There is no Fall of Rome (or else we all built its ruins in state)
Utcumque potuimus veritatem scrutari, ea quae videre licuit per aetatem, vel perplexe interrogando versatos in medio scire, narravimus ordine casuum exposito diversorum: residua quae secuturus aperiet textus, pro virium captu limatius absolvemus, nihil obtrectatores longi, ut putant, operis formidantes. Tunc enim laudanda est brevitas cum moras rumpens intempestivas nihil subtrahit cognitioni gestorum.
- Ammianus Marcellinus, Rerum gestarum libri XXXI XV.1, after 380 CE, amanuensis
When you dissect everything does it really boils down to social acceptance? Because if so I am a very contradicting individual I chase a dream that require social acceptance but yet I am antisocial
- Abdi Smokes, 1 December 2021, Twitter for iPhone
1. Creepy Logo Stories
Our technological dreamscape in delightfully flawed sRGB monitor-glow Technicolor of online life underlyingly comprises a sophisticated system of deep-encoded categories and signs entrenched in our minds by the trick of constant exposure up to pure white, the fundament of subtractive color and, complementarily, the ultimate apex of additive, wherein we express through our gamut in digital video with significant alterations and transformations rendering the data unrecognizable except insofar as it can be rendered from lossy codec to screen, where, viewed, it happens to carry a sequence of logotypes preceding the grey-area cinematic download. One may, without much effort at all, make the trivial observation that the production-company logo sequence is narratively detached from whatever cinematic sequences follow, conveying little to no meaningful exegetic value with respect to what it politely introduces except insofar as it may inform something of a meta-understanding of how the film itself was produced, who may have been involved, and the identities of its potential backer-beneficiaries on the finance side, a series of signs whose internal logics occupy the space of a maximum of twenty seconds apiece, only narrativizable in the sense of their motion graphics progressing over a series of frames to form the final image from which one at last gleans something along the lines of Sony, Pixar, Lionsgate, MGM, Warner, A24, or something else entirely. Eventually coming to expect and recognize various start conditions for given logos over the course of multiple pirate downloadings, multiple full viewings, and multiple rounds of thought which invariably begin at the subconscious level of the subtle, backgrounded ident - the same thing James Ferraro surely considers when he claims America, by virtue of its Hummers and its wars, is a “theatrical nation” and when he expresses a world of “21st century trash” on Far Side Virtual - some may become drawn to a micronarrative apophenia whereby they can relate to the logos moreso than what such logos introduce, loosely interpreting already abstract motifs through idiosyncratic lenses and coming to conclusions only understood on the inside, a line of thought most natural for a child lacking contexts along which lines to interpret fiction who does not quite draw a line between fact and allegory and finds a certain magic in the logos, which seem to lack both, to present nothing, to be living, breathing equivalents of brands not yet mentally correlated to products in the meatspace domain, without the constraints of physical law. When, later, the meta-understanding emerges, the desire to interact with the medium ensues without any real knowledge of the software used to produce these images so painstakingly, distant from what is possible, and thus available tools - Sony Vegas 13, Windows Movie Maker, Adobe After Effects - become evidently the closest approximation of the unattainable, creating the rigidly categorical system of re-editing the logos in series of effects until an apparent publishable state emerges, YouTube as a gathering point, and the children involved figure out they are not alone in their pursuits, birthing the “logo kid,” knower of everything and nothing. This group’s defining characteristic is their emphasis on non-narrative work and a sense of “readymade metamorphosis,” taking what is already there and extracting elements from it through predictable digital methods seen in video editors procured and used for their effects alone, arranged into patterns, satisfactory to only a select few congregated knowers of the craft. In this sense, we, as avant-garde artists in this day and digital age, are all logo kids.
Given the apparent granularity of individual comprehension across such - rather loosely - logo-oriented spaces and now the whole world having over time arisen as such in a sea of pattern recognition swiftly becoming apophenia, we must nonetheless ascertain that this ocean of quasi-understanding shares across individuals in its atomization, and the readymade necessitates, the world only partially differentiable, its existing differentiation coming well undone with every new move against existing epistemological standards, a series of neat boxes which appear to fit everything placed therein on the level of the box-beholder being plugged into few or no others, yet are said to accommodate only certain things without difficulties. Such is what we see with the abject loss of crucial context surrounding the ongoing wojak-proliferation or perhaps normalization, that these crude-outlined symbols now widely integrated into the TikTokker’s unthinkably labyrinthine system of mind-regulatory traffic signs had their origin within denialist, equally angry male failure whereby society could be reorganized around the outside “Chad,” the “soyjak,” and no doubt many others, that an unfalsifiable system be construed around the self at whims to legitimize total unintegration into an existing system too complex for the developing misunderstanding, underpinned by an existentialism which never seems to subside even in desperate times. This context well outside of mind, we see the Gigachad merely used to put in neat, “strong,” and ultimately unattainable compartments, while everything dislikable may be attributed more and more particular stubble-bearded figures, readymades transformed for slights by sleights of Chan. The TikTokker, along the lines of an algorithm and but ten years old or so, receives this mass of signals and makes sense thereof by imposing it despite the unsound skeleton of its ontology, and thus categories are preeminent in that grammar of being despite the fuzzy, permeable borders discarded in the process of attributing such categories a kind of mental reality, by which means it self-perpetuates through constant unfalsifiability, and suddenly, the well-meaning yet exasperated public-middle-school teacher experiences a realignment to meet the rest of society’s marginal underbelly, the transsexuals, the criminals, and the “unbased” (as opposed to the separate “cringe”), thus becoming an immediate enemy. Blind to this amorphous, broadly internal morphing, the ever-difficult TikTokker turns to the DSM-V and learns helplessness by taking “hyperfixation” as nothing more than intensifier for “fixation,” “special interest” likewise for “interest,” and the categories of attention deficit and autism are at last at ease-of-access, ready to accommodate anyone exhibiting even the vaguest phenomenological parallels moreso than one actually introspects and discovers traits in these categories, which, of course, are discursively preeminent in genre, forming the basis of new musical construction in the overgenuine logo kid’s search for the strangest, most differentiated intersection of categories and boxing in with new genre after new genre things whose common traits are, after a while, nothing more than pseudo-philosophical cognitive innovations of the latter day. I will simply call this the tyranny of categories, for it feeds all else I describe, even, in some regards, my construction of the “logo kid.”
