance (even if there are technically no witnesses). This is quite interesting, because tribes will still spread propaganda about each other, accusing each other of being cannibals, while the others will vociferously deny it. Additionally, heads and skulls are taken from victims most often as trophies. There may be an element of magical thinking to this, as shown in the next bullet point.

• It is also common to try and extend the suffering of the dead even beyond the realm of this world. For instance, the mutilation of a dead body is sometimes done not just to “send a message” but deliberately to cripple the victim in the afterlife. Extreme bodily mutilation occurs quite often among primitive tribes cross-culturally, something I found interesting because the practice still takes place in modern times amid the gang violence between rivaling drug cartels, such as in Ciudad Juarez (a friend of mine actually had a “coffee table”-style book on the topic, featuring some of the most disturbing crime scene photography I’ve ever seen. But the mutilations were quite similar to those described in this book). Keeley also presents one recorded example of a Maori warrior who talks to the severed head of one of his victims, taunting him because he has cooked and eaten his male family members and taken his wife and daughter as slaves. The implication being, the head was forced to “watch” this act of cannibalism, and is now forced to “watch” his killer lord over the rest of his family indefinitely.

• Primitive wars often do result in territorial changes, something that anthropologists had previously denied. And even when no territories change hands, lingering hostilities can turn the border between opposing tribes into a veritable “no-man’s-land.”

• As mentioned above, the concept of “surrender” is not often recognized, and giving the enemy no quarter is thus the default practice, since holding people captive as prisoners of war would be unreliable and costly. However, sometimes when a massacre takes place, a single victim is left just to tell the story of what happened. Interestingly, surrender seems to become more of a recognized concept with the advent of private property. For instance, in eastern Africa, herdsmen who own cattle will sometimes surrender by offering their cattle and/or allowing themselves to held for ransom in exchange for cattle. However, their survival still isn’t guaranteed.

• There is no evidence to support the Malthusian argument that population density causes war. In fact, population density seems to force populations to figure out how to organize themselves better, thus giving them the social technology to prevent unnecessary conflict.

• The assumption that war is prevented through economic exchange, or even economic interdependence — an assumption that persists all the way into the present — has no evidence to show for it whatsoever. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case: the frequent presentation of one’s goods to another village or community can lead to jealousy, accusations of dishonesty or unfairness, or other complications that arise from the coveting of a neighbor’s goods.

• Among primitive societies, even the most warlike ones do not reward their best warriors with any special status. This is probably due to the combination of their egalitarian nature and the fact that they really do hate wars despite participating in them so often. During times of peace, it isn’t uncommon for the best warriors to be regarded by others with an air of suspicion, not reverence. And across various cultures, a warrior who has just killed an enemy will be seen as impure until he ritualistically cleanses himself, such as the South American Carib warriors, who will cover their heads for a month after dispatching an enemy, or the African Meru warriors, who will pay “curse removers” to purify them through various magic rituals.

• The peace chiefs and “big men” of various tribes, such as those of highland New Guinea, are typically not great at fighting but instead show signs of gregariousness, a good-natured temperament, they’re strong orators, they have acquired great wealth, and they possess a knack for diplomacy and negotiation. If you consider 21st-century society, this kind of prehistoric personality type might explain why someone like Donald Trump — consistently derided as being a draft-dodging, gaudy braggart by many of his baby boomer contemporaries — ultimately won over the people and became president twice, gaining racial minority votes with each successive presidential run out of three in total. It seems likely to me that more “big man”-like presidents like him will follow across North America and Europe as western populations grow more racially diverse (thus simplifying ethnically specific codes of honor) while war moves in an increasingly “postmodern” direction.

All of this, of course, amounts to just a sample of various takeaways that I found fascinating, personally. Your mileage may vary.

Shortly after the book’s publication, at least one review accused Keeley of overstating how common the “peaceful savage” view from anthropologists really was. This may be correct. But the sense I get is that the actual number of such academics with any given opinion doesn’t really matter compared with how vanguard it is perceived to be and how aggressive its proponents are with it. An extreme, intolerant minority will typically have more impact on an academic field, or an entire society for that matter, than a liberal-minded majority. I’m more of a humanities guy, so I know that in the world of music, twelve-tone serialism was never dominant over American music departments in terms of its total number of academic practitioners, but basically everyone felt that it was dominant during the 1950s-1960s because they were the most radical and intolerant school of musical thought by far (only a blockhead would compose the sort of “kitsch” music that normal people enjoy, you know). In literature departments, the same could be said for deconstruction during the 1970s. So while it may seem like the acknowledgement of primitive violence would be the reasonable and level-headed position that most anthropologists would share, and it may have indeed been the case, sometimes the numbers don’t tell the whole story as much as one might think.

Keeley’s observations in this book still haven’t fully made the impact that they should have thirty years after publication. Although the book shook things up at the academic level (despite him writing at a register suitable for a popular audience), it seems that his points still haven’t yet penetrated into the popular imagination, which is still fairly Rousseauist (according to how Keeley defines it), at least when we see how the matter of primitive war is handled in popular culture. Just watch the Avatar movies. Meanwhile, among the educated, the idea that agriculture is the source of mankind’s problems is still surprisingly common — this is partly due to the lingering effects of Jared Diamond’s widely respected (and readable) academic work, notably Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), but it may also be the effects of other 1990s primitivist works of fiction like Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael (1992), not to mention nonsense films like Dances with Wolves (1990). As for honest depictions of primitive violence, we still have an intolerant minority of people who simply cannot handle the truth. For instance, the historian S.C. Gwynne’s excellent and thoroughly-researched Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (2010) is unflinching in its portrayal of Comanche Indian violence, even though Gwynne also shows little sentimentalism toward the American settlers. It’s a pretty fair-minded book overall, and it is highly rated on the Goodreads web site… but if you check out some of the user reviews, it’s also pretty clear that some people just cannot deal with reality.

Now, beyond my interest in the question of total war as a concept, I also read this book because it seemed like an implicit rebuttal to Johan Huizinga’s theory on war as an extension of man’s capacity for play from his book Homo Ludens (1938). However, I went back and reread Huizinga’s chapter on war (I haven’t read the book in over a decade), and I was pleased to find that he doesn’t say anything egregiously wrong in it. In fact, he seems to recognize that the play element of war develops with civilization and is largely absent from primitive violence. What awareness! What wisdom! There are also some fascinating theoretical takeaways that I’ve slowly been gathering from Huizinga’s theory on play, the concept of total war, and Carl Schmitt, particularly his remarks on the political as a category of human affairs and ideological enmity. But that will have to wait until later. Maybe next time, if I can think of something sufficiently meaty to say about it.

edit 6/30: I corrected an error saying Trump lost white votes in 2020 and 2024 when in reality he just gained minority votes as the total number of votes increased.

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that fiddles and tinkers with non-structuralist semiotics and media ecology. What follows is a somewhat sketchy, impressionistic post that I’ve with written with only just a little bit of research. There are a few books I’d like to read before I make this argument in a more formal setting, but it seems to confirm at least part of a working hypothesis I’ve been carrying around in my mind for a while, namely that lowbrow arts and disciplines tend to grow more technically sophisticated under commercial conditions, all the way up until they reach critical acceptance, at which point their technicality begins to weaken. If either that hypothesis, or the following blog post, is reasonably close to reality, then hot damn, that’s good enough for me!

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I. The disenchantment of the oriental martial arts

A while back, someone on social media made an interesting point that the sport of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) has effectively revealed that besides catch wrestling, Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) is the best technical combat system ever developed for one-on-one fighting in a controlled setting. If you want to compete in mixed martial arts, which allows any martial art to be used, then you need to know either wrestling or Brazilian jiu-jitsu very well. It’s just simply non-negotiable. Interestingly enough, though, Brazilian jiu-jitsu was not developed until surprisingly late in human history, as it hadn’t been formalized into a system until the 1920s. Additionally, MMA only became popular during the first decade of the 21st century, so no one even understood just how valuable BJJ was until a couple decades ago.

Back when I was a little kid, neither me nor my friends realized that BJJ and wrestling were the most effective martial arts for one-on-one close combat in a controlled setting. None of us had even heard of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Maybe one or two of us knew what jiu-jitsu was, but virtually none of us had any idea that the Brazilians had anything to do with it. And as for wrestling, we all knew what it was, and we roughly had some idea that the pro wrestling we could see on television — that’s the thing with the piledrivers and the steel chair shots to the head — was fake, but then there’s “real” wrestling, which is a lot more boring to watch and involves weird-looking headgear. But none of us would have understood that wrestling could be considered a martial art, which we exclusively associated with Asia.

Back then, we thought the best martial arts were kung fu, karate, and taekwondo, all of which are now considered fairly useless for mixed martial arts and have subsequently waned in popularity. Films like The Karate Kid (1984), The Karate Kid Part II (1986), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991), 3 Ninjas (1992), Surf Ninjas (1993), and 3 Ninjas Kick Back (1994) all led us to believe that being a ninja was the epitome of martial prowess, and ninjas do karate (we didn’t know what “ninjutsu” was). Kung fu, meanwhile, was karate’s more mystical cousin, and it involved meditating upon a mountain somewhere and imitating different animals, or something. Our collective perception amounted to what’s now derisively referred to as “orientialism,” and it was a perception that had been around since the 1970s. But then again, the eastern countries largely encouraged this “orientalism” with the films of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, not to mention Japanese entertainment franchises like The Fist of the North Star in the 1980s.

Anyhow, once it became clear that either BJJ or wrestling was the best grappling martial art, and either Muay Thai or boxing was the best for strikes, a lot of the mysticism and romanticism went away from martial arts, and the west soon became properly acclimated to its nasty and brutish nature. And when you think about, that guy on social media has a point: it is kind of astounding that it took so long to determine the most efficient martial arts under controlled conditions, killing off the mystique of karate and kung fu once and for all.

In the sport of mixed martial arts, combatants can fight using any martial arts of their choosing, and so theoretically, that particular sport comes the closest to a real fight that could occur spontaneously. Whatever works best in MMA would therefore have the greatest amount of carryover in real life, and yet we’ve only known for a couple decades now that BJJ is either the best or the second-best martial art for MMA. Now, assuming the truth of these premises (and we’ll revisit these premises a bit later), you would think that discovering the best martial art would have happened a little bit sooner, no? Why did it take until all the way up to the twentieth century for us humans to innovate and perfect the ultimate technical system for a one-on-one fight? By which I mean, a fight without the use of weapons in a controlled environment occurring between strangers wherein the only barred maneuvers are headbutts, eye-gouges, fish-hooking, groin attacks, strikes to the throat, spiking an opponent on his head or neck, small joint manipulation (like individual fingers), and any kicks, knees, or stomps to the head of a grounded opponent? Man has always been a fighter, and he did not evolve into this world peacefully. We all know this. So shouldn’t we have discovered Brazilian jiu-jitsu sooner?

II. Natural fighting, fair combat

I’ve thought about this question for a while, and although it’s interesting to ponder, I think the reason is ultimately sort of banal. It’s because MMA doesn’t have much to do with how we’ve fought throughout the ages. There is a distinctly abstract nature to MMA that we often don’t consider because of the way it allows for the use of any martial art, so long as that martial art doesn’t rely on either weapons or the barred holds mentioned above. This relative freedom leaves one with the perception that the fight is occurring as closely as possible to the recreation of “natural” circumstances. But fights have always involved “dirty” maneuvers as well as weapons throughout human history, and we’ve always had a hard time negotiating with this fact. Put one way, we might say that there is nothing “natural” about any kind of fight other than the fact that we can naturally expect men to fight in the first place. Let me try to explain what I mean by that.

Brazilian jiu-jitsu, like all martial arts, is a fighting technology. And typically, when we think of “technology,” we’re thinking of something that humans add to their lives, almost as a supplement of the body’s natural faculties. Such a supplement can improve things — it can make a task go by faster, aiding in one’s overall efficiency. But it can also worsen one’s life by having an alienating effect on the psyche. Whatever the case, when we consider things like armor and weaponry, we think of them in those terms. Armor and weapons are martial technologies that man uses to extend his body outward for the purpose of violence. The club is an extension of the fist. The sword is an extension of the tooth. Bullets are like little flying teeth. Those medieval sabatons are extensions of the foot, but then, so is the running gear of an armored tank. The point is that the unadorned body is what’s “natural,” while everything else that humans use in a combat situation is a technological extension.

But when it comes to combat, this view of technology doesn’t quite describe things accurately, since man evolved in an environment in which tools were always by his side, and thus they were always available to be exploited for combat purposes (and almost certainly were). Homo habilis used the Oldowan stone tools for cracking things (like bones and rocks) and perhaps woodworking, then Homo erectus started using the relatively more advanced Acheulean hand axe as a carving tool. These were among the potential weapons available by the time Homo sapiens came around, and other weapons were soon to follow. If there’s a real problem with the “technology as an extension of the body” conceit, it’s that if man evolved in an environment in which his technological implementations were necessary for the evolution to occur — and it seems that this was indeed the case, not just for stone tools but the hearth as well — then he has always been in some sense acclimated to them, and thus they cannot be considered alien. Tools of war have always been the more “natural” choice when fighting to kill. And yet, paradoxically, there is nothing “natural” about us using them insofar as they aren’t things we’re born with.

However, not all fights are done with the purpose of killing. As far as I can tell, there’s a rough spectrum for the kinds of violence of which humans are capable, and the Greeks distinguished it nicely with the terms πόλεμος (polemos, war) and αγων (agon, contest/competition). On one end of the spectrum, we have war, which is goal-oriented and highly instrumental, and it certainly involves weapons and other tools. It also tends to involve fighting in ways we might now consider dishonorable or dirty, in large part due to our culturally Christianized ethics. But the furthest possible end of this spectrum is a situation known as “Total War,” in which all members of a society are engaged in absolute enmity against all other members of a society. The entire economy, population, and infrastructure within the society make up part of the war effort, and potentially anyone is a combatant, including women and children.

Such “total” wars have only emerged quite recently within the twentieth century, but don’t think that their novelty is due to primitive man’s innate pleasantness. We know that before civilization emerged with the growth of agriculture about 12,000 years ago, raids and ambushes among neighboring tribes and bands would happen regularly instead of formalized battles, and raiders were usually ruthless, killing men remorselessly while stealing their women away as resources. But we wouldn’t call this “total war,” because not everyone was involved. Creating a state of total war as I’m describing would actually require a relatively complex and abstract ideologically-inspired form of enmity, one in which members of society who would traditionally have been non-combative (like peasants or women) are now mobilized and inculcated toward hostility (Carl Schmitt discusses this in Theory of the Partisan). For the most part, wars don’t work this way. Wars, when they take place, will typically have at least some kind of loose, rule-based framework involving selected members of the population and areas for combat, and of course, any party will violate some aspect of this framework if it can confer upon them an advantage. This has been the case from perhaps the neolithic era up to the present day. It also must be kept in mind that the very concept of “war” can emerge only alongside that of “peace.” Prior to the creation of civilization, one could say that that different bands and tribes who lived in proximity to each other were always locked in a state of perennial “war,” albeit a kind of war without organization or designated armies. It might not have been “total war,” but arguably it might’ve been worse.

Anyhow, on the opposite end of the spectrum, we have the one-on-one contest taking place within a rule-bound environment, and such a contest can serve as way to prevent more all-encompassing, lethal forms of violence from taking place. In the Yanomamo tribe, the chest-slapping contest is one example, while other primitive cultures have oral poetry or singing contests (typically with boastful, hostile, or satirical lyrics) like the song duels of the Inuit or the flyting of the medieval dark ages. And, of course, wrestling is another popular kind of contest, in large part because it’s so universally intuitive: we have instances of wrestling happening in various cultures all over the world from basically all points throughout history. There’s the Senegalese láamb, and there’s Nuba wrestling in Sudan, both of which are practiced today. And earlier on in time, we have depictions of wrestling from c. 2000 B.C. in rock art at Beni Hasan in Egypt, there are attestations of wrestling in the Panhellenic Olympic games of 708 B.C. (boxing is added twenty years later), and in the Bible, Jacob wrestles an angel all night until the break of dawn in Genesis 32:22-32 (theologians and philologists are still scratching their heads trying to figure out what’s going on there). The tendency to engage in such contests as a relatively nonviolent means of settling disputes may have actually evolved alongside man, since we have evidence of primates such as chimpanzees engaging in pre-rehearsed displays of aggression that eventuate in a winner and loser. But the basic idea is that they aren’t spontaneous, they’re guided by a framework of rules, and they carry the useful function of precluding further conflict.

Now, because these contests aren’t designed to recreate the conditions of war, and in fact are acting as substitutions for it, they can vary to a great degree, and some can move toward the middle of the spectrum (medieval jousting comes to mind, which has been used to settle fairly large-scale legal and economic disputes, not to mention Paris and Menelaus agreeing to fight one-on-one to prevent the continuation of the Trojan War). Because of this wide variety of forms that a contest can take, no two forms of even one distinct activity like wrestling will be the same, as the rules for that alone can have potentially limitless variations. The way men wrestled in Egypt was almost certainly different from how the Ancient Greeks or Romans did it, and the “Greco-Roman” wrestling that we know now is a purely fictitious 19th-century reconstruction, probably based on a few different extant folk styles. Meanwhile, the “catch-as-catch-can” form of wrestling that developed through the 19th century British carnivals, and which later formed the basis of today’s collegiate as well as “freestyle” wrestling, is its own separate ball of wax — and we’ll discuss it more in a bit.

The point here is that while we can expect men to fight, and it is entirely natural that they will, there is rarely something that we might consider a purely “natural” fight. In the context of war, combatants will use external objects like weapons or armor, which means that oftentimes a culture’s level of technological advancement will determine the victor. In such a situation, any potential advantage can and will be seized including via deception or subterfuge. Alternatively, however, a fight will be designed within an honor-bound system, and thus a framework of agreed-upon rules will be imposed upon it externally, which means that there will always be some kind of artificiality to it. So, in αγων, there are too many rules, while in πόλεμος, everybody’s always cheating!

III. The commercialization of violence as a driver of technical skill

When the nineteenth century finally came along, something happened that was rather unique within human history: commercial market forces created a reason to develop a new style of fighting in which matches could take place as a spectator sport with a system of rules that allowed for an ongoing series of events featuring genuine strangers who had no prior conflict. To survive in a market system, these sport matches would require the potential for any successful fighter to return and fight some more (in other words, no lethal stakes or brutal injuries could be allowed). And if the sport proved profitable enough to survive as a commercial entity, then there would be a reason for a successful fighter to pass down his techniques to a group of students, so that his system could attain some continuity. In Great Britain, these conditions arose through the traveling carnivals in which catch-as-catch-can wrestlers first proved themselves. Catch wrestlers evolved and innovated their techniques by taking on amateur volunteer fighters (like farmers or millers) from a diverse array of crowds, which means that the catch wrestlers had to constantly learn new ways to subdue their opponents, both big and small, in order to keep issuing open challenges and keep the carnivals profitable. The more challengers there were over time, the greater the wealth of experience.

Then, throughout the 20th century, the legendary Gracie family evolved the techniques of Brazilian jiu-jitsu in a similar fashion, through a series of “vale tudo” (anything goes) matches, which were designed for spectators and often performed in Brazilian circuses. BJJ slowly began to incorporate more maneuvers found in other martial arts, including catch wrestling, which had a particularly strong impact on it (e.g. the “kimura lock” is named after Masahuko Kimura, who defeated Helio Gracie using what was really a double wristlock in wrestling).

The technical superiority of wrestling and BJJ, in other words, required a culture of mass entertainment and commerce to properly grow and develop. But as these superior martial arts developed through the commercialization of fighting, we were all forced to demystify the martial arts in a certain sense. Under these new conditions of cross-discipline combat, all participants were now forced to perceive the value of, say, a double wristlock hold, or to recognize the variety of submission holds available from a closed guard position, in which a grappler is lying down on the mat with both of his legs wrapped around his opponent’s waist. Spectators, meanwhile, could no longer nurture the illusion that there are secret mystical techniques from far-flung areas across the world, waiting to be discovered (i.e., the premise of the Street Fighter video game franchise). But in another sense, one could argue that the commercialization of spectacle combat further mystified fighting by creating the imaginary pretense that a participant involved in a BJJ tournament is engaging in a “real fight,” something more “legitimate” than a karate tournament, and thus will be more prepared to hit the streets and take on the world — a world in which the switchblade and handgun both exist.

I realize that this last point may seem a little too pretentious; maybe a bit too “French.” It is well-known that vale tudo fights were quite brutal, as were the fights in the old English carnivals, so who the hell am I to accuse these grapplers of trafficking in artificiality? But then again, recall the videos you’ve seen on WorldStarHipHop in which a group of, say, three or four feral degenerates will follow some unsuspecting victim as he walks down the street. They loudly indicate their intentions to maul him, he turns around, and he then uses his Brazilian jiu-jitsu skills to initiate a single-leg takedown on one of them. It works, he gets ready to “ground and pound,” and then, just as luck would have it, the others proceed to stomp his head in unceremoniously while the cameraman yells, “World staaarrrrrr!!!” These conditions are about as “real world” as you can imagine, and BJJ is utterly useless in them.

Then, if we zoom out a bit and examine the nature of war throughout history, it slowly becomes clear that the conditions and exigencies of war actually, if anything, prevented something like BJJ from being created. The most obvious demonstration of this principle can be found in the original jiu-jitsu from which Brazilian jiu-jitsu takes its name. Far from a distinct fighting style designed for tournament play (the term “jiu-jitsu” didn’t even show up until the seventeenth century), jiu-jitsu originally evolved as a discipline that could allow unarmed samurai to defeat armored opponents. Since strikes against armor don’t work, practitioners realized that pins, joint locks, and throws would be the best way of neutralizing an enemy. There was simply no room for something like lying down with your legs wrapped around an opponent’s waist (i.e., putting him in full guard) and then spending about a minute trying to set up for a submission. Such a tactic would get you killed in war, and so it makes sense that Brazilian jiu-jitsu would only emerge under the more controlled conditions of spectator sport combat.

Obviously I wasn’t alive during the Sendoko or Edo periods of Japan, but without having researched a ton into the matter, my suspicion is that jiu-jitsu techniques were taught knowingly as a last-resort method for unarmed samurai, and it was understood by pretty much everyone that its chances of working as intended would be pretty low, at least if the opponent is still armed. It’s like learning CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The chance of CPR reviving someone whose heart has fully stopped is also quite low, but you do it anyway in the off-chance that it could save a life.

Anyhow, if my train of thought is correct, then there is certainly something interesting in the way that the conditions of the modern marketplace (you know, capitalism) have the tendency to drive technical ability within old — extremely old, utterly ancient — human affairs by essentially turning them into commercial products and spectator events. This is not only true for violence, but also for dance. It is even true for the sex act as well. It is also true for music, since jazz evolved within a commercial enterprise of 78 RPM record production, which led to a demand for musical virtuosity within the context of improvisation — something that simply never existed in previous forms of music, which were guided by religious/metaphysical principles and thus practiced under certain stylistic constraints. But even though the marketplace can drive technical prowess, this does not always elicit respect from the intellectual classes. During the 1990s, the UFC (the world’s biggest MMA federation) was regarded contemptuously as “human cockfighting,” resulting in multiple state and television bans that nearly destroyed the company. But then, thirty years later, a UFC event took place on the White House lawn. It will be interesting to see how MMA is regarded another thirty years from now.

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that unceremoniously crams together non-structuralist semiotics with various inquiries into media ecology.

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Intro

It feels strange to criticize Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics more than thirty years after its initial publication in 1993. Plenty of others have already done so in the field of Comics Studies (yes, this is an actual field), including Thierry Groensteen, Bart Beaty, Scott Bukatman, Charles Hatfield, R.C. Harvey, David Carrier, and more. Since McCloud’s work was published, there have been plenty of competing accounts about what comics are, what they’re meant to do, how they work on the mind, and so on. But the thing is, McCloud is the only one who made an explanation of comics that is actually fun to read, and so he remains the top guy, whether you like it or not. Out of all the existing accounts, his formalistic approach to comics has been the most influential by far, and Understanding Comics has been a required text for students in many different university courses dealing with the topic. Additionally, he has probably been highly influential in the elevation of comics as a valid middlebrow mode of storytelling. When you see publications like Newsweek, NPR, and BBC News release lists of the top 100 novels from the last fifty years (or whatever), you’ll now see Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980-1991) or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000-2003) on those lists pretty commonly. I think that McCloud has played a significant role in building up the confidence for educated people to treat comics as literature — for better or for worse.

And to be sure, Understanding Comics gets a lot right. Above all else, it’s clear that McCloud is really, really into comics, and that’s my favorite thing about the book. His enthusiasm is infectious. When he references artists like Osamu Tezuka, José Muñoz, R. Crumb, Dave McKean, or Sergio Aragones, you think to yourself, “Man, I should check out more of that guy’s stuff! Wow!” Additionally, I think he’s more or less right about many of the things for which he’s been criticized. His discussions on “closure,” the importance of the “gutter” between panels, sequencing, the compression or expansion of time, the six types of panel transitions, and so on, are all basically right. I’m sure that they all have minor conceptual flaws that niggling academics have made sure to correct, but they’re right enough to be useful, and that’s what matters.

I also will say that I disagree that comics necessarily need to be studied from an historical or sociopolitical lens instead of a formalistic one, as some of McCloud’s critics have argued. It’s perfectly valid to study comics as a mode of storytelling from a formalist standpoint with less emphasis on history, and I don’t think it’s productive to just whine about one school of theoretical criticism while promoting another. The reality of academia is that just about everything will eventually be approached by just about every school of thought, and there’s little to be done about it. McCloud was at least passionate about analyzing comics in the way he chose, and he did it on his own accord. He wasn’t just haplessly trying to secure tenure at some backwater university in the middle of nowhere because his life had become nothing more than a constantly-shrinking prison cell. This alone speaks volumes, and it suggests that the vantage point he took is worth something and deserves to be taken seriously. And besides: professional academics study works (or genres) of literature from far dopier theoretical vantage points.

However, there is something that I think he gets very wrong about comics. It doesn’t come from his approach, or his definition of comics, either, which may be a bit too liberal but which I still don’t have much of a problem with (who cares about definitions, anyway?) Instead, it concerns something even more basic, and it’s how he conceptualizes the relationship between language and images. I’m into both semiotics and media ecology, so I think about this topic often. For comics in particular, it’s the essence of the art form itself. So for the big fans of McCloud, understand that I’m not just trying to crap all over him for no reason — I actually think that his work acts as a springboard for some decent takeaways on not just comics as an art form but also semiotics and media ecology. Even if these takeaways must be adversarial.

I. The Semiotix of Comix

McCloud’s characterization of the relationship between images and language — let’s just acknowledge this at the outset — comes from what seems to be an insecurity about the content found in comic books, which is often seen as simplified, childlike, and distinctly non-literary. This perception would have been a big problem for McCloud, who was writing a conceptually ambitious treatise on the topic back in 1993. Back then, the main problem with taking comics seriously was that they’re for dummies, you know. Little children. People who can barely read. Nowadays, everybody can say they enjoy comics, and it’s no longer a guilty pleasure — but not then. During the early 90s, only the really smart guys could say that they enjoyed comics, like the famous novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco, an avowed fan of American strips like George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Italian fumetti such as Corto Maltese. But he could say this as a way of flexing, basically: it indicated that he had intelligence to spare.

However, despite the shift in cultural perception since then, comics themselves really haven’t changed all that much. The first theorist on comics, and also the inventor of the modern comic, was Rodolphe Töpffer, and McCloud both cites him and draws some influence from him as well. Yet Töpffer, as revolutionary as he was, had no illusions about the kind of audience to whom his work would appeal. About the comic book, or “picture story,” he had this to say:

The picture story, to which the criticism of art pays no attention and which rarely worries the learned, has always exercised a great appeal. More, indeed, than literature itself, for besides the fact that there are more people who look than who can read, it appeals particularly to children and to the masses, the sections of the public which are particularly easily perverted and which it would be particularly desirable to raise.1

So for him, a comic isn’t real literature, it’s something children can understand, and it’s mostly valuable as a source of moral instruction, which is sorely needed because the derelict artists of the contemporary world are constantly forgetting about the importance of such things. And when you look at Töpffer’s words, it seems clear that people still basically feel the same way today, though they might not want to admit it. Why is it that Marvel Comics is so “woke,” as its conservative critics love to point out? It’s because the writers recognize that comics are good tools of moral instruction for the semi-literate masses. So, not much has really changed since the mid-19th century when Töpffer was active. The main differences are that 1) society is less literate than before, and 2) educated people now read comic books with less shame. Maybe these two things are related. Who knows.

But for McCloud, Töpffer’s sort of thinking simply won’t do. He indicates throughout his book that comics deserve to be taken just as seriously as their neighboring yet more highly esteemed art forms like novels, paintings, and film, and so he won’t brook the commonplace that “comics are just kids’ stuff.” To offer an alternative perspective, he establishes a semiotic theory designed to elevate the artistic value of the cartoon character, the fixture of modern comics from the nineteenth century all the way up to the present. And this is where I begin to get irritated. One charitable discussion on McCloud claims that he recreates and elaborates upon the theory of signs established by Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce proposed a tripartite scheme for the classification of signs, which he divided into symbols, icons, and indexes. Now, McCloud does discuss icons and symbols… but given how far his definitions of symbols and icons differ from Peirce’s, I suspect that he either had never heard of Peircean semiotics at the time of his writing, or he simply didn’t care enough about it to take it seriously.

Here is how Peirce defined icon, index, and symbol:

• Icon: A sign that represents something through resemblance or similarity (e.g. a portrait, a map, onomatopoeic words like “ZAP,” a musk-scented perfume, a grape-flavored soda, an Audubon bird-call)

• Index: A sign that represents something existing in a specific place and time through a direct connection or causal link (e.g. smoke indicating fire, a weathervane indicating wind direction, footprints, bullet holes, jaundiced skin, the smell of fresh-baked cookies coming from downstairs)

• Symbol: A sign that represents something through convention, habit, or learned rules, and not through motivated resemblance or connection (e.g. spoken words in a language, mathematical notation, music notation, traffic lights, country flags, coats of arms).

For McCloud, however, an icon is “any image used to represent a person, place, thing, or idea.” So, basically, an icon is any representative visual image, even when the referent is abstract. This is an incredibly wide definition. “Symbols,” then, are just one species of an icon, and they include things like the Christian cross, the “Om” insignia, the swastika, the peace sign, national flags, corporate logos, and traffic lights. Stuff like that. Letters, scientific notation, and numeric signs, however, are not symbols. They’re a different subsection of icon entirely, and McCloud doesn’t bother to give them a special name. Now, despite the massively inclusive definition he gives to “icon,” according to McCloud, some pictures are “more iconic than others” because “as resemblance varies, so does the level of iconic content.” You got that? Yeah, I don’t follow that, either. It’s simply impossible to know what that statement means on its face, and McCloud seems to realize it, so he proceeds to demonstrate what he means, essentially forcing us to come up with a new, truer definition of “icon” based on inference.

We come to find that for McCloud, a genuinely iconic picture involves something like the bare minimum amount of information to convincingly portray its referent. Think of the nine-stroke portrait of Alfred Hitchcock:

For McCloud, that portrait would be more iconic than a photograph of Hitchcock. This conceptualization couldn’t be further from Peircean thought, since Peirce would argue that the more something clearly and unambiguously represents something else, the more iconic and less symbolic it is. For McCloud, though, the icon lies about two thirds of the way between “resemblance” on one end, which is passively received, and “meaning” on the other, which is actively perceived. And once icons stop being icons, they immediately transition into… the printed words of a phonetic alphabet:

Here’s another demonstration of the same sliding scale, from McCloud’s personal website:

McCloud then comes up with a triangle figure. The top, which opposes both resemblance and meaning, indicates pure abstraction. Visual realism is on the left, and visual meaning is on the right.

So, completely non-representational works (like Jackson Pollock’s or Barnett Newman’s paintings) go at the top, photographs go on the left, and language-signs go on the right. And at the furthest right, the absolute edge of the triangle, we have, like, lots of language signs, lots of words… and they’re written in italics, or scribbled handwriting, or something. But somewhere in the sweet spot (about two-thirds through), we get the images of comics. The classic comic style of art shows up in that pristine area, and it runs all the way up to the phonetic alphabet, where it becomes language.

Now, I want you to ask yourself this question, and try to be as honest as you can. No — ask yourself a couple. Does the progression from a photo of a face, to a realistic drawing of a face, to a stick figure drawing of a face, to eventually the word “FACE” feel natural to you? Let’s expand his example a little. If I draw a stick figure of a whole body, am I somehow just a stone’s throw away from writing out the word “BODY”? or maybe “STICK FIGURE”? Let’s push this example even further. If I draw a simplified picture of an Extreme Ultraviolet lithography machine, am I conceptually just a hair’s breadth away from writing out the words “EXTREME ULTRAVIOLET LITHOGRAPHY MACHINE” instead of drawing the picture? Well?

To that last question, McCloud might respond,

Well, no, because any drawing detailed enough to make the specific type of machine recognizable would have to go further toward ‘resemblance,’ while any description of the machine with several words would have to move closer toward ‘meaning.’ If you wanted to bring them as close to each other as possible, you would have to draw a highly simplified and thus non-specific machine, and the word next to it would just be ‘MACHINE.’ Then, as they diverge, you could specify what kind of machine it is, through intricate visual depiction on one end and intricate written description on the other.

That seems like what he would say, anyhow (I’m trying my best to ‘steelman’ the argument here). But if that’s true, then how does a more intricate drawing — intricate enough to show us the exact type of machine it is — go further away from meaning, while a more thorough verbal description goes closer to it? Let’s consider this whole entire concept of “meaning” for a moment. Is there no “meaning” at all in a photograph if it tells you everything that a lengthy verbal description would tell? Is there no “meaning” in detail when it’s portrayed visually? And how is it just passively “received” — doesn’t it require more active interpretation the more detail there is? If I can see all the parts of the machine, I’m forced to think about what they actually might do in order to identify it, am I not?

Let’s alter the line of questioning a bit: is meaning really rooted in verbal abstraction? And more importantly, if we’re assuming that this is the case, then how does this attitude not betray a glottocentric (AKA language-centric) theory of communication, exactly the thing that places novels above comics in value? It seems to me that the more you disambiguate something, the more meaning there is, so a picture of (for example) a bird detailed enough to tell you its exact type carries more meaning than an “iconic” drawing that could indicate potentially a hundred different kinds of birds.

