A Primer on the New Culture War Categories
Family/Sygn, Monocult/Monoculture, Young-Girl/Young-Boy
One of the problems with talking about the culture war is it’s become sort of culture war-coded to even say “culture war”. Often, especially on this platform, the idea that there’s something qualitatively new going on on this front is identified with the assumption that one of the sides is “Woke” - which depending on who you ask either follows inevitably from or completely breaks with the historical left, but in most usages (Emilie Carrière’s, which gets very close to some of my core metaphysics despite a lot of disagreements on the object and intermediate levels, a welcome exception) is defined from the outside as an undifferentiated bolus of negative stereotypes and impressions of various forms of identity politics which, relative to all previous equilibria, have “gone too far”. Counter this inherently unfriendly construction, those whom the opposite side (limply defining itself as “anti-woke”) would label with it tend to dismiss the idea of a “culture war” itself as an abstraction either of the unresolved left-right conflict at the heart of Western modernity - which to be clear, it isn’t not - or as the uprising of innately and exceptionally evil fascists and bigots, not even a legitimate “right”, against a neutral, pluralist civil society. But the problem is what gets called “woke” and “anti-woke” still doesn’t naturally map to either of those models. Everyone has somehow separated into two camps despite neither of these camps having an ideology (even) as clear or coherent as liberalism, leftism, conservatism or fascism. The sense in which it’s a “culture war” is not one in which cultural politics which are mere distractions have replaced material politics which are Real, it’s one in which cultural and material politics aren’t aligned in the ways you would expect, or the ways they were in previous coalitions. A tweet by Graham Gallagher defined the bizarre ways this has manifested at the level of geopolitics since the early 2010s - and everyone seems to agree on this historical window - as "Lumpen bourgeoisie national conservative neoliberal third worldism" vs. "Avowedly Keynesian Urban Liberal Democracy with a non-proletarian base of support" - and when I mentioned these mapped the same thing as a bunch of terms I’ve been using for a while in my own attempts to describe the elephant, it occurred to me that I should write these up properly somewhere, because people are often asking me to (at least for monocult/monoculture, which I use the most these days) and also because the three sets I used aren’t identical to Gallagher’s, or to each other.
I’ve avoided this for a while mostly because having a personal terminology like Moldbug or somebody is embarrassing. It’s the classic mark of a pseudointellectual, disregarding the conceptual labour of generations to impose your own limited perspective on the elephant of totality. In my defence, none of these concepts are meant to exclude any other levels of analysis or function as a totalizing system; they are concepts in a strictly Deleuzean sense, positive productions from my own empirical experience rather than a transcendental unifying schema. The very premise of several of them necessitates this, and demands the production of more. That’s why I have so many of them, and probably will have more before the decade is out - the culture war is already moving too fast to understand without making some shit up and throwing it out there. Let’s start with the:
META-LEVEL
The Family and the Sygn are not even my own terms - they come from Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand by Samuel Delany, probably my favourite novel ever written (I use some other terms from it in contemporary political contexts too, like RAT). The important reason I use them is that they’re not culturally local - or at least, not entirely. In Stars In My Pockets they’re ideological alignments spanning thousands of inhabited worlds in a kind of cosmic Cold War - worlds that can be radically culturally and politically different in other ways, and which may or may not go into “cultural Fugue” - that is, total, apocalyptic social collapse - independent of the fate or stability of their overarching faction. So they’re not highly-determined forms on the level of liberalism or fascism - the Family world on which the novel begins has its own rich and dysfunctional political tapestry (which goes up in nuclear hellfire). They’re more like protocols for minimal interoperability between social forms in a universe with a dizzying array of them. They’re also Delany’s hypothesis of what the “cultural” left and right would look like in a universe where economic scarcity isn’t a given, economic stratification doesn’t necessitate a “coalition of underdogs” and non-capitalist systems can uncontroversially support a planet, at least given the right technologies and resources. Insofar as the “culture war” represents something increasingly decoupled from both economic leftism and self-interested historically local identity-group coalitions, this seems like a good model. It also seems plausible that Delany himself considers them deeply emergent, not specific to one setting, given he sets up a similar conflict between “conservative” inner-system planets (including both a patriarchal Earth and a matriarchal Mars) and libertine/anarchic outer-system ones in Triton.
