please temp-ban Mordy from the Thatcher Is Dead thread

theres a web comic for everything now

http://www.ssobrasil.com/forum/public/style_emoticons/default/suicide.gif

comics r bad ppl shd grow the heck up

joeks on u thats a webcomic, from the web

http://shermanslagoon.com

shermans march to the lagoon

this approach of all out internet warfare is a recipe for burnout that is destined to rob the movement of valuable people and any sort of wisdom earned through experience, just feeding more young virtual cannon fodder through the humanities to battlefield pipeline

tbf this same cycle exists in "irl" or "afk" w/e activism too--people who've read lots of critical theory going all to the wall and maybe winning a few, maybe losing a few, then realizing society still sucks and all their righteous energy is burnt up for a while. the unique danger of this stuff on the web i think is that the cycles are faster and the echo chambers longer and more hardened from the outside world: you're supported by your community and shielded from damaging things unless the damaging things are explicitly a target for you to direct antagonistic energy at, so you come out the echo chamber a spent husk disillusioned with everything in the world as much as the internecine warfare within your echo chamber.

the web is a realm of pure ideology for ideologies sake, an ideologysphere, its insane and terrifying

i think if you read "critical theory" and come away thinking you can change the world through angry tweeting you've probably read the wrong theory or read it very, very poorly.

idk there is a certain underlying logic there, like the critical theory might not be saying that u can change the world through tweeting but then again it itself is in the form of just a very long tweet

i used to have a friend who went to seminary who liked to say all the problems with christianity would be solved if people just "read the bible." same thing applies to theory some respects.

read yr blogs ppl, read yr blogs

maybe it's like okay Adorno makes it seem pretty hopeless but if he had been alive for Twitter he would've understood its revolutionary potential

Adorno turned his back on actual political activity, arguing that the relentless negativity of dialectical criticism was the only thing that could stay true to the progressive spirit of the Enlightenment that history had failed to actualize. This is not a far cry from the "sense of total war" lagoon describes, although it's true adorno's writings are more careful and nuanced than most tumblrs. The turn from activism to criticism ppl are describing seems to exist in the earliest texts considered part of the critical theory canon.*

*Not disparaging anyone here, least of all not Adorno

'the only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption'

it always bums me out that there are ppl out there depressed because they read some bs critical theory about the ennui of late capitalism

id actually be curious to know *which* theorists--if any--really inspire the "internet social justice" culture. i dont follow it very much so i dont know.

in my case i was depressed before and found that sort of thing sustaining and inspiring on the whole even if there is a lot of misleading crap in there. xp bet he's thinking of jameson

bell hooks seems real popular xp

hooks, lorde, foucault, a scoop of adorno in there, and then all of it on puree until you have a nice flavorless slurry

dudebros love zizek

like its less critical theory i think than like second-gen popularizations of ideas that originally were proposed by critical theory?

xps

jameson, especially later jameson, is pretty damn nuanced and not very easily appropriated to this or that activist agenda. despite some marxist protestations otherwise he's always seemed more interested in the status and possibility of *theory* as a discipline. im working my way through all of his stuff lately so i could be wrong.

i was thinking maybe foucault--especially "history of sexuality" foucault?

yeah the only people i know who talk jameson regularly are not enmeshed in this culture really

much prefer the bell hooks personal experience vein of theory influenced twitter to the adorno actually socialism ppl myself

like its less critical theory i think than like second-gen popularizations of ideas that originally were proposed by critical theory?

yeah this is what i mean. i dont think a careful reading of foucault or whoever is really gonna jive with what some of these types seem to think they are doing. that's what good about theory--it's in tension with activism. this doesn't mean dont be an activist but it does allow you to critique it, and it leaves you open to critique yourself.

ftr the most textbook tumblry social justice person i know is writing their grad thesis on *capitalism & schizophrenia*

my method for judging philosophers: how awful are their admirers on twitter

i judge by their quote bots

can I be an ally if I don't have a twitter?

i judge by their quote bots

― ryan, Friday, February 27, 2015 2:06 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a good praxis too tbf

I get the maybe ungenerous impression that most internet activists only have cursory familiarity w theory, maybe through reading a handout excerpt in college from discipline and punish or just knowing the names and some of the words through cultural osmosis

esp when ppl are brandishing chic neologisms like shibboleths

xps also maybe people being glib about appropriating it for their social / consumer personae, which is basically what the internet is. idk i find the good stuff p deep but i'm extremely basic when it comes to living it. hooks on patriarchy in particular since i come from a very patriarchal culture. it's tough to expand instead of be reactionary, falling into that pre-destined role/slot that rhetorically or dialectically or whatever just reinforces the prevailing pov. i think some of that "this is how it really is" from hooks is absolutely necessary (and to be fair to her as a theorist, she does create positions that are productive past that), unfortunately so many people stop there. how do you reform or reenact yourself and your relationships without contracting? that's where it gets tough imo.

