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abtrusion · 2 months

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Theories of the holy shit what did I just see back there on the street?

Because transmisogyny makes them so impossible to ignore, for at least the last 70 years transfeminized people have served as key material of Anglo-American gender/queer/trans theories, as laundered through anthropology, sexology, and uncited personal witnessing. The anaemic denial of this fact through snappy and surface-level distinctions between ‘queer’ and ‘trans’ and between different transfeminized groups has made it functionally impossible for these theories to seriously account for transf* life, and this failure is highly productive, because it allows for the continued use of both ‘premodern’ ‘third gender’ and ‘postmodern’ transgenderism as lobotomized material for the theories of other people. The last century of gender theoretic development has revolved around slowly refining methods of extracting transfeminized peoples’ insight, forgetting and re-introducing them to their field over and over again to frame them as perpetual novelties, leading to a pernicious form of feminist amnesia that repeats over and over again.

1 . MARGARET MEAD (1949)

The work begins with Margaret Mead, the ‘most famous anthropologist of our century’ (Behar and Gordon 1996), who made her career studying indigenous groups in Samoa and New Guinea, then joined the larger anthropological effort to inform the US Government’s genocidal re-education campaigns against Indigenous American tribes. She later enjoyed a prodigious career as a public intellectual and shifted to more explicitly feminist writing which extensively influenced the movements of the 60s and 70s. Mead argued that essentially all sex-gender roles were culturally determined, and used the specter of the transfeminized homosexual-transvestite both to make that argument and to advocate for gender abolition.

This can be seen most clearly in Mead’s 1949 book Male and Female: a Study of the Sexes in a Changing World. Mead chronologically traces individual gender development through an ethnographic-sexological narrative, beginning with ‘first learnings’ that a child receives primarily through observation. Then the family comes in, and the transvestite comes with it, existing as the primary motive (alongside Freudian sexual attachment) which motivates gendered socialization:

Too great softness, too great passivity, in the male and he will not become a man. The American Plains Indians, valuing courage in battle above all other qualities, watched their little boys with desperate intensity, and drove a fair number of them to give up the struggle and assume women’s dress. (Mead 1949)

Mead argues that “fear that boys will be feminine in behavior may drive many boys into taking refuge in explicit femininity,” but makes a distinction between this identification and what she calls ‘full transvestitism,’ the culturally-specific recognition of that status. This differential leads her to conclude that the physical traits seen as markers of ‘gender inversion’ are culturally specific, and that what is understood as physical sex (then existing on a ‘spectrum’ model) is therefore partially socially determined.

For Mead, gender must be abolished precisely because of the fact that she could even make this argument. As she says,

Only a denial of life itself makes it possible to deny the interdependence of the sexes. Once that interdependence is recognized and traced in minute detail to the infant’s first experience of the contrast between the extra roughness of a shaven cheek and a deeper voice and his mother’s softer skin and higher voice, any programme which claims that the wholeness of one sex can be advanced without considering the other is automatically disallowed.

The desperate need to reproduce these distinctions, to make sex clear and visible and obvious, leads Mead to ultimately argue for a gender abolition that rests on complementary sex-roles. The main benefit of this approach for Mead is the complete eradication of sex-gender ‘confusion’ and its incarnation in transfeminized people, so associated precisely because of their intense usefulness as a tool for undermining sex-gender distinctions. So Mead sees the construction of physical and social gender by using transfeminized people as a lens, but because of her own disgust she can only fix gender by unseeing it again, by displacing gender to ‘real’ physical sex and protecting herself by breaking the tool. This, unsurprisingly, leaves her exactly where she started.

2. BETTY FRIEDAN (1963)

The feminist theorists that came after Mead directly confronted this reversion to ‘complementary sex’ logics, most notably in Betty Friedan’s foundational work The Feminine Mystique. Friedan discusses the ‘paradox’ of Mead’s influence, the strange combination of her exposure of ‘the infinite variety of sexual patterns and the enormous plasticity of human nature’ and her ‘glorification of women in the female role – as defined by their sexual biological function.’ In the middle, Friedan cites a page-long quote describing a point of ambivalent warning in Mead’s writing:

The difference between the two sexes is one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature… Sometimes one quality has been assigned to one sex, sometimes to the other. Now it is boys who are thought of as infinitely vulnerable and in need of special cherishing care, now it is girls… Some people think of women as too weak to work out of doors, others regard women as the appropriate bearers of heavy burdens “because their heads are stronger than men’s” … Some religions, including our European traditional religions, have assigned women an inferior role in the religious hierarchy, others have built their whole symbolic relationship with the supernatural world upon male imitations of the biological functions of women. (emph added by me)

...Are we dealing with a must that we dare not flout because it is rooted so deep in our biological mammalian nature that to flout it means individual and social disease? Or with a must that, although not so deeply rooted, still is so very socially convenient and so well tried that it would be uneconomical to flout it…

...We must also ask: What are the potentialities of sex differences? … If little boys have to meet and assimilate the early shock of knowing that they can never create a baby with the sureness and incontrovertibility that is a woman’s birthright, how does this make them more creatively ambitious, as well as more dependent upon achievement?

Friedan attributes this ultimate focus on sexual difference to Mead’s Freudianism: she argues that Mead’s need to approach culture and personality through sexual difference, combined with her anthropological understanding that ‘there are no true-for-every-culture sexual differences except those involved in the act of procreation’ (Friedan and Quindlen 1963), combines to cause her to inflate the cultural importance of the reproductive role of women. Friedan intensely rebukes this reification of reproduction as another component of the ‘feminine mystique’ (very close to the modern ‘divine feminine’), advocating for programs which enable women to reject the mystique and housewife status and to seek education and employment, to combat the problem ‘which had no name’ but takes shape through spikes in female ‘sex-hunger’ and ‘overt manifestations’ of passive male homosexuality, both understood as ‘children acting out the sexual phantasies of their housewife-mothers.’ In a paradoxical return to Freudianism, Friedan characterizes husbands unwilling to let their wives work as being seduced ‘by the infantile phantasy of having an ever-present mother’ (the Freudian homosexuality-signifier), associating antifeminism with passive homosexuality with femininity which the aspiring feminist has escaped, learning to compete “not as a woman, but as a human being.”

3. THE MULTIPLICATION OF TRANSFEMINIZED SUBJECTS

As we can see, transfeminized subjects are frequently used as signs of system collapse, hypervisible enough to be easy examples and potent enough to rhetorically corrode existing sex-gender systems in preparation for the author’s own vision. Once a piece is published, these examples are usually then forgotten, assumed as scaffolding for the real theory; but the rhetorical strawmen of these transfeminized subjects still remain, trapped implicitly in the text, and they bleed into one another with every new addition to the corpus, every call to action invoking a new transfeminized archetype.

So far we have seen Mead’s anthropological-orientalist framing of ‘transvestitism’ among the anthropological Other and Friedan’s psychological framing of ‘passive homosexuality’ in the United States. The increasing visibility of adult ‘transsexuality,’ somewhat disjoint from the developmental sexology Gill-Peterson (2017) discusses because of its visibility in high-profile cases like Christine Jorgensen, was likewise framed for theory. Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) book Studies in Ethnomethodology, which described methods for observing ‘the objective reality of social facts as an ongoing accomplishment,’ used an intersex woman named Agnes as an avenue to expose how everyday social facts are constructed. Agnes was an ideal exemplar because her insistence on getting HRT and being seen as a woman was considered psychologically normal: “Such insistence was not accompanied by clinically interesting ego defects. These persons contrast in many interesting ways with transvestites, trans-sexualists, and homosexuals.” Of course, Garfinkel was later notified that Agnes did not have an intersex condition, and he then noted that ‘this news turned the article into a feature of the same circumstances it reported, i.e. into a situated report.’

Anyways, now it’s time for yet another transfeminized subject: the ‘transsexually constructed lesbian feminist.’

4. JANICE RAYMOND (1979)

As with her predecessors, Raymond sees analytical power in her particular transfeminized group, arguing that “transsexualism goes to the question of what gender is, how to challenge it, and what reinforces gender stereotypes in a role-defined society.” But she also has some concerns for ‘transsexual women,’ initially assumed heterosexual, none of which are particularly novel or interesting. Now that she’s writing in an environment dominated by Friedan’s mandate towards shedding femininity, feminist amnesia makes it novel to regurgitate Margaret Mead’s responses: that “male transsexualism may well be a graphic expression of the destruction that sex-role molding has wrought on men,” and that “men recognize the power that women have by virtue of female biology and the fact that this power, symbolized in giving birth, is not only procreative but multidimensionally creative” (Raymond 1979).

Her analysis of (new archetype) ‘transsexually-constructed lesbian feminism’ is much more interesting. While Raymond can understand heterosexual transsexual women as ‘reinforcing gender stereotyping’ by pulling primarily from medical archives already hegemonized by gatekeeping and passing requirements, the transsexual women in the lesbian-feminist movement achieved a certain degree of personal contact and visibility that undermined ‘hegemonizing’ logics. So Raymond uses three main arguments: an essentialist appeal to fundamental ‘maleness,’ a red-scare-esque appeal to transsexual lesbian feminists as ‘court eunuchs’ bent on monitoring and controlling feminist spaces, and finally, an argument that transsexual lesbian feminists are fundamentally epistemically corrosive to lesbian feminist spaces:

Whereas the lesbian-feminist crosses the boundary of her patriarchally imposed sex role, the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist is a boundary violator. This violation is also profoundly mythic, for as Norman O. Brown writes of Dionysus, he as the ‘‘mad god who breaks down boundaries.’’

Contrary to contemporary transmisogynistic discourse which frames trans lesbians as personal threats to women in lesbian-feminist spaces, this violation takes its form not in any particular act but in the act of passing, the deconstructive question this existence seemingly automatically places on lesbian-feminist spaces:

One of the most constraining questions that transsexuals, and, in particular, transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists, pose is the question of self-definition—who is a woman, who is a lesbian-feminist? But, of course, they pose the question on their terms, and we are faced with answering it.

Raymond notes with some frustration that this transsexual question has been discussed ‘out of proportion to their actual numbers,’ using up valuable feminist energy, and frames this as a symptom and crime of transsexual lesbianism itself. The trans question is transsexual women; like the theorists before her, she sees transfeminized people as a gaping hole in the gendered world, but now they’re inside her house, feeding “off woman’s true energy source, i.e., her woman-identified self,” and inherently stand to break “the boundaries of what constitutes femaleness,” to dissolve lesbian-feminism itself.

