$EGIRL: Part 4/4
Angelus Novus
Part 4 of 4. Part 1 is available here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.
It would be impossible to complete the discourse on the E-GIRL without a detour through the ANGELICISTS…
What is Angelicism? The true first enemy of “Crumps” in New York. It’s an avant-garde micro-movement. It’s a weird internet subculture. It’s a Substack blog of niche downtown scenester gossip. It’s the ramblings of one anonymous academic guy based in the UK (“Angelicism01,” or simply “01”) who seems to be familiar with Heidegger and Derrida and De Man and so on; it’s the collective undertaking of a group of his young artsy disciples in New York. It’s a cult. It’s not a cult. It’s the celebration of early Drain Gang aesthetics. It takes partial credit for the “vibe shift” meme. It’s the most pretentious form of manic slursaying provocation that says nothing. It’s the most pretentious form of libertarian Covid biopolitics paranoia that says nothing. It’s the most pretentious form of “network spirituality” that also says nothing, but with the flair of Hito Steyerl. It’s the most pretentious form of global ecocide paranoia that might say something, but is probably still a nihilist anti-politics tied up in adolescent suicide fixations. It’s the most pretentious form of pedophilia. It’s the destruction of the narrative genre in the internet space through the valorization of esoteric fascist incel grandiosity. It’s the destruction of the narrative genre in the internet space through the valorization of the waifish beauty of e-girl socialites. It’s definitely a cult. Whatever it is, it’s something that I found incredibly grating and obnoxious when I first got to New York. It was always slippery and coy and no one involved in the project could ever give me straight answers about anything. It was something that I wanted to kill and replace with my vastly superior, if still nascent vision of what “post-theoretical” internet gossip writing could be.
When I got to New York in the winter of 2021/22, I didn’t personally know any of these characters I was beginning to write about. I only knew of them, as internet personas. I didn’t really have any friends in the scene yet. The Crumpstack was not yet called Crumpstack, and it had not developed its “novelistic” style. In those days when I wrote about these bourgeois countercultures of New York, it was from an interpersonal distance that flattened the distinctions between these individual vectors of social striving. Dasha and Dean and Gasda and all the other microcelebrities were homogenous symbols of an ambient reactionary chic—to an outsider they all just appeared to be members of an insufferable club. Their trajectories and the all-too-human intricacies of their mutual recognitions and misrecognitions were not yet perceptible. Part of what held together that illusion of aesthetic and political uniformity at the time was the obscure popularity of Angelicism.
By 2023, Angelicism’s trendiness had waned a bit. Some of the disciples and fellow travelers had fallings-out with the leader. In the summer, the Angelicists screened Film01, a three-hour experimental feature that largely bored its scenester audience, many of whom were in the film itself. Admission to the screening required submitting a questionnaire and clearing a pre-approval process that I did not pass, though some of the attendees still went on to write unflattering reviews.[1] As my writing developed its novelistic style that focuses on the characters I know personally, it no longer seemed necessary or relevant to keep shadowboxing distant Angelicism. By early spring 2024, the rivalry with Angelicism had cooled to the point that they let me on the list for the screening of a new, shorter cut of Film01, which I didn’t attend because it was at 4:30 PM on a Friday.
This brings us to the present. Angelicism01’s New York proxies are running an eight-week seminar called “AMOC Shutdown: School’s Out.” School’s out, but Angelicism is in. I’m on the list for a panel discussion they’re hosting with Tom Cohen and Avital Ronell, a coda to the seminar’s “Tom Cohen Month.” Finally, the showdown with the Angelicists I had always wanted, not as mere namecalling in a virtual hall of smoke and mirrors, but an in-person engagement with the purported real intellectual substance.
