The Prophet and the Barbarians

On Sam Kriss

Francis Bacon, Second Version of ‘Painting’ 1946, 1971, Oil on canvas

Sam Kriss, as is well known, lives on top of a mountain in a little hut. It is cold on the mountain. Sometimes, when the sun is shining, he ventures out to the moss-sprung slopes to pick mushrooms, but most of the time he just sits indoors, reading the Tarot, listening to the prophecies blown to him on the icy winds, the curtains of rain. He spends his evenings huddled by the fire, studying the works of the great heresiarchs: Basilides, Swedenborg, Clung. Only occasionally does he venture down into the valleys to meet the toothless hordes, usually when there has been another Taylor Swift concert or another presidential election. He makes these journeys not because he likes them — Kriss lives in England and the English treat all literate people like witches, let alone those who live on top of mountains and predict the future — but because it is his duty. The people must be guided, shepherded. And Sam Kriss has a gift.

For most of us, Kriss communicates in the form of essays, which he publishes every week or two on his Substack, Numb at the Lodge. Though one should of course be wary of quantifying these things, as of this writing Kriss is “#27 in Culture,” while #1 is a publication whose first offering is a couple-by-couple review, in Italian, of a reality show called Temptation Island. The fact is, he has managed to accrue more than 40,000 subscribers in about three years, no small feat. He also has plenty of detractors, who all seem to take to Reddit and X after each new post to accuse him of being “insufferably smug” and “long-winded and verbose,” and to seize on his never having written a book as evidence of his fundamental unseriousness. But then again, this comes with the territory. In fact — and I say this in full knowledge that it opens me up to all kinds of mockery, and that Kriss himself has a habit of responding to praise by reiterating it — I would submit that Sam Kriss is the best essayist of his generation. On his day, he can go toe-to-toe with De Quincey and Montaigne.

I started reading Sam Kriss over a decade ago, when a friend insisted I read his report on a new establishment in East London called the Cereal Killer Café. The concept was simple enough: Behind an unassuming shopfront in the trendy, cleared slums of Shoreditch lay a bright, flimsy, teenage-friendly interior, where a pair of creepily dressed identical twins called the Keerys would serve you breakfast cereal for about £5 a bowl. It was appalling, but appalling in a remarkably symbolic way. This was the new London, scooped hollow by the Tories, where teenagers like me could leave the gates of our austerity-ravaged schools and zip across the city to eat a bowl of what was, at least in nutritional terms, barely distinguishable from dust. Needless to say, I had been to the Cereal Killer Café several times.

I can still remember the line in Kriss’ piece that hooked me. Instead of beginning with the standard-issue invective against gentrification, Kriss took aim at the twins who ran the establishment. “I can’t help but posit the necessary existence of a grotesque, hidden, third brother,” he wrote. “Something scrabbling in the cellars, a cringing Smerdyakov figure onto whose memory all the suppressed differences between the superterranean Keerys has been displaced.” There was a lot for a teenager to enjoy in this line — the reference to Dostoevsky, the whisper of the incestuous glamor of psychoanalysis, the wonderful word “superterranean,” which managed to make those of us who live beneath the sky seem strange and exotic. But what impressed me most was how willfully unreasonable the whole fantasy was. Of course, the problem with the Keerys wasn’t really that they were twins. But to take them seriously as political or moral creatures was to miss their true significance. Kriss had taken one look at the fulsomeness of corporate London and decided instead to imagine something else: something dark and grimy and malign — something that, once summoned, made all the Day-Glo signage and expensive marketing seem impossibly silly.

All writers need to develop a sense of decorum — a knowledge of what form is appropriate to the content (sonnets for love, hexameter for war, etc.). Sam Kriss was the first writer of his generation to realize that the one truly decorous way to render the smarm of late-capitalist London was by channeling it through the ancient, the abstruse, the inhuman. Thus, a trip to the cinema to see the latest dollop of superhero-based light entertainment demands to be told exclusively from the point of view of a bat. The result is something strangely reminiscent of Kafka’s “The Burrow”: “I am a bat. I fly outside at night and eat small insects. I shiver through the night in my aching trails of wings. I feel the sky very close to my skin. I feel the moon very close to my skin . . . . I fear Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is wasted on me.” And a trip to the mediocre chicken franchise Nandos can only be truly rendered by collapsing into the placeless terror of Beckett’s Trilogy: “Shouldn’t there be people? You’re in the centre of town, but the streets are empty, and silence roars eternal fury in your ears.”

