Culture, Digested: On the Pleasures of Exclusion

The excommunication of cardinals, Nina Power, and Americans at Berghain

I was listening to an episode of the Search Engine podcast. Two American men went to Berlin to try to get into Berghain, but they were rejected. The German techno club has a front door policy about as strict as the gates of heaven – the bouncers look deep into your soul to determine whether you are worthy of entrance. And most people are not.

The tourists turned to Search Engine because they wanted to know what the bouncers had seen in them that deemed them unworthy. In host PJ Vogt’s attempt to answer that question, he ends up talking to Lutz Leichsenring, a longtime advocate for nightlife and club culture. He explains that who a club like Berghain lets in the door has a powerful effect on that club. Not just in that a tourist might be more likely to try to violate the no pictures policy or would interfere with other people’s ability to enjoy themselves. But things like, how a club is taxed and zoned.

But still people want to get into Berghain. People who don’t like techno music want to get into Berghain. People who have never been to Berlin and know nothing about it want to get into Berghain. And that’s because it feels really good to be accepted into spaces other people are rejected from. The front door policy is so notorious that it has created an inflated demand.

Leichsenring gives Vogt a few suggestions for how to get in: meet people in the scene, learn about the music, be friendly and curious and considerate. Don’t just look like you know what you are talking about, know what you are talking about. Vogt seems wary of these suggestions. That sounds like it’ll take a long time. But the advice amounts to investing yourself in a place that you want to accept you. Relationships should be reciprocal, and this community has decided they want participants, not tourists.

One of the reasons Berghain has survived as long as it has is because it is exclusive, and because its exclusiveness is not based on coolness or money but instead fostering community. Communities are only as strong as their ability to withstand, well, let’s call it gentrification. People praise communities for being accessible but being accessible in the wrong ways – open to bad actors, flattered by attention, valuing money over cohesion, lowering standards to raise profits – causes scenes and communities and venues to fall apart. When everything that’s created seems to be made solely in the hopes of selling it out, it might be interesting to consider the value of exclusivity.

Jeanne Mammen

You Have to Know How to Hate

A day after Kendrick Lamar released the music video for “Not Like Us,” his boundary-creating anthem against sexual and economic exploitation by wealthy celebrities, Pope Francis excommunicated Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. If Lamar was haunting Drake by piling up references to Drake’s wardrobe, hand gestures he’s used on social media, former friends, and iconography from his brand, Pope Francis’s move against his political enemy cuts even deeper. While Lamar seems to be attempting to eradicate all trace of Drake from the culture and society, by ordering excommunication the Pope has annihilated the possibility of this man ever basking in the healing light of God’s love. That’s taking hate to a whole new level.

You’ve got to learn how to hate. How to hate not rooted in envy or avarice but out of a deep love for the way the world could be. Viganò is one of the figures in American Catholicism who has created a perverse nostalgia for “tradition,” and by tradition they of course mean power. They don’t want an educated and involved congregation, they want fear and trembling and control. (Viganò has been a vocal supporter of Donald Trump.)

Institutions like the media, the church, and the government are vulnerable to the glamour created by wealth, celebrity, and power. Which is why they are quick to make excuses for predators and fascists. The Catholic Church has historically rolled over for dictators and the wealthy, collaborating with military regimes, slave owners, colonizers, and oppressors of all kinds. Then when those bastards are overthrown, they’ll congratulate themselves on how they protected the oppressed and used their position to advocate for human rights. The media will protect those they’ve deemed worthy, demurring to ask difficult questions and refusing to platform people offering a counter narrative.

Loving your congregation means hating those who threaten them, no matter how inconvenient recognizing the source of the threat is to you. No matter what the consequences of drawing a line might be. You learn how to hate by building your capacity for love.

