I. For the past year I’ve written a fortnightly newsletter for a bookshop I used to work at. Since neither I, nor the staff, have the time to read the couple dozen new releases we highlight in each edition, I often rely on a combination of reviews and the publisher’s blurbs when synopsising each title. This is growing increasingly difficult, I’ve found, because increasingly these blurbs summarise less the actual content of each book, but rather the zetigeisty themes and concepts they claim to feature. A typical one may read (this is a Frankenstein creation of different cannibalised copy, to protect the innocent authors):
“A lyrical meditation on displacement and generational trauma, Inspiring Fictional Story is a rallying cry and deeply-felt epic about taking up space, finding your community, and giving voice to long-buried family secrets.”
Which, sure, fine but what’s it actually about. What’s the story. Who is in it. What milieu does it take place in. What’s going to hook me in, because it’s not going to be this weird SparkNotes precis I’m receiving before reading a page of story?
II. In a newsletter from the start of this year, writer Joanne McNeil predicted a cultural vibe shift I have simply not shut up about since:
“My sense is it’s going to look like a return to ambiguity.“I find myself longing for art that refuses to explain itself. Dhalgren was like that for me, Mulholland Drive is another well-known example. Good music always does this. There’s been, for a while now, a Clarissa Explains It All-quality to movies and books, where everything is made for ‘analysis’ and culture criticism. It is defensive and exhausting. When I saw that even Emily Ratajkowski released a Trick Mirror-inspired book of essays I knew that whatever you call that style of writing, it’s coming to an end. Also, this tweet about everyone talking these days like Patrick Bateman’s monologues on pop music (inspired by something from this interview) seems like a weak signal.
“I want the work that’s intuitive, subconscious-driven, and hypnagogic rather than the contrived, the ass-covering, the people-pleasing, and the crowd-reading. ‘Analysis’ of this work can’t be traded in Letterboxd reviews or Substacks—this one, included—which is exactly why I’d bet on it that this is where the wind is blowing.” III. I recently finished reading Jeremy Atherton Li’s Gay Bar, which is a very good, well researched personal and cultural history of its titular topic. In the opening chapter, Lin does a brilliant job of evoking the general vibe of a night where the dark room smelt like “fog machine or nitrites, syrupy lager spilling over thick fists, smoke’s breath, someone’s citrusy cologne, the bleached vinyl seats.” The night is named Brüt; it’s already been established that there’s a rough, almost bullying quality to the interactions. After doing such a terrific job of creating a sense of place, Lin tops it off with the line “it reeked of toxic masculinity,” which did an equally brisk trade in pulling me out of the scene. Why, after creating a sense of toxic masculinity, do you need to turn to the camera, or pull us out of the scene like an artist’s statement next to a painting, and explain it? Why follow the signifier by just straight-up stating the signified, smothering the more complex and alive set of symbols with something much more tidy and much less interesting — something dead? III. The author M John Harrison, in a recent blogpost on genre fiction of the seventies: “A photograph of a cast is not a broken leg. The ideological framing of a broken leg is not a broken leg. The sociological framing of a broken leg is not a broken leg. The cultural analysis of a broken leg is not a broken leg. The historical & economic analysis of the type of circumstances in which the leg broke is not a broken leg. The story you tell of a broken leg is not a broken leg. The only thing that is a broken leg is a broken leg.” IV. In many occult texts and fantasy stories for children, knowing a being’s “true name” allows one ultimate control over said individual. It’s a trope perhaps best known from Rumpelstiltskin; knowing the true identity of this little creep robs him of his power. It crops up in everything from Ursula K LeGuin’s Earthsea books to Spirited Away to Snow White to Superman villain Mr. Mxyzptlk. Accurately labelling something is the end of it. In “Against Interpretation,” Sontag rages against the mimetic arguments of her critical peers, rooted in the thinking of Aristotle, who was completely unimpressed with representations of real things. You can’t sit on a drawing of a chair, so it will always be inferior to an actual chair, is the logic. Is that really the meaning of art, though? To replicate objective reality? Or is there something “truer” and more complex in our wrestling with transmuting experience into language? V. Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, was one of the earliest recorded thinkers on the latterly-named topic of “linguistic relativity.” This is the hypothesis that peoples’ understanding and interpretation of the world around them is significantly affected by the language they speak. Thought is not necessarily curtailed by the limits of language (that’s a whole other fish kettle), but certainly has an influence on how we view things. Experiments by social psychologists and linguists Roger Brown and Eric Lenneberg identified a variance in colour perception between speakers of languages that classified the shades differently. There are a whole lot of arguments just about that experiment; even more about the hypothesis more generally. Regardless of its application, or ignoring of the fundamental common structures beneath all language, I think there’s an underlying truth for the oddly-named Sapir–Whorf hypothesis: that the words you choose determine how you think. V. Language is magic. Literally! Well, not literally, insomuch as being able to cast a spell using a magic wand that turns a prince into a frog, curses your enemies with misfortune, or extends your manhood. Language