Apr 20, 2016 05:08 AM
(This post was last modified: Apr 20, 2016 05:13 AM by C C.)
In Defense of Pretentiousness
http://www.vulture.com/2016/03/defense-o...sness.html
EXCERPT: . . . The core argument of Dan Fox’s Pretentiousness: Why It Matters is that pretense is the “engine oil” of all creative endeavors, that we’d have no art and a very impoverished culture without it. On a basic level this seems to me indisputable, yet there’s something about Fox’s defense of being pretentious that makes me a bit queasy. It’s no easy thing to cordon off a realm of culture from the social world, but in each context being pretentious has different implications. What wins you a prize in one place can get you beat up in another. Unless things have changed since I was a kid, for many precocious adolescents those places might be one and the same.
[...] Fox never claims that pretentiousness is a path to wealth, and he’s for the most part very good on issues of class. “Used as an insult,” he writes, calling someone pretentious is “an informal tool of class surveillance, a stick with which to beat someone for putting on airs and graces.” In Britain, class distinctions out themselves in accents — a narcissism of small differences. Of course, the easiest way for an American to sound pretentious is to adopt a British lilt. Fox reports that Americans often tell him his very accent renders him pretentious. On the other hand, it’s always disappointing for an American to learn that an Englishman isn’t as brilliant as his accent leads you to believe. (I’ve never heard him speak, but on the page Fox doesn’t disappoint.)
[...] Fox returns more than once to a remark by Brian Eno, who wrote that at one point he “decided to turn ‘pretentious’ into a compliment”: “The common assumption is that there are ‘real’ people and there are others who are pretending to be something they’re not. There is also an assumption that there’s something morally wrong with pretending. My assumptions about culture as a place where you can take psychological risks without incurring physical penalties make me think that pretending is the most important thing we do. It’s the way we make our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise.”
Fox’s book is an elegant and convincing defense of this idea, and I understand the loyalty he feels to the adolescent pretentious enough to grow up to be the author of this book. I think he’s right in that what we tend to call “authentic” can usually be revealed to be a perfected form of pretentiousness, and that a pretentious creative individual is at worst an endearingly innocent, “tragicomic” fool who might someday turn into what he or she aspires to be. But in trying to reclaim pretentiousness from its pejorative uses, Fox weights the scales too heavily on the side of pretentiousness as the larval mode of creativity....
Non-existent Thrills
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1685318.ece
EXCERPT: . . . Nancy Bauer’s book is a bold and original intervention in the discussion of these questions in recent feminist philosophy, and a refreshingly frank one. Philosophers writing on pornography have been known to err on the side of primness. No such charges could be laid against Bauer, whose book opens with a forthright discussion of "Tying Up Rebecca," the film described in prurient detail in the US Attorney General’s scolding 1986 report on pornography (known as the Meese Report). Bauer draws inspiration from J. L. Austin – her title is a riff on Austin’s famous "How To Do Things with Words" – in urging us not to miss the phenomena in our eagerness to theorize about them. She argues that we currently “lack the words to articulate the role of pornography in our lives. What we need now is not a new politics of porn but, rather, a candid phenomenology of it, an honest reckoning with its powers to produce intense pleasure and to color our ordinary sense of what the world is and ought to be like.”
One of Bauer’s main worries about pornography is that it instils false expectations in its consumers. She argues that the pornographic world is a distant sexual utopia – a “pornutopia” – in which anyone is up for anything, and everyone’s desires are compatible with everybody else’s. The pornutopian world view therefore erases rape and incest. It provides a sexual miseducation. Less obviously, it is also liable to make sex boring. Without any suspense as to who will want whom and how, many of the thrills won’t be so much cheap as non-existent.
