semiotext(e)

luka

luka

Well-known member
@poetix you get a compliment in Gus' book





When it comes to the ‘way of thinking and existing’ stu , I think there’s still a place in my heart for the sort of hyper-foundationalist Paul Christiano type of reasoning and discourse. What I dis- like is the <em>SSC</em> thing of, take some anecdotal evidence for <em>y</em>, now construct a grand uni- fying theory of the social world based on <em>y</em>. I get enough of this shit being continental social theory adjacent! And the good continentals are much better at it! <em>Ribbonfarm</em> is pretty cool, but, I swear, most <em>Ribbonfarm</em> posts I’ve read would in fact be way better if they drew on existing continental social theory vocabulary and reference points. I think really the rise-to-visibility of hardcore techie nerds with hardcore con- tinental background, like Lucca Fraser and Dominic Fox, made a lot of the nerds-rebuilding-a-continental-social-the- ory-analog stu I associated with the ‘post-rationalist’ scene feel very rudimentary. </p><!-- /wp:paragraph -->
 
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luka

luka

Well-known member
i would call this book the first Incel masterpiece. As I keep saying I love Incels. I consider the Incel condition to be Universal. Only in its most extreme manifestations does it involve a complete lack of sex. what it's really about is an inability to win the true object of desire, the object of sexual fascination and infatuation. as desire only reaches its utmost limit when its object is unattainable everyone is an incel. this is my theory. and this is why i think this is the first Great Work to arise from the incel community.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
the same rationalisation of pain is evident here. the same will to systemise and sort into taxonomies. its a scream but its a scream which expresses itself in abstract thought
 
sus

sus

Moderator
I feel like I can rest easier now. Even if I get addicted to opiates, birth a child out of wedlock, and never produce anything of social value again, I wrote a masterpiece. It may be a repellant misogynistic incel masterpiece, but it's my repellant misogynistic incel masterpiece.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
i mean, i am being complimentary. i hope thats obvious. im almost never so effusive in fact.
 
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luka

luka

Well-known member
suspended said:
Edit: P223 is partially Dissensus homage
Click to expand...
Showgirls, Devil Wears Prada—these are films that acknowl-
edge the moral degradations and trespasses of social
hazing—that induction into the values and judgments of
one’s new peers. But they also refuse to downplay the allur-
ing power of these rituals, their role in preserving values
systems against the creep of a cosmopolitan and relativist
apathy—and in bending young people into instruments of
power.
Streep’s Priestly, a thinly veiled Anna Wintour, sets up
ludicrous standards, then uses words like “disappoint-
ment,” high hopes, “faith,” I’m depending on you, You’ve let
me down—mommy-dom’ing Hathaway’s Andy into radical
self-sacrifice.
So why’s it take her so long to quit the personal assistant
gig? “She is vicious,” Andy/Andrea complains of Priestly,
just days into starting at Vogue rip Runway. “So quit,” Nigel
retorts. Andrea just fumes, can’t think of a comeback. What
she wants is acknowledgment, and when she doesn’t get it,
she’s furious. “You want to know why [Priestly] doesn’t kiss
you on the forehead and give you a gold star at the end
of the day,” Nigel tells her
 
sus

sus

Moderator
I think Andy's story is really beautiful, because everyone has an ideology by 20 these days—this archetype feels like it dates to the sixties—a set of strong priorities for spending time, a strong belief about who they are and what their life is. which is why integrating into the economic machine and the realities of the market is hard; the valuations of the invisible hand do not align with your own. And the standard anti-capitalism story let's you narrativize that friction as a struggle to preserve autonomy, a resistance against something soulless. Ostensibly most people who feel this way early in the labor force capitulate and lose it within a decadeish, it's just a quiet, kind of sad disintegration of self into system. (Some people do cling to it I guess and they end up the shaggy-gray anti-war Chomsky weirdoes in the office who convince a few colleagues to try legal grass or listen to raga or question American geopolitics. At which point it becomes actually beautiful and kind of brave, the way the hobbyists just romanticize it. This is the story, at least, right? I haven't lived it, I've just seen its burnout effects and it's cultural products— In television, in a Vietnam vet neighbor permafried from pot.)

But with Andy she doesn't go quietly, she could be just this predictable New York journalism liberal (this is what she tells herself she is, by publishing the tell-all, whereby she re-joins the ranks of literary liberal society by selling her soul—turning on her old friends in an expose that says "we're above them" to her NYRB pals). No, for a while, in the middle, she doesn't miss it she really sees it for what it is, she can perceive the fashion world (a set of values aesthetics norms social hierarchies power structures, a language) for what it is, and not just the ideological reduction she's inherited from media. She sees it all—the profane beauty, its cruel demanding demand for a specific kind of excellence that subverts everything she learned was good and proper for a woman of her middle-class milieu. It's a love story, a vampire story. She's bit by a person who's carrying culture. She frees herself with a wooden stake through her maker's heart. Fin.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
Not a coincidence that "what Runway is" as a world is another media outlet. A producer of propaganda for itself, for its own existence. An unrelenting stream of self-justification.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
i agree that the refusenik is always an ambiguous figure. you can never decide if its tragic or heroic.
 
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