Nonetheless, they’re largely left to the reader to define from the random selection of examples provided through the viewpoint of the characters (a very Delany way of worldbuilding). My best guess is that they’re fundamentally (at least from the Sygn perspective) built out from the postmodern debates about language he seems occupied with in the loosely contemporaneous (including Triton) theory-fiction sequence “Some Informal Remarks Towards The Modular Calculus”. Does a language capable of crossing worlds need a master-signifier, a central binary from which it can be built out as a series of binaries, a referent? The “Sygn” would say no, and it never has - signs are self-sufficient, without originals, refer infinitely to each other, and are transferable from any system to any other - not without loss of information or context, certainly, but this is always-already taking place in any exchange of signs. This loss is a fundamentally tragic dimension of language - an appendix to Triton deals with a group of artists who made increasingly desperate and painful attempts to abandon it - but for most people, provided the agency to navigate a world of ambiguous signs as they see fit, no less dignified or compensated by joy than the existential tragedies the Family accepts (indeed, enforces). Gender, sex, religion and ethnicity are not “abolished” in a sense of becoming undifferentiated - these are very much real sources of diversity on Sygn worlds, but understood as referring back to infinite chains whose evolution is infinite. (By the time of Stars In My Pocket, male pronouns are mostly used as a modifier indicating sexual desire - a plausible extrapolation of G/ACC and top shortage.)
The Family, requiring a master-signifier as key for all languages requiring master-signifiers, appears to defer to biological reproduction. Of course the mere facts of biological reproduction aren’t The Family, or even “biological sex” - a Sygn theorist might point to DNA itself as an archetype of the Sygn, a complex, lossy language of inconsistent and partial communications between chemicals themselves unaware of the bodies they will go on to produce through a miraculous organic game of telephone with each other and their environment. The Family is constituted by the biological facts of reproduction in conjunction with the position of master-signifier - but the centrality of reproduction as a fact for biological life, and its intimate link with the deep subjectivating traumas of dependence and death, makes it non-arbitrary in a way other master-signifiers that might align under it - gods and sacred texts, national identities, capital - aren’t. While it might rally in our world under the banner of “Christianity”, the Family is essentially a return to the “Worship of the Generative Powers” Thomas Wright identified in the cross-cultural paradigms of classical Antiquity well into the Christian Middle Ages. Its biological metaphor seems to be concerned with race/species as well as sex/gender. It isn’t clear from an incident where a Family family visits the Sygn world of Velm and is appalled by the “lizard-loving perverts” whether the Family is human-exclusive or simply doesn’t permit miscegenation between humans and aliens; any comparable divisions between humans seem down to the particular world. But from my model, it seems plausible that the Family doesn’t require extermination or even a supremacy narrative to maintain its signifying matrix as long as sufficiently different reproductive paradigms are kept apart; moreover, since cultures themselves are articulated as recombinations of the reproductive master-signifier, cultural differences are likely to be elevated into “biological” (i.e. racial) ones and tabooed even where there is no original biological difference.
I tend to use Sygn and Family when I’m being prescriptive and not just descriptive, where I’m taking a more-than-strategic side. I don’t identify with say monoculture or Young-Girl but I do with the Sygn, and a lot of my interventions are dedicated to decoupling it from the other two systems. But it’s important to note that Sygn worlds aren’t all good, and it’s not even clear whether Family worlds are all bad. Both can go into Cultural Fugue on their own, and both are prescriptive ideals not reducible to the horrors of any particular (stable or unstable) fail states. Delany was infamously a supporter of NAMBLA; I don’t think that condemns his vision of the Sygn, but both Sygn and Family systems can enable abuse. There are also intriguing examples of worlds joining both at the limits, where unified signifying and reproductive structures are maintained by a sort of religious democratic centralism, as in Amara Reyes’ Heath, and structured individual choice of physical roles, as in Simoun’s Simulacrum. I still don’t believe these reach as total a utopian horizon as the Sygn permits, but they may make it safer to get there.
OBJECT LEVEL
Monocult and monoculture are terms I started using in 2020/21 during COVID. Up until then the culture war seemed to have pretty stably metastasized into “alt right” vs. “woke (or sometimes dirtbag) left” with centrists defending a shrinking territory in the middle, but COVID changed things again in a way that’s hard to pick up if you’re mostly looking at prescriptive political goals. Both economic inertia and the real stakes of culture war prevented the “realignment” many salivated over at the first stimulus checks, where right-wing populists would become the party of economic justice. Instead, there was a move even further away from economics towards pure epistemic politics, the level at which I think these terms operate. Monocult and monoculture are loosely Family- and Sygn-aligned respectively (the latter alignment much looser and more precarious than the former), but they are first and foremost epistemic attractors.