I want to stress two main points in all of this. First, Raymond understands studying transsexualism as a crucial tool for answering ‘the question of what gender is’ and ‘how to challenge it.’ Second, Raymond’s anxiety about transsexual lesbian-feminists moves away from specific actions and towards the ‘penetration’ inherent in their existence in these spaces at all, the understanding that transsexual women are inherently corrosive to lesbian-feminist movements. These two points are clearly linked. Raymond understands transsexuality as a form of epistemic gender acid, something that can be useful at arm’s length but is deadly up close. Of course, the transfeminized people she discusses were not necessarily invested in asking the Trans Question themselves; trans women attended lesbian-feminist events like Michfest before and after their trans exclusion policies, and regardless of ‘passing’ many people enjoyed a form of don’t ask don’t tell (Tagonist 1997). But within these spaces, the Trans* Question long predated the actual existence of transfeminized people – so once they arrived, the Question and person were fundamentally linked. Trans theorists have negotiated this association extensively, but that’s not the topic of this essay, so I’ll leave you with some sources (Stryker 1994; Stone 1992) and move to Butler.

5. JUDITH BUTLER (1990)

This work has been done already by Vivian Namaste (2020), who argues that “contemporary discussions of Anglo-American feminist theory, exemplified in Butler’s work, begin with the Transgender Question as a way to narrow our focus to the constitution, reproduction, and resignification of gender.” This singular focus on the ‘Transgender Question’ has made it functionally impossible for Anglo-American feminist theory to consider the outsized role of work, particularly sex work, in motivating the discrimination and violence against transfeminized people of color: “framing violence against transsexual prostitutes as ‘gender violence’ is a radical recuperation of these events and their causal nature-a violence at the level of epistemology itself.”

Namaste attributes this focus on featureless ‘gender violence’ to a crippling lack of empiricism, a lack of researcher-subject equity, and an exclusion of subject knowledges. She provides an effective power-based solution to this epistemic violence – that feminist theorists should talk with the subjects of their theory and give them some measure of power in the transaction – a sort of endpoint analysis which means she doesn’t need to consider too much of the internals of the system she’s challenging. That’s a good idea for her work, but with the benefit of history we can move differently. The next section synthesizes Butler, Friedan, Mead, and Raymond together to provide a functionalist analysis of the feminist theoretic use of transfeminized people. What are the benefits of using transfeminized people as an epistemic tool in feminist theory? What are the dangers of using this epistemic tool, and how does feminist theory manage those dangers?

6. PATTERNS OF EXTRACTION AND DEFENSE

Looking past Butler and further into the past reveals that transfeminized people have been crucial not just to the feminist theory of the past 20 years, but have served as exemplars as far back as the 1940s. The ‘Trans* Question,’ which frames transfeminized people as the most visible signifier and most horrifying symptom of social gender, has been cyclically used in a form of feminist cultural amnesia:

A transfeminized group serves as a hypervisible example to 'deconstruct' social gender

Transfeminized deconstruction bloats beyond itself, undermining 'sex traits' or 'femaleness' or some other foundational category of feminist analysis.

Reconstruction of gender as 'biological sex,' alliance between feminist theorists and men of all stripes by arguing that post-gender eradication of transfeminized people will (a) allow men to be feminine without becoming women or (b) destroy femininity entirely.

New-generation feminist theorists realize their predecessors have reinvented social gender. Return to (1).

As Margaret Mead’s work shows, the use of transfeminized groups to deconstruct both physical and social gender has been observed regardless of transmedicalization. This helical pattern has a few general properties:

Each cycle introduces a distinct transfeminized group, positioning it against prior groups as uniquely suitable for analysis, but simultaneously blurs the new group into the existing melange.

This "Trans* Queston" is almost entirely devoid of group-specific context and rooted in transmisogyny, which positions them as horrifying and visible symptoms of social gender.

Each "Trans* Question" initially exposes social gender, but constantly threatens to dissolve other categories or even the theorist's own writing as socially constructed, against the theorist's will.

Each new cycle demonstrates near-complete historical amnesia as to the relevance of transfeminized people in the prior theoretical move.

So the “Trans* Question” allows for the basic feminist move, asserting that gender is socially constructed, but if improperly controlled it stands to dissolve virtually any definition feminist theorists try to build. To be clear, I do not believe in the total deconstruction of categories – you need definitions, even ones you acknowledge as imprecise, to say anything at all. But transfeminized people probably have pretty solid ideas about gender, having to, you know, live with it. The alienated ‘Trans Question*’ has none of this insight, appearing instead as a gaping epistemic hole in the world, and so feminist theorists are forced to come up with complicated quarantining measures to keep the Question from spilling over.

What jeopardizes feminist theory’s use of the Question? One answer (among many) comes by looking at Mead, who concluded that physical characteristics seen as ‘sex traits’ were socially constructed by looking at the culture-specific construction of what she called ‘full transvestitism.’ In this case, the Question undermined sex when the social position of transfeminized subjects were seen as simultaneously normative and anti-normative, existing in some normative ‘social’ role while being understood as distinct from non-transfeminized subjects via another ‘natural’ axis. The fact that these splits were made differently across different transfeminized groups undermined the distinction between social and ‘natural/biological’ aspects of gender, and because the alienated Question provides no means of making anything solid out of any of this, Mead retreated to the womb.

So understanding that the Question allows for the deconstruction of gender, and that it overgrows when multiple (studied as) semi-normative transfeminized groups are cross-compared with one another, we can consider aspects of contemporary feministqueertrans theory that enforce the epistemic isolation and normativization/antinormativization of transfeminized groups. The knots this ties in feminist theories seem relevant both to the ‘why does trans theory exist’ question posed by Chu & Drager (2019) and to the challenges and limitations of applying queer/trans theory to groups outside the anglosphere (Chiang 2021, Savci 2021). I’ll discuss that more in another essay.

SOURCES

Behar, Ruth, and Deborah A. Gordon. 1996. Women Writing Culture. First Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chiang, Howard. 2021. Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific. Columbia University Press.

Chu, Andrea Long, and Emmett Harsin Drager. 2019. “After Trans Studies.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6 (1): 103–16. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-7253524.

Friedan, Betty, and Anna Quindlen. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. Reprint edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. 1st edition. Cambridge Oxford Malden,MA: Polity.

Gill-Peterson, Jules. 2017. “Implanting Plasticity into Sex and Trans/Gender.” Angelaki 22 (2): 47–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2017.1322818.

Mead, Margaret. 1949. Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World. First Edition. William Morrow.

Namaste, Viviane. 2020. “Undoing Theory: The ‘Transgender Question’ and the Epistemic Violence of Anglo-American Feminist Theory.” In Feminist Theory Reader, edited by Carole McCann, Seung-kyung Kim, and Emek Ergun, 5th edition. New York, NY London: Routledge.

Raymond, Janice G. 1979. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. New York: Teachers College Press.

Savci, Evren. 2021. Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics Under Neoliberal Islam. Durham (N.C.): Duke University Press Books.

Stone, Sandy. 1992. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 10 (2 (29)): 150–76. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10-2_29-150.

Stryker, Susan. 1994. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (3): 237–54. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1-3-237.

Tagonist, Anne. 1997. “Sister Subverter Diary August ’97.” Unapologetic: The Journal of Irresponsible Gender.

#transmisogyny #trans #transgender #my writing

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dreamofthemaidenless · 3 months

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good evening dream lord, how has the gorgeous Lucienne been?

a culture from the outer fringes of the andromeda galaxy has been dabbling in postmodern expressionism well ahead of schedule, and before having invented anything that could feasibly be called modernism. she’s so so so excited about it and she’s explained it to me in detail but i get distracted by her huge beautiful brown eyes and can’t retain the information :/

#the sandman #dream of the endless

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probablyasocialecologist · 3 months

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When it comes to gender theory, scientists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who were informed by eugenics “made strong statements about the social and political role of women, claiming all the while to speak for the scientific truth.” They typically referred to women’s reproductive capacity as a natural indication of their divinely ordained social role. Social, political, and religious ideologies informed the scientific beliefs of this time period, which is not dissimilar to the widely held beliefs of current gender/sex psychologists. It can be argued that the father of modern psychology himself, Sigmund Freud, in his quest to validate psychoanalysis as a legitimate science, reproduced the social opinions of his time in his psychological theories. His theories about femininity, in particular, have been criticized by feminist thinkers for the ways in which his frameworks position femininity as fundamentally incompatible with subjectivity, thus cementing women’s passivity and subordination as a psychological disposition that explains and justifies their social position under patriarchy. Although psychology has developed considerably since Freud, his work remains foundational to the field, and informs the ongoing structural violence of psychiatric pathologization experienced by marginalized subjects. Psychoanalytic concepts have become embedded in clinical, academic, institutional, and colloquial language, influencing the epistemologies of neurosexists and feminists alike. We continue to see bioessentialist reasoning about sexual difference employed in the name of feminism. Notably, bioessentialism informs contemporary discourse about trans rights. For example, Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism (TERF) refers to a radical ideology that equates womanhood with biological sex, and maintains a bioessentialist stance to discriminate and incite violence against trans women, and to exclude trans women from women’s spaces. Proponents of trans exclusionary radical feminist ideology espouse the conviction that women are a group with a singular shared experience of womanhood based on the patriarchal violence experienced by people with vaginas. It arose out of the work of anti-porn feminist writing like that of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon in the 1970s, which centered the ways in which cisgender women’s bodies are uniquely subjected to sexualized violence. The objectification and sexualization of the cisgender female body was the main concern in this discourse, and as such, postmodern perspectives that disrupt bioessentialist ideas about gender and the body have been received as an existential threat to the objectives of this radical ideology. Third wave feminist discourse and theories, like intersectional feminist theory, have disputed the idea that bodily or physical similarities are experienced in the same ways socially and culturally (e.g., at intersections of race, class, ability, nation, gender identity, and sexuality). When it comes to trans discourse, it is important to recognize the ways in which non-normatively gendered bodies with any perceived association to femininity or womanhood are subjected to patriarchal and sexualized violence. Heteronormativity and rape culture affect more than just cisgender women. To weaponize a binary understanding of gender against women with diverse experiences of womanhood is to collude with the oppressive forces of the colonial, white supremacist hetero capitalist patriarchy.

