Bugmen and the New Death of Art.

Recently, the Twitter user Isaac Young sparked quite the controversy over a thread he did on the film Starship Troopers¹. The thread in question tried to prove that Paul Verhoeven's directorial adaptation and parody of Robert Heinlein's original sci-fi work fails as a biting and sardonic critique. What ensued was a multiple-day Twitter spat where irony leftists and the E-right battled it out over the interpretation of a 90s film. Something seemingly nonsensical, but served to reveal several key issues underlying the current online culture war in relation to art and literature.

The Back and Forth Online is entrenched in the usual political shelling points, and mostly are irrelevant to what I wish to talk about in this piece mind you; Now, it's been a while since I've written a one-off article. For the past year I've been busy writing my book (entitled “Neoliberal Kitsch: Online Art and Aesthetics in the 21^st century”. It's going to be quite something, I hope you all will enjoy it), and hopefully in a few months you all get to read it. If I, of course, manage to edit it in time. So Substack writing has been lower on the list of priorities for the past year.

But for the past few days there has been a debate taking place over art criticism that compels me to weigh in. So whether you believe that these bugs actually are a civilization that is worthy of consideration and nuance. The message of the film is warranted, and thus should trump any other aesthetic consideration. And therefore should be heard out in some kind of liberal notion of multiculturalism. Or whether you believe that in fact these galactic space fascists are correct in wiping them out after destroying Buenos Aires, everyone seems to have been thrown up into a discourse storm. Into a cacophony of voices, and everyone has a voice now in the digital age, however large or small.

The initial tweet was quoted over and over again by the largest of irony leftist accounts saying that “don't you know that you should sympathize with the bugs”. That this is an obvious parody of fascist regimes, and that you should have a sense of “media literacy”. Because then you would realize that the director is actually the final source of authenticity and authority, who works to instantiate all aspects of meaning garnered from a piece of art, in this case a film.

There are a few problems I noticed with this line of thinking. In a longer post replying to the initial firestorm², I said that what we have here is an abandoning of this concept of “the death of the author”. A concept that was held in high regard by New Left circles for multiple decades. A concept that has now been completely abandoned by Millennials and Zoomers on the political left. Perhaps it was always a cynical ploy, or something that would have eventually been sloughed off as the institutional march reached a place of inertia. This is a debate for another time, but it's abandonment on the cultural front was for a variety of reasons, some which we shall get into.

But firstly, let me go to a take I found that I find to be the summary of the leftist culture warrior argument over the film. One that, to me at least, was as infuriating as it was dense; This person goes by “Henry Gilbert”, who of course has a Simpsons podcast with a Simpsons avatar.

Now, I don't wish to denigrate people for being Soylennials, But in this case, I bring it up because it will serve as an important lesson for later on. In this tweet he says “I will forever love the DVD commentary of Starship Troopers where Verhoeven is talking to viewers like they are children who missed the point of the movie. If you see someone in this who dresses like a Nazi, that was done on purpose because we are saying these people are bad, bad, bad”³.

What we have here is a very surface-level take on a work of art. Or rather, the interpretations and inter-textual nature of art itself, rather than just the authorial intention of the author. Now, the whole debate is ridiculous as I said, because let's come down to earth for a minute. It's a piece of 90s trash media, but somehow it lit a burning flame of passion in aging Millennials on all sides. We admit this, we know that it is a parody movie from the 1990s, and we can also admit that it was meant to be laughable. The ironists are correct in asserting that it was meant as a parody. The issue is whether or not it stands as the only definitive interpretation over a work.

In general, this is a very childish, surface-level interpretation of what the work of art is. Gilbert commits to a few positions here, perhaps without knowing it. The key assumptions in this tweet that I wish to tackle are as follows:

1. The position basically boils down to saying that “Le heckin bad things are le bad” and this stands alone as the sole arbitrator of a piece of art - Its normative moralistic value according to current “standards”.

