Category: culture

Notes on Llano

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Note: A special thank you to Ryan Lackey, who very generously—and without prompting—offered significant edits and comments on a draft of this.

I am standing in the ruins of a utopian dream. Llano del Rio is sixty miles northeast of Los Angeles, splayed out under desert mountains. Founded in 1914, it was mostly dead by 1918, though a group of members—led by the founder Job Harriman—managed to limp forward for several years, moving to Louisiana before disbanding. To reach Llano today, you must drive through endless exurbs of the Antelope Valley, a utopia in the literal sense: a “not-place.” Thousands of houses, all the same, maliciously oblivious to the natural world, punctuated by churches that look like malls and malls that look like churches, all blended with the green-brown ground. Your speedometer will hit 101, and still the cars around you will blur by in some desperate bid to warp spacetime, to render the non-places nonexistent. No wonder that, among the Qdobas and Hobby Lobbys, mass shooters bloom; here, madness is the default state of being. Ecological madness, consumer madness, the madness of being from nowhere, not even the middle of nowhere. In older stories, the wanderer without a home always carries with him an air of danger.

In their violent self-similarity, these non-places speak to Marx’s elision of the future and Adorno’s insistence that positive utopias cannot be theorized. The exchange relationship is the essence of our world. Such an essence does not exclude thought. And so the equality of any utopia devolves into exchangeability, a liquidation of the unique subject in favor of the sameness of the commodity.

As Llano draws nearer, the dys-ou-topias, the bad-not-places of the exurbs thin out until suddenly they’re gone and only towns like Little Rock and Pearblossom remain.[1] You speed by church readerboards in Spanish, farmer’s markets that look like convenience stores, life-size dinosaurs made from rusted copper, tents where a family is serving up carne asada as roaring cars throw dirt on the grill, and signs—so many signs. Fresh local pears; land for sale; Charlie Brown Farms, breakfast specials!; McDonalds; land for sale; Autozone; for sale by owner; Family Dollar; Dollar General; Dollar Tree, every possible store with dollar in the name; Antelope Realty; John’s Automotive; Martin County state park; RV parking; more RV parking; Iglesia de Cristo Nuevo Empezar. And then even they disappear, with one exception. Realty advertisements continue right up to Llano, and then past it. 52% of California land is publicly owned. Driving through the Central Valley, you  suspect the other 48% is listed.

The GPS will direct you past the ruins of the cooperative; according to the maps, Llano is its post office. The city claims a population of 1,200, though they all seem to be in hiding. There’s a smattering of trailers and a few single-story ranch homes that might as well be trailers, and sand. Unimaginative graffiti covers the ruins closest to the highways and the remnants of the kiln. The ground is covered in broken beer bottles and corroded cans, a few so fully rusted I wondered if they were tins from the time of the cooperative.

It was probably already this desolate when Aldous Huxley first visited, writing “Llano del Rio: Ozymandias, The Utopia that Failed.” This would explain his antipathy  for the project, despite his own utopian proclivities. He accused Job Harriman of ignoring nature in favor of abstract theory: “To the brute facts of meteorology in arid country Job Harriman was resolutely indifferent. When he thought of human affairs, he thought of them only as a Socialist, never as a naturalist.”[2] Later historians have emphasized that Huxley ignored the stress of anti-German xenophobia—this was the height of World War I—and anti-socialist broadsides from Otis Chandler’s LA Times. Not that it matters. A ruin is a ruin, however it became so.

And yet despite himself—and to his son’s bewilderment—Huxley was drawn to the decrepit monuments. He built a house there, brought his family up for extended periods. The bright desert sun allowed him to read, despite his near blindness. He spent the days typing in the heat. In the evenings, his wife Maria would read to him.[3] What drove him to this sandy no-place?

In his essay “Wordsworth in the Tropics,” Huxley writes:

Yes, the world is obviously one. But at the same time it is no less obviously diverse. For if the world were absolutely one, it would no longer be knowable, it would cease to exist. Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself. Absolute oneness is absolute nothingness: homogeneous perfection, as the Hindus perceived and courageously recognized, is equivalent to nonexistence, is nirvana.

