pasticheism: my (c)opium for creative ego death
THE MIRROR CRIT
when i came to art school, i asked myself of two things: don’t look sideways and read more theory. doing only half of what I promised was taking a shotgun to my self-concept. even though i’ve always been a snarky, pseudo-ironic piece of shit, i held an embarrassing modernist fantasy for far too long. I had internalised the image of the artist-as-origin, a figure who produces from some sealed interior, who answers to no lineage, no market. all i had to do was dig enough within me, make myself puke up something worth showing the world. while i wanted to know culture, god knows i chase the zeitgeist as much as anyone else, i didn’t want to pay respects to it. i wanted to learn it to put my flag in it, quixotically so. in sixth form, this mindset was especially self-important, isolating, and, who would’ve guessed, helvetica forward. i was planning to enter the most derivative art form out there, joined by eighty people, give or take, who'd been on the same internet as me. safe to say the delusions of grandeur had a pretty short shelf life.
in seeing my peers work, i got a very ‘this is water’ type epiphany. not even, water can be bottled at least. we were breathing the same air. i could see references to things i'd prematurely thought personal floating in someone else's piece, borrowed from nowhere specific, everywhere at once. I started quietly praying they hadn't migrated from pinterest to are.na. i started getting antsy about posting work in progress, lest my oh so original techniques get swiped. another thing I noticed was how much we all circled the idea that none of us were in any way unique agents. everyone has a subconscious realization that differentiation is less and less possible. to say you read a certain author, watch a certain film is an indicator of your online presence before it ever is an indicator of your personhood and point of view. everyone can quote kafka now. or, more accurately, everyone can quote fisher.
PAST THE END OF HISTORY
this whole situation is contextualised by fisher’s hauntology, building on derrida’s view on the recurrence of marx and the fact that culture at what fukuyama called ‘the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution, will become recursive. fisher presents us a present haunted with ‘ghosts’ of the past, with nothing truly new to offer, thus giving us a ‘cancellation of the future’. hauntology has re-entered the collective consciousness with how we understand the state of art today. i’ve seen it used to describe ‘underground’ revival scenes, the state of pop music, all the IP schlock that passes for cinema. a lot of creatives have taken up the notion in some form, some a bit too gleefully. i have seen a rise in people christening themselves archivists and curators even while participating in more directly productive creative fields. it’s understandable to take preemptive distance from your role as a creator when creation itself seems fraudulent. nostalgia and callback are the word of the day, partly because we know there’s not really a way around it.
while hauntology is a useful frame for understanding our condition, at its face it’s a total artistic blackpill. anyone concerned with originality in their art can lie down and rot for all we care. the term has often been used to excuse halting of culture as fated and unchangeable, but I’m only half convinced on that thesis.
MY OWN PRIVATE POSTMODERN
since the dawn of the internet, and perhaps before, media theorists have debated whether postmodernism is dead, ongoing, or recurring. a useful frame i have gathered is that as well as postmodernism existing as a set cultural moment or series of moments across the arts, it can be seen as a baton passed on from each generation’s creative output to the next. as kenya hara put it in 2007: “It was just a fleeting commotion that occurred during the hand off of modernism … an event symbolising the aging of the generation of designers that sustained modernism”. modernist thought of the time is polished with every generation, a way of picking up cultural slack.
in this context, the anxiety, the referentiality, the constant breaking of the fourth wall, the malaise and self-consciousness of current art are given a sort of historical reverence since the postmodern canon produced extraordinary work. all of it was flagrantly derivative in method, and yet entirely itself in voice. the anxiety about originality didn't stop any of them from being interesting. the idea that it may just be our turn makes the situation seem a lot less hopeless.
it feels reductive to say that we’re just going through the motions with broadband (about broadband, mostly), but i personally think the idea of a generation of truly internet-fluent artists now finally tasked with deconstruction is a thought worth paying attention to. i know artworld has picked up, but they’re always ahead when it comes to this stuff.
