This paper examines how white-nationalist and identitarian fan communities read The Dark Knight f... more This paper examines how white-nationalist and identitarian fan communities read The Dark Knight film series as a coded attack on liberal values by the secretly sympathetic writer-director Christopher Nolan. In a classic esoteric reading, white nationalists posit super villains like Ra's Al Ghul and Bane as giving voice to the true message of the trilogy, namely, that liberal countries have become decadent and must be destroyed so as to give rise to archeofuturistic ethnostates. The paper examines the white nationalists’ criticisms of traditional media critics on both the left and the right and in a way that helps differentiate esoteric hermeneutics from more conventional professional critical readings. It concludes by highlighting the peculiar capacity of pronoiac, fan-based esotericism to resignify and circulate pop-cultural memes for radical, right-wing ends and to do so in ways that avoid the strategies of cultural censors.
Cultural Politics: An International Journal, Nov 1, 2021
Hillary Clinton and Katy Perry drink the blood of murdered children to live forever, Barack Obama... more Hillary Clinton and Katy Perry drink the blood of murdered children to live forever, Barack Obama and Tom Hanks participate in the sex trafficking and molestation of children, and a cabal of Satan worshippers control global events from behind the scenes. This is the central, animating idea behind QAnon, a right-wing populist conspiracy theory that has achieved a level of saturation in American and global politics (in)commensurate with its peculiarity. Although part of the reason for QAnon's enormous success must reside in widespread conditions of political distrust and epistemological uncertainty, another part consists in its exploitation of a technologically enabled mode of rhetorical hermeneutics. This article focuses on the latter, arguing that there exists a tendency among QAnon followers to read and write esoterically, primarily in relation to President Trump, and to do so via the amateur “produsage” made possible by a serpentine pipeline of digital-cultural interactivity and networked internet platforms. This is not to say, of course, that any QAnon participant is versed in the history of esoteric writing, only that QAnon as a discourse appears to rely heavily on a communicative strategy of encoding and decoding that bears strong resemblance to an esoteric hermeneutic, but one played out across social media.
Jacques Rancière is one of France’s leading intellectuals and a recent addition to the who’s who ... more Jacques Rancière is one of France’s leading intellectuals and a recent addition to the who’s who of Continental philosophy. Since his time as a student at the Ecole normale supérieure, Rancière has generated a body of work that is at once wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, and consistent. His arguments for a postfoundational and postliberal democratic understanding of politics have infl uenced, echoed, or demanded critical response from such other Continental luminaries as Slavoj Žižek (1999, 2004) and Alain Badiou (2005). Much of this cachet is no doubt due to Rancière’s central thesis regarding the sources, uses, and ends of politics. According to this argument, politics does not derive from putative a priori truths about knowledge, human nature, or social interaction; it is not a function of particular forms of government, and it neither establishes nor ensures socioeconomic order. Rather, for Rancière politics is a dissensual activity consisting solely in the demonstration of equa...
This paper examines how white-nationalist and identitarian fan communities read The Dark Knight f... more This paper examines how white-nationalist and identitarian fan communities read The Dark Knight film series as a coded attack on liberal values by the secretly sympathetic writer-director Christopher Nolan. In a classic esoteric reading, white nationalists posit super villains like Ra's Al Ghul and Bane as giving voice to the true message of the trilogy, namely, that liberal countries have become decadent and must be destroyed so as to give rise to archeofuturistic ethnostates. The paper examines the white nationalists’ criticisms of traditional media critics on both the left and the right and in a way that helps differentiate esoteric hermeneutics from more conventional professional critical readings. It concludes by highlighting the peculiar capacity of pronoiac, fan-based esotericism to resignify and circulate pop-cultural memes for radical, right-wing ends and to do so in ways that avoid the strategies of cultural censors.