The truth is, there’s just simply no smooth transition going from a photograph to a simplified drawing to a word written in the phonetic alphabet. Interpreting a simple picture and interpreting a word involve entirely separate mental processes located in separate parts of the brain. It seems to me that what McCloud wants to do is say that simple images and words written in the phonetic alphabet are both similar because they’re visually less cluttered and less distinct, and perhaps this means they have less “ground,” to use the term from the legendary media theorist Marshall McLuhan (McCloud is a McLuhan guy, which I don’t consider a bad thing at all). But here’s why Peircean semiotics shouldn’t be ignored: no matter what superficial similarities a simple image and a written word in a phonetic alphabet share, the picture still has an iconic referent (i.e., something that it portrays through motivated resemblance) while the written word has no iconic resemblance to hardly anything besides other instances of the same written word. That is a huge conceptual difference. If you really wanted to represent the transition from picture to word correctly, you’d have to put a giant gap between them, maybe with a “???” in the middle. And when you think about it, this need for such a gap is exactly why the phonetic alphabet was such a revolutionary invention, such a great leap forward for the ancient Greeks — a truly profound discovery not to be bested by Lysippos’s innovations in anatomical realism (and, for reasons I’ll explain in a bit, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the same culture that produced one would also produce the other).

Someone will now say, “But what about hieroglyphics, Kerwin? Aren’t they drawings?” and sure, yes, they are. And some of them did carry iconic resemblance — or, in other words, some of the glyphs were logograms, drawings that directly signified their apparent referent in an iconic, motivated way. But the problem is that these logograms were only a minority of the hieroglyphs, while the others either signified sounds, like full syllables or entire words, while others still acted as contextual determinatives to clarify the meaning of the sentence without being pronounced at all. This is why the hieroglyphic script was supremely elite, only known by the highest of clerics, while merchants, jurists, and accountants would use the more streamlined and sound-based (though not completely alphabetic) hieratic script, and then later, the even more streamlined and more sound-based (though still not totally alphabetic) demotic script, which looked like this:

Yeah, you see that? The script where you don’t recognize anything at all is easier to learn than the thing with the recognizable pictures. So, this is my point: if you look at a series of hieroglyphics simply as icons (in either Peirce’s or McCloud’s sense), they’re incredibly simple. Couldn’t be easier to interpret. Look, there’s a bird! And wow, there’s an eagle! And hey, a feather! Oh, but there’s a stick… But if you look at them as how they were intended, namely as symbols (in the Peircean sense), all of a sudden they become more or less impossible. There’s a reason we weren’t able to translate hieroglyphics until all the way up to the 1820s, and it’s one of the reasons why hieroglyphics were fully abandoned by the 5th century A.D.: they were complicated as shit, and highly inefficient! And again, all of this is because iconic interpretation and symbolic interpretation involve totally separate mental processes. They cannot be placed together upon the same linear sequence.

II. The Image and Language as Mutually Evolving Phenomena

I kinda hate to beat up on McCloud so badly here, because he doesn’t return to his “picture plane” for a few chapters, and the intervening ones are quite good, as I’ve said. But alas! He does return to it again in Chapter 6, and his conceptual flaws here lead to further errors, all of which concern the same misunderstanding regarding the relationship between visual images and language.

In Chapter 6, McCloud wants to explain why the combination of pictures and words is now considered crass and lowbrow. In order to do so, he tells the story of pictures and their relationship with words, and McCloud shows how humans once created representative images before they ever developed literacy. Some of these images were fairly intricate, while others were “iconic” and acted as “symbols.”

Already, we’ve got some problems. It isn’t altogether clear if McCloud believes that primitive drawings naturally evolved into language, or how exactly the process came about. But the more important thing he misses, I think, is that while it’s true that humans made cave paintings 15,000 years ago, those were not the first images humans ever made. As Andre Leroi-Gourhan pointed out in his Gesture and Speech (1964), the first images humans ever made were not representative of anything at all: they were purely abstract notches, waves, and other assorted scratchings on things like rocks and bones. Think spirals, clusters of dots, and rows of little lines, like this:

They indicated rhythm more than anything, and it was probably fun for those guys to just move their hands about in various patterns to create these little designs. Although there are some theories that such scratchings indicated specific things (like kill counts in hunting), I kinda doubt it, as do many others. As far as we can tell, they were purely non-representational.

Now, think about language for a second. Language started out orally, not written, and it’s a collection of phonemes that are assigned symbolic significance. Language is abstract, and it certainly came before the cave paintings at Lascaux to which McCloud is referring. It isn’t clear if hominids were making non-representative scratchings before they developed language or only afterward, but language was a way of exteriorizing and formalizing a rhythmic, predetermined series of abstract utterances. It therefore comes from the same psychological substrate that prompted early man to create those little scratched-out notches and waves pictured above, even if they were far from being formalized with the same ingenuity. Language also, I think, was a necessary innovation for representative art to come along much later, like in those Lascaux cave paintings, since language gave man the gift of cognition — or at least a cognition sophisticated enough to imbue images with specific functions (like map-making, or warning others, or practicing magic). So from the beginning, abstract shapes and lines were there alongside language. It took a good while for mankind to finally reunite his earliest visual inscriptions with symbolic meaning, but regardless, the impulse to make non-representative drawings was there before representative pictures.

Now, the reason this matters so much is that it shows how visual images and media (including spoken language itself) have always evolved in an intertwined fashion. Even though they occupy different modes of interpretation, they still can mutually influence one another, if in unexpected ways. Language and abstract scratchings came about around the same time, and then, much later, cave paintings showed up around the same time as more complex tools were being developed. Literacy eventually showed up thousands of years later, and it was essentially a mnemonic tool for stock-taking, economic, and administrative purposes. So it was effectively an extension of earlier tools, and it took a while for people to use for cultural or aesthetic purposes.

For McCloud, innovations in language media slowly created an effect wherein pictures and language became gradually separated from one another. He argues that the printing press in particular pushed language into one direction while images evolved in an opposite direction. But as Marshall McLuhan has (I think correctly) observed, the printing press was responsible for the Renaissance innovations in visual perspective, like the “vanishing point,” since the uniformity of the printed page created the illusion of a fixed point-of-view. So again, a language medium allowed the visual image to evolve in complexity, even though they involved different interpretive practices.2 Moreover, the printing press brought written language closer to what McCloud calls “the icon,” since the letter had never been so visually bold and clear beforehand. The press even led to the standardization of spelling and grammar, creating maximum clarity and ease of absorption.

It also doesn’t seem to be the case that the printing press pushed language and images in opposite directions by prohibiting them from intermingling. Intricate images still occurred throughout the age of print, and they interacted with texts to which they corresponded, but not in the way McCloud has in mind. The most obvious example is in the way paintings from the Renaissance all the way into the nineteenth century depended upon the Bible and its associated tradition. Sure, these paintings weren’t photographed and copied into the printed editions of the Bible (an impossibility), but they were clearly designed to interpret the text creatively, creating a kind of mutual interaction between the painting and the Biblical scene being depicted. For instance, if you look at Caravaggio’s highly detailed The Calling of Saint Matthew, c. 1600, his interpretation is so striking that it threatens to assume sovereignty over the story itself. It becomes nearly impossible to think of that episode from the Gospels the same way again.

At other times, elaborate images formed the frontispieces to many different kinds of books, and these frontispieces often relied on a certain kind of conceptual glue known as allegory to portray the book’s ideas. For instance, the frontispiece to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1628 edition) depicts the many different states of mind that Burton is about to expound upon, and it actually looks quite a bit like a comic strip. In fact, many of these frontispieces did. The frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) was actually drawn in close collaboration with the author, and through allegory, it visually portrays Hobbes’s philosophical argument about statecraft and the figure of the sovereign. It was heavily commented upon back then, and it still receives academic analysis to this day.

If you probe further, you’ll find books loaded with folio images, like those of Athanasius Kircher, the 17th century German polymath. Kircher not only had incredible and often highly allegorical frontispieces drawn for his books (great works of art in their own right), but he loaded up his books with folio images of maps, diagrams, and models, like this fascinating depiction of the earth’s core from his Mundus Subterraneus (1665):

And then there was the genre of emblem books, which were loaded up with images that contained written explanations next to them, since it was prohibitively difficult for a printing press to mix writing with images at the time. Among the most striking of the emblem books is Michaelis Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (1617), an alchemical treatise filled with not only intricate allegorical images but also poems, and even music pieces for chamber performance, all while slowly recounting the Greek myth of Atalanta and Hippomene (see the emblems in color here).

Again, all of this involves heavy intermingling between text and image — and music, for that matter.

When William Blake finally came along in the late 18th century, it should go without saying that he took poetry and illustration into unknown territory. He invented his own idiosyncratic printing method known as relief etching, which allowed him to combine words with images on the same page with much greater ease, and once he used it to produce his own works of “illuminated printing,” he became nothing short of revolutionary. However, he was a revolutionary who failed to incite a revolution only because of how bold his vision was. The illustrations we typically find added to reprints of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859) or Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) pale by comparison to the conceptual unity we find in Blake’s Jerusalem (1804-1820), or his Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793), and it amazingly took quite a while for twentieth century academic literary scholars to realize that Blake must be read with his drawings — his drawings must be taken just as seriously as his words! But as sui generis as Blake was, it still must be understood that he was coming out of an earlier print-based tradition in which both image and text mutually augmented one another, even if the technology didn’t allow for images and writing to occur within the same space. And yeah, sure, these images don’t look like modern comics… but who cares?

It therefore just isn’t accurate to say that text and image became alienated from one another during the age of print. As I’ve noted, the modern comic only came along during the nineteenth century, and there wasn’t anything too much like it beforehand, even prior to the Renaissance. McCloud, who considers the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry a comic, seems to believe that an alienation occurred after a mutual harmony between text and image. But once you recognize that logogrammatic language scripts weren’t being treated the same way we typically treat representative works of art, and that his examples of early sequential art weren’t exactly common, you quickly realize that the harmony he’s imagining was never really there. What the new medium of print accomplished was to allow both language and visual art to reach levels of complexity never seen before, but there’s no reason to assume that their complexities were growing in opposition to each other. Works of art like the Bayeux Tapestry were never the norm, and as McCloud recognizes, sequential art never stopped being produced during the age of print. He himself mentions examples. There’s also a big, giant book of examples collected by David Kunzle called The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825 (1973). I haven’t read it, though, so I won’t comment on it. Maybe I will sometime soon.

Still, we haven’t yet answered the question McCloud poses as to why images eventually became devalued and relegated to lowbrow status during the 20th century — unless, of course, they were highly abstract, and (ironically enough) incredibly primitive. So primitive, in fact, that they were going back to Homo erectus times, back to the times of those non-representative swirls, spirals, waves, dots, and notches. McCloud’s view is that pictures and words had been pushed so far to opposite extremes, they each had nowhere else to go but to reconvene at that breaking point between “icon” and “word,” but because all of this happened through the mass media, people scoffed.

Despite his terrible “picture plane” model, I think he’s about half-right on that last point. I suspect that the reason has to do with the advent of electronic media, which cheapened the image by making it endlessly reproducible and available to everyone, thus eliminating its uniqueness and its mystique once and for all. And in America, when comics in the style of Töpffer’s “picture books” became mainstream entertainment among working class Italians, Puerto Ricans, and Irishmen, there was no chance for redemption in an Anglo-dominated society (the French and Italians, for their part, never had these social status problems that McCloud identifies in their own countries). Meanwhile, intellectual Jews such as Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Steinberg were theorizing about art and then effusively praising the artists who demonstrated their theories. As Tom Wolfe pointed out in The Painted Word (1975), modern abstract art had become subordinated beneath theory to such a degree that it derived its sole aesthetic value from it. This was an altogether new phenomenon, not to be found during the days of the Church’s dominance over the west.

III. Visual Stereotypes, Schemata, and Comics

We come to McCloud’s most criticized claims, and these are the claims that most clearly reveal his need to try and elevate the dignity of comic book art. Cartoons have traditionally not been terribly detailed, as we’ve established, and McCloud wants to give us a way to appreciate works of art that aren’t photorealistic — works of art that rely on stripped-down visual forms that small children can appreciate just as well as adults. This is a worthy enough aim. But again, he runs into the same problem established by his “picture plane” triangle. It happens when he tries to suggest that mere simplicity is the essence of the cartoon, as he does here:

“The more cartoony a face is … the more people it could be said to describe.” Again, is that really right? Just look at the picture to the furthest right. Would you say that it’s the most cartoony out of all of them? I certainly wouldn’t say so; in fact, it looks humorless and bland. The guy on the far right could only be the protagonist of a pretty shitty cartoon. Let’s think about that for just a second.

There are a handful of guys that McCloud totally omits from his analysis, and perhaps he should have included them. They’re the caricaturists. He does discuss Rodolphe Töpffer, as we’ve mentioned a few times… but then there are guys like the inventors of the caricature, the Caracci brothers: Annabale, Agostino, and Ludovico (mid-16th to early 17th centuries).

The art historian E.H. Gombrich, in his Art & Illusion (1960), discusses trying to figure out with a colleague why it took so late in western art history for the caricature to have been invented. So, to try and answer the question, he contemplates these fascinating bros:

The word and the institution of caricature date only from the last years of the sixteenth century, and the inventors of the art were not the pictorial propagandists who existed in one form or another for centuries before but those most sophisticated and refined of artists, the brothers Carracci. Few of their caricatures have been identified, but according to literary sources which we have no reason to doubt, they also invented the joke of transforming a victim’s face into that of an animal, or even a lifeless implement, which caricaturists have practised ever since.

We thought at the time that it was the fear of image magic, the reluctance to do as a joke what the unconscious means very much in earnest, which delayed the coming of that visual game. I still believe these motives may have played their part, but the theory might be generalized. The invention of portrait caricature presupposes the theoretical discovery of the difference between likeness and equivalence.

[…]

IN THIS formulation caricature becomes only a special case of what I have attempted to describe as the artist’s test of success. All artistic discoveries are discoveries not of likenesses but of equivalences which enable us to see reality in terms of an image and an image in terms of reality. And this equivalence never rests on the likeness of elements so much as on the identity of responses to certain relationships. We respond to a white blob on the black silhouette of a jug as if it were a highlight; we respond to the pear with these crisscross lines as if it were Louis Philippe’s head.

He’s referring to this 19th century caricature of Louis Philippe I:

Gombrich’s analysis of art seeks to deny (or at least seriously compromise) the validity of iconicity as a concept. He’s one of those guys I’ve written about who are suspicious of the icon as a valid semiotic category, and this is why he can’t fully bring himself to say that the caricaturist is embellishing characteristics that are really there. But his point is nonetheless well-taken: caricaturists were able to come along because they practiced a bold kind of experimentation. That is, they were able to borrow the forms of other known objects and superimpose them upon their subject, doing so in a way that seemed acceptable to the audience. They also sometimes made up their own forms and tinkered with them, finding a way to synthesize these alien forms with the faces of their subjects until it would unlock some hidden essence of the subject’s appearance or personality. So they weren’t just “simplifying” the images but actually introducing an element of distortion, exaggeration, and grotesquery as well. That is the essence of what makes an image cartoony. Simply reducing the cartoon to lack of detail effectively neuters what makes a cartoon special.3

There are other caricaturists that McCloud doesn’t mention, either, like William Hogarth (1697-1764). Actually, that isn’t quite right. He mentions in Chapter 1 that Hogarth created works of sequential art, like A Rake's Progress (1732-1734)... but he ignores the fact that Hogarth was also a caricaturist. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the same guy who experimented with sequential art would also have experimented with caricature. Hogarth, like many of the other innovative caricaturists, wasn’t interested in slavishly copying likenesses as they appear in nature. As Gombrich points out, he was interested in “learning the language” of objects and finding a “grammar” to them. In other words, he didn’t see the need to simply copy models posing in front of him, but rather to memorize forms for the various physiognomies and expressions of the human face and body, respectively, and then experiment with them.

Others had the same basic idea and pushed it even further, like Alexander Cozens (1717-1786), who advocated for intentional deviations from the canon of standard classical beauty when drawing comic faces. And then there was Francis Grose, who in 1788 published a pamphlet called Rules for Drawing Caricatures. Again, here’s Gombrich:

It certainly met a demand at the time when the merging of the Hogarthian tradition of comic art with the fashion of portrait caricature led to a popular craze for such drawings among amateurs. Grose combines the diagrams of [Charles] Le Brun with the variation principle advocated by Cozens. The academic standard face, which corresponds to the canon of Greek art, is experienced as beautiful, he says, precisely because it lacks expression. Try varying the proportions as drastically as you like, and watch what happens. You will soon be equipped with a repertory of funny faces that will be useful in drawing humorous pictures.

Ah, yes, there we go! Humor! Expression! Experimentation! Distortion! Imagination! This, my friends, is the essence of the cartoon image — NOT the stupid three-pronged American-style electronic outlet just staring at you blankly:

Now, if you consider how McCloud reduces the cartoon to simplicity, then the cartoon as a category must include all sorts of things, like the weird medieval guys from those high-medieval manuscript illuminations. And given how silly some of them look, not to mention the elements of scatology in some of the images, we can perhaps accept this classification (although it’s also clear that the artists weren’t usually trying to be funny). But his reduction of the cartoon image would also have to include the Grecian vase paintings and Chaldean bas-reliefs. It would also have to include the stick figures on those “pedestrian crossing” signs. Is any of this right? Yes, these things are all simplified images… but are they cartoons? Do they carry the same function as cartoons? Do you they make you feel the same way?

The answer — for me, anyway — is mostly no. And if I interpret some of these things as cartoons, like the depiction of the Christ on the mount of olives in the famous Book of Kells, then some better part of my judgment knows that I’m interpreting it the wrong way. Meanwhile, the work of Honoré Daumier is cartoony as hell, and yet it is highly detailed, not simple. So why does McCloud insist that naked simplicity is the essence of the cartoon? What could his argument gain from such a misrepresentation of what we typically think of as cartoon drawings?

We finally come to the crux of McCloud’s argument: the reason for why he’s so insistent on simplicity tout court as the essence of the cartoon. And it is indeed the most-criticized claim he makes. For McCloud, the advantage of such simplification is that it allows the reader to psychologically project himself or herself onto the character, using the character’s appearance as a mask. Essentially, the simplified form exploits the viewing subject’s primary narcissism. This psychological theory has been widely criticized from a number of angles, and I don’t want to spend too much time on it for that reason, but I can’t resist quoting the way he makes his point:

I know I can’t be the only one who read that question and thought to himself, “Uhhhh, yeah. Sure, I would. Why not?” But even if the answer had been no, it wouldn’t be because I need to see myself as McCloud in order to find what he says interesting. It would have more to do with the fact that the realistic figure is more alluring and interesting than the text above him, while the simpler figure is easier to register, gives me less to care about, and thus directs my eyes right to the text.

Usually, the appeal of simplicity isn’t about man’s inherent narcissism. Maybe sometimes, but not usually. For one thing, cartoons often involve a protagonist and an antagonist, and it isn’t as though the antagonists are maximally detailed so as to alienate them furthest from the viewer. Bluto is just as simple as Popeye. Peg-Leg Pete is just as simple as Mickey Mouse. Tom is just as simple as Jerry — it’s not as though Tom is played by a live-action cat. When I watch the Roadrunner outwit the Coyote, am I supposed to sympathize with both of them at once? Is the entire spectacle of their mutual antagonism just an internal psychomachia taking place inside of me, in which one faculty of my mind is at war with another?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think that it’s just too cute of an idea to take seriously. The process through which a viewing subject will start to identify with a character is an interesting phenomenon, and it certainly is real, but it happens all the time in, say, film (see the final girl theory). It happens in television. There are actually transsexuals who claim that playing as a female character in video games — including those with precise graphics and detail — eventually awakened their transsexual urges. All of these examples seem to indicate that formal simplicity has little to do with the process of identification. Plus, simplified forms can be just as “othering” as they are inviting. This is probably why Scott McCloud doesn’t address the rich history of ethnic stereotypes in cartoons, which are indeed quite funny and enjoyable, and very cartoonish.4 But despite being amusing, these presentations always portray the ethnicity as a grotesque heterogeneous figure — there’s nothing instantly relatable about, say, Sunflower, the now-erased character from Disney’s Fantasia (1940):

The nature of the cartoon is better understood as something that triggers an instinct inside of us. A culturally conditioned instinct, perhaps, but an instinct nonetheless. McCloud starts to apprehend this instinct when he talks about how we always liken inanimate objects to the human form (like that three-prong outlet above), but he misses the mark when he says that we’re all just looking for versions of our individual selves. Rather, humans have always responded to distillations or exaggerations of broad categories, like e.g. in the form of literary or stage play “stock characters,” like those found in burlesque theater, the performances of the medieval jongleurs, the Commedia Dell’arte, or puppet shows such as Punch and Judy. And the reason we’ve always had an interest in such imaginative embellishments is that they correspond to the way we internally characterize and classify the types of phenomena we encounter in the world. Essentially, we’re all walking around with an array of schemata loaded up in our minds that we project outward onto our surroundings, and each schema acts as a lens through which we interpret what we encounter. Some might call these schemata “archetypes,” as C.G. Jung did, while others might call them “stereotypes.” But however we conceptualize them, we develop these things through a complex mixture of native instinct, direct personal experience, and cultural conditioning.

The visual form of the cartoon plays upon these schemata in a humorous fashion, and whether we like it or not, such schematized presentations of life can’t be considered highbrow or intellectually respectable in any meaningful way because they are indeed so psychologically nonspecific. The highbrow mentality insists upon us recognizing the individuality within everything. When we’re being highbrow, we’re engaging in lengthy interpretations of all the psychological particularities that go into this person or that person. The cartoon, on the other hand, invades your mind with deeper and sometimes darker truths that resonate with the animal senses — truths that language will always fail to capture adequately. Yessss, the cartoon hisses into your ear, tickling the cartilage with its forked tongue, that man with the speech impediment sounds utterly RIDICULOUS! Let us laugh at his misfortune! Oh, and look over there! That redheaded woman with the big boobs — she sure is SEXY! Watch as her mammoth-sized mammaries jiggle hither and thither, to and fro! And Yessssss, it continues, look at that Polack standing at the streetlamp! Observe his shabby appearance juxtaposed against his austere countenance! Say… wouldn’t it be FUNNY if he slipped on a banana peel??? Violence is a GAS!!!! And so on.

What McCloud does to divert our attention from this awkward yet undeniable truth is set up a semiotic model wherein maximum value is placed upon simple character designs because they’re more “meaningful,” since they invite us to imaginatively project ourselves upon them. But in doing so, he winds up creating a much worse problem, and it’s a problem that has plagued the comics and animation industries for the last thirty-five years or so. Although I don’t think McCloud has been solely or even majorly responsible for the growth of this problem, it is a problem that his thinking demonstrates nonetheless. Whether intentionally or not, he winds up indicating that the real value of the simple character design is in its proximity to language.

I already mentioned way back in Part I that McCloud’s “picture plane” triangle is inherently language-centric because of how it assigns maximum “meaning” to the written word, but I think that only now the implications can be fully explored. When you look at all of the most highly rated, critically appraised comics, they all seem to involve simple-looking characters, not even particularly cartoony ones, and they have deep, deep thoughts. I’ve already mentioned Maus and Persepolis, but then there’s Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (2006), various projects by Daniel Clowes, Love & Rockets by Los Bros Hernández (1981-), Craig Thompson’s Blankets (2003), and plenty of others. And look: I don’t want to attack all of these things. I think Love & Rockets is great, personally. But most of these critic-friendly comics derive their value from their writing rather than their art, to such a degree that they’ll often prompt me (and many others) to ask, “Why am I even reading this and not an actual novel?” At best, this combination of simple art mixed with psychological realism (or perhaps ideological/philosophical complexity, or some other uniquely novelistic feature) can yield something like a Love & Rockets, which has excellent character design, great visual storytelling, and shows strong awareness of both the history and potential of comics as a medium. But at worst, you wind up with, well, a gaggle of opportunistic hacks who aren’t literate enough to write a real novel and can’t draw well enough to produce a great superhero comic, or crime comic, or horror comic, or bande dessinée in the style of Blueberry or Thorgal, and so they settle on producing sheer “slice of life” mediocrity. On the whole, the desire to achieve critical respectability has harmed comics, and it unfortunately involves a kind of style that McCloud’s theorizing privileges.

Not only is the problem bad in comics, but it’s bad in animation, too. Bojack Horseman is probably the best example of what one critic has called “therapeutic realism,” a kind of novelistic approach but tailored specifically to the nuances of therapy culture and all that it stands for. And while such realism more often shows up in live action entertainment (although there’s also Tuca & Bertie, not to mention Big Mouth), Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s use of cartoon animals to convey it here pretty much goes by the Scott McCloud playbook to a tee. Simple and crude character design, maximum proximity to the word — the holy, sacred word. This is why the show can feature an episode in which the main character devotes about 90% of the runtime to self-indulgent monologuing about all of the problems he has with his mother. Hey, I have a question. If I must be subjected to such blathering nonsense, can I at least get some pretty pictures to go with it?

By my account, the value of comics isn’t necessarily in the fact that they’re cartoony (they don’t have to be cartoony to be good, and many of the best aren’t), but it is largely in the fact that comics are a lowbrow art without novelistic pretense. People don’t quite understand what this means, because when they think “lowbrow,” they think technically unimpressive or undisciplined. But this has never been the case. Monster trucks are lowbrow, but they’re also masterpieces of vehicular modification, and they require great driving skill to master. Pro wrestling is lowbrow, but it’s essentially an athletic form of theater that takes years of practice and conditioning to excel at. Death metal is lowbrow, but it involves rigorous technical musicianship and stamina, especially if you’re the drummer. Pole dancing is lowbrow, but it requires impressive calisthenic ability and proprioception, especially if you’re doing it the proper way, i.e. at a strip club in eight-inch heels. Jazz was once lowbrow,5 but the critics decided to start loving it all of a sudden, and then it became “music for musicians.” Bodybuilding is lowbrow, but it requires a lot of time spent in the gym, plus the endurance to starve yourself nearly to death, and some serious knowledge of chemistry. You get the idea.

In an interesting way, McCloud managed to create a model which actually confirms my point, because he places technical drawing skill in such stark opposition to the written word that he essentially renders the former completely optional — if not, quite frankly, undesirable. Of course, this opposition is imaginary, as I’ve stressed, but it gives us intelleckshuals all the reason in the world to turn our noses up at, say, a pornographic and ultraviolent yet stunningly impressive sci-fi comic like Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri’s Druuna (1985-2018), while we now have all the theoretical justification in the world to drool over something like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, even though any single volume of the former required far more brilliance and ingenuity to create than the entire run of the latter. In response to this mentality, I say, paraphrasing Thomas Carlyle: open thy Druuna and ignore thy Maus.6 Comic books are a visual medium, their meaning comes from images, and when comics are properly made, the image is the master, and the word, its envoy.

Alright, that’s enough rambling for today. I’ll see you later.

Edit 6/16: I tidied up some grammar and fixed some typos, made some light edits for clarity and disambiguation. Added a few hyperlinks.

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog dedicated to violently cramming the precepts of media ecology together with those of nonstructuralist semiotics.

Some quick preliminary housekeeping: you may have noticed I’ve unpublished last week’s entry and taken it off the blog. That’s because I decided it sucks, basically. It was an attempt to synthesize what should have been two different ideas entirely, and it wound up being kind of a disjointed mess, riddled with factual errors and structural problems. Thanks to the people who called me out on it, thus confirming my own suspicions that it, in fact, blew chunks. I’ll try to revisit the topics it covered sometime later, though, since I do think it had some solid points. Can’t win ‘em all! Alright, now let’s get back to business…

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I. Contentious Lists, Pop Culture

We’re now living at a time during which our legacy publications have discovered a neat trick to keep the clicks coming: create a “best of list” associated with some aspect of culture, and then bask in the attention as everyone fights about it. Here are some examples. In 2023, The Rolling Stone updated their “200 Greatest Singers of All Time” list from 2008, removing Bob Dylan from the #7 spot and inserting singers such as Mariah Carey and Beyonce Knowles into the top 10. Everyone then argued about it, as they surely did back in 2008. This sort of thing happens often with The Rolling Stone. But we’ve also seen other similar lists emerge from even more greatly respected publications in recent months. For instance, The Guardian put out a 100 Best Novels list in May of 2026, which generated a lot of attention — so much so that they put out an additional article about how much buzz it got. A month before that, the NY Times put out a list of the Top 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters, and it managed to annoy almost everyone because it featured several notoriously unambitious pop artists while neglecting more widely respected songwriters and lyricists with longstanding accolades such as Billy Joel or Todd Rundgren; or maybe Tracy Chapman, or Erykah Badu. One particularly controversial entry was Young Thug, a rapper who doesn’t create his own backing music, instead leaving the task to DJs and producers (like nearly all rappers), and who has claimed in interviews that he never listens to any music at all besides his own and Lil Wayne’s.

It cannot be overstated how much lists excite everyone. Social media has turned them into centerpieces for endless debates and posturing competitions, and so we can expect to see more mainstream newspapers pumping out such lists. To be clear, though, these lists are not just being produced for economic reasons. These lists are also conscious attempts to change the minds of the educated into adopting different criteria for cultural value, and in doing so, lay the groundwork for a future, more definitive canon to be taught in some of our higher institutions. Because, yes, make no mistake about it: these lists are ultimately groping toward the establishment of cultural canons — bodies of work that everyone should know if they want to belong to the culture. It seems unlikely that a frivolous and mostly ephemeral mumble-rapper like Young Thug will ever be considered an essential artist among serious purveyors of American songwriting, but provocative lists like these are where the tastemakers and would-be cultural authorities can experiment a bit and see what works.

“Canon wars” (we should really call them “battles”) were a major fixture of the broader culture war from the 1980s and 1990s, and they were highly ideological in nature. Most of the fights people in academic offices and lecture halls were having concerned the canon of great books from western civilization, and they dealt with the question of whether or not the canon should be expanded to be more representative of minority voices — racial and otherwise. And since then, amid the west’s longstanding state of permanent cultural war, most of the arguments about pop culture resemble miniature versions of these academic canon wars. But since nowadays colleges feature courses on pop culture, these smaller debates about “best of [whatever]” lists can still influence what young people are taught at their generic backwater “State U” universities, if only in a secondary manner (like through some individual professor allowing himself to be influenced by the NY Times and its embrace of “poptimism”).

II. Canons as Tools of Collective Mnemotechnics

The reason these pop culture list and canon debates get so contentious in part is that canons are inseparable from identitarian concerns. By their nature, canons are tools of what the late Egyptologist Jan Assmann called “collective mnemotechnics,”1 which we can define as externalized, institutionalized practices through which distinct and self-conscious groups of people remember themselves, preserve a sense of common history, and stay mindful of their shared destiny. Collective mnemotechnic tools and techniques can include rituals, prayers, symbolic taboos (such as dietary restrictions), monuments, memorials, holidays, ceremonial clothing and uniform, and more — but the key with them is that they require institutions and deliberate maintenance to keep from disappearing, and therefore, they fall to some extent under the political domain.

The idea of the canon originally referred to the establishment of the Bible’s official texts, but it can be extended to other formations of official bodies of writing that have occurred cross-culturally. The Upanishads are the canon of texts that the Vedanta is based on, the Pali Tipitaka is the canon that forms Theravada Buddhism, the Analects of Confucius is another canon, and so are the Quran and the Hadith. What has made these kinds of canons so impactful is that they allow for the production of exegetical writings produced by scholars, which expand, refine, or clarify certain passages in the original texts. These different interpretations can sometimes disagree with one another, creating lively scholarly debate. Other times, interpretations can build upon each other, branching outward into uncharted territory. Thus, canons can serve as the foundation for monasteries or universities filled with exegetes whose writings spur on intellectual activity, creating more writings that expand outward in a cumulative fashion, and all of this activity serves to exalt the greatness of the original canon rather than attempt to contradict it. Canons can even lend inspiration to secular poetry or literary fiction, giving artists a tradition with which to interact creatively. But above all, they preserve a culture’s collective memory, keeping that culture from losing itself and allowing its identity to dissolve in a sea of undisciplined, chaotic thought.

However, while they still maintain a collective mnemotechnic function, the original role of canons has changed in the modern world. Whereas they could originally function as the basis for entire religions, if not civilizations, their role has since been diminished. Creating a new canon for something (anything) will have almost zero chance of forming the basis of a new civilization — the world is pretty full, just about everything has been modernized (even the few hunting-gathering and horticultural tribes that remain still rely on the modern world in various ways), and you can’t start anything new from scratch. We thus create canons now for different purposes.

In the case of highbrow culture, canons often facilitate a sense of national identity, though in the Anglophone world, the maintenance of a literary or philosophical canon is a far more complicated matter than it might seem at first glance. For instance, in the United States, the professor John Erskine pioneered the Great Books program during the 1920s, and it was partly designed to serve the American national identity, though he didn’t frame it in such stark terms. Erskine’s viewpoint was shot through with liberal assumptions, and it was distinctly more cosmopolitan in nature than the assumptions behind the formation of other literary canons elsewhere in the world. Erskine treated America as the outcome of great ideas from many different western cultures, all of which could contribute to the moral righteousness of intelligent, rational thinking (he perceived intelligence as essentially moral). And this attitude was indeed quite a contrast from when the American universities were adopting England’s canon of specifically English literature decades before. The American universities in that case had started from the assumption that America is the continuation of a distinctly Anglo-Saxon ethno-cultural tradition, but over time, this assumption lost out. Erskine’s more liberal viewpoint began to prevail, though not without some controversy, and by the 1950s, the New Critics came along and completely removed all identitarian aspects of the English literary canon, aiming for a standard of pure aestheticism by treating the quality of a literary work as an objective trait.2 It was not long before schools of critical theory could emerge and explode the whole thing.

Given the lack of a distinct, straightforward identity underpinning America’s canonical selections from that point onward, it is not hard at all to understand why its cultural canons of great books (whether fully international, broadly western, or simply English) have drawn so much contention. If you look at America’s specifically English literary canon, for instance — or at least the books that have been taught to high school and university students as essential works of literature — the selections have shifted incessantly since the 1970s. Meanwhile, the Spanish, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Russian, and especially French literary canons have remained pretty much intact with very little change. The American great books canons have invited too many challenges to stay intact, and most of these challenges have been explicitly identitarian in nature, typically coming from racial, ethnic, or even religious groups calling for more representation. This is probably why they have been so powerful, actually. Again — canons have a collective mnemotechnic function, and black Americans form a collective, as do other immigrant diaspora groups, not to mention populations of formerly colonized regions. When they demand representation, the purpose of a canon isn’t lost on them.