Broadly, it would be absurd to attribute such a tyranny to the logo kid, its near-innocent and always nonparticipatory bystander mired in some kind of inside baseball or another into eternity, for it neither begins nor ends with witness. Accordingly, perhaps the “tyranny of categories” I speak of with such alarmism has its origins in consistently illogical reactions to the undifferentiated, fluid, abject horror-bound American tumor-hyperobject, wherein fascism remains, imperceptibly latent, within every “citizen” (at least those above second-class) of the United States or otherwise collaborator therewith, always with the result that, presented with such a visceral mass of spilled blood in continuous, shifting, yet incomprehensible composite, the median (not at all average, for such an idea would be skewed) American attempts to systematize it thinking pertinent Verstehen a strength, completely oblivious to the far more fundamental truth that conjuring this variety of illusion only entrenches another foot deeper the supposed onlooker, who has always been on the inside, overstuffed into other bodies forming a shambling Fourth-Reich ooze from which and within which a crypto-Hitlerist death orgy proceeds with the same eternity humanity attributes to itself otherwise - although these nativist proponents are, as things stand, scarcely human. The rest of the world feeding into it for lack of healthful options, this tumor self-promulgates throughout the Internet, the most illusory of its creations, whence it is impossible to opt out and whence the hallucination operates on the same discursive level as the thing-in-itself many long for through every day, and the tyranny of categories, at a collective level, works as a restraint as much as an oft-acted-upon means of punishment for underclasses denied a taste of latter-day imperial supremacy - one either is a figurative or literal Mormon striving for the commendable Zion or comes across condemned, ostensibly, to a soon-to-be lethal gnosis of the Next. When the state may take a life, it likewise categorizes the mass into its arbitrarily worthy and unworthy parts, regulating the tumor with threat of prison rape or death, and the common man now thinks in IQ percentiles to excuse deficits, striving so earnestly to be worthy to the state in a world where these categories blindly fluctuate with the stochastic rapidity of adulterations of Roman Imperial office in late antiquity, the beater-beaten dichotomy proliferated in every power dynamic and every newly impossible part of what was once experience held in common, diluting even supposed rights to roof and sustenance. Bodies descend, and the logo kid watches their abstractions to inflate the degree to which fiction is intrinsic to a human experience increasingly defined by total abbreviation, only ever promulgating empty signs in a time of digital excess and radical ontological redefinitions. This is Hell, and the logo kid weathers it.
The reference point whereby we categorize has shifted to an indescribable, internal locus of origin, an incomprehensible vibe-axiom of composite images construed from the depths of memory so personal they are nothing, giving meaning to Chomsky’s “colorless green ideas” once and for all, yet ruining their expression, resulting in a phenomenon which ultimately entails a widespread atmosphere of incomprehension wherein the normalfag becomes the always-newfag, and video essayists-as-educators, at the forefront of uncoordinated efforts lacking any real semblance of didactic purpose when finance becomes involved, create slots for advertisements to fit into neatly during meals. This kind of “education” thus finds its primary purpose in advertising ideology, uncritical as the Wikipedia skimming efficiently misremembered through layers of artificial-intelligence redrafting, and “unpolitical” work becomes the most repugnant of all, indeed in its politics, its quasi-didactic purpose to quietly reinfore all already available elsewhere without further research, amplifying not necessarily lies, but watered-down truths voided of their intensity by the need to retain engagement in the vivid dream of everyday life, dominated by the image above the sound, void of relatable characterizability. Again, the category comes herein to dynamic prominence, governing the always-newfag’s approach to the world such that nothing is uncontained and beyond the categorization system and the newfag, in imitation of the seasoned syntactician, produces frames of subcategorization from the faulty hierarchical grammar of being, expecting the entailed presence of certain forms at certain levels according to a rigorous set of inviolable rules which, despite their supposed underpinnings, consistently produce ungrammatical forms, which in turn elicit only some necessary revisions to the generative framework without even a mention of the myriad for which modeling language is, as it were, but a partial model constantly revised and debated, accounting only for one range of synchronic data, soon to become permanent in the minds of all us confused onlookers. Indeed, the grammar of race obeys a similarly branching (albeit never truly binary-branching in the manner of X-bar) hierarchy of inheritance in the mind of the long-term always-newfag obsessed with concepts of human variation proposed now centuries ago in the works of those who knew just as few smidges as the non-PhD harbinger of seemingly esoteric, really worthless supposed knowledge pertaining thereto, and frames of subcategorization originated with the parents and passed down through generations have long promoted anti-miscegenation regulatory efforts amidst inconceivable worldly flux, and what has percolated up in an attempt to move through the structure in a broad sense descends to the bottom of, a cycle soon to be enabled even in literary circles by the video essayist-as-educator, breaking open a subcategorization of what may or may not be read according to imposed, superficial categories, indeed engaging in tyranny.
Drifting in semantics along both ameliorating and disparaging currents in equal measure is likewise a sacrosanct idea of gender, already discussed at length elsewhere by many with far more knowledge pertinent thereto but by no means immune as a concept to the tyranny of categories, indeed propping up arrangements broadly unsustainable for all involved in the percolating cycle yet ideal for the proliferation of the cycle itself, individualized in scope yet attributable not to but one individual, atomizing yet universalizing. The binary division so salient in all expressions of gender construes the remainder of identities in negative relation to the whole, for the “agender” is an absence of the binary (or anything else) while the “nonbinary” explicitly rejects such concepts, yet naturally, the logo kid becomes more drawn to the flashy, modern-tending, and modernizing externals to the established concept witnessing their apparently exalted status as mirables, the topic of conversation the always-newfag may not construe so easily, having grown obsessed with complementarianism and the hierarchical interrelations of arbitrary category nodes - which lack subjective, written explanations for their states in the now and thus pose quite the problem for any an undifferentiated newfag - a topic which rises to importance among logo kids given their blameless fixation on what exists outside, also potentially lending itself to more rigid ideas of a Political Compass and of regulatory deeds of fiction-fandom inter alia, but above all else exposing the logo kid to the idea that it is true at least in certain domains that, as Holly Trollope has put it in a disappeared interview, “prominence being static long term is unlikely because context and identity are disposable,” though this is raised to expression in the form of identities expressing change and transience - a definition of abrosexuality, the rapid flux of attraction between varying ranges of intensity, comes to the front of mind from my own far-off days of indie-wiki pilfering - yet this manner of categorization seems restrained by comparison to manly appropriation of such elements.
