This new conservatism is killing me, even more so considering it’s been born of a will to subversion, traditionally a liberal imperative towards cultural disruption etc. Angela Nagle talks about it in Kill All Normies (2017), citing how the alt-right has hijacked sixties-era transgressivism to disseminate ideas wildly out of sync with the emancipatory incentives such tactics are usually trafficked from. Basically what’s gotten me miffed is seeing Camille Paglia sound-bytes on my feed, over and over again, her crepuscular dulcet tones detailing the fall of Rome and its decadent precursor, drawing comparisons between the alleged hubris of that period and contemporary society to fear-monger about how ‘The West’ has been derailed by liberal agendas. We are apparently now hurtling towards a similar implosion or bloody finale, woe betide anyone just trying to get by in this grand eschatological closing act. Boooooriiiiiiiing.
In whatever interview it is this Paglia snippet has her relaying in characteristic nasality how excessive tolerance for degenerative lifestyles, including gay marriage, are the death knell of a once great empire, glossing over the details exactly but concluding that this is symptomatic of liberalism’s shortsightedness, which she’d presumably say consists of dialectically proffering civic liberties to categorically marginalized identities without bothering to factor in the broader structural ripples such concessions may or may not lead to. I wouldn’t give a fuck usually—because this almost fashionable conservatism has been an annoying ambience for some time—but I’ve seen several pro-Paglia bytes now in the last few days circulating on Red Scare loving accounts (with tens of thousands of followers), meaning accounts administered by self-conscious Gen Z intellectuals who in the style of Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova performatively deploy their polarizing reading sensibilities and proto-fascist leanings, less from a fealty to such ideas and more towards the edge-lord clout grab. Affective rendering of intellectualism as nothing more than vain aesthetics is nothing new. But when an otherwise benign channel becomes vehicle for potentially violent regression, or when fashion starts seeding hate, it gives reason to pause.
Another Paglia byte doing the rounds has her bemoaning the proverbial Soft Boy, not in those internet 2.0 words but close enough. Basically she thinks men, in labouring to uphold feminist dicta, establish a mummy-son relationship with all the women in their lives, a dynamic she perceives as detrimental to proper gender equivalence as per feminism’s earnest remit. I can’t say I disagree with her—and floating around the art scene for a decade and counting racks you up a valid distrust in soft-spoken self-hating men, that’s for sure—but in the same breath I wouldn’t lionize the toxic masculinities of a bygone era, if only because they are most certainly not exclusive to a bygone era, and anyone arguing as such is either deluded, or has never spent a significant amount of time in New Zealand, or maybe lives in a goddess-commune where the men are tolerated for their seed and then dutifully discarded (I’m guessing somewhere in Titirangi? Sounds lit).
I think the most concerning thing for me is this mode of dissemination that takes a thinker’s more polarizing stances completely out of context, and circulates these along emergent lines of a binarily exhumed climate of exhaustion with criticality, that would prefer salacious bytes over coherent premises and a throughline of actual discourse. Ideological drift is nothing new, but the frictionless drift of social media along a dyadic chain of likes and follows and their opposite, makes an alluringly easy channel for this drift—the ideological equivalent of a tarpaulin lawn-slide covered in detergent.
I can’t say I’m overly familiar with Paglia, but the idea that excessive liberalism (and the emphasized attention to social issues this comes with) is lethal to civilization as we know it is embarrassingly simplistic, and less generously a symptom of social myopia—hate to be that bugbear, but more often than not a complaint ignorant of marginalization and its frequently entrenched biases, with little direct experience therewith. To be fair to Paglia (do I have to be?) this isn’t even to say that I’m a huge fan of marriage equality, as a superficial example. If anything the institution of marriage could’ve done with an overhaul for everybody (off the top of my head, women?), and not just the gays for whom the issue was dangled with performative fanfare, amplifying the unequivocal myth that progress is a linear trajectory ala Space Mountain, a ride between two clear points with a long-awaited crescendo of utopian thrill.
Which I think might be the point. This myth of progress, as spurious as Fukuyama’s premature eulogizing of History superseded by American-style liberal globalization, lingers against a multilateral reality which has inevitably exhausted it, and which will continue to do so—the end result being a residual grief over a harmonized future that never happened, and probably never will happen.
It is perhaps from this exhaustion that we find ourselves in an embittered climate, with a specific bitterness against the insurmountable complexities of a compromised reality, and in that exhaustion a burgeoning culture of despair that has fanged humour and desperate shock tactics—with the lure of clout—as its voluble proviso. This really isn’t a Paglia bash and I’m swerving as hard as I can to stop it being as much, but with Paglia as an exemplar of pseudo-intellectual engagement, in as much as a thinker’s most polarized points are essentially commoditized amidst online communities of ironic hate, a Paglia renaissance seems to flag inertial populist responses to world disorder. This populism we could call post-Trump, post-covid, and post-truth, negatively stimulated by various existential threats and culminating in a general critical lethargy, captured and disseminated through viral metrics primed for the clout of the Hot Take. What’s more, it recycles ancient conservative adages which proffer the flux of existing gender orders as the scapegoat du jour for said disorder, mistaking the symptom for the cause and vice versa. If gender is an historical dialectic and its expression contingent on material processes that place certain bodies in certain relationships (and I’m pretty sure it might be), then gender itself is symptomatic of a greater premise, itself hybridized of less than concrete factors—making the idea of gender as societal litmus largely incoherent. Thusly, any new script bemoaning excessive permissiveness ala Sodom & Gomorrah does not in fact have a mind to civilizational longevity, because it’s concerning itself with expressions of Ur-text and not the text itself. So sorry to Paglia but I’m praying her little Gen-Z moment will be blessedly short-lived.
No comments:
Post a Comment