K-Normies: K-War and Holographic Hypernormality
Stare into the power hologram and feel the power hologram staring back into you.
“Capitalist realism keeps attention on the ephemeral plentitude of wealth and social status, containing the nullity of ecological catastrophe as an anamorphic blot at the edge of vision.”
Mark Fisher as “K-Punk” 1
If a signifier has a primary quality of emptiness, why should we look into the significance of a signifier which leaves us feeling cold? We have to look at the function of the signifier and how its processes become unlocked. To not examine a signifier which seems empty at first but nonetheless has a function is to be uncritically subjected to its processes. We can understand niche signifiers as a power hologram. It cannot be viewed except by those who have been primed to receive the rest of its messages. To the average viewer, it may look like nothing at all.
The signifier “K” can be used denote some sort of futuristic intensity. The letter itself is sharp and essentialist. “Z” reminds one of writing a question mark. If you ever pick up the “Johnny the Homicidal Maniac” comic, you see the “Z” with the question mark close by, in a sort of natural pairing, like white wine and fish. The letter “K” and its aesthetics point us to a certain intensity of the future for certain persons or groups. Each author’s “K” denotes their future intensity and their intent.
“The CCRU has coined the term ‘K-tactics’ to describe the action of hyperstition, using the mode of schizoanalysis, in contemporary information culture. “K-tactics,” explains Land, “is not a matter of building the future, but dismantling the past … and escaping the technical neurochemical deficiency conditions for linear-progressive [narratives]”.
Carstens & Land 2
The future intensity which is present here operates through thecold (insofar as it is empty) signification of “K-Hive.”
The power of Kamala Harris does not lie primarily in a voter base. The idea of a real populist K-Hive is not quite laughable, it is too empty for the outside viewer to produce a joke. It exists as a virtual version of a popular movement such as Bernie Sanders’ on the populist left and Donald Trump’s on the populist right. The K-Hive is in fact something which only carries meaning from a certain angle. When viewed from the current centrist Democratic establishment, the K-Hive connotes a loyalty to the current centrist power administration. From the outside, it appears nonsensical, or like nothing at all. From the inside however, it is a sign of loyalty to the hypernormality of power.
To talk of a futurity of normality almost seems like a contradiction in terms. “Normal” suggests timelessness. A conservative professor talking about timelessness may also betalking about the assertion of normality, via historical proof. It is designed to fit into neutral frameworks but lead people to the conservative framework. But what do we make of “K” normality, the futurist variety of the normal, Hypernormality? The futurism of the neoliberal capitalist ruling class (perhaps we can just shorten that to “K-Normies”) will be preserved through the hypernormalization of good causes, stripping them of all revolutionary power and dangerous content. Hypernormality is the death of plurality and the introduction of the power hologram in its place. The doubling down of the obvious leaves room to make the good the plaything of the bourgeois in soul and temperament.
The ”K” combined with sex gets another hard futurist concept. “K-Tactics” is a term in evolutionary biology to describe animals which care for a select few offspring, suggesting an elitism of the few and a process of labor. This is not the Kamala K-War, or is it?
The K-Hive cares not for your genetic makeup, but rather for your Twitter bio. Are you or are you not a bee in the #KHive, this is the question. To become a bee is not to fit in primarily, but to stand out. To not only be for progress, but to be a part of the neoliberal progress cult. In the K-Hive, Mama Kamala shines. Marvel’s new TV series features a girl named Kamala whose name is mispronounced in the preview, and the superhero girl Kamala corrects the mispronouncing person. Obviously, this person is not of the K-Hive. Who asked for this? Hypernormality doesn’t ask, it distributes the K-Normie into positions of power. Kamala the Marvel superhero says fit in or fuck off, not using the reactionary signifiers of course. A discourse where Kamala is ignored, misunderstood. No popular movement wanted her, but she was always already queen via the hypernormal. The past revolutions are put into time crisis via the casual K-Tactics of the hypernormal ruling class. The Marvel superhero is carefully guarded by the Gaze of the director.
What makes a K-Normie? The hypernormal isn’t just what is, it is a certain perspective which makes the power hologram come to life.
The signifiers of the K-Hive don’t belong to Kamala Harris specifically. It is a loose assemblage of pride flags and general calls for racial and climate equality. The K-Hive knows itself as for the general Geist of neoliberal ideology, but reflects once again upon itself as for Kamala Harris. This is the movement of the hypernormal. It is not a discourse to create new knowledge, but rather something which looks inwards and to a small group of die-hard bourgeoise neoliberals. It is not new ideas that the hypernormal offers, but rather an aggressive strain of the dominant ideology.
Hypernormality does not lack intelligence. Complaints about Harvard not generating new discourse and rather acting as a repeater for milquetoast ideological forms misses the force of the hypernormal virus. The point is not that anti-racism is bad, but rather it is de-fanged of its revolutionary quality. The fight of yesterday’s revolutionary is the banner of today’s reactionary.
Rather, the point is that anti-sexism combined with Harvard, or anti-racism combined with the Democratic Party’s ideological apparatuses, will not yield a normal result, which is to say an easily replicated table item which popularly travels from person to person. Feminism takes a K-Normie turn as Judith Butler takes out her checkbook to write the donation check for both Harris and Warren. It is made by power, for power. Hypernormality always involves the combination of an idea with an apparatus. It is a Trojan horse which creates agency for a power, cloaked in what seems to be a common sense good cause. No abstract idea stands for long next to the brutal pragmatic poopooing of the K-Normie, when the K-Normie is the true King or Queen of the realm.
Maybe we could take a moment, and imagine ourselves as an ideal K-Normie. Someone future minded, ruthlessly pragmatic, and unquestioning of one’s own essential alignment for what is good. Imagine yourself a disc jockey of what has already occurred, and your radio station is the corporate lounge. The lust of new forms of existence, the creation of the new, comes rushing forward into the frame.
Immediately you become confronted by the reality of neoliberal capitalism, which is to say, you must reproduce the individualist-effort ideology within all problems which you are trying to address. You can’t talk about state power being good,everyone knows that what is really good is being promoted to management! This is how you become a good person. What does it mean to be hypernormal? It means that you are not just a warrior for the kind of good which is uncontroversial, but you are an advocate to the point that you have stopped yourself from interacting with the normal pleasure of a cause.
The K-Normie has their own form of philosophy and logic and doesn’t need yours, and they know theirs is best. Common sense in the abstract plus power. You may have heard other critiques which fall under the subset of the hypernormal. “Woke”Capital,” or “Capitalism with a human face,” maybe even “leftism,” or, “progressive.” Whatever it is called, if you have common sense in the abstract, if you are future minded and that future looks a lot like a commercial for a low-effort Netflix reboot or a soft-drink commercial, perhaps your pause earlier to reflect on what it would be like to become K-Normie has been somewhat successful.
The K-Normie does alchemy to all of history to turn it into something that can take place in an HR meeting. Revolution is not war, it’s a pre-meeting. War is bad for business, at least, your business.
Hypernormality is the banality of the slow cancellation of the future. The dream of freedom through identity becomesthoroughly negated by #KHive adjacent powers, and replaced by something which can reproduce something which can be easily grasped by K-Normality.
If “K” is a signifier of futurism and vitalism, than why is the futurist neoliberal aesthetic so boring? This is because everything of substance is stripped down, and this stripping down of substance is to be purified in the church of Kamala. The mythic power of boredom, which is to say the hidden power of boredom and obviousness, is the current aesthetic of power. No more Napoleon riding through Jena on a horse. Needing to win the approval to be up for election in the Democratic Party rather than any sort of popular support, one can get to the second most powerful position in the county on administrative handshakes alone. Never did she really need to win an election, except maybe her California senate primary, which was won thanks to the blessing of the Democratic Party machine favoring her more than her opponent. Her visceral boredom is not a bug for her rise to power, but a feature.
