For all Self's brilliance and eloquence and his growing litany of achievements I find in this lecture some essential core of inconsequentiality, some gnawing feeling that he just can't really nail whatever it is he is trying to articulate…
I think a big part of it is his age. He’s trying to explain a culture he isn’t native to and can’t fully understand. He’s trying to explain the digital mindset from the Gutenberg mindset.
I think the commenters are onto something but it's more than that he's trying to bridge the gap of artist, subject, and audience, and grapple with the contradiction of existence itself
I am becoming a bit of a defender of Self. Didn`t used to like his prose style of speaking. But that was a trivial criticism. He is a great guy. Very generous. And extremely acute when it comes to some difficult ideas and emotions. Any Will Self Haters out there ? Fancy a ruck ? You effin Bitches ?
Ageing Studies:Radio 4.An interview with mother who claimed her own Mother had disowned her and her brother for becoming parents against her believes?Not spoken to either for eight years!My view is that their Mother is very wise.Full well knowing that subconsciously they (as parents)will try to incorporate her into their responsibilities as the benevolent “gran”.No matter their denial.It would creep.World population is everyone’s responsibility!Even though poor Senior mum would be there in disease or death.But more likely as the future crashes in.Her own!As John Lennon said”Life happens while you’re busy making plans”!?Thanks Mr.Self.Mac.Jan.2021.
Why are people so stand-offish and passive aggressive to him when he's so eloquent and convincing in his argument, and obviously an exceptionally intelligent man? Their attempts to counter his argument are rendered pitiful and rather lame in comparison to Self's erudition.
I agree. There was really only one intelligent question and you can see he is interested at that point. I can only think that they feel threatened, particularly the academics, because he is pointing out how dependent they are on the now rather anachronistic university set-up to nurture them whereas, being of a different order of talent from most of us, as you know he can and does make a living from any number of different activities. Met him on the train once and he was very pleasant to talk to.
I agree. People usually go on the attack when they find it threatening. I love Will Self. I live listening to , and watching, him. I find him, and his ideas, endlessly fascinating, and deeply engaging. Rather disappointingly, I tried reading one of his books, once, and I just had to give up on it. It did my head in. Isn't that weird. Maybe I am just not as clever as I like to think I am. Or as clever as him. Or, maybe, he is simply a much better, more effective and engaging orator, than he is a writer. I was quite shocked, and, like I say, rather disappointed. Maybe I picked the wrong book. Or his writing is not for me. I thought, frankly, that it was a load of bollocks. 😂🤔😜
Will self's writing is horrendous. If ever their was someone who trys to sound like he's 500 times more intelligent than e eryone else it's him. The thing is that it's actually a stupid way of writing because it's impenetrable and boring....waste of paper his books
The front row man misses the point. Self’s point about symphonies is not that none are brilliant art, but that the form is going the way of the codex-fewer and fewer of us are listening to them.
He resents the idea of artists doing stuff that writers just can't: staying out all night 'getting bladdered', yet dissents from Connoly's inclusion of the demon drink in listing the enemies of good art.
Interesting to hear a pre-Booker Bernadine pipe up. Also interesting to see such an angry Self. I quite like that somebody told the symphony guy to shut up.
"Shut up yourself!" - University level Creative Writing student, everybody. With guys like that writing our future literature, Self is right. The novel is dead.
I love a bit of Will Self's lugubrious, long-form verbalising. A lot of people can't stand him but they must be a bit insecure. Why not ransack the dictionary for obscure words? What fun!
