Making Sense of Clavicular and ‘Looksmaxxing’
Clavicular is a Politician
Sarkozy
Everyone is a Politician
What does it mean to be a politician? To explore this question, we can turn to the Italian Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci. One of the more interesting and accessible aspects of Gramsci's thought is his radical view and elaboration of social professions. Central to his thought is the idea that the intellectual is a social function that falls into two general categories, as either in the ‘traditional’ sense as having a profession that requires intellectual labor: scientists, lawyers, authors, etc., or in the sense he calls organic:
Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields. The capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organisers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc. Thus there are historically formed specialised categories for the exercise of the intellectual function. They are formed in connection with all social groups, but especially in connection with the more important, and they undergo more extensive and complex elaboration in connection with the dominant social group.
Gramsci always ties the intellectual to a social class and to the politics of that social class. Politics is a matter of organization: the intellectual organizes the visions, aspirations, and hopes of a particular class - in a word, its worldview. As noted by Gramsci, a class develops intellectuals for itself on the road to its social ascendancy:
One of the most important characteristics of any group that is developing towards dominance is its struggle to assimilate and to conquer “ideologically” the traditional intellectuals, but this assimilation and conquest is made quicker and more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds in simultaneously elaborating its own organic intellectuals.
Everyone is an intellectual from a trivial standpoint; however, not everyone functions socially as an intellectual. Not everyone is designated the role of organizing that the intellectual is, despite everyone taking some part in that activity to some degree. Organic intellectuals are always tied to a class, but are also always tied to a political party, another central object in Gramsci’s political writings. He extends the concept beyond its formal boundaries, as the political party is much less a formal organization than a social organism that collectively plays for the class what the intellectual does individually: that is, organizes the worldview of a particular class. He describes this in his famous passage, The Modern Prince, his symbol for the political party:
The modern prince...cannot be a real person, a concrete individual. It can only be an organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will, which has already been recognised and has to some extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form. History has already provided this organism, and it is the political party— the first cell in which there come together germs of a collective will tending to become universal and total.
In order to return to the question of what it means to be a politician, we can use the idea of everyone being a legislator, elaborated by Marxist writer Michael Denning in his essay Everyone a Legislator, where he makes the titular argument through an analysis of Gramsci’s theory on organic intellectuals. He starts by quoting Gramsci's assertion of all men as ‘political beings’ and then further elaborates on how that makes everyone a legislator:
Since all men are 'political beings', all are also 'legislators'" [...] "everyone is a legislator in the broadest sense of the concept" because everyone "contributes to modifying the social environment in which he develops (to modifying certain of its characteristics or to preserving others); in other words, he tends to establish 'norms', rules of living and of behaviour." "One's circle of activity may be greater or smaller," he notes, and "the representative power may be greater or smaller." But that only means that one's legislation "will be put into practice to a greater or lesser extent in its normative, systematic expression by the 'represented'. A father is a legislator for his children, but the paternal authority will be more or less conscious, more or less obeyed and so forth.
If everyone is a legislator in the broadest sense of the concept, he continues to be a legislator even if he accepts directives from others—if, as he carries them out, he makes certain that others are carrying them out too; if, having understood their spirit, he propagates them as though making them into rules specifically applicable to limited and definite zones of living.
Politics universalizes social existence in the sense that it brings everyone to the political terrain, some kicking and screaming. Everyone is a legislator because everyone, to some capacity, shares the social function of elaborating the worldview of a certain class. While traditional intellectuals make their living from their intellectual labor, they join organic intellectuals, whose role is designated as such and thus recognized by society, yet who are not necessarily professionals. What’s important here is the connection between the intellectual and the legislator - we should also say that every legislator is an intellectual. Every legislator, in order to achieve their goals of legislation, must organize the worldview of a particular class. I would say that the intellectual-legislator is a solid definition of what it means to be a politician, in response to the opening question. And so everyone is a politician.
