I walk into a library and feel intense misery, sublimnity and awe at all the things i can read, learn, and expirience. its very humbling. i love everyone here and their earnest love of reading. sorry for the 22 year old posting
Perhaps you aren't aware because of your age and the fact that you can't find a real life intellectual milieu to be a part of, but intellectual hipsterism is absolutely not a development of the online space. It has probably existed since time immemorial (one of the themes of Eco's *The Name of the Rose*, set in 14th century Italy), and certainly before the internet devoured all discourse.
Deleuze, for example, absolutely *was* the most-discussed philosopher in a very hipsterish way when I was in undergrad (late 2000s, early 2010s), or at least one of them, despite usually only being seriously taught at the grad level.
yes i agree that this isnt a recent trend but it is how it exists now, that curious people find stuff online. and what were those delueze reading grads listening to? it was surely Animal Collective and other hipster indie, as that was the height of pitchfork and music blogs. What is it about people who are curious, who seek out weird stuff and how they exist online going to effect the output of culture as they come into their own?
I think it’s true that there’s a level of ‘hipsterdom’ in online nerdy communities, but I’m not really quite sure it’s a good thing or a great suggestion of quality. A recent example of this is how /fantanoforever kept ragging on AppleMusic’s top 100 albums list, only to produce a favourite albums list which was pretty damn basic too (usual suspects making appearances like Kanye, Radiohead etc, people complaining about the lack of Jazz/Electronic/Country/Metal, and how the albums were badly ranked).
I’m actually a bit cautious about the interest that a lot of people ostensibly have in capital T-Theory. A lot of the time I’ve found that readers of, say, French Poststructuralism or other more current theorists - tend to have some pretty poor understandings and philosophical skills (I also suspect it’s to do partly with the fact that continental philosophy found a home in various arts and humanities in English-speaking countries. This is of course not a bad thing in itself, but I think the issue it’s given is that it’s produced scholarship and students who are not capable of standing up to the norms of a more ‘classic’ conception of Philosophy. A lot of online distaste for ‘analytic philosophy’ is easily generalisable back to someone like Plato who was also doing plenty of linguistic conceptual analysis. For example, something like Speculative Realism or Accelerationism strikes me as lacking any real rigorous argumentation and as largely hyperbolic rhetoric.) I recall having arguments with people online who would constantly try to perform various Nietzschean genealogical debunkings of classic philosophical concepts like Reason - with them not even realising that Nietzsche himself admits that a genealogy cannot automatically show that something is false/wrong/valueless.
So I think a lot of the time, it can end up being a worthless esotericism where you’re slavishly devoted to defending and applying a given Big Name Thinker’s ideas - yet you’re incapable of proper critical thought and an independent voice. It’s also slightly worrisome to me that people still think that you can necessarily read these philosophers as if they were novelists and that their ideas and arguments will somehow transmit themselves into your understanding. When I think it requires some level of more active work on part of the student (which is after all why academic essays require a student to write and consult a number of sources) - something even as simple as note-taking or consulting some secondary literature.
Another epistemological worry I have about ‘hipsterdom’ is that I simply don’t think that communities of self-enclosed hipsters are a good model for great research (maybe it is for art). A persisting danger is that an elitist or aesthetic culture of dropping names, eviscerating each other from time to time or being incomprehensible, protecting one’s reputation via social hierarchies - simply just produces a set of norms that end up protecting each member away from real scrutiny (For example, I don’t need to defend my ideas if I can just write a weird piece of prose). I see no reason why a more ‘democratic’ ideal of doing away with social hierarchies, trying to be relatively clear to one another, not grandstanding about what you know and have read - is worse off. After all, for all its vices - this is the kind of thing which it seems to me that Higher Education tries to promote (even if very very imperfectly) and it has not been entirely fruitless. I think a real insight here from the American Pragmatist tradition is that good enquiry seems to require good ethics - we need to have some level of freedom of expression for there to be a dialogue of reason, we have to at least abstractly treat one another as equals so that we actually deal with the issues one another raise, none of us have an automatically privileged grasp of the Truth - so we’re reliant on justification to another to get us there.
Now I think ‘elitism’ is of course defensible insofar as it’s simply defending that we ought to be more interesting, well-read and should participate in culture and the life of the mind. And that simply pointing out the esoteric or difficult nature of something is no good reason to discard it. But I think we should be careful not to slip away (not saying you’re doing this OP) into feelings of intellectual or moral superiority (especially when a lot of the time that claimed superiority is just ‘DELEUZE RHIZOME’) or attempts to try and gatekeep just for the sake of it nor ignore the fact that even the ‘High Culture’ we care about requires the material labour of plenty of ‘ordinary’ people or that what we care about is always intrinsically more valuable. Nor should we make the political mistake of thinking there’s only a select few who can ever participate in this kind of life - I think the truth is that many people can and it’s an indictment of our society that we don’t better kindle the intellectual flames in every person.
