Only partially a response to your last post in particular, but I am interested in this conversation (read & enjoyed the OP paper) and have some thoughts, but I want to make sure I'm following before bringing them in.

What you & @StreetlightX have been talking about, is it something like this?

-Within some local systems, the state of things at t=0 does determine a unique state at t=x. (i.e. there is only one possible state at tx, given t0)
-But the universe (or 'everything' or 'the one' or ' the total totality' etc )cannot be treated as a closed system where 'everything' is such and such at state 0, determining unique states at t=x
-What counts as a closed system always requires some sort of constituting 'carving' in order to foreground certain aspects, while ignoring others.
-That doesn't mean that the 'subject' or 'mind' or 'knowledge' is the ultimate ground for what happens in that system -things still happen as they do - but how you're tracking what's happening is based on how you've carved

-[less sure of this] if you're focused on deterministic systems, you're going to keep finding them, because that's where you're directing your attention.

Is that roughly right?

Related, crude theological ideas:

--Alan Watts often comes back to a central idea: The ego cannot change itself. It often pretends to disintegrate itself while 'moving to the next floor up' (as Watts puts it) because it recognizes having disintegrated ones ego as something it can then claim, for itself, as proof of its essential goodness and spirituality. Lyotard makes a similar point in an essay called Rewriting Modernity. Change is something undergone and so cannot be engineered in advance. I think that this opens up the space for a secularized (or nonsecularized, whichever is preferred) version of Grace, which is something that has appealed and made sense to me for a while.

--Grace can't be courted or solicited, so even if the idea make sense, that doesn't necessarily get you anywhere. But it also seems off to sort of remain in the rut you're in without changing anything, because it's not up to you whether or not you're visited by grace. I think this is where a secularized (or nonsecularized, whichever is preferred) idea of 'faith' might be helpful. Even if internally everything's the same, acting as though you did have the inner strength to move from an old way of living, to another, clears the ground for grace. It is a way of actively readying oneself to passively receive. I think this can take a lot of forms, but can sometimes even be really simple: just establishing a routine, new habits. The thing is that these things are not gratifying, and require fidelity through a period lacking any concrete reward so:


--Patience, also, and humility. More old theological virtues. Original sin (again secularized or not) allows oneself to be truly aware of one's flaws. Rejection of original sin, while prima facie liberating, leads, naturally, to a covering-over of one's flaws [that's a lot baked into one brief sentence, but I think it can be fleshed out convincingly.] The rejection of the idea of human weakness tends to lead people away from growth and to an absolute good/bad social mechanism that operates through shame, and encourages hiding rather than confrontation.Eventually, at the limit, one learns to hide oneself from oneself.

At night, orange mists.
The sun has killed a trillion of 'em
And it keeps stretching back, impossible planets.
How do I know? I'm lost. It says its name.
The blue-black message at the end of the garden
Is garbled. Meanwhile we're supposed to be here
Among pine trees and nice breaths of fresh air.

This was to be forgotten, eliminated
From history. But time is a garden wherein
Memories thrive monstrously until
They become the vagrant flowering of something else
Like stopping near the fence with your raincoat.

The inert lifeless mass calls out into space:
Seven long years and the wall hasn't been built yet
The crust thickens, the back of everything...
Clustered carillons and the pink dew of afterthoughts
Support it.

New Poem: Suite

[end of poem]

As when the songs start to go
Not much can be done about it. Waiting
In vanilla corridors for an austere
Young nurse to appear, an opaque glass vase of snapdragons
On one arm, the dangerously slender heroine
Backbending over the other, won't save the denouement
Already drenched in the perfume of fatality. The passengers
Reappear. The cut driver pushes them to heaven.
(Waterford explodes over the flagstones.)
At the same time that we are trying to spell out
This very simple word, put one note
After the other, push back the dead chaos
Insinuating itself in the background like mists
Of happy autumn fields - your money is dead.
I like the spirit of the songs, though,
The camaraderies that is the last thing to peel off,
Visible even now on the woven pattern of branches
And twilight. Why must you go? Why can't you
Spend the night, here in my bed, with my arms wrapped tightly
Around you?
Surely that would solve everything by supplying
A theory of knowledge on a scale with the gigantic
Bits and pieces of knowledge we have reatained:
An LP record of all your favorite friendships,
Of letters from the front? Too
Fantastic to make sense? But it made the chimes ring.
If you listen you can hear them ringing still:
A mood, a Stimmung, adding up to a sense of what they really were,
All along, through the chain of lengthening days.

