The Remnant

Sexy Murder Poets against Managerial Progressivism

1.

In 1987, or thereabouts, I briefly got it into my head to seek to convince the others in my rag-tag crew of suburban mall Goths that what we really needed to do was to produce a manifesto. I wanted to change the world, somehow, and the only people I could think of as possible recruits to my cause were the other members of my own motley crue of neo-Romantics.

I should be a bit more precise in my taxonomy. I myself was never a Goth, but I did belong to a broader genus that included their species, a genus that then self-described as “progressive.” This was a sufficiently big-tent category to include the kids with t-shirts advertising their totemic affiliation to the Cure, to Bauhaus, or to Alien Sex Fiend, but also included mods, SHARP skins, straight-edge punks, white Rastas, gays of any subcultural leaning or of none at all, as well as a residual class, which is where I surely fit in, of indescribable weirdos.

The idea for a Progressive Manifesto went nowhere—a disappointment that sent me looking for more mature forms of community, driving down to Oakland from Sacramento to attend meetings of the Young Socialist Alliance, learning how to look like I cared as much as the others in attendance about the stakes, say, of the latest AFL-CIO strike. I suppose all this was good for me. It gave me my first glimpse of the kind of issues actual adults engaged in actual political struggle tend to take seriously. But the soundtrack of my drive to and from my Bay Area labor-LARPing was provided mostly by the Damned, This Mortal Coil, and Diamanda Galas. That’s where my heart was, and I resented both the political apathy of the kids back at the mall, and, conversely, the total absence of any detectable spirit of romance among the young socialists.

To some extent my entire subsequent life has been an effort, long and unsuccessful, to unify these non-overlapping magisteria: matter and spirit, mind and heart, material analysis of the forces that shape history and the productions of the truly free imagination that will always evade material analysis.

2.

A good number of those young “progressives” grew up to become progressives in the sense that our more recent culture wars have imposed on us: profile pics with FFP2 masks, pronouns in bios, generalized fear of and contempt for the lives and concerns of the great majority of their fellow Americans. Others however spun off into a very different sort of dérive. Their imaginations grew darker. Having convinced themselves that their aesthetic flirtation with death and decay and violence must move beyond the faculty of the imagination, must be made literal in order to be maintained as true, they turned to Death in June, to Boyd Rice, to far-right neo-folk and to the strange dark underworld of Nazi esotericism, where a name like Savitri Devi might be evoked as casually as Megyn Kelly’s in more mainstream right-wing circles.

One of my old friends was, when I first met him, a sweet and quirky boy, who brought his Leica with him everywhere and had stenciled an Icee logo on the underside of his skateboard. I had entirely forgotten about him until a few years ago, when I happened across a photo of him performing some ad-hoc semblance of a Norse pagan ritual in his California backyard. This photo was published in a book I had picked up by chance, an ethnographic study of the American far-right neopagan scene by the Swedish anthropologist Mattias Gardell (you know you’ve had an interesting adolescence when your old friends become not anthropologists, but objects of the anthropological gaze). I did some searching and learned that this friend had died, alone in his Sacramento apartment, under uncertain circumstances, in 2004 (RIP Rob).

Dead or alive, most of this subset of my former cohort fell off the radar long before the rise of social-media, leaving no profile pics to scrutinize and to judge. Though at least a few of them did metamorphose into standard-model 2020s-style vectors of ressentiment and middle-aged owners of libs.

3.

If I had had access to the Stasi’s intelligence files back in 1987, I might have known better than to try to awaken the political consciousness of the Goths. Two years prior, the East German spy agency produced a report—circulated widely on the socials in 2019, following its publication at the website Open Culture—that profiled the appearances, musical tastes, and political leanings of the various youth scenes that had begun to infect the socialist body politic: the Skin’s, the Heavy’s, the Punk’s, the New Romantik’s (multiple sic’s for these strange apostrophized plurals), and what are known in German as the “Gruftis”. This term derives from Gruft, “crypt” or “tomb,” and is commonly used, today as in the 1980s, to designate those we know in English as the Goths. According to the Stasi’s report, while the punks exhibit a “rejectionist political stance”, and the skins exhibit “partially neofascist tendencies”, the Goths are noteworthy for their “total political and social disinterest”. The same goes for the subculture identified as the “New Romantics” (who in my milieu were typically regarded as a subspecies or varietal of the Goths).

Is this a fair characterization? Or is there perhaps something inescapably political in this social posture of disinterest, and in the life that prefers to dwell at the murkier depths of consciousness, stirred by dark moods, submissive to desire, preoccupied with the specter of death that will eventually absorb us all?