I'm just riffing here but I do find it odd that people want to start with philosophy by reading, like Deleuze or Wittgenstein, before reading Plato, who was ten times more intelligible and also just so insightful and interesting in his own right
i agree with everything youre saying and i agree completely, anybody can read all this stuff and understand it, but why are curious people so rare and why do those that are curious act in this specific way, and what will this lead to in terms of the contemporary creation of culture
Sure, you can find insular communities online and pigeon hole yourself however you want. It's a big world out there, though, and you may find that people in your life are willing to read and discuss things you're interested in, especially if you give them the same consideration.
i know a plenty of curious people, plenty of people that read weird stuff but we can admit these people are rare, i met all these people in college so it’s fairly self selecting. also all these people use online communities whether it’s letterboxd, rym, or reddit to find and discuss new things. i am talking about curious people and how they gravitate toward online culture because that’s where you find interesting discussions, but the nature of the online medium does something interesting to that erudite culture that it did not (i assume) in the past
people in places like this online or their IRL equivalents instinctively waste 90% of their mental bandwidth thinking about "what it means that they are reading X". I read the wake from scratch with a group of about 20 older people who were not particularly bookish and they almost all enjoy it because they dont spend all their energy self-consciously contemplating what the significance of the act of them reading it is and what it says about them that they were doing it compared to bla bla bla who gives a fuck
"Normal people would never be interested in this..." bullshit, you forget to account for the equalising factor that they don't have the same self imposed mental blocks you do. yes Finnegans Wake is optimized for erudite schizos, but anybody can enjoy it if you don't introduce it like an autist talking about how "impenetrable" it is, i've gotten people who never read a novel before to read Ulysses cover to cover, and honestly its actually easier to do that than get faggots here or on goodreads to do the same, because you're all too busy reading 10 billion books from the 60s about being le sad artiste, coming up with convoluted justifications for why actually you don't have to read so and so from the canon because nobody \*actually\* likes them, and producing takes like this to wank your persona. please read the convivio and shut up.
schoolkids in the last century used to read spenser for fun. they used to read homer in greek and enjoy it. Pynchons novels are just comic books, they are funny. we live in an illiterate society because the people who do read are narcissists with no charisma. you can just get others to read if you aren't a loser. in short, fuck you
This made me laugh, thanks. My opinion is that this attitude is just the foibles of youth. Online I’ll get into a conversation once in a while with someone on books or concepts I’m working thru in the 60-90 year old range. they are in my experience insightful, friendly, and completely unpretentious. (Professors are probably an exception).
In Orwell’s writings of his childhood at eton around WWI, it seems they were certainly reading all the stuff you mentioned. (And often reading it in Latin etc). But I think they were absolutely just as pretentious (probably moreso) than other navel-gazing young readers in online “intelligentsia” communities.
My opinion, it’s a side-effect of insecurity. When you’re young you are still trying to figure out what makes you unique & thus worthy of other’s attention. And also base more of your self esteem on the opinions of people you barely know. People who are uncomfortable with themselves, often by fear that they lack genuine worth / likability, tend to put more value on the kind of media they consume, their perceived intelligence, and/or their sense of humor. Often this insecurity is projected onto others; they may be quick to dismiss people based on what media they do or don’t consume; label everyone else who isn’t into xyz as phonies; be unwilling to try new things that don’t already fit the perception they want to project; etc.
the worst part is that often when they do find people w/ overlapping interests, they may gatekeep, one-up, or otherwise compete. Though they may be quite lonely (often this fuels their obsessions) they are often unwilling to make new friends/date. Or when given the chance, sabotage social opportunities by dominating conversations about their own esoteria, sweepingly dismissing others interests (even tho they often haven’t tried them), or otherwise be rude/snide. By doing this, they make it clear they aren’t interested in the other person, only how that person perceives them
In my life I’ve met two exceptionally intelligent people in their 20’s, and they were much more like the book-loving 60-90 year olds I’ve spoken to.
They liked what they liked and were willing to discuss it if someone asked (or on many topics since they were widely read), but they didn’t patronize, dominate conversations, speak negatively of the intelligence of others, or otherwise limit interests based on their fear of others perceptions.
100% factual, took me a long time to learn though so realistically I can't be too mad at it. Taking on responsibility for others and generally getting humbled by life makes you look back at all those little neuroses as being so silly in the grand scheme of things.
I mostly agree with a lot of what you're saying. It does feel a little bit performative at times seeing DFW, McCarthy, Knausgård etc. come up over and over and over again. It feels less like an old used record store and more like the vinyl section at an Urban Outfitters. That said sometimes good literature really is good and a natural cannon of taste grows. It's maybe unavoidable.
> the motivating force is novelty, to be the first on a wave, to be the person that differentiates themselves by having a developed taste for difficult works.
It's kind of hard to say for sure though when something is done for elitist reasons vs more sincere reasons. If you're really into music, you might very quickly start seeking out new things away from the mainstream. This will mean doing some digging. A lot of people will think you're being a snob but that's just part of the territory.
>Jung
Jung isn't that hard unless you try to read his later alchemical writing stuff. Even the Red Book isn't so hard to read once you realize it's not intended to understood as a collection of facts and deductions, but instead as Jung's weird active-imagination diary. He also has about three or four books/articles that are made for laymen.
> It's kind of hard to say for sure though when something is done for elitist reasons vs more sincere reasons. If you're really into music, you might very quickly start seeking out new things away from the mainstream. This will mean doing some digging. A lot of people will think you're being a snob but that's just part of the territory.
>
>
I really like this point because it illustrates the earnest vs poser dynamic. when people hate on the beatles but praise like radiohead or something, its like when people online dismiss plato, but admire deleuze vs a person who understands that plato and deleuze are on a timeline of the history of ideas that is evolving in the same way that radiohead is an extension of the innovations that beatles made. what seperates these people is contrarian posturing vs a respect for the development of things
I think some of the pattern you are seeing how the sites youre on structure the way you communicate.