BUILDING FRAMEWORKS IS CRINGE
i know that no one artist will tackle the ‘call of the web’ with exactly the same ethos. for most people, practice is always kind of hazy and hard to set bounds or ideologies upon. but I personally need to grip myself to a frame of mind lest I become totally anhedonic. i’ve felt myself reach upon it, poorly. at every stage I felt like a hack. i wanted invention in what I was conscious of as an infinite world. therein lies the dilemma pasticheism had arisen from. pastiche was a running view I had of what postmodernist practice in this ‘generational’, speaking-from-the-inter-web sense could look like.
pastiche, the open imitation and recombination of existing styles, has a slightly dismissive connotation as it stands. pasticheism as I'm thinking about is built on the premise that recombination is not the wimpy fodder of creative work, it is its primary mode right now. we have too much raw data and not enough exciting combinations. the future of art is not in the virgin idea springing fully formed from the void, we know that much. the pasticheist future lies in finding disparate elements to join with the ultimate goal having enough of your own perspective shine through in the message that you can’t hide behind the ‘archive’ itself. if you can’t justify your artistic choices and references with fervor, you’re just doing collage.
but wait, isn’t this what the ai bros are talking about?
TASTE IS THE NEW BUZZWORD
due to many recent developments, taste is yet again lauded by people in power who have not a slightest what taste means. i don't want to be fed a belief system by openai staff who have specific incentives for why "taste" is suddenly important, and neither should you. the discourse coming from tech is largely nebulous, class-based, and conveniently individualistic, very modernist in its separation of ‘those who have taste’ and ‘those who don’t’. what I'm describing is more committed and artist-first. it's less about having taste (implying some elevated, untouchable discernment) and more about having a position, values, neuroses, things you believe in, and using existing symbolic material to articulate it. this does a clean swipe on the whole ‘well ai just makes combinations of unrelated things and imbues them with purpose too!” argument. a computer has nothing to go insane over, therefore it cannot be pasticheist. this is a tired point from artists, but true stays true regardless.
while I see a lot of discussion about the nature and practical applicable skills of taste in the foreseeable future, it’s not really in the same direction i’m looking at. pasticheism to me is more about a re-arrangement of values, some folk truth, and some emphasis on my own existing reference-neurotic practice. but what made me write this was the suspicion I am not alone in this tendency. i keep noticing a pattern across a lot of loosely connected creative niches toward an increasingly confident willingness to work inside existing symbolic debris rather than pretending to stand outside it. i think that if there is to be an artistic movement belonging to our generation, it will likely be derivative. i do have hope that it is derivative in the loudest, best possible sense of the word.
maybe one day ill go off the deep end enough to write a manifesto.
the new raskolnikov - incellectuals and the postmortem panopticon
a note on semantics: throughout this essay, i'm flattening the term 'incel' in regard to criminals of a certain general profile and media diet instead of its raw definition of 'involuntary celibate' due to how connected the term is to subcultural crime and the sort of self-mythology im discussing. some of the examples are incels in the tradiional sense, some are proto-incels, some aren't incels at all. don't expect intricacies on 4chan specifically, the site runs thru most of the irl operation (or used to, that avenue has died down as of late) of what im discussing in some form, but is not the primary focus.
despite near-exponential visibility over the past decade, discussion around the ideological shooter (or one who shows promise to be, anyway) remains disappointing and stagnant. debates in the public eye fixate on symptom management, pathological profiling, and the definition of male loneliness, often compounded by ambient political anxieties. attempts to turn killers with clear ideological positionalities into cases for a “theory of everything” about troubled youth, while well-intentioned, dilute discussion into general cultural sludge in which cause and effect are so entangled they may as well be moot. talking points of faulty schemas, media influence and echo chambers are repeated by those fancying themselves psychologically savvy whenever an imageboard or true-crime-community-affiliated shooter makes headlines. what this crowd tends to either under-analyse or performatively scandalise is the degree to which these acts are self-mythologising performances, how much the crime is an affect, an act of theatre. when a subculture openly writes its own mythology (sometimes a whole book's worth, thanks supreme gentleman), it's odd to see that mythology considered peripheral.
incel congregations in their darker manifestations are often called something of an esoteric death cult. if our goal is to understand a death cult, the first step is to approach its texts with a clear head. it’s useful to invoke jung’s idea that ‘what remains in the subconscious will direct life as fate’. understanding an archetype is thus a first step in making sense of those who model themselves on it. the “subcultural shooter”, in my reading, is not simply a social type but a manifestation of an archetypal role, an inheritor and reproducer of the image of the violent exceptionalist.