It is no secret that secular modernity, on both sides of the divide between the capitalist countries and capitalism’s various discontents, has sought to keep us entirely focused on the immanent plane of affairs, not to spend too much time limning its boundaries, or asking what might lie on the other side of them, or even asking what it might mean to live a life that is, as Nabokov said, but a flash of light bounded by two infinities of darkness.

Under the absolute reign of immanentist politics, and of the cultural productions that serve as this regime’s ideological buttress, we are subjected for example to advertisements from banks and insurers and pharmaceutical companies, all of which unfailingly depict death and dying as if these were just another event of life, to be experienced alongside the many leisure activities that can be expected to fill your retirement. Romanticism, we might conjecture, emerges in history in part out of a need to affirm that no matter how efficiently our banks and hospitals and insurance agencies are run, the real horizon of our mortal lives will always lie beyond the purview of these institutions, and properly understood will always have the power to expose them, in certain respects, as a great lie.

4.

Even in the most fully secularized regions of the West, Romance continues to offer at least some means of resistance to the institutions of immanence, though here the preferred mode of Romantic experience is almost always the erotic one. Sex, sometimes enhanced by drugs and rock-and-roll, is indeed one way to jolt yourself out of the everyday order of things, to be reminded of just how far below the radar of modern secular rationality the fundamental experiences, the ones that reveal our real nature and fate to us, really lie.

In other places it is not Eros but Thanatos that excites the Romantic imagination. Throughout the Balkans severe Orthodox monks will scold young women for visiting their ancient monasteries with exposed midriffs and thighs. Those same young women will often belong to families where it is common to dig up the bones of deceased loved ones seven years after burial, to wash them clean and then to rebury them. It is close to the site of such efforts, too, that some centuries ago Austrian administrators arrived in their newly annexed territories, and began to send back to Vienna dutiful yet nervous reports of the strange goings-on in Serbian villages, where widows often complained of being stalked and menaced by their dead husbands, and schemed with neighbors to dig up the coffin and to drive a stake through the old ghoul’s heart and to finish him off once and for all.

The scenes described in these reports eventually made their way into medical treatises, clinical and sensationalist at once, on the physiology of death and the difficulty of determining the moment it occurs with any certainty, notably Jacques Benigne Winslow’s 1742 work, Dissertation sur l’incertitude des signes de la mort et l’abus des enterremens et embaumemens précipités. This fascination with possible real cases of premature embalming and similar horrors provided an obvious template for fictions of the living dead, and by the time Bram Stoker comes along, not to mention F. W. Murnau, the deep origin of such legends in the vernacular traditions of rural European cultures, recorded by hapless imperial bureaucrats just trying to do their jobs and submit their paperwork as required, was largely forgotten.

The encounter between the clerk and the villager repeats itself over and over again. On the one side there is raw ancestral violence, which functions, like Indigenous headhunting, to maintain sociocosmic balance, to set things right again and again. On the other side there is the apparatus of the state, which seeks to assert its monopoly on violence by suppressing such ancient practices, but in doing so imagines that it is imposing not violence of its own, but only rationality.

The philosopher Liam Kofi Bright once proposed a distinction, influential on social media, between two different types of thinker populating our philosophical guild: the “sexy murder poet” and the “basically pleasant bureaucrat”. This contrast echoes the one we have already been making between the villager and the clerk, the mall Goth in the Cure shirt and the union activist at the AFL-CIO picket line, the continental philosopher effusing about the signifying phallus or whatever and the analytic philosopher solving his little logic puzzles.

But Liam seems to have forgotten about the murder bureaucrats, while for me it is this tertium quid that is far and away the most worrisome of them all. As far as I can tell, with some notable exceptions like Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the so-called Moors murderers, who went on a killing spree in England in the early 1960s after reading a bit too much Aleister Crowley, for the most part the sexy murder poets put murder into poetry in part in order to sublimate it, to take it out of our low world and to exalt it in the imagination. They know our lives are haunted by death at every turn, and it is because of this that they make death a central object of their aesthetic vision and their artistic creation. The bureaucrat by contrast does not want to acknowledge that grim specter at all, wants to portray life as centrally a matter of management and efficiency. Pleasant or not, this disposition has, in the modern period, repeatedly resulted in acts of obscene violence at a mass scale.

5.

Counter-Enlightenment has never had a fixed political valence. J. G. Herder was a great defender of vernacular cultures, and a great enemy of all attempts to allow any single civilization to set a uniform global standard. Yet the soft nationalism of defending a distinct German Sonderweg against the universalizing power of Enlightenment was also plainly ancestral to the hard nationalism of the 20^th century. In the aftermath of World War II, new ways had to be found to talk about culture that could circumvent or at least downplay the ultimate origin of this notion in an agrarian metaphor that seeks to root (another metaphor) human groups in the particular soils of their historical homelands.

