[To listen to as you’re reading: Glenn Gould playing Bach's Chromatic Fantasia]

[Images taken on my iPhone 15 Pro Max from L’Argent streaming via criterionchannel.com—which prevents screenshotting—with my free trial subscription]

[There’s nowhere to publish thinking on film anymore so here it is]

—IC

Something shifts in the final twenty minutes of Robert Bresson’s L’Argent (1983). It occurs the moment an austere woman unfamiliar to the screen stuffs a handful of bills into her black purse. She has counted the bills several times after picking them up in a building marked “Telecommunications.” It is unclear whether they are wages or a pension. She counts them conspicuously, less to check the amount than to make sure the bills are real, authentic. She is watched by Yvon, recently released from prison, whose goodness we have witnessed degrade throughout the film. Against her black dress, the woman’s hand appears to act almost autonomously. A close-up shot shows the hand shoving bills into the purse, with a mind of its own like the unhinged, existential mouth from Beckett’s play Not I. As the hand clips the purse closed, a sound of trickling water overcomes the soundscape, unattached to anything onscreen. A hundred notions—or at least ten—of what the water signifies become possible in the seconds before a visual corollary appears. The woman carries her purse over a small footbridge; a viridescent stream runs beneath her. Yvon is following at a terrifying distance in the background. The woman is aware of his presence. Strangely, she seems unperturbed, as tranquil as the water sounds below.

The water is startling because, until now, L’Argent has sounded like machinery. Honks, screeching brakes, roaring motors, and the high-pitched whines of moving machines intrude on nearly every scene, intimate and public alike, giving the film a low-grade mania. I went to see L’Argent at the Metrograph for their series celebrating French sound engineer Jean-Louis Ughetto a week after I saw Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959) at Anthology Film Archives.

Both films emerge from the moral universe of Russian literature: L’Argent adapts Tolstoy’s The Forged Coupon, while Pickpocket unmistakably converses with Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. While these films were made nearly twenty-four years apart, they bookend Bresson’s career with their moral severit and one recurring notion: the exchange of bills through hands from pockets, wallets, registers, a system of circulation that seems to continue independently of the people caught inside it. Both films transplant the moral atmosphere of those thumbed-through Russian books into Paris, a city that recalls Dostoyevsky’s St. Petersburg in its filth, traffic, and gravity. Bresson gives us a striking sense of order despite the bustle. It is an order organized by money.

Money is certainly among the stakes that lead Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov to test his theory of the “extraordinary man,” superseding ordinary moral law because he believes himself capable of something greater. Tolstoy’s The Forged Coupon works differently: a relatively trivial act of fraud travels outward through society, producing an escalating chain of consequence. Bresson takes something from both traditions while simultaneously pulling away from them. Throughout his career, I feel like he attempts to subvert and transcend the notion of morality altogether, playing with the great question of those dusty Russians in contemporary settings—settings of accelerated capitalism where money is not merely a desired-for object but a kind of god that makes the world, and all its people, keep turning.

By the time L’Argent—perhaps Bresson’s perhaps his most violent and crime-filled films—is released, Bresson’s sense of morality feels so obfuscated by objects and circumstance that murder is indeed weighed for its moral impact on society (as Dostoyevsky explores) and viewed as one domino in an unending chain of violence (as Tolstoy explores), but is also and finally achieved, or at least confused, as a moral act—an act of redemption.

L’Argent feels to me like an endpoint of Bresson’s preoccupation with Catholic morality and redemption, in which the two finally collapse into violence. Watching it, I kept wondering what comes after. Could these stories be adapted to our contemporary Western world? Where does morality exist now? Good Time (2017) did it, I suppose.

Bresson perspicaciously begins with social circumstance: who has money, who needs it, who can afford to lose it, and who bears the consequences when it changes hands. In many ways, his worlds are reduced to this quandary and this alone. L’Argent begins with a schoolboy asking his father for an advance on his allowance. His father refuses. A friend supplies him with a forged five-hundred-franc note, which the boys promptly unload at a photography shop. The shopkeepers discover the counterfeit almost immediately but, rather than absorb the loss, decide to pass it along. Soon it lands in the hands of Yvon, an oil-truck driver who has come to collect payment for a delivery. He spends it innocently at a café and is promptly accused of being a swindler.

The counterfeit moves, leaving culpability in its wake. But unlike the evidence of the counterfeit bill, culpability can be manipulated by those who can absorb it, and placed onto those who cannot. When Yvon identifies the photography shop as its source, its employees simply lie. In court, their word carries more weight than his; their suits are tailored, while the oversized, coarse jacket he repeatedly wears seems to announce his class before he speaks. What began as a rich boy’s minor inconvenience becomes, by the time it reaches a working man, a criminal charge. This is the cruel arithmetic of L’Argent: each person with enough social or financial capital passes the cost of his own actions to someone with less.

While the plot of L’Argent is a steady and nihilistically efficient descent, it is strangely difficult to identify the action itself. Acts of extraordinary violence occur, but Bresson withholds their spectacle. Violence is displaced from image into objects and sound—and often not sound mimetic to the action, but a kind of screen-sound, like Freud’s screen-memory, standing in for an event taking place somewhere else.

Yvon’s first spurt of violence occurs in the prison’s dining hall after fellow prisoners begin needling him about his mounting melancholic desperation. He has just learned that his young daughter has died of diphtheria; his wife has stopped answering his letters. Distraught, and egged on by an affectless chorus of prisoners swirling around Yvon’s own anxiety as though they were the voices of his own consciousness— “His letters to his wife are being returned. We’re worried.”;“Another woman who can’t live without a man”; “Do you know who stole her?”—he seizes a metal skimmer and raises it over their heads in threat.

Bresson directed his actors—nonprofessionals he called ‘models’—to speak as if speaking to themselves: “monologue instead of dialogue.” He instructed them to “avoid paroxysms (anger, terror, etc.) which one is obliged to simulate, and in which everybody is alike.” Regardless of the event they face—heartening or brutal—Bresson’s models deny us its conventional emotional expression. Where, then, does all that emotion go? In L’Argent, I think the fury is placed in props.

When Yvon snatches the metal skimmer as a weapon, his body stops moving, the scene plays out without physical movement, as a tableau vivant. What carries the action is the sound—the guard’s whistle blowing and then the clatter of the metal weapon sliding across the concrete below the tables. In the next scene, we hear that “if another guard had not stepped in, [Yvon] would have crushed another guard’s skull.” That is not the scene we witnessed visually. We witnessed a metal skimmer sliding across the floor with inertia (we do not see Yvon toss it). It sits perfectly in the center of the frame like a still-life painting, a container for Yvon’s potential violence. The object simmers and shakes with the paroxysm Yvon does not.

“A sigh, a silence, a word, a sentence, a din, a hand, the whole of your model, his face, in repose, in movement, in profile, full face, an immense view, a restricted space…” Bresson wrote: these were the materials through which he hoped to reach what he called “the life of the soul.” Bresson used concrete images as a way to challenge our expectations of emotional representation. Instead of directing responses, he brings you to an encounter yourself, so you may experience something authentic, something that might resonate with that inner, ephemeral place. He used sound as a Charon-like guide to these depths. The way sound moves between visual scenes, as both portent and symbol, mirrors the way humans move through life in his films: between circumstances, stuck in the crevasses of class, reaching toward something beyond, tethered ruthlessly to their worlds.

Objects alone do not carry the weight of this inner life Bresson dedicated his career to representing, but become significant in the way they hold traces of violence—the residue of actions withheld, displaced, or only partially shown. When Yvon is released from prison, he immediately murders a pair of hotelkeepers and robs them. We do not witness the killings. Instead, we see him changing out of his blood-soaked garments afterwards, raiding their register and stuffing his camel-colored canvas bags with the bills.

What emotion do we glean from Yvon’s rucksacks or the metal skimmer, his choice of weapon? The sound it makes sliding across the earth? The perfect way it is framed in the rectangle on the wall, the screen? The way his sacks hang off his shoulders like the scales of justice? What does it evoke? Bresson states: “I have never wanted to make a moral film, far from it. I want to say that the events just provide the opportunity to access a life other than physical life, I mean an inner life, the life of the soul. Of course I’m obliged to use concrete things as a means to get there.”

Money works as a ship across the Lethe, except that nothing it carries is forgotten. It passes from hand to hand carrying the consequences of exchanges that have already taken place elsewhere. Violence is passed along through these objects; the sound is a trace of these objects in space, a kind of metaphor for the residual violence the objects themselves carry. Derrida describes trace as “the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself.” Bresson’s cinema operates through this same displacement: what matters is often not the event itself but what survives it.

Bresson understood how little of an event was required to summon the whole. He wrote, “a locomotive’s whistle imprints in us a whole railroad station.” Ughetto’s soundscapes are filled with such traces, functioning through metonymy. A sound brings us to the scene of an action without showing it to us; an object retains the violence that occurred beyond the frame. Often throughout the film, sound transports us to a scene before Bresson shows it. In that interval, it grows in the mind, momentarily free to signify beyond the image that will eventually claim it.

By the time we arrive in the final movement of the film, the tranquil water seems to portend a change in circumstance and, perhaps we hope, a change in morality for the ill-destined Yvon. Having seen Pickpocket only a week earlier, I am primed for this Dostoyevskian turn. The chronic pickpocket Michel finds the possibility of redemption; surely Yvon, too, will be offered one. The soundtrack seems to promise it: water instead of traffic, fresh air instead of pollution, Bach instead of machinery, piety instead of crime. Water is peaceful, water is God.

The austere woman takes Yvon in after he follows her to her country home. He sits in a corner in her kitchen silently watching her prepare food. The woman’s father resents her charity, slapping her across the face—but the slap is displaced onto the bowl of coffee she is carrying to Yvon, which sloshes black over her white hands. For several minutes, calm infiltrates the shot: the father deftly plays Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia on a clunky piano, Yvon picks almonds for her as she hangs up laundry—both scenes placid until a wine glass topples from the piano and shatters the calm.

In these scenes, the acting slips into a kind of uncanny valley: the models seem almost like automatons, and it becomes extremely difficult to parse emotion. What does misery look like on a face that refuses to perform misery? Yvon, witnessing what he perceives to be a miserable life in service to her family, asks the woman why she hasn’t drowned herself in the river. Police seem to be circling the small town, although mostly they appear gossiping and eating baguettes. “Do you expect a miracle?” he asks her. “I expect nothing,” she responds.

“Miracle” hangs in the air like Chekhov’s gun, more threatening to the plot than any weapon. We root for Yvon to make good decisions, and yet he keeps staring at the hatchet beside his bed. He raids the woman’s home when the family is out running errands, searching for l’argent. When will his redemption come?

The final scene happens in the dark, shadows moving around an oil lamp, the only thing we can see distinctly in the grainy film image. The fitful barking of the family’s German shepherd takes over the soundtrack. The dog runs from room to room, sniffing the dead bodies that Yvon has just chopped down, sniffing the traces of violence Bresson refuses to show, responding to it through sound. It is totally maddening. After murdering the woman and her entire family, Yvon arrives at a cafe—this time unbothered to change out of his gory clothing. The cops are there, after drifting through the final sequence gossiping and eating baguette. Yvon admits to his crime.

I am not convinced it is this confession that carries the possibility of Yvon’s redemption. I keep returning instead to the “miracle” hovering over chores, their decisive conversation over laundry. What, in Yvon’s mind, would the miracle be? Is it possible that he believes he is giving it to her when he raises the hatchet?

Christianity has long bound suffering to salvation, sacrifice to mercy. Bresson draws on this tradition only to scramble its terms: what if an act of deliverance looks indistinguishable from an act of violence? Perhaps this is where the uncanny sense of peace of L’Argent comes from. It reaches backward for an old moral vocabulary—sin, sacrifice, mercy, redemption—only to find its terms horribly unstable. By displacing Yvon’s shudders of violence so completely that even the moral meaning of the act becomes difficult to locate, Bresson brings cruelty and mercy horribly close together. Spirituality and violence feel strangely reconcilable through the tradition he inherits.

Do we have to dig deeper into the past as we go farther into the future to find a language for morality? Or do these old moral forms simply keep circulating, changing hands like money? What changes? What stays the same? The hatchet carries the fury. The dog barks at the remainder.

Quotes from Bresson all from Notes on the Cinematograph (NYRB Classics)

INFINITE REGRESS is a series of cultural criticism that unfolds over time.

Continuing my exploration of how contemporary culture aestheticizes absence, recently traced in “How to Exist Without Actually Existing, this piece turns to Olivia Kan-Sperling’s Little Pink Book (Archway Editions, August 2025) to examine how surface and simulacrum operate as both aesthetic and ethic. Detachment here flattens history, desire, and even critique into ‘vibe’ — is this good or bad?

*This essay was originally published in the UK literary review platform Review 31.

‘Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms.’

—Émile Littré

What metaphysical comportment do these words, emboldened and colored rosy pink, carry across Olivia Kan-Sperling’s Little Pink Book? Some pages feature the rose thrice, vaguely salacious in its appearance among the traditional black-and-white of printed matter. They do not make a poem, nor lyrics to a song, like ‘Peach Night Skins’, belonging to the romantically lost mind of the protagonist, Limei. Simply, this network creates an image — a moodboard — composed of snapshots from the frail, feminine, pop-world of Kan-Sperling’s imagination.

We might imagine that word ~ imagination ~ similarly highlighted, pink and aesthetic, not really a wink or nudge to the reader — for this isn’t a text of irony, necessarily, but pure artifice. This book is vaporous, clever, and compulsively readable — it’s fashionable, yet slippery. And at times, Kan-Sperling’s gestures toward the political feel questionable. What’s at stake is the tension between style and substance — the book may be cute, but its cuteness comes at the cost of historical gravity. I’m not suggesting that aesthetic detachment must yield to political earnestness, but when simulacrum stands in for examination or feeling, the valorization of emptiness over content in contemporary art and writing begins to feel dumbly chilling.

This chill unfolds in Little Pink Book’s treatment of Limei. The book follows the virginal barista as she is scouted by a handsome, dangerous older fellow who ultimately takes advantage of her, then gaslights her about his intentions. The book and its characters slip into the familiar narrative trope of the ‘Golden Heart’, as coined by filmmaker Lars von Trier to describe his trilogy of endlessly caring, doomed female protagonists based on Mary Magdalene, rendered in ‘banal and sentimental’ storytelling. Kan-Sperling’s own subversive spin is her engagement with so-called ‘Oriental identity’, incorporating her own shame at writing from her ‘Chinese side,’ while remaining firmly within the realm of aesthetic play.

In one biting scene, Kan-Sperling writes:

‘Limei’s heart was big, but her bed was small. Above it was a wonderful fresco of ripped images bleeding down the walls and almost onto the pillow. There was the cute face of Faye Wong and the cloudy face of Maggie Cheung, the blonde face of Natassja Kinski… Clearly, this girl, although not a cripple, was creative and complicated.’

Rather than offering psychological depth, the scene assembles Limei from fragments of feminine star power. Aspiration, emotion, and debility collapse into a kind of stylized inference — suggestive, but ultimately illegible. It’s a telling mise-en-scène: identity in Little Pink Book is merely a collage, one with an affective charge that veils a deeper cynicism.

Written as the exhibition text for Vietnamese-American artist Diane Severin Nguyen’s film In Her Time, exhibited at the Rockbund Museum in Shanghai, Little Pink Book is less a companion than an accessory to the film, a kind of textual bauble that draws attention to itself rather than clarifying anything about the work it ostensibly accompanies. This disjunction can’t be accidental — Kan-Sperling refers to Little Pink Book in an afternote as a ‘perverse mistranslation’ of In Her Time, a phrase that gestures toward irreverence. And it saturates the text: ornamentation feels like the only mode of engagement.

By contrast, Nguyen’s In Her Time takes up the ethics of representation with oblique seriousness. The film follows a young actress named Iris as she prepares to reenact the 1937 Massacre of Nanjing in Hengdian World Studios, the world’s largest historical film set. If Kan-Sperling’s text touches historical trauma at a slant, with self-aware frivolity, Nguyen’s film confronts it with weighty kitsch, layering rehearsal, repetition, and a deft precision of images, to make visible the existential toll on a girl tasked with staging atrocity.

Engaging with trauma doesn’t have to be sincere, cringe, or sentimental — the register Little Pink Book seems terribly aware of avoiding — but Kan-Sperling offers no real attempt to grapple with film’s political or aesthetic stakes, to take part in its references and implications. Instead, it floats at a hesitant remove, sticking its fingers in the wound of revolution only long enough to extract a glistening pink.

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Reading the description of Little Pink Book —

‘somewhere between polaroid and porn popup; proverb, pop lyric, and propaganda’

— one can’t help but get caught up in the alliterative propulsion of the ‘p’, which, in this succession, seems to subsume the rest of the vowels and consonants into a generalized ‘aw’ sound. The result might be a repetitive ‘pop’. But what is ‘pop’? Kan-Sperling has made it clear that her intellectual and artistic purview is ‘pop culture’ — her previous publication Island Time (Expat Press, 2022) is a literary fan-fiction of pop-literature.

(Yes, so many dashes in these descriptions, and you might locate Kan-Sperling’s work there: in the juncture of the real, neither fan nor fiction, pop or literature…)

In her n+1 essay ‘Toward Pop Literature’, Kan-Sperling references the Chinese concept of shanzhai — knock-off culture — as a mode of generative mistranslation. She writes:

‘It is understood that an artwork is enriched by the allusions, inversions, and contextual revisions made possible by its reinterpretation of style and subject matter.’

Here, she echoes Byung-Chul Han’s account of shanzhai as a tradition in which copies are fluid reinterpretations, equivalent to the original, part of an evolving text.

Little Pink Book makes this ethos explicit in its afternote, citing Chinese literati painting as a precedent for creative misreading. Yet, even as it borrows this language, the book sidesteps the historical and political conditions that give shanzhai its urgency. What in Han’s framing is a challenge to originality becomes in Kan-Sperling’s hands a kind of artistic license, a permission slip for play. In doing so, Little Pink Book does not remake anything so much as it restyles cultural memory into an Oriental vibe untethered from place, language, or political consequence.

This sense of detachment becomes most striking when contrasted with In Her Time, which navigates similar terrain of simulation but does so with a deeper ethical commitment. Shot in and around a sprawling replica of imperial China built for mass media spectacle, Nguyen’s film stages this memory differently: as a recursive, disorienting narrative in which Iris rehearses her role in a reproduction of the Nanjing Massacre. The violence remains offscreen, abstracted, but the labor of preparing to reenact it is foregrounded: learning lines, repeating gestures, familiarizing herself with gore — breaking down and building up affect.

In the hollowed-out simulacrum of Hengdian World Studios, Nguyen stages exhaustion, different from emptiness: the affective toll of living within layers of historical representation. Here, performance becomes a way to access what cannot be fully represented from history, insisting that even the most artificial stage bears the weight of the real. Nguyen isn’t rejecting hyperreality so much as using it to reveal the emotional traces flung forward from the past.

Accessorizing In Her Time, which confronts the entanglement of artifice and history directly, Little Pink Book glosses the surface, fetishizing this simulation further, which in Kan-Sperling’s mode, becomes not confrontation but displacement, citation in place of critique.

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Little Pink Book takes its name, knowingly and provocatively, from Little Red Book, Mao Zedong’s pocket-sized volume of quotations that circulated during the Cultural Revolution, both an ideological scripture and mass-produced object. Designed for portability, memorization, and mass alignment, the Red Book was a vehicle for revolutionary interiority and exterior performance. Kan-Sperling’s version is a boutique inversion — revolutionary red diluted into consumerist pink, earnest recitation swapped for style.

In ‘Toward Pop Literature’, Kan-Sperling stakes a claim for writing that is slick, scummy, fast, thin, proudly allergic to traditional notions of depth or form. Pop, in this formulation, is both a genre and sensibility: gleefully minor, impure, and styled after the disposable. Little Pink Book seems to take up this charge literally, offering a simulated scripture for mood calibration and nostalgia.

Mao’s book sought to obliterate the ‘Four Olds’ (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits) in the name of ideological transformation. It was a manual for rupture. Little Pink Book, by contrast, offers similar signs, although there is no program or theory, only a grand gesture towards historical meaning. I can’t help but notice the way her awkwardly juvenile style mimics the pragmatic futurism of the Cultural Revolution’s campaign: ‘lively study, lively application’; The Great Leap Forward. Comparably, the flatly jubilant (a contradiction, I know) slogan of Limei’s café states:

‘Can You Put A Surprise On That.’

Spun and recontextualized in an essentially meaningless setting, Kan-Sperling’s use of Maoist tone isn’t an undoing, or a rewriting, but a kind of residue. Historical violence is combined with femininity in affective leftovers, offering latté-art feeling (I might evoke Nguyen’s foundational image that also appears on the cover of the book: iridescent, magenta bubbles hovering over the barrel of a gun) in place of structure or soul. In this way, it aligns less with the ecstatic contradiction of real pop culture, where pleasure and suffering are always at stake, and more with Baudrillard’s hyperreality, a world where signs, zombified, immortal, and parasitic, come to replace all we hold near and dear.

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With this context in mind, one could claim that pop is an aesthetic of geopolitical inheritance. As a postcolonial formation, pan-Asian identity has long been mediated by pop culture’s surfaces: K-pop, J-dramas, Taiwanese New Cinema, Studio Ghibli, even Maoist kitsch. It attempts, like the Cultural Revolution’s call to erase the ‘Four Olds’, to invent something new by way of the simulacrum: a modern identity unburdened by history that is both sleek and exportable.

In Little Pink Book, pan-Asian identity falters as style; anything that could be called ‘solidarity’ or cultural specificity are flattened into floating signifiers rendered in blush and ambient Mandarin. The text’s translation into Chinese — despite Kan-Sperling’s lack of fluency — further dramatizes this drift: a kind of global Asian gesture that is less about language than about vibe.

This makes the title even more fraught, especially placed against the real-world ‘Little Pink’ movement: a loosely organized group of digital-era Chinese nationalists known for their fervent online defense of the Chinese state. The emergence of Little Pink reflects a crisis of belief among China’s digital youth — disillusioned with 1990s-era universalism, disaffected by globalization’s false promises, and increasingly attracted to statist Marxism as a counter to domestic inequality.

There is a longing here: for recognition, for power, for a new ideological clarity after the failed utopias of liberal modernity. Yet, in Little Pink Book, this tense emotional and political terrain is washed out into a palette of suggestion. What was once a response to failed futures becomes a brand of melancholic girlhood: soft, sad, vaguely ironic — and maybe, artistically, that’s rather compelling. But the way Kan-Sperling’s text unwittingly mimics the gestures of the Cultural Revolution, wiping out historical complexity in the name of newness, without the conviction, terror, or hope that made those gestures transformative, feels a bit frightening.

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In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard distinguishes between two forms of nihilism: one political, violent, and metaphysical (terrorism); the other aesthetic, self-referential, and immaterial (dandyism). Little Pink Book belongs squarely in the latter category. Dandyism, in Baudrillard’s terms, empties reality of meaning by transforming life (and here, literature, art, &c.) into a performance of signs. It is a refusal to participate in ‘serious’ reality, choosing instead to circulate through style. Nguyen’s film stylizes the seriousness of history in a way that feels interesting and unique; Kan-Sperling’s text hangs over it completely.

In this way, Little Pink Book doesn’t just perform dandyism; it participates in what Fredric Jameson famously called pastiche: a ‘blank parody’ that imitates style without satirical intent or critical edge. If parody presupposes a real — something authentic to distort or comment on — pastiche emerges in the void left by the collapse of that real. It is imitation without content, ‘speech in a dead language’.

