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Conceived in Sin: The Online Audience and the Case of the eXile
by John Dolan

The question of audience seems particularly fraught as topic of an
academic conference. As in, whoever said we have one? English-language
academics not only lack an audience - they don't want one. For starters,
connecting with one requires some shared premise; and the unspoken
motive underlying most contemporary Anglophone academic writing is the
proud sense of alienation from a despised popular sensibility which is
to be surveyed at all only to be deplored.

Contemporary academic discourse continually depicts itself as "speaking
truth to power" and "transgressing," thus positioning itself as a
dissenting voice - but this discourse without an audience threatens no
one, least of all "power," and these "transgressions" are the work of
some of the tamest, most harmless people in existence. How likely is it
that people afraid of caffeine and secondhand smoke could generate
anything that would give "power" a second's worry?

While pretending, against all evidence, that academic critique
constitutes a form of dissent, we are always strangely eager to deny the
possibility that the online community might offer effective ways of
enfranchising new dissident voices. I've heard this said so many times
that the very eagerness with which it's stated and accepted strikes me
as its most interesting feature. For example, in one of the papers
presented at the conference in which this paper was first presented, the
retiring editor of a major academic journal specializing in contemporary
culture described Jameson's dismissal of postmodern culture as wrong
only in its excessive optimism.  Then, looking to the future, she
indicated wearily that after a century of doggedly deploring film, it
would be necessary now to deplore a host of new media, all of them
infected with the original sin of being conceived outside our seminars.

A strange urge, this need to hear that nothing can improve; as the man
said, it out-Herods Herod. When you've heard it as many times as I have,
you begin to notice the nervous, fretful tone in which it's made - as if
the prospect of an indefinite future with no effectual new forms of
dissent is meant to reassure the academic critic.

Perhaps, like Herod, we fear that they will offer salvation, that they
will genuinely become what we love to pretend we are--real
transgression, real insolence in the face of power. Thus a thousand
tenured Herods' eagerness to prove that they will never open up the
debate.

Speaking as one who made the transition from academic to popular online
discourse, I find it to be simply wrong. Two years ago, I left a New
Zealand university to write fulltime for the eXile, an English-language
Moscow biweekly intensely loved (and hated) newspaper which draws real
readers (and death threats.) As of September 2004, the eXile's online
edition was attracting 3.4 million hits per month.

The chance to write for large numbers of real readers excited me. Long
experience of academic discourse convinced me of the truth of the old,
bitter truism that that the average academic article has exactly three
readers: the author, anonymous reader, and proofreader.

The very concept of the "reader," in contemporary academic idiom, refers
to an anonymous functionary, acting as gatekeeper of a journal, who
decides whether an article serves the needs of the Academics' Guild.

These requirements - for example, that the article cite every other
academic who has written on the topic - ensure that the text will be
unreadable to outsiders; but that never seems to trouble most
gatekeeper/readers. Indeed, tracing the lineage of sheer hatred for
popular culture and its audience from Adorno to Jameson, it's hard to
avoid the conclusion that beneath our surface stance of defiance is
envious disdain. We weren't challenging contemporary culture; we were
snubbing it, unnoticed - a ridiculous tableau. But defecting to Moscow
meant dropping all claims to professional virtue. The eXile got its
millions of readers the old-fashioned way: by scandalizing them. From
its very beginning, the eXile was steeped in sin.

That's the trouble with the possibility that new media might empower new
voices, from the perspective of the phoney dissenters of our profession,
is that they actually do link up with premises held by millions of
people. And those premises are, almost without exception, sins in
themselves.

Consider a particularly effective example of online dissent presented by
the eXile: that strange being known as "the War Nerd." The War Nerd is
Gary Brecher, a fat, miserable, and incidentally brilliant
self-described "war fan" who lives in Fresno, a particularly nasty city
in the hot Central Valley of California. Brecher is a Community-College
dropout who works as a data-entry technician by day and, by his own
admission, spends every other waking hour surfing the net looking for
war news.

In other words, he is someone who would be excluded both from the
Lilliputian world of academic stylized "dissent" as thoroughly as he
would from the larger world of mainstream journalism. In fact, it's
difficult to imagine any discourse community predating the Net which
would not exclude Brecher on first meeting; he is, as he confesses
freely, an unsightly, unsocial, non-networking individual.

Brecher's unsuitability is what has made so beloved of hundreds of
thousands of bitter, lonely fans. He has never hidden his ugliness, his
hatred of those above him, or the sinful nature of his love of gore. In
fact, he confessed all these disabilities in the beginning of his first
eXile column in early 2003:

"[the eXile] asked me to write a column on how all the wars are going,
kind of a war reviewer. And I said yes on one condition, don't send
emails telling me liking war is a sign of unhealthiness or some
psychoanalytical crap.

I'm a war nerd. I know what I am. All I have to do is look down at the
keyboard and there's my hairy white gut slopping over it, and there's
crumbs between the keys from the fake homemade soft'n'chewy big cookies
in the machine downstairs. I mean they made me pay for the last keyboard
because I spilled Diet Coke all over it. Diet Coke, the most fattening
drink in the world. Every web pig in the world is swimming in it,
farting off the side of the swivel chair, aroma-free carbonation farts,
or at least you hope they are.

