Post-Weird by Calum Lister Matheson

American society seems to have fractured. Common touchpoints of authority have receded in recent decades and beliefs that were once taboo are now openly shared, from neo-Nazism to occultism to conspiracy thinking. In this book, Calum Lister Matheson goes beyond the fraying of contemporary American culture to ask how splinter communities form in our current media environment, what keeps them together, and what they build from the ruins of shared language.

This book is about how anti-rhetorical readings shape communities in the wake of the decline of symbolic efficiency. Its key argument is that the communities that arise to fill a perceived void in shared culture bear unexpected structural similarities that are evident in their styles of interpretation, or reading, and that, while not all of these communities are insidious, cultivating rhetorical attitudes as a means of both accepting and navigating ambiguity and uncertainty is an important condition for us to find ways to live together.

Every now and again I’ll be browsing Foyles with an hour to kill and I’ll find myself probing past the world history and science sections, past the politics and current affairs, where I find myself in the philosophy section. There I begin to wonder, nay hope, whether this is the year I finally get philosophy. I’ll read a half dozen book covers, Schopenhauer, Nietschze, Foucault, Deleuze. The ideas all sound so enticing, they scratch a deep part of my brain. Then I flick one cover open after another to take a bite and I’m met with dense, circular, indecipherable pages. Dejectedly I’ll put everything back where I found them and go look at the true crime shelf. Most recently I’ve been blaming this on long COVID, but the truth is I have never really been able to get my head round philosophy.

I say all this by means of apologising in a sense to Calum Lister Matheson. I don’t think this book is for me. I’m not sure whether he intended to write it for the benefit or enjoyment of people like me or not, whether he even has an audience in mind. If you’re out there Calum, I want you to know that I turned every page with good intentions. I really wanted to absorb whatever ideas you were throwing out of your brain and onto the page.

Post-Weird is a book about language, culture and rhetoric, drawing from theories of Jacques Lacan (a French contemporary of Freud) and Slavoj Zizek. The book focuses on four fringe groups that have rejected mainstream opinion and have adopted ‘alternative facts.’ Matheson sees this rejection of unity, and a pursuant confidence in nonsensical, problematic and harmful beliefs as a form of psychosis. If you listen to the critics, we are unmaking the world - not by flood, not by fire, but by shitpost. Four chapters of the book cover distinct groups that have rejected established normative values: Sandy Hook denialists, who believe that a horrific school shooting was the work of anti-gun crisis actors; Christian serpent handlers, a snake-handling sect that risk injury and death in their religious practice; Pro-Ana communities, online pro-anorexia communities who share techniques and beliefs about consuming literally nothing; and finally Reactionary Science including incels, white nationalists and transinvestigators that misuse scientific theory to promote hatred. Matheson explores how all groups reject complexity and ambiguity, creating their own novel belief system that can help the world and its rules feel simple (ie good vs evil morality), holding an absolute, unshakeable certainty of belief that draws parallel with psychosis, rejecting their own agency in the service of truth.

The ideas and principles of Post-Weird are excellent. The actual book itself in practice though was an absolute chore to get through. To re-iterate, I appreciate that this book probably isn’t for me, and if I knew one thing about philosophy I’d know it’s meant to be read with a highlighter pen and York Notes, and I should go read a Hauntology book or some berk’s Substack about vaping DMT. I would respectfully push back on this self-recrimination though to say I wanted to get into Post-Weird, I just found the book to be fairly impenetrable.

An ambitious look at rhetoric and psychosis that explores how communities form when society collapses is how Rutgers University Press describes Post-Weird. I always get red flags from the word ‘ambitious.’ Some of my writing was described by my course tutors as ‘ambitious’ - those never got good marks. Ambitious is a kid who tries to build a rocketship from recycling. Ambitious is a person with pet hair allergies starting a dog grooming business. I have a problem with the publisher’s (and author’s for that matter) use of the word psychosis. The subjects of Post-Weird don’t carry psychosis in a clinical sense, but instead a philosophical/existential one. While Matheson describes various forms of psychosis through the lens of Jacques Lacan (a French contemporary of Freud), his reference to psychosis feel more symbolic, using it as a means to describe the certainty of belief that certain fringe groups hold, something he describes as ‘radical certainty.’ There’s not really any societal collapse featured in Post-Weird either, just a sad and lonely 21st century America.

There is irony in talking about language and rhetoric while inflicting sentences on the reader like - This work is performed at the level of the letter - the “material medium [support] that concrete discourse borrows from language, or at the place where something is transfigured from the code of langue and deployed in the parole of everyday communication. I’ve read that sentence, and hundreds more like it, countless times over the last two weeks in the hope of making sense of it, and I realise that there’s not really any point. Its a secret language that you either get, or don’t. Much like the speech patterns that he attributes to snake handlers and the pro-ana movement, Matheson is also employing language and rhetoric in a form of psychotic communication, just as subjective and coded as the communities he explores, different only in its presentation. Bafflingly, I think its easier to understand the central argument of a Sandy Hook denialist. Maybe I’ve been Inceptioned and Matheson has actually [de]programmed me without me even knowing it.

I’m also equally baffled that the same book that has headache-induing Word Jenga like The resonance of Science for these overlapping but disparate groups is a path to evaluating Lacan’s claim that signifiers are the real agents of discourse, while subjects are largely epiphenomenal functions of these basically inhuman operations of language. also makes reference to Rick and Morty to describe the limitations of scientific objectivity when it has been maladapted and co-opted by fringe communities. I’ve seen this sort of adoption used in the past by the likes of Zizek, who seems to think that if you randomly put 200 syllables into a sentence it will be readable because you mentioned Batman.

While I agree with the fundamentals of almost everything Matheson says in Post-Weird, I can’t really agree with the details of his arguments, in part because I can’t understand half of them. What’s quite frustrating is that so much of what he covers is important, and poses serious questions for the stability of western society and culture. Matheson’s arguments are comparable to the sort of sense-making word salad you get from the likes of Jordan Peterson. There’s a whole lot of words saying not a lot. Most of his points are covered in the introduction. Most of what I learned was about the fringe communities themselves, rather than Matheson’s arguments about whether or not these are examples of anti-rhetoric. Not much in the way of data, statistics or scientific rigour to back up anything that’s being said. It’s very much a vibes-based trip. 200 pages later, I’m still not sure what anti-rhetoric even means.

If you do know, it’s ok don’t worry about it hun x nvm I’m now reading a book about Raoul Moat xx

Post-Weird is available from Rutger University Press as a paperback or e-book from 11th November. Thanks to Rutger University Press via NetGalley for providing the opportunity to read this ahead of publication.