I’ve noticed I’ve become repelled by the “post-” prefix. I know it has its uses, but it has been overused too frequently, by the wrong people, with too much enthusiasm, for too many problematic purposes, and now it is musty, backwards and part of an oppressive orthodoxy who still hasn’t noticed it is the furthest thing from what it imagines itself to be.
I declare this trend not only dead, but long-dead and rotted away to wet putrescence, the furthest point from both life and rebirth.
Jeff Maurer has been nailing it this year. I might really have to buy a subscription to his substack.
Today’s headline and preview expresses my own exasperation, but clearly and hilariously:
Why Have We Gotten Bad at Recognizing Bad Guys?
It’s not like bad guys have gotten subtle
It’s strange that some people can’t figure out who the bad guy is in the Russia/Ukraine war. For starters, I thought that “Russia = bad” was nestled deep in every American brain; for years, the three groups that could be blasted to hell with no repercussions in movies and video games were zombies, aliens, and Russians. But more importantly, Putin’s invasion was so egregious that it was almost refreshing; in a world of complex conflicts, it was kind of nice to see a war that made you think “Well, obviously you can’t do that.”
What’s doubly strange is that this is the second time recently that some Americans haven’t been able to recognize evil when it’s practically grinding its pelvis in their faces. The number of people who took Hamas’ side in the Israel/Hamas conflict was shocking. Of course, practically no-one would admit to “taking Hamas’ side”, just as Trump claims that he’s “on the world’s side” — what a hippie! — as he does literally everything that Putin could ever want him to do. I don’t want to over-simplify these conflicts, Ukraine and Israel both have profound flaws, and I don’t want to be the asshole who accuses anyone who disagrees with him of being “on the enemy’s side”. But on the other hand: Come the fuck on. Some people are clearly Team Russia or Team Hamas, and I think an interesting question is: why?…
Another one:
Why Doesn’t Hitler McFuckface Like Us Anymore?
Why won’t this garbage-faced pile of ass cancer do what I want him to do?
Mark Zuckerberg has announced big changes at Meta. The content moderation policies favored by many on the left are out, and the company is rolling back DEI and cozying up to Trump. Zuckerberg also recently went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to criticize the Biden administration and decry the lack of “masculine energy” in the corporate world.
Like many liberals, I’m shocked by this pivot. What happened to the Mark Zuckerberg who, after the 2016 election, kowtowed to progressive lawmakers? Where is the guy who backed left-wing causes and clashedwith conservatives? What’s causing this? Is it something in his personal life? Craven pandering to the new administration? Or is there any chance that it has something to do with more than a decade of people on the left calling him a corrupt plutocrat who might be the biggest pile of shit in the cosmos?
It’s hard to trace the roots of Zuckerberg’s falling out with the left. Maybe it started in 2011, when the guy from The West Wing wrote a big, award-winning movie about how Zuckerberg is a total asshole. That doesn’t happen to most people — it’s really just Zuckerberg and former Oakland A’s manager Art Howe. After the 2016 election, some on the left blamed Facebook for Clinton’s loss, and Cambridge Analytica ended up on the Rachel Maddow show more than Rachel Maddow. In 2020, progressives demanded that Biden take down “new oligarchs” like Zuckerberg, which led to Lina Kahn hunting Zuckerberg with the tenacity of Javier Bardem’s character hunting Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men.
And then there’s this one addressing Musk’s emails, demanding agency employees list five accomplishments from the last week:
All Substack Writers Must Send Me Five Delicious Pasta Recipes by 5 P.M. Friday or Be Shot Out of a Cannon
No YOU’RE being unreasonable!
Of course, I have serious disagreements with him on many topics. But I agree with pretty much nobody, anymore. Interesting and productive disagreement is now brings tears of gratitude to my eyes. Honestly, any symptom of a functioning intuition and independent intellect is a precious shock.
The fundamental crisis faced by members of the professional-managerial class (a.k.a. “proclassers”) is not, as they believe, difficulty managing the profuse data they abstract from reality, but, rather, keeping those abstractions in contact with any directly intuited relationship with reality.
They are alienated from reality and inhabit a world of secondhand abstractions rooted in yet more abstractions. In normal dealings with real people, they have been taught to mistrust their perceptions, intuitions and emotions and to replace whatever they experience and intuit directly with less biased, more objective conceptualizations based on categorizations and calculations of power relations, by which they can determine the correct mode of interaction.
But intuition alone gives reality its heft, solidity and depth. And it is only intuitive participation in social life that can give us any felt identity.
Life in an information simulation can offer us only social categories, deductions, calculations and executable actions. This is also a participation of a kind, but one that gives us only one identity — a right-thinking, right-acting pro-classer, who is essentially a job-holding professional with pro-social progressivist beliefs — even if that one identity encourages us to adopt secondary identities based on its schema of social categories. It is all done for the sake of the one, essential, unnamed identity, erased to preserve the illusion of objectivity.
It is all so boring, insubstantial, tedious… unreal. Such is advanced alienation. Meanwhile the meaty, dirty, visceral, hands-on world beyond the abstractions is summoning itself to catastrophe. How can a time be so simultaneously stultifying and momentous?
Once upon a time, news was an uninteresting chore, and our personal lives were fascinating.
If you cannot be someone to another — if you cannot maintain a reliable self — if you cannot exchange promises and obligations with others — if you only know how to live in parallel spectatorship with others, each an audience of the others — you will passively seek containing circumstances that prevent dissipation.