This paper focuses on the Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser's notion of telematic society, arg... more This paper focuses on the Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser's notion of telematic society, arguing that it implies a media-theoretical revision of Friedrich Schiller's project for an aesthetic model of civic education, according to which aesthetic effectivity is reconsidered in light of a history of media based on a technological alternation of images and texts. After a brief overview of Schiller's aesthetic letters, it examines the ways in which Flusser repositions and expands upon Schiller's vision of an aesthetic education (most importantly, the aesthetic condition or middle disposition), highlighting the role that Flusser assigns to the evolution of codes inherent in the most important cultural and media techniques, namely, images, texts, and technical images. It then shows how this modification results in a forecasting of a telematic model of aesthetic education, before concluding by addressing the prospects of such a model in a post-digital world of automated media bias.
The last decade witnessed a drastic reconfiguration of American conservatism by way of a newly em... more The last decade witnessed a drastic reconfiguration of American conservatism by way of a newly emergent and energized dissident right. Beyond the question of ideology, this article argues that an essential aspect of this realignment occurs at the level of strategy, specifically with the adoption of agitational tactics pioneered by the progressive left. It attempts to make sense of this sea change, first, by tracing in broad strokes the history of American conservatism's opposition to much of what passes for agitational politics. It then examines the right's seemingly abrupt adoption of three species of agitational practice: Alinsky-styled radicalism, identity politics, and accelerationism. It concludes by discussing the implications of this shift, in terms of what it means both for the future of conservative discourse and for leftist groups who must now take into account the possibility of having to outmaneuver their own set of tactics.
This study aims to make a rhetorical intervention in the aesthetics of politics and political leg... more This study aims to make a rhetorical intervention in the aesthetics of politics and political legitimacy. Much of the research on this topic suggests that politics is unavoidably aesthetic and, on this basis, conceives of the state’s political legitimacy in terms of the capacity to elicit broad-based aesthetic approval. What this research has yet to address is the likelihood that members of a given society will disagree over what is deserving of aesthetic praise combined with the tendency of aesthetic feeling to degenerate over time. These tendencies, I argue, indicate that the problem facing political legitimacy is primarily a matter of overcoming a rhetorical crisis in the aesthetics of politics. My central idea is that the state can regain aesthetic control by circumventing or transcending beauty altogether. This strategy comprises rhetorical maneuvers that exploit the emotive power of aesthetics without appealing to beauty itself or inducing in citizens their feeling for the bea...
From 19th-century novels to contemporary computer-animated adventure films, popular media culture... more From 19th-century novels to contemporary computer-animated adventure films, popular media culture provides no shortage of representations that subserve colonialist attitudes and perspectives. Thor: Ragnarok (2017) provides a rare decolonial fantasy, which is especially surprising given that it does so through the veneer of the big-budget superhero film. Registering a deep concern with public memory, the film spotlights and challenges the various uses of public memory in the maintenance of colonial legitimation. In doing so, Thor: Ragnarok offers an incisive and uncompromising indictment of colonization and colonialism, one that ends not with a call for reform but with the end of the world.
This article positions Peter Sloterdijk’s spheres project against Carl Schmitt’s spatial writings... more This article positions Peter Sloterdijk’s spheres project against Carl Schmitt’s spatial writings, showing that Sloterdijk’s anthropo-philosophical approach to spatial analysis implies a theoretical strategy for thinking beyond Schmitt’s fatalistic view of
the deep contingencies shaping human social existence. Schmitt’s spatial pessimism is particularly noticeable in Land and Sea, in which he recounts the unfolding of world history as a succession of spatial epochs, arguing that the modern era can best be understood as the achievement of a centuries-long path toward a unified global space
of nihilistic anarchy—a development that he comes to refer to as englobement. The legacy of Schmitt’s spatial history of modernity can be seen most urgently today by its influence on the emergent right-wing identitarian and neo-Eurasian movements, which seek to transform Schmitt’s pessimistic nostalgia for a prior mode of spatial ordering
into an expansionist geopolitics. The author maintains that, against that legacy, Sloterdijk proposes “spherology,” a unique practice of spatial anthropology through which he teases out an art of writing at the service of experience, seeking to understand the phenomenon of human togetherness not in terms of determinate political or territorial forms but as a function of shared spaces (spheres) set up and stretched out through shared living in them. By affirming and potentially informing the ever-renewable possibility of lived extendedness in local-shared enclosures, Sloterdijk’s theorization of the spatial constitutes a compelling countercurrent or immunological defense against the forces of nostalgia and resignation that feed into reactionary spatial thought.
