smol bean Fascism

Regulating Peter Pan according to Wyndham Lewis

Yesterday, Twitter/X poster @repligate tweeted the response from AI chatbot Claude to the question of “how to achieve maximal cuteness.” Don’t waste too much time on it once you get the gist.

The most striking part of this response, I thought, is the conflation of cuteness with the fear of being cringe—another reply confirmed this curiousness of this conflation.

I thought about it for a while—and where my thoughts took me shook me. This post is going to get fucked-up real quick.

Gertrude Stein

In his 1927 book Time and Western Man (free on Archive.org), English painter and writer Wyndham Lewis saw danger in the conceit of childishness of modern culture which the unexpected popularity of Peter Pan had made explicit. He chose, as its exemplary poet, Gertrude Stein. Reading one of her poems, I’ll uncharitably say, is to have read them all.

In Miss Stein’s composition there is above all time, she tells us as best she can. As best she can, as you see; for she is not able to tell us this or anything else clearly and simply; first of all because a time-obsession, it seems, interferes, so we are given to understand. The other reason is that she is not simple at all, although she writes usually so like a child—like a confused, stammering, rather ‘soft’ (bloated, acromegalic, squinting and spectacled, one can figure it as) child. Miss Stein you might innocently suppose from her naïf stuttering to be, if not a child, simple, at least, in spite of maturity. But that is not so; though, strangely enough, she would like it to be thought that it is. That is only the old story of people wanting to be things they are not or else, either as strategy or out of pure caprice, enjoying any disguise that reverses and contradicts the personality.

Lewis observes that any honest poet would be able to speak at-least somewhat sensibly about their technique in composing poetry. Yet when she is on the record, Miss Stein gives explanations about her technique in the style of her poetry. She acts like she can’t drop character. But, as Lewis points out, it is clearly a cynical affect. As a fully-grown, commercially-successful women she most certainly could speak as one if she wanted to!

Lewis is engaged in more than mere literary criticism here (if literary criticism can be so disparaged with the qualifier!). His prior book, The Art of Being Ruled, was a Machiavellian guidebook for how a fascistic state ought to—that’s right, ought to—enslave the minds of its populous. In the two years between the that book and this one, he changed tact and decided to write more explicitly in defense of liberty and the preservation of free, rational Western though.

Just take a gander at this table of contents for Art of Being Ruled and tell me you understood what was going on in 1926!

Perhaps the strong influence which Lewis had on a younger George Orwell is now more apparent.

The key to enslavement of the populous, he argued in both books, was the inducement of a perpetually childlike and romantic sensibility regarding time.

This habit of speech, like a stuttering infection, is very contagious… The child-personality, the all-important base of this school that I am attacking, and all that the affecting of that personality, and of the language of childhood, implies, is of such decisive importance, that I will now, during some pages, provide a brief analysis of this sudden malady of childhood that has mysteriously overtaken all our world, from the hoariest veteran down to the veritable child…

How the demented also joins hands with the child, and the tricks, often very amusing, of the asylum patient, are exploited at the same time as the happy inaccuracies of the infant; how contemporary inverted-sex fashions are affiliated to the Child-cult ; and in fact all the different factors in this intricate sensibility, being evolved notably by such writers as Miss Stein, will be found there. Not to seize the secret of these liaisons is totally to misunderstand the nature of what is occurring around you to-day.

A major result was the equation of the feminine and masculine, resulting in the childish “neuter”. Literally, he writes on page 264 of Art of Being Ruled,

When the citizen was no longer physiologically a child or a neuter, he would be recommended to remain a child or a neuter or both, in every way except in age. Especially would the necessity of remaining in tutelage, in helplessness, in neutrality, in childishness, mentally, be insisted on. The image of the famous child of Kensington Gardens ‘who never grew up’ would be constantly held up before him as a cherished ideal.

As to sex and the family, the same line would be taken in suggestion and argument. Sex—the crude cutting up into ‘men’ and ‘women’—destroys that divine neutrality of the tender, tractable first years. This would involve something else. It would be preferable that only the pleasure principle should remain in sex: and so far as possible it should be isolated in a neuter organism.

Regulating Ambivalence

I’ve been encouraged to expand my familiarity with developmental psychology, and am reading a short book of lectures by John Bowlby titled The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds. Bowlby was the founder of attachment theory.

What I’m learning so far is that a healthy, consistent attachment to parents gives a developing child is the environment to handle and integrate opposing, contradictory tendencies like love and hate.

