wtf is culture?

In Jameson’s formulation, postmodernism registered an economic and cultural vibe shift, rippling through a world whose final barriers to global capital circulation were crumbling. Under so-called late capitalism, an alchemy of multinational finance and postindustrial consumer fantasias powered a cultural regime of ahistorical pastiche, defanged... See more

One major benefit of subcultures is that they open up necessary space when the mainstream becomes too crowded. Now, thanks to the internet, everything is supposedly a subculture—the mainstream has supposedly broken into a thousand fragments. One would assume this creates more room for everyone to spread out, literally and figuratively, but even

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This idea that in today’s world, counterculture must embrace invisibility—that it must rest on a bedrock of withdrawal—appeared in every conversation that I had for this article. Biz Sherbert, culture writer and cohost of the podcast Nymphet Alumni, offers a moral angle. “If mass culture runs on conflict,” she says, “then the only real... See more

I began to think that the role of a critic is also a relational one: If someone has spent years of their life on a work, they deserve a serious, sustained response. Critics who write such reviews aren’t just offering something to the maker of a work but to the world. Look here , a critic says. Imagine what culture could be like — if there was more... See more

All criticism, by the way, is reverential; not with regard to specific books, necessarily, but reverential to each book’s potential aspiration toward literature

But a critic, Nguyen implies, is not the man in the Ivory Tower damning or sanctifying specific works of literature based on his own taste: instead, criticism “comes from a deep fascination with the medium (literature, art, fashion, design, architecture, &c) and an overwhelming urge to discuss it, as deeply and as rigorously as possible, in... See more