Hillary Clinton and Katy Perry drink the blood of murdered children to live forever, Barack Obama... more Hillary Clinton and Katy Perry drink the blood of murdered children to live forever, Barack Obama and Tom Hanks participate in the sex trafficking and molestation of children, and a cabal of Satan worshippers control global events from behind the scenes. This is the central, animating idea behind QAnon, a right-wing populist conspiracy theory that has achieved a level of saturation in American and global politics (in)commensurate with its peculiarity. Although part of the reason for QAnon’s enormous success must reside in widespread conditions of political distrust and epistemological uncertainty, another part consists in its exploitation of a technologically enabled mode of rhetorical hermeneutics. This article focuses on the latter, arguing that there exists a tendency among QAnon followers to read and write esoterically, primarily in relation to President Trump, and
to do so via the amateur “produsage” made possible by a serpentine pipeline of digital-cultural interactivity and networked internet platforms. This is not to say, of course, that any QAnon participant is versed in the history of esoteric writing, only that QAnon as a discourse appears to rely heavily on a communicative strategy of encoding and decoding that bears strong resemblance to an esoteric hermeneutic, but one played out across social media.
Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, 2020
This paper takes as its point of departure the newly resurgent controversy about whether the poss... more This paper takes as its point of departure the newly resurgent controversy about whether the possible civic or pedagogical functions of true-crime documentaries outweigh the harm they are occasionally known to inflict. Although supporters of true-crime documentaries tend to downplay their potential to create or exacerbate trauma, their arguments, like those of the subgenre’s critics, presuppose that trauma functions as an unwanted byproduct. This paper maintains that while this assumption buttresses belief in a shared moral universe of what qualifies as the just administration of law or authority it also conceals the dual possibility: (1) that the design of certain true-crime documentaries constitute an exercise of extra-juridical punitive power; and (2) that viewers are capable of deriving pleasure from such an exercise. To that end, the paper examines three recent, critically acclaimed true-crime documentaries— The Thin Blue Line, Tickled, and The Act of Killing—identifying in eac...
ABSTRACTThis article uses Heidegger's critique of the aesthetic tradition to reconsider the l... more ABSTRACTThis article uses Heidegger's critique of the aesthetic tradition to reconsider the limits and potential of aesthetic rhetoric. Contextualizing rhetoric's so-called aesthetic turn within the German aesthetic tradition, we argue that aesthetic rhetoric remains constrained by aesthetics' traditional opposition to the rational and the true. This theoretical heritage has often prevented contemporary aesthetic rhetorical theory from considering the value of art beyond sense experience and ritualized cultural reproduction. We claim, however, that rhetoric can be artistic and at the same time project a community's evolving sense of political and social truth. Through an analysis of Simón Bolívar's Angostura Address, which in 1819 inaugurated a political rebirth of the Venezuelan republic, we demonstrate how the art of rhetoric can exhibit Heidegger's three senses of “aletheiaic” truth: the bestowing, grounding, and beginning of a political community.
This paper examines how white-nationalist and identitarian fan communities read The Dark Knight f... more This paper examines how white-nationalist and identitarian fan communities read The Dark Knight film series as a coded attack on liberal values by the secretly sympathetic writer-director Christopher Nolan. In a classic esoteric reading, white nationalists posit super villains like Ra's Al Ghul and Bane as giving voice to the true message of the trilogy, namely, that liberal countries have become decadent and must be destroyed so as to give rise to archeofuturistic ethnostates. The paper examines the white nationalists’ criticisms of traditional media critics on both the left and the right and in a way that helps differentiate esoteric hermeneutics from more conventional professional critical readings. It concludes by highlighting the peculiar capacity of pronoiac, fan-based esotericism to resignify and circulate pop-cultural memes for radical, right-wing ends and to do so in ways that avoid the strategies of cultural censors.
