The Simulacrum Of Coolness
By Mujtaba
A Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting, Exhibition Tote Bag. Baggy Dickies Jeans adorned with carabiners for key-holding. A perfectly ironed Merz b. Schwanen 215 white T-shirt, contouring snugly to the lean musculature of the upper body. An eclectic array of rings, sourced from a local thrift market, occupies space across the fingers. Matcha, purchased from a local art-café, in one hand; Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion in the other. Immaculate Adrian tassel loafers are worn. An assortment of patchwork tattoos sprawls across the skin. A great pride is instilled when casually informing others that fatmum designed a custom tattoo for them. A deliberately unkempt haircut and rugged moustache - both requiring far more upkeep than they let on. Tis hard to achieve the perfect stubble to moustache ratio to align with the monthly £80 haircut. Wired headphones in lieu of air pods, with Clairo playing on repeat. Should Charm no longer suffice, then Atlanta Millionaires Club by Faye Webster will be played. They have a huge crush on Beabadoobee, maybe that’s what started their fetishisation of ABG’s. They can’t wait to discuss progressive politics and how the patriarchal right is violating women’s autonomy. Inserting Patricia Hill Collins into that conversation would be useful. It’s not enough to reference women’s rights, so discussing black women’s rights would be even better.
He knows that everyone can see him, and he knows he’s cool
He is, The Performative Male
But are we not all performative? Do we not all tune our ivories for the ears of the Other? Is not our very representation but a submission to the gaze of others? Yes. But the notion of a self-voyeuristic self is not my primary concern in this essay. Rather, it is the direction of the voyeurism itself that interests me so – and that direction is toward coolness.
Coolness - what a peculiar concept. We don’t treat it in the same manner as social status, wealth, attractiveness or success. Whilst it shares certain properties with these concepts, coolness remains its own distinct category. And within this nebulous category of coolness, we find something that is inherently a simulacrum.1 By weaving together a brief history lesson, the thought of Jean Baudrillard, and my own schizoid disposition, I intend to expose coolness as a mere phantasm.
Let us begin with the term cool, which in its “purest” form is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as: “Of or at a relatively low temperature; moderately cold, esp. agreeably or refreshingly so (in contrast with heat or cold)”. Its modern semantic state began with its usage in African-American jazz culture during the 1930s. It is from this point on, that we can begin to grasp the historicity embedded within the signifying power of coolness. “Cool” no longer referred to temperature, and was increasingly used as a term of contemporaneous social excellence. Much like today, calling someone “cool” is not a reference to their social stature or objective physical attraction, but rather, in an act of pure ostensivity, a reference to their coolness itself. Cool is akin to the colloquial term hot. One might say “They’re not sexy, and I wouldn’t really call them handsome, but they’re a little bit more than just attractive. They’re just hot”. And just as hot is irreducibly hot, cool remains irreducibly cool
But this generational ostensivity originated within the African-American Jazz circles, and from there we begin to understand the signified characteristic embedded within the signifying term cool. And what was being signified then, as it is now, is a phenomenon only made possible within the broader architecture of modernity. It is a sense of a detached individual. Detached not from their mental faculties, but from the cultural and political establishment. It is a detachment from all that is mainstream and aligned with the prevailing hegemonic order. To be cool is, fundamentally, to be contemporaneously subversive.
Twentieth-century America was notable for a great many things. Alongside its role as a principal actor on the global political stage, it harboured an insatiable appetite for cultural suppression. The very image of America was unmistakably white, with an unnatural credence granted to all that was Anglo-Protestant in nature. Every facet of black communal life was filtered through a lens of presumed inferiority. The ways in which they looked, acted, spoke, danced, sang, cooked, and prayed were all subject to persistent cultural violence. The dominant cultural establishment was, without question, anti-black. And whilst individuals may have privately enjoyed elements of black culture, hegemonic society at large could never fully accept that which was black. The only permissible entry of black culture into the mainstream was via a white intermediary.