At and from these digitally-mediated ideological margins wherein categories and the logo kid’s means and methods of categorization predominate come - as one may reasonably imagine - not sliding, integrated gamuts fading mutually and interrelatedly between the fluidity of self-designations and the staunchness of social semireals, but rather further categories, the terms of which themselves promote a different kind of argument and broadly obey a type hierarchy wherein items may inherit certain traits, networking labels which only let radiate further labels themselves interdependent and only existing on terms known to the audience who “celebrate themselves” in theory, yet practically criticize and berate, seeking this idea of validity using a logic known only on the inside, forming a space by the name of Marginalized Orientations, Gender Alignments, and Intersex (MOGAI), discussed elsewhere solely when conceptual validity becomes a factor, leading often into rounds of ridicule despite the obvious, that no one, anywhere, seems anymore to exist outside these self-referential and recursive definitions - but I will not blunder by crying “invalidity” myself and thus feeding the machine in ignoring the significance MOGAI thinkers, who deserve to be singled out as such, attribute to gender identities like catgender, neopronouns only expressed through emojis, and sexualities in perpetual multi-identified flux, what I might dub some kind of abro-ego. What makes this abro-ego’s creations so immediately potent is their vivid expressive power, the outsourcing of atomization through communal, multiple, and quite often self-governing wiki-sites and social media only possible in an apparent “information era,” where one person’s newfound identifications are collected and made conceptual possibilities for others in sharing framework after framework, resulting in not a memetic version of identity per se, but certainly a transformative one, even if steeped in constant patterns emerging from the unyielding discourse mirage, noticed in places others may see nil, a vulgar philosophy constructed in terms of the nebulous latent space of the vibe, effective and recognized all around in recent generations’ internal political logics even if inarticulate and at times incomprehensible in rigorous terms, but just as the mathematician too must work with the indefinite and the unknown, so shall any good exegesis of the systems to which MOGAI-logoists are today beholden. The approach taken at these margins allows manifold catgender or neutrois vibes to “align” (in the words of the one who coined MOGAI, whose initial intention was to de-emphasize the pertinence of some assignedness-at-birth in whatever microblog terminological domains he wielded authority over) into complex frameworks rivaling, in some respects, Socratic approaches in interrogating the vibe-label as much as its semantics and thus scope or meaning, yet, by virtue of these very same conceptual benefits and intriguing nebulosities, the final and hitherto constant result of discursive arguments born from what in reality we could call pointing misogyny, misandry, phobia, and bigotry in equal, indiscriminate, and nuanceless measure to restrain it from ever reaching a sense of surface social reality, even when social reality has become in equal measure argumentative post-Tumblr exodus through the perpetual casting of the niche around from place to place, station to station, esoteric and theological in nature in that its application draws from a set of unfalsifiable axioms which become recombinatory with philosophy and the verifiable truths of the everyday, explaining the former on terms of the latter, and the terms of theology are the ones on which I may appreciate MOGAI as a faulty guide for being, a metamorphic metaphor whereby nothing is truly compressed into pieces of truth wieldable and arguable, although the texts used are fleeting postings made at algorithmic behest for algorithmic circulation as opposed to freely-referenced, random-access codices whence born were the Abrahamic religions in their late-antique form whence present civilization we’d call Western can be said to have come in turn, dressed in purple, palpably aware of all its ironies and contradictions yet never sharing them lest the terms of sense already established in these theological manners prove impossible to reconcile with reality bifurcated from the moral texts, be they of fixed-text or entirely social nature, language as a virus always springing from the Burroughsian ideal into the real, a notion whereinto the always-newfag may not so easily self-insert lively efforts to recontextualize and simply chuckles shallowly and without a genuine sense of profundity by any means, promulgating polemic operating on ostensible terms of logic, veracity, and correspondence to the real, but actually beholden to the same illogics as the MOGAI idea has always held close to its heart through the integration of the vibe, publishing “cringe” for all to see so readily and feeding a computerized surveillance machine to punish not necessarily misdeeds, but misvibings, things misaligned with the broader system the always-newfag wishes to surreptitiously universalize in their increasingly private network of what are now best seen as constantly fluctuating telephone-game chains of Discord servers and reconsidered, inconcise rules for society vaguely underground - if the underground even exists by now with the kind of surveillance positioned over and throughout its restrictive reach.
Centering again a procul vantage of this always-newfag, we see looking from the outside in how they stand as a force of ignorance and negative anti-epistemology, then weaponized as it becomes the new standard for a metaphysical framework or frameworks in the place of or more often upon whatever stood tall before the realignment into a standard of flux, there is a strange longing among the masculine for the ostensibly obsolete system of pederasty they have remembered in hushed tones since its post-antique disappearance from the foundations of much of Western society’s masculine aspects, holding the idea of a pubescent, effeminate, and often third-gendered male as its theoretical catalyst through many attempts at explicit reintroduction - the Uranian idea sitting at the forefront, though the most truly successful effort to integrate pederasty once more alongside modern conceptions of nonviolating male homosexuality has by and large been the category of the femboy. Even if pederasty is not readily recreatable at the macro-level whereat it once occupied every station of powerful men and their boyish salvation-elect, on a more microscopic level it was, has been, and continues to be recreatable among those wanting to exert power through categories that place one group in a bucket of submissives, another in a dominant domain, and others into total irrelevance, meaning the spread of the femboy-idea occurred along the worn-down roads of womanizing imposition, along deep-seated strings of control upon which more and more rope came to depend as time went on, to the regrettable extent that the femboy made its way over to the otherwise strictly always-newfag-vituperating logo kids, whose role in the new system was never known to them when, in their eyes, all the femboy-idea could be was another form of a priori psychosexual identity without historical precedent, thus construing generally virtual spaces around a term so effectively normalized it is, in some circles, now considered inoffensive, reigning over thought about gender all throughout. The logo-MOGAI idea, it can be surmised, takes little issue with self-electing and self-governing along the lines well-traveled by regulatory always-newfags concerned with authenticity and transparency in a time erroneously labeled the age of the latter, the Age of Transparency, for the sole reason that social-media presences now enable the idea of the femboy and fast-food chain profiles construed, like Citizens United, as distinct persons to, in tandem, exist, pushing limits which, void, had to be established rapidfire in the vacuum left by Usenet and its ilk as their decline became palpable, for within these profiles are neuroses to be filtered down, a corporate origin of contemporary culture beaming down from above, but the story I herein tell is, at day’s end, decentralized, and, happening and undergoing discussion behind closed doors as much as in the bustling city streets (as was said to be done by the Etruscans with “even children” in necessarily difficult-to-trust Roman-origin texts claiming their children held in common as some kind of vicious attack slandering by means of embellished salacious aspects), ideas of pederasty are corporate, public insofar as anyone may join a board through a purchase, but private insofar as the board-room’s affairs are irreversible and central, dictating a machine unknowable in its complex networks of employees along hierarchies we might call the Order of Nine Angles were we to name these things explicitly, and the Age of Transparency only allows certain parts to be seen at the surface, the body’s considerations filtered through layers upon layers of marketing to the commoner, who either does not concern themself on a conscious level or has already entered the logo-newfag complex in some way or another.
Logo kid gendering regularly externalizes its principles to what has already been generated, the already-been-chewed nebulae of concept which have materialized over millennia of society in its neat categories without so much as an interlude in sedentary society for the audience to pass through the restroom and politely retrieve rounds of concessions for their quasi-amusement and a vague degree of sustenance alike, and putting these examples to an alternative sort of stranger’s scrutiny necessarily produces an equal measure of both proper insight and assumptions made from the paucity of proper evidence entering the narrowed peepholes, piercing which are darting eyes alert to the storytelling of a broader society without working definition-fields of what makes a performance a “performance” in the gendered sense, proclaiming identities of a myriad sorts in a vast taxonomy wherein each logo kid is a perfect, still-life taxidermy of a different nexus of gender neuroses, of neuroses and interests in general placed thereunto as much as inserted therein, frozen in time yet entirely dynamic and reliable-upon to change within the months as recent pronominals promulgate further and more and more are collected to the profile, forming a nest of disparate ideas made into one thing - indeed far newer than what the always-newfag has conceptualized, free from cycles regardless of the mark of intensity whereat the newfag strives so urgently at every possible cost to operate, having construed Aristotle’s catharsis not as a bodily purge along the lines of defecation, but rather a sacrosanct act of belching out personal evils which remain as much as evil can in every human as a potential even if expelled ephemerally, such that all history, in truth often wastewater, becomes a mixture of the very same belched elements. Queerness, then, is the dregs of a difficult, suppressed, and visibly fragmented narrative originating in Sappho et al. millennia into the past and left so deep in the arms of interpretation for so much longer than the quotidian historian can in practice ascertain that projecting concepts onto queerness is easier than defining the composite of sexual deviations by which we commonly construe the character of queerness, a recombinatory effort of compiling a great many kinds of shame into a definiton of pride in the negative, and the continual redefining of queerness-in-the-negative is a tool for use in the maintenance of community. Thence, it becomes visible that projecting novel ideas onto and thus producing a novel combinatorics of queerness is popular insofar as it adds a personal touch of categorical thought and multitudes of entailed idiosyncrasies, which mean no two people define queerness identically and place the isolated logo kid into conflict with others who cannot quite state queerness on terms with universal significance or at least colloquial meanings understood by those increasingly raised on the crude advertising-pedagogy found in a post-2017 YouTube ecosystem, post-2020 Instagram, and post-2022 Twitter alike, cascading into the corrupt composite of discourse, whence so much needless struggle begins and many identities are constructed in the negative, against the tiresome tides of time as much as Verstehen’s pervasive staticity, never quite catching up.