Trump had, of course, inaugurated the era of “post-truth” and “alternative facts”. At first this could be mistaken for a deepening of epistemic polarization along existing prescriptive partisan lines, although the consolidation of a number of alt media and conspiracy memeplexes spanning previously nonpartisan libertarians and leftists behind Trump marked an early stage of “monocultization”. COVID seemed almost too perfectly designed to bring this era to a close - all other political priorities went out the window in the face of a new set of facts with no previous political valence, advanced by a non-partisan coalition of experts. Even the early alt right had claimed to defer to “facts and logic” - and several of its figureheads, including Richard Spencer and Mencius Moldbug, followed historical authoritarian common sense in the pandemic. COVID was commonly positioned as the revenge of material reality - and its handmaiden, institutional expertise. Despite all this, the epistemic war widened. The monoculture infamously flipped position on the pandemic in the first few months, undermining its claim to identity with the reality principle from the get-go. The containment measures were so novel and wide-ranging as to be empirically visible for everyone, whereas compared to early projections (and decades of pop cultural fantasies of what an “apocalyptic pandemic” would look like) the death toll for many people was simply a ticker on news reports, debated up and down by anyone with a modicum of statistical literacy. And then Trump stepped into the ring, dismissing the very disease that made him look bad and backing unproven panaceas like hydroxychloroquine - which were just as quickly struck from scientific discussion by bizarrely sloppy debunkings.
The monoculture refers to the narrowing common interest of pre-online institutions (and the parts of online institutions that platforms can publicly make money off without alienating advertisers). When someone like Moldbug proposes a “Cathedral” uniting academia, mainstream media, the State Department, non-profit activism, international governance and corporations, he sounds histrionic; all of these institutions have different ideological equilibria and intentions. Their alignment in the monoculture is partly a hyperstition produced by the culture war itself, and partly an effect of their increasing consolidation. Academia, for all the rhetoric that admittedly does its best to maintain this impression, is no longer a hotbed of “tenured radicals”; any political innovation exists strictly at the mercy of the CS, biomed and business degree mills. Formerly radical stances on identity politics (and even capital) are accepted and even promoted partly because they are the most profitable thing happening in beleaguered humanities departments, and partly because their proponents have spent so long justifying their own continued investment in the institution that they have become experts in disavowing any call to direct action at odds with liberalism. Entertainment is consolidated in a few studios and streaming conglomerates. The explosion of “new media” seems to have only intensified the dependence of professional writers and journalists on their employers. This isn’t even entirely malicious; competition with social media intensifies the profit incentive of all these institutions.
It isn’t impossible that the Family could seize the monoculture - that’s what it looks like it’s trying to do in the UK with its mainstream anti-trans and anti-immigration politics, whereas Trump maintained the insurgent posture of the monocult throughout his Presidency (it’s admittedly hard to imagine some of the UK TERFs like Helen Joyce not doing the same). The main reason it doesn’t is simply that the Sygn has moved the Overton window such that you can no longer claim to be even nominally non-partisan while excluding sexual and racial minorities from visible signalling (under the high-visibility conditions of the internet); the former conditions of neutrality are no longer accepted by groups who, as the institutions themselves well know, were not politicized entirely of their own choice to pursue an orthogonal goal. The Sygn metaphysics also follows logically from the material and technical conditions of a highly networked society; it is the operating system the monoculture institutions themselves run on (even though they still outsource social reproduction to the Family, much like they outsource manufacturing to China).
