#the new conservatism

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.

Do I have to join Urbit to get this or buy it in crypto on the blockchain or something? In any case, I want to read it. The manifesto strikes the note of the emerging ideology as it slowly engulfs elite aesthetics, an unlikely balance between the intellectual worlds of the New York literati and the Silicon Valley technorati (and now its Austin/Miami diaspora):

The fact is that language can be holy, at least when it’s used correctly. Every writer who is a real writer and not a mere reporter knows what it is when sound and sense form a feedback loop with one another, and the world itself comes to seem more sinuous and more clear, and the hairs on the back of the neck prickle. It doesn’t work when you cheat on the sound—which is why, for instance, a thesaurus is so handy, and why Flaubert drove himself mad over choosing just the right word. And it doesn’t work when you cheat on the sense—which is why, for instance, Joyce made such obsessive inquiries about the height of the railing Bloom and Daedalus would have to jump over in the Ithaca section of Ulysses.

[…]

Urbit is a software project. But one might suggest that at its core it also implies a different way of looking at the world. The short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” which lent the first Urbit company its name, tells the tale of a parallel universe that slowly subsumes reality. It may be that such a parallel universe—one where quality beats quantity, permanence beats a flash in the pan, and a deep concern for human flourishing beats venality—is slowly twisting its way, ivy-like, through the nooks and crannies of our otherwise humdrum world. We’ll have to wait and see. In any case, we couldn’t be more grateful to the Urbit Foundation and its sister organization The Combine for their support in getting this project off the ground, and for the steady belief that something so quixotic might have staying power. However the Mars Review does conclude, we can say confidently that no other project could have provided the necessary premise.

Up-to-the-minute contents: I’m always up for more Angelicism chatter; I’m curious about the the first great work of cyborg literature as I am about the PMC; and you’ll never go wrong reading Default Friend on sex, society, and technology. 

For my specific purposes as both a literary man and an observer of The New Conservatism, “Christian Lorentzen on BAP & Logo” is the surprise here. Everything depends on the treatment, but this may be the literary-critical equivalent of Jacob Siegel’s and James Pogue’s relatively sympathetic journalistic treatments of Yarvin and Co. I’ve wondered for years who would be the first critic with ties to the older literary (I first mistyped “libterary”) establishment to take seriously the pseudonymous world of the self- and small-press-published online right or illiberal dissident sphere. 

Why take it seriously? A century ago, modernism itself, before it made the canonical cut, was a similar stew of weird little magazines, eccentric small presses, vanity-published projects, and strange urban scenes stalked by all manner of occultists, nihilists, anti-liberal cranks, ultra-reactionary queers, elitist critics, and fascist troubadours. So if Lorentzen can be the Edmund Wilson of the hour, well, somebody has to do it. 

I will await our critic’s dispatch from Mars, but, for whatever it’s worth, I’m indifferent to BAP qua literature. As for Logo, I read enough of Selfie, Suicide online to see that it was good, but I suspect his totalitarian turn of mind will inhibit his development—not an eventuality unknown to our modernist precursors either. 

—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty(1859)

Mill explains the vibe shift and/or new conservatism and/or post-left and/or new right. Even his 17th-century example is libertine vaguely/crypto-Catholic right-wingers reacting against left-wing puritan Protestants.

If someone PayPals me $5 or buys one of my books, I’ll read Gasda’s play and tell you if it’s any good apart from the subcultural scenester and culture-war chatter. 

It would be a good way to cap “The New Conservatism” as a critical topic, since this movement is itself fractionating the more victories it scores against current hegemonic left-liberalism. The split is roughly between those with substantive right-wing cultural commitments of various sorts and those whose primary objection to wokeness was always the moralism and iconoclasm. On the one side, The Perfume Nationalist:

This pride I’m grateful for the increasing division between the dirtbag left/moralizing trad axis of poor unfortunate souls living in a doomed political fantasy of the past and the psychedelic 20s DH Lawrence gays, guys, and gals forging a future of creativity, freedom, and art

On the other, J. D. Vance:

“Again, we made a political choice that the freedom to consume pornography was more important than the public goods, like marriage and family and happiness,” he continued. “We can’t ignore the fact that we made that choice and we shouldn’t shy away from the fact that we can make new choices in the future.”

