According to former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, "dark psychic forces" are haunting America.

These forces, she implied, manifest themselves as fear—a fear that President Donald Trump weaponized in 2016.

Though not new, or even particularly creative, Trump became the hyper-visible avatar of this evil in 2016. It makes sense, then, that Trump's election spawned a loose movement known as the " Resistance ," as well as a resurgence in mainstream feminist activism in conjunction with the #MeToo movement.

The term "Resistance," however, is not quite as radical as it may seem, as it implies a sense of hope and faith in the current system. To resist is to attempt to preserve, to avoid an insurrection, to refuse change in some way. It's to abstain from something, to refuse temptation, to resist change. Though a lot of powerful movements arose from this "resistance," so did a significant amount of corporatized, performative activism.

One such corporate-activist movement is Lingua Franca, a high-end brand that mixes activism-inspired messages with luxury goods. Lingua Franca offers one way of responding to the wickedness of men and the world at large. As I was reading about Lingua Franca, with all its cutesy, optimistic messaging, I couldn't help thinking of another Lingua: the relentlessly pessimistic noise musician Lingua Ignota. Together, both Linguas offer linguistic frameworks for processing the end times*, presenting different ways of contextualizing trauma, evil men, and the capitalist system that upholds them.



Lingua Franca and the Price Tag of Performative Resistance



As a recent profile in The Cut reads, Lingua Franca is a cashmere sweater fashion brand that has labeled itself as "the official cashmere of the resistance." Founded by Rachelle Hruska MacPherson, it sells things like $380 sweaters and cards emblazoned with slogans like "WE THE PEOPLE" and "ROSES ARE RED / VIOLETS ARE BLUE / I WANT TO DESTROY / WHITE SUPREMACY WITH YOU."

Hruska MacPherson was inspired to move her company towards activism in 2017, when three F.I.T. students from Iran came in crying after Trump instituted his travel ban. "It was the first time in my white privileged life I had politics affect me. It's insane and ridiculous, but it's the truth," Hruska MacPherson told The Cut.

It would be easy to dig into Hruska MacPherson, but the fact that she was able to live until 2017 without being influenced by politics (while some people are incapable of avoiding them) is more indicative of a larger problem, one more related to Wall Street fossil fuel barons than small Bleecker Street shop-owners.

Armarium

Inevitably, Lingua Franca reeks of Hruska MacPherson's delayed turn to activism and the culture that allowed her to turn a blind eye for so long. The brand also embodies capitalism's eerie habit of repackaging activism and social justice and using them as advertising fuel, a product of capitalism's natural drive to consume and market anything that could potentially create a profit.



Despite its complicity, Lingua Franca has its upsides. The company donates some of its proceeds to charitable organizations, and all its sweaters are hand-knit by women in New York who are paid between $20 and $27 per hour. Hruska MacPherson is trying. Most fashion companies don't make an effort to make a stand for something; instead, they source labor from overseas and contribute to the environmental crisis.

We are living within capitalism. We are flawed. Everyone's trying to make it through; but some have it a lot easier than others. No, it is not fair. Yes, it could change if the people on top wanted it to.

Lingua Franca's website expresses some awareness of its own insufficiency. "We're living in uncertain (and often scary) times. We don't have all the answers. But we try to listen and we try to learn," reads a postscript on its "about" page. Listening and learning are absolutely undervalued skills.

Linguistically, a lingua franca is about communication, but it's mostly about the knowable and the visible. The term "lingua franca" is defined as "any of various languages used as common or commercial tongues among peoples of diverse speech." It refers to "a common language consisting of Italian mixed with French, Spanish, Greek, and Arabic that was formerly spoken in Mediterranean ports." A lingua franca is predicated on the idea that common ground can be found. It's hopeful and always illuminated—by the kind of artificial light that makes for fantastic photographs but sometimes hurts the eyes when you stare too long.

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Lingua Franca is one woman's way of responding to the rise of an evil man, whose rise proved the existence of an evil that white women like Hreska MacPherson had long been able to previously ignore. Trump's election and subsequent events, such as the travel ban and the images of children trapped at the U.S. border, had eye-opening effects on many American citizens, particularly those who had previously been sheltered. The election helped bring these events out into the open, creating space for a lingua franca—a common, palatable dialogue—a resistance that could exist comfortably within a pre-existing capitalist system, a resistance that mandated the participation of even those who benefitted from that system and had previously lived comfortably.