III. Canons and Voluntaristic Identity

But there are other canons that have stemmed from entirely different sets of assumptions. If you consider high western concert music (you know, classical music), it didn’t really get its own distinct canon until the nineteenth century, and the canon was formed on strictly aesthetic principles from the beginning. Organized music had itself gone through a series of varied purposes and justifications as civilization had progressed, but it had never been simply “music for its own sake.” Early on, its institutionalized presentation formed an essential part of religious or spiritual life, with its compositions often guided by metaphysical or eschatological assumptions. But after a long process of secularization in the nineteenth century, music was treated as an expression of national identity. We call this the time of musical nationalism, in which composers were thought to embody the Russian spirit, or the German, or the Finnish, or whatever. But there was also a distinctly pan-European selection of pieces being formed during this time that represented the best of what music qua music had to offer, and this list of great works formed the basis of today’s international classical concert repertoire. Around this time, the idea also formed that a piece of music has an almost Platonic essence and each performance of it is merely an imperfect representation of it. Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is simply Beethoven’s 9th (preserved on paper, of course), while Toscanini’s or Bernstein’s versions of it can only be understood as representations.

Although there have been some mostly limpwrist attempts to “shake up” our assumptions as to what constitutes great classical music (e.g. nowadays, BBC Music magazine will often spotlight random woman or minority composers who usually aren’t that impressive), the international repertoire has remained pretty much the same, and people largely share the same or similar understandings as to what great music is.3 There are a few reasons for why such a non-identity-based canon could survive, and I’ll sketch out a few:

1. The same principles that form the western musical canon also treat instrumental music as its highest form, since it represents music shorn of all ideological or sociopolitical qualities. Music is understood as a matter of pure form, and while literature always involves ideas that can “spill out” into ideological or sociopolitical terrain, music doesn’t do this as much.

2. There are economic considerations at play. While the western music canon isn’t exactly the same thing as the international repertoire, they’re pretty closely linked, and you cannot just throw a new composer into the repertoire so easily. A bunch of professors can start to pretend that Toni Morrison’s Beloved is one of the greatest American novels of all time pretty easily without much risk. But if you wanted to add a work by a new composer onto a concert program, it would require finding a conductor, training the orchestra, and selling some concert tickets. The wheels of change must turn more slowly.

3. Thinking about classical music just simply isn’t required for daily life — it isn’t even required for the members of the striver class to demonstrate their high status anymore. And if it isn’t required in those areas, then there’s not as much reason to fuss over it.

Then, there’s one final reason that closely corresponds to number three, and it’s this: because classical music has become a completely optional aspect of society for pretty much everyone involved in it, it actually does have an identitarian component to it, but in a counterintuitive way. The canon of great classical music pieces establishes “classical music person” as its own identity group. So, in other words, the canon is there for people who want to become classical music guys and take that on as a part of who they are on some essential level.

Now, when we canonize the various discharges and secretions from the wide world of popular culture, we’re essentially doing the same thing as with classical music. Here, we’re engaging in a practice of collective mnemotechnics for people who have taken up a branch of mass culture and adopted it into themselves, turning it into a part of who they are. It’s true that classical music is highbrow while pop culture is lowbrow, but they both possess an optionality not found in the canons of the past. In fact, the arguments about canons within pop culture are a more intense affair, since popular culture inspires genuine interest while classical music is largely propped up by the state. A canonical list of must-see films is essentially a tool designed to preserve the collective memory and identity of cineastes and assorted film dorks. A canonical list of death metal albums is for people who want to take up the identity of the death metal dweeb. A canonical list of must-read graphic novels is a way of strengthening the identity of comic book geeks. And speaking of comic book geeks, if you’re trying to become fully up-to-speed on the lore of Marvel or DC comics in particular, you need to know the official canon of comics that contribute to the greater storyline of the Marvel or DC Universes (or multiverses, or whatever) — a different kind of canon, but no less significant.

If you’re fully immersed in one of these subcultures, then debates about canons can feel immensely important, but at the same time, it isn’t exactly difficult to understand why people have stepped out of these worlds altogether, even after a period of heavy entrenchment. One reason for what’s been known as the “woke” era (let’s say the mid-2010s to the mid-2020s) is that cultural prestige declined with the growth of the internet and the explosion of internet piracy, and thus a pretty good chunk of yesterday’s vinyl-recording-collecting hipsters turned into the finger-wagging moral scolds of today. When they switched over from seeking status in their record collections to seeking status through political grandstanding, it simply felt like more was at stake.

But why have these aesthetics-based, opt-in identities formed in the first place? Well, much like the reason for why people exit from them, the reason for their proliferation in the first place is also not particularly hard to understand. With the inventions of the phonograph, the radio, the cinema, and the television, there was a concomitant explosion of artistic and cultural products associated with the various electronic media, and these products could facilitate new identities mainly rooted in aesthetic enjoyment rather than religion or ethnicity. In fact, the explosion of information actively degraded the concentrated power of religion and ethnicity. Clothing also assisted in the formation of these identities — probably a response to the depersonalizing standardization of clothing across the industrialized world. In 1964, from his Gesture and Speech, Andre Leroi-Gourhan had this to say on the subject:

Dress, truly the symbol of humanness, is a precise measure of ethnic and social organization, and what is happening to dress at present deserves careful attention. In Europe and America the standardization of dress has reached an advanced stage; masculine and feminine costume hardly varies from one social class to another except by its greater or lesser costliness and the immediacy of its adaptation to fash­ion. This may denote across-the-board social advancement, the disappearance of social barriers, and higher levels of culture and information, but it is also a sign that the individual is losing his or her links with the framework of the group within which he or she is personally integrated. […] The standardization of dress symbols may mean acquiring a planetary consciousness, but it also means losing the relative indepen­dence of your ethnic persona. The disappearance of carnival disguises is another symptom of the same development.

Understood this way, what happened to clothing in the twentieth century was a sign of man’s massification, but the advent of the flapper, the (1950s) hipster, the punk, the hessian, the hippie, the disco guy, the (2000s) hipster, et al. have amounted to small acts of resistance rooted in consumer consciousness.

The question that remains, then, is what may happen to all of these opt-in identities as time advances. The answer isn’t altogether clear. As I said at the beginning of this blog post, cultural lists continue to fascinate people and spark up heated debates. Even for relatively niche cultural areas, lists of things from them will inspire outside attention, perhaps because a “best of” list suggests an intrusion into the broader culture, as though the minds of the young might somehow become impacted by these normally avoidable subcultures. Nevertheless, these lists only resemble canons in a nascent state, and it isn’t clear if any of these opt-in subcultures will ever find a way to impose themselves upon the broader culture, the mainstream, in a meaningful way. At times, I wonder if it could happen. Could classical music snobbery somehow gain truly cult-like dimensions, with classical music starting to carry its own ideological or metaphysical precepts — maybe some kind of religion with a greater array of collective mnemotechnic artifacts and techniques beyond the existence of a respectable canon of composers/compositions and some attenuated penetration into the western university system? It seems that the answer is no, since the art form has refined itself into an advanced position of state-funded irrelevance.

The popular or lowbrow art forms, on the other hand, seem to be a different matter entirely. Could a group of extreme metalheads form some kind of hallucinogenic mushroom cult and start influencing society in a hidden, subterranean manner? Could the “Disney Adults” somehow start to mobilize as a new ersatz-religion? They do already have two distinct sites for quasi-religious pilgrimages… Could Japanese animation start to become an integral part of neo-fascist teenage thought? That is, could an ultra-decadent canon emerge that blends the works of Yukio Mishima together with Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Urotsukodoji: Legend of the Overfiend? Basically, the question I’m asking is, could it be possible for these relatively inert, consumer-based identity groups to one day flip over, stop offering the simulated feeling of tribal belonging, and start to become the real thing, i.e. central outposts of identitarian activity, with their own institutionalized set of rituals, array of monuments, uniforms, and even political/religious insistences?

These are always the possibilities that start to emerge, however faint they might be, when lists and canons permeate the social space — particularly those associated with popular rather than highbrow culture. And if that question from the last paragraph seems ridiculous, understand that to some extent it is already happening. There is some sort of continuity, for instance, between the Democrat party and the fanatical celebrity-worship of pop singers like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé Knowles, and the NY Times’s list of the greatest living American songwriters has, to some extent, helped form the bridge between those seemingly disparate spheres. What has been going on for the last dozen years or so has caused Walter Benjamin’s concept of “the aestheticization of politics” to feel downright quaint. Yet it seems as though society has not become sufficiently fragmented for anything too fruitful to emerge in a contrasting direction. Regardless, the manner in which the internet blends together aesthetic and ideological currents seems to offer interesting possibilities for the future. Even if it is a distant future.

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog whose ideas largely stem from media ecology and non-structuralist semiotics.

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I.

A while back, I wrote a post about how language is not a fiat currency. It was a response to the oft-stated claim that if someone overuses some word in a sociopolitical context, then eventually its meaning will go away or become greatly diminished. When I was growing up, the claim was typically, “If people keep accusing us of being racists, then eventually the word will lose its sting, and no one will care about the accusation!” My contention was (and remains) that words don’t inflate in value through overuse that way, because language doesn’t work like a currency with its value determined through supply and demand under conditions of scarcity.

So, how does language actually work? Well, consider all the people who accuse the mildly insensitive of racism rather than reserving the word for only the hateful bigots. When a word starts to cover more and more semantic ground, it ideologically reinforces the importance of the concept racism = bad. It doesn’t particularly matter if the word is being used too liberally to maintain a consistent definition, because that’s not really the point. Its persistence and ubiquity serves as a reminder that racism is the worst thing there is, and therefore the worse the racism, the worse the person.

One might object, what happens when you’ve used the word “racist” to describe totally normal or relatable thoughts and feelings for long enough? What do you even say when it’s an actual racist who blatantly discriminates against blacks in the workplace? Well, then it’s simple: you call him a racist. Maybe you throw some qualifier in there like “literal” or “actual,” but that’s about all you need. When people make the accusation of “racism,” it’s like when a schizophrenic hallucinates something happening. If the schizophrenic then actually sees the real thing happening, he’ll typically say something like, “No, it’s real this time!” because some latent part of his mind actually does recognize the difference between reality and fantasy. So it goes for these overused words.

The basic idea of my post was that language doesn’t just have a signifying function but also a mnemotechnic one. If I’m constantly blathering about racist this, racist that, and all of my friends are doing the same, we’re reminding each other of what really counts in this life; what we need to stay vigilant against. We’re keeping our values at the forefront of our conscious minds. This is a function of language that we often don’t recognize.

Now, at the time I wrote that post, I focused on the word racist… right when it was starting to lose its power to affect public opinion. Of course, it hasn’t lost its power as an accusation, and it matters tremendously in academic, corporate HR, and legal contexts (such as when determining the motive of a crime). But in the court of public opinion, it has indeed lost much of its sting, particularly among Republican voters. So, how did that happen? Some will say that indeed the prophecies came true: people kept saying the word over and over again, and then finally its value inflated and it could no longer retain the same semantic punch that it once did. Much like the papiermark during the Weimar Republic, or the Hungarian pengő following World War II, the word “racism” finally hyperinflated and lost all of its power. Never mind that it is still incredibly powerful within certain milieux, particularly those whose inhabitants discuss it and think about it most often. Never mind all that.

But if you really do think that this shift in public opinion was all because of word inflation, here are some more plausible alternative explanations for why the accusation of racism seems to matter less nowadays:

• The ideology around racism itself has shifted and become more politically polarized, with Republicans simply caring about it less in America. Although most people overall were supportive of Black Lives matter when it was happening from the years 2014-2020 (or at least that’s what they told pollsters), its memory has clearly grown more sour, with public approval between 2020 and 2025 dropping from 67% to 52%, while the number of people with actively hostile views toward the movement has grown. Similarly, from 2024 to 2025, Republicans who feel that black Americans face at least some discrimination declined from 66% to 55%. Skepticism towards DEI initiatives has also grown.

• The gatekeeper institutions that are largely responsible for hurting people’s reputations over racism — namely, the ADL and the SPLC — have lost a ton of credibility, particularly among the left. Regarding the SPLC, founder Morris Dees’s personal sleaziness finally caught up with him. This is interesting, because progressives had been criticizing the organization’s financial corruption since the late 1980s, but Dees eventually was forced out of the organization personally for allegedly discriminating against nonwhite staffers and sexually harassing the young females. Meanwhile, the ADL has lost much of its credibility following the October 7th attack in Gaza, with progressive publications like The Nation subjecting them to strong criticism, while progressive campaigns against them like DropTheADL have formed. Without these gatekeeping (some might say “shakedown”) organizations to credibly monitor racism, there is less organized power behind such public accusations.

• Social media has recently started allowing for more freedom of expression with Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg’s pledge to use less censorship across his social media platforms. This shift has perhaps signaled to people that what was once called “racism” is not so terrible and will thus elicit less negative consequences.

• Crowdfunding seems to have proven valuable in disincentivizing people from “cancelling” people through viral racism accusations. The 2025 case of Shiloh Hendrix, who called a small child a racial slur for stealing from her child and was caught on video, has been particularly illustrative. While she is being prosecuted by the state for saying the racial slur, she did crowd-fund nearly a million dollars when someone tried to “cancel” her for it on social media. For many of her backers, the rationale was simple: send a message that when someone tries to organize an online mob to harass someone else, the mob victim will get paid lots of money by the mob’s ideological enemies.

• And lastly, people now seem to have been distracted by a new bipartisan moral concern that isn’t racism…

II.

Ten years ago, back in 2016, the science-fiction author and blogger Vox Day posted this on his blog:

If they call you a racist, you simply call them a pedophile. After all, it’s something worse than a racist, and you need to show everyone observing the exchange that you’re always on the offensive. It’s how you “maintain your frame” in a confrontation and win the rhetorical joust. Doesn’t really matter if the accusation is true or makes any sense. Just go ahead and call them a pedophile.

OK… listen. Say what you will about his ethics, but Vox Day was conjuring up the American cultural zeitgeist for probably the next thirty years. At least.

In all likelihood, V.D. was inspired by the viral success of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which was starting to become prominent around that time. A widely-read Reddit post dated November 4 had alleged that Comet Ping Pong was involved with a child sex trafficking ring involving Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, and the theory had been cooking on the 4chan forum for at least a few days beforehand. Vox Day was reading the cultural moment. And again, whatever his faults, he pretty much understood what was on the horizon. Consider how the next several years went:

• In 2018, a year after Mr. Day’s post, QAnon, or just “Q” for short, first emerged on 4chan, then quickly migrated to the 8chan forum, a somehow even less moderated version of 4chan. QAnon presented a theory in which a global Satanic pedophile elite was engaging in a worldwide sex trafficking as well as adrenochrome harvesting operation. Donald Trump, according to Q’s account, was a covert operative preparing to bring down this pedophilic elite via a series of military tribunals (for some reason, Q believed that most of the military officials within the deep state were morally unblemished, and only a few bad actors had already left or were soon going to leave).

• In the summer of 2018, some boys from a soccer team got trapped in the Tham Luang cave in Thailand. Elon Musk claimed that he could hire engineers from SpaceX to build a miniature submarine to help rescue the boys. A British cave diver named Vernon Unsworth called this idea impractical during a CNN interview and accused Musk of engaging in a PR stunt. Musk responded by calling him “pedo guy” on Twitter. He later doubled down and referred to him as a child rapist in an email to Buzzfeed. There was no basis to these claims, of course.

• A year after that, in 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges. The /pol/ subforum on 4chan then learned about Jeffrey Epstein and his child molestation allegations from 2005 and started cogitating together. The information about Epstein quickly became absorbed into Pizzagate lore, and in the same year, the alt-right podcast Fash the Nation dedicated an episode to the matter. QAnon quickly scooped up all this info, and the global pedophile elite theory began to incorporate both Epstein as well as Pizzagate. It was all coming together pretty well.

• Starting in the same year, Cyntha Koeter and Janet Ossebaard put together the Fall of Cabal conspiracy theory “documentary.” Completed in 2020, The Fall of Cabal is a series of slide-show videos with a voiceover providing a summary of the QAnon posts on 8chan. It includes information on Epstein and Pizzagate, but also some information about pedophilia in Hollywood (which is actually pretty well documented) as well as some wacky stuff about Hitler, cannibalism, Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, the NXIVM sex cult, the theory that 50,000 indigenous Canadians were raped, murdered, and buried in mass graves under churches, the “spirit cooking” art of Marina Abramović… and more!1 The three-hour “documentary” is altogether a pretty loose hang, weaving in and out from one thread to another, often neglecting to tie it all up into a neat package. But pedophilia is a clearly recurring theme throughout.

• In 2021, the popular social media account LibsofTikTok started accusing gay and transgender activists on social media of “grooming” kids, referring to the practice in which pedophiles or sex traffickers build trust with their victims, essentially to prepare them to accept forthcoming abuse without being able to prevent it or alert any authorities.

• In 2022, the insult “groomer” became wildly popular among right-wingers, in large part because of the practice of “drag queen story hours,” in which drag queens read books to small children. When Ron DeSantis introduced the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, which sought to prevent school discussion on gender or sexual identity from teachers to children up to the third grade, its conservative advocates endorsed it as an “anti-grooming” bill.

• In the same year, Gays Against Groomers was formed, an organization which (as far as I can tell) comprises homosexual conservatives who oppose progressive legislation regarding transsexuals, particularly laws enabling minors to “change their sex” or receive double mastectomy surgery.

• In 2024, Kendrick Lamar released “Not Like Us,” in which he rapped — with no evidence whatsoever — that Drake and his record label are “certified pedophiles.” It became a major hit, and Lamar would later perform it during a Superbowl halftime show.

• In 2025, Trump indicated on social media that the Epstein Files (a vast collection of investigative records related to Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes) do not contain any legally actionable information, denied the existence of a “client list” of child rapists, and claimed that the Epstein conspiracy theory (i.e., about Epstein enticing his clients to rape children, and then taking photos of them to use as blackmail on behalf of the state of Israel) is a “Democrat hoax.” The DNC Twitter account posted on June 5, 2025, “What is Trump hiding? Release the Epstein files.”

• At some point around 2025 to 2026, the “Ripped Redneck” online shop started selling “Pedo Hunter” hats.

• In February of 2026, Bill Maher apologized to QAnon and declared that he agrees with them about massive international pedophile networks. He did say that he feels that the Democrats don’t, in fact, eat the babies, but thankfully, Lauren Boebert was there to correct him.

• In March of 2026, world-famous climate change activist Greta Thunberg offhandedly called Donald Trump a pedophile while discussing a seemingly unrelated subject.

• In April of 2026, MSNBC’s Joy Reid declared that QAnon was right and that there is, in fact, an “international pedophile conspiracy.”

Meanwhile, at the level of vulgar discourse, it’s pretty much acceptable to accuse anyone of pedophilia for whatever reason at this point. At least, it’s acceptable among the general public. Vox Day’s rhetorical strategy has won.

To be sure, many high-profile pedophilia accusations have turned out to be entirely right, while attempts to discredit them have been wrong. The documentary Capturing the Friedmans (2003) is a good example of a pseudointellectual attempt to add false ambiguity to a rather straightforward pedophilia case from the 1980s in which a father and his teenage son ran a “computer class” in their basement during which they committed vile acts of child abuse. Additionally, some accusations have taken forever to generate a proper investigation, like the lead singer from the alt-rock band Lostprophets [sic] Ian Watkins, who sexually assaulted at least two babies (and likely more children) yet was only arrested and tried after repeated accusations from various women between 2008 and 2012. Then, there’s Jimmy Savile, a notorious pedophilic celebrity who died a free man. There’s also the sexual abuse scandal in Rotherham, England, which lasted from the late 1980s into 2013, and which stands as a particularly potent example of how the fear of being called “racist” prevented justice from being served. Lastly, the rampant child abuse in the Catholic Church is well-documented, and what we know about child abuse in Hollywood seems like it could be only the tip of the iceberg. There is a reason that we should take pedophilia accusations seriously.

But of course, everyone baselessly throwing around the accusation knows this. And curiously enough, I’ve yet to see anyone show up to say, “If you keep calling everyone a pedophile, then the word will lose all meaning!” This is a talking point that would regularly surface surrounding the accusation of “racism,” though not so much now. They both are, after all, essentially thought crimes that are impossible to prove one way or the other, so the accusation works in a structurally similar manner. Yet most of the people critical of these wanton pedophile accusations seem to be more concerned about innocent people being wrongfully accused than the potency of the word itself.

Perhaps everyone is starting to slowly understand how language works better than they did before. Such understanding would be in part a consequence of our electronic environment, in which the abundance of digital information discourages us from having a scarcity-based mindset when it comes to the use of words. It is pretty easy to see that rather than causing everyone to care less about pedophilia, the word’s overuse coincides with a heightened sensitivity about it that will probably remain for a long time, at least at the popular level. Concomitant with this development is an increasingly sexually conservative temperament in the western world, though it is a conservatism that seems to place more responsibility upon men and less upon women.

It is also possible, of course, that concerns over pedophilia occur in waves, and soon everyone in society will decided that racism must go back to being the accusation of choice. The “Satanic panic” during the 1980s was largely a reflection of societal concerns over the safety of children, and pedophilia accusations were a major part of it (the McMartin preschool trial being perhaps the preeminent example). But then, it just kinda fizzled out after official investigations failed to produce any persuasive evidence for its most salacious claims. However, the Satanic panic was also the last great hoo-rah of a time in which fundamentalist and evangelical Christians had the power to tip the scales of widespread public opinion — something they’ve simply lacked since the 1990s. Today’s cultural obsession with pedophilia might instead resemble the hostility toward pedophiles that develop in prisons, which are standardized, heavily controlled, multicultural total institutions in which no one can claim to be morally upstanding.

Whatever the case, whenever our current “pedophile” moment blows over, it won’t be because the word itself lost value. It will be because of a change in collective attitude, or just some other “Current Thing” to keep everyone occupied. I’ll say it again: language is not a fiat currency.

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that’s theoretically rooted in media ecology and non-structuralist semiotics, believe it or not.

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I. Intro - Beer and Hops

I recently finished reading Tom Acitelli’s The Audacity of Hops (2017 ed.), a history of craft beer in America. It isn’t a bad book in that it provides a thorough account of all the major developments that contributed to the rise of craft beer as we know it: Fritz Maytag’s work with Anchor Brewing, the spread of home brewing, the slow growth of microbreweries throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of Samuel Adams and contract brewing, the more rapid growth of microbreweries in the 90s, the formation of the Brewers’ Guild, the creation of the Great American Beer Festival, and so on. But the book mostly focuses on the business side of the craft beer phenomenon, only giving a partial glimpse into craft beer as a cultural phenomenon that reached its apex in the 2010s before fading into the ambience of American life. I say “ambience” because even as people now declare that the millennial hipster urbanite’s moment in the sun is over, the landscape of alcohol consumption has still been changed forever. As I’m writing this, brewpubs are common just about everywhere in America, and grocery stores all across the country carry a large amount of local beer in a wide variety of styles and alcohol percentages. Two craft beer tycoons, Ken Grossman of Sierra Nevada and Jim Koch of Samuel Adams, have even become billionaires. All of this would have been unthinkable in the 1980s, which suggests to me that whatever we might think about the beverage itself — or the often irritating culture surrounding it — craft beer has won.

Still, though, the book is called The Audacity of Hops. Yes, it’s a clever pun on the Obama book, but it has “hops” in the title, and a huge part of the craft beer explosion had to do indeed with the many fascinating possibilities and innovative techniques that breweries were discovering with regard to the humulus lupulus plant. Acitelli mentions that the hop-forward IPA (“India Pale Ale”) is the most popular style of craft beer, and he does passingly explain that the Cascade and Centennial hop varietals (first commercialized in 1972 and 1990, respectively) were necessary for the growth of the “West Coast” IPA, a beer style that put a strong emphasis on bitterness complemented by piney, floral, and citrusy flavors. But he doesn’t give enough attention to just how crucial the selective cross-breeding of hops really has been throughout the growth of the industry, especially in the 21st century. The hop farmers who were quietly working in the background, spending sometimes decades just to create a single new strain, are the unsung heroes of the craft beer explosion largely missing from Acitelli’s account.

The book first came out in 2013, and then Acitelli wrote an updated edition in 2017, mainly to chronicle all of the big corporate buyouts that were happening at the time, so perhaps we can forgive him for this oversight. But consider this: usually when anti-craft-beer people think about what a “craft beer” looks like nowadays, they envision an opaque, viscous, and maybe even sludgy yellow-orange liquid with some sediment at the bottom and about a finger’s-width of foam at the top, sitting in a pretentious tulip glass being ogled by some overfed bearded urbanite — a beverage sure to be cloying, heavy, and hard to drink more than two sips’ worth. This is a style known as the “New England” or “Hazy IPA,” and it is distinctly different from the West Coast IPA. Whereas West Coast IPAs are bitter, piney, clean, and dry, New England IPAs are slightly sweet, fruity, turbid, and oily. Whatever one might prefer (and Americans, not being big fans of bitterness, seem to prefer the latter), the New England style could not have been possible without the new hop strains that had been debuting on the market, particularly from around 2008-2013.

When New England IPAs first showed up around the early 2010s, many craft beer experts were at first bewildered. Cloudiness was understood as a sign of sloppiness and poor fermentation practices (perhaps this is why Acitelli does not mention them in the 2017 edition at all). But it soon became clear that the cloudiness came mainly from a protein-heavy grain bill, and that the style is actually quite hard to do well because of the beer’s heightened sensitivity to oxygen exposure during the brewing process. Once people figured out the technique for brewing these “Hazy IPAs,” they came to dominate the market, forcing many of the West Coast IPA specialists to do their own version of one just to meet the consumer demand. If Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, and Columbus hops had still been the most flavorful kinds available, then this new type of IPA likely wouldn’t have taken off. But as it happens, a number of new hops had just been put onto the market, such as

• Amarillo (released 2003)

• Citra (released 2008)

• Galaxy (released 2009)

• El Dorado (released 2010)

• Mosaic (released 2012)

• Azacca (released 2013)

• Vic Secret (released 2013)

• Idaho 7 (released 2015)

And these hops didn’t really taste floral, herbal, or grassy (as with the classic Old World hops), nor were they piney, earthy, or citrusy like a grapefruit (as with the West Coast style). Instead, they invited comparisons to mango, papaya, passion fruit, pineapple, lychee, white grape, peach, plum, berries, and sweeter citrus fruits like clementines. Such hops certainly were being used in West Coast IPAs, and their “tropical fruit” flavors were detectable in that style, but New England IPAs added these hops at later stages in the brewing process so that the flavors found in their oils would be more noticeable. Given the timing of when these hop strains were released for commercial use, it is unsurprising that the New England IPA would eclipse the West Coast IPA in popularity, since it more fully exploited the hops’ potential. The brewmasters at places like The Alchemist, Trillium Brewing, or Tree House Brewing Company may have been able to perfect the technique required to bring out the sticky and resinous juiciness latent within these new hops… but just as important in craft beer, if not moreso, were the actual guys who created those hops in the first place. These were the guys on the periphery, quietly working at various farms located in North America, Australia, and New Zealand to breed more palatable strains into existence — guys like Jason Perrault, the most well-known name in that field, and someone whom Tony Magee, the founder of Lagunitas brewing, once called the most important person in American craft beer.

II. Artistic Expressions of Selective Breeding

Hops are just one example of how the relatively hidden process of selective breeding can inform consumer habits, even though the practice isn’t always given its due. Selective breeding is an interesting practice, because it’s rarely examined as a standalone activity, and it’s often a neglected aspect when we think about nutrition or even domesticated animals. Selective breeding is why your parents remember brussels sprouts tasting harsh and bitter, though ever since the end of the 1990s they have become quite pleasant. It is also the reason why corn has gotten a lot sweeter. It’s also why pit bulls have contributed to 66% of all deaths by dog bite from 2005 through 2019, while other dogs are comparatively quite wimpy. It is something humans have been doing for millennia, pretty much since the dawn of agriculture in fact, and it has radically changed the genetic makeup of the watermelon, the eggplant, the carrot, and the apple over long expanses of time, as well as the horse, the donkey, and the canine. However, it was not refined to a precise science until the Europeans more or less perfected the practice during the 1800s.

Since then, selective breeding has evolved into a kind of art form that treats the genes of living organisms as the media with which to experiment, and this is where it becomes a point of fascination. For me, anyhow. About a year ago, the poet Christopher Sandbatch remarked on social media that selective breeding is the great art form of the Anglo-Saxons, and for a good while I’ve grown to suspect that he is correct. While selective breeding for food is fairly humdrum, goal-oriented, and commercially widespread — and not a particularly Anglo-Saxon practice, since the guy who changed the flavor of brussels sprouts was a Dutch scientist, not an Englishman — there are other forms of selective breeding that don’t merely concern the improvement of essential fruits and vegetables, and they veer off into the realm of the aesthetic rather than the utilitarian. Here are just a few categories.

Foods that aren’t particularly necessary

I’ve already discussed the topic of hops, and it’s a good example of an herb that isn’t really necessary for the survival of civilization, since it pretty much only goes into beer and a non-alcoholic alternative called “hop water” (its bitterness overpowers basically everything else). But hop farmers have often worked with university-sponsored agriculture programs or on for-profit farms, and thus there’s less individual passion or obsession associated with the process. There are better examples of how hobbyists have used selective breeding to produce edible plants that were never really needed, and which no one even asked for.

Take, for instance, the Carolina Reaper hot pepper. From 2013-2023, this was officially judged the hottest pepper in the world, and it was developed over about ten years by the American breeder Ed Currie, a former stockbroker with near-suicidal depression who decided to turn his life around and moved to Fort Mill, South Carolina, the town in which his parents lived. There, he started to experiment with hot peppers in 2001, and he soon created the PuckerButt pepper farm in 2003. It’s now the largest organic pepper farm in America, even though Currie at first treated it as more of a side hobby, working at a bank until 2012. The Carolina Reaper was an early project of Currie’s, and he created it by breeding a Naga pepper he got from a doctor in Pakistan with a Red Habanero that a co-worker gave him from the Island of Saint Vincent. After about ten years of cultivation (it takes about 8-10 generations of breeding to stabilize distinct characteristics), the Carolina Reaper was born, and two years later, it entered the Guinness Book of World Records.

Currie learned about horticulture from his mother, who was a master gardener, and she taught him the art of cross-breeding with flowers like the Iris and the Lily. As Currie grew older, he experimented with selectively breeding marijuana (producing results he called “dangerous”), and then, after giving up drugs and alcohol entirely, he realized that hot peppers could give him a similar feeling of euphoria that hard substances once did. From that point on, he became obsessed with trying to create the hottest peppers in the world, and it has worked out pretty well for him. As I said before, the Carolina Reaper was the hottest pepper on record until 2023. The pepper that surpassed it, Pepper X, was also an Ed Currie original.

Gardens and flowers

So far, we’ve been looking at quite recent examples of selective breeding, and they’re products that demonstrate America’s unique preference for gastronomic extremism. But selective breeding in plants has been used for purely aesthetic reasons rather than dietary ones, and the garden is where the Anglo-Saxon practice of selective breeding has most clearly been able to showcase its artistry. In the nineteenth century, both the French and the English were heavily involved in selectively breeding flowers to make them look prettier, but the French were more prominent in that area for a good while. The Hybrid Tea rose (the kind that most of us picture when imagining one) was a nineteenth century French innovation, a cross-breed enabled by Joséphine de Beauharnais, AKA Napoleon Bonaparte’s wife, and her obsession with acquiring more roses to fill her gardens. However, in the twentieth century, the British horticulturalist David Austin became the most important rose breeder in the world, producing tons of hybrids known as “David Austin roses” such as the Abraham Darby introduced in 1985.

The Anglo-Saxons have done some other interesting stuff with flowers besides roses. The delphinium is another example of a flower in which the British overtook the French in creative breeding: the Frenchman Victor Lemoine produced the first Elatum hybrids in the mid-nineteenth century, but then James Kelway brought them to England in 1859, and they were extensively bred in the twentieth century by Charles Langdon and James Blackmore.

In Cornwall and Scotland, wealthy landowners were able to produce a number of hybrids of wildflowers that Joseph Hooker brought back from Sikkim, India (in the Himalayas) during the 1840s. Consequently, there was an explosion of Victorian aristocrats and wealthy bourgeoisie experimenting with them, and a favorite was the rhododendron plant. The Rothschild family in particular helped to produce a number of azalea and rhododendron hybrids, and these continued well into the twentieth century.

Meanwhile, George Russell, a self-taught gardener in York, spent about twenty-five years in the early twentieth century breeding lupins, completely transforming their color range and form to create flowers that were altogether new and even shocking in their beauty. Russell, like many breeders, was driven by obsession, refusing to show his work publicly for decades and only selling the stock later on in life, convinced that others would mishandle these botanical delicacies that he had created. Sadly, most of the original Russell lupin hybrids have been destroyed by diseases and insect pests, but some remain, and they’re quite striking.

Animals

For the category of animals, we can limit our inquiry to just two kinds: horses and dogs, since they form the most striking case studies.

Regarding horses, the British essentially created the Thoroughbred between around 1680-1750. Even though there had been plenty of animal breeding all across the world at that time, the speed of the process was quite rapid, and its intentionality was unusual. The breed itself came out of three Arabian stallions who had been imported to England: the Byerley Turk (c.1680s), the Darley Arabian (1704), and the Godolphin Arabian (c.1729). Breeders mixed them up with English mares, they remained absolutely focused on producing a distinct new type, and now every Thoroughbred today comes from one of those Arabian horses. There was one particular factor that allowed such a specific and intentional breeding project to take place: horse racing was quite popular and attracted quite a bit of gambling, and so there were financial incentives to breed faster horses.

What’s more interesting, though, is what came after the creation of the Thoroughbred. In 1791, James Weatherby published the General Stud Book, which was a breed registry for horses in Great Britain and Ireland, and this little contribution did something unique for animal breeding. Namely, it tracked the actual mating of these horses to ensure the purity of each lineage. If a horse was a true Thoroughbred, then it could trace its lineage back to the established foundation stock. Now, when you think about it, the reason that the Arabian horses were so fast is because the Arabs themselves were selectively breeding them to be that way. So selective breeding is a pretty natural human impulse when a culture has a reason to do it, even though it probably took the Arabs longer to get there. But by creating an approach of thorough documentation, the British allowed for both efficiency and creative possibilities in animal breeding that simply couldn’t have been achievable elsewhere. The stage had thus been set for advanced dog breeding.

