Is it time to kill personal style?

“We might say that ‘style’ is the form of ideology: and that indicates the necessity and the limitations of a history of styles.”

The other day, I was sitting in Pasteur, eating tomato-shrimp soup by myself, trying to listen to this Byung-Chul Han book, Psychopolitics, which the Spotify algorithm had recommended to me. The book’s about how “we” (his “we” is one of his bigger analytic shortcomings) have turned ourselves into “projects” rather than “subjects.”

For Han, neoliberalism has transformed freedom itself into coercion, all but abolishing should (disciplinary society; orthopedic society) in favor of the seemingly infinite possibility of can. This atomized pseudo-freedom (as he notes, Marx’s vision of freedom is self-actualization together) means that we (the we that is an I) always could be doing more.

Neoliberalism, in his estimation, leads people to become entrepreneurs of the self.¹ As finance capital reproduces capital without end (in both senses of that word), this self-as-project produces depression—depression that “we” are not living up to our potential, which, of course, is eternally deferred—a ruse.

That is, the can produces more can and so only displays has not: a void.

We feel we are failures in ourselves, not that the system is designed to make us feel as if the next accomplishment is always out of reach.

In so doing, he claims, project-selves will labor even without the need for a direct employer→employee relationship, since psychogeography has been turned over to and colonized by the emotional manipulations of neoliberal capitalism (as if all this non-production didn’t require physical objects made in a globalized world as well; I’m not sure his analysis is generalizable). The smartphone is a rosary, he says, a tool of self-admonishment and control.

I get why the first and only self-help book I’ve ever read (a book for media-industry tryhards) quotes him, because it seems to me Psycholpolitics is more useful as well-studied self-help for the middle-class precariat in the global north than a text with strong political potentials. However, I am decidedly a depressed member of the middle-class culture industry precariat so it felt duly relevant. That is, as Spotify’s algorithm sensed or coerced into being, I am the target audience.

Very relatable!

But I couldn’t really hear the audiobook at Pasteur because a kid one table over was playing with his iPad yelling, “You’re a loser!” as he hit it forcefully with one hand, clinging with the other to its dirty blue oversized foam case.

I am now an iPad kid. I got the cheapest one available using my boyfriend’s sister’s employee discount in order to read my many PDFs and articles.

I really like reading articles on it. It’s so much nicer than trying to read the LRB or whatever on my laptop. And when I am too tired to read paper the backlight draws me in.

I read a lot of articles how articles have gotten worse, and how books, and movies, and Substack, and magazines, and fashion have all gotten worse, and also how these will all save one another, apparently.

The other day, Taylore Scarabelli wrote a micro-takedown of the takedowns in the fashion-sphere:

“I keep seeing the same fashion think pieces over and over again. They’re either about personal style or the algorithm, and more recently, how we should stop blaming the algorithm for everyone’s lack of personal style. I’m not sure I agree, as I have a hard time separating cultural output from the dominant media source of our time, but it’s certainly true that the algorithm is to blame for the proliferation of hot takes that generalize the so-called crisis of style in our current era.”²

As I talked about with her later, I agree, and the notions these writers she critiques have of a pure, prelapsarian “personal style”—a style not in relation to whatever media and advertising forms of a time, a style not determined by what objects can be purchased, modified, worn—is further misdirection. Taking the bait, falling into traps—the traps of writing think pieces and online shopping.

“Personal style” is not an inherent good (nor was it ever, really, personal). It is itself a situated and contingent phenomenon. One deploys (usually) off-the-shelf consumer products to communicate a legible identity that is at once “distinct” yet also coherent within available interpretive paradigms.

(The apparent imminent death of these many halcyon personal styles forms a neat circle with its alleged early “educated” “individuality.” Two sides, same coin. A false contradiction that was always already its own synthesis.)

I won’t say that this version of its supposed demise is or was inevitable. I don’t know that “The Algorithm” or whatever was inevitable. I’m not so into determinism. But personal style not only birthed its own death (as we do our own), but was always already a living death: mere myth.

Sure, having your own style and feeling good in what you wear and what it “says” is fine; we live in a society, etc. But personal style will not save you. People are trying to use personal style to solve the problem personal style in fact created.³

Scarabelli again:

“‘If you’re passively consuming and not actively trying to bait your algorithm to show you something outside of who it perceives you to be, you're stuck in sameness,’ commented one Substacker. This is interesting, insofar that gaming the algorithm might be seen as a new form of media literacy. But there is no beating the apps, and asking users to fight against manipulation with more time-wasting forms of consumption seems antithetical to any sort of liberation.