“Jazz is the return to the African jungle. It is un-Christian, a backward leap into savagery.” - Reverend Dr. Percy Stickney Grant
“The jazz type of music is destructive to both morale and manners.” - Theodore Roosevelt Jr
If such was the state of affairs, it is little wonder that the collective black psyche bore deep and enduring scars. To be ceaselessly told by the societal Other that both you and all you create are inherently ugly, is an affliction far deeper than mere sadness. In such circumstances, one cannot simply adopt the role of antithesis to the societal Other, for doing so would only perpetuate the cyclical dialectic of antagonism. The only viable response was to sublate and thereby escape such a frustrating and oppressive dialectic. Within this sublation, the correct course of action became a simple acceptance. One must not react to the Other; one must simply be. And this calm, deliberate acceptance of being, constituted the radical sublation that many African-Americans quietly undertook.
Acceptance of their appearance. Acceptance of their cuisine. Acceptance of their fashion. And, perhaps most significantly in the context of coolness, the acceptance of their music.
The most radical gesture one could make was a rejection through acceptance2. In contemporary terms, it meant being oneself in a manner that appeared nonchalant - even though, in truth, it was an intensely chalant act.
Hannah Arendt astutely observed that “Where arguments are used, authority is left in abeyance. And where force is used, authority has failed.”. For Hannah, authority operates as an unspoken relation of power; thus, the very act of speech or action shatters the mirage of that silence3. And so true authority exists in the narrow margins of unconscious acceptance. We unknowingly submit to them and engage in a dialectic of power, and it is within this dialectic that the subject becomes trapped by an authoritative figure. For when an unsuccessful authority resorts to argument or coercion, the subject still remains positioned within the gaze of the Authoritative Other.
To illustrate this point further, take this analogy. If a crackhead yells “Oi” at you, you feel free to continue walking; aware that they possess no power over you. Yet when a Police Officer shouts the very same “Oi,” you feel compelled to respond. Some may respond with defiance, others with submission, but a reaction is produced nonetheless, precisely because of the presence of authority. Thus, the most radical subversion lies in acting as though authority does not exist, even while remaining acutely aware of its omnipresence within the collective psyche.
From the revealing origins of the term cool, we can see its deep-rooted association with contemporaneous subversion. And from this culturo-linguistic lens, punk emerges as synonymous with cool. Of course, there exists punk music and a clearly delineated punk subculture. But at its core, punk was an act of contemporaneous subversion, with the term punk entering the zeitgeist as a signifier for more than just the subculture of the late twentieth century. Hence it becomes linguistically and culturally coherent for Superman to say [regarding kindness] “maybe that’s the real punk rock”. Literally speaking, kindness is not punk rock; anti-capitalism and disestablishmentarianism are punk rock. Yet within contemporary linguistic usage, it remains valid to claim that kindness is punk rock, if, it performs the function of contemporaneous subversion. And, unfortunately so, with radical individualism and fascistic mana reserves growing daily, kindness as a form of universal selflessness is a contemporaneous subversion of the status quo.
With this in mind, it becomes clearer why terms like rock’n’roll are synonymous with cool in certain cultural contexts. The narcissistically inclined Liam Gallagher was never obsessed with being cool or punk, for his conception of coolness was always rooted in rock’n’roll. Hence his perpetual references to what constitutes “true rock’n’roll,” and his unwavering obsession with The Beatles.4
So, is being cool merely a matter of contemporaneous subversion? No. To be cool is to be included in the category of cool. Anyone can be contemporaneously subversive, but to be cool is to belong to a broader socio-symbolic category. In this present age, a Nazi may technically embody a form of contemporaneous subversion, but no one would consider a Nazi to be cool. Even Nazis don’t think Nazis are cool.
There is always a prevailing standard of coolness - an unspoken metric by which our contemporary cultural capital is measured. So, to grasp the paradoxical standard of coolness, we must return to its original instantiations. Like an original sin - or perhaps a founding virtue - the emergence of coolness was intrinsically tied to progressive subversion. Once black jazz artists bit into the forbidden apple of coolness, society became irrevocably burdened by its legacy. Cool was thereon a representation of the original revolutionary act, and in our current paradigm, only a progressive revolution is truly revolutionary. To be cool therefore is to be an image of progressive contemporaneous subversion.
With the linguistic invention of cool, a new metaphysical category was conjured due to the world building nature of language. And Baudrillardian analysis remains profoundly applicable to concepts like cool, precisely because such concepts are inextricably bound to the socio-symbolic order.
Cool is never an ontologically authentic state; it is always mediated, always phantastical, always already performed. Coolness maintains a necessary relation to its originating referent. And yet, the originating referent itself was never cool. For something to attain the designation of cool it must first undergo a process of social elevation through a surplus of symbolic devotion in its fetishisation.
