Post-Weird:
Fragmentation, Community, and the Decline of the Mainstream
by Calum Lister Matheson (Rutgers University Press)
The thesis here is great. The Marx quote “Well, who ya gonna believe me or your own eyes” is the core.1 Describe the history of cultural fragmentation in the contemporary United States as you like, the result is a prevalence of anti-rhetoric. In the fall of a consensus2 structure to culture, the ethos of “do your own research” becomes a response.
As such, the way that we customarily talk has it backwards. It is the conspiracy theorist who has the “facts,” and has sought out and processed their own information in terms of learning. It is the non-conspiracy thinker who is operating on belief. This functions as a recapitulation of the previously held consensus, largely through erasure of doubt by giving great amounts of meaning to things. To everything, without any question or room for debate (and thus no reason for the rhetoric to use in debate).
The twist here from other books about how we do not agree is the psychoanalytic approach. There is good and a bad thing about this. The good is that the book is taking the cultists on their own terms. It is not stupid or crazy, but any choice is doing something for them, and it is useful to look at that with psychoanalytic tools, looking to figure out what this sort of thing is doing for the believers, in the hope that provides better insight into the process.
The bad is the usual bad about psychoanalysis, which is that it is a walled garden, and at its best when talking about itself. The problems the book solves are the ones that the book creates. And the book uses this to explain with the DNC lost in ’24?3
The majority of the book is a group of case studies of internet subcultures, looking to reconcile them into psychoanalytic terms. The major link seems self-created; to measure is to control as it were. Each of the studies has a ‘b-side,’ another related though different set of analysis to explain what is going on in the group and how that has greater meaning for understanding things.
These explorations do fit conceptually within the flow of the book, but not structurally. The best is the one from the Sandy Hook Deniers, where the book reconsiders how the idea of guns to the cult is understood. The worst is the Evangelical Snake Handlers, with its look at “Liberal Sadism” and making fun of people for making fun of the Evangelicals.4**** There is something of an odd big-C conservative streak through the writing, down to it doing the New York Times Pitchbot-style equivocation.
Anyway, the problem is best described by the absence of any history in the section that looks to distinguish between science and science-y-ness in the context of scientific racism and sexism. In treating these fanatics on their own terms, the situation is to divorce it all from ideology and worldliness. This is intentional in the discussion of the anorexia supporters, since the book’s theory is a refutation of sociological explanations for anorexia in place of a sort of spirit quest that happens to correlate with sociological forces.
It is a bunch of not not relevant motives and reasons, but it has a hard limit of what it can reach. And in a global sense, the absence of history makes me wonder if history is actually absent. Are we post-weird? We are all agreed that MAGA is anemoia, so how much of this is bias? The book is not interested because it is not the book’s problem. Admittedly, what it says on the tin, but to be clear this is a useful book in a particular sort of way of approaching things.
The conclusion does a good job at explaining the thematic and functional similarities between the otherwise disparate groups, but the best it can do at a piece of advice is to iterate on the importance of the author’s own discipline. And at worst it feels like the worst of Harper’s Letter Pickmeism, an urge to a fictional middle.
So cool for what it is, but hyper-limited in what it is.
My thanks to the author, Calum Lister Matheson, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Rutgers University Press, for making the ARC available to me.
- That it is this and not Orwell’s “[t]he Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears” is left as an exercise to the reader. ↩︎
- Or not consensus, in the sense that the book explains why it is not actually a consensus, but for our purposes here, it works. ↩︎
- Of which all I will say is that is not the way that I remember it. ↩︎
- It is an odd high horse because the book provides a much better solution for what is going on in its opening chapters on propriety and comedy. ↩︎
CITATION HEEDED 