“Instead, I’d like to propose something else, or rather something I’ve proposed before. It’s time to stop thinking so much about being different.”

I was watching episode six of the Adam Curtis Soviet Union/Russia documentary the other night and the Vogue publisher says something like, “I think one of the reasons communism fell wasn’t economic or political. It was just very ugly.”

Stupidity like this was why the Bolsheviks had started shooting.

What’s even stupider today is the highest, perhaps only, paying outlets for Marx-inflected cultural analysis are culture magazines kept barely afloat by ads from luxury conglomerates like LVMH and Kering. Long live the US left…

As a born-again iPad kid counting my rosary-portal-pacifier, I read several Susbtacks about why working as a writer sucks. (Kate Wagner’s felt the most relevant—what if I, as a human being, don’t want to be a TikTok influencer because allegedly this is how I “must” share ideas?) I also read several Substacks about why Susbtack is better for writers, and then several more about how it promotes being “interesting” over craft, then more about how it demonstrates how magazines have failed to maintain Good Writing and so it’s sensible people will follow writers rather than magazines and…⁴

Look. One of the reasons—perhaps subconscious, and, as you may have read, not without conflict—my Substacks are, for me, blogs or diaries, is because I am entrepreneuring myself out: I am producing a sense of intimacy and connection because I understand that shilling my “interesting” writer-identity earns me pitiful amounts of money, maybe. But also, and I’d love to believe more importantly: I seek intimacy and connection.

I ramble therefore I am.

You read my ramblings and therefore we are together.

Putting aside “craft”—which I’m not sure is the most pertinent paradigm to think about a diaristic blog post like this—among the things which cohere my Susbtacks, and place them in the context of my crafted work published by magazines and journals is voice and/or style.

G— and I were talking about the distinction between these, and I’m sure some craft theorist makes them. For him, if I recall, “style” is how you work a sentence, whereas voice is some overall effect caused by diction, organization, etc. But I can’t imagine my voice other than working a sentence—sentences that necessitate certain words and thus certain ideas and certain other sentences. Perhaps that’s tautological but that is my experience of writing, if not the reality of it.

Anyway, what I was trying to get at, if obliquely and partially (and thus defensively?), is that should we say my Substack is cohered by either or both my performed identity (the self as continuity by way of my name on in magazines or my photo in newspapers or my posts on Instagram or my performance at events in NYC) or by the voice that is, relatively, consistent across my fiction, nonfiction, blogging, Instagram stories, so on?

Is voice—finding one’s voice—a prominent focus of academic fiction programs (allegedly; I have a hybrid-genre MFA) because it represents a height of entrepreneurship of the self? Has social media has flattened voice—privileging those who seem to have it even if they have nothing to day, but also making everyone think they have it, even if they sound like everyone else, maybe just not in their self-same echo chamber? Are we going to read the same remixed takes of Merve Emre’s personal-essay essay by people who don’t read literary criticism until we die in floods and fires caused by emissions from the AI reading all our “voices” and spewing them back out?

Even Saint Augustine had a distinct voice, so while the fixation on and primacy of voice as an aesthetic criteria—and on voice as somehow revelatory and singular—might be prodigiously “neoliberal,” I don’t think, in itself, as a feature of art-making or writing, it has to be… (Au contraire, it was a 19th-century art historical invention to prefer previous centuries’ artists for their ability to stick to one style [which is then somehow deemed “authentic”] versus play around in many.)

I do believe writing is reading and vice versa. That we are always speaking with and through others. That any coherence across my work is not a self-promotional sleight of hand but something I almost can’t but help to do. Perhaps that is nothing more than ideology at work in me. (I hope not: what way out do we have then?)

None of us are that original.

So, then, voice. Perhaps it is the most available superficial tool to become the singularwriterentrepreneur but when voice is not in service of a point of view, it’s DOA.⁵ Writing, shaped prose, is, ideally, not just information nor an exercise in voice, but an opportunity to see the world alongside others, past or present. Or maybe voice is counterrevolutionary. (I said “personal style” was, basically, yet when it comes to my sacred literature I change my tune…)

What do I know? I only have like 350 followers on Substack.⁶

I am lucky and privileged, I realize, to have other platforms where I can write—sometimes—in a sustained, organized way about ideas I care about. I never identified that much with the first-person boom, and so I think some of the reactions against that also missed me; even my column, which does use the first person, uses the first person, I hope, less to reveal myself than as a conduit for organizing information and situating knowledge production and receptions: giving readers a chance to sneak past the line and have a little fun.