If the monoculture adopts Sygn politics, however, it is in a dangerously partial way - as long as it couldn’t possibly be objected to either by shareholders (who haven’t objected to nominal anti-capitalism, as a non-threat, since the days of movies about saving the community centre from condo developers) or by any other part of the coalition. The Sygn as imagined by Delany celebrates and requires aesthetic, intellectual and ideological as well as “identitarian” diversity, conflict and nuance. The monoculture exists to suppress these even where historical liberalism permitted them. The institutions have not - as even their new recruits would admit - abandoned their systemic biases, nor the value they derive from exclusivity itself, especially relative to the internet. This has necessitated narrowing the diversity not only of “opinion” but of style, tone and content (not to mention that nebulous and problematic metric, “status”) that were once permitted to groups whose privilege spoke for itself. The loss of these degrees of freedom is often only perceptible to those who possessed them in the first place, and represented by those who have adapted to them as a triumph of meritocracy. Intersectionality, which concerns the ways oppressed groups in a coalition can oppress or support each other, and which requires uncomfortable, long-running debates over optimal equilibria, is conflated with a corporate logic of risk aversion; a “problematic” position is “cancelled” with the same indifference to its referential truth or even utility for a long-term political project (which the monoculture doesn’t have besides the incremental advancement of equality and quality of life according to statistical indicators) as a TV series that bombed because it was too experimental. This means, like with COVID, huge areas of legitimate epistemic and political conflict (no, I am not talking about race science) are effectively off limits - and others simply not acknowledged outside specialist fields because the monoculture institutions don’t think anyone will pay to hear about them. These are overwhelmingly the areas in which “intersectionality” is actually active and important - where oppressive systems interact in complex ways that cannot be determined with reference to a flowchart of deference. And like with COVID, anyone who acknowledges these unresolved contradictions - indeed, remarkably, from either side - can be recuperated by the monocult. But most importantly, the monoculture is not even a political regime - its misidentification with this most recent and visible pillar is central to disarming critiques. It consists above all in the enclosure of the remaining apolitical, “neutral” dimensions of discourse - the snap expert consensuses on COVID, and other emerging, contested scientific fields like AI and superconductors; the reduction of history to Sapiens, of ethical inquiry to the repetition of self-evident close-range demands, of spiritual and metaphysical inquiry outside traditional or cultic venues to therapeutic-existential platitudes, of artistic imagination to the recombination of tropes. All of these can be rationalized by reading unfamiliar language in politically uncharitable ways (and familiar language in charitable ones); but the overall effect is the withering of social critique orthogonal to the culture war as such.
The term “monocult” came to me when Sarah Hightower was posting pics from one of the late-2020 Montreal anti-lockdown protests, noting not only the presence of QAnon slogans and imagery but of longstanding cults - I can’t remember exactly which ones since the post is gone, but I remember even some of the more innocuous UFO cults (I want to say Raelians but actually can’t find anything associating them with this stuff). Cult-informed misinformation researchers like Hightower (her work on how Asian cults like Happy Science, the Unification Church and Falun Gong have syncretized with Western political subculture particularly informs my analysis) have been noting for a while a historically unprecedented convergence of cults, New Age spiritual and pseudoscientific movements, and conspiracy theorists behind a single political faction and cause. Identified first with the nebulous anti-authoritarianism of Trump and consolidated with populist opposition to emergency medical governance, but since the end of lockdowns and the Trump era, it has tended with surprising regularity to fan out into a generalized “anti-wokeness” and the cultural agenda of the Family (especially the anti-trans agenda), even where no previous right-wing commitments existed. Even monoculture commentators are now familiar with the “New Age-to-QAnon pipeline” - which structures the beliefs at the end of the pipeline differently from a STEMbrained “Dark Enlightenment” or a materialist economic populism. And QAnon itself was central in gamifying the collective free association of a Foucault’s Pendulum-esque ur-conspiracy (Parinya Champ’s Great Awakening Map is a good visualization) which has now largely detached from its passive faith in anonymous “white hats” in the Trump administration and a sprawling corpus of cryptic 8chan posts and airlifted into the mainstream through astroturf vehicles like Sound of Freedom. But this isn’t about retroactively inventing reasons to support Trump or Republicans; even cults explicitly founded on left-wing premises and goals, like Black Hammer, will pivot to denouncing vaccines, Critical Race Theory and “groomers” as soon as the rest of the “left” (monoculture) starts calling them out. While it’s easy to dismiss this behaviour as opportunistic - a tendency arguably latent to cults and pseudo-epistemes, to say nothing of the related concept of the “grift” (you can map monoculture/monocult economically to the increasingly stark division between credentialed professionals and “grifters” in dematerialized Western economies) - the accumulation of opportunistic behaviour (and other known phenomena like crank magnetism, which used to be constrained by physical limits on the spread of ideas) has structured a distinct emergent consensus. Basically, if you believe there is a Deep State deliberately concealing truths that could awaken you from the illusion of consensus reality, increasingly you are on the same side as everyone else who does - if only because the consolidation of the monoculture looks exactly like the Deep State making its final moves towards totalitarianism.