            For Huxley, utopia is non-existence. Standing in Llano, one feels that this very well might be the case . Swallowed by the ever-expanding desert on one side and the worn mountains on the other, you feel the exhilarating terror of our liquidation. No wonder teens come out here to drink, fuck, and smoke. Such thrills take on an added dimension in such a place. For David Foster Wallace, excess and intoxication are ways of dealing with terror.[4] Perhaps. But, paradoxically, these modes of escape, the temporary flights, are simultaneously attempts to experience nothingness. Drunk and high, the self feels as though it is on the way of being obliterated. In sex, one becomes part of another, the I becomes an us, or maybe a you. Intoxication as mimesis of the death drive, a cheap imitation of non-existence.

And then the stones rise from the ground, insisting on our existence, even as they—the stones—dream of going beyond this. They are a denkmal, a monument. Literally translated, it means “thought symbol/point/time” (mal can mean a symbol or point in time; einmal is “one time”). In its existence, a denkmal brings about thought, which requires the very difference it wishes to deny. This is true of the concept in general, and the rocks of Llano are no different. Thinking excises utopia, even as it requires utopia to exist. It is the failure of our world and the promise of a better one that drives philosophy. The monument differentiates a particular moment from all others. When we reflect on this object, this particular moment is then placed into relevance for our time, a different unique instant. Difference is obliterated, utopia achieved, only for it to slip away as the transposition fails, as the difference overcomes thought’s striving for non-existence.

            Huxley eventually stopped going to Llano, preferring to stay in at his Malibu home—at least until it burned down. He laughed at the tragedy; for him, losing everything was good practice for dying. I will return to my car; it is 3:30 and I have six hours of driving to do. One can only sit with the paradox of thought for so long before fleeing. Huxley again: “It is fear of the labyrinthine flux and complexity of phenomena that has driven men to philosophy, to science, to theology—fear of the complex reality driving them to invent a simpler, more manageable, and, therefore, consoling fiction.” But these fictions are necessary. Even when they are wrong, perhaps especially then, they tell us about the world. Not only as it is, but as it may one day be. More than this, they save us from nonexistence. Driving through the exurbs, I thought of Llano.

[1] Of course they don’t actually disappear; the non-places are maintained in the shape of the chain stores and fast food restaurants. The philosophical term for this is aufhebung, when something is both eliminated and preserved.

[2] This is classic Huxley; for all his late mysticism, the Englishman’s only true faith was arithmetically determined limits on consumption.

[3] One imagines she was none too happy with this. In Los Angeles, she was carrying on “affairs”—in quotation marks because Huxley knew and didn’t care (indeed, they facilitated each other’s amorous relationships)—with Greta Garbo and other queer Hollywood stars. In Llano, she was babysitting a mostly blind man. That she loved him must have been cold comfort.

[4] “You think it’s a coincidence that it’s in college that most Americans do their most serious falling-down drinking and drugging and reckless driving and rampant fucking and mindless general Dionysian-type reveling? It’s not. They’re adolescents, and they’re terrified, and they’re dealing with their terror in a distinctively American way. Those naked boys hanging upside down out of their frat-house’s windows on Friday night are simply trying to get a few hours’ escape from the stuff that any decent college has forced them to think about all week.” Adolescence, we might note, is itself a developmental utopia. Neither child nor adult, the teenager begins reflecting on their existence exactly at said existence’s most tenuous. No wonder none of us escape unscathed.

Non-fungible Subjects

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NFT’s are expressions of the terror that is life at the end of bourgeois society, of the fear that comes when the subject is fully liquidated. The subject was always fungible, to an extent, defined as it was by its imbrication with exchange and identity. Yet capitalism liquidates the subject even as it relies on it, for in its individuality there is something resistant to the standardizing impulse of capital, something that must be gotten rid of. We live at the end of this process; with the arrival of the internet, personal identity became fully subsumed. We all pre-sort ourselves—our thoughts are inevitably structured by the world. At the same time, something like a sham subjectivity arises for capital. Unable to rely on the rational-actor subject, there becomes a turn to produce a corporate subjectivity (think of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizen’s United, or the insistence on algorithmic trading, etc).

