Looksmaxxing,
is a neologism that has of late blossomed onto even more public media,
including popular social media like TikTok and Instagram. While for a long time
it remained part of the hidden underside of male virtual sociality it
eventually surfaced primarily through the rise of a few influencers on such
popular social media. Most recently the ethos of Looksmaxxing has
gained a large following primarily due to a single influencer: Clacvicular
a.k.a Branden Peters. Peters is an online streamer and media influencer who
gained notoriety as a propagator of Looksmaxxing along with being a Nazi
sympathizer and part of the general trend in Alt-Right masculinity which has
become a source of new values and ideals for a large youth demographic. Peters
produced his content on TikTok but also on the streaming platform Kick where
Peters can be seen through most of the waking day, mostly socializing. Apart
from this Peters has done a number of interviews with both liberal and
conservative YouTube channels, describing his ethos of LooksMaxxing and his
general opinion on the need for men to have an anti-feminist stance.
The Ascendancy
System (Bustamante 2026)
Masculinity in
this form, becomes more than Hegemonic. There is along with the hegemony of
traditional ideas, in this case an ethics that escalates into greater degrees
of misogyny and violence. The speed of this escalation running on the very
substance of viralit on such forums and platforms produces an acceleration of
often greater and more deliberately provocative forms of speech and praxis.
However, this acceleration also implies a greater need for quick normalization
of values. What gets unlocked I believe in the process is a vast edifice of
forms of value systems, which are buttressed by an expanding and ever fleeting
set of terms or a lexicology that outlines these terms.
In most of his
interviews Peters for example references the ‘Ascending to Chad’ system: a
normative diagram of people rated broadly from liberal (normie) to
ultraconservative (chad) based on the various values levels of ‘chadness’ and
‘normieness’. The categories scale up aspirationaly from ‘low tier normie’ to
‘true normie’ to true, giga and tera chad. The values of Looksmaxxing are
inherently bound to this system. Amongst its lexicology are terms like
‘mogging’ (meaning asserting dominance through ones looks). The looksmaxxers
also favour ‘whitemaxxing’ implying a racial preference in the kind of look
epitomized. In order to achieve these looks a variety of practices are deployed
like ‘mewing’ (sucking ones tougue to the roof of one’s mouth to elongate the
structure of the jawline) and ‘bonesmashing’, using a hammer with which through
repeated light hitting of the cheeks and other parts of the face modify the
structure of the face.
These
techniques are further supplemented by broader ideological systems. One of the
most popular systems that undergirds the ideology of the manosphere is the blue
pill vs red pill system. The terms ‘blue pill’ and ‘red pill’ emerge from the
movie ‘The Matrix’ where the protagonist of the movie is offered a choice to
continue in the real world or have the same revealed as a machine generated
illusion. An alternative to the two that emerged as a manosphere term was the
‘black pill’. The ‘black pill’ implies that the reality of the world is that
men are really are victims who are dominated and controlled by women. This was
expressed most vociferously in backlashes against the #MeToo movement, even
expressed in hashtags like #makehimasandwich or in the ideal of a traditional
wife who stays at home and cooks, cleans and takes care of children expressed
in the term ‘tradwife’.
-x-
A question
that arises as a natural consequence of my previous post
is what the difference is between revolutionary and fascist virality and
mimesis. As a first answer let me already be clear, revolutionary mimesis is
engaged in the eruption of identity, even in the game 'tu fascist' 'tu fascist'
it exhorts the speaker towards a dissonance that dissolves identity. Fascism on
the other hand reacts to dissonance through hyper-fixation to identity. But why
the superlative 'hyper' here? what does the proliferation of superlatives like
'hyper' and 'meta' in modern language indicate? Clearly a kind of
hyper-reality, a kind of simulacra and a deracination of the reality principle.
We dont need
Freud here other than his positing of a reality principle driven by the
maximization of pleasurable impulses. Superlatives I find are the condition of
taming an emerging reality, however they too can be read memetically. The word
Meta for example uttered playfully to describe amateur philosophy ‘thats
meta’.
