It’s a collection of fables of individuation. George Martin sets up expectations with respect to characters’ individual destinies, and generates narrative energy by frustrating/fulfilling them (an awful lot of chapters end up with someone apparently getting killed, who later turns out not to have been).

Game of Thrones’s point-of-view chapters concern characters who have individual destinies (which may or may not be thwarted, derailed or violently curtailed). In the background are “non-player characters” who are basically survival machines with rather poor chances of survival. The separation is similar to that enforced (in an ironic fashion) by E. M. Forster in Howards End: “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk”. So, one of the invariants preserved within Martin’s fantasy world is that of the bourgeois novel.

Now, I love fables of individuation, stories about how so-and-so is separated from their social self and forced, through exile and hardship, to become their true self. Such fables are vectors for social investigation (suppose you can’t be “you”: what then?) and the pay-off - revelation of true-selfhood in crowning moment of awesomeness - is typically deeply rewarding. But fables of individuation require a background population of selves held to be identical with their social presentation: inert human material, typically divided up according to established social stereotypes. A world full of “players”, with no “non-player characters”, would be impossibly busy and complex and…well, non-fantasy-like.

In other news, there might be some new stuff here eventually; or there might not. I’ve been writing some poems - they’re over here.

The ethos and experience of attending an ancient college like Lincoln is this: don’t be afraid of anything, don’t be squashed, don’t feel that the special doors are meant for someone else. Live in the 14th century building, dine in the panelled hall. Whatever you want, stride towards it boldly without asking permission.

We live in a class society. If you don’t feel that the special doors are meant for someone else, it’s because they’re meant for you (as the daughter of a distinguished academic, himself a Lincoln alumnus, might be expected to realise). An apt name for the process through which you come to recognise that the special doors are meant for you, that you do not need to ask permission, is Bourdieu’s “consecration”: “the legitimation and naturalisation of social difference”.

Now, there is a sense in which the social is difference, or is at least the medium through which differences propagate: it is in and as society that difference is “produced” and “reproduced”, to phrase it in Marxian slang. “Naturalisation” and “legitimation” are then names for the ways in which the production of difference is mystified and its reproduction is secured. They are mechanisms of class power, which is exercised in the production and reproduction of a particular set of differences. A lot of it turns out to be about money, but there are other legacies also at stake: what Bourdieu for example calls “cultural capital” (“live in the 14th century building, dine in the panelled hall”).

I’m skeptical about the argument that there is nothing in our nature that participates in the shaping of social differences. There is I think something: but if you want to understand what that something might be, there is a dense fog of mystification you have to get clear of first. What’s more, it tends to close in around you just when you think you’re really getting somewhere. The “natural” is precisely that which “naturalisation” works to obscure, replacing the unheroic kinks and obstructions of our predicament with heroic stances, epiphanies of selfhood, those elements of Bildungsroman which underwrite an ongoing bourgeois self-narrative. “Consecration” is a ready-made epiphany of selfhood, the conferral of a sense of destiny and entitlement: whatever you want, stride towards it boldly.

Among the epigraphs to Geoffrey Hill’s essay collection “The Lords of Limit” is this short quotation from Iris Murdoch: “It is always a significant question to ask about any philosopher: what is he afraid of?”. Our “nature”, our fundamental orientation, might better be described in terms of its characteristic incapacities, the ways in which it is inescapably contracted or beholden, than in terms of latent abilities or propensities which await only empowerment and opportunity to be realised. “Don’t be afraid of anything, don’t be squashed”: pursue your desires ruthlessly, without perhaps ever pausing to consider whose desires they actually are, or from whence they derive the permission you no longer feel you need to ask.

I’m being perverse, but to some purpose. I have been afraid, and I resent the promulgation of an “ethos” and “experience” based on the erasure of uncertainty. It could be argued that I’m over-reading what is, after all, a sales pitch (the invitation to live in the 14th century building and dine in the panelled hall could be followed, without dissonance, by references to the excellent sports and recreation facilities). The writer is hardly going to say “come to Lincoln and be miserable and discouraged”. But these are not fixed and self-evident opposites. I am more grateful to my old college than I imagine I sound; but what I am grateful for is the opportunity it gave me to get to grips with the intellectual imperative usefully phrased by my first-year tutor as “problematise, don’t deproblematise”. If this also is a form of consecration, it is one which at least contains the seeds of its own critique.