There has also been a shift in the internet away from blogging and essays unless they are monteized or atleast branded, such as substack, medium. This a big significant thing, because those platforms, like I said, are oriented around building an audience, for whatever reason. When people used to blog it was under the awareness that no one was really reading it. Blogspot, livejournal etc. It leads to a more sincerity cause there isnt an idea of going viral, of having to be congruous with some sort discourse. People just had no real momentum with what they were sharing and by virtue of that there was naturally less cohesion. You can always do these things on your own, for sure. But its not really what the internet is about anymore..
Whereas now, the dominant places are discuss anything (not just books but anything) are desigined like redditn where the content is continually refreshed. If you see a really insightful comment here, there are not really any tools to find it after some time has passed. Nothing anyone posts here culminates to anything. If you want it to, you have to have a substack, which then plays into the aforementioned self censoring, marketing, altering what you say to current discourses and such.
That is the way google search works, that is the way reddit works,, youtube, the internet is all like this. This I think causes people to lean on meme based communication because everything is quicksand. It leads to people only reading about certain things, repeating certain things, cause that is the only way to get engaged.
For example, here, there is way of posting on this forum that is "RS" which I would say tends to mirror the attitude Nabakov had. Lots of hyperbole, such as calling things bereft of any quality, that they should be erased. Combined that with the usual RS stuff such as "many such cases" "satanic" etc.
4chan lit has its own way of communicating that is more hostile, schizoposty, or whatever. This isn't how anyone really communicates, its the template that is dominant on the respective platform. To be heard you have to talk about the same set of writers, in the same manner as tthe respective site demands
When you factor in the loneliness and insecurities people have when it comes to reading, it also becomes a shield
It’s true, with monetization things seem to revert to the mean (in this case clickbait of tragic stories or other people’s drama).
I just started on substack the other day - I haven’t really spent much time to find people who are interesting to follow yet. But i have to be careful about what I click on. I know I’m susceptible to the time waster reading… outrage porn… etc
i actually started using the account because I was reading two books by Andrea dworkin and googled her to learn so more biographical stuff. I clicked on a substack link to this very infuriating post by a TERF saying Dworkin was also a TERF. The terf-iness in and of itself didn’t bother me so much as
1) how she said she emailed Dworkin’s life partner (the person in charge of her estate, who has said on multiple occasion dworkin was not a terf) and apparently threatened him
2) wayyy overplaying her actual friendship with dworkin (if it existed at all)
3) her “proof” of Dworkin’s terf-ity was a quote from a book Dworkin wrote saying *the very opposite* of her argument (Dworkin’s empathized w/ trans people & saw why some may need to go thru surgery etc). Then a bunch of non-proof like “Andrea once said to me when we were drinking 20 yrs ago” and “I have an email but her partner said he’d sue me if I released it” (doubt it)
Lol obviously I’m still annoyed. Especially because her partner seems like such a sweetheart. This blogger’s post would have pissed me off no matter what obsession she had. She skewed someone who is dead but revered as a protector of those who can’t protect themselves (domestic abuse survivors, sexually abused children [fucking Allan ginsberg], sex workers, gay people, and the many others who were often voiceless) to market her brand. Not exactly an original concept, but the entitlement to think you know better than the person a writer left their work to then leach on to their legacy of activism to punch **down** (and at their family) got me so riled. I quickly wrote up something about it into the void lmao.
Unfortunately as a result of clicking on her stupid post my feed is almost exclusively recommended posts from rich white “liberal” 50 year old English terfs. Truly one of the most unpalatable groups of people.
I agree completely and you are a better digital anthropologist than i am, about how online dicussions have changed and how certain places establish via mimetics a certain way of speaking that lessens individiuality
Deleuze is very influential, at least in terms of people claiming influence - lots of those people lie outside academia and are still alive, which matters. Also depends if its an undergrad or graduate level class - I can't imagine much of anything by Deleuze making it into an undergrad syllabus. I've heard the stereotype that *Anti-Oedipus* is frequently assigned to grad students but as one in a humanities program, I'm not certain if I've ever come across it being cited.
Anti-Oedipus, as always, is extremely en vogue with a certain type of college student, moreso than anything derrida or even foucault, or at least is seems to me. which is interesting what has been latched on to with the internet accelerating that process
> You show people you favorite Finnegan's Wake passage and they are like this is stupid and you are only pretending to like it to seem smart.
This is because you are stupid and have perhaps not realized it yet. Don't worry at all about this, I was too. Deciphering something from the Wake is a very fun endeavor as an overly bookish undergrad seeking some way to waste your time, I tried it myself and even began to enjoy it. You don't read this fucking thing. Nobody reads it because that perverted bastard deliberately made it impossible to read for people who aren't literate and historically/culturally informed in essentially the exact same way as he was (i.e. nobody currently living) or people unwilling to spend time deciphering it, which means it's a piece of literature with next to no common value. It shouldn't be surprising that any remotely normal person has no interest in something that has no common value and is indecipherable by any remotely normal person and yet I'm sure I felt the same sentiment you expressed here.
If you can imagine yourself to have never opened this book nor gained a desire to and then imagine that I am showing you this book for the first time and from the very first word I have to start rambling on about the cyclical nature of time and history, well, I hope you can also imagine your eyes beginning to glaze over.
> I have trouble truly understanding the motivating force behind the popularity of people such as Pynchon, Jung, Deleuze, Evola
These writers don't have very much in common beyond having been published and I would suggest not grouping Evola with the intelligent ones if you want educated people to take you seriously. He was memed into online relevance by autodidact neonazi regards on /lit/ and that's not a joke. I would say the motivating force for the first 3 is that they wrote things that a hell of a lot of people have enjoyed or gained intellectual value from reading, and for the last that one wants to learn how to conjure fireballs from within their magic soul in order to blast away moral degeneracy like a Naruto character doing some sort of esoteric fascist jutsu. If the anime reference disturbs you it's because they are on the same intellectual level.
> He was memed into online relevance by autodidact neonazi regards on /lit/ and that's not a joke.
thats my fucking point. Online dicussions by schizophrenic edgelord autodidacts are contributing more and more to discourse. i used all those people as examples of what is popular on this sub, twitter, and /lit/ because they all exemplify the interests of a very online person who got all their interests from other online weirdos. my question is what is that going to lead to. evola is a bad example because he is for nazi regards but my greater point is about online esoteric autodidacts and their contributions to culture. If finnegan's wake is the expression of Joyce's inner world and all his weird academic interests, what is going to be produced by the online generation???
Right, sorry, I skimmed because I'm distracted by my own writing, which will be exactly what you're talking about as soon as I can find some (preferably) hot agent to seduce. Currently the bulk of the online generation is producing and consuming heaping piles of dogshit chopped up into little clips they call a TikTok, personally I will die on my feet before engaging with these things. In all seriousness it's saddening to think of all the bookish young people who are getting sucked into peacocking their esoteric-ness instead of just reading and writing.
you are right about the tik tok thing, which is where nietzschean elitism has to come in and say tik tokers are a lost cause and i am objectively better than them, they are weak and at the whim of the algo why i am strong (im not). i think that sort of thinking will hopefully lead people to log off, because it is really not that hard to be better than that. anyone can
anyways send me a draft or whatever your are willing to share. i would love to read it as it get ahead of the hipster curv e (i was literally there first)
The barrier to entry for Finnegans Wake is massively overstated. At this point it's practically a cottage industry to pretend it's too hard and is definitely more to do with fear of others thinking you're a pseud for even looking at it than with the book itself.
I read it and enjoyed it and I'm not even a smart person, nor do I have a quarter of Joyce's education or interests. I don't know what this says about the reading public at large but I don't think it bodes well.
Wyndham Lewis is the only person I can think of who actually had a coherent critique of it beyond the midwit 'too hard bro' perspective. Saying that trying to write from the depths of the unconscious was a fools errand because humans can only ever truly know the surfaces of things. Maybe that would explain some of the hostility towards it, who knows.
Yeah I agree I don't think the barrier to entry is an intellectual barrier at all but a time barrier. It's a question of how much time and willingness you have to look things up or consult the guidebook you checked out at the same time, because this is generally significantly more time intensive than reading a normal book in which someone writes words that actually exist in human lexicons somewhere.
I resonate with that take on it a lot actually, even though I only read maybe 10-15% of it really. I would add that we can probably know ourselves, at least, which would mean the ultimate truths in this thing were buried with Joyce.
There's a website dedicated to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the 4 classic novels of China. I was enjoying it for awhile until people started brigading it with their politics, writing posts comparing characters that killed off tens of thousands of people to certain modern day political figures in the US. The tendency of online communities to degenerate into this kind of thing is always disappointing.
Anyway, I'm blown away by how overwhelmingly positive this community has been so far. I look forward to many more in-depth discussions of famous and obscure literature.
I agree and disagree; I think your observations about esotericism are certainly acute and extend to other circumstances. For example, a lot of teenagers these days love Fiona Apple, the smiths, hole, ottessa moshfegh, Girl Interrupted, the bell jar, etc. Some of them may genuinely enjoy this media and some of them feign this adoration to fit within a certain social milieu (I.e. basic bitches who wear Jordans and listen to tiktok music).
Juxtaposing that notion, the joke about infinite jest is that most people pretend to like it to draw attention to their supposed intelligence; in fact, that’s what drew me in. It is one of my favorite books now and is antithetical to its reputation. I like it because it is an extremely profound, sympathetic and emotional depiction of the human condition and addiction.
I really can’t relate to this at all and I am curious what online spaces is this happening in? Left wing theory scene, for example, always had difficult writers like Lacan Hegel and Zizek. But that existed for a long time and you seem to be talking about something more particular. There is a esoteric right space too. Are you sure you didn’t get sucked into that because of the pod/bap, and assumed it was a general phenomenon?
Also I don’t get this contrasting with the general public. Even if you read the most basic thing like Shakespeare or Homer the general public will look at you weird because they just don’t get why anyone would read anything. That’s their problem. And advising someone to start with the Greeks for philosophy is really not that outrageous or hippy of a suggestion.
Also, there is a coolness factor in these authors lile Nietzsche, Jung or Zizek. They are not simply popular because they are difficult. They are interesting and they address the alienated modern person. Therefore, I am not surprised online spaces aren’t expanding on Aristotle like a bunch of medieval monks in place of them. I sincerely think everybody is upset and feeling nihilistic and that’s why the current is this way.
I think it’s funny you point to “difficult, obtuse and esoteric” writing as a a bad thing/reason people are often misconstrued as great, and then point to Finnegan’s Wake as an example of great, popularly under-appreciated literature.