Yes, but - there are no "yes, but"s.
The body is what this is all about and it disperses
In sheeted fragments, all somewhere around
But difficult to read correctly since there is
No common vantage point, not point of view
Like the "I" in a novel. And in truth
No one never saw the point of any. This stubble-field
Of witnessings and silent lowering of the lids
On angry screen-door moment rushing back
To the edge of woods was always alive with its own
Rigid binary system of inducing truths
From starved knowledge of them. It has worked
And will go on working. All attempts to influence
The working are parallelism, undulating, writhing
Sometimes but kept to the domain of metaphor.
There is no way of knowing whether these are
Our neighbors or friendly savages trapped in the distance
By the red tape of a mirage. The fact that
We drawled "hallo" to them just lazily enough this morning
Doesn't mean that a style was inaugurated. Anyway evening
Kind of changes things. Not the color,
The quality of a handshake, the edge on someone's breath,
So much as a general anxiety to get everything all added up,
Flowers arranged and out of sight. The vehicular madness
Goes on, crashing, thrashing away, but
For many this is near enough to the end: one may
Draw up a chair close to the balcony railing.
The sunset is just starting to light up.

And then? Colors and names of colors.
The knowledge of you a certain color had?
The whole song bag, the eternal oom-pah refrain?
Street scenes? A blur of pavement
After the cyclists passed, calling to each other,
Calling each other strange, funny-sounding names?
Yes, probably, but in the meantime, waking up
In the middle of a dream with one's mouth full
Of unknown words takes in all of these:
It is both the surface and the accidents
Scarring that surface, yet it too only contains
As a book on Sweden only contains the pages of that book.
The dank no-places and the insubstantial pinnacles -
Both get carried away on the surface of a flood
That doesn't care about anything,
Not even about minding its own business.
There were holidays past we used to
Match up, and yep, they fitted together
All right, but the days in between grown rank,
Consume their substance, orphan, disinherit
But the air stands in curtains, reigns
Like a centennial. No one can get in or out.
These are parts of the same body:
One could possibly live without some
Such as a finger or elbow, but the head is
Necessary, and what is in doubt here. This
Morning it was off taking French lessons.
Now it is resting and cannot be disturbed

New Poem: No Way of Knowing

[end of poem]

Process
of a red stripe through much whiplash
of environmental sweepstakes misinterprets
slabs as they come forward. A
footprint
directs traffic in the center
of flat crocus plaza as the storm
incurves on this new situation. Why
are there developments?
A transparent shovel paves, "they" say,
residual elastic fetters
pictures of moments
brought under the sand.

New Poem : Sand Pail

[end of poem]

Yet we are alone too and that's sad isn't it
Yet you are meant to be alone at least part of the time
You must be in order to work and yet it always seems so unnatural
As though seeing people were intrinsic to life which it just might be
And then somehow the loneliness is more real and more human
You know not just the scarecrow but the whole landscape
And the crows peacefully pecking where the harrow has passed

:cool: I'll take quality sass over sclerotic pessimism threads any day.

I don't want to get into the antinatalist weeds. Read that as an incapacity to meet the force of the antinatalist argument if you will. Count me as one of the recalcitrant lost. I've said what I wanted to about antinatalism a bunch of times and have nothing left to say, so: take it or leave it. I'll chat about other stuff, but I've no interest in the antinatalist stuff, more or less power to me.

As for the rest: it seems like you don't like your job - that's a common thing. Strip metaphysics and go from there.