Again, it was pretty common in Europe for wealthy landowners to own selectively bred dogs during the nineteenth century. But in 1873, the Kennel Club was established, which used the kind of logic found in the General Stud Book in order to record the various kinds of dogs, essentially inventing and institutionalizing the very concept of the standardized dog breed. As Wikipedia puts it, the Kennel Club would “maintain breed standards, record pedigrees, and issue the rules for conformation dog shows and trials and accreditation of judges.” All of this amounted to a specifically British aristocratic pastime, one that aestheticized the dog in ways that the continental European countries hadn’t. The Kennel Club even has its own little version of the Superbowl, the Westminster Dog Show, which I know mostly because it would typically cause a scheduling conflict for cable television, causing WWE Monday Night Raw to air on a different channel.

Humans (Eugenics)

It should come as no real surprise, given everything we’ve covered thus far, that the modern theory of evolution would originate in England through Charles Darwin, who in 1859 published On the Origin of Species. There was already a Victorian fascination with the concept of evolution, and many scientists were already trying to find the most convincing account of how gradual change in a species takes place. In 1844, for instance, Robert Chambers anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and this was read aloud to Queen Victoria, who found it eminently fascinating. Other scientists actually discovered the theory of natural selection independently of Darwin and even published their findings before Darwin published his. One Patrick Matthew actually published On Naval Timber and Arboriculture in 1831, a book on how to grow suitable trees for Navy warships, and in it, there’s a digression that contains the theory of natural selection in a rough-hewn form.

As we can see, within the culture of Great Britain, people were thinking about these questions pretty seriously, and so it’s fair to say that Darwin was picking some low-hanging fruit when he wrote his theory. But then, Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, took this theory of natural selection and ran with it, pushing it into all kinds of different directions, arguably demonstrating through his sheer curiosity and creativity a greater knack for applied science than Darwin ever did. In 1883, he coined the term eugenics and started promoting it heavily, and for this reason, he is largely neglected or diminished by popular science historians as a moral heretic, even though he invented the concept of psychometrics (still in use today), he was the first to apply statistical methods to study human differences, he came up with the concept of regression towards the mean, he innovated various methods of collecting data on human communities (again, still in use), he popularized the phrase “nature versus nurture,” and — although this isn’t really connected to his work with anthropology — he also created the first weather map.

Although eugenics is often seen as a hateful concept borne of ill-intent, it was initially embraced by socialists and progressives, although the support from that camp faded in the wake of… well, a certain failed German political regime from the mid-twentieth century. Before then, supporters of eugenics included Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger (something that today’s pro-life conservatives never tire of mentioning), John Harvey Kellogg (the corn flakes man!), Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, sci-fi writer H.G. Wells, feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and even Helen Keller, of all people. This may seem surprising, but the idea is perhaps more intuitive than you’d think. In my own personal experience, I’ve asked hundreds upon hundreds of first-year college students as well as high school students what they think about marriage and children, and a rather significant amount of them will often say something like, “The world is getting too filled up with stupid people.” I’ll then ask them, “What do you think about making people get some sort of license to have children, with maybe a literacy test that they have to pass in order to breed?” and they’ll respond to the idea with enthusiastic approval. Then, I’ll say, “Oh, OK.” Clearly, they have not yet been taught by their teachers that such thinking is pure evil. Some probably have but don’t care.

Still, though, calling eugenics an art form is something of a stretch, since it has never been instituted for purely aesthetic reasons. Not in humans, anyway. Eugenics has often been promoted from a conservationist standpoint, and one of its major promoters, Madison Grant, was actually a wildlife preservationist who was responsible for establishing various National Parks across America. It has also been promoted in a Malthusian context, and in fact, there was a British organization called The Malthusian League which existed from 1877-1927, one of whose founders was Annie Besant, a hippie-dippie theosophist who wanted to promote birth control and contraception. Although it was not a strictly eugenicist organization, it was intertwined with the eugenics movement fairly closely, as they both wanted to limit and control the human populations.

Regardless of whatever we consider its moral value today, eugenics was a popular idea among Anglo-Saxon intellectuals, it still remains popular in softer forms (hence the outlawing of incest, which is totally eugenics-minded), and therefore, calling it “pseudo-scientific” is highly misleading. Actually, the only courageous way to morally oppose eugenics is by acknowledging that it could perhaps have some underlying truth, but then to say that it is nevertheless wrong to place humans along the same conceptual and ethical framework as plants and animals. If one’s main problem with eugenics is that it’s “pseudoscientific” (a consequentialist position), then this prompts the question: shouldn’t we just improve eugenics with better science?

In any case, aestheticized eugenics still remains fertile territory for exploration in science fiction and/or horror writing, at least for any author ballsy enough to explore the topic these days. We’ve seen eugenics touched upon in works like Gattaca, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and Dune, but I can’t think of any examples of fiction in which a demented and perverse aristocracy breeds humans to have strange new traits that we wouldn’t typically encounter in an unaffected population, just for the hell of having them. Additionally, eugenics remains an interesting filter through which to interpret contemporary social trends and political policies once you start thinking about how they will affect sexual selection. The British anthropologist Edward Dutton wrote a book called Woke Eugenics, in which he interprets social justice politics as operating functionally the same way as Social Darwinism once did, despite its strongest advocates expressing totally different intentions. I haven’t yet read the book, so I cannot speak to its merits, but I have made similar observations privately.

III. Selective Breeding as a Diabolical Practice

This post is going on longer than I intended, so I’ll conclude with a few points that could probably be expanded upon at a later time. A couple years ago, I wrote about the 1973 folk horror classic The Wicker Man, about a Hebridean island off the coast of Scotland called Summerisle, which is populated entirely by neo-pagans. Summerisle has a typically high produce yield, shipping its fruits to England annually, but the harvest from the previous summer was quite bad. A British police officer comes to visit the island after hearing of a missing girl there, and eventually comes to suspect that the islanders sacrificed the young girl to appease the Gods in hopes of a better harvest next year.

In my post, I discuss the island’s pagan origins: its leader, Lord Summerisle, had a great-grandfather who was a British agronomist, and he settled in the island because he wanted to introduce some new crops to it. He was selectively breeding fruits and then treating them with a certain inorganic fertilizer whose substance is never explained, but some local ministers found this blasphemous, and so he spread propaganda to the islanders and converted them to paganism. In one scene, Lord Summerisle gives a detailed account of what happened to the officer:

You see, Sergeant, his experiments had led him to believe that it was possible to induce here the successful growth of certain new strains of fruit that he had developed. And so you see, with typical mid-Victorian zeal, my great-grandfather set to work. But of course, almost immediately, he met opposition from the fundamentalist ministers, who threw tons of his artificial fertilizer into the harbour on the grounds that if God had meant us to use it, He’d have provided it. My great-grandfather took exactly the same view of ministers, and realized he had to find a way to be rid of them. The best method of accomplishing this, it seemed to him, was to rouse the people, by giving them back their joyous old deities; so he encouraged, as it were, a retreat down memory lane; backwards from Christianity, through the Ages of Reason and Belief to the Age of Mysticism.

The fruits these islanders produce are quite special, like “the Summerisle famous apple,” the “Star of Summerisle pear,” and the “Flame of Summerisle apricot.” And some of the fruits really shouldn’t be growing in Scotland at all: in old photos that the officer examines, we see various images of women holding watermelons, a fruit that could never survive in that region. Although the Christian ministers supposedly opposed the fertilizer in particular, the film seems as if it’s portraying the act of selectively breeding crops to survive in a normally inhospitable clime as equally diabolical in its aims just on principle alone.

The movie is thus not merely a recounting of “the rise and fall of an experimental biome on a Scottish island,” as one insightful blog puts it, but something of a statement on the manner in which the soundness and precision characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon mind could so quickly and easily lapse into scientific imprudence and outright irrationalism. Because, after all, Lord Summerisle turns out to be a rather deranged pagan rather than just a propagandist leading the islanders about. As the film comes to reveal, there is something a bit diabolical about toying with nature, documenting everything through formal registry systems as the British were starting to do in the mid-Victorian era, and then using such precision and managerial expertise to push plants and animals to limits previously considered unthinkable. The Wicker Man only focuses on the selective breeding of plants as the catalyst for a complete reversion to paganism, but in a way, this makes its point all the more trenchant.

Systematized and self-conscious selective breeding — or, the refusal to bend before nature’s wisdom and instead take matters into one’s own hands — would be the supreme art form of the same nation that brought us Paradise Lost. To become so adept at selective breeding, there has to be an element of irreverence toward God and nature, a sense of intellectual detachment, and a feeling of rootlessness; a rejection of fixed borders, hierarchy, and formality coupled with an enthusiasm for cosmopolitanism, international commerce, economic universalism, and (taken far enough) liberal capitalism. These are all characteristics that the British Isles have embodied more strongly than the rest of Europe. As the German political theorist Carl Schmitt observed in his Land and Sea (1942), Great Britain is a maritime power, one which created a specifically maritime style of world order. Britain’s values, in other words, have often reflected its general orientation to the world economy. Its style of rule has accordingly brought it into stark intellectual contrast with the rest of the European land monarchies — a contrast that persists even to this day, if you consider the opposition between analytic and continental philosophy in the humanities as just one example, not to mention the haste with which Britain fled the European Union. When considering the Anglophone countries and their adeptness with selective breeding in this light, we can see that all the geopolitical and socioeconomic factors were in place for them dominate not just the practice (e.g. through access to colonial territories all over the world) but also provide the definitive theory behind it.

What makes the situation funny, though, is how aggressively the Anglo-Saxons have come to reject applying selective breeding to humans. Your average WASP now considers eugenics to be the most utterly immoral practice ever, second only to total genocide, even as they’ve done more than any culture to formalize the procedures behind selective breeding and create the conditions that seem to lead inexorably towards eugenics, or at least an ersatz version of it. But the anti-eugenicism and anti-racism (a closely related view) of the liberal Anglo-Saxon are in many ways just as irreverent and Promethean as the systematization of selective breeding itself. Instead of accepting the inherent dignity of the human races by allowing them to produce offspring as they naturally are inclined to do, the Anglo-Saxon throws his hands up in the air and declares, “Race doesn’t exist at all! Everyone is equal!” and thus he preserves the intellectual freedom to keep observing the world through the lens of endless becoming as opposed to definite being. Both eugenics and blank slate theory reflect an ideology of anti-essentialism — they just happen to express the view in different ways.

Regardless of how we feel about these weighty matters, though, selective breeding is a cornerstone of economic and cultural life, and it has given us some great-looking flowers, some really spicy peppers, and some decent beer. God bless hops! God bless the Anglophone world! And God bless you.

update 5/17: lightly touched up the paragraph discussing Carl Schmitt for clarity

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I.

Back in 2019, a book came out called A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy by Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead. It argues that the political climate has been permeated by a tendency toward conspiratorial thinking that differs from the earlier kinds of conspiracy theories, like the ones about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or the claims about the moon landing being fake. This new kind of “conspiracism,” the authors contend, represents conspiracy theory without the theory. It operates as a kind of fallback disposition of reflexive skepticism rather than a genuine striving for truth with a clear epistemological framework, a developed account of how the conspiracy in question actually works, or any potential for organized and collective resistance. Now, that’s certainly an interesting premise, but for those who might be interested, I’ve got some bad news: this book was underdeveloped, lazy, and dumb. In essence, it was a work of advanced DNC propaganda designed to explain, among other things, why the “Russiagate” conspiracy theory about Donald Trump being a Manchurian candidate for Vladimir Putin was perfectly legitimate and truth-oriented, while Donald Trump’s characterization of the Russiagate conspiracy theory as a “witch hunt” was poisonous for Democracy. Never mind that the former amounted to an attempt to overturn the outcome of a legitimate election via a drawn-out FBI investigation — one which ran on literally no credible evidence whatsoever — and the latter did not affect the outcome of any known elections or impede the operations of any elected official. You can sense that the authors are running on a rather exceptional definition of “Democracy,” one which they never bother to explain.

But besides such astonishing displays of argumentative chutzpah, most of the book’s basic distinctions between the old “conspiracism” and the new “conspiracism” don’t hold up under scrutiny. Some are inconsistent with how the authors classify individual examples of conspiracy theories, while others just simply don’t make any sense; this critical review by Oliver Traldi explains the book’s problems well. For a work that complains about how today’s conspiracy theories lack theory, it is itself void of convincing theoretical reasoning, the kind that’s necessary for the argument it’s trying to make. So, rather than being a serious sociological analysis on how conspiracy theorists/theories have changed over time, or a contribution to a broader theory on conspiracy theories, or anything that would have had lasting value, the book is simply a partisan work of political hackery and should probably be understood as yet another attempt to cash in on anti-Trump mania of the time.1

There is, however, one thing that the book gets right: conspiracy theories are getting dumber and lazier. Trying to explain the situation with the pretentious phrase “new conspiracism,” and then including every statement of mistrust (no matter how minor) toward the media or the government as part of this phenomenon, convolutes the issue far more than one can forgive. But there’s no question that conspiracy theories are now typically expressed in a different way than before, often coming from a different psychological sensibility. I remember back when I was young, only a few unusual people would latch onto conspiracy theories, and they’d take them pretty far. They wanted to “go down the rabbit hole.” Believing in conspiracy theories was generally a sign of eccentricity, and conspiracy guys would knowingly take on the role of the eccentric. The late-1990s cartoon show King of the Hill, at least in its earlier seasons, actually does a decent job of portraying such conspiracy theorists in the character of Dale Gribble. He’s self-consciously strange, his actual political views are often incoherently expressed (but closest to civil libertarianism), he’s not exactly perceptive about what’s immediately going on around him, and above all, he’s genuine in his reflexive mistrust of big, complex organizations and institutions. Dale is a unique character for various reasons, but I can say that his conspiratorial disposition resembles that of various people I’ve known in real life.

Today, however, there is nothing eccentric about embracing a conspiracy theory. It is, in fact, the default “normie” position. Normal, everyday people watch conspiracy theory videos on TikTok, they listen to conspiracy theories explained in their favorite podcasts, they circulate conspiracy theories with each other on Facebook and other social media platforms, and crucially, such theorizing is totally bipartisan. Everyone does this; left, right, and center. If a shooting or terrorist attack happens, it’s a false flag. If an assassination attempt takes place, it was staged. If a bad candidate wins an election, it was rigged. If some inconvenient news comes out, it has been manufactured. Of course, some events will invite more suspicion within one political corner than the other depending on their character, but pretty much everyone seems to agree that nothing is at it seems. The bipartisan nature of conspiracy theorizing was already pretty obvious back in 2019 when A Lot of People Are Saying was published (and anyone even slightly disinterested could have realized this), but the sheer laziness of it all wasn’t as apparent. Not to me, anyway.

The beginning of the 2026 War in Iran was when I really started to figure it out. It began when I talked to someone about the war, expressed my annoyance, and she murmured somewhat vacantly, “Yep… just a cover-up over the Epstein files…” as if this were common knowledge, so common that it was boring to even say it. But the statement, far from boring, was a real-world expression of things I had only been reading online up to that point. Now, did she believe in all of the most fantastic and lurid claims about Epstein? Probably not. But after a few more incidental conversations with random people over time, I realized that this viewpoint in its most stripped-down version was totally normal. You yourself might actually believe some version of it right now! Of course, the Epstein files have not led to a single arrest, nor will they because they do not contain anything legally actionable, and moreover all of the redacted files were redacted because of the alleged victims’ requests, not the potentially accused… but then again, as the Pizzagate theory made it clear, the fantasy of a pedophilic cabal doing everything in its power to create distractions from the muckraking research of our intrepid citizen journalists is just too tempting to resist. Hey, why should the 4channers and QAnon faithful get to have all the fun?

Not long afterward, Cole Tomas Allen (himself an Epstein pedophile conspiracy theorist) attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, and I made a passing reference about it to an acquaintance: a fairly normal, average baby boomer. She said to me immediately, “Oh, come on, you know that was staged.” I said to her, “But it’s true that there’s a lot of gun violence in this country. You don’t think that at least one guy who would commit it might turn his attention to a high-profile politician?” She then asked me in response, “Well, then why didn’t he seem to hurt anyone? He practically shot no one when rushing towards Trump.” I told her, “He released a manifesto where he specifically said he didn’t want to hurt any guards — something about not wanting to hurt low-level employees, only the top guys.”

She then contorted her face into an expression that could only have meant, “Oh dear, this poor fuckin’ rube… he’ll believe anything.”

II.

One reason that so many attempts to essentialize the mind of the conspiracy theorist end in failure is that there isn’t one type of conspiracy theory, and there isn’t one type of conspiracy theorist. The more enthusiastic and motivated theorists still exist, there’s no doubt about it, and they often exert influence upon the less motivated. But conspiracy thinking is very much an opt-in affair, and you get to choose the extent to which you engage that realm of suspicion. Accordingly, there are specific types of conspiracy theories that are more compatible with lazy speculation, while other types are less inviting. I can’t put together an exhaustive account of how all conspiracy theories work here, but it’s important to have at least some framework for understanding them, since such a framework can explain why they often get jumbled around in people’s minds nowadays, creating a vague cloud of suspicion among the general populace. So for this discussion, I’ll divide conspiracy theories into three basic types using scale as the delineating factor.

#1 - Suspicion of criminal conspiracy or collusion

This is a conspiracy theory in its most conservative, bare-bones form. Criminal conspiracy happens all the time, and federal prosecutors nearly always slap a conspiracy charge onto any crime in which two or more people were involved. Sometimes these accusations are correct, sometimes they’re not; such is the nature of the justice system. But they are conspiracy theories, even though they are rarely labeled as such, and when we hear the phrase “conspiracy theory,” we almost never think of these situations. Many of the more adventurous conspiracy theorists always bring up this point to defend some of their more controversial views. For instance, you’ve probably heard this one: all explanations of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks are conspiracy theories, including the official story about the terrorists hijacking the planes. So, no matter what, 9/11 has to be explained by a conspiracy theory of some kind. This claim, strictly speaking, is correct.

That being said, this kind of conspiracy theorizing can get pretty damn wacky and even downright frightening, not despite but because of its specificity. If you consider the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, it would fall under this category, since it involved mostly specific people: John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, Marina Abramović, James Alefantis, and more, and it had a specific location: Comet Pizza in Washington, D.C. Although the theory presumed the involvement of anonymous participants, it was mainly directed at distinct people who had sent actual emails to one another, and it assumed that various and sometimes (admittedly) strange references to “pizza” in these emails were in fact references to trafficked children. It also proposed a motive that was specific to everyone involved: they all were perverts who wanted to use children for sexual gratification. These claims had no evidence behind them whatsoever, and they threatened to destroy peoples’ lives — particularly Alefantis, a small business owner whose shop was eventually targeted by a vigilante gunman. Although some have tried to argue that Pizzagate lacked specifics and didn’t have a “theory,” this is not true at all: it was a remarkably clear-cut and highly detailed accusation of criminal wrongdoing and was thankfully met with some skepticism. No authorities investigated Alefantis because there was no evidence that merited an investigation, and the mainstream media overwhelmingly disapproved of the theory.

It is unfortunate, then, that other evidence-free conspiracy theories belonging to this category have not always been met with similar skepticism. For example, when Rolling Stone magazine published “A Rape on Campus,” a defamatory article accusing the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity of criminal conspiracy to commit gang rape, the university immediately suspended all fraternities, and mobs of outraged students vandalized the accused fraternity’s house. And, as I mentioned before, the accusation of criminal collusion between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin resulted in a major criminal investigation — one that hindered the administration’s ability to engage in foreign policy, and which has justifiably damaged the public’s trust in both law enforcement agencies and the mainstream news media.

#2 - Suspicion of a specific plot orchestrated by a complex, abstract entity (like a government or a corporation) with a specific outcome in mind

Whereas the previous category concerns individual people, this one moves up a step in abstraction. Here is your standard conspiracy theory, the kind we typically think of when we hear the phrase. It includes false flag theories (a very big category that includes all orchestrated terrorist attacks and high-profile assassinations, as long as there’s a claim of a designated patsy, scapegoat, or falsely accused group), voter fraud or election manipulation theories, financial conspiracies about price-fixing and deliberately engineered economic crashes, and pretty much all other theories of orchestrated deception, even minor deceptions, with a coherent motive. Some include, but are certainly not limited to, the Obama “birther” conspiracy theory, theories about the moon landing being faked, theories of UFO cover-ups, theories about rigged matches or games in sports, theories of dark/hidden money being supplied by wealthy elites for various projects, cover-up theories involving disturbing new weapons or technological innovations designed to oppress people (“chemtrails”), theories about government agencies conducting experiments on people without their consent (“MK-Ultra”), accusations of entrapment by criminal justice organizations, and even most theories about scams, false advertising, and undisclosed invasions of privacy (“your cell phone is spying on you”). The key to these theories is that although they might involve one or more particular individuals, they almost always include nameless, faceless people doing at least some assistance work, if not all of the work.

What makes these conspiracy theories so frustrating is that they aren’t as easy to dismiss as we would like to hope. They sometimes have a grain of truth to them, and some are just simply true, straight-up. These theories almost always have a motive that one can explain,2 and the reason they focus on corporate entities like government and big business is that the methods through which these entities operate are often inscrutable. Americans learn about how their government works in a civics or social studies class, but ever since FDR’s presidency, the government has been filled with unelected bureaucrats who are unaccountable to voters. Although educated coastal elites will scoff at the phrase “deep state” and roundly deny that such a thing even exists, they themselves will gladly use the phrase “intelligence community,” sometimes in the same breath, and not realize the hypocrisy of what they are doing. But however you want to label it, whether it’s a deep state or intelligence community, it is a real thing, and it invites suspicion.

In order to understand these conspiracy theories and why they have been common for decades now, some basic concessions must be made among America’s most faithful institution-trusters, and one of them is this: we have very little idea as to how our government actually works, we have very little idea as to how corporations actually work, we have very little understanding about the interrelation between the two, and there is virtually no reliable, easily-accessible way to get good information about such matters, even with such attempts to provide transparency as the Freedom of Information Act.

#3 - Suspicion of a massive, overwhelming, longstanding plot in which our basic understanding of reality itself is at stake

Here is where conspiracy theory gets interesting. This type acts as a kind of big, recursive meta-theory that can absorb as well as generate smaller theories. It can sometimes form additively from these smaller suspicions as it gradually subsumes them over time. In other cases, it can start from a grand theory and then gradually incorporate various incidents and situations into its lore, both by waiting for new ones to arrive and ret-conning old ones. Whatever the case, in this sort of theory, a grand narrative is presented that can explain an incredible amount of things. Just pull a string, and you can unravel the entire universe. Such a theory might constantly occupy the adherent’s thoughts all day, every day, and enough engagement with it can have an almost hallucinatory effect. Because of how wide-ranging the theory is, it requires a certain level of discipline from the committed adherent: one must slowly reorient one’s own perceptions to fit the theory, or perhaps change around one’s own everyday vocabulary to stay consistent with its doctrine. And because such theories directly concern the fabric of reality, they will often veer toward the metaphysical, the theological, and/or the eschatological dimensions of human understanding.

Almost always, these theories come from genuine paranoia3, though minor adherents might get involved in them for other reasons. In some cases, the theory can take on a cult-like structure, and people will join simply because they want to be in a group of some sort. In other cases, the theory can resemble a sort of antinomian rejection of mainstream society and attract followers for that reason. But it would be a mistake to say that such theories are merely performative or symbolic. The people who believe in them, with few exceptions, really do believe.

Some examples of these conspiracy theories would include flat earth, QAnon (which absorbed both Pizzagate and the various Jeffrey Epstein theories and slowly grew to resemble a millenarian Christian denomination), various theories about extraterrestrials interacting with humans at one or more early periods of human development (and the attempts from the government to cover this up), and theories about reality being a simulation of some kind. Nobody seems to take the phantom time hypothesis seriously these days, but if they did, it would count. These theories also include grand unifying metanarratives about history being controlled, or at least routinely impacted, by mysterious and shadowy groups including, but not limited to, Freemasons, the Illuminati, the New World Order, the Jews, and the Reptilians.

What makes this tier of conspiracy theory so fascinating to me is that it in some cases, it can become simply a “theory” without the conspiracy even being necessary. For instance, the New World Order acts as the conceptual linchpin to explain why globalization is happening (an undeniable situation), but one will rarely encounter specific claims about a New World Order with official, self-identifying members — it instead acts as an abstract unifying concept that includes the Bilderberg Group, the Skull & Bones Society, and others. It can include plenty of far-fetched conspiracy theories belonging to the second type, but it doesn’t really require any. In this way, it is hard to find much meaningful difference between the New World Order theory and University-approved theories such as “structural racism,” “patriarchy,” or “capitalist superstructure,” all of which I would place in this third category.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this kind of overarching theory eventually dispenses with identifiable groups altogether and becomes a pure condemnation of abstract forces, whichever kind the adherents dislike. In the Italian esotericist Julius Evola’s Men Among the Ruins (first published 1953), Evola discusses the concept of the “occult war,” first postulated by Emmanuel Malynski and Leon de Poncins in 1936 as a Judeo-Masonic plot against traditional Christianity. Evola, however, sees the occult war as a spiritual struggle taking place at the most subtle level of metaphysics. On the same theme, he had written an approving introduction to the infamous forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (1903) in which he acknowledged that it is probably indeed a fraudulent document, but then further contended that this doesn’t matter, because the book’s description of what is happening sociopolitically is true regardless of who is causing it to happen. In Men Among the Ruins, Evola thus warned readers not to invest too much energy in blaming one particular group such as the Jews or Freemasons, for these groups might themselves be unwitting pawns of the forces of subversion driving this occult war and bringing traditional civilization to complete dissolution. So, in other words, there is an occult war taking place, and it does seem to cause the Jews and Freemasons to do terrible things, but the actual driving force behind it is abstract and impersonal.

The manner in which Evola describes the forces of subversion isn’t too conceptually dissimilar to how the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault describes power. In Foucault’s theory, power seems to act in a similarly free-floating way with no identifiable targets. You get to have all the paranoia of a conspiracy theorist without any of the fun of picking a scapegoat (although this hasn’t stopped some of Foucault’s more dull-witted fans within the university system). In any case, these are fairly advanced and unusual examples of how conspiratorial thought can unravel itself when pushed far enough.

III.

Now that we’ve gotten our taxonomy out of the way, we can look at the dumber and lazier conspiracy theories that we find expressed in daily life. Typically, these conspiracy theories fall under the second category. The first and third categories require too much thought and/or personal commitment to be attractive for the average person, but the second category of theory tends to demand a pretty low level of commitment. All you really need to do is state that something isn’t the way it seems, figure out a party responsible, identify a motive, and voila, you’ve got your theory. However, the first and third types of theory lend an air of credence to conspiracy theories of the second type by dint of their mere existence. Theories of the first type, which can become “canon” simply by being repeated enough, sometimes form the building blocks of a lazy and stupid theory of the second type.

We still need to figure out why exactly the second kind of theory has gotten so low-quality on the whole, though, at least compared to how such theories were articulated prior to the 2010s. And unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be just one reason. So, rather than providing everyone with one superimposing meta-reason under which every other reason can be placed, I’ve come up with seven small ones, and I’ll end this post by providing them. Here they are:

1. Greater popularity of something usually means dumber people are getting involved

This should be pretty self-explanatory. If conspiracy theories can be disseminated at an unprecedented rate through the internet, then those that appeal to the lowest common denominator will win, and the most successful presentations of these theories will not be particularly ambitious or demanding.

Conspiracy theories also seem to operate now through a bottom-up process of transmission. An intelligent and rational person might be a reliable source of truth if she subsists in a community predominately filled with other intelligent and rational people, but individually, the intelligent and rational are quite powerless. Such people are often emotionally vulnerable and easy to sway through appeals to pathos, moral grandstanding, and peer pressure (and note: on the internet, everyone is a peer, no matter how superior one person might be to the other by every measurable standard). Therefore, when a conspiracy theory gains traction, those who once would have helped nullify it in an environment with greater barriers to entry will instead find themselves engaging in apologia, saying things like, “Well, surely, something is going on here,” or, “Well, even if it isn’t literally true, it sure does reflect a deeper underlying reality,” and so on.

Thus, the environment is set for typical people to go around vacantly believing in a conspiracy theory, even if they aren’t particularly committed to it or don’t feel obligated to work out its underlying mechanics. With little pushback from above, there is little incentive for them to do so.

2. American life is increasingly filled with scams and deceptions

I remember being roughly eight or nine years old and seeing one of those “You May Have Already Won 10 Million Dollars!” letters that the Publishers Clearing House would send to everyone. After being overwhelmed with excitement, my old man came home and presented me with a hard truth on that day: there are all sorts of people in this society who just make up nonsense and then try to scam you with it. In America in particular, these kinds of deceptions are remarkably common, and one must get used to them early on. The ad in the classifieds that seems too good to be true is probably fake. The massive sale at the clothing store on the strip mall is only giving you a discount from a prior mark-up. The medicine that the doctor is prescribing you might actually make things worse. The new nutrition study that just came out probably doesn’t mean anything because it hasn’t been replicated (even though the news seems quite confident in its legitimacy). The new cryptocurrency is probably designed to take your money. The insurance company denying your claim probably will accept it despite their assurances to the contrary, but you’ve got to lawyer up first.

Under such conditions, assuming that something is fake or misleading is often a reasonable starting position, and it is simply naive to expect that the average person who maintains this disposition so often in day-to-day life should carve out an exception for “official channels of information” like a respected newspaper or a government organization. In the book A Lot of People Are Saying, the authors claim that all usages of the term “fake news” constitute “the new conspiracism” because “fake” implies malicious intent. But looking at a news article that seems wrong and labeling it fake is, cognitively speaking, only a stone’s throw away from looking at a deceptive advertisement and calling it fake. I don’t believe that everyone who uses the word “fake” is implying malicious intent. But if someone calls something “fake news” and then concocts an impromptu conspiracy theory to explain why it’s fake, again, we’re not too far from the man who says, “The reason that hot dog buns are sold in eight-packs while hot dogs are sold in six-packs is because the hot dog company got together with the bun company, and they decided to scam the people by forcing them keep buying more of both until they reach a common multiple!”

The bottom line is, when people live in a society in which a skeptical disposition has become something of a day-to-day requirement, they will lose trust in just about everything and come up with their own way of explaining the world.

3. There is an epistemological crisis in the west

The epistemological crisis has been defined as a major breakdown in the shared societal framework for determining truth, and this pattern has been acknowledged countless times. It is often Democrat voters who seem most alarmed by it, though various philosophers across the political spectrum have been discussing the matter for decades. What’s amusing, though, is that the awareness of an epistemological crisis has actually broadened the epistemological crisis. The university system has discussed philosophers who have commented upon this crisis from Heidegger to Arendt to Lyotard to Baudrillard, and it has accordingly taught students — correctly, I might add — that pure objectivity in the reporting of facts and stories is an impossibility. In the same way that there is no “object” without a “subject,” there is no way to present information without some kind of vantage point. This idea is not mere postmodern nihilism; thinkers like Goethe and Herder showed awareness of it when discussing the concept of history.

But with lower barriers to university entry, many dumb students have taken dumb lessons from such ideas, and they’ve concluded that objectivity should not even be attempted. Moreover, they’ve encouraged the smarter students to agree with them. These students, both dumb and smart, have then gone onto occupy elite spaces in the information-circulating sector of American society. The concept of “the view from nowhere” has been altogether dismissed as a bourgeois prejudice, and consequently, many academics, journalists, and info-tainers have no problem at all seasoning their work with ideological bias, citing the (again, true) teaching that bias is unavoidable. Because, hey, if it’s unavoidable, why not crank it up to 100?

This is just one of the many reasons that our elite institutions have discredited themselves and broadened the epistemological crisis, but there are economic and media-ecological reasons as well. Mainstream news has had a difficult time transitioning from print to the online world, and it often relies on hysterical “clickbait” articles to attract attention as well as deceptive and “sexy” reporting, even among the most respected papers. Additionally, 24/7 cable news networks have struggled to maintain television ratings, and they have been financially incentivized to pursue titillating nonsense to keep the viewers hooked. Although I believe that the decline in reliable journalistic analysis and academic integrity is more ideologically driven than economic in nature, the economic situation has provided support for the downturn by providing immediate short-term gain.

4. Decline in literacy

Here’s another media-ecological reason for not just the widespread epistemological crisis affecting the west but also the uniquely dumb and lazy status of so many of today’s conspiracy theories. Without diving headlong into the thought of Marshall McLuhan, I will just briefly sum up how he and his colleagues like Walter Ong distinguished between the mentality of those in print cultures vs. oral ones. McLuhan believed that the printing press trained people to possess linear reasoning, emotional detachment, a knack for sequence and causality, and analytical distance. Oral cultures, by contrast, emphasize immersion, simultaneity, collective identity, pattern recognition, group participation, and mythic thinking. Lest we assume that he considered the former superior to the latter, he actually spent quite a bit of time articulating the flaws within the print mentality, since it created the feeling of rupture between the mind and body, which has led to the preponderance of desiccated intellectualism (recall my point that the intelligent are often easily dominated by the foolish in a direct interpersonal setting, allowing for the bottom-up transmission of ideas). Oral cultures, by contrast, possess a more unified, holistic perspective.

That being said, the electronic environment seems to have taken on more attributes of oral epistemology with less of a literate counterbalance. Highly literate people, for instance, tend to prefer interpreting troubling news in structural terms, using a theory as a sort of lens. Internet-based people seem somewhat prone to person-oriented if not mythic thinking, which strengthens the tendency to engage in conspiracy theory. For a good while before the widespread dissemination of high-speed internet and smart phones, a conspiracy theory could live alongside a structural analysis, even within one person negotiating between both. Now, conspiracy theories seem to be supplanting structural analysis altogether. This may mean that the third type of conspiracy theory will grow increasingly mythopoeic and less intellectually sophisticated over time.

5. Boredom and the need for entertainment

One of my favorite new conspiracy theories popular among Generation Z is the one that Helen Keller didn’t actually do anything particularly impressive, and her “handler” Anne Sullivan largely faked her accomplishments for personal gain through various tactics of deception and subterfuge. It’s a pretty good example of how conspiracy theories have an “opt-in” quality to them. Some people have put a great deal of effort into the theory, while others have caught whiff of it from a cursory glance at Tik-Tok and came away with the impression that Helen Keller never actually existed. There’s a range. But one of the reasons the theory has proliferated is partly because it’s a whole lotta fun. It’s just simply amusing to talk about how Helen Keller didn’t really do anything and your fifth grade teacher was being a gullible buffoon.

