EMILY SEGAL
Emily Segal is an artist, writer and trend forecaster based in Los Angeles. Co-founder of K-Hole, the now-defunct, normcore-famous trend-forecasting group, she has since gone on to establish Nemesis, a design and strategy consultancy, with Martti Kalliala. After writing about the self-devouring excess of the experience economy and performing oracular experiments with natural language-processing systems at Nemesis, Segal is publishing her first book, Mercury Retrograde (2020), an auto-fictional facsimile of pre-Trump, post-Occupy New York and the frantic confluence of cultural and financial capital to which it played host. It is published by Deluge Books, a queer, experimental press created by Segal with Hannah Baer and Cyrus Simonoff.
Interview by Guy Mackinnon-Little
Guy Mackinnon-Little Could you introduce the book’s titular concept of “Mercury retrograde”. It’s rooted in astrology, of course, but you use it in a particular sense as a way to grapple with the collective mood of the mid-2010s.
Emily Segal The book’s kombucha scoby or sourdough starter was “Mercury Retrograde”, an essay I wrote in 2015 for e-flux journal. I had become really fascinated by Mercury retrograde as a cultural meme, which went far beyond the professional or spiritual understanding of astrology. People who often bragged about not believing in astrology would also attribute their life being fucked up to Mercury retrograde, and the number and intensity of those mentions were accelerating in my sphere. Concurrently, I was having a bit of a meltdown and felt like I looked a total mess whenever I got dressed. I was feeling very inept fashion-wise, which sounds completely banal, but it ended up being the entry point for me into reassessing how I looked at the functioning of society writ large, which of course sounds rather grandiose. In traditional astrological formulations, things like vanity or beauty or appearance are ruled over by Venus. When a planet retrogrades, whatever it rules tends to go haywire in some way. If you hate your outfit that’s theoretically a Venus retrograde thing, but it was happening for me during Mercury retrograde and Mercury rules information. I then started thinking about how you could look at our society as an information economy that was constantly glitching, within which fashion was just one subset. Mercury retrograde became a metaphor for an information economy in meltdown and a colloquial signal that people were aware of something falling through the cracks. There was so much unfettered and rather delusional excitement around how technology was frictionless and changing society and driving all of this supposed growth at that time, and I saw Mercury retrograde as a way to touch the underside of that, however unwittingly. The book is not about astrology and it’s not even really about Mercury retrograde. It’s about a particular moment when this “information society” reached a very strange, decadent boiling point. The main character – who shares my name and a great deal of my biography, although not all of it – is accessing the cracks and fissures of that culture.
GML When did the form of a first-person novel come to you? Did you know you were working on the novel while you were working or was it something more emergent?
ES I had originally intended to collect a group of essays that I had written while working on K-Hole, the trend-forecasting group and art collective that I ran with four other people for five years. I wanted to create a narrative spine that would tie it all together, but my attempts to compose that narrative spine took on a life of their own and became the focus of my writing process. Then another serendipitous thing happened when my friend and mentor Doug Copeland was giving me some writing advice, which I already found so surreal and exciting. Doug was a bit spaced out and kept referring to my book as a novel, even though that was not my intention at the time. That made me try the idea on for size: what if this was a novel? I should also say that I’m very inspired by this whole lineage of more or less female, mostly queer writers – Eileen Myles, Bernadette Mayer, Michelle Tea, a lot of the new narrative writers, Chris Kraus, of course – who have played with the autofiction form, in which you’re invited to wonder how much of it is true. Gimmicky or not, I’m rather fond of that; I find it addictive to wonder. Another way to think about it is in more anthropological terms: what I was attempting was a kind of fictional ethnography or a piece of thick description. I’m very much a fan of looking at the book as a semi-ethnographic work that tried to account for the failed experiments in art, technology and culture in which I was involved in the 2010s.
GML There’s an Alice Notley quote at the beginning of the book: “Experience is a hoax.” How do you think about “experience” as both a methodology deployed in the book and a broader cultural buzzword? Experience is a funny word because it suggests both unfiltered reality and something fleeting and easily commodified.
