sincerity I

This is a thing I wrote a ways back and now I'm posting it without even rereading it

Because the blog has like NO UPDATES LATELY, which is bad. I've been busy, sorry. Probably soon I will have more free time and will post more stuff but for now you can have this thing from sometime. I remember writing it and not really liking it. I remember taking another stab at writing it more recently but I think that was lost in my latest hard drive crash.

I write stuff like this fairly often and almost inevitably I'll dislike it and end up forgetting about it but I probably should post it first, I usually don't do that. The reason I don't is like first order ironic with the topic of this post, i.e. I'd rather just keep putting random lame stuff on here than take an honest effort to write something good i.e. I'd rather be insincere than a failure, and I basically think that attitude is the biggest problem with art at the moment.

Anyways:

Sincerity

So a number of times I've alluded to what I think I usually call “The Sincerity Problem”. This is, in my opinion, the largest problem facing art today: that everything is done with an expected level of “meta-irony-reflexivity” such that the actual thing being presented being what it “looks like” is a naïve and simple interpretation. Before I get too serious here, because I suspect that soon I will begin to get really weirdly emotionally invested in this, which is ironic for a number of reasons that I'll get into soon, and I'll take it really seriously, so before that happens, I'd like to point out how weird it seems to me that OpenOffice automatically fixes the “i” in “naïve” to have two dots, as it should, but then gives me the red squiggle and asks if I meant to put first “nave” and then “naive”, single dot, as the second suggestion. Weird.

But yeah this is something I think about a lot, and when I try to pin down what sorts of things bug me about today's society... this seems like crotchety old man behaviour but I actually do it because I find it keeps the number of things that bug me down, like, if I see something that looks dumb initially, if I think about why exactly, often I'll end up liking it. But when I still don't like it I find it usually has something to do with this whole sincerity problem.

The Sincerity Problem

The sincerity problem is basically that sincerity is seen as an outdated concept. To say what you mean is considered old fashioned. To mean what you say doubly so. There's been a second abstraction between language and thought, not the metaphoric abstraction of the romantic era, but an abstraction built around irony and reflexivity, supported entirely by its own obscurity. This is the ultimate form of postmodernism: an arrow made of nothing pointing at nothing that disappears when you can see it.

What?

Okay here's a really simple example: knowing use of cliché.

Hey it does the same thing for “cliché” as it does for “naïve”!

So here's a really simple and common example: knowing or ironic use of clichés. This is so common now that it itself has become a cliché. The simplest example I can think of is starting your story with “Once upon a time...”. Now, I mean, context is everything, but in most cases I think we can agree that if we saw this in something recent, we'd not think “Oh, this took place in some bygone timeless era of fairy tales, thus I am expecting a fairy tail”, we'd prolly think “Oh, this is some contemporary story hoping to create humour/poignancy through the intersection of its contemporary elements and the mos cliched stylistic tropes from fairy tails”. Interestingly it does not do it for the word “cliched”. Also interestingly, this specific postmodern cliché of starting your story with “once upon a time” doesn't exist because so many of us now default to the second reaction. See, one problem with this is that the second reaction works because we're accustomed to expecting the unexpected, and its ability to do the work of creating humour/poignancy through whatever I said there is based on this being the reflexive, self-knowing, ironic usage, the usage that subverts the “expected” usage and prepares us for further subversion, in other words, an insincere usage.

But that isn't a problem in itself, of course

Well, “one monkey don't stop the show”. These simple examples don't usually amount to anything but a quick joke. Even more sophisticated ones, uhh, maybe later I'll give a good example, hey how about saying “uhh” in the middle of a blog post?! I'm not really speaking to you real time, I don't have to do things like say “uhh” to buy for time while I compose my thoughts, half the time when I type “uhh” I'm not even thinking “uhh”, let alone trying to buy for time! But yeah I'll get back to that later. Individual examples of this sort of insincerity in writing doesn't create any sort of problem. What scares me is the culture it produces.

The Cynical Generation

Was I think actually the MTV generation, which wasn't my generation. No, my generation is something even worse: the internet generation just seems, in many ways, fundamentally empty. The MTV generation was distrustful of the sincerity of everyone 'cause everyone was just trying to sell you something. They were cynical, but they had some sense that there was a secret, underlying “real” thing out there, that something below corporations and advertisement there was something that deserved passing the great standards of cynicism that they built up for themselves.