PROTOTYPICAL NON-CONFORMIST
rodion raskolnikov of crime and punishment fame is one of the most influential predecessors of the archetype of the modern violent intellectual, one who doesn’t simply commit violence but ruminates on it endlessly first, framing a violent act as a way of resolving some internal ontological argument.
raskolnikov, in his isolation, is fixated on a hypothesis that goes as follows: humanity is divided into ordinary and extraordinary men, the latter of which holds the moral license to transgress law and social boundaries if doing so serves the realization of his idea. notably, this hypothesis ran parallel to nietzsche’s master and slave moralities. the theory (or rather the misreading of it) is such a favourite of the incellectual and has done so much irreparable damage to the collective consciousness of adolescents that the topic barely warrants discussion, the through line is clear as day. i’m more interested in what raskolnikov does with the theory than the theory itself.
the titular crime raskolnikov commits is essentially an experiment designed to confirm his self-concept within this framework of ‘extraordinary men’. he wants to know whether he is a ‘trembling creature’ bound by morality and his own fragile psyche, or whether he ‘has the right’ to impose his will by killing a stranger he’s made up some arbitrary, half-baked vendetta against. in his view, his ideas are morally and logically air-tight. importantly, he does not see himself as a victim of culture or of isolation; he thinks he sees clearly beyond those factors. all he wants to do is craft a sense of self, the murder is instrumental.
the question is not whether this is an archetype and a style of thought that persist, as we all know they do. what i want to explore is how exactly it mutates in the modern day. when the thinker gains a camera, when his sense of self is inherently outsourced and needs evidence, he will no doubt change his gears in his ontological search. the figure who wants to understand himself through violence turns into one who wants others to understand him through violence. in other words, the new raskolnikov wills the other to decide whether he is exceptional.
AN AUTHENTIC PERFORMANCE
zero day is a found footage/mockumentary style film by ben coccio, made soon after, and because of, the columbine shooting. it presents you with two seemingly affable, painfully normal if atomised high school boys as they film themselves on a camcorder, plotting, philosophising, hanging out and making pipe bombs all in preparation for a school shooting they lovingly dub ‘zero day’. both in style and substance, it’s an artistic interpretation of the ‘basement tapes’, a series of videos filmed by the columbine shooters intended for media coverage, that are (rightfully in retrospect) inaccessible to the public.
in these suburban boys, you find the same raskolnikov dna in planning, self-concept and motive (or lack thereof). the kids repeatedly call themselves mentally sound and refuse to see themselves as victims, instead thinking themselves logical and calculated. the extraordinary man theory is loosely echoed by one of the shooters: “how many kids wanna kill themselves…how many of them realize that the way of the samurai is found in death? i’m not gonna leave cleanly… i’m gonna make my mark and then it’ll be my time to die”, the crime is seen as but a ‘mark’ the shooter leaves behind to prove himself as someone greater than himself. the kids burn books and video games on camera to prove themselves untouched by outside influence, they insist the murder was an execution of their wills.
now here is where the mutation of the archetype starts. despite how much these characters try to emphasise their agency, the whole conceit of this film is that they’re acting and that they are beholden to the viewer’s gaze. the filming and narration exist interdependently with the crime itself. despite framing the filming as a strictly documentary process, they start playing roles. notably, the ‘acts’ the shooters put on, one perp as the sensitive philosopher, the other as the calculating footsoldier, are reversed as soon as the pov shifts from first person (self account on video) to third (footage of the actual crime). the ‘aggressor’ gets antsy about killing himself, the more ‘sympathetic’ one shouts profanities with abandon.
the boys in their collection of ‘evidence of self’ want to be read and understood, they cackle sadistically at the prospect of their loved ones ‘looking for reasons’, only to snap back that ‘there are none’. this is their fantasy, that other people are agonising in search of a cohesive ‘identity’ for these boys to fill. this is where foucault is useful. in his account of the panopticon, the prisoner internalises the gaze of the unseen warden and polices himself accordingly. the new raskolnikov inverts this structure, let’s call it the postmortem panopticon. these killers construct, in advance, a surveillance apparatus they know will activate only after they are gone. they are not disciplined by the gaze so much as they perform for it willingly. the cameras and the manifestos are the tools for the postmortem panopticon to function, for their performance to be seen. they install the warden's eye as it were, before the warden has even entered the prison, they script his conclusions for him.
the raskolnikov of old could only have his verdict internal. the new raskolnikov’s ideas are too thin, perhaps even to himself, to be validated in isolation, so the amorphous ‘public’ is forced into the role of analyst. the new raskolnikov commits the act, turns his back and waits. the self-concept isn't proven by the crime so much as it’s produced posthumously by the audience.
