ITT is the most confusing acronym

bambamramfan:

.@ozymandias271 is hosting an “Intellectual Turing Test” competition over at their wordpress, and the comments are really interesting. https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/10/12/itt-social-justice-2/

What I think all this really highlights is how much ideology is not located within the individual. Zizek is fond of pointing out how ideology subsists when people don’t fully believe in it:

once upon a time we pretended to believe, while, in our intimacy, we were skeptics or even engaged in obscene mocking of our public beliefs.

Often one believes even if only indirectly through seeing how others believe, in this case ‘all that matters is that’ one believes ‘it to be true that most of the people around them believe’. And ‘for a particular ideology to survive, it is not essential that people actively support or believe in it’, Zizek writes.

And what are the comments saying? This person could not be a real SJ-er because they don’t express doubt or enough sympathy to try to understand the other side. Which is to say, you only sound like a person from SJ ideology if you disavow at least some of SJ ideology.

Ideology is then, a belief system that everyone involved knows about but none/few “take seriously all the way.” Which renders the entire question of whether the the mystery answerer “means it” or not irrelevant. They are able to be an agent continuing the meme, even if they are some secret double agent who was fighting against the ideology all along.

This is…not a fair analysis of the phenomenon under consideration, I think.

I mean, yes, it’s true that “ideology can exist [totally] outside the individual.”  Cf. the worst eras of Communist Chinese political-insider-dom, when Everyone was parroting ridiculous party-line ideas because Everyone knew that Everyone would purge anyone who didn’t do that thing, even though small-e everyone was talking (or thinking) secretly about how ridiculous those party-line ideas were. 

But the tenor of the ITT commentary on Ozy’s blog is, well, not that and not even particularly tangent to that. 

“SJ” and “Anti-SJ” are both ideologies with enormous internal diversity.  In particular: both ideologies run a spectrum from “high” versions, which are filled with sensitive and careful thought that is meant to withstand harsh scrutiny from intelligent outsiders, to “low” versions that are basically just mindless tribal war-chanting that takes place within echo chambers.

And, of course, except at the very very highest levels of discourse, members of each team engage primarily with the lowest and most stereotype-able versions of the opposing creed. 

Playing the ITT game well, especially when run in a center of high discourse like Ozy’s blog, centers on being able to replicate the highest (strongest) version of the opposing argument.  It’s not that hard for a good rhetorician to lay out the really good version of his own beliefs, the version that doesn’t involve any shibboleths or slurs at all – even if there are plenty of people on his side who would use those shibboleths and slurs, even if he’d do it himself in a less-diplomacy-focused context – but it’s somewhat harder to do the same thing for your opponent, since you spend less time thinking about the opposing High Discourse and more time thinking about the opposing slime.  That’s the theory, anyway.

So when someone’s allegedly-pro-SJ submission uses a nasty catchphrase like “fragile male egos,” it scans as a replication error.  Not because no SJ fan would ever use a phrase like that, but because in this context we expect genuine SJ fans to present themselves differently, in a more high-discourse way, which is hard to replicate if you engage with SJ ideology as Enemy Slime Ideas.

Less interesting than what you’re going for, but truer to the fabric of reality.