In Search of Artistic Integrity

Foodie and Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle

According to the Internet, nobody has paid any attention to Foodie, a mysterious, serialized novel profiled in The New Yorker in July 2021, and this may be exactly what the pseudonymous author “Stokes Prickett” intended.

Three years after various book critics, writers, musicians, and artists began receiving unsolicited “Advance Promotional Copy: Do Not Read” copies of Foodie, or, The Capitalist Monsoon that is Mississippi, the book has returned to obscurity. Although I never received a copy of Foodie, I was immediately fascinated by excerpts of its polished, philosophical prose, the enigmatic interview with “Prickett” and a certain (fictional?) Professor Sherbert Taylor, and by the book’s alternative/anonymous distribution method. I proceeded to spend 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. Sherbert is a big fan of your original article,” someone wrote to me last spring .... I haven’t heard anything about the anthology since).

To date, there has been no further discussion of Foodie in The New Yorker (nor 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: maybe this is exactly what “Stokes Prickett” intended.  By choosing who has the right to read Foodie, the pseudonymous author explicitly eschewed any option of becoming known, and although it’s hard to believe for follower-count and little-red-heart junkies like you and me, it is possible, is it not? that Foodie was written without hope or despair for an audience … and perhaps 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 all should 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

In 1967, a French college dropout named Guy Debord wrote a philosophical treatise called The Society of The Spectacle. 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. In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (also known as The Paris Manuscripts), Karl Marx 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,” and 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 “content creation” and follower-counts as they are with doing the work.

Very few writers—even well-published writers—have ever been able to make a living from writing. This is not new. What is new, however, is that today, the value of a book’s content is often secondary to the content created by the author to promote the book. To literary agents and publishers, a novel that has taken ten years of diligent writing means nothing if the writer of said novel is unwilling to create an Instagram/Twitter/Tiktok account. This is because regardless of how valuable a work might be, our consumer capitalist society depends upon easily-digestible content to feed the algorithms, which often leads to a conflation of authentic art and “content” and results in an alienation of the artistic self.

The Alienation of the Self

Alienated consumption has become just as much a duty for the masses as alienated production.

-Guy Debord

What does it mean to “be a writer” these days? Is it dependent on “having a book out?” Is a writer someone who navigates their own existence through the written word, or does “being a writer” mean being able to pay the rent with our words?

According to the current economic model of cultural production, writers are people who are paid to write, even if the entire history of literature tells us something a bit different (Karl Marx, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe … many of history’s most important writers were never able to make a living from writing alone). “Stokes Prickett” understands this and Foodie’s distribution method formally projects the idea that writing should primarily be a for-profit business (the author gave the books away for free, not unlike most writers do for their writing on Substack nowadays). By not only self-publishing Foodie but deciding who gets to read it, “Prickett” skirted the abyss of overworked literary agents and shrinking publishing houses by reconsidering what literature should do in the 21^st century—namely, to return to the idea of what it means to be a writer versus simply appearing to be.

Once a book hits bookshelves, the writer becomes an author who has a book out, and in order to sell it, the author has to focus on gaining followers and constant publicity. “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, 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. With the commodification of the artistic self now all-but-complete, there is only one option left to peddle our wares—self-promotion—which at best requires a constant focus on managing our own egos, anathema to any real engagement with a more authentic artistic self.

Conclusion: In Praise of True 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, explained it beautifully in his 2021 blog post on the subject:

“[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, this premise is highly unlikely. It’s more likely—and 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. The most logical scenario, however, 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.”

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

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 three years, in search of an author who wrote a mysterious novel that he’s still never read. And in  this way, Foodie offers us an alternative by revealing our own complicity within the spectacle. “Prickett” offers us a chance to reflect on the integrity of anonymity, a revolutionary alternative to this late consumer capitalist era’s individualistic and identitarian obsession with the self.

To this day, it remains impossible to get a copy of Foodie, or, The Capitalist Monsoon that is Mississippi unless “Stokes Prickett” wants you to have it, and what a gift to be reminded that we cannot consume simply because we want to. I can only hope to one day read its metamodernist tale about the Age of Consumption and one person’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 teaches 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 to forego popularity in favor of a quieter, more authentic kind of ambition?

Samuél Lopez-Barrantes writes if not, Paris .