Wading into the Discourse is Boring

Rough Notes on Reviving the Spirit of the Avant-Garde, Social Media as Mass Culture and Dodging the Algorithm by Being Strange

Note: I haven’t posted in a while. Been too busy wandering America and interviewing people about their favorite kinds of pistols or brisket restaurants. This is something I cooked up in the past few days. I have a bunch of interviews on the way soon as well as some articles in some publications. Thank you for all of your support. My podcast is called Rough Drafts, go check it out. We’ll be releasing more things soon.

I had a note go viral recently. I’m not going to link it because it is dumb, even if I’m right. I wish it hadn’t gone viral, as all of my opps came out the woodwork. I enjoy my peace. I don’t even like sports like that, but I enjoy a good sports riot video any day of the week, unlike many of these miserable leftists. Anyone who reads my Substack will know. Either way, it had me thinking about how the DiscourseTM is so boring and meaningless when it comes to the real world. Except the discourse is the real world, as I am always complaining to my girlfriend about the stupidity happening online. Despite this, sports are things that people have enjoyed and will continue to enjoy regardless of whatever anyone says on some random website. But these arguments are all aesthetics, not politics, we’ll get to that later, though. Part of this was prompted by how I’ve had multiple people I do not know write whole responses to small notes I’ve written. But why do we fixate on these strange discourses? And what is to be gained from that?

Very little except algorithm fame, I suppose. The logics of the market. The aesthetics of the algorithm cloaked in the correct language. But politically, nothing at all. But how does this relate to the avant-garde spirit more importantly?

I’m always thinking about the spirit of the avant-garde and how to embody it. My first understanding of the avant-garde before writing this essay was an understanding that the avant-garde were the most advanced and experimental artists who historically operated outside of the bounds of bourgeois art society such as the salons. However, as I read more, I learned that that term avant-garde comes from a military idea. The avant-garde was a unit that did reconnaissance in front of the army. It’s always been a term associated with the Left also in the 19^th century. Notably, according to Poggioli’s first chapter in his book Theory of the Avant-Garde, he argues that there were two “avant-gardes” that were artistic and political while being closely associated with the revolution in 1848 and the Commune in 1871. However, eventually this unity between the artistic and the political disappeared.

“Thus, what had up to then been a secondary, figurative meaning became instead the primary, in fact the only, meaning: the isolated image and the abbreviated term avant-garde became, without qualification, another synonym for the artistic avant-garde, while the political notion functioned almost solely as rhetoric and was no longer used exclusively by those faithful to the revolutionary and subversive ideal. The point was reached at which anyone who still used the phrase outside the ambience of the political left was led to qualify it with special adjectives and attributes, as if to underline that, in this case, one was dealing not with a technical term but with a generalized publicizing or propagandistic image.”

I’d argue this separation continues to exist today in the small online and literary context I exist within, for whatever that matters. Much of the political left is bound by the market logics of social media. An array of leftist influencers, artists and commentators have appeared, devoid of any artistic avant-garde artistic capacity. They have unclear socialist or abolitionist politics without the bite of a revolutionary event like the Commune. That’s why many of them ignore the past fifteen years of anti-police rebellions. In the opposite direction, the most interesting voices in terms of literature and art remain largely apolitical or outside of an explicit left perspective. Sam Kriss is one who comes to mind immediately with his strange writing style that was detailed quite well in Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s essay on Kriss in The Metropolitan Review. I’ll come back to that later. The small online and offline journals remain the most interesting places artistically, wholly separate from the influencer baiting big journals and influencer writers. Some of this has to do with how mass culture exists now because of social media.

To go back to some more theory, theorists such as Walter Benjamin wrote about how fascism organized the newly emerging proletarian around aesthetics rather than around questions of who controlled production. He talks about this in his text The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin states how,

“Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.”