K-Tactics of the K-Hive are administration-maxxed. Thepopular support to have power is to master the anti-vital aesthetics of the K-Normie. Only the right support, not necessarily popular support. To have the right support, you can have nothing in your campaign which challenges too much of the viscerally dull and repetitive aesthetic.
K-Hive movements are that of bureaucratic non-politics. A monarchical devotion to those in power. Attention is given to those who can give and nobody else. Boss-maxxing. Admin-maxxing. When the specter of Trump dies, or where it fades, Kamala reveals herself as the simple bully boss who has nothing outside of the liberal absolutist worship of the headless neoliberal power.
Stare into the power hologram and it stares back into you. We can imagine an absolute Kamala with no limits. It’s Mama Kamala’s world, we just write about it. California Couture.Administrative executive mutualism. The new-old revolutionary vanguard of the Lexus Generation. The Grande Latte Bourgeoise of the soul. A Deep K-Hive is possible, but what matches the K-Hive misses what is outside of the K-Hive.
K-Hive is the epitome of politic insofar as it is the death of politics. Much like the psychoanalytic idea of desire, it is not a place of meaning, there is not exactly a meaning of Kamala, but rather it is the point where meaning ends. It isn’t a movement on its own, but it is an allegiance to power. In this way, the K-Hive is a reactionary vanguard, absolutely obedient to what can grant it more power. All that related to the communal, the social, theday-to-day live and dignity of workers and the working class end when the K-Hive energy comes into power around them. California administration is a plague that there is no cure for, there is only quarantine. Quarantine now seems less and less likely for capitalist Grande Latte ism as California is a central media hub for the world.
Marx wrote knew about the extreme specificity of massive, high quantity machines caused by the modern capitalist modes of production. “K-Hive” is a hypermachinic, its inhabitants are multiple, real and virtual, administrative and universal all at once. All things which focus on stripping down revolution to its market use can be said to be K-Hive, insofar as they are a reproduction of the subjectivity which we can call the K-Normie. Culture links up with the past to re-arrange it to suit the needs of the ruling class. Casual Kamala time war to annihilate true subversion, a certain dimension of K-War. All things serve the masters, no rationality can categorically challenge the multiplicity of the administrators of Blue Power.
It is not policy, but rather acceptance into the subjectivity of the K-Normie that one is cleansed of American foreign policy via its very sins; which is to say, by the stripping down of all critique which does not have at-hand use, the K-Hive knows itself. What does a mere theory have against such power? How can we even be talking about Land and Fisher in the shadow of the great K-Hive? On April 22, 2022, CNN announces that Tina Flournoy, Kamala Harris’ chief of staff has quit.3 CNN does not mention the reports of Kamala having a “bully mentality” like the Daily Mail did when they reported mass exodus from the hive in January of the same year. 4 The point is not that Kamala is good or bad, but rather that she fits into the Democratic machine, the ruling class administrators, the grande-latte-bourgeoise.
K-War is semi-automated in that Hypernormality is reproduced by individual Subjects as well as the extensions of contemporary capitalism and its market necessities. K-War is the nightmare of revolutionary geometrical philosophy, actual a priori force after the fact of reason. You are confronted by the brutal pragmatism of it. K-War is sex. Via the markers of K-Normality Kamala and the Mayor of San Francisco use the K-Normie sexual signaling to have sex which produces no biological children, but rather accelerates the spiritual offspring, Kamala, into her future role as Queen Bee of the K-Hive. Once you have the power and the position in office, you have always had it. You are one with the Cause, defined further by your interpersonal connections.
K-War is not bound to history except insofar as history is egoistically transcendental.
K-War is the nightmare of Sigmund Freud. The American spirit condenses into the repressed aesthetic cocktail of K-Normality. Ahistorical Americanism never was Freud’s preference to investigate the unconscious.
