Tumgik
#cultural criticism
retiredpawg · 6 months
Text
wow almost seems like this whole romanticization of "girlhood" thing kind of revolves entirely around consumerisim. "little treats". 10 step skincare regimens. "girl math" as an excuse to be financially illiterate. be a good girl, don't think, just spend inordinate amts of money to conform to the latest tiktok microtrend bc that's all it means to be a girl <3
1K notes · View notes
longreads · 5 months
Link
In his new Longreads essay, Colin Dickey reconsiders the movies Ghost and Ghostbusters, viewing the films through the lens of the pandemic’s influence on New York City.
In Ghost and Ghostbusters, the city and its multitudes are just the backdrop from which the narrow few protagonists emerge. But the reason I’m drawn to ghost stories is precisely because by its very nature the ghost blurs the edges of the individual. It flickers. It is and is not any kind of identity. It is and is not the subject of its own story. There’s possibility there.
Read “Signs of Ghosts” by Colin Dickey at Longreads. 
443 notes · View notes
thoughtportal · 1 year
Photo
Tumblr media
929 notes · View notes
Text
Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. The society of the 21st century is no longer disciplinary, but a society of the performance. Nor are its inhabitants called ‘subjects of obedience’, but ‘subjects of performance’. These subjects are entrepreneurs of themselves.
Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation. This is much more effective than the exploitation by the others, because it is accompanied by a feeling of freedom. The exploiter is the same exploited. Victim and executioner can no longer differentiate. This self-referentiality generates a paradoxical freedom, which, because of the structures of obligation immanent to it, becomes violence […] In this society of obligation, each one carries with him his forced labor field.
What proves problematic is not individual competition per se, but rather its self-referentiality, which escalates into absolute competition. That is, the achievement-subject competes with itself; it succumbs to the destructive compulsion to outdo itself over and over, to jump over its own shadow. This self-constraint, which poses as freedom, has deadly results..
No-longer-being-able-to-be-able leads to destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression. The achievement-subject finds itself fighting with itself. The depressive has been wounded by internalized war. Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.
Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.
― Byung-Chul Han, extracts from The Burnout Society
623 notes · View notes
dominarianplowshare · 1 month
Text
(Regretfully) I have created a substack to discuss Magic. May God help me (please do read it!)
46 notes · View notes
sam-keeper · 1 year
Text
The Auteur as a figure in entertainment is dead. Grown strong on digital production, a more artistically bankrupt creature emerges in their place. It is the Executive Auteur, and it's coming soon to a theater near you, whether you like it or not.
If you've noticed all manner of artists increasingly taking a back seat in the discourse to studios and franchises, if you're weirded out by how much more valued a corporation's vision seems to be than the interchangeable drones tasked with realizing that vision, this article is for you.
193 notes · View notes
randomberlinchick · 4 months
Text
Tumblr media
When it comes to Hollywood historians or cultural critics, Peter Biskind is in a class by himself. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood was a fucking joy to read. So I am very much looking forward to diving into this.
Tumblr media
@gotankgo You in? 😂
26 notes · View notes
postpunkindustrial · 8 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Stewart Home - The Assault On Culture
Stewart home - Cranked Up Really high
Stewart Home is a writer, artist, cultural critic, something something, something.
Because I am lazy here is a brief description from his Wikipedia page:
Kevin Llewellyn Callan (born 24 March 1962),[1] better known as Stewart Home, is an English artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, and activist. His novels include the non-narrative 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (2002), and the re-imagining of the 1960s in Tainted Love (2005). Earlier parodistic pulp fictions work includes Pure Mania, Red London, No Pity, Cunt, and Defiant Pose which pastiche the work of 1970s British skinhead pulp novel writer Richard Allen and combine it with pornography, political agit-prop, and historical references to punk rock and avant-garde art.
What I have here is a couple of his books for your perusal.
The first is The Assault on Culture: Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War
A history of the What followed the Surrealist movements and how it affected culture.
From Stewart Home's Website where you can also read this for free:
This book was written in 1987, things have moved on since then (both for the author and in the world), so please bear that in mind....