The Myth of the Political Neutral
There’s a prevalent attitude in American life of political neutrality. It cuts across ages, genders, races, religions, classes, the whole gamut of social identities. It manifests in abstention, in ignorance, in little everyday conversational phrases like “I don’t follow politics”, “politics is a waste of time,” and “politics is stupid.” A more specific form of this attitude in American politics expresses itself as the claim that both parties are pretty much the same - a respectable position if it weren’t backed by a shallow justification, devoid of anything beyond the government being a vague evil and politicians being vague liars. It is the worst form of pretentiousness - the type of pretentiousness that also wants to appear common sense.
Americans will feel above the circus of politics, but this attitude is somehow ‘humble’; it is the high-falutin politician or silly ‘activist-academic’ who is stupid enough to engage in politics. Ironically, it seems like those who claim to be political neutrals always have something to say about politics. They wear their abstention like a badge of honor, and, tragically, this badge brings them back to the sordid endeavor of politics.
It could be argued that political neutrality is a mild symptom of social anomie, the consequences of a society increasingly withdrawn from itself. But regardless of its cause, I think it's a mythology - there are no real political neutrals for the reasons outlined by Gramsci and further elaborated above - everyone is an intellectual-legislator – a politician. Politics is like death - it comes for us all in due time. Furthermore, culture interpenetrates politics and vice versa, and no one would dare to claim to be culturally neutral. One can abstain from culture and find it silly, but in politics, this attitude is accompanied by rejection.
The rejection of politics is ‘objectified’ into a personality trait, one that fixates on the individual as the possessor or lack of possessor of some secret knowledge. All those that claim political neutrality do so in one of two general ways, both of which exclude a bare and boring apathy: 1) from above, as a matter of wisdom (“it is known that politics is for idiots”) and 2) from below, as a lack of technical expertise (“I don’t know about politics”). The first is an annoying and ultimately useless arrogance, since a self-proclaimed political neutral can’t be truly counted on to advance politics. But the second is alienation, as the political world confronts the political neutral as some technical monstrosity external to and alienated from politics. Nonetheless, it is the interlocked worlds of politics and culture that refute these dual attitudes. There are no political neutrals.
Clavicular the Politician
All this to discuss a strange phenomenon that has bubbled up across social media that goes by an even stranger name. Enter Clavicular, a white, 20-year-old, 6’2 internet personality who’s taken the streaming world by storm. His height is only found relevant here due to its emphasis within the mythology of what's known as the blackpill community - an online subculture of the self-proclaimed involuntary celibate (incels) that center their activity around looksmaxxing. The blackpill, combined with looksmaxxing and inceldom serve as the unholy trinity of this community.
Together, these online centers of gravity reflect the bleak ideology and worldview, a social practice that hyperfixates on brutal ‘truths’ involving beauty standards, social privilege, and overall human behavior. It is a closed system: one that takes extreme misogyny and absurd misanthropy as a given. It is also a rational system, wrapped in physiognomic metrics such as the orientation of one's maxilla or the direction of a person’s canthal tilt. If these physical features sound like gibberish, then you are a normie, as the blackpill community prides itself on esotericism. The ability to speak the language of inceldom is a skill that can only be earned in the catacombs of 4chan threads, subreddits, and Discord channels.
Clavicular, the most popular representative of the blackpill community right now, is on a mission to ‘looksmax’ to the extreme. Like most young and even old men, he wants to have sex with as many women as possible, particularly with so-called “Staceys” - the term used by incels for the very top of the sexual hierarchy for women. In Clavicular’s universe, women only exist to be seduced, slept with, manipulated, and ultimately abandoned. To achieve this, he has secured a doctoral-level scholarship and the expertise for not only seduction but also looksmaxxing: how to optimize one’s physical appearance based on a rigid interpretation of prevailing beauty standards in Western society.
Clavicular has a casual white supremacist ideology. It isn’t a bio-essentialist, historically informed, ‘faithful’ and dogmatic racism. Instead, it is a calm supremacy, one that, culturally, holds certain expectations of the white man over other races. This is evidenced by certain interpersonal situations in which he participates. Whenever he gets into an altercation with another white person that could lead to physical violence, he manifests the famous Boondocks meme (“hey, wait a second, I’m white!”) and pleads for a civil and peaceful resolution on the grounds that white people don’t behave in such a lowly manner. It is the classic racism of Mad Men, where Don Draper scoffs that some low-class job is no job for a white man.
