In Search of Artistic Integrity

Fame, Anonymity & the Society of the Spectacle

Feb 27, 2023

According to the Internet, nobody has paid any attention to Foodie, or, The Capitalist Monsoon that is Mississippi, a mysterious, serialized book profiled in The New Yorker in July 2021.

Three years after various book critics, writers, musicians, and artists began receiving unsolicited “advance promotional copies” of Foodie, the book has returned to obscurity, and this may be exactly what the pseudonymous author “Stokes Prickett” intended.

I never received a copy of Foodie, but I did read excerpts and was fascinated by its polished, philosophical prose, an enigmatic interview with “Prickett” and a certain (fictional?) Professor Sherbert Taylor,1 and by the book’s alternative/anonymous distribution method.

Inspired by this literary oddity, I spent an entire night writing an early version of this essay for nobody in particular, which I later submitted to an open call for submissions to a Foodie Anthology that seemed to be headed by someone connected to the work itself (“We would love to include your piece,” an anonymous emailer wrote me last spring. “Sherbert [Taylor] is a big fan of your original article.”

I haven’t heard anything about my submission, Foodie, or the anthology since. To date, there has been no further discussion of Foodie in The New Yorker (or anywhere else for that matter), and the book’s associated Twitter and Soundcloud accounts have remained stagnant at 109 and 15 followers, respectively.

But lately, I’ve been thinking: what if anonymity were the point? What if by choosing who has the right to read their work, Foodie’s mysterious author is explicitly eschewing any option of becoming known?

Although it’s hard to believe in an era of follower-count and little-red-heart junkies like you and me, it’s still possible, is it not, that some people write books without hope or despair for an audience? And maybe, just maybe, the continued anonymity (and silence) of “Stokes Prickett” points towards a more authentic kind of art, the kind of art that explicitly rejects popularity and the assumption that in order to be successful, we should all want to become well-known.

The Society of the Spectacle

“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation. The spectacle’s social function is the concrete manufacture of alienation.”
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

quote from *The Society of the Specatcle*

In 1967, a French college dropout named Guy Debord wrote a philosophical treatise called The Society of The Spectacle.2 In it, Debord argued that contemporary society’s core values have shifted from being into having, and from having into appearing. When the first of these shifts occurred, during the Industrial Revolution, “Human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was [being], but with what one possessed [having].” In the second stage of this shift (the 1950s), “All ‘having’ must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances.”

Guy Debord didn’t invent the idea that the conditions of modern industrial society have alienated us from our deeper human essence. Way back in 1844, Karl Marx wrote Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (also known as The Paris Manuscripts) and defined the four ways in which modern capitalist society has resulted in human estrangement:

Alienation from the product (“the product stands over and above [us], opposed to [us] as an independent power”),
Alienation from the self
Alienation from our “species life”
Alienation from other human beings.

A 21^st century version of alienation is not hard to apply here. Just consider the way in which social media, virality, and follower-count culture have mutated the very definition of what “being” an artist means. We live in an era in which artists are told to be just as concerned (if not more so) with follower-counts “content creation” as they are with actually doing the work.

Very few writers—even well-published ones—have ever been able to make a living solely from writing. This is not news. What is striking, however, is that these days, the value of a book can come secondary to the content created by the author to promote the book.

A “successful” book is primarily one that is well-promoted … literary value (not to mention human significance) be damned. To literary agents and publishers, a well-written book means nothing if the writer of said novel is unwilling to create an Instagram/Twitter/Tiktok/Facebook/Substack/[whatever’s coming next] to promote it. This is because regardless of how valuable a work might be, when it comes to a lot of art these days, consumer capitalist society relies on easily-digestible content to feed the algorithms, often leading to a conflation of authentic art and “content” that results in the very forms of alienation Karl Marx outlined in 1844.

The Alienation of the Self

“Alienated consumption has become just as much a duty for the masses as alienated production.”
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

What does it mean to “be a writer” these days? Is it dependent on “having a book out?” On getting enough clicks on Substack? Is a writer someone who navigates their own existence through the written word, or is “being a writer” fundamentally connected to being able to pay the rent with profits from writing?

If the answer is the latter, I have failed miserably. According to this current economic model of cultural production, writers are people who are paid to write, even if the entire history of literature tells us something different (Karl Marx, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe … many of history’s most important writers were not able to make a living from writing alone).