To understand
the simulacra we must understand its movement
Reality
Principle-> Unquantifiable Intensity -> Phantasm or Involuntary image
configuration -> Simulacra the skillful deployment of the phantasm into an
image
In the case of
the meme too the simulacra implies this skillful deterritorialization (quite
literally the territory of the meme is the raw scaffolding and its
deterritoiralization is the new co-ordinates that produce difference to the
default configuration) of the default meme, into a multi-sided form, a kind of
simulacra if you will, ideally an uncontainable excess of meaning. Nietzsche,
the greatest Memelord.
But he felt
intensities that became so overwhelming that he could no longer maintain the
distinction between the person who experienced the moment and the moment
itself. And from there on for very long it was only the intensity that
returned, but the return is never to the individual that thought it; a viscous
circle. The 'I' must affirm what abolishes it. This return cannot be simply
communicated through language. This is why even the lightest archeology of a
meme reveals a the uneasy sense of the murmur of a language. The Alt-Right,
GenZ Protests etc. Memes are simulacra that veil intensities.
This is apart
from Baudrillard’s hypothesis on simulacra which states:
The
imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine
set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp.
Whence the debility of this imaginary,
its
infantile degeneration. This world wants to be childish in order to make us
believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to
conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere- that it is that of the
adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions
as to their real childishness. Disneyland is not the only one, however.
Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World: Los Angeles is surrounded by
these imaginary stations that feed reality, the energy of the real to a city
whose mystery is precisely that of no longer being anything but a network of
incessant, unreal circulation-a city of incredible proportions but without
space, without dimension. As much as electrical and atomic power stations, as
much as cinema studios, this city, which is no longer anything but an immense
scenario and a perpetual pan shot, needs this old imaginary like a sympathetic
nervous system made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms.
Disneyland:
a space of the regeneration of the imaginary as waste-treatment plants are
elsewhere, and even here. Everywhere today one must recycle waste, and the
dreams, the phantasms, the historical, fairylike, legendary imaginary of
children and adults is a waste product, the first great toxic excrement of a
hyperreal civilization. On a mental level, Disneyland is the prototype of this
new function. But all the sexual, psychic, somatic recycling institutes, which
proliferate in California, belong to the same order. People no longer look at
each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other,
but there is contactotherapy.
However, our
initial sense of the Nietzschean simulacra, lets call this Simulacra A
I believe must lead us to an additional hypothesis to Baudrillard: hyperreality
produces and is produced by dissonance of the self from the self. This
dissonance creates the possibility in reverse of the experience of
extraordinary intensities. The students at the anti-SIR protests demonstrated
exactly this. That simulacral formulations produce dissonance which itself is
the vehicle for incredible demonstrations of intensity. THe Alt-Right on the
other hand reacts to dissonance by collapsing into a black-hole of identity
formation, lets call this Simulacra B.
-x-
I am
interested in a rather small event. A boy is standing before the bathroom
mirror with his phone held just below his face, his tongue pressed against the
roof of his mouth, his jaw turned towards an imaginary light. A photograph is
taken, discarded, taken again. Somewhere in the background a video is playing
in which another young man is explaining that there are ways to arrive at the
face one should have been born with. The chin has an angle, the eyes a positive
or negative tilt, the face is divided into portions, a number is assigned to it
and the number becomes the explanation of an entire life. We could begin by
saying that this is an ideology of masculinity, that the young man has accepted
some particularly brutal account of what a man ought to look like. But the
moment one says that we have lost the most curious aspect of the episode. The
ideology has not yet arrived as a coherent set of beliefs. There are alraedy
photographs, gestures, postures, invented calculations, jokes and repeated
sounds. The body has learnt something before the subject has decided what he
believes. Somethign like a language is at work, although if asked to translate
it one would not get very far. However even in this machinic impression, we
find something else missing: the gaze. The subject in this case identifies
entirely with itself as an object, and thus is prone to look at the world
'objectively'. The subject has curtailed the inherent dissociation of the
mirror image with a complete conquering of the dimension of Das Ding: the
thing. The subject has not crossed in a Hegelian sense form Consciousness to
Self-Consciousness.
