[mamma-wolf]

heat 2, new mexico by denis piel

[cosmicanger]

Alice dos Reis, Monastery on the Moon 3, 2024, Handwoven tapestry, organic wool, acrylic frame, 27,5 x 33,2 cm

[proustiansleep]

"Since you are reading this book, you are probably, like me, an ambivalent member of the PMC. I am at best a second- generation PMC person, but I do not like what I see of my class, and I am determined to fight to socialize the things that the PMC wants to hoard: virtue, grit, persistence, erudition, specialized knowledge, prestige, and pleasure, along with cultural and actual capital. To define the changing contours of a class to which one partially belongs is to enter into the difficult process of political self- criticism, beginning with an exfoliating and brutal reconceptualization and historicization of one’s own values, sensibilities, and affects. To renounce one’s narcissistic fetishization of intelligence or refinement is not a simple act. This short introduction aims at helping us do the necessary work of self- criticism while providing a few tools to attack PMC positions in its best- defended redoubts— political organizations, publishing, media, private foundations, think tanks, and the university."

—Catherine Liu, Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class

[proustiansleep]

"By the 1990s, the cultural rebels who had gotten PhDs in the 1970s stormed the university and secured tenured positions. They did not pay attention to budgets and administration as much as they were obsessed with their own commitments to cultural transgression, some of which involved wearing jeans to class, smoking pot, sleeping with students, and listening to John Cale, but also enjoying Madonna’s MTV videos. Jean Baudrillard had taught us that everything was simulacral, and it did seem as if style had become the most important part of substance, and words become signifiers were permanently untethered from their referents. In the evolution of PMC, antagonism against mainstream culture and ordinary people were mixed up with its smug sense of subcultural superiority."

—Catherine Liu, Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class

[proustiansleep]

looking back at my posts I can't believe I was reminiscing about Amsterdam pasts during my April Amsterdam trip - just one month later, officially one year older, there has already been a switch - I feel a deep gulf between me and any and all pasts, I feel this sense of a clean slate where I miss no one and nothing and everything past feels old and dated and no longer familiar or acceptable

I am listening to William Orbit's Strange Cargo III. I am moving into a friend's empty place for the summer until I figure it out. There is but a contracted 'now'.

[proustiansleep]

"As the fortunes of the PMC elites rose, the class insisted on its ability to do ordinary things in extraordinary, fundamentally superior and more virtuous ways: as a class, it was reading books, raising children, eating food, staying healthy, and having sex as the most culturally and affectively advanced people in human history. According to John and Barbara Ehrenreich, the PMC is made up of “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist clas relations.” While Siegfried Kracauer and C. Wright Mills described white-collar workers as clerks, salespeople, and office workers who were shielded from physical labor, the Ehrenreichs’ PMC comprises deracinated, credentialed professionals, such as culture industry creatives, journalists, software engineers, scientists, professors, doctors, bankers, and lawyers, who play important managerial roles in large organizations. As a class, the PMC loves to talk about bias rather than inequality, racism rather than capitalism, visibility rather than exploitation. Tolerance for them is the highest secular virtue—but tolerance has almost no political or economic meaning. The Right is well aware of liberal preening, and it has weaponized popular resentment against this class of alleged hypocrites. Fox News lives to own liberals; reactionary hatred of professionals and professionalism come not out of love for the people but out of fealty to the special sovereignty of free markets to solve all social problems. In fact, conservatives need a functioning and powerful PMC cadre of inhibited professionals to serve as punching bags for their politics of popular resentment. The PMC continues to oblige these reactionaries by betraying popular policies like Medicare for All, opting instead for means-tested, think tank–brewed Big Pharma and lobbyist-approved forms of health care that allow for profit taking to take place at the expense of public health and health care workers." —Catherine Liu, Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class

[proustiansleep]

"Liberal members of the credentialed classes love to use the word empower when they talk about “people,” but the use of that verb objectifies the recipients of their help while implying that the people have no access to power without them. The PMC as a proxy for today’s ruling class is shameless about hoarding all forms of secularized virtue: whenever it addresses a political and economic crisis produced by capitalism itself, the PMC reworks political struggles for policy change and redistribution into individual passion plays, focusing its efforts on individual acts of “giving back” or reified forms of self-transformation. It finds in its particular tastes and cultural proclivities the justification for its unshakable sense of superiority to ordinary workingclass people. If its politics amount to little more than virtue signaling, it loves nothing more than moral panics to incite its members to ever more pointless forms of pseudo-politics and hypervigilance." —Catherine Liu, Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class

[proustiansleep]

(it seems I want again

but can I take?)

[proustiansleep]

I'm a completely different person than I was last year, I don't want any of the things I thought I wanted, I have only just now caught a glimpse of the version of myself that has been in the works for the past 3-5 years, I'm finallywonderfullyblindly groping in the dark in the midst of summer and that's all one can hope for one day before the mundane anniversary of their birth usually spent in a dreadful office or other that we insist on calling a birthday

[proustiansleep]

"I invite you to run your mouth, to run your hands through my thin hair like a theme. I invite you to lean your head against my better judgment."

—Ben Lerner, The Lichtenberg Figures

[naldibutnice]

Sylvia Sidney, c. 1929

[clearpills]

[hauntanelle]

one must imagine the tumblr mutual happy

[proustiansleep]

"I don’t hate AI writing just because it’s nonsense. At some point, all interesting language has to reach down into the deep chasms of indetermination darkening beneath us. Any straightforwardly meaningful statement has to float on the surface of the meaningless like pond scum; poetry is when you stick your arm into the black swill beneath and stir it around. But there are different types of nonsense.

But you people don’t listen. However bad a writer you think you are, you are not worse than AI. But you still keep letting it do your writing for you, as if I won’t be able to tell. Listen: I can tell. I can always tell. You think I won’t notice, but I will. There’s no hiding from me. If you let AI do your writing I will find out, and I will kill you."

—Sam Kriss, If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you

[proustiansleep]

"In my day, we knew how to drown plausibly, to renounce the body's seven claims to buoyancy.

And there was the promise of pleasure in                                                                          every question we postponed. Like a blouse, the most elegant crimes were left undone.

Now I am the only one who knows the story of the baleful forms our valences assumed in winter light. My people, are you not

horrified of how these verbs decline— their great ostentation, their doors of different sizes?"

—Ben Lerner, The Lichtenberg Figures

[proustiansleep]

"I had meant to apologize in advance. I had meant to jettison all dogmatism in theory and all sclerosis in organization. I had meant to place my hand in a position to receive the sun. My cowardice may or may not have a concrete economic foundation."

—Ben Lerner, The Lichtenberg Figures

[proustiansleep]

I haven't slept properly in one month and it's really starting to feel like it