Anyway If you want to read it you can get it from my Google Drive HERE
The Second Book is CRANKED UP REALLY HIGH: GENRE THEORY & PUNK ROCK 
The title is pretty self evident but here is the blurb from Goodreads:
A lot of ink has been split on the subject of punk rock in recent years, most of it by arty-farty trendies who want to make the music intellectually respectable. Cranked Up Really High is different. It isn't published by a university press and it gives short shrift to the idea that the roots of punk rock can be traced back to 'avant garde' art movements. As well as discussing sixties garage rock and the British, American and Finnish punk scenes, Home devotes whole chapters to deconstructing Riot Grrl, Oil and the sorry saga of Nazi bonehead band Skrewdriver. This book champions the super-dumb sleazebag thud of The Ramones, The Stooges, The Vibrators, The Art Attacks, The Snivelling Shits, The Lurkers, The Queers, The Germs, The Child Molesters, The Ants and The Blaggers.
Also you can read this on his website or you can get it from my Google Drive HERE
He has his own spin on things but if you find these things worthy of reading about he is worth reading.
49 notes · View notes
grandhotelabyss · 9 months
Text
Tumblr media
What we really need is a book in the style of Craig Seligman's Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me about Sontag and Paglia.
I thought Deborah Nelson's Tough Enough—which I liked—should have ended with a Paglia chapter. The fact that it didn't, and for what I take to be political reasons, suggests why Paglia has the upper hand in my view: she's not going to be as easily recuperated by the institutions while she's alive. It's hard to imagine Paglia earning the admiration of a consummate professional like Merve Emre. Which is ironic, because Sontag proudly never taught and expressed only bitter contempt for academia while she was alive, while Paglia has faithfully taught for pretty much her whole adult life, if at a wary art-school distance from official academe. (Sontag was good at finding people, even princesses, who would pay her bills; Paglia perhaps not so much, or perhaps, to give her more credit, she regards herself as having a vocation.)
Politically, Sontag was always on the right side of bien-pensance, which I find slightly contemptible; people are allowed to change their minds, but still, if she'd maintained the political views she held in the '60s into the '90s then she would have been on the Michael Parenti side of Yugoslavia (or, conversely, her '90s views in the '60s would have put her on Updike's, Ellison's, and Nabokov's side of Vietnam).
On the other hand, Paglia was and remains too credulous about pop culture, and Sontag's later turn against it—if at times too much in the style of what Kael called the Come Dressed as the Sick Soul of Europe Party—was basically right. Almost her last act on earth was to canonize Bolaño, while Paglia was claiming George Lucas as our greatest living artist.
Paglia's historical scope and emotional register are broader, and for this she'll always have my heart; Sontag couldn't have written a Paterian prose-poem in honor of the bust of Nefertiti or of a Tamara de Lempicka painting. But Sontag probably was more politically sophisticated, and the moral conscience that mortified and tormented her aestheticism created tremendous drama, and for this she will never lose my admiration; Paglia couldn't have issued the prophetic injunctions of Illness as Metaphor or On Photography.
Hilariously but predictably, the moralist Sontag was apparently bad news as a friend, lover, or family member, if gossip and biography are to be believed, while the aesthete Paglia is by all accounts a perfectly kind person in private life.
(When dealing with moralists, you should always bear in mind this line from "The Soul of Man Under Socialism": "One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." When dealing with aesthetes, you should always bear in mind Basil Hallward's charge against Lord Henry Wotton: "You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing.")
Paglia lived one side of the binary dividing them to the full, every inch the diva dancing a step of Apollonian precision even in Dionysian frenzy, whereas Sontag allowed—or couldn't have avoided it if she'd tried—Athens and Jerusalem, never mind Apollo and Dionysus, to go to war inside her mind. In that sense, they're not an equal match. I probably love Paglia more as a writer—that is, I love the spectacle she creates on the page—whereas what I love about Sontag, not that she didn't write many unforgettable sentences, is the exemplary tragicomedy of the life of her mind.
I suppose those are some notes toward the book we need.
40 notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media
affinities / brian dillon
5 notes · View notes
onlylivingirlinny · 3 months
Text
"Desire is the way your heart pumps, it’s guttural and lives in the way the wind greets you on your birthday. You are older and hungry. You have it in you to get what you need. Desire bubbles in a laugh, a sunrise, and I am happy because I can be." - Welcome To My Island (And My Problems) (a snippet from an upcoming essay.............)
7 notes · View notes
areadersquoteslibrary · 7 months
Text
Sven Bikerts provides an epochal framework for this anxiety in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, originally published in 1994 and reissued in 2006. “The decade of the 1990s,” Bikerts claims, “was a classic historical watershed” (xi), marking the irrevocable influence of digital technology on the way people think and relate to each other. For Bikerts, “the societal shift from print-based to electronic communications is as consequential for culture as was the shift instigated by Gutenberg’s invention of movable type” (192).
