076 Just Looking
The speculative value of the armchair "culturologist"
In an interview published posthumously in Rouge back in 2006, Raymond Durgnat suggested the word “culturologist” to describe what he did, and I’ve always liked that term. I like it partly for the way that it implies something a little amateur, gonzo, or off-label. A real culturologist, whatever that might be, truly must relinquish the role of expert or authority in at least a large number of the fields under observation. You must cast a net wider than your own territory.
Relatedly, after meaning to get to it for many years, I finally started to read Victor Klemperer’s LTI (which is, so far, incredible). In this book Klemperer documents some of the linguistic changes and behaviors that characterized the Third Reich. What a lot of people went along with, perhaps unthinkingly, becomes the fodder for his weathered and fierce analysis.
In this general spirit that I record notes and observations—whether private, or shared with friends, or shared publicly—about the sea changes in human behavior. We’re living in interesting times. It may be useful to have some records of some of the shifts and habits and assumptions, years in the future. All of us who care to record such perceptions will play a small role in keeping them for the future.
Algorithms have recently shown me some videos of schoolteacher-influencers; some of them are fashionistas. As I indulge the household god of the phone screen for a few moments, I see a succession of looks and poses that simply emphasize how much the clothing each day serves as a costume. “What I wore in a week as a middle school teacher.” In this case the outfits are all homages to the 1970s, but without rhyme or reason—certainly with absolutely no bearing on what a K-12 teacher might do or wear. Three piece leisure suit on Tuesday, track suit on Wednesday, bellbottoms and blouse on Thursday? Sure, whatever. All of it feels tryhard; it feels narcissistic. It feels “off” to me.
But let’s advance a step further for a minute, and grant something else. I suspect these teachers are also trying to find a way to communicate or bond with their students. The question then is not a matter of authenticity; it’s a more practical question of attention capture through aura. Preteens on their phones aren’t going to care if you are dressing authentically, quietly, tastefully like a 1970s educator might have dressed. But they might care if they recognize that you are committed to the bit, in a manner of speaking. You’re fun, you care about details. Wear your tracksuit, fam.
A structure like this characterizes a great deal of contemporary life in my eyes. Something feels off, perhaps unreal, and yet I can discern or rationalize why someone is doing what they’re doing. People who make reaction videos tend to exaggerate their responses in ways that anticipate “engagement.” There’s a strong, mugging performance of concern, empathy, enjoyment, etc., that plays well for thumbnails and clips. Remember, in a hypersaturated information environment, extremity establishes signal amidst noise. There’s an adaptive reason for all these changes, however idiotic those changes might be.
I was telling a friend, re: some shameless online clout seeking, about a family story from my youth. My sister, as a toddler, would go reaching for some object she wasn't supposed to play with. If my parents would catch her, they’d say, “stop, I see you!” And my sister would cover her eyes and keep going because she reasoned that if she couldn’t see anything while she reached for the forbidden object, neither could they. Social media performance often feels like a version of that.
Months ago, Robert Mariani’s “American Diner Gothic” essay aroused some discussion, which I glimpsed from afar. I finally read it and was struck by how much of it is devoted to the description and re-description of a constellation of markers of what the author calls, half-seriously, American diner goth. Mariani has a theory (“economic mobility dies, suburbs become psychic deserts, and Discord becomes more real than your cul-de-sac” … “geek equals goth equals left-behind American”), and he has numbers to reinforce his argument. But he seems really interested in, let’s say, a quasi-phenomenological reckoning with the new arrangements of signals that wouldn’t have made sense a generation ago. “The dinergoth core is the pierced-up, gender-fluid Amazon warehouse worker who streams on Twitch, writes fanfiction, wears a furry tail to raves, runs an OnlyFans, and dreams of voice acting while working nights at the fulfillment center.” I think his aesthetic bemusement is coming from a place very much like the one I describe above: a sense that things are off, the signs don’t match up and flow together organically to him. He’s trying to make sense of it. You can judge for yourself how successful he is.
Katherine Dee’s response is both skeptical and supportive of Mariani’s argument. I’m not a paid subscriber to Dee’s newsletter so I don’t know what she highlights as the real new developments of 2020s culture, but she tweaks some of the American Diner Gothic ideas about the origin of all these changes.
“Your curiosities, because you were 8 or 14 or 16 or even 21, visiting home from college, were things like: where are these kids buying the cat ears? Where did they find that choker? How do they know about Inuyasha? It turned out they were going to the Hot Topic at the far-away mall, the one that was considered the “trashy” one. Hot Topic opened in 1989. The founder was from Alton, Iowa, and his whole business model was to bring downtown alternative culture to suburban mall kids who would never see downtown. By 2005, Hot Topic was making almost a billion dollars a year. This was only briefly an urban thing, and it was an urban thing before Rob and I were born. What was ultimately mainstreamed was specifically suburban and exurban. The infrastructure for distributing alt identity to provincial America predates the commercial internet. It’s a chain store that opened when the Berlin Wall fell.”
She cites The Craft (‘96), and the West Memphis Three; these kinds of things are forerunners to the American Diner Goth. I don’t have very strong opinions, certainly less any theories, about this particular type. But, perhaps like the half-huckster, there are emerging several new permutations of old figures, and anyone who cares to sort through everything will keep doing so.
In William Maxwell’s late novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, the narrator pieces together events from his childhood and speculates on the lives of some of those he once knew. He extrapolates, with the benefit of age and experience, from concrete observations of behaviors and patterns and deviations he noticed in childhood. The culturologist, I think, attempts something similar.
Some recent viewing/reading, for anyone interested:
