In the war of haves and have-nots, what tends to get lost is documentation of mid-cult; an explosion of the cultural fringe that renegotiates the boundaries of both sides. I’m tempted to write with flourish and polish on a subject like this, but attending to mid-cult demands the opposite.
In ideological contests between opposing forces, the main site of struggle is for definition. This struggle plays out in various arenas — abstract/real, local/global, utility/equality, intrinsic/extrinsic, etc. — philosophical battlegrounds that produce the proofs we use to make sense of the chaos of daily life. But without the buffer of mid-cult, these ideological contentions can only generate endless loops of power, revolutionizing information too quickly for any staying change to take hold. Without mid-cult present in cultural conversation, all aspects of culture are reduced to a game of heuristics and majorities, stripping the common of all subjectivity and expression for the sake of winning numbers.
It doesn’t take much to imagine the disaster of culture defined by probabilities and statistics; we are already living through this dystopia. Whatever we love in life — whether things, ideas, or even people — can almost certainly be traced back to consumer behavior and images forced on us by a controlled flow of information. The role of mid-cult, in my view, is twofold:
- Generatively analytic
- Tactically subversive
In simpler terms, mid-cult 1. draws careful connections between ideologies and 2. expands definition while out of view. What I mean by out of view is that mid-cult is almost never presented as a tangible entity; ideological wars are always shifting, and mid-cult by nature remains in the same dynamic state. Optimally, mid-cult should take the form of cultural observation, extracting the psychic principles made available by analysis of the real, material world.
Eventually, as the apparatus of mid-cult dissects ideologies into a complex network of nuances, we should be able to see representations for what they are — representations — rather than absolute truth. Every war, physical, psychic, or otherwise, is waged on the inherent truth of language and laying claim to this or that definition. In my diagnosis of today’s ideological landscape, the only way toward peace is to disrupt the notion that language bears any sort of neutral truth; sowing doubt will produce good questions, and all that is true can withstand questions.
Polemics belong in the conversation of what culture is and should be. Without it, all we’ll hear on our climate-fueled death march is advertising.
Sincerely yours,
–
midcult 