Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

https://c.tenor.com/Loy4BOAxEMgAAAAd/analyze-this.gif

he's done performative* public apology but afaik never apologised directly to jason lee? (not that i would know this obv but lee says not as of 2020 iirc)

*yes this is an incorrect usage i am in a hurry

ok fair but i still feel that it was handy that the thing it used to mean had a word for it, and now it kinda doesn't

even tho presumably if it does get a new word the same thing will happen again

"“For people who get a thrill from anger, apologies make no difference. There’s a notion now online that shouting itself has a kind of nobility, that it’s the voice of the disenfranchised,” he says. If Baddiel wasn’t on social media, this embarrassment from his past would have been largely forgotten."

He wouldn't have written his books on AS either..

>>> performative, as in an action delivered by words, such as “I do” and “I’m sorry”, is totally vulnerable to the problem that the words may be said without them actually enforcing the action. so that performative has come to mean statements with no intention of action.

This doesn't quite make sense to me.

I see how performative (perhaps unfortunately) comes to mean this new thing, but not how this flows logically from the old thing, which arguably meant the opposite.

https://i.imgur.com/xea6iVR.jpg

Oops sorry for huge image...Have been looking for this for ages: the various options for performative apologies.

I see how performative (perhaps unfortunately) comes to mean this new thing, but not how this flows logically from the old thing, which arguably meant the opposite.

― the pinefox, Monday, 13 December 2021 12:29 (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is true.

it doesn't flow logically, it flows empirically (ppl fib a lot and correlation in large quantities is more and more taken for causation)

my favoured exemplary performative statement is "i now pronounce thee man and wife" (and i don't think this is vulnerable to the fibbing dynamic)

(tho i do like the idea that the vicar can say the next day "actually you're NOT married bcz i totally didn't mean it!")

but of course the elements go into that making "man and wife" performative are very specific and required by law

I did a few performative confessions with priests when I was a kid. Like make something up ... had an argument with my brother etc... rather than yeah I drank some cider last week and started an embankment fire that got out of hand and required the fire service to put it out.

what's the old definition of performative? actorly or something... sort of the same.

not really: it's a technical term introduced by j.l.austin (i guess in the 50s ?) to fvck with analytical philosophers and the like, who were all abt speech being true or all all the time. it's a type of speech that does something rather (than describes something). hence "i now pronounce thee man and wife" is performative bcz it performs the act of marrying two people

(ie it's abt the effect of the performance not the quality of the performance: yr still married if the vicar stammers or gets half the words wrong or falls over)

s/b who were all abt speech being true or FALSE all the time

whereas now when we say someone saying something is performative we just mean they were doing it for show or merely virtue signalling or otherwise pretending

a boring take is that "perform" has a few different senses and it's fine if the derived adjective "performative" does too

ok fair but i still feel that it was handy that the thing it used to mean had a word for it, and now it kinda doesn't

even tho presumably if it does get a new word the same thing will happen again

― mark s, Sunday, 12 December 2021 18:18 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

also austin definitely invented it with a specific purpose in mind (it's not in the SOED)

https://i.imgur.com/di5raJF.png

well i mean it probably is now, it's not in my grandad's 1933 edn

before 1960 the preferred term was performalicious

I think it's not really true that performative is limited to SAT definitions given how it was so quickly taken up and prodded at by Derrida and subsequently butler so probably its most influential use where I think it's best understood simply as the 'doing' facet of language rather than the describing facet (as we really don't need to get hung up on sorting statements into normal/not normal*)

*What a bunch of totally normal guys

…we just mean they were doing it for show or merely virtue signalling or otherwise pretending…

‘Just doing it for show’ doesn’t really capture when things have to be done in the public arena, there has to be an actually public declaration. Eg for a major political speech it’s published on a website, tweeted, extracts and press notice given to media under embargo (or leaked) - but there often has to be an actual speech, a performance.

