Currently reading Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. How the fuck has this man managed to fit so much jargon and waffle into just 80 pages?
Don't get me wrong, a lot of it is super interesting and every now and again I'll read a parapgraph and go 'woah, holy shit' - but there's a lot of stuff in between where it feels like the author is just flexing on me or namedropping for the sake of intellectual credibility rather than actual content. So that people will read the book and go, woah, what a smart guy. I believe what he says.
Is this just a sign that I'm insecure that there's people way smarter and well read than me? I don't think it is, but if none of y'all get this problem then it could be.
I don't know, maybe it's just that I dislike formal writing styles. It doesn't seem useful to me. I love words, I get called a human dictionary every once in a while, but when I write I never throw around all the big words I know. What's the point in being hard to understand?
I get that some topics require a lot of linguistic precision, and sometimes you can't get straight to the point unless you use a sentence with a million punctuation marks, but some of the shit I read in these books is completely alienating. Doesn't even flow nicely either - just clunks along with every sentence giving you more of a headache than the last.
It's not just flexing though, it's a much quicker way to reference other theory, a shorthand essentially. Especially when written for an academic audience, these namedrops aren't so much a flex, as they are abridged signposts and common points of reference, pointing you in the general direction of other theorists that are relevant here.
All that being said, of course there are egos in academia too, especially with public academics
Yeah, another poster pointed that out. I was just having a good ol' vent. The key part I ignored is the intended audience.
Oh, I didn't see that. I think your frustration is definitely warranted, Fisher isn't very welcoming in his writing.
Parenti has a casual style. But then my poncy ass doesn't appreciate the lack of footnotes...
There's much simpler ways to express our ideas but they don't necessarily need to be in theory books. There's room for pamphlets & visual/audio media which simplifies, informalizes or collates theory. It's useful to have the theory itself be very extensive and detailed though, so it can hold up better to scrutiny a poster or meme might not be subject to.
Starting Blackshirts and Reds tomorrow. High hopes.
You're right there. Caught me libbing/lackin.
Such a good book and hard to put down! Parenti is so fucking good at describing massive geopolitical concepts and debunking anti communist myths in the matter of just a few paragraphs. I do wish he had more citations- there’s a part in black shirts where he just lists some figures of death tolls from western atrocities without citing anything, and it’s like, I believe him and I know that the US is responsible for the death of millions, but people just coming into leftism could read that and assume he just pulled those numbers out of nowhere if they’re still in the process of unlearning western propaganda.
Still, everyone should read parenti!
The terrifying thing is that as you read more texts, you realize that Marx is actually the clearest "theory" writer of them all. When I first felt that, I had a feeling akin to eating the umbilical cords in Bloodborne to increase my Insight.
yeah it's bad writing to constantly reference other books and ideas in the middle of a train of thought. the way to do it is make the reference either before or after your point
academia as a whole is slathered in this obscurantism, but from my experience its even worse with anglo academia. might just be bc english is my second language though
That's a relief that it's more of a Mark Fisher problem than it is a general lefty book problem. Since we're on a sort of similar wavelength, what books did you find easy to engage with?
Yeah, there's some fuckin huge egos in academia lol. I have to read quite a lot of art related ones for university, and I've never understood why I should accept someone elses opinion on art as gospel. It's art - why does someone else get to decide what it means to me?
Literally from a comment I made a while back about J. Moufawad-Paul:
I also mostly feel the same way about Mark Fischer. Capitalist Realism had some amazing ideas, but you had to sift through a whole bunch of name-dropping of philosophers and random tangents to get to them.
So you are definitely not alone, lmao. But if we're that aligned, you're going to LOVE Blackshirts and Reds. But probably avoid Continuity and Rupture for the moment.
That is the consensus, yeah. But when you get set an assigment at university you aren't being asked for anything original, they just want you to perform. Like a seal.
To be fair, some modern art pieces are very blatant talentless money laundering schemes
on a bit of a tangent off your feminist journals, today I found out that Naomi Wolf has lost her fuckin marbles. Spouting 5g conspiracies.
I've heard of Naomi Wolf but never read anything, just sifted through her Wikipedia and she seemed nonsensical already.
Also advisor to Bill Clinton :billdawg: :billdawg: :billdawg:
I write the same way. It’s because in higher education we learn how to write using historical examples, which themselves are super formal and old fashioned. For lots of scholars, it’s harder to write in modern English.
Yeah, I mean every single academic journal I've ever referenced has been gross to read so I see where you're coming from. On top of that, if you write an essay that doesn't adhere to the strict rules of formality and formatting, you get marked down. A backwards system in my opinion.
Academics are surprisingly very insular. If you write a paper in a journal, most likely only other nerds will read it, and since we’ve all been trained in the same old fashioned writing system, it’s fine if it’s gibberish for the modern man. Proper communication to the average person is probably one of the most under rated but most important skills a scholar can have.
Yeah that's true actually, I'm ignoring the intended audience. Now that I think about it, two books that made the mainstream, Natives and Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race are both very digestable.
I'm with you on Mark Fisher, I felt similarly. I get the sense that if I had read more philosophy I'd get a lot more from it. Some people get PHDs so I imagine it's targeted at that specific academic group. But I do still like working through it, and I like learning about philosophers I've never heard of.
Fisher in general definitely tends to do specifically that, just throwing stuff at you, but I think Capitalist Realism actually isn't so bad. Most of the time when he name drops, he's not necessarily expecting you to be familiar with the work of whoever he mentioned. It's more like he's citing his sources imo. For example, a good half of the ideas here are just Zizek, but chewed up into comprehensible units. I think this one is more difficult mostly because Fisher is trying to explain the postmodern lens of capitalism, which relies on the reader being in a place where they can also come to understand that strange world. My point being, have you ever fucking tried to read Zizek? Infinitely longer, so so much harder to parse. Fisher plucks out his most directly useful ideas, grinds then up with Jameson's and boils them down about as far as they go. Still a hard read, but I promise that where he's getting the stuff for CR is way more obnoxious to read.
I heard people say that it is an accesible theory book. That's complete bullshit. The most annoying thing to me is when he uses difficult synonyms for very normal words. As if he is constantly using thesaurus while writing the book. It's still a good book though.
Isn't that true for anything resembling a community?
Even this tiny site or small probably has stylistic quirks that are hard to understand for outsiders