Jeans provide the paradigmatic example for Baudrillard’s thought and my point at hand. What once was a pair of workwear trousers designed for miners and factory workers in the 19th century, eventually became the quintessential fashion item in contemporary history. The genetic code within a pair of jeans transcribes for a sturdy trouser that is to be used in a working environment. An evolutionary genealogy of the jeans reveals that every element of its design was reproductively successful in the face of the concrete demands of its original environment. For example, the tiny pocket within the front pocket of jeans is no mere spandrel. They exist as a way for workers and cowboys to hold their pocket watches in a safe and accessible manner.
In the early 20th century, jeans still retained their tether to their authentic referent: labour. This was a time when the garment’s symbolic order was still anchored to a referential order: jeans were the visible index of manual labour and of the social position produced and sustained by industrial production. And just as the purpura Toga praetexta was a referent to one’s place in Roman society, so too was a pair of blue jeans in 19th century America. A servus would never be seen wearing anything purple, let alone a purple toga; similarly, a lawyer in the 1920s would never have worn a pair of jeans. The item of jean or purple toga had a de facto strict relation with its real referent. Yet as the rigid social structures of the pre-modern world dissolved, and the onslaught of industrial mass production democratized attire, such distinctions began to erode. The representation of class in clothing, once grounded in material reality, began to falter. In the wake of this destabilization, jeans entered the order of the second simulacrum: no longer the sign of labour, but the sign for a symbolic economy in which labour itself had become mediated and consumable.
This dissolution was represented in the conversion of jeans to simulacrum, which noticeably became consecrated with the fetishization produced by Hollywood heart throbs Marlon Brando and James Dean. Jeans as a symbol of authentic ruggedness became paired with a bad body attitude displayed in films like The Wild One (1953), Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Jailhouse Rock (1957). Westerns like Stagecoach (1939) and A Fistful of Dollars (1964) further mythologized jeans, linking them to rugged frontiersmanship, romanticized violence and a continuing ideal of the “bad boy”.
Jeans thereon existed as a mere image of its original use and had entered the order of the third simulacrum. Whereby its reality was no longer that of a garment for labour, nor even a representation of labour, but an autonomous signifier circulating within the closed hyperreal system of fashion, advertising, and mediated desire.5 It no longer had any use-value, for its sole usage as a workwear trouser was a symbol of capital and coolness. Its only value emerged from its sign-value, produced through mass fetishization. Further copies of this rugged, working-class image were proliferated, till there bore no relation between a modern conception of jeans and its real image.6 The image of jeans has thus become neutralised.
“The meaning of the commodity has shifted from its use-value to its sign-value: what it signifies socially. Clothes are a language in which social identity and status are inscribed.” - Jean Baudrillard
And jeans were, for a short time, cool. They represented a radical subversion of the status quo, with a new rebellious individualistic culture emerging against the backdrop of a communal Christian nation. The first person to wear jeans in a non-working manner was not a cool person, they would’ve been seen first as a weirdo. Just as today, if we see someone wearing a tuxedo in a construction site, we will immediately understand the weirdness of the juxtaposing image produced from our sense-data. So, the image of jeans being cool arose due to its mimicry of something being subversive. Yet when the subversion becomes undermined and/or subverted, it no longer becomes contemporaneously subversive, and so it no longer becomes cool. It is in this sense that coolness faces a perpetual dilemma, whereby it must continually generate new points of origin, only to have them swiftly neutralised through mass cultural absorption. However, it is an inevitable outcome, for coolness is never truly subversive but a simulacrum of an original subversion. And since the status-quo is constantly becoming subverted, a new status-quo emerges, which itself requires subversion. And whatever new subversions are produced, will in turn produce images that go through the stages of simulacra until, like jeans, it reaches neutralisation. And so, the end-stages of simulacra is the cool.
To illustrate my point further, consider how the usage of cool would have been used in the jazz circles from whence it came. Aside from the absence of the linguistic category itself, no one within the early jazz community would have described King Oliver as cool. Joe ‘King’ Oliver was not only the mentor of Louis Armstrong, but was the necessary bridge between the semi-mythic beginnings of Jazz and its establishment within the mainstream. King pioneered the usage of mutes, and with his moulding of Louis Armstrong and the faster New Orleans Jazz sound, he laid the foundation for swing and bebop. The man was unashamedly himself, garnering admiration across racial and economic lines in 1910s New Orleans. Joe ‘King’ Oliver was an undoubtedly cool man, but he could never be classified as cool, since no image of his subversion had been produced. He was the original. It is only in retrospect that one can call such a man cool. Since a concept of cool had yet to enter the cultural imagination. Coolness must be built up slowly within the zeitgeist, through repetitive mimicry and symbolic saturation.
