Fanatic Domain
Hello. There’s a bit of a problem with my substack in that all my drafts can’t be modified anymore so i’ve had to retype this whole thing. Sometimes it’s good to start again. I am thinking of changing newsletter host though, I’ll warn you when that happens.
Here’s the second part of the Thing. It’s both broader and more specific than the first I think ? I’ll have a 3rd part or addendum later that tries to be less a critique and more of a starting point for something else.
Here.
GENERAL PATTERNS/
Ever been in a place where bad faith feels like the lay of the land ?
Everyone spitting in each other’s faces and allying with people first on the basis of aesthetics and then on the idea of them being on the same side in some stupid feud that is someone else’s fight of the century, at a certain moment, in a certain place. Everybody acting in earnest irony and denouncing everybody else for acting out in bad faith.
If it didn’t seem so unsustainable you could push this image to even more ridiculous heights : an uncontrolled fragmoretated alien landscape, alien in the sense that everybody has become so estranged to their neighbors that nobody speaks a language that can be bridged to another’s, there’s no conversation possible between these people, only signaling.
This pattern of fragmentation and aggregation is not a potential future but a process happening at all scales : Balkanysation tells us there’s got to be some original territorial authority to be fragmented in order for new authorities to rise up ; the gentrified internet we roam around was never the blank slate the old silicon valley dreams accustomed us to, cyberspace was never free land. Someone paid the bills for all the cables, tubes, datacenters, shiny boxy robots and so on.
The internet is a giant room we walked throughout and something(s) has always owned the building, now the room is so much bigger that cops are trying to own and control their part of the playground and exclude others from it.
It’s weird, all of it.
The past, the internet, the present, the future. It’s all weird. Extremely online tumblrite bowlcut fascists, decentralised autonomous cults, art that’s not really art, entertainement that’s more logistics than storytelling. Even if someone had prefigured this, we’d probably say there’s nothing to that vision beyond mockery, a cheap joke with too many moving parts for the narrator to remember their lines. Doesn’t matter, it’s happening.
Affective Tactics
In part 1, I put the term fandom, which is generally associated to reverence to the cultural industry, next to religion and politics. The reason for it is that the most visible examples of fandom nowadays are very simply about a cultivated fidelity to aesthetics, with low-to-no-efforts thinking about what they mean with regards to the ethics and practices of the fandom as it relates to its Object. There’s no questioning of canonisation, of following and producing a Canon, none that reaches audiences’ ears at least.
I understand it ; to enforce a Canon, in knowing and trusting righteousness, is easy, reassuring, it’s being on the right side of history. Establishing safety for you and yours ; There’s the circle you draw around you, and everything in the circle is safe and good, and everything outside is a potential threat and intrusion.
Trapped in this careful anxiety where everyone who isn’t with you might be against you, you get to cultivate who can see you and therefore speak and hear you, with your own set of criterias for what’s fair game and what’s yikes, you can trim away the unpleasantness, the weird, the disturbing.
But it never happens, does it ?
The cottagecore gf needs to defend her moodboard IG alt and the safety she wants never comes because she doesn’t really seek the end of discomfort but to communicate it to those she sees as reponsible of that discomfort. Riling up others by pointing at people who live a difference that threatens their established Canon. She uses the agency a platform affords her and curates the space she has at hand into an insular one, a weird sort of pastoralism, one that’s always already under attack.
A lot of people in fandom (the militant, intense part of fanS, the stans) approach the spaces of fandom as safe spaces.
A discord channel, a twitter hashtag, a DM group, or before that, places like comic-shops, somebody’s backyard, a convention room, a Games Workshop, specialized libraries, stadiums, supporter pubs… These were conceived by fans as their personal free-time, safe spaces, when and where they get to be ok from the everyday.
What is a safe space exactly ? It’s a specific, exceptional, designated space that operates along a set of rules meant to insure the mental and physical well-being and safety of certain people the space was designed for (and often by).
