Pretentious Crap

vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Yeah sure, I think I grok that. That's related to how identity -- right? What it means to be an individual (member of a tribe, member of the volk, member of the citizenry) at least partially determines identity.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
No, no, I just mean that arguments involving any amount of biological determinism are going to be even more messy than this one already is!
 
J

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
I think its interesting and fitting that the pretentious crap question should have led us questions about identity. Because identity is the nerve-center of pretentious crap, I think. In the sense that, wherever you find instances of pretentious crap, issues of identity - be they crises, parade, card, or whatever - are never far behind.

Pretentious crap is often about wanting somebody - even if this person is also you - to think that you are somebody in particular. And I think there is also a way in which pretentious crap is about a refusal to put questions of your own identity - stance, position, desires, and posture, etc - into play.
 
B

BareBones

wheezy
this is such a great thread, from minor grievances about pretentious shoreditch twats, to a short chat about mental health institutions, to a discussion about the nature of identity itself, narcissism and the internet, to a totally awesome argument about primitive societies and back again. The hour or so i've spent reading/assimilating all this has been far more worthwhile than the work i should've been doing.

vimothy said:
The more you learn, the less you think you know.
Click to expand...

This pretty much sums it up for me, really (in relation to the original question about pretentious crap). I'm pretty certain most people posting in this thread "know more" (have read more books, listened to more music, watched more lectures, read more essays, etc etc) than I do, and I know that the more i learn, the more i want people to think i know. Which is obviously me being pretentious.

Incidentally, all the stuff comparing identity/personality from primitive times and nowadays reminds me a bit of the "neuronics" Ballard talks about in The Drowned World, about moving back through archaeopsychic time... although again, it's quite pretentious of me to say so
 
nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
vimothy said:
[BTW, I haven't read any of the posts since logging off yesterday... in case this seems totally irrelevant!]

Just had an epiphany. Think I’ve been talking past people a bit. “Sociocultural” and “identity” are social science terms, because that’s the only language that I’ve got to talk about this. Maybe they’re not ideal because they suggest something specific, when I’m trying to be general. Anyway. Identity is made up by people. The people who make it up are broadly the same (biologically speaking), but the stuff they make it up out of – the sociocultural stuff – is different. Different people in different times have had different ways of thinking about themselves. Have had different “constructions of the self”, or whatever the original phrase was. A merchant in Ancient Rome would have had a way of thinking about the world, what that world was and his place in it, totally unlike you or me.

Personality, I think, is something more nebulous. Personality is how other people think of you, or how you think other people think of you. And that’s tied into identity. I guess I figure ultimately that different identity equals different personality, because identity mediates personality. This makes intuitive sense to me, at least, because I think I do have a different personality depending on the social scene (at work, with friends, with family, etc).

Where this relates to the internet – and I apologise in advance for the banality of this insight – is that the internet provides a venue, is a machine, no less, for the production of identity, and for mass experimentation in the production of identity. The internet facilitates its splintering, because it creates these linkages across multiple social fields. Everyone gets more confused, everything gets more complicated. The more you learn, the less you think you know. Genres will keep on sub-dividing. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

It’s not all bad. The fact that I don’t think my interest is the same as my country’s interest, and my country’s interest is to invade Poland, is a gain. The loss in national identity (such as it has been – I’m not suggesting it has disappeared) is twinned with a rise in global identities, multinational identities, intra-national identities. Identifying with the tribe (i.e. the state) is probably going to be replaced by something else. Of course, that’s probably going to be identifying with a new kind of tribe – we won’t stop being human, but we will change the way we think about ourselves (and surely we always are), and therefore change the way we interact with the world and interpret that interaction to ourselves and to each other. Not all good, not all bad. Material well-being will keep going up; identity will keep changing*.

*Obvious caveat: I understand that change is relative. With regards to identity, I think the centre is calmer than the edges. But then if you look at anything closely enough, it’s almost certainly in flux.
Click to expand...


