No one reads anything at all so most people have developed a form of discussion in which specific references to texts/authors are considered rude to the extent that the answers would require familiarity. Talking “around the books” is preferred. Talking about “your feelings” best.
You’re trained this way in school anyway— you don’t get asked “how does Faulkner develop the novel” you get asked “how does Faulkner speak to contemporary discussions of race & your feelings about that discussion” etc
The concept of formal rigor, or formal innovation/development, is considered a false framing, & that “development” is a critical projection that isnt evident in the text, & that all art is basically “intuitional feelings dumps” — the curtains are blue because he felt like it.
As a Student, Reader, or Person — “you have always been valid”— there is no reason to develop yourself, any sensation of inadequacy derived from contact with Art beyond your immediate intuitive understanding is offensive because it suggests you need improvement of some sort.
This is all due to Pedagogues being cowards & folding in the face of bureaucratic pressures to “cater the school experience to the consumer”— “the customer is always right”— “you have to adapt Shakespeare for contemporary consumer demands”
I blame the dominance of Business over State.
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The real blackpill for american rightists is that there are absolutely no elites who aren’t embarrassed by the “folk culture” of america— & this is due to evangelical protestantism (which is truly an embarrassing “faith”) ghettoizing itself from all high culture.
No one with the intellectual capacity to govern a modern state believes in evangelical protestantism authentically— they “community organize” & show up— like going to the Iowa state fair for primaries— but it’s not a faith that can mediate a polity. It’s a frontier faith.
Evangelical Protestantism exists for “conditions outside of civilization”— even Mormonism is more coherent because it’s an American State Church akin to Anglicanism— & is itself the theological culmination of Evangelical Protestantism. Romney really does believe.
The Liberal conception of Truth is that it is the “prevailing market consensus”— this is why we “trust the prevailing market consensus”— but obviously, many lies are more amenable to social consensus than the truth is.
The anti “woke capital” ists who still think Markets select for Truth, believe that it’s just “those overly-socialized nuts who ruin a possible Truth Consensus”— market saboteurs, an informal cabal of “theocrats,” etc.
Ah damn nick disappeared before he could call Rockefeller a fake capitalist— compared to— I guess— Mises?
George Soros— also cringe, so not a Capitalist— but Elon Musk? Epic Sci fi laser? Hecking MARS? Ok! That’s Capitalism! SKYNET— remember cyberpunk & jungle music & before ketamine sold out & became popular & commercialist (& therefore fake capitalist & probably communist)?
Global Governance of World Trade is the most Capitalist thing imaginable— maximizing consumption while decreasing life expectancy— also Capitalist! Hyperefficiency doesn’t mean “human fitness”— it means greasing the wheels with blood!
Most people don’t want to read Joyce or Pynchon et al because they had classical educations & play with multiple networked allusions to obscure biblical, kabalistic, hermetic, pagan, historical, musicological, philosophical, etc concepts figures events & persons in a single page.
The Proteus section of Ulysses for example is a history of western epistemologies with extremely specific allusions that if missed render the whole scene pointless because it’s literally just about “becoming able to write/read such a sequence & understand it”
When Pynchon connects Wagner to the Third Reich to the Rockefellers to Auschwitz to Disney World in one scene— that’s a topographical map of historical developments which become meaningful when taken apart & put back together by the reader— otherwise “lol Rocketman stole weed”
The reason why “white male authors” & “boring white guy movies” are castigated has nothing to do with ideology & everything to do with the laziness of “critics” who need all art to be paced like an episode of The Office.
You learn this hermeneutic so that you can blackmail professors into giving you a pass for refusing to do the reading— that’s its sole utility in life.
I’m not doing the reading because it’s offensive to me that I was asked to— instead I shall explain why it’s counterproductive to do the reading when I could be scrolling my timeline & watching TikToks & “worrying about politics”
See we needed Democrat Bush so that we could get Republican Obama so we can have Democrat Trump so that after that we can have Republican Democrat Trump & then finally what we all have been waiting for— Democrat Republican Democrat Trump.
Clinton? Don’t you mean Democrat Bush?
Obama? Don’t you mean Democrat Bush?
We got stuck in a cycle, but finally we can complete the system when we elect Democrat Republican Democrat Trump in 2036.