tumblr meme culture is really just a form of neo dadaism
I’d like to clarify:
dada was a largely european art movement that took place after wwi. this time and place is not a coincidence. let me explain.
dada art made no sense. the artists who made dada lived in a world in which nothing made sense - in which conventional logic led to the senselessness of a world war. so, making art that made no sense, making - well, you can’t really call it art, so making ANTI-art that rejected the conventions that brought about that atrocity in the first place - it made total sense. (if that makes any sense.)
so the artists did weird things. new things! putting things that were already made together and calling it sculpture, cutting up bits of pictures and putting them together and calling that something to frame - this site has some nice examples.
but from my perspective - there’s serious intellectual continuity between the absurdity of attaching a bunch of tacks to the bottom of an iron, rendering it useless, and say…. bath bomb posts. Put a fucking macbook in a bath. it’s useless now. Nobody fucking cares anymore. you want something funny? you want a punchline? gun. that’s your punchline. Take it. I am laughing
in a way it could be a method of venting some of the frustration and hopelessness and dissatisfaction that tumblr’s userbase (largely, disenfranchised millennials) feels in the modern day. I can’t really speak for anyone else, but… at least from a US perspective, there’s plenty to be disillusioned about. growing up in a constant state of questionably justified war, income inequality, an economic recession caused by the actions of a handful of wealthy fucks who didn’t even get properly punished, growing awareness of police brutality, being called lazy and self-absorbed by the generations that gave us these problems in the first place… I can’t help but think that these factors (and more) could produce a similar mindset to the one that precipitated the first dada movement.
so of COURSE we make nonsense jokes. it’s a coping mechanism for a world which doesn’t make any sense.
related: this isn’t by tumblr but I have to plug UCLA’s atrocity of a virtual gallery once more. it really needs to be experienced, but… it’s definitely also millennial neo dada. from the presentation (like an unplayable video game) to the content (THE DOGS HAVE ARRIVED), it is exactly what I am talking about. it is a fucking shitpost. and it’s high art, too! I love this
tl;dr: my generation is fed up with this bullshit, and the best way that we can express that is by shitposting. alternatively, dada was an early precursor to modern shitposting and we should all thank duchamp for signing a fucking urinal
a dear friend has given a perfect update to some of my phrasing, courtesy of their word replace extension:
you see this? this is exactly what I’m fucking talking about. the thing that I’m talking about is:
shitposting is the deconstruction of hegemonic discourse through the use of the absurd and surrealism.
I’d also say that while Dadaism was obsessed with the technological aspects of Modernity, of newspapers, of industrial mechanics and factory made clocks, neo-dadaism (of which shitposting but also the increasingly broad reach of the New Aesthetic and net aesthetics) is obsessed with the technological aspects of our time, or at the beginning of our time.
As just a comparison, the Clock in Absurdist and Dadaist art is both a symbol of the uplifting beginning of industrial relations (as one of the first complicated machines made by manufacturers, as the symbol of mankind’s ability to triumph and analyze nature and better ourselves) and as the deified symbol of horrific modernity (of demarcated time, labor hours, the oppression of the working class via managerial time), Neo-Dadaism/Absurdism has a similar relationship with early computers, which both symbolizes the utopian attitudes which we entered the digital age with, and the horrifying period we live in now, where the Digital is ever present and semi-deified.
My favorite dada satire is probably from Georges Grosz who takes the kind of robotic modernist tube people of folks like Leger:
and turns them into these mindlessly patriotic broken automatons chanting rote phrases:
And it’s so so funny to me that there’s all kinds of Gen X artists out there creating art about the millennials on their damn cellumar phones who think they’re the inheritors of this aesthetic but really it’s people who use the Madden gif generator to shitpost because they’re taking the technology meant for a coherent purpose for a particular narrative and they’re breaking it and turning it back on itself.
The more the Dominion protests their innocence, the more the Romulans will believe they’re guilty because it’s exactly what the Romulans would have done in their place.
This episode is not just one of the best Trek episodes, but one of the best episodes of television, period, ever written.
I wonder if the return of rich white people to American inner cities is gonna make the Scientologists’ plan of planting centers there pay off, or undercut it w/ the average passerby feeling less in need of a total life change
Aluminum takes a metric shit-ton of electricity to refine. This is why it developed a consumer recycling infrastructure before other materials, and also why Iceland is such a center of aluminum refining - it’s effectively a way to export their surplus of geothermal power.
