On Infantilism by Udith Dematagoda

Reflections on Art, Morality, and Regressed Life

The totalitarian desire to dissolve the distinction and critical relationship between art and politics is a sign of regression. The separation of art into its own autonomous domain is a hallmark of progress.

– Jon Rafman

Rafman is not entirely wrong in describing this contemporary sign of regression. It is however less totalitarian than it is merely puerile, an indication of a culture that is growing more infantilized by the day. Such a desire is childish because it seeks to dissolve a distinction that no longer exists, if it ever did. His notion of aesthetic autonomy as progress is therefore somewhat naïve. Jacques Ranciére wrote that the relationship between art and politics does not constitute ‘a passage from fiction to reality, but a relationship between two ways of making fiction.’ I would go further: the ‘aesthetic’ today, mediated through technology, has become pure perception: equivalent to, and interchangeable with the political – that is to say – with ideology. We have long left behind the possibility of an autonomous domain for art. Rafman is an artist who, in his own words, has attempted less to predict the future than to ‘frame certain aspects of the present in order to make certain obsessions or points of tension in our culture more transparent.’ I propose that the principle point of tension is precisely this collective infantilism, and its attendant paroxysms and tantrums. That Rafman fell afoul of this hysteria is therefore telling, though in retrospect unsurprising. If he had attempted to predict the future, he would have seen it coming. 

Infantilism here will signify a lack of maturity as opposed to psychosexual paraphilia – though the boundaries between the two are steadily becoming blurred. I will limit myself to the former, as the latter seems too grave to contemplate. It may suffice to briefly posit that repressed childhood sexual trauma has increasingly burst forth into the popular consciousness, with the extent of historic and ongoing pedophilic abuse across social and class boundaries becoming glaringly apparent. As Pornography, divested of its taboo status, has become ubiquitous, predictable and glossy – its producers, chasing their own failing quest for relevance, have become fixated with depictions of the degraded family image; scenarios of incest, most frequently with maternal figures, and between teenage brothers and sisters have become ever-present. Curiously the father, who Jacques Lacan referred to as the fundamental signifier and the representative of law and authority, is conspicuously absent. 

In the last decade, aided by the vapid panopticon of social media, people began to construct therapeutic atmospheres of comforting words and sentiments around themselves. Facilitated by an ascendant technological paradigm which favored the superficial, an entirely forced optimism pervaded, cloaked in design elements, color schemes and fonts reminiscent of childhood. Needless to say, this was at odds with an unspeakably barbaric reality; war and terrorism, beheadings and executions broadcast in real time - their nightmarish imagery reproduced instantaneously throughout the world; frequent mass shootings; death, disease and destruction in its various guises. Yet, at the same time a shrill form of cultural journalism emerged which emphasized the value of uninteresting deterministic art and literature that adhered to facile politics, accompanied by similar forms of music journalism which insisted on the validity and import of music that trafficked in ‘poptimism.’ They intended to absolve many of their erstwhile ‘guilty’ pleasures. Indeed, the very notion of a guilty pleasure ceased to exist. It became increasingly difficult to discern who had taste, or what this actually meant any longer. Adults devoured children’s books about wizards and vampires, traversed cities chasing virtual Pokémon on their smartphones, ate over-priced children’s food, played children’s computer games, and began openly discussing the merits of superhero movies churned out in various iterations, with increasing frequency, year on year. The Japanese culture of Otaku – a derogatory term used to signify the obsessive interests of maladjusted loners and outsiders - became mainstream in western societies. In a cultural landscape characterized by technological abstraction, the prevalence of anime characters and idols as AVIs on social media magnifies an all-pervasive and depersonalizing unreality. Yet all of this was somehow kept in for as the political status quo was unobtrusive, only covertly malign and cynical: the enduring legacy of the first Obama administration. We would do well to remember this legacy, as his spiritual third term begins in earnest. 

Things changed in 2016, when people’s childish assumptions of the inexorable march of progressivism and the inevitability of its triumph were brought into question by the election of a reality TV cretin to the presidency. An openly venal kleptocrat, as opposed to one who hides behind a veneer of slick PR, Trump was perhaps the most honest American President in many years because he made no real attempt to disguise his true character and intentions. This is undoubtedly why he was so despised. He functioned, briefly, as America’s id, holding up a mirror to its unvarnished corruption, hypocrisy, gluttony, vulgarity and proud ignorance. Such confrontations with reality are inevitably uncomfortable. But the infantile tantrums thrown over Trump by American progressives, and those of us under the sway of their cultural imperialism, was illuminating. Trump (a moron, a populist charlatan, himself in many ways a child) was to them the only problem – and not, for example, the systematic neglect and degradation of the American working class living in its hinterlands by neoliberalism.   

