I'll kind of miss the wokeness. It was so easy to be against it and to feel moral by being against it. In its absence I feel so much less certitude, and it's somehow a lot less fun to just write regular old fiction that has little chance of getting anyone worked up or offending anyone. Being transgressive for the past ten years has just been so simple. I doubt it'll ever be that easy in my lifetime again
No because anti-wokeness means to provoke you, so you're just playing into it. To really transgress against it you must call it tedious, which it is, but which feels less fun. What's nice about 2023 is it is possible to believe in social justice and talk about racial disparities etc again without feeling guilty about it
Omg that guy. No kidding. And Chris Rufo is writing op-eds in the times in the same week he writes openly in compact that his aim is for a post-liberal society. Fun!
I have mixed feelings about this all (many of which I’ve hashed out with you over a he last few months) but maybe the simplest thought is that we’ve lived through an era of overcorrections: to the post-60s quietism of parts of the later 20th century, to that century’s belief that the artist was a kind of sanctioned madman whose genius justified or at least allowed us to ignore his (for it usually was he) misdeeds. All of which gave us about a decade where we forgot among other things that the artist is allowed their bad takes! On the political dimension of this I’ll just say that I more and more think we all mistook aesthetic or even personal ethical questions for political prescriptions. Hopefully we’ve all moved beyond it.
Yes, I'm more in favor of the quietism since (with maximal irony) it provided the space in which to produce among other things gargantuan politically radical novels that everyone agrees are the last sure-thing masterpieces in Am. Lit. (Great American Novels are written in quietist decades between Awokenings: 1850s, 1880s-90s, 1920s, 1950s, 1980s-90s.) As for moving beyond it, I'm still an Anna-and-Dasha watcher and they said on the last one they now sense only bad things from the right-wing anons and plan to move away from them (despite quoting them the whole episode). I think they see that Trump has no heir on the right, that old-time religion and workhouse technocracy will be all that's left. The Dems offer workhouse technocracy in their own way, but if they can talked even marginally down from their new-time religion then everything should quiet down among the artistic set. All of this pending war with China, of course.
There’s room for quietism of course, but at a certain duration it starts to look (whether or not this is true or not is it’s own debate) like apathy to injustice etc. we’re probably doomed to periodic reprisals of this sort of thing. If we’re all still here and in a similar configuration it wouldn’t surprise me if there was an eruption of some kind in the 2060s. I think things will quiet down, are quieting down in Dem controlled spaces, but these things will of course take time. One almost picks and chooses prospective apocalypses- I’m personally more concerned about the prospect of a second Russian civil war/coup by even more belligerent factions!
It's definitely periodic, and we'll have the cycle again in 30 years. We had a minor version in the late 80s/early 90s, less intense than the 60s or 2010s, I suspect because it was derailed by the end of the Cold War. And yes, could be Russia, too!
"defended pedophilia and child pornography"—funny they hit her with that, the one thing (that and a related overestimation of Sade) she has in common with the intellectual left of the period.
I don’t exactly blame them; It is probably the easiest thing (beside the climate change denial) to hit her with, but yeah it loses something when you know that every second post structuralist thought broadly the same thing
I'll kind of miss the wokeness. It was so easy to be against it and to feel moral by being against it. In its absence I feel so much less certitude, and it's somehow a lot less fun to just write regular old fiction that has little chance of getting anyone worked up or offending anyone. Being transgressive for the past ten years has just been so simple. I doubt it'll ever be that easy in my lifetime again
Yes, it was definitely easier to transgress. Even transgressing against the becoming-hegemonic anti-wokeness doesn't quite have the same charge.
No because anti-wokeness means to provoke you, so you're just playing into it. To really transgress against it you must call it tedious, which it is, but which feels less fun. What's nice about 2023 is it is possible to believe in social justice and talk about racial disparities etc again without feeling guilty about it
The bar is very low right now. It used to feel almost dangerous to agree with Thomas Chatterton Williams—now everybody agrees with Steve Sailer!
Omg that guy. No kidding. And Chris Rufo is writing op-eds in the times in the same week he writes openly in compact that his aim is for a post-liberal society. Fun!
I have mixed feelings about this all (many of which I’ve hashed out with you over a he last few months) but maybe the simplest thought is that we’ve lived through an era of overcorrections: to the post-60s quietism of parts of the later 20th century, to that century’s belief that the artist was a kind of sanctioned madman whose genius justified or at least allowed us to ignore his (for it usually was he) misdeeds. All of which gave us about a decade where we forgot among other things that the artist is allowed their bad takes! On the political dimension of this I’ll just say that I more and more think we all mistook aesthetic or even personal ethical questions for political prescriptions. Hopefully we’ve all moved beyond it.
Yes, I'm more in favor of the quietism since (with maximal irony) it provided the space in which to produce among other things gargantuan politically radical novels that everyone agrees are the last sure-thing masterpieces in Am. Lit. (Great American Novels are written in quietist decades between Awokenings: 1850s, 1880s-90s, 1920s, 1950s, 1980s-90s.) As for moving beyond it, I'm still an Anna-and-Dasha watcher and they said on the last one they now sense only bad things from the right-wing anons and plan to move away from them (despite quoting them the whole episode). I think they see that Trump has no heir on the right, that old-time religion and workhouse technocracy will be all that's left. The Dems offer workhouse technocracy in their own way, but if they can talked even marginally down from their new-time religion then everything should quiet down among the artistic set. All of this pending war with China, of course.
There’s room for quietism of course, but at a certain duration it starts to look (whether or not this is true or not is it’s own debate) like apathy to injustice etc. we’re probably doomed to periodic reprisals of this sort of thing. If we’re all still here and in a similar configuration it wouldn’t surprise me if there was an eruption of some kind in the 2060s. I think things will quiet down, are quieting down in Dem controlled spaces, but these things will of course take time. One almost picks and chooses prospective apocalypses- I’m personally more concerned about the prospect of a second Russian civil war/coup by even more belligerent factions!
It's definitely periodic, and we'll have the cycle again in 30 years. We had a minor version in the late 80s/early 90s, less intense than the 60s or 2010s, I suspect because it was derailed by the end of the Cold War. And yes, could be Russia, too!
Lol speaking of the one in the 80s and 90s did you see this? https://twitter.com/ositanwanevu/status/1685281399920635904?s=46&t=cm9xZ6pClfnE0fwkUhgHiQ Paglia as proto JBP is a bit much even if I’m not completely convinced by her
"defended pedophilia and child pornography"—funny they hit her with that, the one thing (that and a related overestimation of Sade) she has in common with the intellectual left of the period.
I don’t exactly blame them; It is probably the easiest thing (beside the climate change denial) to hit her with, but yeah it loses something when you know that every second post structuralist thought broadly the same thing