on the matter of visibility in the furry subculture

There's a lot of unspoken and assumed pressure for furries to be patrons of the arts. This mostly manifests on who wins the lottery for the attention economy on social media. [...] If it isn't a suggesting fursuit photo or cute art, [furries] aren't going to waste their time. This can make it feel like you have to spend money on art/fursuits/etc. to be accepted in the fandom.

But this simply isn't true. You only benefit from those things if you're trying to win a popularity contest in your own mind and become an influencer on social media. Your Twitter follower count isn't your worth to your friends, and if you think that it is, you have the wrong friends.
— Soatok, “Is there extreme classism in the furry fandom?” (17 February 2022)

this is not an essay about whether there is “extreme classism” in furry subculture, a question i find myself uninterested in answering at length because i think the answer is obvious. (yes.) but it is an essay about the language adjacent to this question—about the ‘attention economy,’ about the ‘popularity contest,’ about ‘acceptance in the fandom’ and to what things this is tied. because the truth is this: the subtext that none of this matters if one has the right friends, the right mentality is little more than wishcasting. such a thing can only be true if one believes that furry subculture is in some sense socially meritocratic, a community—to adapt a phrase from Dennis Altman about the gay bathhouse—that is far removed from the “bondage of rank, hierarchy, and competition that characterise much of the outside world.”¹ but the subculture is not a meritocracy any more than the gay bathhouse of which Altman spoke was a utopian ‘Whitmanesque democracy.’

one may say with conviction that there is no need to ‘spend money on art/fursuits/etc. to be accepted,’ but this is not really true. the furry without the signifiers of furrydom will probably not get far socially; the furry with money to splurge on these signifiers will probably pay their way to into many social groups. to buy off people is cheap, to buy commodities cheaper still. disposable capital lubricates ownership of the very luxury commodities (art, VR models, fursuits) upon which furry subculture is built, and the ownership of these luxury commodities in kind facilitates the accretion of social capital and attention—visibility, in other words.

indeed, visibility within the subculture is often just a byproduct of what identities are privileged under the existing social order outside it. this dynamic can be felt across many facets of identity, but in furry spaces it most often reflects class hierarchy. the spirit of the ‘suspiciously wealthy furry’ is not an ex nihilo invention; the specter of the furry tech worker, the white-collar wage-earner, looms in almost every furry space. true, these phantasmal furries are over-invoked. (one presumes the median furry cannot be described as any of suspiciously wealthy, or tech-worker, or otherwise white-collar.) but discursive abuse does not really change what these phantasmal furries signify to many: a growing material hierarchy and inequality within the subculture—facilitated through visibility—that cuts against its meritocratic founding mythos.

and if visibility is not physical capital—if it does not convert one-to-one into success, or spend one-to-one into popularity or stability—it still greases the wheels much as literal capital would. by its very nature visibility is a form of social capital: it opens doors; creates opportunities; provides chances for things to happen that otherwise would not, just as physical capital can. if our subculture is a lottery of attention, then we neither enter it nor play with equal odds and it debases us to pretend otherwise. hierarchy and inequality reify visibility and always have; one cannot negate material reality by having the ‘right’ friends (as though friendship is fungible or trivial) or by tuning out the ‘popularity contest’ (as if one can simply opt out of the social forces to which they are subject).

of course, i do not want to overstate the case. some level of social hierarchy and therefore inequality is immutable. we cannot redistribute intangibles like attention or visibility on Marxist grounds, nor would such a thing even be desirable anyways. the perception of hierarchy or inequality of social status is also not synonymous with genuine hierarchy or inequality; particularly in online spaces—so manipulated by algorithms and so corrosive to how we relate—one may attain a very warped sense of what one's place ‘should’ be.

but these are complications, not refutations; that we cannot completely level the playing field and might attain a false consciousness of where hierarchy or inequality exists does not invalidate the very real hierarchy and inequality that does exist. if we speak of a world in which ‘[furries] aren't going to waste their time’ unless something is a ‘fursuit photo or cute art’—a luxury commodity—then we are speaking of, resigning ourselves to, a world in which there is a split between those who have and those who have not. we are resigning ourselves to the dichotomy between those whose sole visible representation was bought by the leftover between rent checks; and those whose visibility in art never evokes the cost of living at all. we are resigning ourselves to sociality in which some will never be so fortunate as to ‘be seen’ at even one furry meetup; and some will be able to arrange their lives around these spaces and their social circuits. we are throwing up our hands and allowing some to suffer tremendously at the hands of another for want of visibility; and allowing others to weaponize their visibility in the service of harm. and we are resigning ourselves to a world in which there are those who will, every day, bear the shame of begging others to live because it is what little leverage their visibility allows them; and those who will, each day, never know the indignity of groveling because their visibility has already paid the bills.

what we should—must—speak of, and dream of, is something better. we must embrace politics, and politicization, of our subculture in the service of that something better. because i will not settle in any community, any society, any system for such TINA bullshit—“all is luck; some are rich, some are poor, that is the way the world is... it could be you!”—and you should not either.²

notes

¹ Dennis Altman, The Homosexualization of America, The Americanization of the Homosexual (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), pp. 79–80.