It serves little purpose to excoriate safe spaces, micro-aggressions and trigger warnings, which are merely symptoms of a larger cultural malaise. I’m also keenly aware that our infantilism is exacerbated by increasingly onerous material conditions. The extended adolescence of young people is produced in large part by their anxiety over obsolescence. For the past decade at least, we’ve been faced with straightened economic conditions, vanishing opportunities, the devaluation of qualifications through over-production in higher education, the deferral of family formation in favor of the illusory forms of self-actualization propagated by consumer society, and the insidious fiction of meritocracy that conceals enduring systems of patronage and nepotism. But do these factors sufficiently explain the ubiquitous infantilism of contemporary culture? Or do they merely portend a far more comprehensive psychopathology inculcated by our environment, that is to say, by technology?

Ours is by no means the first crisis precipitated by technology’s tendency to outpace our capacity to control it. In the 1930s Wyndham Lewis, a brilliant and prolific English modernist painter, writer and theorist was (to use the contemporary parlance) ‘cancelled.’ Unlike the current inaccurate invocations of the term, Lewis was indeed a fascist. He wrote a book of reportage called Hitler in 1931, one of the first insights in English on the mass hysteria gripping Weimar Germany. He was caught up in it himself. He extolled the virtues of Nazism, was well acquainted with its Italian Fascist antecedents, and lauded its stated aims and goals - which he erroneously (though genuinely) believed to be peace. Like many men of his generation, he came to this position after having been compelled to serve in World War I, and in the process being forced to interrupt a promising career as England’s foremost avant-garde artist and provocateur. Like those other young men, he was traumatized by his experience of war, where many of his friends, among them absurdly gifted artists such as Henri Gaudier-Breszka and writers like T.E Hulme, were killed in the trenches. Particularly traumatic for Lewis was the sublime horror of technological war and the mechanized destruction left in its wake, which seemed capable of altering the very category of nature. Rapid technological progress clashed with archaic notions taught to young men of duty, honor and heroism. Initially, many of them had signed up enthusiastically, and had rushed headlong into conflict filled to brim with infantile naivety. Their experience forced them to grow up nonetheless. 

The lessons of Lewis are manifold, and oddly prescient for anyone who feels at odds with contemporary culture. The war robbed Lewis of his most creative years and endowed him with a great deal of bitterness and resentment towards the wealthy cultural liberal elites in the Bloomsbury set who professed pacifism and peace, whilst protected from the front by powerful friends. After his Hitler book, he would publish three more books along the same lines. He would emphatically recount his views before the outbreak of war in 1939. Nevertheless, the damage to his reputation was irrevocable. Despite producing work of comparable quality and scope, Lewis has never been recuperated and institutionalized in the same manner as his friends and erstwhile collaborators T.S Eliot, Ezra Pound and James Joyce – despite at one point arguably being the most prominent among them. Much like Rafman, the solution for Lewis seemed to lie in a renewal of art’s claim upon an autonomous domain. Tired of war, like many artists before him and since, he simply wanted to be left in peace with his art. To this end, he believed it necessary to turn away from art towards politics. This was the first of his many misapprehensions. Politics, war by other means, embodies and inevitably encompasses the sum of all extant antagonisms, of which art is merely one facet. The political is aesthetic, the aesthetic is political: you cannot shun one in favor of the other; you cannot escape from one into the other, nor seek to sully oneself in one, in order to preserve the purity and sanctity of the other. Art is peace, but it is also war; and one cannot desire peace without preparing for war.