A Gentrified Community is an Atomized Community

Back in 2012, a video of a woman walking through Brussels went viral. It documented what a typical day being physically visible was like for this young woman: she was catcalled, followed, honked at by various men on the street. It started an unbearably tedious round of discourse about sexual harassment in a time when our professional feminists based all their commentary on their own personal experiences. It lasted long enough to produce some terrible books.

In the backlash cycle – because every cycle of discourse has an equal and opposite force called the backlash – people pointed out that the street harassment complaints were mostly being made by white women against brown and black men, mostly in neighborhoods with a migrant community. In the logic of backlash, a woman’s desire to walk down the street unafraid of harassment or violence was racist or classist or xenophobic, despite many trying to bring attention to the violence and unwanted attention experienced by women who aren’t white.

This cycle repeated through many different issues. If someone complained about people smoking or exposing themselves on public transportation, they were yelled at to go back to the suburbs. If someone complained about antisocial behavior at all, from having sex in public to fare jumping to driving cars that have been modified to be as noisy at possible down residential streets at high speed, someone was there to yell at them for being racist, sheltered, classist. As if it’s “working class culture” to watch loud videos in confined spaces on tablets and phones.

The Atlantic called silence the “sound of gentrification.” No, bitch, the sound of gentrification is a writer who went to Brown University claiming to speak for a community they are no longer a participant in and who are talked over, silenced, and misrepresented without real avenues for speaking to the outside world for themselves.

But a gentrified neighborhood is an atomized neighborhood. Which means it’s harder to manage the problems of the community, because how do you organize people who don’t know each other? How do you help manage the menaces when they don’t respect the authority of the longtime residents? If your political representative is aligned with developers, how do you get him to respond to the threats to cohesion?

Sometimes the Witch Hunt Finds Real Witches

I don’t know Nina Power. I have only slight ties of awareness to the UK political media scene. But even with such low stakes engagement, it’s been just tremendously sad to see someone fall into a Nazi mindset.

I’m not using the word “Nazi” lightly – she created a pseudonym to associate with a prominent neo-Nazi. The connections between the so-called “gender critical” movement and fascists has been well documented, but it’s one thing to see this alliance happening to a movement and another to watch it happen in real time to an individual who seems otherwise intelligent. Why can’t they just see their way around this? “This” being things like race science, bigotry, conspiracy theories, and TERFdom.

Compact, a publication where Power worked as an editor, worked quickly to cut ties with Power after private texts and other documentation were handed over to the court as a result of a lawsuit Power had filed and lost against a Jewish writer. Compact was immediately accused of disloyalty by many in the gender critical movement but also in the “heterodox thinking” community. (No one who calls themselves a heterodox thinker is capable of independent thought, but that’s a topic for another time. Remember the “intellectual dark web”? Hahahahahahaha. Sorry, getting off track.)

But handing over a witch to the witch hunt is not disloyalty. Disloyalty is a magazine hiring a freelancer for a dangerous assignment, so if something goes wrong they can say “hey man not our problem” when the journalist is harmed or abducted or killed. Disloyalty is firing someone at the first whiff of sexual impropriety despite no proof while protecting much worse actors with long histories of misbehavior who have more power in the organization. Disloyalty is not backing up a writer when they are targeted by billionaires, massive corporations, or despots. These are the kinds of things that happen in contemporary media all the time and rarely spark a scandal.

It would be disloyal to everyone else at a publication not to have certain standards for behavior. It’s also disloyal not to expect everyone to be accountable to those standards, no matter how powerful or important they are. By not doing that, you’re forcing more vulnerable people to be associated with Nazis. And by condemning one person but not another for the same behavior, you are showing that you value some things (access, money, fame, power) more than others (honesty, dignity, integrity).

It takes community to de-radicalize people, but that community should be people who know and love them, not a network of professional alliances.

People Who Want to Be Gatekeepers Should Not Be Allowed to Be Gatekeepers

The most eager advocates for exclusion are prudes and scolds, bigots and cops. The only people who should be given the power of exclusion are people who are reluctant to hold such a position.