The safe space is always safe from something, it exists necessarily as an exception from the rest of the world. This is obviously problematized by the fact that certain people will feel unsafe in certain safe spaces because they’ll be asked to rethink how they behave in accordance with the rules of the space ; for example conservatives feeling threatened by people asking them not to say slurs.
The problem of seeing online as a (collection of potential) safe spaces is that it’s just fruitless, it’s a problem of heavily interconnected platforms built without safety in mind nor practice. You can always get surprised by new bubbles, micro-communities and fandom specimina you didn’t know about, operating along lines you fundamentally disagree with. There’s few chances you won’t see things you don’t want to see, especially if you don’t take precautions : The internet is not made for vulnerable people.
The ocean is not a pool.
(for an example of people losing control over a hobby turned Object, check out the football culture bit from part 1.)
“the problem with the left nowadays…”
Is a problem wider than “strategies” : Aesthetics over ethics.
>Fidelity to the Object of Kronstadt workers getting killed like martyrs by the USSR rather than engagement with the actual praxis of workers’ self-governance,
>Fidelity to the Object of China as a socialist image rather than an actual commitment to building proletarian power in westerners’ localities as well as working to give support to the third-world against (all) imperialisms.
Being more attached to known sentiments and affects rather than any critical analysis, forging an identity in relation to the “content” that’s consumed. That “content” being whatever’s remotely aligned with your worldview. It’d be weird if “Politics” wasn’t a context to propagate this attitude.
The historical divide between “communists” (marxist-leninists, Blanquists, vanguardists, state socialists etc) and “anarchists” (mostly talking about social anarchists here) is more complex than a simple differential in tactics and visions, though that is a part of it, in both traditions you find a common impulse to negate the world as it works today, because it makes us all miserable and doesn’t have to, the critique and the programme that follows are not the same for all movements, traditions, people, organisations, etc.
The aesthetics that emerge out of these distinct programs and traditions have to be taken into account when looking at these “left rivalries” that, to an outsider, will seem weirdly passionate for people who’re “all part of the Left”.
One of the two traditions has more blood on its hands (state power has more troops than coalitions of proles, huh ?) but both movements have people who seem to see their tradition as a a Canon to be defended and praised rather than a History to be learned from : Once you’ve accepted yourself as being of the same tradition as CNT militias fighting against fascists, you’ll ressent people who wear Stalin shirts and will characterize them as gulag-crazed red cops who’re here to mock you and your Object and showcase their Object as being better.
This is not to dismiss sectarianism either, there’s demonstrable reasons for why you often can’t organise with (and as) other political traditions, but there’s a difference between that and firmly opposing these other groups as deadly enemies to your Cause.
Getting angry at other people on twitter simply makes you better at getting angry at other people on twitter, it’s not honing your skills in debate or writing better discourse because the very shape that discourse will take will necessarily be constrained by the format and dynamics inherent to the medium ; that of the syncopated quickfire panic attacks of 280 characters snippets of sarcasm disguised as insight, discourse is not flattened but made into a school bus ride where someone is always getting bullied for having their pants down.
I’m aware of the risks of ascribing a particular condition to ideology and vice-versa, saying depression is purely a product of capitalism can be both eye-opening and a veil on the long run. I think establishing connections and looking directly at the similarities in reasoning between two things is more useful than using one to explicate the other. I don’t know if I consistently follow that line of reasoning but it feels more tangible than making a clean and linear chain of events.
For example, there’s a certain kind of attitude I’ve noticed that I don’t want to qualify as liberal-christian (note the american-ness of that combination) but which I strongly associate to these labels.
That attitude consists in emphasizing constantly that to feel is to be inflicted upon by the world and its inhabitants. That affect is (not just influence but) effect.
This emphasis is constructed through, first, a distinction between world and self ; to this distinction you add the idea that to be inflicted harm upon is necessarily a fault that has a guilty party and that to be inflicted pain requires payback. There’s three things here : the notion of individuation, of a guilt and of a retribution.