Little Pink Book, then, is not only fake, but a meditation on fakeness — a forgery of the real, and a version of reality so processed and aestheticized that the question of truth no longer applies. And yes, this version of reality has become our real: Instagram filters, iPhone screens, Zoom calls, Labubus… It all exists in the realm Baudrillard calls the simulacrum: where signs refer only to other signs, and the real becomes a mirage chased through layers of style.

There’s something inarguably stylish, even seductive, about the book’s softening of this world, an embodiment of Kan-Sperling’s own elusive navigation of meaning, identity, and artmaking. Still, Little Pink Book — this pink hologram of itself — flaunts its emptiness in a way that borders on charlatanism.

Why do we need more art that knows it’s fake and revels in that knowledge? What once may have passed for subversion now feels indistinguishable from passive participation in the very conditions it mimics. Little Pink Book risks becoming yet another cultural artifact that gestures toward critique while luxuriating in detachment, participating in a broader aesthetic mode that evades the labor of clarity, coherence, or care.

Baudrillard’s dandy might have once shimmered against the grain of seriousness, but today, in an era defined by billionaire technocrats, genocide, and a radical defunding of the arts, disaffection no longer disturbs, it ~ dissolves ~.

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It’s clear that Kan-Sperling’s progenitors are artists of detachment. For both Tao Lin and Tan Lin, who appear as blurbers on the back of Little Pink Book, disaffection is a deliberate boundary: Tao Lin’s autofiction flattens affect into a kind of personal mythos, while Tan Lin’s conceptual writing revels in aesthetic surfaces and internet ephemera. Their works, as their blurbs suggest, are unconcerned with political charge. Tan Lin celebrates Kan-Sperling’s ‘hologram light show’ and Tao Lin praises her ‘wink and a smile’. Detached, for them, is the point.

But Little Pink Book is not a blog post or a social media collage. It’s a text commissioned to accompany Diane Severin Nguyen’s In Her Time, a film about the Nanjing Massacre, and it frames itself within one of the 20th century’s most iconic political objects: Mao’s Little Red Book. This move demands a different kind of reckoning. Should Kan-Sperling ever decide to confront the weight of her own materials, she could write something far more provocative.

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Thank you for reading the latest installment of INFINITE REGRESS by ISABELA CERVANTES. Each essay extends a thread from the last, letting ideas shift and mutate as they cross new terrain. I imagine it to be a kind of cultural criticism in motion, recursive and alive. This piece takes my ongoing inquiry into how contemporary culture aestheticizes absence and turns it toward Olivia Kan-Sperling’s Little Pink Book — a study in surface, simulacrum, and the politics of detachment. What happens when history and identity are flattened into mood, critique itself an accessory? What comes next may look unrelated. It won’t be.

I’m excited to incorporate others’ ideas into this project, leave a comment to contribute!

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This was meant as a formal analysis. Looking at the lines, mostly—how they cross, turn into wrong angles (“angels”), or curve off like something organic and dying. Klee thought he was a psychopomp. He believed in intermediaries: in being infected. I understand that.

Summer is also a threshold, this weird and soft trap. Everything suspends. Desire, memory, nightmares—nothing reaches a resolution. The angels here don’t age. They float in the stalled air, translucent and unfinished.

I want to age… At least I think I do. I also want to keep describing what I see. There’s a cold edge to the light today. Maybe I’ll start writing soon; or not. Maybe I’ll just keep watching and waiting. I trust in the process.

It Weeps (1939)

Stuck in a carapace of sharp angles, a softly organic creature—mollusk-like and lugubrious, at that—extends its neck from this jail of acuteness. The only obtuse angles exist in the foreground; lowest to bottom of the picture, a single horizontal line establishes a floor that opens up towards the subject—toward the background. The third obtuse angle appears near the bottom right of the frame, articulating the bending surface of a table upon which the two pearlescent droplets fall from the rotund eyeballs of the creature. Hinging the foreground on these obtuse angles, Klee establishes the vanishing point outside of the painting and towards the viewer. This tactic, first seen in the reverse perspective of Byzantine icons, does the opposite of creating depth within the painting as it exists for the human eye. Opposite of this is not rendering flatness, however. It is extending the subject outside of the picture—projecting essence outward—creating a kind of reciprocal gaze that suggests it is not just the human eye that is seeing; it is us, also being seen, summoned, implicated—invited to participate. Therein lies a thwarting of the ocular consumption of surfaces in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Let us return to the figure, which, like the picture, is extending itself outward; here, in a gesture of sorrow. Es Weint—it weeps—it is not mourning (klagen) or grieving (trauern). It is also “it,” and the neutral, objectifying pronoun of the German. Sorrowful, because it is stuck in this position of neutrality—of anglicism—which suppresses a certain kind of naturalness belied only in the roundness of its form.

The picture appears to have been formulated around the eyes of the angel (if we can call it that even; for it is never offered this title). Falling nearly directly in the middle of the frame, two large bowls sutured together by the left’s inner corner suggests that its face is tilted, only slightly, in that kind of perspective that allowed the Cubists to riff on the many planes of face. Two small nostril holes create a pattern with the eye bowls, which also reminisce breasts or a bottom, and precipitate the droplets of weeping that fall onto the table. Its eyes are downcast, hence the elision of an upper lid (or full circles, as Klee often draws the eyes of angels). It is like a string of pearls—inevitable. The mute expression of the angel’s mouth, a straight line drawn slanted and perfectly congruous with the rightmost triangle—the angel’s right wing that not so much extends from its body but fastens it down. If one were to trace their gaze from the top point of this right wing down towards the table, the mouth appears not as a mouth but as a continuation of the wing—the angel’s face like a cloth being pinned down.

To grieve or mourn both suggest the loss of a thing; to weep out of sorrow implies an abstracted, existential pain untethered to the material world. This angel weeps because it is imprisoned by its role; not only its role now, but the history of iconography that portrays it as a one-dimensional creature. It reminds me of a teenager bending under the pressure to figure themselves out. Perhaps this angel wants more space to express itself.

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The Angel’s Rock (1939)

I mistakenly remembered this picture’s title as The Angel’s Mountain. Usually, the word I associate with rock in the German is Stein; Klee uses the word Fels, which I might better translate to cliff. That seems more fitting for this steep angelic structure—implying something larger, more immovable, and majestic. The Angel’s Cliff: evocative of other structures named in this way—angel’s crest, angel’s landing, angel’s fault. It is not that the structure is made out of angels, but belongs to them.

Arranged in a kind of cheerleader-esque choreography—one that could be familiar to audiences of high school football games—the angels’ corporal pyramid could initially be read as one of infrastructure. At first glance, the lines that compose the foundation appear almost like another angel(s). It takes a moment of concentration to differentiate the near-winged formation— which must be the titular cliff, but is also so small compared to the bodies that it can hardly be apprehended as a natural formation.

The size of the cliff implies either a perspective—the angels are closer to the viewer and the cliff further out near the curved horizon—or of a kind of heavenly scale. Maybe, the angels are just that large because they are beings of this scale. Two clues give away the answer. The first, that curved horizon, implying that the cliff is indeed so large that to take in its size is also to be able to be at a distance where you can perceive the curvature of the earth. The second, while the two angels flanking the cliff align tangentially with its structure—a single tip of the triangle dress of their bodies brushing the formation—the central and largest angel, whose body falls out of the perfect angles of the body-triangles, into something more rounded and grotesque, overlaps with the cliff. Its right side body ever so slightly infringes into the boundary of the cliff, creating an nearly imperceptible enclosure. Conversely, the left side of this angel’s body is covered by the cliff, suggesting not only a third-dimensionality but that the angel is caught between the crags.

Simone Weil wrote: “Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity. Grace is the law of the descending motion: gravity. The soul touched by God falls to the center. That fall is love.” Similarly, the central angel is seized between two opposing cliffsides. This destroys the chance that this is a game of perspective but opens up a new possible reading.

Like the mystics seized in divine rapture, this angel is caught between the crags not as punishment but as condition—pinned by perception itself, in a pose both erotic and devotional, where containment becomes a site of uncontainable presence. Therefore, to see the cliff as a small thing, to zoom out wide enough to see the earth’s curve, is to enter into the realm of angelic perception. Is this realm possible for a human to enter? Are we ever in a position, other than from a spaceship, where we can see the earth’s curvature?

And what to make of the topmost angel, the smallest and with legs and a skirt—not yet the full gown of the adult angel? It ascends above the infrastructure, the larger angels tethered to their cliff. Is this Klee’s Baroque putto—a cherubic, infantile angel of decorative flourish—that draws a distinction between it and the more awe-inspiring celestial beings? Free floating, not only with its winged spires poking upward now but its diamond-shaped skirt angled towards the edges of the picture, the smallest angel engages now in that perspective game. Perhaps it is not a juvenile form, but a far away one. The diamond skirt and exposed legs are a different angle, a looking upwards, perhaps, up the angels dress, from the perspective of the down-below. This angel, then, flies away from us, at an angle closer to horizontal with the earth’s surface.

Is it possible that this angel has jumped from the cliff? Are they playing a kind of game? The cliff-bound angels look out over their view, as if in wait to take the plunge (or rather, the soar) themselves.

Angelus Novus (1920)

The earliest and most recognizable of Klee’s angels in this selection, Angelus Novus—or “New Angel”—takes its name in Latin instead of German. Articulated curls like a head of ancient scrolls amass at its crown—scrolls, or tens of snake heads—the insides of the scrolls like eyes. Medusa, Hadrian, or Marcus Antonius. Sculpturally, Klee integrates the angel’s eyes into this mass: a long stroke delineating its forehead drops down suddenly to accommodate the almond-shaped eyes. Two lines break across this form, forming steep brows. This angel has been given a face unlike any other, almost evocative of the wry humanism of the Mona Lisa.

Klee’s innovative oil transfer method lends a translucent smudging of brown, orange, and yellow. Beneath the angel’s sidelong, fearful glance—as Benjamin described, “as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating”—dark brown smudges suggest exhaustion. From looking? From flying? From being stuck between the future and the “pile of debris” of the past?

The angel’s jaw is doubly represented—or perhaps it is a halo, colored in yellow, that drops down from its pupils and envelopes the entire outline of its squared, masculine face. Bearing long teeth—fantastical in a way, as though angels were the square-toothed cousins of vampires—the mouth leads downward in a column that forms its neck. A recurring motif—one feature serving as the hinge of another—reveals the interconnectedness of the angel’s inner workings. This is an angel-machine. Its center is a convoluted tangle of joints and junctures; a house-shaped figure contains the latch to its heart, or its function. Perhaps it is its wings that this lock controls. Benjamin says it is a storm blowing from Paradise that “has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.”

But what if it is not an external force that has entrapped the angel in its angelicism, but an internal one? Who holds the key to its release? Is it us? Its wings are open in a posture of utter vulnerability, of submission; the angel averts its eyes from its master. Holding the key to this historical creature, it is we who choose to imprison it in this suspension. Between past and present, as Benjamin writes—“The storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward”—or perhaps in Klee’s terms, in the antechamber of angeldom: no longer of earth, not yet of heaven. A space not unlike purgatory. Or the wandering exile of the Shekhinah—the feminine aspect of the divine—estranged from her source, waiting to be reunited through perception, through presence.

Is an angel only an angel when glanced upon? Is it the gaze itself that both liberates and binds? Then what, truly, is progress?

Fertilized (1939)

Considering each angel for analysis, I must admit, I swiftly turned the page whenever coming upon this one. My attraction to the guileless smiley face came second to the aversion I felt—was it at the plainness of the symbolism—this small creature being the seed of the “fertilization”—or something else? Forcing myself not only to look more closely at this picture but analyze it, I notice first the slightly rounded and overlapping nature of the junctions. Unlike his oft-used clean angles and tangents, Klee employs a kind of intentional sloppiness here, which is meant to suggest the femininity of this creature—her enveloping nature.

What is it about the feminine that is visually repulsive?It might not be innocence that repels, but the softness of its edges—the refusal of control. Kristeva’s notion of abjection is useful here: “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” Seen in the swelling curves of the angel’s body, confidently rendered in their subversion of rectitude and linearity, form is blob-like, which is to say, diffuse.

Two points, like the summit of a mountain range, denote Klee’s common angel wings. But this angel’s face is crudely stickered onto the left wing, giving way to a larger, grotesque shape in the center of her form. It is hard to make out what this central figure is or represents. Her chin rests latently on the shape’s upper left curvature, slightly overlapping so that her mouth—not her chin—touches the shape. A kiss? The angel’s face has a nose rectangular and carrot-like in its protrusion, which sits between her bowl-for-eyes—a common disposition seen on angels, sometimes of remorse and sorry, but here, in combination with the Aquiline nose and pursed mouth, exudes an essence of calmness.

To the bottom left of the central shape, is another very curious shape, chimeral in its composition—part angel wing tip, part rounded frond, like the budding green finger of a fern. Considering this as a hybrid form, the central shape becomes obviously that which the wing is not—which the angel is not—its infantile form. Connecting these two stages of angelic formation is a navel, the umbilical that shoots three cords to the top and sides of the picture. This is the center of gestation, and beneath the navel, which here is likely to say inside of it, is the crudely rendered fetus.

This is a Madonna and child. Klee asks us to imagine a history in which every rendering of the baby Christ was reduced to a smiley face tacked onto a kneeling stick figure—its holiness resting entirely in this fragile, gestural devotion. The child appears almost as if it is being presented on a platter or table postpartum. But as the title of this drawing suggests, this figure in utero is still a part of the Madonna’s folds. Exposing the child in this form, uncovering what we—and especially in Klee’s era—are not meant to see beyond the folds and roundness of pregnancy, disturbs the symbolic order of mother and child as separate entities.

The grotesqueness of this suggestion, of life inside of life as a kind of parasite, weighs down the mother angel. Beneath the transforming shapes in both the foreground and within her, her legs appear stout and belabored. A simple detail in her exposed right leg, the extra fold given to her thigh, suggests a weight that is pressing her body down so much that her skin has begun to layer upon itself. The weight she carries is destructive to her form. And yet, she is calm. Resting her head on the biological growth (not the angelic one), this angel relies on nature to weather the increasingly bulky responsibilities of her body. With her unborn child as Christ, she becomes both vessel and sacrifice, bearing not only divinity but the abject distortion it requires.

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Fragment 67 (1930)

Teetering on the black marks of a baseless triangle—two thin legs—converging at the base of a conical dress, the angel swoons in the face of the viewer. Its left hand is held up to its forehead, the shadow of fingers creating more of an extension of the brown fur of hair that waterfalls down its unarticulated face than the actual dexterous appendages—an angel with thumbs? What appears to be the only possible blueprint for Klee’s later angels is the the right angle of the left arm, a perfect ninety degrees that, even in the naïvely painted gouache and watercolor, appears to have enough dimension to show that it is the back of the angel’s wrist that rests on its head (swooning) as opposed to the front of it (exasperated).

Such delicately articulated facial features such as freckles, eyeliner, and the heart-for-mouth lips give the angel a look of a cabaret dancer. The presence of these details contrasts with the lack of facial and neck outline: the face is floating above, only that furry hair grounds the features to any body. The approach to the angel’s face emphasizes the visageness of this feature; visage denoting it literally but also figuratively, as in, the angel’s appearance or disguise. A mask. But this is not an object that the angel has donned itself with—reminiscent of those negerplastik masks that appear in Cubist works from Picasso to Picabia. Rather, these are the dainty elements of a woman’s makeup—the paint which she paints on her face. This is a reference to the paintliness of the painting itself.

Klee does not allow us to know this angel through its expression, which remains hidden in its visage of paint. We can only discern its countenance through body posture. One arm swooning, the other one—similarly with the back of wrist making contact, shadowed hand extending backward—attached to its thin waist. This central point, the waist, mirrors the triangle of the angel’s legs and emphasizes the conical shape of its body. Viewing this, one might have a memory of learning about the architecture of bridges as a child. Perhaps play a game in school—who could build the sturdiest bridge, and which ones, more importantly, would not withstand the tremors of an earthquake.

This angel’s architecture is frail and obviously notwithstanding to our gaze. To be seen is like a natural disaster. A combination of divine blue and sanguinous red, this angel is painted in what Klee defined as “the antechamber of angeldom,” not yet fully fleshed and no longer fetal. This one is a fragment—number 67 to be exact. An unclear reference, it could evoke Psalm 67, the Deus Misereatur, a prayer for God’s mercy and blessing to be extended to all nations.

This angel, then, is not a visitation but a draft—a trembling structure of personhood and posture. A body in blueprint. The fragment, by definition, implies both loss and potential. This angel is not shattered but deliberately incomplete—held in suspension between figuration and becoming, between the sacred and the staged. It is not yet ready to ascend, but neither is it buried. Instead, it strikes a pose: an architecture of poise and collapse, of affect as structure. If Klee’s late pencil angels are messengers, schematic and austere, this one is their theatrical ancestor—an angel rehearsing the conditions of its own emergence. Not yet a presence, but an intention.

This piece extends my exploration of how contemporary culture aestheticizes absence, developed in my essay “It’s Called Mysticism, Sweetie.” Where that essay traced how spirituality is flattened into aestheticized ritual, this piece turns to Eugene Kotlyarenko’s The Code to think about how voyeurism and surveillance become the dominant structures of being, collapsing boundary between spectator and subject.

She is young. My downstairs neighbor with three kids that screech and howl — I am able to identify hers from theirs, deeper and more melancholic. Her children are a mere echo. Sometimes, I watch out the front windows when she receives them on Sunday evenings from a man who drives a black BMW, his blacked-out windows. Once the children are delivered to their mother, the jazz cuts into rap, the bass rattling the Bushwick street as he speeds away. I hide behind the curtains, against the glass, so he can’t see my silhouette. I tell my boyfriend to shut up, so he doesn't blow my cover — I can’t imagine what would happen if they saw me watching.

In the hallway, when I see her locking the door with a cartful of laundry, I say hello in passing. She hardly ever responds. This reserved greeting is always a front — I already know too much about her — the smell of her detergent and how she schedules her vices— the way she smokes pot in the bathroom away from her kids, it comes up to ours through the vents. The nuance of her fried dinners — fish sticks, bacon, anything coated in cornmeal — has risen through the floorboards and stained my shower curtains.

One neighbor, who lost his job last winter, has developed a ritual of departure. He slams and locks his door, steps into the hallway, crouches to lace his shoes, and then re-enters his apartment — again and again, four times exactly. Most mornings now, at 4 AM, he leaves loudly to go mark up the city with the cartoonish tag that I can now recognize on scaffolding and mailboxes. I once caught him crawling up our fire escape; now he discloses his illicit activity while complaining about the super — a petty distraction from his buffoonery.

If the gaze is an inherent perversion, then I have become a pervert since moving into my latest apartment. Not sexually, but spiritually — a titillation born from proximity, the intimate yet separate architecture of city apartment living. Through the peephole — an invention whose very name implies lewdness — I watch my neighbors pass through the narrow stairwell.

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In Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel La Jalousie, the act of looking becomes a framework more tangible than any event it records. The narrator — never named or confirmed — watches a woman through the slats of a window blind, through doorways, across dinner tables, every glimpse thick with suspicion and longing. Nothing decisive ever happens. The gaze itself is the only structure: framing her body, fragmenting time, replacing love with the slow violence of interpretation. When I first read La Jalousie, it struck me that voyeurism was a way of organizing reality. To look was already to misrecognize. To watch was already to invent. Intimacy, like violence, was just another function of lack — the need to fill-in what is missing.

Voyeurism folds desire and suspicion into the same gesture. To look is to want — but also to doubt, to control, to fantasize about what remains unseen. According to Merriam-Webster, voyeurism is defined not only as “the practice of obtaining sexual gratification from observing others” but also as “the practice of taking pleasure in observing something private, sordid, or scandalous.” Pleasure, in this sense, is not always erotic. It can be moralistic, punitive, self-soothing — an act that disguises itself as vigilance, even as righteousness.

Freud located the voyeuristic impulse in infantile sexuality — a primal drive to master knowledge of the other’s body, tinged with excitement and guilt. Sartre went further: in Being and Nothingness, he argued that the gaze is not simply an act of seeing, but a rupture — the moment when the subject is seized, exposed, reordered under another’s eye.

To observe, then, is not to record what exists but to distort it — to refashion the world under the pressure of one’s own fear, desire, and doubt. The gaze becomes an act of world-making — and world-weaponizing — where the line between witnessing and violation is never clean. It trembles constantly, vibrating with ambiguity.

In this light, La Jalousie reveals itself as a double entendre: a reference both to the narrator’s vicious longing and to the jalousie window he peers through — a slatted screen that fractures sight into suspicion. Robbe-Grillet’s windows evoke the closet doors in Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), where Jeffrey, hidden and paralyzed, witnesses a world he cannot alter. Many filmmakers have grappled with this tension: the camera does not simply record but distorts, eroticizes, violates — a liability built into the human eye.

For filmmakers, this has always been a structural problem. Seeing is never neutral. Cinema has long risked turning what is most inward — love, grief, desire — into spectacle. In Contempt (1963), Godard shows how tenderness disintegrates under the cold demands of cinematic vision: how lovers begin to see themselves through the eyes of imagined audiences, until their gestures harden into performance. Love becomes another transaction staged for someone else’s consumption.

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The anxieties of Contempt’s world have congealed around us. Every glance calcifies into data; intimacy is no longer sheltered — it is soldered by surveillance itself. We do not vanish under the gaze; we are organized by it.

Eugene Kotlyarenko’s The Code (2025) pushes this collapse to its natural end. Here, romance isn’t contaminated by the gaze — it is built entirely through it. Jay (Peter Vack) and Celine (Dasha Nekrasova) cannot exist together without being watched. Supervision becomes the only intimacy left: they love each other through the cameras.

The Code maps a world where surveillance is not the dark side of closeness but its scaffolding. Jay and Celine — sexless, paranoid, suspended between performance and longing — stage and restage themselves under each other’s gaze, filming and being filmed, fracturing connection into endless, anxious images.

The claustrophobia of The Code sharpens through its casting. The faces are recognizable, but not famous: Nekrasova, Vack, Ivy Wolk, Casey Frey — figures who orbit the internet’s compulsive feedback loops, celebrities of a world we can only participate in abstractly. Their presence activates a sideways, compulsive voyeurism: the social-media gaze, where familiarity sharpens estrangement and substitutes for real kinship.

We don’t just watch them perform; we watch them perform versions of themselves. Their performances are calibrated to an audience they anticipate and seduce — us. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre writes that to be seen by another is to suffer a break: “I see myself because somebody sees me.” Under the gaze, the subject freezes, becomes an object, experiences shame.

But The Code twists this dynamic. Here, it is the audience who freezes. Watching actors already performing their own spectatorship, we find ourselves fixed, implicated. The Code becomes a screen through which the audience recognizes its own helpless visibility.

Maybe that’s its deeper seduction. Voyeurism doesn’t just seek an object — it seeks its own reflection. The act of looking isn’t complete until it is returned. Only then does the watcher feel, perversely, real. It’s strange how easily the reversal between subject and object can take hold.

At the start of The Code, Jay and Celine flee the early days of the pandemic in a borrowed Tesla, heading for the California desert under the flimsy pretext of making a documentary. The escape fails immediately. Instead of collaboration, the camera becomes a weapon: Celine films Jay, Jay films Celine, both film themselves, each glance hardening into suspicion, each silence bracing for accusation. Surveillance migrates with them, embedding itself deeper inside the house, until what begins as a documentary dissolves into a cold war of hidden cameras — love recast as paranoia.