What’s more: on Substack, there are no editors.⁷ Sure, editors can gatekeep, be annoying PMC types. But also, editors edit: a good one pushes you further, takes your ideas another step, means that you’re not typing to the void of inboxes but before your piece is seen have already engaged with others, others who might not agree, who might point you toward further references, who in, a perhaps already-lost ideal media world that maybe clings to survival, might even hire professional fact-checkers.⁸ But if what The Kids are saying is true, caring about the imprimatur of The Magazine (The Kids say that is all a magazine in truth is) is itself insecure.⁹

Maybe.

I am insecure. I am a good neoliberal project (apparently I am no longer even a subject). I question if I am a person. I am. But I am also an online character. I am a middle-class striver. I am a media professional. I have a beautifully yet idiosyncratically decorated apartment.¹⁰ I get free fragrances from luxury brands that I would not have chosen for myself. I pilfer $170 wine from crates sent by Chanel. I have rats in my ceiling. None of this provides me a sense of superiority or inferiority because I don’t have anyone over besides my boyfriend and maybe TJ. I complete gratitude meditations more than once a week. Having had to relearn to walk, I tell myself, I should love and appreciate my body, for what is, what it does for me, how it lets me be in the world. But I starve myself because I believe in perfection. I know I will never be perfect. I could mop my floors more often. I could save money and get laser facials and then have to pitch more freelance work to continue to minimize the size of my pores. I could re-download TikTok and break down my ideas on it but then I would have to watch TikTok and I would not have the attention span to have ideas. I have not put any social media apps on my iPad. I am in constant combat with my drives.

The additional pieces that felt most resonant to me I read this past week were:

Will Tavlin, in n+1: On the death of Hollywood’s middle class and movies made by businesspeople who resent movies for audiences who aren’t even watching:

“‘What are these movies?’ the Hollywood producer asked me. ‘Are they successful movies? Are they not? They have famous people in them. They get put out by major studios. And yet because we don’t have any reliable numbers from the streamers, we actually don’t know how many people have watched them. So what are they? If no one knows about them, if no one saw them, are they just something that people who are in them can talk about in meetings to get other jobs? Are we all just trying to keep the ball rolling so we’re just getting paid and having jobs, but no one’s really watching any of this stuff? When does the bubble burst? No one has any fucking clue.’”

On Sam Kriss’s Substack (the Substack algorithm will for some reason show you pieces from three years ago; many believably could be from three days ago), there was this piece that, while I’m not sure I’m along for the ride for every conclusion, the research, writing, and rage is robust, “The internet is already over”:

The tables are already being cleared at the great tech-sector chow-down.¹⁰ Online services are reverting to market prices. The Vision Fund is the worst performing fund in SoftBank’s history; in the last quarter alone it’s lost over $20 billion. Most of all, it’s now impossible to ignore that the promise propping up the entire networked economy—that user data could power a system of terrifyingly precise targeted advertising—was a lie. It simply does not work. ‘It sees that you bought a ticket to Budapest, so you get more tickets to Budapest…All they really know about you is your shopping.’ Now, large companies are cutting out their online advertising budgets entirely, and seeing no change whatsoever to their bottom line. One study found that algorithmically targeted advertising performed worse than ads selected at random. This is what sustains the entire media, provides 80% of Google’s income and 99% of Facebook’s, and it’s made of magic beans.

(A request via this footnote below!)¹¹

I also think there’s the relevant political dimension (in the basic sense of doing or influencing politics). I think G— wrote a lot about Cambridge Analytica in his book. We’re eight-plus years out. Meta announced the other day that it won’t try to regulate disinformation, if it was in fact trying before. The Supreme Court has decided, following a Meta-funded campaign, that presidents can unilaterally ban foreign social media companies. My algorithm on Musk’s X toggles between extreme transmisogyny, Swiftie-victim-complex-content, and over-leveraged self-employment gurus. Your algorithm might too. We are so special because we are the same.

I also read this 1974 essay by art historian TJ Clark, “The Conditions of Artistic Creation.” In it he announces, “I could begin by saying that art history is in crisis, but that would have too strident a ring.” (Seemed relevant given all the “crises” lamented above.¹²)

He then wants to ask questions about “the conditions of artistic creation” that seem to “have been scrapped by art history” in his day. “Perhaps we ought to ask what made it possible to pose them at all,” he writes.