As a side note, typing on these things is especially annoying if you have a large vocabulary or like to coin words. “Minmaxer” took 5 tries - I’d start “min” and it would helpfully realize there are no words that continue to “m” so read my presses otherwise and THEN if I completed it would helpfully realize that wasn’t actually a word
The creation of fear is at the heart of all horror, yet the traditional Gothic model differs a great deal from today’s cinematic and literary blood orgies. Modern horror routinely slices, dices, and disembowels its victims to create a sense of fear. The underlying theme is that the human animal is simply nothing more than meat. For all its claims to superior intelligence and divine favor, humanity can be splattered against the bleak wall of hopelessness without so much as a nod to its dreams of truth and nobility - and fear is generated in the realization of that cold, hard reality. In a common ‘slasher’ film, the question is not so much what will happen as when. Hope that springs for with the coming of dawn is inevitably crushed, for even if the hero can escape the maniac with a cleaver, the monster never dies and the poor hero must spend the rest of his days looking over his shoulder.
Gothic horror, by contrast, relies on subtler techniques. It teases and taunts its victim with terrors shrouded in mist. Often the victim is blind to the evil that hovers above like a ravenous spider, and sometimes evil masquerades as virtue, revealing its true nature only too late. By the time danger becomes apparent to the victim, death by an ordinary knife might seem a relief.
There is a fundamental acceptance of the existence of virtue and goodness in the Gothic genre, and evil is all the more terrible for the comparison. The reader doesn’t wonder how the hero and heroine will die, but whether they are spiritually strong enough to survive the blackest night. Fear comes not from a sense of the impending fall of an axe, but from the horrifying truths and temptations that assault them as they fight for their lives.
In the modern horror tale, the source of evil is usually identified early, for it remains unstoppable despite that knowledge. In the Gothic tale, evil is something sinister and unknown. A dark mystery lies beneath the horror, and the protagonists are condemned to unravel it. The innocents are trapped in a whirlpool of conflicting emotion, driven by the desire to learn the awful truth that they sense lies beyond the black shroud, yet dreading it all the while. With each step beyond their comfortable, day-lit world, they discover that reality is more twisted than they could possibly have understood, and that their own virtues may not be sufficient to see them to the dawn.
from Bruce Nesmith, Andria Hayday, and William Connors, Ravenloft Campaign Setting, p. 6. Two brief thoughts:
1) Some of the most interesting writing on genre comes from the introductions to tabletop roleplaying supplements. This makes sense, on reflection, because making one successfully means creating the tools for amateurs to tell stories in that genre. A real hidden goldmine of critical Discourse, IMO, if presumably as subject to Sturgeon’s Law as anything else.
2) It’s interesting to see this sort of analysis of horror subgenres made before cosmic horror became the highest-prestige tradition within it. Nowadays, post-Scream and the Lovecraft revival, it’s traditional to set up a slasher horror foil (moralizing, humanist, explicit) against the cosmic style (materialist, nihilist, mysterious); here - the text was published in 1994 - it is the slasher foil that is materialist, nihilist, but still explicit against a Gothic style that is moralizing, humanist, but still mysterious.
Jury nullification as discussed on the Internet: Keeping some who wasn’t hurting anyone from going to jail for violating some bullshit law
Jury nullification IRL: Keeping someone who was violent against someone subverting the social order out of jail
Absolutely correct. For an example, check out this series on “The Unwritten Law” - the turn-of-the-century practice of acquitting (as “temporary insanity”) men who had determinedly stalked and killed the rakes who had sex with their women.
Two interesting points here: one, that this “Law” metastasized to the point of undermining ALL murder laws, as defendants would offer this difficult-to-disprove backstory.
Two, that the government (under threat of losing the ability to credibly punish killings) responded not with crackdowns but by accommodating the desire to punish adulterers - criminal laws against adultery were passed or rediscovered, likewise “heartbalm” civil actions - “criminal conversation” and “alienation of affection”.
Defendants could even claim a formalized, if limited equivalent to “temporary insanity” defenses - a man who caught his wife in the actual act of sex with another, “in flagrante delicto” was entitled to kill either or both of them, and men who knew or suspected adultery would arrange such “surprise” discoveries for the purpose of claiming a righteous kill.
That’s not the only place in American history to show that pattern - citizens use lethal violence as means of social control, government responds by cracking down not on them but their targets in hopes of rewinning assent to a government monopoly on violence by proving itself willing to use it as they would prefer. Many southern states tightened “Jim Crow” racial codes between the World Wars as part of an attempt to stop lynchings, many victims of which were in jail awaiting trial when they were seized by mobs unwilling to trust the courts with their punishment.
And labor leftists bitch that American strike action is too constrained under the Taft-Hartley Act, but that governments that stand for the suppression of mob violence, extortion, and trespassing would at all allow a mob to forcefully lay sieges on private property with the intent of extracting concessions from its owner – let alone defend them and enforce the resultant contracts – is nonobvious. What it is is the same thing - over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries the people had made clear there would be labor militancy, and the government shrugged and decided it preferred it to be backed by the threat of violence by existing government institutions, rather than open violence by private actors who might eventually seek to supplant those institutions.