2. That the “far-right reactionaries” are “revealing themselves”. That they in fact sympathize with the fascistic message of the movie's protagonists, and aesthetic interpretations are wrong. Also they themselves could not understand the actual interpretation of a parody film. So therefore, his equally puerile, equally simplistic interpretation shall never be misinterpreted. And finally-

3. That the author is brought to a sacred level of authority over the work of art once again.

Any alternative interpretations are a moral crime. Because of course, every piece of media must have a moral message. It must have, specifically, a progressive moral message. So let me go through each argument one by one. Because to me, what really is at stake is the state of the work of art and art criticism itself. Issues which I also extensively comment on in my forthcoming book (sorry for the shilling).

Under this framework, all works of art stand under the threat of this way of thinking around so-called “media literacy”; The first and third criticisms are what, in my estimation, amounts to the actual death of art. One that is in direct contrast to what Arthur Danto determined to be the death of art in his magnum opus on the subject. We have witnessed is a sea change in the last 15 or so years towards art and literature. Or this fundamental change in attitudes people have towards their meaning. Art and literature have been driven to exhaustion. This is something everyone can feel and even comment upon quite well. But in a way, the death of art does not come about from an infinity of interpretations or an infinite proliferation of meanings, as Danto is famous for asserting.

Quite the opposite. The death of art is actually at the hands of people that wish to simplify art and the authorial interpretations of art. That wish to (in my opinion, for clarification's sake) hijack the open-ended authority of this free and easy inter-textual nature of the work of art for their own political and moral ends; Danto, of course, as we shall be reminded of, formulates that the death of art comes about from the expansion of what art actually is. If everything is art, then nothing is art. or rather that art meshes with philosophy and then later with what we know to be “literary theory” or “art theory”. Or even art criticism as a form of theory, from it's development in the 19^th and 20^th century.

For example, Danto says in his book on the death of art (from the essay “The Art World”):

“When in the end, what makes the difference between a Brillo box And the work of art consisting of a Brillo Box is a certain theory of art. It is theory that takes it up into the world of art and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is. For example, Warhol's Brillo Boxes could not have been art 50 years ago. The world has to be ready for certain things, the artwork no less than the real one. It is the role of artistic theories, these days as always, to make the art world and art possible.”

To Danto, what is at stake is this notion of art as an entity which always progresses, namely the art movements, or our notion of a linear picture of the work of art as always progressing onward, between different movements and different groups that have radically new styles that usher in new epochs in the work of art. But this all changed with the death of the Avant-Garde and the rise of Pop Art, to which Warhol was it's judge, jury and executioner. Especially to another, more boisterous art critic Robert Hughes; if everything can be art, then nothing can be art. Or rather, the delineation between the art-object and the objects of the everyday vanishes. Art becomes a series of non-things, sunk into and yet standing apart from the dictates of everyday life. Or from the demands of intellectual passions and political concerns.

Or rather, the actual authenticity of what an artwork is, is determined by theory, and determined by what we interpret the art to be. The authorial intention of art and literature collapses in the age of inter-textual freedom. The “tyranny of the author”, as thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes formulated, are upended by Postmodernity, or what we can now can confidently call Hypermodernity. I'm simplifying things for the purpose of a shorter article of course, but in essence the death of the author was meant to liberate people from the “tyrannical nature” of the author or artist.

The author, even as they still live, do not bear any sort of authentic voice in what the work of art is according to this thesis. Because a work of art, as given to the world, can now be free to proliferate in any different context, can be interpreted and reinterpreted, and put into dialogue with other works of art. This, in fact, was the exciting new promise of Postmodernity.

But now we see that this is no longer politically expedient for those who have absolute domination over all aspects of the culture industry. The work of art, or rather the death of the work of art, does not come about by what Danto sees as an expansion of art or literature. Rather, it is the closing of them. It is artwork that can never escape the shadow of the author. This presents a complication of hermeneutics. The world that a text presents, or a work of art, or film is presented as a closed entity that demands a form of passive consumption. The art-object becomes a, act of concealment rather than something which reveals itself, or flowers open towards the audience. Any interpretation is then null and void. If an author or artist chooses to leave nothing in the way of commentary, then these works perhaps should exist in a zombified state. Existence without meaning, or rather, the possibility of full meaning. To die or to become living dead is to exist without movement or growth. To exist or to die without the possibility of engaging with the world.