Half Cocks, by Dominic Fox - Intercapillary Editions

Not all of the poems are as good as the one on the linked page, but there are 50 of them, so the odds that you’ll like at least one or two of them are decent provided that you like “that kind of thing” in general.

I would suggest that the problem with porn is not so much that it exposes its consumers to things that are ab-normal with respect to their own conscious standards, but that it establishes its own normativity, its own rigid template of roles and behaviours, and that it does so for essentially mercenary reasons.

A lot of human culture involves the enjoyment, more or less clandestine and disavowable, of cruel, violent, obsessive or otherwise socially unacceptable passions: crime fiction, horror movies, fairy tales, paintings of martyred saints and so on. Contemporary explorations of the dangerous and illicit usually conjure the monster from its box, let it romp around on stage for a bit, then put it safely away again. We’re not good at dealing with a morally ambiguous cosmos; we compartmentalise, and this compartmentalisation has become culturally normal for us.

Porn fits perfectly into this world, plays entirely by its rules (for all its fake “outlaw” credentials), but at the same time is relatively unusual in that it tries to make the box seem like an attractive place to live, to make its consumers resent their reality for being larger and more complicated than its reality. Porn doesn’t really tolerate moral inconsistency or ambiguity either; it simply ratifies the “forbidden” flip-side of our rather timid consumerist enjoyments.

One of the things I’ve always liked about Andrea Dworkin is that she never imagined that a sexuality free of patriarchal domination and commercial exploitation would be safe: she felt that sex was big enough and bad enough to call on the full humanity of both men and women, and that the task of constructing sexual integrity was a daunting and thrilling one. She hated porn because it was ugly, deceitful, misogynist and cruelly destructive; but also because it was in the way, because it thwarted our attempts to imagine something stronger, wiser and more courageous.

I wonder, therefore, about the usefulness of attacks on porn that play up its morally dangerous and corrupting qualities, that suggest implicitly that we should cling to safety and purity. Much porn is vicious, and it can be vile, but it offers its own securities, its own consolations and imaginary solutions: it has its own privileged place among the mental fetters of our culture, and only in its own imagination is it a wild and lawless force assailing that culture from without.

The full source is in the localtruth GitGub repository.

Both acute and chronic suffering are endemic throughout the world of sentient beings, and human life in technologically advanced societies is quite unusual in the extent to which it is able to keep such suffering at bay, to treat it as something out of the ordinary. When we think about other animals it might be fun to be, we normally choose those which are relatively exempt from being preyed on by jackals, infested with gnawing parasites, paralysed and pox-eaten by myxomatosis, or casually gulped down in their hundreds of thousands by passing whales. We tend to use similar criteria when thinking about which other human beings it might be fun to be: it might be nice to be a dolphin, or a wealthy layabout in Berlin; it would be pretty ghastly to be a vole, or someone poor, weak and undefended in the middle of a warzone.

Wars are not natural events, or at least are not wholly natural events: you can understand the daily slaughter of the wilderness without recourse to political terms; and wars can also give way to ceasefires, cessations of hostilities which would be incomprehensible to a hyena. But by disrupting and dismantling the defenses of society against starvation, pestilence and predation, war brings human beings closer to the state in which other sentient creatures live: setting aside the numberless cruelties of specifically human invention, the horrors of war are most generally the horrors of being a living thing that can suffer and perish, that must fear for its life, that can and will be hurt atrociously and for no reason other than the need for survival of some other living thing.

At what point does the ubiquity and intensity of suffering in the natural world render meaningless the individual effort to reduce the suffering of this or that suffering creature? Perhaps at no point: kindness remains a virtue, no matter how bad things are or how much worse they may get. But it does render one kind of meaning unavailable, and that is the redemptive meaning that the rhetoric of “animal liberation” gives to the task of extricating non-human animals from the grasp of human power, need and appetite. Life on earth without us would not be a paradise, in any sense that we could recognise according to our own preferences for comfort and security over terror and pain. The departure of humanity would, in fact, leave the world devoid of its only remotely ethically attractive feature: the propensity of human beings to try to make parts of it nicer, for each other and for such non-human animals as they elect to care about.