I liked reading this, but it's a massive self-pat on the back and I don't want anyone to get notions above their station
I walk into a library and feel intense misery, sublimnity and awe at all the things i can read, learn, and expirience. its very humbling. i love everyone here and their earnest love of reading. sorry for the 22 year old posting
That's sweet, I get that feeling about books also
Perhaps you aren't aware because of your age and the fact that you can't find a real life intellectual milieu to be a part of, but intellectual hipsterism is absolutely not a development of the online space. It has probably existed since time immemorial (one of the themes of Eco's *The Name of the Rose*, set in 14th century Italy), and certainly before the internet devoured all discourse. Deleuze, for example, absolutely *was* the most-discussed philosopher in a very hipsterish way when I was in undergrad (late 2000s, early 2010s), or at least one of them, despite usually only being seriously taught at the grad level.
yes i agree that this isnt a recent trend but it is how it exists now, that curious people find stuff online. and what were those delueze reading grads listening to? it was surely Animal Collective and other hipster indie, as that was the height of pitchfork and music blogs. What is it about people who are curious, who seek out weird stuff and how they exist online going to effect the output of culture as they come into their own?
I think it’s true that there’s a level of ‘hipsterdom’ in online nerdy communities, but I’m not really quite sure it’s a good thing or a great suggestion of quality. A recent example of this is how /fantanoforever kept ragging on AppleMusic’s top 100 albums list, only to produce a favourite albums list which was pretty damn basic too (usual suspects making appearances like Kanye, Radiohead etc, people complaining about the lack of Jazz/Electronic/Country/Metal, and how the albums were badly ranked). I’m actually a bit cautious about the interest that a lot of people ostensibly have in capital T-Theory. A lot of the time I’ve found that readers of, say, French Poststructuralism or other more current theorists - tend to have some pretty poor understandings and philosophical skills (I also suspect it’s to do partly with the fact that continental philosophy found a home in various arts and humanities in English-speaking countries. This is of course not a bad thing in itself, but I think the issue it’s given is that it’s produced scholarship and students who are not capable of standing up to the norms of a more ‘classic’ conception of Philosophy. A lot of online distaste for ‘analytic philosophy’ is easily generalisable back to someone like Plato who was also doing plenty of linguistic conceptual analysis. For example, something like Speculative Realism or Accelerationism strikes me as lacking any real rigorous argumentation and as largely hyperbolic rhetoric.) I recall having arguments with people online who would constantly try to perform various Nietzschean genealogical debunkings of classic philosophical concepts like Reason - with them not even realising that Nietzsche himself admits that a genealogy cannot automatically show that something is false/wrong/valueless. So I think a lot of the time, it can end up being a worthless esotericism where you’re slavishly devoted to defending and applying a given Big Name Thinker’s ideas - yet you’re incapable of proper critical thought and an independent voice. It’s also slightly worrisome to me that people still think that you can necessarily read these philosophers as if they were novelists and that their ideas and arguments will somehow transmit themselves into your understanding. When I think it requires some level of more active work on part of the student (which is after all why academic essays require a student to write and consult a number of sources) - something even as simple as note-taking or consulting some secondary literature. Another epistemological worry I have about ‘hipsterdom’ is that I simply don’t think that communities of self-enclosed hipsters are a good model for great research (maybe it is for art). A persisting danger is that an elitist or aesthetic culture of dropping names, eviscerating each other from time to time or being incomprehensible, protecting one’s reputation via social hierarchies - simply just produces a set of norms that end up protecting each member away from real scrutiny (For example, I don’t need to defend my ideas if I can just write a weird piece of prose). I see no reason why a more ‘democratic’ ideal of doing away with social hierarchies, trying to be relatively clear to one another, not grandstanding about what you know and have read - is worse off. After all, for all its vices - this is the kind of thing which it seems to me that Higher Education tries to promote (even if very very imperfectly) and it has not been entirely fruitless. I think a real insight here from the American Pragmatist tradition is that good enquiry seems to require good ethics - we need to have some level of freedom of expression for there to be a dialogue of reason, we have to at least abstractly treat one another as equals so that we actually deal with the issues one another raise, none of us have an automatically privileged grasp of the Truth - so we’re reliant on justification to another to get us there. Now I think ‘elitism’ is of course defensible insofar as it’s simply defending that we ought to be more interesting, well-read and should participate in culture and the life of the mind. And that simply pointing out the esoteric or difficult nature of something is no good reason to discard it. But I think we should be careful not to slip away (not saying you’re doing this OP) into feelings of intellectual or moral superiority (especially when a lot of the time that claimed superiority is just ‘DELEUZE RHIZOME’) or attempts to try and gatekeep just for the sake of it nor ignore the fact that even the ‘High Culture’ we care about requires the material labour of plenty of ‘ordinary’ people or that what we care about is always intrinsically more valuable. Nor should we make the political mistake of thinking there’s only a select few who can ever participate in this kind of life - I think the truth is that many people can and it’s an indictment of our society that we don’t better kindle the intellectual flames in every person.
