I liked your point about the Mike Judge vibe of being traditional but non -judgmental. Hadn't thought about it but it seems right to his product. Also I wonder if maybe the Fixer Upper folks - Chip and Joanna Gaines - have that vibe, and maybe it has something to do with their appeal.
Not at all what you were saying about the dissipation of normie-dom, but it reminded me of a thought I have sometimes, which is that probably 80+% of people in the world experience a fair amount of social anxiety and awkwardness in their dealings with other people who aren't their closest friends and kin -- i.e. in the workplace, at social gatherings, at school events (if you have kids), etc. -- and yet we've defined normal as someone who doesn't mostly experience that anxiety and awkwardness, so everyone's walking around thinking everyone else is socially adept but in fact the truly socially adept are a small minority. Basically being a bit of a nerd is the default. This is in part how I make sense of every celebrity profile quoting the given celebrity saying that when they were a kid they were kind of an outcast, or describing themselves as "nerds." I used to think they were bullshitting, and then I thought maybe celebrity selects for really charismatic people with childhoods of alienation, but now I just think it's everyone.
I think the last 200 years have seen many groups claiming and being involuntarily figured as the emblems of existential freedom and the dizziness of self-creation (the 'new woman', gays, Jews, poets, dandies, etc) so the 'we are all ___' statements just strike me as having the same shape as the rotating gallery of The ____ Question, not as something peculiar to transness or gender in our slice of modernity.... I don't think I have a theory about which doors are to be closed to whom, but I do think everyone insofar as they have an idea of politics also has some idea about a door, no? (Even the line of thought that begins, 'I'm not sure that person's line of thought is good for my people [which is a totally normal--and normative--line, one without which, how could we live?]' is a political and exclusionary one, asking about friends and enemies. As Hank says, at some point you ask the other "politely but firmly to leave")
Agreed, one of the joys of watching a certain sort of reactionary is seeing them cycle through all 200 years of that evolution depending on the moment. The basic complaint is as you’ve noted mostly always the same (everyone is spiritually Jewish/a woman/gay/trans etc in modernity, if we get there I’m sure cyborgs will get that treatment in 20 or so years), and whoever’s most recently been that group is usually (not always) frantically disavowing whoever it is now, which is understandable really! That’s a Neo gene thing I mostly didn’t get into because I thought it was too obvious, but it’s certainly there. Speaking of which, it’s not so much the limit that bothers me-I think you probably do have to politely but firmly ask people to leave at some point-it’s the (possibly irrational) suspicion that the person being asked to leave would be me!
I'm not sure that the relation say, between gay and trans is best described as the latest episode of a series of rivalries between groups figured as bearers of modernity's tensions by which the 'most recent' group thus figured draws the ire of the penultimate group... or that trans is more recent than gay in this sense. Trans identities are in some ways older than homosexual ones, or emerge in a complicated process alongside them from the late 19th and early 20th century medical and psychological discourses (whose ancestor--gay or trans--is 'the invert', the 'third sex' etc?)... for that matter, it's not as though gay identity was developed in exactly 'frantic disavowal' of feminism or Zionism (or either of those through frantic disavowal of the other) but through again complex borrowing, imitation and rejection...
There are of course plenty of reasons why the ways that trans identities are theorized and enacted might be in friction with gay, feminist, etc frames... which do not I think have to do with some structurally tragic compulsion on the part... I am not sure that these frictions either can be done away with from some sufficiently tolerant perspective, however much they might be at either the macro-political or micro-personal level be suspended by good will, common interests, etc--but then neither can tensions between say, fundamentally different worldviews, religions etc, whose members in spite of their radically irreconcilable claims do manage in some liberal regimes to get along quite well!
Idk what "neo gene thing" is, let alone why it's obvious! I have no power to ask anyone to leave anything except my own home, so although I relate to the line of anxiety ('is this person homophobic?' is of course a question that animates my reading of any, for example, spicy antiliberal thinker--and the salience of that anxiety is part of why I remain, I guess, a liberal) there is also something strange about having one's own prejudices enlisted by someone else in an imagined scenario of persecution ("would you send me to the camps?" I guess is the thinking-from-the-perspective-of-the-victim version of "what would your job be in the commune?")
Yeah there’s what might be fairly described as wild generalization happening in my comment there (which I can specialize in, especially in the wee small hours!) I don’t necessarily think those developments follow necessarily or structurally either, and nor do I think *you’d* be asking me to leave, to say nothing of the camps. Agreed about liberal regimes.
The “Neo gene stuff” refers to certain half baked theories of mine about sensibilities that tend toward something like neoconservatism as a recurring social process, possibly over-extrapolated from the first generation of neocons and some intellectual developments of the last decade or so.
Thanks for clarifying, as I said I’m never sure how much of that sort of unease is reasonable and how much is well, self victimizing paranoia on my part!
Three quick thoughts:
What's gooning (I refuse to look it up).
I liked your point about the Mike Judge vibe of being traditional but non -judgmental. Hadn't thought about it but it seems right to his product. Also I wonder if maybe the Fixer Upper folks - Chip and Joanna Gaines - have that vibe, and maybe it has something to do with their appeal.
Not at all what you were saying about the dissipation of normie-dom, but it reminded me of a thought I have sometimes, which is that probably 80+% of people in the world experience a fair amount of social anxiety and awkwardness in their dealings with other people who aren't their closest friends and kin -- i.e. in the workplace, at social gatherings, at school events (if you have kids), etc. -- and yet we've defined normal as someone who doesn't mostly experience that anxiety and awkwardness, so everyone's walking around thinking everyone else is socially adept but in fact the truly socially adept are a small minority. Basically being a bit of a nerd is the default. This is in part how I make sense of every celebrity profile quoting the given celebrity saying that when they were a kid they were kind of an outcast, or describing themselves as "nerds." I used to think they were bullshitting, and then I thought maybe celebrity selects for really charismatic people with childhoods of alienation, but now I just think it's everyone.
Oh dear, this is worse than the time I was the reason someone became aware of who Richard Hannaniah is. Sorry to ruin your day but https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gooning
You made my day! That's amazing. Just have to figure out how to work this into my vernacular.
I think the last 200 years have seen many groups claiming and being involuntarily figured as the emblems of existential freedom and the dizziness of self-creation (the 'new woman', gays, Jews, poets, dandies, etc) so the 'we are all ___' statements just strike me as having the same shape as the rotating gallery of The ____ Question, not as something peculiar to transness or gender in our slice of modernity.... I don't think I have a theory about which doors are to be closed to whom, but I do think everyone insofar as they have an idea of politics also has some idea about a door, no? (Even the line of thought that begins, 'I'm not sure that person's line of thought is good for my people [which is a totally normal--and normative--line, one without which, how could we live?]' is a political and exclusionary one, asking about friends and enemies. As Hank says, at some point you ask the other "politely but firmly to leave")
Agreed, one of the joys of watching a certain sort of reactionary is seeing them cycle through all 200 years of that evolution depending on the moment. The basic complaint is as you’ve noted mostly always the same (everyone is spiritually Jewish/a woman/gay/trans etc in modernity, if we get there I’m sure cyborgs will get that treatment in 20 or so years), and whoever’s most recently been that group is usually (not always) frantically disavowing whoever it is now, which is understandable really! That’s a Neo gene thing I mostly didn’t get into because I thought it was too obvious, but it’s certainly there. Speaking of which, it’s not so much the limit that bothers me-I think you probably do have to politely but firmly ask people to leave at some point-it’s the (possibly irrational) suspicion that the person being asked to leave would be me!
I'm not sure that the relation say, between gay and trans is best described as the latest episode of a series of rivalries between groups figured as bearers of modernity's tensions by which the 'most recent' group thus figured draws the ire of the penultimate group... or that trans is more recent than gay in this sense. Trans identities are in some ways older than homosexual ones, or emerge in a complicated process alongside them from the late 19th and early 20th century medical and psychological discourses (whose ancestor--gay or trans--is 'the invert', the 'third sex' etc?)... for that matter, it's not as though gay identity was developed in exactly 'frantic disavowal' of feminism or Zionism (or either of those through frantic disavowal of the other) but through again complex borrowing, imitation and rejection...
There are of course plenty of reasons why the ways that trans identities are theorized and enacted might be in friction with gay, feminist, etc frames... which do not I think have to do with some structurally tragic compulsion on the part... I am not sure that these frictions either can be done away with from some sufficiently tolerant perspective, however much they might be at either the macro-political or micro-personal level be suspended by good will, common interests, etc--but then neither can tensions between say, fundamentally different worldviews, religions etc, whose members in spite of their radically irreconcilable claims do manage in some liberal regimes to get along quite well!
Idk what "neo gene thing" is, let alone why it's obvious! I have no power to ask anyone to leave anything except my own home, so although I relate to the line of anxiety ('is this person homophobic?' is of course a question that animates my reading of any, for example, spicy antiliberal thinker--and the salience of that anxiety is part of why I remain, I guess, a liberal) there is also something strange about having one's own prejudices enlisted by someone else in an imagined scenario of persecution ("would you send me to the camps?" I guess is the thinking-from-the-perspective-of-the-victim version of "what would your job be in the commune?")
Yeah there’s what might be fairly described as wild generalization happening in my comment there (which I can specialize in, especially in the wee small hours!) I don’t necessarily think those developments follow necessarily or structurally either, and nor do I think *you’d* be asking me to leave, to say nothing of the camps. Agreed about liberal regimes.
The “Neo gene stuff” refers to certain half baked theories of mine about sensibilities that tend toward something like neoconservatism as a recurring social process, possibly over-extrapolated from the first generation of neocons and some intellectual developments of the last decade or so.
Thanks for clarifying, as I said I’m never sure how much of that sort of unease is reasonable and how much is well, self victimizing paranoia on my part!