Patrick Mullins, wayward and occasionally vexatious spirit of these and many other parts, has written a book, Illegal Dances of New York City. Graphomanic, self-absorbed and perplexing, it composes a kind of textual mirror-world out of personal anecdotes, cake recipes, opaque glosses on film and dance, fragments of online interactions with various pseudonymous interlocutors, and a kind of insistently bizarre fan-fiction centred on an elusive introject named as “Saint Nick Land”.

The first section was once rejected for publication by the editors of the journal Collapse, who described it as “execrable”. In a sense they were right, at least by their own lights: the instinctive reaction of any cohesive theoretical body to the kind of text Patrick has produced would be to try to expel it, to shit it out. Illegal Dances is frequently concerned with “crawlspace”, with places of refuge from systematically articulated thought and living. Crawlspace makes room for accumulations of junk and clutter, chimerical assemblages of totems and fetish-objects, erotic strange-attractors, items of sentimental value (among the curios exhibited in Illegal Dances is a poem of mine that Patrick liked and that I gave him permission to include; I couldn’t say exactly what it’s doing there, but it doesn’t look out of place as such). Of these, the book attempts to extract the “efflorescences and nectars”.

Is it a good book? It’s beautifully put together, a credit to its publisher. It is also a record, an inscription, of the continual involution of “outer” into “inner” life, of time into image and place into crawlspace. It will not appeal to everyone’s sympathies, but it should be understood as a genuine, if obscure and singular, work of art.

Intelligence must learn that it is not intelligent, that stupidity is more powerful than intelligence. Stupidity is the prime mover.

Intelligence cannot accept that stupidity is more powerful than it, and is stupid because it cannot learn the rules of stupidity.

Stupidity rules over beauty, emotion, nature, the depths of things. Intelligence misconstrues the world as intelligible.

Violent grief, perversion, rage, imbecility, self-harm are authentic. Intelligence obstructs authenticity with its inauthenticity.

LvT sees women as fundamentally aligned, simpatico, with the underlying stupidity of things. Men are misaligned, and trust in intelligence.

Cinema, as a sensual art, outruns intelligence: it can tap into reserves of stupidity. Cinematic immersion is a stupor, self-abandonment.

A fundamental identity: for LvT, cinema is feminine. The cinematic subject is woman. Men appear in cinema in order to be eclipsed by women.

Antichrist is extremely beautiful to look at, even if one distracts oneself by tweeting about it. A mad, kitsch, factitious beauty.

A beauty that mocks intelligence, which seeks to see truly. Antichrist’s beauty is the beauty of things that are not there.

This is also a formula for cinema: the beauty of things that are not there.

“You’re just so damn arrogant!” “Your thoughts distort reality, not the other way around”.

“I’m cured! You’re so clever!”. Everything must necessarily go to shit from this point on. “You can’t just be happy for me, can you?”

“Chaos…reigns!” And then it….rains. Reality puns.

Writing degenerates to a childish scrawl.

Let’s role-play nature, nature against reason. Nature appears to reason as a role in reason’s role-play.

“Women do not control their own bodies. Nature does”. “You were supposed to be critical of those texts!”

You are not supposed to be critical. Critique masters, neutralises, subordinates to reason. Nature’s stupidity is beyond critique.

Nature’s answer to phallogocentrism is blunt trauma with a block of wood.

Willem Defoe battering a small bird to death, having crawled backwards into a dank hole. Now he gets it. Silly man!

“A crying woman is a scheming woman”. Nature projects its schemes through abjection.

OUCH.

“None of it is any use”. Grim and frosty hail. Improvidence, inutility, loss and waste: pure expenditure without return.

Foraging, watched by woodland creatures. Typical LvT fake-out ending, equivalent to bells in Breaking The Waves: jarring false resolution.

Well, that was indeed both grim and tr00.

I think of LvT’s false resolutions as final farts in the face of intelligence. He knows what he’s about.

Antichrist less aggravating than Breaking The Waves because largely void of pathos, which acts as a kind of apologetics for the worldview.

I don’t object to a work of art’s being the product of a sick mind. Most interesting ones are. I object to apologetics, special pleading.

What non-Catholics see as Catholic sentimentality is just this form of special pleading, a way of circumventing rational evaluation.

You are supposed to be terribly moved; you are supposed not to argue with what moves you so terribly.