In its polychrome ever-flux, this scripture, I must with nurturing care emphasize, is no sculpture, much less veritable death-mask (for it cannot as mere idea bring teleology to the ongoing in lieu of action), of all relevant dramatis personae playing at their roles in an argued-to-be-concrete representation of the real world, and I allege of myself my own succumbing to the constant cycle of vicious categorizing, ultimately separating and straining tendencies, and I criticize with the vigor of struggle session and the attention of an earnest yet wholly secular researcher of the already-difficult Biblical documentary hypothesis the work I have laid out for an attempted exegesis’ sake hitherto, ideally systematizing my anecdotes further towards a sense of bitter robustness but, before anything else to come, the more pressing issue is this inattentive, rather troublesome bifurcation of logo kid and always-newfag seemingly disallowing overlap despite the theory’s allowance for crossfeed between such polarized categories. An ever-augmented state of epistemological accessibility, however, allows for both to exist within the same person in measures independent when expressed in terms of variables and acting not necessarily as sole determinants of function, personality, and all relevant ilk making up a person, demonstrable when the logo kid first meaningfully and earnestly acknowledges the always-newfag’s existence, innovative as much as differentiated, through shame at necessary acknowledgments of superficiality, then self-distances from the established logo-kid mind, thus deviating from an orthodoxy available to oneself, for knowledge comes in hues as much as intensities in such a subjectivity-dominant era, and the known no longer comes through the lens of identifiable authors, broadly replaced with “Editorial Staff” or “The What’s-It-To-You Team” or a mirage of devout Wikipedians devouring stories for the sake of an imaginary epistemological totality, and nominal orthodoxy is impossible as acts witihn a reign to attribute only to an emperor of some domain of information whose only domain is an article they’ve published anonymously for justifiable fear of ad-hominem attacks taken to the point of contra eius vitam, standing in for a far broader wave, but by virtue of anonymity, one already ensnared in the nebulous logo kid-always-newfag nexus constructs and presents identity case by case, selecting for incendiary contributions as much as sincere attempts at recombinatory categorization, both permeating and constructing the syntax and semantics governing the system, such that no single party carries complete power. In this way, the differentiated YouTube Poop aficionado continually downloading Vegas plugins from questionable sources sustains a very carefully-regulated air of invisible norms to justify the fighting spirit of the artform and impose standards of quality nonexistent and completely nonsensical elsewhere without the knowledge that this is the case, yet the logo-kid initiate’s totalizing theories on the medium eventually become integrated into the same set of norms thitherto entirely vituperated in the name of raw creative impulse, the unawareness of curation disappearing in favor of ambition as a great many may have tried to impose with ostensibly senseless impulse, the always-newfag thus standing as a voice of authority even if there is none beyond the paracosm. No matter how many times Vice Media and their alternative-journalism ilk approach the dominant figureheads in the space who may or may not have outgrown their always-newfag nature in the context of the vernacular YTP tradition, the reporters will not understand the lingering impulses of children which led the space to its nature just as the greater arena of international news does little more for terms like the Finns’ far-off sisu than provide a measly single sentence without glosses or true semantic pondering, none of them noticing the rapidity and Heraclitean fire which births the archetypes I describe, always to fall back on ties to the ordinary, offline world, to say “think X on Y Substance doing Z in a novel way,” a formula far less fluid than the inside baseball really flows and pulsates, one which nonetheless highlights how intimately the world depends on the mind of the child to distinguish and describe the indescribable, yet swiftly erases its impact. This is the means by which the logo kid and always-newfag are valued, insofar as they can explicate, then integrate, and at last disappear altogether.
Youth, then, though it brims over with such fruitful chance and possibility to such a remarkable intensity, meaningfully catalyzes subsequents through means chance cannot wholly explain in and of itself while having no authoritative bearing thereupon given the litany of regulations, legally enshrined or otherwise, pertinent to children and even moreso to ever-increasingly conscious adolescents, whose categories continue to exist in their minds after falling victim to outgrowing, imprinting subtle guidelines for worldly behavior and subsequent understandings, the myth of the digital native disproven by its own consequences, the total ruin of a knowing-framework present in the book-form for millennia prior, expressed through written-word organization present in print and indexed without hypertextuality and sans streamlining overlaid to prevent tangential concepts from leaking into the mind as they once did when books and articles were always read in full, cross-references always theoretically consulted at bare minimum, a state which, while no doubt indescribably convenient to the marauding researcher, concludes the abstract, open mind which weathered days in libraries exploring in an idiom most recently exemplified only as late as the early 1970s, perhaps to be dated to the passing of the last of the Modernists, the final synthesist of all human history, and the least-read of the literary geniuses of America, Louis Zukofsky. Having self-enriched through many decades of compounded noospheric journeys leading into a vast linguistic array of literature across the human patchwork and thus having come to transcend historical patterns in subsuming them and imposing metamorphoses thereupon, editing the preexisting beyond recognition to blur the interrelation between source and resultant new form, Zukofsky, as the foremost and perhaps greatest among the final frontiers of the old, pre-digital epistemology, found a totality through scouring the ages to find and refine all within, completing his magnum opus “A” only near to his own piece of history’s drawing to a close knowing he’d encompassed over half of the twentieth century in his masterwork, and by these means, Zukofsky, having proven himself the unprecedented, unparalleled compositor, produced a truly universal epideictic neither invective nor panegyric, yet none were brought together, nothing was held in common within this framework, and his odyssey far too tragically concluded with public ignorance in a nation which, at the onset of “A”’s first movement, had provided backdrop for unionists, socialists, communists, anarchists, and all their other kin to struggle with meaning, by means of real significance, but soon came to embody only capital shortly after LZ of LZ Masque (with CZ) left this world, ushered out by the flattening of so many knowing-ways down to opinion, a thing which forms in the atomized mind far from the “z-sited [Arbutus] path” of Long Island, ever-internetworked, the preeminent hyperlink lying latent within the next two decades of clever computational promulgation, whereby the knowing of a few tongues - as we knew of LZ - can be reduced effortlessly to mere dabbling by changes to understanding we cannot derive consequence from at first, for even in exploring “A”, I was slave to the hyperlink reference myself for lack of immediate recognition and would otherwise be trapped in the position of a mirror-world Gaddis critic, praising (rather than blindly scolding) that which I do not in any way understand, and such is the context of Verstehen in youth when everything is, in theory, accessible, yet the neatness of computed categorization, irreconciliably binary, destroys every tangent, precludes every digressive chance, in flattening. When the logo kid of today’s post-Zukofskyan world sees, consciously or unconsciously, how appallingly reduced the set of epistemologies has become since LZ’s days alive, their atomized, mirage-predicated worldview shatters to acrid pieces, they begin growing up and outward, that quintessential recombinatory-creative impulse verges on void, and multiplicity ceases to precede reduction, for this is the design of the world, to confine such things to the constructed child, to inflict what the by-the-books Class S mangaka does with their stories, categorizing one way as fleeting that another may and will soon take its place.