But the vanquishers of fascism did not give up on culture altogether—not in the way we have given up on it in the 21^st century. In the USSR museums of traditional ethnic dress and musical instruments proliferated. Throughout the Eastern Bloc ethnographers and ethnomusicologists were out in the field with their primitive tape-recorders, documenting lifeways they understood to be of value, even if it remained a challenge to account for why one should care about their preservation in strictly historical-materialist terms. In the US as well, institutional efforts at documenting and studying vernacular cultural traditions proliferated in the post-war era, and eventually filtered from the highbrow institutions into mass culture: thus Bob Dylan availed himself of the musical riches in the Library of Congress archive while finding his way towards a new, but old, articulation of American rootedness.

In the 1960s the need for roots was felt to be a progressive imperative. As I have argued previously, one of the most important, yet most overlooked, transformations in American life from the 1960s to the 2020s, is the one whereby the left cedes its spirit of romance, its love of the vernacular, its counter-Enlightenment effervescence, to the right. This cession and transfer amount to nothing less than the abandonment by the left of any real idea of “America”—as old and weird, as terrible and great, as psychopathic but also kind of cool. For America is nothing, could never be anything, if not a Romance.

6.

From within its academic redoubts, besieged but not yet abandoned, the progressive left does wish to be involved at least in the bureaucratic management of what gets said about vernacular and traditional culture as it is translated into the higher registers of scholarly journals and conferences. This involves, for example, the processing of Indigenous representations of the world into a format recognizable within the algorithmic identitarian logic of social media. A notable example here is the tremendous memetic success of the “two spirits” designation often included alongside other descriptors of sexual or gender identity, as if the anthropology of gender in non-Western societies could be dealt with as neatly as the category of the “ace/aro” or any other label confected in the Tumblr milieu over the past years.

Managerial progressivism pretends at least to like traditional cultures, especially non-Western ones. But it does not generally want to learn about them, let alone to allow them to quicken our imaginations; it only wants to manage them for its own bureaucratic purposes. You might suppose that this is the inevitable dead-end of vernacular traditions within modern secular institutions that are, ultimately, threatened by these traditions. This would indeed explain why the progressive American conception of “diversity” ends up looking as artificial, as Potemkin-like, as a Soviet museum of peasant costumes. You’ve got representation, but no Romance.

7.

Romance has such strange DNA. In the first instance it pertains to Rome, a toponym perhaps of Etruscan origin, but long associated by false etymology with the name of Romulus, the city’s mythical founder. By the early Middle Ages the Byzantine Greeks had adopted Ῥωμαῖοι for themselves, a habit the Ottomans would later continue in describing, as Rumeli, all of the European territory they had conquered. In the 11^th century speakers of Old French came to call their language, along with the other vernaculars descended from Latin, as romanz, and not long after that the term was narrowed to refer specifically to narrative works in these languages. From narrative in general the term gets narrowed further in the high Middle Ages, as roman, to describe the emerging form of the novel. It is only at the beginning of the modern period, broadly from the 15^th to the 17^th centuries, that the particular subset of such narrative works that centrally feature a love plot will come to be described as romances. In the 18^th century, in this same form, the term comes to be used in some contexts to designate the activity of those who study Occitan fabliaux or the Roman de Renart or the like. And so Romance philology was born, taking as its objects not just the output of Provençal troubadors, but also such rare gems as “African Romance,” a vernacular Latin-derived language spoken in the Empire’s former provinces on that continent. Not much later than that, Romanesque came to designate, mostly in France, a style of architecture characterized by round arches, thick walls, and ornate portals; and around the same time the same word also came to describe, in French, any real-life experience that seems to come out of a novel. Romantic, in turn, soon came, first in Germany, then elsewhere, to denote a literary, aesthetic, and philosophical movement that prized feeling over reason, the medievals over the moderns, the folksy over the classical. Soon enough, again, this designation filtered out into the surrounding culture to designate even the most common experience, by the most common sort of people, of the proverbial butterflies in the stomach. In the arts, Romanticism would continue to send out new shoots, even as modernism sought, from the end of the 19^th century, to condemn it as naïve and sentimental. It thrived in Weimar cabarets, was interrupted by war, and muted by the aggressive modernism of the immediate post-war era. It crept back willy-nilly, like nature herself when driven out by a pitchfork, with the raw sex appeal of early rock-and-roll icons and with the figure of the juvenile delinquent. It began to crest in the 1970s with the heightened theatricality of glam rock, and then experienced a full renaissance, towards the end of that decade, with the revival of inter-war aesthetics in such subcultures as the one designated by Stasi spies as the “New Romantics”—those I myself have identified as a subspecies of Goths, like them but sweeter, with a soundtrack by Spandau Ballet and Ultravox, but not Christian Death or Sex Gang Children.

