For the record, I think The Catcher in the Rye is… OK? It’s fine. It’s definitely a book of an earlier era and it felt as such when I read it as a teenager. I was hoping to connect with it on a deep level (uh, not a Mark David Chapman level) the way some adults in my life had, and I didn’t and was kind of bummed out. But it was fine. As is so often the case with these things, there’s a really dumbass reading of the book lurking in the discussion about it, which is that you’re somehow commanded to identify with Holden Caufield and to want to act like him. This is… not a good interpretation. You certainly can identify with him, but I don’t think that’s suggested very strongly, let alone mandated. As with Fight Club, another boy story for boys about boys being boys, you are invited to empathize with the alienation and loneliness of the main character while recognizing the juvenility and pointlessness of his reaction to it. But, well, now I’m actually engaging with the book, which is more than social media critics of books ever do. They never seem to want to go deeper than saying “TOXIC MASCULINITY” or whatever, which is particularly bizarre here. (Is the idea that Holden Caufield is supposed to be some sort of symbol of an idealized man? What?) It’s all uselessly Manichean — I know this headline is partially a joke but it makes me wince anyway. The important work is always to say a) this book/author is bad and b) liking it is not a matter of bad taste but of some sort of failure of political and moral sophistication.
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Have you never imagined reading a book without wanting it to be a signifier of your entire personality? Do you know how many books I’ve read specifically because I hate the author and their outlook? Or, quelle horreur, you could consider reading a book without knowing what you think about it until you’ve read it! You know, the generative state of being open to forming a summative position based on the gradual aggregation of myriad minor judgments formed along the way? That would seem to be a major part of the point of reading.
[...]
It’s a sickness, the assumption that we must always tightly control every last aspect of our self-presentation, no matter how distinct from our true self, because someone on the subway with a $300k education and zero opinions they didn’t steal from podcasts might silently judge us. And as (this philosophy presumes) no one has a durable sense of self worth, being judged by strangers must be terrifying instead of meaningless.
Many have lamented the fact that professional criticism these days is often just a recitation of ways that a work of art does or does not conform to the childish moral calculus of “social justice.” And mountains of worthless reviews and recaps have been produced under these terms. But it’s important to say that this tendency is not solely or even mainly the product of ideological discipline and the desire to evangelize. Rather it stems from insecurity about one’s own subjective opinions. People who don’t trust that they are sophisticated readers or cinephiles or whatever gravitate towards tedious political checklisting because those political claims seem more transcendent and defensible and real than their own claims of taste. But this fundamentally mistakes the purpose of a review, and it’s very hard to understand why someone who is so afraid of standing by their own opinion would think to write one.
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And it must always be remembered that, not that long ago, most media elites were not woke, but rather sneering neoliberals who mocked leftists as losers; the fact that media culture turned on a dime to embrace social justice fads makes it a certainty that, when that politics goes out of fashion in the coming decade, the media will flip flop right over again. No, the problem with media culture is not the politics but rather where those politics come from — not just from elite colleges or privileged childhoods lived in affluence, but from insecurity.
For the record, I found The Cather in the Rye phony and lousy.
I haven’t read any of David Foster Wallace’s novels, but I do keep going back to The String Theory.
In The Sum of Small Things, David Brooks points out, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues that the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information:
To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.
“It’s all uselessly Manichean.”
Popular discourse in an environment of popular governance cannot be anything but. The ‘selection pressures’ of such an environment ruthlessly culls any adaptive nuance in signaling as extraneous, optimizing for the most reductively adulterated memes possible. Th predicate of open-ended consensus uber alles predicating an arms race of ideological weaponry highly adapted for proliferating themselves as ideograms, the occupation of mindshare in the psychic battlefields, irrespective of adaptiveness for the hosts they take possession of.
Pseudo-Chrysostom: “Popular discourse in an environment of popular governance cannot be anything but.”
Oh, we have an environment of popular governance? Show me the populace getting their way, then.
Freddie deBoer: “For the record [...] but from insecurity.”
https://i.ibb.co/b5d41HB/jesse.png
Isegoria: “In The Sum of Small Things, David Brooks points out, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues that the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information.”
Yeah, if by that Elizabeth means that members of the over-credentialed, under-capitalized modern-day house-negro class engage in ridiculous contortions meant to performatively separate themselves from the rest of the middle and working classes.
Otherwise? Cope.
By the way, Happy Memorial Day.
“Oh, we have an environment of popular governance? Show me the populace getting their way, then.”
Popular governance is an environment where occulted princes destroy open princes, in the name of popular governance.
There are naturally significant differences in the selection mechanisms for what kinds of organisms come to hold power in such environments; what kinds of power, more or less given to what kinds of ends, that predominate, in particular.
Who are the occulted princes, Pseudo-Chrysostom? Name them.