Cultural Politics: An International Journal, Nov 1, 2021
Hillary Clinton and Katy Perry drink the blood of murdered children to live forever, Barack Obama... more Hillary Clinton and Katy Perry drink the blood of murdered children to live forever, Barack Obama and Tom Hanks participate in the sex trafficking and molestation of children, and a cabal of Satan worshippers control global events from behind the scenes. This is the central, animating idea behind QAnon, a right-wing populist conspiracy theory that has achieved a level of saturation in American and global politics (in)commensurate with its peculiarity. Although part of the reason for QAnon's enormous success must reside in widespread conditions of political distrust and epistemological uncertainty, another part consists in its exploitation of a technologically enabled mode of rhetorical hermeneutics. This article focuses on the latter, arguing that there exists a tendency among QAnon followers to read and write esoterically, primarily in relation to President Trump, and to do so via the amateur “produsage” made possible by a serpentine pipeline of digital-cultural interactivity and networked internet platforms. This is not to say, of course, that any QAnon participant is versed in the history of esoteric writing, only that QAnon as a discourse appears to rely heavily on a communicative strategy of encoding and decoding that bears strong resemblance to an esoteric hermeneutic, but one played out across social media.
Jacques Rancière is one of France’s leading intellectuals and a recent addition to the who’s who ... more Jacques Rancière is one of France’s leading intellectuals and a recent addition to the who’s who of Continental philosophy. Since his time as a student at the Ecole normale supérieure, Rancière has generated a body of work that is at once wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, and consistent. His arguments for a postfoundational and postliberal democratic understanding of politics have infl uenced, echoed, or demanded critical response from such other Continental luminaries as Slavoj Žižek (1999, 2004) and Alain Badiou (2005). Much of this cachet is no doubt due to Rancière’s central thesis regarding the sources, uses, and ends of politics. According to this argument, politics does not derive from putative a priori truths about knowledge, human nature, or social interaction; it is not a function of particular forms of government, and it neither establishes nor ensures socioeconomic order. Rather, for Rancière politics is a dissensual activity consisting solely in the demonstration of equa...
This paper examines how white-nationalist and identitarian fan communities read The Dark Knight f... more This paper examines how white-nationalist and identitarian fan communities read The Dark Knight film series as a coded attack on liberal values by the secretly sympathetic writer-director Christopher Nolan. In a classic esoteric reading, white nationalists posit super villains like Ra's Al Ghul and Bane as giving voice to the true message of the trilogy, namely, that liberal countries have become decadent and must be destroyed so as to give rise to archeofuturistic ethnostates. The paper examines the white nationalists’ criticisms of traditional media critics on both the left and the right and in a way that helps differentiate esoteric hermeneutics from more conventional professional critical readings. It concludes by highlighting the peculiar capacity of pronoiac, fan-based esotericism to resignify and circulate pop-cultural memes for radical, right-wing ends and to do so in ways that avoid the strategies of cultural censors.
This paper focuses on the Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser's notion of telematic society, arg... more This paper focuses on the Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser's notion of telematic society, arguing that it implies a media-theoretical revision of Friedrich Schiller's project for an aesthetic model of civic education, according to which aesthetic effectivity is reconsidered in light of a history of media based on a technological alternation of images and texts. After a brief overview of Schiller's aesthetic letters, it examines the ways in which Flusser repositions and expands upon Schiller's vision of an aesthetic education (most importantly, the aesthetic condition or middle disposition), highlighting the role that Flusser assigns to the evolution of codes inherent in the most important cultural and media techniques, namely, images, texts, and technical images. It then shows how this modification results in a forecasting of a telematic model of aesthetic education, before concluding by addressing the prospects of such a model in a post-digital world of automated media bias.
The last decade witnessed a drastic reconfiguration of American conservatism by way of a newly em... more The last decade witnessed a drastic reconfiguration of American conservatism by way of a newly emergent and energized dissident right. Beyond the question of ideology, this article argues that an essential aspect of this realignment occurs at the level of strategy, specifically with the adoption of agitational tactics pioneered by the progressive left. It attempts to make sense of this sea change, first, by tracing in broad strokes the history of American conservatism's opposition to much of what passes for agitational politics. It then examines the right's seemingly abrupt adoption of three species of agitational practice: Alinsky-styled radicalism, identity politics, and accelerationism. It concludes by discussing the implications of this shift, in terms of what it means both for the future of conservative discourse and for leftist groups who must now take into account the possibility of having to outmaneuver their own set of tactics.