There's something in Harold Bloom's comment about Shakespeare inventing the modern self that Self mentions - for me, literature (and I don't just include literary fiction but forms like philosophy as well), and the sophisticated (but also ancient) linguistic technology which houses it, is not just a repository of some shared cultural heritage - set of values and ideologies and so on - at all. As Self said in his talk on film, modern films, the way they are put together, are designed to 'interleave with our perceptual systems', to the effect that often our ability to think is really suspended, against our will, for the duration of whatever film or show we're watching. But literature, a much older technology, (and personally, if I'm reading something complex in terms of cognitive content, semantic and linguistic construction like Shakespeare's plays, the effect is really a quite similar 'interleaving') -- but the point is that literature (and philosophy and so on) has developed to interleave with the human psyche on all its levels and in all its valences of meaning: it is designed to interleave with the 'soul', the spiritual core of our identity and the levels of consciousness described by 'depth psychology' - the unconscious, archetypes so on (although of course depth psychology doesn't apply to all kinds of literature). Many great works of philosophy are designed to engage the reader's intellect in a dialectic - as much of the stimulation and benefit of reading comes from disagreeing with the arguments being made by the text, or at least engaging actively with them, imaginatively and intellectually, in order to incorporate them and synthesise with our pre-existing cognitive structures. The point I'm trying to make is that, for me, reading 'elite culture' texts as a discipline and lifestyle literally changes, expands and enriches the phenomenological texture of my reality and my 'soul.' Now I'm not entirely sure how I feel about 'bi-directional digital media' - and I certainly think that the internet gives us access to many valuable sources of knowledge and general personal enrichment. But what I'm getting at, I suppose, is that as far as I'm concerned, digital media has not yet produced any art forms, endemic to its technological form, which approach to anything like an alternative to the kinds of personal enrichment I get from the study of 'classic' and 'canonical' texts. (As something which disseminates and makes widely and conveniently accessible information which was previously housed in the physical 'codex', it's a revolution of a positive kind, and to be honest, I'm extremely grateful to have access to the internet.) And I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who is 24, has pretty much grown up with laptops, computers and games consoles, and not belonging to the generation of 'Gutenberg minds', although maybe I was born just on the cusp of the transition from the 'Gutenberg' to whatever sort of 'mind' predominates in my, and younger, generations. For me, rediscovering literature and philosophy has been an enormous release, like discovering a magic doorway into a universe with greater depth, meaning and reality than this virtually augmented one we live in nowadays. To realise that you can escape from the vapidity of so much of contemporary culture. It's like discovering you can breathe real fresh air, with all its timeless scents travelling from remote places, after having been cooped up in some kind of stuffy cell your whole life. Also, the idea that the 'algorithm' and computer coding are an adequate metaphor for the way the human psyche works or constructs reality is kind of irritating to me. But that's a prejudice on my part, I suppose. Of course, I'm not entirely confident about the judgements I have just made, it is more a meandering and messy attempt to articulate certain feelings and value judgements and personal experiences. Anyway, I'd appreciate any reactions to these ideas, particularly by way of correcting, perspectivising, and/or contextualising my ideas (that is, if anyone can be bothered to read and process all that I've written, which is a bit impertinent of me to assume, I know).
If we recognise that our response patterns too has undergone a change with the passage of large chunks of time ,we would begin to understand the difference between the way the novel is received today and during the earlier times,say, in the late 70's or the early 80's. For a variety of good reasons too. Much has changed since socially and culturally and in the manner of our communication with one another. Every one is racing against time . The younger generation has been deprived of abundance of time ,rather unjustifiably too . It is a given and our psychological behaviour is fashioned to suit our impatience. Practically everyone lives under stress of one or the other kind daily. Hence the art of the novel too has changed. The long,descriptive paragraphs are found boring,snappier it is, quicker it is,better. The narrative of the modern novel must reflect this impatience and recognise this absence of time and renew itself urgently. Isolation and solitude are luxuries ,this is a form of stress too for the writer as well as the reader. Recognise this if the two must meet even if narrowly somewhere. 2. The younger generation born and brought up with the computer as a constant companion has learned to read books or write (whatever)digitally. The virtual world is not alien or strange to him. No need to doubt his /her capacity to absorb the content from a digitised novel and respond to it as expected of him or her.. The digital age has been his entirely. The new species of human race is perfectly ready to play with the art of the novel or the Arts in general. Just don't worry. Wait please. The changing times will force him to be inventive .Maybe,he will reinvent the novel in a different bottle and in a kind of literature that suits his generation.
