seri

evoking bertholt brecht’s “the way people cast a play!” quote as a spell against prescriptive, stereotypical, fatalistic typecasting

its hilarious that people think there is something inherently revolutionary or liberating about sexual desires instead of sexual preferences obviously being shaped by racism colonialism misogyny and class domination and yet you see it all the time on here. probably one of my longstanding least favorite aspects of the culture on this site

"One of the things we discovered about worlds, art, characters, and mysteries over that time […] is that you really cannot have a concrete answer to anything very interesting; you only need to have theories. Alan Moore says the same thing in From Hell: ‘We will never know who Jack the Ripper is. He will be a superposition of all our theories about who he could have been. That is the extent of our knowledge.’ And that keeps mysteries mysterious. That's also Epistemology, that's how knowledge works. You only have these theories, and some seem more likely or more adequate at certain times. […] But the other thing is: it can't be only that tool. There needs to be an actual preference from the storyteller, like a " word of God" thing. But the storyteller can never tell it directly to the people who hear the story. Lynch does this in Mulholland Drive. There's this DVD where he gives clues about how you should watch Mulholland Drive. And they in no way help you descipher Mulholland Drive. But what they do tell you is that Lynch isn't just throwing stuff at you to be dreamy. There is an underlying logic, and there is a preference there. And if it's this way - if it's both open and systemic - then you can have your cake and eat it. This is also representative of what mysteries are like in the real world. We know there's an actual truth about what happened. We can't get to it. And we have to deal with the superposition of possibilities."

"i do not dream of labour" is one of the worst pseudo-marxist taglines that western leftists have co-opted because when you ask them what they do dream of, they say traveling, studying, and creating art. broski, who's flying the plane to take you to prague? who's the security at the library with the texts you're studying? who are the clerks in the museum showcasing your art? like bro, you do dream of labour. you just dream of someone else doing it so you don't have to! you merely want to outsource the labour and make it invisible.

I don’t think this does away with the legitimacy of the basic sentiment that work shouldn’t be the point of life to be honest, it just shows that class society has always made that dream a reality for a few while condemning the many to endless toil. What’s new about capitalism is that we don’t even need to do this to maintain a large scale global society at this point. Work is no longer central to life for millions of people in the world who are thrown out of the workforce by automation or who are forced to make their living in nonsense careers that have the sole function of accelerating the circulation of commodities and money through wasteful consumerism. Yet nevertheless working society gets on without them just fine, and can even produce enough to sustain them as dependents on social assistance. Since the 1940s most mass working class movements in industrialized countries have been in opposition to the centrality of work, and even the welfare rights movement for example is about this since it’s critiquing the fact that people can only “earn” their right to live by working for money yet at the same time there aren’t good jobs available for everyone. After experiencing mass disruption to the workforce during the pandemic, seeing how many jobs didn’t actually count as “essential workers,” and now seeing just how many people can be unemployed while the system continues to work, wouldn’t poor people demanding that their needs come before the imperative to work have a revolutionary meaning today? I think there’s a real distinction between this sort of refusal of labor and the middle class one you’re describing, even if both find a recuperating institutional outlet in consumer culture