Fun is certainly a reason for the growth of conspiracy theories in the internet age, and fun conspiracy theories are often interchangeable with urban legends. When I was a kid, there was an internet-based rumor about how Kevin’s brother from the TV show The Wonder Years grew up to be Marilyn Manson. This isn’t exactly a conspiracy theory, but it’s thematically similar to another internet-based theory that Barbara Bush was the secret daughter of British occultist Aleister Crowley, which has more conspiratorial undertones, even though it started as an April Fool’s joke.

The need for fun does not necessarily make a theory dumb or lazy, however, as long as there’s a genuine element of paranoia accompanying it. Pizzagate actually started off on 4chan as a joke, or at least a half-joke. Although I can’t find the quote at the moment, I recall seeing a poster on 4chan when the theory was in the midst of being concocted saying something to the effect of, “It doesn’t matter if all this is nonsense, this is just too funny not to run with.” Something like that, anyway. I should also point out that there’s a satirical computer game about Jeffrey Epstein popular among 10-year-olds. Again, paranoia about Epstein is real, but this particular thing is fun, and it contributes to what the journalist Michael Tracey has called the “ambient folklore” surrounding Epstein.

6. Increased political partisanship

Here’s a pretty obvious one: you’re more likely to go along with a conspiracy theory belonging to the second type if you’re a true believer in your political tribe and cannot emotionally process inconvenient information that compromises your loyalty. I have no idea how far the folks on BlueSky have gone in trying to prove that every Donald Trump assassination attempt has been a hoax (though they have indulged in such conspiracy theories), but their motivations are pretty obvious. There’s no need to dwell on this one, because it’s quite straightforward, but it is worth mentioning that agonism is a persistent condition of the oral world identified by Walter Ong in his Orality and Literacy (1983). And as Marshall McLuhan said repeatedly, the world is becoming a global village… but it’s a tribal village.

7. Conspiracy theories as a counterintuitive way to escape from politics

I’ll end with a more interesting point here than the previous one. Lazy conspiracy theorizing is growing across pretty much all age groups, but Generation Z is definitely leading the pack. As many have noted, Gen-Z has an interesting relationship with politics. On the one hand, they absorb an incredible amount of political content online… but on the other hand, their actual political engagement (as measured by voting, volunteering, organizing, etc.) is historically low.

Although it is too early to say, it seems possible that lazy conspiracy theorizing might be a sign of political fatigue rather than enthusiastic engagement. Dismissing a news story by saying, “It’s all fake, it was staged, it was a false flag,” etc. acts as a shield from the obligation to engage with it, and such shielding might become increasingly common in a society that expects the average person to form opinions on virtually every topic that dominates the headlines. Additionally, Generation Z is scrutinized to an astounding degree: just about every time I log onto Twitter, I find someone attacking them for some perceived inadequacy, and many of these attacks are political in nature. Just about everyone seems to place all of their hopes and expectations onto Generation Z and accordingly demands great things from them, as if they’re supposed to function collectively as a kind of deus ex machina that will swoop in and save civilization from driving itself off of a cliff. But as Generation Z continues to age, they will probably not deliver on being such a redemptive force, and Generation Alpha (or whatever they’re called) will likely encounter the same if not more excessive scrutiny. For that reason, it seems that the conspiracy theory acts as a stress-relieving way to feign engagement with politics while actually abstaining from politics altogether. And if I’m being honest, it’s easy for me to understand the situation from that perspective.

Alright, that’s it. We’ll end the discussion here.

edit 7/30/26: fixed a small typo

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Last week, I talked about some sex machines in a post entitled “Some Sex Machines.” Instead of discussing masturbation machines (a less interesting subject), I was talking about machines found in lowbrow media, cult films, “midnight movies” and so on, which treat sex in a manner that extends beyond the achievement of orgasm. In Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968), we found a sex machine that elicits pleasure so intense that it kills people. In Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973), we discovered a sex machine designed to make couples procreate, alleviating them of the need to do any work and allowing them to be frigid. And in Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain (also 1973), we were introduced to a feminine, womb-like machine that a user is meant to penetrate with a gigantic electric phallus, which not only gives it a big robotic orgasm but actually causes it to reproduce itself, creating a smaller baby robot.

In all three films, the forces of the erotic are set in contrast to sex itself, and the movies suggest that while the erotic is a wild and even uncontrollable power, there nevertheless are sinister forces among us that seek to tame it by conquering sex itself through the power of the machine. While Barbarella and Sleeper give an optimistic, “sexual revolution” vision about erotic energy defeating oppressive conformity through sex, The Holy Mountain suggests a more pessimistic view, one in which the power of the erotic could be made to serve the cold logic of the machine. Although Jodorowsky doesn’t quite go that far in his conception of “The Love Machine” — it does, after all, miraculously produce offspring and humorously resembles a human mother — it seems clear to me that he was leaning in that direction, especially given the intense satire that pervades the rest of the movie.

Now, it occurs to me at this point that this two-part blog post will have to be regarded as a “fixer-upper,” since I think I’ll need to turn it into two separate essays entirely if I want to make it work. You’ll perceive a thematic tension between sex machines that treat the erotic as a potent source of quasi-mystical energy and those that don’t. Plus, I probably need a few more examples of sex machines to write about; feel free to suggest any in the comments if you’re familiar with a good one. But in any case, the basic point I’m trying to get across here — and I do think this holds up — is that over time, depictions of the interaction between eroticism and machinery started to tip the balance in favor of the machinery. That is, instead of persistently seeing the non-rational force of eros conquer the machine, or at least subsume the exterior of the machine beneath its own organic sensibility, we start to see the emergence of narratives in which eros not only serves the machine but actually winds up conforming to a mechanistic logic. So, here are a few more case studies in which this happens.

The Lord-of-Chaos-Summoning Rape Machine, Urotsukidōji 2: Legend of the Demon Womb (1990)

The first story arc of the Urotsukidōji hentai franchise, “Legend of the Overfiend,” was originally released as a surprisingly high-quality animated trilogy of videos for retail purchase in Japan, but it became infamous for having a time-edited (though still uncensored) single runtime version that was given a limited theatrical release in the United States back in 1989. Although most of the local theaters gave this movie an NC-17 rating, not all of them did, and so a few of the moviegoers who went to go watch it had no idea what they were getting themselves into, knowing only that they were going to see a cartoon from Japan. After a few found themselves scandalized by its content, some local newspapers discussed how perverse it was, explaining that it contains quite a large amount of gore and tentacle rape, and, well, its reputation only grew from there. Urotsukidōji was more or less singlehandedly responsible for the perception that anime is for degenerates and perverts who want to watch women get violated by mutant tentacles — a view that I definitely held back in high school, even as some of my very wholesome classmates participated in a recreational anime club.

Anyways, we’re not discussing tentacle rape today. We’re discussing Urotsukidōji’s sequel, which is not as well known but nonetheless about equally impressive in terms of its budget and production values. This condition of lowbrow animation having surprisingly high-quality art would not last, as Japan’s economy was about to suffer a major downturn, causing big setbacks for its animation industry on the whole. For that reason, these two releases are somewhat anomalous in the history of hentai (A Kite is one of the only other examples from the world of hentai to rival Urotsukidōji in terms of visionary scope and production values).

The scene we’ll examine is the very opening, in which an occult Nazi scientist named Dr. Munchhausen activates an elaborate rape machine. It is 1944, the penultimate year of the Third Reich, and the machine is located at the Headquarters of the Vril Association. Hitler can be seen in the distance, watching the gruesome experiment unfold. This machine consists of a circle of nude women who are hooked up to masturbation devices that penetrate the women with metal dildos, and their backs are connected to additional machinery, which is apparently designed to harvest erotic energy from them. In the middle of this circle of women is a large electricity-conducting apparatus that goes a few stories high and whose design is somewhat reminiscent of H.R. Giger’s “biomechanical” style. There is also a mysterious purple glow that emanates from within this massive monolith. Once the rape machine is activated and the sexual energy is harnessed from the women, the purple monolith starts emitting electric bolts of lightning. Over in Munchhausen’s control room, countless rows of analog dials start tracking the electricity levels. As the erotic energy is sapped from the women, their bodies become withered and corpselike, and soon, the rape machine starts to do what it was meant to do: summon the Lord of Chaos, the arch-nemesis of the Demon God known as the Overfiend, a mythological quasi-deity who appears every 3,000 years to bring about an apocalypse that wipes out the Earth and begins life anew. However, the machine is clearly being overloaded, and it starts to act janky. And just as we’re about to find out if it will work, some Allied bomber planes enter Berlin and destroy rows of buildings as they presumably head toward the Vril Headquarters. The experiment proves a failure, and thus ends the Prologue.

All of this is, of course, pure sensationalist nonsense. But the key takeaway is that we once again find the power of the erotic being harnessed as a sort of energy, and here it is presented as such in the plainest possible terms. Whether we want to conceive of this erotic energy in terms of Wilhelm Reich’s orgones, or as the shakti of Hindu Tantra, it is used in any case to summon an all-powerful giga-beast from the interdimensional realm, and so the machine fully exploits its potency. Moreover, it does so not through erotic love but rather forced intrusion, with the women reaching orgasm against their own will before being desiccated, killed, and ultimately discarded. In this presentation, the cold logic of the machine fully dominates any element of romance that often gets lumped together with human sexuality. In other words, all of the hippie-dippie sex-positivity of Barbarella or Sleeper is completely absent from this picture: the demented scientist is fully on the verge of getting what he wants with his fully instrumental usage of the erotic, and only the Allied bombers thwart his plans.

One major conceptual advantage to Urotsukidōji is that it is self-consciously lowbrow cartoon pornography and thus it operates on both pornographic and cartoon logic. Both pornographic and cartoon logic are often psychologically unrealistic in terms of the storylines they portray, which often serve as wish-fulfillment fantasies, but both retain the ability to be primordially truthful — in much the same way as the simplified figures you’ll find in Greek tragedy or Noh theater, or even the commedia dell’arte can be. In pornography, there doesn’t need to be any socially redeeming element at play, either, and so all of the least romantic aspects of sexuality can be explored in their strangest, ugliest, or most extravagant dimensions, even as the material encourages the audience to indulge in such perversity. This curious and seemingly paradoxical condition between the content and the viewership is probably why various parts of the political left, not just feminist ones, have accused pornography of being crypto-reactionary by nature — inherently fascistic, even. But in having the freedom to strip bare the darker aspects of sexuality, it can nevertheless communicate certain truths regarding the erotic that friendlier modes of storytelling simply cannot.1 Perhaps that is a separate point better left to a separate discussion.

The automobile, Christine (1983) and Crash (1996)

We’re now going to take a departure away from magical beast-summoning sex machines and focus on something different: the erotic reinterpretation of an old and familiar invention, in this case the automobile or motorcar. The car turns into a sort of erotic machine in both John Carpenter’s Christine (1983) and David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996). I’ve already written a little bit about Crash, both the J.G. Ballard novel from 1973 and the David Cronenberg adaptation from 1996. In that post (which I think holds up pretty well despite getting little attention), I made a few points about the material that I haven’t seen elsewhere, the most important being that Crash is not about new technology but old technology. To understand the novel and the film, this is an absolutely crucial point. The story’s erotic subtext is about nostalgia, looking backward from a detached vantage point, not looking forward to the future. Essentially, in my view, Ballard was responding to the newer logic of the electronic world whose consequences were becoming increasingly apparent, and which was (and still is) causing us to conceptually modify our understanding of many familiar inventions and media — including the internal combustion engine, shifting it from being a petrol-driven motor of economic instrumentality into the animating heart of an aesthetic device, the car, in which the erotic could find a new home.

The horror film Christine (1983), about an evil 1958 Plymouth Fury that possesses whoever owns it almost perfectly corroborates the point I was trying to make about Crash. Based on a Stephen King novel released the same year, John Carpenter wisely chose to scrap most of the backstory that lends some coherence to why the car behaves the way it does, how it got the name “Christine,” or how it even became sentient in the first place. Instead, Carpenter ignores those questions and focuses mainly on the transformation of the main character Arnie, who starts off as a bumbling nerd when he purchases the car from a mysterious working-class man who sells it to him in poor condition for a meager $250 (we later learn that the previous owner died in “Christine” from carbon monoxide poisoning, a year after the same fate befell his wife). But as the movie progresses and Arnie because increasingly fixated on the car, ensnared by its mysterious seductive powers, he slowly turns into a 1950s greaser throwback. As with Crash, Christine is a film that deals extensively with looking backwards, and in that sense it acts as a subversive response to the ‘50s/early ‘60s nostalgia that pervaded the previous decade, from American Graffiti (1973) to Happy Days (1974-1984) to Grease (1978).

Once Arnie fixes up the car and becomes filled with the confidence that “Christine” gives him, he snags the prettiest girl in his high school. But of course, when the girl comes between him and his car, he make it clear that he prefers the car. To make matters worse, the car has an unfortunate habit of driving itself around and murdering Arnie’s enemies when he’s asleep in bed. It rams itself into various walls and crevices as it crushes them to death one by one, even turning itself into a flaming mass by careening into a gas station pump at one point. But no matter what happens to it, it magically heals itself afterwards, looking as though nothing ever happened. If you can accept the absurdity of the story at face value, the scene in which Arnie discovers that the car can fix itself is probably the coolest in the whole film, in large part due to Carpenter’s excellent original score:

Anyhow, the erotic subtext never reaches the surface to become explicit. Arnie gets killed in the bloody climax before he ever gets to consummate his love with “Christine.” But there is an excellent scene in which Arnie tells his best friend while driving down the highway, drinking beer,

Let me tell you a little something about love. It has a voracious appetite. It eats everything. Friendship, family… it kills me how much it eats. But I’ll tell you something else. You feed it right, and it can be a beautiful thing, and that’s what we have. You know, when someone believes in you, man, you can do anything, any fucking thing in the universe. And when you believe right back in that someone, then watch out world, because nobody can stop you… nobody, ever.

He then lifts his hands from the wheel, drives into the opposing lanes, and plays chicken with oncoming automobiles.

Now, this is all good and fun, but if you really want to get a portrayal of the automobile as a retconned sex machine, Cronenberg’s Crash is where you’d want to turn. It is, plainly put, a film about people who develop a sex fetish for car crashes. I don’t care to write more on the topic than I already have (again: go read my earlier post), but I’ll provide the (gently edited) money quote from the piece, which explains how it isn’t really about new technology:

The only thing truly novel in Crash’s technological landscape is the way people respond to it — their alienation from the three-dimensional world, the newfound creativity they engage in with the body, and the normative barrenness that they associate with the sex act. All of human sexuality is rendered into a matter of technical jargon and clinical analysis (I mean in the novel), even while the perversions of the characters grow increasingly unrestrained. And in fact, this basic psychological disposition has expanded in modern society since the novel was written and the film was made.

Beyond that point, I’ll just add that here we aren’t dealing with erotic energy presented as a kind of magical or scientifically inexplicable force as with the previous examples. Crash is not science fiction at all. The most inexplicable aspect of it is not the machinery of the automobile itself but rather the coldness of the psychology juxtaposed against the fieriness of the erotic passion that the automobile inspires, simply by dint of its ability to crash and burn.

The Homoerotic Iron Amalgamation, Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)

If you want to pair three films together for how they combine the subjects of erotic attraction and cars, you could do no better than Christine, Crash, and Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Shinya Tsukamoto, the director of Tetsuo, has been open about his admiration for David Cronenberg’s work, and he was strongly influenced by Videodrome (1983), but the correspondences between Tetsuo and Crash are considerably more striking. This is quite astounding because Tetsuo was released seven years before Crash the movie was released, and one year before Crash the J.G. Ballard novel was released in Japanese translation.2 So, how are they related? Well, Tetsuo is essentially about the aftermath of a car crash in which an unnamed Japanese businessman (he’s called “salaryman” in the credits) strikes a body modification enthusiast who has just inserted some scrap metal into a self-inflicted leg wound. We later learn, through a series of the victim’s flashbacks, that following the accident, the businessman has sex with his girlfriend right there and then, apparently aroused by the intensity of the experience, right before driving off. This is pretty much exactly the sort of thing that happens in Crash. There is even an element of nostalgia to the situation, since the crash is slowly and artfully portrayed with some 1950s-style rhythm & blues music (similar to Fats Domino) accompanying it — a major contrast from the propulsive industrial soundtrack that ornaments most of the film.

However, Tetsuo is outwardly more bizarre than Crash, because it is an experimental black & white sci-fi film told with a hallucinatory and nonlinear plot structure, and unlike with the eerily sober Crash, here the viewer is thrown into the world of the supernatural. After the car crash takes place, the businessman is haunted, at first by a mysterious woman whose body is partly metal (she later, I think, turns out to be androgynous), and then by his own body, which slowly starts to be taken over by metal while growing its own metal appendages. He starts dreaming of being sodomized by the guy whom he ran over (again: in Crash, the main character has homoerotic fantasies about the man who introduces him to car crash fetishism), and later, he himself grows a gigantic metal drill to replace his penis. This drill eventually impales his girlfriend to death, taking her, along with the entire female element, out of the picture entirely.

As all this is happening, the wounded body modification enthusiast finds that he is also growing metal on his body, and in fact his brain is being replaced by metal. It’s as though the implant he gave himself in the beginning of the film is functioning as a seed. He eventually tracks down and confronts the businessman who ran him over for a final showdown. At first, it seems as though they are fighting, but as their confrontation continues, the R&B music starts playing again, a flashback to the car crash takes place, and then everything becomes still. Finally, the two men declare their love for one another and complete their amalgamation into a gigantic and hideous mech of twisted iron and junkyard scraps. (It can shoot fire, too.) The body modification enthusiast’s head (located atop this warped mech) tells the businessman’s head (located somewhere in its midriff), “We can mutate the whole world into metal. We can rust the world into the dust of the universe. Our love can destroy the whole fucking world!” to which the businessman replies, “Let’s do it!” And then, off they go, ready to blow the world to smithereens.

Again, as with Crash, it isn’t exactly right to say that Tetsuo is about the fetishization of “technology,” whatever that word means. It’s about the fetishization of a certain kind of technology. When the body modification man and the businessman confront one another, the former tells the latter, “You see all this rust on my body? My first metal implant was already rusty before my cells began to assimilate it. But your shaver was stainless steel!” Iron, of course, rusts, while stainless steel does not, and iron is what ultimately wins in the end. Therefore, the “technology” that our body modification enthusiast favors is one amenable to the forces of entropy. His solution is to spread this familiar technology everywhere, as if horizontally; he isn’t trying to serve technology “vertically” through better scientific research and development. Although Tetsuo is lumped in with the cyberpunk genre, which is largely inspired by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), this association is mainly because of the punk aesthetic as well as the metal imagery that pervades the film. But in reality, cyberpunk is about futuristic technology set against urban decay. Tetsuo is about the spread of urban decay without the futuristic technology.

It is also, of course, a movie about the power of eros ultimately creating a machine that spreads iron, rust, and destruction wherever it goes. Particularly important is the total denial of female sexuality, with homoerotic love prevailing, since homosexual sex is non-productive by its very nature. Again, although the erotic seems to have a kind of magical quality here (it seems to be spreading iron all over these guys’ bodies), it is all in the service of the machine, the denial of the organic. As the machine slowly takes over, the feminine aspect of eros grows altogether diminished until it disappears entirely.

The Virgin and the Dynamo

One point worth making here is that it’s probably no coincidence that two of the examples here — indeed, the most extreme ones — come from Japan. Being a country that developed largely without the influence of Christianity, Japan, particularly following the economic boom of 1955-1973, experienced a certain kind of creative freedom to handle the subject of technology through an artistic treatment. For America, electronic technology accompanied its development as a country, and in a sense, it grew to resemble a kind of substitute for the divine feminine found in the image of the Virgin Mary. In his prophetic autobiography The Education of Henry Adams (1907), Adams explains how he started to think about the spiritual difficulties that this situation might present as he walked down a room full of electric dynamos at the 1900 Paris Exposition, marveling at their mythic potency:

To [Adams’s acquaintance], the dynamo itself was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight; but to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring — scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s-breadth further for respect of power — while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy, the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.

As with the Marcel Duchamp piece that we examined last week, this passage is an example of an early insight into the contrast between the machine and the erotic element, though Adams conceptualizes the latter in the form of the mythic feminine.

The force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays; but in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force — at most as sentiment. No American had ever been truly afraid of either. This problem in dynamics gravely perplexed an American historian. The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment, but as a force. Why was she unknown in America? For evidently America was ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a true force, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the monthly-magazine-made American female had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam. The trait was notorious, and often humorous, but any one brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength. Neither art nor beauty was needed. Every one, even among Puritans, knew that neither Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the Oriental goddesses was worshipped for her beauty. She was goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction — the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund.

The point here is that the second industrial revolution and the growth of electric power didn’t offer a clear place for the feminine element to dwell, particularly in America, since Calvinism didn’t venerate those things to the extent seen in the Catholic church. Instead, electronic technology came to replace it altogether. This is probably the condition that not only made Americans particularly vulnerable to psychoanalysis, which sought to demystify sex in the most clinical possible fashion, but also created a pronounced sense of absence as new technologies grew and spread. The sex machines that we’ve been looking at can be considered attempts to negotiate the (feminine) erotic pole against the (masculine) machinic one, and it is possible that this is why the automobile slowly became charged — at least in some narrative presentations — with erotic power as it became increasingly familiar as a non-electric yet incredibly powerful automotive machine. But the other takeaway from this passage is that it should also come as no surprise that the most unromantic meditations on these opposing conceptual poles would come from the east — particularly a country like Japan, which experienced rampant technological growth during the Meiji Restoration, dealt with the ravages of World War II, and then experienced another shock of unprecedented economic growth shortly afterwards.

Alright, that concludes this discussion on sex machines. Now go outside, walk around, climb some trees, pick some wildflowers, and enjoy yourselves.

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Today, I feel like talking about some sex machines. Here, I do not mean mere masturbation auxiliary devices, like the steam-powered dildos that were invented in the nineteenth century to help cure female hysteria. Instead, I’m talking about fictitious machines, ones found in trashy, lowbrow comic books and exploitation movies — ones with grand designs and powerful ambitions. These are machines that interact with the power of sex to achieve various ends beyond mere orgasm. Last week on this blog, I talked about the neo-Darwinian idea that organic life can be reduced to machinery, and I concluded that the most “animalistic” moments of various species (like the ones involving sex and violence) are the most machine-like, but the vast majority of organic life is spent in a non-machinic state of existence. It is interesting, then, how often the erotic and the mechanistic are paired together and dealt with artistically, and sex machines are just one example of how the pairing has been explored throughout the twentieth century. We’ll discuss a few of them.

“The Excessive Machine,” Barbarella (1968)

The Excessive Machine, simply put, is a machine designed to bring people so much sexual pleasure that it kills them. It originally appears in Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella comic (1966), which Roger Vadim’s film was based on, though its design isn’t as interesting as the one in the movie. In the movie, the machine vaguely resembles a pipe organ, with a keyboard and a series of translucent tubes connecting to its sides, and it even has its own obscure sheet music. The idea is that one person “plays” the Excessive Machine, while the other, its victim, lies down beneath a row of planks that resemble an organ’s pedalboard. The planks proceed to undulate in a stimulating fashion, and the victim is thrown into erotic spasms. Once the machine reaches its crescendo, its victim will die of pleasure.

At least, that’s how it works in theory. In the actual movie scene, Barbarella is so sexually potent (I guess?) that she winds up taming the machine, causing it to erupt in flames, and ultimately destroying it. All of this results in one of the worst line reads ever in cinematic history: “You’ve burnt out the excessive machine! You’ve blown all its fuses! You’ve exhausted its power! It couldn’t keep up with you! This is incredible! What kind of girl are you? Have you no shame? Shame! Shame on you! You’ll pay for this!”

Interestingly, in the comic, it’s Barbarella who asks the operator of the machine, “Aren’t you ashamed?” after it gives her an orgasm, and they don’t bother to have her destroy the machine by passively overpowering it. It’s just a two-panel gag, and they briskly move onto the next plot point. The comic actually holds machines in rather high regard, as evinced from one panel in which Barbarella reassures a self-conscious robot that he is, despite his own misgivings, a perfect lover:

There’s nothing like this in the film at all. So, clearly, Vadim had his own frame of mind when adapting the original work. Barbarella, in Vadim’s version, comes from a futuristic Earth in which sex has been managerially reorganized. Only people with compatible “psychocardiogram” readings are able to do it with one another, and they do so by taking drugs known as “exaltation transference pellets,” touching their hands together, and remaining still for a minute. For centuries, only the poor have been having sex the old-fashioned way, while the middle-classes and above stopped doing it because it was proven to be, in Barbarella’s words, “distracting and a danger to maximum efficiency.”

But of course, in the first half hour of the movie, Barbarella winds up having primitive sex, and she quickly decides that she prefers it that way. The film is thus a celebration of raw eros as contrasted with copulatory micromanagement. There is no point in trying to find character development in this self-consciously ludicrous film, so we can’t say something like, “Once Barbarella was introduced to sex, she quickly mastered it, and the Excessive Machine was her final test!” There’s nothing like that happening here. The point is that we’re dealing with some half-developed themes about the power of the sex drive versus man’s attempts to harness and/or control it, either through mechanistic procedures or technological innovations, and the conclusion clearly points to the erotic assuming primacy over the mechanistic.

“The Orgasmatron,” Sleeper (1973)

In this Woody Allen movie, Miles Monroe (Allen’s character) gets cryogenically frozen and finds himself in a dystopian future world in which, as the love interest Luna Schlosser explains, “Sex is different today, you see? We don’t have any problems. Everybody’s frigid.” Instead of having old-fashioned sex, both partners get into a machine called the Orgasmatron, and it does all the work for them. The Orgasmatron was supposedly influenced by Wilhelm Reich’s pseudoscientific invention of the Orgone Energy Accumulator. Or at least, this is what the internet tells me. But in reality, Reich’s invention wasn’t any kind of “sex machine” — he actually wanted it to treat cancer by having people sit in it and feel vaguely pleasant. However, given the sensationalized way it was covered in the press at that time, it would make sense for Allen to interpret the Orgone Accumulator that way, so perhaps it was an influence after all. Speaking of which, the psychedelic space-rock band Hawkwind also gave their own take on the same exact subject in the same year, and I’m not sure it has much to do with Reich’s thinking, either. Reich is actually an interesting figure worth taking up for a separate discussion, since he’s perhaps the only vitalist who really thought that he found the essence of all life in material form underneath a microscope: a gambit that was sure not to pay off. In any case, Allen’s futuristic concept here is more thematically similar to what we find in Barbarella than anything from Reich’s thought.

At the end of the movie, Miles and Luna declare their love for one another, but Luna objects that science has proven that men and women cannot have meaningful relationships due to the chemical incompatibilities between the sexes. Miles dismisses this objection and says he doesn’t believe in science, claiming instead that the only two things worth believing in are sex and death. Thus, the movie ends on a note of primitive eros defeating the oppressive managerialism of the future. Given that I’m not a huge fan of Allen’s work, I won’t spend too much time on this one, but you get the idea. We’ll move onto the next sex machine.

The “Love Machine,” The Holy Mountain (1973)

About halfway through Alejandro Jodorowsky’s bizarre occult “midnight movie” classic, we meet eight different men and women who are all going to depart on a quest for spiritual enlightenment by climbing a mystical Holy Mountain located in parts unknown. They have sought the help of a guru, a mysterious alchemist played by Jodorowsky himself, who introduces each of them, one by one, to a thief, the film’s main character. The heavily satirical introductions of each person during this part (they’re essentially vignettes, so that’s what I’ll call them) take quite a while to get through, occupying nearly a solid third of the movie’s runtime. The first would-be initiate whom we meet is a man who corresponds with the planet Venus, and he runs a rather ridiculous cosmetics and prosthetics business to help beautify people. The second is a woman who corresponds with the planet Mars, and she runs an equally ridiculous weapons business, one that can effectively appeal to youth fashion as well as people’s various religious sensibilities. Then, we meet the third man, Clen, who corresponds with the planet Jupiter. Clen, a sleazy-looking fellow who vaguely resembles Penthouse Magazine’s Bob Guccione, introduces himself as the owner of an art factory which “produces a new line of art every season,” one of which involves a row of nude men and women stamping their paint-covered butt cheeks onto canvases that pass by them one by one, much like a car part going through a Model T assembly line. This is an apparent jab at Andy Warhol and the pop art movement.

After seeing a number of different examples of Clen’s “art,” the scene switches, and we are presented with an unassuming metallic cube sitting in a warehouse of some kind. In a voiceover, Clen announces, “We created a Love Machine. To make it live, the spectator has to work with it, guide it, receive it… give himself in the act of love. With this electronic rod, he will rub its mechanical vagina. The skill of the spectator will determine the machine’s ability to reach a climax.”

The electronic rod is, of course, an oversized metal phallus, and it’s about as tall as the user himself. Clen’s personal chauffeur volunteers to demonstrate it, but he proves quite unskilled with the rod, outing himself as a poor lover. But then, Clen’s erotically superior mistress takes the rod and manipulates the machine with it. The machine opens itself up and expands outward, revealing its various diodes, buttons, and levers, resembling a work of modern art. Upon reaching climax, it shoots out a brown, then white goo onto the floor. And following that, it gives birth to a small robot baby, which it starts to nurture while Clen and his mistress walk toward the camera, the mistress raising her hand in triumph before the scene cuts to the next vignette.

In all of these vignettes, the would-be spiritual adepts resemble corrupted versions of their planet’s associated alchemical meaning. Venus clearly represents the commodification of erotic desire, and Mars the commodification of war, and so Jupiter demonstrates the commodification of artistic creativity. It is curious, then, that the sex machine is given to him instead of Venus. Clen’s approach to the erotic is decidedly technological in a way that his approach to art is not. We might say that his factory-produced art, for all its innovations in production, remains “analog” rather than “digital,” but the Love Machine really shows the scope of Clen’s Jupiterian vision. The nude mistress recruits her erotic prowess to enliven the cold wires and circuitry of the machine, and apparently this idea works — so well in fact that the machine reproduces itself. Whatever Jodorowsky’s thought process behind the sequence may have been, it is interesting that his view on the relationship between the erotic and the mechanistic is more cynical than in the previous two examples. While he does portray the erotic as the superior, non-rational, life-giving force, he also shows its power being used in the service of the machine rather than overcoming it. This segment, along with a surprising amount of others throughout the film, actually suggests a skepticism towards sexual liberation politics, something that hasn’t been commented upon much vis à vis Jodorowsky’s work.

On Erotic Machines

There are, of course, plenty of other examples in cinema and other narrative arts that depict the relationship between machinery and the erotic, and in a more interesting way than presenting machines as mere masturbation or bondage aides. Of course, there are thousands of examples of those, which are not only found in erotic cinema or comic books (see Guido Crepax’s Valentina for an excellent example in which such devices abound) but they’re also collected and displayed in various tourist-friendly museums, like the Sex Machines Museum in Prague. The previous three examples I’ve discussed are more interesting, though, because they go a little bit further in their aims. For one thing, they come hot on the heels of the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, a time in which the erotic was presented as a spiritual antidote to the proceduralism and conformity that characterize the modern world, and each example juxtaposes the erotic against the machine (or rational processes reminiscent of machines) in largely the same fashion.

In Barbarella, the titular character’s native erotic energy ultimately overcomes the oppressive power of the machine, while in Sleeper, the same thing basically happens, though in a less literal fashion. In The Holy Mountain, which takes a much more critical view towards the youth counter-culture (despite its participants enjoying it anyway), the erotic is actually used to power the machine, an indication of how the former can be corrupted and commodified. But all the same, the erotic is presented as essentially superior to its cold rationality, since it is ultimately what makes the machine operate and multiply itself. Thus, in all three examples, the erotic is presented essentially as different from the mechanical, an organic substitute to the cold rationality of modern life — something with its own mysterious and exotic power.

This is not an altogether new approach to the subject, either. Throughout western literary history, desire has always been presented as something virtually impossible to plan or account for; a kind of power that no mechanism could ever properly capture. We can see this in the satire of Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose from all the way back in the thirteenth century, and even the De Amore of Andreas Capellanus back in the twelfth (though, I should point out, the satirical interpretation of it remains controversial, as I’ve discussed here). One can also find this sensibility in Book III of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, or the chaotic events that unfold in Shakespeare’s various comedies, especially the haphazard endings of his “problem plays” like Measure for Measure. But of course, these are only examples that point to the insufficiency of overwrought schemes and rational planning; they don’t specifically contrast the erotic with mechanical devices or electric machines.

One good early work specifically contrasting the irrationality of the erotic to the machine itself is Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923). This nine-foot-tall glass pane divided into two halves doesn’t really look like much of anything at first glance, only a vague figure in the upper half next to some sort of window-like structure, and some smaller figures and other funky-looking abstract shapes in the lower. But Duchamp conceived the work as a specifically textual experience, and getting a sense of its meaning is impossible without the use of notes that he prepared as a schematic for the piece, and which were later collected in another piece entitled The Green Box. However, the notes it contains are so excessive, complicated, and seemingly arbitrary that one can never actually make sense of the work with a feeling of completion or finality. I’ll quote extensively from how Octavio Paz presents it while relying on Duchamp’s notes from the Green Box, in a passage from his essay “Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare” (1968):

The upper half of the Large Glass is the Bride’s domain. A complicated piece of machinery fills the far left. It is the Bride herself, or to be exact, the Bride in one of her personifications. […] The vague similarities to a human form are accidental; the Bride is an apparatus, and her humanity lies neither in her shapes nor in her physiology. Her humanity is symbolic: the Bride is an ideal reality, a symbol manifested in mechanical forms, producing symbols in its turn. It is a symbol machine. But these symbols are distended and deformed by irony; they are symbols that distill their own negation. The way the Bride works is physiological, mechanical, ironic, symbolic, and imaginary all at the same time; the substance on which she runs is a secretion called “automobiline,” her ecstasies are electric, and the physical force that moves her gears is desire.