This is the problem with these charges of a failure to posses “media literacy”. It violates an older, more genuine form of thinking around the work of art and literature. We no longer live in a post-historical state, as Danto formulates, where the grand narratives no longer bear any weight on the work of art themselves. Rather, the artist or the author must rise from the grave and give everyone a proper interpretation of the work of art, nuance be damned.

Danto states that “The story comes to an end, but not the characters who live on, happily ever after, doing whatever they do in this post-narrational insignificance. The age of pluralism is upon us, when one direction is as good as another”. But under current cultural and sociopolitical conditions, one direction is not as good as another. The Author or Artist is equally oppressed in this equation. For there is a demand of them (Verhoeven does this willingly mind you) to leap from the grave and give the “proper” interpretation. Hermeneutic pluralism, as postmodernism itself, has been thrown to the winds, and in fact such relativism could never have been sustainable for very long. Nor was it the goal to begin with. Danto's fears have come to pass, and in it's stead is something even worse.

But to answer the question about why “media literacy” has become an obsession of the contemporary cultural Left, we must look at the conditions that they themselves created; the yearning to never be “misunderstood” in a politicized cultural context, the wish for superior “media literacy” is, among all things, really a call towards a fundamental existential anxiety over what media we consume.

The anxiety to have a proper politically correct narration. The Age of Anxiety and the Age of Nothing and Nowhere (I explain this more in depth in my book) is over both the social relevancy of things and its impact upon the greater moral picture of society. But a social picture which has been strip-mined of other sources of meaning and concerns which placed the subject/consumer on solid ground.

In the absence of God, the humanist moral order stands in place. Therefore, the author must dictate a proper interpretation of things,“thou shalt” be the arbiter of truth. And this condition places another hidden dictate upon them. The phenomenon we have seen in our current Geist where the author or the artist must anticipate, then stand above and beyond criticism. The author must jump ahead of criticism in numerous possible interpretations and land on the “correct” line of interpretation. And this happens instantaneously without a proper germination of dialogue between artist and audience that was often mediated by slower forms of media and interaction. An instant cycle of criticism and counter-criticism between artists and audiences that was almost impossible in previous ages.

And the reason the author or the artist must do this is because there can be no ambiguity. There Can Be no pluralism that Danto speaks of. Art is not dead because art is meaningless or anything can be art, rather art is strangled by current social and cultural conditions. This is what the charges of “media literacy” act as, a kill shot for terminally online leftists to dictate what art and literature and film should be about. We have now addressed is number one and number three.

The second one is a charge over false interpretation, that reactionaries and people on the political Right, specifically as I like to refer to as the Eright, have a simplistic notion of what art and aesthetics are. This charge lays flat on the surface of it because they in fact also have a very simplistic interpretation, one that is reliant upon the godlike word of the author, in this case the director himself. As we have seen, it is in essence an appeal to authority.

But there is a problem of appealing to authority in this case, specifically within the framework of both “media literacy” an charges of ill-intent behind counter-interpretations. Verhoeven is free to create his parody, and people can critique it of course. Or this was understood until the current moral panic over it.

As I stated in a previous thread, who really has a final interpretation over Starship Troopers Does Verhoeven have the moral authority to say that his film is a parody of Starship Troopers and therefore is the final interpretation of the work itself, where “le bad things are le hecking bad?” Or is it Heinlein, who wrote the initial work with much more moral ambiguity? As I have said, for the purposes of this summary of the discourse and critique, I will not venture too far into the actual meat of Starship Troopers, both the film and the book. Solion has written an excellent piece going through various plot points and critically examining specific claims made about the source text if you are interested⁴.

Heinlein, of course, even though he was very swayed by New Left thinking and by the New Age movement, or the hippies and their “free love”, nevertheless has very, by today's standard,” problematic thinking” when you examine the actual literary work of Starship Troopers. If one were to use a strained Gnostic metaphor, and no, I am not writing a piece for Compact Magazine when I say this, Heinlein is like the God of Light, who gives birth to the work of art. Verhoeven as a director is merely a Demiurge who subverts that work of art through a crass parody and upends the actual meaning of Starship Troopers, creating a facsimile of the real. Heinlein is more politically inventive while Verhoeven is a victim or rather a perpetrator of the current moralistic liberal world order. But what we have to really examine is the interpretation of the target audience.