CALLING BACK TO COLUMBINE
a disclaimer: i am not a psychologist and can’t nor have the wish to speak to pathology directly. what follows is a reading of images, something i’m more fluent in. zero day functions in this essay as a control, a fictional space in which the postmortem panopticon can be analysed before we meet it in the real. what coccio's film makes legible to me, the following cases confirm repeatedly. throughout it all, violence is posed and documented with the core purpose of production and transmission of a self.
the columbine shooting, which effectively established the school shooter as a cultural type, was staged and master planned for public reception, directly modelled on the 1994 film natural born killers. the perpetrators, regulars of the early internet, were among the first to clock the emerging media landscape and use it in a way that has since become a template for numerous copycats. in that template, violence is a call for forced reckoning. the perpetrator ensures the world must interpret him, his theory (however incoherent) gets ran through the machine of media and commentary. diaries are ripped open, the acquaintance testimonies are never-ending. the shooters designed shirts with the words 'wrath' and 'natural selection' to wear to the event, inscribing their preferred interpretation of motive onto their bodies.
virginia tech in 2007 is a case where the construction of the postmortem panopticon reaches tragicomic levels. between his first and second shooting locations, the perpetrator stopped to mail a package to nbc news. it contained photos, video clips and a manifesto prepared in advance. he was trying to broadcast his image, and i'm not even speaking in jargon anymore. nbc aired it, because of course they did.
the kerch polytech attack in 2018 is useful because it happens in crimea, which breaks the argument that shootings of this kind are specifically american products of gun culture and western ennui. if you look past the weapon on cctv, you'll notice a cosplay. the perpetrator wore a white shirt with the word 'hate' in russian (a direct visual quotation of the columbine shirts). he was performing a role that already existed. not just that, the role had a pre-built audience which promised to aestheticise and mythologise him the same. the postmortem panopticon had, by this point globalised, maintained by true crime communities, imageboards of all sorts, and the archival nature of the internet generally.
halifax is an especially interesting case, one where the self-mythology becomes fully collaborative (praise be to tumblr). in 2015, a group of teenagers in nova scotia explicitly inspired by columbine were arrested before they could carry out a shooting at a local mall. their plan was instigated and advertised through the tumblr true crime community. young people helped build an image around the perpetrators before they'd even done anything. among the digital ephemera were edits, gifsets, a poster. the perpetrators were so eager to have their identities as shooter-martyrs validated that the plan went bust. further evidence that identity was always the driving force.
CONCLUSION
the irony of archetypal identification in these cases is that criminals presenting themselves as radical individualists, “extraordinary men”, are in the grand scheme but a reproduction of a reproduction. the promise that drives the new raskolnikov motivation is that the crime will produce an audience, and the audience will produce a self. he fantasises of being remembered a performance artist, an 'activist' to his causes, an intellectual thinker. what none of raskolnikov's inheritors have managed is that the externalised verdict can never be final. raskolnikov's internal experiment at least offered the possibility of a conclusion about the self. the postmortem panopticon offers only recursion, the self now stuck in the limbo of interpretation. treating these criminals motivation as something 'beneath us' is a way to avoid the fact that their mythic logic is common, even boring. it sits comfortably with everyday narratives around exceptionalism and self-assertion. so the archetype persists less because the ideology is actively recruiting as such and more because the tenets are familiar and the promise it sells seems, to an outsider, to be fulfilled time after time.
it's as true as it is easy to say that sublimation would be a worthy endeavour, the quest for a self just needs to be redirected, nourised and 'tamed'. however, pitching raw self actualisation to the lowest of the low is a fool's errand. we are all aware by now that the modern shooter does not discover violence so much as he steps into an existing symbolic role and costume. the culture must thus become unphased and unenamored with the acting out of the new raskolnikov, strip the camera of its appeal, for him to wither in the collective consciousness (from which he will no doubt reappear, mutated once more. but we’ll deal with him when we see him). i myself have never been able to let go of my own fascination with negative models of the self, so i take the hypocrisy, and beg for the people to take it off my shoulders. which is why im so glad to see that copycat shootings (or even ideological shootings in general) are finally, if slowly, beginning to be seen by the public not as tragic (implying gravity) or even pathetic (implying suffering), but simply as gauche.
PS: the reason i wrote this is bc these fuckers are literally doing branding on themselves go figure
