I am of a strong belief that most contemporary “theory” “writers”, convey relatively simple ideas in more and more words, there is so much insanity that can be possesed in a statement, so much shock you can pack into another bullshit essay. Post-modernist, post-marxist, post-structualist, post-rational, post-post-post-post-post, post post blah blah blah it all becomes a meaningless babble. I don’t give a shit, kill yourself.
All this, combined with a history of failure to stand up against injustice and explotation of this world, it creates a feedback loop where more and more layers of ‘post’ are being added to something, more new words are being invented, and more old words are being used in different, “wrong” ways. This results in works that are at best a very advanced schizopost, and at best some broader psyop.
It all becomes obnoxious, everyone knows it is obnoxious, and even pointing it out is counter-productive.
Every sincere expression of a revolutionary zeal both rightfully and wrongfully is percived as naive, as real possible change is drifting away to the realm of history.
It makes everything seem like theater, a way to fulfill your need to feel good about yourself and the world, all while the subconcious truly fights against that.
The paradox of it is that, this very critique (and possible critique of it), creates so many layers of meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta answers and questions, one could say this sort of “realism” is a immunization of capitalism, but so does that very statement and even whatever I am doing right now, and whatever you could say about it. It is an unwinnable situation.
The performance can be both something good, it can be art, it is also quite literally the only way to state something, an opinion in modern times without the pretense would not be an opinion, in most cases it would be a punch to a face of the other people in discussion. We are simply trapped in it. Even every single asshole which claims to point it out (including me, being just one meta layer above) like Mark Fischer and co. fuels the same thing, repeats the same patterns, and plays social games with language. Talking about talking about capitalism. And what I am doing is talking about talking about talking about capitalism. Every layer repeates the mistakes of the last one.
I don’t want to claim a solution, or know enough about what truly causes it or how it can be resolved.
The only two ways to ‘win’ (that I percived) is to be either ignorant, and avoid the trap of this very conversation and instead be happy, this just being a rare 3am thought.
Or know the age-old revolutionary optimism, and a sort of paradoxical materialist idealism, a faith in history and what some dead old dude wrote like over a century ago, side-stepping every point of this as counter-revolutionary. (Which at certain point circles back to the start when some assholes critiques you and you answer them. This can only be stopped if your bullshit revolution works out and you can execute the people bitching about you[1])
In either case it is important to be aware you are performative, it is imporant to know that art is performative. That politics are performative. That friends and love are performative. That saying the word “performative” is performative.
The only un-performative acts are; eating, shitting and having sex[2].
[1] - that is (imo) not ideal
[2] - vanilla
TL;DR fuck leftism, fuck post-leftism, fuck art, fuck you
self-editing is an important and essential skill for being an effective writer, or any other form of communication for that matter, and to be able to edit yourself you have to have a sense of self-awareness as well as a sense of your audience. in other words, you can't be a narcissistic asshole who thinks that every turd that comes out of your asshole is a nugget of solid gold. to convey a complex idea in very direct and clear and concise language is a highly underrated skill, particularly among the upper-class intellectual elite. consider a phrase like "shit happens" - elitist snobs dismiss this as crude vulgar lower-class gutter language, but in just two words it manages to perfectly convey what philosophy and political science and quantum physics majors write entire 50,000 word theses on every day.