A Note On Andrea Long Chu

Style was a concept.

As a stylist, Andrea Long Chu is not only an overly self-conscious writer of good sentences, she also makes a strategic bet. Once we understand the bet, pointed criticism or resistance is beside the point. If she brought the new Trump nasty to the prose game during those years, then it’s because she was in that present. In fact, more than anyone else she signalled the need to install Trump as a lesson for writing, as what Reza Negarestani would call an update. Negarestani writes of how ‘a commitment—be it assertional, inferential, practical, or cognitive—can neither be examined nor properly undertaken without the process of updating the commitment and unpacking its consequences through a full range of multimodal practices’. To write after Trump was to update bitchiness into something else; sheer cut-off. To have written after him as if the old cooler types of sadism and masochism would do was hardly anything at all. Chu was sadistic and reinvented the ontological heating of a new variety of takedown.

The sadism of fine style is also just a form of inverted masochism. One of the main things that happened in 2018 was that Chu showed to perfection how unfair and inaccurate takedowns (Ronell and Soloway, then Ellis) may be used to leverage genuine theoretical breakthroughs (‘Did Sissy Porn Make Me Trans?’ and ‘Black Infinity’). In part, in that time, she was a Trumpian top, a true stylist, a controversy-script.