But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past

by Chuck Klosterman

Taste is subjective, but some subjective opinions are casually expressed the same way we articulate principles of math or science. There isn’t an ongoing cultural debate over the merits of Moby-Dick: It’s not merely an epic novel, but a transformative literary innovation that helps define how novels are supposed to be viewed.

logic doesn’t work particularly well when applied to the future.

Occam’s Razor: the philosophical argument that the best hypothesis is the one involving the lowest number of assumptions.

But take solace in the fact that you can quit at any time. I cannot.]

“What ages [poorly], it seems, are ideas that trend to the clever, the new, or the merely personal,” Saunders continues.

But it’s a little easier to conjecture how this might unspool in the smaller, more contained idiom of film.

Before we can argue that something we currently appreciate deserves inclusion in the world of tomorrow, we must build that future world within our mind.

(and since it’s an especially interesting e-mail, I’m going to leave in his unorthodox parentheses and capitalizations).

I certainly understand the mentality behind forwarding the possibility that nothing from this era will be remembered, simply due to volume.

But Kafka did not have any semblance of a normal literary career, unless you assume “a normal literary career” constitutes dying poor and hating everything about yourself.

It will be someone we’re not currently aware of, which will allow this person to feel fresh to the generation that adopts him. So who might this person be?

There is a misguided belief—often promoted by creative writing programs—that producing fiction excessively tied to technology or popular culture cheapens the work and detracts from its value over time.

A book becomes popular because of its text, but it’s the subtext that makes it live forever.

Hum... why?

An impotent, unspecified hatred of the wealthiest “one percent.”

It has to offer a window into a world that can no longer be accessed, insulated by a sense that this particular work is the best way to do so.

Historically awesome art always means something different from what it superficially appears to suggest—and if future readers can’t convince themselves that the ideas they’re consuming are less obvious than whatever simple logic indicates, that book will disappear.

This is a challenging sentence to parse.

But even those who hate him have to open their attack by conceding his perceived greatness, since that classification is no longer dependent on the subjective opinion of any one person.

I love this description of argument: “open their attack”

It would not simply mean that the way we presently consume and consider Roth will be the way Roth is consumed and considered forevermore; it would mean that the manner in which we value and assess all novels will remain unchanged.

And pretty much from the moment it came into being, people who liked “rock” insisted it was dead.

(customarily built on the conviction that the current generation of musicians were more careerist in nature, thus detracting from the amount of raw emotion they were allegedly injecting into the music).

There’s an exhaustion of intelligence which has moved out of the music industry and into other industries.”

Right now, rock music still projects the illusion of a universe containing multitudes. But it won’t seem that way in three hundred years,

all those various people exist within a washing machine of chaos,”

It seems like people have just become more bored with being human.”

In Western culture, pretty much everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality.

Elvis did not write songs; he interpreted songs that were written by other people

Gioia’s assertion was that twenty-first-century music writing has devolved into a form of lifestyle journalism that willfully ignores the technical details of the music itself.

Gioia is touching on a variety of volatile ideas here, particularly the outsized memory of transgressive art.

History is defined by people who don’t really understand what they are defining.

There is, certainly, an unbreachable chasm between the subjective and objective world. A reasonable person expects subjective facts to be overturned, because subjective facts are not facts; they’re just well-considered opinions, held by multiple people at the same time.

If certain ancillary details turn out to be specifically wrong, it just means the science got better.

What are the thoughts I can’t have? What beliefs are impossible for me to understand or express? Are there aspects of this simulation that its creator never considered?

In the same way that religion defined cultural existence in the pre-Copernican age, the edge of science defines the existence we occupy today.

A smart person is supposed to recognize that the term “conspiracy theory” has only one conversational utility: It’s a way to marginalize undesirable possibilities as inherently illogical, along with the people who propose them.

Every night, we’re all having multiple metaphysical experiences, wholly constructed by our subconscious. Almost one-third of our lives happens inside surreal mental projections we create without trying. A handful of highly specific dreams, such as slowly losing one’s teeth, are experienced unilaterally by unrelated people in unconnected cultures. But these events are so personal and inscrutable that we’ve stopped trying to figure out what they mean.

The only way we can analyze the content of a dream is to ask the dreamer what she remembers. That makes the entire endeavor too interpretive to qualify as regular science.

(if film director Kathryn Bigelow had used Hersh’s story as the guide for Zero Dark Thirty, it might have qualified as mumblecore).

How much of history is classified as true simply because it can’t be sufficiently proven false?

This whole section is SO good!!!

There’s a game I like to play with people when we’re at the bar, especially if they’re educated and drunk.

It’s mildly shocking how often highly intelligent people can’t get past the sixteenth century; if they make it down to the twelfth century, it usually means they either know a lot about explorers or a shitload about popes.

Television is an art form where the relationship to technology supersedes everything else about it.

same way television replaced radio: through the process of addition. TV took the audio of radio and added visual images. The next tier of innovation will affix a third component, and that new component will make the previous iteration obsolete. I have no idea what that third element will be. But whatever it is will result in a chronological “freezing” of TV culture.

But the least compelling material would be whatever the Egyptians classified as their version of “prestige” television.

Interesting. I want to see where he’s going with this...

Because that’s the way it always is, with everything. True naturalism can only be a product of the unconscious.

Mad Men cannot show us what life was like in the sixties. Mad Men can only show how life in the sixties came to be interpreted in the twenty-first century.

The degree to which “realness” is central to the show’s ethos.

What is the realest fake thing we’ve ever made on purpose?

reality television. As a genre, the social and generational importance of these shows is vastly underrated; they are postmodern picture windows.

Programming that nakedly operates as a subcultural roman à clef actually gets a little closer.

Beyond a few key exceptions, simulacrum shows are soap operas, marketed as fantasies, geared toward mass audiences who don’t want to think very hard about what they’re watching.