Individuation is articulated through and for guilt to be assigned to someone, therefore systems that obscure clear and concise guilt are not thought of as vectors of the hurt, it’s very important that a responsible party be designated, therefore it’s people who hold tools of hurt. From then on the hurt has to be solved by a new hurt. Not in asking someone to solve what they’ve done (regardless of their original intent) but in asking them to expose and shame themselves, it’s expected of the guilty party to (at least) make a show of their guilt in a way that’s satisfying to the wronged party. Which obviously means the problem is only solved when the wronged party decides it’s solved.
It’s a game that can run for a long time and one that makes me think of bad faith as a social game. A perverse kind of play where the fun and satisfaction is drawn from the entertainment of knowing illusions and everybody else is a spoilsport for not buying the lie.
I call this a christian-liberal attitude because it holds both the notion of the scapegoat that feels like it’d emerge out of a close-knit community that needs to police the behavior of its members but also the liberal notion of a rational individual who can be punished into being better.
It’s the sort of practice that emerges out of a community of people incapable of facing each others honestly and is entertained by a lack of accountability from the start. Weight begets weight, shame attracts shame, until there’s a rupture. Lying is good practice for lying.
With that said, the primacy of emotions and affects, the idea that love in itself can solve everything, that to pray is the same as directly doing something, all of this spells out “the power of ideas”, “the power of thinking” on its own, the power of affect. It’s an under-developped, puerile idealism that states that the right ideas, the right affect, the right emotion can solve the wrong situation.
Power of love defeats wrongfeel type stuff.
The way these affects are thought, articulated, experienced and conveyed online is through visibility, being visibly pained or demanding that others make a show of their pain. There’s a notion that something revealed lends power to those who reveal it.
This might seem to come out of left field but here I think of representation as (a project on its own), a strategy divorced from a project of better living. What does it mean to be represented when you’re identified to a political minority ? Not just in culture but in positions of power ?
As far as I see it, when it comes on its own without any long-term strategising, representation in positions of power is an effective diversion from real issues.
For exemple, representation of Black people in the oval office coincided with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement as a response to an increased visibility of violence against black bodies and increased militarisation of police. “Black faces in high places” doesn’t solve anything but there’s a persisting notion that to be seen is a powerful act. I think it’s wrongheaded : to be powerful is to master your image but to be represented is to be done to or done with, someone is doing the work. For you?
The reason I tie the “christian-liberal atittude” to representation is because I’m a bitter nerd who has navigated certain fanspaces of the francophonic and anglophonic cultural industries and these two are a recurring duo.
I see young (and less young) people online who signal the fact that they’re not cis-het in spaces of fandom, embracing the “personal is political” mindset in appearances and often in practices. The practice of making visible your sexual/gender identity has been integrated as normal by a lot of people online, it almost feels like questioning labels and Diverse Representation in Media™️ is purely conservative even when you point at hypocrisy and laziness from corporations, you can still end up lumped in with “i’m just asking questions” conservative trolls for just stating what you see.
What I see is that representation and visibility serve certain purposes and taken on its own it only serves a project of integration, though obviously it can work for other purposes if it’s applied in a wider strategical scope.
At best it’s fine to have people who look like you on tv, at worst it feels like a spit in the face when a black woman is hailed as a hero for having done a doubleplusgood war crime on brown people abroad.
Representation, in politics specifically, is often a distraction some people can afford to fall into because they don’t have to care immediately about their base needs first and foremost, like how to get hrt, how to get food on the table, how to not get shot by cops, how to not get sexually assaulted, where to sleep at, etc.
This discussion of representation gets different with regards to cultural production obviously, a “content creator” and an “intellectual property” are not the same as a senator or vice-president. They can all be Objects, they can all have fandoms but the relation of the fandom to these Objects will have very different actual outcomes.
QAnon’s extended universe has a body-count. Disney’s doesn’t have one yet, though I’d qualify a history of union-busting and poor treatment of workers as being directly on Marvel’s tab.
Something that’s not always visibly supported by fandom, too focused on the lore of an intellectual property to see the people behind the scenes, who work with it and try to both get paid and tell a story.
There’s a divide between the Object and the Canon entertained by the fans who’d rather support images over people. Maybe because they’re more used to that ?