But what if one's existence had always been uncomfortable—even unbearable—before Trump?

Lingua Ignota and the Sound of Self-Immolation

Lingua Ignota is an experimental musician who released the excellent album Caligula this year. Born Kristin Hayter, the Providence-based musician creates stunningly violent, erratic music that combines abstract, medieval Christian hymnals and classical influences with Hayter's guttural screaming. The result is the sonic equivalent of a subway bombing.

As a project, Lingua Ignota was born from trauma. Hayter is a survivor of domestic abuse, and her experiences inspired her to create a thesis at Brown University entitled BURN EVERYTHING TRUST NO ONE KILL YOURSELF. She then started setting the sentiments she explored in that thesis to music, and Lingua Ignota rose from the ashes.

The term "lingua ignota" refers to an "unknowable language" that was created by St. Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century abbess who is said to have designed the language for "mystical purposes."

Wikipedia

The abbess is always heavy on Hayter's mind. "With Hildegard, I think of divine immolation," Hayter said. "She wrote of "sparks of God" and "living light,", and in illustrations she's depicted with flames surrounding her or rising from her head. God spoke to her through fire… I'm trying to construct something that speaks the unspeakable, and so I use this sort of amalgam of musical devices to make my own sonic language which is meant to also be ecstatic or outside the self. There is always the urge to escape the body, to immolate."



Lingua Ignota's "initial premise was survivors of violence reclaiming their bodies through self-immolation, this idea that violence begets violence, and that resistance and empowerment meant weaponising the self with fire—that nothing else was possible," said Hayter in an interview with The Quietus . Unsurprisingly, Hayter's songs are not hopeful. They are about murdering men. They sound like something is being ripped open, like demons are being summoned from below. They are the polar opposite of Lingua Franca's neat, cashmere resistance. They are the opposite of soft. They don't ask for sympathy. Instead, Hayter stated that they are attempts to explore "the depravity of people in power politically these days; and also the depravity of people in power in our communities and intimate relationships."

The Collaborative

Lingua Ignota's music is not implicitly better or more ethical than Hruska MacPherson's project, and maybe Lingua Ignota is just another relatively privileged white woman's attempt at processing the unprocessable. But sexual assault spans race and class, and sexual trauma has a way of living in the body. When Trump was elected, that trauma (somewhat ironically) was forced out into the open.



Lingua Ignota had been splitting her sides open and screaming out her demons since before Trump was elected, but her work can be read as another, more helter-skelter reaction to what Trump represents to so many. Though she is a performer, her shows embrace suffering and nuance and focus on destroying illusions. With its refusal to be remotely palatable, her work could be read as the antithesis of the wellness-corporate feminism machine; it could also be read as a death threat to abusers everywhere. It's gospel for the f*cking tired, for everyone whose life was forever altered by the irresponsible actions of terrible men who felt they could take everything while facing no consequences.

If lingua franca (the language) was built for trading purposes, lingua ignota is about implosion and deconstruction. If Lingua Franca (the company) is the emblem of neat, pristine, Instagram-ready capitalist activism and corporate feminism, Lingua Ignota and her brutal solo performances are embodiments of a more primal, slippery, fleshy rage, one that accesses a profound emotional response to horrors that, often, we are too burned out and desensitized to actually face, let alone protest.

If lingua franca is the language of the "Resistance," lingua ignota might be the language of the apocalypse.

Originally a Greek word, the term "apocalypse" refers to "an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known and which could not be known apart from the unveiling." An apocalypse is a revelation, and the shattering it implies is inextricable from the rise of something new.

dictionary.com

Though the sentiment behind Lingua Franca is inspiring, real change and healing will not come from cashmere sweaters that exist within and perpetuate capitalist systems. Maybe, to see real change, we need to embrace a kind of apocalyptic thinking. This doesn't mean we should be bogged down by abstract fears of the world ending*. For the fires are here . The floods are here . The violations happened. We can't really hope to see change while attempting to work within the same systems that brought Donald Trump to power and legitimized pain and oppression for so long.



Perhaps, to actually protest these "dark psychic forces," and to change the course of this burning earth, we need to be going towards their sources. Maybe we should be trying to dismantle the bomb at the heart of it all rather than perpetually twisting the pieces into slogans, or waiting for the wounded to emerge screaming from the shrapnel.

That bomb will only be dismantled when we act—by donating to causes we believe in, elevating marginalized voices, and rallying around politicians who promise to create something new rather than maintaining more of the same.