Vance, oddly, understands why you can’t ban guns in America but doesn’t understand why you can’t ban porn. 

Take it from me, you’ll feel better if you make your peace with the fact that this country was founded as a very particular or peculiar kind of utopia: a place where individual liberties could be carried as far as is minimally consistent with civic order. Alternate utopian ideologies generated in the crowded dark warrens of Europe—Catholicism, social democracy, communism—don’t apply. Myself educated in grade school by Catholics and grad school by Marxists, I spent some time in my early life dismayed by this, and God knows it’s a tough country by design, but I can’t spend the rest of my life in the style of clenched miserabilism with which the Marxists torture themselves (more than the Catholics, who can remain happy warriors since their goal is transcendent rather than immanent). My life, as the man said, is not an apology, but a life. 

Paradoxically, I can even ground my groundless individualism in my ancestry: the immigrants of a little more than century ago on my father’s side, who came because they were killers, and the immigrants of a little more than half a century ago on my mother’s side, who came to get rich. Among Gasda’s back catalog, I see he wrote a book of poems called The American Sublime, which is Harold Bloom by way of Wallace Stevens or maybe vice versa, so I trust he understands. But, this being America, you’ll have to pay me to find out for sure if he does or not.

How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?

When General Jackson
Posed for his statue
He knew how one feels.
Shall a man go barefoot
Blinking and blank?

But how does one feel?
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,

The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?

Havingvisited the left yesterday, let’s check in on the right today. It’s not doing too well either. Town is reacting against the $400 right-wing Passage Prize anthology, particularly these two racist poems (don’t click that link unless you’re prepared to read racist poems). The poems are shit, which is to say willfully excremental and lamentably unflushed. What a society makes taboo will be violated. The maintenance of the taboo as taboo even requires its regular violation to fortify the boundary between what may and may not be said, just in case we forget. But bad artists mistake taboo-violation for good art, since violating the taboo is a cheap and easy way to generate a bit of energy in a text. You see this in 20th-century sex writing, all that flaunting of the genitalia in the stern (if imagined) face of the gray-bearded Victorian patriarch and his purse-lipped domestic angel; this was my impression, for instance, of what little I ever managed to read of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. And so just as Lawrence got a charge out of writing cock and cunt in Lady Chatterley, so today’s fascoid poetasters giggle as they scribble the N-word. (You can tell where the taboo falls: which words am I willing to type out and which not.) Personally, I find it contemptible; I join Mark Alastor’s double anathema “Against the Sowers of Discord.”

Now on to to Town’s main point. As far as books go, he’s right. Individual self-publishing is probably better than small presses as long as you are willing and able to generate your own publicity. (Small presses go out of business and take your books with them, or cancel your books at the behest of Twitter mobs, or refuse to use Amazon, or any number of other annoying things—so, the technological affordances for self-publishing being what they are, why bother with them?) But it’s naive to think there’s not going to be some re-bundling of writers into schools and journals. Books are one thing, because they’re always purchased individually whether they were self-published or not, but how many paid newsletters can you really subscribe to a month? This is why the minute I heard about the Mars Review of Books I knew something was happening, for good or ill. And the writing is good; it’s just that I still don’t know what to think about Urbit. And Urbit et al. is the only reason “Dimes Square”matters,if it does, and it’s too soon to tell. These people who think they’re in Slaves of New York might be in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” instead, which is worth a couple of articles.

As for right/left: art, in a functioning modern civilization, is apolitical, a terrain of inquiry, not exhortation, and so solidly considered in this light that even art meant as hortatory comes out inquisitive. As I think I’ve said before—but nobody ever listens, so I’ll say it again—the answer to bad left-wing art is not bad right-wing art, but art tout court and without qualification.

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.