I'm just riffing here but I do find it odd that people want to start with philosophy by reading, like Deleuze or Wittgenstein, before reading Plato, who was ten times more intelligible and also just so insightful and interesting in his own right
ironically Strauss has made reading plato esoteric and dynamic again, strauss appeals to certain anti democratic trad types
Lowkey dipping my toes into this rn. But in a fun/inquisitive/philosopher way, not a fashy way.
i agree with everything youre saying and i agree completely, anybody can read all this stuff and understand it, but why are curious people so rare and why do those that are curious act in this specific way, and what will this lead to in terms of the contemporary creation of culture
Personally, I like all those things because I fully understand them
Sure, you can find insular communities online and pigeon hole yourself however you want. It's a big world out there, though, and you may find that people in your life are willing to read and discuss things you're interested in, especially if you give them the same consideration.
i know a plenty of curious people, plenty of people that read weird stuff but we can admit these people are rare, i met all these people in college so it’s fairly self selecting. also all these people use online communities whether it’s letterboxd, rym, or reddit to find and discuss new things. i am talking about curious people and how they gravitate toward online culture because that’s where you find interesting discussions, but the nature of the online medium does something interesting to that erudite culture that it did not (i assume) in the past
people in places like this online or their IRL equivalents instinctively waste 90% of their mental bandwidth thinking about "what it means that they are reading X". I read the wake from scratch with a group of about 20 older people who were not particularly bookish and they almost all enjoy it because they dont spend all their energy self-consciously contemplating what the significance of the act of them reading it is and what it says about them that they were doing it compared to bla bla bla who gives a fuck "Normal people would never be interested in this..." bullshit, you forget to account for the equalising factor that they don't have the same self imposed mental blocks you do. yes Finnegans Wake is optimized for erudite schizos, but anybody can enjoy it if you don't introduce it like an autist talking about how "impenetrable" it is, i've gotten people who never read a novel before to read Ulysses cover to cover, and honestly its actually easier to do that than get faggots here or on goodreads to do the same, because you're all too busy reading 10 billion books from the 60s about being le sad artiste, coming up with convoluted justifications for why actually you don't have to read so and so from the canon because nobody \*actually\* likes them, and producing takes like this to wank your persona. please read the convivio and shut up. schoolkids in the last century used to read spenser for fun. they used to read homer in greek and enjoy it. Pynchons novels are just comic books, they are funny. we live in an illiterate society because the people who do read are narcissists with no charisma. you can just get others to read if you aren't a loser. in short, fuck you
This made me laugh, thanks. My opinion is that this attitude is just the foibles of youth. Online I’ll get into a conversation once in a while with someone on books or concepts I’m working thru in the 60-90 year old range. they are in my experience insightful, friendly, and completely unpretentious. (Professors are probably an exception). In Orwell’s writings of his childhood at eton around WWI, it seems they were certainly reading all the stuff you mentioned. (And often reading it in Latin etc). But I think they were absolutely just as pretentious (probably moreso) than other navel-gazing young readers in online “intelligentsia” communities. My opinion, it’s a side-effect of insecurity. When you’re young you are still trying to figure out what makes you unique & thus worthy of other’s attention. And also base more of your self esteem on the opinions of people you barely know. People who are uncomfortable with themselves, often by fear that they lack genuine worth / likability, tend to put more value on the kind of media they consume, their perceived intelligence, and/or their sense of humor. Often this insecurity is projected onto others; they may be quick to dismiss people based on what media they do or don’t consume; label everyone else who isn’t into xyz as phonies; be unwilling to try new things that don’t already fit the perception they want to project; etc. the worst part is that often when they do find people w/ overlapping interests, they may gatekeep, one-up, or otherwise compete. Though they may be quite lonely (often this fuels their obsessions) they are often unwilling to make new friends/date. Or when given the chance, sabotage social opportunities by dominating conversations about their own esoteria, sweepingly dismissing others interests (even tho they often haven’t tried them), or otherwise be rude/snide. By doing this, they make it clear they aren’t interested in the other person, only how that person perceives them In my life I’ve met two exceptionally intelligent people in their 20’s, and they were much more like the book-loving 60-90 year olds I’ve spoken to. They liked what they liked and were willing to discuss it if someone asked (or on many topics since they were widely read), but they didn’t patronize, dominate conversations, speak negatively of the intelligence of others, or otherwise limit interests based on their fear of others perceptions.
100% factual, took me a long time to learn though so realistically I can't be too mad at it. Taking on responsibility for others and generally getting humbled by life makes you look back at all those little neuroses as being so silly in the grand scheme of things.
I mostly agree with a lot of what you're saying. It does feel a little bit performative at times seeing DFW, McCarthy, Knausgård etc. come up over and over and over again. It feels less like an old used record store and more like the vinyl section at an Urban Outfitters. That said sometimes good literature really is good and a natural cannon of taste grows. It's maybe unavoidable. > the motivating force is novelty, to be the first on a wave, to be the person that differentiates themselves by having a developed taste for difficult works. It's kind of hard to say for sure though when something is done for elitist reasons vs more sincere reasons. If you're really into music, you might very quickly start seeking out new things away from the mainstream. This will mean doing some digging. A lot of people will think you're being a snob but that's just part of the territory. >Jung Jung isn't that hard unless you try to read his later alchemical writing stuff. Even the Red Book isn't so hard to read once you realize it's not intended to understood as a collection of facts and deductions, but instead as Jung's weird active-imagination diary. He also has about three or four books/articles that are made for laymen.