can nonetheless affect reality, though, and vice versa. Right now I’m typing out words, which you will read, internalise, and — depending on how keen you are to pick up what I’m laying down — will put ideas in your head. Magic! It’s a “spell” which only works if the right words are used, however. That’s a central tenant you’ll find in a lot of historical and fictional depictions of magic. You’ve got to do the ritual correctly, otherwise things can go badly wrong (cf The Evil Dead etc). We’re in a weird place atm for language. Everything is very slippery, swift and changeable, yet were more keen than ever to taxonomise, to account for things as if there is a set, agreed upon taxonomy for objective and subjective reality: thoughts, things, feelings. VI. Who benefits from such a taxonomic mentality? Both the positive and negative expressions of identity politics in the 21st century make for a good case study. The teenagers and teenagers-at-heart (and brain) whose Tumblr — and now Twitter, and possibly even Hinge, and now perhaps back to Tumblr — bios feature a list of acronyms representative of mental health diagnoses, gender identity, sexual preferences, and fandoms to which they belong. They operate online like badges pinned to one’s jacket in meatspace; or a hanky code with all the erotic frisson drained out along with the colour. Those small political slogans, band logos, and catty aphorisms say to those who approach, this represents something fundamental about me. It requests a certain type of treatment and interaction. It posits the question, do we have these things in common? They can therefore act as both a call for solidarity, yet also an individualist staking out of territory. The intersectionality of Audre Lorde’s queer, Black feminism, reduced to solipsistic data points. In this formulation, the ways in which you differ become bridges that cannot be crossed, even if you meet some of the other criteria. Any drawing of equivalencies between identities are treated as hostile intrusions that threaten to flatten your unique lived experience. This repudiation of camaraderie is obvs necessary in the formulation of one’s individual identity, in order for certain aspects of one’s life to be taken seriously. Yet the attendant rejection of fluidity, of porousness, leaves little room for the way we actually operate AFK. Signifier overwrites signified. A self-defined straight woman marries another woman. Someone’s pronouns shift as they explore their gender identity. Consciousness is raised, or a mind is changed, and an old identity is slaked off like a dead skin. Does that delegitimise the prior identity? Is this person now to be regarded as a liar, a poser, or otherwise untrustworthy? Or do we allow for a greater plurality within the individual, let alone in larger groups, cultures, society as a whole? VII. Of course, there are circumstances where specificity is paramount. Words have meanings! Foreign speakers may struggle with allusion, euphemism, poetic turns of phrase whose actual meaning isn’t readily clear. Instructions for baking a cake without measurements and on-the-dot timings would be useless (unless you’re going for star baker in the technical challenge). In the law, in government, in the way we communicate in workplaces, being clear and avoiding misinterpretation as best you can is key. One of the most frustrating things, for me, in both personal and professional contexts, is not being understood by someone when I think I’ve made myself very clear, have chosen my words carefully. VIII. There are surely more contemporary examples I could draw upon, of fuzzy thinking obscured by concrete wording, of seemingly wilful misapprehension within the language of social justice, but that would require sticking my head directly under the unrelenting faucet of absolute horseshit on social media, and I ain’t about to waterboard myself. Cast your mind back through the mists of time to, er, like nine months ago, when West Elm Caleb was the hot topic of conversation. For a brief moment, a significant amount of the (English-speaking, Western) audience for the short-form video service TikTok was entirely focussed on both unmasking and shaming this man. His crime? Well, being similar to a lot of single men: kind of a dick, shagging and then dumping a succession of women who felt (justly!) burned by the sudden removal of his romantic attentions, leveraging his position as a designer for the apparently-trendy Brooklyn-based furniture company West Elm to get people into bed. The level of scrutiny this very shitty — but very common — bad behaviour got on an international scale was dizzying. Tiktok, as a platform, encourages such mini-trends through its features, which allow people to “duet” alongside an existing video, or else “stitch” a response after one. That was the technical reason for Caleb becoming public enemy number one, but what about the cultural context? There’s a definite trend towards public shaming, albeit one that comes with a certain criteria. A tendency that was born in the bowels of Tumblr, where the blog Your Fave Is Problematic encouraged a bizarre puritanical surveillance culture where users were encouraged to submit examples of “cancellable” behaviours by public figures of all levels of notoriety, has since been mainstreamed; it is not enough for someone to be dismissed simply as kind of a shitty person, because of personal slights or prejudices felt. Instead, they must be framed as perpetrators of some form of moral wrong, so that individuals and society as a whole might feel morally justified in destroying their targets. IX A key part of that formulation, and something which has perhaps even outgrown the ethical-shaming paradigm to become a key part of current (again, English-speaking and Westernised and a certain demographic) lexicon, is the appropriation of phrases hitherto used only in psychiatrist’s offices and the DSM. Jayson Greene refers to such phrases as “open-source cultural term[s, ripe for applying (or misapplying) to all kinds of