My generation is distrustful of the sincerity of everyone because they want to get it. And if you ever think you get it, you don't get it. And if enough people actually do get it, it's ruined. This is “secret club” mentality. This is the mentality of memes. This is the mentality of ironic art. This is the mentality of trolling.

Okay so wait where do you see this problem exactly?

So I really think this is a problem on the forefront of art, which means that you should most easily find it in the oldest arts and the arts that move the quickest. And you do, you see it in literature and music, and in the social arts, especially internet-related ones. I know I'm being weirdly abstract and vague here. And it's certainly not a problem across the board in these mediums. Okay I'll try to be more specific.

The problem, as I see it, stems from hyper self-reflexivity that has become possible due to the internet. What I mean by this is that art now has an immediacy that is totally unprecedented. The lines between production and reception have been blurred, and the barrier for entry for the canon from which allusion and stylistic homage is fair game has been reduced to none. This is easiest to see when you look at how intertextuality has changed but has also drastically changed the very idea of commitment to one's meaning. To be exact, the artist is now free from any sort of commitment to the sincerity of the meaning of their work. Outside of the internet, I mean, I love to blame/praise the internet for everything, but outside of the internet, books have been moving in this direction since uh Joyce. Like with this idea “cliches for the sake of cliches” that I touched on with my earlier example, there seems to be an establishment of an entire new codified abstraction in literature, like a new language almost.

Okay first let's look at some more historic things with a very uneducated perspective

Uhh, alright, so I said earlier that the sincerity problem was the ultimate form of postmodernism. Basically I see it as postmodernism eating itself. What is postmodernism? Looking through the window at a shout in the street. Ha hm. Okay so we have modernism, a response to romanticism. Previously I talked a bit about modernism being the pursuit of “progress”, I think that was in a post about Hidamari Sketch. I still kind of like that definition but I think maybe it's best now to think of how each movement responds to the previous one. Romanticism could be said as the pursuit of perfection, of impossible ideals, right? Modernism, to me, was the response of, hey man, why do we need to look for things like beauty or love or death as big fluffy abstract ideals waiting in the Platonic realm for a worthy description? Why can't we just progress further in any direction we so please? And that was fun for awhile but what ends up happening is that so much of modern art is so far off in whatever crazy direction they came up with that no one has any idea what's going on. So then you have postmodernism as a response to that, saying something like hey man, what's the idea of “progress” anyways? Where are you going and what do you think you'll find there? Something like this? Because look at this, it isn't what you thought it was! And that's pretty funny and we all have a good laugh at how postmodernism totally punk'd modernism but eventually modernism kinda stopped doing stuff and postmodernism didn't really have any battles to fight and all it had left to mock was itself.

That's where things get wacky. It gets wacky less to do with the mocking itself and more to do with it having nothing left to mock, because what the heck does that mean? It means that no one is doing anything mockable, and we all know, the mockability of something hinges on the perceived sincere investment of effort and emotion into it. What does it mean when no one is investing anything with sincere effort and emotion? It means terrible things for a culture. It means a great hollowing out.

And that's the sincerity problem

Yeah. It's that people are scared to say what they mean, not just because they're scared they'll be mocked as I may have implied in that last paragraph. Really the big reason is that it just isn't “cool” anymore to say what you mean. That seems silly but I really think it's true in so many cases.

I'd like to get into this in much more depth but maybe this is an okay spot to stop for today. I'd really actually like to write a semiformal essay about this at some point because it honestly bugs me and I really do think about it a lot. But this obviously isn't it. Topics I'd like to cover are like:

-David Foster Wallace writes about this a lot and I think he has some really good things to say

-Actual examples of where I see this problem, hopefully not just hypothetical ones

-The cleverness vs. sincerity dichotomy, which is really what this problem boils down to

-Internet trolling, which is the super extreme example of this

-What killed the romantic era, why has it become trite to tackle certain subjects

-The strange “packing” of emotions you see a lot on the internet, nostalgia thread, sad thread, funny thread, >that feel threads

>That feel when you can't tell what stuff you actually like and what stuff you like on some level of weird commentary on itself

>That feel when you keep thinking that nothing you feel is an “actual emotion” and that somewhere lower there are “actual emotions” that will feel different because you won't doubt them

-Reassurance to people that I am not crazy/possible relocation of previous two points to a post on /r9k/

-Moving past this, the “new age of sincerity”, Noah Lennox, moe anime, Das Racist, shoehorning all the stuff I like into the good side of everything

 Right now I am too tired though.