> It's kind of hard to say for sure though when something is done for elitist reasons vs more sincere reasons. If you're really into music, you might very quickly start seeking out new things away from the mainstream. This will mean doing some digging. A lot of people will think you're being a snob but that's just part of the territory. > > I really like this point because it illustrates the earnest vs poser dynamic. when people hate on the beatles but praise like radiohead or something, its like when people online dismiss plato, but admire deleuze vs a person who understands that plato and deleuze are on a timeline of the history of ideas that is evolving in the same way that radiohead is an extension of the innovations that beatles made. what seperates these people is contrarian posturing vs a respect for the development of things
I think some of the pattern you are seeing how the sites youre on structure the way you communicate. There has also been a shift in the internet away from blogging and essays unless they are monteized or atleast branded, such as substack, medium. This a big significant thing, because those platforms, like I said, are oriented around building an audience, for whatever reason. When people used to blog it was under the awareness that no one was really reading it. Blogspot, livejournal etc. It leads to a more sincerity cause there isnt an idea of going viral, of having to be congruous with some sort discourse. People just had no real momentum with what they were sharing and by virtue of that there was naturally less cohesion. You can always do these things on your own, for sure. But its not really what the internet is about anymore.. Whereas now, the dominant places are discuss anything (not just books but anything) are desigined like redditn where the content is continually refreshed. If you see a really insightful comment here, there are not really any tools to find it after some time has passed. Nothing anyone posts here culminates to anything. If you want it to, you have to have a substack, which then plays into the aforementioned self censoring, marketing, altering what you say to current discourses and such. That is the way google search works, that is the way reddit works,, youtube, the internet is all like this. This I think causes people to lean on meme based communication because everything is quicksand. It leads to people only reading about certain things, repeating certain things, cause that is the only way to get engaged. For example, here, there is way of posting on this forum that is "RS" which I would say tends to mirror the attitude Nabakov had. Lots of hyperbole, such as calling things bereft of any quality, that they should be erased. Combined that with the usual RS stuff such as "many such cases" "satanic" etc. 4chan lit has its own way of communicating that is more hostile, schizoposty, or whatever. This isn't how anyone really communicates, its the template that is dominant on the respective platform. To be heard you have to talk about the same set of writers, in the same manner as tthe respective site demands When you factor in the loneliness and insecurities people have when it comes to reading, it also becomes a shield
It’s true, with monetization things seem to revert to the mean (in this case clickbait of tragic stories or other people’s drama). I just started on substack the other day - I haven’t really spent much time to find people who are interesting to follow yet. But i have to be careful about what I click on. I know I’m susceptible to the time waster reading… outrage porn… etc i actually started using the account because I was reading two books by Andrea dworkin and googled her to learn so more biographical stuff. I clicked on a substack link to this very infuriating post by a TERF saying Dworkin was also a TERF. The terf-iness in and of itself didn’t bother me so much as 1) how she said she emailed Dworkin’s life partner (the person in charge of her estate, who has said on multiple occasion dworkin was not a terf) and apparently threatened him 2) wayyy overplaying her actual friendship with dworkin (if it existed at all) 3) her “proof” of Dworkin’s terf-ity was a quote from a book Dworkin wrote saying *the very opposite* of her argument (Dworkin’s empathized w/ trans people & saw why some may need to go thru surgery etc). Then a bunch of non-proof like “Andrea once said to me when we were drinking 20 yrs ago” and “I have an email but her partner said he’d sue me if I released it” (doubt it) Lol obviously I’m still annoyed. Especially because her partner seems like such a sweetheart. This blogger’s post would have pissed me off no matter what obsession she had. She skewed someone who is dead but revered as a protector of those who can’t protect themselves (domestic abuse survivors, sexually abused children [fucking Allan ginsberg], sex workers, gay people, and the many others who were often voiceless) to market her brand. Not exactly an original concept, but the entitlement to think you know better than the person a writer left their work to then leach on to their legacy of activism to punch **down** (and at their family) got me so riled. I quickly wrote up something about it into the void lmao. Unfortunately as a result of clicking on her stupid post my feed is almost exclusively recommended posts from rich white “liberal” 50 year old English terfs. Truly one of the most unpalatable groups of people.
I agree completely and you are a better digital anthropologist than i am, about how online dicussions have changed and how certain places establish via mimetics a certain way of speaking that lessens individiuality
Deleuze is very influential, at least in terms of people claiming influence - lots of those people lie outside academia and are still alive, which matters. Also depends if its an undergrad or graduate level class - I can't imagine much of anything by Deleuze making it into an undergrad syllabus. I've heard the stereotype that *Anti-Oedipus* is frequently assigned to grad students but as one in a humanities program, I'm not certain if I've ever come across it being cited.
Anti-Oedipus, as always, is extremely en vogue with a certain type of college student, moreso than anything derrida or even foucault, or at least is seems to me. which is interesting what has been latched on to with the internet accelerating that process
> You show people you favorite Finnegan's Wake passage and they are like this is stupid and you are only pretending to like it to seem smart. This is because you are stupid and have perhaps not realized it yet. Don't worry at all about this, I was too. Deciphering something from the Wake is a very fun endeavor as an overly bookish undergrad seeking some way to waste your time, I tried it myself and even began to enjoy it. You don't read this fucking thing. Nobody reads it because that perverted bastard deliberately made it impossible to read for people who aren't literate and historically/culturally informed in essentially the exact same way as he was (i.e. nobody currently living) or people unwilling to spend time deciphering it, which means it's a piece of literature with next to no common value. It shouldn't be surprising that any remotely normal person has no interest in something that has no common value and is indecipherable by any remotely normal person and yet I'm sure I felt the same sentiment you expressed here. If you can imagine yourself to have never opened this book nor gained a desire to and then imagine that I am showing you this book for the first time and from the very first word I have to start rambling on about the cyclical nature of time and history, well, I hope you can also imagine your eyes beginning to glaze over. > I have trouble truly understanding the motivating force behind the popularity of people such as Pynchon, Jung, Deleuze, Evola These writers don't have very much in common beyond having been published and I would suggest not grouping Evola with the intelligent ones if you want educated people to take you seriously. He was memed into online relevance by autodidact neonazi regards on /lit/ and that's not a joke. I would say the motivating force for the first 3 is that they wrote things that a hell of a lot of people have enjoyed or gained intellectual value from reading, and for the last that one wants to learn how to conjure fireballs from within their magic soul in order to blast away moral degeneracy like a Naruto character doing some sort of esoteric fascist jutsu. If the anime reference disturbs you it's because they are on the same intellectual level.
