silas of trees

(Please understand that when I say "racism" I mean "...and xenophobia, sexism, ableism, general misanthropy, etc." …We'll get there. )

Abstract

For the third entry of my "Fair and Balanced™ Reviews of Craft Books" series, I read The Science of Storytelling, by Will Storr. In my Fair and Balanced™ opinion, this book hates science as much as it hates storytelling, but not as much as it hates human people. When I say this, I'm not making a glib joke about the poor quality of the book and how painful of an experience it was to read it. I'm actually saying this book is dripping with contempt for humanity, and I cannot fathom why the author chose a career in the arts if the mere idea of genuine human connection is so foreign to him as to seem risible.

Introduction: Life is meaningless and people are horrible

Just as this society tends to reduce, and even absorb opposition (the qualitative difference!) in the realm of politics and higher culture, so it does in the instinctual sphere. The result is the atrophy of the mental organs for grasping the contradictions and the alternatives and, in the one remaining dimension of technological rationality, the Happy Consciousness comes to prevail.

It reflects the belief that the real is rational, and that the established system, in spite of everything, delivers the goods. The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered. And in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent. Conscience is absolved by reification, by the general necessity of things.

idk there are a lot of other bits along these lines, but i feel like there's some specific connection between:

A. Marcuse's argument around the neoliberal emphasis on neoliberalism's self-defined rationality, the operationalization (the process of breaking down abstract concepts into measurable metrics) of our ways of thinking, and the resulting closure of the universes of politics and discourse

and

B. The Thing Will Storr is doing in "The Science of Storytelling"

something clicked for me just recently. i was reading The One Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse and this one passage stood out:

We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilization: the rational character of its irrationality. Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man's mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced.

so idk about you, but i have not recognized myself in any such thing. it occurred to me at the time that maybe things were just different in 1964, or that he means this specifically in the way people identify status or personality with their objects.

but then i thought about fandom. specifically the kind of fandom that makes you find a piece of yourself in a corporate-produced piece of art, truly commodified art that is mainly understood by number sold and budget and revenue and profit. fandom that lets you find community and identity within this commodity, and then encourages you to defend that commodity against all legitimate criticism.

recent events made me really get what this could look like.