And coolness does not merely become a simulacrum, it is, by its very nature, a simulacrum from the outset. If jeans are deemed cool, then we are not discussing a fetishisation of jeans, but rather we are discussing the auxiliary attachment to their semiotic function, their status as signifiers of coolness. This attachment constitutes a simulacrum precisely because it bears no intrinsic relation to any original, material reality. But coolness, despite its simulacral quality and detachment from any stable referent grounded in the real, is no less real than anything else - for, as Derrida reminds us, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte.”
When one consumes something deemed cool, there is no transitivity of relation. In consuming new cool music, one does not engage with its original ethos, since only its abstracted and self-referential coolness is consumed. In a society that defers obsessively to coolness, the act of consuming what is deemed cool becomes a purely reflexive exercise. All consumption soon becomes consumption of the cool.
For in the act of consuming coolness, we do not consume the object itself, but rather a psychic projection. The original function of the object vanishes; what remains is a mere phantasm in the circuitry of desire. It is in this sense that a cool subject becomes the very object of consumption, with an endless loop of reflexive self-fetishising consumption.
“And, in a sense, the only objective reality of consumption is the idea of consumption; it is this reflexive, discursive configuration, endlessly repeated in everyday speech and intellectual discourse, which has acquired the force of common sense.” - Jean Baudrillard
To conceptualise coolness at all, presupposes a collective neurosis embedded within the zeitgeist. In his broad category of neurosis, Freud focuses on hysteria as a devastating type of neurosis. In his Studies on Hysteria (1895), Freud provides us with a great metaphor for hysteria with his tale of the knight and the lady’s glove:
“The knight who fights for his lady’s glove knows, in the first place, that the glove owes its importance to the lady; and secondly, he is in no way prevented by his adoration of the glove from thinking of the lady and serving her in other respects. The hysteric, who weeps at A, is quite unaware that he is doing so on account of the association A–B, and B plays no part at all in his psychical life. The symbol has in this case taken the place of the thing entirely.”
This knight develops a fixation on the beautiful lady’s glove, knowing it holds significance for her. And since the lady is important to him, he unconsciously imbues the glove with symbolic value, believing that its return might secure her favour. Yet in his neurosis, the knight loses sight of the transitive relationship: he no longer understands what the glove signifies, nor what construct it refers to. He obsesses over the glove with no understanding and relation to the real. He might stumble upon a random glove resembling hers and be willing to kill or die for it. For he has forgotten the symbolic chain that once bound the glove to the lady. Now only the glove remains, emptied of meaning and saturated with desire.
Coolness thrives upon this very structure of neurosis, and manifests at the level of the collective.7 There emerges a collective forgetfulness, that borders neurosis, surrounding the concept of coolness. Within the collective psyche, signifying relations of progressive subversion are systematically neutralised until all that remains is the empty self-referential category of cool. One would never encounter what is “originally cool”, and think it to be cool, for coolness resists attribution at the point of origin. Coolness only emerges once society begins to replicate the original, and the proliferation of unfaithful copies become the cool. The original may, in time, be retroactively canonised as cool, but it never was cool. Our cultural rewriting of symbols is based on a case of collective neurosis, for we never truly see the “original cool” as cool.8
Coolness is a mere simulacrum of authentic progressive subversion. For example, the original punk was never punk, for they were simply themselves, and that unmediated selfhood was, at the time, radically subversive. But the iterative reproductions of their image, within the mimetic self, shaped by collective neurosis, solidified a codified model of what subversion is supposed to look like. And thus, subversion is no longer subversive but submissive to the image of subversion.9 Through this lens, The Performative Male emerges as the extreme phenotype of submissive coolness, formed by the contemporaneous neurosis that dominates our era. He thrives upon a broken symbolic chain which institutes a compulsive drive toward a progressive contemporaneous subversion of the status quo.
