ENCORE UN EFFORT FOR LD50 Part 1
The Nano-Racism of the Mob, or Supplemental Tbt For Tomorrow’s Tales From The Crypt.
In toxicology, the median lethal dose, LD₅₀, LC₅₀ or LCt₅₀ is a measure of the lethal dose of a toxin, radiation, or pathogen.
The following piece was too long to fit the Substack newsletter format so will be broken into parts over the next week or so, and followed by an extensive bibliography. It concerns the LD50 gallery affair in London in early 2017. We are now four years on from all that, exactly to the month. But it remains possible that this original ‘cancel culture’ wound is guiding in all that happens today, in 2021, and easily predicts the next decade. Many people were inopportunely affected, very few if any of them fitting the bill of the original targeting, which always in my view threatened to be incoherent. I make no bones about returning now, in what is in effect the same clavicle fracture in time, and for using psychoanalysis to do so. No freedom, let’s suppose, without a degree of truth.
Who cares today about the gallery controversy once known as ‘LD50’? Perhaps nothing remains of the debates it occasioned. Nonetheless, I want to try returning to that scene, and to do so while focusing on two extremely load-bearing claims with seem, with hindsight, to have been essential to what happened, and yet entirely unconfirmed:
one, that the LD50 gallery was never really a gallery,
and two, that we knew it was not a gallery because the ‘neo-reactionary conference’ it allegedly hosted in the summer of 2016 was kept secret.
In this controversy, the argument per category-error was from the very start conflated with an argument per secrecy. The official narrative was that the gallery was not a gallery at all but a ‘fascist organising point’, and that this was known for sure because they kept their ‘fascist’ activities to themselves. But what if, looking back, neither of these load-bearing claims was ever true?
It happened so long ago, in early 2017—or in what at the time I labelled ‘2017.1’. LD50 was the art gallery in the east end of London targeted by a group of activists (including Danny Hayward, Andrew Osborne, Suhail Malik and Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, and others) who formed a counter-group called ‘SDLD50’ (Shut Down LD50).1 Despite many claims to the contrary, the protest group may be argued to have formed in rapid reaction not so much to an event or to an exhibition, but to the big reveal on Facebook of the gallery curator Lucia Diego’s private dms. Yes, dear reader, it started with a screenshot.
LD50/SDLD50—The Split
Daniel Miller’s ‘The True Story of LD50’ remains, in my view, the only account of the affair that gets things right, but it balks somewhat at the level of what this newsletter calls theoretical gossip. If we are to indulge encore un effort to challenge the originary claims about LD50 in toto, it is essential not only for understanding but for accuracy to go back back into the psychic sludge and risk a certain amount of sublime gossip. So now is the time for deluxe HD protective goggles. Holding the toxic LD50 woundology close to us at arms’ length, let us make use of some of the acidic content that was buried first time round.
Coincidentally, SDLD50 have themselves recently been busy taking down their own original textual performatives, their Tumblr no longer available online. Why this deletion? In effect, when it comes to ‘LD50’, I want to suggest we were always returning to artefacts which even at the time seemed to be vanishing forever from view. The toxicology and the hermeneutic bluster meant we were saving only demi-extinction doses, badly archived tinctures, the double dose of SD-LD50; a repetition set to fail.
We had double-dosed vision, in other words; we were splitting catatonically (LD50/SDLD50) as we went along.
Screenshot Frenzy
The events therefore began, as Miller rightly diagnoses, with a screenshot. The artist Sophie Jung chose to screen grab some private messages with the LD50 curator Diego and post them publicly on her Facebook wall. This was, let us recall, on 11 February 2017, exactly four years ago give or take, and a couple of weeks after the inauguration of a certain now cancelled American president. This timing may be seen, super-dimensionally, as far from coincidental.
Sophie Jung’s Envy Crypt
But wait, let’s backtrack a moment. Jung was a a fellow artist of Diego’s. Both, no doubt, had ambitions. Diego ran her own gallery, LD50, which had hosted a number of major artists (Jesse Darling, Deanna Havas, Jake and Dinos Chapman, and others). Even in basic outline, it appears Diego was successful within whatever parameters the London art scene then had. Diego was also—already—controversial, and on the verge of being far more so.
As for Jung, accomplished and relatively well-known, she was about to express an ethical concern. At the same time, Diego was a human being with a unique vision who was going to be erased, never till this day to the return to the internet (quite a price). Reaching back in time, might we not speculate that Jung’s position, not her person, was simply envious? Yes, envious.
LD50’s Coincidence Report
Such an envy is, on one level at least, mere historical speculation. But certain things might follow if we allow it to magnetise our account: speculative envy might, in February 2017, have made a kind of ‘coincidence report’ on and with Jung’s worries about ‘the election of Donald Trump’ and LD50 gallery’s content, and so the ‘concern troll’ of Diego became serious and got out of hand, terminating, several years later, with innumerable broken hearts, liberated and partially ruined innocent adjacents, and the advances of state ‘cancellation’ in 2021.
