Anne Imhof's Falcon

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, How We All Died On The Internet, which at the the present rate, and 500 pages counting, is due out in about 2030, when I'll be dead from excess scrolling.

The Phenomenology of Podcasts, or, Dasha Among The Angels

podcasters are angels – Dasha

Let’s say some things in a speculative vein about a possible phenomenology of podcasts, to see if we can get from angel to falcon. A good way to understand ‘the podcast’, which I posit here as a type of ‘organism’, is through the singular way it reflects and understands events. If the podcast is itself a singular genre, and therefore a singular art (technique, technology, sending, and so on), we would expect it to leave a singular impression on the events it covers, and even makes as it does so. Take 9/11 for example, or one of the many miniature 9/11s that followed the election of Donald Trump such as the LD50 gallery protest and closure in early 2017. One might say, looking back, that it is hard to depict or describe LD50 in words or with other art objects, because like 9/11 it is such a specific and loaded event. The density of such events means that it is dishonest to make them into something else, like a parallel fiction or an installation with a different name. ‘9/11’ and ‘LD50’ are what might be called unique names, or what Sylvain Lazarus even called ‘unnameable names’. One cannot name them anything else, but at the same time, they are impossible to name, because of how dense and heavy they were and still are as events. When Stockhausen said that 9/11 was ‘the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos’, and then walked it back, we can understand both the naming and the walking back, but the naming is probably what lingers for the important part of the time being. Equally, one may recall that Nick Land claimed that ‘LD50 has completed aesthetic modernism, to general consternation’. Because these types of event are too heavy and freighted with static to be anything other than names, the inner logic is that one may as well make a podcast about them, a ‘real life’ discussion of their effects. It goes without saying the present is overloaded with such heavy events. In the same way, sometimes there is something one cannot name, it is just too much, and one is forced to go to an analyst. The ‘podcast’ therefore might be taken to name an urgency or even bursting of subjects or even of the subject, a kind of, to use an extraordinary term from the analyst Eric Laurent, ‘alloverdose’. Furthermore, if the podcast form has flourished under the event named ‘Donald Trump’, then perhaps we can understand the coincidence as a kind of coming together of voice and overloaded shock. Perhaps the podcast can be understood as the vocal imprint of an alloverdose.

Podcasts are not just ballads, then, they are secret histories, or shock registers. They allow what is not being said in the still formal jargons of online magazines and theory journals and even colloquia and consulting rooms to be cast (to have a voice). While anything that a podcast registers may also be expressed by one of the other muses (the artistic genres and faculties, poetry, sculpture, music, and so on), podcasts allow for a dithyrambically chaotic absorption. Watching an Alex Jones live broadcast, as I argued elsewhere, the gestalt becomes more important than the fully formed book or essay. It’s as if the podcast form tells us: there are now officially too many ideas and too many books, we therefore need a form that refuses and sends (casts) everything into semioliquidity and loquacious meltdown. The End of the universe (we know we are perhaps somehow there) as a feeling is, strictly speaking, too vast to be filtered, and so something like a vocal fry is called up to cope with the violent and intrusive patina (ours is called general cope). There is a sound, in other words, and it is the sound of a universe closing out, and it is down to the podcasters involved in the attendant podcast wars to sound this out. Perhaps it is for this reason that Dasha will insist that ‘podcasters are angels’.

The recent past, Benjamin said, is always more powerful and guiding than the present. In a contemporary moment—November 2020—overloaded with events and articles, it serves us to step back a notch, to the start of April 2020, when Steve Bannon went on Red Scare. The girls, as they are called, had already been analysing and beckoning him. In an episode from March, Dasha had noted how Bannon mispronounces ‘avant-garde’ in American Dharma. In that one instant, the worlds of Red Scare and Bannonology had, it seemed, already clicked. The Anna and Dasha formula was there in exemplary form: autistic attentiveness to contemporary popular political culture as a form of jouissance at the possible end of a universe of sense. Just that, to repeat, is what a ‘podcast’ now is. Prolonged nerdiness faced with the pain of a looming end, such as Kantbot’s seven hour long cast on Watergate released in October 2020 or his seventeen and a half hour podcast on the Iran-Contra affair in December 2020. We keep talking and noticing details to stave off the worst. And if you don’t know what the worst is by now, then no need to listen. One can add that if all of this is ‘alloverdose’, then the word ‘overdose’ itself reverberates in strange ways through the signscape of today at key moments. Take Anne Imhof’s falcon for example. What do you think it happens to be called?

Imhof will tell us in an interview that he’s called Overdose. This falcon called Overdose, this unnameable name, Overdose, deserves more attention. There’s a final word there, a word of sending. What is general overdose in the present? What is animal alloverdose, for all of us, now?