“Stokes Prickett” understands this, which is why Foodie’s distribution method formally projects the idea that writing should primarily be a for-profit business. The author gave away the books for free, not unlike most of the writing on Substack. By not only publishing and choosing how to distribute Foodie themselves, “Prickett” skirted the abyss of overworked literary agents and shrinking publishing houses by reconsidering what literature should do in the 21^stcentury—namely, to return to the idea of what it means to be a writer versus simply appearing to be one via the simulacrum of social media.

When I published my debut novel back in 2015, I had the experience of “becoming an author.” Once the book hits bookshelves, I became “an author” who “had a book out,” and in order to sell it, I was told to focus on gaining followers via constant self-promotion on social media (I respect people who can do this; I simply couldn’t; it made me itch.)

Maybe it’s because I something Guy Debord’s alludes to: “Stars—spectacular representations of living human beings are specialists of apparent life … everything that was directly lived [recedes] into representation.”

Often victim of their own success, well-known artists can quickly become nothing more than a construct, a digital avatar who must be followed to be understood, the summation of Instagram captions, Reddit AMAs, countless likes and re-tweets … and alas, just like this run-on sentence, the experience is exhausting before the commodification of the artistic self is all-but-complete.

At this point, there’s only one option left for the “known” artist, which is to peddle our wares by cleverly not-talking-but-actually-talking-about-ourselves, which is at best a plainly narcissistic attempt at managing our own narcissism, anathema to any real engagement with artistic authenticity and integrity. (As simple of a business move as it might be, for example, including a “go paid” subscriber button ~~right here~~ would represent the exact kind of problem we face within the spectacle)

Conclusion: In Praise of True(r) Mystery

“We need more true mystery to our lives, Hem. The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most at this time.”
Evan Shipman, quoted in A Moveable Feast

Brandon Milner, a New York-based writer and DJ, beautifully explained Foodie’s value in a 2021 blog post:

“[Foodie is] a non-story about friends who recognize the unsatisfying nature — the futility, even — of contemporary work, sadder still because theirs is the work of nourishing others, and it comes with none of the disadvantages of an artwork that’s been forged into a social-media branding tool and whose perceived worth is largely dependent on extant clout.”

Of course, it's possible that “Stokes Prickett” chose to self-publish a manuscript and send it to a select group of people who he/she/they believed would talk about him/her/them (“If you got one,” “Prickett” explained to the New Yorker’s Adam Dalva, “it’s because I liked something you wrote. It could be anything from a critical tome to a tweet”).

But given how little anybody ended up actually talking about Foodie since its 2020 release, I consider this premise unlikely. It’s more likely—or at least, this is the narrative I choose to believe—that “Stokes Prickett” is a published author who grew weary (and wary) of sacrificing writing-time to become a “content creator,” which their agent/publisher insisted was the only way to remain relevant to the algorithms in pursuit of literary fame. An even more logical scenario is that we take Foodie at face value: a mysterious, humble, explicitly not-for-profit story about one American writer’s disillusionment with, as Foodie’s subtitle makes clear, the “capitalist monsoon.”

quote from *The Society of the Spectacle*

Regardless of who “Stokes Prickett” is and their reasons for Foodie’s distribution, it’s clear that three years onwards, the pseudonymous author isn’t interested in being known. This is a revolutionary, Debordian act in our current culture, especially considering “Prickett’s” willingness to forego traditional publishing after being profiled in The New Yorker, the most renowned literary magazine in the world.

Despite this, and to this day, it remains impossible to read Foodie, or, The Capitalist Monsoon that is Mississippi unless “Stokes Prickett” wants you to … and what a gift to be reminded that

we should not be able to consume simply because we want to.

Authentic art has nothing to do with market value. Authentic art illuminates and makes us feel less alone by shining a light on the ways in which we might live more authentically. It inspires writers like yours truly to write multiple drafts of an essay over the span of three years, forever in search of an author who wrote a mysterious novel that I still have yet to read. In this way, Foodie offers us all an alternative by revealing our own complicity within this current society of the spectacle, a chance to reflect on the integrity of anonymity in this late consumer capitalist era’s individualistic and identitarian obsession with individual self.

I can only hope to one day read Foodie’s metamodernist tale about the Age of Consumption. and one writer’s attempt to remain human in the face of algorithmic alienation. After a frenzied decade of artists believing they must be prophets, concerned not with their teachings but with followers and comments and likes, Foodie can teach us something important how future artists might combat what Guy Debord defined as society’s “concrete manufacture of alienation.” As we continue to witness the Debordian transition from being»having»appearing in the 2020s, forever metastasizing with social and political idolatry dictated by the algorithms, the question remains: who amongst us is willing—and is it even possible?—to forego mass popularity in favor of a quieter, more authentic kind of ambition?