Christopher Lasch's Angry Ghost
@ghostofchristo1
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In a dying culture, narcissism embodies the highest attainment of spiritual enlightenment.
A third place
Joined August 2020
Fall of Kabul really heightening the Ivy League ideological contradictions. On one hand: decolonial! On the other, the global imperium of human rights.
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Byung-Chul Han speaks of the new “dictatorship of emotion,” and the rise in popularity of viewpoints like this one provides a good illustration of what he might mean.
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That the fears, emotions, and affective states of experts are now reported as stories in themselves seems a key component of our current information regime.
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The phenomenon of the post-literate university—and the not simply post-book but *post-reading* library—is something we’ll have to grapple with more and more over the course of the 2020s.
At what used to be a leading research library, where they moved all the books off-site, going from 2,4M volumes to 5,000. At this point you might just as well tear it down and build a coffee shop.
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Two very middle-class teenage girls on the train, talking about their intersectional identities and then segueing seamlessly to role-playing, tarot, and astrology. It's under-recognised the extent to which we are in a new popular New Age moment and how it's all one thing.
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Watching millennials transform academia and the cultural institutions is wild to watch. A radically decultured generation, but one in possession nevetheless of fascinating new taboos expressed as "kindness." Instinctive fans and consumers who believe they are "anti-capitalists.".
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Hello, bearded British leftist here. Fully two years into this pandemic, I am now ready to say—but not in a fash way—that, on balance, the emerging COVID biosecurity state might be, you know, slightly sub-optimal. Please subscribe to my Patreon for more bleeding edge analysis.
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The collision of politics and Sesame Street-style language here typifies our current culture of kitsch. A segment of the population seems to crave being talked to as though they were children. And a whole class of politicians has arisen to oblige them.
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A compelling trauma narrative plays the same role on the political “left” as a vivid conversion or temptation narrative once played for leaders on the Christian Right. It testifies to a personal experience so visceral that the authority of the speaker cannot be questioned.
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If your radical liberatory movement is coming out of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and its message is being amplified by the New York Times, the tech companies, and the big corporations, chances are it’s neither radical nor liberatory.
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It proved impossible for me to pick my favourite paragraph from @deankissick's remarkable new Harper's essay on the kind of art that the art world's post-2016 quest for political relevance is leading to. So here are three instead.
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A major source of cognitive dissonance comes from clinging to the belief that we still live in a traditional society of domination (with easily identifiable oppressors) rather than one of networked hegemony, where power comes at us from all directions and we are all implicated.
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Has there been a more disastrous intellectual legacy in recent years than that of the New Atheists? Not just in terms of the ignominious trajectories of certain New Atheists, but also the new inability to understand history and society when religion is no longer taken seriously.
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You’re going to “roast” it on the basis of what, its abstract? You’re asking whether “federal funds” supported a British student doing her PhD at Cambridge? Christ, have some self-respect.
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Right-wing populism—a mechanism whereby voters who think they’re being promised nativism, restrictionism, and a return to past structures and certainties are given deterritorialising libertarian turbo-capitalism instead. In large and rapidly administered doses.
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Everywhere you look in humanities academia, the critique of "dominant value systems" becoming more and more formalised and compulsory. No recognition that the university itself has power and is neither "marginal" nor "dispossessed." An accelerating sense of kitsch and unreality.
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Pretty much everything happening in Europe and America right now can be explained as the outcome of an ongoing crisis of managerialism. In response, managerial elites are assertively trying to renew their positions with new forms of moral authority.
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Since everyone’s suddenly bandying about definitions of “wokeness” or whatever, here’s John Gray’s.
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“We won’t stand for any materialist or structural analysis in our ‘wokeness’ critique. Why, if we did, it might even start to make sense!”
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"The rights of indigenous peoples! Land back! Reconceiving the nation state in terms of land theft and historical dispossession!".But also:."Open borders! People have an absolute right to live wherever they like!".I do wonder how long this glaring contradiction can persist.