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Kotlyarenko had sent me The Code in an expiring Instagram link a month before its NYC premiere at Roxy Cinema. Watching at home should have offered distance — the comfort of fiction, the reassurance that the looking was one-sided. Instead, the film folded into my life, until watching felt exposed, reciprocal.

I could pause the movie, slip to the back door when a disturbance rattled the hallway, and peer through the peephole — the corridor compressed into a trembling fisheye.

Onscreen, Celine and Jay circled each other with their cameras; in the hallway, my neighbors slammed doors and shouted, earthquaking the building. The surfaces thinned. The Code pulsed on my laptop, waiting to resume, as I watched our super locked in a incriminating confrontation with the jobless tagger. Their voices cracked against the drywall, sharp and humiliating. I stood there, hidden, breath held — not from fear exactly, but from the deeper feeling that I was part of it. That witnessing wasn’t passive. That every act of looking stitched me deeper into the scene.

When I returned to the film, it no longer felt like a story unfolding, but as if the hallway itself had leaked into the frame — accusation, exposure, the slow corrosion of being seen too long. Jacques Rancière writes in The Emancipated Spectator: “Looking is not a passive activity. It is an act that confirms or modifies the distribution of capacities and incapacities.” There is no safe distance. The voyeur is never innocent. To witness is to intervene, to tip the balance of what can happen.

The unstable relation between observation and existence — public and private — has long preoccupied Kotlyarenko. In earlier films like Wobble Palace (2018) and Spree (2020), he traced how social media, consumer performance, and self-invention bleed into one another, how the line between sincerity and theater is eternally unstable. But The Code feels different. Bleaker. More recursive. It no longer satirizes surveillance from the outside — it confesses to being trapped inside it, circling through images with no way out but to keep recording.

Watching The Code alone in my apartment, I felt this pressure. The creaking foundation, the hissing vents, the slammed doors — none of it clarified anything. I wasn’t documenting events. I was hoarding fragments, mistaking absences for evidence. Watching didn’t reveal the world; it fractured it, scattering it into endless uncertainties.

Kotlyarenko understands this perfectly: Surveillance doesn’t simply rupture reality — it trains us to crave the rupture. Jay and Celine don’t resist the collapse of their own self-documentation. They plunge deeper, filming not to preserve intimacy, but to replace it. Without the camera, there would be no proof that anything between them ever existed — no cruelty, no yearning, no shame to sanctify.

And observing them, I felt the same gravitational pull: the impulse not to look away, but to gather more. The only way to survive surveillance is to accelerate it — until nothing is left but the record of having been watched.

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This is where The Code stops pretending to diagnose and starts to implicate. Kotlyarenko doesn’t just stage the sickness of self-scrutiny — he weaponizes it against the audience. Every sidelong glance from Celine, every wounded smirk from Jay, every pixelated frame of their painful engagement flatters the very voyeurism the film pretends to expose.

It’s no accident that the film spirals into ritual. Ivy’s sudden wedding to the landlord — a frantic ceremony between strangers — doesn’t feel like narrative resolution. It feels like a nervous tic. A desperate attempt to pretend that connection, meaning, or continuity still exist in a landscape already reduced to pure image.

In La Jalousie, Robbe-Grillet showed how repetition — looking, glimpsing, doubting — does not stabilize intimacy. It hollows it out. The gaze, meant to capture meaning, only multiplies its absence. The Code inherits this logic. Jay and Celine’s scavenger hunt, Ivy’s wedding — these are not acts of hope. They are the frantic reenactments of structures that have already flattened. They perform love, loyalty, community — not to preserve them, but to cover over their disappearance.

After orchestrating a final humiliation, Celine disappears, leaving Jay to scavenge through the wreckage. What begins as a search for reconciliation quickly devolves into a scavenger hunt through Jay’s own memories — the scenes we have already witnessed, now emptied of urgency, nullified by recurrence. Each location, once charged with longing or betrayal, becomes just another stop in a rigged game, another image in a hall of mirrors. Jay’s pursuit isn’t driven by hope. It’s driven by inertia, as if by walking the same routes, he could summon back the love that once animated them.

The scavenger hunt becomes a parody of closeness, just as the wedding becomes a parody of renewal. These rituals don’t reconstruct what has been lost. They only aestheticize the loss itself — staging devastation as if it could still mean something. When Jay finally finds Celine, stranded in the desert at sunset, they consummate their relationship — an act framed not as communion, but as the last exhausted rite left to them. Even this fails to restore anything.

The final sequence folds the film back onto itself: Jay and Celine — or facsimiles of them — sit in a sterile studio, analyzing the footage we have just witnessed. Their identities blur into the machinery of their own documentation. It no longer matters whether they are the same people, actors playing roles, or simulations generated by endless repetition. The final revelation is not reunion but recursion: memory is a screen. Watchers watching watchers.

The roots of voyeurism aren’t so deviant. They grow out of a basic, undiscriminating visual curiosity. Wonder isn’t neat or goal-oriented; it’s amorphous, restless, directed at anything and everything: the seen and unseen, the real and imagined, the obvious and obscure.

Sight, among the senses, holds a privileged position. It insists on crossing boundaries, ignoring what’s supposed to stay hidden. Seeing disregards frontiers as a matter of principle. The more rules we invent to govern what should remain invisible — what shouldn’t be touched, what shouldn’t be witnessed — the more inevitable it becomes that we crash against them.

I have always been curious about others — reading a hookup’s diary when he left the apartment, rifling through cupboards and drawers at an Airbnb, finding the secret BDSM paraphernalia of the parents whose children I nannied one summer — I joke not. Is this a perversion or a will — a desire not just to observe, but to enter? To inhabit someone else’s life without permission, to feel the heat of their privacy without announcing my presence? Is this inherently sexual?

Watching The Code, these questions and distinctions feel essentially meaningless. The act remains the same: intrusion disguised as inquiry.

But maybe even calling it voyeurism is a categorical error. When exposure is constant and expected, the act of looking no longer crosses any frontier. It simply repeats the conditions already in place. Here, watching no longer violates privacy — it abolishes it. The gaze circulates ambiently, compulsorily, repeating itself across a world where nothing is hidden, or whole.

I have searched all my neighbors on Google, starting with the names scrawled on their mailboxes. I have found their social media profiles, traced their extended families, watched them give birth to children and pray for dying mothers. I hear refrigerators open. Water run. Never laughter — only the occasional whine, like a prayer.

All winter, I swear they never left their apartments. Now that it’s spring, they’ve started to surface on the sidewalks; maybe by summer they will have made it to the park. When I see them, I always recognize them, and they look at me with an absent glare, if at all.

The absence of their validation, like a heavy gust of wind, will pass through me — cleansing my soul — reminding me that to most people, I hardly exist at all.

It is only under the speculation of my own controlling gaze that I bring myself to life.

~

Thank you for reading the fourth installment of INFINITE REGRESS by ISABELA CERVANTES. Each essay extends a thread from the last, letting ideas mutate as they cross new terrain. This is cultural criticism in motion — recursive, unfinished, alive. This piece turns the question of how capitalism aestheticizes absence toward a new frontier: the architecture of surveillance and voyeurism. What happens when intimacy is no longer protected from the gaze, but built through it? What comes next might seem unrelated. It won’t be.

I’m excited to incorporate others’ ideas into this project, leave a comment to contribute!

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This piece extends the critique of capitalism developed in my previous essay on Mark Fisher, Marc Kokopeli, and Mark Leckey, turning it toward the inaugural issue of Amulet Magazine — a new publication dedicated to “spirituality, religion, and mysticism.”

*Since this essay’s publication, Amulet Magazine has changed its name to Kismet Magazine.

It is not, at this point, egregious to say that the most interesting thing about Tao Lin’s style is his relationship to the “I.” Not indulgent, not dissociated — there are no grand gestures of interiority or detachment — but rather a kind of mild inertia. The self as one among many facts, unremarkable, there. A variation, perhaps, on Mark Fisher’s late-capitalist anhedonia, but even still lacking in the nihilistic verve that made that emotional tenor of the early aughts riveting.

Lin, for some years now, has tried to arrange his subject matter into something like expertise — psychedelics, autism, the occasional foray into animal companionship. His method, if it can be called that, is improvisational. It never quite coheres. The voice — neutral and declarative — deposits information. One gets the sense that even Lin himself does not know why.

Voice is, of course, the linchpin of writing. The thing every writer is supposed to find, cultivate, make distinct. It is also a kind of red herring, at least a sleight of hand. Something both utterly vital and false. Sheila Heti, in her essay “Outside of Story” for the inaugural issue of Amulet Magazine — “a new literary magazine offering a fresh perspective on spirituality, religion, and mysticism for seekers and skeptics alike” — writes that magazines “anchor it down.” It being the voice here, which is anchored by the magazine’s “context.” But she does not refer to it as voice. “It” is your “article.” The frame, the editorial tone — what a writer must submit to if they are to be understood, or published, or read.

Voice, in this case, becomes a function of packaging. The thing that all real writing runs from, leaving behind only a faint, subjective trace.

Here arises the tension in writing about the metaphysical. The idea that language and voice could hold something outside of it — could go beyond fact, argument, materialism. The magazine, still, is a format of conclusions. Mysticism, theoretically, is not. Yet Amulet is tasked with putting one inside the other.

This is, perhaps, a problem particular to nonfiction, that beleaguered genre scrapping for its place beside fiction and poetry. Where verse, lyric, and plot can allow for the mystical structurally — caesuras, the voice is porous, that narrative is unstable — nonfiction is a medium of facts. And facts demand verification, a structure of cause and effect, a logic of knowing.

Heti acknowledges this. “Cause and effect is reassuring,” she writes. “It means that nothing happens for no reason. It means that the reason that something happened can be figured out, and shared with the magazine’s reader.” This is, of course, an Enlightenment project. The assurance that knowledge, reason, is capable of grasping the world. That a subject, observing, can understand.

Even Descartes — who put forward the great foundational “I think, therefore I am”— believed this, at first. Until he encountered the problem of passions. The realization that thought is disrupted by feeling, that reason is not sovereign but subject. That the body — this vessel of impulses, reactions, interactions — has authority over the mind. That knowing, perhaps, is an illusion.

This, too, is the question of voice. How much control one has over it. Whether it belongs to the writer or the reader or the structure that contains it. Whether it is a site of knowledge or a site of failure.

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Passions, throughout the history of thought, have been treated as the engine of creativity. In Ion, Plato writes, “The poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him.” The poet, in this rendering, does not create but is created through. The gods speak through him. The voice belongs to something else. The work is neither deliberate nor rational, not even fully human. It is a kind of transmission. A moment of possession. The act of writing, a byproduct.

Voice, as it is now conceived, did not exist in Plato’s 380 BCE. It emerged later, throughout Romanticism and early modernity, as a term for an author’s signature, the unique imprint of their being on language. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley — their turn away from rigid classical forms, their insistence on a natural, vernacular style — was a way of asserting something authentic, immediate. But even then, voice was not entirely one’s own. It was a channeling of the external: folk tradition, landscape, the weather, the time.

The relationship between voice and authenticity is more complicated now. It is no longer clear where the self ends or what, exactly, it is expressing. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write: “Affect is not a personal feeling but a pre-personal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another.” Affects, passions, creativity in this formulation is a movement between states. A force acting on the writer rather than something the writer controls. It is, in a way, a return to Plato millenia later — except that what acts is not a god, or inspiration, but something more ambiguous, diffuse.

By the time of American postmodernism, voice had become self-conscious. It had turned ironic, recursive, wary of itself. Abstract expressionism had already played out the idea of artistic authenticity — gestures of feeling, the painter’s body in the paint — only to collapse into its own performance. The writer, by then, could no longer believe in direct expression. What followed was a kind of generalized exhaustion. Writing that was tentative, mediated, disavowing its own claims to truth.

Tao Lin is, in some ways, a product of this. What comes after the loss of authenticity? A voice that does not assert itself but simply states. Information, flatly delivered. The presence of a self that does not interpret, only relays.

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Heti calls Lin in his recent Granta essay “My Spiritual Evolution,” “confident.” She writes, “‘My Spiritual Evolution’ is a really good title, and Tao Lin’s confidence in saying all the things I was unconfident in saying made me jealous in the best way: it made me wish I had written it and made me send it to all my friends.” But “confident” is a strange qualifier. One does not call Woolf, Balzac, Hunter S. Thompson confident. One assumes confidence as a prerequisite of the work. What Heti seems to be responding to is Lin’s willingness to state things plainly, to write about psychedelic experiences as though they are self-evident.

And this works — because the reader is willing. Because Lin, for all his rejection of materialist thinking, is still writing for materialist readers.

Lin’s writing, as Heti notes, moves in the grammar of cause and effect. A narrative structure that reassures. That tells us, explicitly, why something happened, why it matters, how it might be filed away. “Materialist thinkers, magazine editors, readers of nonfiction, even those who love simple stories, are crazy for cause and effect,” she writes. “It means that nothing happens for no reason. It means that the reason that something happened can be figured out, and shared with the magazine’s readers.”

But metaphysical writing is not reassuring. It does not explain or resolve or function as a delivery system for meaning. It gestures. It evades. It fractures, and breaks. It asks the reader to sit with what is unclear, remaining in suspension so that language, much like the world around us, can unravel rather than settle. A magazine, which by definition packages and presents, cannot be the space for this.

Perhaps Lin’s voice — so intent on documentation, so fixed in its own reasoning — comes from his background in journalism. Or perhaps from his self-diagnosed autism. Whatever the case, it is a voice that, especially when writing about metaphysical experience, fails to do anything but state. It is a voice that proceeds as though the act of writing itself is a task to complete, a process of saying rather than creating.

Compare this to Peter Handke, whose contends with the psychedelia of historical time, or Thompson — a self-evident predecessor of Lin’s drug induced forays into American culture — to any writer who understands that to write about what cannot be defined requires a willingness to let language itself become unstable. Reassurance, if it belongs anywhere, belongs to the shared silence of not knowing — not to the noise of explanation.

Lin, describing the comedown from a DMT trip, writes:

“Compared to where I’d been [high], the universe [newly sober] seemed limited and somehow artificial. Despite its complexity, it felt suspiciously simple, like an extremely advanced multiplayer online role-playing game… In the days that followed, I came to feel that I was hiding here in the physical world, like a child who hides in a computer game to escape a more consequential reality. But I also felt that I wasn’t really hiding, that hiding was just how I was playfully terming my situation, which actually had a more mature and mysterious purpose.”

There is a tendency here toward qualification, correction. The brackets — implying, as though in an aside, that the words alone are not sufficient. The computer game metaphor — flattening the ineffable into the most recognizable and accessible image. A sense of language keeping itself in check, refusing excess, limiting its own reach. The experience described not through sensation, or contradiction, or even observation, but through a kind of detached theoretical framework: “I wasn’t really hiding,” Lin explains, “that hiding was just how I was playfully terming my situation.” The need to state, to contextualize, to summarize, overriding any actual feeling of rupture.

Thompson describes a similar experience in his Gonzo style, which is, interestingly defined as “journalism without claims to objectivity,” and radically departs from Lin’s:

“The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others—the living—are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to do when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still out there.”

Thompson’s style is at once personable and hallucinatory. Here is a refusal to define. The sentence opening on negation: “There is no honest way to explain it.” The clauses strung together with or, each possibility complicating the last rather than resolving it. Yet it is still a record of lived experience. This is how metaphysical writing operates. Not by containing experience, but by letting it slip through.

Handke does something similar; language shifts not just in meaning but in sensation itself.

“Tiredness creates its own kind of time, a drifting time that is neither forward nor backward, neither productive nor wasted. It is a time outside of history, where thought detaches from itself and language becomes something weightless, almost autonomous. In this tiredness, I feel myself most completely, and at the same time, least bound to myself. The world is neither distant nor close—it simply is.”

Handke, like Thompson, understands that to write about an altered state — whether induced by exhaustion, drugs, or something spiritual — requires a displacement of language itself. Time is redefined. The self is both present and absent. The world is neither this or that but something altogether unable to be defined. Is this not true to experience?

Lin, for all his engagement with metaphysical topics, does not dwell in these questions of being. His “I” remains intact; his structure, linear. His voice, despite its detachment, is never destabilized. And this, ultimately, is the failure of his writing: that it does not trust language to go beyond what is known. That it does not allow itself to be carried elsewhere. That it remains, always, within the limits of the explainable.

Handke, defining tiredness, lets the word turn over itself: a looping hesitation, a circling back. Tiredness exists outside history, outside forward motion, outside time as we typically understand it. It is neither one thing nor its opposite. Instead, it is a state. A threshold. A way of being in the world. Lin, writing about coming down from DMT, attempts something similar but does not quite reach it. He repeats: I felt like I was hiding. Again. I felt like I was hiding. But this is not the same as redefinition. It is a tautology, a holding pattern, a sentence repeating itself for no reason other than its own inability to change.

The difference is the “I.”

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Handke, Thompson, Clarice Lispector — these are writers who let language become something external to the self. Who let the experience exceed them, distort them, move their sentences beyond what is stable. Lin, for all his supposed distance, never leaves himself behind. His prose is trapped in a first-person voice that refuses to dissolve. An ego that remains intact, unshaken. What he calls confidence is, in fact, a deep reluctance: a refusal to allow his language to stretch toward the unknown.

Heti, too, seems aware of this problem. “How are we supposed to speak—to a wide audience—about the spiritual realm, or about things unknown, which can’t be fact-checked, or can’t be checked against the reader’s experiences, without seeming like fools?” she asks. Fools. The worst thing a writer can be. The thing that must be avoided at all costs. But why? The metaphysical is unknowable. It resists verification. Writing toward it, about it, must allow for the possibility of failure, of uncertainty, of saying something foolish. This is what Lin does not risk. What Heti, too, is wary of.

North American writing — at least in its minimal, magazine-appropriate form — has never had room for this. Its lineage is declarative, clipped, straightforward. It, and authors like Lin and Heti follow, comes from Miller, from Carver, from Yates. Its strength is its directness. Its weakness is that it cannot, or will not, engage with what cannot be plainly stated.

And yet, many lineages outside of this do not seek clarity or compression; not all writing has cowered before the intangible.

Often people find it strange that I consider Lispector a writer of nonfiction, but Aqua Viva and her crônicas might be among the most radical explorations of human experience ever written. She writes:

“And suddenly, terrifyingly, I understood: I was nobody, absolutely nobody. And I was seeing something that was the same as me. And I finally understood that the what is—it was something I’d never known because I had never needed to know it. The what is was me. And I was the what is.”

An “I,” yes. But one that negates itself, that collapses as soon as it is spoken. Not a subjectivity asserting itself but one breaking apart. This is what Simone Weil calls de-creation. The undoing of the self. The ability to recognize that we are only participants in something larger, something greater.

Lin does not probe the human condition so much as he reports its symptoms. His writing, for all its talk of ego death, does not actually engage with this process. He remains inside himself, inside a voice that never wavers, inside an understanding of experience that cannot be rewritten. It is all very neat. Very clear. But metaphysical writing should not be neat. It should not be clear. It should be unstable. Disorienting.

Lin writes, of DMT, that its purpose is learning, or entertainment, or transformation. Heti echoes this:

“The same purpose we, as conscious beings, might be experiencing when we decide to read a book (or article): it’s to learn, or to entertain ourselves, or to travel in some way beyond our own experiences and the limits of our bodies, in order to bring something new back to our daily living.”

But here is the problem. This is not what I took from “My Spiritual Evolution.” Not a sense of transformation. Not an altered perception. Only a lingering awareness of Lin’s self-regard. The ‘I’ intact, unshaken, as always.

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Spiritual writing, in materialist terms, like voice — a spiritual entity — is always a kind of trick. A way of speaking about the sublime without letting it affect the form. A way of saying: Here is an experience that transcends language, but I will explain it to you anyway. Lin does this. Heti, in her caution, does this too. The question is not whether they believe in what they are saying but whether their writing is actually willing to risk its own undoing. Whether it is willing to gesture beyond itself. Or whether it will simply continue, sentence by sentence, explaining.

Somewhere along the way, mysticism — virtuosity — lost its weight. It was always an uneasy fit in contemporary art and contemporary writing; too much faith, too little irony. The idea of a god, of transcendence, was at best naïve and at worst reactionary. But for a while, at least, there was affect theory. A way to thwart the pull of language, of logic, of capital after the democratically sworn-off virtuoso. Or so it seemed.

Lauren Berlant, in the 2010s, had given affect theory a kind of credibility. The idea that something — emotion and sensation — could escape commodification. That there were forms of experience that exceeded capitalism’s logic. But theories, like people, have a way of becoming what they once resisted.

Susanne von Falkenhausen, writing in Frieze, calls affect theory a blind spot. A theory that concealed its own ideological function. It did not, in the end, offer an alternative to capitalism. It only disguised its complicity. “A symptom for the old dream of merging art and life,” she writes. A way to name something without ever letting it disrupt the structures that governed it.

It is not difficult to see how mysticism has now taken affect theory’s place. There are the same contradictions. The same promise of rupture, only to be turned into a product. Amulet Magazine calls itself a publication of “spirituality, religion, and mysticism for seekers and skeptics alike.” A publication that, by its own mission, collapses transcendence into readability. Spiritual writing made sleek. Mysticism turned into an aesthetic.

Heti seems to know this. Her essay hesitates. It plays with the discomfort of writing the ineffable inside the format of a magazine. She knows that argument, clarity, fact — all these things exist in tension with the metaphysical. And yet, she does not reject them. She does not let go.

Tao Lin, she thinks, has confidence. He writes his spiritual evolution plainly, without apology. She envies this, she says. But Heti is uncertain. She asks: How does one write about the unknown without seeming like a fool? If to be foolish is the attempt to stake authority on a topic that remains sovereign from us, then wouldn’t the best approach be to treat it as a friend instead of something to be dominated? This, of course, contradicts how we are taught to read: as an act of absorption, of taking in what is fixed so that we might determine where we stand.

What is foolish is to think that writing is an act of authority. It is seldom even expertise. We all might question the point of reading if it is not to ingest facts and opinions in order to determine our own undetermined stance in the world. This is, after all, how we self-actualize, through other people’s fixedness. What if there was no actualization, no fixedness, no fact? What if becoming was not solidification, but drift? Not knowledge, but the act of standing still inside our collective unknowing?

At the end of her essay, Heti wonders aloud. Am I dreaming of a magazine filled with mystical propositions, next to reports of genocides, airplane crashes, the rise and fall of the almighty dollar? She thinks: maybe this is the answer. Maybe mysticism, catastrophe, capital can coexist in the same publication. That if placed side by side, they might begin to make sense.

But this question itself is an admission of failure.

The terms remain unchanged; the structure remains the same. Mysticism as an aesthetic. Spirituality as a consumable. The promise of affect theory was, once, that it would let us see beyond capitalism’s grip. Instead, it became another vocabulary. Another way to organize feeling.

Falkenhausen saw this coming. Affect theory, she wrote, had assured us of two things: (1) That we would find an alternative to human dominance in the Anthropocene. (2) That we would find a new way to think the political — through sensation, through a global commons, through the collective force of affect.

Neither has really come to pass. In fact, people think this thinking is maladroit. Please, not the anthropocene. Not the commons, again.

Amulet Magazine, too, is making big promises. That there is still a way to think about the spiritual. That writing can still approach something unknowable. Reason has run its course. That logic is no longer sufficient. That we must now turn to something older, something beyond Enlightenment epistemology, to understand the world as it distorts, deludes, and collapses. That human life, as material conditions worsen, will turn — inevitably, necessarily — toward the spiritual. Not as faith, but as a kind of last refuge.