Before coming to our main theme—the conditions which in childhood favour or retard the development of the capacity to regulate conflict—I want to emphasize one thing more: there is nothing unhealthy about conflict. Quite the contrary: conflict is the normal state of affairs in all of us. Every day of our lives we discover afresh that if we follow one course of action we have to forgo others which are also desired; we discover, in fact, that we cannot eat our cake and have it too. Every day of our lives therefore we have the task of adjudicating between rival interests within ourselves and of regulating conflicts between irreconcilable impulses. Other animals have the same problem. Lorenz (1956) has described how formerly it was thought that only man was the victim of conflicting impulses, but how it is now known that all animals are constantly beset by impulses which are incompatible with one another, such as attack, flight, and sexual approach.

The idea of the order arising through the regulation (or, in cybernetic terms, homeostasis) between opposing forces is once which transcends systems. Your nervous system is the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. Your brain is the opposition of left and right hemisphere. Everything is a balance of tension.

What we see in the LLM Claude’s idea of cuteness is a total lack of regulation. The maximally cute subject, according to the analysis of this talking computer, exhibits a total helplessness of self-regulation. Of knowing whether or not one is able to maintain an attachment to the other. It is a flowing, unstructured release of motormouth, endless train-of-thought.

Lewis, for his part, saw a great amenability to “being ruled” in such a state. Mental slavery. And it was facilitated by an affect, a fake, a cynical put-on of childishness by artists for the public, on one hand—and by an earnest childishness in the receiving public on the other.

I have written a lot on Lewis in the past. I’ve mentioned…. And a major reason is owing to the fact that Marshall McLuhan personally knew and deeply studied Lewis work. I believe that McLuhan’s work can be fashioned as a project to spread strategies to fight the “somnambulism” of the time-cult which Lewis described. Referring to Lewis, McLuhan says, “Good Heavens—that’s where I got it!”

Good Heavens—that's where I got it! [Laughter] It was Lewis who put me on to all this study of the environment as an educational—as a teaching machine. To use our more recent terminology, Lewis was the person who showed me that the man-made environment was a teaching machine—a programmed teaching machine.

A key part of McLuhan’s message is the need for the artist to take within themself the ambivalence in the environment and create new balances and constructive tensions. To regulate the out-of-control feedback loops which have got people—children of all ages—running in one direction or another, and smashing violently into one another in public conflict.

At a deeper level, it’s about the regulation of the senses, and our sense of embodiment to a world full of tools which extend our bodies and machines which extend our minds.

Contrary to that, the body as a sensual instrument for constant stimulation—the reduction of sex to “only the pleasure principle” in Lewis’ terms—is a sure way to continued merger with the machine.

Jackin’ the bean-stalker

In all the arguments being made today about online porn, I haven’t seen discourse cotton onto the pervasiveness of kink-aesthetic of power dynamics—the D and S in BDSM. Lewis recognized a dangerous post-liberal potential (lending itself, roughly, to both fascism and communism in ascendance when he wrote) in the put-on of childishness by artists. So what about the endless images of domination and submission which fill imageboards?

The hands-off pedagogy of telling kids to go “be creative” in fan fiction, drawing, and online over-sharing has lead to a whole lot of “maturation” of the form of drawing cartoons fucking. And the ability to find books and “do research” online, which precocious and shy kids do as a means of studying-ahead for experiences in adulthood, has lead to entire world of children studying BDSM dungeon manuals as sex manuals.

I think it’s preposterous to blame sex-education in schools for anything whatsoever—what the hell do kids learn in school which can overpower what they learn on the internet? The environment is a teaching machine—McLuhan advocated in the early ‘80s for “The City as Classroom” just to compete with the television advertisement as classroom.

By design or not—it doesn’t really matter at this point—we’ve gone and created the very environment the early, fascist Lewis was advocated for. It runs on neotony and lust, creating subjects “lost in time, lost in space—and meaning.”

And there are plenty of people who know just how to dominate in such a mileau. I won’t dignify them with the labels adults, or mature—they’re fully satisfied with the term “dominant” in their own childish way.

If Claude has read all of the internet and came up with “fear of cringe” as being maximally cute, then we have confirmation of poor social attachment, perpetually childishness, and lack of regulation as being made into an ideal. We’ve optimized straight through puppy-dog eyes to anime eyes to smol bean e-girls and transgirls crying for a mommy and daddy.

Is there anything cuter than to beg for reassurance? Than to need endless emotional support and comfort? To pine for the security of enslavement? 🥺

And how does a healthy, mature adult parent-proxy behave in such a situation? Answer carefully.