The longer short story is a better option. ex. Hemingway's all-time classic The Old Man and The Sea ( 1991,109 pages),0r F.Scott Fitzgerald's The Diamond as Big as the Ritz( 1922,2005, 57 pages). Who has the time to read a tome? Raise your hand if you have read the Ullysis page 1 to last without putting it away 10 times to breathe? I am referring to material which qualifies itself in taste to be considered literature,not those weighty pot-boilers.If these offer vicarious pleasure or benumbing your senses as drugs,literature is aimed at elevating the human spirit. Book publishers and agents must promote art and not seek to corrupt young minds by denying literature although it is short and does not meet 90,000 word restriction before it is considered a novel worthy of their attention . There is something bizarre going on in the bazaar and it is killing the beautiful art of the short novel.
"....literature.......and the sophisticated technology...which houses it...." This a crucial observation. (Was this from Will Self?...or your own? {I was so inspired by the introductory tale read by the professor of particle physics -"A Little Tale of Consequence Revealed" -- that I jumped right to the "Comments", and have not listened to Mr. Self's lecture.) I'm about 40-years older than you, and have delved into literature and philosophy to a greater degree than most of my circle of correspondents. At the end of a long quest.....I have found mostly a pile....and infinite pile... of words. Symbols. Which are ultimately given meaning based on one's life experiences. But this introductory tale of the physics professor's is one of the more illuminating observations I have stumbled across. And I see it as related to the "sophisticated technology of language." The professor's tale cites the scientific progression of (what I would say) "literate" man's shift in self perception. From being at the center of the universe....man is now conceived as at its fringe. And now....separated from his true "self." You write that this "sophisticated technology" is "designed" (to perform certain functions.) But who or what designed it? It is hard to imagine primitive man being able to devise such a subtly complex and cerebral system. Regardless of where literature/language came from.......I now think it may be the source of our displacement from our "center" >< Although I believe electronic media has had a mostly hypnotizing effect on the human mind......I do appreciate it for providing this sort of communication between two otherwise strangers. Thank you for provoking my thinking!.....4 years later! Ty, jd
McLuhan was NOT Catholicly ecstatic about the "Global Village" as a City on a Hill--he steadfastly abstained from making judgment calls about the cultural revolutions going on, unless pressed. When asked point blank for his feelings about the direction of the world away from Gutenberg, he expressed great distress--but his emotions would only get in the way of seeing clearly and helping us to do the same, so he didn't praise or defame in his analysis. McLuhan was, for all his electronic media analysis, a great example of the (moribund) Gutenberg mind.
Ive gone through phases with this guy. First I really liked him for his humour and intelligence. More recently I have been turned off by his negativity and his political commentary. However this is excellent and really kinda sums up a lot of feelings I have had for some time but havent been able to articulate.
In the ISIS videos people very graphically have their heads cut off. I'm surprised if that was true 2 years ago although I don't remember when I first saw them. Will Self is a fantastic public speaker and one of my favourite writers
Computer off, even, to properly read a book, ideally computer in other room. Reading ibooks, digital pdfs are necessary, audiobooks novels rock, especially unreadables like Gravity's Rainbow.
I'm literally about to start a Creative Writing MA and I couldn't agree more with Will Self. Writing cannot be taught on a course, you can only teach yourself. The only reason I'm doing the course I'm about to do is so I can one day lecture on the subject and manage to survive whilst writing, and when that day comes, I shan't be teaching my students anything else. They shall be reassured that only they can teach themselves to write, they will be assured that that is not what these courses are for - What they are for is giving a writer space and time to work on their project and to allow them to one day maybe make a living whilst undertaking this impoverished endeavour.
I think that Cyril Connolly's notion of success as 'the enemy of literary promise' has a slightly more nuanced implication than Will Self infers. Connolly is perhaps suggesting that achieving financial rewards or the acclaim of your peers for apparent writing prowess, also entails the potential problem of bringing the writer into both the cultural mainstream and the orbit of a particular literary clique, which may subsequently circumscribe the ability to write that unique reflection of the human condition that everyone one is subconsciously aware of but nobody has ever actually articulated. The writer is, in effect, in danger of losing that necessary isolation and solitude that enabled them to write the kind of praiseworthy piece of literature that earned them all those initial plaudits - they are no longer in a position to write the truly 'novel' and either consciously or subconsciously write with the expectations of their peers and/or their potential reader (market) in mind, and either rehashing the earlier material of others or reproducing merely generic fiction, the difference between artistic literary creation and literary production. In my own humble opinion, this is the main reason why the vast majority of contemporary fiction isn't worth the paper it is printed on, but I fully appreciate that everyone has to make a living.