[...] When it does come to material of the pornutopian variety, there are interesting empirical questions about the extent to which it engenders long-term false beliefs and expectations about sex (as opposed to more or less problematic desires and appetites, for example). Bauer’s worries about pornutopia’s power to mislead people into thinking sexual fulfilment and compatibility are easy and automatic (respectively) are plausible, but not obvious....
http://www.vulture.com/2016/03/defense-o...sness.html
EXCERPT: . . . The core argument of Dan Fox’s Pretentiousness: Why It Matters is that pretense is the “engine oil” of all creative endeavors, that we’d have no art and a very impoverished culture without it. On a basic level this seems to me indisputable, yet there’s something about Fox’s defense of being pretentious that makes me a bit queasy. It’s no easy thing to cordon off a realm of culture from the social world, but in each context being pretentious has different implications. What wins you a prize in one place can get you beat up in another. Unless things have changed since I was a kid, for many precocious adolescents those places might be one and the same.
[...] Fox never claims that pretentiousness is a path to wealth, and he’s for the most part very good on issues of class. “Used as an insult,” he writes, calling someone pretentious is “an informal tool of class surveillance, a stick with which to beat someone for putting on airs and graces.” In Britain, class distinctions out themselves in accents — a narcissism of small differences. Of course, the easiest way for an American to sound pretentious is to adopt a British lilt. Fox reports that Americans often tell him his very accent renders him pretentious. On the other hand, it’s always disappointing for an American to learn that an Englishman isn’t as brilliant as his accent leads you to believe. (I’ve never heard him speak, but on the page Fox doesn’t disappoint.)
[...] Fox returns more than once to a remark by Brian Eno, who wrote that at one point he “decided to turn ‘pretentious’ into a compliment”: “The common assumption is that there are ‘real’ people and there are others who are pretending to be something they’re not. There is also an assumption that there’s something morally wrong with pretending. My assumptions about culture as a place where you can take psychological risks without incurring physical penalties make me think that pretending is the most important thing we do. It’s the way we make our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise.”
Fox’s book is an elegant and convincing defense of this idea, and I understand the loyalty he feels to the adolescent pretentious enough to grow up to be the author of this book. I think he’s right in that what we tend to call “authentic” can usually be revealed to be a perfected form of pretentiousness, and that a pretentious creative individual is at worst an endearingly innocent, “tragicomic” fool who might someday turn into what he or she aspires to be. But in trying to reclaim pretentiousness from its pejorative uses, Fox weights the scales too heavily on the side of pretentiousness as the larval mode of creativity....
Non-existent Thrills
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1685318.ece
EXCERPT: . . . Nancy Bauer’s book is a bold and original intervention in the discussion of these questions in recent feminist philosophy, and a refreshingly frank one. Philosophers writing on pornography have been known to err on the side of primness. No such charges could be laid against Bauer, whose book opens with a forthright discussion of "Tying Up Rebecca," the film described in prurient detail in the US Attorney General’s scolding 1986 report on pornography (known as the Meese Report). Bauer draws inspiration from J. L. Austin – her title is a riff on Austin’s famous "How To Do Things with Words" – in urging us not to miss the phenomena in our eagerness to theorize about them. She argues that we currently “lack the words to articulate the role of pornography in our lives. What we need now is not a new politics of porn but, rather, a candid phenomenology of it, an honest reckoning with its powers to produce intense pleasure and to color our ordinary sense of what the world is and ought to be like.”
One of Bauer’s main worries about pornography is that it instils false expectations in its consumers. She argues that the pornographic world is a distant sexual utopia – a “pornutopia” – in which anyone is up for anything, and everyone’s desires are compatible with everybody else’s. The pornutopian world view therefore erases rape and incest. It provides a sexual miseducation. Less obviously, it is also liable to make sex boring. Without any suspense as to who will want whom and how, many of the thrills won’t be so much cheap as non-existent.
[...] When it does come to material of the pornutopian variety, there are interesting empirical questions about the extent to which it engenders long-term false beliefs and expectations about sex (as opposed to more or less problematic desires and appetites, for example). Bauer’s worries about pornutopia’s power to mislead people into thinking sexual fulfilment and compatibility are easy and automatic (respectively) are plausible, but not obvious....