And in our present age, the status quo that has already been subverted is one based upon traditional gender and sex. This subversion has successfully become fetishized and reproduced on a mass scale, entering the zeitgeist.
The previous status quo was constituted by the fact that, men would listen to “manly” music, wear “manly” clothes, drink “manly” drinks, and do “manly” things. I need not deconstruct these concepts for they have already been successfully deconstructed. The category of “man” remains fluid, and past constructions of “manliness” have been grounded not only in prevailing social structures but also in the aestheticized performativity of coolness. Figures such as The Man with No Name, The Marlboro Man, and James Bond operated as semiotic carriers of this coolness, through a representation of a radical subversion of the American status quo.
Whilst each appears, at first glance, to instantiate the traditional masculine archetype, each in fact enacts a progressive subversive re-coding of the masculine sign produced by the then establishment. All of them were liberal subversions of the hegemonic Christian American model of manhood. The Man with No Name was a fatalistic gunslinger whose laconic detachment and “bad boy” attitude dismantled the narrative of the virtuous and wholesome western hero. The Marlboro Man was a calculated advertising construct, designed to re-code the “feminine” filtered cigarette as the phallus of rugged individualism, thus breaking down traditional gender barriers. And James Bond was/is a philandering man, who has consistently been more invested in sexual conquest and luxury consumption than in actual espionage, thus subverting the Protestant work ethic and general Christian ethics.
The prevailing configuration of manliness is not some immutable archetype but the sedimented construct of the mid- to late-twentieth century10. Once this subversive phenotype became exhausted through mass proliferation in media and culture, it became the neutralised status quo it once opposed. So, the neutralised sign, must be replaced with another. Thus, the new status quo of cool masculinity required subversion since coolness must always rise from the ashes of its own neutralised commodification. Whilst certain elements of traditional masculinity may still retain a degree of subversive potential, the project as a whole can no longer be considered entirely subversive. The general element of traditional masculinity resides in the vestiges of the hegemonic order, and is the cultural status quo within the collective psyche, thus requiring progressive subversion.
If being a man means listening to “manly” music, then one must listen to something unapologetically girly. If masculinity demands beer in hand and steering clear from feminist literature, then one must drink pink palomas and read Simone de Beauvoir. However, one who engages in such negations only does so through a mimicry of its images. For the original creators of such subversion were never cool, they were weird due to their subversion. And the images that follow from them are mere simulacra. Since coolness is but the phenotype of the original subverter. Thus, The Performative Male is never subverting but imitating a subversion that he is ignorant to. And so, The Performative Male, who is attuned to the zeitgeist of collective neurosis, is unable to understand the signifying relation of listening to “non-manly” music when he listens to Clairo. He listens to Clairo because it is cool.
“Nobody need produce an opinion any more, but everyone must reproduce public opinion, in the sense that all opinions are swallowed up in this kind of general equivalent and proceed from it thereafter” - Jean Baudrillard
Similarly, a comparable neurosis emerges within the female sphere, for no one is immune to the all-encompassing logic of simulation. A notable variant of coolness within female-oriented culture emerges with a distinctly queer inflection. With a deconstruction and subversion of traditional gender and sexuality by the queer community, female oriented pop culture has taken on such aspects of the subversion by swiftly codifying the simulacral images of queerness. The original subversion by queer communities through the simple act of being themselves was radical. Since the most radical thing a person can do, is to sublate the present dialectic of power that oppresses one so. Yet their radicality only spawned images of what radical subversion ought to look like. And thus, the package image of coolness constituted various stylized aspects of queer culture, through language, dress, lifestyle and art. Queer has become cool, and its current solidified form no longer acts as something subversive but submissive. It is no longer a genuinely radical gesture to wear rainbow colours or to use the phrase “serving cunt”; these are now neutralized markers of cool which no longer signify resistance but signal conformity to the logic of the spectacle11. Because coolness itself functions as a performative imperative across cultural spheres, this neutralized queer affectation infiltrates the female pop imaginary, nullifying any phantasma of genuine subversion. Future developments in queer culture may subvert society in a new progressive way. But within the current order of simulacra such acts of subversion will inevitably ossify into new signifiers of cool; perpetually reabsorbed into the collective psyche as marketable progressivism rather than revolutionary politics.12
Given that coolness functions as a progressive and contemporaneous mode of subversion, it follows that subversion itself must be subverted, for the collective psyche has already internalised the subversion. Pure subversion alone is no longer sufficient; one must now subvert their own subversion with irony as a form of second order subversion. The Gen X and Millennial cultures, from the 90s to the early 2010s, thrived off imitating ironic subversions of the status quo. From the morbid irony of grunge subculture, to tattooed moustaches on index fingers, mimicry of irony was the contemporaneous representation of the simulacrum of coolness. And so it follows that this ironically self-aware subversion becomes a form of cool, since the original self-subverter was simply a self-subverter. The grunge archetype presented by someone like Brad Pitt in the 90s, was not a case of a him picking clothes up off the floor to wear.13 He had a cadre of fashion designers carefully sculpting his look, which was based upon the original subverters who ironically wore ridiculously tattered and dirty outfits, with obscenely gauche sunglasses. Similarly, when the millennial proceeds to do a weird face for the camera, to represent some humorous irony of aestheticness, they only do so as a representation of an original form of irony.
