dictionary_of_hating_things epitome of incomprehensibility (Entry titles taken from David Macey's 2000 Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory.) ABJECTION - "In Kristeva's post-Freudian theory of psychoanalysis" indeed. Why be a wimp? Being abject is being a wimp, isn't it? And why on earth should we feel abject when we poop? Who is Kristeva anyway, and why does her last name sound like a first name? That should be illegal. ABSTRACTION - hate it. Modern art sucks. And really, why cite a guy called Lyotard? Stupid name. ABSURDITY - My cactus belt ate a moon willow, and it hated every minute of it. ACTANT - "The basic unit in the structural-semantic analysis of narrative." Otherwise known as someone or something that is doing something. Why do things? Life is futile. ADORNO, THEODOR WIESENGRUND - Thinks totalitarianism is ultimately self-destructive. Fine. Loves Schoenberg but hate Stravinsky. Well... Hates jazz. Hates jazz?! What an idiot. AFFECT - Stupid Freud's stupid psychoanalysis gave us the English noun form of this word, further confusing people on the difference between "effect" and "affect." Harumph. AFFECTIVE FALLACY - But not effective, I see. AFROCENTRICITY - Yes, ancient Egypt was more African than Eurasian. Black people have culture too, you know. Except for the people who made up this ridiculous excuse for a word. AGA SAGA - a term for a novel set in the country that takes its name from a type of stove. That says it all. AGITPROP - because you're not a punk, you're a poser! Or a poster. Can't decide which. ALIENATION - Now that's just mean. Some of the most sociable beings I know are extra-terrestrials. ALIENATION-EFFECT - At least it's not affect. ALLEGORY - J.R.R. Tolkien didn't like them, so why should I? ALTHUSSER, LOUIS - I don't know anything about him, so he must suck. Oh wait, there's the interpellation concept. Like how ads address you as the consumer. How you are called into the role of cog in a machine, whether overtly or not. Ideology and so on. But it says he went crazy and murdered his wife in 1990, and that's not the sort of thing you should do when you're crazy. Any self-respecting artist knows that you should draw stylized cats with scary eyes when you go crazy. Besides, he wasn't even really an artist. FAIL! AMBIVALENCE - I dunno about this one. ANACLISIS - Uh-huh. That explains the female LGBTQs - we're ALL secretly turned on by drinking our mother's breast milk as babies. Except for gay men, who clearly have the wrong parental perversions. Why am I not buying this, Freud? ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY - is not "the reduction of complex ideas to their ultimate simple constituent ideas." What is this, the grand unified theory of philosophy? Has it every worked this way? NO! ANAMORPHIS - distortion of perspective. Sounds like a type of insect. ANAPHORA - Repeating words for rhetorical effect. Repeating words because you don't know what else to say. Repeating words for the sake of repeating words. Just don't! ANDERSON, BENEDICT - said a lot of things about nations, but were they interesting? Did they involve dinosaurs or zombies? NO! ANDERSON, PERRY - He clearly just stole the name from the other guy. Besides, his first name sounds like a last name. That should also be illegal. ANGRY YOUNG MAN - Well, I'm an angry young woman! And I can't take this anymore!!! ... I may continue later if I feel like it. Gosh, it's exhausting hating everything in one dictionary. I didn't even finish the letter A yet. 130710 ... e_o_i In ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY, I wrote "every" instead of "ever"! Oh dear! And I don't think I can hate everything in that dictionary. I am clearly not good enough at critical theory. Besides, I like Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt (who would be just a few entries away) and I totally think they should have gotten together. What was she doing with Martin Heidegger, that Nazi sympathizer? I need to start matchmaking dead philosophers instead of hating everything. 130711 ... e_o_i ANNALES - as in annals; a grandiosely-titled French history journal. But it's not just history, see, it's ideas... the main idea being that the French are better than everybody else. They probably are, but they don't have to rub it in. ANOPHOBIA - fear of old women, not of assholes. The word was coined by Germaine Greer, who wrote these nice feministy things but now scoffs at transwomen for being born with the wrong parts. Is that nice? Is it? Besides, we all have assholes but we don't all have to be assholes, right? ANTI-PSYCHIATRY - Anti-this, anti-that. I hate negativity. ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE - The fear that writers are not only an influence on other writers, but a BAD influence. Completely false, of course. Video games are to blame for everything. APHASIA - Don't use speech disorders to prove your little language theories. That's just mean. APORIA - This either means contradicting yourself or being Jacques Derrida. I never contradict myself, so therefore I must be Derrida. I hate logic. ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE - Michel Foucault thought he could dig up texts from the past and put them together to make a picture: a picture of why the past is fundamentally different from the present and that any attempts at understanding it are doomed. That's the Order of Things, folks. And no dinosaurs. He could have at least called it the PALEONTOLOGY of knowledge, so I could shut my eyes and imagine dinosaurs, but no! ARCHETYPE - Images of the collective unconscious. Animus/anima. But why, I ask, does "animus" mean a prejudice or dislike? Is it because everyone hates Carl Jung? ARCHIVE - HELLO ARCHIVISTS! I'm not yelling because they're old and deaf, I'm yelling because no one lets you bring pens into an archive and I hate writing with pencils. That being said, I have a message: HELLO ARCHIVISTS! THERE'S AN INTERNET! ARENDT, HANNAH - Pioneered the groundbreaking theory that Hitler was bad. Of course, I'm just bitter because I'm all Arendt X Adorno (AdorEnt to the fans) but critic Harold Bloom frowns at non-canon pairings. Poor guy doesn't know I ship HIM with Germaine Greer. Team BlooGreen unite! 