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The decline of religious adherence not leading to a mass enlightenment, but instead to people accepting en masse the extension of consumer logic to the whole of their lives and beings.
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[Adam Curtis voice] “But of course DOGE wasn’t real. It was the same simulacrum of government restraint we’d seen many times before. Paradoxically, it led to the growth of government. New rules and new regulations so as to comply with the new edicts issuing from above.”
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Baudrillard calls this state of enforced and total transparency “obscenity.” And one of the paradoxes of total transparency is that, once everything is forcibly exposed to view, there is nothing anymore to see. Just the abject state of exposure itself.
I actually find it quite icky that American colleges expect you to be “emotionally honest” in your admissions essays. under normal circumstances, if you’re writing an extremely personal essay, it’s because you *want* to. but here you have no choice.
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The more extreme and unrepresentative an event is, the more viral potential it possesses. The more viral it becomes, the more it restructures our perceptions of reality in its own image.
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An often uncommented-on irony that much anti-conspiracy theory rhetoric itself operates as a conspiracy theory—as in, “how are these nefarious conspiracy theorists organising among themselves? What shadowy state actors might be backing them and amplifying their signals?”.
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The undergraduateisation of intellectual culture—the production of an intelligentsia that knows how to repeat paragraphs and slogans (with parenthetical references to approved scholarship) but not enough to realise that these snippets of discourse are not the absolute truth.
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Took about four years to go from “we are the 99%” to “we hate the 99%.”.
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The left (in its populist form) was thoroughly defeated by the end of the 2010s. Leftism instead became a vocabulary—a set of “transformative” words and slogans that could be applied as a radical veneer to make management and institutions seem inclusive.
I met so many characters 2010-2018, activists, people at cutting edge of austerity, minor celebs, who were drawn to left wing politics of giving working people a better deal. Suspect 40%+ are now either politically indifferent or have actively moved to right wing point of view.
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The crack up of the right wing populist coalition is yet more evidence of the contradiction at the heart of the modern Right—the impossible suture between conservatism (with its need to hold onto the past) and postmodern capitalism (which liquifies all pre-existing structures).
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"We are facing the emergence of a real, collective madness reinforced by the synchronization of emotions: the sudden globalization of affects in real time that hits all of humanity at the same time [. ] We have entered a time of general panic."—Paul Virilio (2012).
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You can go back and immerse yourself in the media of the last normal year (2011), but what you’ll never be able to access now is the 2011 version of your friends and family. No way to roll back the many ideological system updates that have erased what was there before.
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The thing with synchronised emotions and vibe-based politics is that, once the collective intensity has eased off, it becomes retrospectively difficult to verify what happened. People claim that “no one said that,” while at the time it seemed everyone was saying that.
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Something about the Just Stop Oil mode of protest—gluing oneself to an object and passively waiting for a third party to fix your self-generated problem while making anguished TikTok faces for the omnipresent cameras—perfectly encapsulates how the Spectacle is manufactured today.
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Someone elsewhere today described B***S*y as being "2010 Tumblr, except for 38-year-olds," and this encapsulates it perfectly. I shudder to think what new orthodoxies are currently being formulated there, soon to be unleashed on the rest of us.
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When we decide that our culture needs to be moderated, administered, and accredited there comes a tipping point after which culture itself disappears. Only the moderating, administrative, and accreditation processes remain, like a hard shell around a now empty space.
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The dissident right (or whatever it’s called these days) heading for its own 2020-style Bernie Bros movement wipeout.
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Hello, bearded British leftist here. Just wanted to say that the new fusion of the corporate, therapeutic, and surveillance states now coalescing under the heading of “inclusive capitalism” is totally the utopian communist horizon we’ve been waiting for all this time.
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There are certain books that have a certain clarity and coherence to them, such that virtually every paragraph is a banger on its own, packed with acute insights. Here are two.
