We refuse the nuances of critique, for assigning regressive iconicity onto the vignettes we encounter day-to-day enables us to presuppose all other permutations of criticism. Acknowledging iconic regression while relentlessly endorsing (or ‘stanning,’ as preferred by a trending vernacular) it requires our critique to obtain or encompass an expanding field of inquiry in which our sensitive, well-intended skepticism and inclinations towards nuanced critique must be beheaded to make room for the growth of new, yet monstrous, auto-modalities. These auto-modalities—refusal, levity/horror, sarcasm/sadism—do the rest of the thinking for us. They are built into the designation of regressive icondom, and thus, articulate themselves behind-the-scenes, reaching, entangling, embracing, neglecting, negotiating, altercating, contradicting, conversing, relating, and dancing with the problematics of regressive epistemologies, all the while referring back to their own efficacies and the lacks that pervade them, the holes they fill for one another.

An oxymoron refracted by homology, the phrase “regressive iconic” lends itself to semiotic possibilities of paradox, cultural paranoia, self-contradiction, undergirded by a sort of nonchalant horror. Who is regressive iconic? What is regressive iconic? Or, in another formulation, who gets to be an icon sarcastically excused for the despicable deeds they do? We turn to our regressive icons in the attempt to side-eye the horror and distress they conjure in us as to, rather, intimately encounter the absurdity of appraising their ethically challenged feats and inject our repulsion with the levity of comicality. We hate our regressive icons, as do we love them. And perhaps, this dissonance, of the exceptionalization of formidable but redeemable problematics, is just the sort of noise that activates our auto-modalities and constructs the chamber through which they echo, enlivens some (and only some!) realms of nuanced critique, which, otherwise, would be a total bore, and admits us into the study and enactment of craziness, what cishet men above the age of 40 prefer to call “radicality.”