#gender #bioessentialism #neurosexism #feminism

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formulinos · 1 year

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HYPERFIXATION CORNER | NOW, THAT'S WHAT I CALL LATE STAGE FORMULA 1!

theydies and gentlemen of f1blr, i regret to inform you guys that the rumours are true: we live in a society. liberty media's tenure with FOM has opened a can of worms that ushered in what i've been calling lately "late stage formula 1". But the thing is, what the fuck would that be, exactly? so, as a good scholar, i took it to myself to study more about late stage capitalism in order to truly understand the term and see if my application made any sense. in today's hyperfixation corner, we'll get deeper than necessary on the microcosm of capitalism that f1 has become. and then we will get depressed. but maybe, just maybe, we can figure this out.

note: this has 7k words AND at times gets quite dense in terms of sociological theory, but i truly did my best to make it palatable. still, this is not going to be everyone's cup of tea and might get boring. if you still believe this is your thing, i just ask you to please hang on tight and see it through to the end as i truly feel everything ties up together rather logically.

PART I: THE DAWN OF LATE STAGE FORMULA 1

the basics of late stage capitalism

the application in late stage formula 1

PART II: YOU CAN'T RUN AWAY - FORMULA 1 AND CAPITALIST REALISM

mark fisher's capitalist realism

the indycar situation

was there ever class consciousness in f1?

the illusion of abu dhabi

THE DAWN OF LATE STAGE FORMULA 1

1. The Basics of Late Stage Capitalism

For a term we see being used daily on several outlets, you'd be surprised to find out that there isn't a rigid definition. In fact, depending on who you talk to, you'll get widely different explanations, since there's basically "academia" late capitalism and "normie" late capitalism. I'll brush up those two for you guys real quick because, at this point, might as well.

The term was coined by a German scholar Werner Sombart. At the time, just at the start of the XX century, he was a HUGE Marx/Engels stan. He had all of their photocards, but beyond that, he also took to himself to write his lifetime's defining work, which is basically an expanded universe fanfic to what Marx and Engels wrote, tbh. In 1902, Sombart started to publish "Der moderne Kapitalismus" (Modern Capitalism), comprised of three volumes in which he discussed four stages of capitalism: proto-capitalism, related to the appearance of capitalist-like tendencies in feudal society until it became proper capitalism + early capitalism, which was basically seen pre-industrial revolution; high capitalism, which came in with the industrial revolution and ended with WWI; and at last, late capitalism, which was what they were living at the time of the third book release (1927), that is, post world wars world. That's all very chill, but given that later on Sombart drank the kool aid and became a Nazi, he can fuck off.

Thank God, two other dudes came in to take the expression from Sombart. Ernest Mandel and Fredric Jameson are two scholars who, although published their works in different times, were responsible for widespreading the term. Mandel published Late Capitalism in 1975, marking it as the era of economic expansion post WWII that, in his view, would reach its peak in the 70s since the economy was starting to have frequent crises. Jameson, however, dropped his book, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 16 years later, talking about the then-current world marked by globalisation and the expansion of capitalism to culture (arts, lifestyle, etc.).

All of this is to say that, today, if you ask an economist or a political scientist, they will most likely talk to you either about this time progression or straight out use Fredric Jameson's definition. Which, tbh, works, since in a way Jameson touches on the expansion of capitalism to daily life, something that goes in common with the contemporary POV on late capitalism.

We legit live in hell rn, no big deal

If you go on Reddit or watch corecore edits on tiktok, then there is a sense of dread and irony that's unique to the internet's definition of late capitalism. Since it's a relatively recent thing, there isn't a concrete way to define it, so I'll just use the one given by Ian Neves (Brazilian Historian) in his video about Capitalist Realism because I think it's the one that manages to summarise it the best: Late Stage Capitalism is the stage of capitalism in which the contradictions of capitalism are so evident that they become explicit to the population. That is, it is so in your face that it stops being campy. It's just tacky.

In the video, Neves further explains that one of the big deals about capitalism is that it sells itself as a contradiction-free system, but in our current time we aren't quite fooled anymore. A few examples of this would be multinationals like Amazon opening factories in underdeveloped places like Tijuana, under the guise of wanting to "help develop the country" but placing themselves close to a slum, clearly showing their intentions of exploitation; You can also think of the "art" market of NFTs, which are nothing more than numbers stored in a computer - capitalism touts itself as being a creator of value capable of meeting society's needs, yet there is no need met with NFTs besides value generation for the sake of value generation and pure speculation. Anyway, there are several examples and whatever you think is probably Late Stage Capitalism.

2. The Application in Late Stage Formula 1

Having done this deep dive, imagine my face when I realised that it turns out I didn't just pull "Late Stage F1" out of my ass. I was gooped! Gooped, I tell you. See, if late stage capitalism is now defined as the era in which capitalism's contradictions are explicit, then Late Stage F1 can be easily perceived as the stage of the sport in which its contradictions are no longer capable of being ignored by the fans either. In that sense, it does feel that this is the perfect way to synthesise the bitterness that a large part of the fandom tastes in their mouths.

note: I'm not stating that pre-Liberty Media Formula 1 was perfect. God forbid I become one of the purist fans talking about the good ole days. Bernie Ecclestone wasn't shit and in a way, some of our issues nowadays are inherited from his tenure as the head of FOM. But, at the same time, the sport managed to sell itself as a luxury hobby while still being satisfying and accessible, in a way or another, to the non-wealthy fans. You couldn't see as many contradictions as now because the image of the sport was more or less aligned with what you actually saw, good and bad.

The same, unfortunately, can't be said nowadays. To illustrate my point, let's take a look at FOM's Corporate Strategic plan, released in 2020. The idea, in their words, is "to deliver a more popular, more exciting, and sustainable sport, which pushes the boundaries whilst protecting our heritage.", supported by six axes:

Race – Increase competitiveness and unpredictability on track

Engage – Produce an amazing spectacle for fans on and off track

Perform – Generate value to our shareholders

Sustain – Deliver sustainable and efficient operations

Collaborate – Create win-win relationships with our partners

Empower – Build an engaged and high-performing workforce

Besides Perform and Collaborate, arguably the two most capitalistic inclined pillars, it's incredibly easy to find counter-arguments to illustrate how this is just corporate talk and doesn't actually reflect on the sport. [cracks fingers] So, let's get it:

✷ Increase competitiveness and unpredictability on track: Ok, sure, they try with this one as it is the core of the sport - after all, this is what the regulations' tweaks are for. But you just need a quick overview of the Andretti situation to see that competitiveness only serves the structure to a certain point. After all, although Andretti managed to get the backing of a manufacturer (General Motors, in the form of Cadillac) which, in theory is enough to make it a more legitimate entry less likely to Caterham levels of bankruptcy, the vibes are still somehow off from camp F1.

Michael and Mario Andretti on a pit wall during something that WASN'T a Formula 1 race

This all boils down to the revenue split at the end of the season between the teams and FOM: once you remove the bonuses that are thrown around, roughly 50% of what's left goes to FOM, and the other 50% are the championship prize money (don't quote me on these percentages actually, I'm not sure if it's exactly 50/50) . If Andretti gets in, then either the teams' share gets diluted as a consequence of an extra mouth to be fed, either FOM needs to adjust its own reward to increase the total prize money and make sure that all teams still get the same liquid value for positions 1-10.

Now, Andretti are willing to pay the 200 million dollars "anti-dillution" fee that's to be distributed to the already existing teams as a regulated "sorry we're gonna have to split the prize money in 11 from now on". Yet, instead of welcoming the bid, teams have lobbied for an increase to that fee to 600 millions, a cheap tactic to either get more money or to keep Andretti out. On one hand, Christian Horner has made it clear, from the teams' perspective it is about the money. On the other hand, Stefano Domenecali and FOM are hot and cold, stating that he's happy Andretti are interested but mad that they're calling out the bureaucracy of the process.

The key aspect here is that F1 no longer needs an American team to reinforce their position in the United States market as they did back in 2014 when Haas formalised their entrance. In fact, they don't even need Haas to assert themselves as American anymore as they have three GPs lined up regardless of the team's national fanbase. This way, in FOM's optics, they have nothing to gain from Andretti. In a way, the teams are basically doing what's expected of them, but bottomline is the fact that FOM is fucking mental in adopting the same perspective instead of planning how an extra entry of such magnitude as Andretti-Cadillac could pay itself with time.

✷ Produce an amazing spectacle for fans on and off track: See, I guess you can call me a bit of an old school fan, because when it comes to Formula 1, I WANT TO SEE THE FUCKING CARS RUN ON THE FUCKING TRACK. I suppose many of you are aligned with me on that one.

Using the 2021 numbers as reference since we didn't get the 2022 report yet, the average global audience is around 70.3 million. Given that the biggest venues can only hold 400k attendants tops, the rest of those 70m fans are watching the GPs from home. They are also most likely having to pay for it, since F1TV's dominion keeps increasing. While, all credit is due, F1TV offers a much better pay-per-view experience than many other sports have, with a very rich archive and incredible coverage of each race weekend, some of these prices per country are a legit effort for a fan to make.

From the Reddit post, an example of the price disparity between countries. F1TV is priced accordingly to the purchasing power that each country has.

Could be worse as many other fans are held hostage by Sky Sports, which is only available with a much more expensive £34.99 subscription to UK and Ireland fans, who don't even have F1TV as an alternative option. Given that Sky also has the airing rights in Germany and Italy, the fact is that F1's free to air presence has been lowering over the years (a problem that has been discussed in 2016 and represented a decrease in viewership at the time, mitigated by the Liberty Media efforts). But F1 really can't be arsed in considering a full return to free-to-air TV given the current times and so, the idea is to basically adapt to the pay TV market as much as possible and to retain free-to-air positions in specific markets. And if you, individually, don't have the money to pay for it and there is no free-to-air alternative for you, tough titties.

When it comes to actually attending a Grand Prix though, it's becoming equally harder to do it. The F1destinations 2023 rank shows that there has been an average 56% increase on the average 3-day ticket price in relation to 2019, costing roughly 508 dollars. In terms of affordability, these tickets can represent from under 10% to over 50% of the average monthly net wage for the countries hosting the GP. If it was just the tickets that would be easy peasy, but the fact is most of the times attendance includes the need for housing, transportation, food, etc. What this means is that it's fucking expensive, ok?

