058 The Kitschian Sink

Escalationism I

People strive to stand out by building themselves into a brand that establishes a clear signal in an environment where attention is scarce and information is abundant. In this kind of economy, extremism and simplification make especially useful tools to connect with an audience. I wrote about one manifestation of this with reaction videos a while back, in which content creators exaggerate and underscore their emotional responses to the music they’re responding to. But this impacts the search for the true moral order as well, and the associations of certain aesthetic expressions with certain political positions.

Recently I had occasion to look back over Susan Sontag’s famous article, “Fascinating Fascism.” One of the ways it differs from the typically associative-apatropaic (“this is not OK”) thinkpieces of today is that it builds its argument out of factual, empirical, unspectacular claims. This is true particularly in its first section, where Sontag examines how Leni Riefenstahl’s photography book on the Nuba, and its dust jacket copy, helps shore up Riefenstahl’s reputation as a lover of beauty, mostly innocent of her role as a Nazi artist. Sontag advances a conceptual argument, absolutely, but it’s also rooted in observation about things that are verifiable, empirical. This gives her a more authoritative basis to speculate:

The rituals of domination and enslavement being more and more practiced, the art that is more and more devoted to rendering their themes, are perhaps only a logical extension of an affluent society's tendency to turn every part of people's lives into a taste, a choice; to invite them to regard their very lives as a (life) style. In all societies up to now, sex has mostly been an activity (something to do, without thinking about it). But once sex becomes a taste, it is perhaps already on its way to becoming a self-conscious form of theater, which is what sadomasochism is about: a form of gratification that is both violent and indirect, very mental.

Sex, but also the construction of one’s self for others, certainly seem to be a “taste” and a “self-conscious form of theater” for anyone spending time in the social media world that took over what was once the internet. One of the online arenas of selfhood as self-conscious theater that I’ve found troubling, baffling, hilarious, and depressing all at once is the world of right-wing kitsch. Or, to clarify, I’m not talking about “right-wing art.” I’m talking about self-proclaimed right-wing culture warriors who try to enlist a wide range of art into fairly sophomoric political visions. (We’re not talking about Eric Voegelin or James Burnham here, folks.) Scads of aspiring influencers gesture toward art and letters—some of which is itself kitsch, some of which isn’t—with a sense of taste that is nothing if not kitschy, tacky, tryhard, simplistic, and superficial. Example:

“Ivan Throne” and many others like him promote a picture-book understanding of the products of Western civilization in an effort to promote Western civilization. But do you think people like this are chastened if they’re told they get their facts wrong or that their comprehension is feeble? Well, no, of course not. Error does not disqualify when the object of the game is to capture attention. And people want their attention captured because so many of us do exist in a world that feels hopeless, rootless, pointless, and painful. This basic diagnosis is one shared by sharper cultural observers of countless political persuasions; exploiting that diagnosis is the activity of these influencers. They are trying to supply their publics with some picture of order. This facsimile of order is most easily reproduced in broad strokes.

George W.S. Trow, anticipating the end of the televisual paradigm and whatever was going to come after it, wrote decades ago: “I think people will reinvent their history using specific images from a more ordered moment.” Perhaps nowhere does this seem more visible than in the public and thinly-veiled yearnings of online larpers constructing selves and communities out of rose-and-AI-tinted lenses of selective, curated historical pictures. The right-leaning confluence of Great Books, “Western civ,” “trad,” grindset hustle culture, and 21st century Know-Nothingism, in particular, seems to be having a big moment. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe wrote about “chains of equivalence” through which different, contingent political claims come to be associated with one another. We’re seeing the construction or maintenance of these equivalences in this ascendant kitsch aesthetic. The signaling of disparate elements into a picture whose coherence emerges only over time, by repetition, by say-so.

Certain hallmarks of “the West”—Greek statues, Renaissance art, Belle Epoque architecture, leatherbound “classic” books—commingle with imperatives of liquid modernity to gesture toward “the best that has been thought and said” while anchored to the ethos of “like-share-and-subscribe.” This much seems relatively new. In an earlier paradigm led by technocratic elites whose cultural vanguard leaned left, merely labeling such expressions as kitsch served to trivialize those expressions. But this is not the paradigm we currently inhabit. In “the context of no context,” or in other words in a groundless, hyper-stimulated, postliterate information environment, the label of kitsch has little efficacy. People don’t know, don’t have the frame of reference to know, what kitsch is. Or they don’t care. Or they know and care and like it. The attention-scarce, informtion-rich environment rewards the production of extremes.

As Clement Greenberg put it, kitsch represented a “rear guard” to the avant-garde: “Kitsch is a product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America and established what is called universal literacy.” In this new information environment, kitsch is, or at least can be, a kind of vanguard itself, precisely because it is an extremity that offers momentary clarity within the Oceanic. It is signal amidst noise.

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Left-leaning kitsch exists too, of course. But I think it’s obsolescent in the current moment given the rise of huckster authoritarianism across the globe, and anyway, the line I want to trace has less to do with associating kitsch with one or more partisan positions, and more to do with the mechanics of signaling in arenas believed to be significant in themselves … such as politics, or art. We are incentivized to feed some raw material of culture into the novelty-and-status-generating machines of the attention economy. This instrumentality, I think, warps us and what we could really be, for ourselves and for each other. Another case in post, not quite so explicitly politically coded this time, some content that has gone slightly viral more than once from Jash Dholani, the self-styled “old books guy,” who surely created this table with an eye towards the vitriol (not simply the kudos) it would bring.

Dholani is also presently promoting the “hardcore” productivity journal he’s selling. On Twitter, his pinned tweet includes a video montage of things like Rocky Balboa training, Elon Musk talking, and … Whiplash. The idea is that if you work insanely hard, and journal well, you might be able to go the distance with Apollo Creed. Or found a company like Tesla. Or drive a Tesla. Or click ‘like’ on pictures of Tesla Cybertrucks on Twitter.

I mean none of this as a personal attack on Dholani, who as far as I know is not malicious. (Plus why should he care what some random person says about him? He probably welcomes the publicity.) But I do feel convinced that all of this brouhaha should strike any thinking person as a caricature of Great Culture. To mine all of painting, philosophy, literature, architecture, etc. for material for entrepreneurial self-help?

The amalgamation of Great Books/Wisdom Literature/Western Civ-posting with productivity-and-hustle framing and algorithmic virality-seeking represents a willful and blithe instrumentalization of culture (i.e., leisure) toward instrumentalization itself. These optimizers do not recognize values that are not quantified and quantifiable. Reading old books can provide you with direct and indirect lessons on how to be a human being; I don't deny it. But reading old books should also make you less a product of your age than if you didn’t read them. It should not sharpen you to be more completely such a product. A perspective like Dholani’s is locked in to the mimetic & memetic ways of doing things. In the end—or is it the beginning?—it seems to me that this reductive, viral vitalism has no room for wonder.

And wonder, some of us would agree, is the precondition for some important things …

(More notes to come …)