/UNRAVELING PARTICULARITIES
A spectre haunts the internet, it’s name is “lgbtqiaa community”
It’s gonna sound like too much but bear with me : there’s no single group that can be designated as “the lgbtqia community”, there’s instead sets of social groups, organisations, associations, people who use the acronym or part of it to describe themselves and are affected by patriarchy because of their being in the world as a person who can be identified as l-g-b-t-q-i-a or a, that’s not a community.
There are communities, there are groups of friends, lovers, families, colleagues, militants etc but there’s no unitarian community that has enough connections to effectively organise and enforce relations of reciprocity, instead things rise up and fall down within informal and formal structures that are populated by people of the groups.
Queer people online (which is to say at this transnational and transclass meeting point that is the Internet/s) don’t share enough commonalities to bridge all of their differences because they’re not organised as queer people online but rather as friends, as colleagues, as families, (as fans) who happen to be queer. There are cliques who create queer-only spaces obviously but a lot of spaces are trying to be non-homophobic at the very least (which is not the same as being specifically designed for queer people). Spaces that try to be neutral in a positive light or simply regard bigotry as an issue of goodwill.
The integration of middle class queer people and the people who are the most palatable to the Norm into “normal civil society” means all the safe spaces and specialised places have been converted or dissolved into normality, because they’re no longer needed to the same extent and purposes as before. You can’t go anywhere in the world as a queer person and not fear for your life if you’re found out but safety can be bought, if you have the ressources.
It’s why trans people, who’ve historically been filtered out of integration into the norm, still have spaces of sociality that are designed for them towards them and by them because they still have a high need for it. Going to a country where homophobia is legal, unchallenged and common sense would mean being more likely to encounter an actually underground militant and cultural resistance through queers-for-queers spaces like gay clubs, lesbian bars, etc.
The desire to integrate can also be one of elevation and status-seeking, of building respectability, trying to make oneself palatable and feeding into the discomfort that’s felt at being associated with those you feel should still be called degenerate.
Progressing towards conservation of a status quo by seeking to become a good servant to it. This is not necessarily something people enact with a clear and scheming mind, it might just be embedded in their practices and the affects they foster.
Projects of Queer Secession and Exit have more or less stopped or exist as vacations rather than serious life-long commitments to dropping-out. Meanwhile, online : the notion of being part of a community is abstracted into vague appeals to being “different” and needing to still signal your being different to a norm that is changing.
GAIES MICRONATIONS
Are you queer ?
Imagine having a passport with your specific flags stamped on it, explaining what spaces and contexts you bring with you as an agender apothisexual who previously thought they were an asexual gay man. What does it make you feel, that image ?
Representation exists within a wider context : Labels and flags are lamp-posts on the way towards something, they offer position and information you can ground yourself on, is this what you seek ? Is this ground worth defending ?
History is there, not as a book or an Object but as the record of what has happened, keeps happening and will happen. You are in history, even as elders of what you’re going through have been wiped out by decades of careful carelessness by State and Capital and the Civil Society they sustain.
Queer history is eerie in the Fisherian sense, manifest in absences moreso than presences, a culture being recreated generations after generations because of wipe-outs and underground movements repressed, again and again, from countries to cultures.
The flags-list above is someone’s map of affects/attitudes as classified under names that could help them navigate lamp-posts, it’s unnecessary in a number of places, but is that because it hasn’t been systematised collectively or is it because legibility is a futile attempt at getting certainty about a species thats always in movement ?
These labels are obviously only used by intense numerical minorities, there’s no “hyperromantic representational movement“ or “sapiosexual advocacy group”, only people talking about these and integrating it into their personal discourse, and among these people there are some few who take these to be prescriptive categories rather than words describing behaviors, drives and affects.
It’s only logical young people at the precipice of understanding their becoming would try and pin down some concrete and reliable essential framework through which they can understand worlds and selves, nothing is ever a blank slate though, and we can only work with what we have and bring with us.
