Kill All Normies
by Angela Nagle
This short book was highly timely when it was published (June 2017), but this seems to have come at some cost. The book is unfinished – it has none of the referencing apparatus it requires, it doesn’t appear to have been proof read, it is fragmentary and has real problems of cohesion, and has clearly been rushed for publication. Whether this cost still seems worth it a year on is debatable.
Overall it reads as either a draft thesis or a series of thematically linked articles. This is far from satisfactory, but if read as a rather patchy series of draft essays one can see through the flaws to the contribution the author could have made.
There is one big problem that destroys the coherence of the book as a project (there are unfortunately also many small ones, partly down to what appears to have been zero editing performed by Zero Books): it claims to offer a materialist explanation of the current internet ‘culture wars’ yet restricts itself entirely to analysing internet culture on its own, internet cultural, terms. As a result, it loses much of the claimed analytical edge and is often rather descriptive, and necessarily selectively so (the internet is a big place): something which then of course causes its own problems as the grounds for selection can seem more for convenience than methodologically driven here.
The first potentially saving grace is that it takes seriously the impact these culture wars are having on intellectual discourse. This is not a novel argument to make, but I think it is under-expressed. The brain drain away from open internet expression that she highlights as a result of current online culture is a real problem, as intelligent people find better things to do with their time than engage with a public sphere dominated by this self- and identity obsessed cry-bullying.
The second is a more novel but underdeveloped argument about how a counter-cultural obsession with transgressiveness – common to both online left and right – has become constitutive of online content. Nagle has been accused of endorsing horseshoe theory: to me this seems entirely erroneous from any reasonable reading of the book, but does highlight that this useful argument is not made clearly and explicitly enough (and is perhaps, and perhaps irredeemably, confused in its expression). The core of her argument here seems to me to be not that the online left and right somehow meet, but that their common modes of expression come from their expression (of, unfortunately unspecified, material positions) being overdetermined by this counter-culture transgressiveness.
Ultimately the book does not do what it sets out to do: it does not explain the alt-right. It does however do more than simply, or even sympathetically, describe it as some have accused (there does also seem to be a problem with commentators believing attempts to explain are intended to excuse). Some of the online left does also come out looking pretty bad from this book – Nagle is highly critical of ‘Tumblr liberalism’ – but it surely deserves to. One only has to look back to Mark Fisher’s Exiting the Vampire Castle, and more so some of the reaction to it, to see how prevalent long-standing and structural are the problems Nagle identifies with the left online. It is not entirely mistaken to suggest this has caused a reaction, but that should be the starting point for an analysis – why is this the case? – rather then, as here, description of it mostly substituting for one.
Nagle correctly criticises the turn to cultural politics, but fails to transcend it.
Recommendation
This is a short and still timely book. Whether you’ll find Nagle’s work here objectionable or useful despite its flaws can be derived from your reaction to one sentence, highlighted repeatedly in hostile reviews of the book:
Trigger warnings had to be issued in order to avoid the unexpectedly high number of young women who had never gone to war claiming to have post-traumatic stress disorder.
If you read this a simply attacking the idea that anyone other than veterans can suffer from PTSD, or more specifically that young women cannot suffer PTSD, then you are part of the problem the book tries to address.
If you see the importance of the ‘unexpectedly high’ part of the sentence, and from there see it as attacking a valid problem of performative self-victimisation (albeit clumsily expressed in snark), then you will probably find the book rewarding despite its faults.