Antichrist is what it is: you can enter and leave its world, which has its own integrity and consistency as depressive worlds generally do.

It also - as I said about Xasthur - shows you the facticity of depressive thinking, the bare circularity on which it depends.

Thinking about consent as disposition vs consent as speech act. Compare “like” and “Facebook like”. I can FB like things that I do not actually like. I can give consent (speech act) without consenting (willing, being disposed towards).

Earlier on, I’d been talking about “being (an) intellectual” as being somewhat like “being (a) homosexual” - an analogy that has to break down somewhere, but which captures a particular tension that interests me: that between “extrinsically defined” and “intrinsically motivated” identification. The basic idea is that while both “intellectual” and “homosexual” are socially-created categories (hence “extrinsically defined”), you can’t account for the existence of either intellectuals or homosexuals purely in terms of the power of “society” to call them into being in order to fill out arbitrary categorical distinctions. If no-one had the particular “structure of feeling” that characterises the intrinsic motivation of the intellectual, there would be no intellectuals. Such structures of feeling are aetiologically obscure, and there is no obvious mapping from large-scale social distinctions (notably class) to whatever it is that differentiates intellectuals or homosexuals from others around them.

Now, pretty much the entire point of a concept like Foucault’s “subjectivation” is that “intrinsic motivation” is produced by an outside working its way in: it doesn’t gush spontaneously out of some hidden well-spring in the individual, but is produced under intense local pressure as a result of a kind of “fold” (as Deleuze’s reading of Foucault has it). Lacan’s observation that my desire is the desire “of the Other” has a similar bent: we aren’t dealing with some inalienable personal property here, but rather with something aggravatingly and irrevocably alien, something in me that does not altogether belong to me and can never be fully integrated into who and what I imagine myself to be.

It’s here that the analogy between sexuality and having an intellectual bent seems most suggestive: in both cases, we have to do with a kind of unscratchable itch, something that nags at you and drives you out of hiding, out of conformity, even while the “extrinsic definition” of that itch and the means for its satisfaction continues to invent new ways of giving in, new things to settle for.

The “intrinsic” here is primarily that which resists external normalising pressure, that insists on going against the flow. It’s about being “unbalanced”, in some particular sense. Or maladjusted, as they used to say.

Which, again, is not so far from Deleuze’s Foucault, notably Deleuze’s allegation that Foucault’s analysis of biopower culminates in a kind of “vitalism” in which “life” is that which “resists” the power of death carried by the outside in its pacifying, normalising aspect. But Foucault’s point would be that this “resistance” is produced by, and as a kind of eddy or cross-wind within, the very nexus of forces it resists, and is not really a resistance of the inside (my “true inner nature”) against the outside (what “society” wants me to be). It’s rather an extremely localised, and locally intensified, skirmish in a wider conflict that starts before I do, and continues beyond the point where I leave off.

In any case, something like the opposition “intrinsic” / “extrinsic” came into play a couple of days later when I started thinking about consent in terms of a distinction between speech acts, public signals of consent, and the kind of inward disposition we might know as willingness, voluntary agreement, consensuality and so on. A “disposition”, as Gilbert Ryle puts in, is a propensity to act in certain ways in certain situations, whether out of habit (being a smoker, for instance, or a worrier) or through acquired expertise (being very good at playing pool, or “instinctively” knowing when and how to comfort someone in emotional distress).

Ryle argues in The Concept of Mind that dispositions are not the shadowy contents of some internal mental theatre, but ascriptions we make to actors, including ourselves, whose actions are reliable or predictable in some respect. So consensuality as a disposition is less a distinct inward sentiment (“I feel really consenting tonight”) and more a tendency to go along with something, to promote it by one’s own efforts, to anticipate feeling satisfied by the outcome, and to experience satisfaction if the anticipated outcome is reached. There is obviously more to sexual desire than this, but one thing we would say about a truly consenting sexual partner is that they were not merely someone who had “given their consent” (i.e. signed the waiver), but whose behaviour towards us was a continuing donation of consent, consensual in its very drift or willed direction.