Lyotard was a theorist of postmodernity. He was incredibly critical of it, and the fact that he is often called a 'postmodernist' philosopher - as if he advocated or celebrated it - is not only wrong, it is practically the opposite of what he would have wanted. He bemoaned the end of the meta-narrative, which was coincident, for him, with the crisis of capitalism. He was a diagnostician of postmodernity, not a cheerleader for it. — StreetlightX

I hesitate to raise this point here, because I by and large agree with what you're saying, but....

I don't have a good grasp on Lyotard, but his The DIfferend, for whatever reason, is a book I keep coming back to and never finishing. The central concept, the 'differend', is something like: a thing that needs to be articulated, but is inarticulable in an existent 'idiom' (read: 'language game') The book is about how new language games emerge, or how existing language games are changed. I agree with the defense of Lyotard against pop-lyotard, but also real-lyotard was (1) firmly insistent on the incapacity of existing 'idioms' to express what needs to be expressed and (2) painstakingly focused on showing what that process looks like when you retain good, analytical hygiene (the book is shot through with kripke and wittgenstein and kant) while also alllowing for something new.

By which I mean: The pop-Lyotard is wrong; but the defense against the pop-lyotard is also off - he's not bemoaning - but is nevertheless closer to the truth, as correction, than the pop version.

Hard digression for sure, but I will never stop complaining that no one reads Lyotard's work besides the pomo report. He's the best mix of analytic and continental. I kind of want to start a reading group and finally finish this book. It's a gem.

As always, my position is: if it's broke, and you can't fix it, then fantasies of fixing it are....fantasies. I no longer believe suffering is meaningless, but even if I did, I'd say the same. I like what you've said about the irrecusable (apologies to Ray Brassier), ineluctable, sheer fact-of-the-matter of technology(modernism/capitalism/etc) - yes! You're plunked down somewhere, and the way back is barred, like a pile of pixelated concrete in a survival horror game; you have to go forward. I don't think arguing that no one else ought be plunked here is the best course of action, because no one considering having kids is listening. Any pretense of 'this-is-actually-about-actually-reducing-suffering' vanishes quickly; if what we're talking about a pipe dream, then we're not meaningfully talking about reducing suffering anymore; we're very much in something else.

But we've talked about this before. And our conversation on this thread is much more interesting than the antinatalism thing.

Schops never been too rah-rah about parturition, though to be fair I don’t know if that still holds. In any case, I’ve solved the problem. After decades training with the world’s foremost doulas, midwives and practitioners of Transcendental Meditation I’ve come up with a method (patent pending) of progeneration that actually decreases suffering and I’m almost ready to license it to expectant mothers for a modest fee.

Just so stories are signposts. — fdrake

For sure. I think you can keep the baby of these stories while throwing out the bathwater : just because they're human impositions doesn't mean they're not worthwhile. I think they function as projections, which are, as you say, signposts. As signposts, they key you in on what one part of you is dimly aware you need to work on personally.

So you get the best of both worlds. You still get to keep everything of value in those stories, only seen (more helpfully now!) for what they were; at the same time you no longer have to project yourself into the world so much, which unclutters your vision, and lets you see it in its grainier actuality (which usually (not always) means: locally)

Yes one thread among many is what I'm saying as well (at least how post-modernism characterizes almost everything). My major critique is that post-modernism might be about threads about people's reaction to modernism, but modernism cannot be escaped. By modernism I mean here the very "real" through-line of technology, science, and how it touches all aspects of life (creating the personal narratives that we try to critique, find absurdity in, etc.). You need that superstructure there since pretty much the Enlightenment for the various personal threads and narratives to play out. It is all in reaction to that inescapable reality. You can critique it, accept it, optimism of progress, pessimism of minutia-mongering, the optimism of "authentic" experiences of travel and mountain climbing, and the pessimism of angst of being an autonomous individual in a much wider, often impersonal system. However, you cannot escape the modernism of technology. You can deconstruct narratives all you want, technology, science, and the minutia needed to keep this going is here to stay. — schopenhauer1