The GPs are getting more and more packed, but for how long?

Again, the sport has always been elitist, but there was for a good while a relative balance between your average fan who managed to save up and get a GA ticket with the rich wealthy fans at the paddock drinking their champagne. Nowadays, even people who were regular attendees of their home gps have tapped out due to being priced out. Plus, even the new GPs added to the calendar already come with a big disclaimer "FOR MONEY ONLY" as, for instance, the cheapest tickets for Las Vegas cost 500 bucks but the real average price for the three days is $1,667.

So, if they are in fact producing a great spectacle for fans, it's becoming more and more hard for said fans to actually be able to see it. Whatever.

✷ Deliver sustainable and efficient operations: F1 made a pledge in 2020 to improve their relationship to Mother Nature by 2030, which includes: Net Zero carbon, sustainably-fuelled, hybrid power units, efficient and low/zero carbon logistics & travel, 100% renewably powered facilities and credible carbon sequestration. The whole pdf has a bunch of lovely lines about their grandiose plans, but these are somewhat easily dragged to filth by anyone who understands just a tiny bit of eco-sustainability. One of these people is David Bott, chief innovation officer for the Society of Chemical Industry*.

Bott explains well the situation with the fuel. F1 cars currently use E10, which is a mix of gasoline (+ the likely additives that gasoline already has) with 10% ethanol, a sustainable fuel. The thing is, gasoline is more popular than ethanol for cars for a reason: if you take 1L of gasoline and 1L of ethanol, when you burn them, gasoline will give you way more energy. According to Bott, this means that the new E10 fuel is not as potent as gasoline would be, so you end up needing to use more of it anyway and in the grand scheme of emissions, that means fuck all.

F1's carbon footprint per sector. Does something feel funny to you?

Still, as F1 itself showed in their sustainability report back in 2020, the power unit emissions are less than 1% of the total emissions during a season. As you'd imagine, the thick of it really lies in logistics (45%, transportation of all equipment) and business travel (27,7%, transportation+hotels of f1 staff). Drivers and TPs carpooling with their private jets might help a little bit, but it's evident that F1 doesn't give a single shit about improving those numbers given that the calendar has expanded to 23 races, three of them in the same country but in completely different times of the year, which means that the back and forth of airplanes between continents will correspond to a 15% increase to emissions in relation to last year. According to Paolo Feser, If they were to at least organise the calendar in a sensible manner, they could cut these emissions by half, but such a calendar would go against their contracts with Bahrain and Abu Dhabi for the season's opener (till 2036) and finale (till 2030), respectively. When you consider the pledge's deadline of 2030, it's pretty evident that they'll say they made it because of the drop-in fuel in development, but logistics are far removed from the rest of it.

✷ Build an engaged, high-performing workforce: TALKING OF THE 23 RACE CALENDAR, the biggest impact is obviously on the workforce. Race weekends are gruelling enough for the drivers, who have stated through the GPDA their concerns of burnout. But then, you also have to consider the garage side, who are used to a minimum of 12-hour shifts during a race weekend, having to adapt to more frequent double and triple headers. As an anonymous mechanic said:

"Then, when you are coming home on a Monday morning or Monday evening, and you haven't slept properly in days, that then affects how you feel in your personal time. It means your relationships can suffer – either because you are agitated with your partners or you've got other things on your mind. And that's not fair on you nor them. You are not just mentally fatigued, you are physically drained as well. As the season wears on, there are a hell of a lot of injuries happening. The teams do have doctors and physios to help look after you, but the easiest solution is to pump you with painkillers to just keep you going. There is no way in a million years that a regular doctor would give you what we are given to keep us going."

The psychological strain adds to the anxiety of creating the perfect car and work culture has become increasingly tense. To add to the tension, the cost cap negatively reflected on the workforce as many teams, including RBR and Mercedes, had to fire people to adapt to it. Those who stay have to be reminded that they are "so lucky" to still have a job and if "they don't like it, they can go" (as Tost said in 2021) but the situation is overall so demotivating that yeah, people are quitting motorsports overall or changing categories. To sum up, the engagement and performance of the workforce isn't out of love for the sport, but fear and pressure.

To wrap this with a golden bow, I could never forget the #WeRaceAsOne initiative, still touted by F1 as a campaign that really wants to bring awareness and impact important problems in our society. When it was created in 2020, the main focuses were COVID-19 and social inequalities, but given that they banned T-shirts in podiums in 2020 after Lewis Hamilton protested the death of Breonna Taylor by the hands of US pigs, they clearly weren't comfortable in really tackling the inequality issue. Therefore, they changed the goals of the campaign for a very corporate "Sustainability, Diversity and Inclusion & Community" axis, whatever the hell they mean with that. It's good that they can focus on it all they want, as the FIA has banned drivers from political statements during race weekend procedures. Moreover, while the boycott of the Russian Grand Prix is completely justifiable, it still feels empty once you consider they raced in Saudi Arabia while a factory mere miles away from the track was bombed, also as an act of war.

To sum up, the fact is that late stage Formula 1 is here to stay and we have to deal with all of the sport's contradictions. The same way that late capitalism does not mean that the end of capitalism is near, late stage f1 means nothing as its popularity has been rising more and more, and at the current rate, the abandonment of the older fans means jackshit as more people show up on social media and are willing to pay what's necessary to either watch it or attend races. The question that might linger, in fact, is if F1 has reached the point of inevitability at last?

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YOU CAN'T RUN AWAY - FORMULA 1 AND CAPITALIST REALISM

1. Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism

Even when we're faced with the existence of a late stage Formula 1, whether when it's concretely laid down or just a feeling deep down, many of us still continue to engage with it. As much as we complain about it, the current panorama does show an expansion of the sport, which can only happen as well because a good chunk of the old school fans remain. The question is, why do we insist on watching a sport when we know shit is that bad? Is it solely because of affectionate ties to a team, a driver or even f1 itself? Sure, these factors contribute to it, but what if I told you that it is also because current F1 has finally managed to sink into our collective consciousnesses as inevitable?

To understand what I'm trying to say here, we need to look first at the big picture. That is, if we have been treating F1 as a microcosm of capitalism up to this point, it's now necessary to step back and face Capital itself. In order to do this, I want to introduce to you guys the concept of capitalist realism.

Say hello to Mark Fisher (1968-2017), an incredible mind gone too soon

While, just like late stage capitalism, "capitalist realism" was an umbrella term used for a myriad of different meanings, we don't have to contextualise its timeline. Rather than that, we can jump straight to Mark Fisher's defining work, "Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?", published in 2009. In it, Fisher defines it as "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it". Putting it in simpler terms, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

With capital realism, Fisher no longer talks just about the influence of capitalism at a socio-economic level, but also how it bled into the cultural and psychological spheres (scary!!!!!!!). All of this culminates in apolitical attitude towards capitalism: since we can't escape the system because things are like this, all we can do, realistically, is to adapt to it and try to minimise its effects instead of actually fighting them.

Having that in mind, I ask you guys: can you imagine the demise of F1? We often hear about it separating from the FIA, but similarly to capitalist realism, Formula 1 losing its world championship status (as close to its end of the world as it gets) feels more likely that a massive restructuring of the category or it shutting down for good. Similarly, fans have adopted an "it is what it is" point of view towards the sport as we all know what FOM and the FIA are like and we don't have, supposedly, the power to change anything, we just have to suck on whatever they propose to us.

Stefano Domenicali (FOM CEO) and Mohammed bin Sulayem (president of the FIA), joined in unholy matrimony

Now, capitalist realism didn't show up out of the blue. According to Fisher, neoliberalism was the mother of capitalist realism. This is because its campaign in the 80s and 90s with regan and maggie thatcher (names in lowercase because I don't respect them) was successful in gaslighting people into thinking that it wasn't necessarily perfect, but it was the only approach of government rooted in reality. Once it was implemented, the next step was to consolidate it, which happened thanks to two factors: the end of the soviet union and the transition to post-fordism. I know this seems crackheaded and with no relation to F1, but give me a chance pls!

Trigger warning: the many faces of neoliberalism

During the Cold War, there was a concrete antagonist to capitalism in the shape of the USSR*. With its demise, this role of a real opposition to it was completely obliterated, allowing for capitalism to expand however it pleased without anything to contest it. Similarly, maybe F1's biggest triumph in these last two decades - and this is why I said at the top that Bernie wasn't shit and the problem about late stage F1 had its roots further back - is that it successfully managed to free itself from the sole category that threatened its popularity: Indy Car.

*note: by stating this, there is absolutely no value judgement. the statement is not about the ussr being a problematic fave or a communist hell that needed to be abolished. it was just a physical entity that asserted itself as a possible alternative to capitalism. by its physical existence, it allowed for public consciousness to understand that, if the ussr was a possible alternative to capitalism, then there might as well be plenty of others. kindly remember that the ussr was quite oppressive and countless people and countries suffered on their hands, while also understanding that for this particular purpose, it did its job.

2. The IndyCar Situation

The IndyCar World Series as we know it was established in 1979, with CART (Championship Auto Racing Teams) as the governing body behind it. The similarities between F1 and IndyCar went beyond the cars (although the Indys were a tad less sophisticated than F1s): the creation of CART itself was based on Bernie's FOCA model (television rights, sponsorships, etc).

IndyCar's Indianapolis 500, 1992. Not bad in terms of attendance!

From the 80s, its popularity grew in America, with them even inheriting venues that originally held grand prix, like Long Beach. Still, no one was really intimidated by them as F1's presence in the US, albeit messy with several different events attempted, was constant during that period. However, shit went down in the next decade, when Formula 1 was shut down by the organisers of the US Grand Prix at Phoenix right in 1991. From that point, it would take 9 years for F1 to get back, at the heart of American racing, Indianapolis. Hold this information.

Once F1 disappeared from 'Murica, IndyCar thrived, at least for a while. CART had managed to join ACCUS (Automobile Competition Committee for the United States), who are affiliated to the FIA, which made it possible for drivers to race in Indy without losing their super licenses. Soon, there was a migration from foreign drivers to IndyCar, and that included people from F1, such as Emerson Fittipaldi. Once that happened, the sky became the limit for Indy and they started to race outside of the US. By 1993, Nigel Mansell had dropped F1 after a rift with Williams and decided to go drive for Newman/Haas at IndyCar instead.