This study aims to make a rhetorical intervention in the aesthetics of politics and political leg... more This study aims to make a rhetorical intervention in the aesthetics of politics and political legitimacy. Much of the research on this topic suggests that politics is unavoidably aesthetic and, on this basis, conceives of the state’s political legitimacy in terms of the capacity to elicit broad-based aesthetic approval. What this research has yet to address is the likelihood that members of a given society will disagree over what is deserving of aesthetic praise combined with the tendency of aesthetic feeling to degenerate over time. These tendencies, I argue, indicate that the problem facing political legitimacy is primarily a matter of overcoming a rhetorical crisis in the aesthetics of politics. My central idea is that the state can regain aesthetic control by circumventing or transcending beauty altogether. This strategy comprises rhetorical maneuvers that exploit the emotive power of aesthetics without appealing to beauty itself or inducing in citizens their feeling for the bea...
From 19th-century novels to contemporary computer-animated adventure films, popular media culture... more From 19th-century novels to contemporary computer-animated adventure films, popular media culture provides no shortage of representations that subserve colonialist attitudes and perspectives. Thor: Ragnarok (2017) provides a rare decolonial fantasy, which is especially surprising given that it does so through the veneer of the big-budget superhero film. Registering a deep concern with public memory, the film spotlights and challenges the various uses of public memory in the maintenance of colonial legitimation. In doing so, Thor: Ragnarok offers an incisive and uncompromising indictment of colonization and colonialism, one that ends not with a call for reform but with the end of the world.
This article positions Peter Sloterdijk’s spheres project against Carl Schmitt’s spatial writings... more This article positions Peter Sloterdijk’s spheres project against Carl Schmitt’s spatial writings, showing that Sloterdijk’s anthropo-philosophical approach to spatial analysis implies a theoretical strategy for thinking beyond Schmitt’s fatalistic view of
the deep contingencies shaping human social existence. Schmitt’s spatial pessimism is particularly noticeable in Land and Sea, in which he recounts the unfolding of world history as a succession of spatial epochs, arguing that the modern era can best be understood as the achievement of a centuries-long path toward a unified global space
of nihilistic anarchy—a development that he comes to refer to as englobement. The legacy of Schmitt’s spatial history of modernity can be seen most urgently today by its influence on the emergent right-wing identitarian and neo-Eurasian movements, which seek to transform Schmitt’s pessimistic nostalgia for a prior mode of spatial ordering
into an expansionist geopolitics. The author maintains that, against that legacy, Sloterdijk proposes “spherology,” a unique practice of spatial anthropology through which he teases out an art of writing at the service of experience, seeking to understand the phenomenon of human togetherness not in terms of determinate political or territorial forms but as a function of shared spaces (spheres) set up and stretched out through shared living in them. By affirming and potentially informing the ever-renewable possibility of lived extendedness in local-shared enclosures, Sloterdijk’s theorization of the spatial constitutes a compelling countercurrent or immunological defense against the forces of nostalgia and resignation that feed into reactionary spatial thought.
Hillary Clinton and Katy Perry drink the blood of murdered children to live forever, Barack Obama... more Hillary Clinton and Katy Perry drink the blood of murdered children to live forever, Barack Obama and Tom Hanks participate in the sex trafficking and molestation of children, and a cabal of Satan worshippers control global events from behind the scenes. This is the central, animating idea behind QAnon, a right-wing populist conspiracy theory that has achieved a level of saturation in American and global politics (in)commensurate with its peculiarity. Although part of the reason for QAnon’s enormous success must reside in widespread conditions of political distrust and epistemological uncertainty, another part consists in its exploitation of a technologically enabled mode of rhetorical hermeneutics. This article focuses on the latter, arguing that there exists a tendency among QAnon followers to read and write esoterically, primarily in relation to President Trump, and
to do so via the amateur “produsage” made possible by a serpentine pipeline of digital-cultural interactivity and networked internet platforms. This is not to say, of course, that any QAnon participant is versed in the history of esoteric writing, only that QAnon as a discourse appears to rely heavily on a communicative strategy of encoding and decoding that bears strong resemblance to an esoteric hermeneutic, but one played out across social media.
Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, 2020
This paper takes as its point of departure the newly resurgent controversy about whether the poss... more This paper takes as its point of departure the newly resurgent controversy about whether the possible civic or pedagogical functions of true-crime documentaries outweigh the harm they are occasionally known to inflict. Although supporters of true-crime documentaries tend to downplay their potential to create or exacerbate trauma, their arguments, like those of the subgenre’s critics, presuppose that trauma functions as an unwanted byproduct. This paper maintains that while this assumption buttresses belief in a shared moral universe of what qualifies as the just administration of law or authority it also conceals the dual possibility: (1) that the design of certain true-crime documentaries constitute an exercise of extra-juridical punitive power; and (2) that viewers are capable of deriving pleasure from such an exercise. To that end, the paper examines three recent, critically acclaimed true-crime documentaries— The Thin Blue Line, Tickled, and The Act of Killing—identifying in eac...
ABSTRACTThis article uses Heidegger's critique of the aesthetic tradition to reconsider the l... more ABSTRACTThis article uses Heidegger's critique of the aesthetic tradition to reconsider the limits and potential of aesthetic rhetoric. Contextualizing rhetoric's so-called aesthetic turn within the German aesthetic tradition, we argue that aesthetic rhetoric remains constrained by aesthetics' traditional opposition to the rational and the true. This theoretical heritage has often prevented contemporary aesthetic rhetorical theory from considering the value of art beyond sense experience and ritualized cultural reproduction. We claim, however, that rhetoric can be artistic and at the same time project a community's evolving sense of political and social truth. Through an analysis of Simón Bolívar's Angostura Address, which in 1819 inaugurated a political rebirth of the Venezuelan republic, we demonstrate how the art of rhetoric can exhibit Heidegger's three senses of “aletheiaic” truth: the bestowing, grounding, and beginning of a political community.
A Feeling of Wrongness: Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture, 2018
"This work explores our contemporary fascination with pessimism with such a strange relish and jo... more "This work explores our contemporary fascination with pessimism with such a strange relish and joy that one can't help but feel relief that the end of human exceptionalism means the opening of weird new narratives and worlds (rather than the dire existential crisis we expected). Rigorous and cynical while being jubilant, the book is a marvelous injection of vitalistic wrongness to a sometimes tedious field." -Patricia MacCormack, author of Cinesexuality
In A Feeling of Wrongness, Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman confront the rhetorical challenge inherent in the concept of pessimism by analyzing how it is represented in an eclectic range of texts on the fringes of popular culture, from adult animated cartoons to speculative fiction.
Packer and Stoneman explore how narratives such as True Detective, Rick and Morty, Final Fantasy VII, Lovecraftian weird fiction, and the pop ideology of transhumanism are better suited to communicate pessimistic affect to their fans than most carefully argued philosophical treatises and polemics. They show how these popular nondiscursive texts successfully circumvent the typical defenses against pessimism identified by Peter Wessel Zapffe as distraction, isolation, anchoring, and sublimation. They twist genres, upend common tropes, and disturb conventional narrative structures in a way that catches their audience off guard, resulting in belief without cognition, a more rhetorically effective form of pessimism than philosophical pessimism.
While philosophers and polemicists argue for pessimism in accord with the inherently optimistic structures of expressive thought or rhetoric, Packer and Stoneman show how popular texts are able to communicate their pessimism in ways that are paradoxically freed from the restrictive tools of optimism. A Feeling of Wrongness thus presents uncharted rhetorical possibilities for narrative, making visible the rhetorical efficacy of alternate ways and means of persuasion.