Yes, success defined as a framework of expectations predicated upon the notion of financial reward. In other words, when art becomes more of a business it becomes less of a vocation. There was never any moral superiority in being a "starving artist", but neither is it a masochist cliche. This might actually be a larger definition of the solitude that he speaks of, not only in the work, but a solitude within the society itself.
Self misses the point on Politics being a hindrance. I am from the school of Mckenna who cautions about where you get the manual for your cultural operating system. Everyday you go to sleep, you wake, what do you eyes encounter? where do you allow your conscious attention to be directed, what IMAGES do you allow to shape your world? Our world is image, words vehicles, if you allow politics a place in your paradigm of reality, the memory of that image and the associated cultural conditioning that it entails will demand your conscious and unconsious attention also. Whether you admit it or not, the fetish of politics is a kind of dream space both sides enter into, if you are for or against the established paradigm, you are part of the established paradigm. bashing trump and being anti trump, is the same as being anti trump. this is the new truth, this is the new reality. Politics is like a wart, hidden on the underside of the heal of our foot, we have accepted through historical reasoning. The only realisation is to accept that whatever cultural baggage you choose to encode into your being, is an endorsement of that reality. have a good day, don't try and digest what might make you feel ill.
More powerful than the professors of the consumer-based university at "caring for" novels--a job for which these Soviet-style mind conformists are epically maladapted--is the individual who gives a shit. If the "codex" is valuable, we will take him into our private homes, and maintain our long struggle to keep each other awake and alive.
The sales figures of literary fiction have fallen off a cliff in the UK over the past decade, but the same cannot be said of sales in Germany and France. There is obviously a cultural element -- smartphones are just a popular here as there...
104:00 Synthetic A Priori is the process of discovery from first causes; it has nothing to do with 'turning pages'. Great lecture but nearly ruined by Self's need to make a vice of pretension.
Things fall away, change happens....the quality appears to disappear, yet life goes on in banality and economic rationalisation......lemmings over the cliff?
Self seems to imply that books are going to go out of fashion. That the "codex" is gone (whatever that is, I don't think Self himself knows, he certainly never explains what he means by "CODEX'). Then in the Q&A he clarifies that Genre writing will still exist. He then ineptly tries to explain and differentiate Genre Writing from that writing which apparently needs a Codex to survive. I think he is talking about classic literature, in the Hemingway, Proust, etc. tradition, whatever he is talking about it apparently has not been around for very long... by his astute observation, and now it is disappearing. He also mentions the author as celebrity, as if there was a time when the Codex writers were in vogue.
"...shift to a binary, on/off culture" is a little bit like saying "a shift to a solenoid culture". Which means what? The "binary" bit does not embody the philosophical character of the present, it's just the nuts and bolts of the data processing technology we use. The "binary" aspect of an e-book, or of an excerpt from "Madame Bovary" you're reading on your PC screen, for example, does not in any wise inflect the text. "Binary" in this way is too often a lazy misnomer. I'm all for addressing Internet pathologies or the ethical conundrums of digital reproduction but this "binary, on/off" riff is too common and sloppily un-illuminating. Having said that: paper-based books will not vanish, they will revert to being a ring-fenced luxury of the rich. And the pressing problem of today, imo, is "Large Screen" vs "Small Screen" info-culture... the insidious shift to the latter and all that...
It's not a problem ..........well it might be a problem to writers. We aren't drawing on cave walls much these days, things move on. The Gutenberg mind will be replaced as it has to be for the modern era. Sort of the same debates in photography in regards to the digital world and the creation of images have been made. You can't be Luddite about it.