And yet its structure is already set. Its language is already contained. Mysticism, like affect, has already been absorbed.

Affect theory’s similar promise was to rebuff capitalism’s overdetermination of feeling, experience, meaning. Emotion as pre-personal, sensation as ungovernable. And for a time, it worked. In small groups, in conversations where the discourse was not yet set, where it was not yet theory but something happening. Where the structure of thought had not yet solidified into product.

Amulet arrives post facto. The rupture has already passed. The happening is solitary now, confined to the doldrums of isolated existence. There is not even an invitation of togetherness. All this mysticism and spirituality — these things once suggested a refusal of containment, of comprehension. Now, tightly organized into prose, into content, into something that can be published and read and put away. The ineffable, structured into a paragraph! They have tote bags uwu.

There is a fundamental inability to let art and life merge. Here is an insistence that writing about the spiritual must be distinct from experience. The text is always already separate from the writer, from the act of writing: simultaneously disembodied and enchanted, and tamed. Style, voice, form — these things are incidental, rather than the very medium through which meaning is made.

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A magazine dedicated to new perspectives on spirituality, mysticism, religion — it will inevitably fail. Not because the subject matter is impossible, but because the conditions of its publication are anathema to it. To be made readable is to be made legible. Legibility is one of the greatest lies of our era. The illusion of comprehension is realistically a flattening of dimensions.

Once, ancient conversations — on faith, on transcendence, on being — were unwieldy, oral, sacred in their instability. The problem is not that Amulet publishes writing about spirituality. The problem is that it does so within a system that requires resolution. That rewards clarity. That smooths over contradiction, difficulty, and opacity.

If nonfiction is to hold the spiritual, it must stop being a record. It must stop being knowledge. It must become something else. Rapturous, a language of experience. There are my god enough descriptions of things in this world.

Can not language, at the very least, elude the materialist demand to explain?

Writing is not fundamentally at odds with life.

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Thank you for reading the third installment of INFINITE REGRESS by ISABELA CERVANTES. Each essay carries forward a thread from the last, allowing ideas to shift, morph, and unravel as they move from one terrain to another. This is cultural criticism as a live process—discursive, recursive, and always unfinished. In this essay, a critique of capitalism’s absorption of the metaphysical unfolds through a close reading of Amulet Magazine. Where does critique go when even transcendence is packaged for consumption? What comes next might seem unrelated. But it won’t be.

I’m excited to incorporate others’ ideas into this project, leave a comment to contribute!

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It was, by all measures, the best possible news. I set my phone down. I sat still. My heartbeat accelerated. Then it waned. Then I waited. I was waiting. I was waiting for something to happen.

That was mid-morning. By noon, the fever had begun. A dull pain in my lower abdomen. A tightness in my jaw. My joints ached as though someone very strong had stretched me out in four different directions. That was a kind of execution, I believe. Drawn and quartered. Quartered. Split. Taken apart to be put back together wrong.

The tea burned my tongue. My face was a mask. The tea burned my tongue, and the skin there was new. Fantasies about sleeping the rest of the week—impossible. The air was bright, unbearable.

At some point, I must have stood up and drawn the black curtains. This is not a metaphor. It was an act. I erected those black curtains the week before. Perhaps they were an omen. I drew them for no particular reason. No reason, but it had been done. There was an order to these things. One received good news. One closed the curtains. One lay in bed. One waited for the fever to pass.

The news contained a dream. That was the phrase, wasn’t it? A dream come true. A phrase people used without irony, though the structure of it suggested something unnatural. A dream should not become true. A dream should remain a dream. A dream should not become anything.

But my dreams are never possibilities. They are grotesqueries. They are outside of hope, outside of the body. They wait for me outside of me.

In one dream, I pull something from my gums. Hard plastic, knotted around my teeth like wire. I am protecting my brother. I am pulling the plastic. The location is unclear. A station, maybe. A government building. A clerk’s office with no clerk. The walls are blank. There is no sound, but I am speaking, endlessly speaking, endlessly explaining, endlessly trying to explain something that has already been decided.

Sweat has stained my pajamas yellow. I wake up. I wake up and the dream continues.

Perhaps what the phone call brought was not a dream fulfilled but a correction. A shift in the order of things. A passage from one plane to another. Or: a loophole, a glitch, an allowance from some unseen authority. This thing should not have been permitted but was. And now, of course, I was suffering the physiological consequences.

There is something to be said about how wishing keeps you in a state of life. Striving arranges you toward the future, lets you muster whatever energy you have. Energy. People speak of it as though it is something to hoard. Something measurable. They believe they can control where and how it flows. That by directing themselves correctly, they can avoid collapse. Calculation runs up against the incalculable.

The body does not trust change. The mind does not trust happiness. Even for the better, it resists. There is always some latent terror, some sense that if versions of reality have collapsed in the past, they will collapse in the future. If they will collapse, they have collapsed.

In any case, the fever broke after an extended sauna session. The back pain, however, will either resolve or remain, but it will no longer be a mystery. Life will continue, altered in some imperceptible way, until the change is indistinguishable from what was before. Until it was always this way. Until it was always.

His whiskers grew from what appeared to be a jaundiced fungus patch. It was, she said, just his muzzle, the flesh which grew again and again, on top of itself, in a process of healing. It was unclear whether or not Mario’s drool was infectious.

His mouth was a leaky faucet, said Adina. She called him her “slutty boy.”

When we arrived at Adina’s townhouse in Gramercy Park, we were prepared to leave with an entire apartment’s worth of furnishing. You see, in addition to being a self-proclaimed crazy cat lady, Adina was also a hoarder with, according to her, many fancy and desirable objects for a young couple’s first apartment in New York City.

She owned the entire townhouse and was the sole inhabitant, save for her nine cats.

From the glossy wet sidewalk, she led us up the steps, proud to say that the rickety old building was built in 1807 and, along with the two more updated units next door, was among the oldest buildings in New York City. These had once served as the farmhouses for Dutch colonizer Peter Stuyvesant, the first governor of the proto-NYC, New Amsterdam.

Adina told us this with pride, and would proceed to repeat it throughout the day, as she led us from the rainy wet sidewalk up to the house proper.

Indoors, noticeably necrotic Victorian wallpaper peeled away from the walls. As if treading an alternate dimension, one where the wallpaper was renewed and the parquet floors were polished, Adina seemed entirely unable to perceive the state of her home’s disrepair.

Stepping foot onto the wan floor of the entryway, one would notice that it was not so much flooring but what was underneath—the exposed foundation of the home which had become soggy from time.

It was not time, but cat piss.

“Watch out,” Adina said, pointing to a puddle on the floor that she herself had just trudged in, knowingly. I was surprised by her comment, that she was able to differentiate what for her would pass but for another would not.

She led us again up the steps. Further up the stairs indoors, these ones littered with small grainy balls of coagulated cat sand. Here was her bedroom, lavender sheets and no cover. Upon her bed we perched, as though it were the futon in a parlor. Did she sleep here? I wondered, eyeing A, who still stood despite Adina’s pleas to “take a seat.”
“Here, here,” she repeated, motioning to the head of her bed where a black hairball cowered atop a crumpled purple pillow like a Fuselian nightmare.

Reluctantly, we sat with her there for an hour, at least—I eyeing the stains and hair clumps, human and otherwise, on the bed—as she told us about her habit of fostering cats that were too ugly and sick to find a proper home. It was more than a habit, she concluded. It was her lifestyle. What a strange word to use in this context, as though fostering cats was a kind of luxury reserved for those few privileged enough to have such a generous heart.

If you Google Adina’s name, you will find that her tendency has resulted in trouble. Not, necessarily, her will to house those unloveable. But rather around the notion of ‘fostering,’ which would imply a temporary home. According to several reports, Adina was sued by a friend for not giving her cats back after a short-term stay at her Gramercy abode. The report cited that the domicile was not safe or sanitary for the cats.

These creatures who licked the same paws that pawed away at soiled earth in order to bury their excrement. The report referred to Adina as a ‘self-proclaimed crazy cat lady.’

Soon, in the kitchen, where A and I had managed to escape, which was, actually next to the head of Adina’s bed, she told us about the woman she had been housing. First the cats and now this.

This woman had a love of spice, she stated confoundedly.

Opening the cabinet, she was suddenly pelted with dozens of half-used containers of exotic spices such as cumin and cinnamon and a general ‘all-spice,’ as it were, but not the type used in Italian cooking.

Unphased, she shoved all the fallen plastic jars into a plastic to-go bag for us to take home. Later, at the metro station, I would place these in the trash can, because were we not absolutely forced to take all she had to offer? Leaving us with more than what we needed from her.

Adina pulled a jar of peanut butter from the cabinet next and told us her favorite quick dinner recipe:

Two tablespoons of peanut butter

Spaghetti

Two packets of chili oil from Chinese takeout

“Delicious!”

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She gathered the fine China that belonged to her parents. Most of the saucers were being used as cat food dishes. Her brother didn’t want the China even though he wanted her to pay for his son’s college.

The thing with Adina is that she was a doctor, the osteopath kind, and had done rather well for herself—buying a brownstone in the East Village, for instance—despite having lived with her parents until 40 and never marrying or having children.

She was, according to herself, a success. Only to and for herself, however. For she did not rejoice over having nephews and nieces. Rued, in fact, the financial strain of blood relativity. She was ready to replace her parent’s China with a ceramic collection from the Salvation Army.

In the basement we learned that the woman she had housed was from Haiti; she had met her at the farmer’s market. Which is to say, on the street. Adina showed us where she slept on a couch covered in other junk. Jackets and pots and pans. A toaster with a broken cord. Two weeks into her stay, the woman had found a job in catering but needed a uniform to complete it. Black shoes, black jeans. She could not afford the shoes and Adina kindly purchased them for her.

For some reason, beyond what Adina could surmise, the woman became incredibly angry at this gesture. She cut apart the top of the shoes, leaving an open footbed with frayed black fake leather lining it like a crown of thorns.

Upon the footbed, in Sharpie, she had written for Adina, and Adina alone, “Not for purchase n****-cracker.”

Adina thought this humorous. The contradiction of the phrase. She rued, as well, the strain of relationality. Human relationality, that is.

In the basement, I tried on several fur jackets that were too small for my build. I found a vintage lamp covered in a sticky brackish substance. A rolled up cream rug in the corner of the room seemed appealing. It was entirely made of wool and, like many of the items in her large brownstone, belonged to Adina’s parents.

She claimed that the rug had just been cleaned, just after she cleared out her parents home. Her father had recently died. What was her recently was certainly not ours.

Upstairs, in the room one should call her study but was filled, quite literally, to the ceilings with antique wood, Adina kept a short, simple table. It caught my eye and she immediately snapped that I couldn't have it. It was where she and her brothers played when they were children.

I thought this oddly sentimental for her taste. What did I know about her taste?

She was grateful when we began hunting through the piles of clothing to reach the side of the room with more lamps and more kitchen items. She called it “making rivulets” in her “ocean of chaos.”

I personally could not fathom Adina’s state of self-awareness. Where at once, she was able to recognize what was, for us, a moderately horrifying romp through dust and disuse, and was utterly fine with, if not comforted by, the state of affairs herself.

On every windowsill sat a dying brown plant in a whitening terracotta pot. I learned once from my grandmother, another crazy cat lady, although not self-proclaimed, that the white residue was a kind of fungus that confirmed a plant in good shape.

It was only then, standing in the middle of what should have been Adina’s parlor but which gave into the feeling of a Mexican Mercado in the heat of August, that I realized my grandmother’s own knowledge of plants was poorer than I initially thought. While she did keep her plants alive, there was certainly no possibility that this white residue was a mark of health for vegetation.

What differed between Adina and my grandmother was their ability to speak. One found her pathologies wrapped into layers of unadorned, manipulative cycles. For instance, in portraying her knowledge as greater than it actually was.

The other identified herself amidst the rubble in loquacious resonances with her surroundings. I considered what echoes existed when there were no other people in the brownstone. Just Adina and her cats.

“There you are, slutty boy,” cried Adina as Mario entered the room, sniffing the pile of old towels.

“Grab him, he’s looking for a place to pee,” Adina told A, who hesitated before reaching for the slutty boy. If he could have picked that cat up with only his fingertips, as one reluctantly pinches a soiled garment, then I would have been spared the anxious bellyaching about getting feline herpes that accompanied our trip home.

After we had collected a ramshackle display of furnishings from Adina’s prized collection (which included a rusted cast iron she found in Union Square!), she was to take us to lunch at Veselka. We had to remind her that she had said this as our adventures through the brownstone came to a close and she was thinking to herself, with pleasure, that her day with other people was coming to a close. And we were not ones to give up an opportunity for a free meal.

She led us down the street in a drizzle, dragging a little wheely cart behind her. She was going to pick up bread from the farmer’s market and cat food at Petco, too.

Veselka was a disappointment. Their food, greasy and bland, not the sour pungency and suppleness I am used to when dining Polish. Adina was concerned with the menu items that “clung to the ribs”—the vegetarian latke reuben and the barley soup—but I couldn’t figure out if she meant that it made you fat or it simply made you full. I couldn’t tell if she was concerned or just enthralled.

During our feast, Adina told us of her family from Latvia who survived beyond the Pale of Settlement and in fact assisted other Jews who would come into the town unregistered.

“My great-grandfather, Herschel Apfel, was a tailor in Riga. Not a great one, but good enough. He saw the insides of people’s coats, what they stuffed in their sleeves. The things people think are hidden but aren’t.”
We were bemused by her sudden sentimentality and let her continue.

“He was born outside the city, somewhere in the Pale. Left early, or was sent—depends who you ask. The Russian army came looking for conscripts, and my great-great-grandmother, sent him away with a lie. Told the soldiers he was sick. Not entirely untrue.

Riga was full of unregistered Jews. Illegal, but there anyway. Needed papers. Shelter. Someone who knew which police officer took bribes and which one didn’t. Herschel helped where he could. Not charity. Some paid in coins, some in fabric, some in favors. A man gave him a pocket watch that never kept time, but made him look respectable.

Some nights, four or five men slept in the back of his shop, curled up against bolts of cloth. He told them where to find work, which a baker sold on credit. Sometimes he let them use his name. By thirty, he had a dozen brothers walking around Riga, sending money home to families they might never see again.

He got caught once. The police overturned his sewing table, kicked in the back door. Lucky, he said later. The captain’s wife needed a dress. A good tailor was hard to find.

The men he sheltered weren’t so lucky. Put on trains. Never came back.

Then came the Germans. The ghetto. The lists. The trains. Herschel, picked up on a nameless afternoon, his name never spoken again. He died in a camp,” she paused, flashing a beet-purple grin to no one. It was, actually, more of a grimace.

“You know I always tell Black people that the original term ghetto referred to the Jews. We’ve always been allies.”

This was her conclusion.

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

“It was written down, the only thing from my family that survived the war.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

Adina didn’t respond, only ate, and by the time the check arrived, she was ready for ice cream.

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She walked around the rest of the afternoon with chocolate sundae dried to her thinning lips. It was impossible for me to tell her about it, as though that would finally be crossing the line into some unknown territory of intimacy neither she nor I was ready for.

We followed her into the cat store and to the Union Square farmer’s market where she bought bread.

Later, we wondered what else she ate, if she drank water, how often she used the restroom.

She told us some smutty story about the term “circle jerk” and being a girl with an older brother.

We wondered if she had ever had sex.

I carried her rolling bag, filled with cans of cat food, up the steps. Through the window into the building next door, we could see the lavishly decorated parlor, the renovated details of the vintage home. We assumed that Adina’s neighbor’s hated her.

Later, on the train, I looked closely into the wool rug that had belonged to Adina’s parents. I can only describe the accumulated cream-colored lumps as a kind of frosting, which A identified, using his phone, as the egg colonies of wool moths.

At Metropolitan Avenue, we discarded the rug and several other textiles we had acquired from Adina’s. We left them under an awning, half-hoping someone might see them and claim them for their own. It was raining hard by that time of night and we hoped that the water would drown the eggs and make it possible for someone to use the rug in their home.

This is a kind of hope certainly familiar to Adina. The hope that objects will extend their stay past midnight. The hope that time doesn’t erode things, only cat piss.

The cats had peed so much on her basement door that it had bored a hole all the way through, through which the cats could now enter the basement and continue their pissing cycle.

We put our clothing in the freezer to kill any straggling moth eggs. Days later, it was 20° out and I needed my wool hat. It’s a very strange feeling putting an ice cold hat on your head. It is part pain, and a part of it feels oddly good.

This piece picks up Heidegger’s Lichtung—the clearing—from the first essay on Nosferatu and substance-dependent cinema, tracing its relevance in an entirely new context.

IT HAS BECOME, somehow, gauche to try to talk about capitalism. I hate to admit this. I don’t know when it happened, or how. One moment, Mark Fisher was killing himself, and Repeater Books was publishing K-Punk, the tome of the decade, or so it seemed. A friend of mine wore a CCRU t-shirt and a JSTOR ball cap at a wine hang in Tempelhofer Feld in 2019. She couldn’t have foreseen that no one was going to be lugging around a 800-page collection of blog posts and an unfinished, speculative fulmination of capitalism called Acid Communism—an essay urging us to rediscover the communal psychedelic potential of the ’60s and ’70s before it was swallowed whole by the banal individualism of New Ageism.

By now, we have become too absorbed in our selfhood for all that. If we talk about systems at all, it is only to identify the ones preventing us from living out our impulses as freely, as frictionlessly, as we believe we deserve.

Before it disappeared—collapsed in on itself like a dying star—discourse around capitalism had already been embalmed, anesthetized, its radical charge neutralized by the same forces it sought to critique. Packaged into leftist publishing cycles, meme accounts, and vague gestures toward accelerationism, it lost its urgency, its stakes. The grandiose failures of Crypto and Web3 played out like a Fisherian farce. Alternative economies, promising freedom from capital’s grasp, were only ever hyper-capitalist grifts that accelerated its logic rather than rupturing it. What once animated early techno-materialist paranoia has since dissolved into NFT auction houses, ironic proximity to God and politics, and Lacan.

Why, exactly, is it embarrassing to speak about capitalism?

Is it that we are so fully entrenched in its logic that to name it at all feels clumsy, childish—like a baby in a stage of object permanence, newly aware of the fixtures that compose reality? Fisher, in Capitalist Realism, called it an atmosphere—“not a particular type of realism,” but something more pervasive, more total. Not an ideology one could oppose, exactly, but the air itself. The world as it is. Unlike fascism or other twentieth-century systems that demanded explicit allegiance or rejection, capitalism is insidious because it does not require belief. Only participation. And exhaustion.

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So when I see Marc Kokopeli drop the phrase “factory and production line” in the press release for My TV Show I ❤️ TV up now at Reena Spaulings, I’m slightly taken aback. Reena, once defiantly anti-institutional, now reads as something else—more detached, more abstracted. The politics are still there, maybe, but blurred. A posture rather than a position. Still present, but harder to pin down.

That shift was obvious at the opening. Downtown scenesters, artists, writers—the usual crowd, hovering somewhere between relevance and spectacle. The show itself was an event, a gathering. About presence as much as work. In this context, Kokopeli’s invocation of the production line feels anachronistic, a relic from a time when critique was direct, maybe even sincere. Here, it lands differently. Not as indictment but as a gesture, a knowing nod. A phrase dropped in quotation marks, more wry than urgent.

Which is, probably, the point. What it gestures toward is not just capitalism, but our whole relationship to the future. The way it’s all become tongue-in-cheek—Oh, those layoffs. Oh, that apocalypse. 10 steps to survive Monday and the end of the world. The future, once a real thing, apprehendable, something to work toward or against, is just another punchline.

There was a time, in postwar America, when the future had structure. When Ayn Rand could claim, with absolute conviction, that individual success was simply a matter of will: “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” Then, causality was intact. One thing led to another. The past, present, and future fit into a sequence, a story. Now, that sequence is broken. Time flickers, collapses. The future, like capitalism itself, is something we no longer quite believe in, yet still operate within.

“The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations,” Fisher writes in Capitalist Realism. This is what Kokopeli captures in his ready-made TVs—not just lost futurity, but the mechanisms of its disappearance.

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Let me digress.

In the winter months, I have been averaging six miles a day, which is roughly 13.5K steps—exceeding the recommended 10K, though I don’t know who recommends this or why. Every Sunday, my phone delivers a report on how many hours I have spent looking at it. This week: four hours a day. I have no baseline to compare this to, but I suspect it is too much. My phone, I note, is quite generous with its calculations. It tracks everything—Gmail, Messages, Instagram, Substack. Am I meant to capitalize these names as if they were beloved friends?

What am I supposed to do with this information? Is my phone telling me to use it less? It is hard to believe that a product would monitor a unit that, in theory, would justify its obsolescence. Maybe this is a psychological trick—by making me aware of these numbers, my usage becomes remote to me, harder to regulate, harder to stop. I believe this is called “reverse psychology.”

Screen time is a joke, a self-parody. A reminder that we quantify our lives as though measurement will offer control. But as the Einstein quote goes, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” There is something futile about it—breaking the world into units, believing they will add up to something. Capitalism has trained us to think this way, to believe that tracking is knowing, that knowing is mastery. But entropy is still there. The counting will not save us.

This tension—between measurement and meaning, between data and disappearance—is what animates My TV Show I ❤️ TV. Kokopeli writes in the press release (which, as I learned at John Kelsey’s reading at Artist’s Space, is based on a Buddhist prayer): “What I think of as a TV is made up of only non-TV elements.” Near the entrance of the gallery, a projection loops an old screensaver—dollar bills stacking, accumulating endlessly over video footage from Ken Burns’ 17-hour documentary on New York City. I’ve seen this piece before, or something like it, three years ago in Berlin at The Wig.

Then, as now, the image of capital accumulating against a nostalgic backdrop felt both absurd and inevitable. In that earlier work, which reappears in this show, an animated elephant drags bricks across the screen, while the same Burns documentary plays in the background. Capital and labor, circulation and weight, a loop without resolution.

The screensavers, once passive digital artifacts meant to prevent burn-in, now take on a sharper, more deliberate significance. Their looping, hypnotic motion mimics the way capitalism functions—an invisible, self-sustaining system, indefinitely extending itself. Superimposed over Burns’ polished, sentimentalized retelling of American history, the effect is both absurd and inevitable. Burns, who structures his documentaries as sweeping, authoritative narratives of progress and struggle, here finds his vision compressed under the weight of accumulation itself—history reduced to another aesthetic backdrop.

A nostalgic, PBS-brand framing layered over the banal, pre-programmed animations of a lost desktop era. The collision of these two visual languages—the earnest, mythic American past and the automated, digital afterlife of capital—reveals what is already apparent. Capital does not just erase the future; it absorbs the past, hollowing out both history and progress until neither has any weight at all.

It is hard to imagine Kokopeli has not read Capitalist Realism, where Fisher writes: “The 21st century is littered with the relics of an imagined future that never arrived.” This is precisely the terrain of My TV Show I ❤️ TV.

Beyond the screensaver works, Kokopeli has assembled a dozen or so screen-like devices—though one could hardly call them TVs—from the 2000s and 2010s. Objects like the two red plastic orbs concealing an internal screen in “Check It Out,” or the mini High School Musical locker-screen in “Facing Up,” are relics of an era when technology fully embraced kitsch. These were objects made not for function but for play, electronics that disguised themselves as eggs, apples, or miniature pop-culture shrines. A moment when consumer electronics briefly flirted with something other than strict utility—gesture, decoration, self-expression. A kind of object-oriented utopianism, if one were being generous.