The right to “express yourself” has only become more commonplace now with the advent of social media. You no longer need complicated mechanisms of production to produce “art” or better understood as “content,” you can just go live on TikTok or write a critique on Substack as long as that critique serves the algorithm and popular discourse. In addition, art and reality itself is cheapened by the algorithm. This relates to Benjamin who writes about how the aura of the art decays in its mechanical reproductions. The de-materialization of everything exists upon the Internet, like it or not. It’s all floating images.

One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced

Think of the people who post the books they are “reading” with no reading occurring. We all know a few! Or the infographics which dumb down, simplify and mess up the arguments of complex texts. So many examples in the social media age. At least according to Benjamin, much of the mass culture that decays art leads to fascism. While fascism in our current moment is a complicated term, I’d argue that things are at least tilted towards authoritarian ends, even amongst those against those authoritarian tendencies…just google anarchist influencers, they exist! Not to mention, these apps are still data-harvesting machines built around the logics of the market. The masses now see their chances to become influencers, instead of seeing the need for any kind of social transformation. Mass culture facilitated through capitalist technology leads from Benjamin’s perspective to a set of politics rather than anything emancipatory, even if the fascist politics wear a red flag. People understand “expressing themselves” online as the true freedom rather than any sort of critical analysis about their own social circumstances, even if the content they produce seemingly involves “critical analysis.” They lack the avant-garde spirit. They are just doing another brand of content. It is just more slop for the algorithm. One could and should say the same easily about this essay. We’re all caught in the machine. Slop, slop, slop, all turning in the widening gyre.

For instance, Substack is understood by most of it’s users, even the leftists, as a shimmering almost magical thing that delivers news, hot takes and comedy. The obscuration of how apps like Substack are created is directly related to how many people who buy devices like iPhones or Macs do not understood that these devices are composed of varying types of minerals that had to be harvested and then the devices had to be built in factories. I think Marx talked about this? Hmm. This is increasingly the case in places like the major post-industrial cities (most of ‘em) in the United States, as most of the production happens elsewhere. Similarly, Substack exists in a place where the actual creation of the app is obscured from the consumers. It’s part of why you get ridiculous activists making demands of Substack as if their opinion matters when the Substack is a VC- funded firm first. The illusion that many on the Left have about why social media is actually their friend or something is a longstanding problem that exists largely as a result of the feigned closeness between social movements of the 2010s and early social media companies. I’ve written about this elsewhere.

Why does this matter when thinking about the avant-garde? The thing is that aesthetics have been totally introduced through the means of social media, which is ultimately just another form of mechanical production, into our political world. So much of what composes “political” discourse online and increasing across the meat space is defined by the aesthetics that are offered up by the Internet. Even the radical presences whoever on these websites (including myself) exist largely as simply the aesthetization of politics which helps to obscure the actual productive forces that compose society.

To return to avant-garde. I don’t believe we can simply ignore the presence of the online space. It obviously impacts the real world in numerous ways. However, I think that a member of the avant-garde should seek to subvert the space and the existing market logics. This would mean forgoing an intellectual trajectory that favors following popular discourses. For instance, my most popular article was written about how much I liked the film One Battle After Another. In the article, I gave two different small sentences that addressed some of the critiques that were levied against it. The reason that article was popular had to do with how it addressed the “discourse” and followed market logics rather than forging an independent avant-garde path when it came to criticism.

Instead, I believe at least for myself we should be like the dadaists in how Benjamin describes them in relation to film and other media.

“Dadaism did so to the extent that it sacrificed the market values which are so characteristic of the film in favor of higher ambitions—though of course it was not conscious of such intentions as here described. The Dadaists attached much less importance to the sales value of their work than to its usefulness for contemplative immersion. The studied degradation of their material was not the least of their means to achieve this uselessness. Their poems are “word salad” containing obscenities and every imaginable waste product of language. The same is true of their paintings, on which they mounted buttons and tickets. What they intended and achieved was a relentless destruction of the aura of their creations, which they branded as reproductions with the very means of production.”