ES I love that Alice Notley line for a few reasons. One is that in writing the book I was continually amused by how necessary fictionalising is to make a particular event or story or moment legible. With some of the early writing that led to the book, I was just trying to write about stuff that happened, but life was so overdetermined, there were so many factors and people involved in every moment that it never really made sense when I tried to nail it down in the most practical clear-eyed way. The poem that quote comes from is also about how relating to men as a young woman can at first bamboozle you into thinking that you need to learn from and absorb what these illustrious men who’ve come before you have done. It maps a process of disillusionment or coming out of that cocoon in a way that I found relevant to the themes of the book. The book also deals with various cons: the con of founding a start-up and getting absolutely ungodly amounts of VC money for it; the con of getting a job but actually trying to make an artwork out of the job; the con of tricking yourself into thinking that the people around you have your best interests at heart when they probably don’t.
GML You mentioned the e-flux essay at the germ of the project, so the book has evidently been a long time coming, and reading it I was acutely aware of how it might have landed very differently had it come out in, say, 2016. What was the experience of working on the book while the world changed and how does it feel to put it out now, with that awkward distance in place?
ES I’m quite pleased that it ended up coming out a little bit further away from the period that it’s describing – although I didn’t feel that way at certain points in the process – because it emphasises the part of the book that is a micro-history and asks us to think about what five years is in historical terms. I remember the artist Ryan Trecartin, who’s a friend of mine, saying to me that an age difference of five years is one of the weirdest age differences there is between two people. I think that we get a little taste of that in trying to reflect on this time that we can still trace in many of the things going on now, but that doesn’t feel viscerally close at all. I started to take writing more seriously and began to generate a lot more text around 2015. In doing so, I learned about what you had to do to your life and your person and your brain in order to be able to do that, physically and otherwise, which took a lot of work. After about two years of a great deal of writing, I had the good fortune of working with an editor who did this very cool manoeuvre where she took everything that I had written and put it into what she perceived to be chronological order, which wasn’t necessarily clearly signalled in the text itself. That unlocked the process for me. I developed a very loose three-act structure based on that exchange and basically rewrote the book from the beginning. Then I was in the mix of trying to get my book published by a “real publisher”, which was a very, very slow process. I got priceless feedback from my agent and from the various editors of different publishing houses that I was in touch with, but I was also tearing my hair out around how long it was taking. Of course, this is one of the interesting predicaments of fiction as a mode of writing. How do you ever account for the differential of the time to write versus the life that’s being written about?
GML I remember when Olivia Lang’s Crudo came out in 2018 and there was all this hype about it being a “real-time” novel, fully responsive to the present, whereas here the inevitable failure of that endeavour is centred. Even in what you were saying about your editor rearranging the book into a best-guess chronology, that temporal disjunction is sort of baked in.
ES The legend of Bernadette Mayer’s long poem “Midwinter Day” is that it was written within the day that it describes – that’s what you break your head over the whole time reading it. How could you be making and eating that sandwich and writing this amazing poem about it all in the same moment? It puts this gorgeous pressure on the temporality of what you’re taking in and asks you to entertain these multiple universes happening at the same time. I love things that are super-fast and responsive; I think it’s a unique and occasionally sickening part of the culture that we live in, but I’m super down with novel writing not being that. There’s a lot to be said for the period of gestation and just how weird it is to delink from the everyday churn of information and try to build your own reality in your head and on the page. It’s a really valuable exercise. The other thing that comes to mind is the problem of something like Keeping Up with the Kardashians, where everything that was on the show was already on social media months before, or how luxury shoppers see clothes on the runway and want to buy and wear them instantly, but they’re not stocked for another six months, at which point they seem terribly old and out of step. These questions of temporal disjuncture are at the heart of media consumption anyway and the outrageously laborious task of writing a novel troubles it in yet another way. ◉