Leaving personology aside, the least we can say is that the envy-quotient is surely much higher and far more guiding in the aesthetic sector than is generally admitted. Girard, most famously a theorist of scapegoating, was also an analyst of envy, writing his sole book in English on the affect in Shakespeare. Here’s how he puts it in an an interview:
Today envy is the emotion which plays the greatest role in our society, where everything is directed towards money. Therefore you envy the people who have more than you have. You cannot talk about your envy. I think the reason we talk so much about sex is that we don’t dare talk about envy. The real repression is the repression of envy. And of course, envy is mimetic.
That is, not only is scapegoat theory a theory of envy, but the deeper cause of the historical persecution texts that make up our present is envy-mimesis (‘envy is mimetic’). But if envy was expressed in the case of ‘SDLD50’, perhaps it belonged to nobody, or to the one we least suspect. What about me, for example?
Everybody’s Envy
Envy-mimesis spreads like an insta-virus. Such doxic toxic doxxing is itself an immediate ideological after-affect of non-existence, and this is what we want to say again, now, encore un effort, in 2021. 2017.1 was especially ontologically scorching because of the extinction-primed ascendance of Trump, but also, more locally, because of the suicide (not just death) of Mark Fisher. Trump ascended; Fisher bowed out. This intense psychic dovetail was itself a skandalon—remaining to be read.2
The screenshot reveal was in this way strongly context-dependent. A photophagic cover for a non-existence which, like the envy, belongs to no one person, which is also to say to us (one thinks perhaps of the coiled spaces of Las Meninas). In Bion, who I am riffing on, this is how deep the art and toxicosis of envy goes:
‘Non-existence’ immediately becomes an object that is immensely hostile and filled with murderous envy towards the quality or function of existence wherever it is to be found. ‘Space’, either as a representation, or the realization the term derives from or represents, becomes terrifying or terror itself: ‘Le silence de ces espaces infinies m’effraie.’ The space of the ordinary man, the astronomer, or the physicist, becomes confounded with ‘mental space’, and its objects with the objects of ‘mental space’.
Between gallery spaces and outer spaces, what is the real difference? Le silence de ces espaces LD50 infinies m’effraie.
The vacuum that the cultural scene must have felt in 2017.1 might have literally shivered into iteration; in fact, the void it thought it abhorred was singularly conducive and conductive, setting up inevitable envo-nano-machines and repercussions. Encore un effort, says theoretical gossip! Or the math of envy thus:
Envy is typical of other elements of the personality in that everyone would be prepared to admit its existence. Yet it does not smell; it is invisible, inaudible, intangible. It has no shape. It must have invariance, or it could not be so widely and surely recognized; and if it has invariants it must be invariant with regard to some kind of operation and therefore there must be an underlying group of such operations.
It doesn’t (i.e. does) stink. And even deeper:
The realization that approximates most closely to my formulation is the group individual setting dominated by envy. Envy begets envy, and this self-perpetuating emotion finally destroys host and parasite alike. The envy cannot be satisfactorily ascribed to one or other party; in fact it is a function of the relationship.
Let us set out the following speculative bet, as if to deregulate what is meant to have happened around ‘LD50’ in early 2017, and dream of inverting ‘cancel culture’ as the plague. Envy begets envy in the same way that one toxic dose (LD50) begets and is in need of its other half (SDLD50). The letters are shared; so many L’s and so many D’s go to make up the global London and England that Bion’s origin and Girard’s envy book shared.
Envy, me?
When it comes to ‘LD50’, it is as if we are asking the question ‘why envy?’ as much as we are begetting and betting on the question ‘why England?’. What happened here was a potentially immense split between alternative interpretations which, if only they could have seen themselves, well, they might have at least have seen themselves splitting. ‘England’, we are saying, envied itself, and passed it on to the whole world, and this could be shown in more than one way:
The emotional matrix from which this springs is not envy and gratitude, but envy and greed. The idea is split over and over again and is felt to produce a quantity of splits—‘mental faeces’.
Encore un effort with the mental faeces, with the many split features of the shitty and splattered face of early 2017 staring back at us. It’s true, after all, that nobody wants to go back there.
The Mystic and the Canceller Class
In Bion jargon, Diego is the mystic and Jung, as part of the analytic canceller class, is the group. The group wants something specialised, of course; it wants, in a moment of heightened non-existence, to eat—it wants to eat, if not vore, the mystic.
By 2021, it seems that Diego has been fully swallowed down and even what was shat out has been swept away. But has it? You don’t need to be an analyst of some variety to know that’s probably not the case.
Lest we are not being clear, ‘LD50’ is itself the name of the appropriate but median death dose, a toxic embargo that preceded what is called ‘Covid-19’. But unleash such a dose on the population in an era of extinction and the halves and the splits themselves will splice, spike, and adapt, only as further contagions. What starts as self-cancellation and splitting (LD50/SDLD50) can only end in more mental shit, all shapes and sizes hidden below the crouch/crotch—a world of shit and disease.