Now, I mentioned before, the account which originated the criticism of Young's thread is a fan of The Simpsons. He is the typical Millennial Podcaster, as I am to be fair. It seems that within recent years, children's media is held to a level of sacredness for the Millennial, but children's media that conforms to the moral landscape of our current order. And the Simpsons is a perfect example of such a franchise. It was a subversive and edgy liberal show back in the day. It graded against the placid normalcy of a lot of 80s sitcoms revolving around family values. To only then become a shell of itself. Not a creator of mainstream culture, but a victim of culture. A handmaiden to pop culture rather than one that transgresses against it.

Irony leftists love The Simpsons for such a reason. They can't stop quoting and referencing it. Apart from other childhood trash media, some of them are in an arms race to have the most idiosyncratic profile pictures of the most obscure Simpsons characters. Other children's media act in a similar way. Vulgar children's media becomes a source of moral authority and authenticity. It also provides a form of ironic cover when one tries to critique such franchises. They can always go back to saying “it's just a show I watched as a kid, yes we take it as a source of art, but touch grass my dude”.

This is something that Frederick Jameson postulated in his book on Postmodernity. It is a hallmark of postmodern culture, a collapse of the high art and low art distinction. All high art must be brought down and all low art must be brought up to where you have literal PhD dissertations on The Simpsons, Family Guy, Beyonce, and other various forms of pop culture ephemera. But more importantly these pieces of media presents a very simplistic moral picture. One that escaped the thinking of children at the time, but was only rediscovered by those same children, now adults (or adult children) who grew up watching such shows.

The problem with using this argument is that it cannot be brought to any standard of taste or aesthetic value. It is an empty moralism one can say. What these people are saying is that the Eright does not know how to “interpret art”. And in fact, they have to supplicate the Eright's “simplistic interpretation”, an interpretation that “shockingly reveals” a deep-seated fascism, with their own equally simplistic and politically charged interpretation. But more importantly, it falls flat because it neglects the actual, immediate and sensual experiences of something they hold in high regard, this nostalgic longing that kid's and early adult media produces. They ignore how the vast majority of us Millennial actually interpreted something like Starship Troopers. So let's actually, for a moment, examine what it was like being a young boy watching Starship Troopers on some kind of TV network that would play reruns of it. What did they actually feel?

They didn't care about the “moral lesson” or the “nuance” of a militaristic society whipping out an alien civilization, or the ambiguities of a film that depicts rival civilizations conducting an existential war of extermination against each other; what they really were thinking of was how much of a gigachad Caspar Van Dien looked like. How they too want to kill ugly and violent bugs, how beautiful Denise Richards and Dina Meyer were, and how in fact even Neil Patrick Harris' character represented an alpha nerd, someone who's smart but equally cunning and ruthless.

That is what the sensitive young boy who grew up watching such films really cared about. So to say that the audience is misinterpreting a work of art violates the whole point of why the work of art exists in the first place. If we must take even low and children's media up to the level of art criticism, we cannot simply say that whole segments of the audience should be banished from that hermeneutic cycle. After all, the contemporary Left seems to have “children's rights” as a pillar of it's worldview, for a variety of reasons we shall not venture into.

Granted it is a gotchya argument. But what the Political and Culture online Right is saying in this debate over Starship Troopers, and in fact a lot of these debates over various pieces of pop culture, is that an Aesthetic Truth is more immediate to the subject than anything else. Because as we know, an aesthetic truth is in a lot of cases equally valid to an interpretive truth or an authoritative truth; the aesthetic truth of this work, one can argue, is more in line with the original God of Creation, Robert Heinlein. That these righteous intergalactic gigachads are blasting aliens who just committed genocide on a whole city of Earth, and this is natural and right. And that in fact, it is morally correct to do so.

