Infinite concretude

In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari propose that “philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.” Should the users who promiscuously invent terms on TikTok be understood as philosophers, then, rather than purveyors of “tryhard slang” and “trendbait” — to cite two terms Rebecca Jennings coins here to deride the TikTok term-coiners?

With every scroll, new terms compete for space in your brain: “orange peel theory,” “microcheating,” “girl hobby,” “loud budgeting,” “75 cozy.” They are funneled into the collective consciousness not because they are relevant or necessary but because random people have made videos inventing these terms in the hope that the wording will go viral.

But what makes a concept “relevant or necessary,” really? Many academic papers are premised on the procedure of giving some observed phenomena a distinctive name and hoping subsequent researchers will feel obliged to cite it. Journalistic trend pieces work the same way, using a showy phrase to establish the impression that something is happening that requires a name. When users repeat their coined term “as if to drill into the audience that this is a phenomenon that deserves its own designation,” they are basically trying to start oral hashtags on a site that is not primarily text-based. They are trying to make something happen, to invite a reaction, to convey a sense that a particular kind of effort is being made. “With its concepts,” Deleuze and Guattari declare, “philosophy brings forth events.”

Of course, they also point out the “shameful moment” when computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, all the disciplines of communication, seized hold of the word concept itself and said: ‘This is our concern, we are the creative ones, we are the ideas men! We are the friends of the concept, we put it in our computers.’ ” They note that “marketing has preserved the idea of a certain relationship between the concept and the event” in which the “only events are exhibitions, and the only concepts are products that can be sold.” The problem with TikTok term-coining, then, as Jennings suggests, is that it turns concept-making into product-making. The only kind of event is a product launch.

Jennings likens the term-coinage frenzy to the “microtrends and niche aesthetics” generated by social media’s accelerated trend cycles; they are insignificant in and of themselves but together form the means by which one can measure how fast the fashion wheel is turning. The point of trends is that they are ephemeral and make the passage of time palpable; they make the rate of information flow feel a certain way. Coinages designed to become trendy are not meant to be enduring descriptions, lasting contributions to how we schematize the world. They are inadequate on purpose. They come pre-adulterated with a ring of triteness, in part because they must mainly signify their own inevitable evaporation and, with that, the eternality of the great game of coining ever new phrases.

When these coinages also function as personal identities — this Refinery 29 article from October 2022 by Jessica Cullen lists a bunch of them — they impose that same ephemerality on one’s sense of self. Or one could say that by adopting trendy microaesthetics one commits not to any specific one in question but to an overall project of perpetual becoming. To be invested in fashion is to fetishize change. Cullen’s piece is similar to Jennings’s in that it claims that there are too many identity labels being circulated too quickly, but it treats this flow as something we are required to try to manage and master, something that is “exhausting” and likely to cause “burnout.” But feeling exhausted is not so different from feeling exhilarated. No one who tries to keep up with fashion would be satisfied with being all caught up.

Cullen asks, “If you spend your life stuck within the rigid barriers of an aesthetic, is it possible you’ll never learn who you really are?” The idea is that it’s stunting to try to follow the prescriptions of a particular identity formula. But following fashion is precisely a commitment to perpetual becoming, to taking any identity as provisional, subject to arbitrary change. Trying to “become who you are” as though that somehow transcended all social prescriptions and formulas, as though it were a matter of ceaselessly demonstrating your singularity and inventing a way of being that took nothing from any established currents, is far more exhausting than following microtrends.

My point here is not to defend trendiness but to suggest that “being tired of trends” is what we want from them. They form a backdrop against which we can imagine “a real self” without ever having to find ourself trapped in such an essentiality. But at the same time, they allow us to participate in social momentum, to go with its flow or to stand against it.

Chatting about these links with Nathan Jurgenson, he suggested that the profusion of terms and labels reflects people’s attempts to emulate sorting algorithms. To show cultural competency in the era of platforms, one must demonstrate a constant ability to invent marketing terms and slogans, to identify and delineate niche aesthetics, to hashtag-ify life in real time. We conform to algorithms, but not in the way a book like Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld suggests, by becoming boring. Instead we try to mimic their way of operating, learning to see the world in terms that can be recoded into a set of novel coinages — to see everything as potentially viral, given the right spin and seeded to the right sorts of audiences, and thus to see everyone in terms of demographics and fluid clusters of interests.

I often feel this way when I listen to new music: I find myself identifying the influences rather than a set of sounds and produce formulas in my head, like those one can find in bad record reviews: “This sounds like if Daniel Lanois produced Cocteau Twins, with Deerhoof practicing in a neighboring studio,” or whatever. It makes me dismiss the music itself when I think of it in these terms, but it allows me to congratulate myself on my knowledge base and my ability to analyze culture as I consume it. Instantaneous analysis becomes the mode of consumption itself. I’m breaking it down the way Spotify might.