Nigel Mansell and teammate Mario Andretti. Oh how I want Nigel, ngl.

note: the motherfucker demolished his competition, won IndyCar and is still the only person to be, technically, F1 and IndyCar champion at the same time.

At this point, some people will say Bernie Ecclestone wasn't bothered, but he hadn't even gotten over losing the Long Beach GP to CART back in 84. You know Bernie, I know Bernie, we all know Bernie. HE WAS MAD!!!! At the same time, NASCAR was rising in popularity like never before, causing a certain rivalry between the categories over who would take over the hearts of all the petrol head americans.

Enter Tony George, then head of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and chairman at CART. Tony believed that CART was getting lost in the game and ignoring Motorsport Traditions by racing in venues that weren't ovals. Since Georgy was annoying as fuck, CART booted him from the board of directors, which was one of the most stupid decisions given that he owned the track that literally gave the name to their championship. IndyCar's whole thing was the Indianapolis 500, right? "So fuck you too," Tony George cried while being thrown away from the CART offices by security "You don't want me? Then you don't get to race the Indy 500 anymore!".

Well, it didn't happen exactly like that. Instead, Tony George created a separate category called Indy Racing League that would be dedicated exclusively to ovals and get to be the owner of the Indy 500 from 96 onwards. The original IndyCar series changed its name to CART and Indy racing in America became fractured. Just to be clear, IRL did allow an 8 CART car limit to compete at Indy 500, but CART decided to boycott the event instead. This worked for some time, and CART still managed to make do with their reserves (they even offered to buy F1 in 1998) but soon these started to dry out as sponsors dropped the series and teams started breaking the boycott to race in Indy 500, eventually by the 2000s completely defecting to IRL. In 2004, CART filed for bankruptcy and got bought out, living as a zombie series until 2008 when IRL bought it and reunified them. At this point, the damage was done as NASCAR had taken over in popularity and F1 was back since 2000, racing the IMS.

Tony and Bernie, BFFs 5eva

Oh yeah, haven't you heard? 1998 also marked the year where it was announced by Bernie that F1 would come back to the United States, racing at the holy land of Indianapolis herself. Sounds sketchy? You're not the one to think that, as both Jacques Villeneuve (1995 IndyCar champion 1995) and Gordon Kirby (journalist, US correspondent for Autosport 1973-2004) have stated that Bernald, alongside NASCAR boss Bill France, basically whispered sweet nothings in Tony George's ear to get him to act a fool. Although it took several more years for F1 to finally sink its teeth into the United States in an effective manner, the main competition was out before they could even expand further.

It was up to Formula 1 then to expand without anything to stop it, as we can see in the many calendar changes we've had over the years. Even further, since there is no antagonist, this has also allowed F1 to turn its sights to the feeder system, creating its own "preferred" path that, with the super license points system basically make it harder for drivers who are outside of the F1 feeder series bubble to make it to F1 (as we've even seen recently with Colton Herta). Same thing is happening to the W Series, which for lack of funds wasn't able to finish their 2022 season even though they were promoted to an F1 support championship, racing. While Formula 1 did not offer to help them or tried to integrate them properly in the feeder series ladder, they have just recently announced F1 Academy, their own initiative for female drivers, placed officially just under Formula 3 with a direct link. That's great for the female drivers, but incredibly fucked up at the same time.

3. Was There Ever Class Consciousness in F1?

Yeah, so the whole lack of opposition didn't help on an external basis, but there is also an internal factor that cannot be ignored and it's linked to post-Fordist work structure. In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher cites a study by Richard Sennett called "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism". In it, Sennett states:

"Where formerly workers could acquire a single set of skills and expect to progress upwards through a rigid organizational hierarchy, now they are required to periodically re-skill as they move from institution to institution, from role to role. As the organization of work is decentralized, with lateral networks replacing pyramidal hierarchies, a premium is put on ‘flexibility’.[...] This flexibility was defined by a deregulation of Capital and labor, with the workforce being casualized (with an increasing number of workers employed on a temporary basis), and outsourced."

Translating this, instead of becoming a specialist on something, you become a jack of all trades without any job stability. In the F1 world, this is seen not only in drivers changing teams and getting sacked of the category altogether, but also in the poaching of talent between teams and the frequent internal restructurations. Ian Neves says that post-Fordism was key in the establishment of capital realism because its natural consequence is the individualisation of work, which leads to the weakening of trade unions and ultimately, the mining of class consciousness.

As one would expect, there isn't a trade union that looks after all F1 workers. Instead, most of the engineers, mechanics and other staff are subject to the unions of the countries the factories are located at (for instance, Alpine is protected by the "collective convention of metallurgical engineers and workers").Therefore, as much as the personnel is against work conditions and calendar expansion, it's much more difficult for them to unite and rally against it as they have been segmented.

Ferrari team photo, 2022. Together, but divided nevertheless

This is particularly fucky when you consider the existence of the GPDA. The Grand Prix Drivers' Association is a trade union that, historically, has made itself heard in delicate situations where drivers needed to claim their rights and fight for their safety. Unfortunately, this comes with a side effect that reinforces a difference between drivers from the rest of the F1 crew. While they are absolutely right and the GPDA should exist as a trade union regardless of the existence of a larger one encompassing all workers, the fact is that the illusion that drivers are in the status quo of the sport, and not subject to it, remains.

Look, as much as they are in a privileged spot and reap all its benefits, the fact is they do not own the cars they run - well, at least not most of the time [stares at the Strolls]. They still rely on the teams that own the structure and the backing of sponsors, that is, the means of production, to work. Most of the time, when they retire from F1, they still tend to race in other categories or find side quests. While I have no doubt that drivers are super passionate for racing and you can't completely quit it, how much are we sure that this is also not partially motivated by the desire to make sure they are still able to afford the lifestyle they had as Formula 1 drivers? Marx was clear, baby, the drivers are as much the proletariat as anyone else. By separating them from the rest of the structure and maintaining the post-fordist work structure for the rest of the teams, class consciousness inside the paddock is close to none and it helps to consolidate F1's status as an almighty being.

4. The Illusion of Abu Dhabi

Here's the thing: if "realism" is used as an argument for maintenance of the current state of affairs, by conforming to what's in theory "realistic", then the best way to threaten it, according to Fisher, is if you manage to expose the cracks of said "realism". This should be able to work because, get this, there is a difference between what's Real and what's reality.

Again, sorry but I'm gonna get theoretical here. However, when you consider that so much of what we're talking about here directly relates to a psychological sphere, you can't not add some psychiatric theory into this. When you look at it from the point of view of Jacques Lacan (French psychiatrist who spit some bars), reality is constituted not of what's actually Real, but of social conventions and symbolism. The Real itself is unrepresentable and even traumatic at times, and you can only perceive it when you look at the inconsistencies of reality, that aims to suppress it! What the fuck!!!!

It's super easy, you just have to show that the whole framework is inconsistent!

Except it never works that way.

Going back AGAIN to capitalist realism, take a look at the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. I don't understand much about the mechanisms of the economy (and I am right not to, as this is all made up by weird people), but even I know that the Lehman Brothers collapse resulted in a worldwide clusterfuck that saw many lose their lifetime of savings. After that point, the ripple effect was so severe that companies were falling like flies and it was up to State interventions to halt things. Maybe the greatest example of late stage capitalism, this was the key point to explicit the greatest contradiction of neoliberalism: they sell themselves as a system above the State, however they needed the State to save it, which means they don't really want to abolish State, just to occupy it to their own desires.

The absurd numbers of the financial crisis in the US.

So, you have your reality cracked, you can look at the Real and see the inconsistencies of capitalism laid bare in front of all of us. This should have been enough for neoliberalism/capitalism to go out of style completely right? As you can see if you look out the window, however, we're still living in a capitalist society. Then what happened? The crises ended up reinforcing the status of capitalism precisely through the bank bail-outs as the States doubled down on the whole "realistic" thing because they had no alternative and saw these companies as "too big to fail". What we see today, then, is an economical model that clearly fallible, yet remains because it's perceived as a default. Mark's words, not mine.

But this is in the field of Capital. It's not like, in the F1 bubble, anything of the genre has ever happened.

Yup.

I guess you could say there have been moments in Formula 1 that came close to exposing these inconsistencies but didn't, like crashgate, spygate or the whole 1989 championship debacle. Still, these didn't expose anything because:

1) F1 didn't sell itself at the time of those events the same way it does now

2) All of these could be easily pinned to individuals instead of the whole structure of F1 itself - even Senna put 1989 on the back of Balestre only, instead of the entire FIA.

Abu Dhabi, however, wasn't looked at the same way given that it's still such a controversial topic and was the point of rupture to many fans with the category.This is because the series of events that led to Abu Dhabi, touted as the biggest showdown since 1974 and followed it afterwards managed to create the circumstances to break the veil between the reality (F1 as the greatest, most spontaneous motorsport modality in the world) and showed the Real (the newfound need to push narratives, consequence of the transition from sport to entertainment encouraged by Liberty Media ran-FOM, enabled by the FIA and accelerated by Drive to Survive).

The animosity between TeamLH and the Orange Army lingers to this day. However, regardless of its peak at the time, the controversy of the actions taken at the Grand Prix did not provoke just an outcry amongst Hamilton fans, but to a good chunk of neutral parties as well. We're still here though, so how did Formula 1 manage to escape from it? Simple, they also reinforced their position by the immediate actions of the FIA, as Jean Todt demanded a review of what happened. In its swiftness to respond, the World Motor Sport Council, that is, the one institution that could bail-out F1, states they would take action to understand what happened and avoid any problems in the next season.

The bail-out, in this sense, isn't monetary, but institutional as they place their focus on the "relevant parties" instead of the major structure itself. From their side, FOM avoided taking responsibility for their role, as Domenecali said right after that "We have already spoken with the president [Mohammed bin Sulayem, who had just assumed his role] . We talked about the priorities he will have to face, and there are many.". This landed as well, as the common reaction was to demand the FIA changes and penalties, blaming Michael Masi for "trying to balance the need for spectacle with the rulebook" instead of addressing the root causes of the need for spectacle itself.