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To me, this is an acceleration of a certain kind of millennial fan-fiction mindset. The idea that the fans know better than the author; that they can be “disappointed” and are entitled to rewrite the text to better accord with their head canons.
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The tendency in contemporary academia to express your political disappointment by condemning your entire country as a “redneck wasteland” if it doesn’t vote the way you wanted it to—and then wondering why “ordinary people” don’t have much trust anymore in academia.
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Defending the humanities by arguing for their “relevance” has served only to discredit the humanities in students’ minds by associating them with emotional harm, historical injustice, and social inequality.
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The biggest synchronised meme complex the world has ever seen, instantaneously transmitting current Anglo-American ideology globally via its information sinews and networks, would like you to castigate the past for being oppressively “colonial.”.
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A real-time, 24/7 global monoculture needs daily hooks to synchronise emotions. Events or pseudo-events against which everyone can set their moral watches. These exist within a web of relations, simulating the depth and historicity that is otherwise lost in our radical present.
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Was just thinking how, for so many brand conscious people, “lived experience” is an just endless series of tests, applications, and probation periods. And then I saw this tweet.
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Having achieved its task—radically simplifying culture along arbitrarily drawn moral lines—the textual clickbait economy is now obsolescent, succeeded by new media that are even more perfectly optimised for delivering culture in the form of simplified viral payloads.
Today is yet another really rough day in media; dozens of my Vice colleagues are being laid off globally and we just got news that Jezebel, where I worked for years, is being shut down.
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A cultural elite that passionately hates art, literature, and "heritage" but sees no reason why it shouldn't continue to bask in the aura and cachet that those now-vanished objects once conferred.
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The mimetic desire to be seen as a “good person” on the “right side of history” is one of the most potent forms of ideological control among the current educated elite.
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The decline of the New Atheism on the left and the rise of a new form of mysticism or magical thinking—highly reminiscent of the ’70s New Age in its naive embrace of what it believes to be “non-western knowledge,” but with an updated critical vocabulary—is fascinating to watch.
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The long-term effects of teaching complex thinkers (Foucault, for instance) in highly simplistic ways to undergraduates in intellectually insecure second-tier professional credentialing programmes (nursing; education).
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The decline of musical subcultures and the absorption of their social energies into politics has been a disaster for the human race.
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Because it’s Friday, it feels like time for an announcement. I am writing a book that will develop the ideas discussed on this account. It is to be called The Professional Managerial Mind. And I’m delighted to say that it’s now under contract at Repeater.
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So much of what has happened over the last 40 years in the west is the replacement of government (underpinned by democratic ideals) with technocratic and expert-led "governance," which seeks to manage rather than govern and regards democratic participation as undesirable.
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What people describe as “wokeness” is less a coherent political movement than a sensibility, a group of shared affects and moral commitments, and—increasingly—a developing new etiquette and system of manners.
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Baudrillard describes the collapse of all boundaries between the “rational and the real,” whereby models and theories about the way the world works are simply assumed to 𝘣𝘦 the world.
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Kind of feel like certain "anti-woke" critics might have got somewhere more useful if they'd focused on reading recent management literature rather than '70s and '80s Theory. This is a professional managerial ideology, not the pedagogy of the oppressed.
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Institutions that hate their missions. Authors and publishers that hate their readers. Bands that hate their audiences. Everything turned in on itself in postures of accusation and suspicion. In each, an audience is there to be *educated*; divested of old thoughts and habits.
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HOT TAKE: Be generally sceptical of a liberatory left political movement made up of people who work in admin or compliance.
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We see here two features of the new capitalism posing as anti-capitalism. 1. Responsibilisation. Social problems become individual problems of manners and performance. 2. The deprecation of tacit knowledge (learned from experience) in favour of a uniform standard response.
This is likely to be one of my more controversial takes, but ultimately the smell produced by a homeless person taking shelter from the cold on public transport is *harmless*. It might be unpleasant, but it can be tolerated (or avoided) in the name of compassion.