[…]

Moving to the right, below the Milky Way, a groove holds up a metallic shaft or stalk connected with the “desire-magnet” lower down. The desire-magnet contains in a cage the “filament substance” (invisible). This substance is the Bride’s secretion, which materializes at her moment of “blossoming.” The Green Box indicates that it “is like a solid flame … which licks the ball of the Handler of Gravity, displacing it as it pleases.” The shaft of the desire-magnet is an axis, which is why its other name is “arbor-type.” It is hard to decide if it is also called “motor with quite feeble cylinders,” or if this expression denotes another part of the machinery. The arbor-type axis or spinal column is connected to a sort of syringe or lancet: this is the “wasp.” The wasp has unusual characteristics: it secretes the “love gasoline” by osmosis; it possesses a sense of smell that allows it to perceive the “waves of unbalance” emitted by the black ball of the Juggler of Gravity; furthermore, it is endowed with a vibratory property that determines the pulsations of the “needle” and of a ventilation system. In turn this determines the “swinging to and fro of the Hanged Female with its accessories.”

Below the wasp is the “tank of love gasoline or timid power.” This erotic gasoline “distributed to the motor with quite feeble cylinders, in contact with the sparks of her constant life (desire-magnet) explodes and makes this virgin, who has attained her desire, blossom.” The tank, also called an “oscillating bathtub,” is what provides for the “hygiene of the Bride.” Lower down, the “pulse needle” is balanced. It is mounted “on a wandering leash. It has the liberty of caged animals.” The pulse needle is in the shape of a rather threatening pendulum, swinging over the void: the horizon-garment of the Bride.

The Bachelor-Machine is a “steam engine on a masonry substructure on this brick base, a solid foundation.” The machine has “a tormented gearing,” and it gives birth to its “desire-part.” Thanks to the latter, the steam engine turns into a “desire motor.” But this motor is separated from the Bride by a “cooler of transparent glass” that blends into the horizon-garment. In the Large Glass these items are hard to identify, and the Bride’s architectonic masonry base does not appear.

[…]

In the lower half of the Large Glass, at the far left, we find the group of the Nine Malic Molds, or Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries, or Eros’ Matrix. All three names suit them because the Bachelors have no true personality. They are empty suits, hollow pieces inflated by the illuminating gas. “The Bachelors serve as an architectonic base of the Bride, which thus becomes a sort of apotheosis of virginity.”

The differences between the Bride’s and Bachelors’ respective universes are vast. First of all, “the principal forms of the Bachelor-Machine are imperfect… that is, they are measurable…. The principal forms of the Bride are more or less large or small, have no longer, in relation to their destination, a mensurability.” […] The region of the Bachelors is governed by the laws of classical perspective; the Bride’s by a free geometry where “more or less” is the rule. A world of free forms, which cannot be measured and can be seen only with difficulty: the realm of indetermination, where causality has disappeared or, if it survives, obeys laws and principles that are different from those here below. The Bachelors’ domain is that of measurements and causality, the region of our two- and three-dimensional geometry and, therefore, of imperfect forms.

This is, of course, only Paz’s attempt to make sense of all the parts — one could certainly interpret them differently — and this is only a (very) partial description. In Paz’s essay, the full explication goes on for pages and pages. We haven’t even gotten to the sieves, the water wheel, or the Chocolate Grinder next to the bachelors. This YouTube video, featuring a contrived discussion between two art critics, does a pretty good job of explaining the piece in a relatively short amount of time. But the point is that in this work, we recognize a certain machinery fueled by erotic desire, and yet its final meaning is always endlessly deferred, the desire that fuels it never fully consummated.

Duchamp’s work stands as a pivotal point in the modernistic attitude toward sex and machinery, since it has one foot firmly planted in western tradition and another foot planted into the future. The western literary tradition, somewhat uniquely, honors the irreducibility of eros and treats its essence as beyond all rational comprehension, but as time goes on, the arrival of the electric machine ultimately puts such a conceptualization of it into question. What Duchamp was able to do was draw an explicit connection between the erotic and the machine, which he ultimately (being a Dadaist) reduces to absurdity. This elevation of eros above rationality is actually, in a certain way, a conservative conclusion, and the same conservative conclusion is likewise reached in the three pulpy film examples I’ve discussed. Only Jodorowsky, at that time, was looking toward a world in which the erotic could prove vulnerable to the total dominance of the cold and controlling marketplace, or even actively assist it. But he doesn’t quite go so far as to equate the erotic with the mechanistic. This perception does, however, eventually make its way into the modern imagination, and we could discuss some examples — but this post has gone on long enough, and I feel like ending it here. I will continue the discussion later in a second part.

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I’ve been typing “biosemiotics” into YouTube lately just to see what kind of wacky results might turn up. And indeed, they have been quite wacky. It seems that over the past few years, the term is starting to spread into strange places. Among the results I’ve found, first, there’s this seemingly AI-generated podcast adorned with a thumbnail of an Indian guy not wearing a shirt. There’s also this talk with Kalevi Kull, who has actually done serious work in phytosemiotics (plant communication). Although he’s not the greatest talker, his material makes up the best content you’re likely to get out of YouTube. But then there’s this talk, which is supposed to be about the link between biosemiotics, trauma, and social policy by a hurried and discombobulated British man who never quite gets to his point until deep into the Q&A session. And then there’s this interview with the environmental philosopher and public health scientist Yogi Hendlin, whom I’ll discuss in a moment.

The last two links in particular suggest to me that biosemiotics is turning into a vague catch-all term that you can sport as a sort of fashion. It’s meant to show that you’re into biology, but not in a cold, reductionistic, unfeeling sort of way. You’re not into that whole “nature red in tooth and claw” way of thinking. No, you’re more of a hippie-dippie kinda guy — you’re in touch with your feminine side. You see the animals and the plants, and you’re all about feeling what they feel. In the discombobulated British guy’s talk, for instance, he specifically contrasts biosemiotics with sociobiology, which he feels is a dead-end because it’s a “male” point of view that treats aggression as inborn and part of nature — as opposed to socially constructed, I would have to presume. He also claims that no cooperation can ever happen under the neo-Darwinian framework unless it occurs as part of kin selection. This is a claim which would come as news to Richard Dawkins, who dedicated an entire chapter in his second edition of The Selfish Gene (1989) to showing via game theory models how “tragedy of the commons” situations often compel different species to work together cooperatively across kin lines in ways that would seem irrational at first glance (he called the chapter “Nice Guys Finish First”). So on the whole, the guy’s talk is a bit of a mess, but given that he doesn’t pretend to be an expert, I don’t want to pick on him too much.

The real mess is the interview with Yogi Hendlin, whom I’d never heard of before, but definitely gives off pretty strong charlatan vibes. He constantly shifts what he’s talking about, regularly peppering his discussion with tantalizing non sequiturs. He endorses a strong linguistic relativism, even saying that the Greeks couldn’t see blue because they didn’t have a word for the color blue — an old chestnut that I addressed on this blog last week, incidentally. He endorses the Hollywood slopfest Medicine Man (1992), a preachy film about curing cancer in the rainforest by learning from nature, all while finding true love. He talks quite a bit about getting high on psychedelic drugs (he feels they should be called “ecodelics”) and getting back in touch with your feelings. He, at one point, starts talking about the importance of “killing” your “inner-Nazi,” which is, I’m quoting, “a default mode network which is restraining us from acknowledging the synesthesia— all the feelings that are constantly washing over us.” And, you know, I don’t get that last part, admittedly. After all, who was more emotionally sensitive than Hitler, the man who cared for music so passionately that he ordered a special bunker to be built just to protect Wilhelm Furtwängler from the Allied bombing raids?

Anyways, when the interviewer finally asks Hendlin, “What is biosemiotics?” about twenty minutes into the video, Hendlin chuckles, looks at him knowingly, and says, “Great.” before giving what, by any fair-minded account, would have to be regarded as a pretty weak explanation. He messes up Peirce’s triadic model of signs by confusing the interpretant with the living subject, and he also implies that the “object” is unknowable, almost like Kant’s “ding an sich.” He then turns to Jakob von Uexküll, and he doesn’t do a great job with him, either, calling him a neo-Kantian rather than someone who simply (and luckily for all of us) misunderstood Kant. But beyond these slippages, he never really explains what biosemiotics is in clear terms, or how it relates to any of the other stuff he goes on about. The actual video is entitled, “Biosemiotics: A New Way To Understand Non-Human Consciousness,” and yet you’re left to figure out what it is based on the trail of discursive clues dropped throughout the interview. Apparently it’s about getting high on psilocybin, lying down in a forest, and letting all of your feelings out. Or something.

It seems pretty clear to me that biosemiotics attracts left-wing types with an oppositional mentality. They’re into philosophy, they’re into biology, they’re into the humanities, maybe they’re religious, they want to synthesize these things somehow, and they want recognition for doing important work… but they are mainly driven by the spirit of protest rather than inquiry, and this seems to be crucial for understanding them as a community. Essentially, biosemiotics is attracting people in the market for a “new way of thinking,” one that makes people more opposed to capitalism, or environmental exploitation, or male chauvinism, or whatever. Back when I wrote an informal post on the value I see in semiotics a couple years ago, I basically equated Peircean semiotics with biosemiotics, since the latter seemed to me at the time like a catch-all to describe the study of non-symbolic semiotic processes, i.e. forms of communication occurring at the animal, plant, and even cellular level. But I also said that I’m not too wild about the term “biosemiotics” because semiotics in general should be commonly understood as incorporating all of these forms of communication; it shouldn’t require the prefix “bio-.” In hindsight, I believe I’ve made the right choice in not fully embracing the label.

Since I’m in a “devil’s advocate” sort of mood, I’ll even go a step further and say that their opposition to neo-Darwinism is overstated. Let me explain this point. There’s no question that neo-Darwinism attracts its own kind of subculture, one that is more obnoxious than what the culture of biosemiotics might be (and I only say “might” because I’ve never actually gone to a conference, so I’m just feeling around from the outside). Neo-Darwinism is still the mainstream, accepted evolutionary theory, and it’s flexible enough to accommodate plenty of additions, like niche construction and epigenetics. In fact, its flexibility is enough to make me suspect that it will remain the mainstream account of biological evolution for a good, long while. But when you look at the kinds of public intellectuals it has generated — guys like Richard Hanania, “Professor Dave Explains,” and The Four Horsemen of New Atheism — it doesn’t take long to perceive a streak of puerility at the heart of its most strident adherents; a deep-seated inability to grasp, or perhaps a discomfort with grasping the fundamentals of human psychology, even as they insist that the inner-workings of the green world are precisely what allow us to understand man.

Nevertheless, though, it isn’t exactly hard for me to see why even the most misleading accounts of evolution have proven so popular and so enduring. For biosemiotics, probably the most offensive of these accounts is Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (first published 1976), which has been massively influential all over the world and reprinted numerous times. It also has propounded the coldest and most mechanistic view of life in all of popular science, and if you actually sit down and read it, it is pretty clear that it was written with more than a tinge of self-satisfaction. Dawkins revels in playing the flamboyant role of myth-destroying idol-smasher. What else could explain his rhetorical questions such as, “When you are actually challenged to think of pre-Darwinian answers to the questions ‘What is man?’ ‘Is there a meaning to life?’ ‘What are we for?’, can you, as a matter of fact, think of any that are not now worthless except for their (considerable) historic interest?” and, “If … you are not religious, then face up to the following question: What on earth do you think you are, if not a robot, albeit a very complicated one?” Pure silliness. Like I said, the neo-Darwinian synthesis has an uncanny ability to attract teenaged minds.

But probably the most outlandish claim of Dawkins is also one of central importance, namely that all organisms without exception are merely “survival machines” that genes have fashioned as vehicles to ensure their ability to keep replicating themselves in perpetuity. I’ve already discussed the conceptual flaws with this characterization of the issue a couple weeks back, and I haven’t changed my mind about the excessive gene-centrism of Dawkins’s account since. But let’s try to be fair-minded about this presentation, since it does actually offer some things that biosemiotics simply cannot. To put it simply, it gives the people what they want: a heuristic framework to serve as the basis for a precise analysis of what’s going on in the natural world at any moment — along with predictions about what will happen in the future. Yes, this is all very unphilosophical, but the Dawkins model gives people an answer to the question, “So what? What’s the application?” and the appeal of such a thing cannot be denied. Even if a narrative-based simplification like “survival machines” ultimately causes more confusion than it resolves, people will still accept it if they feel it offers enough punching power when it comes to explanation and prediction-making. And if your story is amenable to some supplemental game theory analysis or mathematical probability calculations to bolster the feeling of having infinite precision, then all the better. Neo-Darwinism gives an excited response to Leibniz’s clarion call, “Let us calculate!” Biosemiotics, meanwhile, doesn’t really provide anything like that.

So, are organisms really “survival machines,” then? No, I don’t think so. But the metaphor enables the acquisition of what the British philosopher Owen Barfield calls “dashboard knowledge,” since it sidesteps the problem of essential understanding in order to enable operative understanding. And operative understanding is really, really attractive. Barfield explains the concept like so:

Take a clever boy, who knows nothing about the principle of internal combustion or the inside of an engine, and leave him inside a motor-car, first telling him to move the various knobs, switches and levers about and see what happens. If no disaster supervenes, he will end by finding himself able to drive the car. It will then be true to say that he knows how to drive the car; but untrue to say that he knows the car. As to that, the most we could say would be that he has an ‘operative’ knowledge of it - because for operation all that is required is a good empirical acquaintance with the dashboard and the pedals. Whatever we say, it is obvious that what he has is very different from the knowledge of someone else, who has studied mechanics, though he has perhaps never driven a car in his life, and is perhaps too nervous to try. Now whether or not there is another kind of knowledge of nature, which corresponds to ‘engine-knowledge’ in the analogy, it seems that, if the first view of the nature of scientific theory is accepted, the kind of knowledge aimed at by science must be, in effect, what I will call ‘dashboard-knowledge.

This hypothetical boy, by the way, could easily rely on animistic explanations to help himself understand the car. He could assign one lesser pagan god to each button, switch, and pedal, while reserving a mysterious greater sky god for the operation of the car as a cohesive whole. Such reasoning might even help him learn to drive better. It’s like how the Waldorf schools will use little allegorical gnomes named Mr. Odd and Mrs. Even to teach arithmetic. I’m digressing, here.

Anyhow, back to Dawkins. If these “survival machines” were truly machines, we probably would have been able to fully figure them out by now in a non-superficial way, since we as a species are pretty good with machines. But the truth is that we haven’t even come close to figuring out the simplest of these “survival machines.” Consider this example. Some computer programmers actually tried to digitally recreate a C. elegans worm: a well-researched, transparent, non-parasitic, 1mm long nematode that lives in temperate soil environments — or, in other words, the perfect organism to try and recreate through programming. Relying on an extraordinary body of pre-existing scholarship as well as a scientific advisory panel to guide their every decision, they began the OpenWorm project in 2011. But as it happens, the project has been a failure, with extremely little progress having been made despite plenty of outside interest and support. People seem a bit surprised by this, too. If we can understand nematode worms, surely we could create them, right? If we aren’t stewing in the ignorance of religion, then what on earth could we possibly think animals are, if not robots, albeit complicated ones? And yet, we’ve got nothing.

Dawkins, of course, understands that the brain is not a computer. He even says so in the endnotes to a later edition of The Selfish Gene: his critics are being too “literal-minded” because he’s only saying that brains are analogous to computers. He isn’t so foolish as to think they’re exactly the same thing! But then again, it’s a perfectly fine analogy to use over and over again, because, “Functionally, the brain plays precisely the role of on-board computer—data processing, pattern recognition, short-term and long-term data storage, operation coordination, and so on.” But don’t worry, it’s just an analogy; stop being so literal about everything.

Perhaps Dawkins should have been more concerned about his literal-minded fan base, because many of them didn’t seem to realize that the analogy has serious limitations. Maybe if people had less faith in not just Dawkins’s version of ecology, but the entire “science fiction” outlook on life in which Dawkins has indulged so shamelessly, there wouldn’t be such tremendous confusion about, say, artificial intelligence right now, which appears to be on the verge of a catastrophic speculative bubble revulsion, in large part because no one really knows what intelligence actually is and they seem to think it just means “computation.” A good metaphor can yield plenty of superficial, operative insights, but over time, it can lapse into outright distortion, particularly as it starts to literalize in people’s minds as a hangover from its prior use.

If I’m going to be fair, though, I have to concede something: it is easy to see why the idea of organisms as machines has proven so attractive, even beyond predictive punching power and dashboard knowledge. In nature, organisms do often act “machine-like” in that they don’t demonstrate the kind of reflection or wisdom that we expect of humans. The machine-like behavior of animals actually influenced Martin Heidegger’s philosophy: in his book of lectures The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1929-1930), he describes an experiment in which a bee is placed in front of a dish of honey. Normally, the bee would consume the honey until satiated and then fly off, but in this experiment, the bee’s abdomen had been physically severed while it was feeding. The bee, apparently either unaware of or uninterested in the new circumstance, keeps consuming the honey indefinitely, even though it cannot digest it anymore. So, it just keeps eating and eating as the honey seeps out of its mutilated body, helpless to see the situation for what it is. This experiment caused Heidegger to conclude that non-human animals reside in a state of captivation (Benommenheit), primed by their immediate environment yet unable to step back and approach each of its component parts as beings in their own right. Thus, whereas humans are “world-forming” (Weltbildend) in a decisive manner (e.g. by being able to perceive deeper contexts, meanings, and possibilities within their surrounding environments), animals are “poor in world” (Weltarm) insofar as they have access to stimuli but not what Heidegger considered Being-as-such.

Later philosophers, such as Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, have criticized Heidegger for these conclusions, but the basic point seems pretty hard to toss aside. Typically, when we characterize a behavior as “animalistic,” we’re talking about sex, violence, or gluttony. The most “animalistic” behavior is often automatic and thus reducible to the operation of machinery. If life were simply eat, fight, fuck, and die, then project OpenWorm probably would have been a resounding success. But it’s all of the other stuff that takes place in the intervening periods that makes life so difficult to understand, and perhaps impossible to recreate from the ground up.

What biosemiotics has always promised, to me anyway, is a framework for understanding these “unsexy” aspects of life — those that don’t immediately draw our attention, since they aren’t strictly about survival in an immediate way, and yet are essential to understanding life’s inner-workings. One dog humping another dog is pretty easy to explain, but it’s less easy to explain the behavior of dogs when they’re engaging in nonproductive play. When they’re just messing around for the hell of it, basically. In those instances, one can never predict what will happen next from moment to moment. Heidegger was probably right in his view that humans have a privileged access to meaning, which he elsewhere attributes to language (“the house of being,” as he famously called it). Because humans are the only species with symbolic communication, they actually can ponder the greater contextual circumstances that make up any situation. Human beings have an elevated capacity for recognizing the haeccitas, or uniqueness, of any given entity or scenario, and as a corollary, they can also recognize its quiddity, or its essential nature. But all the same, biosemiotics is there to keep us mindful of one of C.S. Peirce’s claims that in even the most rudimentary forms of experience or semiosis, there is always the distant potential for “thirdness” or symbolic understanding. That is, from the very beginning of life in its simplest manifestations, the seeds of symbolic awareness are already planted, and this condition is what imbues all of life with semiotic freedom — even if this freedom is not exploited so decisively until organisms reach a sufficiently complex state.

It’s worth noting that Dawkins himself, the arch-villain of the biosemioticians, recognized that humans are unique in their ability to overcome their genetic programming. While he may have oversimplified the significance of this genetic programming, it is undeniable that he was positing some kind of free will among the human species. Over and over again throughout The Selfish Gene, he denies being a genetic determinist and says things like, “Our brains have evolved to the point where we are capable of rebelling against our selfish genes.” Of course, he lacks any kind of philosophical framework to explain what this rebellion actually is, or how it could come into being — and given that he’s now 85 and spent the majority of his life agreeing with the statement that all attempts to explain human nature prior to 1859 are worthless (it’s always so convenient when we can find an excuse to be less erudite), it’s safe to say he’ll never find one, and neither will his biggest fans. But all the same, the admission is there. And concomitant with that admission, if we really want to take this claim seriously, is the possibility that the evolutionary model for all other species that the neo-Darwinists use — namely, kin selection as opposed to group selection — might not even meaningfully apply to humans. In other words, the rules-of-thumb that the neo-Darwinists have spent such painstaking amounts of time to explain the green world might only have an attenuated value when it comes to understanding man. This could explain why sociobiology or evolutionary psychology, fields I’d say are worth taking seriously despite some conceptual flaws, often result in lousy, unconvincing research.

I’ll end this rambling, wandering post with this final statement. To the extent that I’m interested in biosemiotics, I’d have to say that the biosemiotics I prefer is one more compatible with the poet William Blake, who once wrote, “Where man is not, nature is barren,” as opposed to, say, the radical environmentalist Pentti Linkola, who once wrote, “If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating, if it meant millions of people would die.” In other words, I’m always going to approach biosemiotics anthropocentrically, if that word can be taken in a certain sense. Here I don’t mean “anthropocentric” epistemically, in the sense of anthropomorphizing the world and analyzing it according to human laws, which is indeed a prejudice that should be eliminated when possible. Instead, I mean it rather normatively, in the sense of acknowledging that only man so far has demonstrated the ability to decisively steer his own destiny and behave in a way that can be minimally machine-like, minimally automatic, and minimally robotic — that is, when he isn’t lapsing into what’s commonly known as “animal nature.” For that reason, when I’m looking into the world of ecology, I’m looking for hints of what later grows into man’s more fully realized semiotic freedom, his symbolic understanding of life, and his creative imagination. But it seems that these hints are not essential to the survival of any given species, while the essential behaviors are often brutish and machinic. This acknowledgment would seem to place me at odds with how some of biosemiotics’ vocal advocates can be at their worst: actively avoiding the uglier aspects of non-human life, almost like a frightened child who simply wants reconciliation with The Great Mother.

I’m reminded of Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man (2005), about the conservationist Timothy Treadwell, who went to go film brown bears in Alaska seasonally over the course of thirteen summers. Given the different viewpoints on nature between Treadwell and Herzog, I must admit, I’m closer to Herzog when he says, among other things,

What haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a savior.

Treadwell, if you haven’t seen the documentary, was eventually mauled to death by one of these bears that he so enjoyed visiting and filming. Any account of nature that cannot confront this crucial side of life should probably forfeit all claims of scientific/philosophical authority.

edit 4/19: fixed up some minor grammar issues, did some superficial rewordings

edit 4/21: I replaced the word “overdetermined” with “overstated” because I was using it wrong

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that deals with media ecology and non-structuralist semiotics. And sometimes linguistics.

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I. Intro

If you were in a first-year “intro to linguistics” class at the university during the ‘00s, you probably learned about something called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, and you then quickly learned about how it’s wrong. The level of detail you’d hear on the topic would vary from teacher to teacher. For instance, you might have learned that “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” is a bit of a misnomer, since neither Edward Sapir nor Benjamin Lee Whorf officially wrote down a hypothesis to be tested, and therefore, it’s really several different claims that people have thrown together. You might also have learned a bit about Sapir and Whorf themselves, and what kinds of things they were interested in. But you’d get at least these two basic pieces of information: first, that there is such a thing called “the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis,” and second, that it’s wrong because it is the main theory that represents what’s known as linguistic relativity, which is basically linguistic determinism, which is wrong. For most people, that’s where the story would begin and end, and very few within my generation would pursue the question any further. From what I gather, the topic may be handled a bit more carefully now, but I cannot confirm this. I’m only speaking for what the perception is among most educated millennials and their elders, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it has remained the same for the most part up to the present day.

In its strong form, linguistic relativity is the idea that the structure and lexicon of a language shapes and determines all of its speakers’ thoughts — or, in other words, that our linguistic categories limit and restrict our cognitive categories. There is, to be sure, no evidence for this claim, and indeed it is wrong. We should all be thankful that it is wrong, too, because if it weren’t, then things like propaganda, Orwellian “newspeak,” “woke” neologisms, and other such shenanigans would prove so overwhelmingly powerful as to preclude all critical resistance. Actually, if taken to a far enough extreme, linguistic determinism is absurd on its face, because if language exhaustively determines thinking, then it would be impossible for any neologisms to be created in the first place. No innovation would be possible at all! But fortunately, there is a weaker version of linguistic relativity, which says that a language’s structure can influence its speakers’ perceptions without absolutely determining them. For a while, I’ve suspected that this view is correct, and so I was glad to finally discover some academic research that strongly indicates its accuracy. That is what this post will be about.

First, I should point out that relativism is still a contentious topic. All of Chomskyan linguistics depends upon linguistic universalism to be the case, Chomsky’s theories dominated the field for quite some time, and this is why the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis was usually presented with a negative framing for so long. In 1994, Steven Pinker’s mega-popular bestselling The Language Instinct took aim at all forms of linguistic relativity, devoting special attention to trashing Benjamin Lee Whorf in particular, and Pinker would go on to promote the universal hypothesis in other books from a variety of angles. Pinker is probably the most famous Chomskyan linguist besides Chomsky himself, and his anti-relativist ideas on language have even seeped into broader sociocultural discussions, like for instance his concept of “the euphemistic treadmill,” which in his view shows the absurdity of “politically correct” language reforms. I’ll come back to that point later.

II. “Mentalese”

The reason that Chomskyan linguistics depends upon universalism is more subtle than your typical culture war discourse, however. Chomsky’s theories require universalism because in order for language to be an instinct, or an adaptive trait that we evolved to have, or a mental faculty essentially stored within the physical structure of brain, or something characterized by a “universal grammar” that can take on many different manifestations — all views associated with his framework — then everyone must have the same basic pre-linguistic mental state which language can only build upon by creating words and thus a means of vocal/written expression. In other words, Chomsky took for granted that all languages convey the same pre-linguistic thoughts, only using different words and word-orders. When Pinker sought to expand upon this view and give it some scientific validation, he recruited the cognitive theories of Jerry Fodor, who strongly advocated for something called “mentalese,” which is the idea that we all have a language of pure thought without any words — innate ideas that come to us before we ever put them into our native spoken language. According to this view, our ability to perceive the world is already there, and language simply gives us the ability to articulate it. The concepts that we have are already in our minds, and words simply act as media, which dutifully convey the concepts in a neutral, unobtrusive fashion.

Advocates of “mentalese” can be found all over the place, often where you wouldn’t expect them. The novelist Cormac McCarthy, for instance, believes in it, and without using the actual word, he even wrote an essay about how human language was a parasitic innovation that actually diminished non-linguistic thought’s expressive range. Despite McCarthy’s pessimism, however, I think the idea of “mentalese” is on the whole pretty optimistic. Pinker is one of the great Pollyannas of our time, and it isn’t because of his books like The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), with its delusional assessment of what he calls “The Long Peace” of the post-1945 world. No, the reason his view is so cheery is because of how he understands the relationship between “mentalese” and spoken language: spoken language, in this model, is the medium, and non-linguistic thought is the real message. He really thinks a medium can be a passive, neutral vehicle that simply conveys information, and that’s that. If only life weren’t so messy! But the problem here is that all of cognition involves our minds penetrating outward into the transcendent, material world. Indeed, our minds cannot do otherwise, because there is no such thing as a purely internalized mind. We may have built-in calibrations or instincts that come prior to all experience (passed down through genetics, no doubt), but those instincts cannot assume a form and an expression until they’ve got something to interact with. Languages are what come out of this direct, worldly engagement between man and his surroundings. Man’s thought can only develop alongside his ability to use symbols to great effect, and all symbols (including letters, numbers, words, morphemes, glyphs, and diacritics) are gifts to us from the exterior. They are not “built-in,” nor could they be.

In his Incomplete Nature (2011), Terrence Deacon skewers the concept of mentalese, showing that it’s just another expression of the homunculus fallacy so characteristic of Cartesian thinking. Responding to Pinker’s claim that everyone has an interior “language of thought” that spoken languages merely translate into words, Deacon remarks,

If thought equals language, then all that needs to be explained is the translation. But wait a minute! Exactly who or what is producing and comprehending mentalese? Modeling thought on language thus implicitly just pushes the problem back a level … For a language to be “spoken” in the head, an unacknowledged homunculus must be interpreting it. Does this internal speaker of mentalese have to translate mentalese into homunculese? Is mentalese self-interpreted? If so, it is not like a language, and it is unclear what this would mean anyway.

Essentially, there can be no language without inputs. And linguistic universalism is the assumption that the shapes and contours of these inputs will have no effect whatsoever on the way people use them to form thoughts, because the thoughts are already pre-formed. Again: if only our beautiful, precious minds could be so pure…

So far, I’ve been explaining the problem with linguistic universalism from a theoretical standpoint, which has largely formed my thoughts on the subject of language in general. But for the question of relativity, I realize that mere theory is not enough. This is why I recently read The Language Myth: Why Language Is Not an Instinct (2014) by Vyvyan Thomas. I should point out that although I read it and will use some information from it, I would not actually recommend it as a whole, since it has some serious shortcomings. Thomas seems overly focused on contradicting Pinker even in areas where he seems to be on more solid footing, such as his distinction between human language and animal communications systems. This works to the detriment of Thomas’s secondary goal, which is to propose a more robust theory on the nature of language, one that he calls “language-as-use” rather than “language-as-instinct.” Thomas is also largely uninformed about semiotics in general, which would have helped inform a better theory of language. The book is also not especially well-written, indulging in polemic a bit too often to provide a fair presentation of the controversy. However, its seventh chapter, which attempts to rehabilitate a soft version of linguistic relativity, is a good, solid presentation of the recent empirical research on the topic. Thomas shows pretty convincingly that this research has been methodologically convincing and well-executed, and it has helped redeem the position that language does, in fact, contribute to the shaping of thought. That chapter is actually why I wanted to read the book in the first place, and so in that sense, it did not disappoint.

Thomas spends most of the chapter rehabilitating Whorf in particular, since between him and Sapir, he was much more professionally interested in language’s effect on thought. Whorf’s foundational principle of linguistic relativity was this (as quoted in The Language Myth):

Users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.

And most attacks on Whorfian thought rarely contend with this statement as it’s formulated. Typically, critics focus on Whorf’s most extreme claims (or their own misinterpretations of his claims) when attempting to debunk him, as Steven Pinker did in The Language Instinct, which caricaturizes Whorfian thought pretty unfairly. But Whorf actually maintained a reserved version of linguistic relativity, as he himself clarified in his writings:

The tremendous importance of language cannot, in my opinion, be taken to mean necessarily that nothing is back of it of the nature of what has traditionally been called ‘mind’. My own studies suggest, to me, that language, for all its kingly role, is in some sense a superficial embroidery upon deeper processes of consciousness, which are necessary before any communication, signalling, or symbolism whatsoever can occur.

Note that he isn’t proposing a theory of mentalese, but is instead acknowledging the depth found within consciousness itself — a multi-processual awareness of one’s phenomenal world that precedes language. Again, this is the Whorf that linguistic universalists typically choose to ignore, instead focusing on canards like the one about Eskimos perceiving snow differently because they have dozens of words for it (a myth that neither Sapir nor Whorf promoted).

A good example of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is the notion that cultures with different words for colors will perceive them differently upon encountering them in nature. This is actually a totally defensible claim, as I’ll show in a second, but it can get pushed to absurd lengths. For instance, it has been the basis of a popular claim that the Ancient Greeks didn’t see the color blue because they didn’t have a word for “blue,” instead characterizing the ocean as “wine-dark” (as Homer did), thus linking it instead with red/purple liquid. This belief is, of course, false — the Greeks didn’t have a straightforward color for blue as with modern English, but they saw blue just fine. To draw a similar parallel, the European languages didn’t always have a word for “orange” — for instance, the current word for orange in Hungarian is “narancssárga,” which literally translates to “orange-yellow,” but the “narancs” part was borrowed from the Old Italian “narancia,” referring to the citrus fruit. And, as it happens, the citrus fruit only became the word for a new color in Italian during the 16th century. So, the fruit came first, then the color. But I’m pretty sure the Europeans all could see the color orange before this, even if they didn’t have a need to identify it as such.

With the intent of disproving such wild claims as the one about Greeks and the color blue, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay put out a book called Basic Color Terms (1969), which argued persuasively that the color spectrum exhibits cross-linguistic universals, and all language speakers can see all the same colors as the others, regardless of how each language divvies them up. In other words, our shared neurobiology constrains language, and so cross-linguistic variation is always undergirded by semantic universals that will always inevitably be specified in context. So, if I don’t have a word for, say, chartreuse, I can at least give some context clues with the words I do have to point to that color. For a good, long while, this study dominated the field, and it seemed like any relativistic claims about color were completely out of the question. If you thought that any language’s words for colors caused that language’s speakers to perceive the colors differently, then you were a knucklehead. End of story.

But eventually, in the 1990s, an influential critique emerged, first led by the American cognitive linguist John Lucy, then adopted by other researchers. Among other things, it pointed out that investigating the effect of man’s innate color perception on the language he speaks doesn’t actually prove all that much. Yes, a culture might qualify a specific color with more contextual clues if they don’t have a specific word for it… but who cares? The only way to truly disprove linguistic relativism would be to demonstrate conclusively that language does not influence man’s psychophysical operations in the domain of color, and this is something that Berlin and Kay did not even attempt. But then again, the neo-Whorfians like John Lucy didn’t attempt to do the opposite for a good while, either. Instead, they pointed to the sheer diversity of how languages could conceptualize color. It had emerged since Berlin and Kay’s research that not all languages carry the same basic color terms. For instance, Yélî Dnye, the language of Rossel Island in New Guinea, only has three basic color terms corresponding to black, white, and red — nothing close to the whole spectrum. In fact, the speakers don’t even have a single lexical class from which color is drawn. Surely, the neo-Whorfians reasoned, this would mean that they aren’t seeing the world the same way, right? But such observations didn’t impress Steven Pinker and other universalists, because the data didn’t demonstrate that the language is specifically impacting thought itself, which Pinker, Fodor, and others see as operating prior to language.

III. The Experiments

Eventually, research was conducted by neuroscientist Guillaume Thierry and psycholinguist Panos Athanasopoulos which sought to prove that language really is impacting perception. This would be a hard thing to do, because an absence of words or some other peculiarity in a given language wouldn’t be enough to show that the speakers perceive the world differently. So, they found a solution: they aimed to show that language affects automatic, unconscious, and low-level perceptual processing — the kind of “thinking” you do before your conscious mind has the time to process what’s happening. If language could affect people in that kind of psychophysical domain, then surely language would have to influence thought in a meaningful way. And so, in 2009, they released a study entitled “Unconscious effects of language-specific terminology on preattentive color perception.” Its results were pretty striking.