Masi had it coming, but he sure made it easy from the FIA and FOM

In that sense, the reinforcement also comes in the sense of self-criticism, since it leads to something called "interpassivity", a concept developed by Robert Pfaller: when the actors in Formula 1 take it to themselves to discuss and criticise the sport themselves, they are performing our opposite stance for the fans, who then are able to continue to consume it as they please. This is possible as well because we take a "cynical distance" from the sport and thus become passive spectators. This way, as long as we say to ourselves "oh, F1 is rotten nowadays", that's all we need as a cop-out to keep watching it. This is not just us being hypocrites, per se, but legit one of capitalist ideology as Zizek puts it that we overvalue our internal beliefs in detriment of our external actions - literally the "there is no ethical consumption in capitalism" of it all. It's inevitable we replicate this behaviour when it comes to watching Formula 1.

So, once we get all of the way, the question remains: is there anything that can be done to truly change Formula 1? It's not just a matter of direct action, as what we're talking about here is a result of a concealed mulit-layered internal organisation that acts on an abstract level. As much as we can bitch and moan, fan protests and team appeals are direct action and thus, easily countered by the FOM/FIA complex. Hell, these two fight all the time and yet any crisis is easily fixed, as just the mere possibility of F1 separating from the FIA was enough to get bin Sulayem to step away from day to day administration. On one hand, FOM doesn't want to truly separate from the FIA, they just want to occupy the FIA themselves. On the other hand, the FIA needs F1 to stay so that they can continue to assert themselves as the big dawgs in motorsports. This is how they manage to walk hand in hand and compromise over their own interests instead of the interests of the sport itself.

Maybe, this triumph of FOM is directly related to the biggest weapon of capital realism: the individualisation of the being, placing their responsibility and expectations solely on the self instead of the greater structure. This can be seen in situations such as the climate change approach, focused way more on our need to recycle than the large corporations' impact on the environment. Another example is the approach of mental health, that most of the times places on your brain alone the responsibility for your disorders instead of considering as well the influence of social conditions.

In the context of F1, the individualisation is exacerbated by the nature of the competition. Everyone is fighting for their own interests, and in a way, that has always been the goal. Still, the excessive encouragement of rivalries and toxicity - not only in the fandom, but in the paddock itself - serves the role of segmentation very well and helps FOM to continue pushing through F1 as they please. It all boils down to the lack of class consciousness between ALL the personnel, who could adopt strategic approaches that directly affect FOM's directives, turning what was abstract into a concrete issue and thus making it possible to take direct action. (tbh many of these issues can be addressed if capitalism itself is fought but then again, the impact of that on the vroom vrooms can be quite extreme and maybe that's asking too much of a sport dominated by car manufacturers and such).

In the role of fans, we both reflect the inner machinations of Formula 1 and feed it. Thus, the same way that all the staff should unite, so should we. While when it comes to track action many of us are rivals, and some of the drivers legit make it hard to stand with them, fact is the real enemy at the current date is FOM - even if Liberty Media sells it, the next administration will most likely double down on their approach. Our best hope isn't to boycott F1, but to encourage the union of its staff and show that while we welcome the technical evolutions, the main goal must be preserved. Food for thought, really. In the meantime, thank you for surviving till the end! As always, screw you guys, I'm going home!

In the role of fans, we both reflect the inner machinations of Formula 1 and feed it. Thus, the same way that all the staff should unite, so should we. While when it comes to track action many of us are rivals, and some of the drivers legit make it hard to stand with them, fact is the real enemy at the current date is FOM - even if Liberty Media sells it, the next administration will most likely double down on their approach. They were the ones that created the conditions for Abu Dhabi to happen, they are the ones that benefit the most from the rifts. Our best hope isn't to boycott F1, but to encourage the union of its staff and show that while we welcome the technical evolutions, the main goal must be preserved. Food for thought, really. In the meantime, thank you for surviving till the end! As always, screw you guys, I'm going home!

#hyperfixation corner #late stage capitalism #capitalist realism #cheers you guys good luck to those who read it #most normal ana formulinos write-up moment

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horsesource · 11 months

Note

hi! I just came across your post about autism and found it so interesting... where can I learn more about “autism emerging out of psychosis”, as you put it? x

Thank you, it is something interesting to me that I care about

"Autism emerging out of psychosis" can be meant in two different ways. The article Autism: Schizo of Postmodern Capital by Hans Skott-Myhre and Christina Taylor addresses both of these. if you don't have familiarity with some of the psychoanalytic and philosophical arguments about mental symptom production, I still think it's very much worth reading.

Autism, as word, quite literally came into existence as a symptom of schizophrenia. By that I mean, when Eugen Bleuler coined the terms "schizophrenia" and "autism", he used "autism" not as a separate diagnosis but to demarcate a symptom of schizophrenia (a turning "inward", a withdrawal of symbolic exchange, catatonia). Schizophrenia characterized by autism was considered as particularly "extreme", more hopeless than the symptomatic relentless verbosity typically associated with schizophrenia. It's common to attribute this initial "misunderstanding" of autism connected to schizophrenia as an unfortunate lack of diagnostic clarity, later resolved when autism had its own diagnostic territory staked out. I disagree; autism has always been incredibly slippery (it went from construal as an excess of fantasy, an extreme retreat into an incredibly imaginative inner world, to being written as the polar opposite, as flat literality, as a deficiency or aberrance of imaginative capacity, as a paucity of inner world; Asperger's was subsumed by Autism Spectrum Disorder in 2012 which made things even fuzzier (exactly what sort of person are we supposed to imagine when we hear "autistic"?); the influx of speaking, "late diagnosed" autistic individuals is resulting in a drastic rewriting of the popular understanding of autism, etc) and it is much more fruitful imo to track historical fluctuations rather than assume autism is on its way to being nailed down conceptually once and for all

But of course, autism and schizophrenia are more than diagnostic categories. They are subjective processes, they are ways of being in the world through body and language.

As I mentioned in the post you referred to, post-Fordism, the development of communicative technologies and financial capitalism radically changed the nature of labor/the relations of production and consumption. With this change came both deliberate and unintentional production of radically different subjectivities. Communicative prowess, imaginative capacity, personality appeal, ability to cope with intense instability and competition...all of these became economic resources in a way that they were not in an era dominated by factory production. Which brings me to the 2nd article I'm linking, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution written by the CEO of Buzzfeed.

Although Buzzfeed CEO never once mentions autism, he does describe an unintended consequence of minds saturated by a psychotic, ever-accelerating barrage of information and representation:

“These media-savvy youth consume the accelerated visual culture of late capitalism, yet do not develop ego formations that result in consumer shopping. It is as if the light and sound from the television is sufficient to satiate their desire. Actual products become superfluous as the media itself is the final object of consumption."

If endless identity/self consumption and production is compelled by a structurally psychotic market economy, perhaps what cannot be captured economically is a subjectivity that is not consuming representations for its formation, improvement, or dissolution, but sheerly for "light and sound". A subjectivity unconcerned with legitimizing its subjectivity. Tell a speaking autistic "you don't look autistic" and we will predictably give you 1000 reasons why we have autism coursing through our veins, we will assert "I Am autistic" until blue in the face, we will provide paperwork and professionals to vouch for our autism, we will produce tiktoks about the dangers of the invalidation of autism. Tell a nonspeaking autistic "you don't look autistic" and chances are they're listening to the sound of a voice or the sound of a bird

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gothicprep · 4 months

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here's something i see sometimes – someone will make a complaint about a phenomenon that is, admittedly, Really Online, and someone else will reassure them that it's just the internet and to touch grass and stuff. it's so insane to me that anyone believes that in 2024. did you miss the memo that the internet is inhabited by people?

to lay out a stronger version of my point, there's a pretty common complaint now that goes, "when did politics get so weird?" there are a lot of reasons for this, but one of them is that a lot of talking points and argumentative styles from tumblr's heyday mainstreamed. this is what people are complaining about when they rag on "woke stuff". they misidentify this as postmodernism in the academic sense, or the frankfurt school, or foucault, or. ugh. postmodern neomarxism. but if you look at postmodern writing, or anything from the frankfurt school or foucault, or any of the books that karl marx's second cousin, postmodern neo marx, wrote, it doesn't look like any of that. it's informed by postmodernism, yeah, but it's also a crude retelling of it. why did it take so long for tumblr stuff to catch on? probably a combination of tumblr having dogshit SEO, a huge portion of the userbase not fully migrating to more visible social media sites until the nsfw ban, and the fact that most of the tumblr heyday users are roughly in their mid 20s-early 30s now, and have responsibilities and influence outside of their internet bubble.

it's insane how much influence this site has had on mainstream culture, considering how niche it's always been.

anyway. it's not healthy to get too worked up about online happenings, albeit we all do that sometimes. take a break. play with your pets. finally start that book that's been collecting dust on your shelf forever. call your sibling and shoot the shit with them. attempt to skip rocks on a creek for the first time, and get frustrated with how difficult this actually is rather than online stalinists. but that all said, i don't think anyone is in the wrong for paying attention to internet happenings and being a bit nervous about what this all will lead to. it always spills over. every time.

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dhaaruni · 9 months

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The only definition of “elites” that includes most Biden voters is the postmodern one popular with today’s right-wing culture warriors: “disagrees with me on social issues.” But virtually no one outside the culture-war right thinks a millionaire who owns car dealerships but didn’t go to college, or a tech-industry venture capitalist who complains about the “woke mob,” are working class, while a middle-school teacher with a college degree or a coffee barista who puts they/them pronouns on a nametag are elites. To Biden-voting workers, boorishness and bigotry are not inherently “working-class values.” They know there are people who are formal and informal, polite and rude, racist and non-racist in every societal class, and recognize that sexual harassment often comes from bosses. And since Biden beat Trump among people of color, women, and LGBT voters, it’s safe to say most do not think that changes in norms regarding race and gender have been, on balance, bad.