Why did this technique work so well? With hindsight, it seems almost obvious. Kriss was a left-wing essayist writing in the 2010s. Like other London lefties Mark Fisher and David Graeber, he had made it his mission to puncture the assumptions of neoliberalism — the cultural matrix that made monstrosities like the Cereal Killer Café possible while pensioners froze and schoolchildren went without meals. The key ideological tactic of the period was a blank, smiling restatement of the creed that things simply could not be otherwise. (Its most enduring slogan came from Thatcher: “There is no alternative.”) Except in Kriss’ essays, it was impossible not to detect some kind of alternative. This was because so many other ways of seeing and living in the world had been massaged into the prose at the level of the sentence. You did not have to parse your political opinions in terms of rational choice theory and maximal shareholder value; instead, you could render them in the plangent, soundless screeches of a bat. (Indeed, this might even be a more honest way of doing things.) “Part of the whole point of reading,” Kriss wrote recently, “is that it provincialises the present.” His project in the 2010s was, I believe, one of provincializing neoliberalism. To my teenage self, he made the grown-up world of busy professionals and slick politicians suddenly seem very small.

There were problems with these early pieces — notably, Kriss’ irritating tendency to weld every point to a gobbet from Derrida, Lacan, Heidegger. Now, though, he has hit his stride. An inventory of his mature work isn’t possible here, but in the last few years he has attempted virtually every major essay-adjacent form — not just long-form gonzo journalism, travel writing, and profiles of the famous, but manifestos, dream interpretations, and thousand-year histories of entire continents. But if Sam Kriss has “grown up,” it is not at the expense of his old “provincializing” impulses. Sometimes this is obvious — as in a recent dispatch on the London mayoral election, told by a fossilized Saxon bog body trapped behind a cracked tile in Camden Town Tube station. It is perhaps most effective, though, when it occurs in a subtler way. Consider this from one of his most popular pieces, a salvo of celebration of the demise of comic book nerd culture called “All the Nerds are Dead”:

Whatever life should have been, it isn’t this: not plasterboard bureaucracies staffed by people with irritating vocal tics; not slow-withering marriages, not hair falling out, cartilage wearing thin, dreams unfulfilled, places unseen, books unwritten and unread; not Netflix automatically queuing up the next episode; not this couch, this laundry, this glum darkness of 11.26 pm on a Saturday night, this screen, this life that will not be remembered, emptying its nothing into the nothing that ever was.

The internet is awash with writers who can invoke dead-end jobs and ratty couches and Netflix; Kriss’ genius is to end this paragraph on that note of terrifying, metaphysical vastness, like something out of the Visuddhimagga. It takes serious skill to do this. You need to understand strange, exotic registers on the formal level well enough to parody them, and you need enough of a command of grammar to integrate the parody without anyone quite noticing. In fact, in this respect Kriss’ instincts seem to be closer to that of the novelist than the essayist. Since Flaubert, writing fiction has been about controlling how different grammatical units “belong” to different characters through judicious use of free indirect discourse. In the same way, Kriss is constantly playing with the proprietorship of phrases, always teasing the possibility that — as you might expect from a man who lives on top of a mountain and claims to be able to predict the future — there is something else speaking through him.

Perhaps because of this suppleness, Kriss has managed to accrue a remarkable range of enemies over the years, from Tory milk snatchers to New Labour witch hunters to the grievance grifters who ruined everyone’s lives during the era of wokeness. For several years following a public cancellation in 2017, he wrote mainly for right-wing press — The Spectator, First Things — though in these publications, too, he seemed ill at ease. Most recently, he has taken to antagonizing the court intellectuals of Silicon Valley: publicly feuding with Curtis Yarvin, who thinks the United States should become a monarchy presided over by a benign CEO, and Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is so convinced that something called “rationalism” can solve all ethical questions that he published 600,000-word work of fan fiction arguing as much, called (I kid you not) Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. These people really do seem to have the ear of the powerful these days; the thought-experiments they conjure during waking hours — Roko’s basilisk, the Dust vs. Speck dilemma — return to haunt billionaires in their dreams. And few people seem to upset them quite as much as Sam Kriss.

At the heart of the disagreement is a new technique that Kriss seems to be using more and more frequently in his writing. Rather than sifting through the morass of human culture for a few apposite examples to back up his point — a task that seems pretty unimpressive in the age of LLMs, which can eagerly bring up pearl after pearl from the depths of the internet without ever tiring — Kriss is increasingly resorting to outright fictions. He is no longer a writer of “takes” so much as parables. Thus, an essay about population collapse takes the form of a made-up Victorian political economist called Thomas Hooper Cooper, and a recent polemic against the U.K. law enforcement’s fun new technique of arresting the elderly at peaceful protests involves a long excursus about a made-up 16th-century theologian named Laurentius Clung. The obvious analogue from the history of literature is Borges, with his extraordinary pseudo-essays recounting the lives and works of men like Pierre Menard, Nils Runeberg, and Herbert Ashe. But to Kriss’ enemies, the technique is an abuse of writing, something devious and irresponsible. “Mixed fiction and non-fiction with no warning label on where the transition occurs,” writes Yudkowsky, “is the sort of thing that can end with false information stuck in somebody’s head and propagating.” Curtis Yarvin is terser: “Unsatisfied with the universal degradation of AI, Sam Kriss actually decided to invent his own genre of handmade slop.”

