This happened last night and I have an extremely half-baked (half-roasted?) Take https://twitter.com/entertain_mn/status/962160922981781505

After 9/11, the would-be arbiters of culture demanded a “new seriousness” in which we were to abandon the smirking ironism of 90’s pop culture

in favor of mirthless tales of rock-ribbed, steel-jawed ciphers who confront, and (more importantly) DO WHATEVER IT TAKES to defeat, existential evil

And to some extent that did happen. An alphabet soup of TV dramas (JAG, CSI, and especially 24) with narratives of Very Serious Americans defeating Totally Real Evil through a combination of technology and torture

served as the entertainment auxiliary to the barrage of Very Serious News Reports of WMDs in Iraq blaring out of your parents’ and grandparents’ TVs seventeen hours per day

BUT on the by and large, people, while not explicitly rejecting The New Seriousness, instead chose to dive headfirst either into spectacular fantasy (LOTR/comic book movies) or shameless celebrity voyeurism (Paris Hilton, etc.)

As a cultural period 2001-2008 is marked not by its solemnity, but by its near-total vapidity. It’s best signifier is a bedazzled fleur-du-lys on the ass pocket of some artificially distressed boot cut jeans

This cycle repeated itself in a more low-key manner following the 2008 crisis and resulting depression (for my money, Breaking Bad captures the zeitgeist of 2008 - 2014ish pretty damn well)

The third macro-trauma of the 21st century has been the 2016 election of Donald Trump, which is a genuine apocalypse, in the sense of original Greek word ἀποκάλυψις — an uncovering, unveiling, a removal of a mask

Threaded throughout this cycle of macro-trauma has been a constellation of micro-traumas from mass shootings and other spectacular terrors, to acceleratinh quasi-biblical natural catastrophes, to the deaths of beloved celebrities

wait, hold on a sec... YEAH, I’LL BE OUT OF THE BATHROOM IN A MINUTE I’M TWEET STORMING HERE

Interwoven with these spectacular traumas was the rise of commensurately spectacular candlelight vigils*

* I use the word “spectacular” in both the regular and Debordian sense and that these events compromise a near-unavoidable spectacle

Once the province of personal and the local tragedies and dilemas (“little Timmy’s fallen down a well!”), candlelight vigils became national/international media events https://theotheriran.com/2015/09/12/irans-exceptional-reaction-to-911-attacks-candlelit-vigils-for-the-victims-and-60k-soccer-fans-respected-a-minutes-silence/amp/

The thing about candlelight vigils is that as purely symbolic reactions, they are tacit acknowledgements of objective futility

Any time someone trots out the old gray mare of “better to light a candle than to curse the dark” they are admitting that those are effectively the only two options

[this is not to disparage candlelight vigils or other symbolic displays. I think symbolism is important - and the extent to which Reaction is currently ascendent is in part due to their understanding of this]

As TS Eliot and Lana Del Rey have noted: human kind cannot bear too much reality

Likewise we can only be so serious for so long. Just as the post-911 New Seriousness devolved into either pure kitsch or Rock Of Love, so too have flags at halfmast and candlelight vigils largely been emptied of significance through repetition

The present moment is strange, because it’s both objectively awful, but is neither pure tragedy nor pure farce.

The ascension of Trump, a character too ridiculous and too void of any redeeming qualities (other than having some bizarre closed-circuit into America’s darkest id) to be real has somehow broken the cultural seriousness/frivolity dialectic

Stentorian, quaver-voiced HAVE YOU NO DECENCY SIR outrage is about as effective as a slingshot against an Abrams tank

Likewise, the traditional tools of subversion: irony, satire, distance are all obliterated. The last good parody of Donald Trump was the character Biff Tannen

He’s just beyond anything else. The wildest dreams of the most coke-addled script consultant will always be outdone by the reality at hand

[follow @G2Institute to understand why Gremlins 2 provides a possible skeleton key to this cultural moment]