You will drift along, blown from haunt to haunt, until you drift into a windless space that no longer transports you, where you will settle into the life of a bottled ghost.
Perhaps you will settle in a monastery. Perhaps in a cubicle. Perhaps in some domestic limbo. Perhaps in an identity.
You’ll live a life of awaiting, vaguely anticipating a life to come that never comes, but which provides a semblance of stability to a wisp of being with no integrity or structure of its own.
Psychologists are priests of the universal faith. If you have fallen out of communion with conventional wisdom, a psychologist can help you repair the breach and rejoin society as a participating member.
A few things I love to do that make me feel connected with the world beyond my skullspace.
I’ve also gotten this from cycling, especially mountain biking.
Alienation is a loss of intuitive contact and participation in some aspect of reality. Total alienation is rare, but partial alienation is nearly universal. Wherever alienation occurs, things begin to feel unreal and we, ourselves, feel less real. It requires effort to overcome alienation, especially in conditions of mass societal alienation.
I am designing a half-day disalienation event. I would want a mix of generations and worldviews in the room.
A rough agenda.
That would be an amazing day.
I might want to experiment with doing gatherings in multiple cities. A friend in Chicago expressed interest in hosting one. We were thinking we could do in-person gatherings on Saturday, then have a Zoom call the next day for participants in different cities to connect and reflect.
New coinage: Lalalalightenment. Honestly, I don’t even think it needs a definition. That’s how good it is.
After I finish Lee Braver’s A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism, I think I am going to tackle The Colonization of Monographs: Unwieldy Entitlements, Performative Punctuation and Presentation of the Intellectual Self in Scholarly Spaces.
Three words reliably deflate my heart when I hear and read them: 1) narrative, 2) practice, 3) performative. I’ve caught myself groaning.
I am removing these words entirely from casual speech, but keeping some of them for very specific technical uses.
Where there were “narratives” there will be stories or ideologies. There is no reason to use that word ever again. It is irretrievably ruined by association with this idiotic moment in history.
“Practice” will be replaced by methods, tools, or other less fancy-pants terms. I’m ashamed of my own overuse of this word. I will make it up to you, somehow. The only place I plan to use it now is when I discuss “praxis”, which I still consider an excellent word, provided you use it when you aren’t being an asshole, a qualification that will reduce use of the word to almost, but not quite, zero.
“Performative” will be strictly limited to two technical senses, the only permissible uses for this rotten-ass word. First, when a speech act demonstrates or implies a belief which potentially contradicts the content of the speech. (For example, the famous paradox “This sentence is a lie.” The act of assertion implies conveyance of truth, while the content of the assertion denies that what is conveyed is true. Or saying “You do not exist.” The act of addressing you presupposes your existence, while the content claims your nonexistence.)
The other technical meaning of “performative” is where the essence of some thing is its performance. The most famous use of this word comes from Judith Butler who argued that gender is performative — that is, that the essence of womanhood or manhood is the performing of these gender roles, as opposed to the expression of some biological condition.
But the use of “performative” to mean merely-acted is entirely pointless when we have simpler and more beautiful words like “phony”, “ostentatious”, “insincere” or “bullshitty”. Ironically, saying “performative” seems performative, in the sense I claimed I was retiring. See, in that last statement I just performatively contradicted my resolution to stop using performative, but in this present sentence I am not. Shut up, self. You’re boring everyone, including yourself.
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I’m listening to Brett Easton Ellis’s latest novel The Shards.
It is an absorbing story but Ellis’s writing is annoying.
Now I will gripe. I will limit my gripes to three, because this angry blog post was brought to you by the number three.
Gripe 1: The constant music references are cheap and carry too much weight. In some random places he attempts to convey fresh novelty of certain bands who now seem banally ancient (“a band called the Stray Cats”). But most of the time he drops the names of bands and songs as spray-on atmosphere.
Gripe 2: Ellis is a hamfisted abuser of adverbs. One memorably dumb example (so dumb I actually, physically slapped my own forehead in the parking lot of Kroger) was when he had hippie cult members “eagerly” ringing doorbells while casing neighborhoods. Huh? What does an eager doorbell ring look like? C’mon, Brett. Don’t write when you’re stoned. It shows. I’m not motivated enough to dig up more examples of misguided adverbs. I have no work ethic. You go do it. It’ll only take two or three pages, and you’ll have dozens. Had Ellis’s editor removed every adverb, even the rare well-chosen ones, it would have been an improvement. Maybe his editor was stoned, too. This book could be an exhibit in a case against the legalization of marijuana.
Gripe 3: Ellis’s frequent and thoughtless use of “performative” and “narrative” irritates the everloving fuck out of me. It is plain bad and brainless, but it is even worse than that. It stands out like a conspicuously contemporary hair-do in a period piece. Hair is where a director ingratiates characters to us by making them relatable and desirable, and these worn-out now-words are how Ellis gives us the secret handshake that signals to us that he is actually morally up-to-date and not really amoral, after all. I think it is the cowardice of it that’s getting under my skin.
If you’re going to be amoral, commit and do it for real. I’m doing a citizen’s arrest and revoking Ellis’s Gen-X credentials. He can go shop himself around and see if some ethical generation will have him.
I hate this book, but it is fun. I do intend to finish it, but I also intend to supplement the fun and avenge my annoyance with more griping.