Gothic, as a descriptive term, follows a similarly winding path. Its early occurrences in Latin, as Getica, designate a Germanic tribe originating from Gotland in the Baltic Sea—an island the early modern Swedish nationalist and antiquarian Olaus Rudbeck would later describe as the vagina nationum. From this sheath of peoples the Goths moved out through the river systems of continental Europe, with the Rumeli capital of Constantinople as the great center and destination of their motions. In the 4^th century CE Wulfila produced the first monument of Germanic literature, a Gothic Bible, in the vicinity of what is today the Bulgarian city of Ruse. By the early Middle Ages Gothic will have also come to designate the customs and material culture of the Visigoths and other Barbarian polities that had both replaced and continued the legacy of the Roman Empire. In the Renaissance Giorgio Vasari introduced the same term as a pejorative to describe what he saw as a barbarous tendency in church architecture, the maniera tedesca that had imposed so many pointed arches, rib vaults, and flying buttresses across the continent. In time, this pejorative evolved, as pejoratives often do, into a term of praise and admiration. In the 18^th century there is a self-conscious Gothic revival in architecture, paralleled by the birth of Gothic literature, with Horace Walpole’s 1764 Castle of Otranto, a story that takes place against the backdrop of the same architectural settings Vasari had deplored, but that now depicts them as cobweb-infested, ghost-infested ruins of an idealized Middle Ages. Over the 19^th century Walpole’s sensibility is honed and heightened in the work of Poe, Shelley, and countless forgotten authors of popular stories of hauntings and of the undead. This literary proliferation transferred seamlessly into the early cinematic medium, peaked in the Weimar era, disappeared, just like the Romantic, in the early post-war era, only to begin to recrudesce in 1950s b-movies, in Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ comic-but-serious emergence out of a coffin while performing “I Put a Spell on You”, only, again like Romanticism, to enjoy its full recovery in the late 1970s with a musical subculture’s rediscovery of inter-war aesthetics. This revivalist sensibility was perhaps expressed most perfectly in Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” of 1979, and it was this sensibility that shaped the young hearts of the kids who, less than a decade later, rejected my efforts to politicize them.

Only six years before this song was released, in 1973, King Carl XVI Gustaf shortened his official title to “King of Sweden” from the longer form that had been used for centuries: “King of the Swedes, the Goths, and the Vandals.” Sweden had long since retreated as a major player on the world stage (the key defeat, in battle against Russia, occurred in 1709, at Poltava in what is today Ukraine). And yet until practically yesterday the homeland of the Goths had continued to enjoy a Romance of its own, indeed a partially African romance, in which its tribes had spread throughout Europe, and Anatolia and the Levant, and along the Berber Coast, profoundly shaping the dynamics of European history and identity.

In the end what this pair of terms designates, as opposites, is the Roman and the Barbarian, civilization and what lies outside of it. Yet, obviously, the two terms have also converged, taken on the same broad connotation, even if the one is somewhat more tinged with shadow, and have even experienced some of their respective historical transformations, as when both are adapted in the 18^th century to describe new aesthetic sensibilities revived from the Middle Ages, as if in tandem with one another.

8.

Today it is only the far right that would think to reach back to that same period, with its kitsch memetic depictions of chivalry and the Crusades. The very idea of a comparable progressive return (or “RETVRN”) to the past for symbols of what the left might today hope to achieve seems almost inconceivable.

Yet we must not forget that the original spirit of Romanticism, to which you might also add Gothicism, as aesthetic and philosophical movements of the period of the high Enlightenment, was not so much politically reactionary, as, like the Goths and New Romantics of 1980s East Berlin, politically disinterested. Nor was this disinterest understood by its proponents as a simple evasion. It was, rather, born of a growing awareness of secular modernity’s concern to absorb the entirety of our social life into the sphere of the political, an absorption process that surely reached its culmination in the insistence among late-20^th-century feminism that the personal and the political are not just connected but identical.

But there is always a remainder, imposed on us, like it or not, by the fundamental parameters of human existence: as mortal embodied beings, driven by desire and dread. It is in the interest of any viable politics to recognize and to honor that remainder.

—JSR