The langauge
of the Alt Right is often described as the langauge of memes, but this is a
rather unfortunate expression if one takes a meme to be a detachable unit of
information. The frog, the skull, the elongated jaw, the little grey man with
his vacant face, none of these constitute a self sufficient message. They
acquire their peculiarity from the manner in which they are repeated, how they
are made available for re-use, what one must already know to find them funny,
and what kind of conversation becomes impossible when one does not find them
funny. An image that has passed a thousand times from one screen to another
might have no fixed author and very little stable content. Somebody gets the
format wrong and an entire thread turns against him. Someone uses the right
word in the wrong register and is instantly revealed as a 'normie'.
One does not need a dictionary to be initiated. There is an education going on
here, an education through recognitions, throught successful mistakes, through
getting the joke a half second before one ought to. It seems odd then that this
education should so consistently arrive at the body.
Ryan Milner
in The World Made Meme provides us with a necessary starting point
because he refuses the fantasy of a meme as a cultural gene that simply
reproduces itself. A meme is a social practice, a collective modification
of material already circulating. It is multimodal; it borrows; it
resonates with people who have reasons to recognize it; it is made by many
participants rather than one author; and it spreads throught a set of technical
and social arrangements. What is especialy compelling in his account is that a
familiar template permits novelty without requiring originality.
A person is
recognized as participating becuase they have done somethign recognizably like
everyone else, and they are recognised as clever becuase they have not done
exactly what everyone else has done. thus the meme gives birth to a peculiar
type of speaker.
You speak by
showing that you have alraedy heard, and you are heard only because your speech
also departs from what has been said. This is a relation which might be called
grammatical, except the rules apply equally to a badly drawn face, the timing
of a video cut, or the sudden intrusion of a musical phrase. Limor
Shifman, in Memes in Digital Culture, makes this difficulty even
more precise in distinguishing a meme from a merely viral object. A viral image
can spread while remaining comparatively intact.
A meme is
encountered in a family of variants, held together by resemblance and
collective modification. The same face appears with different captions, the
same caption is attached to anohter face, one photograph borrows the gestures
of a film, which in turn is performed by someone holding a mobile telephone in
the street. Content, form and stance can persist or change at different rates.
It is possible to repeat every word of a statement and alter its political
position by changing the imagined speaker, by positioning it in a different
sequence, by adding an image whose apparent innocence is the ocassion for
anohter joke. A word such as normie, for example, does not merely describe an
ordinary person. It also stages the distance from which a speaker can find the
ordianry person contemptible, laughable, insufficiently initiated. The word
carries an entire scene of enunciation with it; it tells us who is supposed to
be looking at whom and from which side of the screen.
now imagine a
photograph of a frog, neither particularly charming nor especially menacing,
which finds itself repeated by an indefinite population of anonymous accounts.
The frog wears a suit in one Image, cries in the next, salutes in anohter, and
then returns as a defeated creature who has lost his girlfriend, his country or
his mind. Pepe did not begin life as the possession of one political party. Angela
Nagle, in Kill All Normies, follows the strange migration of
transgressive online culture into the far right, although no such history can
make every imageboard joke a fascist one.
The history of
its appropriation by white nationalist and Alt Right users is precisely
interesting because the image was capable of being detached from an earlier
comic world and pressed into a quite different one. Even within far-right usage
no single political proposition could account for the different scenes in which
it appeared. The same frog permitted open nationalist signaling, ironic
distance, melancholy identification and trolling of an outsider who could not
easily determine how seriously to take it. One therefore understands something
very important by refusing to ask what the frog really means. Its unstable
meaning is one of the conditions of its considerable practical stability.