Was going to respond in more depth to you, never did; the @Kenosha Kid beat me to it. What he said! (I think we're largely in agreement, ourselves, schop; besides antinatalism, anyway)

This could be a useful/productive heuristic and analysis of the post-modern idea (i.e. Whole -> Rupture/ Eden -> Exile). However, what are you applying the terms Whole/Eden and Rupture/Exile to? Is it grand narrative/ previous "given" truth ---> to individual perspectives and then one's reaction to the grand narrative once one's grand narrative is deconstructed and neutered of its grandiosity (e.g. Ahab's life previous to the encounter with the whale..Ahab seeing his previous picture of life disrupted by the tragic loss of his leg..Ahab no longer caring about anything but revenge on the whale)? — schopenhauer1

Oh, I was just saying that this:

[

Seinfeld is the ultimate post-modern sitcom. In a way we are living in a post-Seinfeld world. How does one take any social situation seriously really? I find it interesting with any form of satire or social criticism, that even after seeing the humor, when people go back to "living their lives" they don't actually take the lessons with them, and go back to living as if their life is not that super set of absurd circumstances as well, but a "real serious and dignified" narrative. A less obvious version of this are people who romantically think that things like "travel", "mountain climbing", "camping", and "sky diving" or (insert any modern form of trying to signal getting back to nature, going "extreme", or being an "travelling explorer") are truly some edifying thing. — schopenhauer1

]

seemed to be an example of a whole->rupture->[x?] frame, specifically the whole->rupture->return one.

In terms of applying the scheme on a grander scale: I think modernism/postmodernism/post-postmodernism is often discussed according to that scheme, but I think that's more a function of the human-mind imposing a particular narrative structure on history (as it always does) than a reflection of an absolute shift. Simpsons-Seinfeld-Office, for example, is one through-line, but only if you're selecting certain shows, excluding others, in order to make it all fit. I think that through-line is true enough, a real expression of something, but it's one thread among many.

Massive blogpost analyzing GPT-3 and showcasing examples by the same guy from the OP (which was GPT 2)

Watched the video (mistook you to be describing a video of DFW talking about simpsons, seinfeld, office etc.) & yeah definitely very close to what I was talking about (& the youtube comment you posted is right : re-pasting the old sitcom/ morality-tale narrative beats over ironic deconstruction of tropes is probably a little too quick and easy.)

I think if there is any "truth" to the ideas of post-modernism it might be this: We are always a creature one step removed from from primary existence. A fish swims, eats, hides, follows innate behaviors, it does not self-reflect. Even an ape or a dolphin probably doesn't go much past certain very basic communications and certain cultural learning. Humans are fully linguistic, cultural, generative, and iterative. It is hard to have a thought and then not have an analysis of that thought terms of other thoughts. It's hard to have a thought in isolation of its own self-analysis. The same goes for social things like values. It would be inauthentic not to self-analyze social and personal beliefs. But at the same token one disregards all sense of authenticity if one is fully and only ironic (which might be Wallace's complaint about post-modernism). — schopenhauer1

Yes, agree, self-reflexivity just simply is something we do. (To really scramble the coordinates: it might also be true that 'inauthenticity' is just something we do, so that it would be inauthentic to be authentic, and vice versa )

Seinfeld is the ultimate post-modern sitcom. In a way we are living in a post-Seinfeld world. How does one take any social situation seriously really? I find it interesting with any form of satire or social criticism, that even after seeing the humor, when people go back to "living their lives" they don't actually take the lessons with them, and go back to living as if their life is not that super set of absurd circumstances as well, but a "real serious and dignified" narrative. A less obvious version of this are people who romantically think that things like "travel", "mountain climbing", "camping", and "sky diving" or (insert any modern form of trying to signal getting back to nature, going "extreme", or being an "travelling explorer") are truly some edifying thing.. None of the absurdities of shitting in a hole (whist camping without a bathroom facility around), uncomfortable sleeping, the very fact that most people are bringing all this modern equipment to be safe and comfortable in the "wilderness". You will probably lose something on that trip, get annoyed at your friend, etc. But yeah, might have some socially created "authentic" moments hanging out with friends in a different setting than a city place or someone's residence. Anyways, I digress.. but these trivialities matter in all of this...