The dadaists as Benjamin describes attached less importance to the sales value. Their work was useless. We should endeavor to make our own work as useless as the Dadaists. I like the fiction and literary criticism published on Substack more than the leftist takes on community, as much of it evades the algorithmic imperatives. While I’m not advocating complete divestment for those of you who use the platform to make money, the goal should be to do strange things on here, basically. Stuff that offends. Things contain obscenities and uselessness to parody the studied degradation of the artistic forms. In Lambert’s essay on Sam Kriss I mentioned earlier, he discusses how Kriss evades the rationalist understanding of what many people believe writing to be.

“Kriss is increasingly resorting to outright fictions. He is no longer a writer of “takes” so much as parables. Thus, an essay about population collapse takes the form of a made-up Victorian political economist called Thomas Hooper Cooper, and a recent polemic against the U.K. law enforcement’s fun new technique of arresting the elderly at peaceful protests involves a long excursus about a made-up 16th-century theologian named Laurentius Clung. The obvious analogue from the history of literature is Borges, with his extraordinary pseudo-essays recounting the lives and works of men like Pierre Menard, Nils Runeberg, and Herbert Ashe. But to Kriss’ enemies, the technique is an abuse of writing, something devious and irresponsible.”

In the creation of something wrong, Kriss creates a bizarre kind of style that mimics and pokes fun at the depressing algorithmic reality in which we live. This can offend both sides. You can see how his work has parallel with Dadaists. He writes almost to parody the LLMs. He’s recently beefed according to Lambert’s essay with techno-authoritarian Curtis Yarvin, despite much of his own writing appearing in right-wing publications. For these reasona, to be amongst the online avant-garde, I’ve endeavored to write strange stories and essays on my Substack and in other places that seek to evade the algorithm. For example, here’s an anecdote from the podcast we went on...

“During our tour of the West Coast, we wandered into a Brick and Marx, a leftist bookstore owned by an old Boomer white communist named Wisconsin Pete. He had been arrested for hiding some of the most under-analyzed group from the 1960s the Pleathermen, they were the knock-off version of the Weather Underground who tried to look like the Panthers but they were too broke to afford the actual leather jackets. Wisconsin Pete after escaping prison, founded a small bookstore in the heart of an unnamed city in California that sits somewhere next to the pacific ocean! Either way, Pete had invited a Black organization known as the African Oceanic Revolutionary Organization who claimed to be from the legacy of Pleathermen. Their goal was to turn their neighborhood into an Oceanic Autonomous Zone. A tall afro-communist named Edwin with yellow locs and a Mexican girlfriend began to protest. He argued that instead of building a network of hydroponic systems to make a juice business, the brothas from the African Oceanic Revolutionary Organization needed to focus on training their cadre with a new method of African street fighting he had discovered in an alternative dimension locked within the San Fernando Valley. He said the name of the fighting form but I couldn't comprehend it. It was in a language unknown to man. He offered to train them in the form for the low price of 200 dollars a session. A real deal! He said he had stuffed a local sheriff's deputy in his Mexican girlfriend's trunk to prove the effectiveness of the fighting form. Instead of accepting his offer, the leader of the African Oceanic Revolutionary Organization Hosea declared that Edwin was a social fascist and endangering their informational session. That lead to the Wave Guard (the paramilitary formation that served under the African Oceanic Revolutionary Organization's command) attempting to seize Edwin. Edwin used his secret fighting methods to disarm them. Some of those guys were big, but he moved around them like a shimmering beef patty at the Jamaican restaurant you can't remember. Unfortunately while Edwin was fighting the Wave Guard, his Mexican lover-girl had gotten together with Hosea, the head of the African Oceanic Revolutionary Organization. HE STOLE HOMEBOYS GIRL!!!! Hosea and his latina mami rode off into the Sunset determined to build a beautiful multi-racial society modeled after The Houston Federated Communes. Edwin was down for a while, but suddenly, Wisconsin Pete told everyone that he had never really believed in slavery and he was selling the bookstore to the university. Some of the feminist academics at the UC-???? were interested in archiving the “problematic histories of the past.” We tried to interview anyone in the store, but they all said social media was a co-insurgent tricknology and even tried to steal one of our mics. Luckily, my homeboy had picked up a few moves from watching Edwin. We caught our Amtrak and headed out the city in shame. Hopefully, we would find something better in the Houston Federated Communes. We heard they had Nigerian/Vietnamese/Brazilian fusion food.”

