Know Not: An Interview With Barrett Avner of the Contain Podcast
Barrett Avner is a musician who uses his podcast, Contain, to conduct modern philosophies, alongside choral interludes, into a sublime form of speech, producing cognitively visceral duets between himself and the guest. He helped invent Finance Punk, a Dadaist type of art giving holy preference to money just as everyone’s finances become increasingly, apocalyptically in question–an especially blithesome way to play 52-card pickup with every agenda. It’s a method somewhat similar in lingual practice to Donald Barthleme’s Not-Knowing–the writer as an angelic vessel for the word, “fruitful errors” from a mind moving in “unanticipated directions”—provoking amorphous, experimental ideologies. Avner aims to take us beyond the internet’s cringe, into a new, sublime, omniscient cringe, where embarrassment is the fool’s boon. His podcast guests include artists, writers, DJs, musicians, demonic possession rappers, and heavy hitters online, such as: Cody Wilson, Mike Cernovich, Paul Town, Alex Lee Moyer, and Honor Levy.
What is an Angelicism01/Finance Punk tutorial for the uninitiated?
Angelicism01 and Alex Bienstock (coiner of the term Finance Punk) are two friends of mine that don’t know each other. Sometimes I feel like a big part of the project suturing these two disparate types of thought, because I see both of them as two of our greatest modern philosophers. The definition of Finance Punk is: “A cultural and aesthetic mind-state that prioritizes making money, even as an “underground” or “radical” creator. The work isn’t made for money, but it’s the money that matters the most.”
Finance Punk works within the angelicist framework because it acknowledges the weight of death and existence and our commitment to how we want our beingness to look if we’re to assume this is the only one we have in its absolute finality. They’re atheists and I’m not, but we have this shared belief the anthropocentric epoch is ending, and if that’s the case, how are we to act, what do we want to see on the projector screen as it does? Do we want to be ruled by actually existing hell (coercion and conformism), or do we want to reject this hell, one that is literally here, not mythological, religious, but a kind of active nothingness.
If you were to write a book, what would it be, and in what style, or style combinations? Will Gen Z adopt Tao Lin’s concrete minimalist transcription style as a similar kind of autofiction?
The mediologist Michel Serres claimed that at a certain point communication became more of a historical force than production: we live in a world full of messages, messengers, air-borne radar, “angels” etc. Our biggest metaphysical commitment is to the reception of pure communication, pure ground, or “vibes.” The immaterial, especially in the age of digitization, is a way greater historical force than a naive universalist category like the proleteriat.
The internet is kind of like a self-writing book, the internet is an autofiction which ironically ended itself. So what is the message people are looking for? They find it in “I want to leave society”…well that's a good idea. Places like Los Angeles aren’t societies, they’re fascist liberal Nazi hellholes. This book (which I am slowly compiling) would be more of a compendium of images, texts, and music. Gesamtkunstwerk, incorporating all disparate forms. When I started Contain, I wanted it to have music, art, and conversations. It’s really laborious and time-consuming to do it this way, but the short end of it was I didn’t want it to be just another podcast when there are already way too fucking many of them.
What do you think of Herzog, Jodorowsky, and the schizoid morphogenetic resonance of Ren & Stimpy?
I’ve always been more drawn to Fassbinder. The only Jodorowsky movie I enjoyed was Santa Sangre, the others felt a bit too pastiche for me, maybe not the fault of the surrealism itself but more that I associate them with the nostalgia obsessed Stoner Metal scene I was loosely affiliated with in my early 20s. I’m an autodidact and an ex-rocker—I don’t have a college degree. Ren & Stimpy is the ultimate pre-post-cringe show, it's totally amazing that that shit was put on Nickelodeon. The vulgarity, the violence, there was something immediately enjoyable about that that marketing strategists in the 90s instinctively understood and didn’t try to endlessly suppress today. As far as precursors, we can say the internet had already written itself from Saint Augustine and these archaic meditations on consciousness. The internet (messages) were always and have always been in invention, waiting to enframe us, it was a deterministic inevitability. When we invented angels, we also invented the internet. So I try to take a holistic view. Obviously some things are just wack and suck ass to me though.