To his mind, to look at the conditions of artistic production (looking at artworks closely to also understand how it was possible to make and circulate those artworks in their socio-economic contexts) is to look at art’s relationship to ideologies and as ideological materials.¹³

“Ideology is what the picture is, and what the picture is not. (We might say that ‘style’ is the form of ideology: and that indicates the necessity and the limitations of a history of styles.) Ideology is the dream-content, without the dream-work. And even though the work itself—the means and materials of artistic production—is determinate, fixed within ideological bounds, permeated by ideological assumptions; even so, the fact that work is done is crucial. Because the work takes a certain set of technical procedures and traditional forms, and makes them the tools with which to alter ideology—to transcribe it, to represent it.”

[…]

“What we are considering at this point is the conditions in which a certain ‘subjectivity’—utterly false, utterly undeniable—was constituted and given form. No topic, of course, is more open to an ideological treatment; it is here that the old concepts come crowding back, insistent, ingratiating, promising keys to the mystery. And yet, if it could be done properly, no inquiry could tell us more about how ideologies work.”

In a sort of aside about what he won’t talk about, Clark mentions “the way in which art history became the vehicle for reach-me-down notions of taste, order and the good life, “compensatory history” for the Bildungsbürgertum.”¹⁴ Personal style. Idiosyncratic decor. “Subjectivity” in scare quotes. Finding your voice. Being special together, unique in the same ways: The fashion girlies say reading novels and going to The Met will make you better-dressed. The Times op-eds claim reading fiction will make men more empathetic.

The other day I read aloud to G—, pedantically, a paragraph from Dionne Brand on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, whose characters’ wealth, in the words of Edward Said, “could not have been possible without the space trade, sugar, and the colonial planter class”:

“Said says, ‘My contention is that by that very odd combination of casualness and stress, Austen reveals herself to be assuming (just as Fanny assumes, in both senses of the word) the importance of an empire to the situation at home.’ I agree, and my contention is that the casualness is indeed casual, not intentional but reflexive—as casual as the state of knowledge, the state of living. It is nothing but a statement of relation, in its casualness. But I stop at the thought that Mansfield Park is a novel of ‘aesthetic intellectual complexity.’ We attach these ascriptions to works many years after their creation, through the very long and insistent processes of empire that cause them to arrive as objects of aesthetic value. Even more, there are social processes that assign aesthetic value to visual and textual objects, processes that have to do with systems of ruling. How is a Gucci logo bag beautiful? It really isn’t. It’s only Gucci. Why is a Louis Vuitton logo bag beautiful and desirable? It is repetitive and unremarkable; it signals wealth, not beauty. Its stamp signals class, acquisition, desire, extraction and a sameness. A paper bag is more beautiful.

Mansfield Park is long and flabby—and I know what those many pages meant in the economies of publishing at the time, and in the bourgeois-making project contained in the economies of reading at the time, too. There may have been no doom scrolling then, but those economies had their own fatuousness. They had their own ways of time wasting, just as we do in the present—or rather, the same seduction and hold of attending to capital. It was just beginning then, the metropolitan grasping, the greed for "‘things,’ and the sublimating or obfuscating of whatever provided the path toward acquiring them.”

In a movie I watched the other day, they cited a Niestzche quote: “Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.”

What word did I last end on in psychoanalysis? “Integrity.”

Anyway, if you made it all the way here, dear reader, I thought I’d give away a self-effacing bonus. (Here reader’s brain might additionally imagine a link to some rando’s Susbtack whining about the degradation of critical writing into personal lamentations on Substack.) A bad poem I wrote in 2017, when I still wrote poems (is vulnerability still interesting? It definitely is not cool. I never thought vulnerability is aspirational but the problematics of literature should not be aspiration—that is your mind on fashion magazines):

Walls, grout, staircases—
edges emerge softening
yesterday’s menace.

An absent sign wonders
why I can’t talk
back to the doorknob.
An absent sign occupies

the spaces between there and here,
when and now. I can’t swallow
the carpet. I can’t be killed
by the crown molding.

No one would think
of something so stupid as a haunting.

It’s hard to believe in accusation
when a body holds the present.

Walls advance toward 
an absence of promise,
faith, use. 

I am too mired
in an architecture of confusion
to be of any use
against the floorboards.

1. For his part, Han has never emailed me back when I’ve asked to put him in magazines. (When I suggested him and my editor did not know who he was he did a quick google and said: “Great hair, yes!”)