Tatsuya Ishida’s formerly apathetically populist, formerly radical feminist webcomic Sinfest is a vividly nightmarish depiction of the world perceived by the monocult. Demons are everywhere, they feed on the blood and trauma of children, and they are invited into the world through AI, DMT and CERN portals. (A common refrain is “I had to believe in God, because I’m sure demons are real”.) Most people (“NPCs”) are too hypnotized and sterilized by their phones and ambient 5G radiation to notice; anyone who does is “cancelled” instantly as a “bigot”, even if their dissent has nothing to do with a marginalized group. The demons promote transhumanism, the first step of which is transgenderism, with the ultimate goal of merging humans with machines, the lessers as slaves, the betters as gods. (The trans agenda also feeds them child victims, scouted by demonically-possessed drag queens at story hours throughout every city.) They promote environmentalism to scare the slave-species into living in 15-minute cities and eating bugs (the inherent humiliation of which gives them more loosh to farm, even as the NPCs submit to it without question). They simultaneously make it impossible to live without increasingly incomprehensible technologies they control, dispossessing traditional farmers and forcing everyone to live in megacities dependent on automated production for food, which they will only be able to buy through a digital bank account that can be locked if they’re “cancelled”. Pandemic lockdown conditions are gradually being normalized to the point that anyone going outside without permission will be cancelled on sight, and all “social” interaction (consisting largely of repeating approved talking points, simping for sex workers and consooming Netflix specials) will be conducted through screens. They enforce experimental injections to make you more autistic, less sexually potent and more mechanical. Their chosen elites, meanwhile, enjoy unlimited jouissance and decadence, both in the form of personal self-expression free from shame (drag, age regression, vague BDSM) and sexual slavery of the trafficked children of the lower classes, including adrenochrome, pure jouissance distilled from pure trauma itself (and anti-aging, a direct vampiric extraction of the life-principle). Despite all this terror, we are on the verge of a “Great Awakening” evidenced by your own awareness of these conspiracies and millions of others like you, including powerful influencers and even world leaders.
Apart from the anti-trans stuff, note that there’s nothing about naturally inferior groups in here, nor about the necessity of social and economic hierarchy (which is largely represented as what the “elites” want). There’s also not a specific golden age harkened back to, even though everything is obviously getting worse now (since the culture war initiated); Arcadia can be pushed as far back as the Bronze Age (deep QAnon mythology traces the cabal back to the Phoenicians, child-sacrificing Moloch worshippers and conveniently non-Jewish rootless cosmopolitans) or as recently as the 90s. Indeed, even though the enemy is often identified with “neoliberal globalists”, suburban Pax Americana at the End of History is always to some extent the monocult’s only lived, remembered tradition. Despite the explicit anti-technology current, any attempt to roll back technologies up to this point, particularly those that made the material dimensions of the middle class lifestyle possible, is equally rejected as anti-human primitivism (the proliferation of pseudoscience manages this contradiction via the invention of secret good tech, from natural panaceas to zero-point energy). The feared “Great Reset” is a monoculture-managed Return of History - in fact quite blatantly the WEF’s attempt to appropriate Occupy-era tropes of nonthreatening economic reform in response to visibly faltering faith in capitalism. When genuine leftists (and even younger liberals) align with monoculture, it is usually on the strength of the monoculture’s perceived/manufactured monopoly on Sygn values and the emotional blackmail of visible identity threats (against which state and capitalist institutions still represent the only real coercive force), not out of any enthusiasm for wonkish schemes like “stakeholder capitalism”. But thanks to this recuperation, the monocult doesn’t even need to identify its anti-elitism with a “red-brown” economic populism - it can cast doubt on most schemes for redistribution as a seizure of power by the monoculture and its “PMC” administrators. It has, however, as Gallagher observed, become the default ideology of anti-Western regimes, as cooperation with the Atlanticist international order is increasingly articulated as cooperation with the Western institutional monoculture and vice versa. Since the end of the Cold War, that very Atlanticist order has been mostly successful in installing anticommunist, neoliberal regimes throughout the developing world, but not crushed its innate longing to be free of the humiliation of American imperialism and to compete on terms other than its developmental paradigm. The monocult provides a framework to distinguish oneself from the Atlanticist order and form alliances against it without abandoning a market economy. This obviously produces an incredibly dangerous situation for the international left.
