#angelicism01

Last week we were anticipating the Mars Review of Books, and now it has arrived over on Urbit. “What is Urbit?” some ask. I don’t know, but stay tuned for the next episode of Grand Podcast Abyss, dropping tomorrow: we will talk to a MarsReview author and general online oracle and hope she can explain. For now, I’d like to consider three other pieces in the publication and what they might mean for our culture.

Above is Christian Lorentzenpraising Selfie, Suicide by Logo Daedalus. Our critic isn’t naturally effusive, so it’s not quite a blurb, but the force of the judgment—which consigns corporate publishing to the artistic irrelevance of the Paris Salon circa 1863—is only strengthened by the understatement. (Now if you want more fiction that hasn’t been choked to death by the five fingers of MFA stultification, generic constraint, Netflix-brained agents, profit-fixated publishers, and Maoist sensitivity readers, you know where you can find it…) Lorentzen also considers Bronze Age Mindset, and I’m glad to see he came to the same judgment I did about BAP’s silly playpen politics even though I didn’t bother to read the book. 

Another piece relevant to our concerns here is Anika Jade Levy on the mysterious Angelicism01, whom we’ve discussed on the blog and the pod a few times. Levy’s concise summary of what I’ve called “The New Conservatism” that forms the backdrop to Angelicism’s literary performances:

Within legacy institutions, the intellectual elite have dug their heels in, doubled down on identity politics, Roe vs. Wade hysteria, and neoliberal consensus. But elsewhere, in New York art world circles and in underground online communities, the vibe has shifted into a post-ironic deep right politics, watered-down Catholicism, and acceptance of socially conservative values.

More startlingly, Levy breaks a taboo that still stands even on much of the post-left: in practical political discussions you must finally disown and disparage the right. The praise of Trump as a singular figure we do hear on the post-left doesn’t violate the taboo because it remains on the aesthetic level as a quasi-ironic appreciation for his carnivalesque persona and crude wit without reference (or without non-ironic reference) to politics per se. Whereas Levy just tears the Band-Aid off and wonders aloud if he weren’t a better president than Obama and Biden, even venturing that his “xenophobia might have proven useful.” 

And finally, as if to give a world-historical explanation for what could motivate such heresy, is Matthew Gasda on the professional-managerial class. Gasda makes short work of socialist anti-PMC discourse since socialism itself will by its nature be a technocracy run by expert bureaucrats and is therefore, no less than PMC rule under our nominal capitalism (really statist corporatism), anti-art, anti-religion, anti-nature, and above all anti-culture. And this, for the playwright Gasda, is the real stake of the argument, which naturally leads him to sympathize with what he calls the 19th century’s “romantic conservatism” and its resistance to the totalitarian society heralded by the French Revolution:

Prior to the 20th century, life was not standardized; agriculture, education, medicine, commerce, and language were more varied, localized, and historically determined. Daily life had more risks and fewer guarantees—but the state had less power, and less will, to mold individuals and small communities. Romantic conservatism—a constellation of thought which valued the rural, the quasi-feudal, and the traditional—was politically tenable; the resistance to modernization and homogenization was a mainstream position. The French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, for example, faced considerable headwinds in the 19th: a century in which many major writers, thinkers, and statesmen expressed considerable skepticism towards the notion that the complex dynamics of society could be mastered by rational, top-down political schemes. 

[…]

The aristocratic spirit of the 19th century—not just of Metternich and Bismarck, but of Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche—lost its vote on the direction of society; the civilization of the 20th century borrowed little from War and PeaceorOn the Genealogy of Morals.

Conversely, in the 20th century, Kafka’s horror at systems of control and punishment, or simply the boredom of office life, or Zweig’s deep disgust at having to carry a passport after 1918, were symptoms of the gradual death of the old world, and the ascendency of the new. The mechanized, scientized 20th century was decidedly grim. “The tragedy of today,” D.H. Lawrence wrote, “is that men are only materially and socially conscious. They are unconscious of their own manhood, and so they watch it be destroyed. Out of free men we produce social beings by the thousand every week.” Lawrence, in his own inimical way, spoke literally of what Kafka expressed allegorically: Human beings were caught in the net of systems that they had built; something had gone badly wrong.

Too romantic? Too conservative? Maybe if you come at these questions politics-first and therefore think it’s reasonable to drub artists over the head with the tomes of Gramsci and Bourdieu and castigate them as a proto-fascist lumpenproletariat rabble. But if you’re expecting such artists—serious artists, I mean, not actual or would-be academic experts—to see the light and cite sociologists, trust experts, and praise bureaucrats forever rather than quoting Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Kafka, and Lawrence in defiance of all “rational, top-down political schemes”—well, you obviously have another thing coming. 

Now whether or not “the heresiarchs of Uqbar,” or rather Urbit, can satisfy this romantic longing remains to be seen.