Since irony becomes the new cool, one must subvert it through a fetishised representation of an original subversion of irony. This meta-subversion leads to a ridiculous state of affairs, whereby in this pursuit of the cool, the self dissolves into the simulacrum of coolness and is annihilated in the hyperreal construct. And the contemporary act of non-chalance is precisely the meta-subversion where the self becomes obliterated in a chaotic hyperreal double-pendulum14. Thus, non-chalance acts as the third-order subversion of traditional masculinity, as it ironically indexes and rejects the traditional strong, silent archetype embodied by figures like Gary Cooper.15 In a bewildering consequence of modernity, non-chalance is the mark of a metamodern subversion, whereby one must oscillate continuously between the sincere and ironic as a subversion of the dialectic of sincerity and irony. This oscillation, in my view, amounts to nothing more than an ironic form of irony. Hence, when The Performative Male mocks his own performativity, it is devoid of authentic humility, and is subliminal of the mimicry produced by ironic subversions of the ironic self as an ode to metamodern subversions.16
There is an old Jewish joke, loved by Derrida, about a group of Jews in a synagogue publicly admitting their nullity in the eyes of God. First, a rabbi stands up and says: “O God, I know I am worthless. I am nothing!” After he has finished, a rich businessman stands up and says, beating himself on the chest: “O God, I am also worthless, obsessed with material wealth. I am nothing!” After this spectacle, a poor ordinary Jew also stands up and also proclaims: “O God, I am nothing.” The rich businessman kicks the rabbi and whispers in his ear with scorn: “What insolence! Who is that guy who dares to claim that he is nothing too!” – Slavoj Žižek
This relentless pursuit of cultural self-fetishising imagery within the realm of coolness culminates in the subject’s transformation into the very object of consumption. To be cool is to devour one’s own tail like the Ouroboros - an endless cycle of self-referential consumption. Since in a consumer society, the person is supplanted by the figure of the consumer. The self is no longer mediated through its relations to the real, but through its relations to simulation. Thus, within a consumer-driven simulation, the immanence of the self is realised solely through the arrangement of consumption-based signs.17 This arrangement is a cool arrangement for the gaze within a consumer simulation demands the salient performance of coolness over all else. Thus, our actions no longer submit to the gaze of traditional morality, but to that of a cyclical progressive subversion. Within any psycho-social framework, we inevitably conform to the gaze, and we forfeit whatever normalcy we purport ourselves to possess.
With a substitution of traditional morality with coolness, it brings me to a minor point made by Baudrillard. He discusses the salvational dimension of objects in modernity, and in this he makes a very compelling point.
“What we see among the lower and middle classes, where ‘proving oneself by objects’ – salvation by consumption – in its endless process of moral demonstration, battles despairingly to attain a status of personal grace, of godgivenness and predestination” - Jean Baudrillard
The salvation by coolness is one such manifestation of this phenomenon. In the quest to attain the grace of the Lacanian Big Other, salvation is no longer sought through works, but through the performance of coolness. And Baudrillard merely touched upon this concept of salvational substitution, but I believe there is much more to be said on this area of psycho-theology.
The very process of salvation stands as something that exemplifies the ethical realm. Though salvation carries heavy Christian linguistic baggage, its essence belongs to a universal ethical process. In the aesthetic realm, we do not adopt a deeply personal stance on the normativity of existence, for aesthetics concerns itself with the primal immediacies of life. And with my usage of the terms “aesthetics” and “ethics” I refer not to their modern-day usages, but to the Kierkegaardian dialectic of the aesthetic and the ethical.