Because the irony leftists who have been rage posting about this film or this interpretation of Starship Troopers are in essence defending the indefensible. This was Isaac Young's point in the thread originally was. A point that garnered 6 million views with over 2,000 quote tweets, that the online cultural Left are actually doing the work of defending a hideous species of space bugs; another insightful reply was by the poster Howling Mutant. That the Left's line of critique fails to be satire because of object of revenge and derision are so instinctively repulsive and violent. Destroying them in any context is warranted, and that if it was an effective critique, the enemy of Man would be something understandably more sympathetic⁵. Take for example, Ursula K Le Guin's short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. A Paradise on earth is tragically and absurdly only insured by the never-ending torture and subjugation of an innocent child. An extreme form of a moral conundrum or thought-probe that borders on a parody of utilitarian logic. It works because the false villain is actually entirely innocent.

Also, the various other points of critique are probably worth getting into, but not really worth being worked up over. Such as one point about an amputee greeting the young prospects to becoming citizen soldiers. Of course we know that the horrors of war are real. The problem is, when critiquing such an element of a film, of a war film, one must sacrifice communal duty and patriotism in order to do so.

There is an equally brilliant thread that comes from Remnant Posting⁶. His point is that in fact, beauty is beauty and it's good for its own sake. And this subversive interpretation falls flat because people intuit an aesthetic truth above a truth which requires strained logic to arrive at some kind of higher “moral” position. In fact, when the leftists cry about “The Democratic Rules-Based Order” losing to an Alien Civilization, and how wrong it is to cheer on a “losing war effort” which requires a continual flow of unfathomable resources and live. These very people on the Left are doing the exact same thing in regards to “helping” Ukraine.

What Heinlein's view was is that you simply can't have society if you aren't willing to defend it, that there must be a monopoly over violence and a willingness to sustain an order that serves all people through force. And furthermore, in the threat, for this reason, anti-fascist propaganda will always fall flat in the wake of this immediately sensuous and intuitive truth; what Remnant Posting also brings up is the litany of other“bro characters” that you “should not sympathize with” according to the media literacy crowd. Characters that you were “missing the point” of, such as DE-FENS from Falling Down or Patrick Bateman or Travis Bickle. These are other examples of pop culture becoming a breeding ground of the current online culture war.

Of course, one should not condone their actions, that they are presented as anti-heroes or as bad guys. But what these films do is give one a window into the social conditions that lead to a character such as DE-FENS or Travis Bickle. This is what is often missed by any left-liberal interpretation of these films. For all of their Marxism and concerns over “material conditions”, they directly ignore why such characters come about and the conditions by which they are rebelling against.

But all in all, in conclusion, what we can say is that authorial intention is but one interpretive lens among many. And the reason why we must get rid of the thesis of the death of the author is because of fundamental anxiety in which we live in. That there can be no proliferation of various interpretations or interpretive lenses. That they can fall in the hands of “dangerous reactionaries” in the far right, and therefore works of art must be guarded and shuttered off at all costs. Lest they fall into the hands of the “wrong side of history”. Even something as powerful and spiritualized to the Millennial as nostalgic itself must be taken into a strange process of what Arthur Chu in the Gamer Gate days called “mind-killing”. Where an and all thoughts to the contrary of the social messaging must be set to the flames. Nostalgic itself can only be taken up when it serves present political concerns, the impulse itself is dangerous to the current progressive liberal order of things.

Even when the aesthetics of such a work of art is glaringly in the face of its audience, it still must be up to the author to give a supreme and godlike interpretation over their own work. All the dangers of such attitudes that people like Roland Barthes critiqued are now ignored because they no longer are politically expedient. I am of course leaving out certain ambiguities, but this is a short(ish) article and I have already given enough thought to a poorly done parody film from the 1990s.

1

https://twitter.com/HariSel57511397/status/1758251273617375340

2

https://twitter.com/giantgio/status/1758976909176656011

3

https://twitter.com/hEnereyG/status/1758926167376368089

4

Media "Literacy"

5

https://twitter.com/Howlingmutant0/status/1758685314527162448

6

https://twitter.com/revenant_MMXX/status/1758921201404010777