In some ways the monocult is a genuine revival of the “neither right nor left” intuitive libertarian populism of the 2000s (opposed to a previous monoculture backing the War on Terror); in other ways it is more fanatically conservative than the alt lite’s “Intellectual Dark Web” ever managed to be. Ideologies generally involve both a descriptive and prescriptive component, but what makes the monocult work as a universal pipeline is that its prescriptive components derive, largely implicitly, from its descriptive ones. The power of the elites and their demonic overlords is so ubiquitous, infects every political ideology, technology or organizational form as such that the only thing you can ultimately rely on is the God who created you as a biological human to eat healthy food, have children and not worry about phones or politics. The exact theological attributes of this God depend on where you get on; as well as New Age cults, traditional organized religions are increasingly recruiting through this common funnel, Christianity (Evangelical and Catholic competing for their slice) above all, but also the Islam of Andrew Tate, the Hinduism of BJP, and even the Judaism of Shmuley Boteach. Where the most supernaturalist and socially conservative branches of each of these traditions used to be the least ecumenical, not only are they increasingly inclined to view each other as more legitimate conversational partners than the secular world, but also New Age cults and esotericism, formerly stigmatized as the gateway to Satanism. Satanism, it turns out, is more easily marketed by secular pop culture like Lil Nas X and Balenciaga under the pretext that it’s all an empty signifier, whereas practices of “third eye opening” spiritual exploration (even psychedelics) are gateways to God via the demon-haunted world He rules at a forbidding distance. The synthesis of mainstream and persecuted traditions operates on a logic I have come to think of as “esoteric orthodoxy”, which I first modelled in the work of Jay Dyer. Esoteric orthodoxy says all the weird, apocryphal, exciting parts of religion the orthodox traditions don’t talk about - Watchers and nephilim, occult bloodlines, Baphomet, cyclical apocalypse, reality-altering blood rituals, angels and demons as aliens, reptilians or machine elves, gnosis-activated superpowers - are real, but you aren’t supposed to think about them too hard except to model enemy workings on Earth or they will eat you. The complexity of the real spiritual world, like the complexity of the real techno-economic world, exceeds your capabilities as a human (unless you augment them by techno-demonic pacts, enslaving yourself to them) and you would be screwed if the exact rules to follow as a human had not been laid down by unquestionable authority and generational tradition. Your only job is to worship, protect your children (not your neighbour, they’re too far gone) and Trust The Plan. The existence of multiple contradictory authorities that seem to be describing the same thing - much like the existence of multiple contradictory accounts of whether COVID is a hoax, a side-effect of 5G radiation or a bioweapon - is a mild inconvenience, either a series of errors in transmission or a deliberate adaptation to the innate spiritual needs of different peoples. As we speak the race is on to define the basic tenets all the “true” beliefs agree on. The successful ascendance of the monocult to a monofaith would represent the emergence of the Family as such from the latent space of semiotics into our timeline - and ironically, perhaps, the One World Religion orthodox faiths until recently feared as dajjal or Antichrist. He Is Already Here.
MEDIATING LEVEL
Young-Girl and Young-Boy are actually the concepts I’ve been working with the longest - Preliminary Materials For A Theory of the Young-Boy, which I’ve been teasing since like 2018, should be finally coming out with Andata Express this year. It’s a response to French situationist-anarchist-Adbusterist collective Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials For A Theory of the Young-Girl, which was very big in feminist-but-problematic art world circles in the early 2010s. I picked it up in 2014 hoping it would help me theorize anime girls (boy was I wrong, but I do that a bit in Young-Boy). It was published in France in 1999 - it is a deeply Y2K text, you could read Planet of the Bass as a nostalgic revaluation of it - but translated into English by Ariana Reines in 2012, right as the Timewave was overturning the pre-culture war paradigm it represents.
