HOW TO GET A B- IN AN UPPER-LEVEL CRITICAL THEORY SEMINAR

Fourth Year. Senior Year. Year of the Rat; far from the first-year proles in the echoing cattle-chamber that was Introduction to Cultural Studies. Time to do good works, mind-trooper. You are now an epistemological apostle, teasing some practical application out of the grayer areas of political and philosophical morality.

Actually, fuckwit, your life is now small rooms of people devoted to proving they feel a book called Minima Moralia deeper in their balls than each other. So buckle up: invisible scare-quotes will bounce pointlessly off of one another; throats will be brusquely cleared; recommendations to Vassar will be signed. And somewhere, high up in heaven, Athena will weep inconsolably into her cloud-pillows. For better or for worse, the rest of the universe will remain generally unaffected.

Have a seat. The man (and it will be a man) in his early thirties wearing an aggressively casual t-shirt would be your professor. He is the master of ceremonies for this quietly informed circus of logic. His job is to vibe on continental philosophy thrice-removed from material reality, and then to try to relate it to a forty-five second clip from an HBO action-drama. Your job is to justify the past nine years of his life. You do this by trying to make statements in the interrogative, again and again and again? Here’s some

Tips, tips, tips!!!:

1. Use subtle scare quotes.

“Air quotes” are for people who haven’t read Of Grammatology in French. The new scare quotes involve harnessing the minutiae of your sunken, guilty face. Just pause after speaking and purse your lips together, as if you just bit a sour patch key into the shape of a question mark.

2. Cite the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust.

If you’re ever asked for clarification, just explain that whatever point you just made is profoundly inexplicable, kind of like, oh, I don’t know…the Holocaust? Since most of the philosophy you’ll be reading will be tangentially related to the Holocaust anyway, it should almost seem relevant to your point.

But your point is besides the point. By bringing the H-bomb into the mix, you no longer have to defend your position. It’s out of your hands, out of the hands of all rational men and women. What are your classmates going to do: suggest that your point is comprehensible? What, comprehensible maybe like how the murder of six million Jews is comprehensible? Or maybe they’re suggesting it was less than six million? Eh, are they?

You piece of shit.

3. Pretend to read The New Republic, don’t say anything.

Just hunch over an article that takes an ambivalent stance on the divide between science and literature.

4. Drop out.

The best thing to do is get the fuck out of there before the opt-out deadline comes crashing down like a time-portcullis behind you. Because when that girl in a Mystery Train t-shirt, that girl whose upturned nose is a testament to the hidden truths of phrenology, when she stands up and asks why, why, goshdarnit why, “why can’t it all be theory?”¹, chances are it will already be too late to believe in things again, and all your jokes will start to look like this:

1 4:36, April 7^th, 2007.

Helmut Eindringling’s Cinemaguide

Translated by Herman Eindringling

Chapter 2: Boredom

The good film is the film that is boring. Hollywood America is bad films – all things moving, dancing, singing of home. With bangs and crashes and the explosions of energy, the American film distracts and negates the filmality of truth. It is the real might of film that enshrouds the dull film.
For what does the madman talk? Overhear. It is with long shots, still frames, ugly acts, and the colours of brown and grey that the Angel of film serves lobsters of merit. In the unfeelable rapture of stolid gaze, the Masterwatcher billows under the gale force of philosophization. Like the monk at Lent, or the mistakenly buried widow, the parapsychosis of the endroned person weaves art with the bitter canny of the Amputee Floutist.

Look to the Kubrick, of 2001: Odyssey of Expanse. This Geniusfilm infects viewers with gazophilia, inducing coma-thought of the greatest. No shot in this film does not last underneath 3 minutes, and no dialogue in no shot does not last overneath 20 seconds. To view 2001 is to view all time, endless immortality, and have of thoughts infinite – to create smart with the watcher, and gain advantage from thus.

Look once more to my Ownfilm, the award-winner Pax Eisenfaust. Upon the death of Kaiser Erbrechenhund, all characters are shut silent and paralysis. For 20 minutes, they paralyze. The viewer paralyze as well, thoughtbirth, and perhaps the actors thoughtbirth as well… but what of fate?

Nothing…
Nothing.

Internal Memo-festo From Ikea’s Renegade CEO / Liberator of the Peoples

by Max Hartshorn

Greetings respected employees. As our quarter inches ever closer to its inevitable close we must prepare ourselves to endure yet another meaningless cycle of capitalist frenzy. Let our earnings per share growth rate ratio shine as a beacon to the great unwashed, and, more pointedly, stand as an ever heightening spire reaching upwards to the heavens we wish to recreate on Earth.

We hope that our increase in profit will enable you to afford some of the niceties of existence, such as salt on one’s bread and proper antiseptics. Yet at the same time we caution you not to lose sight of our basic principles and fall victim to the great moral decay that appears to define our age.

The following notes were taken on a Lenova IdeaPad tablet PC, at the hour of 11:30pm, April 24th 2008. May they remind you of your purpose, and help to get the ball rolling at the next marketing powwow:

• Simple minds have written off our furniture as ‘mediocre.’ This is an offensive designation, not only towards our furniture, but to all mankind. It suggests that the collective efforts of the masses are at best hollow and implicitly asserts the necessity of an elite. We mean our furniture to be average in the best sense of the term, to celebrate, rather than denigrate, the collective spirit that binds us together.

• We do not endorse world peace, for it is only in war that Man truly discovers his worth. However we recognize that it is on furniture, not battlefields, that most of Man’s life is lived. Humanity has been rendered weak by plush mattresses and the soft caress of the swivel chair. We must embrace our inner strength and erect ourselves once again.

• Luxury begets comfort, comfort begets decrepitude, and decrepitude begets luxury. Thus is the cycle of ignorance that represents all false poetry. In contrast, our chairs occur at the intersection of function and style. They reject weakness and elevate the mind out of its torpor. Do not be fooled! We do not seek to provide comfort, we seek to awaken your soul!

• Be weary of our competitors and their attempts to manipulate your desires. All desire is by its nature false, and the act of feeding desire only leads to its perpetuation. You do not desire our furniture. You do not enjoy our furniture the way you have been conditioned to experience joy. The joy you will experience will be that of being brought face to face with the brutal nature of the universe.

• Our low prices are a triumph of the human spirit!

• Our items are sold in parts. We believe all men should assemble their own furniture, if only to glimpse the primordial chaos that exists before the introduction of proper authority. The success of a customer’s purchase ultimately depends on the customer themselves, and their ability to follow the instructions provided. We all must physically enact the creation of our own destinies.

• Did you know that most humans will die reclined on a piece of furniture? Did you wish you did not know that? We assert that it is the ultimate actualization of human potential to die standing up, preferably impaled on a piece of rough metal (and not only once but again and again and again). Our new line of furniture, formally magnificent in its use of space, functionally optimal, will provide adequate chamber until this day arrives.

Act accordingly,
James Barrington
CEO Ikea Furniture Enterprises