Milner's
language of a shared vernacular is useful but the word shared should not
console us. A langauge can be shared precisely by restricting the conditions
under which one is allowed to speak it. there are jokes that work because they
presuppose a community; there are jokes that make the community by expelling
whoever fails to understand them.
Consider the
difference between a novice who asks what an NPC is and a practiced user who
deploys the blank-faced figure under a photograph of a political opponent. The
practiced user produces a judgement without any need to argue. NPC, borrowed
from the non-player character in video games, identifies someone whose speech
is supposedly scripted in advance. The insult is rather cunning because
whatever the opponent says becomes further evidence that they are programmed.
If they object to being called one the objection can itself be displayed as a
predictable scripted reaction. What is produced here is a little tribunal with
no possiblity of appeal. The grey face is a machine for manufacturing the
sameness it claims merely to observe.
The figure of
'Chad' produces a different event. Here we find the jaw made
enormous, the forehead carved as though from a monument, the eyes reduced to
small confident recesses in a face whose proportions are both
scientific-looking and physically impossible. Sometimes it is paired with a
pale, anxious Wojak whose objections are supposed to sound like the buzzing of
an insect. The two figures enact a debate whose outcome has been established by
their anatomy. One wins by looking like somone who could not possibly lose (called
mogging by the ALt-Right). A whole argument becomes visible without being
argued. The mouth that is open, trembling and expressive has already been
defeated by the mouth whose immobility promises certainty. The truth-value of a
proposition is displaced by the imagined physiognomy of its speaker. One does
not have to demonstrate that an idea is superior if one can make the body that
utters it appear superior. this is a language whose predicate is a face.
While these
might seem like relatively marginal and inconsequential jokes it is the furore
and self-righteous anger of the alt-right that makes them dangerous. In Kill
All Normies (2017), Angela Nagle traces one of the more disturbing
histories of the emergence of Alt-Right digital culture through the harassment
of female journalists, feminist bloggers and women working in the gaming
industry. What is particularly horrifying about these incidents is that
the culture of misogynistic trolling precedes the consolidation of the
Alt-Right as an explicitly political movement. Nagle begins with the case of
Kathy Sierra, a prominent technology writer and blogger who, in 2007, advocated
the moderation of online comments. This apparently innocuous proposition was
interpreted by participants in the libertarian hacker culture of the early
internet as an attack upon freedom of expression. What followed was an
extraordinary campaign of intimidation, in which Sierra received rape and death
threats, while digitally manipulated photographs circulated showing her face
beside a noose, with a shooting target superimposed upon it, and in another
image gagged with women's underwear. Personal information concerning her home
and family was also circulated. The hacker and troll Andrew Auernheimer, known
as weev, was involved in spreading defamatory stories about her. Sierra
eventually withdrew from public speaking and closed her blog.
-x-
Michael
Taussig, in Mimesis and Alterity, insists that the mimetic relation
is inseparable from alterity. To make a Copy is already to encounter an other,
and perhpas to become other in the act of making it. This is especially useful
when we consider the strange politcal career of the word normie. A person
declares independence from the ordinary world by adopting an entire set of
ordinary, repetitive gestures belonging to his group.
He becomes the
extraordinary individual through an exercise in imitation. The room is full of
young men trying to look differnt from the crowd, in photographs that look
exactly alike. One might describe this as hypocrisy, although hypocrisy implies
a subject who secretly knows the differnce between what he says and what he
does. The wish to be singular is manufactured in the act of repeating a
collective template. There is no pristine individual who was first autonomous
and later corrupted by imitation. The supposedly independent subject is
produced through the mimetic relation itself. The scandal is that the relation
remains availble for many different arrangements.