2. In an astute comment, a user called Gray noted, “My greater worry is the lack of intuition we have culturally. There's very little tolerance for discomfort and no vulnerability which is so crucial for genuine curiosity to be acted upon, which is fair when you're constantly being observed and judged, and trained to make oneself into a tight ‘brand.’ It’s wild that in 15 years we’ve been trained to think social is the only means of discovery and sharing oneself, of performing both our productivity and also creativity. That, despite fashion literally being about the body, it’s become so bodiless.”

3. Maya Kotomori, the associate editor of and fashion/retail columnist for Document Journal and I are obsessed with the Amazon beigefluencers suing each other.

4. Such handwringing and that which follows—in its repetition—perhaps demonstrates its not so much the writing as the conditions of writing that are relevant. Or maybe that’s stupid.

You know, people comment that it seems a lot of writing is only for people who (also) work in media. I find it telling not only socially but systemically that capitalist media (both traditional and X, Substack, so on) can support (if not financially, then in visibility) so much meta-discourse on the apparent “content” of writing but so little analysis of the conditions of its production.* Obviously, initiatives like WAWOG, The New York War Crimes, freelancer unions, etc. are intervening here.

*I realize the above is largely meta-discourse on media, but it is my public diary and I am a media worker, so…

5. I’ve always had this trouble with fiction—couldn’t I write something more “accessible,” where the “style” doesn’t “overtake the narrative,” as one editor put it? I could, but then I wouldn’t be saying anything I had to say—connecting with others, conveying not information, but a way of thinking through and alongside the world. Syntax is the story.

6. I don’t use footnotes, nor so many parenthetical unless they’re comedic, in my “Real writing”because I value a particular type of lucid organization. Somehow I think of this as compulsive writing, barely a step away from talking. Or, I mean, I do think of it as radically distinct from talking (this writing) but it is really typing in some sense, not the laborious editing of written thought and research. It feels continuous because it is, hence the discontinuities.

7. One of my favorite Substacks, the foreign-policy and international news platform Drop Site does appear to have editors. Drop Site publishes things like interviews with Hamas leadership or reporting on US-Cuba policy and revelations of the preventable deaths of children in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine. Posting on Susbtack doesn’t mean you have to whine about the crowd at Dr. Clark’s. (Yes, this is self-implication.)

8. All this publishing happens in context. In the context of the magazine, one imagines there is some overarching vision, rising from the competing desires of its staff and its freelancers. Its pieces are read in light of one another, even if they are contradictory. They are also read in light of the magazine as an entity with its own duration. The complaint that diaristic writing proliferates on Substack is a symptom of its own context, which privileges individual writers who must perform their individuality instead of elucidate their ideas. (I read somewhere last weekend that one popular Substack writer compares himself more to a YouTuber or podcaster in writing than anything else.) While people may have followed and may still follow their favorite or star writers from publication to publication, magazines also once offered a supportive environment for writers to develop and follow ideas. Of course, as rates plummet, publications shutter, and those with precarious staff jobs are mostly writing lists of “Twelve silk socks that scream ‘Babyratu’” against their will instead of being empowered and supported in doing real reporting or criticism, the rise of an individualist, bootstrapping blog social-platform makes sense… Since clickbait didn’t even work financially, and everyone is sick of it, and the social media platforms it’s shared on are houses of cards, what else is there?

BTW, how does Substack the company make money?

9. I guess I see how one can still have a unique “voice” despite or within a “house style” so perhaps I understood G—’s point all along.

10. “Idiosyncrasies” that—apart from the art works and some vase prototypes—with the right commitment to Facebook marketplace lowballing, Etsy 1983–2000 ceramics searching, and design-brand begging you could affect too.

11. Some of Kriss’s analysis resonates with Nick Srnicek’s 2017 book Platform Capitalism. Much of Srnicek’s materialist analysis is, sensibly, based on how low interest rates were among factors enabling the sharing economy VC boom. But since post-pandemic interest rates went way up, I’m wondering if anyone knows of a similar financial/economic analyses of the tech industry accounting for this change? Would love to read!

12. Clark alludes to a pertinent section from Marx in The German Ideology: Here, as always, Sancho [Marx is referring to Max Stirner, whom he derisively calls Sancho or Saint Sancho after Cervantes’s character] is again unlucky with his practical examples. He thinks that “no one can compose your music for you, complete the sketches for your paintings. No one can do Raphael’s works for him”. Sancho could surely have known, however, that it was not Mozart himself, but someone else who composed the greater part of Mozart’s Requiem and finished it, and that Raphael himself “completed” only an insignificant part of his own frescoes.

