The Style of Current Events
Twitter, Brexit, and nearly every recent event in American Politics
After I humiliated myself by posting an under-edited free-association monologue about Elon Musk, Sophia sagely noted something in the comments:
So far the situation over at Twitter reminds me of the first days of Brexit.
I thought about this for hours after I read it; it seemed immediately true (and is precisely the kind of observation I expect and love from the literary) and possibly important. I wondered if we had on our hands a new style of current event, surely shaped by the media in which current events —whatever they indeed are, these mirages, these noise artifacts, these arbitrarily- and emergently-demarcated “narratives”— unfold and exist. And if so: why?
The properties of this new style:
events seem both inexorable and insanely improbable and arbitrary; once underway, there seems to be “nothing anyone can do” even as it seems that without someone doing something, none of it could happen to begin with; they seem both unsought and unavoidable; there’s a curious mix of individual agency mattering a lot and structural forces / impersonal dynamics driving everything, far from the influence of any single person
there’s a strange combination of brutality / intensity and inconsequentiality; events now are both frightening and limp, dramatic and empty: something drains even the worst outrages of impact, such that one meta theme involved in all events now is the searing debate between those who consider whichever goings-on to be of vital, civilizational, apocalyptic import and those who do not care at all and reject assertions of their importance. On any given day, millions are mourning events that billions have literally forgotten about already. Discourse is incoherent as a result.
everything is farcical. Teeth get gnashed —it’s a habit, it’s a lifestyle, it’s a workout that keeps winter weight gain at bay— but comedy is everywhere in these moments. Surrounding the gloom is an ocean of memes; and somehow, the memes seem to penetrate into the inner workings of events in real time; it is as though graffiti artists have made it into the infamous smoke-filled rooms and now spray their jokes onto the wall even as the suits scheme and plot
These are clownish clusterfucks of unclear consequence. Lives hang in the balance sometimes; deaths occur; yet even that fails to make anything “serious,” at least broadly. Perhaps the global cultural scene is a fundamentally shallow children’s pool, so wide that no matter the depth of a disaster, it always seems trivial in contrast to the breadth of unrelated activity happening around it.
But I doubt this is “new,” as I doubt most phenomena are new. I was reminded, thinking of Sophia’s comparison, of The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil’s immense and frequently comic novel set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire right before WWI. I do hope it’s not too gloomy to note that comparisons to Europe before 1914 abound now; the Ukrainian situation is hard to assess without recalling the complex treaty-based interdependence and Great Power games that led to “The Great War” and the violent end of an epoch.
But Musil’s novel isn’t gloomy. It is light, amusing, playful even when serious; every enterprise in it turns into a clownish clusterfuck; every “official” in it is both capable of doing terrible harm and incapable of getting the slightest thing done, and certainly of getting things done well. It is an impossible-to-summarize book, but I think you could do worse than observing that the events described within it have a certain Brexit-like quality.
We come again to the question of whether history repeats, or rather —since who can deny it entirely— in what ways it does and doesn’t. And it’s tempting to try and ascertain what has happened to catalyze this style of event, even if it’s likely quixotic. I think often that social media has unleashed millions and millions of cults of personality, scaled down to the most local level; there are cults of personality with no members other than the performing leader. And this style of event is characterized in part by the dominance of personalities as forces. The dramatic situation at Twitter is largely down to one man’s personality. Brexit, too, has much to do with personalities, as did January 6th and indeed Trump’s entire trajectory. Perhaps it’s not surprising that “socializing media” —putting a kind of ownership of the means of telecommunications production in the hands of every person on earth— led to individuals becoming state-like, totalitarian in their conceptions of how these systems should work, war-oriented in their views of discourse. But it is surprising that states adapted too, and became more like individuals: reckless, improvisational, incoherent, and fueled mostly by undecipherable personalities.
Simone Weil said that personality “is the part of us which belongs to error and sin,” which I agree with. But more salient is the fact that personality is mysterious. We do not understand it; we cannot readily mimetically duplicate it; it is irreducible even as it seems superficial. Many will act like Elon, but this imitation will not tend to work. Somehow in the mechanized, scaled, digitized, rationalized world of institutions and policies, personality remains non-fungible and dangerous, and with it, individuals, some of whom, for reasons we can only gesture towards, seem to operate under a different social-physics regime entirely. The contest between the individual and institutions is a kind of asymmetric warfare: institutions promulgate rules that simply do not apply, somehow, while individuals take enormous institutional Ls and yet continue to operate freely in contested areas.
Above all, with Brexit, with Twitter, with America, one thing that I can never figure out is: do any of these people have a plan? Supporters of the chaos agents insist they do, but the plan seems to be do as I do based on how I feel, and the world will respond as I want, nothing more. Can that be so? If it is, it accounts for the childish feeling everything has today, for this is what children do. There is no deliberation or strategy, only the unending flow of raw personality into systems we thought beyond its effects, structures we assumed were supra-personal. Whatever made them seem so is gone, however. Whereas a committed communist might have once said “the private life is dead,” today the private life has roared back, is interwoven with the public life, dominates material conditions to an extent I could have never imagined. In the backs of many minds reading the news must be the phrase “they can’t keep getting away with it,” yet they do, for better and worse. I have no idea what to make of it, but thank Sophia for pointing it out.
The Musk takeover reminded me so much of Liz Truss the previous month, their shared qualities being something like: “I imagined this would be chaotic, bad, a little entertaining, and it has surpassed my wildest fears/expectations.” We seemed to have been primed by a century of satire and farce to recognise this age. The chaos is familiar, it just feels slightly fictional. As does war, as does the pandemic, etc etc. Chaotic times maybe always feel like the fictions inspired by the last chaotic times.