² Martin Jenkins, “Introduction” in The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord (Sussex: Soul Bay Press, 2009), 1st ed.

on the tension of furry artistry and high culture

or, the trap of ‘high culture’ and the desert of the future

They just want you to perfume the sewers. They need artists to bring perfume to the terrible stench of their death. It isn’t doing the artist any good. There is no place to go except to the struggle of the people today.
— Meridel Le Sueur, “They Want You to Perfume the Sewers” (1988)

i have a theorem rotating in my mind; perhaps you will agree with it, perhaps not. this theorem is roughly as follows: that high culture—the world of art mediated by the gallery, the curator, the art dealer, the buyer—is the antithesis, co-optation, and ultimate death of “furry art.” that to ever play on this terrain as a furry is (and would be) definitionally a capitulation to polite society, and an irreversible step toward the further class stratification of furry subculture. it is hard for me to explain why exactly i believe this, but i feel it is necessary to attempt such a thing given that the separation between furry art and my concocted definition of high culture is no longer complete.

what i suspect is that the artistic qualia of furry art—its aura (as Walter Benjamin might put it) and the manner in which it acts a reflection of the unique, intrinsic qualities that constitute the furry subculture and our shared understanding of it—is wholly unable to survive contact with the social ideology of high culture. likewise the ‘outsider’ status of those who make such art. in being constituted high culture, furry art is separated and alienated from the very context which made it. the qualia are lost and so is the aura; the artists are brought from the ‘disrepute’ of outsiderness to the ‘respectability’ of the gallery-form. in this respect one might go so far as to say “furry art” elevated by, or created for, high culture is not really furry art at all, nor can it be.

maybe such an assertion is an overstatement. but i am reminded here of the words of László Moholy-Nagy, the ‘relentless experimental,’ that “No society can exist without expressing its ideas, and no culture and no ethics can survive without participation of the artist who cannot be bribed.”¹ in our life these words invite the question: in a subculture congealed through social stigmatization and radical (sexual) inclusion, would the inherent conservatism of high culture not act as the very mechanism of the bribery—the very thing that would rob furry artistry of its ability to authentically reflect the qualia and aura of the subculture? and the (monied) interests of high culture and its agents especially: how could these not politically and ideologically subvert furry artistry—preclude it from achieving a “secured existence” that is “uncompromising and incorruptible” as implored by Moholy-Nagy?

indeed, we must recognize that high culture is definitionally the culture of the ruling class—an expression and extension of cultural hegemony. and what this high culture asks of its subjects, consciously or otherwise, is to ‘perfume the sewers’—to cover up each desiccating bit of the old with a gloss of the new.² the essence of high culture is amorphous, co-opting as necessary to maintain itself, cherry-picking from even the most culturally-challenging movements external to itself and rendering them agents of the very hegemony they wish to challenge. to be sure, we might concur with Walter Benjamin that “the [already] conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion”—furry is certainly met with recoil by many—but there is no innate quality of furry art, no level of aversion it can inspire, which prevents its co-optation when it and high culture meet.³ for high culture is the mechanism through which the ‘truly new’ is stripped of its distinguishing qualia and rendered the conventional. as Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter note, “The value of a good,”—and the degree to which it constitutes high culture—“comes from the sense of superiority associated with membership in the club, along with the recognition accorded by fellow members.”⁴

the question is this: can there be a sort of ‘long march through the institutions’ under which furry art can retain its qualia and aura, by which furry art can challenge the perfuming of the sewers, and through which it can ultimately contest cultural hegemony? i am inclined to think no, certainly not with the absence of politicization and organization that currently characterizes furry subculture. the conundrum of the furry artist and what ought be their relationship with the agents of high culture—gallerist and curator, art dealer and appraiser—is that, in the words of Kyle Chayka, “art becomes retail surprisingly quickly.”⁵ that which challenges is seldom harder to convert into a commodity; and when art is not merely a product of one's labor but a commodity, class hierarchy and inequality are inexorably bound to follow. but perhaps this is the inevitable course of things in this subculture, so wrought already by the spectre of class division if only you know around which corners to look.

notes

¹ László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in motion (1947)

² Meridel Le Sueur, “They Want You to Perfume the Sewers” (1988)

³ Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936)

⁴ Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't Be Jammed (2004), chapter 4

⁵ Kyle Chayka, The Longing for Less (2020), chapter 2