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.
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.