An Assembly for the Cosmos, Curator: Antoine Bertron, Galerie de l’UQAM, Until 17 October

“It’s it
What is it?”
—Faith No More, “Epic”

I begin this column with an apology:

I am sorry for deviating from my normal routine of talking around the thing and instead talking straight at the thing. Because the thing is, the thing can no longer be ignored.

The thing is impenetrable by analysis, ignorant of analogy, resistant to criticism, impervious to satire. We may not recognize the thing or be interested, but the thing recognizes and is interested in us.

The thing in question is not A.I. The thing is not Donald Trump, nor is it Vladimir V. Putin, nor any of the abhorrent individuals that pass these days for leaders. The thing is not war, nor is it famine, nor even death. These things indeed are real things. But they are symptoms of the thing, not the thing itself.

The thing, the enemy, the culprit, the syndrome, is capital — the insatiable appetite.

Capital produces death by abstracting life. Capital produces famine by unevenly valuing people and things. Capital produces war by incentivizing detachment from local ethno-geographic realities. Capital produces figures like Putin and Trump, who are neither its smartest nor its most powerful representatives.

Trump and Putin are not heads of state; they are the headless of statelessness, because capital and its agents have no allegiances to anything except for capital.

Nos espoirs furieux, dir. Alex Trahan, La Chapelle Scènes Contemporains

“You throw me a lame ‘wait shit out,’
You’re a little late.”
—Sharon Van Etten, “Afraid of Nothing”

U.S. president Donald Trump’s “America First” policy appeals most publicly to the Old Right’s hearth-and-home, non-interventionist doctrine of taking care of our own. This strain of nostalgia speaks to the powerful American mythology of reclaiming its bygone greatness. Trump’s supporters chase it like the horizon.

But now, in an era of global interdependence, which America to a large extent initiated with its policies of industrial offshoring beyond its borders and outsourcing to the lowest bidders, the U.S., one of at least three global superpowers, is in fact enacting extreme 21^st century interventionism more evocative of an America post-9/11 than of the nation imagined during its salad days.

Trade wars are tantamount to physical wars because they assault quality of life. But Trump participates in real wars, too — primarily against Iran, tertiarily against Palestine, and implicitly, through alternating inaction and begrudging support, against Ukraine. Therefore, Trump is attempting — and failing at — both nostalgia and neo-reaction.

No Hay Banda with Sam Salem and Dali de Saint Paul, La Sala Rossa, 7 September 2026

“By the time imperial destiny is a political question, it is already historical fact. It is too late, then, for simple denial. The thing is in motion. It cannot be asked not to have begun.”
—Nick Land, “Which Fails First…” (2014)

Dismantling hostile regimes with militarism, however, is replaced in Trump’s time with economic violence against former allies and trade partners, unmaking industries abroad that are not in competition but rather co-dependent with America.

Referring to Trump’s zone-flooding, Dunning-Kruger effect moves as “doctrines” or “policies” or “ideologies” is too generous and implies a measure of forethought and expertise that Trump’s administration falls far short of demonstrating. They are “strategies” at best — not so much “art-of-the-deal” as “hold-my-beer” tactics with little foresight beyond immediate gain and base-level gratification. They are reminiscent less of Herbert Hoover’s Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act than of Charlie Sheen’s rants on Twitter about #Winning.

Trump’s plan is diplomacy-as-hashtag.

Ensembles Zafraan & Paramirabo, Salle de concert du conservatoire, 4 September 2026

“The sky had the stagnant breath of a furnace and the streets of New York were like pipes running, not with air and light, but with melted dust.”
—Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

For the generation 25 years old and younger, that was born after September 11^th, 2001, a world in which voluntary submission to some measure of authoritarian control simply never existed. And so, there is no debate around the merits of control society. It just is. It is fascinating and terrifying to watch people argue against freedom, to democratically elect tyrants, to choose a cleaner cage over the prospect of escape.

I was equally fascinated and terrified in 2008 when I first read Rob Walker’s book Buying In. In it, Walker, who at the time wrote an excellent column entitled “Consumed” for The New York Times Magazine, chronicled the ways in which branding in the 21^st century frequently integrated anti-consumerist messaging characteristic of alternative millennial cultural texts like Radiohead’s OK Computer, Fight Club, Adbusters, or Naomi Klein’s No Logo.

Walker wrote about how brand consultants working for companies like Nike and Red Bull in the early aughts studied the rhetoric espoused by Thom Yorke and Naomi Klein and redirected it like some Kung Fu master move that turns one’s opponent’s energy back upon itself. Walker called this approach “murketing,” a clever portmanteau of “murky” and “marketing,” rounding up cynical sentiments against advertising into “some kind of small-scale National Endowment for the Arts for young American outsider culture.”

Caroline Monnet, Kwìngwan: The Earth Trembles, Blouin | Division, Until 6 November 2026

“…if a Karen can convince herself that she is actually a Rosa in disguise…”
—Naomi Klein, Doppelganger

In the late 1990s, it seemed only natural that a majority of reasonable people would recognize the outsize power and control that corporations were beginning to exert and rightly choose to disengage with them. This, at that time, is what constituted “anti-elitism.”

Nowadays, it is mostly conservatives who rail against the “globalist elites.” How did this about-face occur? It might have earnestly begun with branding. After all, selling a thing = selling an idea.

The tendency on the political left is to ignore its opponents’ activities, to not watch, read, or absorb ideas that we find unsavoury. But the brand bullies of the new millennium devoured oppositional thought and thus immunized themselves from their threatening ideas.

It is high time for the political left to do this — to read Ayn Rand and listen to Nick Fuentes and unite over the traditionally conservative strategies of overlooking rather than microscopically re-examining and granularly disagreeing on our increasingly miniscule divisions.

There are bigger issues at stake — survival, for one.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Caroline Monnet, Flower of Sound, (2026), Polyethylene, synthetic roofing underlayment, radiant barrier solar attic foil reflective, inkjet on synthetic flashspun high-density polyethylene, thread, 160 x 160 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.}