The experiment worked like this: Thierry and Athanasopoulos took a group of Greek speakers, and a group of English speakers. They measured their responses to colors by charting the electrical activity in their brains, so they could determine each participant’s perceptual awareness at fractions of a second. They then showed them a series of successive circles in four blocks. The blocks were colored dark blue, light blue, dark green, and light green. They asked study participants to press a button when they saw a square coming onto the screen rather than a circle — this instruction was a red herring, so the participants would not know what they were being tested on. Now, this is the interesting part: occasionally, a dark blue circle would enter into the light blue block, and vice versa; and also, a dark green circle would enter into the light green block, and vice versa. The participants would believe that this was just a trick and try to withhold from pushing the button. But in reality, the point of the study was to measure how long their brains would take to register the mismatched colors as indeed mismatched. The button they pressed was irrelevant, and the real significance was in their brain activity.

So would they be more sensitive to a different shade of some color? That is, would they show stronger and swifter brain activity? And if so, why would that happen? Simple: in Greek, there is no single word for blue. There is a word for dark blue (ble), and a word for light blue (ghalazio), and so blue is treated as two separate colors. But in Greek, there is just one word for green. In English, however, there is no such basic distinction for either blue or green. The debate about linguistic relativity had finally come full circle: originally, arguments about the Greek language and its relationship to the color blue had been cited as examples of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’s most absurd claims, but now, an argument about Greek and the color blue was being used to redeem Whorf and strike back at linguistic universalism. The results of this study indicated that the Greek speakers were indeed a little bit more sensitive to the differences in the blue range, but they were not more sensitive to differences in the green. Additionally, the English speakers were equally sensitive in both blue and green blocks. So, in other words, at the pre-conscious, directly perceptual level, the language seemed to determine how readily a speaker would detect a color difference. The results didn’t show a drastic difference, as perhaps the researchers had hoped, but there was a difference nevertheless.

This same basic procedure was also used in other ways by other researchers, such as the neurolinguist Bastien Boutonnet. In collaboration with Thierry, he was able to find that language has a relativistic effect on how people classify different objects. The English language distinguishes between a cup and a mug, while in Spanish, they simply use taza for both. They devised a similar methodology to what we saw in the previous experiment about the color blue, and Boutonnet & Thierry found that English speakers are more sensitive to the shape of drinking containers than Spanish speakers. And just as with the color experiment, this was all measured at the pre-conscious level, before lettered reasoning could take over and linguistic bias could make the judgments for the participants.

A similar procedure involving the measurement of brain activity was also used to measure the way gendered language can impact our perceptions. For this study, Boutonnet, Thierry, and Athanasopoulos recruited English speakers (an ungendered language) and native Spanish speakers (a gendered language) who spoke English as a second language. In this experiment, they presented participants with images of two objects that had the same grammatical gender in Spanish, one at a time. Then, a third image was presented — for half the participants, it was the same gender, and for the other half, it was the opposite. Participants were told to indicate using a button whether the third image matched the same semantic category as the first two. This way, they wouldn’t know what the study was about. And once again, Spanish speakers had a more sensitive pre-conscious reaction to the images that did not match the same gender, while there was no such pattern among English speakers.

Although this next one wasn’t covered in Vyvyan Thomas’s book, I can’t resist including one more of such experiments. Over on this linguistics podcast, recorded in 2017, one of the hosts describes an experiment conducted by Emanuel Bylund and Panos Athanasopoulos in the same year. In this experiment, they tested the way spatial metaphors cause people to perceive the duration of time. Understand that in Swedish (and English), speakers use the spatial metaphor of “long” or “short,” to describe a temporal event, like say, taking a nap. In Spanish, however, they use “big” and “small.” What the researchers did was show 40 Swedish speakers and 40 Spanish speakers two videos, both exactly three seconds, and both depicting an animation of a line growing longer. In one, the line grew quite long, and in the other, the line only grew a little bit. The Swedish speakers, who conceptualize time as “long” and “short” overall thought that the videos with the line growing shorter took less time than the other video, in which the line grows longer. So, the length of the line influenced how they interpreted the duration of the video. The Spanish speakers, lacking such a spatial metaphor, did not make such an error. They did, however, get a little bit more fooled by two similar animations depicting a container filling up: one getting filled up less, and another getting filled up more (since they often use the metaphor of “fullness” to describe a temporal event), while the Swedish speakers did not. Again, none of them knew that they were being tested on linguistic relativity.

There are a few other studies that Thomas presents from Stephen Levinson and Lera Boroditsky. I’ll summarize the latter first. To understand Boroditsky’s research, know that in Mandarin Chinese, speakers conceptualize time using vertical rather than horizontal spatial metaphors, so they’ll say something akin to “the transistor came higher than the microchip” rather than “the transistor came before the microchip,” as we would say in English. To give a precise example of this tendency, their word for morning is shang-ban-tian, literally “upper-half day, while the word for evening is xia-ban-tian, “lower-half day.” In Boroditsky’s research team’s experiment, they presented English and Mandarin speakers two photos of a given celebrity; one in which he’s young, and another in which he’s old. They then told participants to press one of two buttons indicating whether the second picture was taken later or earlier than the first. In different tests, they calibrated the keys differently: for one, the keys were arranged horizontally with “earlier” on the left and “later” on the right, while for another it was reversed. In a third, the keys were arranged vertically with “earlier” at the top and “later” at the bottom, and in a fourth, the top and bottom were reversed. What the team found was that both English and Mandarin speakers were quicker to press the correct key when it is arranged in a manner consistent with the language on the horizontal plane, but when “earlier” was to the right of “later,” they were a bit slower to hit the right key. Makes sense. However, this same condition did not apply to when the buttons were arranged on the vertical plane: Mandarin speakers were significantly faster to hit the correct button when the “earlier” one was at the top and the “later” one was at the bottom. For English speakers, it didn’t matter either way. So in this case, the manner in which the language conceptualizes time caused the Chinese speakers to complete their task faster.

Levinson’s research is a bit more vulnerable to criticisms alleging correlation rather than clear causation than the others, so I will explain it in a more truncated manner. In his case, he has done work on the Australian aboriginal language Guugu Yimithir, which uses an absolute spatial reference frame. That is, instead of the way we say that an object is to our “left” or “right,” or the way we say the sun goes “down” or “up,” they use universal and not relative spatial terms, so for them, everything is “north,” “south,” “east,” or “west,” and these terms must be used accurately. Levinson found that the speakers of this language were significantly better at “dead reckoning” than other groups, which means that when they were taken to an unfamiliar location, they were faster in determining their precise spatial coordinates. So, in other words, their reliance on establishing absolute spatial relations in order to use their language correctly influenced their ability to determine what the spatial relations are even in unfamiliar territories.

The problem with Boroditsky’s and Levinson’s research is that one could just accuse them of ignoring other variables that would increase the skill level of the language’s speakers in these tasks. In Levinson’s case, that criticism is quite easy to make, since we’re dealing with a primitive tribe who might have gained the skills to orient themselves to their surroundings predominately as a means of survival, with the language merely reflecting an externally-imposed demand for such spatial awareness. Therefore, one could argue that if they modernized themselves, their spatial terminology would naturally become more relative than universal, and this development would reflect their changes in needs. But in Boroditsky’s, it is harder to make such a criticism — I can’t really understand how the Chinese would have a more “vertically-oriented culture” in any other domain besides language, so it would seem that in that case, the language really does have an effect.

IV. Implications

Now, when you look at all of this research put together, the results might seem a bit underwhelming at first. In all of these studies, the differences between the language groups being tested are pretty minor, and they’re being tested for highly specific brain patterns and behaviors within very distinct situations. There is nothing in these studies that will blow anyone’s socks off. However, I think the significance of these results might be a little elusive at first. After all, we are dealing with the question of whether our adopted language — something that none of us are born with — has an impact on how we perceive the world at the pre-conscious level, before our verbally-articulated interpretations start to kick in. The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce called this mode of interaction “secondness,” a state in which a living being perceives actuality, fact, and objectivity, but without yet bringing it into verbal and reflective understanding. This is the state in which we recognize that something is there, and it’s something distinct from us, but we haven’t yet placed it into a symbolic order of relations. It is the state of being that most non-human animals occupy, themselves lacking language. And if our language has the ability to retroactively influence how we perceive life in this more immediate, more instinctive state of understanding, then the implications could be quite far reaching — much more than we’d at first assume when looking at such meticulously designed studies, all of which measure fairly acute phenomena just to evade accusations of research bias.

The implications could extend into areas that we typically have strong feelings about, even those of us who have been “properly” educated to believe in linguistic universalism. For instance, if you take Chomsky and Pinker’s theories on language seriously, you would have no choice but to dismiss the writings of George Orwell, who strongly believed that the choice of words that authoritarian regimes use in their state-issued propaganda has an effect on how their actions will be perceived. Orwell’s observation has been the basis for attacks on “political correctness,” “woke” terminology, and other progressive attempts at language reform. But Pinker addressed all of this with his concept of the “euphemism treadmill,” a term he coined in 1994. For Pinker, political correctness is bad not because it is dangerous or harmful, but because it is simply pointless. Once a politically correct word is introduced, the associations that people have with its referent will take over the elevated connotation that word once had, and so the politically correct word will become just as tainted as the previous term it sought to replace. Therefore, political correctness is bad, but there’s also no reason to find it threatening.

It is actually remarkable how few people actually buy this argument, at least when you judge their actions. George Orwell is just as popular as ever, and people quote him all the time. Even those who agree with Pinker in a more reflective, intellectually distant way still react to politically correct or “woke” language reforms with as much hostility as they would if it were truly a threat. Perhaps they should. While Pinker was encouraging people to react to these changes with an air of superior quietism rather than outward resistance, books by professional tenured linguists like Deborah Cameron’s Verbal Hygiene (1995) were being published (I review it here), which basically argued that linguistic prescriptivism is good when it is being done for progressive political reasons. So even within the field of linguistics — a field filled with people who had no problem paying lip service to the ideas that “prescriptivism” is bad, the concepts always come before the words, and so on — there was a certain strand of left-wing thought that attempted to square the impossible circle by maintaining that orthodox position, on the one hand, and yet on the other, still agreeing with progressive language reform anyway. It’s as if instinctively they realized that linguistic universalism is a bogus theory, “mentalese” isn’t real, and language really does have an effect on how we perceive the world around us.

Perhaps their actions should have told us something; namely, that these reforms have always been capable of changing how people think. For instance, if we consider one feminist language reform of the 1970s, which deprivileged “he” as the default pronoun for unknown or anonymous people (at least in most professional copy-editing handbooks for big-name publishers), this change seems to have made a real impact on how people perceive gender in society. When authorities replaced the masculine “he” with the neuter plural “they” and imposed it in a top-down manner, I can’t see how it wouldn’t have affected the way people’s minds actually conjure up the image of the anonymous person about whom they’re speaking. Accordingly, it doesn’t surprise me at all that transgender activism turned its attention so aggressively toward the proper use of pronouns in identifying transgender individuals throughout the 2010s. A linguistic universalist would dismiss all of this as meaningless finger-wagging, but it would seem that the activists knew better.

Anyhow, I didn’t really want to take this direction into such fraught sociopolitical territory, since there are so many other implications for even a soft linguistic relativity… but let that one area stand as a clear example. The bottom line is, a language is a medium for conveying ideas, and no medium is ever “neutral” or “pure.” Every medium has an impact on that which it conveys, and it couldn’t be otherwise. Whorf’s name has been tarnished for no good reason.

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That “memetics” has failed as a path of scientific inquiry is not new news. It has been well over a decade since any reputable scientists have tried to take it seriously, and with the semi-recent death of Daniel Dennett, probably its most high profile advocate, it seems all but guaranteed to stay buried in the footnotes of evolutionary historiography. People were predicting its failure from the very beginning of the term’s coinage, and the criticisms only grew over time as the field tried to legitimize itself. The Journal of Memetics – Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission was launched in 1997, and it ended in 2005 due to a lack of quality submissions. In its very last issue, one of its editors, Bruce Edmonds, observed that the idea of the “meme” had failed to provide any added value in how we understand phenomena, cultural and otherwise. Meanwhile, the philosophy of science writer Kate Distin published a book in 2005 called The Selfish Meme, but then in 2011, wrote a thematically similar book called Cultural Evolution, in which she explained in an appendix that she had abandoned the concept of the meme entirely. Since then, the word has only been used in its original sense as a kind of shorthand among laymen, but its feeling of potential has long since faded. It is certainly interesting that the word “meme,” first coined in 1976, would take about a decade to gain traction within the scientific community. Also interesting is that it continues to thrive as the word for online joke templates that people re-post over and over, often with slight alterations to fit new circumstances. In that latter sense, the word’s legacy has been firmly solidified. But for anyone who took the subject seriously, the failure of the “meme” as a concept to aid in widespread cultural inquiry should have been completely predictable from the start.

If you’re feeling a little lost right now because you’re only aware of the frivolous, fancy-free, superficial, internet-exclusive meaning of “meme” (the only meaning that should be in use), let me supply some background. The concept of the meme was first introduced by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his groundbreaking work of popular science, The Selfish Gene (1976). Dawkins’s book remains one of the best-known user-friendly explanations of Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, i.e. evolutionary theory following the synthesis between Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and Gregor Mendel’s theory of genetic inheritance (we call this “the modern synthesis”). Dawkins’s basic argument is that life began on Earth when molecules gained the ability to copy themselves, becoming “replicators.” Though he shies away from the term “RNA,” his view is broadly aligned with the RNA World hypothesis, which argues that self-replicating RNA molecules spread before the evolution of DNA and proteins. But however you conceive of them, eventually, these “replicators” became better and better at protecting themselves as they grew more complex. They eventually upgraded themselves to DNA molecules, and thus the gene was born, whose various potential forms would be determined through the rigorous trials of Darwinian natural selection. These genes, which are made of DNA, slowly developed structures in which to ensconce themselves, and we call these structures organisms. And organisms are nothing more than what Dawkins calls “survival machines,” since the genes devised them gradually through random mutations that occurred over many sequences of copies, with only the fittest mutations being selected by the genes’ surrounding environment to aid them in survival. So, yes, you and I, along with all other flora and fauna, are nothing more than “lumbering robots,” mechanistically-determined tools for these selfish, selfish genes to keep copying themselves into the future. It’s a hell of a story.

Now, what does all that have to do with memes? Well, Dawkins came up with “memes” as a direct correspondence to “genes.” He even fashioned the word “meme” (a bastardization of “mimesis”) to sound like “gene” specifically. It is a clever coinage, and it doesn’t surprise me that the word itself has succeeded so well despite being divested of its original meaning. For Dawkins, human culture can be explained by “memes,” and he mainly came up with the idea to show the importance of replication — the essence of life, in his view. The Selfish Gene has been criticized for being excessively gene-centric (more on that later), but Dawkins must have anticipated such a criticism, and this is why he bothered with the concept of the meme in the first place: it isn’t just genes that act as replicators, but other things as well. And, in his view, as long as his audience could accept this concept of the “replicator” and think about other contexts in which it might be appropriate besides the world of genes, then his chapter on memes would be a success. He was never trying to posit anything that could amount to a rigorous science, and if you read the chapter, it bears all the signs of being more of an elaborate thought experiment than anything else.

The “meme,” or the replicable “unit of cultural transmission,” is presented the same way as the gene: as something that “wants” to survive despite having no consciousness. In the same way that Dawkins presents genes as selfish, memes must be selfish, too. Memes can even be parasitic, harming entire communities of humans all for their own survival — this, for Dawkins, is his explanation for why religion exists, something he considers essentially harmful. But memes aren’t all bad. In fact, they’re quite all-encompassing, since they also include ideas, melodies, catch phrases, clothing fashion, and even technologies such as ways of making pots or building arches (these are all his examples). They are basically everything that humans have ever created that is repeatable and in some way contributes to what we call culture. But the key thing to keep in mind about the meme is that it replicates by traveling from human brain to human brain: in the same way that genes have their own environments, the human being is the meme’s environment. This was the core idea that launched the discipline of memetics in the mid-1980s with the work of Douglas Hofstadter, and which inspired the attempt to establish the scientific legitimacy behind the concept of the meme.

It isn’t hard to understand why the concept of memes didn’t really blow up until the spread of the internet, though. When the internet became common in most American homes, the idea of “memes” became highly well-known, since internet memes “go viral” in the same way Dawkins conceptualized the spread of memes as basic cultural units. Or, at least, so it seemed. The computer is the meme’s vehicle of replication, but the human is the meme’s environment, or what it ultimately “infects.” At the time, it all came across as so straightforward. It was therefore compelling to consider all of the ways in which, for instance, that dancing baby video, or the hampster dance, or “all your base are belong to us” are adapted to survive in our minds and compel us to spread them further. “Hmmm,” someone might think, “Babies are cute… and yes, they must be cute because they speak to our need to replicate ourselves… yes, yes. And just observe this baby’s hypnotic rhythms… I can see how the dancing baby is adapted specifically to infect our minds.” Someone else might start to think, “Ahhh, mistranslations are funny to us, because they highlight the significance of proper communication. And a given mistranslated sentence can spontaneously occur just about anywhere, the absurdity of the location corresponding to the absurdity of the phrasing. Therefore, ‘all your base are belong to us’ is especially potent for replication.” And so on. Writers like Mike Godwin and Richard Brodie primed us to think of internet content in terms of “memes” during the mid-1990s, right around when guys like Daniel Dennett were promoting memetics as a serious science, and in doing so they helped form the bridge between Dawkins’s understanding of evolution and how we might imagine the evolution of online information.

But today, it is hard to imagine that anyone really still believes that internet virality is a meaningful sign of a message’s intrinsic fitness. Ever since the arrival of TikTok, which has brought internet viral culture to an unforeseen plateau of real-world significance, commentators have started pivoting to a different, more pessimistic position. Instead, it is now remarkable how utterly meaningless and random new online-centered trends actually are. A memetics-advocate might say, “Well, the randomness perfectly matches the randomness of the mutations that occur in genes!” but the problem is that the content of a successful internet trend is often completely immaterial — more of an afterthought than anything. A recent Bloomberg article explains how TikTok is used to make seemingly random consumer products go viral, and how this has produced a mostly disorienting effect, even on some of its most enthusiastic consumers:

What the hell is a Labubu? Is Dubai chocolate a brand or, I don’t know, just a genre of candy bar? Who is Benson Boone, and what does he want from us?

At first, I thought this might just be another worrisome sign of aging: I no longer understand kids these days. But kids these days seem just as baffled as their elders by many of the things that they—and to a significant extent, we—are expected to latch on to. On social media, the confusion of teens and twentysomethings has become a meme unto itself.

Whereas a “memetics-based” approach would tell us that all of these things are special in some way — that they burrow in our heads and possess us to spread them around due to their unique memetic potency — people are slowly starting to realize in that in actual practice, today’s memes are not inherently too impressive, and their ephemeral, fleeting moments of popularity are rather driven by our human need to have things to latch onto when finding social commonalities. They are more like Schelling points, the game theory concept, than viruses, and thus they’re actually more amenable to a purely structuralist mode of analysis than a memetic one. Can anyone seriously give an explanation for the adaptiveness of “six seven”?

But of course, this is just a criticism of memetics applied to internet culture, where information is abundant, fast-paced, and seemingly inexhaustible. Human culture in general hasn’t always operated the same way, as information has often been slow, sparse, and unscalable (another popular writer, Nassim Taleb, has called the pre-literate information world “Mediocristan” as opposed to today’s “Extremistan”). But even there, in more predictable low-scale information environments, the framework of memetics has proven unsatisfactory. In 2002, the aforementioned Bruce Edmonds issued three challenges for the study of memetics, recognizing that the concept was in serious trouble. They were:

1. Produce a case study of a cultural process whose nature is essentially evolutionary (taken in a strict sense).

2. Come up with a theoretical model for when it is appropriate to use a memetic analysis (i.e. situations that aren’t simply the transmission of instrumental ad hoc information, like someone orally sharing the bus schedule with someone else).

3. Create a simulation model showing the true emergence of a memetic process.

And all three of these challenges produced nothing that could elicit widespread agreement. Even the first of Edmonds’s suggestions, which should have been the easiest, failed to yield anything convincing.

One reason is that it is nearly impossible to determine whether a modification to a supposed meme constitutes an “adaptation” or just “genetic drift.” Dawkins himself seems to have not taken such questions seriously, even all the way into the year 2016. One of his examples of a meme in the first edition of The Selfish Gene was the song “Auld Lang Syne,” and in the 40th anniversary 2016 edition, he offered this commentary on his own example in an endnote:

‘Auld Lang Syne’ was, unwittingly, a revealingly fortunate example for me to have chosen. This is because, almost universally, it is rendered with an error, a mutation. The refrain is, essentially always nowadays, sung as ‘For the sake of auld lang syne’, whereas Burns actually wrote ‘For auld lang syne’. A memically minded Darwinian immediately wonders what has been the ‘survival value’ of the interpolated phrase, ‘the sake of’.

[…]

I don’t think the answer is far to seek. The sibilant ‘s’ is notoriously obtrusive. Church choirs are drilled to pronounce ‘s’ sounds as lightly as possible, otherwise the whole church echoes with hissing. A murmuring priest at the altar of a great cathedral can sometimes be heard, from the back of the nave, only as a sporadic sussuration of ‘s’s. The other consonant in ‘sake’, ‘k’, is almost as penetrating. Imagine that nineteen people are correctly singing ‘For auld lang syne’ and one person, somewhere in the room, slips in the erroneous ‘For the sake of auld lang syne’. A child, hearing the song for the first time, is eager to join in but uncertain of the words. Although almost everybody is singing ‘For auld lang syne’, the hiss of an ‘s’ and the cut of a ‘k’ force their way into the child’s ears, and when the refrain comes round again he too sings ‘For the sake of auld lang syne’. The mutant meme has taken over another vehicle.

This is, again, a hell of a story. And it isn’t too far-fetched in the sense that copying errors can indeed result in permanent cultural changes due to the error’s inherent phonetic properties. For instance, in the English lexicon, we say “impossible” rather than “inpossible,” even though “in-” is the far more common negating prefix, and this is because the M is closer in the mouth to the labial “P” than N is. The prefix has simply switched from one sound to the other. So undoubtedly, some changes are caused by inherent phonetic properties associated with either acoustics, or man’s anatomy, or whatever.

But in order for Dawkins to establish that the change in his example is “adaptive,” he has to say that S and K phonemes are somehow more likely to be heard, remain in people’s minds, and reproduce themselves. They must be “stickier” in some way. If that were true, however, then Grimm’s Law wouldn’t exist, in which the K in Germanic languages predictably turns into the voiceless fricative /X/ over time (the German “ch” sound, like in Bach). We also wouldn’t have the historic pattern from proto-Greek wherein the word-initial sibilant S slowly turned into the much weaker aspirant H in a process known as debuccalization. We also wouldn’t have widespread word-final S-deletion in Black American English for third person present-tense verbs (e.g. “he work” instead of “he works”). In sum, there is simply no way to take Dawkins’s speculation and turn it into a predictable rule about the memetic fitness of song lyrics. Instead, one gets the sense that Dawkins simply tried to explain something inherently non-adaptive using the logic of adaptation, stumbled ass-backwards into the field of phonology, and took some shots in the dark.

Beyond the problem of adaptation, the deeper problem is that there is no straightforward way to conceptualize memes in the first place. Regarding his first challenge, Edmonds himself offered a couple suggestions, the first of which was nursery rhymes. It seems intuitive enough. Nursery rhymes are transmitted orally from generation to generation, and thus we could imagine that they replicate themselves using little children as their hosts. But even with such a straightforward example, there is no satisfying way to conceptualize the nursery rhyme as a “meme.” In other words: it isn’t clear what the “replicator” in the rhyme actually is — is it the wording of the rhyme? The rhythm? The content? The melody of the song (if there is one)? The rhyme scheme? After all, plenty of nursery rhymes and well-known folk songs have produced different variations that survive and coexist among each other just fine. Little children, for instance, know the standard lyrics to “Jingle Bells,” as well as the version in which Batman smells and Robin laid an egg. But it isn’t clear what the common property is that unites all of the different versions of all the different nursery rhymes. In an article entitled “Why Did Memetics Fail?” Radim Chvaja sums up the crux of the problem pretty well:

In the case of the gene-centered evolutionary theory, there was first the work of Gregor Mendel on pea crossing and then the independent theory of natural selection which were later, after many conflicts between Mendelians, embryologists, statisticians, paleontologists, and other biologists, fused into the modern evolutionary synthesis (Sapp 2015). Subsequently and independent of the development of the evolutionary theory, molecular biologists identified the genetic information in the physical structure of DNA (Watson and Crick 1953). Thus, when Dawkins made his generalization from a gene to a replicator, he already knew that there is an exact physical ontology of the gene. However, when he introduced the abstract concept of a replicator into the study of culture, memeticists had no previous work analogous to the work of Watson and Crick at their disposal. What they had was limited to a highly speculative argument about a substrate-independent replicator.

And, of course, without a substrate, “meme” could refer to practically everything: the technology that gives us the television set, the shows that the television broadcasts through it, the commercials within the shows, the jingles within the commercials, each individual word within the lyric of the jingle, and each morpheme within each word from the jingle. The hubris of trying to come up with a single catch-all discipline that could encompass linguistics, media studies, literature, ethnomusicology, religious studies, etc., using the concept of gene-like replication as its conceptual cornerstone is somewhat astounding when you sit back and seriously think about it. Of course, semiotics tries to synthesize all of these things through the study of the sign vehicle rather than the meme, often in a synchronic rather than diachronic manner. But of course, even with that self-imposed limitation, it is rare that any two randomly selected semioticians will agree with each other about anything.

As much as I would love to sit back and make fun of memetics all day, I don’t believe that everything about the concept of the meme is wrong, however. There is no question that humans have created an environment of cultural ideas and products, machines and media, totems and taboos, etc. all with their own needs and requirements that sometimes will outweigh man’s own needs or desires during his day-to-day existence. The French paleontologist and Jesuit mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called such an environment “the noosphere,” which I’ve discussed here. We could easily take language itself as our primary example of a meme that helps make up this environment, since it amounts to a tool that we use in such an extensive fashion that life without it is more or less inconceivable. It is also, we could say, “parasitic” in that it has demanded adjustments from the human species in its development and expansion, particularly with the invention of literacy. Calling all of human language a “meme” is probably more accurate than calling it an “instinct,” as Steven Pinker has done, since he, too, lacked any physical evidence for his theory. And if this characterization is true for language, it can certainly be true for many other aspects of human culture, all of which emerge in some manner as its consequence.

So if the “meme” has at least some limited validity as a broad concept, then what’s wrong with it? I think the real problem lies is in conceiving of the meme as a replicator, as if it possesses agency. Ironically, the concept may have grown so popular during the internet age precisely because reversing the commonly understood causality of information transmission is so counterintuitive as to be exciting and memorable. There is a sort of exhilaratingly horrific quality to the way memetics is postulated: the meme is so irresistible, so infectious, that we’ve all had no choice but to spread it! And when I repost an “all your base are belong to us” .gif on Usenet, why, it is the meme that is alive, while I am nothing more than a passive sack of protoplasm to serve its aims! But the problem with eliminating human agency in this process is pretty obvious, so much so that spelling it out would be ponderous.

Because the problem is quite easy to see in this context, it actually should have cast a cloud of doubt upon Dawkins’s larger project. That is, instead of causing us to become more enthusiastic about “replicators” and grow more ambitious in trying to spot them everywhere, Dawkins’s chapter on memes should have made us do the opposite: namely, become skeptical about the concept of the replicator in the first place. It certainly isn’t clear why we should see genes primarily as replicators. In Dawkins’s presentation of them, genes are the star of the show while everything else is just a bit player. The genes the guys who built the survival machines. They are immortal, while we lowly organisms are the mere vehicles for their ongoing ascent. But even granted its metaphoric or simplified status, the account doesn’t truly seem to be reflected in the scientific understanding of cells and organisms. In his Mind in Life (2007), Evan Thomas states the counterargument in unflinching terms:

It is simply not true that genes are prime-movers and cells their vehicles (Moss 2003). For example, although there can be no membranes without the gene products that constitute them, genes cannot exist without membranes, and the gene products that constitute membranes are put together from an already existing membrane template. Indeed, the very term replicator is fundamentally misleading, for it obscures this circular causality by implying that genes are self-replicators, as if DNA could replicate all by itself. Actually, DNA replication depends on the complex orchestration of numerous intracellular processes in the global context of autopoiesis. Not only do cellular processes make possible the transmission of genes into the next generation, but many cellular elements are transmitted along with the genes and are necessary for the proper development of the cell, as we saw in the case of epigenetic inheritance systems.

So, giving causal primacy to genes obscures the fact that genes themselves are just as much adaptations as they are drivers of life. And treating genes as replicators ignores just how dependent genes continue to be on the very molecules that brought them into existence in the first place. A DNA molecule outside of the organism that houses it does not convey meaningful information about anything; it’s just some goo. Therefore, its value depends upon the context into which it is placed. In his excellent essay “Memes as Signs in the Dynamic Logic of Semiosis” (1999), Terrence Deacon makes a similar point, and explains the importance of context in relation to genes:

Gene sequences (homeobox genes, for example) that contribute to the embryogenetic assembly of heads and brains in flies have almost identical counterparts in humans, so much so that inserting the human gene into mutated flies with the corresponding gene damaged can partially restore normal fly head development. But notice, that it does not produce human heads (as in a science fiction parallel). The cross-species sequence similarity (and evolutionary common ancestry) is essential to this function, but the information is interpreted in a fly context. In both the evolution of words and of genes, these units of pattern have been preserved over time because of the ways they contributed to the usefulness and replication of the larger systems in which they were embedded. Replication has always been a multilevel affair. It is not a function vested in a gene or in a word, or even in a complex of genes or words, but in a dynamic system in which these are only one kind of unit.

And being someone who takes semiotics quite seriously, Deacon pivots to demonstrate that the same kind of multilevel, dynamic process is required to understand human culture, since the situation in which a sign appears is ultimately what will determine its meaning:

The ultimate significance of a sign is grounded in the consequences of the system of interpretive habits and dispositions it generates and is generated by (i.e., in the larger context of patterns of sign usage of which it is a part). As in biology, then, the relative prevalence and probability of a sign’s use will be a function of the correspondences between its significant consequences and some relevant aspects of the larger context in which it is embedded.

It seems that Dawkins wasn’t totally wrong to make a correspondence between genes and sign vehicles, then… but he was wrong in assigning primary agency to each of them rather than treating them as the context-dependent outcomes and influencers of ongoing, mutually reinforcing processes. While memetics was admirable in trying to uncover the mysteries of how cultural sign vehicles evolve, it front-loaded an oversimplified causal mechanism that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It would therefore seem that any account of human culture would have to remain mindful of its co-dependent status between itself and the human beings it both serves and is served by.

The counter-argument against memetics can, at this point, go into all sorts of potent philosophical directions, like relational ontology, the question of man’s free will, and so forth. I will mercifully avoid broaching those subjects, though, since I’d prefer to wrap up this blog post. As time goes on, I suspect that people will generally find it strange that the concept of the meme was ever proposed within an evolutionary framework, or that the discipline of memetics was ever attempted in the first place. They will grow accustomed to the idea that memes are nothing more than wacky computer images and videos — trifling bits of data with which we distract ourselves while bored at work, or which inspire our conspicuous consumption habits — and that will be that. I would say, however, that its time as a fad science should prove instructive for how we approach human culture. The failure of memetics should be a warning against all unidirectional theories of influence concerning man and his cultural artifacts. Things are a little bit more complicated than that.

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One of the big philosophical positions that always leaves me dissatisfied is, “The self constitutes the whole body,” or, more bluntly, “You are your body.” On the one hand, it should feel like an improvement over the illusory Cartesian distinction between “mind” and “body,” something that has vexed the whole of western philosophy for hundreds of years and still animates the wildest fantasies of the AI-soothsayers and the trans-humanists. “No,” the wily physicalist objects, “The self is unified, and it is distributed through the entire body! The brain is located in the head, but there’s a second brain in the gut! So be sure to preserve the diversity of its bountiful flora and eat lots of sauerkraut!” Wow! All of a sudden, we can start seeing the interconnectedness between the nutritional, neurological, or kinesiological choices we make in our daily lives and the manner in which our brains cogitate, the way they put ideas together, the attitudes they develop, and so on. The “mind” stops resembling a little alien hanging out in our heads, looking out at the world from the cockpit of a giant remote-controlled armored flesh-mech. We’ve clearly reached a more sensible understanding of ourselves.

But on the other hand, there’s still something to be desired in this position. I am not referring to the fact that it inherently denies the existence of a soul, either. That’s a significant omission, but not everyone believes that there is such a thing as an incorporeal soul, and the incorporeal realm isn’t really needed for the statement to be insufficient anyway. The bigger problem here, to my mind, is that the body of any being is not a self-sufficient thing; it cannot be uprooted from its environment and remain the same. This notion should be especially apparent when considering species that rely on constructing or modifying their own external environments. If a beaver spends its life unable to construct a dam, is it really the same being when compared to another potential version of itself that does? The dam isn’t just an external barrier to provide safe food during winter but rather an extension of the beaver’s very being, its own selfhood. The dam is needed for the beaver to be itself.

When a creature modifies its own environment, that modification isn’t an extension of its being simply because it was created, and it now exists, and that’s that. To take a counterexample, if I produce some feces — even, let’s say, if I drop a really big turd — this isn’t an extension of myself. I would prefer to discard it and pretend the whole thing never took place. But a modification to an environment forms a dynamic and indispensable part of how the creature interacts with its surroundings. We can see this principle in how, for instance, a spider will actually relegate its own decision-making process to the web that it builds, allowing the web to do the “thinking” for it. In An Immense World by Ed Yong, a book I recently reviewed, there’s one particularly illustrative passage:

Zoologist Takeshi Watanabe showed that the Japanese orb-weaver Oclonoba sybotides changes the structure of its web when it is hungry. It adds spiral decorations that increase the tension along the spokes, improving the web’s ability to transmit the weaker vibrations transmitted by smaller prey. When it is famished, every morsel counts. To capture such morsels, the spider expands the range of its senses by changing the nature of its web.

But here’s the truly important part: Watanabe found that a well-fed spider will also go after small flies if it is placed onto a tense web built by a hungry spider. The spider has effectively outsourced the decision about which prey to attack to its web. The choice depends not just on its neurons, hormones, or anything else inside its body, but also on something outside it—something it can create and adjust.

