Today’s post – “The Industrialization of the Arts: Meaning in a Capitalist Framework” – is authored by Igor da Silva Livramento. He’s a fellow academic from UFSC, fellow author, fellow creative-writing advisor, and overall a great fellow. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. Check out his papers on Academia.edu, his music on Bandcamp, and his personal musings on his blog – in Portuguese, Spanish/Castilian, and English.You can also find him on LinkedIn.
The lack of exploration of style, and the absence of style development strikes me as a trait of the industrialization of the arts. The artist no longer has to make poetry, no longer has to open up worlds to be experienced in all their familiarity or strangeness; now the artist must only provoke intense subjective experiences one after another.
It is an impoverishment of art to the level of killing it and reducing it to the same criteria as plain entertainment. I call it the aestheticization of life. The whole life has been made the object of aesthetics.
The industrialization of the arts involves art-as-fetish (more…)
A cargo cult is a belief system in which a group of people – typically indigenous tribes in contact with a technologically advanced culture – perform imitative rituals expecting a deity to offer them, too, the same technology. So far so good. But what about cargo cult writing?
Allow me first to talk a bit more about cargo cults, because the essence is important in understanding what is cargo cult writing and why it’s damaging to you as an author.
As Wikipedia informs us, although the phenomenon is older, it began to be noticeable in Pacific islands after WW2, when isolated cultures came in contact with American and Japanese expeditionary forces that arrived (by air) in great numbers and with advanced logistical support :
After the war, the soldiers departed. Cargo cults arose, attempting to imitate the behaviors of the soldiers, thinking that this would cause the soldiers and their cargo to return. […] Cult behaviors usually involved mimicking the day-to-day activities and dress styles of US soldiers, such as performing parade ground drills with wooden or salvaged rifles. The islanders carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses.
The concept of a cargo cult is often used as a metaphor to describe any activity where one imitates something without understanding it, expecting the same result. In some vague sense, it’s a post-hoc fallacy. “I saw a black cat and then I tripped and fell. It’s the black cat’s fault, so I better avoid black cats”.
As for cargo cult writing, you might have already guessed it: It’s when an author imitates what others do without realizing why or how, expecting similar results. Let’s see the various ways this can happen, and how to avoid it.
“Ernest Hemingway used a typewriter, so I need to use one too if I want to be a successful writer”. This simplistic example of cargo cult writing might sound ridiculous (because it is), but other manifestations are more insidious(more…)
Quite a leap, isn’t it? From idiocy and Socrates to the internet. Of course, the real issue here – the keyword, in a sense – is idiocy. Is it timeless, and therefore the common denominator? The answer is yes; there have always been idiots. Indeed, the word “idiot” is Greek. However, there’s a difference, too: Idiocy has evolved.
Nowadays, stupidity (I will use the terms interchangeably) is of a different kind. Understanding its characteristics might, just perhaps, help us better confront it.
At the same time, however, I must emphasize my pessimism. As I have stated before (see my posts on ignorance, Dunning-Kruger, and the failure of democracy), I really don’t see humanity being able to overcome its collective stupidity. The problem with idiocy (as Socrates perhaps would’ve agreed) is that those who should urgently question their thought processes rarely do.
Still, if we managed to at least marginalize idiocy, to the extent historical examples have shown possible, we could perhaps allow a glimmer of hope.
Idiocy in Socrates’s time and the one we face today share a common characteristic: Conviction and certainty. Still, there are crucial differences, too, having to do with the rate of propagation(more…)