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What happens to culture when the reality-recording classes—bureaucrats, academics, journalists, librarians and archivists, publishers—simultaneously lose their ability to distinguish reality from fiction, spinning off together into a kind of shared madness?.
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The flattening powers of “aboutness.” Once you can reduce a book to being “about” something simplistic enough to caricature in a tweet, you can dismiss it as irrelevant or undesirable. The immersive reading experience of being *in* and *with* the text disappears.
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@theAliceRoberts I love an archaeology documentary, but can’t shake the feeling that a discipline based on non-consensually digging people out of the graves they’d been interred in by their loved ones and communities according to solemn rites is just a bit weird!.
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The Twitter-addicted academic left throughout the Anglosphere have downloaded a vast amount of discourse from American progressive circles very quickly. Pre-existing ideas and institutional norms have been translated into this new language, but unevenly and uncomprehendingly.
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“Everything is a social construction—other than the core beliefs of our political tendency, which are absolute truths and direct expressions of The Real.”.
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People operating not simply with outdated, 20th-century ideologies, but with absurdly reductive Wikipedia-level summaries of those ideologies repurposeable for Instagram.
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The humanities were gripped in the 2010s by a euphoric belief in art’s power to “change the world” for the better. This manic belief has now flipped to its opposite, nihilistic depression—a perpetual Werther hysteria in which (the wrong) art will “literally make people die.”.
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Spending 12 years as a British leftist swapping out your core political beliefs for ever-accelerating American internet consumer progressivism, retaining only the attitude of world weary intellectual superiority that enables you to think that your beliefs haven’t changed at all.
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An expression of what Byung-Chul Han calls “the dictatorship of emotion”—the sense that highly emotional performances equip the performer with an unshakable moral authority. We are just beginning to see what new political and managerial cultures this produces.
Isn't it a bit sus when people tell other people they "were shaking" or they're "literally shaking right now"? It's often said to stop other people from thinking critically, and it demands trust that hasn't necessarily been earned.
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We are building Utopia. Kindly refrain from questioning the feasibility of this (as well as our fundamental competence with respect to constructing Utopia, based on what you’ve seen from our movement already) until Utopia is fully in place. Thank you.
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Two new modes of being. 1. Everybody should be free to realise their desires (hypermodern consumerism). 2. Be kind (please abide by this ever-shifting melange of new rules and codes we are inventing in real time to address the chaos stemming from proposition 1).
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"If one gives sufficient social power to a class of people holding even the most outlandish ideas, they will . eventually contrive to produce a world organized in such a way that living in it will . reinforce the impression that those ideas are self-evidently true"—D. Graeber.
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Late Lasch in prophetic mode. On the growing appeal of gnosticism in a deculturated and de-spiritualised world.
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A certain sort of norm-decrying, burn it down, “silly people and their collective rituals,” “I’m such a goth and outsider” routine becoming oddly less charming during times when the social fabric feels genuinely stretched and under strain.
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There is a strong tendency within contemporary higher education to treat university students like frightened and vulnerable children. This is highly attractive to managerial bureaucracies because it necessitates total control (mystified as “safety” and “care”).
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Out of step with the current therapeutic zeitgeist, career success must now be recoded as victimhood and trauma—an opportunity for the display of “survivor guilt” and to provide testimony of perceived slights and microaggressions received from institutions and elders.
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During a period of moral imperialism, a culture will become hyperfocused on modelling new behavioural norms for children. The category of “child” will expand to include anyone in need of “reform.” The dominant cultural output will be infantilising propaganda.
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People are essentially demanding that the "real world" conform to the algorithmically produced experience they're used to on social media, where content and contacts they dislike are hidden from view.
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Aude Lancelin: "It is rather shocking that, henceforth, all American marketing successes, from The Matrix to Madonna's new album, are presented as critiques of the system which massively promotes them.".Jean Baudrillard: "That is exactly what makes our times so oppressive.".
