N+1

projektfu•about 2 hours ago

I discovered I live in a parallel universe from the author, having heard nothing about anything this article references.

appplication•about 2 hours ago

Your comment made me laugh but I had a similar experience. It felt almost voyeuristic with how far I am from whoever they’re trying to reach, like I’m reading someone’s private journal.

jagged-chisel•about 2 hours ago

I almost mistook the article as a work of fiction

nine_k•about 2 hours ago

Isn't it good? On one hand, the world is more rich than you (and I) had thought. On the other hand, the people who would go for a Communist revolution do not surface near you as prominent media figures, at least, not yet.

p-e-w•about 2 hours ago

This happens to me every time I take a quick look at the “high culture” world, be it literature, art, music, or general intellectualism. I have a minor in philosophy and consider myself reasonably well-read, but today’s avantgarde is nothing like that of the past, and seems above all else designed to be exclusionary.

stackghost•about 2 hours ago

Exclusionary isn't the term. I'm not sure there is one specific term in English, but today's high culture all seems to be predicated upon feigning enlightenment, or pretending to have a deep understanding.

My wife's sister did an art degree, for example, and she and her friends wouldn't stop gushing about purposefully-inscrutable postmodern nonsense like Derrida, who was an absolute hack.

All that aside, N+1 sounds like it's the sort of thing I would enjoy read. I didn't get the sense that it was written to be exclusionary, but maybe I just didn't get the full picture from TFA.

strken•41 minutes ago

High culture can feel obscurantist to me.

Writers like to impress that they and Derrida are in on a shared secret, but if this secret is not interesting then the reader must not be allowed to know it before doing some work. A barricade of allusions and references and filler is necessary to make readers feel like they really earned an insight.

Whereas if we took a step back and stripped off the allegories, we'd realise that Derrida's argument to Lacan about the nature of the phallus is not interesting and does not tell us much.

Rendello•about 1 hour ago

> today's high culture all seems to be predicated upon feigning enlightenment

That must be the marker of "high" culture throughout history generally, right?

I like this quote from a funny video on ancient Greek philosophy (although I'd probably be less amused by the layers of nonsense if the people around me were deep into it):

> Philosophy is known for being equal-parts Pretentious and Needlessly Confusing, and that’s definitely true, especially after Descartes shows up, but there is one thing that Philosophy is not, and that is “Boring”, because it is WAY too stupid. Anybody who tells you that Philosophy is the unflinching pursuit of objective truth is lying to you and to themselves — Philosophy is a mess where everyone is competing for the most galaxy-brained take on the world, and that’s why I Love It, dammit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9ve3BARdFI

lordleft•about 3 hours ago

Naomi is an awesome writer and she's been doing many of these deep dives into literary journals. She's also reviewed entire historic genres (like old westerns), IIRC. She has a really unique ability to plainly grasp what's special about a group of related writing.

nateburke•about 3 hours ago

Issue 4 is incredible, I bought a damaged copy for a buck and it was the best literary dollar I have ever spent!

PaulHoule•about 3 hours ago

You can cultivate an aristocratic attitude even if you never had that much money by USian standards. I mean, as much as we complain about medicine as a kafkaesque nightmare and nexus of inequality [1] it is a miracle not least vaccines, antibiotics, statin drugs, dental implants were never available to the richest people in the Ancien Regime. A character in a 18th century novel might spirit his lover away to Paris from the backwaters of France, now for the rest of us there is Ryanair.

It's quite a healthy way to deal with elite overproduction.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mM5kKqUETbE&list=RDmM5kKqUET...

oliculipolicula•32 minutes ago

Placeholder

https://youtu.be/_Y8mpClnuAI

[Next Gen] Editors of n+1 on a Panel

I should also have put an upper bound on the votes!

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Discussion (14 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews