Pretentious Crap

Sick Boy said:

I even worked at an American Apparel, so the proximity is there.

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I even shop at American Apparel, because the clothes fit me well and they're comfortable, and as an added bonus they're not sweatshopped (even if Dov Charney has a trillion sexual harrassment suits out against him).

I have a few of those skirts, that high waisted one. The spandex leggings, the long tank tops, the track shorts, a couple of hoodies. I even owned a bunch of those italian chains (the figaro chain for one) before they were in the AA store. And guess what? I don't care if that makes me a "hipster", I wear what I feel good in.

josef k. said:

That is one interpretation, certainly.

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Sorry, not sure what you mean.

I think it's worth pointing out that pretentiousness exists outside the spheres of academia, literature and the arts. My brother works in IT at a fairly senior techincal level and has to attend these meetings with people from marketing; they drag on for hours and afterwards he says to his colleagues (the people he actually works with on a day-to-day basis, I mean) "So what was all that about then?", and just gets shrugs and blank looks in return. Or, after some marketing consultant wizkid has just delivered a huge spiel about synergizing this and leveraging that, he'll say "So you mean if we lower our prices more people might buy our product?" (or something equally simple) and they just go "Yes, exactly!". Except they've taken ages to say it and peppered it with obscure, voguish marketing buzzwords.

Point being, you don't need interpretive dance or references to Gilles Deleuze to be pretentious. There's a whole world of commercial pretentiousness out there.

nomadthesecond said:

I can understand where you're coming from on this, but it's a convention in philosophy and theory to use "think" this way when you're talking about not just describing something in basic terms but very precisely thinking through a problem and formulating a solution (usually complete with jargon and new terminology to match).

Of course this probably still sounds pretentious but it comes in handy in a philosophy class.

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Ooops, didn't reply to this, how rude. Yep I'm aware of its status as a philosophical convention, so not meaning to diss you or anyone else who may have used it as part of class requirements. Am I right to think this is especially a thing in philosophy done in the tradition of Hegel and German idealism?
I guess my main thing with it is that I always feel that 'think' ought to be qualified in some way - thinking about, thinking through, thinking carefully etc - in order to make more precise what sort of thought, what kind of mental activity we are dealing with. Using 'think' on it's own seems to give an impression of pure, abstract gnostic/Platonic insight on the part of the author (that Rodin statue often springs to mind for me! ), which can come off as a bit self-aggrandising. But like I say, not a huge deal.

My own classic pretentious-person moment: taking out Derrida's On Grammatology from the uni library, reading about a quarter of it, then giving up and putting it back. /

ha! according to no less (pretentious? ) an authority than ian penman (my wife was doing some research and asked him for advice re. where to start with derrida) yr much better off reading bluffer's guides to derrida than the man himself (and that itself is prob a v derrida-ish thing in itself but heigh ho)!

"pretentious" always gets used as a pejorative but to me it's the highest of compliments. what's art about if not to mimic god, exceed the artist? as i understand it "pretentious" in the negative corresponds with e.g. invoking derrida with no real grasp of what he was about and with no real correspondence to the prob. v. humdrum thing yr trying to put across (as i've just done) or pub rock wanting to be wagner (unless you play the rick wakeman 20 yrs after the event "hey i wz only joking" get out of jail free card) but generally it tends to get used as a sort of anti-societal fatwa i.e. EVERYONE ELSE is into A, why do you have to be DIFFERENT and be into B which is SO DIFFICULT for the rest of us to get into thus clearly you must be EVIL (or as one idiot broadsheet scribbler once proposed, equating Metal Machine Music/Kid A fans with pederasts/more generally equating Stockhausen Boulez et al with Soviet Stalin et al) and UNMUTUAL and fundamentally RIGHT WING and must be ERADICATED (apologies for all the Sun front page capitals here).

"or as one idiot broadsheet scribbler once proposed, equating Metal Machine Music/Kid A fans with pederasts/more generally equating Stockhausen Boulez et al with Soviet Stalin et al"

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Really, have you got a link for that article? For some perverse reason I love reading that kind of stuff.