The main objection seems to be ontological: Kriss’ online enemies disagree with him not just about the ethics of writing, but about what writing is. To the rationalists, the written word is basically a neutral medium for conveying ideas or information. If made-up 16th-century heresiarchs are allowed to intrude, this precious neutrality is threatened, and the great problem-solving edifice of rational, reasonable discourse comes crashing down. The writer, they imply, should aspire to a kind of earnestness; he should say what he means as clearly as possible, without the distortions of irony. Kriss’ position — that writing cannot actually be separated into ideas and their formal vehicles; that content always emerges from form, and as such no mode of utterance can be genuinely neutral — is just as familiar, especially when we remember his old critical-theoretical sympathies. It is no wonder that in his rebuttal to Yudkowsky published last month, he doubled down on the reality of Clung, this time with citations from Blaire G. Smellowicz and Ander van der Gunk.

What is remarkable, though, is that Sam Kriss has been around for so long and inveighed against so many different enemies that it is possible to find, in the depths of his back catalogue, countless other fully formed rebuttals. Consider this, from 2017:

If there must be a rule, then it should be that we must not only write what we know. If we don’t write an ignorance other than ourselves, in the end all that remains is a mute, gnashing, helpless, final I. There is no writing that is only legible to and can only be created by people occupying a particular subject-position; there are experiences that are unique and incommensurable, even incommunicable, but if this were the case here there would be no possibility of writing: everyone who could understand would already know . . . . The written ‘I’ is always indeterminate, a tangle of lies and fantasies and ironies and pretences, a person just like you half a world away, the person that you are yourself, an immortal and changing thing.

Except in this essay, Kriss’ targets are not internet fascists and their chinless fellow travelers in Silicon Valley. His target is full-bore, 2017-style identity politics: “One form of the discourse in question, an instance: Don’t write thinkpieces about Beyoncé (or whatever) if you’re not a black woman.” Without realizing it, it seems, Yudkowsky and Yarvin are recycling an older critique, one spawned on Tumblr and propagated on university campuses, in which sincerity and authenticity are the ultimate ends of writing and any formal technique that threatens this authenticity is a kind of fraud or theft. In one of his more recent forays into prophecy, Kriss predicted, “There is going to be a woke 2” — one that sheds all vestigial commitment to egalitarianism and social justice in favor of a purer, more terrifying allegiance to the idea of progress itself. It looks like he was right.

It is worth mentioning the essential slipperiness of these categories because so often in essays such as this one, the temptation is to make everything about fleeting political postures. Is Sam Kriss still on the left? Is he really a Leninist? Has he become a reactionary because he reviewed the new Wes Anderson film for The Spectator? Soon, the essay becomes a catalogue of the various political positions the writer has held over the years: all the courageous stands he or she has taken, all the agonized retractions he or she has published, a brief obligatory mention of that unfortunate endorsement of a dictator or a genocide. As it happens, I believe Sam Kriss has maintained, despite moving around a little, a remarkably high hit rate when it comes to issues of genuine political and moral substance. But this is not what makes him a great writer.

Rather, what actually makes Kriss a great writer — his command of many different voices and registers, and his ability to integrate them into the frame of a single essay — is probably what makes him such a reliably humane thinker. Language sucks us toward inhumanity; fashionable euphemisms — “fiscal prudence,” “structural adjustment,” “the right to exist” — can be relied upon to justify all kinds of barbarism. Sam Kriss is trying to write his way out of this barbarism. In this sense, the prophet schtick is not just a joke. In order to wade into the discourse of the day and not drown in it, you really do need something otherworldly about you. You do need to live on a mountain. You do need to read obscure 16th-century heresies. Only then can you hope to look past the villagers, with their dental complaints and their tendency to wave around misshapen vegetables, and glimpse the eternal things.

Thomas Peermohamed Lambert is a writer and academic from London. He writes for a number of publications, including The Times, The New Statesman, and UnHerd, and his first novel, Shibboleth, was released in May. He is also a doctoral student in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, researching Jorge Luis Borges.