Alas, Angelicism01 is not present at the West Village apartment where the talk is held. Instead, a young woman named Lola reads an introductory statement she had prepared on behalf of her friend and teacher. Tom remarks that even in his absence, 01 speaks to us in this stentorian voice. As Tom talks some more about the seminar and his relationship to 01’s “post-theoretical gossip project that poses questions about extinction,” he lets slip 01’s real first name, “Jonty,” which is a little taboo in this circle. Then the discussion goes something like this:
Tom Cohen: In this seminar we have been reading Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and talking about Angelus Novus and the storm of progress. We are talking about the philosophy of history against the backdrop of global climate collapse. Climate crisis tipping point. Atlantic tipping point. Ecocide and extinction. What happens to time when the tipping points have been passed? The past 20 years have been the window of opportunity. And we have squandered it. We no longer have an open future. Soon New York will be underwater, and that will be one of our lesser concerns. We are now trying to slow down the termination of the system. We are suddenly locked into a new timescape where cyclical and linear time have been pushed away. In this new time, even our dwelling is ephemeral. We dwell on screens and we dwell on this dying earth.
We are talking about the philosophy of history in a time when the narratives are simply so grim to the point of inducing laughter. To laugh is to blow up in meaning. There are different kinds of laughter. There’s innocent, childlike laughter. There’s cruel laughter. There’s the laughter of the madman, the laughter of the mad scientist, that blow-up-the-world laughter. (Thinking to myself: The laughter of the Angelicism01 “retard list.”) To burst into laughter. An explosion of words that will not carry over into the zone we’re talking about. The convergence of stupor and desire in the vortex that proceeds with its own entropy. The AI/climate deterioration vortex.
Consider the billionaire clown Elon Musk. Musk’s fantasy is all about escaping Earth and spreading all the joy to other galaxies. Technology versus technics. Technology, the Muskian fantasies of power, the phallic spaceship, the suburban fantasy of the Cybertruck, the use of IVF to populate this dying planet and its Mars colonies with as many offspring as he can sire. Technics, something humbling, something that shows we are constituted. The trope of the pharmakon. Dicey but inescapable. All is technoeugenics. The stupidity of the accelerationists and techno-optimists. The idea of humans escaping this crisis by becoming artificial lifeforms hooked up to quantum computers. It’s a trick, a façade. It takes the side of extinction.
(He turns to Avital Ronell next to him.) The catastrophe of the liquid ooze in Avital’s Crack Wars. The ooze coming out of the mouth of Madame Bovary. Anti-ooze. Life but not life. The black ooze on the screen. The ooze is oil. The ooze is ink. The ooze is drugs and Rausch. The ooze is the black spot of extinction. The ooze is the immaterial materiality that only comes from the past.
The AI that made this great breakthrough is the language-based model, which puts language and writing into question. The end of writing and the end of readers? Writing in the age of addictions. Addictions to drugs. Addictions to screens. Writing in the age of black ooze. What future is left? Ecocide. Stupidity and deterioration in the political sphere. Extinction. An embarrassment to humanity.
Technology of the memory system. We are being steeped in the transformation of organic to inorganic memory and life and film and screens. Stiegler. The technics of memory. Archival thinking, archival reading, archival maintenance systems. We have popcorn brain. But so did Walter Benjamin. That’s why he wrote that way. Anyway, Avital, perhaps it’s time for me to let you chime in?
Avital Ronell: I am coming to this seminar as a latecomer, in the Heideggerian sense. An untimely meditation. The eventide mood. Tom is teaching about how to read for disinscription. There used to be proleptic orientation toward disasters that are non-anthropomorphic. Now biotech and infotech have become one. People are wowed by différance machines, but they don’t think about deferral machines.
Tom: Benjamin dismisses both the Marxian and the theological. Benjamin doesn’t even complain about the Nazis all that much—he complains about historicism, which today would be “data.” The angel of history is the destruction of the contract of reading. The angel can’t do anything because it’s a lie. It’s a fraud. And then it gets blown away by the storm. “This storm is what we call progress.”
Avital: The essay on clouds and language in Benjamin. From Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich. Benjamin is looking for a force that is more violent than the Übermensch.