There are ways
of imitating that turn a body outwards toward encounters, and ways of imitating
that turn every encounter into another confirmation of a pre-existing
rank. William Mazzarella, in The Mana of Mass Society,
allows us to ask what the audience gets from this encoutner beyond a
proposition or a belief. There is somethign like a rush of energy in collective
visibility, a certain experience of being addressed by an impersonal public in
a way that nevertheless feels unbearably intimate. An anonymous comment
appearing below a stream may seem directed specifically to the performer; a
reply from the performer may seem directed specifically to the viewer, although
thousands are watching the same small exchange. The affect is not a secondary
decoration on the message. The message becomes meaningful partly by virtue of
the peculiar power with which it arrives. Mazzarella's problem of mana is
precisely how a public form takes on a force which appears larger than any of its
separate participants, how the form itself comes to be experienced as an
authority, an excitement, a compulsion. A streamer's jokes become important not
always because they are unusually funny but because the audience is learning
how to inhabit the electricity of being present when the joke occurs.
Terms such as
mogging, Chad, gigachad, sub-five, truecel, mewing, blackpill and ascendancy
are not simply nouns awaiting definition. They are a distributed apparatus for
positioning speakers relative to one anohter. Mogging turns a comparison into
an action performed upon somebody else. The other man need not know he has been
defeated for his defeat to be announced on his behalf. A Chad is an imagined
point of certainty from which all competing evaluations can be issued. The
so-called sub-five is given a position below which further explanation is
scarcely necessary. To be blackpilled is to treat a hierarchy as an inescapable
fact of nature, which can make any contradictory encounter appear as an
exception that proves the rule. In this universe the lexicon is astonishingly
busy, continually producing names for finer and finer gradations. Yet the
proliferation of names can coincide with a drastic reduction of possible lives.
Every differnce discovered in a face is returned to the same ladder of rank. A
thousand descriptions give us one conclusion. In the language of semiotics this
might seem like a great quantity of meaning. In the life of a person it can
become the destruction of alternatives.
The blackpill
deserves attention for this reason. It is sometimes described as an opinion
that the world is unjustly arranged against certain men, but the suffix pill
does far more than announce an opinion. Borrowed from the red pill scene of The
Matrix cinematic universe, it establishes a rite of initiation into a
supposedly concealed truth. The ordinary world is sleep, the initiate is awake,
the critic remains asleep by the very fact of refusing the revelation. The
account has a peculiar immunity from correction. If someone reports a life that
contradicts the theory, the report can be explained as delusion, misrecognition
or dishonesty. The claim is thus not just that there is some biological truth
to be discovered. The claim is that one must enter a special condition of
knowing to recognise it. The problem of knowledge is made into an attribute of
the knower. A redpilled person does not merely have information, he has
acquired a face, a tone, a stance from which other people appear naive. To
dispute the content is to be placed in the position of the naive speaker. The
rhetorical apparatus begins the work of refutation before any argument is
heard.
It is here
that Félix Guattari, in The Machinic Unconscious, introduces us
to an abstract machine, although the expression causes trouble because abstract
seems to imply a form floating above the messy world. An abstract machine is
not a blueprint secretly lodged in the mind of the Alt Right. It is an
operative relation that can be extracted from concrete assemblages and can be
actualised in others without preserving their materiel or representational
appearance. Imagine the recurrent procedure by which a speaker is detached from
his statement, replaced with a stereotyped face, and made answerable not for
what he said but for the kind of person the face represents. The procedure
appears in an NPC cartoon, a before-and-after looksmaxxing photograph, a clip
contrasting a trembling liberal with a silent Chad, and a joking ranking of
people by supposedly biological worth. What they may share is a diagrammatic
operation that converts an encounter with another person into an immediate
classification of their body. The abstract machine is encountered through these
particular operations; it cannot be equated with a vague essence called fascism
which we have decided is quasi-present everywhere.
Faciality is
probably the most compelling concept for understanding these practices. Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, do not
treat the FACE merely as the front of the head. A face is produced by an
apparatus of recognition which distributes visibility, familiarity, deviance
and possible speech. The famous white wall and black hole are not simply a
drawing of two eyes placed on a sheet of paper. They describe a relation
through which expressive traits become legible against a surface of
signification while subjectivity is captured in points that demand recognition.
