Review of Pythian pratar (2024)
Liv Strömquist (writer-artist).
Read in 2026.
Cultural criticism of modern self-help gurus, projecting success and giving “advice” more tendentious than the Pythia of the ancient Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Strömquist stretches her skein all the way from far-right sexist Rollo Tomassi to fluffy treat-your-own-trauma pop psychologist Nicole LePera.
The most central thesis of this book is that of Theodor Adorno’s The Stars Down to Earth (1952), quoted and skillfully applied to the streaming-video influencers of 2024 as a category. Strömquist stumbles making the connection from there to the existentialist dread of Zygmunt Bauman’s Survival as a Social Construct (1992), but her wordless spreads of heta-uma art add gorgeous negative space for thought. Her use of Eva Illouz’s Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help (2008) is more meaningful than Bauman. LePera, in this context, is a representative promulgator of a specific concept of psychological trauma, watered down and framed as something you should work to treat in yourself, not something you should work to prevent causing in others. The disparity sticks out as a symptom of the same narcissistic purpose as the astrologer Carroll Righter’s most frequent advice in Adorno’s essay, which was (first) to be happy and (second) to “improve personal appearance”. In my own interpretation, that’s what Righter’s fans wanted to be told, because in being so told, they felt authorized to act on their bad impulses.