To paraphrase Gramsci, this bizarre interregnum leads to a variety of morbid symptoms. Significantly, emerging modes of expression which supersede both sincerity and irony while containing elements of each

The phenomenon of Weird Twitter, while primarily ironic, is a precursor of this. Interestingly, and perhaps not coincidentally, one of the key weird twitter accounts is... Nihilist Arby’s

Meanwhile, on January 21, a crowd assembled outside of burned-out Taco Bell in Montgomery, Alabama

Note the superimposed bald eagle, the sine qua non visual shorthand of post-911 patriokitsch

This candlelight vigil had EVERYTHING: people in white robes, an interpretive dance, a bearded man breaking down in tears

Was this inspired by a genuine sadness at the loss of the Taco Bell? A cheeky swipe at hypervigilification? Both?

Which brings us to the Uptown Arby’s. First, we must look at the Arby’s brand itself, which is absolutely begging for the sort of folk détournement I will be describing below.

The name Arby’s is actually an acronym for America’s Roast Beef, Yes Sir.

Combined with the grossly exaggerated cowboy hat as its icon, the entire Arby’s brand screams of such a florid, fat-necked American chauvinism that it would have been cooked up as part of the Colbert Report millieu in 2006 if it didn’t already exist

This particular Arby’s is located at the intersection of several antagonistic forces. Literally.

As described here, the block upon which the Arby’s is actually a triangle resulting from some slicing and dicing by the City of Minneapolis http://www.wedgelive.com/2018/01/the-uptown-arbys-is-now-closed.html?m=1

More probatively, Arby’s island now lays on the frontier between the now thoroughly gentrified Uptown area, and decidedly less upscale East Lake

Whatever replaces Uptown Arby’s, it almost certainly won’t be selling sliders and curly fries to the drunk and the cash-strapped

Further, I suspect that the people who put the vigil together were probably not regular customers of that, or any other, Arby’s

Therefore one could plausibly read the Arby’s vigil as an exercise in sublimated reaction two different ways:

1. The vigil attendees, consciously or not, actually yearn for the American chauvinism that the Arby’s brand represents, the vigil gave them a chance to express this repressed desire with sufficient plausible deniability

2. Just as colonizers will mascotify caricatures of the people they subjugate and suburban subdivisions are named after the nature features destroyed in their construction...

... the vigil is actually a victory dance disguised as a lament by the socio-economic forces which are displacing the Arby’s

I don’t buy either of these reads for reasons I will get to after I “eat” and “bathe” I SAID I’M TWEET STORMING, LINDA

tired but strong, I still gotta do some normie shit and then I’ll be back to try to wrap this thing up before the weekend is over . Here’s a Saturday night jam in the meantime (thank you, @899KMOJ THE PEOPLES STATION)

I’m going to suggest that what’s going on here is what I’m going to call “folk détournement” Someone more clever than I can come up with a cleverer name

While détournement is most easily translated as “rerouting” or “hijacking” Debord and Gil Wolmam defined the concept in their 1957 work “A User’s Guide To Détournement”

This technique became popularized as Situationists like Debord provided the intellectual framework for the Paris uprising of May 1968

“Beneath the paving stones, the beach”

Détournement can most simply be thought of as as turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself — as when slogans and logos are turned against their advertisers or the political status quo

The classic example is mixing up the letters of this Marlboro ad

Techniques of détournement have been continued by the culture-jamming movement of the 80’s and 90’s. Negativland’s sound collage of U2 samples and the resulting lawsuit are a classic of the genre http://splitsider.com/2016/07/that-time-negativland-trolled-u2-into-suing-them/

This deturned Dagwood cartoon remains a personal favorite

The advent of twitter (which is contemporaneous with the 2008 crisis and it’s cycle of microtraumas) brought opportunity for dturn to new levels. Our old buddy @nihilist_arbys being a prime example. I also nominate @dasharez0ne

The flipside of détournement is recuperation — in which once revolutionary concepts are co-opted, defanged, and ultimately returned to The Spectacle as commodities

Even absent an orthogonal undermining by recuperation, détournement has its own shortcomings

MARIMBA BREAK

Ok, where was I? One problem with culture-jamming is that it risks that the brand being detourned actually comes out looking *cooler*

Is anyone certain whether this is an “unswooshed” piece by Adbusters, or an actual Nike ad?