#links #joe Biden #politics

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rad4learning · 10 months

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My feminist-related reading progress

My thoughts on different texts I've read

Most recent: The Dialectic of Sex

For all of these I'm not going to point out everything wrong or that I disagree with in them; I assume you'll be reading critically, taking value and discarding other stuff. I'm writing these from memory of my impressions and key points. I may get things wrong - please feel free to lmk if I do :) The Dialectic of Sex: - I really wanted to really like this, my expectations were very high so that may well be part of why I feel underwhelmed by it - I think it is worth reading - although I expect other readers to also object to components of it - even if for no other reason than to interrogate her assertions about the requirements for womens' liberation - Straight after this I read women race & class which briefly criticises this text for perpetuating myths irt black men sexualising white women - I agree with Firestone's claim that the condition of women and children are highly linked and I support children being able to have more autonomy. I cannot agree with the idea of removing childhood entirely (she is explicit about this including irt sexuality) & I think the treatment of children's vulnerability was unfortunately shallow - which is especially unfortunate given her recognition of the links between childhood and women's liberation - Explicitly radical feminist theory text

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982: - Short read, fiction - This is an easy, quick read suitable for women without background in feminism - It's great at identifying the "little" (or not so little) everyday misogyny that permeates women's lives - Don't expect it to give you direction or theory knowledge - Focus on South Korean women, the focus of the book on pointing out the unfairness of what typical resonates cross-culturally

Daring to be bad: - Recommend reading - Can be a bit difficult at the v. start if not familiar with US 1960s history to keep track of the groups but soon becomes easier - Provides information about US radical feminism, how it started and how it went from a focus on gender abolition up to political lesbianism & idea of men and women having innately different natures - Explicitly radical feminist history text focusing on 2nd wave (author's views are also apparent) - Self aware about it but focus again on the stereotypical group The female eunuch: - I mostly read this because it was recommend to be by an older radical feminist who talked about how influential it was at the time - Still relevant today - I thought the concept (something like: women being used for sex and yet having our sexual desire/energy stripped from us) was interesting and worth reading - Explicitly radical feminist theory text focusing on 2nd wave - Very much focused on the stereotypical feminist group - white, western, heterosexual etc. Talkin' up to the white woman: Indigenous women and feminism - Wayyy too postmodern for me - difficult read -- I particularly hated how she comments on some Queer Theory authors including bestiality in "Queer" -> without criticising that - Aileen Moreton-Robertson wrote this based on her dissertation - Relevant criticisms of white feminism and discussion of Indigenous understandings

Who cooked the last supper? The woman's history of the world - I mostly read this because of how much a woman whose blogging I respect hypes it - don't get me wrong there were good bits (and I certainly wouldn't take back reading it) but it wasn't that groundbreaking for me - You might like it more if matriarchy is smth you get hyped about - Expect mentions of other groups but still a relatively stereotypical focus The hidden face of eve - Recommended reading - Nawal El Sadaawi is socialist feminist, not radical feminist, still read the book - If you're not convinced search her name up, learn about her, then read it - Discusses feminism in an Egyptian context and provides guidance to readers on not using feminism as an imperialist bludgeoning tool Gyn//ecology - This book should not be recommended for beginners - Seriously, I cannot emphasise the above point enough. - The ways she uses language requires adjustment -- Including being like "Lesbian is for women-identified-women, not mere female homosexuals, for whom I'll use lowercase 'lesbian' " (I'm paraphrasing from memory but that is the gist / it is really THAT bad) - quote from Audre Lorde's An Open Letter to Mary Daly "As an African-american woman in white patriarchy, I am used to having my archetypal experience distorted and trivialised, but it is terribly painful to feel it being done by a woman whose knowledge so much touches my own." - There are some useful criticisms of patriarchy in there but the above should make it clear I consider the text highly flawed - Part of the "Lesbian Feminism" branch (read: political lesbianism)

Invisible women - Good "look how feminism is still relevant!" text, recommended for that (yes, including to radblrians), - Easy read & good book to loan to other women in your life - I really liked it but don't expect it to challenge or deepen your ideological understanding that much - Recent feminist text, focusing on statistics Sexy but psycho - imo: some good some not so good in there - this book may mislead you if you are not familiar with the relevant subject matter & there's alleged dodgy ethics stuff with the author - Dr Jessica Taylor openly describes herself as a radical feminist. She does have a PhD in psychology (not in clinical psychology) - I disagree with her thesis that all mental illness should be viewed through a trauma lens & imo the handwaving away of the biopsychosocial model as bio-bio-bio is intellectually lazy - recent feminist text focusing on (poor) treatment of women in psychology & psychiatry The beauty myth - good text to read if you're trying to care less about your appearance, particularly if you are white and western - Naomi Wolf treated some of the statistics poorly so be aware of that (take any stats she lists about anorexia with a grain of salt, there's a research paper on this). She's also a conspiracy theorist, so makes sense I guess? - Feminist text form the 90's Ain't I a woman - Recommended reading - Illuminating text focusing on how Black women in the US have faced the double burden of racism and misogyny as well as overlapping misogynoir - Explicitly discusses feminism and Black women's roles in it

Right wing women - Recommended reading - Very radblr friendly - don't expect much ideological challenge - Radical feminist theory text focusing on why right wing women would work against their own liberation

I read I think 6 Sheila Jeffrey's books in the span of less than a week so they've blurred together - can't provide much useful commentary but those were my first intro to feminist theory books I think Abdullah Öcallan's ideas on needing to restructure the family to restructure society & his ideas around what that society would look like are interesting to read. (If unfamiliar look up who he is before diving into Jineology research) Honorary shout out to why does he do that? - also recommended reading I also recommend looking up statistics for women in your area (including dis-aggregated ones for different groups of women) & of course talking with and learning from women irl.

There are maybe, 5ish others I've read that are on feminist drives and that sort of thing but I can't be bothered writing any more rn and at first I forgot them for inclusion so clearly not the biggest deal (they're not key theory texts or anything).

#reading ideas #book quote #r4l thoughts #still a beginner don't take my recommendations too seriously

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soraka-in-warhammer40k · 6 months

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Looking at some of grimdank's reaction to the Sanguinius/Horus fight scene, I can only quote myself: "How the absolute hell can vocal participants in a fandom space that draws and always has drawn the vast majority of its narrative content by novels be so absolutely fucking illiterate?"

Luckily its been getting better with time but apparently some people have no clue what a metaphor is. Or how context informs word choices that might look weird in isolation.

The second part I can understand at least somewhat as a side effect of what you can call "meme-brain". When your primary mode of medial engagement includes constant recontextualisation, it tends to skew perception towards an atomized evaluation of content-bits. Memery is fun (this is a shitpost blog so I might be biased here), and spotting lines or scenes that make a good joke removed from their original context is a valid form of entertainment, as well as the very basis of our postmodern remix-culture, but I feel some people forget that you cannot evaluate the quality of fragments when they are competly isolated and removed from the original.

The "textual poacher", to lean on Jenkin's phrase, makes for a shoddy critic at times.

That second part can be weird, but it is understandable. it's just a quirk that happens with every bit of dominant media: the patterns we consume content in shape our way we see content. It's feedback loops all the way down, and something one can be aware of. What I do not get is how absolutely fucking illiterate some people are despite the fact that they are obviously capable of reading.

One character is described as "moving as fast as the laws of physics allow him to" he is given the metaphor of "light", the fastest thing we know. The other character opposes him by actively circumventing the laws of physics and outmatches him, while being his direct opposite in the entirety of the narrative. "Darkness" is an apt choice of words here to complete the metaphor, and yet there's people pointing fingers like "HAHA HE SAID THE EDGY WORD" - completly ignoring that said word has been charged with setting-specific meaning over the course of 70 or so volumes of novels.

I do not expect much from people, but how can some of them read 70 or so volumes of novels and still be so utterly bad at the task? It's like watching someone paint a 100 miniatures over the months and then the 100th one still looks like the 2nd or 3rd. What have they been doing all this time?!

#warhammer 40k #I do not exactly like blurring shitpost life and media studies life but #I feel like I had to write this down #wh40k

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culturenosh · 9 months

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Is Róisín Murphy transphobic?

On Wednesday, the Twitter feeds of internet-pilled LGBTQ+ people across the world lit up with a dismaying piece of information:

Róisín Murphy had gone full transphobe.

It's not clear yet if this is real - as of this writing, Murphy hasn't commented, and this kind of screenshot is pretty easily faked. Still, the screenshot was enough to send certain segments of social media into overdrive. Her comments and replies have been inundated with disappointed, angry fans and transphobes who are thrilled to have found a new public figure to latch onto.

For at least two decades, Murphy's musical output and public persona have been centered on campy performances of diva-dom. Her voice communicates arch, haughty reserve even at her most emotional, and her work fits squarely within a post-disco dance-pop tradition that has been pioneered by queer people; her aesthetics play with superficiality, glamour, and gender in ways that feel particularly attuned to queer culture. The video for her song "Movie Star" literally shows her strolling around town with an entourage of drag artists.

Aside from the dismay, this comment seemed like unbelievable self-sabotage. She's spent her entire career cultivating a fanbase of people who do not fit within gender norms, pulling inspiration from the work and lives of queer people. Where did this come from? How could she have missed the point so spectacularly?

Yet, while I'm on record as a fan of hers, I watched this all unfold and felt... nothing. A little disappointed, but mostly numb - and, somehow, totally unsurprised.

In 2020, much was made of the supposed "disco revival." Artists like Dua Lipa, Kylie Minogue, Jessie Ware, and - yes - Murphy released records that nominally played with the sound and imagery of disco. I'd argue that, as a whole, this moment was more indebted to house and techno and turn-of-the-decade electropop - and, above all, the postmodern distance that characterized French touch. It wasn't disco; it was "disco." Rather than reflecting the physical thrill of real disco, it drew on the flattened, 2D aesthetic that has come to characterize that musical movement in online spaces. It was about nostalgia, not euphoria; and nostalgia is not depth.

While Murphy's Róisín Machine was easily the best album of this mini-wave - the most considered, the most well-written, the most sonically playful and experimental - it was still, at its core, backwards-looking. It was less interested in updating its influences than it was in projecting Murphy into an imagined past where her arch posture could still scan as transgressive. To her credit, the record did this very successfully! But while she took inspiration from queer music of the past, she also gracefully elided the need to pay attention to queer people of the present. Her allyship only ever extended as far as an aesthetic feature in a music video. She is a pop musician, not an an activist. She is not that deep.

In the past, I've been an enthusiastic booster of the gay-pandering-popstar-industrial complex. (I am, after all, a longtime Charli XCX fan.) This mode of listening encourages a parasocial connection between me and my chosen diva - I imagine that, because of our shared aesthetic taste, we must also share the same values and experiences. But aesthetics are just surface level, and pop stars lie. Their job is to appear the way their audience desires them to appear - to anticipate and direct those desires - so that the audience will give them money.