It is impossible to be an anti-fascist if one does not understand what fascism fundamentally means. Lewis understood better than anyone else that fascism was an ideological aesthetic first and foremost, and that it was fueled by an aberrant impulse to seek out a realm of authenticity amidst an atmosphere of technologically induced alienation. Lewis deserved censure for his briefly held political views. We should learn from him nonetheless, because the conflicts of his time are mirrored in our own. The ability to dispassionately analyze and obtain value even from perspectives we find objectionable has always been the mark of a mature intellectual culture. It grows scarcer by the day. In this particular vein, my sentiments align with those of Adam Lehrer, who sees the facile politics of neoliberal progressivism reflected in what he accurately describes as the contemporary art world’s vapid moral fetishism. The result has been an insipid ideological conformity and uniformity, which produces equally insipid, often infantile art. But what should be its opposite? I don’t believe it is found within those various forms of readily available, often predictable and banal provocation which are scarcely less infantile. The value in such art merely derives from the petulant thrill of regression, of childish rebellion against authority. Such art is impotent; it wears its insufficiency as a narcissistic badge of honor – it claims to be uninterested in the political, but in doing so expresses the purely political impulse of defeatist despair. Neither virtue nor transgression are interesting in and of themselves – their value derives only from the specific admirable virtues championed, or the corrupt values transgressed. We are severely lacking in both. The processes of alienation and deterritorialization which were in their infancy in Lewis’s time have now fully matured, whilst we (its subjects) have regressed. Markets favor the seamless, and artworks of easy morality facilitate this process. Capital uniformly seeks out, recuperates and snuffs out the authentic and the inspired – making them equally seamless. But it can only do so if it is aware of their existence. I propose that true inspiration, from which a truly authentic art can emerge (fully formed), can only thrive in the shadows, it can only come through mystification and communion with something beyond knowledge of itself. Subject to this all-pervasive blue glare of indifferent and desultory attention which encompasses everything, it merely withers. Perhaps this has always been the case. Our infantilism, then, is a symptom of a collective ennui produced by the complete disappearance of authentic desire from a modern life that is bereft of mystery and experience. Contemporary life instantly gratifies and satiates, but neither enchants nor inspires. The blame can be placed squarely on the quotidian technologies and platforms we use to communicate. 

The most egregious among these is Twitter, a website that seemingly exists for the sole benefit of snitches and hysterics. Daily it appears more and more to be the product of some sinister military funded psychological experiment which seeks to study the mechanisms of mass hysteria, and the emotional convulsions of what Gustav Le Bon contemptuously referred to as “the rabble.” The truth, of course, is far more boring and irritating, much like the vast majority of that site’s most prominent users. Indeed this is a different type of rabble; its moral arbiters are on the surface intellectuals and writers. (Or journalists, more accurately). Its dictates are that of a tepid bourgeois progressive liberalism which emphasizes the primacy of identity over more palpable issues such as class and socio-economic status. Its cadres are predominately drawn from the superficially diverse PMC class, and are composed of the sanctimonious, the self-important, the narcissistic, the talentless and mediocre - i.e those who stand to gain most from this self-congratulatory milieu. Careers are made, book deals abound, and reputations grow for various coteries of generally unremarkable people who would have merely muddled along at the side-lines in former times. These are rewards for political loyalty within a hollowed out cultural Ponzi scheme. But their politics derive less from firm principle, than from what René Girard referred to as mimetic desire: the majority possess no firm convictions of their own, they do not know what they desire, nor what to think on any given topic, and need to look to models and mediators for this knowledge. What this veneer of social justice concern barely conceals is a compendium of professional rivalries and unspoken passive aggressive internal conflicts. Most internecine paroxysms of ‘cancellation’ are doubtless on some level motivated directly or indirectly by professional jealousy. 

As Girard proposed, mimetic desire requires a scapegoat mechanism as a conduit for the ever present frustration and ressentiment within groups. Scapegoating thrives on simplistic identitarian classifications. In-group members require the scapegoat, usually an apostate in some form, to be ‘bad’ in order to assure themselves of their inherent goodness. The veracity of the scapegoat’s guilt is of little importance compared to the universal consensus of its existence. This is why there is no forgiveness for the condemned. There are no second chances in cancel culture – when one is cancelled now, one must remain cancelled. None of this is a revelation. But what all of the recent back and forth about ‘cancel culture’ seems to elide is the essential infantilism of these phenomena. Nobody has stopped to consider a very simple premise: that these people are acting like children. That they are not content merely to infantilize themselves – they wish also to infantilize everyone one else. Much like children, those most active and successful on twitter merely crave attention and recognition, seemingly lacking the internal resilience required for introspection and ego formation. The result is a dysfunctional hive mind of undisguised ambition in the service of meagre approbation; mostly precarious and scarce professional opportunities in industries that are, by every metric, failing to retain value. In any case, what is most important is the desultory dopamine high which comes through online validation by one’s peers. Nowhere is the culture of infantile regression more evident than within these online echo chambers, which once merely responded to and disseminated the news – but now seem to constitute it in its entirety. 