The merit of “no means no” as a sexual maxim is that it arms the speaker with an instant power of veto, an ability to jam on the brakes without having to engage in further (presumably unwanted) sexual negotiation. This is particularly important if there is an imbalance of power between the negotiating parties: “no means no” for men too, but they are perhaps more often in the position of being able to rebuff sexual advances without having to issue a flat and uncontestably final refusal of this kind (there is less hazard, for example, in pretending - for reasons of politeness or vanity - to entertain an offer one isn’t really taking seriously). If both parties are equipped with reasonable tact and good sexual manners, then one will generally be able to put the other off, or let them down, comparatively gently. It would be nice to be able to rely on such mutual delicacy all the time; but people have an alarming tendency to stop being delicate when they stop getting what they want.

In any case, I’m less sure of the usefulness of “yes means yes”, simply because it seems to conflate the speech-act notion of consent (clicking “like” on someone’s Facebook status) with the kind of willing consensuality that only really manifests itself in and as a pattern of behaviour over time (if I actually “like” someone, I’m disposed to seek out their company and to try to remain in their good graces). Why is this a problem? It becomes a problem for me when, for example, the English Collective of Prostitutes maintains simultaneously that prostitution is both consenting and driven by economic necessity. It’s possible for performative consent - saying “yes” or “that’ll be thirty quid, then” - to co-exist with being motivated by economic necessity; but I don’t see how the kind of willing consensuality that most non-rapists want from a sexual partner can do so.

What the person working as a prostitute wants is not to be poor: they have a (perfectly rational, and morally blameless) disposition to avoid poverty and seek ways to escape from it. I don’t think anybody bar a few deluded punters believes that the prostitute wants the “client”, or that their sexual minstrelsy (feigning desire, willingness, urgency and so on) is anything other than a sales pitch. This being so, there is a real sense in which the prostitute’s “yes” means “yes, but not really”: yes, but not in the sense that I want this, or anything about this besides the fact that I will be able to put money in the electricity meter when it’s over. How is it that anybody finds this tolerable? It seems to me that the ability of punters to tolerate it, to be satisfied with a “yes” that means so little, is as significant an attribute of “rape culture” as the ability of rapists to disregard the “no” that means so much.

a black swan he says
give us a black swan
easy
easy now
no need to stir up the agon

over what very well might
be nothing
a white
swan on black water
drifting

through late evening
as the light
ebbs
and shadows lie down across
the way you came

ii)

soundtracked with low strings
with tremelo
portentous
or bearing portent
sinister modulation

of the air
enclosing stillness
the clouds’ high striated
cirrostratus
rippling in convection

as the white neck bows
and horses in the next
grey field
start and trample
shaking themselves loose

Worn hollow by globesofvenus

• I’m not sure how you actually tote a Kanban board, but never mind. ** That is, satisfying the following predicates: female, low-paid, employed in a factory…

“How many slums will we bulldoze to build the Information Superhighway?” Kivistik said. This profundity was received with thoughtful nodding around the table. Jon shifted in his chair as if Kivistik had just dropped an ice cube down his collar. “What does that mean?” he asked… “Very well, let me put it this way,” Kivistik said magnaminously - he was not above dumbing down his material for the likes of Jon. “How many on-ramps will connect the world’s ghettos to the Information Superhighway?” […] The words came out of Randy’s mouth before he had time to think better of it. “The Information Superhighway is just a fucking metaphor! Give me a break!” he said. […] “That doesn’t tell me very much,” Kivistik said. “Everything is a metaphor. The word ‘fork’ is a metaphor for this object.” He held up a fork. “All discourse is built from metaphors.” “That’s no excuse for using bad metaphors,” Randy said. “Bad? Bad? Who decides what is bad?” Kivistik said, doing his killer impression of a heavy-lidded, mouth-breathing undergraduate.

In some respects, the scene is a replay of the famous moment in Annie Hall in which Woody Allen pulls Marshall McLuhan out of the wings to berate a tedious intellectual show-off for his glib misuse of McLuhan’s name and signature jargon. Kivistik is the show-off promoted to the status of McLuhan himself, and there is no real McLuhan on hand to take him down. The challenge has to come from below: from the rhetorically unsophisticated but technically adept Randy, who knows next to nothing about Foucault but almost everything there is to know about TCP/IP.