I mean, maybe it’s a critique of Nike’s labor practices. But it also looks kinda metal

Futher, Heys and Hennlich argue in The Art Of Conservative Détournement (2010) that such techniques can be, and are, readily applied service to reaction https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/etc/2009-n88-etc1811648/64331ac.pdf

It seems that détournement, as consciously practiced by radicals seeking some kind of identifiable result, does not have many tangible victories to point to at this point

I’m going to suggest that the shortcomings of détournement so far arise from it being nearly-exclusively practiced by people who are saturated in theory who expect their efforts to have appreciable effect

What if there was a form of détournement that playfully subverted both a particular corporate brand as well as overplayed cultural tropes in a way that was spontaneous, joyful, and admittedly silly? That had no goal beyond itself?

The Taco Bell & Arby’s vigils take the idea of “brand loyalty” to its absurd conclusion — mourning the loss of a fast food outpost in an asphalt wasteland as one would mourn a beloved family member

Further, the use of a candlelight vigil as a theatrical form is a gleeful nose-thumbing at the top-down solemnity our would-be Catos seek to impose upon us with each new microtragedy and mini-crisis

These vigils are ridiculous. Patently so. In and of themselves, they offer no threat to the contemporary order.

They are not going to start any revolutions, they’re not even remotely trying to, and *that* May be why they offer a glimmer of a modus vivendi is these absurd times.

In 1990, anarchist thinker Hakim Bey coined the term Temporary Autonomous Zone (“TAZ”)

The point of TAZ is to “preserve the creativity, energy and enthusiasm of autonomous uprisings without replicating the inevitable betrayal and violence that has been the reaction to most revolutions throughout history”

The key to TAZ is “lies in refusing to wait for a revolutionary moment, and instead create spaces of freedom in the immediate present while avoiding direct confrontation with the state”

TAZ “should feel like an exceptional party where for a brief moment our desires are made manifest and we all become the creators of the art of everyday life”

Let’s see what Lady Baja Blast thinks of this

Bey thought that the key for creating TAZ was subterfuge, relying on stealth and the ability to melt into the darkness at a moment’s notice before it is detected by the state

In contrast, the folk détournement of the mock vigils implicitly understands that when you’re living in a panopticon, you might as well just invite a news crew

Folk détournement replaces the overt antagonism of its Situationist predecessor with the deliberately overly-agreeable “yes, and...” of comic improv

Folk détournement acknowledges that people love curly fries and chalupas and they hate being scolded for loving those things

Folk détournement understands that a State whose flag is perpetually at half-mast has no moral authority to demand our solemnity

Rather than engaging in futile attempts at negating mass media, folk détournement makes itself superficially irresistible to broadcast

Folk détournement will carve out temporary autonomous zones, not on the margins or peripheries, but in the sclerotic center of consumption under capitalism: fast food parking lots

By not having any goals to fall short of, folk détournement cannot fail

Like folk music and folk magic, the practice of folk détournement will proceed any theory. We make the path by walking.

This seems like a good spot to press the pause button on this thread. It’s careening, ridiculous, and likely full of errors — but my biggest regret is not kicking it off with: GUYS. IT’S TIME FOR SOME ROAST BEEF THEORY.

taking a finger off the pause button to say that an abbreviated essay version of this rant will be appearing somewhere fancy, probably tomorrow

post-script: Nobody's ever going to hold a candlelight vigil for a Panera Breads