Though it may be argued a precedent for the logo kid’s voracious recontextualizing tendency and the firmament of partial knowing among always-newfags as translators in its days took the Tang, modernist poetry, rooted firmly in the prosodic, literary-for-literati precedent of millennia whence formal excursions might in the long century outgrow with unnatural flourishes exiting unbearably unforgiving concrete in an uncertain domain lacquered in unabashedly forward thought to intensify the written word’s bearing and expanse over a reading public of millions watching with open eyes, differs in that it had the potential to be readily scrutable inter pares, what the present’s writers of all kinds so lamentably lack no matter the magnitude of oversimplification to which they’ve self-bound as mythic sailors through alluring waters, tempted by the abstract to fall in and transcend pseudointellectual drivel or “Instapoetry” through original synthesis yet never approaching the recombinatory-creative impulse whereby worlds collided in the long nineteenth century and which for several decades thereafter became rapidly categorized and differentiated in mind through the unrestrainable, overall unkempt impulse of imperium and otherwise, culminating in an all-but-vanquished mass of human experience liberated from the fiction of genre, yet soon to disappear in the thickening mirage of standard teachings and into holes of expectation-meeting and verbatim adherence to forms only relevant to high schoolers, body paragraphs and corresponding sentential formulae in the midst held too tight in mind, again returning to China but well past the Tang, falling into the proverbial eight-legged essay as a means and a step as opposed to an artform, the reference coming to precede any exegesis on the subject, at least as perceived by a myriad contemporary reformists preoccupied with seeking the new at all costs yet rightfully abhorring meritless systems increasingly centered around n-legged essayism to such an extent that they encourage their subjects to imagine little else and thus remain subject, static and stuck in the externally-desired mindset and overall grammar of being. Slowly hurrying into the experiential pigeonhole into which nothing will fit by any means and indeed nothing has fit over the course of these decades aside from the banal observation that flows continue and the falsehood of their static nature to enable epistemological alienation to proliferate prolifically beside arcs of history gone unacknowledged in the density of this very aetas, which by its process renders all with such swift swellings that only daimones of media seem to dictate the misinformed avalanche, the fire which all is performs burnings of books and buryings of scholars, both qua mythopoeics, violent its hourly gestures of rescheduling by means of channel drift, and thereby time, time hitherto taken as holding potential understandings of slow and insignificant passage, becomes accordingly a time to relish incomprehension, to become a flood’s victim, lost in knowledge-transformative atomizing processes whereby books are shortened, films summarized, things altered in the name of time not held, much less granted on high, enabling an apotheosis of the fifteen- and soon seven-second moment into a heaven construed on displayed opulence’s terms alone, and all is irrecoverably lost with the rising waters where sit the mysteries of nil, never in the name of anything but providing constructed time to surround moments worked for the wages of unwanted war, all things to be reoriented expeditiously into a single purpose, an imposed teleology well beyond the horizontal spread of the language used to communicate it, which tends to spread not from hierarchical heads downward, but through the authority of networks, web-mediated networks ironically centralized further and made to show their guts more vulnerably by the day. Periodically, this brings an upset to the epistemologically alienated, but broadly, it is but the nature of modern life, to know nothing to the satisfaction of the exterior, the other, and the all-but-imaginary self.
2. Important Queer Art
Given the intensity of this epistemological alienation and likewise how universal it is to experience among even the most learned logo kids of these ranks of ours, one may expect the cultural products resulting to, with at least some consistency, reflect intimately the sensation of removal from knowing and from abstract didactics and in tandem for the art to emerge from the same personal reconstructions of noospheric fabric redyed and detached from the grand tapestry storywork woven through generations of contextual layering into silk, but alas, found there in the artistic heritage of the sincerity-attempting logo kid are only rips incised haphazardly as placeholders for further emotional elaboration, leaving the duty of filling gaps of sensation to the audience outsourced and made the center after years of abro-ego caked on like tar to the fossilized to create some readymade “unity of vision,” which is only to make sense in the context of inexpressible qualia along the lines of colors, yet which is fashionable to claim to understand, demonstrating a peculiar discomfort with expressing emotion in the abstract, for there is nothing more they can do to bring out the mind and make outreach despite constant tries at attaining praise from the beginning of external awareness. They, minimizing such a meticulously woven order broken on behalf of a new essayism, insert the most immediate possible signifiers visible seeking directly demonstrable vision-unity as if art may carry any measure of objectivity and one tactic has, in their opinions, long remained tried and true in spite of its novelty in the grand scheme of all things, often bring product and likewise a sense of productivity to the table at which they imagine art discussed in the open even when discourse has sensibly self-cloistered into Discord servers at the behest of forces vaster than it can itself - if, again, there is a self for it to have - imagine, and the Byzantine process of reception becomes inaccessible and useless, yet tantalizingly appealing, to the logo kid reaching for the other with grasp a precarious it could slip at the moment of the realization that contradiction is the spice of life and total consistency is all but unattainable in these domains, rounded and patrolled for signs of life never lived, all of which points to the cracked, buckling road of wanting what cannot ever fall into hand, wishing to attain recognition for doing as many things already done as possible in one package, writing albums upon albums of traumatic material in the teenage domain and never reckoning with whatever is detailed simply because time fails to grant itself to youth, always fleeting with every regret fathomable impending, which, ultimately, shrinks the world when demands of friends become demands of acquaintances and all are acquaintances, residing in unseen circles of hype, immaterial hype without a bearing on divorced reality, still struggling against the amorphous always-newfag who “believes in cringe culture” and has never tried to touch a digital audio workstation, a Photoshop window, or anything else of digital consequence, but the middling mediation of machines only disparages the state of affairs, degrading the signals beyond the domain of, say, RateYourMusic, where sampling contemporaries has become the norm among musicians of “plunderphonic” persuasions without knowledge of (John) Oswald, recontextualized into raw genre tags coupled to nary an experientiality, combining impulses according to unedited formulae (often of drum patterns in a world where they may solely define a genre) or even unedited samples in and of themselves, putting Lopatin’s Replica on a depressive record solely for its depressive signal, disregarding the externalizing Jewish immigrant experiences of blind commercial viewership as a window into America with which Lopatin was so delicately concerned composing each piece, of course disposing of always-dynamic context to innovate, frolicking without meaning and without sign in condemned ruins and the ashes of a world once near-entirely reviewable and altogether subjective. The primacy attributed to these inarticulate vibes and all their corresponding sensations and gamuts thereof felt and conceptualized only within one person yet promulgated by abro-egos - in deep, perpetual flux, mind you - to crowds in an age of easy access to self-publication tools completely devoid of the authority once attributed not at all at random to organs at Random House level verging into Penguin Classics, instead allowing the investment of power in the most logo-charismatic who may argue most potently on the strict yet heterogeneous and wholly standardless terms of the corresponding logo-kid mass hungry for lawyering down streams of rules, yet rhetorical prowess does not ever seem to weigh grave upon the logo kid in at least in its traditional sense, and thus I must, yet again, draw curved lines estranging the past and the present, for in the latter, the most excellent rhetoric is not the most well-formed, but rather that which captures a zeitgeist and experientially mirrors as many people as is possible to do in simultaneity, begetting little “creativity” in the term’s classic sense, yet also a common system of signs coalescing beyond simple systems of so-called “engagement bait” into metonymic signatures of shared algorithmic confluences, responses (on modern Twitter, here) to “blobslop” and “high-school incidents” among the bustling crowd of other vaguely harsh possibilities, though it reaches further, into both the domain of callout Google Docs left behind to ensure no passage through webs of rumors into contact with the accused and the positive recesses of illustrators constantly seeking new outfits to draw, new characters to obsess over having never experienced the work whence they originate, and this becomes, as much as the democratizing strength self-publishing valiantly holds, likewise its downfall, the harsh conditions which birth more and more regulation, coming to resemble or even match the always-newfag’s complex of subcategorization frames in building up a syntax of society, becoming either tangentially related to or depended upon by all interactions a given space encompasses, yet this is why we may not so easily seek forward-thinking vanguards herein.
