Few Thoughts on a book I haven't read

The FT had a special report in which they sent someone to Wisconsin to interview women who support Trump with a view to finding out why, given his history of misogynistic but also racist comments - one of the interviewees was second generation Mexican.

What they had to say squared with a lot of the more convincing accounts of Trumpism that I've been reading over the past nearly a decade. Nostalgia for a putative golden age in American history (in this particular instance the eighties under Reagan) is the most familiar one: it's right there on the hat. Racism, that's the other one; one of these women reported that that her daughter is attending university in a border city through which large groups of terrorists and rapists stream on a daily basis. One that I think is emphasised to an extent that is relatively new is intra-racism, whereby immigrants in a position of relative privilege - the bar for this can be very low - regard themselves as American in a way newer immigrants are not.

A very rich seam of anecdata but it put me in mind of articles you see in the Guardian about individuals who were once remembers of far-right organisations or cults who present themselves not only as reformed but as domain experts into radicalisation or being duped because of their subjective experiences. Obviously these people know more about fascist gangs than your average person but that implicit suggestion of the state of internal cognitive transparency they’ve achieved always struck me as peculiar. (Sartre once said his own psychological processes were completely open to him and that his philosophy was just a transcription of his psychological processes as they unfolded).

This also had me thinking about a book that I came across on my Goodreads feed written by a cultural critic who seemed to be in on the Lacanian gig before Zizek hit it big, blogging cultural critiques while Obama was in office, precisely on the non-transparency of our social behaviour to ourselves. Everything we do, from this lad's point of view, is an exercise in self-aggrandisement. All of our relationships are transactional, we maintain an internal ledger and drop people if we’re not getting what we think is owed to us. This is especially the case when we do things which seem to moving us towards a horizon of selflessness, in our relationships we’re constantly playing out anti-social power fantasies. I had a flick through the book and his old blog. It reminded me alot of those sections of Infinite Jest (good), Pale King (fine but unfinished and shouldn’t have been published) and Brief Interviews (boring) in which DFW is working through while projecting his own selfishness and very much reifying his subjective understanding of what a good person is: a philistine Midwestern suburbanite. A lot of people in the comments around this guy were saying stuff like 'sure when I'm listening to music I pretend I'm playing the guitar in front of thousands of people but I love my girlfriend pretty selflessly'. We might think here too of all the novels and thinkpieces in which neurotic social media and in-group behaviours are represented to the end of scandalising ourselves in recognition of our own foibles.

What is theory and criticism for? If it's not just a way for me to pass my time, perform our own intelligence, a means to seeing our name on a website I suppose its a spur to thinking, parsing out appearances to get to something more actual, particularly with a view we can intervene purposefully in trying to change it (I think someone important wrote something along those lines once).

I might use this Substack more to parse out stuff I'd be tweeting if that site still existed, so I don't have a conclusion, but I do know that I'm not going to read a book that's going to tell me how I need to begin with my own patterns of thought in getting myself out from under my own wretchedness, I'm too old for that. Why are people compelled to internally represent their lives to themselves in such a way that they’re always coming out on top? Why are our friends and families so amenable to being pressed into the role as a prop? I’d start with Lukács here personally.