Contain interview with Dasha Nekrasova, actress and co-host of the popular Red Scare podcast.
How can someone ensure that their political takes aren’t automatically inscripted into manufactured consent online? Will political fashions ever surpass the hamster wheel of a cyclical revolt that serves the purpose of whatever cause enlisted it in the first place?
Politically I’m more of a circumstantialist—I’m not a partisan in any way or really even a political person. Politics are primarily a way to cultivate alliances and associations around spectacle—it’s Hollywood for ugly people. I think Trump temporarily destroyed this in a beautiful way, but like T-1000 from Terminator the metallic goop of this regime slowly re-metastasized, and in the process of rebuilding itself, disposed of Trump in the process. It’s really tragic to think about.
…But don’t think for one second that cancel culture never existed on “the right,” but we’ll never know to what extent because the last time they had any sort of hegemonic power television was the primary tool of communication and media consensus-making.
My only political commitments are to life and expression. You have people speaking up against biopolitics and COVID laws like Giorgio Agamben, Byung Chul Han, and Alex Jones. A lot of these NYU grad post-woke micro-socialite turned reactionary grifters said nothing when it mattered and helped astroturf a corpse into the White House. I’m very proud to have said things when they actually mattered, when they cost me a few relationships and burnt a few bridges but I’m no longer interested in discussing anything from the 2018 cancel culture ubiquitous relapse.
There are a ton of people, and it’s like they see a car crash on the side of the road. They don’t do anything about it, but will describe it to whoever will listen to them as smoke and fire rages on. This to me, is the majority of the post-left, or anti-liberal punditry of today. These are people who in their day-to-day lives take it from the man, and this is how they vent. They weren’t creative enough, or weren’t willing to make certain sacrifices towards being an artist, or didn’t have the resources, so they became social critics. They lost the plot on how structures of technicity organize our relationship to time, how language and text and media shape and inform this very concept of identity. The more they participate, the easier it is for their rhetoric to be used as a vessel to reify them as objects, as brands. This is typical of politically minded people though. Trump was an artist masquerading as a politician. This is also why he was the president of the moment.
[War on Beauty: An Interview With Jack the Perfume Nationalist]
From Goethe’s Young Werther through Keats’s idea of negative capability, Byron’s “knowledge is sorrow,” romanticists fist-fighting at every performance of Hugo’s Hernani, the Augenblick, decisive moment, the (proto-YOLO) 1800s French Bouzingo throwing fake cadavers out of windows in 1830s Paris, 1990s cruel prank culture and the fluxus apogee of public disruption, from von Trier through Jackass and Tom Green, pratfall dada—is the angelicism scene similarly alive now in Austin?
It’s interesting you bring that up. Romanticism seems to have made somewhat of an internet comeback, Goethe’s Werther has of course been analogued as “incel prototype,” but I haven’t read it. I’ve considered staging a fluxus style performance in Texas, but honestly, people here are so nice, it wouldn’t have the desired effect and I think it would be potentially patronizing. In NYC LES, at Clandestino while visiting I drooled on myself, spassed, acted like a retard, like in Von Trier’s The Idiots, in front of the entire who's who of the downtown scene. It was exhilarating, because I knew that they knew at that moment, I was doing this as a protest of the insular spectacle, of particularism, even if completely ineffective. Christoph Schlingensief had a great quote: “I don’t mind rolling down a hill and crashing into a tree as long as it’s done in a state of euphoria.” I think of that a lot when I want to do something but try to filter certain thoughts out of my head.
Contain interview with Alex Lee Moyer, director of documentaries TFW NO GF and the forthcoming Alex’s War.
As far as the other question, there isn’t really much overlap between Indie Thinkers and the Vibe Shift Group, although Murphy is a friend. Justin is doing empirical work dealing with tech data, crypto, etc. I’m just trying to nudge people in the direction of seeing things a bit differently, so one is more exoteric and practical and one is a bit more esoteric and schizo. Not that I don’t take what I do seriously, it's just a very different mode of operating. We make a pretty funny duo though. He’s like the more straight-laced, traditionalist guy and I'm the more disheveled, aloof, artsy guy.