130712 ... e_o_i ARIELISM - The disturbing tendency of Disney Princesses to have babyish facial features and adult bodies. Named after Ariel from The Little Mermaid, notable for her skimpy bikini top paired with the face of a ten-year-old girl. Contrast hot grown-up princesses such as Esmerelda and Jasmine. (See also ORIENTALISM, which isn't here yet.) ARTAUD, ANTONIN - Surrealist guy who had a fight with André Breton... but really, who didn't? Wrote poems and an essay on the Theatre of Cruelty, which didn't really mean cruelty, but something like it. Or maybe the opposite. Or maybe cruelty to the word cruelty, which is a step below cruelty to the common comma, since cruelty to the word cruelty is just cruel. Don't do drugs, kids. AUERBACH, ERICH - Examined how art thinks it represents reality. Boring. It shouldn't. AURA - The New Age belief, propagated by critic Walter Benjamin, that works of art will radiate sparkly halos if they are originals, but not if they are copies. He theorizes that the chemicals in photography ruin auras, unless the negatives are soaked in sparkly liquid while being developed. I hate sparkles. AUSTIN, JOHN LANGSHAW - One of those annoying guys who criticizes word choice while ignoring the overall argument. Deserves to be hit by the Surrealist Ray (which is not Man Ray, but something vehemently anti-sparkly) even if he's dead. Why do philosophers always die, anyway? This seems to be a problem. AUTEUR THEORY - The theory that French people are better at movies than everybody else because a director is not just a film's author, but its "auteur" - also spelled "hauteur," this refers to the now discredited stereotype that film directors are tall, which was parodied in the avant-garde American film Your Highness. AUTHENTIC - Keeping it real; but for Heidigger and Sartre, the real is always in the future. So it's not, like, really keeping it real. Only sort of keeping it real. Or trying to keep it realer than it was before. Good luck. AVANT-GARDE - Means "advance guard" and refers to the plot by French intellectuals to take over the English language one or two words at a time. It isn't working, you douches! (Wait... no... no...) ... And that concludes the letter A. From now on I will do the excerpts from other letters, but keep the whole thing on file just in case. 130724 ... e_o_i spell check (Heidegger. Martin Heidegger.) 130724 ... e_o_i (and "excerpts" not "the excerpts"; if I split into two people, I could edit myself better! maybe!) 130724 ... e_o_i The plan now is not to make fun of one dictionary, but to provide a grumpy and/or surreal commentary to theoretical terms and figures in general. We'll see how that works. I'm finished the Bs, but not all are in a blather-ready format. And I said a few. So, without further ado, A Beginning of Bastardized Bs: BACHELARD, GASTON – A French philosopher who wrote dryly about concepts in science and effusively about images in literature. I'm waiting for a philosopher who writes dryly about concepts in literature and effusively about images in science. I'm not holding my breath. BAD FAITH – A phrase used by Jean-Paul Sartre to describe the mechanisms of self-deception. Later critics generally agree that Bad Religion is a better name for a band. BAKHTIN, MIKHAIL MIKHAYLOVICH – said that writing is like dialogue. Especially novels, and especially Dostoevsky. Tolstoy is on the Not Hot list for being boring and, y'know, un-dialogic. ...Russian men have nice names, don't they? Maybe if you go into computer science instead of the humanities you can make money and travel to Russia and meet a nice Russian man. If you're into that sort of thing, of course. That's all well and good, but we've got to optimize the specifications. We need a file-run compendium of virtual libraries with low-level utterances. And we need it not to suck. Excuse me, I find that demeaning. To you especially. I don't believe it! You're the one who burned the poodle salad. If you're going to make a habit of telling people what to do, why don't you do it somewhere else? Like, outside of this fucking house. It's a fucking apartment. It's not a piece of real estate and it's not having sex with anybody. It's a pronoun. Your signifiers are showing. Shut up. Your mom is a signifier. No! Polyphony! Our hymn to Polyhymnia! Rebel against the monological voice! Can the subaltern speak? What do you think I'm doing right now? I don't know, replaying the triage nodes with feedback platters tuned to allegories between 200 and 20,000 Hz? Nah, that's too many specifications. We need a compiler to calcify the high-level amenity threshold. I can't get a reading for the “Russian names” amenity platter. Can I get a cathexis into your subatomic dossier? You'll be invited when you're invited. BARTHES, ROLAND – Barthes, another French LitCritter, had a long-standing unrequited love affair with the written word. Most annoyingly, his 1973 book The Pleasure of the Text (or Le Plaisir du texte, because they do these things better in French) spawned the “Reading is Sexy” button craze. At least I think he did. He was kind of obsessed. Read this and tell me he doesn't sound desperate: “The text you write must prove to me that it desires me” (The Pleasure of the Text 6). Alternatively, here's a Bakhtinian reading (tip: if you can turn a critic's name into an adjective, you win): Roland Barthes: The author is dead! The author: Roland Barthes is dead! BASE/SUPERSTRUCTURE – Marx and Engels said: if you build a rotten economic foundation, the structures of power built above it will also be rotten. Somehow they won't fall down, though. Until the revolution, when running in circles around the wall and making loud noises will cause it to tumble. It worked in the Bible. (Marx and Engels, however, were godless heathens and communists, so it never worked for them.) 131010 ... jane diggin' this. carry on. xo 131010 ... gabbie wrire_on 131010 ... dafremen CHANGE: I hate change. It makes my pants fall down after an afternoon of busking. My ninja street cred evaporates when my stealthy foot progress is given away at every step by the jingle jangle of that Benedict Arnold..George Washington!! (P.O.S.) Little shiny metal discs with pictures of over-worshipped MAN-GODS who seem to sneer "FUCK YOU song bum..good luck finding a decent arcade anymore!" I thought about putting "FOLDING MONEY ONLY CHEAPSKATES" on my sign, but shelved that move for a future date. You see, I can't stand change. 131011 what's it to you? who go blather from