Epistemologically and more so, existentially, he buys into the gospel of modern beauty standards, so much so that the ratios between the parts of one’s face (think nose-to-mouth) have some optimal value. This standard for human perfection is absolutely and eternally true, embedded as a law of the universe. Clavicular has even committed to having a serious jaw surgery and a height lengthening procedure, evidence of one man’s determination to ‘mog’ (a term used to describe someone who’s superior in terms of looks) to everyone on planet earth. Clavicular strives to be a Metatron, the archangel of human perfection, but he’d probably settle for mere Adonis.
First and foremost, Clavicular is an intellectual. His modern eugenicist obsessions are intellectual in nature and have a ‘colorful’ history as well. Eugenics aside, Clavicular organizes the worldview of the bourgeois class, specifically the technocratic strata, best exemplified by the public figure Peter Thiel. In fact, Thiel himself allegedly recognizes the connection, as, in a series of streams, Clavicular appears to earnestly discuss how Thiel has invited him to meet under dubious circumstances. It is no coincidence that Clavicular arises at a time when this stratum is attaining ascendancy on the coattails of the AI revolution. Thiel is interesting - he speaks often of a globalist ‘Antichrist’ figure. Press this concept closely, and you realize the Antichrist isn’t a person or even a government, but represents the obstacles to Thiel’s own transhumanist social aspirations.
Besides Thiel’s weird motivations, we can read Clavicular, intellectually, as having the same pairing: the technical - his eugenicist obsession with beauty metrics - with an odd, modernized Social Darwinist worldview. Those who mog survive, and the ‘sub-fives’ - those who exist on the bottom of the looksmax totem pole - die. The ‘high-tier Chads’ shall inherit the Earth; the ‘low-tier normie’ can only inherit the social defeat of not getting laid. This worldview helps organize the future aesthetic-political conditions for fascism. In fascism, it is the strong who are always beautiful, morally correct, and therefore victorious. Every fascist regime, from the Nazis to the Italians, relies on the beautification of its icons - think of the wunderkind, the handsome blonde German youth that represents all the future aspirations of the Third Reich. Clavicular would probably say this youth ‘mogs’ if he saw him on one of his absurd public streams.
Secondly, Clavicular is a legislator. He is a legislator, however, one in denial, since he plays into the myth that he is a cool political neutral. Whenever politics arises in Clavicular streams, he claims that politics is a “jester” activity. He preaches that members of his community need to focus on maximizing their physical appearance instead of the political world, a non-immediate realm filled with a bunch of stuff that doesn’t matter, like the Palestinian genocide. However, he recently appeared on The Michael Knowles Show, a podcast hosted by the right-wing political commentator. Clavicular gave a startling political opinion, one that is surprisingly insightful and closer to real political analysis than many might give the streamer credit for: that Democrat governor Gavin Newsom mogs JD Vance, and that because of this, because Vance is a “subhuman” (Clavicular’s words, not mine), that the Vice President will lose the upcoming presidential election.
We must read this interview as Clavicular lobbying in the abstract, in the broad sense. He isn’t just making a ridiculous claim but is standing before Congress, arguing policy, and interrogating lawmakers. Again, as an intellectual and now doubly as a legislator, he is serving a social function here, despite his designation in society as a mere streamer and not an intellectual. When he speaks in this interview, he is actually organizing for the bourgeois political party.
As reductive a claim as it is to say Vance will lose to Newsom due to Vance’s appearance, Clavicular touches on something rarely emphasized in serious political practice: the raw affectual-cultural dimension of politics. This isn’t to say that there are no existing analyses of beauty and electability. However, the point isn’t even beauty standards per se: we can, first and foremost, take a reminder from Clavicular that there is a purely irrational, emotive aspect to politics and, by extension, to the winner of elections. Even if we reject the thesis that Newsom “mogs” Vance as subjective and overly reductive, we can look past its naivety to reintroduce culture as a determining factor in politics. But this extraction is only a signal to point the inquirer in a more general direction: we can understand Clavicular, despite his proclamations of apoliticism, as an acting legislator.
