Thanks for this post. You trace how aphorism differs from feed fragments, and how profiles, metadatafication, and cant shape judgment. The Baudrillard frame carries through museums, timelines, and labels. The Hogarth, Burrell, Mad Men, and Canterbury cases show how explanation yields to signaling, and how immediacy displaces encounter, ambiguity, and history. You pull together a lot that speaks to this moment.
Perhaps the short-form truth is more like a proverb than an aphorism - proverbs often come in matched pairs of opposing judgements. On the other hand, proverb pairs are quite self-sufficient whereas the sorting of opinion into opposing platforms of omnicause tribal affiliation is a powerful process, able to bypass logical filtering (items on the manifesto can be mutually incompatible) and to reconfigure with a holistic speed Quine would have appreciated (Trumpian whims can flip the attitudes of both sides).
P.S. I like the way that 'empathy' is now defined as a self-identified quality expressed by the person empathized with
'Simultáneos screen fixation' is a good description of what is actually happening with social media. A very nuanced and insightful piece. I, like many, have felt uncomfortable with the pithy slogans (dissolving soon into cliches) and text fragments (CNN like soundbites) of much social media. They are reductionist and superficial, glib with a pretence of getting to the essence of things fast. In fact they are often misleading and fail to have impotant elements such as nuance, even doubt and a sense of contradiction,
A slick cut out copy.
Also I think you could add (probably have elsewhere) a pervading sense of ennui despite or because of the fase certainties.
Thank you! Somehow it became the right hook for hanging together a bunch of ideas I’ve had going around in my head for a long time. I share your hesitancy about glibness and sloganeering. Seeing everything become optimised, coded, and labelled in this way seems deeply uncanny to me.
It would be fascinating to do an update of John Berger's 1970something _Ways of Seeing_, where he uses Benjamin's 1930something essay about "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" to analyze how modern viewers are constantly recontextualizing art (enlarging one bit of a big canvas, turning it into a poster, putting it up on their dorm wall so there is a Renaissance Madonna next to a pop band poster etc., or setting it to music in a documentary, or what have you)
.... in light of the current intense manic fear that the big stupid public can and will contextualize art (visual and literary) in the WRONG WAY with all the snipping and mashupping now possible
so that a huge cultural industry of Correct Contextualizing exists. Of course there is a lively counter-industry of BAPpery etc. doing culture jamming of Official Correct Contextualization
Yes, “unauthorised use” is a huge part of this. But also the spread of a certain kind of moral instrumentalism from the activist social sciences (research must further the ends of social justice) into the humanities more broadly and its fusion with financial discourses around instrumentalisation and the bottom line.
I'm still figuring out the connections here with the perturbations of today's narcissistically hyper-moralistic culture that I mostly try to explore with my newsletter. But wow, this is one of the crunchiest pieces I've read for a while. Thank you for a profusion of fresh insights and angles.
In its origin, this is the effort of therapeutic culture, a necessity for a social order adapted to the needs of empire. Today's political subject has only the illusion of decision-making, based on the holding of unassailable political views. The norm in a majoritarian democracy was conflict, theoretically resolvable by argument and compromise. This has been replaced by the norm of consensus and tranquility within the bubble of one’s algorithmic affiliation. To hold an opinion outside one’s “likes” causes psychic disturbance rather than an invitation to muster arguments for one’s own position that had the potential to change the others' views. For therapy culture conflict causes trauma and injury to oneself as victim; instead it heals the subject by encouraging retreat back into one’s protected circle. In one’s safe space, ranting of “the truth” will not meet “a discouraging word,” as “Home on the Range” called the disruptions acceptable to normative civilization. Apparently, despite the liberal origin of therapeutic culture, both sides of the spectrum rely on it.
Social media did not cause the shift to non-communicating warring parties, as often charged, but is the most recent tool for advancing it, and long in the making. Social media has intensified the wider phenomenon of the shift to the therapeutically-protected empire subject via technology, amplifying and making more efficient everything it services. It eliminates the question of evil by assigning it automatically to those who disturb one’s consciousness.