I think some people actually do like travelling, mountain climbing, camping and skydiving, though I agree that many people fetishize these experiences. Being exposed to Seinfeld (or the culture that produces it) doesn't necessitate that you then see the world as totally absurd, contingent, and so forth. Seinfeld isn't the truth of a culture, it's one expression of one part of it.

But -- I take your point, which I think is essentially drawing attention to an archetypal progression:

(1)Whole->(2)Rupture

(or: [eden->exile])

From (2) Rupture there are a lot of options. For example:

(A)Return
(B)Reconstruct
(C)Toil & Curse
(D)Seek Vengeance
(E)Go Forward
(F) Toil & Joke
etc etc

For example: Ahab, in Moby Dick, is following a [1-2-D] progression where the rupture is linked to a determinate enemy against whom one can avenge oneself. (see also: Satan in Paradise Lost)

Many leftist criticisms of conservatism are that they follow a [1-2-A] progression where A functions as a denial of the fact of 2, and leads to a kitschy dissociation from real conditions. I take this to be the lens through which you're viewing 'camping' and other scare-quoted activities - I think that is true of many who partake in them, though not all.

Following this:

In a way, my authentic attempts to get people to understand antinatalism can be seen as modernist.. in that it is taken so seriously, it is really believed. Suffering is to be something to be reckoned with, and the eye rolling resumes. "Stop being so serious!" would be the major response. The modernist inverse answer to my form of modernism would be "Technology, family, and shared values will triumph over your pessimism". And so we got two schools of thought.. life is a joke, don't take it seriously, or life has values that should be cherished so stop being so pessimistic..

I would say that there are many 'authentic' ways to move in the 1-2-X progression and think it just plum isn't true that 1-2-C is the only one (any of these can be either 'authentic' or 'inauthentic' including C.) I don't really think there is anything sad and absurd about the coder, at least not inherently, it depends a lot on what you're bringing with you. (There is something about certain (most?) 1-2-C proponents that suggests a deep preference for a 1-2-A progression + a certain defeatism. )

Perhaps another day one will want to review all this
For today it looks compressed like lines packed together
In one of those pictures you reflect with a polished tube
To get the full effect and this is possible
I feel it in the lean reaches of the weather and the wind
That sweeps articulately down these drab streets
Bringing everything to a high gloss

:lol: .. I am not accusing you of nicking the YouTube video.. I just instantly saw a parallel there when I saw what you wrote.. Here is the video I was referring to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2doZROwdte4 — schopenhauer1

To quote IJ (sort of), I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?

I'ma respond, just too late for me to dig in tonight. Hit you back during my work-from-home new-systems office training tomorrow.

Great analysis overall. I'm going to evince my own "look at the camera/eye roll" moment now and mention that I remember seeing a video about (the very epitome of literary criticism of post-modernism perhaps?) David Foster Wallace talking about this very idea that The Simpsons/ Seinfeld doesn't have as much a narrative hero (maybe an anti-hero or near-hero at best in Homer or perhaps Lisa?). They mentioned The Office as trying to "reconstruct" a sort of moralistic (sentimental?) post-modernism missing in the first two. — schopenhauer1

Double eye-roll & I'll venmo you a 20-spot if you can find & link a vid matches that description. You sure? (The closest dfw thing I can think is his discussion of 'the most photographed barn in america' from Delillo's White Noise or the bit in Infinite Jest about the cultural shift expressed in the differences between Hawaii Five-O & Hill Street Blues.)

just saw your post tho, have to crash but ill respond soon, had to quickly defend my honor.

