The End of Civilization.

luka

Well-known member
As Stan says it depends on whether you want to maintain this inside outside parasite host metaphor.
 

Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
I agree with Luka's main point here. I'm as bad as anyone at the drunk bantz but we should obvs hold ourselves to high standards here. We're creating a virtual utopia after all aren't we? We're meant to be what the internet *should* be like, what life and conversation should be like.

But the idea of dissensus as a civilisation is also a good one cos it throws up a dilemma. In that all the best civilisations, all those that you actually want to live in, have the seedy backstreets as well as the culture and the art and the the lasting monuments to human ingenuity and skill.

So where's the place for dissensus' seedy backstreets?*

To be clear, though, I dont want a seedy backstreet where it's just blokes saying phwoar look at that pinnie.

*The Intoxication Log
 

sus

Well-known member
I think the idea of inside/outside is pretty key to subculture stuff. I think we should probably just taboo the word "counterculture"; it implies a mainstream, and we don't really have that anymore.

 

sus

Well-known member
This is the "Another Green World" idea—the Shakespeare characters go out to the forest on some festive pagan holiday, and do all this crossdressing transformation stuff, and explode/subvert the norms of Town, and then they come back better for it, and maybe show some of their ways to the townspeople
 

luka

Well-known member
Yeah I'm just keen to avoid bolstering your teenage reactionary politics by going along with the parasite metaphor. Our responsibility is to wean you off that stuff.
 

sus

Well-known member
This is the structure of so much classical work it makes my head spin. See Pentheus, teenage boyruler in Bacchae, trying desperately to contain his heterosexuality while his mother and her lesbian bakkhai horde tear him limb from limb in the forest
 

sus

Well-known member
“The chthonian triumphs in Medea, as in the later Bacchae. The plays are symmetrical: citizenship is denied to a sexually ambiguous magic-working alien, who vengefully debases and liquidates society’s arrogant hierarchs.” Through their deviance, the outside world must come to re-reckon with their morality and norms. This re-reckoning re-opens the space of possibility, allows newness and change, keeps the structure limber and flexible

I get that mediocre metis can beat solid episteme, but the high-level play has always seemed to me in favor of a stable main structure that’s limber and flexible and accommodating enough of transgression within itself, realizes this limberness is in the interests of not just its longterm stability but its longterm growth. If we’re being generous with 70s/80s Paglia this is probably something like her overarching view: Alterity provides not just a shelter for misfits but equally importantly, a means of continuously interrogating and improving the main structure—the main structure providing both the stakes and the premises of interrogation (the premise for response).
 

sus

Well-known member
or in full form
 

luka

Well-known member
Version, typically, brings up some forgotten 1980s film in which some stud waltzes into a town of squares and teaches them how to dance seduces all the women then disappears leaving everyone happy and cleansed and reinvigorated.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I think the idea of inside/outside is pretty key to subculture stuff. I think we should probably just taboo the word "counterculture"; it implies a mainstream, and we don't really have that anymore.

I mean I'm starting to see how there are distinct cultures between the orthodoxy and the negorthoxy. I think it just might have to do with where the line is drawn, not in terms of where capitalism meets its subsumption limits, but in terms of where the reigning orthodoxy draws limits of what is acceptable within the parameters of the mainstream culture. So in a sense, deplorable culture would be the counter culture, insofar as it actually stands outside the parameters of the orthodoxy.

Deplorable as a negative term deployed by the (neo)liberal orthodoxy in the way "pagan" was deployed by the puritan orthodoxy?

Part of why this is so confusing, this model/map that is, is that the liberalism that is coming tod efine the (neo)liberal orthodoxy actually defines itself in opposition to the puritanism of yesterday's orthodoxy. It would be interesting to track if/how a puritan residuum can subsist within the (neo)liberal orthodoxy.
 
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constant escape

winter withered, warm
"Counterculture" as more or less synonymous with "heterodox". But "counter" doesn't necessarily mean "diametrically counter" - that would be the negorthodox.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
This framework gives us a way to robustly understand such sociological phenomena as the alt-right, wokism, Trump, among other things.

edit: sociological/ideological, rather. Perhaps sociology proper is geared toward things I'm not privy to.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
This is the structure of so much classical work it makes my head spin. See Pentheus, teenage boyruler in Bacchae, trying desperately to contain his heterosexuality while his mother and her lesbian bakkhai horde tear him limb from limb in the forest
Crazy - I've just been reading about this sort of stuff in the context of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
 
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