The Good, The Bad, and the Uncute
Cute/Acc is one possible way out of the double bind of our times - 'the polar bears are drowning, the ice caps melting' or 'the water's making the frogs gay.'
These are the two prevailing brands of apocalyptic larping sucking all the air out of the room.
Both employ manic digital doomscrolling as a means of subtly winning you over as a devoted consumer - and ultimately an unknowing pusher - of their product, their agenda.
'The world is not enough, everything is bad, and we hold the secret to create the change that will make things better - we just need everyone to buy in, get on board...somehow..." That's the narrative.
This messaging is a vehicle to reach a goal. Whereas the messaging is the same between the brands, the goal certainly differs.
The goal for one brand is to construct an ever-moving goalpost fantasy future; the goal for the other a 'retvrn' to a fantasized past. Both represent a pathological relation to the category of time. Both employ a manic-depressive utopian / dystopian polarity that secretly hides the same apocalyptic fantasy - the destruction of the current irredeemable world.
To achieve the goal, one brand will propose education or therapy, the other will propose force or coercion. One is miserablist, melodramatic, the other cold, flat. One suicidal, the other homicidal. Both possibly genocidal if their demands are not met - and perhaps more so if they are.
Is this not the nature of the double bind? Damned if you do, damned if you don't. It is no coincidence that damnation is an explicitly religious concept.
But for the everyday person, this double bind does not play out on the this holy, global scale. It's less obvious than that, and therefore far more nefarious. The devil, as we are told as children, lies in the details.
The double bind takes the form of a constant internalized pressure to be a a cutting-edge revolutionary or a stoic reactionary.
The former: an effective activist that successfully navigates the social sphere and its ever-changing rules on the fly. The self-flagellating kind that does not associate with anyone guilty of reactionary behavior and yet is still cool.
And the latter? It is an outcome of failing to become the former (just as the former can be an outcome of failing to become the latter, etc....as we will see, it's a cycle).
This 'revolutionary / activist' game, with its ever evolving rules, is complex, high risk low reward. This toxic mix of unsaid rules and expectations unconsciously incentives one to relinquish one's self into a much simpler micro-fascist, reactionary group-think.
At the same time, the level of commitment required of being a reactionary equally incentives one to drop out of that (racist) race and do something more fun and easy - like being a middle of the road democrat.
Better keep up on the latest race science! Better not leave too big a carbon footprint!
In other words, it takes a lot of effort to be 'woke,' and it takes just as much effort to to be an asshole (this is kind of the lesson of American History X, is it not?). The constant keeping up with the political jones' of one brand leads to suicide, the other to homicide. Again, both to personal exhaustion, and impersonal genocide - or holy war. Annihilation.
The double bind of political alignment is cynical and cyclical. Try and commit to one group, burnout, shift to the other, burn out, and so on.
The tough thing is people start to notice this and try and take the 'middle' route, but the result is criticism by and from both sides - now you're a boring lib that stands for nothing. See? Now we're back to the double bind.
So far, this is just your generic blackpill - the 'no one is on your side kid' kind of thing. But the issue is that the blackbill or even clearpill of the supposed 'post' or 'alt' political spectrum only brings you so far. They may be a vacation from the simulation, but they plug you back into the Matrix by at the end of the day, just in time for you to clock in the following morning. Just in time for you to remember you kind of enjoy the comfortable tedium of the 9-5.
But what does this all have to do with cute/acc?
Make Accelerationism Cute Again
Everything I've thus far described is not very cute. It's depressive, grave, violent, exhausting, etc., and like all double binds, it leads to dead ends, learned helplessness.
Cuteness and the project Maya and Amy are fostering helps us find a way out of this bind. And I'm not being dramatic when I say I think it's also saving lives (if you're into that kind of thing).
What I wrote in my original Cute/Acc blogpost years ago - which is cited in the Cute/Acc book (pg.4; endnote 4 on pg. 51, how flattering :D )- is still true today.
It's still true that Cute/Acc is a light-hearted response to the overly serious R/Acc and L/Acc; it's true that Cute/Acc address what Nietzsche called 'the serious man' whose "thinking is...never something light, divine, something closely related to the dance and to playful high spirits;" it's true that in place of the serious man for whom "'Thinking' and 'taking something seriously...gravely,' are...the same" (Beyond Good and Evil) Maya and Amy suggest the option of the 'cute man'...or 'cute blob' for whom thinking is a dance or a song. These are all true.
But what is now more clearer than ever after Maya and Amy's lil text is that Cute/Acc challenges this 'serious man' not just through a libidinal injection of high spirits but also through the act of course correcting the cringe R/Acc and L/Acc vectors in a practical manner.
What was the course?
The course was this: Under all of the dressings, R/Acc and L/Acc were essentially both attempts at doing away with the concepts of human agency and rational order as organizing or driving principles of culture, and in their place encourage a radical openness to the element of experimentation, accident, and chaos, elements that seemed to be 'metaphysically' present at the base of our world.
The notion is - or was - simple: you're not as in control as you think you are, all kinds of inhuman forces push you around (oversimplified: numbers, genes, chemicals, forces of nature, forces of god, forces of state, drives, incentives, etc., etc.). You can try and control or fight against those forces, but resistance is futile - or deadly. Thus, one must learn to lean in and push and pull with these forces.
This is exemplified in the CCRU's notion that 'it's not what you're playing, it's what's playing you' ... 'like a meat puppet.' Or again, most simply and clearly in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus where the authors encourage the reader to learn the rhythm and curves of the milieu or plane in order to subvert them, as opposed to trying to violently break from the milieu. The former is how one may change the surrounding by becoming it, the latter is how you become a fascist (trying to control what can't be controlled) or a suicidal psychotic (their words, not mine - though as a psychoanalyst and therapist, this is what I sometimes see). This is also what the Xenofeminist (Amy contributed to their main text) mean when they say 'if nature is unjust, change nature.'
