#pariah the doll

First of all, lol. Second, this reminds me of something I really do blame the CIA or at least the “deep state” for, in part anyway. 

The present right-wing turn in culture, such as it is, should have happened in about 2014. We should be past it by now. Even a decade ago, though, the leading institutions were becoming brittle, unable to think in three dimensions. They couldn’t accommodate themselves by coopting, aestheticizing, and thereby politically neutralizing so predictable an artistic shift away from the cloying tones of the New Sincerity and the Obama-to-Occupy era of mass youth movements that failed to deliver on their utopian promise. They were already concluding that any art not didactic was crypto-fascist, instead of the truer converse according to which autonomous art secures civil freedom and fortifies the free citizen’s intellect. Ironically, these soon-to-be “anti-fascists” thought about art the way Goebbels did, in a purely instrumental and identitarian way, whereas those aesthetes they stigmatized as fascist were echoing a host of liberal and leftist thinkers from Mill to Adorno. But to understand irony, you already have to be an aesthete.

By the time Trump was elected and the legacy media in collaboration with the deep state got involved, art didn’t stand a chance; so we had half a decade of rolling top-down moral panics where a culture should have been. New networks, therefore, began to be assembled on the outside and have by now accrued the so-called cultural capital that comes in a revolutionary culture like ours when you build transgressive alternatives to whatever is moralistic and platitudinous. 

But my point is that Lana del Rey’s persona in 2014, controversial at the time, was already more than halfway to the basic sentiment of the parody lyrics above. That’s why I wrote this essay in 2014 and why a mainstream lit journal was willing to publish it:

Recently, Lynn Stuart Parramore tried to explain “Why a Death-Obsessed Pop Siren Is Perfect for Late-Stage Capitalist America.” She was referring, of course, to Lana Del Rey. Parramore explains that the Ultraviolence chanteuse is only the latest heir to a long lineage of decadent femmes fatales that rise to cultural prominence at moments of perilous social transition or imminent collapse […] Parramore’s thesis may not seem to have much to do with Ira Glass’s controversial assertion, tweeted after seeing a performance of King Lear, that, “Shakespeare sucks.” But when you consider that one of the late 19th century’s favorite sources of death-and-the-maiden imagery was the drowning Ophelia, weltering picturesquely among the strewn flowers of her fatal madness, the Shakespeare/Del Rey connection becomes more plausible. Just as Parramore (and others) criticize Lana Del Rey for social irresponsibility, for promoting an anti-feminist celebration of sadomasochistic sexuality and for embracing capitalist spectacle unto death, so the most persuasive and compelling attacks on Shakespeare have charged him with amoral aestheticism and a sensationalized skepticism about human potential.

These thoughts, perfectly within the parameters of the tradition, could not be developed in those spaces after that, so the natural ebb and flow of the zeitgeist was dammed up for almost a decade—which perhaps explains the torrent that now threatens to overwhelm current hegemonic left-liberalism.