Maps of Meaninglessness
One of the quintessential aesthetic markers of our current cultural predicament is the online political spectrum. Half pseudo-graph, half meme, it is a largely crude and homemade phenomenon. It is both provocation and ‘cargo cult’ intellectualism. It is especially beloved of the more gonzo elements within the online far-Right. People create these things in their spare time. As ludicrous as they usually are, they represent a tragically doomed attempt by confused and disoriented people (if also often sinister and dangerous ones) to understand a world which seems to them to be increasingly inexplicable, complicated, and menacing. Indeed, they often reveal an attempt to understand a history which is somehow retroactively also becoming more inexplicable, complicated, and menacing. They reveal the scared befuddlement of their makers even as they boastfully claim confident certainty. One of the tragic things about these images is that they show people reaching for a way to express their fuzzy sense of political categories as complex, interrelated, liminal and evolving. They are stunted and flailing attempts to engage in dialectics.
(Dialectical thinking is, on a very base level, an attempt to systematise, and make scientific, the common sense intuitions that most people bring to their world, if their vision is not clouded by the fug of bourgeois ideology. For instance, it ought to be immediately obvious to everyone that wage labour is exploitative. You boss gets more back from appropriating what you do for him than you get in wages. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t hire you. But our society erects vast frameworks of ideological obfuscation, geared towards obscuring such obvious truths, stretching from entrenched folk wisdom, through the hegemonic assumptions in news rooms, up to learned scholarly works of political philosophy. People will often be pushed by their circumstances to instinctively reject the obfuscation and reach for new and better explanations. Right-wing thinking in ordinary people is often a result of this kind of thing going wrong, of people trying to reject bourgeois ideology and falling deeper into a more savage version of it because they have no material and dialectical approach to replace it with.)
These homemade political spectrums tend to show a series of words or images or boxes representing political groups or philosophies or government forms. There is a sense of motion and progression about the series. The symbols have been placed in lines which suggest their sequential, evolutionary relation to each other. One political group/philosophy/form is next to another, on one side or the other, because it grew out of it, or grew into it. Somehow, by some process (largely occult, at least as far as these images can tell us), one becomes another as it moves down the line. People who would sneer at the idea that gender exists on a spectrum, and often at the idea that species evolved, will reach for some kind of understanding of politics as involving the evolution of ideas, with the resulting ‘species’ of politics also being like colours on a spectrum, bleeding into each other.