The effect, he argues, was to transform our sense of society being composed of isolated individuals who seek solace in the introspective contemplation and subjective immersion in deep time afforded by literature, to one of information seeking citizens interconnected by a digital grid which keeps them perpetually in the present moment. This “network consciousness” (202), Bikerts argues, is at odds with the experience of inwardness cultivated by serious reading, and this explains the waning influence of literature in contemporary culture. A natural consequence is that “the writer’s social and cultural status is as low as it has been for centuries. If there is anything consoling to be said, it is that the need for the writer is right now probably as great as ever” (208).
- The Return of the Omniscient Narrator
Authorship and Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction
By Paul Dawson
13 notes · View notes
blackcoffeestudies · 3 months
Text
Similar effects of submission, impoverishment and exploitation are produced by the imposition of an all-pervasive system of debt over the body of society. Debt functions as a weapon against the autonomy of society, transforming money into blackmail. Young people are obliged to borrow money from the bank in order to pay for their studies, since the public system of education has been destroyed by Neoliberal fanaticism, and private schools are prohibitively expensive. Upon leaving university, they are obliged to accept any kind of precarious job in order to repay their debts, suffering all measure of blackmail in the process. Money, which is supposed to be the measure of value, has been corrupted such that it now acts as a tool for complete submission. Debt has become a sort of metaphysical curse. Within this metaphysical debt, money, language and guilt are all entwined. Debt is guilt, and as guilt, it is entering the domain of the unconscious, where money translates all objects into each other.
Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Heroes: Murder and Mass Suicide
5 notes · View notes
thoughtportal · 8 months
Text
In this episode we explore a relatively new subgenre of science fiction called Solarpunk, which aims to imagine better, more ecologically harmonious, futures on earth. In many ways Solarpunk is a reaction to both the real-world climate crisis and to the many apocalyptic visions of collapse filling our screens. Andrew Sage from the YouTube channel Andrewism joins host Jonathan McIntosh and friend of the show Carl Williams for this conversation.
References & Links • The Andrewism YouTube Channel • Walkaway by Cory Doctorow • Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach • Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation • Fighting for the Future edited by Phoebe Wagner  • Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler • Princess Mononoke from Studio Ghibli • The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin • Emergency Skin by N. K. Jemisin • Monk and Robot book series by Becky Chambers • Dear Alice from THE LINE • Dear Alice’ Decommodified Edition by Waffle To The Left • Our History Is the Future by Nick Estes • 3000-Year-Old Solutions to Modern Problems by Lyla June  • Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher
201 notes · View notes
zaritarazi · 8 months
Text
i think fundamentally my issue is that you cannot make your praxis being reactionary to reactionaries. stop spreading their reviews. stop making their thoughts the center of your ideas, even if you’re doing so to “criticize” them. i don’t know how many times we have to tell you that the first and most important thing in dealing with these people is deplatforming.
like guess what. littletinman69420 on twitter doesn’t actually know what feminism is. so why are you bringing him to my table? when you use his talking points, but in a cute and fun way, in a way that you feel is ironic, you harm the entire dialogue by taking away the space for any nuance. because now we all have to be like yes obviously this guy is a dipshit and we don’t agree with him, and now anything intelligent i want to say i no longer have time for. and you no longer have the point to yourself listen and learn and even come up with the discussion yourself, because you have trapped us all in here with this fucking guy
essentially, when you try to uno-reverse with reactionaries, you hurt all of us and you hurt yourself. this basic entry-level feminism 101 that you feel was for little girls in a pg-13 movie (??) doesn’t actually have to be where we all have to start every piece of media forever and always. and also we all know that this wasn’t even really entry-level fem- listen you get the point. you know. 
what i mean to say is, we can want to have interesting discussions. we can want content to mean many things and have nuanced takes with the audience. we can allow ourselves to assume the audience wants to have an interesting discussion with us. we can try and unsmooth our fucking brains, if we fucking believe in ourselves
and like fundamentally and again, barbie is more than anything a really good and current example of people doing this and what it means. the barbie movie itself didn’t cause this trend. it will not end this trend. it is simply something happening that utilizes the trend heavily and in a way i can easily point to. i’m using it to try and relate to my audience in a way that everyone can understand. so in a lot of ways i’m the barbie movie itself actually
okay listen. listen and learn. i guess i’m not expecting the world to change overnight but like. i’m at least hoping when it starts coming to real politics, you aren’t still quoting littletinman69420 to make your point. because then you’re doing actual harm
12 notes · View notes
uncloseted · 9 months
Note
How do you feel about the desensitization social media has about tragedy and how this affects our brains? I’ve studied media and communication and I’m super passionate about this topic.