So in other words, when you take a satiated spider and plop it onto a web built by a hungry one, it will still respond to the vibratory signals that the hungry spider calibrated specifically to suit its own heightened appetite. The satiated spider will ignore its own interoceptive hunger signals (or lack thereof) and give more credence to the web. The web has become a part of that spider’s sensory apparatus. It shouldn’t be possible not to see it as an extension of its being. The spider is not simply the spider’s body.

And if this true for animals that do not possess the gift of advanced cognition, it would seem even more true for humans, who do possess such a gift and use it to interact regularly with an entire ecosystem of specially made tools on a daily basis. The American philosopher C.S. Peirce once mused that his mind must be partly contained within the inkstand that he uses to write — the implication being that he could not come up with the thoughts he has unless able to write them down and work through them in an exteriorized form. But although he is considering only himself, a philosopher who works with advanced abstract systems (he specialized in formal logic), the point could be made for people with much less lofty ambitions. If we consider the example of the Japanese orb weaver and how it treats the web as an organ to determine its own level of hunger, that principle of outsourcing functions much like an old man who writes himself notes and places them around the house because he is aware of his own short-term memory loss: the notes displace the sovereignty of the brain. The notes are an extension of that man and thus part of his being.

For this reason, it is hard for me to take seriously the proposition that the self is simply the body, as if the two are coterminous. The self is always in dynamic interaction with its environment, and thus it must be characterized by its interactions rather than its primary locus, the body, as an isolated, independent substance.

Now, this characterization of the self, I’m starting to realize, puts me in the territory of relational ontology, since the essence of the self cannot be separated from its relations. But relational ontology isn’t a single doctrine, and there are different versions of it, and I can’t exactly say which one I would prefer, since I’m only in the first stages of recognizing it as a philosophical approach worth some time and effort. To demonstrate one less overt framework of relational ontology, we can use the medieval scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus as our example. In his system, the relations between entities are a distinct part of their being. You could list them as essential attributes, like how a Christian considers Jesus to be not just the embodied avatar of God, but God’s actual Son (a relation). And indeed, these relations are not just a real part of a given individual being, but all of being as such, since in order for relations to be real, all entities must share in a unified (or, per Scotus, “univocal”) being. This is a relational ontology insofar as it is characterized by a strong philosophical realism (as opposed to nominalism) that considers relations to be true qualities rather than merely accidental attributes with no ontological legitimacy, as other medieval scholastics believed. But in this more conservative model, one still maintains that all entities have their own distinct individual essence, or haecceitas, “thisness,” as Scotus called it. Therefore, relations are real but not do not assume ontological priority over substantive entities.

For a more aggressive framework, we can use the Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna as our chief example. In his system, the relations between entities are more fundamental than the entities themselves. This is because in his interpretation of the Buddhist doctrine of śūnyatā (emptiness), nothing has an independent, self-sustaining essence. Being doesn’t exist, but objects don’t really exist, either. The only real qualities are the relations between these illusory figures that we mentally register as “beings” or “entities,” but which are in reality only conceptual designations. It might perhaps seem at first like Nāgārjuna is a nominalist, since he denies the reality of being-as-such. But this would be an improper label, since nominalists believed in the reality of particulars, i.e. individual things, over universals, like categories or genera. For Nāgārjuna, both particulars and universals are equally fake, and the ultimate truth of śūnyatā is the truth of pure relationality. We can see from these two examples that relational ontology has quite the range of articulations.

What got me thinking about this topic was a book by the semiotician Wendy Wheeler, Expecting the Earth: Life/Culture/Biosemiotics (2016). It is an interesting one, in part because it’s sort of a mess. I’ll start with the bad stuff: in the middle of her book, she makes a full-throated argument for some of the worst “trad-cath” commonplaces you’re likely to find on the internet, all of which she bundles into one grotesque package. The argument basically goes like this: the nominalists, starting with William of Ockham, ruined the west’s philosophical progress and plunged us all into a world of nihilism and hatred of the earth. But also, the gnostics are bad and nihilistic, too (as per Voegelin, as per Han Jonas), and the nominalists and gnostics are essentially the same thing. And, what’s more, their spirit lives on through the impulses of a whole bunch of bad guys, like the authoritarian communists as well as the neo-Darwinians like Richard Dawkins and other hyper-mechanistic thinkers.

Awful. I’ve often considered writing a short book of no more than 80 pages explaining why this argument is nonsense, granting full amnesty to both the gnostics and nominalists (note: I myself am neither), since different versions of these claims have been floating around for quite a while, and they all posit a causal framework that is simply unsustainable. Perhaps I’ll jot down a rough sketch of my thoughts on this blog some other time. But anyhow, besides hopping aboard this unfortunate train of thought, Wheeler elsewhere possesses a great deal of real intellectual curiosity, and she manages to reach into the world of French post-structuralist thought to find some thinkers worth engaging, since they have relational ontology in common.

She also ably explains the value of incorporating relational ontology into one’s own thought:

Of course, it is precisely the multiplicity of potential relations through which being can become (and can become whatever it does specifically) that makes change possible. If you think, for example, about the relation between logs and the stones they enable to roll forward in the process of early constructions, it becomes possible that you may then think eventually about the relation between a wheel and a shaft. This thinking about relations of similarity allows the possibility of comparison (as Hume noted), and thus of similar relations applied to something different. Thus, you can go on to think about the relation between a gear and a gear wheel, for instance, or (in an example offered by Simondon) the relation between a wheel, a shaft and ball bearings.

[…]

Thinking simply about substances themselves alone cannot produce this possibility of the multiplicity of becomings which are in fact the case — as evolution from a common ancestor which existed approximately 3.8 billion years ago indicates biologically, but as we can also see in cultural, aesthetic and technological evolution also.

[…]

An ontology of relations is an ontology of change, and thus of habits and expectations. It indicates how things can grow.

This justification is also simpatico with a closely related mode of thinking: process ontology, which views dynamic processes and change as the fundamental constituents of reality — this perspective is probably most thoroughly and systematically expressed in A.N. Whitehead’s work (which I’ve never read, so I won’t say anything more).

Anyhow, Wheeler begins her book with a discussion on Deleuze & Guattari in the first chapter, then ends it with a discussion on Gilbert Simondon in the last, endorsing them both (I should say all three) as thinkers who were trying to move toward an ontology of relations, albeit in different ways. And when you consider Wheeler’s position as a semiotic thinker, it would make sense for her to find some potential in these guys, something I suspect she might be right about. For one thing, Deleuze was a much better student of semiotics than any of the prior 20th century Parisians. He didn’t just reject the conclusions of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, as many other post-structuralists did; he actually moved beyond Saussure in a meaningful way, first by engaging with Louis Hjelmslev, then semiotic philosophers like C.S. Peirce (he still didn’t quite grasp Peirce’s triadic sign relation model, but whatever), and even Thomas Sebeok. I also knew beforehand that he had rejected Lacan’s glottocentric model of the subconscious mind and even, according to Derrida in one of his lectures, took C.G. Jung more seriously than Sigmund Freud. All good things.

But more significantly, the semiotic perspective itself is one that distinguishes itself primarily through its analysis of relations — and processes, for that matter. Paul Bains (whom Wheeler cribs from quite a bit) shows in The Primacy of Semiosis (2006) how John Poinsot’s Treatise on Signs (“Tractatus de Signis,” 1632) is essentially a work of relational ontology, since Poinsot posits that signs operate according to a triadic relation (sign, object, interpreter), and these sign-relations, no matter what entities they involve, always have a kind of real being to them. Poinsot was more of a Thomist than a Scotist, since he denied the univocity of being (in other words, he thought that being was relational, and there are different gradations of it), but this is by the by. The point is that his mode of thinking predicted philosophical approaches to come over a couple hundred years later, after the delirium of Descartes had finally started to fade. The major forerunner of modern semiotics, C.S. Peirce, came onto the scene in the late 19th century, he developed the modern approach to semiotics, and his thinking was similarly relational to Poinsot. Although he was probably unfamiliar with the rather obscure Poinsot, he did know the philosophy of both Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus quite well, and scholars still seem unsure as to whether he thinks like more of a Thomist or a Scotist.

So, semiotics is a kind of process ontology. But that isn’t all. Media ecology (this blog’s other major theoretical area of interest) involves a kind of relational ontology as well, since that discipline refuses to observe a message simply as “the figure” by itself, but always recognizes its meaning and significance as being determined by “the ground,” or the informational medium that conveys it. For a while, I’ve been thinking about how to properly synthesize semiotics with media ecology into one well-articulated approach, and it seems that a relations-based ontology could be perhaps one way to do it. Gilbert Simondon might be a key figure, since he was (like Deleuze) a relational thinker who rejected “thing-focused” analysis and instead opted to focus on the broader processes of each apparent thing’s individuation. He also wrote quite a bit about technical objects as evolving entities which operate according to their own internal logic, brought about by complex individuating structures. And, of course, just as the more conventionally recognized media ecology figures like Ong and McLuhan understood, Simondon understood that technical objects themselves act as participants in the process of human becoming.

All of this is to say, as I wrap up this post, that I’ve wound up throwing yet even more books onto my “to read” list, which is already unwieldy and unworkable. And it’s quite unexpected, especially concerning Deleuze & Guattari, since I told myself years ago that I would never read their work — the main reason being that they have the most dysfunctional online fanbase out of any modern philosophy project I’ve ever seen. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anyone who has read Deleuze and has improved his life afterward. On Twitter, a few years back, I wrote this:

And that post is true, by the way; those accounts really did exist. Elsewhere, I’ve said this:

And this:

But this isn’t particularly fair criticism, since the most compelling philosophers in general tend to have the dumbest fans. Nietzsche is probably the most obvious example. And although I don’t agree with those who insist that one must familiarize oneself with the entire works of Aristotle before moving onto Nietzsche, I get why they’re saying it: they don’t want morons to bother them about Nietzsche. Make sense.

More importantly, though, I’ve slowly developed a better overall picture of French poststructuralism over the past several years, and I feel pretty confident about which currents within it are worth engaging, and which should be left behind in the garbage heap. Now that I have an actual reason to read more of this stuff (I was already pretty well-read in Derrida and bits of Foucault), I think I can afford to let curiosity get the best of me. Even if it means burdening myself with a hundred more books. Suffocating myself in books.

I’m not really a philosopher, you know. I’m a simple-minded boy who just wants to watch pro wrestling and cartoons.

But that’s just how these things go, I suppose.

Edit 3/27: I wound up throwing in some hyperlinks, polished up some minor stylistic deficiencies here and there, and added more of a real conclusion about how I’ve mistrusted Deleuze for quite a while, which I suppose is now exclusive to those who actually clicked the link and went to my blog. We can consider it our little secret.

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that screws around with media ecology and non-structuralist semiotics.

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There’s no question that mainstream popular culture is losing its relevance rapidly, and the internet is the main reason why. Audiences have become split into smaller niches; trend cycles are waxing and waning faster and faster (the explosion of trivial and often arbitrary “brain rot” memes has aided in this development); “watercooler moments” are fewer and further in between (the Superbowl is perhaps the last regular cultural event that middle-class Americans can discuss comfortably at the office); the traditional gatekeepers such as professional critics and mainstream publications are becoming obsolete, while unpaid amateur user-reviews are slowly starting to replace them; content-recommendation algorithms are personalizing people’s culture-engagement habits at an unforeseen level; and, not even lastly, people increasingly experience audio/visual culture in a multi-tasking, attention-deficit manner, e.g. listening to music while watching a show, or watching a movie while scrolling social media on their phones, limiting the potency of any single work of art. The internet is responsible for pretty much all of this.

But here’s a question: does the internet represent a major departure from what came before, or is it a stimulant for large-scale trends that were already well underway? I would argue the latter, since its most salient characteristic is that it aids in the exchange of information, and the invention of electronic media already had the effect of amplifying information, making its reach wider and its audiences larger. Yet the internet’s strongest critics don’t seem to view it that way. For them, the normative state of culture is what we find in the 20th century, and the internet is villainous because it is taking us away from that time. Of course, they never state their grievances in such clear terms. They don’t say, “The 20th century was the best,” and for that reason, I suspect that they aren’t aware of just how exceptional the 20th century actually was in terms of man’s relationship with the arts. Such critics seem to take the experiences of their childhood (in the 1980s or 90s, typically) and telecast it back into history, as if their own experience amounts to how cultural engagement has always worked. If that were true, then the internet would be quite perverse for what it’s currently doing.

So this post will largely be about that topic, since I’m of the view that the explosion of information during the 20th century has created cultural expectations that simply didn’t exist beforehand, and I think that these expectations linger within the minds of the internet’s strongest critics. They don’t realize just how novel their beliefs regarding culture actually are, and moreover just how alien they would seem to, say, your average 18th century lawyer or merchant, let alone commoner. I’m all for criticizing the internet, and if has to be done, then let’s do it. But if we are going to do it, we should probably rely on well-selected premises. And probably the worst premise to rest upon would be the idea that cultural development has always worked the same way; that western civilization has always “progressed” according to a process from which the internet has estranged us. In truth, the internet has only estranged us from a mode of cultural affiliation that was never destined to last.

I. High Art

In 1934, Ezra Pound released a collection of essays in a volume entitled “Make It New.” Although his name would be associated with that mantra, and that mantra would soon become a clarion call for modernist invention and innovation, he didn’t come up with it on his own. He got it from an ancient feudal Chinese ruler, King Tang of Shang, and the quotation was from a volume translated by the renowned orientalist Ernest Fenollosa. The quotation and the means through which Pound appropriated it are inseparable from one another if you want to grasp the essence of modernism — not just in literature, but in all the arts. Fenollosa wasn’t the best Sinologist, being trained primarily in Japanese language and literature, but scholarship on the ancient eastern cultures hadn’t become totally specialized yet. The label “orientalist” hadn’t been turned into an epithet meant to attack western ethnocentrism, and it was still something that intellectual historians would gladly call themselves. There’s no question that “the orient” is far too vast a category for any meaningful scholarly generalization, but the fact is, deep knowledge of the east was just starting to open up in the west, and so the term would have to make do. If you were a westerner interested in feudal China, you were interested in something only beginning to be understood.

So, there’s Ezra Pound, and there’s his saying “Make It New.” He’s going off into hitherto-unknown corners of the past in order to find ideas that will set the pace for the future, and the irony isn’t lost on him, or anyone. The ethos of modernism was about taking newly acquired information about the world — the entire world, all of it, no exceptions — and allowing it to chart the course for bold and unapologetic artistic innovations. Pablo Picasso had already been borrowing from the masks and figures of Gabon and Côte d'Ivoire, Africa, to develop the style of Cubism. And over in the world of music, Olivier Messiaen consulted a 13th-century treatise on rhythm by the Hindu musicologist Śārṅgadeva, using many of its ideas to compose bold and intense chamber and orchestral works, perhaps most notably the Turangalîla-Symphonie. The modernist creator would approach his craft Janus-faced, looking backward even as he moved forward, and with every step, he would produce something novel, indeed wholly original. This is what modernity’s explosion of new information about the world would help to inspire.

But as time went on, the energetic, even manic attitude of the modernists would gradually crust over into a disposition of lifeless academic proceduralism, a desiccated surrogate for the pursuit of technological discovery, and this is where the twentieth century would leave us by the time it came to an end. Many noticed the problem even about halfway through it. In the world of music, plenty of dissenting opinions on the importance of innovation could be found during the heyday of the Darmstadt school, which is known mostly for establishing the post-World War II trend of total-serialism (think Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen). And these dissenting voices weren’t just coming from stubborn tonal composers; they included those who actually attended Darmstadt, like Hans Werner Henze, who described the attitude of Boulez and his disciples this way (as quoted in Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise, 2007):

Everything had to be stylized and made abstract: music regarded as a glass-bead-game, a fossil of life.

Of course, in Hermann Hesse’s novel to which Henze refers, the titular Glass Bead Game players weren’t trying to be innovative, and in his situation, they absolutely were. But it was nonetheless easy to perceive a certain lifelessness in their approach, even despite their often poorly-concealed desire to shock and scandalize audiences. Meanwhile, in France, Musique concrète had been born, and its composers would often dress like scientists, wearing thick glasses and storing pens in their front shirt-pockets. Pierre Schaeffer actually compared French composers to atomic physicists working in a laboratory. Almost no one actually listens to this sort of music today.

Over in the sphere of visual culture, the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis wrote an essay called “The Demon of Progress In the Arts” (1954) in which he pointed out the shallowness informing the modern art establishment’s obsession with novelty. Elsewhere, the British avant-garde theater director Edward Gordon Craig expressed similar sentiments in various writings, stating that all great art stands on its own and thus the artist shouldn’t pay attention to what’s popular. In his writings, the American beat poet Jack Kerouac regularly praised the fellaheen — an Arabic word for farmers and rustics popularized by Oswald Spengler, who used it to describe the state of cultural inertia that a civilization falls into once it has declined. For Spengler, the fellaheen are the peasants who survive the death of one civilization and find themselves there in the next, never becoming fully part of any, and continually remaining indifferent to their place in the grand metadrama of human history. In Lonesome Traveler, for instance, Kerouac says of the Mexicans, “you can find it, this feeling, this fellaheen feeling about life, that timeless gayety of people not involved in great cultural and civilization issues,” and this is all quite respectable. Kerouac didn’t care about being on “the cutting edge” of anything, and for him, the mentality of peasants was preferable to the need to remain dialed-in to the newest cultural fads and trends at all times.

“Making it new” thus didn’t quite pan out the way Pound would have perhaps thought. It turned into a bit of a racket. In America, the problem was exacerbated by the massive glut of academic funding that the government pumped into the university system for Cold War research. Starting sometime in the 1950s, every field (including those within the humanities) had to justify itself through the language of progress and scientific innovation, even if the innovations did not mean anything to anyone outside the field. Milton Babbitt thus composed his essay “Who Cares If You Listen?” in 1958, in which he explained that composers should not be held by the standards of a mass audience. They are specialists, much like any scientific researcher is a specialist, and they need to be respected and supported, even if they are mainly composing pieces exclusively for one another, and their critics. Although Babbitt himself didn’t title the piece, the question it posed more or less summed up the attitude of not just the musical establishment but the entirety of the high arts in America and across Europe. We’re doing important things here with our work! We don’t have time to consider whether or not the public will register its approval! Of course, if your funding is coming from the expectation of progress and scientific discovery, then you will consider these criteria more important than those of the public — a bunch of yahoos, and moreover, yahoos to whom you are held not even slightly accountable in material terms.

II. Mainstream Culture

Now, up until this point, I’ve been discussing how things turned out in the world of highbrow art. When access to information greatly expanded — an expansion that occurred concomitantly with the spread of electronic media — there was an initial burst of creative energy. Artists were enlivened; they were excited. They wanted to issue insolent challenges to the stars. But as time went on, there was no way to sustain that intensity. Of course it would all become faddish and ridiculous. Of course a sense of aimlessness and sterility would develop over time. And of course many would stray from the ideal of progress and simply devote themselves to making what they consider good rather than “important” art, even if that meant their names would have to wallow in only the footnotes of the history books, if represented there at all. But the basic assumption of the twentieth century, i.e. that culture has to “evolve” and “progress” in order to be worthwhile, remained strong in the minds of the educated boys and girls from all over the western hemisphere, and it trickled down to the mainstream mass-media monoculture; or, the “culture industry,” as the Frankfurt Schoolers dubbed it.

I’m not usually one to talk about “capitalism,” since the term is often vacuous and ill-defined. But critics of capitalism have nevertheless made some valuable points about marketplace dynamics over the years, and these points are worth keeping in mind when we discuss the business of culture. Back in 1902, the German economist Werner Sombart wrote the essay “Economy and Fashion,” in which he discusses how the fashion industry has a sophisticated way of creating artificial demand. In order for the industry to thrive, people need to buy new stuff from it regularly, as everyone knows, so the whole industry collectively found a way to turn clothing into a sophisticated mechanism for social signaling. That way, new trends could emerge and die down while the flow of money would continue unabated. “Fashion,” as Sombart put it, “is capitalism’s favorite child,” because the unexamined assumptions we carry with us about clothing often flow from the historically unprecedented role that it began to play in the wake of mass industry.

The same observations can apply to the ingenious manner in which the mass-media monoculture would create artificial demand for new products, from music to cinema to clothing to food to television. Business executives took stock of how many distinct personality-types there are within various age demographics, they found a way to link product choices with personal fulfillment by using different marketing strategies, and they managed to create a “vibe” for every single decade starting in the 1920s (even if this “vibe” would itself be retconned into the cultural memory decades later). Fashion preferences, music choices, dietary habits, video entertainment, and other aspects of mainstream society changed continuously, so that one aging generation could remember itself through the lens of its past consumption choices, while an up-and-coming generation could carry a sense of identity based on its current consumption choices. Although capitalism itself never necessitated any of this, the situation nonetheless fit nicely within a capitalist framework because it rested at the intersection between technological development and big business.

Perhaps the most curious aspect of this unusual historical situation is the manner in which professional critics would help to legitimize mass culture and convince as many people as possible that it must be taken seriously. In Marxist terms, we could call them participants in the culture industry’s ideological “superstructure.” And generally speaking — this part is very important — they legitimized this system by using the language and ideological assumptions of the highbrow art world. Perhaps the most important assumption they borrowed from that world was that culture, no matter how seemingly frivolous, must move forward in some way. In other words, the regular and predictable shifts in consumption choices weren’t to be understood as cyclical but rather progressive, as if each new shift forms a new development in a continuing story leading up to a grand climax. Swing begat bebop begat cool jazz begat rock’n’roll begat fusion begat progressive rock begat punk rock begat power pop begat indie rock… etc. Starting in the late 1960s, if you were an intellectual-type who wanted to “slum it” a bit and listen to some rock music, you could take solace in the rock’n’roll critic who would assure you that your decision is aesthetically valid. You weren’t just engaging in mindless hedonism. You were participating in an expression of working-class authenticity. You were engaged in a dialectic of rawness and confrontation. etc.

This attitude explains some of the various prejudices held by the critic, like the idea that rock bands shouldn’t make albums that sound similar to each other over and over again. An album wasn’t just a music storage device that emerged alongside the invention of the long-playing vinyl record — not at all. Instead, every album, in this middlebrow progressive model, was now an artistic statement (willingly or not) about the cultural moment in which it takes place, and therefore it should change with the times. Of course, there is nothing universally valid about this perception, and it doesn’t reflect the way artists actually work. Imagine applying it to Domenico Scarlatti’s 555 keyboard sonatas, which he composed between 1738 and 1757. What would the critic say about each new “album” of sonatas if they were released onto the market as Scarlatti wrote them?

Scarlatti, in his 36th outing, has once again presented us with a characteristically angular yet chilled-out collection of decadent aristo-core soundscapes. And as always, he has chosen the sonata as his vehicle. It’s a style through which he could push the envelope and break some new ground if he really wanted to. But once again, he has chosen to abstain from developing the transgressive elements that his work merely hints at, and which once seemed so promising at the start of his career. Yes, there are some thorny, even skronk-adjacent licks and trills that occasionally emerge within the mix, but Scarlatti treats them as accidental cracks on the ivory walls he’s trying to build. Instead of exploring them when the opportunity arises, he retreats from them just in the nick of time, doubles down on his signature sound, and rest on the laurels of his past triumphs — from back when it seemed as though he was taking us somewhere truly exciting. Just as with every other recent album, you could slot this one seamlessly into his earlier catalog and not miss a beat. 4/10.

This is, of course, a ridiculous scenario, but I’m trying to give the reader a sense of how contingent the aesthetic standards of the 20th century culture industry have been. Its preferences were mainly decided upon for the continuation of the industry itself, everything else being secondary. Of course, things like “authenticity” have always mattered for rock critics, and social awareness has always been a concern for film critics, and then artistic “maturity” is something that we hear about from time to time. But beneath everything, there was a persistent and universal desire for something “new” to emerge. Rather than being sages and savants, the music critics, fashion critics, film critics, etc. were always the unreflective tools of the business they worked for, and the artists were right from the beginning to call them idiots — as they often did, over and over again.

Still, though, they were necessary idiots, at least when it came to establishing a hierarchy of preference and managing the flow from one cultural trend to the next. Whereas the highbrow art world kept trying to “make it new” over and over again until it refined itself into what we would call irrelevance, the mass-media art world’s sphere of criticism acted as a force for aesthetic conservatism even while posing as progressive. The critics demanded “new” ideas, but none of the ideas were actually new. All of the truly new ideas had already been done in the highbrow world, and they often weren’t very interesting, or worse, they were simply obnoxious. Here, what was “new” was in fact merely different from what came immediately before, and the public had already been conditioned to accept it. Rather than being revolutionary, the cultural products of the 20th century — particularly starting in the 1950s — were marketable, they were entertaining, and they were palatable to the masses. The job of the critics/intellectuals was to fabricate for them a symbolic weight and importance that they otherwise wouldn’t have had.

III. The Internet

It thus shouldn’t be too surprising that so many intellectual types nowadays have grown despondent over the waning power of the 20th century culture industry and are angry that the internet has shattered its complex arrangement of embedded hierarchies. After all, nowadays everything feels pretty insignificant. “Have you seen such-and-such movie?” your friend asks you. “No,” you say. “Oh, OK,” he responds before switching the subject. It doesn’t matter, and what if it did? There’s no pressing sense of urgency to go and watch the stupid movie. It isn’t hard to grasp why sensitive men in their 30s and 40s want to go back in time to a period in which that urgency could be felt — to a point during which even the vapid and vacant lyrics of Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison seemed like incantations from visionary oracles.

I can think of three written examples showing this despondency, though the attitude is seemingly everywhere on social media. But we can go through these three one by one, in part because I’ve already done some of the leg-work in previous writings. The first example is the democratic-socialist Freddie DeBoer’s various attacks on “poptimism,” a trend starting from the 2010s in which critics decided to take even the most absolutely mindless pop music just as seriously as rock music. DeBoer has been banging away on the topic for years. He also has recently attacked the decline of criticism in general, pointing out (rightly) that critics are afraid of being negative nowadays, and he associates these two developments with one another. But as I’ve said in a previous piece, poptimism was simply a response to changing material conditions, and its rise was entirely predictable. It amazes me how poorly DeBoer — a guy who seems to take Marx seriously — grasps this basic point. Because of the internet’s decentralization of information and the consequent obsolescence of the professional critic as a viable career path, critics are hanging onto their jobs, and they’re doing so by being very nice. Much nicer than ever before. They write for web sites whose traffic is almost entirely dependent on Facebook ad algorithms, and both they and the sites make very little money. The critics also realize that they simply aren’t a necessary part of the cultural infrastructure anymore. They served their purpose when print was dominant and digital streaming services didn’t exist, and now the companies who put food on their table rest upon a foundation of sand. Why are we pretending like they have any other choice but to kneel down and beg for mercy?

But more importantly: why are we pretending that poptimism is such a radical departure from what rock criticism originally was? The first “poptimist” publication was Rolling Stone, which launched in 1967, almost sixty years ago. And while it may have cared about “authenticity” more than today’s poptimists do, and maybe a few other aesthetic considerations that the poptimists downplay, it nevertheless played a similar role in the cultural economy, only with the power to make or break careers. These critics were never serious about music as an art form; they were just “vibeologists.” But given what they were working with, they didn’t need to take music so seriously. Rock music is enjoyable, but it’s also pretty dumb.

The second example of despondency over the decline of the mainstream monoculture comes from a book I reviewed, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is by Justin E.H. Smith (he now goes by Justin Smith-Ruiu, but I’ll call him Smith here, because that’s what his name was when he wrote it). In what amounts to an otherwise sober and reflective work, Smith, apparently guided by a mysterious compulsion, decides to complain about how young people aren’t pursuing the cultivation of their aesthetic sensibilities, because they’ve become enslaved by the recommendation algorithms on streaming platforms. He writes,

There was a time, before the ubiquitous application of algorithms to our social life, when it was considered salutary […] to actively cultivate one’s aesthetic sensibilities, for example, one’s musical taste. The “You may also like” function of music-delivery platforms such as Spotify has largely obviated the need for such active pursuit, and now a person who happens to start exploring music from a given song in a particular genre will typically be guided along to other songs categorized as similar to the first one based only on criteria that AI is capable of “understanding.”

[…]

The algorithms … keep the listener trapped in that inane, market-defined cage known as musical “genre.”

To this general criticism, I responded like so:

There is simply no way to argue against the internet according to Smith’s line of reasoning here, no matter how much he might want to qualify or refine his point. The truth is, we’re living at a time in which first-world people are quite comfortable and bored, and thus the greatest total amount of human beings in all of history are pursuing self-actualization through the dedicated cultivation of aesthetic sensibilities. If it doesn’t seem like it, it’s only because the internet has made us believe that the number should be even higher. The internet, after all, has shone a light on all of the people who don’t pursue aesthetic cultivation — people who have always existed as the vast majority yet were invisible in previous epochs.

Perhaps I should expand on this point. We know that Mozart was the most influential composer of the classical period, unless we count Beethoven as classical rather than romantic. So surely, he would have been a celebrity all across Europe, right? Well, no. During Mozart’s career, the news of his music spread through courts, churches, and print media. The only people who would have heard of Mozart probably lived near the major urban centers and were either bourgeois professionals, noblemen, clergy, or musicians, while the vast majority of ruralites would have been blissfully unaware. We can thus estimate that less than 5% of the entire European population would have heard about him, and within that number, only about half would have heard his actual music. If I’m off, it’s not by much. Now, when we keep all of this in mind, should we be particularly surprised that the majority of people respond passively to what their streaming algorithms tell them to engage with? Why are we foisting expectations upon them that would have been considered ridiculous for the vast majority of human history?

The third example comes from a fairly recent piece by Sam Buntz, who argues that the internet has caused the younger generations to experience cultural time not as a continuous flow from one event to the next, but rather as a vast, suspended eternal-present. This experience of time as a synchrony — he calls it “living in The Archive” — ultimately overwhelms young people, rendering them unable to create their own vital popular culture, while the few who do try to create new music (he focuses on music) can only produce impenetrable niche avant-garde nonsense:

[Gen-Z people are] reacting to everything that has ever happened. Which is impossible to actually do. On the one hand, it might make you more cosmopolitan (though this is hard to do without a guide to help develop your critical intelligence). But, on the other, it ruins your ability to assimilate anything and reduces you to a quivering lump of uncertainties. It also reduces your own ability to create because your response to life becomes so indeterminate. You can’t figure out what to respond to.

There are lots of strong points that Buntz makes about the effect that electronic media has had since the start of the 20th century, and his term “The Archive” is actually a pretty good one. He also is correct in suggesting that too much information presents problems for the construction of a cultural metanarrative — this is something I’ve discussed in a piece on Jan Assmann’s concept of collective mnemotechnics. But there are two serious problems with his reasoning: the first is that he thinks that he’s only talking about the internet right now. The second is that the only time period that he can use as a more favorable comparison point occurred during the 20th century when The Archive was almost 100% finished. There is actually far more continuity between his generation and the Zoomers than he seems to realize.

For example, he brings up the fact that Zoomers mostly listen to music made by older generations, seeing it as proof that they’re somehow unique in their lack of creativity. They don’t have music just for themselves, in other words. Okay. But what do we consider, say, Baby Boomer music to be? The Beatles? The Beach Boys? Bob Dylan? Jimi Hendrix? Janis Joplin? Jeff Beck? Well, all of those musicians were born before 1945, which would make them Silent Generation people, not Baby Boomers. How about the Gen-Xers? What did they like? The Sex Pistols? Metallica? Eddie Vedder? Madonna? Prince? Well, they were all Boomers, not Gen-Xers. So it seems pretty clear to me that the most emblematic artists associated with one generation are actually going to be from the previous one, with some exceptions here and there (Kurt Cobain was definitely a Gen-Xer making music for other Gen-Xers). It is certainly interesting that major record labels are taking less chances on younger artists than they used to — among today’s Top 40 stars, I can only think of Billie Eilish as an example of a real bona fide Zoomer — but this says little about Generation-Z’s creative agency and probably a lot more about corporations hedging their bets due to internet piracy, the decline of physical media, and thus diminished profits.

What Buntz really seems to be upset about is the decline of the mainstream monoculture — a system of constraints that keeps people on the same page by focusing their attention on a collection of predetermined products and trends. There was, in reality, always a ton of information available to sift through from the very beginning of the 20th century. As soon as the phonograph was invented, western man was already living in The Archive, and it’s precisely The Archive that came to establish the expectation for each generation to have its own unique culture, and for the average person within every generation to be conversant with that culture. The Archive of yesteryear mainly differed from today’s in that both music and videos were stored in tangible media, and so there were some conditions of scarcity that could be directly monetized. With such monetization, you could have a monoculture that directs young people’s aesthetic preferences and tells them which products to purchase, which ones to ignore, and so on. But once the switch to digital was finalized, the monoculture started to disappear, and that is what is still continuing to happen now. It will probably take a while to go away entirely, if it ever does, but when you consider how brief and fleeting its lifespan actually has been, it’s hard to feel as though something truly indispensable is being lost. The mainstream monoculture was always just a stopgap while The Archive was reaching its final stages. And now that it’s more or less finalized, it feels silly to start wishing that we could go back to the glory days of Kurt Loder on MTV News, or whatever. You can’t really criticize The Archive too harshly if it shaped your own thought process in the first place.

Frankly, I’m not too concerned about young people. I think they’re fine. And if they’re not fine, then they’ll figure something out. Trying to interfere with and fix their problems would only make things worse. If we really, really want to diagnose them, I would say that the main thing they currently lack is a way to make sense of all the information that surrounds them. Buntz seems to agree, and this is why he ultimately decides that they’re just screwed, more or less. But I think that people generally find ways to make sense of things. They create tribal groups, they form affiliations that respect the principle of the Dunbar number, they come up with metanarratives for themselves, and they discover forms of collective mnemotechnics that create limitations and set boundaries on what to pay attention to and what to ignore. There is no actual need for Lester Bangs to step in and tell them what is and isn’t cool. If anything, the desire to be “relevant” is what’s keeping them from self-actualizing, since self-destructive behavior seems to be the main driver of mainstream engagement. But if they jettison that goal altogether, stop trying to please people like Buntz (and me, for that matter), and start focusing on improving their own small-scale communities with little concern for the approval of outsiders, then they will probably be better off. The future generations will adjust to the digital world, and we know this is true because they don’t really have much of a choice. They will figure things out by hook or by crook. They will find meaning in their lives. And, if this analysis carries any weight, they will slowly start to discover the power of the fellaheen mentality. Just as it has always been for the vast majority.