All aesthetic action is fundamentally self-referential; ethical action, though it may also turn inward, begins from a non-self-referential point. Ethical action is that which is directed toward the Big Other. Aesthetic action arises from primal impulses - art, sex, food - it requires no Other, for it exists as a basic consequence of being.
In our deference to the Big Other, we seek their good graces, their praise - we seek, above all, to be accepted. The Other’s metaphysical acceptance bestows upon us a profound psychological sense of protection. Without their authority, we drift through the murky waters of existence, and thus they shelter us from this horrid existence. They grant us salvation. And it is this salvation we all seek when we act in a non-aesthetic manner.
When the contours of the collective Symbolic are restructured within a hyper-individualistic, consumer-driven architecture, a distinctly Baudrillardian fetishisation of coolness emerges. Salvation is no longer pursued through works or through faith, but through coolness. And to become cool requires a submission to consumerism. As a pure simulacrum of progressive contemporaneous subversion, coolness becomes the very epitome of what ethics has, de facto, become in modernity. Salvation is no longer achieved through grace, but through a non-referential reflexive signalling system where images of fetishised virtue are endlessly mass produced.18
If the ethical has collapsed into that which is cool, which is in turn about constant progressive contemporaneous subversion, then, as stated before, we are condemned to an endless cycle of subversion. One prominent form of this coolness-as-subversion, is the cultivation of an “innocent victim” mentality, as seen in any aspect of present political discourse. By lowering oneself, one creates a striking contrast that serves to magnify the greatness of their pedigree. The original humble victim possessed no victim mentality, for they were just a victim. Yet, over time, this figure becomes a symbol of all that was radical and subversive to an oppressive regime that manufactures victimhood. Thus, the victim becomes cool only through the proliferation of fetishised copies that cleanse the condition of its original trauma whilst preserving its symbolic ethico-capital.
It is this point that reminds me of the essay The Race to Innocence: Confronting Hierarchical Relations among Women (1998) by Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack. Fellows and Razack discuss how in feminist circles, there is a constant race to the bottom of the social hierarchy. The “race to innocence” involves stressing one’s own marginalisation with the fetishization of oppression. In the writers’ experience, they find the intersectional feminist community constantly attaching new labels to itself in order to signal an additional axis of oppression. For in a world where scars are displayed as badges of honour, it is inevitable that some will discover the cosmetic potential of body paint.19 And in the new ethical order of coolness, one must be visibly subversive, for we operate under the gaze of a pleasure driven cool society rather than the gaze of a sacrificial society.
Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased – Phillip Rieff
The psychological man of consumerism must ceaselessly gratify himself through the self-voyeurism of coolness. His salvation depends entirely on his engagement with the simulacrum that is coolness. Constantly must he consume to signify his socio-ethical worth. He need not genuinely enjoy a bell hooks book, but he must enjoy the idea of enjoying feminist literature. Every single day must the psychological man be vigilant for what is new and subversive, for without it, his soul is damned. He must perform his coolness everyday, not only for society, but for the Big Other. The authenticity of his attitudes and preferences is irrelevant, for like us all he dances in the ballroom of society. He performs his best ethical dance.
He is, The Performative Male.
No, I will not expand on the meaning and context behind the term simulacrum. Apologies.
If you wanna be radically subversive, just be yourself. Whatever the fuck that means.
Yes. Hannah Arendt and I, are on a first name basis.
The entire enterprise of rock’n’roll had its roots in a musical bad boy culture. They wanted to be cool, and to be cool is to be rock‘n’roll. But who was the original bad boy of rock‘n’roll? One key figure in the production of the image of being rock‘n’roll was Bob Dylan. Bob never attempted to be rock‘n’roll, for no such attitude existed at the time. Black rock artists, even if they wanted to, could not afford to hold any such bad boy demeanour. Bob Dylan was by all standards, from the people who interacted with him at the time, a prick. But when a monument of a man is a prick, it’s fetishisation snowballs, and becomes rock’n’roll. This is further evidence of the pure simulacra of coolness. Rock stars aren’t cool, they’re just accidental copy cats of arseholes who make good music and advocate for civil rights.