Sorting algorithms, as John Cheney-Lippold’s We Are Data argues at length, instantiate identity as fluid and provisional, probabilistic; coining spurious terms and labels mirrors that provisionality. They aren’t meant to be describing essences. They aren’t sorting people and things once and for all but generating a category on the fly whose situational usefulness can then be tested and measured. In their spontaneity, such insta-concepts can be assimilated to Anna Kornbluh’s idea of immediacy as the “style of too late capitalism.”

In Kornbluh’s argument, immediacy as a style generally betokens a refusal of mediation and critical distance in favor of what purports to be direct experience of reality, exemplified by things like cringe comedy and autofiction. Coining concepts would seem to be the opposite of this (it unifies experiences under categories), but conceptualization itself can be accelerated to the point of immediacy, so that any coinage seems valid only for the moment it is announced and seems to describe a niche so small that it may as well be a haecceity.

As Kornbluh argues, the incentives and imperatives” of platforms work to “eradicate the gap between representation and presentation, appearance and phenomena, ‘telling it like it is’ and ‘it is what it is.’” Since new coinages connote flow more than anything they might specifically refer to, they reflect the acceleration of commodity circulation over the lasting usefulness of any term or any cultural observation in itself. Kornbluh draws on Bernard Stiegler’s idea of “discretization,” arguing that “along with our imaginary illusions and cathected images, what the circuit propels is data, which must be harvested from more semantically full and/or ambiguous relations in order to then be exchanged … To arrive at countable quanta of information, behaviors and words must be compressed into tags.”

What Jennings observes on TikTok is another manifestation of “discretization,” giving social practices a commodified, datafiable form. It’s not like people typically talk that way off the app (and when they do it’s usually embarrassing for everyone). Kornbluh calls similar terms — her slightly dated examples include fomo, yolo, athleisure, frenemy, and listicle — “pre-lexical networked babble,” detritus shed by the effort to communicate as continuously as possible.

From this point of view, coining concepts to go viral is not folk philosophizing or theorizing; it’s more like trying to speak in pictures. In Kornbluh’s account, such terms tend toward and culminate in emoji, which, in their direct pictorial manifestation of an idea, work toward “generating the illusion of dragless expression.” The quintessential example of this is a chat window on a livestream: a rapidly spooling registry of abbreviations and emoji that conveys an endless flow of intensity and immediate reaction, where conversation of any sort is unsought for and impossible anyway.

When conceptualization becomes datafication it no longer serves as a means of thickening reality, or of dialectically tracing how meanings cluster and unravel and negate and sublate each other. Suddenly it seems as though all forms of mediation will immediately degrade into datafication, that concepts can’t be anything else but hashtags in our intellectual climate. But refusing to try to mediate phenomena into concepts and letting them float on as noumenal “vibes” would be no better: The vulnerability of concepts to being commandeered for circulation would then become an excuse for not thinking at all.

So what can you do? How can one create concepts without feeding algorithms, which serve as the negation of any concept’s richness and density? I was deeply discouraged by Kornbluh’s chapter on “autotheory,” defined as those works where theorists present ideas in unsynthesized fragments and spontaneous insights (much as I do on this sub-academic, culturally negligible Substack), effecting a “reduction of theory’s mediations down to amiable oozing.” She regards “those accelerated university-press short books, along with open access journals, overnight cultural criticism, and administrative imperatives for ‘public humanities’” as “new highways for circulable scholarship” — i.e. scholarship whose main purpose is less to inform than to circulate.

That seems like an accurate assessment. But to take my own situation, appropriately or not, as an example, it’s hard for me to conceive of doing anything but short or fragmented works in those disorganized, autotheoretical forms. I’m certainly not driving a lot of circulation with what I write, but for reasons I would love to blame on “too late capitalism” and not my intrinsic unfitness, I generally feel incapable of synthesizing ideas or developing arguments and thus feel doomed to write in “immediacy style” if I am to write anything at all. I can’t “pitch an essay” or “write a book proposal” because I can’t really think more than a day ahead of myself or conceive of an audience whose attention I could possibly hold at any time other than right this second. (As much I deeply appreciate anyone who reads these posts, the only audience that feels real to me most of the time is my own internal monologue.) Even though I am thinking thoughts in a debased and commodified form, that doesn’t grant me any ability to sell them.

So I identify with the figures that Kornbluh tends to portray as victims of the “too lateness” of the capitalist order, those people who missed out or were shut out of nonprecarious positions, who “drown in the extremity of bad affects,” who console themselves with the cruel optimism of immediacy and find themselves retreating from the symbolic order. It often feels like it is too late for me to write my way back into it, but I will keep posting these newsletters anyway.