Here's my take: Post-modernism is a total willingness to deconstruct. Usually this leads to themes like irony or absurdity. Why? Because when you deconstruct something that is assumed to be a monolithic "thing", it is actually seen for just a convention. To be real basic here.. Take any classic sitcom (Leave it To Beaver, Fully House, The Cosby Show.. or whatever variation from countries around the world).. That is modernism.. There is a structure.. family has value.. life has lessons... things can get solved..etc. Now think of The Simpsons, Seinfeld, The Office, etc.. It deconstructs the conventions we take seriously and then sees the absurdity in it, often using irony and satire to show you how silly it is to take these conventions as serious in the first place. — schopenhauer1

Building on that: The Simpsons is removed, detatched : it's a vessel for writerly jokes imposed from without, that use the sitcom format as a canvas-sandbox to demonstrate cleverness.

Seinfeld comes just a bit later and is about living in a world where everyone knows it's all bullshit, but still has to live among the detritus. it's much more human: it's about how perennial human sexual and status games always continue, using what's at hand - and the comedy is that what's on-hand (for 90s new yorkers) is utterly disconnected from any unifying sense of value.

The Office comes even later. Michael , at heart, is a George Costanza character - but he can't admit to himself that's what he is. It's a George that can't even be real with Jerry. He's so far gone, all the charm of George is lost in Michael's compulsive need to hide he's a George.

Dwight, in a key way, is Kramer (qua the character who is unaware of the new social system and lives eccentrically in the past) except he, Dwight, is not even likeable, because the eccentric outsider archetype has been fused with the vindictive sycophant archetype.

Jim lives among it all, above it all, looking at the camera to signal 'this is nuts, and I know its nuts ---I keep working here, but I at least know it's all a joke.' That allows the romantic relationship with Pam, who also knows its all a joke, and then the series skews sentimental.

Take all those elements, add em together, and you have a decent blueprint of social mores in 2000-200ish. The hero basically eyerolls at the camera, whenever anyone else does anything (always in caricature.) He's passive as heck, and his activeness is usually shitting on dwight, and, since the writers fused any-alternative-way-of-living with sycophantic-meanspirited-and-creepy, means that the hero of the show proves his value (and thus is worthy of love) by doing his job, not taking it seriously, and demeaning people who have alternative sources of value.

But what's important is that there's a hero in The Office - Jim's a 'good guy, even though he's a dick sometimes, but ultimately his heart is in the right place when the dust settles.' There isn't one in the other two. It's a reconstructive effort, though a questionable one.

What with skyscrapers and dirigibles and balloons the sky seems pretty crowded
And a nice place to live at least I think so do you
And the songs strike up there are chorales everywhere so pretty it's lovely
And everywhere the truth rushes in to fill the gaps left by
Its sudden demise so that a fairly accurate record of its activity is possible
If there were sex in friendship this would be the place to have it right here on this floor
With bells ringing and the loud music pealing

Something in me was damaged I don't know how or by what
Today is suddenly broad and a whole era of uncertainties is ending
Like World War I or the twenties it keeps ending this is the beginning
Of music afterward and refreshments all kinds of simple delicacies
That toast the heart and create a rival ambiance of cordiality
To the formal one we are keeping up in our hears the same

I think it was David Lynch who compared his process to fishing - & I think that aligns nicely with what you’ve described. The source is a mystery even to the artist, but the conscious mind still plays a role above the ‘pond’, reeling in, gutting, deboning, editing.

I think my personal preference is for a final product that glimmers with meaning, but that I still don’t quite grasp myself, even though it feels complete- and then I want to see if others feel the glimmer too. But that is a personal preference; there is plenty of poetry - Dante comes to mind - that, though wrought of fiery stuff, is still tightly organized at every level in order to convey a specific meaning. I like that too, and deeply admire those who do it well.

Its nice to have such complex aspects of art creation brought up and discussed. — javra

It is!

Apologies, I got a bit prickly, it’s a little silly, in retrospect, to post on a philosophy forum about something, and then object to it generating philosophical conversation.