The other day I was scrolling on Youtube shorts, and I saw a girl post a video about the air quality in new york due to the wildfires in Canada. The video was satire/comedy and she sped her video up while prancing around lip singing to yellow by coldplay or something. (Side note: why do people even find these sped up videos funny? They’re annoying)
I’m just wondering if you have an opinion on how desensitized people have become. Like at first glance I was like Oh that’s a bit funny! And then I caught myself and was like hang on this really happened as is currently affecting others… that’s horrible. I’ll scroll on my snapchat news and see murder case / true crime headings reading like fun little blurbs. And people do their makeup and profit off other peoples trauma for views like they’re professionals doing it and it’s so insulting. The list really goes ON.
Do you think some studies will start coming out soon about how our empathy levels are incredibly low or even developing our brains differently because of social media’s impact on empathy and being desensitized to so many things?
Sorry for the loaded question! I’m curious to see what you think.
Thank you for this question because I've been thinking about it for like, three days straight. At first I was inclined to be like, "well, no, I think the internet is fine and our worries about empathy are just a moral panic that we see with every new technology that's developed." And then I was inclined to be like, "people have definitely become less empathetic lately, and the internet is probably a big part of that." But I think the reality is that the internet is kind of neutral. More than anything, the internet is a tool that acts to magnify and intensify the way people already are. Some people use the internet to become more aware of other people and understand their unique situations; other people use it to be trolls.
The first thing I want to talk about here is the idea that people used to be more empathetic in the past. I just don't know if that's actually true. Blood sports- games in which people are violent towards one another on purpose as a form of entertainment- have existed for most of human history. Gladiator combat in Ancient Rome is a relatively popular example of this, and often ended in the death of a gladiator. Boxing is a sport that has historically been popular and continues to be popular to this day, despite the fact that it's just two people violently attacking one another. Lynchings used to be public spectacles, where the attendants often treated these as festive events, with food, family photos, and souvenirs. I don't know that I believe we were really more empathetic in the past at all. I think we've actually really improved on the "you can't torture, maim, or kill other people or animals for entertainment" front, especially since those types of things are generally banned from social media.
And like I was saying before, I do genuinely think that the internet can foster greater understanding and empathy towards marginalized groups. I know the struggles of all sorts of groups that I might never encounter in real life. I know how to be polite to people from a variety of different cultures that I might never experience. I've been posed with some really challenging philosophical questions through the content I've been exposed to online. I'm hearing the narratives of marginalized groups that I may have never otherwise heard, and I'm hearing it in their own words. That's incredibly valuable, and I think people who have grown up in the internet age don't fully appreciate how historically rare that actually is. Up until now, history has been written by the victors, the powerful, the oppressors. Now that narrative is democratized and widely available. That's huge in terms of its ability to build empathy and understanding if we choose to be open to it.
But, that same democratization can create problems. The first is that there's not really a distinction between in-group and out-group content anymore. It used to be that there was kind of a sense of, "well, I can say that about my own [group/family/situation] to people who understand, but you can't say that, because you're not part of it and you don't get it." People create content with their in-group in mind, but it often "breaches containment"- it's seen by people who aren't in that in-group. People who are living in New York and making jokes about the air quality situation in New York are usually making those jokes for other people in New York who are in their same situation. They're trying to lighten the mood of something scary. But the people who are seeing it aren't necessarily in New York; they're all over the world, and the context and emotional intention of that joke is kind of lost. There's an implicit assumption in these videos that you're starting from a place of understanding how horrible it is because you're living it, but that's often not true of the actual viewers. In your case, you saw a funny video and thought it was funny. If you had seen a serious video about the same situation, you probably would have been like, "oh shit, this is serious. I hope the people are okay." It's not necessarily a lack of empathy here but a lack of shared context in the way the information is being presented (or something like that?)