Therefore, if we accept the definition of a politician as intellectual and legislator, and if we further accept that everyone is an intellectual and a legislator, it follows that Clavicular is a politician. He represents and organizes on behalf of the rising technocratic stratum of the bourgeoisie. I think such a widening of our definitions, following the footsteps of Gramsci and Dennings, is required to actively universalize the political process. By involving the whole of society in the great marching band of politics, we can gain a clearer picture of who comprises the political process: everyone.
You Are Not a Machine
TE Moon
The world is currently a collage of televised violence. In the past weeks, a revolution bloomed in the streets of Iran, before being swallowed by the shadow-play of the CIA and IRGC. In Venezuela, the reach of American imperialism snatched a president from his own soil, keelhauling him back to New York City for trial. At home, ICE continues its bumbling, raging reign of terror. President Trump now openly laments that if he only hadn't neglected to seize voting machines in swing states he could have prevented past electoral defeats.
This article is about none of those pressing political issues. Instead, I’ve chosen to dither this week by hyper-fixating on one of the most disgusting and striking symptoms of our sick, alienated society. What I refer to is the strange political subculture of “looksmaxxing.” I have stared into the abyss and its Lovecraftian horror has drawn me fully into its gravitational pull.
I could spend many paragraphs, like a distant yet fascinated anthropologist, simply explaining the practices of those poor souls who have lost themselves within this particular corner of modern life. Smashing your face with hammers. Dramatic and dangerous plastic surgeries. Mewing. Taking meth to “lean-max.” Developing and applying a pseudo-scientific system of “objective attractiveness” that consists of no less than five complex categorizations, once the phrenological math has been tallied. Many commentators have done so and likely in a more entertaining way than I could.
What I wish to convey is that this is not a new phenomenon, despite being a particularly gnarly manifestation. Looksmaxxing is simply the newest denomination in the American church of “self-help,” a practice that has misled millions towards internal derangement and callous disregard for the lives of those outside their own. Further, this tradition has served as yet another method of commodification, specifically to fill the demand for the optimized self. To fully explain the origins of those who “looksmax” requires a suitable historical analysis.
In agricultural, pre-capitalist society, most people did not truly engage with “the market” in a modern sense. The average person was a serf, slave, or peasant, living in a small, rural community, dependent on subsistence agriculture. The massive landholders would simply seize a portion of the product of the peasant’s labor as a tax, funding the lifestyles of the aristocratic elites that dominated every pre-capitalist, agricultural society.
To vastly and brutally oversimplify, capitalism in its modern form began in England and it began as the commodification of the land and the people who lived on it. (This is, of course, heavily disputed). In this telling, William the Bastard seized the state with his brigands, slaughtered a good portion of the ruling Anglo-Saxon lords, and divvied up the kingdom amongst his lackies. The ancient legal institutions of pre-conquest Britain were synthesized with centralized Norman law, and the new rulers of Albion were unknowingly locked into a bitter, 500-year-long, struggle for profit. The lords that “improved” their land by forcing their serfs and peasants to work longer, and with more modern methods, managed to eke out this profit. The lords that did not were eventually bankrupted and forced to sell. This small nugget of profit formed the beginnings of the base from which the English owning class would springboard to global domination over half a millennium later.
Notably here, even in capitalism’s early, wobbling steps, it draws its strength from the commodification of human beings. The bodies of the people themselves were commodities. The vast majority of people in post-conquest Britain were peasant farmers, and more than half of all people were serfs. They were tied to the land, unable to leave without their lord’s (owner’s) permission. They were numbers on a ledger, to be exploited for the sake of profit, tallied up to qualify their lord to stand in parliament, and then passed down through inheritance.
As capital struck out into the world it brought with it this commodification of people. Wealth, as well as misery, inevitably followed in equal measure. An even more brutal system than European serfdom was concocted: the trans-atlantic slave trade. Millions were stolen and sold from their homes and shipped across an ocean in exchange for guns. They were made to work in the worst of conditions in the history of humanity. They were brutalized, humiliated, and murdered.
