A Brooklyn Culture Mafia

[padraig (u.s.)]

and the first name that comes to my mind in re "good prose" is Cormac McCarthy

all those lengthy, astounding, Faulknerian, Biblical passages in Blood Meridian

 

[IdleRich]

Yeah good call... although I could see that he might rub quite a few up the wrong way.

 

[sus]

do I have to be the one to link "Radicalizing the Romanceless" here?—it's topical, but the training machine of Twitter has taught me there's no status gain in linking to rationalists

 

[sus]

has the left ever tried to tackle the problem of unequal desire? feels largely ignored, at least when compared to the rights fixation on it

This is importantly linked to the problem of unequal ability (in the case of instilling desire: ability to earn, attractiveness) being heritable, which is also difficult to talk about at the current moment, and maybe has been for a while

 

[shiels]

really I thought @shiels had the most interesting line of inquiry, i.e. the tension of trying to reconcile egalitarianism with the reality of unequal desire. that's an issue that effects everyone with egalitarian beliefs, not just a tiny clique of Brooklyn subcultural elites who aren't even interesting as a case study unless you care about them enough to follow the intimate details of their lives. the issue of not just unequal treatment but unequal desire didn't really exist on "the left" until very recently, certainly not when I was younger - tho you can see the precursors bubbling up in culture if you look back - pickup artists, the incel entering into popular consciousness, alpha/beta discourse, red pilling, fuckbois + softbois, etc. it's good to be aware of tho idk how much you can directly do about it - keep an open mind and try to keep in mind how beauty standards or other relevant power relations influence or intersect with your own desires, but desire itself is like belief - you can't desire something you don't or not desire something you do.

Desire is not a choice and is kind of impervious to woke regulation, and even stimulated / perverted by attempts to subdue or control.

I spotted a few things on ‘beauty privilege’ but is unequal desire explored in leftist chat much? Point me where if so.

I would nearly listen to the podcast for this reason. I like confessional stuff and that tension and kind of dishonourable honesty can be funny and energising. Maybe these confessions are only acceptable from women at this point

unequal desire and the draw of status is a difficult thing to account for from the left. And the line seems to be that the conditions are always socially determined. there’s the huge focus on gender, the marginalised, those without power or a voice etc. And sex-workers, and the law etc
But there does seem to be this compartmentalisation of sexual desire (my kinks say nothing of my politics) that’s liberal in permissiveness but I feel sometimes mollycoddling or swerving some things we feel all day at the most basic level (the seductiveness of power, genetic unfairness, hierarchies)

Ive been in a few boringly reductive beauty standard discussions so keen to steer clear of biological determinism that they’ll outright deny that beauty is anything but subjective, and socially determined. or that status and power really matter at all when it comes to sex. It makes me laugh a malicious laugh but it also kind of annoys me because there’s a lot to uncover and learn by being honest about these things, and maybe a lot to gain by harnessing or at least not repressing that energy or pretending its not there

 

[shiels]

Like you mention with PUA etc I think the alt right drew a huge amount of power from tapping into this well of resentful sexual energy, it wasn’t exactly planned as such but that festering underworld nexus ended up framing loserdom in simple terms and set up an enemy, a programme of subjugation from some feminist culturalist marxist jewist cabal which was neatly packaged in a gateway drug, the red pill into right wing politics

and then there's 60s sexual liberation and its political alignment

 

[shiels]

You get the sexual revolution in America first because theyre more able to confront these issues because they arent human like luka says, which is to say theyre not so hopelessly neurotic. Theyre fine detaching and talking about embarrassing stuff like hoping to bump into a podcaster in brooklyn, how they really feel etc

Dissensus is afeared of sex though

 

[boxedjoy]

Speak for yourself I love shagging

 

[constant escape]

What if the synthesis of desire and egalitarianism requires a degree of sublimation that may seem, by our current standards, both clinical and casual, psychotic? Contriving an elaborate libido irrigation system, strategically shifting desire's centers of gravity so as to rearrange your wiring. How far are you willing to go to execute this synthesis?

The answer doesn't seem to be one of policy, rather policy seems a rather high order stratum of the system that needs to be built, albeit a stratum that, if one steers it properly, can prompt developments at more integral strata.

edit:"Psychotic" "by our current standards" as in widely regarded as being detached from reality.

 

[constant escape]

As a project, it seemingly coincides with much of the work described in spiritual and mystical discourse, or at least describes similar transformations.

 

[sus]

Andrea Long Chu—who was slated to be discussed today, thanks @shiels—is probably the most influential/best person writing on these issues who identify as left-adjacent (and maybe just period). Highly highly recommend her writing.