I'm tired of diva worship and popstars and glamour and beauty. I'm tired of rationalizing a good feeling in my body - the bouncy, stomach-dropping thrill of a four-on-the-floor beat and a catchy hook - as moral rectitude. I'm tired of idolization, tired of the music industry, tired of these predictable outrage cycles where everyone must grandstand on the internet. I'm tired of finding out, over and over and over again, that some famous musician that I will never meet thinks that I should die. But I'm never surprised. Surprise requires faith, and I have no faith in popstars.

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i-am-the-page-turner · 11 days

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"White Noise" by Don DeLillo.

"White Noise" is a postmodern novel that explores the themes of consumerism, technology, and the fear of death in contemporary society. The story revolves around Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies at a small college, and his family.

The novel takes place in a fictional town called Blacksmith, where an "airborne toxic event" occurs, causing fear and uncertainty among the residents. Against this backdrop, Jack and his family navigate the complexities of their everyday lives, including their relationships, desires, and anxieties.

DeLillo's writing style is characterized by its sharp wit and satirical tone. He uses dark humor to critique the superficiality and emptiness of modern life, particularly in relation to consumer culture and the media.

The book also delves into the concept of "white noise," representing the constant stream of information and distractions that surround us. It explores how this noise can both shield us from the realities of life and contribute to our feelings of disconnection and existential unease.

Through its exploration of death and mortality, "White Noise" raises philosophical questions about the nature of existence and the fear of dying. It prompts readers to reflect on the ways in which we try to cope with our mortality, whether through religion, science, or other means.

Overall, "White Noise" is a thought-provoking and insightful novel that offers a satirical critique of contemporary society while delving into deeper existential questions.

#bookish #booklr #books and literature #books and reading #bookstagram #bookstore #booksbooksbooks #books & libraries #books #reading #bookshelf #bookworm #book blog #book quotes #bookblr #book recommendations #booktok #book review

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am--f · 9 months

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Vernacular Word Clouds and Information Aesthetics

“The purpose of reduced language is not the reduction of language itself but the achievement of greater flexibility and freedom of communication (with its inherent need for rules and regulations). The resulting poems should be, if possible, as easily understood as signs in airports and traffic signs.” —Eugen Gomringer, “The Poem as Functional Object” (1960)

“The first thing that becomes clear to anyone who compares the dream-content with the dream-thoughts is that a work of condensation on a large scale has been carried out.” —Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)

“What is happening?!” —User input prompt, Twitter (2023)

A juice bar has words expanding across its window. The words are: “Cheers to nature,” “positive,” “passion,” “good,” “wellness,” “cure,” “happiness,” “watermelonade,” freshness,” “serenity,” “kale delight,” “relaxation,” “peanut butter oatmeal,” “calm,” “lifestyle,” “wheatgrass,” “sharing,” “wellness,” “whole greens,” “joy,” energizer,” “positive,” “protein supreme,” “healthy,” “organic,” and “life.” The terms are arranged an in amorphous cluster, in a nondescript (vaguely Grotesk) typeface, in a range of sizes, either parallel or perpendicular to one another. Since it is vinyl on glass, the cluster of words floats in the air. The words face out towards the street, although they just as well might appear on an interior wall. They advertise the business to passerby, inventorying possible experiences that might take place. Unlike more conventional awning or window signage, which might linearly list the products and services offered, these words take up the aesthetics of a diffuse field, with blurry edges. And just as the field is relatively indifferent to the form of its support, the rectangular window, it is also relatively indifferent to the level of concreteness and specificity of each of the terms it contains. The term joy is a member of the same set as the term peanut butter oatmeal, and is represented at the same scale.

Word clouds are not an uncommon feature of the contemporary graphic environment. They are not exactly ubiquitous, but they appear throughout metropolitan landscapes as interstitial visual clutter, in contexts where we are rarely anything other than indifferent to their presence: grocery stores, apartment buildings, hotels, fast-food restaurants, shopping malls, airports, corporate offices. They are indigenous to what the architect Rem Koolhaas called “junkspace”: an uncoordinated proliferation of shapeless filler, with its “superstrings of graphics,” its “fabrication of non-existent plurals,” its “fuzzy empire of blur” (“flamboyant yet unmemorable, like a screensaver”). But these formless textual forms are even more particular in a historical sense. They are not reducible to postmodernism, although they inherit its flatness. And while they have no connections to any definite style in art or design today—although they may echo the avant-garde textual experiments of artistic movements like Symbolism, Constructivism, Dada, and concretism, for which the collision of linguistic signs in nonlinear space still represented a revolutionary moment—they are unmistakably very recent, and very medium-specific. They are the forms of a residual Web 2.0, ornaments of a computational culture in which the aesthetics of the historical avant-gardes were banalized in software. Today, the everyday word cloud is more recognizable as an architectural derivative of software, a derivative that has discarded its origins in statistical analysis and UX design, let alone any origins in concrete poetry. The movement of the word cloud is the movement of informatics and interfaces into decorative vernaculars, registering our diffuse, formless present.

What is a word cloud? It is a set of terms—words, phrases, and in rare cases complete sentences—arranged in a cluster or constellation. It is free-associative, impressionistic, asyntactic. It is atmospheric, a brainstorm. It is an accumulation of themes. It is probably set in an inelegant or kitschy typeface. It is an array of opaque and possibly hallucinated correlations. Its terms do not create meaningful sequences, but are simply adjacent or orthogonal to one another. If they create anything, it is a mood or a vibe, a loose bundle of co-occurrences that may be felt. A word cloud is scanned, not read. To use Robert Smithson’s phrase, a word cloud is “language to be looked at.”

What is immediately recognizable in the decorative word cloud, the architectural word cloud, is a specific relationship between possible experiences and their description. As wallpaper, word clouds fulfill the need to put something on the wall, to fill space, and at the same time they communicate something about a place and about experiences associated with that place. The wall of an Arby’s fills up with terms like “signature,” “oven roasted,” “market fresh ingredients,” “hand crafted sandwiches,” and “Arby’s roast beef sandwich is delicious.” The wall of a Bushwick apartment building fills up with terms like “new,” “housing,” “social,” “avenue,” “street,” “future,” and “old city.” This communication is both too little and too much. It accomplishes the minimal task of naming some of the things that might go on here, some of the things (feelings, products, values, referents, connotations) on offer, but in a way that has the appearance of overactivity, busy-ness. It has parsed, labeled, and filtered the data of the experience we (as prospective consumers) are potentially having, but clarifies nothing. It leaves behind a mess; it is the entropic residue of taxonomy. Like almost everything in a designed environment, it has attempted to calibrate and nudge our attention without making overbearing demands upon it. Yet the coarseness and triviality of its matter—language in an ugly font—seems to fail in this regard. If we find word clouds unpleasant, it is because they are clumsily explicit, neither ignorable nor interesting. They name the obvious. They stupidly say words without composing them. They appear to preempt our own powers of description and association, describing and associating for us, but they are also completely unconvincing. It is as though the very first stage of a marketing project, the brainstorming or moodboarding stage, in which the product or brand is “ideated” upon, sufficed for a final design. There is no development beyond the whiteboard.

The word cloud, as a mode of textuality, cannot be conceived outside of computational culture. This is not only because it is produced using digital tools, or because it coincides with certain algorithmic operations (of theme detection, for instance, or the computing of taste), but because it has developed directly from data visualization techniques. In data visualization, a word cloud (or term cloud or tag cloud) is a technical image-text that synthesizes the contents of a set of data by arranging and scaling its terms according to a logic of measurement. What is most straightforwardly measured in this kind of word cloud is frequency. The more times a datum appears in the set, the larger its text may appear. This relation can then be adjusted using other statistical parameters, such as deviation from some other distribution. Sometimes the words are also plotted in space, in which case positionality becomes meaningful (although this would probably be called a scatter plot rather than a word cloud). In any case, the aim is to summarize data, to give humans a more or less immediate impression of can be found in the data.

UX design researchers have located the earliest word cloud (at least in its data-visualization capacity) in a 1976 paper by psychologist Stanley Milgram, who surveyed residents of Paris and mapped the terms they used. A word cloud also appears prominently on the cover of the first German-language edition of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1991), “rhizomatically” showcasing the text’s most idiosyncratic concepts. Douglas Coupland, in his third novel, Microserfs (1995), uses word clouds to model the keywords in “subconscious files,” the imaginary dream-work of a Microsoft employee’s personal computer. Following these precedents, the tag cloud became a trope of early Web 2.0 design, most notably on the social photo site Flickr (2004–) and the social bookmarking site del.icio.us (2003–2017). Here, the words in the cloud were pieces of ad-hoc, user-generated metadata, or “folksonomy,” terms constantly and conjunctively attached by users to content (which may or may not have actually included these terms). And much like Milgram’s survey of Parisians, the social media tag cloud provides a sense of what people are talking (posting) about. The cloud becomes an interface, a clickable map of labels through which one can navigate a database.

So perhaps we see in the latter-day word cloud—the one on the wall of the juice bar—not only the condensation of the taxonomic or statistical, but also the condensation of the social. Perhaps in the nimbus of terms on the fast-casual restaurant wallpaper we are supposed to be hearing the polyphony of the multitude, a “network power,” a “living alternative.” It may be that we are meant to believe that these are not just the statements of a brand but the voices of “community stakeholders” (and satisfied customers). Meanwhile, new algorithms have automated or augmented social tagging practices. New interfaces, too, have reduced the presence of tag clouds online, opting for single-stream content flows or “feeds” (Instagram, TikTok, Spotify) in which linguistic description does not have a prominent mapping or labeling function for the (sighted) end user. The original function of the tag cloud—summarizing a whole—no longer seems important once content delivery, with the help of machine learning, becomes hyper-individualized, and much more passive for the end user (who can only nudge the algorithm). There is no question of a single database of which to have an impression. The clouds appeared to have receded.

The German philosopher and founder of “information aesthetics” Max Bense argued that works of literary art were not so different from any other source of information. “Aesthetic realizations,” he argued in 1960, can be “described through statistical quantities of conditions instead of irrational motives of values.” He described text in atmospheric terms; for Bense, there was no text that was not a cloud. Texts are like “gaseous spaces,” as Claude Shannon’s information theory already recognized when it sought to translate thermodynamic particles as linguistic particles. Information theory has not changed much; today’s “deep dreaming” algorithms, such as AI diffusion models, work by introducing gaseous noise into training data that they then filter out in order to generate new outputs. The clouds are condensed and displaced, a dream-work written not only by psyches but also by machines. The word cloud may be a degraded form, but clouds of words remain.

#writing

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