When classicality’s abandon, arising by means of digital artifacting and fragmentation we cannot comprehend until indeed they manifest, leaves behind only some shards of extant texts for further transfer and novel, yet rooted ideas thereby inbreed lest spaces in mind be rendered empty, niche-deprived, and in endless want as much as everlasting sorrow and incessant mourning for the pulverized world whence they came, we will at last recognize all flaws inherent to the recording process, always deserting some manner of knowledge or framework, but to be remembered tantalizes, so explicit awareness of fragmentation today spawns both the obsessive archival tendency and overoptimized artistic processes targeting what no doubt seems a more permanent kind of cultural memory even if ensnared in digital impermanence and misunderstood as somehow transcending the localized vector of the Internet’s “forever,” the latter sustained by the former’s attribution of equal importance to the entire body of strange - and quite often queer - art produced by the exponents of making all things crucial as they can manage to be, tracking Internet Archive uploads amounting to and regarded as clogs in the proverbial drain to most, and seeing that none of this work obeys any kind of classical standard and acts with near-systemic irreverence, it, as one would expect, creates its own conventions, rock-centric as often as rooted in the systems of, say, wall noise or vaporwave out of many, but the less songwriterly material attracts only logo-kid niches, whereas the through-composed documents of dense narratives and forms lifted into contexts, loftily proposing a sky lined by constellations modernized, subjected to new apophenia, has long sought a new audience, something vaster than the logo-oriented paracosm, which is the precise action whereby it sinks to its misshapen grave, never to transcend its origin. In coming to understand this intense, tectonic-scope rift dividing supposedly-emerging canons of new tradition from the continuity of localized trade preceding digitality and the beginning of a continuous and indivisible system of perpetual surveillance in the name of so-called “digital rights” and thus-spoken “public goods,” one first observes that quite vast swaths of what is known by the name information despite culturally amounting to perhaps-total artwork-by-reference are equally vast numbers documented without the hands of scribes to know their unimaginable binary digits, generated by the hand of what many call the “artist,” who generally displays a gracile, docile, and apathetic indifference to the generating mathematical system whereby a program like Ableton Live, Sony Vegas, or (above all else) Adobe Photoshop bends the discrete mass for further effect, then one, watching, soon comes to realize that by matters just as obtuse in their underlying function to the doctorate-bereft majority, every unsubsumed number flattened in its scope may be exactly reproduced over distances nowadays approaching the limit of light-speed in their traversal of space (a misfortune among disgruntled engineers, however necessary), from which it follows close behind that the culture is only material in a broad sense, divorced from all but the garbled, elaborately-encoded hard drive, in essence a black box, and thus nothing is constrained, everything amok in this vaunted sense of shallow wonder, unregulated and unembarrassed even at the hollow fact that every instrument entailed in digital-art production is borrowed, every pigment so carefully decoupled from physical technique that digital dependency ensues in the absence of fully transferable skills as one would acquire from many nights spent on paintbrush, dip-pen, tape machine, or other medium divorced from a single necessary environs, such that all “tradition” coalescing online, be it the ripples left in Japan and thereabouts by Softimage’s sudden virtual quietus or the quasi-faxlore of countless Jargon files passed around on rotting minis, does not control itself from the inside, does not understand its means, and has never fully captured its own character with any coherence beyond what the digital framework allows at a given moment in time, perhaps never to ascertain itself fully to begin with - although surely it fosters logo kids and inspires awe within their world-eating hearts. A fully-applied sense of classicality, meanwhile, has long required an imprecise kind of textual, visual, or even data reproduction whereby tradition accompanies the item, distorting the contents somewhat with resolute standing waves, yet compounding further possibility of what could have been before and how it may undergo increasingly cumbersome (yet ultimately beautiful) hermeneutics over many centuries piling up bit by bit into caked-on millennia, slathered into gaian slabs of shaky schist, and even when attached commentary accompanies all things seeming worthy of what’s spoken of brazenly as “the discourse,” exterior designs are all over the transcoded file-sharing landscape, which is to collapse at the very moment “digital rights” exceed the position of trade-association rien ever-so-slightly and acquire an audience of international significance, and it is when these muted tones end that every cult of tonality will vanish with its blemished mysteries of illiterate provenance, the time sunken into esotericism bubbling up as waste-product, the world claimed to be built crumbling down, illusory as anything could be.