But yeah, I think what we’d want to defend is why we read and write poetry - and if we admit an unfeeling and unthinking computer as generating poems equal in value to those generate by human poets, we begin to lose why we write and read poetry in the first place. So, I agree that it's important to focus on what we value in human poems versus AI poems. I find, personally, that I like poems that help me reflect on aspects of emotional and spiritual life in ways I wouldn't be able to otherwise, on the one hand, and that also let me admire style and mastery, on the other. Mastery implies something hard-won, the result of a long struggle, and so, to me, can be admirable only in other sentient (conscious/feeling/spiritual) beings. I think we are basically on the same page here.

I wouldn't necessarily agree with the intent to convey meaning, but that may just be a matter of semantics. The reason is something close to what I belive James Baldwin to be talking about here (in an interview with Paris Review:

"When you are standing in the pulpit, you must sound as though you know what you’re talking about. When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway."

I think the best art is an articulation which, in being articulated, reveals both to the reader and the writer its meaning - its not a message intended ahead of time. That's my personal feeling anyway - obviously 'conceptual art' is very much along the lines of the brick on top of the wall. I don't want to try to draw lines demarcating art and non-art, but what I'm personally drawn to, what I Value is the kind of thing Baldwin is talking about - and I agree AI doesn't do that.

But, the poems are pretty and have their own kind value, yes like a sunset, but also in their own highly novel way.

I write you to air these few thoughts feelings you are
Most likely driving around the city in your little car
Breathing in the exquisite air of the city and the exhaust fumes dust and other
Which make it up only hold on awhile there will be time
For other decisions but now I want to concentrate on this
Image of you secure and projected how I imagine you
Because you are this way where are you you are in my thoughts

I think, for 'middle class' folk, a lot of it comes down to having shared bread and a shared butterer. If you're around people whose fashion (body language, intonations and so on and so on) signal their integration in the same reward/punishment system that you inhabit, then there's a (usually subconscious) feeling of having your interests somewhat aligned. If not - and face tats are probably the best symbol of this, since having them by and large bars employment in all most sectors - then there is the disquietude of no-longer sharing the same background sense of some invisible force whose tacit threat of violence sustains the peaceful social interactions you prefer to think are universal, and defanged and free. (Another way to put it: you actually have to actually interact with a stranger human-to-human rather than through a disavowed, reassuring, triangulation)

I think this is definitely racially-coded in the US, but I don't think it breaks down strictly along racial lines. I have a hunch that this has a lot to do with whether you're nurtured by the state, or whether you need to look outside of it - which flows into issues of who can rely on the police to back them up, and who can't.

Growing up white & sheltered & middle-class in almost-all-white Maine, I definitely felt this dynamic play out even in the almost-entire absence of race differentiation. I felt all the things 'karens' classicaly feel around other races, but around other white people. (I learned how to see this way of thinking 'outside', while remembering how it was to think it from 'inside' when my family's class status sharply declined in my teens. And then how much starker these differentiations can be, and how they tend to break along race lines when I finally left my home state.)

I think the tldr; is a lot of what's being talked about with 'fashion' has to do with the domination through violence by one group of another (to continuously demonstrate who has the 'monopoloy on legitimate force'), and so it's true it's not entirely a race thing, but in the US the history of how that dynamic plays out is, obviously, deeply,deeply grounded in race, so it's impossible to disentangle the two.

Nathan the Wise is a good title it's a reintroduction
Of heavy seeds attached by toggle switch to long loops leading
Out of literature and life into worldly chaos in which
We struggle two souls out of work for it's a long way back to
The summation meanwhile we live in it "gradually getting use to"
Everything and this overrides living and is superimposed on it
As when a wounded jackal is tied to the waterhole the lion does come

New Poem: Lithuanian Dance Band

[end of poem]

One horse stands out irregularly against
The land over there. And am I receiving
This vision? Is it mine, or do I already owe it
For other visions, unnoticed and unrecorded
On the great, relaxed curve of time,
All the forgotten springs, dropped pebbles,
Songs once heard that then passed out of light
Into everyday oblivion? He moves away slowly,
Looks up and pumps the sky, a lingering
Question. Him too we can sacrifice
To the end progress, for we must, we must be moving on.