It’s a weird aphoristic text constructed like a newspaper cut-up, with bits of headlines and articles as well as selected novels (Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke) and theoretical texts interspersed with gnomic interpretation. (Young-Boy does the same thing with tweets and memes, among other things), using the “Young-Girl” (high school through 20s), as idealized by French fashion and lifestyle magazines they use as sources as a metaphor for the ideal subject of neoliberalism at the turn of the millennium. Despite their protestations that such a metaphor is “not gendered”, that it functions is probably not unrelated to the “crisis of masculinity”, or recent gender ontologies like Andrea Long Chu’s or the Barbie movie’s where we are all “female” (but actual females are better at it) in desiring primarily to be desired. The Young-Girl consumes in order to constitute herself as an object of desire, which she accumulates as value; not the desire of other human individuals, let alone actively-desiring men, but of the Spectacle itself, into which the “male gaze” is suffused as omnipresent yet completely impersonal. Spectacle has replaced capitalism as a system of material exchange; even the value-form as a reification of labour-time has been replaced by Young-Girls as a “living currency” of desire. The Young-Girl explains why, at the End of History where no grand narrative or transindividual task requiring energy or resources is imaginable, the accumulation of capital (and more importantly, the consumption of increasingly ephemeral and superfluous goods that makes capital accumulation possible) is even meaningful or worthwhile. She uses consumption of an endless rotation of “fashionable” clothes, media and dietary trends to constitute her body as an object of desire, suitable for “fucking”, the ultimate realization of her value - which is not, however, an interaction between biological bodies or individual souls, but an exchange of metaphysical desire-value. The body itself must be disciplined exhaustively, both as in bodybuilding (at the time just emerging as a popular phenomenon, and vaguely suspect as metrosexual vanity) and anorexia, to eliminate any vestiges of autonomous physicality as a vessel for such exchange. Yet its physical reality, like the reproductive reality of the Family, serves as a substrate legitimizing its meaning in a positivist capitalist realism that suspects ideas and abstractions as such of totalitarian ambitions. Gerwig’s Barbie contrasts Barbie as the perfect, abstract Young-Girl with the “ordinary Barbie” produced by her overworked, depressed admirer, but these are the same as the Young-Girl is the apotheosis of the ordinary, the asymptote towards which all “ordinary” life aspires as such and a superweapon for the extermination of all that isn’t “ordinary”, “realistic”, i.e. compatible with a static circuit of Spectacle/desire/consumption forever.
Yes, this analysis is obviously both sexist and anti-Marxist (capital as such disappears, the Young-Girl is its ultimate embodiment, and she has neither name nor address). But it’s a hyperstition; dismissing it simply on the grounds that it isn’t true misses the point. There were a number of critiques of it on these grounds at the height of its popularity (coinciding with that of early 2010s feminism), none of which have aged well (one is by Nina Power, today not only a TERF but an exemplary monocultist). As a devotee of the Goddess who had placed all my hopes of surviving the 2012 Timewave in that Return of Herstory, Tiqqun’s model accounted for the suspicions I was developing of the versions of it that were making it to the mainstream: that the “girlboss”, “Lean In” feminism of Beyonce, Hillary Clinton, Rey Skywalker and Ms Marvel wasn’t advocating for women, it was advocating for Young-Girls. At the same time, the reaction developing to that moment in Gamergate and Trump blew all of Tiqqun’s blind spots up to apocalyptic proportions. The problematic metaphor of the Young-Girl came from capital or whatever metaphysical force stands behind it, not Tiqqun; but in failing to compensate for it, Tiqqun were party to another, symmetrical hyperstition, that of the Young-Boy.
The Young-Boy accounts for the shift from the End of History to the Culture War in itself - a shift Tiqqun didn’t imagine possible without a total shift to mystical, situationist spontaneity. He is made possible in part by the internet, and the ways it changes the structure of semiotic exchange. He rejects exchange as fucking for exchange as warfare: gaming, trolling, cancellation. He accumulates abstract negativity (kill counts) where the Young-Girl accumulates abstract positivity (body counts). He masochistically restricts himself, and sadistically reduces others, to an accelerating cycle of political, spiritual, aesthetic and social (even identitarian) concepts to prove his independence from the “material” universality of the Young-Girl. These concepts themselves, however, do not invade semiocapitalism from a radical Outside, but have become a commodity themselves thanks to the internet, where name, face and body disappear and the consumer is a collection of verbal and social metadata. “Discourse” has become as productive of Spectacle-value as fashion (and subject to many of the same laws) - indeed, the Young-Girl’s “material world” of bodies and pleasures has become increasingly inefficient, and is being dissolved into the cloud under the pretext of its own “political” abolition by the culture war. The Young-Boy is thus a perversion of the “Anonymous” (yet subtly gendered - less subtly as 4chan became the domain of incels and the Wachowskis’ cyber-Gnostic “red pill” became a metaphor for banal misogyny) subject Tiqqun and many others imagined as the “chosen one” who could escape the Spectacle.