Or perhaps another story from my youth that I recalled when I was back in Rockford.

“Back in my teenage years at Auburn High School, I was in the middle of several feuds between different warring leftist families. Think Romeo and Juliet, but with more red flags and instead of swordplay, people would shoot Glock 26s at each other on the football field. No one was ever hurt though cause everyone missed intentionally so they could keep beefing. There were several sword fights cause no one could afford ammunition. Either way, I was kinda a Mercutio type character in the drama between the warring factions. I liked everyone involved though sometimes I’d also just leave school early to hang with some Ex. Nation brothas (they started they own group) as they sold bean pies by the side of the road. Those brothers were not into the leftist stuff cause they saw it as comparable to begging the white man for things. I would attend the communist balls that were hosted in the lunchroom after the 3:45 dismissal time. We would dance to Drake’s One Dance while the head of the basketball team would recite sections from the Manifesto. This was before AI. Occasionally, I’d find my way over to the classroom where the queer anarchists listened exclusively to Alex G and the early Weeknd stuff and Yung Lean. I was trying to romance a beautiful woman named Tamia with a phenomenal brazilian buss down. She was besties with my homie Monica. It didn’t work out cause when I tried to spit to her about my David Graeber knowledge, Tamia told me that Graeber was eurocentric and I should have been reading C.L.R. James. She left with a smooth ass brother who had read Facing Reality back to front forty eight times. In my melancholic mood, I turned on Frank Ocean’s strawberry swing which I had downloaded off Datpiff.com. Either way, I found myself back at the communist party and they were now playing Migos’ Bad and Boujee to link up with my friend Monica who was reading report-backs from the Occupy Oakland encampment. Unfortunately, DeWayne from the anarchist contingent got into a sword fight with Dennis because they were both in love with Monica. For a bit of background, Monica was a fetching council communist who existed like myself as a floater between the two scenes. Monica began to cry “I can’t choose between the two of you” while they fenced across the gym to Rihanna’s Work ft. Drake. I spilled all my emotions tonight, indeed. Very astute, Mr. Graham. Either way, I was busy reading some Habermas when Monica came up to me and told me she had been accepted to Bryn Mawr College and had decided to renounce men in favor of being a lesbian. I thought that was a quite suitable decision. We absconded in a boosted Toyota Camry. Some say that DeWayne and Dennis are still dueling to this day. I’m not sure, I missed the high school reunion. Monica doing good though. She lives in West Philadelphia with another beautiful Black woman. They do pottery on the weekends and conduct Audre Lorde reading groups during the day in Clark Park. And me, well, I’m still humming those old drake songs as I practice different parries and lunges that I remember from back in the ol’ days at Auburn High.”

My own interests are obscure and invalid. I take aim at both the right and the Left (but mostly the Left because that’s where I reside.) I do not engage in the discourse. I wrote long stories about things that may have never happened. I tend to write about things that I like, instead of doing takedowns. I troll well known smart leftist academics. I make lots of jokes. I spell things wrong. I make grammatical errors intentionally or not. The avant-garde takes nothing serious, short of the struggle, and if the struggle is happening, I won’t be online talking to you, an online denizen. That’s when you don’t hear from me. Or perhaps, I am just taking a nap with my beautiful girlfriend. Either way, the algorithm is boring. The discourse is boring. I am boring. You are boring. Until we do things that are more strange and esoteric and outside of the market, we will be stuck in a horrific cycle of boredom. That boredom looks awfully fascist, authoritarian, undemocratic, evil, nasty or whatever word you’d like to use. So let’s imagine something else with our words, notes and deeds.