[Hyperidean Press; 2024]
The social media feed promises to increasingly personalize what it serves. Algorithms spit out an unending stream that resembles what you already consumed (or resembles what others, “like” you, have already consumed). To write about what you see online, then, treads the thin line between exposing others and exposing yourself. It also makes a difficult task for the reviewer, who is left to measure one’s own internet against another’s, unsure, if there is disconnect, where to lay the blame: the anonymous algorithms fueling the content, the author’s internet, or one’s own. To read U.H. Dematagoda’s Agonist is to be confronted with someone else’s internet and to be left unsure what to do with the unsettling, ironic, critical material found there. Other hybrid writing on the internet forefronts its creator’s and curator’s “I” as a reference point. (I’m thinking here of the relentlessly self-positioning “I” of Andrew Durbin’s Mature Themes (2024), which seems to always come with an acknowledgement of the author’s privilege, or even the titular “I” of Lauren Cook’s I Love Shopping (2019/2025) and Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan (2023).) U.H. Dematagoda forgoes his own explicit poetic voice to the instead control the form and the position of seemingly found text, relying on repetition, juxtaposition, and scale to communicate with us.
In his second life as an academic, Dematagoda has reviewed the rather influential, anthropological study of the internet manosphere, Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies (2017), which perhaps is the companion text or, rather, required reading for Agonist. With access to both, it might be possible to ask what Agonist’s form does to the same content, that is, what is the verb for our online consumption. He also runs a blog on which many of the subjects of this collection—“internet guys” and “E-girls”—receive short write-ups. Agonist is meant to show rather than tell us about these subjects.
I would hazard that, according to Agonist, we do not consume online content but rather swallow it. The verb is a metonym for consumption that also—placed through the filter of the especially sex-obsessed, misogynistic internet reproduced here—evokes oral sex. The abject, sexualized woman who is “taking it” appears as speaking voice, as poetic referent, and as threat. The poem is subdivided into eight sections, but if we include the preface, we get to something resembling the structure of Dante’s hell. The first of these nine circles is titled “hetaera,” a Latinized version of an ancient Greek term for female entertaining, entertaining that is with both sex and conversation. Like swallow, it is a term that confuses consuming with getting off. Set off on one page like a thesis statement is another definition of this term: “Sexual abjection and honesty, but by hot / girls. // (only).” The final beat of the “(only)”—a precondition articulated only after the fact—hints at a particular online disdain for any non-consumable woman, a policing of girls for hotness that happens only after the fact, after it’s been posted. This caveat repeats throughout this section and again and again throughout the collection. The demand to sexualize swallows all else: “queer, esoteric anti-capitalistic texts,” “Hegel,” “notes in Ivy league college writing class,” “Analytical (‘professional’) Philosophy,” and (of course) the “relatable” film about an abject hot girl “The Piano Teacher.” Everything is cloaked in the rhetoric of a moaning demand, or cast as mere accessory to a rhetorical performance of hotness.
Lest you Dante fans think that we move past lust—it is only the first circle, after all—the language of sexual appeal and degradation remains a constant. Page to page, font to font, section to section, the poem shifts, and lust is one of the few refrains. Or, more properly, lust as filtered through intellectual self-seriousness (not dissimilar to Dante’s own classicizing and name dropping) is one of its few refrains. One anonymous rant in the collection begins “We have become through feeling, something other than a principle unto ourselves” and ends “it has turned us ALL of us into Bitches.” If swallowing presumes a subservient sexual position, then being online puts us all in a vulnerable position: we become other than the principle, become bitches. “Bruh you have the small delicate hands of a prepubescent girl,” this time an addressed rant opens, and “you spent the majority of your time essentially gossiping on the internet with women.” Maybe, more nicely, the collection imagines us all as Eve, swallowing the Apple logo, the “white apple…the fateful bite already taken. Even after the fall, Imma keep poasting.” We take what we are given, in reading this book, in being online. The apple has already been bitten—we just swallow.