I get the maybe ungenerous impression that most internet activists only have cursory familiarity w theory, maybe through reading a handout excerpt in college from discipline and punish or just knowing the names and some of the words through cultural osmosis

― Mordy, Friday, February 27, 2015 12:12 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

finishing like three books and half-finishing ten ime

I think that's otm there's also this dogmatism that argues that "this is truth/reality" as opposed to it being a paradigm or construct which is what you get more on an intellectual history level- that specifically these constructs are useful for ppl in some places and times in history but that critical theory is not about describing the truth of reality xp

doesn't deleuze say somewhere that there's no authentic leftism since it's always being outflanked. i wonder he'd make of twitter!

the slogan "the personal is political" is one of the more abused imo. not so much against the intent of phrase as used originally (so far as i know) but more how it now seems to license a kind of distressing "total war" of feelings vs feelings--with nary an attempt to broker anything actually "political" (in the sense of making and being bound by collective decisions with lots of different voices) in sight.

i know i'm kind of a broken record on this but i really think all of this at its worst amounts to the valorization of vocabulary over actual political practice, the elevation of battles of small ultimate political consequence--the AngrySquad got reebok to drop rick ross for having lyrics that mentioned abusing women, great, what about the working women actually being abused while making reebok shoes? i know this isn't zero sum, but the popular approach these days counts the former as a victory and lets the latter go largely unspoken, and that's the kind of misplaced priority that really worries me.

ha xp

how the obscure difficult dense theory trickles into popular culture is prob the most interesting thing about it, i dont think it necessarily betrays ppls lack of rigor in understand the source material so much as a lot of it is pretty unless and nonsensical for anything else than like talking about in college, also to the extent that there is any point to theory it is that the ideas will mutate into everyday familiarity

the other day i saw Lorde's "self preservation is an act of political warfare" quoted to justify eating ice cream in bed instead of going to an organizing meeting

lol

I have a different take on the reebok phenomenon which is that ultimately this is a powerless politics that can only be effected on a superficial level of celebrity/social media/entertainment/etc so it's not that they're not concerned about the factory workers its that reebok is happy to do some things to mollify customers and won't do others do u better celebrate the shallow victories or it's going to be really depressing.

i know i'm kind of a broken record on this but i really think all of this at its worst amounts to the valorization of vocabulary over actual political practice

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Friday, February 27, 2015 2:21 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm to use the native terminology a lot of it is very performative

theory may mutate into the everyday but i'll be damned if i surrender it to those meanings. it's "uselessness" is pretty much its point in these realms--it's a discourse or mode of thinking that isn't the everyday!

part of the reason so much theory is abstruse is precisely because the theorists are fighting against the theory's appropriation. of course they always lose but then we always have new theories too.

This is kinda Walter Benn Michaels idea re corporations in general. Changing the gender or race of the ceo is painless- more intense interventions into capitalism are not

the AngrySquad got reebok to drop rick ross for having lyrics that mentioned abusing women, great, what about the working women actually being abused while making reebok shoes? i know this isn't zero sum, but the popular approach these days counts the former as a victory and lets the latter go largely unspoken, and that's the kind of misplaced priority that really worries me.

this is definitely a thing, hey? similarly in journalism think-pieces about some sexism from a comedian, or some racial appropriation by a white singer are given equal importance and column inches (if not more) than like actual reportage, investigative journalism, research etc. about oppression actually operating out in the real world.

part of the reason so much theory is abstruse is precisely because the theorists are fighting against the theory's appropriation. of course they always lose but then we always have new theories too.

― ryan, Friday, February 27, 2015 2:25 PM (54 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i feel like they r kinda being uptight abt this?

imo fwiw cultural appropriation is the most absurdly half assed of the tweet theories