It’s a bit like Weber’s almost nonsensical list of qualifications for who should be a politician. They have to be charismatic but not vain. Pragmatic but uncompromising in their vision. Attracted to power but immune to its seductions. Like, sir. Only four people are ever alive on the planet at the same time who meet those requirements, and two of them are probably in prison.

But if you want to see the behavior that should disqualify someone from being a gatekeeper, just go on social media. Exclusion should never take place on social media if you want the act to have any integrity or meaning. Because social media is about enforcing conformity, not about creating cohesion.

The typical act of boundary maintenance on social media is to take something out of context and post it solely so that it can be condemned. This can be someone dancing weird in a club, someone saying something that can be construed as objectionable, or someone behaving eccentrically. It is presented to the mob, who are all too happy to do what mobs do: judge and punish.

Community should provide context. If someone is acting out, their community can help explain the behavior that looks odd to outsiders. Social media is for breaking bonds, not creating solidarity. And it is rife with people all too happy to exclude and banish, which is why they should never be put in a position to do so.  

Money Should Close Doors, Not Open Them

My takeaway from Ashley Mears’s Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Party Market was that rich people are extremely boring. If you factor out the high that being around and associated with famous and wealthy people brings you, and you just see them as people, they kind of suck. They’re petty and status obsessed. They’re boring and vain. They don’t know what they like in art, society, food, or travel unless everyone around them reinforces which things are okay to like. They can’t really think of anything interesting to do with their money, so they just all hang out in exclusive bars and clubs in New York or Ibiza or whatever dumb place is deemed cool this season. They only hang out with each other and people exactly like them.

It’s a bit like that drug you can take to block in your brain the pleasure and feeling of euphoria alcohol brings you. Without the buzz, all you get is the clumsiness, fatigue, and heaviness. Stripped of glamour and neurochemicals, you’re basically just paying money to ingest something that will make you want to lie down on the floor.

So when a rich person takes an interest in your community, scene, or venue, the only logical response is to shut it down. Block access. Because when one rich person shows up, another dozen or so will follow, and they will strip any location of anything interesting or unique because that is the only thing they know how to do. They don’t know how to contribute. They don’t know how to nurture or participate. They only know how to monetize and dominate.

Berghain is Berghain not just because of what they do inside those walls. It’s also because it’s a place that will turn away Elon Musk from the door.

This is what the debate about “selling out” misses. Selling out is not vile because it rewards an artist, who needs to stay poor in order to be pure. Selling out is vile because of who it lets in the door: executives, algorithms, Elon Musk. Exclusion is, or should be, primarily an act of protection.

Recommended:

• I admired Emily Colucci’s review of an art installation about the Nova Music Festival.

• Community is a verb.

• Different kinds of accusations broke this past week about Neil Gaiman and Alice Munro, and almost immediately in both cases people turned to the “separate the art from the artist” conversation. Rather than heap on scorn like the guy saying this was like “9/11 for white women,” I’d just like to point out that this is the result of the secular, consumerist mindset prevalent in the professional literary circles. We don’t believe that praying for someone has any real effect on their behavior or soul, but we do believe in money. So withholding money from bad people, heaping money on “good” people, becomes a form of prayer when these announcements are made. Hence the declarations of “I can simply never” buy or read their work again, knowing what is now known. I am regularly reminded of the intellectual impoverishment of Claire Dederer’s Monsters, but also how it is representative of the writing community’s (in)ability to think through these issues. I do think fans and readers could use some help in thinking through these scandals, and a media that once covered for stars that is now eager to profit off of those same stars’ victims is not helpful.

  I also think these scandals are in part products of the need for the industry to turn writers with mainstream appeal into secular saints. Reading builds empathy etc etc. Advocating for libraries, all those tasteful literary festival events. I’ll just leave this here:

Edited to change the language of how the private texts Power sent were brought into the public light and to remove an accusation of harassment by Power. Accusations of harassment were made but not proven. We regret the error.