That brings us to problem two, which is compassion fatigue. More than ever before in history, we are constantly aware of every bad thing that has happened everywhere in the world, every single day. It used to be that you would get the newspaper and it would be focused mostly on local news, with some national headlines and a couple international headlines that were really important. The information we had about bad things that were happening were mostly things we could do something about. But now, that's not really the case, right? Today, I know that the Jenin refugee camp suffered massive damage following the Israeli army's biggest assault there in 20 years. I know the Palestinians fear that the situation will escalate. I know that Allison Mack, who ran the Nxivm cult, was released from prison after serving just two years of her sentence. I know that a suspect in a Philadelphia shooting was charged with the murder of five people, and that a Canadian man is facing terrorism charges over far-right videos, and that Japan has announced a controversial plan to release treated waste water from the Fukushima nuclear plant, and that Senegal has been facing a crisis because their President, Macky Sall, was threatening not to step down after the end of his second term, and that France is protesting police violence because a police officer shot and killed a French-Algerian teenager. And I can't do anything about any of this. I just know about it, and I have to care about it because I know about it.
And we've created this weird ecosystem online where everyone feels like they need to issue a PR type statement about whatever sociopolitical thing the internet cares about in the moment to show that they're a good person who is informed, even if they don't have a significant following and aren't impacted by the issue at hand. All of us are doing a weird kind of brand management for a brand that's just our own self, and we're managing it for the sake of our friends and family because we feel like we have to. And any time a person with a significant following does publish one of those statements, inevitably there are people badgering them about why they haven't spoken on the issue that they care about that's happening in their country. I just don't think that we as people have the emotional capacity to process that much information or care about that many things, especially when they're situations that we can't really do anything about, and especially when that situation will be replaced with something new within a few days. I think that's one of the reasons so many people feel helpless and disempowered right now. There's too much to fix but no real way for us to do it, especially in the time scale the internet provides.
So in this sense, I don't think that we're lacking empathy so much as we're required to be so empathetic that we've exhausted our capacity for it. There are more demands put upon us to be empathetic than ever before, and so we reach those moments of compassion fatigue more than ever before.
The other thing that I think is worth talking about here is the way in which the internet prioritizes extremes. The goal of algorithms is generally to get people to stay on the website longer, and the easiest way to do that is by getting them to feel a strong emotion. That's why clickbait works. It's also why the internet is invested in creating so much outrage. And the easiest way to continue getting people to feel outraged is to show them increasingly outrageous things, whether or not they're true. The internet kind of got 4chanified- like teenagers on 4chan, social media algorithms and article headline writers are trying to out-do one another by recommending or posting the most outrageous thing they can in order to capture the attention economy.
This is the part that concerns me the most with regards to the internet in general. Famously, Facebook’s negligence facilitated the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar after its algorithms amplified hate speech and Facebook failed to remove the inflammatory posts. Outrage = views = money for Facebook = more outrage bait being pushed = in the most extreme cases, genocide. And also, outrage = views = money for Facebook = more outrage bait being pushed = Donald Trump getting elected in the US. Outrage = views = money for Facebook = more outrage bait being pushed = people believing misinformation about medicine. And I think that creates a kind of interesting dynamic when it comes to empathy. Because in some sense, these people are very empathetic- they're outraged because of their empathy. They read a (fake) story about a child being victimized by a pediophilic trans teacher (or whatever) and panic because they have empathy for the children that they believe were victims. They're anti-immigration because they have empathy for the people who (they believe are) losing their jobs to immigrants. In the case of the Rohingya genocide, the Buddhist majority in Myanmar had empathy for the individuals that they believed were victimized by the Rohingya for their religious beliefs. These people were all wrong, but they're not lacking empathy. They're making a decision that an outside group isn't worthy of empathy because they've committed such heinous crimes. And that's a tale as old as time; just ask anyone who's Jewish.
I think what we need to be worried about is the ways in which the internet, and especially social media, can platform and expedite that process on a level that hasn't really been seen before. After the 2016 election, I used to really believe that we just needed to sit down with people across the aisle and have a civil, empathetic, rational conversation about the issues. But now I think that if that was ever possible, the time for it has passed. Misinformation, disinformation, and sensationalized information have become so rampant online that there's not really any way to have those discussions anymore because there's no way to agree on what is and isn't true. And unless we change something really quickly, that problem is just going to get worse with the advent of deepfake technologies and AI bots.
I feel like I've said a lot here but I haven't really come to any conclusions... but those are some of my thoughts, at least. I guess maybe it's that humans have always kind of sucked at being empathetic to people who are part of an out-group, but now we're just doing it on a global scale and reacting to threats that are (perceived to be) larger than ever before? Maybe it's that we should focus on strengthening and bettering our local communities as much as possible, and contributing on a global scale when we can? Maybe it's that media literacy is important, and we should always interact with news articles critically, even if they seem like they're a credible source?
13 notes · View notes