Negation of the geometry of the unconscious into the condensation of the K-Normie subjectivity. It is a gap in meaning of world spirit and power that liberal subjectivity could give us such a thing. The unconscious is a subset of the K-Hive, a plaything of power. In her autobiography, Kamala’s fifth chapter after introducing her is titled, “I Say We Fight.” What is fighting for Mama Kamala? We don’t see this sort of thing, but rather a time reversal where-in the fights already occurring include Kamala. This is K-War, time-templexity. Marx’s dialectical observation of the human as a particular part in a more and more complex and particular machine, making the worker dependent on the machine and thus dependent on the ruling class. First and foremost, she introduces the other senators of California that pre-dated her, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, and immediately emphasizes that they are other women, but that it was only the so-called Year of the Woman. Kamala also emphasizes that she fights for a “strong middle class.” 5
When we fight for a strong middle class, we rid ourselves of the slime of the world, except insofar as we want to make them one with us, or one with our power. You are always already too broke or too rich to matter, unless you do matter. Mattering is kneeling to the banner and the cause de jour. The cause is never pure, universal, transcendental cause, but egoistic cause. Always of the K-Hive.
K-War then involves the de-radicalization of the radical, the K-Hive-ing of the potential plural forces into a single unit of neoliberal force.
In the face of Absolute K-War via the ruling class, the only thing to do is re-assert then, the unity of socialist forces against the capitalist class. The hypernormal plays with the radical before negating it via the emptying it into pure semblance and armor for the ruling class.
Socialist K-War must re-discover the powers which the ruling class plays with and use it against the ruling class. This is done by material analysis of the working class and areas of chauvinism by the ruling class, there is no other way. The ruling class/middle-class supremacist movement will always champion the obscuring of radicalism via the hypernormal. The task of the socialist is to negate the negation which is hypernormality.
To revisit the Kantian idea, we do not need to know a concrete triangle to know that you can’t have one side of the triangle which is longer than the other two sides. In the same way, the aestheticization of revolutionary politics by the ruling class can be negated once more by bringing into encounter with its own failure. This is the socialist position in K-War, address the failure of anti-radical pseudo-radicalism, and bring it towards radicalism.
Forms of socialist critique which specifically address the K-Normie subjectivity allow us to deviate from it more directly. To understand any industry insofar as it reproduces the gap between the ideal of the industry and its fidelity to the capitalist mode of reproduction aligns socialist critique to this moment of essentialist, futurist, but inevitably dull “K.”
What is the “K” subjectivity of socialism? Maybe it wouldn’t be a good brand, but we could imagine a Lacanian “K-Hysteric” who points at the gap between the ideal of all of technical industries and political philosophies where they become failures of their own ideals because of the necessity to reproduce neoliberal capitalism. The “K-Normie” is what happens when capitalism synthesizes with all good intentions, and it represents a gap in our ability to overcome neoliberal capitalism by ourselves. Until then, it is be a K-Hysteric, or be nothing at all but a subject of hypernormality, the K-Normie.
References
1 Fisher, Mark. http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/2009_11.html. (2009)
2 Carstens, Delphi. “Hyperstition” http://xenopraxis.net/readings/carstens_hyperstition.pdf (2049)
3 Diamond, Jeremy & Wright, Jasmine. “Kamala Harris’ chief of staff heading for the exit.https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/21/politics/harris-chief-of-staff-leaving/index.html (2022)
4 Caralle, Katelyn. “SEVENTH aide since Kamala Harris’s disastrous June border trip announces he is leaving in staff exodus: Press director Peter Velz heads to the State Department after allegations of turmoil and ‘bullying’ in her office. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10375085/SEVENTH-aide-Harriss-disastrous-June-border-trip-announces-leaving-staff-exodus.html. (2022)
5 Harris, Kamala. The Truths We Hold. (2020).