What is the status of people who try and preemptively nullify accusations of pretentiousness by declaring their pretensions before describing a pretentious activity they once embarked on, but where one suspects that although the outward meaning of the statement is to assert the pretentiousness of the speaker it is really a thinly veiled attempt to put across the fact of the act itself without actually being regarded as pretentious i.e. "One time I was feeling so pretentious I just sat and read Alexandre Kojève's L'idee du determinisme dans la physique classique et dans la physique moderne in one sitting whilst smoking a shisha pipe without even going to the toilet. Wow I'm so pretentious sometimes!"

CombinedHarvest said:

What is the status of people who try and preemptively nullify accusations of pretentiousness by declaring their pretensions before describing a pretentious activity they once embarked on, but where one suspects that although the outward meaning of the statement is to assert the pretentiousness of the speaker it is really a thinly veiled attempt to put across the fact of the act itself without actually being regarded as pretentious i.e. "One time I was feeling so pretentious I just sat and read Alexandre Kojève's L'idee du determinisme dans la physique classique et dans la physique moderne in one sitting whilst smoking a shisha pipe without even going to the toilet. Wow I'm so pretentious sometimes!"

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Preemptively dealing with objections = anteoccupatio; ostensibly self-deprecatory vainglorious anteoccupatio? Urgh.

Pretension involves the artist exceeding her or his normal parameters - and there is nothing wrong with that. The thing is that works that break ground in this way also can exceed the interpretative capacities of most potential consumers. The mere fact that this failure of reception can exist permits some artists to pretend that their work is of real value and merely misunderstood and tempts audiences to pretend that they possess understanding where there is actually none.

Pointlessness ensues when poor artists and incomprehending audiences become trapped in a mutually-dependent relationship, each having to pretend that they understand and meaningfully sustain the other.

Mr. Tea said:

I think it's worth pointing out that pretentiousness exists outside the spheres of academia, literature and the arts. My brother works in IT at a fairly senior techincal level and has to attend these meetings with people from marketing; they drag on for hours and afterwards he says to his colleagues (the people he actually works with on a day-to-day basis, I mean) "So what was all that about then?", and just gets shrugs and blank looks in return. Or, after some marketing consultant wizkid has just delivered a huge spiel about synergizing this and leveraging that, he'll say "So you mean if we lower our prices more people might buy our product?" (or something equally simple) and they just go "Yes, exactly!". Except they've taken ages to say it and peppered it with obscure, voguish marketing buzzwords.

Point being, you don't need interpretive dance or references to Gilles Deleuze to be pretentious. There's a whole world of commercial pretentiousness out there.

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Is marketing even interesting enough to be termed 'pretentious'? It seems to sail effortlessly into the in-tray (dustbin) marked 'bullshit'.

CombinedHarvest said:

What is the status of people who try and preemptively nullify accusations of pretentiousness by declaring their pretensions before describing a pretentious activity they once embarked on, but where one suspects that although the outward meaning of the statement is to assert the pretentiousness of the speaker it is really a thinly veiled attempt to put across the fact of the act itself without actually being regarded as pretentious i.e. "One time I was feeling so pretentious I just sat and read Alexandre Kojève's L'idee du determinisme dans la physique classique et dans la physique moderne in one sitting whilst smoking a shisha pipe without even going to the toilet. Wow I'm so pretentious sometimes!"

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So, so , SO true. Also, false modesty with regard to the intellectual labels being foisted upon one's work, is tha most annoying thing ever. "Oh, I don't necessarily see it as exclusively Deleuzian..."

baboon2004 said:

Is marketing even interesting enough to be termed 'pretentious'? It seems to sail effortlessly into the in-tray (dustbin) marked 'bullshit'.

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It's both pretentious, and crap (or indeed bullshit). The title of this thread is, after all, 'Pretentious Crap'. So in a sense it's even worse than academic or artistic pretentiousness, because there isn't even the possibility of there being something worthwhile or interesting there once you've stripped away the pretentiousness. It's pure, unmitigated pretentiousness.