He imagines that the so-called organisers of labour wanted to organise the entire activity of each individual, and yet it is precisely they who distinguish between directly productive labour, which has to be organised, and labour which is not directly productive. In regard to the latter, however, it was not their view, as Sancho imagines, that each should do the work of Raphael, but that anyone in ‘ whom there is a potential Raphael should be able to develop without hindrance. Sancho imagines that Raphael produced his pictures independently of the division of labour that existed in Rome at the time. If he were to compare Raphael with Leonardo da Vinci and Titian, he would see how greatly Raphael’s works of art depended on the flourishing of Rome at that time, which occurred under Florentine influence, while the works of Leonardo depended on the state of things in Florence, and the works of Titian, at a later period, depended on the totally different development of Venice. Raphael as much as any other artist was determined by the technical advances in art made before him, by the organisation of society and the division of labour in his locality, and, finally, by the division of labour in all the countries with which his locality had intercourse. Whether an individual like Raphael succeeds in developing his talent depends wholly on demand, which in turn depends on the division of labour and the conditions of human culture resulting from it.

In proclaiming the uniqueness of work in science and art, Stirner adopts a position far inferior to that of the bourgeoisie. At the present time it has already been found necessary to organise this “unique” activity. Horace Vernet would not have had time to paint even a tenth of his pictures if he regarded them as works which “only this unique person is capable of producing”. In Paris, the great demand for vaudevilles and novels brought about the organisation of work for their production; this organisation at any rate yields something better than its “unique” competitors in Germany. In astronomy, people like Arago, Herschel, Encke and Bessel considered it necessary to organise joint observations and only after that obtained some moderately good results. In historical science, it is absolutely impossible for the “unique” to achieve anything at all, and in this field, too, the French long ago surpassed all other nations thanks to organisation of labour. Incidentally, it is self-evident that all these organisations based on modern division of labour still lead to extremely limited results, and they represent a step forward only compared with the previous narrow isolation.

Moreover, it must be specially emphasised that Sancho confuses the organisation of labour with communism and is even surprised that “communism” gives him no reply to his doubts about this organisation. just like a Gascon village lad is surprised that Arago cannot tell him on which star God Almighty has built his throne.

The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in particular individuals, and its suppression in the broad mass which is bound up with this, is a consequence of division of labour. Even if in certain social conditions, everyone were an excellent painter, that would by no means exclude the possibility of each of them being also an original painter, so that here too the difference between “human” and “unique” labour amounts to sheer nonsense. In any case, with a communist organisation of society. there disappears the subordination of the artist to local and national narrowness, which arises entirely from division of labour, and also the subordination of the individual to some definite art, making him exclusively a painter, sculptor, etc.; the very name amply expresses the narrowness of his professional development and his dependence on division of labour. In a communist society there are no painters but only people who engage in painting among other activities.

Sancho’s organisation of labour shows clearly how much all these philosophical knights of “substance” content themselves with mere phrases. The subordination of “substance” to the “subject” about which they all talk so grandiloquently, the reduction of “substance” which governs the “subject” to a mere “accident” of this subject, is revealed to be mere “empty talk”. Hence they wisely refrain from examining division of labour, material production and material intercourse, which in fact make individuals subordinate to definite relations and modes of activity. For them it is in general only a matter of finding new phrases for ‘Interpreting the existing world-phrases which are the more certain to consist only of comical boasting, the more these people imagine they have risen above the world and the more they put themselves in opposition to it. Sancho is a lamentable example of this.

13. In a response, which also introduces into the equation Nochlin’s famous 1971 “Why have there been no great woman artists?” essay, Sampada Aranke writes: “And most importantly, those subjects who all too often land outside of art history’s focus turn away from the idea that art history belongs to a public at all in order to ask: ‘wait, whose art history do we need to escape from?’”

14. The German Bildungsbürgertum (urban, educated, predominately Protestant bourgeoisie) first emerged in the 1700s taking jobs in, per Wikipedia, “upper civil service and free professions such as law, journalism, and the arts.” Following World War I, they found their incomes and statuses diminished. “Many of its members saw democracy as a threat and supported a return to authoritarian rule, but under the Nazi regime, what remained of the Bildungsbürgertum as a class faded out.”

Sound eerily relevant?

(As an aside to this aside: who was it that was writing well on how liberal arts education trains people to have a sense of moral superiority about doing morally horrendous things, like working for health insurance companies—or maybe the fashion industry?)