Someone explain the second paragraph to me. Is this even supposed to make sense?

Someone explain the second paragraph to me. Is this even supposed to make sense?

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quillette.com/2018/03/06/incomprehension-501-intro-graduate-school/
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Start With the Greeks

Very choppy but it conveys meaning well enough.

It's about the current idealogical strucure of all humanity, and the aspects that it dwells upon with changing conviction.

it's about how changes in the mode of production change the culture, standard marxist talking points

No, pomo trash is designed specifically to not make sense.

quillette.com/2018/03/06/incomprehension-501-intro-graduate-school/

Is that Benjamin or am I mistaken?

It is.

>very choppy
Assumes a lot and doesn't follow, no?
Your summaries are incredibly vague, and I can get a vague notion out of it too, but when I look at the individual sentences some of it just doesn't make sense.

Can you explain this:
>Their dialectic is no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economy
Whose dialectic? What sort of dialectic (dialectic in the marxist sense?)? Is the superstructure for a marxist not the mode of production? In what sense does he use the word economy then? What does he even mean by dialectic being noticeable in the superstructure and economy?
>It would therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon
Again, which theses? He just mentioned two types.
>They brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery – concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense.
What?
>(and at present almost uncontrollable)
what??
>processing of data in the Fascist sense
what???

It does make sense, kinda; it's just the absolute worst kind of soulless Marxist jargon. (All communists must hang.) That said, here it is translated into human, sentence by sentence.

>The transformation of the superstructure...
The world is being changed at the "lowest level", i.e. the level of ordinary working plebs, but it takes time for that change to be reflected in the "higher levels" of culture.

>Only today...
Marx tried to predict what was going to happen; only now can we look back and say what has happened and whether he was right.

>Certain prognostic requirements...
If we make statements about what has happened, those statements, to be true and useful, should be able to make PREDICTIONS.

>However, these about the art of the proletariat...
However, there's no point getting ahead of ourselves. It's more useful to talk about where we're going from here, rather than where we might be in some far-distant Marxist Utopia.

>Their dialectic is no less noticeable...
What's going on in art is following the Marxist March Of History just as much as what's going on with people's pay packets.

>It would therefore be wrong...
Talking about cultural trends and interpreting them according to a Marxist world-view can be very useful for us.

>They brush aside a number of outmoded concepts...
If we get rid of the idea that individual geniuses create art and culture, it will be one of the ways people can be brought to see the world in a Marxist rather than a Fascist way.

>The concepts which are introduced...
We're now going to talk about art in a new way which the Fascists won't be able to twist to their own ends.

>They are, on the other hand...
We're going to look at art in a new way, and even using new vocabulary, to help us use it for our own political ends.

I repeat:

All communists must hang.

>The world is being changed at the "lowest level", i.e. the level of ordinary working plebs, but it takes time for that change to be reflected in the "higher levels" of culture
That's not what superstructure and substructure mean you moron. You haven't even read Marx's wikipedia entry.

he means there is a lag from when u change the mode of production and when it is reflected in the culture, for example (mine not his) after the russian revolution there was still avant garde art for maybe a decade or two before all the communist art was tacky socialist realism with big stalins and fighter jets and shit...the irony being art under communist was more shitty and stereotypical than even the most unoriginal christian productions (but then the church and the communist party are not so different)

Thanks, these both sort of make sense. It still seems to assume a lot and explain little.

it is shitty writing, and maybe the translation is ass idk, but it will be a lot easier to make sense of it u read marx first

I'm convinced that Communists are penetrated by some alien force that seeks the destruction of life, in a very literal sense

the entirety of their literature is so wholly hostile to humanity, humanness, and Nature as well that only someone who is possessed by something that despises these things could ever advocate for the things they do. There is something metaphysically amiss with these people

stopped at the first definition cuz its wrong, I'm not a communist but actually read crit. theory if you want to make fun of it you uneducated fuck

please offer your interpretation instead because none of that paragraph was legible to me

stick to stem brainlet, literary theory is not for u

>smug indignation instead of any attempt at explaining it
yeah so clearly you've got no idea.

>brainlet tries to read literary theory
>cant even make it two paragraphs
>assumes anyone who won't spoon food him is as stupid as he is

stick to jordan peterson dude

>bemoans the one person who actually attempts to decipher purposely obtuse horseshit while clearly terrified to do it themselves
>brainlet meme, stem bitching, and an unrelated jp namedrop on top of it
I hope you're just memeing and you don't actually suffer from the level of autism you're portraying

>purposely obtuse
What's wrong with that? Not the other guy btw.

its a marxist talking about how to analyze art distinct from microcosmic nonsense and also that it can be utilized for political purposes both fascist but more ideally marxist. Superstructure is culture, state, institutions, movements, ideas etc. If you don't know the other words you should kys

The ideology behind it is obtuse, even irredeemably stupid but the actual intent and meaning of the passage isn't difficult to parse. You're either a highschool student, not well read or just deficient mentally. Google is your friend. If you really want to know what a word means, you can most certainly find out with a few keystrokes nigger

Inaccessibility for its own sake, solely so that the writer and his small circle of readers can snub their noses at those who don't 'get it' while feigning higher levels of understanding.

Basically writing like that is for fucking faggots.

do u get angsty and blasted if u jump into a stem text and don't get it because u didn't do any prerequisite reading? idk why plebs think they can just pick up some rando work of literary theory and expect to understand it as if they are reading some commercial pop shit like pinker or peterson

But that's prejudice, though. I won't deny that there are authors in academia who do that, but the mere fact that something is written in obscure language doesn't imply it's nonsense. Language is not just a way to communicate content, the way you formulate your theories is part of the content as well. Sorry for the bad English :)

Funny how the Marxist intellectuals write in a manner that assumes the reader is clued in on all of the known literature on whatever they write about, and write so as to almost purposefully exclude the working class from ever being able to understand it. How pompous of them to assume that the revolt is the duty of the elites and that the silly proles need not concern themselves with their own position in society. As if to say
>don’t think about it too hard, you’ll only get confused. We know what’s good for you so just let us do the talking.

>implying the vocabulary is the problem
Dumb fucking nigger (in the fascistic sense)*

*what does that mean? well fuck you, huh

>It's fucked up that people write anything but introductory texts
Embarrassing

What a great example of a reductionist view on something, you must be a Marxist too!