NFT’s attempt to restore non-fungibility to a fungible item—the digital image, something perfectly replaceable and exchangeable. This is bullshit, course. The very nature of digital images is that, NFT or no, they are replicable. But this failure is irrelevant. In claiming that they can restore the particular, they offer the false promise that we may undo capitalism’s worst excesses and bring the subject back to life. This is why, for all the revolutionary talk around them, NFT’s fit into a restorative project, something none of us should abide. the very thing that created the subject killed it. There is no going back. To do so just guarantees we will end up here again.

Zooming By

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Both my parents and I were born on generational seams. My father was born in 1959, my mom in 1960, right in the last years of the baby boom era. I was born in 1996, two years before the zoomer cut-off (usually put around 1998 or so). The result of this fluke is that, like everyone else born around 1996, my relationship to 2008—likely the defining event in both generations’ lives—is neither fully millennial nor fully zoomer. What I want to do here is use this in-betweenness to sketch a rough schematic of how each generation’s relationship to 2008 manifests in aesthetics and politics, in what decade each generation turned to for fashion and art, as well as each’s commitment to Marxist materialism and tendency to historicism. Before doing so, however, I want to stress that these are generalities, and as with any generation, there’s no hard line between zoomer and millennial.[1] Each generation bleeds into every other. The rough periodization I’m indulging in is nothing more than an attempt to label two different impulses among young-ish people (under 35).

That aesthetically, we both looked backwards is inevitable: the future has been foreclosed, after all, and even if hadn’t, pastiche and recirculation has been the name of the game since at least the 1980’s. But what strikes me as fascinating is not that each generation looked to a different era (millennials looking towards the 1970’s, Zoomers looking towards the early 2000’s/late 90’s), but why. Younger millennials turned toward the 1970’s as an aesthetic touchstone not because of hauntology (as Mark Fisher argues), but because of the similarities between then and the post-2008 era.[2] In my thesis, I attributed this to what is called the secular crisis of capitalism. I still agree with that analysis.[3] But without even getting into that we might say that there’s an obvious kinship: the seventies were the last period of extended stagnation like we saw after 2008. And even when recovery began after the Great Recession, it was only a recovery for a small group of people. The jobs that came back were for the most part more precarious and lower-paying.  You can even in some ways draw a modern parallel to stagflation, the feeling that you’re being left behind as the economy grows: the explosion of rents and home prices across the nation, even in cities with no limitations on housing stock. It’s not stagflation of course (inflation rates are still quite low, though Biden’s administration is talking about raising them), but rather extreme inequality. The feeling, however, might as well be the same. For the average person, wages have been stagnant even as the cost of reproduction (in the Marxist sense of the term) has risen.

The key here is that the turn to the 70’s wasn’t nostalgic as much as sympathetic. That’s not to say there wasn’t any nostalgia—certain cultural products did romanticize the era. One of the more popular bands of the 2010’s was called The 1975, after all. But this nostalgia was rooted in a recognition that the time period was horrid. We were nostalgic because at least the 70’s was producing new culture even as they were mired in the shit. We couldn’t say the same. 1977 alone had Bowie’s Low, the first Star Wars, Eraserhead, Annie Hall, Jubilee, Rumors, Aja, the B-52’s first public performance,  and so much more. We had The Avengers, Mac Demarco, and (a rare bright spot) Kendrick Lamar. Our nostalgia was that back then, despite (or because of) a war everyone wanted to forget about going on in the background, a heroin pandemic, and a crashed economy, there was still something worthwhile going on. Our imitation of the 70’s was only partly mimetic. We don’t want to become the 70’s, a desire usually harbored within acts of mimesis. As a friend pointed out when bitching about the people who were genuinely nostalgic for the era: 1975 almost certainly smelled like shit.