On the page, the internet is just barely digested by the poet’s implicit method. A three-line preface stands in for an author’s note: “I have endured this torture wheel, drank of its poison, consumed all of its sins, and vomited them upon the page.” If you do swallow the internet’s content, you can spit it back up. This note also warns us like the inscription above hell that what we are going to see will be like vomit: unfiltered, undigested, we might even say unmoderated reproductions especially of the worst, most tortuous sentiments. In addition to the misogyny that I’ve already described, some of what is reproduced includes antisemitism, slurs, patronizing, paternalizing racism triggered by care for social causes (“If you’re not an #expert on what is happening in # Afghanistan you should sit your ass down and listen!”). These exhibits—casually reproduced, disseminated—stand on their own for our consumption, for our passive swallowing. You will see more content like this whether you look at it ironically or not.
At one point, Dematagoda does seem to question his own method, pokes and prods at the limits of this kind of strict reproduction of digital text, and he asks whether one’s own digital text really has anything to say to another, external audience. At the start of a section called “Contact,” we are privy to what feels like a text exchange: single contentment, sometimes incomplete, sometimes unpunctuated, the rules of capitlization strategically, subtly, abided and disregarded. One party (the left side of the page, the left side the screen, the person reaching out to us) wants to “maybe use some of our messages” as part of a “performance…based on text” that would “try and capture the undulations of desire” and “the use of technology as a vector, ever-present but mis-utilised.” If I was looking for an artist statement for the collection, I could borrow this one. Yet, on the right side of the page, from our position, the reply: “What you’re describing is quite commonplace, and it’s not suddenly going to be become interesting just because it’s about you.” To reproduce “messages” and digital “text” does not show us anything new, its “quite commonplace.” Instead, all it can be is “about you” and all it can expose is the author’s own browsing habits and algorithmic profile. What differs in Dematagoda’s practice from his imagined double in this passage is that he has someone reply in order to offer a caveat: the difference is that he is as interested in the replies as in the content.
The book’s dominant formal mode is “the reply.” The title itself refers to a chemical receptor—that is, a thing that receives and reacts to stimulus, the thing inside of us that replies. (In a sense, the project is a “reply guy” project). Throughout Agonists, we feel plopped into conversations we are not privy to, for which the statements, outrageous or mild, feel as if they are responding to someone or something. (One page pastes “Hell yeah.” “Cope. “Cringe.” “Ghey.” dispersed like disconnected comments below a photo we do not see). The densest section comes as a series of emails between ill-suited paramours, the only named figures but still essentially anonymous, R_ and Alice, paired with what seem to be their text exchanges with friends (or maybe just unrelated text exchanges). If the verse epistle never needed a real addressee, this collection takes that particular affordance to the extreme: the imagined person who could write (or sometimes not write) underpins every utterance.
I recently taught Dante’s Inferno—that tour through the “torture wheel,”—and what my students found most noxious was not “all of its sins” but rather the terza rima. Dante’s propulsive, interlocking rhyme scheme (aba/bcb/cdc and so on) made my students, according to them, carsick, nauseous; the form and not the content made them want to “vomit them upon the page.” This rhyme scheme so demands a sonic reply that it feels impossible to stop unless one does stop it short—as Dante does—with a single line, or as Dematagoda does with “Alarm. 7am. I reemerge reborn, revitalized, and step into the shower.” Teaching Inferno and reading Agonist, I was reminded that sometimes it is not the content—speculative, reproduced, or regurgitated—that compels our strong response. Agonist posits that it is not the content we consume but the manner in which we consume it, like junk food, like slop, like pap, that matters. The question is whether we swallow.
If a friend has ever shoved their phone in your face to show you something—an image, a video, a short message that has appeared on their screen just for them—perhaps you’ve been taken aback, paused a moment before accepting your role as voyeur, perhaps you’ve felt a little twinge of second-hand embarrassed that they would show you this private space so casually—or feel embarrassed that they don’t assume it’s private at all but, rather a universal space. The video they show you isn’t funny. There’s been an assumption about taste—that what they like everyone likes. Maybe you laugh anyways and try, still, to connect in respect of the vulnerability of sharing something—I know I appreciate those gestures when my phone is in the other hand. The risk of reproducing the internet is to essentially recreate this everyday experience in reading what’s on the page. By the end of Agonist, I still feel this ambivalence about being handed someone else’s phone, but I also feel aware of the range of potential replies to such a gesture, many less generous, some just as passive, as my conciliatory laugh.
Lilith Todd is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
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