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the deep contingencies shaping human social existence. Schmitt’s spatial pessimism is particularly noticeable in Land and Sea, in which he recounts the unfolding of world history as a succession of spatial epochs, arguing that the modern era can best be understood as the achievement of a centuries-long path toward a unified global space
of nihilistic anarchy—a development that he comes to refer to as englobement. The legacy of Schmitt’s spatial history of modernity can be seen most urgently today by its influence on the emergent right-wing identitarian and neo-Eurasian movements, which seek to transform Schmitt’s pessimistic nostalgia for a prior mode of spatial ordering
into an expansionist geopolitics. The author maintains that, against that legacy, Sloterdijk proposes “spherology,” a unique practice of spatial anthropology through which he teases out an art of writing at the service of experience, seeking to understand the phenomenon of human togetherness not in terms of determinate political or territorial forms but as a function of shared spaces (spheres) set up and stretched out through shared living in them. By affirming and potentially informing the ever-renewable possibility of lived extendedness in local-shared enclosures, Sloterdijk’s theorization of the spatial constitutes a compelling countercurrent or immunological defense against the forces of nostalgia and resignation that feed into reactionary spatial thought.
to do so via the amateur “produsage” made possible by a serpentine pipeline of digital-cultural interactivity and networked internet platforms. This is not to say, of course, that any QAnon participant is versed in the history of esoteric writing, only that QAnon as a discourse appears to rely heavily on a communicative strategy of encoding and decoding that bears strong resemblance to an esoteric hermeneutic, but one played out across social media.
the deep contingencies shaping human social existence. Schmitt’s spatial pessimism is particularly noticeable in Land and Sea, in which he recounts the unfolding of world history as a succession of spatial epochs, arguing that the modern era can best be understood as the achievement of a centuries-long path toward a unified global space
of nihilistic anarchy—a development that he comes to refer to as englobement. The legacy of Schmitt’s spatial history of modernity can be seen most urgently today by its influence on the emergent right-wing identitarian and neo-Eurasian movements, which seek to transform Schmitt’s pessimistic nostalgia for a prior mode of spatial ordering
into an expansionist geopolitics. The author maintains that, against that legacy, Sloterdijk proposes “spherology,” a unique practice of spatial anthropology through which he teases out an art of writing at the service of experience, seeking to understand the phenomenon of human togetherness not in terms of determinate political or territorial forms but as a function of shared spaces (spheres) set up and stretched out through shared living in them. By affirming and potentially informing the ever-renewable possibility of lived extendedness in local-shared enclosures, Sloterdijk’s theorization of the spatial constitutes a compelling countercurrent or immunological defense against the forces of nostalgia and resignation that feed into reactionary spatial thought.
to do so via the amateur “produsage” made possible by a serpentine pipeline of digital-cultural interactivity and networked internet platforms. This is not to say, of course, that any QAnon participant is versed in the history of esoteric writing, only that QAnon as a discourse appears to rely heavily on a communicative strategy of encoding and decoding that bears strong resemblance to an esoteric hermeneutic, but one played out across social media.
In A Feeling of Wrongness, Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman confront the rhetorical challenge inherent in the concept of pessimism by analyzing how it is represented in an eclectic range of texts on the fringes of popular culture, from adult animated cartoons to speculative fiction.
Packer and Stoneman explore how narratives such as True Detective, Rick and Morty, Final Fantasy VII, Lovecraftian weird fiction, and the pop ideology of transhumanism are better suited to communicate pessimistic affect to their fans than most carefully argued philosophical treatises and polemics. They show how these popular nondiscursive texts successfully circumvent the typical defenses against pessimism identified by Peter Wessel Zapffe as distraction, isolation, anchoring, and sublimation. They twist genres, upend common tropes, and disturb conventional narrative structures in a way that catches their audience off guard, resulting in belief without cognition, a more rhetorically effective form of pessimism than philosophical pessimism.
While philosophers and polemicists argue for pessimism in accord with the inherently optimistic structures of expressive thought or rhetoric, Packer and Stoneman show how popular texts are able to communicate their pessimism in ways that are paradoxically freed from the restrictive tools of optimism. A Feeling of Wrongness thus presents uncharted rhetorical possibilities for narrative, making visible the rhetorical efficacy of alternate ways and means of persuasion.