This is why their grotesque multiplication of eyes is more philosophically
useful than a portrait of a person. One face becomes many, while the border of
the face can travel from the skin to clothing, landscape, architecture, a
public image or an entire social group. The face is a machine of social
identification, and its success does not depend upon biological resemblance.
The NPC has almost no individual traits. The Chad has too many exaggerated
ones. both function as extremely efficient faces because a recognisable social
judgement is compressed into a few visble marks.
The copy does not keep the face inside its borders
The
looksmaxxing face brings faciality into a more frightening proximity with the
living face. In the old cartoon a character can be given a grotesque jaw
without serious consequences for the drawer's own bones. In the new hierarchy
the cartoon becomes the standard against which the human face is evaluated. The
bordering effects of the face begin to multiply. One face is enclosed within
another ideal face, whose contour is enclosed within a chart, whose chart is
returned to the viewer as the supposed objective truth of his own appearance.
The Machine proliferates eyes which do not merely look outward; each eye
becomes another place from which the subject imagines himself being judged. The
boy before the mirror does not imitate one living rival. He imitates a
distributed optical machinery that has no final body. It is this lack of an
original which gives the ideal its peculiar capacity to remain unsatisfied.
-x-
The term
redundancy acquires an unexpected relevance. In an ordianry account of
communication redundancy suggests information repeated after it has alraedy
been transmitted. For Guattari repetition has distinct regimes and their
differences are not simply differences in the quantity of the same message. A
redundancy of resonance can organise signs around a recogniable centre,
multiplying confirmations of the same identity or interpretation. A redundancy
of interaction concerns recurring relays through which heterogeneous elements
become capable of operating together. Every collective needs some degree of
recurrence, some capacity to recognise its own phrases, faces and gestures. A
refrain can create the minimum territory from which anyone is able to depart.
But a redundancy may also close on itself until every difference is summoned
merely to confirm what the system has already decided. The striking thing about
a number of Alt Right templates is how much formal variety they can absorb
while keeping the relations of superiority and inferiority nearly unchanged.
The refrain
has a similarly double existence. A refrain is an expressive recurrence by
which a territory is established, a way of marking a passage through chaos by
the return of a sound or gesture. The digital refrain may be a short clip, the
pronunciation of based, the invocation of the red pill, a familiar frog, the
transformation of the same movie line into another accusation. These fragments
announce that one is among people capable of recognising them. But the refrain
need not remain at home. A joke borrowed from a teenage imageboard may become a
parliamentary slogan, a merchandise design, a campaign gesture or a news
television graphic. With every passage the fragment acquires new companions and
may shed earlier ones. The politcal question is what these passages do. Does
the recurring figure make it possible for people who were isolated to organize
themselves? Does it turn a scattered resentment toward an identifiable
programme of exclusion? Does it enter a market in which outrage is monetized
and everybody has a material interest in producing the next outrage? No single
answer follows from the fact of repetition.
A refrain
persists while the things it assembles change
Colective
assemblages of enunciation allow us to get beyond the rather tiresome question
of whether these people really believe their jokes. It is assembled from a
photograph made by someone who may no longer be involved, a borrowed fictional
character, the convention of a particular forum, the algorithms of a platform,
the audience which knows where to place its laughter, the person who adds the
newest caption, and the people who screenshot the result to condemn it. the
collective assemblage speaks through this material arrangement. This does not
absolve individuals of responsibility for harassment or hatred. It simply
recognises that responsibility cannot be adequately investigated by pretending
the image is a little letter, written in solitude, whose meaning can be
recovered by consulting the author's secret mind. We have to follow the
production of the circumstances in which the utterance became available,
powerful and repeatable. A collective voice is not the sum of individual voices
but a relation through which certain utterances can be made at all
Here the
politics of virality becomes a much more exact problem than the idea that
something spreads rapidly. Virality names a relation among imitation,
recommendation, measurable attention, and the incentives through which
attention is made to reproduce itself. . A commercial platform does not need to
endorse the utterance's content in order to benefit from the exchanges it
generates. Yet one should not imagine a single platform secretly controlling
every political result. There is no universal algorithm called the Alt Right.
what one can identify are recurring couplings between particular economies of
attention and particular pleasures of recogniton, humiliation, initiation and
belonging. The international passage of these forms is a particularly interesting
test of the abstract Machine. An American imageboard joke can be translated
into an Indian social media register without retaining its original political
references. The point is not that all nationalisms are secretly one ideology,
nor that every repeated image is part of an organised international conspiracy.