 

[sus]

Dayna Tortoricci (pictured right): editor of n+1

 

[shiels]

With this ‘asymmetric gaze’ there can be a certain deceit or concealment in how we operate under it, when we have to suppress our glee if we’re to pull off the ruse, show its due, we’re worthy of the attention, yes amt i brilliant i am amt i

And it’s very difficult to resist what the asymmetric gaze does to you. I remember varoufakis talking about how he felt he deserved to skip queues, click heels down the corridors of power, he was seduced by his own image as a powerful man

We really get off on the eyeball and attention and flattery, we cant help feeling were really deserving of fame and power, and it literally changes the brain this dynamic

 

[sus]

Whitney Mallett - I think she writes for like Pin Up and Editorial and Ssense, all of which are very sceney

this one actually did reject me it was many years ago I was 20 she was maybe 26 but it still stings. we smoked with our legs swinging over the Hudson Heights but I was young and uncultured and didn't stand a chance, I got a lecture for liking Ryder Ripps. I'd actually forgotten entirely, I wasn't lying when I said as much to @Leo she's not a core member by any means very fringe, she doesn't get featured regularly on the Phillips finsta or anything, but every once and a while I stumble upon her as part of some conversation or article or snapshot and it's an odd feeling. I think last I saw her at a distance in line for some PS1 space-opera a couple years back

 

[sus]

With this ‘asymmetric gaze’ there can be a certain deceit or concealment in how we operate under it, when we have to suppress our glee if we’re to pull off the ruse, show its due, we’re worthy of the attention, yes amt i brilliant i am amt i

And it’s very difficult to resist what the asymmetric gaze does to you. I remember varoufakis talking about how he felt he deserved to skip queues, click heels down the corridors of power, he was seduced by his own image as a powerful man

We really get off on the eyeball and attention and flattery, we cant help feeling were really deserving of fame and power, and it literally changes the brain this dynamic

One thing I've noticed is part of the way gals can disrupt (especially in-person) previously all-male spaces is because they get preferential attention/deference from the guys, and it sorta throws off the vibe. This isn't trying to put anything on women, it's just a dynamic. I haven't been in all-girl groups to tell whether it goes the other way as well.

 

[shiels]

Yes but I think it happens with men too (me). I like to say to impossibly beautiful people 'you havent even met anyone!' your face is so distracting that it sends out ripples of energy that adjust everyones personality and posture within a 50 metre radius. people cannot act themselves around you. all you meet are actors

 

[sus]

Here's some Long Chu.

fr "On Liking Women" (n+1):

true separatism doesn’t stop at leaving your husband. It proceeds, with paranoid rigor, to purge the apartments of the mind of anything remotely connected to patriarchy. Desire is no exception. Political lesbianism is founded on the belief that even desire becomes pliable at high enough temperatures.

Desire is, by nature, childlike and chary of government. The day we begin to qualify it by the righteousness of its political content is the day we begin to prescribe some desires and prohibit others. That way lies moralism only. Just try to imagine life as a feminist anemone, the tendrils of your desire withdrawing in an instant from patriarchy’s every touch. There would be nothing to watch on TV.

I doubt that any of us transition simply because we want to “be” women, in some abstract, academic way. I certainly didn’t. I transitioned for gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone’s girlfriend, for letting her pay the check or carry my bags, for the benevolent chauvinism of bank tellers and cable guys, for the telephonic intimacy of long-distance female friendship, for fixing my makeup in the bathroom flanked like Christ by a sinner on each side, for sex toys, for feeling hot, for getting hit on by butches, for that secret knowledge of which dykes to watch out for, for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts. But now you begin to see the problem with desire: we rarely want the things we should.

fr an interview at LitHub:

That’s the terror and also the holiness of a desire: It doesn’t actually have to do with the good. It has no necessary relation to that which is good or beneficial or healthy or advantageous or in one’s interest or any of that. It is independent of the object, even as it is structured by dependence on the object.

Shiels is right though that this doesn't really get into the ways asymmetric desire makes hierarchy of some form inevitable. I'm not sure where to go for that take. You see bits of it in Paglia, in Khachiyan, and in incel lit—but I dunno any straight-ahead take that transcends "well, as a women, my desires are problematic" or "the man was good but lonely and felt gaslit because none of his lefty friends would acknowledge his problem"

 

[shiels]

she doesn't get featured regularly on the Phillips finsta or anything

what the fuck are you on about

 

[linebaugh]

Whitney Mallett - I think she writes for like Pin Up and Editorial and Ssense, all of which are very sceney

this one actually did reject me it was many years ago I was 20 she was maybe 26 but it still stings. we smoked with our legs swinging over the Hudson Heights but I was young and uncultured and didn't stand a chance, I got a lecture for liking Ryder Ripps. I'd actually forgotten entirely, I wasn't lying when I said as much to @Leo she's not a core member by any means very fringe, she doesn't get featured regularly on the Phillips finsta or anything, but every once and a while I stumble upon her as part of some conversation or article or snapshot and it's an odd feeling. I think last I saw her at a distance in line for some PS1 space-opera a couple years back

wait gus are you telling us you once lived in NYC?

 

[sus]

@Linebaugh Yes that's where I developed an unnecessary set of opinions about autofiction, too, incidentally


I even did a lil autofiction parody-of-the-genre, literary-crossdressing book which brushes up against the border / has a little bit about this stuff, when it's all around you you have to work through it, understand where you stand, now I feel somewhat detached