This transformation—from functional to decorative to obsolete—is best understood through Heidegger’s distinction between ready-at-hand and present-at-hand. Something is ready-at-hand when it is seamlessly integrated into life, unnoticed in its usefulness—a keyboard beneath one’s fingers, a refrigerator one opens without thought. The moment it breaks, it becomes present-at-hand—an object to be scrutinized, evaluated, regarded as an object rather than an extension of use. The screens in My TV Show I ❤️ TV have already undergone this shift. Once designed to be integrated into daily life, they are now displayed as artifacts, stripped of function, their presence conspicuous, unresolved.

The press release echoes this present-at-hand awareness: “I see the electricity surging within it. Born from the burning of fossil fuels, or perhaps solar or other energy. I also see the radio connections it makes through the air via WiFi, phone networks managed by thousands of people, and towers, cables, satellites…” A screen that sits on a plushy plinth, reduced to the sum of its material components.

Most disorienting are the transparent LCD cabinets, perhaps the most direct enactment of Kokopeli’s lost futurity. The front panels of these display boxes have been replaced with transparent glass. Inside, a single cinder block sits motionless while video plays directly on the glass surface. The effect is immediate dissonance—we crouch, tilt our heads, expecting to perceive depth or a visual trick that never materializes. A screen, by design, is meant to disappear in function; here, it refuses. Instead, it obstructs. The expectation of seamless transmission—of effortless image, immediate meaning—is entirely denied.

There is a brief, almost frustrating moment where one treats the glass as a normal window before realizing it is the screen itself. It is this moment of hesitation, of misrecognition, that reinforces the uncanniness of Kokopeli’s objects. These were once intended as futuristic technologies; now, they are post-function. Neither integrated nor defunct, but stuck in a liminal space between past and future: too futuristic for their time, too outdated for ours.

Like much of Kokopeli’s work, they expose the failure of capitalist realism’s promise of perpetual innovation. Objects designed to integrate seamlessly into the world, now stranded in aesthetic limbo—looping, suspended, awaiting a function that will never come.

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Kokopeli’s work—his use of commercial remnants—falls in line with the ready-made. The ready-made, which was always a kind of irritation, a slight against function, a repurposing, but not exactly an elevation. The object is taken out of its system. A toilet, a urinal, a bicycle wheel. Its utility neutralized, its context altered, it becomes, suddenly, art. Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), the obvious example. A urinal, mass-produced, now useless in a different way. Not broken, not discarded, but relocated. Suspended outside of circulation.

By the time Warhol got to Brillo Boxes (1964), the shift had already happened. The logic of the ready-made had been folded back into capital. It was no longer about rupture, but exposure. A kind of re-enactment of capitalism’s own trick: to strip objects of use, to make them valuable by sheer repetition, visibility, context.

Kokopeli’s screens inherit this history, but differently. They were supposed to be cutting-edge, but they never fully arrived. It is not just that they are functionless now—it is that they were never quite functional to begin with. Objects meant to fit seamlessly into the logic of consumer tech, and yet, somehow, left out of it. Their transformation into art does not imbue them with new meaning. It only confirms their failure to ever mean anything else. Suddenly visible, suddenly objects again. They do not function. They only persist.

Inside the transparent LCD cabinets, a cinder block. A screen is meant to project, to transmit, to create a virtual space beyond itself. Here, it only reinforces what is already there: weight, material, brute presence. An object containing another object, displaying nothing but its own vacancy.

The most unsettling thing about Kokopeli’s work is that it does not pretend visibility is an answer. This is the problem with late capitalism. It has made all of its failures obvious, inescapable, fully documented. That does not stop them from continuing. Fisher understood this: “The ruling class has lost the ability to rule. But the ruled still lack the ability to take power.”

And so, the loop. I recognize the absurdity of tracking my own consumption. I do it anyway. I check the numbers. I check them again. I wait for them to tell me something. They don’t. The system does not require belief. It continues, through sheer momentum.

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Fisher, borrowing from Jameson and Žižek, wrote: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” It has become a cliché. A kind of joke, a tired refrain, except that it is also true. Capitalism’s failures are omnipresent, visible to the point of exhaustion, and yet, its logic remains intact. The system sustains itself through collapse, through crisis. The possibility of an outside—of anything beyond—seems to recede further with each repetition.

Kokopeli captures this, a world where capitalism continues to produce long after it has stopped producing anything new. The future, or what we once thought of as the future, stalled. The loop, infinite. But is there an exit? A rupture? If so, it does not seem to come through critique alone. This is where Mark Leckey diverges.

Leckey’s 3 Songs from the Liver at Gladstone does not document failure so much as it tries to break free from it. His work is not about dead screens, obsolescence, or the impossibility of futurity. It is about something else—about sensation, intensity, the body. It is not critique; it is something more immediate. If Kokopeli’s objects demand analysis, Leckey’s demand engagement. They do not ask you to think; they ask you to feel.

Leckey describes his three “songs” as coming not from the heart, not from the intellect, but from the liver. An odd, deliberate choice. The liver, unlike the heart, unlike the brain, is not sentimental, not rational. It does not contain; it processes. It absorbs, filters, metabolizes. It does not reflect; it acts.

Before modern medicine, before the clean division between organs and their functions, the liver was thought to be a site of vision. A screen of sorts. In Mesopotamian and Roman traditions, haruspicy—the reading of livers—was a way of seeing, of glimpsing something beyond what could yet be understood. The liver, an instrument of divination. A record of what has passed, and what is still to come.

This is where Leckey veers from Kokopeli. Kokopeli’s screens are artifacts of a world where capitalist realism has already sealed off the future. His work lingers in the wreckage, documenting failure. Leckey, by contrast, is looking for something else. Not critique, not resignation, but a way out—through altered states, sensory overload, the sheer force of bodily experience. If Fisher argued that capitalist realism is an all-encompassing atmosphere, one that suffocates the possibility of alternatives, Leckey suggests that rupture is not conceptual but metabolic. It does not happen through thought or theory, but through the body in its immersion, excess, ecstatic destabilization.

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In “To the Old World (Thank You for the Use of Your Body),” Leckey takes a viral video—a drunken lad crashing through the glass of a bus stop—and reframes it as an ecstatic event, a moment of involuntary transcendence. In 2022, at Under Under (Galerie Buchholz, Berlin), his work functioned similarly, collapsing the specificity of place into a kind of portal. Here, too, the bus stop is reconstructed exactly, orange benches intact, a perfect recreation. The viral footage plays in loops, variations of the same event, the man passing through—except this time, something shifts. The glass is not just breaking. It is opening. He does not just crash; he enters, slips into other dimensions. The screens—like the advertisements that usually occupy these bus stops—begin to show something else.

In “Mercy I Cry City,” Leckey cuts rectangular openings into the walls of the gallery. At first, they are empty. Then, darkness. Then, suddenly, a screen illuminates the space beyond, revealing a 3D-rendered castle. The room next door is no longer the room next door. The gold-leaf edges of the holes recall Byzantine icons, and this reference is deliberate. A Byzantine icon, unlike a screen, is not meant to be looked at but looked through. It is not an image; it is a passage. Leckey is seeing beyond the screen, beyond the TV elements

In his press release, Leckey speaks of exultation—“to leap up” or “to leap out.” A kind of engagement that bypasses cognition, that operates on a bodily level, where thought is irrelevant, where perception is flooded, overridden. He describes a moment, pushing a pram through a park in lockdown, when the sun broke suddenly through the clouds, music flaring in his ears, and he felt it: a “tremendous muchness, an excess of everything.” This is what he is after—not critique, not reflection, but the sheer force of experience.

Where Kokopeli makes failure visible, Leckey refuses to linger in it. He does not document capitalism’s wreckage; he tries to step through it. If capitalism has made it impossible to imagine alternatives, then perhaps the only way forward is to feel our way out—to find intensity, disorientation, states that overwhelm and distort the rigid contours of the present.

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Fisher’s essay “Baroque Sunbursts” offers a way into this. He understood rave not just as subculture, but as rupture. A collective intensity, an ecstatic event, the dissolution of the privatized self. This was why the Tory government cracked down on raves in the 1990s—not because they were political in any explicit way, but because they were collective. Because they threatened the atomized, individuated subject on which capitalism depends.

“The campaign against rave might have been draconian,” Fisher wrote, “but it was not absurd or arbitrary. Very much to the contrary, the attack on rave was part of a systematic process—a process that had begun with the birth of capitalism itself.”

Capitalism survives by eliminating “the specter of a world that could be free.” Rave was dangerous because it proposed another kind of time, another way of being. It broke with enclosures—the work cycle, the segmentation of leisure, the division of subject and environment. Capitalism replaces collectivity with the ideology of hard work, individual responsibility, and isolated consumption. Rave rejected all of this. It allowed for duration without structure, sensation without purpose, euphoria without productivity.

Leckey’s work tries to reactivate this threat. Not through nostalgia, not through representation, but through immersion. He is not documenting a lost future; he is reaching for a break, a tear, a way through. His use of sound, repetition, excess—all of it mirrors Fisher’s vision of rave as a post-capitalist potential. Time unravels, labor and rest collapse, the individual dissolves into rhythm, the body is not a site of exhaustion but of transformation.

This is where Heidegger’s Lichtung—the clearing—comes in. A space where being becomes visible, where truth, briefly, steps out of concealment. Capitalist realism, by contrast, is enclosure. A sealed atmosphere, a system so totalizing that nothing new can break through. But rave—like Leckey’s work—suggests that the clearing does not have to be a political event. It can be metabolic. It can happen in the body. The liver, in this sense, is its own clearing—a site of transformation, where reality is filtered, absorbed, processed. Where perception, briefly, shifts.

Fisher called rave a baroque sunburst. A flicker in the structure of capitalist realism, a distortion, a glimpse of something else. He quotes Frederic Jameson: “From time to time, like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces are still possible.”

Leckey’s exultation is this. Not a future, not an alternative, but the sensation that another world—somewhere, somehow—is still possible. Not for long, not as program, but as affect. A moment. An opening.

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It was only at John Kelsey’s reading last night that I came to understand Kokopeli’s press release more profoundly. It clicked, his work was in its own way, a baroque sunburst, too. His assertion that a TV is made of non-TV elements is a kind of Buddhist prayer—a metaphor for the continuation of the mind after death. Look at blank and see that it is made of not blank. This is the formula for transcending individualist perspectives, for accessing a deeper truth about the universe. “Grateful,” Kokopeli concludes in his press release. A more emotional ending than I expected.

This realization makes me reconsider his stance. What initially seemed wry and critical now feels like something else entirely. Something less aggressive than Leckey’s rupture. Subtle, more closer to love. I think of the big red heart emoji in the show’s title.

“TV is never in the present,” John Kelsey said. We exult ourselves. Information is something we agree upon. A blank is composed of non-blank elements. To see this truth, we must leap out of our perception. The individual is made of the collective.

But I didn’t see this at the opening. I only understood it later, after the director of Reena Spaulings explained the show to me. And if I didn’t grasp it then, surely others didn’t either. Many were drawn to the work for its aesthetic, for its “postability.” The screens were good to post on Instagram—the platform where, as John Kelsey put it, “people say yes or no.”

Were Kokopeli’s TVs not information, then? Is this what makes them art—because they resist a single meaning? That would be too easy a conclusion. I feel exulted when I see good art. But is good art real art? Is good art a clearing?

Is art the liver of society, or the diseased eyeball?

If art is rupture, what do we make of the new dialogue around ruptures? The trends of “opting out,” “slowing down,” “leaving society.” Are we all artists, enacting this ideology of rave, now an algorithmic movement, of screen-free mornings, distraction-free meals, the measured pacing of analog time? A response, supposedly, to the same conditions that make capitalist realism feel totalizing.

To slow down. To go screenless. To be present. These have become bourgeois consumer experiences. Optimized rather than inhabited. And here we are, quantifying our own rejection of quantification, tracking time spent offline as if presence itself were a productivity metric.

But presence, too, is made of non-present elements. Productivity is made of non-productive elements. Critique, likewise, is made of non-critical elements—love, gratitude, those faculties of deep attention and presence. Different from measurement, an antidote to quantification.

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There is an overlap between “higher” consciousness in yogic traditions and politically “raised” consciousness in the radical movements of the 1970s. Both go back further. Political consciousness comes from the Marxist idea of class consciousness—the moment workers recognize that their collective interests outweigh their personal interests or cultural differences. Meanwhile, the idea of higher (or “elevated,” “universal,” “cosmic”) consciousness is rooted in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, which see the self as an illusion.

Liberation comes from seeing the self as just a fragment of a greater whole—a state sometimes called “enlightenment,” though the original Sanskrit term is more accurately translated as “awakening.” That “woke” would emerge as radical slang for political awareness seems, in this light, obvious.

I once heard someone say that Buddhism would become the dominant spiritual practice under late capitalism because it teaches total acceptance— “religion is the opiate of the people”! There is something unsettling about this. If acceptance is the end goal, does it foreclose radical change? Can one resist if one has already surrendered?

Maybe not. But maybe, in capitalism’s relentless present, the only way to endure is to cultivate a kind of detachment—not as surrender, but as a clearing. A space where another kind of consciousness might still emerge.

And in the clearing, maybe something else is there. Maybe happiness. Gratitude.

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Thank you for reading the second installment of INFINITE REGRESS by ISABELA CERVANTES. Each essay picks up threads from the last, letting ideas evolve, expand, and take on new shapes as they draw from one topic to the next. Discursiveness and the live essay expose the messy, dynamic, and always in progress process of critical thought. Here, you can follow along as this piece, which considers the fate of critique in contemporary art—where capitalism absorbs its own opposition—leads into something unexpected and entirely unrelated.

I’m excited to incorporate others’ ideas into this project, leave a comment to contribute!

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Some people brought books to ease their boredom and discomfort. It was easy to consider this outlet a cheat, for what was a night of silence other than a challenge to our limits of boredom and stillness. But who was I to judge? After all, I stayed for only an hour of the six offered, daring not to take on that Herculean task—or perhaps it was one of the mentalist.

This was last Sunday at Silence, an evening of no speaking and phones presented by writer of a forthcoming novel on bodybuilding, , and post-sociopolitical lit journal . The event was hosted at Dean Kissick’s experimental space called Earth.

Earth did not prepare the space for an evening of silence by insulating the room with soundproof materials. Yes, there was a generous selection of herbal teas, votive candles, and fine cotton cushions, none of which were meant to muffle the drunk passersby shouting about money, the taxi honks, and baby cries. The event was live-streamed on YouTube, a factor that some people believed to degrade the objective of the evening. (I can be seen arriving around 3:27:00.)

Along these lines, I don’t think we have ever believed that silence is the absence of sound. It is rather the absence of verbal human communication. For instance, I sit in silence in my bedroom, an ambulance racing by my window tears at my eardrums. Or, I sit in the park silently, the birds a chattering mass around me, yet I am at peace.

I am interested in that sensation that occurs when you experience utter quietness and the void presses into your ears, making you worry brain matter will begin spilling from your nose. This didn’t happen at Earth, although I would have been pleased if it had. There are very few scenarios where one is able to experience this pressureless pressure: true silence. A simulation of it at the bottom of a pool, perhaps.

Upon my entrance, this silence revealed itself not as a dictum but a riddle. Meant to determine what the night’s theme meant for ourselves, if gesturing and facial expressions, eye-contact was its own kind of shout, someone touches their wrist for the time. Fingers wave in air, a pointer presses 1 and then 1 and then the whole hand a high five slaps the air. It was movement that, I swear, was very loud. In fact, they also miscalculated the hour.

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In the evening’s configuration, where not speaking was a metaphysical quandary meant to elicit contemplation on the essence of presence and absence, silence could be defined as a type of solitude. And what did it mean to be alone when surrounded by others in the middle of New York City, especially others who are recognizable cultural figures, maybe whom we have never seen in person before?

The expectation was that we would not speak to one another in a setting where conversation is usually a libidinal source that advances not only our desire but our status. This simple law of silence — and I am now reminded of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962) where a group of bourgeoisie guests find themselves trapped in a house after a dinner party — had the potential to expose the frail structures that determine our social lives within a culture dominated by symbolism.

On Buñuel’s film, Robert Stam notes that it “is structured on the comic formula of a slow descent from normality into anarchy… The 'Angel' executes a mission of social justice, an apocalyptic laying low of the noble and the powerful.”

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Silence was an event laid out like an extended prayer. Castro and Cluny’s angel was more literal than Buñuel’s. Their angel of silence was not an exterminating one meant to subjugate the social paradigms that enable some and entrap others, but a gentle beast meant to bring us closer to God, together. And like the process of standing and singing and kneeling and standing and singing during Vespers, the durational quality of the evening is what challenged us most.

I fell into a state of meditation and I wondered if that, too, was a kind of cheat. Prayer differs from meditation because it is a state of utter presence, whereas meditation is one of aspirational, utter absence. Beginning in a posture of genuflection, after about ten minutes my feet became numb and I had to take up that of the lotus. I found this shift meaningful — my body moving from west to east — and in this motion, something was exposed.

We usually think of the east as stricter, more austere, but in these postures of reverence, the western stance of kneeling on hard ground arouses far more physical sensation — pain, if you will — that constantly calls attention to your body in space, your action, and intention.

That night, while intended as one of stillness, was in fact one of shifting and rustling, right to left, one leg under and then the other. Bring the pillow to the middle of the circle and then back to the wall. Stand up, make tea, use the restroom, sit down. Stare at me, stretch your neck, stretch your legs out and pull them in again. Stare into the candle flame, pour the wax on your hand. Stand up again. Sit down again. Don’t speak; stare.

Did those most disciplined get the most out of the evening? Was the restlessness a product of our ADHD minds, our addicted phalanges craving to doom scroll, or was there something more physiological at play? Are we not meant to be sitting for so long in repose?

Some say our inability to sit comfortably on the ground stems from the modern convenience of diapers. In many Eastern cultures, infants are traditionally trained without them — placed on a rag resting on their mother’s stomach, learning through subtle gestures and linguistic cues. A mother tunes into her preternatural sense of her child’s needs, able to detect when her child has to use the restroom. She brings them onto her belly and rubs their stomach in a downward motion, whispering the word for “pee” or “poop” to condition the child. Eventually they will be able to respond physically to the word, instead of being a part of a more physical process.

Forgoing the restrictive hold diapers maintain on babies’ joints, the hip and sacrum are able to develop properly. Floor-sitting, in turn, is most comfortable and even preferred over a chair or stool. In theory, we could sit for an eternity in lotus pose, like the 200 year old swamis they uncover from caves in the Himalayas who are not yet dead, hair and fingernails building off their dead matter in spirals.

Slowing down is the new live fast, die young — a New York Minute has become sheerly a measurement useful as a denominator. Denuded of our costumes of language, some more elaborate than others based on loftier reputations, the night of silence was a practice of this new observational life.

I watched Dean Kissick in his colorful sweater and jeans, peeled apart from his Harper’s piece and his Red Scare panel discussion. Here was a man, a bit smaller than I imagined, older in the way the candles drew dark rivets into his face, who seemed very open to others. Contrarily, Jordan Castro, perhaps in his deep focus on inner discipline, seemed more aloof, defensive.

We construct ourselves through language, obscuring our true nature (if we are to believe such a thing is real) to the rest of the world. In silence, which is an opportunity to learn more about others than we could otherwise, we stand exposed, vulnerable. Many attendees of the night of silence kept their eyes downcast, unsure whether they were the observer or the observed, whether they wants to partake in this new social fabric or ignore the subtle truths that were emerging with the space.

Leaving after an hour, I felt calm. Or something like calm filled me like a second blood. That particular kind of peace that comes not from quiet, but from duration, from having sat through something without leaving too early or too late. Outside, the Lower East Side was still, in a blizzarded slush. I thought: I should have stayed longer. I thought: An hour was enough. It was never going to be enough.

Silence, it turned out, was not what I had expected. It wasn’t an absence of something, not really. It was a thing that filled the room. A presence, heavy and irrefutable, like a third party to every glance and gesture. The way people shifted, subtly, crossing and uncrossing their legs, staring at their hands, looking around without appearing to look. The weight of it all. The way silence exposes the fundamental restlessness of the body, a nervous system wired for interruption.

I wondered if a night like this, even if it happened every week, would change anything. If the absence of language would begin to accumulate, to gain meaning and change a culture utterly contingent on words. Would we become different people in the silence, or just the same, stripped of our usual methods of concealment?

There is a kind of clarity here. The kind that doesn’t reassure, doesn’t offer answers, but insists on being. In a city that demands speed, I had the feeling that slowing down wasn’t necessarily better. Just different. Just another way of reality.

And yet, I wanted more of it. To come back, to sit longer, to see what else would surface when there was nothing to say.

“What am I to do? I can’t bear living. Life is so short, and yet I can’t stand living.”

“I don’t know. I feel the same. But there are things, lots of things. There’s a point where despair is a light, a love.”

“And after that?”

“After that comes Nature.”

“Are you calling death nature?”

“No, I’m calling nature Nature.”

“Have all lives always been like this?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

Clarice Lispector, September 9, 1967

They give you these lights that are supposed to mimic the light of the sun, significantly more enriching than fluorescent, halogen, incandescent, or the blue light of your screen, which is actually, they say, damaging to the ocular nerve and one’s potential to deep dream. Well, they don’t give them to you. You have to buy them. Large panels of whitish yellow light that hang on your walls or fixtures with several articulated arms, each hand a bulb that gives you an all-around illumination outside and in. An illumination of the psyche, of the intellect, of creativity. All relationship issues of the 21st century could be solved by a little illumination, don’t you think?

In Ayurvedic medicine, it is believed one can heal poor eyesight by regularly staring into the flames of a candle. I wonder if the same physical processes can occur when the candlelight is onscreen. Our artificial fire burns on a TV mounted over a decorative fireplace, its crackling heard throughout the apartment. Most searches on YouTube for live fireplace result in quivering flames forged out of artificial intelligence’s pixelated gel, as unavailing as it is lazy. In a world where water and fire are made from AI, an image of the Hollywood sign burning up in flames is extremely symbolic.

Derealized tragedy sticks in the throat like a fishbone. My dad taught me a trick once to ameliorate this internal discomfort, like an itch of the pancreas. In the Philippines, he was told to swallow a banana whole, skin and all, to dispel such pernicious melancholia. The issue, now, however, is it is more like a watermelon seed: you swallow one whole and grow a garden inside you.

Someone in Minnesota has a river birch farm that runs along the Saint Croix River. Their YouTube channel is called by the name of the river, but instead of water, it's an unending stream of fire. Burning their harvest in a sizable metal fireplace is a ritual to share. Their leather gloved hands set the torch to the birches whose bleached skin dissolves like toilet paper. The trunks are organized in different shapes. In one video, the birches begin as a boy scouts cabin, in another, a jewelry box from which a ballerina springs forth and twirls to Mozart’s Requiem.

Time is constituted as a river of the imagination. We dream of it in flows, a second merges into a minute merges into an hour, a day, a week, a year, just as the tides lap sensually at the shore—what is degraded? The shore, of course. It falls into the sea. Similarly, it is said that our individual consciousness is one drop in the sea of universal consciousness, made of the same molecules, fundamentally the same, a fractal of the whole.

The speed of a flame’s transformation from one shape to the next occurs at a level too elusive to the camera obscura. Flames lick so quickly that when shot with a regular video camera, they seem to be glitching. Perhaps their evasiveness is what strengthens the muscles of the human eye, which labors to chase an ephemeral purple or green into the folds of red, orange, and black.

When shot statically, a flame abandons its chaos, its nature unravels into something simpler, more serene. It becomes a tangerine blur, the essence of ‘light’ revealing itself in a transient clarity. At its core: a solid, glowing nucleus, paradoxical in its purity, the inverse of a black hole, a point of no collapse. Around it, the world responds, not as if it were a mirror reflection, but as something touched, illuminated, awakened by a presence.