CombinedHarvest said:

What is the status of people who try and preemptively nullify accusations of pretentiousness by declaring their pretensions before describing a pretentious activity they once embarked on, but where one suspects that although the outward meaning of the statement is to assert the pretentiousness of the speaker it is really a thinly veiled attempt to put across the fact of the act itself without actually being regarded as pretentious i.e. "One time I was feeling so pretentious I just sat and read Alexandre Kojève's L'idee du determinisme dans la physique classique et dans la physique moderne in one sitting whilst smoking a shisha pipe without even going to the toilet. Wow I'm so pretentious sometimes!"

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If I had a penny for every time I caught myself saying that sort of thing... I kinda love it though.
I guess this posts counts as a meta-example.

Prefixing words with 'meta-' in everyday speech is a bit pretentious. Doesn't stop me doing it all the time, though.

My friends have given me a lot of stick when I've used 'neologism' in conversation.

everything is a pre-tense or premeditated isn't it?

Mr. Tea said:

I think it's worth pointing out that pretentiousness exists outside the spheres of academia, literature and the arts. My brother works in IT at a fairly senior techincal level and has to attend these meetings with people from marketing; they drag on for hours and afterwards he says to his colleagues (the people he actually works with on a day-to-day basis, I mean) "So what was all that about then?", and just gets shrugs and blank looks in return. Or, after some marketing consultant wizkid has just delivered a huge spiel about synergizing this and leveraging that, he'll say "So you mean if we lower our prices more people might buy our product?" (or something equally simple) and they just go "Yes, exactly!". Except they've taken ages to say it and peppered it with obscure, voguish marketing buzzwords.

Point being, you don't need interpretive dance or references to Gilles Deleuze to be pretentious. There's a whole world of commercial pretentiousness out there.

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that's true - someone else mentioned marketing here i think - you could also throw in conservatism (talk radio), false-pretense like the Colbert Report, independent media, neo-marxists/subculturalists, message board hacks/failed writers - anyone with a smug tone of self-importance, but 'pretentious crap' to me means any postmodern art that tries to negate aesthetics.

also a good way to hold it over undergraduates and generally ignorant/stupid people.

Rachel Verinder said:

ha! according to no less (pretentious? ) an authority than ian penman (my wife was doing some research and asked him for advice re. where to start with derrida) yr much better off reading bluffer's guides to derrida than the man himself (and that itself is prob a v derrida-ish thing in itself but heigh ho)!

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I hope you're joking.

mixed_biscuits said:

Preemptively dealing with objections = anteoccupatio; ostensibly self-deprecatory vainglorious anteoccupatio? Urgh.

Pretension involves the artist exceeding her or his normal parameters - and there is nothing wrong with that. The thing is that works that break ground in this way also can exceed the interpretative capacities of most potential consumers. The mere fact that this failure of reception can exist permits some artists to pretend that their work is of real value and merely misunderstood and tempts audiences to pretend that they possess understanding where there is actually none.

Pointlessness ensues when poor artists and incomprehending audiences become trapped in a mutually-dependent relationship, each having to pretend that they understand and meaningfully sustain the other.

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Hmmmm...this is an interesting way of putting it.

Preemptively dealing with objections = anteoccupatio; ostensibly self-deprecatory vainglorious anteoccupatio? Urgh.

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I'm thinking about this, and I'd probably simplify and just file this under narcissistic behavior. A narcissist will use any opportunity to talk about what they've done, or what they do, what they've read, etc.--even to the point of self-parody. A narcissist will make a comment on pretentious crap and see it as an opportunity to put their knowledge on display, and in doing so obliviously perform what they've described.

Of course, in the Webdrome we're all narcissists.

Mr. Tea said:

Prefixing words with 'meta-' in everyday speech is a bit pretentious. Doesn't stop me doing it all the time, though.

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In a lot of humanities programs now you hear people say "framing" the way you hear people in business say "leveraging"--too often.