Thanks for this post. You trace how aphorism differs from feed fragments, and how profiles, metadatafication, and cant shape judgment. The Baudrillard frame carries through museums, timelines, and labels. The Hogarth, Burrell, Mad Men, and Canterbury cases show how explanation yields to signaling, and how immediacy displaces encounter, ambiguity, and history. You pull together a lot that speaks to this moment.
Perhaps the short-form truth is more like a proverb than an aphorism - proverbs often come in matched pairs of opposing judgements. On the other hand, proverb pairs are quite self-sufficient whereas the sorting of opinion into opposing platforms of omnicause tribal affiliation is a powerful process, able to bypass logical filtering (items on the manifesto can be mutually incompatible) and to reconfigure with a holistic speed Quine would have appreciated (Trumpian whims can flip the attitudes of both sides).
P.S. I like the way that 'empathy' is now defined as a self-identified quality expressed by the person empathized with
'Simultáneos screen fixation' is a good description of what is actually happening with social media. A very nuanced and insightful piece. I, like many, have felt uncomfortable with the pithy slogans (dissolving soon into cliches) and text fragments (CNN like soundbites) of much social media. They are reductionist and superficial, glib with a pretence of getting to the essence of things fast. In fact they are often misleading and fail to have impotant elements such as nuance, even doubt and a sense of contradiction,
A slick cut out copy.
Also I think you could add (probably have elsewhere) a pervading sense of ennui despite or because of the fase certainties.
A very good piece thank you
Thank you! Somehow it became the right hook for hanging together a bunch of ideas I’ve had going around in my head for a long time. I share your hesitancy about glibness and sloganeering. Seeing everything become optimised, coded, and labelled in this way seems deeply uncanny to me.
It would be fascinating to do an update of John Berger's 1970something _Ways of Seeing_, where he uses Benjamin's 1930something essay about "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" to analyze how modern viewers are constantly recontextualizing art (enlarging one bit of a big canvas, turning it into a poster, putting it up on their dorm wall so there is a Renaissance Madonna next to a pop band poster etc., or setting it to music in a documentary, or what have you)
.... in light of the current intense manic fear that the big stupid public can and will contextualize art (visual and literary) in the WRONG WAY with all the snipping and mashupping now possible
so that a huge cultural industry of Correct Contextualizing exists. Of course there is a lively counter-industry of BAPpery etc. doing culture jamming of Official Correct Contextualization
Yes, “unauthorised use” is a huge part of this. But also the spread of a certain kind of moral instrumentalism from the activist social sciences (research must further the ends of social justice) into the humanities more broadly and its fusion with financial discourses around instrumentalisation and the bottom line.
I'm still figuring out the connections here with the perturbations of today's narcissistically hyper-moralistic culture that I mostly try to explore with my newsletter. But wow, this is one of the crunchiest pieces I've read for a while. Thank you for a profusion of fresh insights and angles.
In its origin, this is the effort of therapeutic culture, a necessity for a social order adapted to the needs of empire. Today's political subject has only the illusion of decision-making, based on the holding of unassailable political views. The norm in a majoritarian democracy was conflict, theoretically resolvable by argument and compromise. This has been replaced by the norm of consensus and tranquility within the bubble of one’s algorithmic affiliation. To hold an opinion outside one’s “likes” causes psychic disturbance rather than an invitation to muster arguments for one’s own position that had the potential to change the others' views. For therapy culture conflict causes trauma and injury to oneself as victim; instead it heals the subject by encouraging retreat back into one’s protected circle. In one’s safe space, ranting of “the truth” will not meet “a discouraging word,” as “Home on the Range” called the disruptions acceptable to normative civilization. Apparently, despite the liberal origin of therapeutic culture, both sides of the spectrum rely on it.
Social media did not cause the shift to non-communicating warring parties, as often charged, but is the most recent tool for advancing it, and long in the making. Social media has intensified the wider phenomenon of the shift to the therapeutically-protected empire subject via technology, amplifying and making more efficient everything it services. It eliminates the question of evil by assigning it automatically to those who disturb one’s consciousness.