So I'm unhealthy. No shit, Sigmund. I live in Fresno which is a death
sentence already, and I do about fifteen hours a day at this desk. 6 or
7 hours entering civilian numbers for the paycheck and the rest surfing
the war news. I like war. So do you or you wouldn't still be reading. So
shut up or leave.

Anyway, war-wise it's been a pretty good year. Let's start with the WTC.
Technically that wasn't an act of war, and also it happened last year,
but you have to mention it because it was just so beautiful. Come on, be
honest, it was beautiful.

It was like a two-course dessert. First there was the towers falling
down in slo-mo, over and over. Which was really, really beautiful. Don't
tell me you didn't watch them fall about a million times in a row. That
was the first time an office building ever got beautiful in the history
of the world.

And secondly it was like permission to work out on whoever did it. Total
permission. Total complete permission to do anything you want to them,
like a movie that starts with the hero getting his farm burnt down or
somebody killing his family. You just lean back and relax with a little
grin and inhale those milk duds, because now comes the good part, 90
straight minutes of revenge.

The best war is when you can hate both sides, and that's how it was with
the WTC. I cheered those jets. I work in like a ten-story version of
those towers, and I know for a fact that I'm not the only one who perks
up every time a plane gets close to the building. Everybody cheers the
planes now. Until those planes hit the WTC Nobody dreamed you could
knock down an American corporation building. Nobody ever thought one
would come down. And when they did, damn. It was like the noche triste,
when Aztecs made the Conquistadors bleed for the first time and said,
"Hey these aren't magic six-legged metal monsters, they're just a bunch
of victims like us!"

Then you saw the ragheads having tailgate parties to celebrate the big
WTC bbq, and it's like Whoa! I get to cheer when Americans die but that
doesn't mean you can, you hairy-ass goats."

Brecher's sensibility, exemplified in this Credo, has found hundreds of
thousands of fans online. Every day devoted followers write to the War
Nerd, giving homage to the only online voice they trust. Yet Brecher's
sensibility could never be admitted either to mainstream journalism or
to academic writing. Brecher's admission that he enjoyed watching the
WTC towers fall would instantly disqualify him from the tiny range of
acceptable opinion in American discourse, which became even more
jingoistic than usual after 9/11. But his voice would be even less
acceptable to any academic venue. For one thing, he demands the right to
be intuitively right - something American academics accord only to
foreign sources. When Baudrillard finally admitted that the fall of the
towers was a thing of beauty, the point was couched in language so
intentionally dreary that only a committed professional could have
plowed through it. Brecher made the point in one paragraph of colloquial
American English, more than a year before Baudrillard did.

I would argue that Anglophone academics systematically exclude the sort
of original cultural criticsm exemplified by the War Nerd, unless it
comes to them from a non-Anglophone source. Contemporary cultural
criticism certainly requires occasional injections of the shocking and
iconoclastic, but under the current division of academic labour, these
are produced offshore to be turned into Doxa by the Stateside academics'
guild.

In the process, even the most amoral sensibilities are adapted to a
Protestant humanitarianism - Frederick Jameson's tedious ars predicandi,
endlessly replicated in miniature on a thousand campuses.

Even more fundamentally, Brecher's voice is alone. And that would
exclude him from American academic discourse, which is so obsessively
communal that it is impossible to make a claim without citing a
precedent, and thus impossible to make an unprecedented claim at all.

Non-academic audiences refuse to see in this moralistic, collegial
Jamesonian critique any real "transgression." And they are right; that
critique is simply a more intense form of Protestant humanitarian Doxa.
Jameson is to Bush as the clergyman is to the real-estate develop who
sleeps through his sermon.

Brecher's critique begins very differently: with a sense of his own huge
sinful pleasure in war. That alone would exclude him from American
academic discourse. Such feelings belong to the vast chunk of experience
our profession has excluded a priori, except when attributed to a very
other Other. This sort of hypocrisy is so advanced that one can sit
through an entire graduate seminar in Horror Films, as I did at
Berkeley, without hearing one whoop of joy at a particularly juicy
killing - the whole purpose and pleasure of these very popular films.

The real claim of the American academic world's critique of
postmodernism is simply that we, the guild of academics, are without
sin. It should be no surprise that for those outside the guild, we are
also without significance.

By contrast, the eXile was conceived in sin - "and proud of it," as Bart
Simpson would say - by refugees from the moral world of the American
academic. Its editor, Mark Ames, fled Berkeley to set up his own paper
in Moscow, then the sin capital of the world. In 1997, when the eXile
began publishing, Moscow was without law - especially libel law.
Moscow in the early 1990s was invaded by tens of thousands of American
expats. The eXile, under Ames and co-editor Matt Taibbi, grabbed the
local, then online audience by providing a place for the sort of voices
who were truly excluded, and not in a cute or harmless way. The greatest
example was Eduard Limonov, the writer and radical politican whose
columns in his own unique, uncorrected English were printed in every
issue, even when he was imprisoned for attempting to buy weapons for an
alleged revolt. Even Amnesty International found Limonov too hot to
handle, but the eXile was proud to print his work.

