/lit/ - Literature

>>12446028
it's not a small thing either. all of the contemporary bullshit about Finding Your Voice or Expressing Yourself encounters at least one formidable stumbling block: what if i Find my Voice and it fucking *sucks?* what if i have nothing to Express, and i know it? what if what is making me suffer is the idea that *my own suffering actually matters?*

the Gospel of JBP as such really isn't all that crazy - take responsibility, clean room, all of this. i'm fine with this, obviously. it's just that it is too easy to forget that some people, like myself, actually *want to be offended.* i don't think it's the same thing as wanting to offend: i don't really want to offend anyone else (although, inevitably, i do, because i tend to tyrannize threads and blogroll them with my very open-mindedness...and for this i deserve to be mocked, i really do!)

but when you genuinely love someone, you *can* offend them. this is what is so bizarre about our world: maximum empathy, a world of social media, and conditions of absolute social terror also. but the cynicism of it all masks, i think, a very deep and powerful need for someone who can mock you, who actually can remind you that you really aren't the Main Attraction. before any of the grandeur of the catherals or the Bach and Palestrina masses can appear, there is first of all this underlying humility - and only then because you stop behaving like a fucking teenager, and are able to recognize something - anything - which comes before yourself.

the problem with postmodernity is that it produces two virtually irresistable temptations as one: the desire to suffer on behalf of a state which rewards you morally, and as such to reap the rewards for public suffering in a material sense. making advertisements for Woke Capital kills two birds with one stone, but it wouldn't be possible for this to happen had late capital not already gotten into bed with Silicon Valley Neomarxism. by the time Gillette begins lecturing directly to its audience about the dangers of toxic masculinity, the integration of church and state is fully underway. its endgame is the Woke Corporation. we have come a long way from commodities trying to seduce you for your attention; now, we punish you for desiring at all, and displace this onto some never-to-be-achieved Utopian sensibility.

but there is no Utopia w/r/t desires - although there is *jihad,* and joyous scapegoating. the crazy part about this is that capitalism has basically tapped into aspects of the psyche *too intimate* to be turned into advertisements that have even a shred of objectivity. they will have to go for unadulterated politics, and it is exactly that which will alienate their market share.