Verily knowledge, its collapse into empty splendor among nous’ ruins perpetually pending now that institutes stand well beyond the expected authorities, is in its very nature folding at or for ignorant, totalizing hands towards hierarchical orders flattened as described and furthermore is or has become the self-pulverizing marble edifice without a curia-containing roof, only there for awe’s cloying, clinging persistence and thus to serve no living function for however long it uneasily occupies its place, fostering and nurturing impractical nonindulgence as something of a preventative measure. Therefore, examining the exemplars of the issue, Frutiger Aero seems, among others, to draw out many who feel comfort in claiming they are, in a broad sense and in a flattened era stored in fragments throughout a transient network, “scholars” who fill in every gap as they seriously (qua earnestly, of course) delve into mysteries in truth solved as they occurred in history’s record, inquiring with intuition and just-a priori judgments in greater measure than witness and evidence inasmuch as the smoothing of a continuity to tabula rasa makes easier work than to wound the preconceived notions held by a liar populace who forget as soon as they see yet seem to retain the names and even slogans of brands mentioned in fifteen-second preroll advertisements (or even such ads’ premises) through the ephemeral decades, among which concepts is a primacy of the surface form already made extricable in syntax (and more broadly the generative approach) by exhaustive Chomskyan exercises establishing that transformations are applied to a great variety of abstract structures while fitting into every salient rule, but when a “scholar” shifts such a rule into more unfalsifiable territory, sliding it with a stratagem to a new goalpost, the impossible, the indescribable, and then the nondescript reign to great loss. We see that, despite efforts within Aero-oriented circles at truly rigorous categorization returning to supposed historical lineages somehow beholden less to cultural-control projects with corporate origins than to the deeds of diligently anonymized individual designers through whom one would theoretically trace the deeds done, deformalizing the idea of the institute amounts to a deflowering, ultimately manifest at surface form as a covert marketing operation carefully drawn from the ravaged and epitomized corpus such that one may offer a new aesthetic for every conceivable set of hues attested among the generalizing, often generated summaries in much the same way an online storefront tries to predestine its clientele to choose color schemata by season yet offers an endlessly multitemporal slew of itemized materials assembled elsewhere for wages of nil, every “analysis” promulgated comprising the voiceover lifted from an advertisement to sell a way or ways of conceiving of the world to illiterate masses, becoming that which they recall even when the image in its nondescript qualia has vanished from its uneasy station wherefrom it cries out for attention, which ultimately results in an obverse (not reverse) of the job-outsourcing phenomena so sore and many-faceted a problem among businessmen, an obverse process of judgment the people are expected to perform in the place of experts before projecting the same contexts back towards a rectifying system leaning swiftly into moral territory, although every norm established by these means is but a custom carried on for an imagined continuity and beholden to the limits of innately human contextual memory and dulled-out interpretation. With the crushing overwhelm brought on by this promotional deluge and that irresistible profit-turning draw it fosters come evidently harsh circumstances in which to work to look beyond the flood’s sucker-pocked tentacle reach fades, disused and imperceptible, from possibility’s gamut to a spectacular (both qua remarkable and qua theatrical) nothingness, and the loose definition, in low resolution, resolves to semblances, just as the name of a broad parent class, to speak in object-oriented terms, may not, when used to specify a type, be melded to uses more particular than the stated parent class’ definition allows for without error, bringing into the world vast sums of genericized work in all fields of expression which thus dilute their narratives to capture as many of the universals many claim to coalesce from the logo kid-accumulating coalescence of simplified preferences and pre-made choices. Given the great many indescribables involved in articulating queer experience, this interiority seems to put forth a challenge a generic framework, as is widespread, cannot truly meet, paradoxical at surface insofar as what I have called “important queer art” strives to capture as many experiences as possible yet never turns to the sociological, the outward, or the material, all these vantages are but lesser concerns secondary to purportedly expressing such qualia which, both in reality and the important queer paracosm, constitute the inner experience of queerness and often more particularly every much-debated defining aspect of transgender phenomenology (again an ultimately ineffable and wildly idiosyncratic subject to be broached only if one dares with too proud a heart to recognize the folly), and the character of the important queer artist markets on the deceptive premise of subsuming some range of queer experiences into a perfectly “relatable” domain one may not protest or challenge in its reading without, per this artist and their acolytes, undermining the apparent politicizing mission of queer life, which they say is much the same as raising eyebrows to, say, transgender culture itself for entrenching into itself so deeply the virtues reportedly gleaned from perpetual ketamine frolics and deromanced, dispassionate networks of casual sex primarily economic and thus transactional in nature (as is common in Seattle and some parts of New York City), though both critiques hold value when they start from the inside, and the uncritical apostles of the medium seek to win as many apostates as can be found back to the antirealist system on grounds of this unfalsifiable, infallible visage put on for a vast audience by the important queer artist. In truth, failing to prioritize the actionable, the real, and the materially possible as did Wojnarowicz on 1992’s uncompromising, unrelenting ITSOFOMO, thus likewise failing to meet AIDS-crisis demands of the true activist-artist, the militant homosexual, even amidst surely worsening atmospheres of cold-verging-on-inhospitable conflict, even among 2025’s passing claims of an “enemy within” in Great Britain and North America both from high places, and despite every conceivable warning to act boldly and to transgress this milquetoast standard, important queer artists exercise what they see as their right to the contrary approach, whereby they wish misguidedly to provide comfort and promote normalization, visibility, even though their false advertisement of qualia leads nowhither, compromises wherever it cannot be of its own nature alone (a fact which coexists with even the intense, overtly diaristic traits held by the most exemplar and consciously traumatic important queer art), stares down the barrel of a gun not necessarily proverbial, and guts up every alternative avenue to, say, tell stories of dream-sourced introjects decanceling the composer and calling her to compose fantasy-world rock music at just the right time to address some salient inward struggle left behind by some cycle of abuse or another and commodify the impossible, even though by its very nature is this recovery-seeking deed a selfish one.
In convolving qualia through the world seeking the Tacitean-turning-Kaurish pithiness of a remark carrying a verisimilitude transcending time itself in its always-augmenting wisdom to become the epigraphic epitome of a “short twenty-first century” despite the era’s signature mass of fragmentation into what ultimately amount to secular breviaries and assorted compendia of catechisms which pertain only to the now-billions of atomized perspectives built up to heaven as one would do either without purpose in the manner of a tel or, granting greater agency and thus responsibility to the corporate interests whence originated the underlying microstructural and paracosmic domain wherein exists each mind deprived of its interest in the other except insofar as othering is done, mayhaps moreso a Tower of Babel enclosing a combinatoric library of the same sort and a similar name which Borges proposed - that place in which a void of human agency in composition would bore many great thinkers who abhorred large language models’ so-called “Akashic records” swiftly inasmuch as the often-finite nature of human experience would never be seen within the runaway factorial capture of possibility’s total enclosed gamut except wherever it recorded a passage which already existed, canonized prior by the agency and means wielded woven into the welcoming warp of the everyday by mankind itself without intervention from hypothetical ontological unknowns - so constantly overreaching throughout quote-crafting authors’ blush-engendering enthusiasm for being grazed upon and related to by audiences who may elatedly claim after a good or (synonymously) representational TV program that they are seen and what they have chosen in the way of work to represent themselves intersects with the convergence of twin circles into one indistinct blur of total similarity, entailing often the subtext that the long-precedented divorce between author and reader is at minimum inconvenient to the latter party, but maximally an active source of displeasure and pain to an audience which is to be faced and confronted and is thus also, to them, a non-necessary part of the experiential process one may or even must dissect from the specimen, then over time the whole corpus, to engage with a work, a process which is not as much a hyperbolic sense of Verstehen trudging through solid lines of ritualized “empathy drills” (for practice) as a drawing inward towards the wholly inexpressible self and just-as-contextual thoughts, as if being perceived itself, even in the abstract by someone who stands not in the same room and does not even necessarily live in the same moment (mayhaps millennia gone), is the onus and the wound a puncture makes (and may thus, at that, use to highlight the futility of one mere adhesive bandage meeting the openly pulsing wound a-spurting, so to speak), pain from which is not cherished, not layered as lace into the self which once admitted others’ transfusions into its cauterized bloodstream, a situation in which we would ordinarily be inclined to speak of bodies of work, providing as much as supplied and faring the scholarly ocean by means of inspired stars which culminate in the instar known by Ovid, and since quote-seekers merely game to be remembered without ever laying out true causes or even creatively falsified verisimilitudes as one might do in Christian apocalyptic literature early in the first millennium, having sliced away the scene-setting in-betweens in the gory agony of lingchi and become exceedingly thin anyway, write poetry which, in contrast to the Modernists, is rootless, but the poetic domain extends to everyday speech, not the backdrop of song and its properties, and what here I observe bypasses the base of poetry to permeate all social reality today by influencing speech, overdescribing clothing, and underdescribing bodies.