In the last instance, the Young-Girl’s logic aligns with monoculture and the Young-Boy’s with monocult, but both are apparent in both. Monocult figureheads like Bronze Age Pervert, Andrew Tate, Dasha Nekrasova and Sameera Khan sculpt their fantasy of the “natural”, antediluvian body according to the same production demands as a Marvel superhero or Ryan Gosling’s Ken. The monoculture derives a jouissance from pre-emptively censoring ideas the Young-Girl would have exterminated simply by ignoring or devaluing (which is no longer possible in any case), dividing enemies and allies in the Young-Boy’s game. The Young-Boy and the Young-Girl (which are both operative in everyone) are the formations of subjectivity through which Family and Sygn and converted to monocult and monoculture. They explain the paradox whereby the internet, a near-perfect manifestation of Sygn-logic, is increasingly dominated by the Family while the institutions built on generations of Family authority shelter the Sygn. The Young-Girl is the Sygn as perceived by the Young-Boy; though he also operates on a self-destructive vortex within the Sygn (irony/sincerity), he aspires to escape the Matrix of the Spectacle into the authentic (Real) materiality the Young-Girl eliminates through the authentic (Imaginary) abstraction she excludes. The Family, which channels the infinite variation and transformation of material reality through a master-signifier, offers exactly this. The Young-Girl (or rather, the material capitalism she still reifies at the level of subjectivity), however, already falsifies and restricts the fecundity of the Sygn through her own requirement of a stable medium of exchange. And we cannot avoid that the Young-Boy and Young-Girl, however real, are in fact both gendered metaphors - thus both beholden to the image of the Family, though they have not yet grown up to accept their role in reproduction.
So where do we go from here? That’s a whole other post - well, a lot more than a post. But if nothing else, I hope decoupling these three layers helps clarify how it’s possible to critique the “culture war” as such without retreating to a position of prescriptive neutrality, a “both sides” centrism presuming a stable centre which can only be that of the monoculture and the Young-Girl’s “endless everyday”. (Oh yeah, “endless everyday” vs “apocalypse” is also a relevant pair here - I’ll just let Angie’s post speak for that one, but once you read it you’ll see it in every single recent movie.) The problem is that we can’t just uncritically accept the form in which online group consensus critiques that centre, as the logic of the Young-Boy structurally advantages the Family and the monocult. The left, or at least the “woke” or modern left, which values not only equality but equality in freedom and diversity (the Family offers a compelling if classically totalitarian vision of pure equality as tiling the universe with identical units), occupies a paradoxical position in this war, and has not actually constituted itself as an independent “side”. We are simultaneously obligated to critique and oppose the monoculture and Young-Girl as capital, and defend them as Sygn - and the logic of the Young-Boy, which structures the critique of capital as a critique of Sygn, demands we suppress any such dialectical expression of the conflict as “both sides” equivocation between Good and Evil. This creates a constant pressure of cognitive dissonance, under which left figures who don’t optimize for cognitive dissonance (itself a bad thing) habitually break and defect to the monocult - a phenomenon mystified by their own accounts of “leaving the left” because it “cancelled” them first, and the monoculture-left’s fatalistic non-explanation that they were only ever pretending to be on the left in the first place. In reality all of us are only ever pretending to be on the left because it isn’t a stable formation with a material logic that resolves its own contradictions; at the same time, I believe even many who defect to the monocult are not terminally committed, as the true, full Sygn, restricted neither by Family nor Capital as master-signifier, is a cosmic principle of (in)coherence inherent in our ability to use language itself. The difficulty lies in sustaining this principle across a society; not only in the innumerable slippages of its signifiers, but in the material relations they support and represent. The “postmodern” character of the Sygn’s relation to language does not require the dematerialization seen in the Young-Boy and Young-Girl, as materiality itself is not a master-signifier - that is the ruse of the Family. It is the separation of conceptual from material communication and agency through the bottleneck of social oppression and its privileged medium, the value-form that produces the Young-Boy and Young-Girl as falsifications of the Sygn. The problems of the culture war, therefore, cannot be resolved simply by debating or enforcing ideas; the Sygn requires material infrastructure constructed on its own terms to express and resolve its own contradictions. My next post, The Solarpunk Stack, will attempt to demonstrate that this is possible (without even the deus ex machine of an apocalyptic “revolution”). Until then:
Will have to re-read to try and re-process mediating level because I started to lose touch near the end (will keep an eye out for when Young-Boy drops). This is tremendously helpful both in understanding the parts of your thought I’ve been exposed to so far and giving me tools to explain my own cognitive development to myself. Thank you for writing! Is there a specific Thomas Wright text you’re alluding to? What you touched on sounds interesting. Also, are there any rationalist primers you would point to as being helpful for better understanding your work, or should I just proceed with my current plan to read Maimonides + gain some statistical literacy? (I have of course already read Unsong and The Northern Caves!)