The key taboo in the Anglophone world is sex, and not coincidentally the
key trade between Americans and Russians in Moscow was sex--paid sex.
The collapse of the prim Soviet façade briefly created an atmosphere in
which this exchange could be celebrated. A survey of Russian girls in
the early 90s showed that the profession to which most aspired was
"valyutka," prostitute gaining hard currency. The Americans who went to
Moscow came, officially, to aid in the development of a capitalistic,
democratic polity—but this overwhelmingly male community spent all
its spare time talking about sex, largely paid sex.

Like every other expat newspaper in the former East Bloc, the eXile
derived most of its revenue from the ads placed by prostitutes and strip
clubs. For example, I noticed that in my hotel room in Budapest was a
copy of the English-language Budapest City Guide, a typical example of
the genre. All the stories were about the city's cultural treasures,
museums and fine restaurants—but most of the advertisements in the
back of the magazine were for strip clubs, escort services, and other
sex-industry businesses.

When this wild sexual landscape was admitted to Anglophone discourse at
all, it was as a morality play on "sex slavery." The notion that the
exchange of money for sex might be advantageous to both parties was
inadmissible.

Apparently it was better for young Russian women to work eleven-hour
days in a vodka kiosk for a pittance than to make several hundred
dollars in a night by trading sex for dollars.

The eXile broke the taboo on discussing the central fact of Moscow expat
life by actually writing about prostitutes. Ames had paid sex with
prostitutes, described the act and recorded his conversations with them
in a running feature called "Whore-R Stories." The paper's Death Porn
feature described the funniest, most gross murders of the week without
moral gloss - and was able to take its tone in this directly from
Moscow's most popular newspaper, MK. Since easy access to prescription
drugs was one of the other big appeals of life in Moscow, the editors
talked freely about the pleasures of "hard drugs" like speed and heroin
- which were shared by their colleagues everywhere but never, ever
discussed except as scourges. When Ames wrote that the reason people
take drugs is that "drugs are fun" hundreds of grateful letters came in
- several from prisons where harmless druggies were being used as real
sex slaves for the non-existent crime of drug use.

Russians were notably un-shocked by these features. Russians, thank God,
are not Protestant humanitarian hegemonists. Not yet, anyway.

But a huge online audience of English-speakers reacted with violent
devotion. The usual letter to the eXile was a slightly crazed mix of
gratitude and disbelief; gratitude that someone at last spoke honestly
about why we were those "sex slave" stories so avidly, why we watch the
Death Porn of the evening news so eagerly, and disbelief that any
English-language publication could say such things and survive.

From shared sin, the eXile derived considerable authority with its
online readers. Once again, the War Nerd's example is exemplary. He came
out against the war in Iraq, describing his position as that of a
"patriot" rather than a "sucker" and arguing that the war would be no
fun for anyone, even war fans, since it would devolve into ambushes and
punitive expeditions, civilian slaughters without interesting combat.

Brecher's position on the war alienated many of his more simpleminded
fans, but many more rethought their position on the war - particularly
when his predictions proved to be right. It does help to be right. But
it also helps to be steeped in sin - one of the fat sickos, rather than
the skinny, fastidious elite. The notion that the Iraq invasion could be
attacked on nationalist grounds, rather the implicitly pacifistic,
morally superior position of "elitist" antiwar essays, made Brecher's
critique powerful. It was impossible to dismiss this wretched office
slave as a liberal wimp. When the eXile experimented with allowing
readers an online forum, letters for and against Brecher's antiwar
stance quickly overloaded the site. And as the war went from bad to
worse, formerly shocked or hostile readers began changing their minds,
defecting from the uncritical nationalism of the "suckers" to the
bleaker version of the "patriots."

Of course, the eXile's embrace of original editorial sin was never
simply a tactical choice. It was more like popping a huge zit onscreen,
Jackass-style: an assertion of a sensibility and an act of comic,
childish revenge, all at once. It's surprising how few people are
willing to take the simple gambit of telling the gross old truth once in
a while. And even more surprising how well that old trick actually
works.

This offer is open only to academics who actually have been steeped in
sin - and so it excludes those at the top of the profession who, in my
experience, truly have sequestered themselves so well that they are
without sin - and thus without much of interest to say. This crippled
elite inhabits its starchy sensibility in utter comfort, and really is
as ignorant of the grosser forms of popular culture as its critiques
imply.

But go one level beneath them, to the thousands of, ahem!, "subalterns"
carrying out their orders, and you find people writing in bitter bad
faith. These collaborators have sampled the sinful world, the war games,
the sex games, the drug games. When they affect the tone of shocked
horror required by the profession, they make themselves stupid, writing
in an affected ignorance of subjects they actually know very well. If
you've ever gotten drunk with somebody at a conference and heard their
real views, just after they've delivered a secular homily in the
approved style, you know what I mean. Is it any wonder no one but paid,
anonymous readers care to sample the results?

So, Subalterns, ex-colleagues, consider taking the plunge. Readers are
there, millions of them, waiting to be warped. And the sin is fine.