The slaves were, as the serfs were, numbers in a ledger. They were commodities, same as the sugar or the cotton. But yet, it should always be remarked that they were still, somehow, human through it all. The whips and the chains could not silence the religion, the art, and the ideas of the slaves and the serfs. They refused, with all their might and despite all the pressure, to be only commodities. They danced, sang, married, had children, and told jokes and stories. They mourned their dead, they sinned, and they made amends. They made their lives their own, to the best extent they could. Some even took so much agency as to openly rebel against their conditions. Some even won.
A long period of technological and socio-economic transformation, as well as liberal and nationalist revolution, birthed the world described by the marxists, a world of capitalism. The early socialists, and Marx after them, fully comprehended and articulated the theory of the “labor market.” Those without property are unable to accumulate capital, as capital is only begotten from itself. As a result, these “proletarians” are forced to sell their labor to survive. In this way, most people around the world are forced to sell off most of the time in their day, their sweat and tears and the fruits of their labor, to the enrichment of their boss. For the proletariat, it was said, had nothing else with which to “bargain.” The hegemony of capital managed to survive Marx’s analysis however, as of time of writing. Despite the heroic efforts of millions over the course of more than a century, capitalism remains, theoretically, stronger and more flexible than ever. The ability of capitalists to find new, creative pathways towards accumulation remains unmatched. They have found new subjects to commodify as the productive forces have developed. Attention, for one, is perhaps the most garish and obvious example. A helpful case study is the hyper-individualist ideology of “self-help.”
The end of the second world war was a time of greater prosperity than had been seen by most of the American population. Immense poverty, racial apartheid, and patriarchal domination dulled the redistributions of the new deal, but the economistic unions of the early 20th century earned their pound of flesh. They built a world in which the proletariat’s cage was as gilded and air-conditioned as possible. As the administrative apparatus of the state and the unions temporarily stabilized the "labor market" of old, capital began to turn its gaze inward, toward the very psyche and sinew of the individual. It sought to convince the subject that their existence was not a life to be lived, but a product to be managed, polished, and presented to a market that now demanded not just the strength of one’s back, but the "optimization" of one’s self. To optimize yourself, of course, always means making yourself more useful to capital. Make yourself more skilled, more specialized, more knowledgeable, more marketable. Make yourself famous so you can sponsor our products!
From this environment, “self-help” burst forth like a pimple. Snake-oil salesmen had long peddled their poisons in America, along with all manners of gurus, charlatans, and chiropractors. They were simply looking for a way out of the woods and into the palace. Books like The Power of Positive Thinking, theologies like the prosperity gospel and scientology, as well as hundreds of competing self-improvement seminars emerged. The self-help industry made $13.4 billion dollars in 2023. Notably, this figure has increased since and includes only those goods and services which explicitly label themselves, “self-help.” This does not include the business conferences, apps, merchandise, classes, and church programs that would likely balloon the total worth of the racket. A whole world of commodities meant to help an individual transform their very selves into a commodity, to bring out the most of one's exchange value for the sake of squeezing yet more blood from our societal stone.
This observation runs perfectly parallel with György Lukács’s theory of reification. In his seminal 1923 essay "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," Lukács argues that the commodity form is not merely a problem of economics, but the "universal structuring principle" of capitalist society, penetrating the "total outer and inner life of society". For Lukács, reification occurs when: "a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity,’ an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people".
In the context of looksmaxxing, the "relation between people"(sexual attraction, social status, romantic interest) is ossified into "things" (canthal tilt, jawline angularity, height metrics). These physical attributes thus acquire a "phantom objectivity." They appear to the looksmaxxer not as subjective preferences or cultural constructs, but as hard, immutable laws of nature (often justified through pseudo-science). The "sexual marketplace" becomes a "second nature," a hostile environment governed by laws that operate independently of human will.