Tom: Reading the angel as “bad” is a type of disinscription. Altering the terms of performance of the previous readings. An attack against interpretation. Weak messianism? Watered-down messianism? Or, following De Man: no messianism at all. And the storm? Inhuman, non-anthropomorphic. No face. The unreadability of the weather. The violence of the weather. “This storm is what we call progress.”
Avital: Benjamin is looking for a force that is more violent than the Übermensch. By über we mean trans. Re-threading the Übermensch. Making it cracked. Making it a crack zombie. Consider the works of Emerson and Thoreau. Consider the distinction between the American piece of shit and the European tyrant. We are American pieces of shit. We love shit.
Tom: We now live in the shadow of the inverse vulgarization of Nietzsche. The transformation of sentience and apprehension. Have we already mutated into something vastly different? A new type of human unrecognizable to those a hundred years ago? I think so. But those humans had already mutated into something vastly different than those a hundred years before them.
Avital: Benjamin is my mother. Nietzsche is my other mother.
Tom: Apocalypse means unveiling. All will be revealed. But we don’t get this unveiling with climate collapse, at least not like we do with the nukes. Time is so fucked in the climate collapse that we don’t even get apocalypse. We don’t get that blinding flash of light before the moment of total annihilation. It’s something else.
Avital: Tom, years ago you had a critique of my work that traumatized me. It has taken me many years to recover from this. In fact, I am still mourning.
Tom: I’m not sure what you’re talking about.
Avital: Your critique castrated me and deeply wounded my ego.
Tom: Ah. I’m still not sure what you mean. But my feelings about your work are the same as they’ve always been. You’ve managed to do something very unique and controversial. You’ve consistently brushed up against the boundaries of academic decorum, and you’ve done this with great elan. In your work, in your self-expression, you’ve been doing a sort of performance art, you’ve constructed this persona that’s at once penetrating, visionary, mercurial, sinister…
***
Max and I are walking from West to East Village, where the next $EGIRL party is happening.
“That was interesting,” he tells me. “I’m glad I went. Even though Jonty once called me a faggot and said that my writing sucks.”
“We’re all faggots. He’s just jealous that we live in New York and get to hang out with girls sometimes, without threatening to kill ourselves. Or, rather, ‘extinct’ ourselves. He called me a ‘communist faggot.’ Then I think he called me a ‘de-extincted faggot.’ I kinda like the idea of being a de-extincted faggot, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Like a faggot outside of the continuum of history, or something. The faggot between two deaths. The unkillable faggot. Just sucking and fucking on this dying world. We’re also retards. I think we both made the latest retard list.”
“Yeah. Of course. By the way, don’t you think Avital Ronell is, like, a seven-times leveled-up version of Cassidy?”
The thought had crossed my mind. They do share a vague resemblance. Similar height and dark brown hair. There’s a yawning intoxication in the way they talk. I’m imagining Cassidy teaching German at NYU. Talking to the class about wanting to fuck autistic daddy Ernst Jünger. Terrorizing her grad students. I kinda get a downers vibe from Avital, whereas Cass is all uppers. They’re both performing this whole Madame Bovary bit. I’m imagining the black ooze coming out of the corners of their mouths.
At the party, all the girls will be wearing $EGIRL merch and wrestling each other in a pool of jello.
[1] Madeline Cash, editor of Forever Magazine (which had run glowing pieces about Angelicism in 2022), writes:
“The film is one inscrutable montage of social media cuts, found footage, and vertical iPhone videos… Within the first fifteen minutes, Anika asks if I think the film is pedophilic… I don’t think the film is pedophilic, because the filmmaker’s gaze is not sexual or predatory, but cold, like a computer… There is a difference between cult cinema and luring-you-into-a-cult cinema… Under the name Miya, Remilia Collective co-founder Charlotte Fang allegedly groomed a harem of e-girls with oppressive rules, such as restricted eating and encouraging self-harm. While there is a Fang-to-Angelicism pipeline—some of the same girls have jumped ship since Miya’s doxxing—Angie’s methodology is less direct, shrouded in esotericism…” (ellipses mine)