Barthes views photography as a “certificate of presence” for subjects that are no longer. Photography immortalizes things while also emphasizing their absence, thus reinforcing the tension between life and death. Unlike other forms of art, the impact of a photograph lies in the viewer’s personal relationship to its content, particularly through the punctum, a highly individual detail in the surface that one viewer finds poignant and another might not notice. The punctum is shaped by the viewer’s subjectivity—memories, emotions, and experiences. It differs from the studium, which represents the general, cultural, or intellectual interest one might have in a photograph.

In the photographs of the Los Angeles fires, one may glimpse a bent traffic sign or a craggy hill evocative of a childhood play site. An American flag rests like a stillborn amidst a roiling, liquid apocalypse. A play structure dissolves into shadow. Society has collected around these photographs, distinguishing its strata based on each person’s emotional proximity to the contents. Someone’s house burns up: perhaps it is my house, or my neighbor’s house, or a house I drove past on my way to work, or a house I once saw on Zillow, or a house that belonged to a friend of a friend, or a house of a celebrity, or a house containing a history that I associate myself with, or a house containing a precious library of a world I wish I knew more about.

Our imagination begins to play at sorrow, we imbibe the tragedy as if it were our own through these photographs. As effectual as they are general, at the same time, these photographs exists outside of Barthes’ location of the subjective and objective. Where is the punctum in the photographs of the fire when small, overlooked details are not hidden but absorbed by the main subject of the photograph? The fire minimizes our ability to be surprised or moved in ways that cannot be fully explained or rationalized because it is dominating and obsessive.

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One of the most shared images from the LA fires could be vintage film treated with red toner. The golden arches of McDonald’s stand behind a grove of palms that lash back as though someone, and maybe it was God, took a saw to their metal necks. It gives one the idea of some ecologically-minded MFA project: “a non-anthropocentric Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” or something.

What gets me about these photos of the fires is how the punctum is the fire itself, the pure viscerality of the element forces us beyond any intellectual analysis. Fire is also the studium that binds us together through its destruction: a new logic of social organization? Barthes distinguishes photography from other mediums because it mechanically reproduces what was physically in front of the lens, making it an unmediated imprint of reality. Unless, that is, the photograph is digitally manipulated, like this: A crude cutout of Angelina Jolie or Tom Hanks is pasted into the foreground of a Hollywood Hills mansion engulfed by fire, the caption: “X’s home narrowly escaped the fate of the elements.”

I find it interesting how some photographers used the fires as an opportunity to demonstrate metaphysics. For instance, a swimming pool sits still reflecting the rapidly growing grey and orange bushes. Imagine: instead of standing in a room with the walls gradually closing in on you, you were surrounded by a hastily multiplying rose bush, its soft smell becoming more pungent by the second. And its thorns. My personal favorite captures one’s fine china sunken onto the steps of the pool. While the photograph itself is not taken with any craft, it does contain a punctum and studium. Fine china, Titanic, swimming pools, class, attachment, desire, fear. Why? Because of the absence of visible flame.

I can understand now the reason for digitally stoking a burning hearth instead of attempting to capture the real thing on video. There is an ease in the lack of ambiguity. While the burning of the Library of Alexandria stands one of the most distinguished events of ancient history, its causes and origins are still uncertain. Plutarch blamed Caesar; Edward Gibbons, a staunch atheist, blamed Theophilus the Christian; Bishop Gregory, an anti-Muslim, blamed Omar. Agendas and incomplete evidence leave the library’s evisceration not as an event but an incomplete process—supposedly Mark Anthony gifted Cleopatra 200,000 scrolls from the library decades after Caesar was accused of ignition.

The burning of the Library of Alexandria was a long and piecemeal destruction obscured by centuries of blame and misremembering. Gary Indiana’s library was similarly undone not by flames but by the quiet, corrosive inevitability of time. Books piled on floors, water damage creeping in, papers decaying into humid air. Let us not think of his library as burned now, but unravelled. It was undid and still lingers, not as an absence, but in fragments and replicas. Something remembered, imagined, something reassembled.

Photographs of fire could never be an encapsulation of reality because fire, in its distortion and constant reframing of its subject, is a kind of medium itself. As such, it transforms reality from one thing to the next. This is how the element is viewed in Vedic philosophy, as the element of transformation. In its dual nature to create and destroy, it always restores things to balance. Los Angeles has never been a city of balance, but rather one always on the precipice of destruction.

As observed by Jean Baudrillard: “In years to come cities will stretch out horizontally and will be non-urban (Los Angeles). After that, they will bury themselves in the ground and will no longer have names. Everything will become infrastructure bathed in artificial light and energy.”

Also: “Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm.”

I remember once in college, at Pomona, in Claremont, my friend let me borrow his new BMW. It was one of those nights I can’t place in time, fall or spring semester, the seasons blurring together in the warmth of Southern California. My friend T and I were heading into the city for a show, and for some reason, we snorted a few lines of cocaine before driving. Maybe for the thrill, you know, the invincibility.

Growing up, my parents shared a decrepit Subaru, forest green, its engine a pneumoniac chain-smoker worse than my grandma. It’s easy to recall the rare moments when their paychecks finally permitted daydreams to become real. The black Toyota for my dad, a Honda Odyssey for my mom: We whirled around the neighborhood as though in a fish tank. The arrival of those cars felt monumental, like an unspoken declaration that life could change. That’s how objects function for the working class.

But then—blazing across the 210 at midnight, feeling like the center of it all. High on cocaine, driving a borrowed BMW toward a Silverlake rave where we’d stay until 4 a.m., and end the night at a 24-hour pho shop. Blazing down the hills which fell away before us, the city opened up, welcoming us as a flickering expanse of lights and possibility. Rich, famous, and interesting? I could have been fire.

What we remember becomes significant to us, always in that order. Everything else is just nature.

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SOMEHOW WE MANAGED to find two seats in the middle of a larger group who had, among other things, brought a handle of vodka in a purse to the Christmas screening of Nosferatu (2024). Their hot, intoxicated breath carried over our noses, bragging about how high they were from their THC gummies. Someone was already regretting taking a microdose of shrooms as the mercurial bloom of Robert Eggers’ cinematic experience touched their ocular curve and pushed further deep into their gray matter. I was expecting a party, but they were fairly tame; bored, if anything, maybe even asleep. At the end of the film, all I heard was “That was a fucking trip,” and “Lily-Rose Depp ate.”

At this point in time, it is more common than not to experience cinema stoned, drunk, or somewhere in between. Films like Eggers’ Nosferatu respond to this trend, its content and style catered to an audiences’ inebriated perception. Developed from this state, Eggers’ cinema and other films, many of which have been produced by the production company A24, have established a new logic of entertainment, one that ultimately reflects a cultural moment defined by detachment and sensory consumption.

This creates a kind of cinema-as-event, where the primary goal is immersion, not interpretation.

As audiences seek sensory immersion over narrative complexity, filmmakers respond by crafting films that cater to altered states of perception. At the same time, these films reinforce audience expectations, creating a cycle wherein boundaries between sobriety and intoxication blur. In traditional cinema, filmmakers aimed to provoke intellectual engagement or emotional catharsis, encouraging audiences to reflect on themes and narratives beyond the theater. In new films, the act of consumption itself is centered, shifting from what a film means to how it feels—how it envelops the viewer in its sound and imagery. This creates a kind of cinema-as-event, where the primary goal is immersion, not interpretation.

I might call this new form of cinema Substance Dependent Cinema (SDC): films that do not require viewers to be intoxicated but are crafted to mimic, enhance, or complement the experience of altered states. Through hypnotic pacing, immersive soundscapes, and disorienting visuals, SDC reshapes how audiences engage with cinema, prioritizing feeling over meaning, and confined experience over historical engagement.

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Growing up, I was obsessed with horror movies. In high school, I’d casually drop titles like Cannibal Holocaust (1985), A Serbian Film (2010), and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) into conversations—a deliberate provocation akin to pricking my finger as a child to scare off others with the flourish of blood. Morbidity can be a coping mechanism. In the cavern beneath my lofted bed, handmade by my father, I consumed these films voraciously. Despite their gruesome content, they shuddered me out of my troubled existence into a place that, paradoxically, felt safe.

My affinity for horror films was later bolstered by my use of marijuana. Stoned, the carnality of gore reverberated through my body in a way that felt profoundly existential. Violence on screen—blood seeping and coagulating—was no longer repulsive, but resonant, an evocation of my own corporeality. Violence became almost sensual: an aphrodisiac. Contained on screen, violence has the potential to feel like liberation, a portal to somewhere else entirely.

Falling asleep as a child, I always imagined the nothingness of death because I liked the sensation of vague, vertiginous panic. There was something lulling about this; attempting to fathom the infinity of non-existence was kind of like counting sheep. Cinematic violence captivates one similarly. More than satiating one’s morbid curiosity, it is a way of confronting the void.

In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger describes shuddering as a sensation of experiencing the void, the groundlessness of being. The original German Erschrecken means most literally “to be so shocked or surprised by something that you find is difficult to believe or accept.” Death is the primary truth that shocks us: gory images or performances like the Japanese Butoh are analogs of its omnipresence and can shudder us into knowing.

Heidegger elaborates: “The shudder is not mere trembling, but rather the shock of the abyss of the world.” Unlike Kierkegaard’s trembling, associated with the confrontation of the absurd and the individual’s struggle with faith, freedom, and ethical responsibility, shuddering pertains specifically to nothingness and the contingency of existence.

Shuddering is a kind of revelation, where the concealed structures underpinning our existence such as identity, family, and society, are momentarily exposed. Horror films face us with the ruthless, inevitable abjection of our lives. When you’re high at the point of this confrontation, you can feel death most vividly. Nothing is solved by this interaction, merely revealed. Much cinema that induces shuddering is often poorly scripted, plotless, or at least brutally clichéd. Interestingly, by tripping away the comfort of narrative resolution or visual familiarly, audiences are left in a tête-à-tête with their own fundamental vulnerability.

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The Internet’s newfound morbidity complimented my fixation on cinematic violence. Sites like Cannibal Cafe offered forums for taboo fantasies like consensual cannibalism, while Rotten.com hosted grotesque media—suicides, murders, mutilations. Growing up in the fringes of suburban monotony and working-class despair, these sites offered a jolt, a kind of truth buried in shock. In these images of suffering, there was an affirmation. It was where the hiddenness of my pain became incarnate.

Several years ago, I had a friend who wasn’t addicted to oxycodone but enjoyed it recreationally. I knew him to pop a pill or two after work, in the dredges of the night, for he worked in a kitchen, as a pizza maker. It wasn’t a daytime drug. I knew him to sit on the couch all night on his phone, sedation gradually giving into a restless and disturbed sleep. Sometimes, he would scroll through streaming services, taking hours to find something to watch. He always landed on a single film, which would lull him into soporific annihilation. The film was The Witch (2016), Eggers’ breakthrough film.

I first watched The Witch during my self-proclaimed ‘moderation’ of three spliffs a day. It was the era of A24, when films like Spring Breakers (2013) and Under the Skin (2015) evolved the sensationalism of nascent internet culture for the big screen. By 2012, Rotten.com had been deactivated, but its spirit lingered in A24’s neo-horror, a genre that moved away from overt monsters and gore toward atmospheric dread and sensory engagement.

A24’s films are about a feeling: one of simultaneous escape, thrill, danger, and freedom. In other words, the feeling of being stoned and watching a snuff film. The shock factor of violent images has been tempered by the form of these films: discordant pacing, oppressive soundscapes, and disorienting cinematography evolve the flatness of two-dimensional visuals into an immersive, three-dimensional shuddering.

While the medium has the potential to enhance empathy, the reliance on cinema for shared experiences and narratives can simultaneously reduce the autonomy of individual memory and imagination.

Content has become secondary to medium, and medium itself has shifted—it is less about how a story is told and more about how it saturates the audience’s sensorium with the film’s essence. Made porous by substances, audiences are already tuned to this calibration.

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At its core, Substance Dependent Cinema has reimagined how we engage with screens. For French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, cinema is not just a representational medium but an affective and sensory experience that engages the viewer’s emotions and perceptions.

Sound, image, and editing are all a type of technics that help extend the human mind, allowing viewers to experience time, places, and emotions beyond their immediate reality. Stiegler is critical of this industrialization of cinema, for while the medium has the potential to enhance empathy, the reliance on cinema for shared experiences and narratives can simultaneously reduce the autonomy of individual memory and imagination.

Those who have used substances might recall the claustrophobia of experience, in which objects and sensations feel so saturated with meaning that they overwhelm: Panic ensues. SDC uniquely dissolves this semantic claustrophobia, making it particularly suited for inebriated viewing. Films like Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021) counteract this overwhelm through their openness, offering the sensory world room to breathe. This expansiveness is embodied in Dune’s vast desert, while Hans Zimmer’s score deepens the immersion, pulling the audience into a realm unburdened by rigid interpretations.

Unlike films by, for instance, Bergman or Pasolini, who lock audiences into tightly controlled symbolic frameworks, Dune embraces ambiguity. Through silence, vastness, and scale, it attempts at evoking a sense of awe rather than focus. This openness alleviates the pressure to extract meaning, instead allowing viewers to drift within its narrative current—leaving the theater with no clearer memory of its contents than of a deep dream. For me, one IPA in, I fell asleep.

Blurring the boundaries between sober and altered states, SDC is a kind of prosthetic that heightens engagement—or, at the very least, serves as a lullaby. In this way, our capacity to experience is extended: “The image, the recording, and its temporal structure are not only memories, but prostheses for thought,” writes Stiegler. Yet Stiegler warns of mass media, including cinema, which often “short-circuits” attention. By conditioning audiences to consume rapidly, cinema risks replacing deep reflection with fleeting absorption. Viewers may drift in the coruscating currents of sensation rather than plunging into its depths.

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Sound design is essential to Substance Dependent Cinema and forges a connection to a lineage of other substance dependent media, particularly music. From Dune to The Green Knight (2021), soundscapes create an immersive grip that aligns cinema with the history of rave culture and the improvisational ethos of the Grateful Dead. In these traditions, sound is not merely heard; it is felt, absorbed, and inhabited.

These musical experiences cultivate an altered state where sound transcends its functional role, immersing the listener in a liminal space where time and self blur into uncertainty.

Take techno and MDMA as an example: The genre’s repetitive beats, paired with the drug’s ability to heighten sensation, dissolve the boundaries between self and other and transform music from a passive auditory experience into a visceral, all-encompassing phenomenon. Similarly, the combination of ketamine and drum & bass fragments time and perception in a kaleidoscope of disjointed sensations and reassembled realities. These musical experiences cultivate an altered state where sound transcends its functional role, immersing the listener in a liminal space where time and self blur into uncertainty.

The Grateful Dead’s live performances were a precursor to this form. Their long, improvisational jams, designed for audiences often under the influence of LSD, prioritized atmosphere over structure. Sonic journeys dissolved traditional boundaries between performer and listener, fostering a communal experience of shared rhythm and collective emotion. The music became not a series of songs but an expansive, evolving universe, enveloping audiences in an environment that mirrored the altered states of consciousness facilitated by psychedelics.

What’s particularly fascinating about SDC is how it positions cinema as the inheritor of these sonic traditions while evolving them further. Unlike music, which relies on sound as its sole medium, cinema can integrate a broader arsenal of technics—visuals, editing, and narrative—to construct immersive environments. In SDC, sound design often becomes the anchor that binds these elements together, constructing a sensorial framework where the film unfolds less as a linear narrative and more as an experiential landscape.

This multimodal approach enables cinema to shape experiences with unparalleled complexity, positioning it as uniquely capable of creating Stiegler’s “open spaces:” spaces that are not confined to a single sense but instead invite the audience to inhabit an experience fully, engaging on sensory, emotional, and intellectual levels.

In Robert Eggers’ films, the “open space” manifests as shadowy and liminal; time stretches, sound engulfs, and meaning becomes optional. Yet, this is where the comparison to communal experiences like raves or Grateful Dead concerts becomes fraught, and Stiegler’s critique of technics gains relevance. While those communal spaces thrive on mutual ecstasy and consciousness, SDC, as exemplified by Eggers, often becomes a solitary immersion. Watching his Nosferatu is isolating; its heavy style was ensnaring rather than seductive, entrapping instead of communal.

Twice remade, Nosferatu and its archetypal figures—Count Orlok and Ellen Hutter—have long been etched into the cultural imagination. Their mythologized status makes them an ideal match for Eggers, whose films frequently strip characters of psychological complexity, rendering them as symbols rather than fully dynamic individuals. In Nosferatu, Count Orlok is not a man, nor even a vampire; he is a shadow, a hunger, a pure embodiment of dread. Ellen Hutter, portrayed Lily-Rose Depp’s facsimile of her predecessor Isabelle Adjani, functions less as a person and more as an icon of sacrifice, purity, and, on a meta-level, theatrical tradition.

Here, the claustrophobia becomes not only semantic or spatial, but existential. A claustrophobia of the ego. We are immersed, but not connected, and this amplifies our alienation.

Using archetypes has its merits. By abstracting his characters, Eggers creates a canvas for audiences to project their own fears and desires, amplifying the film’s universal resonance. However, the limitations of this approach are equally apparent. Archetypes, by their nature, allow little room for evolution or surprise. The tragic arc of Nosferatu’s narrative, in turn, becomes almost paradoxical: The film’s heightened atmosphere is nullified in its predictability.

For SDC, atmosphere comes at the cost of connection. Here, the claustrophobia becomes not only semantic or spatial, but existential. A claustrophobia of the ego. We are immersed, but not connected, and this amplifies our alienation. Nosferatu exemplifies what Stiegler calls the industrialization of memory. As an early process, primitive technologies enabled humans to externalize and standardize memory through rituals and writing; but this has been further diminished with technological advancement.

History is now reduced to aestheticized fragments, foreclosing deeper engagement with its truths. This industrialization isolates individuals from collective traditions, conditioning them to passively consume prepackaged narratives rather than critically reflect on them.

Central to both the power and limitation of Eggers’ Nosferatu is the automation of memory. The film’s meticulously curated aesthetic conditions attention, drawing viewers into its shadowy world while simultaneously constraining their engagement with its themes. By relying heavily on gothic tropes and archetypal structures rooted in cultural memory, Eggers commodifies the past, transforming it into a cinematic artifact that reflects, rather than interrogates, its historical origins.

The desires and beliefs Nosferatu elicits are, therefore, not born of revelation but of recognition—less about opening new interpretive possibilities and more about reaffirming a familiar, preconditioned sense of dread and awe. In this way, Nosferatu exemplifies the dual role of cinema as both a repository of collective memory and a tool for its industrialization, leaving the viewer caught between the illusion of choice and the inevitability of preordained affective responses.

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The ultimate takeaway of Substance Dependent Cinema is that it is never as profound as it seems to be in the moment. Such can be said about substance use in general. I scarcely remember all the poetry and revelations of mushrooms; the cringy prosaic diary entries written while stoned. A similar feeling lingered after experiencing Nosferatu.

In recent years, for some of us, substance reliance has shifted to sobriety. For me, this shift stemmed from heartbreak over the empty promises drugs offer: exceptionalism, genius, connection, and fun. Drugs mediate, often with pleasure, our engagement with the world; yet in doing so, they distance us from the actual matter of our temporal lives: the enduring, psychedelic experience of being.

Stiegler’s assertion that “the industrialization of memory, through technologies such as cinema, conditions the attention of individuals, shaping their desires and beliefs,” underscores the unsettling nature of films like Nosferatu. There must be something unethical about reducing history to atmosphere and utilizing the past without reinvigorating it; such an action leads to a widening temporal schism between the present and history.

In this way, those enacting such unethics perpetuate the loss of the “primordial temporality” that connects individuals to the rhythms and realities of lived experiences. Instead of fostering understanding, filmmakers like Eggers risk engendering disconnection from knowledge, memory, and the capacity for genuine critical engagement.

What is most disturbing about Nosferatu is not its evocation of dread, but its tendency to foreclose meaning. This nihilistic drift is a disorientation of our desire, pulling us further from understanding the forces that shape our existence. As I sat in the theater, I thought about how cinema has the power to move us deeply into our bodies—but also out of them. For years, horror films grounded me, the sensation of violence reverberated in my marrow, connecting me to something primal and raw. But SDC blurs this connection. Nosferatu lures us into a cloud, offering not an anchoring confrontation with reality, but a seduction into detachment.

Heidegger’s notion of shuddering as an encounter with groundlessness becomes, in SDC, a carefully curated simulation of shock, stripped of its transformative potential. Perhaps the most unsettling truth of Nosferatu is how perfectly it mirrors the disoriented desires of our time. We are like Dionysus, frantically dancing, drinking, and fucking—not to embrace life, but to flee from the truth of who we are: Hades in disguise, forever bound to the underworld of our making.

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Thank you for reading the first installment of INFINITE REGRESS by ISABELA CERVANTES. Each essay picks up threads from the last, letting ideas evolve, expand, and take on new shapes as they draw from one topic to the next. Discursiveness and the live essay expose the messy, dynamic, and always in progress process of critical thought. Here, you can follow along as one piece on substance-dependent cinema leads to another on something unexpected and entirely unrelated.

I’m excited to incorporate others’ ideas into this project, leave a comment to contribute!

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The apartment belonged to a boy called M, whom I wasn’t able to identify by face let alone intuition. He was dependently wealthy, meaning despite a friendly reputation as a very good painter, not a single one of his four bedrooms was a product of his successes. Instead, it was obvious that a patron was involved. We shouldn’t say it’s familial or hereditary because ascribing wealth in such a way is no more polite than phrenology.

Enshrouded in clothes made from cotton and linen, or donning face paint with their genitals exposed, some people were dressed as saints, others as demons. The theme of the party was one Italian director whose work courts scandal not for the sake of attention but because he believed that scandal might illuminate, or even redeem. For a nondenominational holiday party set on the winter solstice, naïve to the spiritual or historical relevance of such an event, redemption was found in the living room near the windows. A table filled with different spirits, including hard and soft beverages, seventeen types of cheese, and a homemade panettone with gold leaf candied fruits.

I was invited by my ex, who would likely be ruffled by this title. If every man I’d spent months passing a quarter of our time together and the other three-fourths separately, me pitifully infatuated, gave me $20, then I’d have enough money to pay my exorbitant Brooklyn rent for a year. We were not doing anything other than ‘hanging out’ for several months and while I thought I rested scarcely in his mind, his close friends knew my birthplace, the name of my first pet, even my favorite fictional character when I was growing up. The unfamiliar vividness of myself was dissociating.

I made cookies to contribute to the altar; most people brought cocaine.

Crossing hands, one reaching for the taleggio, the other for the pickled mushrooms, introductions were tense. It was a point of pride how few people one knew at the party. I met an expressive couple who brought snickerdoodles wrapped in torn-up tin foil. The guy was impressed with the pan offerings, he found a kind of dinner roll stuffed with an unidentifiable green substance. To the tongue, it tasted like apples. She, on the other hand, was taken by the remarkable dearth of familiar faces.

“I only know two people here, you and my roommate,” she said to me.

They were the kind of couple who joked their partner wasn’t in romance, only in lease. I learned later they hadn’t been invited and had, from the street, simply followed music up the stairwell.