The point is that some procedures of enunciation travel very well: the heroic
face set against the deficient one, the claim to have awakened from a mass
delusion, the comic humiliation of the speaker who questions the dominant
narrative. The references alter, the historical antagonisms alter, and the
composition of the audience alters. Even the pleasure of the joke alters as it
enters anohter langauge. A machine is not proved abstract because it has become
universal. Its abstraction is evident in the possibility that a relation can be
extracted and made to operate with different components, while always requiring
these components in order to exist at all. This is also why every attempt to
write a complete dictionary of Alt Right speech will be obsolete nearly as soon
as it appears. The terms matter, but the terms do not exhaust the procedures
which produce them.
-x-
Perhaps the
most extraordinary illustration of this poliical fragility is provided by the
Netflix documentary The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem. What began
on 4chan as a collection of rather harmless pranks, Rickrolls and
the collective pleasure of making someone else take a joke seriously,
eventually produced Anonymous, a collective whose very identity was the absence
of an identifiable subject. The Guy Fawkes mask, itself borrowed from a
fictional revolutionary, became the face of a tousand people who could
participate in the same acton without becoming the same person. Anonymous
subsequently entered the revolutionary atmosphere of Occupy Wall Sreet. Yet the
same imageboard culture, its anonymity, its improvizations, its peculiar
enjoyment of collective disruption, also provided the conditions for the
eergence of QAnon. How does the anonymous become the initiate, and how does the
pleasure of having no identity become the extraordinary pleasure of possessing
the only true identity?
Tere is
perhaps something here that reminds us of the French Revolution, particularly
the relation between the Terror and Thermidor. The revolutionary eruption had
opened up an extraordinary dissonance between the people and the identities
through which they had previously been governed. The king was no longer the
sovereign, the subject was suddenly a citizen, the citizen was the people, and
the people were yet to be constituted. duing the Terror of 1793–94, however,
revolutionary virtue increasingly became a criterion by which the revolutionary
himself could be identified, investigated and eliminated. The enemy of the
revolution could be discovered within the revolution. Then came Thermidor in
July 1794, the overthrow of Robespierre, followed by the persecution of
Jacobins and the repression of popular radicalism. Remarkably, some of those
who had participated in the Terror now participated in its repudiation. The
same revolutionary vocabulary could be reorganised around entirely different
relations of power. This is hardly an identity between the Terror and QAnon,
but it suggests that a collective enunciation can be captured by the very
apparatus of identification it had once disrupted.
It is perhaps
for this reason that the contemporary eruption of protests is occurring under
governments identified with both the Right and the Left. In India, protests
against the BJP government have gathered around electoral exclusion,
unemployment and education; in Nepal, the Communist-led government faced a
youth revolt against corruption and restrictions on social media; in Mexico,
protests against the left-wing Morena government have expressed anger over
violence and insecurity. These grievances are materially different, and their
political consequences cannot be inferred from their shared forms of
circulation. Yet the recurrence of memetic protest across these differences
suggests that collective dissonance need not originate in a prior ideological agreement.
A borrowed image, an absurd name, a repeated gesture can become the occasion
through which otherwise separated bodies discover a capacity to act together.
This is what I mean by Simulacra A, the simulacral production of
dissonance which opens the subject to other possible relations. Simulacra
B marks the contrary possibility, when that dissonance is captured by
an increasingly elaborate machinery of identity. There is no guarantee that A
will not become B. The political question concerns the conditions under which a
collective can sustain its dissonance without demanding that every participant
finally acquire the same face.
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