In contrast, the Zoomer turn towards the early 2000’s/late 1990’s is much more straightforwardly nostalgic, not too different from the 80’s obsession with the 1950’s. Part of it is likely due to millennials’ own nostalgia for when we were young. Kid Detective, one of the better films of 2020, sets its nostalgic 1950’s suburban dream in 2002, well after deindustrialization and death of American innocence. The dominant culture of one generation is very often produced by that of the preceding one. 20 year-olds may drive our culture, but the movers and shakers are millennials or (even more likely) generation X. Hang around the internet and you’ll see plenty of millennials reminiscing about LimeWire and burning CD’s and Blockbuster (indeed, there’s now a full-length pean to this last one on Netflix). But there’s something else at play. The recent resurgence of 2000’s aesthetics is centered around their trashiness, their absurdity, how ugly every part of that culture seemed to be. Low-rise jeans and tiny sunglasses don’t flatter celebrities; no normal person wearing either seriously thinks they look good. Instead, it reflects the Zoomer desire that contemporary aesthetics reflect how bankrupt they are. While millennials harbored the desire that alternatives be produced out of suffering—for this what every great work of art is, an acknowledgement of its guilt and the pain of our world and yet refusing to accept this, and out of this quixotic desire grows the haunting knowledge that something better is possible—Zoomers are more pessimistic, more “black-pilled” to use internet parlance. All they can ask for is that culture not pretend it is anything but ugly and evil. The era of bad reality TV and Paris Hilton and Rockabilly and George Bush and illegal wars delivered this; there was no pretending we were better than things appeared, as there would be later, in the era of Peak TV and “Yes We can.” There was just power and Angelina Jolie wearing a vial of Billy Bob’s blood.

On the left, you can see a similar dynamic play out in millennial and zoomer approaches to critiques of capitalism. Those of us who remember the before of the financial crisis (however imperfectly), turned to Marxism because it offered us an analytic framework that explained our own blind spots. The k-shaped recovery makes more sense if you believe David Harvey’s claim that neoliberalism is attempt at the restoration of class power. Bush’s concept of an “ownership society” takes on a new valence if you read it as nothing more than a tool to produce debt that could be packaged and traded, another chapter in capitalism’s quest to commodify all objects and relationships to stave off its own contradictions. At the same time, we saw firsthand the breakdown of what Foucault called an episteme, how 2008 fundamentally changed how we think and the accompanying culture. The early 2000’s was a time when capitalist ideology was working about as smoothly as possible. Due solely to when we were born, we got to encounter this without being fully interpellated as older generations were, making the breakdown particularly obvious. As a result, we tended towards a materialism and historicism—those I know most committed to something like periodizing are mostly in their late 20’s and early 30’s. Zoomers, on the other hand, have little memory of the pre-2008 ideological apparatus. They have grown up almost entirely in an era where capitalism has struggled to paper over its cracks. This is one reason so many young people are taking increasingly polarized positions; they have never seen the status quo “work.” But at the same time, to them Marx looks less like a revelation and more like an old white guy stating the obvious. Millennials (myself included) have occasionally strayed too close to a vulgar Marxist determinism, where all the failures of society are laid at capital’s feet. But if you came of age only watching capital flail and its ideological defenders twist themselves into increasingly absurd knots, this vision of capital as such a force that it not only touches everything in life but shapes it all is harder to swallow. In conversations with people slightly younger than me, I see a tendency to ontologize, to attribute everything to an ahistorical essence. Or rather, that’s not quite right. It’s not purely ahistorical. Rather, it is a tendency to freeze one historical dimension of an object and claim that this is its pure being, what it is at its heart. Of course, this could be a product of youth. It’s a (true) cliché that when we’re young, we tend to see things as black and white, as eternal and clear. Perhaps they will grow out of this tendency. Certainly, this would be better for society; as Adorno, Levinas, Derrida, and more have argued, there is something fascistic in the very concept of ontology, and so to indulge in ontological thinking is to allow fascism to enter into your politics, whether you mean to or not.

At the end of the day, however, these generational impulses are not clear cut. Afro-pessimism (which relies on ontological thinking) is particularly popular among people in their late 20’s and early 30’s, and I see plenty of people old enough to know better imitating kids who are in turn imitating 90’s fashions. And certainly, despite my reticence to talk about it, our differing relationship to the internet matters. But despite all this, I do believe that over the next couple years, it will become increasingly clear that 2008 still reverberates, not only in the Neighborhood’s “Sweater Weather” (2013) but also in 100 Gecs and Billie Eilish and whatever else the teens are listening to.

[1] I half joke that it comes down to Fortnight, the popular Battle Royal game. If you can play it well, you’re a zoomer. If not, you’re a millennial.

[2] Or rather, hauntology is not entirely the reason.

[3] This is not the place to get into it, but it essentially means that we’ve been in a crisis for fifty years now, and the reason the full extent of this crisis wasn’t apparent through the 80’s-2008 was because of the rise of debt and the accompanying bundling and trading. In short, financialization.