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My ex was dressed like a love interest of the Italian director. He had cut his bangs to resemble the emperor Hadrian’s and wore a tight angora sweater so it exposed his naval. His darting eyes, red-veined and restless, made him seem like he was holding his breath. The night demanded constant vigilance. But now that I think about it, the director's taste was more proletariat. Attracted to working hands and stomachs, bright eyes set into a fatigued surface, the director was a prominent materialist Uranian of the 20th century. Everyone at the party had supple faces with taught glances as if their pupils were joints, their tendons extended outside of the body, gossip was lubrication.

M, the host, had four bedrooms and they all had beds in them despite him being the only inhabitant. At a certain point in the night, a large group of attendees ascended to the second bedroom to wait. A hooded figure arrived fourteen minutes later, handing out party favors like petite perfumes and seasonal tea tins. Unshrouding himself, he then laid down onto the bed and allowed people to take turns pressing their orifices against his naked skin. When it was my turn, I pushed my right ear against his chest. I felt childish, almost embarrassed, by my expectations. His skin was cold. I could hardly hear a heartbeat.

At midnight, people began to spill their red wine on the carpets. Someone sloshed a bottle onto their friend’s private area and a woman, the most beautiful one at the party, a dancer, took him into the bathroom to rinse himself with salt and seltzer. Others began to dissolve akin. I sat on the couch avoiding disaster. It was the only place to sit in the room and I was joined by others whose legs were beginning to exhaust. They spoke of Rome and Turin, and then of Naples.

They talked about leaving New York once and for all, in the Eat Pray Love kind of way.

I learned that when you grow up in New York City, you tend to perceive everything as encroaching on your right to be. Noises, bodies, shared spaces are negotiations of existence. He sat next to me on the couch; our shoulders touching proved some point about something. Asking me if the fundamental difference between east coasters and west coasters was the desire for civilization versus nature, he still avoided me directly.

When I asked him what he meant by civilization, he shrugged and said, “You know, hanging out.”

His glib answers were always too casual for their own pretensions.

“Do you mean like the structures that bind us, the spaces where we perform living, you know, how Agamben talks about it?” He told me to stop being so prescriptive. Here was another one where I overthought and he refused to think too hard about it.

Towards the end of the night, when most people started to leave, the dancer reemerged from her stain-removal procedure and began to strip. She started with her left shoe and then her right. She took off her earrings and let down her hair. Then, she laid herself atop the chaise lounge and fell asleep. The dancer began to dream, mumbling inchoate phrases to the rest of us like “mother tried” and “pace alone” and “grain-free.” When someone opened the window to smoke inside, she whispered “frigid air.” I felt the faintest flicker of envy. She had mastered the art of existing without participating and we all stared in amazement at consciousness’s ability to simultaneously withdraw and remain sensate to the world.

My ex left the party before I did. I stayed behind, sipping water with the party-crashers, who, by then, had become an accidental tribute to the Italian director in their unintentional pageant of eros and alienation. By morning, we had all dispersed. I woke at 3 PM to a text from him apologizing for his haircut. Bangs, it seems, are the cinema of crisis: immediate, declarative, and irretrievable. It was too late—or maybe too early—to respond.

“The body is our general medium for having a world”—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

The fact that her name is Margarita has no resonance while she drinks her margarita. Oops, not blended. Oops, not on the rocks either. No ice, please. She begs with her fake Spanish. When your tongue hits your two front teeth, that is real Spanish. Not this hissing like a rattle snake—gasp! The mighty Quetzalcoatl.

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A technicolor whoosh of feathers dances through the cantina to the beat of a stick against animal hide pulled taut over a branch. Stomachs are rumbling from the tequila tasting, where Margarita declined the procession of alcohols derived from the agave plant. Three small worms form the nucleus of addiction in its specter form, a father or a dead brother, perhaps? But it is obviously not her worry of spirit, but her worry of what moves beneath the microscope, so to speak.

She drinks her margarita warm and we are all surprised when she orders the carne asada plate, especially after the tour bus passed the dried up donkey flesh grilling on the grates of a shopping cart. Coal is so porous and light but stains everything and burns wild, wild, wild all desert night. Get this, our tour guide says at the base of an ancient ruin. His laminated photo binder digs into his armpit like a cactus thorn. I just made this soup last night, he says, removing the binder and rapidly fingering through it, stopping at a photo that looks like a blinding sun. That is the sun. That is pozole, he says. Yes, we had pozole last night, I answer.

Pozole was a ceremonial soup of the Aztecs. After a sacrifice, they would take the human head and boil it to make a rich broth. The rest of the body was chopped up and added, along with hominy. After the Spanish conquest and the suppression of Aztec religious practices, the use of human flesh was banned. According to some accounts, pork became a substitute for human flesh in pozole because the Spanish noticed a similarity in taste and texture. Pink and fatty, gray after sitting, easily chilled.

You won’t believe it, but Margarita yelped like one of those stray dogs, as if she believed she had ingested the heart! We all knew the heart was the object of sacrifice, ripped out of the sternum of the honored, never tasted by the diabolical papillae of mortal soldiers.

Margarita knows something that we do not, that by the time we will arrive home after this tour our stomachs will turn against us. Is that what happened when a sacrificed heard his calling? A yearning of the heart to be ripped from its cavity and shown to the sun? Inanimate, the body was kicked down the steps of the pyramid into the microbial dust.

Her hair has gotten bigger throughout the day like Medusa’s, the sun ripples behind her like a shrine. In the bathroom, Margarita nibbles from a small bag of pretzels held clandestinely in her purse and then reapplies her lipstick. Her lipstick is the color brown, a brown tinged with blood.

Now I say this delicately, as to not hurt anyone’s feelings, although I know that Margarita won’t be reading anything on a platform dedicated to this kind of writing. What pride I have left after losing my lower intestine and esophagus to a germ last week makes me think that Margarita is nothing but an inauthentic whore.

We were sitting in the ‘living room’ talking about the phenomenon of people our age having nice things but no money. Above G’s head hung a poster for Michael Haneke’s movie Happy End. It was the only decoration in the apartment which was cold and bare: The windows had to stay ajar because of the gas leak from behind the oven.

“Can’t you get brain damage from inhaling natural gas?” asked S.

“That’s why I keep the windows open,” said G.

The superintendent would be there on Monday. It was only Friday.

Sometimes you overhear something that changes your life. I say overhear because it is not granted to you head on, as a piece of advice. But it is spoken around you, a general point meant to ignite interest and admiration. If it were spoken directly, it would have been a tip—the kind of knowledge that one lives so you don’t have to.

A basic irony in this kind of exchange is both party’s inability to speak directly, as if it wasn’t the case that one was essentially a test subject and the other one the lab tech. This analogy doesn’t hold up though, because the power dynamic between parties is actually the opposite: Our so-to-speak test subject holds not only significant cultural clout over the lab tech, but also embodies the kind of wisdom one could only imagine coming into this day and age.

So, when G began to walk us through the steps of stealing from Whole Foods, I listened intently, as though I was learning the secret to Kundalini awakening.

I learned that there are many tricks of this trade. The most time-consuming is ordering expensive clothing from Nordstrom.com or Ssense.com and then back charging your credit card. I have never done this, of course, but I’ve heard of people doing — getting their Bottega Veneta puddle boots and Rick Owens down puffer for free.

You have to open several credit accounts in order to pull this off, or else your account will be flagged for suspicious activity. Diversifying the sites of your purchase is also integral to success, or at least having several accounts with different emails. But even then, your address and name will be a part of their system and at some point or another they will discover your trick.

Might, that is. They might discover your trick. And who is ‘they’? We assume that each entity is like a hawk-eyed parent waiting for you to come home with blood-shot, squinty eyes and a rapacious appetite. However realistically our information dissolves into the algorithm. Stealing requires us to convince ourselves that we will not be caught.

“It is dumb easy to pretend to scan your stuff at self-checkout,” said G.

“But don’t the staff see you?” asked S.

“Maybe they do, but it doesn’t matter because no one gives a shit. They have a no heroes policy there which means they can’t approach you or apprehend you if they see you stealing,” G explained, “My girlfriend used to work at Whole Foods.”

“But check this out,” G continued, “The other week we got like $100 steaks for $10.”

Then, rattling and jolting open, the front door revealed Ivan, G’s roommate. He lumbered to the kitchen and started cooking oatmeal with his work boots on. Not as much a nod of acknowledgement.

“First I bought like three breakfast sausages from the butcher counter and then after checking out, I ripped the price sticker off of it and handed it off to my girlfriend who was waiting inside. Then, she went and ordered the two most expensive steaks from the butcher. Maybe it was filet mignon, you know, the one with bacon wrapped around it? And then she slapped the sticker over the price, scanned the barcode for the sausages, and that was it,” G said.

“$100 steaks for $10,” he repeated at the end.

“Not bad,” S said.

“It’s a fool proof method.”

Chiming in with my two cents, which has always been that tampons should be free and accessible to everyone, I began talking about the kinds of totes least auspicious to be filled with pilfered supplements and expensive face lotions. Every woman has a right to her health and beauty when both are staked in wellness capitalism.

G said he wants to get one of those red light therapy masks for his face from Sephora. They cost $600 but Sephora always refunds customers if their ‘package didn’t arrive.’

“Nordstrom is a pain in the ass though,” G continued. He bought his girlfriend an Acne wallet and they refused to refund him when he claimed it was stolen from his front porch so he just returned it in-store.

Amazon is always a good bet, but be careful about the frequency of your claims.

The walls and ceilings were painted erratically with undomestic colors like tangerine and magenta. G had moved in a month ago; Ivan had lived there for years. The interior makeup was his doing. He was from Georgia. Not the state, the country. Now, Ivan’s oatmeal was burning against the pan in that sticky layer of char that smells vaguely pleasant. He couldn’t smell it with his headphones on and eyes glued to his desktop computer, which he kept at the kitchen table much to G’s annoyance.

As a green card holder if Ivan was caught stealing he would be deported. That was why Ivan was eating oatmeal instead of steak for dinner. G had a theory that if he gave Ivan some sort of meat from the Whole Foods butcher counter at least once a week, Ivan would stop threatening to paint G’s room turquoise and chartreuse. I thought it was a gentle threat, like telling someone you were going to make them tea if they wouldn’t stop crying.

We’ve come up with a theory. Stolen goods are not only beneficial to our health but also to our safety. They can be used as collateral in threatening situations or to prevent us from committing a dooming social faux pas. I remember in middle school learning about a phenomenon called menstrual poverty. It refers to the lack of access to sanitary products, proper hygiene facilities, and education about menstruation, often compounded by cultural stigmas, which can disrupt the lives of women and girls, particularly in low-income regions. There was a story of a girl who could not leave her house during her period out of fear of being humiliated, and maybe even physically injured, by the ‘red stain.’

Having no savings or trust fund in a city like New York is its own kind of red stain, in a way.

People steal from Whole Foods all the time to maintain their lifestyles and resist ostracization and physical harm. Some stores have started to lock up the vanilla extract and matcha and probiotics behind the checkout counter, but that’s only in the less economically advantaged boroughs like Bushwick.

I live in Bushwick but go to the Whole Foods in Williamsburg to buy groceries.

You can always spy a thief in the Williamsburg Whole Foods. They wear their earphones with sly glances beneath the brim of their Yankees ball cap, shoulders up to their ears. Often, they retrace their steps throughout the store, visiting the cheese case twice, the granolas thrice, as if to appear a citizen very concerned with getting everything on their grocery list.

Luckily, most people are upright citizens in this way idling back and forth, sometimes standing in the same spot as though their bodies were being pulled by innumerable vectors of desire: “The schizophrenic is closest to the beating heart of reality: the production of production.”

In the checkout line, they probably finger the meat sticks and hand sanitizer baubles and chocolate. If you’re looking closely, you might see them stick that truffle into their sleeve. Imminently, a look of despair stretches across their faces. It is the mystical kind of despair, as if at any moment they were ready to self-immolate in the pasta aisle and ascend.

There is no difference between a need and a want. Both are earthly matters. This is canon for a Whole Foods thief.

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“The things you own have to be used, or they own you”... John Updike, Rabbit Redux

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Communist-Enlightenment

For the post-vegan friend who spends their days walking alone in the park writing scribbles reminiscent of Adorno’s Minima Moralia and their evenings hand-grating nutmeg for biodynamic eggnog.

This is the socially-anxious friend who has destroyed their cuticles and fingernails and swears by their morning oatmeal (glyphosate-free steel-cut oats soaked overnight in raw milk, of course). They’ve written a manifesto about why fermentation is the perfect metaphor for Hegelian dialectics, and are at work on a Substack post comparing Ayurvedic cleansing rituals to the Stoics’ concept of apatheia. They will monologue for hours about the tragedy of cultural loss when aaaaargh.fail went offline and regularly email PDFs of forgotten Lacan essays to anyone who dares express mild interest. You’ll find them steeped in a scent of firewood and tallow, their backpack weighed down with a tattered copy of Spinoza’s Ethics and a jar of homemade sauerkraut. They drink kombucha not because it’s trendy but because it’s alive—unlike Big Dairy, which they describe as ‘a monument to alienation.’

• Donation to the David Lynch Foundation

• Cymbiotika Shilajit

• Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq

• Palo Santo Incense Sticks

• Park Slope Food Co-op Membership

• Masaki Kobayashi The Human Condition Boxset

• Raw local dairy subscription

Capitalist-Enlightenment

For the friend who starts their day with sun salutations and a cold shower, oscillates between intermittent fasting and intuitive eating, and has an app to monitor their circadian rhythm. (And it’s all towards the goal of fertility optimization.)

This is the biohacker who lugs a gallon of reverse osmosis water from the grocery store because ‘hydration is consciousness.’ They journal about ‘mindful dopamine fasting’ in a Moleskin after their 4-step morning matcha routine (organic, shade-grown, whisked in a hand-thrown bowl they found at a craft fair in Hudson). They recently downloaded an app that aligns their circadian rhythm with lunar cycles and have started referring to their apartment as a ‘regenerative living space.’ They’ll spend $150 on a fertility-boosting seed cycling kit but think talk therapy is overpriced. You’ll find their bedside table cluttered with adaptogenic tinctures, Yoga Nidra, and issues of Parapraxis Magazine. They claim sunlight cured their hormonal acne, but they still use a stem-cell face serum to make sure it doesn’t come back.

• Vibram FiveFinger Shoes

• Salt & Stone Candle

• Lars von Trier Curzon Collection

• Berkey Water Filter

• Manduka PRO Yoga Mat

• Matchaful Hikari Matcha

• BonCharge Red Light Mini

Capitalist-Indulgence

For your best-dressed friend who’s been unemployed for six months and insists on making their own cashew milk for the sake of being ‘frugal.’

This friend thought Luca Guadagino’s Challengers was the best film of the 2020s (which is surprising, considering they spend most of their time going to the cinema and you’d think they’d have better taste). Their Margiela tabis were a ‘practical investment’ as is their $400 skincare routine, which is an absolute must for their sensitive skin and large pores. They wait to go home for the holidays to have their mom pay for their botox and know Oeko Tex certified materials are best but sometimes can’t resist a synthetic blend. Their favorite activity is leisurely grocery shopping, where they’ll spend 20 minutes picking out the perfect jar of raw honey. They’ve mastered the art of layering scents, starting with Le Labo’s Santal 33 and finishing with something ‘bespoke’ they had mixed in Paris.

• Caraway Non-Toxic Cookware

• Tekla Pink Pyjamas

• MM6 Anatomical Flats

• Our Legacy Ballon Set

• Nespresso Aeroccino3 Milk Frother

• Epi.logic sensitive skin Rx

Communist-Indulgence

For the dreamer who’s convinced that joy is a ‘revolutionary act’ and that homemade sourdough bread will heal their partner’s gluten intolerance.

This is the romantic who wakes up at 6:30 AM just to have a ‘slow morning’ and spends Sundays baking einkorn bread. They pickle radishes in brine, swearing it’s inspired by Walter Benjamin’s theory of aura (??) and brew herbal infusions from plants they collected on their walk in Central Park. They only order amaro at the bar and think the bartender is really nice, if only she wasn’t so skinny. They spend their evenings wearing blue-light blocking glasses, journaling, and re-reading Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition lit by the subtle glow of beeswax candles. They always hand write you letters of thanks and insist you rewatch Tarkovsky’s The Mirror or Pasolini’s Salò on DVD every time you come over for dinner.

• The Grotesque Archive Giftcard

• Hara Bamboo G-String Undies

• Beekeeper’s Naturals Bee Pollen

• 7 Stories Press Annie Ernaux Boxset

• NTS Radio Supporter-ship

• Stifflex notebook and pencil

• A romantic date with Michael Krebber (??)

• Quince Italian Olivewood 4pc Set

“Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. And we have as many souls as a honeycomb has cells”... Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

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What I was after, however, was more the artistry of Lerner who could write about desiring such an experience more than the actual experience. To have a mind that could conceive of something like a profound experience of art and then write about desiring it. In this way, my desire for art has always been crooked and impure—a facsimile of someone else’s genius. 

Medieval art has been particularly challenging. Long, emaciated bodies with woeful grimaces: Tonsures peel the skull open for heaven. It must all have been so painful. In Leaving the Atocha Station, the protagonist returns to the Prado to observe a man who returns to the Prado to stand in front of Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross and weep. 

How does he connect himself to these figures so far behind us in history? This painting is a masterpiece of the early Renaissance. Depicted is the body of Christ being removed from the cross; surrounding figures swoon pallidly with grief. Van der Weyden’s scene strikes so vividly realistic—intense sorrow evoked in his translucent layers of oil paint. It might be the most meticulously rendered scene of the cross ever created. 

Finally, for me today—I’m very moved by the depiction of Christ’s crucifixion. My response is not performative nor conditioned by a societal expectation, that being the expectation that to be intelligent one must be able to connect emotionally to art. I am simply moved by time, the way it has been collected in these objects over millennia and the way, moreover, I can detect that my desire for profundity was present at these artwork’s conception. It is not the artwork’s ability to evoke these desires in me that is spectacular, but rather the fact that thousands of years stand between an artist’s distillation of emotion and its timeless evocation in the audience. 

What haunts us is not the absence of the past but the persistence of it.

I walk into the food court and get yelled at by a guard for eating outside the lines. $25 caesar salad, $10 cappuccino inside the sculpture garden meant to look like that at the Louvre but with these tacky American sculptures of a neo-neo-classical moment. I walk upstairs through the AbEx painting and Philip Guston Room. Guston impresses me with his ability to speak about his art intelligently, there’s nothing vague–hardly a spirit moving through him (other than vodka). The intention of art has always been to capture. He collects rusty nails to signify their essence with layers and layers as if by building up, he could break down. Oil paint never fully dries. 

In comparison, Gaugin is in the room with van Gogh, attracting only those following a mousy male docent. The docent’s round glasses frame his black eyes, evoking a saturnine ring or an islet in the middle of a dark sea. He points at the one called Ia Orana Maria, which reimagines the Annunciation and the Madonna and Child in Tahiti—Polynesian figures and landscapes merge with Christian iconography. 

“Gauguin's romanticized vision of the exotic,” says the docent.  

The women in the painting avert their gaze from an angel, seeming to cower in the background, and likewise turning away from us toward the back of the painting where a misplaced French haystack rises beyond a coconut palm. By turning their backs to the angel—and, by extension, Western tradition—the figures witness Mary and Jesus’ quiet grace. Their calm, benevolent expressions embody a serenity untethered from the Western gaze.

“Gauguin’s work exudes a dreamlike, often romanticized view of life, aiming to escape the industrialized Western world and connect to a spiritual, eternal essence,” the docent says, “The angel’s quiet presence reflects reverence and spiritual harmony, contrasting with the dynamic struggle seen in Gauguin's earlier works like Vision After the Sermon. Through vibrant colors and simplified forms, Gauguin fuses Western religious themes with his romanticized vision of Tahiti, creating a scene that is both mystical and culturally hybridized.” 

And then he turns to the painting titled Two Tahitian Women and says, “Here, there are two women who are brown and somewhat Asian painted in a style that recalls Western portraiture but departs significantly.” 

Looking at my face, which strikingly resembles the Tahitian women’s faces, he says again: “They are brown and somewhat Asian, and although they are nude, this painting is not pornographic.” 

He repeats, “Pornographic.” It is unnatural, his use of the word in this public space.

Three breasts are visible, one is shrouded in a light blue fabric. Nipples protrude with subtlety next to a bowl of orange fruit. Something inchoate and earthly emerges from this depiction of their bodies, not the porcelain pink of Manet’s Olympia who challenges our gaze with her hand stroking her sex (for she was a ‘prostitute’). Somehow their brownness sublimates sex as a violent act and returns it to its pre-sin origin: Reproduction! 

Idealized in form, presented as symbols of purity and natural beauty, Gaugin’s Tahitian women transcend the material. Their nobility is grounded in their lack. But their sensuality, which is to say their agency, is utterly anchored in the gaze of their beholder. 

Brown and somewhat Asian: Existing in the interstices of subalternism and Orientalism, not exactly a representative identity but a representation of an ideal form. That is, the savage. That is, the non-Westerner. Carrying a burden like the purity of non-industrial society comes with the pain of your mother constantly referring to your father’s country of origin as the “third world.” 

Here in the first world, we view an Ancient Egyptian tomb rebuilt inside a room with air conditioning and hand sanitizer at the door. We eat dog meat in secret and steal nut butters from the grocery store. If we wanted to be captured like Guston’s rusty nail, we should have stood naked in front of the man with glasses and eyes and told him to **** us. 

Despite staring at my face on the canvas, it is not the Gaugin that I respond to but the responses to the Gaugin. I am once again caught in this loop of synthetic feedback. Tearing myself away from this crisis, I return to the icons of Byzantium. Iconoclasm > identitarianism. To respond well to a piece of art, you must maintain a healthy distance—approximately 4-5 feet away from the object of your reverence. Too close, the artifice begins to fall apart beneath your gaze. 

“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are just able to endure.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke

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Pumpkin Cornbread

Ingredients:

½  c sourdough discard

¼  c yogurt

1 scant cup flour 

1 scant cup cornmeal 

2 tbsp water ish 

2 eggs

½  tsp baking soda

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt 

⅓  cup melted butter 

Instructions:

First, you will combine the sourdough discard with the water in a large ceramic or glass bowl.

Add yogurt to the sourdough mixture. 

Add flour and cornmeal to the sour mixture. 

Let this combination rest on the counter for 6 hours or overnight, cover it with plastic wrap.

It will ferment and make the flour more digestible. 

Now, you should preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Add eggs to the fermented dough and stir until fully integrated.

Combine baking powder, baking soda, and salt and add to the dough.

Stir to combine. 

Melt the butter in a ramekin for 30 seconds. 

Add the melted butter to the dough and stir to combine. 

Spread butter on the inside of a ceramic baking dish.

Bake for 40 minutes, it should be golden on the top and a knife will come out clean. 

Enjoy with cold butter.

You could use more pumpkin in the future and add maple syrup and vanilla for a cake. 

Tahini Banana Bread 

Ingredients:

½ c sourdough starter

3-4 super ripe bananas

⅓ c tahini

3 Tbsp milk of choice

2 c flour

½ c coconut sugar 

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

⅓ c melted butter

½ c chopped walnuts (optional)

½ c dark chocolate chips (optional) 

Instructions:

You should start by setting the oven to 350 degrees. 

Next, peel and mash the ripe bananas with a fork in a large glass bowl. 

Add the sourdough starter to the bananas and combine. 

Add the tahini and the milk to the combination and combine. 

Add the flour and the coconut sugar to the wet ingredients and combine. 

Allow this mixture to sit covered with plastic wrap on the countertop to ferment. 

Turn the oven off because it’s not time to bake. 

After some time, stir to reintegrate the dough. 

Add eggs and vanilla, combine. 