An extra piece of information on this point. The zipper fly on jeans, is indicative of the transition from workwear to leisure wear. The original button fly on Levi’s Jeans were made specifically for work, since it allowed for more space and durability. Even when the zipper was invented, Levi’s did not incorporate the zipper into the jeans as the goal had always been to make the perfect workwear trouser. In 1947, they invented the 701 jean, which included zippers for women since buttons were considered immodest due to “easy access”. Finally, once zippers caught on, and the clientele of Levi’s shifted, they replaced the button fly with a zipper fly in the 1950s on the hallmark 501s.
A recent development in fashion is resembling the simulacral process of jeans. More and more, are workwear outfits become appropriated and becoming a neutralised staple of fashion. For example Carhartt is nearing neutralisation. And black workwear trousers with its many flaps and pockets are in the process of becoming a greater simulacrum.
This neurosis embedded within the fabric of society, is what leads to various archetypes of individuals who are submissively subsumed in a cultural niche. Individuals who seem obsessed with a cool area of society, but cannot comprehend why. And so their dedication towards such aspects of culture are seen as a faux love, for it resembles fetish more than enamoration. A classic example of this within satirical comedy, is of the white male who has an odd obsession with various features of African-American culture. I could ramble on about this, but instead I leave you with this satirical tik-tok that best portrays my point at hand.
Take for example the new motif of male fashion: Dad core. What was once a cringe form of style, with blue jean shorts, white new balances, and polo shirts, has now become a major source of fashion for young men today. Dad’s were never cool, and their subversion of typical fatherly attire was never appreciated, for any true subversion is weird in the eyes of mass culture. Steve Carrell’s character in Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), literally had his white new balances thrown off a roof due to its cringeness. Yet now, he’s cool, and so were his New Balances.
Something of interest that relates to the simulacrum of cool vs the original
In making this point I do not aim to discuss the category of biological male. Rather I aim to discuss the fluid social category of male. This relates towards clothing, hairstyles, demeanour, hobbies etc, and not towards gonads and hormones.
This does not mean however, that simply being against rainbow colours and the term “serving cunt”, necessitates that one is somehow acting against the logic of the spectacle and is somehow immune to it. In an era of mass media, we are all consumed in a simulation.
I hope you the reader will not interpret what I have just said in a disparaging way. My discussion on coolness relates to the very height of mass media and culture. Therefore when I discuss fetishisation, I do so in a cultural manner. The real world continues to discriminate queer people and communities. But my focus is not upon this reality, but the fetishisation of anyone and anything in mass culture. Such fetishisation includes the queer community despite any real world antagonisations.
See from 00:54 onwards
It is for this exact reason that non-chalant is out. This summer onwards, chalant is back in. The non-chalant king is dead. Long live the chalant king.
I’ve been watching The Sopranos, and I really wanted to throw Gary Coopers name around.
A man who refuses to be cool, in a much repeated and overdone attempt to meta-subvert the state of coolness in an era of meta-modernism. Sounds like a simulation to me?
Consider how we talk about The Performative Male. We call him performative due to a sense of “fakeness” we get from him. It feels like he’s just a product of everything around him. An entity that is a pure simulation of social media, devoid of any qualia. It is because, like all of us, he is only immanent in the signs he produces.
Social Conservatives often make the point about how Liberal media pollutes the mind of young individuals. They make this point due to the content of the media being produced. Content which they dislike and believe does great harm to peoples developing minds. Yet the point goes deeper, for social conservatives are also afflicted by mass media, even if it is conservative. Marshall McLuhan, who is referenced by both Baudrillard and The Sopranos, stated that “the medium is the message”. The very medium of mass media is polluting the ethical sphere, the message itself is a secondary concern. If social conservatives truly seek to protect society through censorship, they ought to seek an end to consumer driven mass media.
Beyond the intersectional feminist community, we have seen a return to a purity culture. Older and more conservative cultures tend to give greater salience to purity/sanctity - treating it as a valid ethical dimension as displayed by the works in moral foundations theory. The late 20th century saw a transition away from such values, yet Gen Z is bringing it back. Moral Purity has become a major motif of the generation, and with any sense of purity, homogeny is key. The greys of ethics have been eradicated by Gen Z, and to maintain some sense of ethics perfect victims and perpetrators must be sculpted. To do so, means to attach extra labels in a non-ostensive manner. Language becomes fractured, and reality breaks. Now there exists victims who aren’t victims, and villains who aren’t villains.