This is the aesthetic equivalent of Taylorism (scientific management), a key component of Lukács’s critique. Lukács argues that capitalist rationalization is based on "the principle of calculability," which requires the "destruction of the organic necessity" of the work process. In the factory, the worker’s activity is broken down into abstract, specialized, and repetitive motions, stripped of their qualitative character and reduced to quantitative units of time. As Lukács writes: "In consequence of the rationalization of the work-process the human qualities and idiosyncrasies of the worker appear increasingly as mere sources of error when contrasted with these abstract special laws functioning according to rational predictions".
The looksmaxxer applies this exact logic to their own face. The face is no longer perceived as an organic, expressive unity (a gestalt), but is fragmented into isolated, calculable variables: the philtrum length, the bizygomatic width, the gonial angle. Any "human quality" or idiosyncrasy that deviates from the "abstract special laws" of the algorithm is viewed as an "error" or a "failo" (failure) to be corrected through surgery or "bone-smashing." This represents the "fragmentation of the subject" predicted by Lukács. The subject treats their own body as an object separate from themselves, a machine to be tuned. The worker (the subject) attacks the raw material (their own face) to force it to conform to the “rationalized” demands of the market.
A critical distinction in Lukácsian theory is the contemplative stance. Lukács argues that the bourgeois subject (and the reified worker) adopts a passive, contemplative attitude toward the social world. They view the laws of the market (or society) as unchangeable, "natural" laws that can be calculated and predicted, but not fundamentally transformed by human agency. The looksmaxxer is hyper-active within the parameters of the system (optimizing the variables), but totally passive in relation to the system itself. This passivity is the hallmark of reified consciousness. The subject feels they have no power to change the definition of beauty or the economic structures that enforce it; they can only "adapt" to the "laws" of the sexual market. As Lukács notes, "the specialized 'virtuoso', the vendor of his objectified and reified faculties... lapses into a contemplative attitude vis-à-vis the workings of his own objectified and reified faculties". The looksmaxxer contemplates their own jawline with the detached, calculating gaze of an engineer inspecting a faulty piston.
While the looksmaxxer represents a new, hyper-masculinized frontier of this internal enclosure, he is a latecomer to a factory floor that has been running at full capacity for women. The history of the body-as-commodity has always been bifurcated by the sharp blade of class. For the wealthy woman, beauty was the "ornamental" proof of her family’s capital, a display of expensive idleness, where the pallor of her skin or the delicacy of her hands signaled a total exemption from manual labor. Her body was a vault for the storage of status.
For the working-class woman, however, the management of the self was never about ornament; it was about the brutal math of survival. In the absence of property or a living wage, her physical presentation was often the only leverage she possessed to navigate a world that would otherwise discard her. The "optimization" of her appearance was a desperate, calculated investment: a way to secure a slightly less grueling position in domestic service, a more stable marriage, or a reprieve from the most punishing forms of exploitation.
What the looksmaxxer represents is the final democratization of this survivalist anxiety. Capital has realized that the insecurities once reserved for the feminine are a goldmine when expanded to the whole of the proletariat. The “algorithmic gaze" does not care about your class origins; it only cares about your conversion rate. It has taken the "conspicuous consumption" of the rich and the "survivalist grooming" of the poor and blended them into a single, mandatory digital performance. Whether it is a luxury skincare routine or a desperate bone-smash in a bedroom, the goal is the same: to prevent your value on the ledger from dropping to zero.
This trajectory has reached its most deranged fever pitch in the digital ether. The internet has supplemented the "labor market" with an equally alienating "attention market," where the individual is simultaneously the merchant, the billboard, and the product. Despite our sneering at their self-promoting spectacle, one could argue looksmaxxers like Clavicular are the most honest expression of the era. They have accepted the grim logic that if the self is a commodity, then every inch of the body must be tallied, measured, and improved for the sake of attention.
From attention comes fame, comes sponsorships, comes Patreon subscriptions. When looksmaxxers dissect the human form with the cold precision of a butcher, measuring the width of the shoulders or the angle of the "hunter eyes" to determine if a particular person can successfully harvest the algorithm’s gaze, they are merely teaching millions how to update the ledgers of the Norman lords. They are not slaves, nor serfs. They are certainly not forced to live under the most horrific living conditions known to history. But they are commodities, nonetheless.