Vimothy, you might like Agamben's "The Coming Community"...you might like a lot of what he writes really...

What I was getting at before the unnecessary digression was that personality has always been there in the individual, but the idea that we should find our fullest expression as human beings, our "fulfillment", through finding our individuality or sense of self outside of a community, is something that is overstated in importance in our culture. This may be part of a stage in the process of human evolution, though, which is something we're only ever playing catch up with.
 
nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
josef k. said:
I think its interesting and fitting that the pretentious crap question should have led us questions about identity. Because identity is the nerve-center of pretentious crap, I think. In the sense that, wherever you find instances of pretentious crap, issues of identity - be they crises, parade, card, or whatever - are never far behind.

Pretentious crap is often about wanting somebody - even if this person is also you - to think that you are somebody in particular. And I think there is also a way in which pretentious crap is about a refusal to put questions of your own identity - stance, position, desires, and posture, etc - into play.
Click to expand...

Also, I was going to post this a long time ago and I think I forgot--

Grandiosity, delusions about one's own abilities and skills and such: these are survival mechanisms. People without these become very depressed.

There's research that indicates that depressed people actually see the world more clearly, as it really is, or closer to the real state of affairs, than others, and that it's the happy people who are self-deluded and think more highly of themselves than they probably should given their actual intelligence/skill/talent levels.

There's some amount of self-delusion that's necessary just to keep going, to keep it all up in a sort of vague existential or psychological sense I think. As Chris said earlier, so what if people have to cling to something, we all do it to one extent or another? To "fake it till they make it"? Otherwise life is pointless and meaningless.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
"I think its interesting and fitting that the pretentious crap question should have led us questions about identity. Because identity is the nerve-center of pretentious crap, I think. In the sense that, wherever you find instances of pretentious crap, issues of identity - be they crises, parade, card, or whatever - are never far behind."
Click to expand...
Heroically steered back to topic there Josef.

"There's research that indicates that depressed people actually see the world more clearly, as it really is, or closer to the real state of affairs, than others,"
Click to expand...
Sounds like Kafka

"A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die"

or Henry James

"the natural inheritance of any one who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters."

Or probably a million other people I guess.
 
J

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
A couple of things:

First of all, the idea that depressed people somehow see the world more clearly seems completely fantastical. I grant that the different moods produce different views, but to grant ontological dignity to one in particular strikes me as pretentious crap.

Second, there are delusions, then, there are delusions. But the crazed delusions of knowledge that make for the methane of power-trips are I think is the central one. There is nothing like certainty for good pretentious crap!

Third, the woman upstairs is currently screaming in sexual pleasures, and I salute her!
 
nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
I wasn't just making this up, there's all kinds of research that supports this claim. That's why the claim was made in the first place, because research supports it.

Here's one easy to digest journalistical article about it:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpa...2C1A961948260&sec=health&spon=&pagewanted=all

This

Second, there are delusions, then, there are delusions. But the crazed delusions of knowledge that make for the methane of power-trips are I think is the central one. There is nothing like certainty for good pretentious crap!
Click to expand...

doesn't make much sense.

But then, there is nothing like repeated accusations of pretention, bandied about at your convenience whenever you have nothing to say, to make you look like a self-blind asshole!
 
P

poetix

we murder to dissect
Depression in my experience flattens value judgements. Life and death seem broadly equivalent (equivalently worthless, as may be).

This doesn't necessarily reveal a world of "fact", and true (or useful, or consensually-sustainable) valuations are as vulnerable to this kind of levelling as delusional ones.
 
nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Right, I'd agree I think personally--anhedonia seems to be the ultimate affective response of the depressed, especially the more severely depressed.

The research about depressive realism is more focused on "control" ... as in depressed people make more accurate judgments regarding their own lack of control over situations and circumstances in an experimental setting (one that's set up to test this ability)...

So apparently depressed people can look at a situation and read their own potential effect on it (or lack of effect on it) more clearly than others?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top