circumstances.” By utilising the language of mental health, trauma, and the like, an air of seriousness is conveyed unto circumstances like, well, a fuccboi running rampant through the dating apps of New York City. X. https://twitter.com/herelieslill/status/1560378199250505729 XI. I don’t want to be mistaken as drawing offensive parallels between different struggles; phenomena that truly have nowt to do with one another, aligning the trivial and the literally life-and-death. It’s just that they’re all part of the same thing, aren’t they. Expressions of an atomised individuality, the technocratic anti-society rhetoric of Reagan and Thatcher and neoliberalism animated by the interconnected panopticon of the web. Need some more tired academic buzzwords and straw men in this bit. No-places. Trauma. Abjection. No ethical consumption under capitalism. &c. XII. A little while ago I was talking to a friend about recent dating experiences, and found our discussion was peppered with any number of buzzy phrases: lovebombing, gaslighting, etc. Jargon that would not make sense to anybody a generation older, but which is useful shorthand. Except how useful is it, exactly? Platforms like Tiktok, but also Instagram, newsletters, podcasts and self-help books produced for millennials in the past five years or so have been responsible for the mass dissemination of ideas which are rooted in more complex psychological models (or, in the example of gaslighting, a 1940 British melodrama) and have been significantly flattened and stripped of nuance upon entering the mainstream vocabulary. Ayesha A Siddiqi, in discussion with New Inquiry editor Charlie Markbreiter, has spoken about the sunsetting of “the cultural obsession with millennials” — the fiction of Sally Rooney, TV shows like Girls and Fleabag, etc — in part because what is relatable to a wide audience is actually much more multifaceted than suggested by that generational designation. There is a much greater plurality to us as people, and so suggesting an entire demographic is relatively privileged, sexually promiscuous, and irresponsibly self-destructive, is just a bit silly innit. XIIV. I’d argue — I am, right now, arguing — we’ve reached a point at which many of these labels have outlived their purpose. They are tatty, frail and haggard, and oftentimes used in place of actually engaging directly with the emotions we use them to tidily surmise. It’s understandable we’d reach for such terms when thinking about painful, complex situations where we may have to reckon with personal responsibility. Much easier to easily taxonomise and pop in a drawer, safe in the knowledge that we have been victimised, or else we can explain away our own behaviour by virtue of an external force which we are not responsible for. In an interview for PE Moskowitz’s brilliant Mental Hellth newsletter, Khadijah Diskin speaks about the limits of using metaphor to understand/excuse our emotional states in this way: “How I’ve come to think about the world is that people assume there are easy answers to these tough questions. And the fact of the matter is there aren’t easy answers. People don’t understand that psychology is all metaphor—there are no psychological ‘truths.’ Every time there’s a shift in methodology, things come out that completely contradict what previous methodologies have supposedly proven. "I teach my students that so many things we think we know about the brain—even the very idea that biology influences behaviour—are actually philosophical arguments, not arguments that have been proven scientifically. But psychology gives us the idea that we understand how the body works, specifically as it relates to behaviour and personality. But really we’re working through abstraction, through metaphor, through assumption, that’s often disproved as much as it’s proved. There are just as many people that SSRIs don’t help as they do help, there are just as many people not helped by particular types of therapy as are helped. "Just because you do something and it makes a certain part of a brain light up, that doesn’t actually mean anything. You can make a dead salmon’s brain light up, and neurologists have! "When you say, ‘my neuroatypicality is causing me to do X, Y, and Z,’ or, 'Oh, sorry I can’t do this thing because the ADHD means the chemicals in my brain are this way,’ that’s just…not what’s happening. And no good, rigorous clinician, psychiatrist, psychologist would talk in the terms that we talk about these things. We don’t know what’s happening!” Using these labels and, more broadly, how we talk about subjects such as mental illness have a direct effect on how we experience it. Such simplified metaphors for complex issues surely have their place, but when they overtake the more slippery and ill-defined reality of them, and lead to a feeling of helplessness, frustration at the limits of treatment, or blaming behaviours and actions on this “other.” I came of age on, regrettably and embarrassingly, the aforementioned Tumblr, where mental health discourse in the early ‘10s was remarkably lacking in nuance. Your Fave Is Problematic was just the most public and clear example of a mode that was common throughout my experience of the much-maligned (but still standing) microblogging site. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of mental health which, to my mind, not only allows someone to elide responsibility for their actions but also sets back popular conceptions of mental health issues: this person is nuts, they’re wholly defined by their condition and thus dehumanised to an extent. Said discourse mostly took the form of reacting against the then-prevalent ignorance surrounding mental health and was, as such reactions often are, extreme to the extent of validating the more destructive impulses of mental health crises: not only is it okay to stay in bed all day, eat garbage, avoid difficult situations, etc, but if anyone tries to help you or you make an effort to clamber out of that hole, that’s as toxic as people denying depression even exists. This is of course part of the wider black-and-white moral framework that social media has perpetuated through its systemisation of social interaction, as Diskin continues: “We have this need to not only categorise, but crudely binarize things. It’s either good or bad, you’re a good person or a bad person. You’re sick or not sick. Your brain is neurotypical or atypical. These are logical traps and entrapments that white supremacist ways of discourse force us into. We now can only view ourselves as inherently valuable if we engage in this process of categorization.” XV. It’s not just how we conceive of things within ourselves, but then how that’s filtered through the sort of discourse that’s allowed and encouraged on our online platforms, which is where a great deal of public discourse now happens, either directly or as a result of. It’s also filtered through the impulse to share any of these things publicly in the first place which, again, comes from a very healthy and progressive starting point of making previously swept-under-the-rug issues a point of public record without shame, but which ultimately serves to gather data and sharpen an algorithm for a handful of very large, very wealthy companies. Of course, the fact that much of this language has entered the popular consciousness brings with it the hope of a greater understanding of the mental health issues they are supposed to signify. Even before the link between the word and the meaning is degraded, however, it’s arguable how much help increased awareness actually brings. In an interview for Vice [https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkpzdk/does-how-we-talk-about-mental-health-change-how-we-experience-it], psychologist Lucy Foulkes argues that while conversations about mental health have increased, that’s not the same as a greater public understanding of it. “The temptation with these campaigns, especially social media campaigns, is to simplify and make these things easy. Mental health as a topic is just inherently complicated, and there's so many different viewpoints on it. It's not like one is right and the other is wrong…I think we do need a categorisation system, even though it's flawed. I'm okay with stating the fact that it is flawed, but it should still exist. There are very practical reasons why we need to put boundaries around sets of symptoms and come up with thresholds and get some names. “Even though it's imperfect and the place where those lines have been drawn are not biological realities, you still need to place the line somewhere. You need to make a decision about the threshold at which you're going to say, these groups of people have a shared problem…There's movements in the UK and in the US to get rid of the whole notion of psychiatric diagnosis. I'm sympathetic to some aspects of that, but I also know that lots of people do find the concept of having a name really useful. Sometimes they're not, but sometimes they really are, particularly in terms of making sense of suffering. “I think trauma is a very nice example. The more you shift these boundaries towards common normative experiences, a concept that really should be saved for the more extreme end of things gradually leaks down into more and more experiences. My concern is that the more there is concept creep, two issues happen: Those terms lose meaning and value for people who really need them. And at the milder end of the spectrum you cause unnecessary worry by making people use these concepts as part of their identity and their experience in a way that's actually not useful.” Perhaps the most pertinent concept Foulkes invokes for the purposes of this wider discussion of the usefulness of labels is Ian Hacking’s “looping effect”: “I was really fascinated by this idea that once you give something a name, like binge eating disorder or social anxiety disorder for example, and you label a person with that name, then that name and that concept kind of becomes a real entity in a way that it wasn't before. “People start altering their self concept and they start altering that behaviour. If someone labels themselves as having social anxiety disorder, they might think, “Oh, I can't do that presentation because of my social anxiety disorder.” XVI. At this point, the language being used has far outsripped its usefulness, arguably; again, I’m sort of arguing that. I could very well return to the an earlier piece of writing, where I did the very cool and very original thing of using Borges’ short story “On Exactitude in Science” to discuss this difference between the signifier and the signified, and what happens when the latter ends up overtaking the former, rather than being in service to it. In the story, presented as a real found document, a group of cartographers set out to produce a map of a 17th century South American empire with complete exactitude. What this means in practice is that the finished map is the exact same size as the land itself. It’s a cute philosophical gag which has influenced the thoughts of many who came after, including Jean Baudrillard’s ideas around Simulacra and Simulation, wherein an “ageing double ends up being confused with the real thing.” XVII. Towards the end of Gay Bar, Lin runs up against the limits of language while contemplating, in the broad sense, the idea of a gay or queer community, in regards to the closure of East End staple the George and Dragon: “The day before, the Irish social historian Iain Boal had arrived to tour the property. He’d said something that stuck with me — that language is doomed to fail, but metaphor can help explain things. Community was the word that had consistently failed for me. So: could I solve it through metaphor? If the word community is indeed a failure of vocabulary — too broad, too utopian — perhaps the metaphor best to replace it is metaphor itself. Disparate objects are brought together, alike in some, but not all, respects; dissimilar in all ways but one. I’d like to think we can be different together — even homos, ostensibly the same.”