Max Berwald – Core Post #4

It’s interesting to follow some of the detailed history of who posted what first and where. I wanted to use this space to add some of my own thoughts about causal forces in this. I can’t get a clear sense of how the authors see this particular development in the culture wars. There seems to be a sense that this new form (the meme) drives some of the events here (like, say, the development of QAnon). A brief remark in the epilogue, which I wouldn’t want to over-emphasize, draws on Susan Blackmore to suggest that “memes may be bad for people.” (333)

Economic contraction and precarity get mentioned a few times as causal. One thing that strikes me as very important is the growing impossibility of popular political change via the public state (Congress, the courts, and so forth). This has moved in sync with the economic contraction. There are many causes of this, including the noted embrace of “culture wars” by specific politicians at specific conjunctures, but also the continuing expansion of what the authors would probably describe as the deep state (I don’t know how derisively). By this I mean the juncture between the national security state and economic elites. C. Wright Mills wrote about this kind of formation, which of course owes something to the earlier conception of the military industrial complex. Perry Anderson has written obliquely about this, as has Peter Dale Scott, cited here. But, at the opposite end of the political spectrum, people like Francis Fukuyama have also nodded approvingly in the direction of the deep state. I think the idea took on a sort of new life during the Trump presidency, not only because of Trump’s calls to drain the swamp, but even more so because of the way legacy media seemed to be counting on concerted bureaucratic resistance, and especially security state resistance, to Trump. Anyway, the fact that US policy has been relatively immune to popular pressure (most notoriously in foreign policy but also across the spectrum) has not been lost on people. This is another major source of ennui, alienation, rage, and despair in American life. 

People are aware that there are not opportunities, even through concerted popular action, for meaningful political influence over state policy. How do they respond to this awareness? The most polite reaction is to embrace the electoral horserace, particularly when it comes to local politics. Another is to organize labor power. Another is to engage in political violence. More popular than political violence (and perhaps more popular than labor organizing as well) is to give oneself over to cultural warfare. This previously (prior to the internet, to social media, etc.) was a slower, more difficult game, and therefore it didn’t offer as clear of a substitute to political life. Now, however, the meme offers an incredibly (immediately, ephemerally) gratifying form of cultural engagement. This is the convergence between LARPing and the conspiracy that the authors identify in the chapter on QAnon. I really have no major issues with their chronicling of this history (or any of the other histories throughout the book). But I do want to emphasize the importance of this transposition of political life into a rewarding culture-war fantasy, via the particular form of the meme. I mention QAnon, because it’s the clearest example: I think QAnon’s description of an elite cabal is, in some ways, perceptive. It incorporates things we know to be true about the security state’s use of sexual blackmail, widespread surveillance, elite criminality, rule by executive order, the increasing power of multinational corporations to create their own legal regimes (or powerfully influence existing ones), the corruption and dysfunction of the major political parties, etc. Is QAnon’s accounting of these phenomena apt or absurd? Obviously it’s absurd, because its real raison d’être is not to effect political change (that has already been ceded as impossible given the historical moment) or to mount a precise and devastating critique of the operations of power (from the perspective of the truly disillusioned, how boring) but to be an interactive The Da Vinci Code. Narratives like The Da Vinci Code do not need to be credible because they are pleasurable. That’s what they offer. The narrative is compelling because it acknowledges that the channels for influencing policy have closed (if they were ever open) while replacing conventional forms of political struggle, or even just political engagement, with something different. What that something is is complex, but I think the book does a good job of describing its contours.

Another place we see this transposition is in the Manosphere, especially the particularly violent segments of it that would be interested in, say, producing Eliot Rogers as a martyr. Interpersonal relationships are a great site to see the cultural being embraced wholesale as the political. Of course, increasing rates of loneliness (and here it’s very important to say, for women as well as men) are themselves tied to the increasing precarity, futurelessness, and desperation of American economic life (there’s a “weeds to the wires to the weeds” dynamic to all of this) but they do not generate politically engaged subjects. That is, most people do not find solace from their loneliness and alienation by embracing local horserace politics: they find solace by transposing their political lives (which would require a meaningful social dimension) onto their cultural lives (which, because of memes) can be experienced, engaged, manipulated, role-played fully online. Every so often, someone will also decide to embrace political violence, as with Elliot Rodger. 

There are many examples throughout the book. Later in chapter 3, the authors note that “labeling the opposition SJWs allowed their attackers to meme and shape the discourse about feminism and antiracism without engaging much with their opponents’ content.” (167) That is, the attack on SJWs as SJWs is about the fact that SJWs are still asking for policy change, for labor organizing, for changes in material conditions, etc. Their attackers (the complex patchwork of formations described in the chapter) have already fully replaced political struggle with cultural action (posting and cringing at posts).