And what needed correcting?
What started as an opening up of the body, an invitation of experimentation, accident, chaos into the body - what the R/Acc or L/Acc may describe as 'opening up to Outsideness' or 'radical alterity,' or what Nietzsche describes as becoming "a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) - what started as that anti-agency praxis lapsed back into agency bullshit (or what D & G describe as de- and re-territorialization).
By accident, it seems, R/Acc becomes interested in bolstering state power, supporting police, dampening undesirable behavior, and buying bitcoin. The experimentation results in something ultimately indistinguishable from racist, conservative talking points. The supposed acceleration seems to slow down. Meanwhile, L/Acc can't figure out if it wants people to have luxuries and commodities provided by a benevolent gratifying state, or to suffer violently with no belongings or property until capitalism collapses. The experimentation becomes indistinguishable from some derivative of a vulgar Marxism or vulgar anti-Marxism. The supposed acceleration here too seems to slow down too. The way(s) out get us deeper back in.
Both end up preserving a human vision of the world that impotently fantasizes of a new, better world to replace this sinful one. And the path to the new world is some deadly, unsustainable lifestyle fad whose end goal has yet to materialize. This can be exemplified by the urban accelerationism legend - after Land went psychotic and dropped out of academia, not to be seen for some amount of time, a colleague saw him on the street in Canada or the UK and remarked at his abrupt disappearance and long absence. Land responded something to the effect of 'you can't fully escape the human, it always crawls back, so here I am.'
R/Acc and L/Acc lack the tools to ward off this inevitable return to the all too human.
Cute course corrects this by reinvigorating the exploration, experimentation, and chaos in a way that does not seem to pledge allegiance to a right or left politic.
Here, Cute/Acc can be said to be in line with contemporary philosophers who imagine their function in the world as posing better questions, articulating novel practices, and seeking new limit experiences. That is, contemporary philosophy attempts to map new territories. Cute is a guide to traversing some sort of new territory.
This is what cute is to some extent. It is the not so easily defined element at play in culture, or between persons. What makes a smile cute? It sticks in your head as a freeze frame, and part of what makes it stick is that you can't fully explain it. It doesn't fit. Cute is the opposite of eerie. Eerie - which Mark Fisher wrote wonderfully on - lingers, not fully symbolized, never truly integrated, etc. It nags at the back of the mind. Cute is this, but without the cryptic stuff. What makes a little feature stand out - it's cute. What makes a little jingle from a song - an 'ear worm' as the music marketeers call it - go round and round your head literally all day? It's cute, it hacks into your biology and get's stuck there. Cute is somewhere in-between the big molar ideas or senses. It's something little that tickles you.
Amy and Maya know this and put it into words more creatively than most of us could. They're onto something.
Just as Lamarck's teleological conception of animal behavior was supplanted by Darwin's random variation, and the conscious-actor model of human behavior replaced by the unconscious drives of behaviorism or early psychoanalysis, so cute/acc may too replace the accelerationism(s) of old.
Cute hits the reset button on the state polarity. It gets back to that space under and between the R and L.
And if in Cute/Acc we by chance see agency return, as it did with R and L/acc, then we must try and see agency as something to be played with in the way we are shown through Nietzsche's Zarasthura or D & G's schizo; in the way that it is only reinforced so it may hold more chaos without imploding into suicide or psychosis, or exploding into homicide or fascism.
Cuteness Be My Jesus
Cuteness saves.
Transition could have saved him (or her...or whatever)? Maybe.
Cuteness could have saved him (or her...or wha...)? Definitely.
It saves lives, I mentioned earlier.
When I was speaking with Amy and Maya, among other cute company, I reiterated some of my thoughts about cute as a way out of the R-L double bind. Amy responded with a personal story about seeing her friends of various political positions within the Acc orbit burnout. She wondered if there was not a way to play with these accelerationist concepts without going mad (I'm taking liberties, Amy can always correct me :D).
For a person who does not see themselves in the hypermasculine BAP-overman, or the feminine Trad-wive; who does not see themselves in the stoic right or the revolutionary left; to someone who feels like they don't belong; someone who may not care that the polar ice caps are melting, or that the frogs are gay; for a person like this, experimenting with your own agency and leaning into what you want to do regardless of the rules - in the face of shame - can go a long way. After all, if there is no God (or even if there is - especially if there is [but that's for another blog]) and nature - the contemporary stand in for God - can be changed, then all there is left is precisely what we want to do with our time (desire). We can be sickly with our time - retvrn to the impossible past, forever seek an unreachable future- or we can be creative with our tine.
What this means for me is - and it's a bit cringe - that after my mom died, it became very evident to me that you're here for a finite amount of time, so you might as well be yourself. Experimenting and being yourself may mean a lot of things. It doesn't necessarily mean being trans, or nonbinary, feminine, masculine, this, or that - it can - but it means doing what feels right. For me it was taking up boxing, but also calming down and not being so judgmental of others, not being a micromanager at work - letting a little chaos in. This can be for some a way out of anxiety, depression, despair, exhaustion, misery, violence, etc.
Cuteness as Category
Critique of capitalism? Capitalism is the critique. Maybe, but try again.
Critique of cute? Cute is the critique. That will work.
A final thought: this is not to say depression, graveness, exhaustion, violence, etc., can't be cute. But to say that is to make a kind of categorical error. It's not so much that depression and violence can be or become cute, but more like cuteness can become depressing, or violent if it is not cultivated.
Things don't become cute, cuteness becomes other things.
Cuteness is where we start. Cuteness as base libidinal materialism.