Here for exemple, traits are made into clues that can reveal the essence of someone as this or that label. You’re given a name and a host of notions and references and behaviors associated to it by people you may never meet. Self-referential contexts which can’t be bridged to one another. They collapse upon contact into the stupidest disputes centering around “discourse” like “bisexual lesbians” or “aromantic exclusionist“ which all translate real affects but are never put in conversation to create understanding and deliberate positions, it’s all empty signals and exchanges of resentment.
Description gets distorted into prescription when you have tools and no practice of them, when you don’t have a History to learn from but an Object to revere, worship or turn away from.
You end up reproducing the practices and ethics you have already integrated in the past under a new aesthetic, call it postliberal conservativism, a bureaucracy of self expression.
Do what feels good and expedient, what feels good and expedient is shaming others and valorising some self you’re aspiring to rather than embodying in actuality.
For a lot of young (and less young) people, it means directing a strong voice at a certain person you feel should change their behavior. It’s about being noticed and seen and that awareness changing something. if nothing is visibly changed, people will instensify their voice, with the hope of affecting directly their target, because in this logic to affect is to effect.
A conservative practice and impulse that manifests itself under progressive liberal language, call it purity culture.
Small groups of people with identitarian concerns try and have their identities recognised and represented as they want them to be. A certain strain of them accelerate this essentialism into a rabid demand from all other queers to fall in line and obey their demands, conservative values are repackaged under progressive notions. Concern for innocent children that are completely absent from the conversation except as an Object to be protected from the filth of internet users, web-crusaders.
Cyberbullying as offensive catharsis , wasting hours of their lives writing dissertations on why a certain character shouldn’t be shipped to another because they have a 2 years age gap and that runs the risk of normalising unhealthy relationships. This is tumblr’s userbase spread out to other platforms.
These people live in a consensus reality operating on its own set of values, masked under cute aesthetics aimed at maintaining an appearance of innocence and innocuous living. The call-outs are not designed to damage everyone, simply the people who can’t defend themselves or don’t have support. And like all fans, only the most rabid are the most visible, their common sense can seep itself into any conversation because the outrage they convey makes their affect a matter of life and death. Coping Mecanisms turn to cop schemes.
The pattern these tiny groups take is : aggregation, growth, fragmentation, split, etc. It can never get to full isolation nor full unchecked growth because of the internal contradictions of its constitutive parts. One of these contradictions is the struggle for visibility brushing against the struggle for purity.
Visibility tends towards a form of connectivity, as opposed to purity which relies on perfect isolation, not rawness but refined and stripped quantity.
Originally, pure means clean, that which has been cleansed from contamination, it’s always already about the separation of a quantity from another, the homogenisation of a thing, the stripping away of anything that isn’t that quantity. Purity in “the west” is generally related to a christian notion of guilt. That there’s a problem that needs solving and that the solution lies in paying a price in suffering. Suffering is the great redeemer, now imagine all of this rethoric being lambasted by picrew-faced teenagers who lament a piece of fanart made by some obscure online artist has two characters that shouldn’t be together. A phenomenon dubbed “antis-”.
The people of these groups don’t attack platforms but users, because their practice is centered around personal responsibility, out of despair or untought, they’ve simply decided that it’s easier to bully people rather than enact change to existing platforms.
“Cancel culture” is only harmful to people who have no stable support network, which is why it doesn’t affect starstreamers or political presentators but mostly everyday people who don’t have an already established and firm platform that can procure them support, even worse if they don’t have a community to fall back on.
Even worse if it’s the “community” in question doing the assault.
The “online lgbtqia community” never happens and what passes for it in a lot of young people’s minds both pushes to an identification with an innocuous twee aesthetic and a distancing from the history of ‘living as a queer’, which ends up having you identify to an Object you don’t have agency over and through, you end up making yourself into a fan of a community that’s always ideal and never actual when you could actually meet people and befriend them. Or better yet, engage in a political struggle to sustain the likelihood of queer people not being homeless and eventually being liberated.
That would imply getting to know people rather than images, reconning with the complex fuckery of people, recognising the intricate puzzle of “bad” and “good” people are, getting troubled but staying troubled and caring and working from within that, it would imply maturing.