But agree with the boring take on this.

yeah like incidients of lingustic change it's a battle lost (ilx has a whole dumb thread plaintively canuting* it) and fizzles' explanation of the unavoidable social dynamic is as good as any

i think i'm making a meal of it bcz i only really got my head round the austin definition very recently -- despite being a massive fan of derrida's demolition of searle, which is actually all about this very topic lol -- so i'm all "i only just learned the exact opposite ffs!" so in conclusion poor me

*also misused yes indeed

he's done performative* public apology but afaik never apologised directly to jason lee? (not that i would know this obv but lee says not as of 2020 iirc)

*yes this is an incorrect usage i am in a hurry

― mark s, Saturday, 11 December 2021 bookmarkflaglink

The Jason Lee fantasy football clips, on their own, don't show how ubiquitous and successful Baddiel's campaign of racist harassment was. At the time you'd hear the chant it inspired everywhere, from the terraces to school playgrounds. It really was a 'cultural moment'

— UEFA SNIPER (@dreamboatslim) December 14, 2021

speaking as someone for whom football is as mysteriously distant and unexplained as the longyou caves what is the chant being described there?

(not at all doubting the claim btw, as it absolutely matches my read of how the 90s were evolving)

"He's got a pineapple, on his head" to the tune of “He's Got The Whole World In His Hands”

It must have been great for Jason living in the least racist country in the world during the era of political correctness

some abhorrently homophobic comments Blunkett made about Freddie Mercury on some live tv from the 90's recently resurfaced on a bbc doc as well. Anything went back then - it was the wild west really.

Don't forget Jack "not a racist cunt" Straw calling for a partial burqa ban

tapping sign: last "good" home secretary was roy jenkins first time of asking

Off topic: i thought David Baddiel’s programme was interesting and worth watching. It was a bit unbalanced though: with more time devoted to trying to show how prescient David Bowie’s comments were about the internet, than to some of the interviewees who had very perfunctory and unsatisfactory coverage.

Not convinced personally that David Bowie’s comments from c.1999 were anything more insightful that might be offered by anyone who had glanced at Wired magazine for 10 minutes at some point in the mid-90s.

perhaps someone dumb enough to try and melt some superglue off his spectacles by putting them into a microwave oven may just be the type of person who thinks Bowie was some kind of wise prophet!

"Pour me out another phone
I'll ring to see if our friends are home"

Prescient? Well, no the friends could be out of the house and still answer the phone these days. And, etc

Tell us about your favourite memories of the office https://t.co/IMpPyqLSSv

— The Guardian (@guardian) December 15, 2021

my favourite memory of The Office is never actually watching it.

lol same

Can’t stand Ricky Gervais. Never took to any iteration of The Office.

Ricky "I have no catchphrase" Gervais?

Funny, I'd just go "..ooh, bit sexist..." and let you guess who I'm doing.

He used to live around the corner from me, and is a very short man with a face that appears red and scaly because either rosacea or retinol treatments gone bad.

original office is absolutely genius, one of the best works of television ever

gervais sucks

let's here it for the exorbitantly talented comedy writers connie booth, arthur mathews and stephen merchant who did great work in the face of fearful obstacles

It's became overwhelmingly certain in the last few years that David Brent was mostly a self-portrait.

I quite enjoyed the films he made, Ghost Town, Lying, and (ahem) Cemetery Junction

Suzy, does that make you a Whitley resident (or ex-...) ?

So many references in that Cemetery Junction film I recognised (often when things were markedly different, e.g. Cemetery Junction itself is not a railway station, posh girl surname Kendrick, the dull office the main character works at..)

And, although I've not met RG (i don't think) , I'm sure I have met some of the people that the characters were based on!

xpost yeah, some people I know raved on the David Brent "rock band" sequel, I thought it massively unfunny. Also, conversely, "Free Love freeway" is too good a song to be treated with the derision that the comedy calls for.

Ha no, I’m in Bloomsbury and RG used to live in a block on Southampton Row.

I used to live near Cemetery Junction so I was going to watch that film just to see if there were references I'd get but when I found out it was a railway station I thought oh they just used the name and lost interest

I feel like Gervais kinda redeemed himself with Afterlife... no, it's not exactly a hoot but it's thoughtful and even sweet at times

Xpost it's really evocative of Reading in the seventies, but cast through a dreamscape where various things are slightly different.

I don't know if it's a good film or not.

I used to love The Office, but RG is such a revolting prick I will never revisit it. but I can't tell if you all realize that guardian tweet wasn't about the show? maybe it was too banal for comment, but they're soliciting cherished memories of working at the office

Well, yeah...