Could Simone Weil’s concept that we unfold a hidden God at our peril with the overuse of metacognition, that we might eradicate the self to reveal God’s radiant love therein, sensed through the veil of time and space without nosing in too deep, piercing through the screen and ceasing to be, the holy fool’s decreation–could this be the answer to turning away from the specious, anemic culture of now while still leaving room to subvert the traditional?
Weil’s notion that attention as being the “rarest and purest form of generosity” is something that influenced me from the beginning. Attention also inflicts a kind of inner suffering that brings us out of ourselves into peace, or absolvement of singularity. When I started the project I said “I’m going to do things for the sake of doing them. Each episode is going to have its own art. I’m going to score a lot of the music too. I don’t care if it’s time consuming, almost torturously attentive, I’m seeking a quasi or near mystical experience, the world has just changed forever.” Each episode takes a lot more work than one would assume. Many times I meticulously edit things that sound forced, while leaving in mistakes so they sound like I didn’t even do anything.
People have said “you can get away with cutting a few corners” but to me, that never mattered. All my music gets put out on hand-burned CDs. I never want to release an album in any other way again. I’m not looking for a publishing deal, I'm not looking for a record deal. I’m not looking for anything like that. One of the bargains you make when you have some form of patronage is to remain independent. When I paypig other people's content, it’s not just to support and thank them for their honesty and hard work, it’s like a pittance that helps foster an ecosystem of heterodoxy. You’re not merely just gaining access to a few episodes beyond a paywall: you’re ensuring the work doesn’t get sold out to the Guardian and botched to fit their agenda or your podcast doesn’t end up as a fucking NFT.
There is some room to subvert tradition, while being somewhat distant from the calcifying effects of this trash star culture. Many people already do this, and many are self-aware. What we’re looking for is an alterity that isn’t against tradition per se, or a source, but a horseshoeing that engages premodernism prior to capitalist reason and logic with some possibility of a Real postmodernism, and that embraces polysemic readings, where things don’t have to be so spelled out all the time. Part of the whole notion of a “vibe shift” as Angelicism01 noted is one that needs no coordinates. It doesn’t need chat rooms, or doxxing chambers, or pretext. It all happens organically, with various agents playing off each other, creating neologisms and narrativising their work so that it dissolves and becomes one, and then dissolves before subsumption; it can stay agile and self-immolate in a time when everything has become so understood. Maybe it will ultimately fail, but it’s worth doing, because why not?
Do you think people will ever overcome the addiction of taking a side in order to achieve a healthy level of intentional disorder?
I believe so. The sooner people start to see themselves as subjects on the precipice of becoming something else, I think this is where we may find our grace. People want material solutions to solve our problem with atomization, of individuation, etc. But forcing socialism or reforms on people isn’t going to change that. Things change constantly, entropy, and we are constantly defining and redefining what things are because our relational understanding to things is constantly changing. If we can intimate what something is without being literal or spelling it out, I think that’s a good thing. That’s the direction we should head in, and I think that’s the direction we are heading in.
[The NEET Revolution: Why NEETs Will Change the World]
What is your rundown of the Gen X through Gen Z evolution across society and the arts, including the bloated turmoil of being fellow millennials?
I think millennials are weak idiot crybabies for the most part. They discard some of the more interesting historical themes in favor of reengaging ones that feel familiar. I know this because I’ve done it myself. A lot of my friends happen to be Gen X and Gen Z. Heiner Muhlmann, the German anthropologist outlined the ways in which technical images and digitization exploded the distinction of civilization and time. Each generation encompasses its own separate civilization within a broader one, the guy walking down the street from you, chances are you process FPS (frames per second) at variably different speeds, enough to radically alter their way of experiencing the world. As far as Gen Z, they are kind of like the Human Instrumentality Project in Neon Genesis Evangelion; they may be the group that triggers the apocalypse, but I think most of it is an aesthetic response
How can we put the spirit back in epiphany?
I think it comes from being sincere in everything that you do, and giving people the tools and ideas to help activate or spark an act of doing something different, of opting out. We don’t live in a society, and this is a crucial point. We need to bring back objects that ground us so we can give the earth back its dignity and magic.
Follow Sean Kilpatrick on Twitter.