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The teachers don’t like how the children are playing. Some children are left out. The teachers have an ideal model for how play should unfold. They intervene and micro-manage play to make it conform to their ideal. The children eventually lose all ability to play on their own.
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A certain visceral horror in watching the political orientation and milieu you’ve always identified with collapsing into fundamentalism; beliefs mutating into unshakable faiths; friends becoming zealots—a reign of synchronised unreason convinced that it epitomises rationality.
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The point of declaring something a “conspiracy theory” is to set up a discursive exclusion zone. Here ends respectable discourse. For discursive control purposes, the art lies in maximising the size of that exclusion zone—the dead area at the border wall no one wants to dwell in.
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@ryan_zickgraf The lack of an editorial filter that would have caught the problem is telling. The Jacobin of 5-10 yrs ago would have caught this and fixed it.
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Increasingly interested in the use of deliberately childish aesthetics—infographics; “fun” fonts and illustrations; highly simplified language and morality—in institutional and official communications.
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Empathy as emotional imperialism—demanding that people make their inner lives transparent to the “concern” and “allyship” of outside observers. To being massed and concretised along with others into groups whose emotional terrain can be “managed” by emotional professionals.
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Forms of cultural practice that rely on mocking or critiquing “dominant norms” or institutions ultimately rely on those norms or institutions continuing to exist in some credible form.
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Was never a smoker, but it was incredible how much the ambience of places changed after smoking bans came in—becoming much more homogeneous in feel. The tangible sign smoke brought that “here was an intensive place of socialisation” with clear boundaries disappeared.
I'm glad I quit smoking and have no desire to be around smoke, but I'm pretty convinced that the aggressive anti-tobacco campaign I witnessed as a teenage and college-age smoker in the 90s to 00s was a crucial turning point in making culture and public life much, much worse.
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We need to be sceptical of words and concepts like “safety,” which seem like neutral “goods” but can instead function as empty categories that can be occupied by ideology (and which can then present itself as neutral and beyond question—mere procedure or best practice).
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Feel like the poptimism of the early 2010s—the seemingly compulsory Beyoncé fandom—was in some way a harbinger of what was to come. Waves of regimented, synchronised emotion just waiting to latch onto politics.
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If you’re trying to make sense of this story, this book is a good place to start.
Kirstie Allsopp reported to social services for allowing son, 15, to travel abroad
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Social and political movements in the age of the attention economy have no brakes, no incentive to compromise or reach a settlement. The incentive instead is to become more extreme versions of themselves to remain “attention worthy.” This works right up to the moment it doesn’t.
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I’m not sure that anti-capitalists have fully grappled with the fact that capitalism has the power to secure anything it needs—including, if necessary, the appearance of occupying the high moral ground—in order to keep itself alive.
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There is a fatal untimeliness in our language and tools of analysis. On one hand, socialists will talk about “the means of production” as though it were still centralised under the old factory model, not hyper-distributed and fractal as it is in hypermodernity.
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It's under-realised the extent to which the current zeal for flattening hierarchies and eliminating borders and boundaries is in fact an ambitious new enclosure movement.
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You either tolerate a system for the management of irrationality, the spiritual, and the sacred (such as organised religion), or accept a situation in which quasi-secularised versions of the sacred break their bounds and invade every aspect of civil society.
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Why do “leftists” and rad-libs instinctively reach for the slurs and stereotypes they otherwise stigmatise as soon as they want to punish a member of a minority group for disloyalty or disobedience?.
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One of the most remarkable features of the present moment seems to be a simultaneous rejection of discipline and embrace of control.
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The problem with academia over the last 15 years is not that it’s smugly confined itself to an ivory tower, divorced from the street. It’s that it’s been desperate to identify itself with the big issues. To be relevant and socially responsive.
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The bizarre contemporary fallacy that, if something can be shown to be “socially constructed” in some way it is therefore illegitimate, leads to a new essentialising rhetoric, whereby things are treated as timeless or stemming from some intrinsic or primordial essence.
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