Hence, the deleted SDLD50 memory form is merely a parasite on what it claims, enviously, to want to destroy. Envy begets envy, as in any mimesis dimension, and this self-perpetuating machine finally destroys host and parasite alike. Look in vain for either the LD50 or LD50 original sites and see what you find (they are only there, compartmentalised, in anal internet secrecy, on deep archives).
Envy Before Sex
If sex is also per Girard a cover for envy, then persecution is going to act in the same way. Was Lucia Diego sexy? By virtue of being forever invisible, she was, splitting now between present and posthumous erotics (what are erotics in the afterlife?). Envy is, if you like, the meta-mimetic persecutory function, and it floods in to scold into deeper zeros a threatening non-existence. Now, we can never know that person X was envious of person Y on this or that historical occasion, but it is extremely unlikely that in this case one young female artist going after another was ever going to be entirely detached from the structure and trap Girard and Bion are flagging up. By this, I inculcate the whole affair on both sides, as it continues, in a zillion splitty forms.
Worse and better still, envy may be said to coincide with, motivate, but also contaminate genuine ethical concern. But also, in Girard’s terms, which nobody would want to speak about, envy, because it gazumps sex, precedes mimetic contagion of any type. Envy contagion outbids erotogenesis.
(One split of the point would be, how can you ‘shut down’ that with a mere meatverse protest.)
The Big Reveal Itself
In the heat of the moment, perhaps it would have been possible to stop the mimetic momentum about to pick up by acting as Jung’s analyst. Luckily and due to surviving tact, that is not our job, especially now that we we are on remote. Yet, that is exactly what Jung was doing with Diego, and even now that alters our permissions:
Should this series of screenshot or any like it ever have existed? What kind of shit was this, and is it? Is it autistic to reproduce this shit here again? The argument would be that these narratives are pretty much always shittier than we pretend them to be. This shit remains . . . close. In time, we look back and let things hit the pan. Perhaps we feel better for it.
In the reply section, which lasted for days, the issue of permission was the first objection raised and, to be fair, there was an attempt to think the matter through, with all the limitations a Facebook discussion contains. The discussion is still available (almost complete) here, as Diego arranged for us.
Shit Envy, Us?
What was my own reaction as I watched this live in early 2017? Was I spatially envious, challenged? Did I want some of the same shit? Did I want it to go down for me? To smear them all, every last motherfucking one of them, all over the wall? Highly probable. One thing I marvelled at is the fact that in this discussion a relatively serious racial insult was used in the very moment they were about to take a crap on somebody’s life and career (Diego’s). In this very self-same moment, Jacob Bard-Rosenberg—who over the years has acted as a kind of cuckoo clock popping up regularly to remind us all of what the official narrative was—used a racially-saturated and cack-handed pun on a fellow Jew’s name on the TL (timeline). That is, if one wants to get really super nerdy and granular about this, one may wish to note firstly that the decision to cancel the gallery effectively took place in ‘replies’ and secondly that it occurred in an atmosphere of casual and shitty-minded etymological slander. This is what we claim to have gotten beyond.
Here is what Bard-Rosenberg said, in response to someone who had politely questioned the need to make the screenshots public in the first place:
Why did he just shit on that guy’s head? Why use a shitty racial epithet at the very moment you want to form a group dedicated to a degree of racial safety and diverse hygiene for members of your community? For the figure of Bard-Rosenberg, not the person, who is about to effectively recommend the cancellation of the livelihood and vision of someone he doesn’t know, and who will remind us every five minutes of every year since what we should really think about all this without ever offering any actual evidence of much at all (as we shall see in detail), it is perfectly okay to throw a shitty racial slur into the mix at the moment of making the ethical decision. Diego is not allowed to express an opinion in a private context without having it made public, but Bard-Rosenberg finds it ‘lolz’ to call another person ‘little shit’ in the Jewish mother or father tongue in the very moment of deciding the fate of a human being and their life’s work.
In the next part, I analyse the load-bearing claims to the point where they perhaps fail to exist and introduce a previously unanalysed February 2017 interview with Lucia Diego. All errors are my own.
SDLD50 claimed to be an anonymous group at the time, although their partial identity was hardly a secret, see for example here. My essay in its entirety makes the argument that any claim to anonymity as a right was in this case contaminated as soon as this protest gesture began with a highly debatable abuse of Lucia Diego’s own privacy. Once Diego chose to make art of SDLD50’s gesture in reply, during their attempt to ‘shut it down’, any right to privacy had been embargoed, eroded, and suspended, leaving SDLD50 to the trace-work of history. She signed off, if you like, by freezing SDLD50’s initial assets; SDLD50, signing in in her name, were signed. The claim to anonymity while attacking the lives of others, in any case, stinks.
The least we can suggest is that, when it came to this enthroning and suicide, ‘LD50’ was only one way of reading it. Or rather, it was, in some respects, the way of not reading it at all. ‘LD50’ marks the coincidence-spot, but it also marks the original technogenesis of modern unreading.