That’s kind of the Catch-22, innit?
At the end of the day, one simply can’t avoid leaving clues, though. Tthe ability to exercise power would not be possible in the first place without at least some kind of interface.
Where decisions are made by consensus, consensus manufacturers are king. Who runs the New York Times? Who runs Ivy League unis? Who spends millions of laundered debtbucks on local county and state DA appointments to stuff the business ends of the governing bureaucracy with politically reliable apparatchiks? These are all faces of power.
Not everyone appreciates Salinger’s sense of irony. And a little of it goes a long way.
It’s a parodic Bildungsroman, is what it is. It depicts a failed attempt to become an adult. It asks the right questions and gives the wrong answers — insincerely. Chekhov would say that’s just fine.
The use of irony as a preemptive shield against devalidation is a mark of a clear turn in to the post-modern tradition of literature (the retrochronicity of this term, that one can even speak now of such a thing as ‘the post-modern tradition’, is perhaps the final ultimate irony of modernity, through all it’s high pretension and tautological emptiness, the world moves on regardless); which makes the topic of David Foster Wallace very apropos.
Pseudo-Chrysostom: “Where decisions are made by consensus, consensus manufacturers are king. Who runs the New York Times? Who runs Ivy League unis? Who spends millions of laundered debtbucks on local county and state DA appointments to stuff the business ends of the governing bureaucracy with politically reliable apparatchiks? These are all faces of power.”
Are the consensus manufacturers “king” or are they “faces of power” (of “occulted princes”)?
They can be one or the other but not both.
Which is it, ye Purveyor of Structurally Schizophrenic Ideology?
Of course they can be both.
Pseudo-Chrysostom, you’re smarter than this.
The world isn’t run by newspapermen or university professors.
The world is run by insiders of a loosely held patronage network spanning intelligence agencies, banks, tech companies (i.e. private intelligence agencies), military contractors, pharmaceutical entities, intergovernmental organizations, and organized crime.
Name them.
There is no rivalry or mutual exclusion in these phenomena. It is only natural for them to be entangled.
Means towards the regimentation of minds are a form of power; and such forms of power that are less explicit or more easily dissimulated include means towards the regimentation of minds.
Obvious power is also obvious targets; there is in many cases an inherent tendency – or an incentive even, if you will – towards such forms of power that are more easily dissimulated, represented as something other than what they are, or otherwise further remoted from explicit awareness in the minds of it’s targets, in relative terms as compared to other forms of power. Similar in a way to how a statue has an ‘incentive’ to be a pile of rubble instead; such being a more stable orientation of it’s molecules, in response to the vagaries of the universe thrown at it over time. An expression of entropic forces in the civilizational sphere, in essence.
Which processes are of course also not without consequence, since all power has a flavor, different forms being more or less given to different ends.
Both proponents and detractors of civilization all face the same problem, which is the coordination problem. In particular here, the construal of social networks and organization that do not suggest themselves to broader perception. Or in more prosaic terms, conspiracies.
The jedi mind trick of ‘multiple independent sources’ who ‘care only for scientific truth’ all just ‘coincidentally’ happening to agree with each other on a single particular set of philosophical prepositions, when of course none of these adjectives are true in reality, is a seminal example of this dynamic. The enforced and self-reinforcing networks of preordained consensus under the guise of ‘spontaneous convergence’.
Pseudo-Chrysostom: “There is no rivalry or mutual exclusion in these phenomena. It is only natural for them to be entangled. Means towards the regimentation of minds are a form of power; and such forms of power that are less explicit or more easily dissimulated include means towards the regimentation of minds. Obvious power is also obvious targets; there is in many cases an inherent tendency – or an incentive even, if you will – towards such forms of power that are more easily dissimulated, represented as something other than what they are, or otherwise further remoted from explicit awareness in the minds of it’s targets, in relative terms as compared to other forms of power. Similar in a way to how a statue has an ‘incentive’ to be a pile of rubble instead; such being a more stable orientation of it’s molecules, in response to the vagaries of the universe thrown at it over time. An expression of entropic forces in the civilizational sphere, in essence. Which processes are of course also not without consequence, since all power has a flavor, different forms being more or less given to different ends. Both proponents and detractors of civilization all face the same problem, which is the coordination problem. In particular here, the construal of social networks and organization that do not suggest themselves to broader perception. Or in more prosaic terms, conspiracies. The jedi mind trick of ‘multiple independent sources’ who ‘care only for scientific truth’ all just ‘coincidentally’ happening to agree with each other on a single particular set of philosophical prepositions, when of course none of these adjectives are true in reality, is a seminal example of this dynamic. The enforced and self-reinforcing networks of preordained consensus under the guise of ‘spontaneous convergence’.”
https://i.ibb.co/b5d41HB/jesse.png