Perhaps the incoherent infantilism of online politics will be brought into sharp focus as events spiral out of control in the coming years. The politics of online ‘wokeness’ was always a pseudo-politics. This will only become more apparent as these flimsy ideologies are gradually called upon to serve more tangible political purposes, as they were in the recent anti-racism protests – and where they were found severely wanting. One need only consider that in the wake of these protests and riots, the most widely shared (and bestselling) book was not a probing work of socio economic and political economic analysis. It was White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo – a work of pseudo profundity by a white corporate HR consultant. Its lessons are suitably infantile, but despite the author’s stern elementary school teacher countenance, its intent is far more sinister than it first appears. It purposefully shifts focus from those who ought to be the main political subject of these protests, namely, working class African American men. It diffuses the tangible and specific into the amorphous and indeterminate. Racism in general is the problem – not the specific problems of how racism is manifested, and who its most frequent victims are. It posits, rather absurdly, that the solution lies in white people taking responsibility for their racism, ‘privilege’ and for ‘white supremacy’ – thereby absolving themselves through a symbolic (and utterly meaningless) ameliorative to a wholly material problem. Such books pander to the ineffectual and childish chiaroscuro of American racial politics – which our Silicon Valley masters wish to make the global standard of racial politics. 

All online politics are the politics of mimetic desire. They were never intended to produce anything tangible, nor were they meant to offer anything except an interminable and circuitous discourse (‘We need to talk about this!’). This is the primary feature of social media, and no doubt what one of its earliest investors Peter Thiel (an admirer of René Girard from his Stanford days) perceived to be its main value. And this is what we return to. The nerd plutocrats of the tech industry benefit most from our collective infantilism precisely because their products speak to and perpetuate our most unproductive and childish psychic needs; to be ‘seen’ and ‘heard’ and ‘recognized’ - terms which have become something of an unofficial mantra for the terminally online. Observing social media from the side-lines is much like watching animals behind the cage gleefully throwing excrement at one another. What is most perturbing is the extent to which some people, whose every impulse and instinct undoubtedly informs them to the contrary, persist in the belief that they can derive some benefit from their continued participation within this discourse. There is nothing to be gained. As Mark Fisher poignantly observed in his prescient 2013 essay Exiting the Vampire’s Castle:

We need to think very strategically about how to use social media – always remembering that, despite the egalitarianism claimed for social media by capital’s libidinal engineers, that this is currently an enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital. 

The need to go even further than this is now upon us. There can no longer be any optimism whatsoever towards the possibilities of this technology as long it is run in the interest of capital. There can be no possibility of authentic art, or authentic revolution, if we continue to infantilize ourselves by deferring to technologies whose very purpose is to suppress both. In the long term, we require a cause – and it will inevitably be a casus belli. Until then - the time for immanent critique is over, and the possibility of maintaining a critical distance whilst engaging in these platforms have passed. There is only so long one can remain in enemy territory before becoming an enemy. It needs to be abandoned en masse. Our tech overlords are seemingly aware of our increasing disenchantment, and are becoming agitated, as the recent Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma attests. This supposedly ground-breaking critique of the excesses and psychological impacts of social media by those who have worked inside of it, in the end felt like more of a whitewash; a pre-emptive and maladroit propaganda couched in the moronic platitudes and trite histrionics of the TED talk. It was a transparent attempt to briefly admit, but then gloss over, an incontrovertible truth – that these technologies are designed to make children of us all, and the only way for us to grow up will be to abandon them altogether. 

Udith Dematagoda is a Scottish writer and academic based in Tokyo. He’s currently finishing a book on the confluence of masculinity, technology and fascism within modernist narratives, considering work by Wyndham Lewis, Louis Ferdinand Céline and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle - among others. He is also editor and co-founder of the experimental fiction publisher Hyperidean Press. You can download his recent novel, Horizontal Rain, here.

Illustrations:
Collage, Adam Lehrer
Film still, Jon Rafman
Example of “Otaku”
Donald Trump
Wyndham Lewis ‘A Canadian War Factory’
HR diversity
Robin DiAngelo meme
Illustration of Peter Thiel