The “algorithmic gaze” that produces looksmaxxers is not a passive observer. It can be understood, in an Althussurian sense, as an ideological state apparatus (ISA). ISAs are institutions (schools, media, family, internet platforms) that function to reproduce the relations of production through ideology. The "algorithmic gaze" previously described is not just a passive observer; it is an active mechanism of an ISA. The social media platforms (TikTok, Instagram) and the specific communities (Discord servers, internet forums) function as apparatuses that "recruit" subjects.
We could be further aided in understanding by Althusser's idea of “interpellation” or the process by which ideology "hails" concrete individuals and transforms them into subjects. Althusser uses the famous example of the police officer shouting "Hey, you there!" When the individual turns around, they become a subject: subjected to the law. In the case of looksmaxxing, the "hail" is digital and algorithmic. The algorithm presents an image of the "Chad" or "Stacy," or a video on "negative canthal tilt." The individual watching the screen recognizes themselves in this address: "Yes, that is me. I have a negative canthal tilt. I am the incel."
Althusser explains: "The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing".
Crucially, Althusser argues that "subjects 'work' by themselves". The apparatus does not need to force the looksmaxxer to smash their bones. Once interpellated, the subject freely accepts their subjection. They desire to optimize themselves because they have recognized themselves as a "looksmaxxer." They believe they are acting autonomously to improve their lives ("self-help"), but this autonomy is the form through which their subjection is realized. One allows themselves to become a machine for capital precisely through this illusion of freedom.
The horror of this subculture lies in its total fealty to the concept of man as a machine. Those who engage in "bone-smashing" or "lean-maxxing" are performing literal, physical labor upon their own bodies to satisfy the demands of capital, whose cruel and fickle approval shifts with each passing moment. By turning their own faces into a site of production, they are completing the work that began with the first enclosures of the English commons. The land was stolen, the labor was stolen, and now, the very physical reality of the human being is being partitioned and "improved" for the sake of attracting the fleeting, monetizable interest of a digital audience.
The tragedy of the looksmaxxer is not his vanity, but his submission. He has accepted the logic of the ledger: that if the system treats you like a machine, you must become a more efficient one to survive. These young men are sharpening the very knives used to dismember their own humanity, attempting to solve systemic alienation with individual "upgrades." The energy, this immense, agonizing effort spent on "maxxing" themselves, is a redirection of revolutionary potential into a dead-end of self-commodification. Instead of engaging in the collective struggle for liberation, these young men are performing a lonely, desperate "capitalist praxis."
Clavicular himself, and the looksmaxxing movement more broadly, represent a fascinating intersection of the various threads of reaction and commodification that make up our modern day tapestry, and are a perfect example of the fearful position of the modern subject of capital. Whiteness, maleness, and straightness are threatened by the growth of intersectional “wokeness.” All people, including white people, straight people, and male people, feel the inevitable pull of submission to capital. The only path to wealth and comfort lies through carving out a role for yourself that further enriches the propertied and further exploits the proletariat. In the midst of this environment, a great psychological anguish has opened up in some: that of precarious privilege under pressure by the march of capital and social equality. The previous models for maleness: that of the stoic provider, the family man, the tough guy, have been obliterated by changes in socioeconomic conditions. Looksmaxxers, like all strains of the broader incel movement, are attempting to construct a new social definition of maleness. They wish to define a new set of practices that will supposedly ensure the privileges they imagine to have been guaranteed to a previous generation of men: wealth, respect, and romantic attention.
There are, of course, more pressing geopolitical fires to extinguish, from the streets of Caracas to Minneapolis. But these struggles are one and the same. If the proletariat is to meet the gravity of this historical moment, we must first refuse the ledger, then band together to tear it up entirely. We must reject the lie that our worth is found in how effectively we can hold the algorithm’s gaze or how perfectly we fit the commodified mold capital forces us into. The "looksmaxxer" strives to be the most valuable product in the shop window. Our task is to smash the glass. We are not data points, we are not "optimized assets," and we are certainly not machines. We are, despite every attempt by capital to deform us, stubbornly and inconveniently human. It is time we started acting like it.
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