Witnessing the collective, even commiserative abrading away of not only the baroque formal veneer whereby objet approaches then meets objet d’art or even with luck objet de vertu by the aleatoric workmanship of history in the making as much as a piece’s spellbinding character may come across from just the mere idea of Heraclean Zeuxis attracting birds to bring a fitting would-be end to his illusory grapes, but also any manifests of thither-incorporated constant thoughts among textual critics that the self - what is correct in delineating what was and was not someone at some time - is not by its very nature present in a piece and may only emerge through linkage to something vaster and in some regards unknowable past the moment of composition, which, is it to carry even images of a self or selves, requires a labor of love not unlike what great things Pepys undertook to provide earnest memories and momentaries encompassing excruciating decades unfixed in their progress, such erosions, as it were, only disembed the inscrutable self in its successful endeavor to pry out with screeching, permanent, and heartless blemishes a gem hitherto integral to the exterior of a mind’s-eye jewelry box I could (but will not) describe in labyrinthine intricacy (thus forming a ekphrasis, in this case excised) here, brought to the common eye in triumph to say it is “unnecessary,” that it brought the art wherein it resided nothing more than opulence, worthless given its authorship as many claim of the Great Books in their pervasive maleness (among other concerns) without will to take pragmatism to heart and consider the truth at hand, that Marx (for instance) read the ancients as would anyone else and had his theories born of Hegel, likewise ignoring limits of the corpus, the selves therein denigrated insfar as they should not, in the eyes of their proscribers, continue to be a common language despite having stood as precisely that for untold spans of time. In much the same way as each other phenomenon (for one must realize they act together, stretching away from eternity), poor stylists promoted in undue rank punish all but brevity not found in Shakespeare who brough forth the fabled “soul of wit” lest winding prose corrupt the journalistic integrity nowadays erroneously said - or implied - to be desirable above most or all else in apparent “great” works of contemporary fiction, and shortening textual descriptions otherwise lush and bound to the world as it is lived saps a work of the quality of descriptivism so loved and needed by the oft-ignored cadre of linguists who seek to judge less than those who preceded them in studies, which combines with the former such that no school of rhetoric exists to do anything with the primacy of speech to which vulgar means bring us in the absence of spheres of high literature, leading authors to curate volumes consisting mostly of blank space not as a secondary consequence of format, but as, again, a Kaurish mask behind which hides the absence of the self in a work so genericized it may only appeal to the tyranny of categories whereby so many people each hold close an ontology unmoored and untethered, from which dropped is an anchor at not one point in time nor space to keep nothing at bay, and relate solely through projection and concerns voiced as to the author’s morals alone, nothing tying anything anywhere lest it stay too long in one place and be caught departing life.
As the logo kid languishes, piled deep into an oblivion of surface-scratching epitomes by which all pertinent text on certain subjects may someday be known solely in terms of that very sort of fragmentation (no matter how natural a condition this state of shards may be after enough epistemological alienation and experiential pigeonholing have met scribes and those who stochastically dictate copyists alike), and also at the same time as illusory cognition and syntheses predominate towards a looming dark-matter status precluding the essence of the alma mater and restraining its influence insofar as it has been reduced to a machine which begets the spitting-out of further eight-legged essays for the benefit of employers whose interest lies in recursive training which parallels and becomes control as information is absorbed (ostensibly preventing an abjection despite its running and casting in the very same parallel), to know becomes an exercise in audience participation, initially in the form of preschoolers’ call-and-responses overstretched beyond the color-learner demographic towards those far older who now think all things to be explicable in terms of how one - but not another - knows the color red when one sees it, though this uneasy centralization soon degrades to what some have praised as knowledge’s “democratization,” by which means, as seen more directly with prior-mentioned self-publishing mechanics, vacuums in comprehension are filled up, made plentiful, by reductively sensationalizing what is already reductive and sensationalizing, grouping all under categories similar to and indeed including important queer art itself before making clear an unfalsifiable claim so vast and space-filling with its curve, one which is invariably fractal and self-referential as opposed to outreach-making and scholarly, that speaking it not only projects the (absent) ability to conclude meaningful arguments from first principles which all ought to understand and be able to reason out in mind after even the most trite and inapplicable of instruction should they have any will to do so (as is rarer and rarer today), but also, with its controversy in use, sows seeds of its hinted ties to a greater sociological reality misunderstood and spreads self-justified, inward-turning-outward categories pertinent to important queer art inter alia, qualia all, and the audience joins in not to question, but to make it clear they are seen in the spineless “analysis” - resembling true criticism in no way - put out to the vast world in seeking the same conceptual validation, and all that is wrought is visibility and awareness, never action lest something uncomfortable come to the forefront, something putting the work into new context and contesting the narrative. In a video essay titled “Trans Music and the Desire to Exist,” we take young-adult collisions of arbitrary, ultimately meaningless categories mirroring in no way the metaphysical systems worked out over millennia since the ancients dreamt such things up and categorize trans music, as it is dubbed, into the “Wish,” the “Wrath,” the “Want,” and the “Warmth,” propped up by an ultimately undersized gamut of selections contorted into shape so those whose algorithmic playlisting places them in the listeners of one camp among these four overarching items will see from the picked cherries in the bowl that at least some of the work is true insofar as the watcher is “seen” in return, but whatever value is gained from this flimsy ontology is asymmetrical, for one party monetizes social capital translated into numerics (as the Internet does) and indeed virally profits, while illusory visibility only robs the viewer of time taken to comment, time unregainable but ostensibly well-spent because even though the system was by no means satisfactory, at least the always-newfag demographic brought their kindness and empathy, creating a “place to start” of sorts. Thus, in a physiognomic era, the face hereby extends far beyond oneself and is judged in terms of dream-world contributions to “society” mirrored in audience participation even though nothing is gained, even when nothing changes, and this “greater, broader” face becomes a judiciary instrument, taken as prophetic evidence for obscure futures of isolation or integration, bent out of shape and taken as the greatest indicator of all, the profile in full swing, the legend told in orature in lieu of true literary begetters, executors of wills.
3. The Lesser Jihad
That this condition befalls the commons is no real shock, and there is nothing more to say beyond its tragedy in the face of history’s irreversibility, that there will be no restoration of the literary conditions whereby we began and there will be not another fall of Rome to do over less disastrously or perhaps more glamorously and impactfully, but Rome sinks slow in its aqueducts’ absence, bound to a narrativizing impulse which drags it deeper as if condemned to drowning, hypoxic and self-satisfied with martyrdom and the evasion of burning, and it pains me to say addressing what I have described exceeds even the great scope I laid out for myself herein, but the suffering all face, the epistemological alienation promulgated thus and imposed lest any dare question its presence, makes none exempt, grants no pardon, and everyone, even if not in equal share, is illiterate in some regard or another, perhaps redirecting the longing to read, to understand in depth, in manners unforeseen and to places unknown, and the grand cognitive landscape remains a-shrinking from what it was, mediated digitally and brought down from its station to be examined by means of the hyperlink whose promise of instantaneous knowledge is no longer able to be seen by even those with the best eyes worn down the most into myopia from the greatest porings over tales and truths and explanations, indeed an atrocious condition in the grand scheme of things, yet in authoring such a work, I pray to be perceived and to be recognized, criticized for my diction and questioned as to my precision, to engage in dialogue transcending mere sycophancy surrounding what I speak and how it reads in the eyes still seeing or corrected thereto, even if my vision worsens the more I look into screens, onto pages, indeed at rates I would never have predicted in my youth when I could see without too much squinting, violently ripping me from what I am only now beginning to grasp even somewhat, barely tending towards what lies beyond the freshman’s dream, only narrowly considering what must be done. I may or may not have hope for a better epistemological state for society at large, the world beyond the circle with whom I have so many times discussed this work, so I leave it to the reader to determine whether I lean hither or thither on the issue of escapability, for perceiving is, for the time being, the most crucial step. Step forth unalienated, if at all possible.