We’re given to understand that Kivistik’s an operator, someone who knows how to work an academic crowd, and for whom metaphors are good or bad largely to the degree that they produce the desired rhetorical effects. He has a quasi-Nietzschean epistemological argument to back this up, but this too is only really a concatenation of rhetorical gestures (“he held up a fork”). In keeping with the tribal sociology of Stephenson’s novels (most explicit in The Diamond Age, in which humanity is divided into numerous competing “clades”), Kivistik and Randy face off as the elected champions of their respective “crowds”, here described as Hobbits of the Shire (idle, talkative and fanciful) and Dwarves of the deep mines (“stout, taciturn, vaguely magical characters who spent a lot of time in the dark hammering out beautiful things, e.g. Rings of Power”). Kivistik is a successful manipulator of the values and prejudices of his tribe, a skilled player of its status games. Randy, who is drawn into the argument in defence of his own tribal values, is at this point separated from his “people”, and has yet to assume a position of equivalent respect and significance among them (he has to wait until page 869 before he finally gets the girl).

Randy’s assumptions about the legitimate bases of respect and discursive authority are at odds with Kivistik’s because he inhabits a different symbolic economy: precise technical knowledge, painstakingly acquired, is a source of kudos for Dwarves, but scorned as “technocratic” by Hobbits (Kivistik: “Oh, I see…so we should rely on the technocrats to tell us what to think, and how to think, about this technology”). In order to think at all lucidly about the internet, you do indeed need to know a certain amount about TCP/IP, amongst a good many other things. But lucidity of this kind is besides the point if the discursive game you are playing is about moving rhetorical markers around in order to accumulate righteousness.

In terms of plot development, the point of the Waterhouse/Kivistik encounter is to emphasise Randy’s alienation from and social incompatibility with his Hobbit girlfriend, and give him a stimulus to jet off around the globe having geeky adventures with Avi. We learn that there are different systems of motivation in Stephenson’s fictional world, and that Randy’s will motivate him to do particular kinds of things in pursuit of goals that will seem arcane (or simply uninteresting) to characters with Hobbit-like motivations. Stephenson also gets to have some fun at the expense of condescending humanities-types into the bargain. But what’s also interesting in this scene is the political crux at the end of the argument, where all of a sudden both parties are talking about privilege and false consciousness:

“The false consciousness Tomas is speaking of is exactly what makes entrenched power elites so entrenched,” Charlene said. “Well, I don’t feel very entrenched,” Randy said. “I’ve worked my ass off to get where I’ve gotten.” “A lot of people work all their lives and get nowhere,” someone said accusingly. Look out! The sniping had begun. “Well, I’m sorry I haven’t had the good grace to get nowhere,” Randy said, now feeling just a bit surly for the first time, “but I have found that if you work hard, educate yourself, and keep your wits about you, you can find your way in this society.” “But that’s straight out of some nineteenth-century Horatio Alger book,” Tomas sputtered. [Or The Diamond Age, for that matter - DF] “So? Just because it’s an old idea, doesn’t mean it’s wrong,” Randy said.

The point to understand here is that Randy is right for a small, local value of “this society”: if you are in a position to participate in the social customs and network of the Dwarves, the path to advancement is indeed to “work hard, educate yourself, and keep your wits about you”. If you are amongst Hobbits, you need to practice quite different virtues. Tribes such as these act as force-multipliers for personal effort (working one’s ass off, something Kivistik has also presumably done in his own way), provided it is directed towards goals that the tribe esteems and is in a position to reward. What is “entrenched” is of course not Randy’s personal position within the tribe to which he is affiliated, but the position of the tribe itself, with its considerable resources of knowledge and power.

The ideological move common to Cryptonomicon and The Diamond Age is to displace class analysis (which would have something to say about hierarchy and exploitation, as fundamental operators of the division of the social world) into a “pagan” compartmentalisation of the world into competing tribes, a flat ecology of value-systems whose historical development is governed by something like an evolutionary fitness landscape. This is apparent from Cryptonomicon’s opening metaphor of the “first self-replicating gizmo” as a “stupendous badass”, and progenitor of a tremendous and varied proliferation of badassery throughout the natural and, by metaphorical extension, social world. This compartmentalisation enables Stephenson to range across wildly varied social and moral environments, and gives the Baroque Cycle its bewildering sweep and scope as well as its synoptic power. But it leaves Randy Waterhouse essentially mystified as to the nature of the opportunities available to him, and unable to grasp the Hobbits’ point, rendered as it is in language that seems offensively fatuous and vapid to him, about “false consciousness”.