I have a rather different view of literature, whether reading or writing. The use of literature is to convey meaning as accurately as possible and to evolve our cognitive state both individually and collectively and I have seen evidence of neither. It is, rather used as "entertainment" a literary term which itself has been bastardized beyond recognition. Why is it that every reader is so cognitively underdeveloped? Is it because reading and writing have been systematically misused? Or is there an intrinsically debilitating property of literature on brain development? Based on my examination of this unexplored subject, both are the case. Reading and writing have been systematically misused and as a result, from the youngest of ages, natural brain development has become severely impeded. The resulting impediment has now become so normalized as to be undetectable by anyone who is not on the outside looking in. This particular skill has become so conflated with accomplishment as to effectively obscure knowledge and understanding of the healthy neural development which would have otherwise occurred. In order to understand this position, one must be interested in what constitutes a natural or authentic human state.
the only problem is that the London Symphony is actually the second by vaughan williams - the sea symphony is the first. If youre going to express such indignance it might help to get your fucking facts right.
Gosh, I hate these introductions before the lecture! THAT part could be done by: Here's Will Self who will talk about Isolation etc. Find out about him and his work in the net. Over to you Will!
Not really convincing when the extent of his erudition is five decade-old media theory. The thing about the novel is that it originated as a 'consumer' of different forms and forms of media: chilvaric romance, picaresque, verse, the letter. He leaves out the most interesting part of this more-or-less two-decade old digital media: how the novel is consuming, how these forms will be distorted and warped into the literary. I see that he needs to make his writing practice dramatic for himself, but he misses out the most interesting things about this anachronistic medium of the novel.
The ability to 'write' should be essential before submitting a thesis in typed-form it should be written ( warts 'n' all) by hand. Only if the hand-written version is illegible then type out the horrid typed-version. I wanna be sedated.
As much as I detest Will Self's politics and though his gassy pronouncements irritate me, I do appreciate his decision to "de-obsess." Now--when he decides to atone for the indecency of his political manias, I might actually find something to admire.
His intellect is transparent and he's a learned man especially in the arts and literature which he has dedicated himself to but there is an element to him that's annoyingly adolescent. His written and spoken vocabulary can be tiresome rather than illuminating as they often obfuscate his ideas and make them muddle rather than communicable to any type of audience even for those who view themselves as been native to high culture by virtue of their education. I also think a lot of his ideas are arcane and recycled from more innovative and formidable thinkers such as Adorno from the Frank furt school and Walter Benjamin and many others that has left a lasting imprint on twentieth century thought. He's more a populariser of ideas rather than a pioneer of any utterance or assertion he makes in the public sphere. Educated and cultured men are not veiled to the ideas he espouses but then the culture of thought even amongst those who are labelled as educated has severely diminished
@@TerryStewart32 Heavens, there were only a couple less-common words in the entire talk. That this suffices to qualify one as an obfuscator speaks "volumes".
@@BiodegradableYTP Hello We got along fine saying method for years, then suddenly ology is tacked on the end. There are other examples. Maybe it's an attempt to appear scientific.
Slavoj Zizek is a a contrarian with nothing proper to say, he doesnt really have a speech impediment he's just hiding that he says nothing important or useful between the barrages of fetid sputem he projects onto the front row
4 года назад
@@clarerindl5852 LOL you sad fucking no mark. Your gullible ignorance is disgusting.
I think he's putting too much emphasis on both technology and inevitability. Plus he is hobbled by his casual leftism. He fails to see , or at least discuss here, the debilitating effects of The Frankfurt school cultural Marxism, the French post structuralists, the hyper political identity nonsense that now passes for literary and film criticism, the abandonment of classical education, and so on. Thus he fails to see their possible reversal. Its fashionable to see Trump, Brexit, and the rise of the right across the world as Vulgar and frightening, but they will, in their best turns, counter the deadness of all forms of art and criticism, and maybe even bring back the novel, the long cut in film, the appreciation of truth and beauty long lost to cultural marxist propaganda and the corporate agendas it feeds.
It's always sad when a dozy right wing parasite tries to pretend to have an IQ. Brexit and Trumptardism are signs of the death of WASP "culture" you ridiculous barbarian filth.
Obviously all this time later you were proven to be very wide of the mark. However, even granting you the context of time how could you possibly think the very anti-intellectual movement you advocated for would bring about a return of the novel or arthouse directorial techniques? Precisely the opposite, an acceleration of the decline of artistic standards.
@@scythermantis people say things in public they wouldn't dare say five years ago, true things. And yes the alternative cultural economy is growing fast