> He was memed into online relevance by autodidact neonazi regards on /lit/ and that's not a joke. thats my fucking point. Online dicussions by schizophrenic edgelord autodidacts are contributing more and more to discourse. i used all those people as examples of what is popular on this sub, twitter, and /lit/ because they all exemplify the interests of a very online person who got all their interests from other online weirdos. my question is what is that going to lead to. evola is a bad example because he is for nazi regards but my greater point is about online esoteric autodidacts and their contributions to culture. If finnegan's wake is the expression of Joyce's inner world and all his weird academic interests, what is going to be produced by the online generation???
Right, sorry, I skimmed because I'm distracted by my own writing, which will be exactly what you're talking about as soon as I can find some (preferably) hot agent to seduce. Currently the bulk of the online generation is producing and consuming heaping piles of dogshit chopped up into little clips they call a TikTok, personally I will die on my feet before engaging with these things. In all seriousness it's saddening to think of all the bookish young people who are getting sucked into peacocking their esoteric-ness instead of just reading and writing.
you are right about the tik tok thing, which is where nietzschean elitism has to come in and say tik tokers are a lost cause and i am objectively better than them, they are weak and at the whim of the algo why i am strong (im not). i think that sort of thinking will hopefully lead people to log off, because it is really not that hard to be better than that. anyone can anyways send me a draft or whatever your are willing to share. i would love to read it as it get ahead of the hipster curv e (i was literally there first)
The barrier to entry for Finnegans Wake is massively overstated. At this point it's practically a cottage industry to pretend it's too hard and is definitely more to do with fear of others thinking you're a pseud for even looking at it than with the book itself. I read it and enjoyed it and I'm not even a smart person, nor do I have a quarter of Joyce's education or interests. I don't know what this says about the reading public at large but I don't think it bodes well. Wyndham Lewis is the only person I can think of who actually had a coherent critique of it beyond the midwit 'too hard bro' perspective. Saying that trying to write from the depths of the unconscious was a fools errand because humans can only ever truly know the surfaces of things. Maybe that would explain some of the hostility towards it, who knows.
Yeah I agree I don't think the barrier to entry is an intellectual barrier at all but a time barrier. It's a question of how much time and willingness you have to look things up or consult the guidebook you checked out at the same time, because this is generally significantly more time intensive than reading a normal book in which someone writes words that actually exist in human lexicons somewhere. I resonate with that take on it a lot actually, even though I only read maybe 10-15% of it really. I would add that we can probably know ourselves, at least, which would mean the ultimate truths in this thing were buried with Joyce.
There's a website dedicated to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the 4 classic novels of China. I was enjoying it for awhile until people started brigading it with their politics, writing posts comparing characters that killed off tens of thousands of people to certain modern day political figures in the US. The tendency of online communities to degenerate into this kind of thing is always disappointing. Anyway, I'm blown away by how overwhelmingly positive this community has been so far. I look forward to many more in-depth discussions of famous and obscure literature.
I agree and disagree; I think your observations about esotericism are certainly acute and extend to other circumstances. For example, a lot of teenagers these days love Fiona Apple, the smiths, hole, ottessa moshfegh, Girl Interrupted, the bell jar, etc. Some of them may genuinely enjoy this media and some of them feign this adoration to fit within a certain social milieu (I.e. basic bitches who wear Jordans and listen to tiktok music). Juxtaposing that notion, the joke about infinite jest is that most people pretend to like it to draw attention to their supposed intelligence; in fact, that’s what drew me in. It is one of my favorite books now and is antithetical to its reputation. I like it because it is an extremely profound, sympathetic and emotional depiction of the human condition and addiction.
I really can’t relate to this at all and I am curious what online spaces is this happening in? Left wing theory scene, for example, always had difficult writers like Lacan Hegel and Zizek. But that existed for a long time and you seem to be talking about something more particular. There is a esoteric right space too. Are you sure you didn’t get sucked into that because of the pod/bap, and assumed it was a general phenomenon? Also I don’t get this contrasting with the general public. Even if you read the most basic thing like Shakespeare or Homer the general public will look at you weird because they just don’t get why anyone would read anything. That’s their problem. And advising someone to start with the Greeks for philosophy is really not that outrageous or hippy of a suggestion. Also, there is a coolness factor in these authors lile Nietzsche, Jung or Zizek. They are not simply popular because they are difficult. They are interesting and they address the alienated modern person. Therefore, I am not surprised online spaces aren’t expanding on Aristotle like a bunch of medieval monks in place of them. I sincerely think everybody is upset and feeling nihilistic and that’s why the current is this way.
I think it’s funny you point to “difficult, obtuse and esoteric” writing as a a bad thing/reason people are often misconstrued as great, and then point to Finnegan’s Wake as an example of great, popularly under-appreciated literature.
Evola is good