Combine the baking powder and baking soda and salt separately and then add it to the dough and combine. 

Melt ⅓ c butter in a ramekin and add; stir to combine. 

Optional additions include chopped walnuts and chocolate chips or maybe shredded coconut if you’re feeling it.

Bake for 50 or so minutes. 

Crepes 

Ingredients:

½ c sourdough discard

3 Tbsp melted butter

2 eggs

½ c flour

¾ c milk of choice

½ tsp salt

Extra butter

Instructions:

Ideally, you’re going to use a blender for this recipe. 

Add the discard and butter and eggs and flour and milk and salt to a blender. 

Blend on medium speed until thoroughly combined. 

After combined, allow the batter to rest in the fridge for one hour. 

After one hour, heat up a cast iron skillet on the stove at medium heat. 

Add 1 tsp butter and then add ¼ c batter. 

This part is tricky: 

Tilt the pan in a circular motion to spread the batter in a circular formation, distributing it into a thin layer of crepe. 

Cook 60-90 seconds until it turns golden and then use a spatula to flip it. 

Cook for another 30-60 seconds. Not too long, or it will be dry. 

Repeat with the remaining batter. 

Of change shall o'er [her] sleep the mortal curtain draw.”

She was crossed-eyed and Jewish and never married. Figure out the puzzle yourself. When we went to her apartment that day, seven friends from the Center were already there sorting through her belongings and clearing out the apartment. It was surreal. We didn’t know she had died but the feeling that she had was with us on the subway. Indeed, she died on the sixth of October, two days after we arrived in New York City. In other words, she died fourteen days ago in her apartment with low ceilings in Gramercy Park. Suddenly we were there too, smelling the sour stench of death, the itch of dust that makes you scrub your face with hot water in the bathroom sink. 

One of her friends named Martia asked me if I was ok—my face beat red and scalding; her eyes were itchy and watering. Not crying, watering. 

Intuition is a spooky thing, especially in the heart of October when an August sun melts pumpkins and styrofoam bats hanging on your gate. Imagination had already walked us through the rooms, her bedroom and study crammed with NYT bestselling books—only the intellectual ones that have stood the test of time. Stepping into her physical apartment had us rewiring our expectations: the bathroom was there, the kitchen too small for us. Perhaps the rent-controlled lease was perhaps never worth it. Two bedrooms but hoarded with a lifetime of stuff. All those unfinished scarves and sweaters, the colorful piles of wool yarn! 

Carole had lived there for over 50 years and it is where she died on the sixth of October, while the sun turned a deep orange and the leaves in Central Park anomalously clung to their green.  

Let us call her our Great Aunt, although it is not through blood, but affinity and time. Her therefore niece, our mother, had called us that day. A psychic prickling—she had not heard from Carole for over two weeks. A petulant beeping replaced her landline. Disconnected. Police were meant to do a wellness check on the old woman, but never got around to it. The thing with Carole dying is that she lived a long and full life of reading and service to her community so it isn’t necessarily sad that she is gone, just melancholy. Emptiness—the loss of something that once was there. 

In June of 2023, Carole sent me a box of Valentine’s Day cards. They arrived in a small purple box postmarked Carole H. in New York City. I still have the Valentine’s Day cards Carole sent to me two Junes ago. She lived in New York when I was still living in Oregon. She had lived in New York City since before I was born. 

The cards were like this: 

A shy, freckle-faced boy in oversized glasses clutching a bouquet of wilted daisies: “I’m a little rough around the edges, but my heart’s in the right place.”

A bashful tomato with bright red cheeks and a small bowtie, standing beside a pickle in a top hat: “Lettuce be together!”

A plump bumblebee in a tiny top hat, buzzing around a heart-shaped hive: “Bee mine!”

A detective mole in a trench coat and magnifying glass, peering at a hidden heart: “I’ve uncovered a mystery in my heart—and it’s you!”

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Charming, vintage, a smidgen surreal. Carole had a reluctant tenderness about her hidden beneath her thick rimmed glasses and scowl. I was going to send her a card for Valentine’s Day after she sent me the package, but I forgot to. This year, I was going to wait to see her in New York after moving here. That never happened because Carole died two days after we arrived. We had wanted to take her out to Indian food, as she did for us when we were little. A photograph shows her helping us scale a small boulder in Central Park. Marked 1997, when we were two. 

Carole was 86 when she died and the Valentine’s Day cards are the only piece of her that I have remaining. Freezer-burned pork chops were offered as Martia’s peculiar form of condolence; I wondered if they’d taste as out-of-place as they felt. We couldn’t take anything else because there’s a crazy cousin who has emerged claiming the moth balls and sweaters and ice packs. We got a half-eaten bag of dried cranberries. I wondered why Carole was eating pork. For instance, Martia refused to even touch the package. 

The chops were not expired but they made us sick the next day. We sat in bed watching TV, our stomachs bubbling up with an unrealized emotion. 

Talking about Carole H.’s death seems futile, the way talking about the coming of winter is. Leaves fall from the trees. Trees become skeletal figures that appear more like our bodies than anything else in the city. Squares and right angles; a perfect linear silver horizon reflecting the sun; darkness while we ride the M train home. 

Her affection remains, however, delicate in this purple box: packagable and transportable like a dead leaf pressed into a novel. 

Then there is the question of a coin-op laundry system in a building that has no means to procure loose change. How is it to perform its duty while one cannot feed it- a tech bro without espresso? The basement is where the trash goes and Buley, the building manager, sleeps and where an uncertain yet penetrating sour scent originates. It is not the smell of trash, per se. More like a symphony of the tenement. A symphony of the nose permeates the building. It rises, like heat, through the elevator shaft up to the sixth floor. Stench falsetto in my apartment. 

All of this would be said and done if coins were a common object anymore. Wallets are even out of fashion. I use my iPhone’s tap system to pay for groceries, the metro, and lottery tickets. Other purchases made from places like Amazon and Ssense are made online and delivered to my door on the sixth floor. These are reasonable modern establishments. My building doesn’t even have a mailroom. Since last week, the quarter bowl near the front door has been empty. 

Today is Tuesday and tomorrow is a day many people do their laundry. “Hump day.” No, not hump-day. So I must do mine today but I have no quarters. I searched my wallet and only two $5 bills and nickels. A few Euros and Zloty and Yuan. On my way out of the apartment building to exchange $5 for quarters, I hand the old woman who always asks me for change the other $5 bill. October this year is much like July in terms of weather. 

At Bob & Betty’s, I buy a gallon of soy milk and a quart of bone broth, hoping they’ll give me change in quarters. Groceries have become stupidly expensive this year. These two liquid drinks in cardboard cost me $18. I pay and ask if they can give me change for my $5. “We don’t have quarters,” they say. I tell them neither do I. The market across the street has several kinds of electrolyte water and different flavors of Takis. Coconut waters are in the back with the bruised bananas. I buy coconut water with my $5 and ask for change in quarters. He gives me change in bills and dimes. Ok? I go to another market and the same thing happens so now I have two bottles of coconut water, one soy milk, and one bone broth. No quarters. 

I walk back to my apartment building, annoyed and sweaty. Exchange rates are down, I tell the woman. She’s standing there with a cup of coffee and something else in a brown paper bag that she probably got with my $5. Verging on tears, I frown and she asks me what’s wrong. It’s this unresolvable predicament— absurdity of modern life! A coin purse emerges from her coat pocket, quarters spill onto her hands. Eight of them and I ask her for four more. Twelve quarters: three dollars. My clothing will be damp and I’ll have to hang it on the kitchen chairs. Only three kitchen chairs, I’ll have to hang the sheets on the door hinges—what a beautiful phrase. Door-hinges. 

Thank you, I say. Kind woman. Enjoy your coffee. 

This note was written last month. I am in a new apartment this month. It’s not really an apartment, more of a townhouse. Not a brownstone though. It’s gray and disadvantaged. There is no laundry in the basement. Laundromats boast themselves next to the burger and pizza joints (two-in-one). A block down the road there’s one called Perfect Laundry. This shop is very fortunate, it has a machine at the front that distributes quarters. I fill my palms and pockets and ball cap with them. I feel so rich. Wealth is most certainly relative. 

Still, Kanye takes advantage of his dissenting position and has enlisted in the iconoclast’s battle: creating the perfect sweatpants. Collaborating with Los Angeles Apparel, Ye has dropped new merch for his album Vultures, which includes a line of sweats, t-shirts, bodysuits, and sweatshirts. We had ordered the sweatpants after seeing Kanye’s lo fi SuperBowl ad promoting this merch. In the ad, he said he spent $7 million to get the commercial spot and didn’t have any more money for production. He didn’t mention that every item on Yeezy.com was only $20. Unlike most geniuses of the 21st century, Ye has made good on some of his bigger claims. One of them has been to make his non-dispersion collection all for a price equal to or less than Walmart clothing. Two months later, the sweats arrived at our doorsteps… Two months later, everything remains only $20.

Isabela Cervantes: What was the process of buying the sweats like? Was the website cool?

Boyfriend: It's a white website with floating models wearing the clothing. I'm pretty sure that the first time I went on, I thought it was only t-shirts, and I would never buy a branded Yeezy t-shirt because I don't like logo t-shirts and I’d never wear a shirt that looked like those, it doesn't make sense to me.

IC: Could you elaborate? 

BF: They're like tunics. They have what you might call a boat neck, because it’s just a slit made for the head without a collar. As far as I know, each of the Vultures merchandise items are made of one piece of fabric. These sweatpants for instance are a single piece of fabric cut out and sewn together at the butt, all the way up the inseam, and then at the waistband which is cinched by a drawstring. The t-shirt is also one piece of fabric assumedly cut as a cross shape which is then folded over and sewn together at both sides. I'm not interested in wearing a weird t-shirt like that. Pants have a completely different resonance for me. I'm much more excited by variations of sweatpants than shirts in an experimental context. 

IC: Why do you think it's easier to have more experimental garments below the waist than above? I guess we can use Kanye as a contrasting model because he always goes for wackier upper silhouettes that completely warp his body shape. 

BF: There's definitely a meme among men with a similar taste in clothing to me that pants are just easier to get obsessed with. I don't know anyone for instance who gets excited about shirts. Any experimentation with a top is basically… decorative. With pants, there's a huge amount of variation of shape and size and length that seems to productively change the silhouette and meaning of a man's body without the possibility of plateauing. Does that make any sense? 

IC: I'm not sure if I understand the word plateau in this context, but it's making me think of Elizabethan collars and wigs that were historically worn by male aristocracy as a symbol of prestige, power, and wealth. Below, they only wore little tights and culottes and pointed boots. During the 16th and 17th century, sartorial decoration was top-heavy and emphasized the face, which was at that time adorned with make-up. Obviously this had an effect on the silhouette and the shape of a man's appearance. What was the use of these above-the-waist decorations on the male body? 

BF: Historically the types of clothing that Western privileged male citizens wore expressed their power by demonstrating how their bodies were used. Their tops guarded their anglicized, ideal face and head, where down below the flexibility of their pants implied they could ride a horse or go to war. This particular style emerged during the late Renaissance and Baroque period—during the Napoleonic Wars, the Seven Year Wars—the increasing instability of Europe, and the American Revolution. There's a military turn in fashion that emphasizes soldiership and horsemanship—the costume that civilized male gentlemen would wear essentially implied they were wearing sabers at their sides. This eventually transitioned into men sitting at desks and controlling their colonial empires from a seat. All men of power begin sitting at desks and the tails of their coats get smaller. This is becomes the foundation of the contemporary suit.

IC: How does this decoration relate to masculinity? We find it effeminate, but it’s also very naturalistic like plumage on a male bird. 

BF: I think about the scene in Barry Lyndon where they're playing cards.

I think fashion as an ultimate expression of leisure and control is extremely masculine.

Obviously the Napoleonic Wars changed how respected men were seen. Then you get the Buddenbrooks period in the mid-19th century where business and intelligence become very valued in men of the upper class. 

IC: During this period frill and outward decadence as an expression of masculinity is internalized. It’s the Romantic period after all where all things outward becomes a metaphor for the internal. These things become valued in characteristics like wit and aesthetic sensibility. 

BF: In Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann all of the men grapple with how to express their masculinity, whether it's through intelligence or success or fashion. The Kendall Roy of Buddenbrooks named Thomas Buddenbrooks is the last to run his family’s firm and he’s also the most obsessed with his appearance. This is described as his weakness, this need to express his identity and masculinity through appearance in his attempt to fulfill the role of what we would now call CEO. 

IC: Can you bring this into our current moment?

BF: The postmodern turn in fashion happened with pants. Jeans were popularized by GIs after the war. Cargos were worn by men doing physical labor. But soon these pieces became desirable for upper class men, who were attracted to the implication that they were doing this labor without actually doing it. The shirt doesn’t have this power. It's interesting that you talk about the early modern men using clothing to frame their faces because Kanye West does create these top heavy, Baroque silhouettes but then abnegates his face by wearing balaclavas and masks. 

IC: This is a working class gesture, because the working class are anonymous. Only the aristocracy should be recognized for their faces. 

BF: Kanye is all about removing his identity. He keeps saying that he's either Jewish or he's Indian. He says Black people are Indian, or he isn’t Black.

He's completely obfuscated ethnicity in exchange for populist anonymity. A shirt can’t offer you this level of transformation. But with pants, you can hone in on whatever version of working class masculinity is the correct one for you at any given moment. 

IC: It’s interesting that you’re locating this all in the pants because our most colloquial fashion delineation of working class vs business class is “blue collar” versus “white collar,” right? Which refers to the shirt. 

BF: I think when the invention of the culture class occurred, class delineation moved below the waist. It’s a symbolic subversion. 

IC: Subversion and manipulation. Kanye seems to be using the working class aesthetic toward his vision of sci-fi futurism. Is the creation of a sci-fi futurist aesthetic contingent on working class aesthetics? 

BF: Not always, silicon valley doesn't productively feature signifiers of working class people.

But maybe the most profound versions of futurism like Soviet communism have always been based on populism and the transformational capacity of the working class, who can bring about a future that the upper class can’t.

During his initial collaboration with Adidas at least 10 years ago when we were both still in high school, he claimed that he wanted his clothing to be at a Walmart price point. 

IC: Did you know when Adidas gave up their partnership with him, they donated like $1.3 billion worth of leftover Yeezy merchandise?

BF: Yeah, I think I heard about that. 

IC: Which is an interesting move because it was donated to those who needed clothing. A large portion of the impoverished global population received $1.3 billion worth of Yeezy merch, which is pretty insane. In the logic of his mission to populate the lower class with his identity and brand, losing his partnership with Adidas appears almost strategic. If not strategic, fortuitous. How would you describe the aesthetic of the Vultures merch?

BF:  It's not blue collar or Americana whatsoever. With the tunic style tops and the straight, drawn at the waist, high water pants, you can definitely make a case for a Medieval peasant aesthetic. I would say with the commercial and website, there's a lo fi aesthetic, like not even a lo fi sensibility, but specifically an aesthetic with the hand drawn size numbers in the clothing, etc. I don't know if making a pair of sweatpants out of one piece of fabric is any cheaper or more efficient at this level than if it were two or three pieces. Another interesting populist move is that the sweats are made by Los Angeles Apparel. So the price is extremely low, but the workers are paid more.

You could call it “manufacturing-core.” 

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IC: Where does this aesthetic emerge from in 2024? 

BF: There’s a lot of videos on Instagram Reels and TikToks of people going to trade fairs and talking to representatives from factories in China, which has spawned a wave of Western men who suddenly have a deeper understanding of the process of the fabrication of garments in East Asian factories. So from watching Instagram, a ten year old could now understand the specifics of how you work with a fabricator in Asia. 

IC: So you're saying that the design of the Vultures merch emphasizes the making of the garment itself. That when you're wearing these pieces or interacting with them in any way, you are essentially thinking about the people who made it, how they made it, and the personalized touch of their work. 

BF: Absolutely. 

IC: How does this differ from the deconstructed garment of Margiela or Ottolinger? Because those garments also bring attention to the garment-ness of the piece, but I don't think that they necessarily call attention to how they were made.

BF: Those lines work from the figure of the tailor, the archetype of the master designer. Like the House of Woodcock in Phantom Thread. This deconstruction references the idea that the mysterious Martin Margiela himself is both designing and sewing every single piece produced by the house. All of the workers who are actually doing the manufacturing are essentially absorbed by this figure. His hands become their hands. 

IC: Kanye is essentially doing the opposite where he's dissolving his figure and imbuing every single maker of these pieces with his essence. This logic, if you could call it that, is essentially that of a symbol, right? A unifying power or ideology emanates from wherever that symbol exists. At the moment, Kanye seems really drawn to these symbols of Northern European power.

BF: Yeah, he wore a Burzum t-shirt (of Mayhem’s Varg Vikernes) and one of the prospective Vultures album covers resembled a detournement of a Burzum cover blended with a Caspar David Friedrich painting. 

IC: Exclusively through the aesthetic regime, Kanye continues to associate himself with Northern European nationalism. The other symbol obviously is the double headed eagle or double headed vulture which is the crest of his album and merch. Obviously, there is an instant association with the Nazi eagle, but this specific figure is more of a Medieval image with roots in the Byzantine and Holy Roman Empire. 

BF: You know the meme of men being obsessed with the Roman Empire? Well the Holy Roman Empire is much… nerdier. It’s like cubed history. The knightly orders of the Crusades took up Roman conquest in an abstract sense because they were these non-economic, essentially apolitical, aesthetic powers donning the cross and conquesting in the name of God. It had to do with intense religious desire and channeling God through that desire.  

IC: Would you say that instead of economic or political power, these knights were dominating through aesthetic control? 

BF: Definitely, the Catholic Church was like the original aesthetic, and potentially the most powerful aesthetic of all time. 

IC: So the Crusades were aesthetic wars? 

BF: Maybe. It's hard to understand what else it was. I mean it was to do with trade and stuff, but not really. And also why did they want to conquer all the Slavs and Balts and Pagans?

IC: Was it like ethnic cleansing? Or does it have to do with beauty and God? 

BF: It's a little of both. The Knights of the Teutonic Order certainly had an ethnic bent because they were Germanic, and their proto-German-ness was important to them. They went on to found the first monastic state, which would become Prussia, which would become modern Germany. 

IC: The notion of a monastic state must be aesthetic because it doesn't rely on economics or family inheritance. It is purely ephemeral. But I'm just curious what aesthetic was it, beauty? Cleanliness? Is it all emanating from the symbol? Because they were pushing power and using violence to pillage and conquer all in the name of a symbol, which was the cross. 

BF: Yeah, I think the cross is a symbol of power, and Catholicism invented the aesthetics of power. The Knights had their own black and white cross flag. This period essentially set the groundwork for most nationalistic myths. Nationalism is a relatively new narrative that had to be invented to create excitement and power in the populace. It was an idea different from regionalism, wherein European nations had distinct identities based on their region. During the Medieval era, regionalism simply wasn’t true for Germanic kingdoms— peasants had so little contact with even nearby peasants, that you wouldn't say their way of life was an identity. But the Knights of the Teutonic Order came in and established a state based outside of material reality, based entirely on myth in which a bunch of peasants that were literally just peasants suddenly had a religious and eventually nationalistic identity.

This idea that there is such a thing as national identity has generally been the foundation for any populism. So I guess what's interesting is if Kanye West is invoking populism, he’s also invoking nationalism. He's completely obfuscated regionality and ethnicity in exchange for a symbolic national identity.

IC: So the foundational myth of contemporary populism include those created by the monastic state and the Teutonic Knights, which is perhaps why Kanye is attracted to this sort of  symbolism. It was the original symbolism as we think about it today. Before that there was hieroglyphics and runes which didn’t necessarily exist in this abstract realm. 

BF: This gets at the difference between the myth that these Knights were laying out versus the more storied origins of nationalism in countries like France and England that had powerful monarchies in the Medieval period around which they could coalesce a regional identity, and which would later transform into a democratic republic. But Germany was composed of hundreds of different kingdoms. There's this idea called the German problem, which is the question of how Germany will be unified? Should it be unified? Is there such a thing as Germany? For regionalism to exist in that area, a multi-step process of myth-making took place. For hundreds of years, Germany continued to struggle to coalesce around a single solid identity other than their history of the Holy Roman Empire or Prussia, which led to two different wars of world domination because Prussia was never a colonial state. It was a monastic state. It had absolutely nothing to do with regionalism or history. It was about the future. 

The German Federation was founded on this aesthetic, future-oriented state of the church's design. The weird thing about these Knightly Orders was they were populated by second and third sons. It was like an enterprise of pure ambition, of like men that weren't going to inherit their father's lands. It was like joining the priesthood, but to go make war in a random place. One of the reasons that this state even existed was because Jerusalem was lost to the Muslims, but no one had any desire to dissolve this Order of Knights that had originally run hospitals for German speaking pilgrims in the Holy Land. So they were turned into a military order. Eventually they started a state where German speaking people could go and consider home. But their home state didn't have a king, it was run by a brotherhood of knights.

IC: I just want to emphasize the symbol. I’m thinking of the fleur de lis and how it has traveled through time from a symbol of monarchy, to revoluzion—liberté, égalité, fraternité—to a lasting mark of colonialism. Symbols move through time to take on different meanings. But, they are also unifying and totalizing, as opposed to glyths or runes, which have a sense of communalism and multiplicity. Symbolism as used by the Knights of the Teutonic Order is akin to monotheism, all spiritualism falling under a single god. 

BF: It gets back to the most classic question of belonging and this is why it connects to Yeezy. Populism is all about how different forms of belonging are instantiated. Obviously Kanye has found some pretty simplified, powerful, subtle ways to create a widely accessible form of belonging. He's massively famous. His music has always been massively popular. His clothes are now cheap.

All of his maneuvers make belonging very accessible. Yeezy shapes based on peasant wear and proletariat aesthetics refer back to how belonging is calculated or felt. 

This has always been the hardest question in Germany—what does it mean to be German? What does it mean to belong to Germany? And, obviously, there was an insanely unique and rather terrible DNA in Germany from this monastic state where many German speaking peasants went to colonize this formerly pagan land. Most of the pagans who were the indigenous people of Prussia were genocided and completely replaced with German speaking people who gathered their sense of belonging from the fact that these knights had crusaded here under some sort of an aesthetic religious mandate.

IC: Sounds familiar… So there is something particularly violent in political organization that exists exclusively in the aesthetic regime. It doesn’t even have to do with ideology, necessarily, which I think Kanye is keen to as he continues to utilize these images. He’s very intuitive in his association with these histories, but it’s also an impulse to take control of these symbols as they exist in the current moment. Kanye seems to understand that meaning shifts over time and he’s curious what dictates those shifts and if he can control them. Now, forever, the double-headed eagle crest is going to be associated with Vultures. Like people in a hundred years will look up his album and see the image first before learning its associations five hundred years prior. Even people who don’t know what that symbol means historically will plainly associate it with Kanye—he owns it now. 

What’s interesting to me is that Kanye has the power to manipulate future images in a very practical way by taking a historical symbol and putting it on a pair of sweatpants. This gesture is a pretty big assertion of his status in human history. He has the capacity to use fashion in a way that we all want to use fashion, not just to belong but to create a future in which we have control over our image.

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BF: It's a very shroomy question, like a meta meta question of the difference between deploying a symbol in a sharp way versus not. It gets at the very existence of a message at all. To be honest, I think most of this is the fallout of Kanye’s drug use over the last eight or so years. 

IC: Yeah, ever since he started smoking DMT in Wyoming. 

BF: You don't get the sense that he's making choices. It’s almost as if he feels that he has a destiny to do whatever is the most controversial. 

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