There’s an ancient thread of tweets from @fucktheory, peace be upon him. Firsthand record of the thread is gone, and the account suspended, so you’ll have to believe me when I say that it went approximately as follows:

For at least twenty years, upper-middle class, often tenured academics have been teaching young people that politics is a futile form of irony.

I’ve watched Ivy League professors with tenure explain to graduate students with no health insurance that striking for pay is silly.

I’ve heard smug male assholes with PhDs describe registering voters as the “busy work” of political activity.

I’ve watched Derridians and Lacanians who own homes sneer at 19-year-olds who raise their hands to ask what forms of activism are useful.

I’ve watched post-Žižek fuckboy marxists condescendingly tell young socialists that signification, not class, is the real locus of struggle.

I’ve watched Tim Dean tell young men that ethical gay liberation means filling as many anonymous assholes with cum as possible.

I’ve watched Lee Edelman tell students, with a shit-eating grin, that hope is surrender and fighting for the future is “heteronormative”.

Kids who were the first in their family to go to college. Kids who spent their whole life fighting for a scholarship.

Kids who worked full-time while they studied for their SATs, rather than having a family tutor come to the Hamptons every summer.

Kids who, like me, grew up looking with awe at the worn, dog-eared copies of the Communist Manifesto on their grandparents’ bookshelves.

Kids who, like me, had the shit kicked out of them for being smart, for being queer, for being brave, for being different.

The smartest kids. The most determined kids. The most enthusiastic kids.

The kids who need a concept of ethical politics the most.

The kids who could, and in so many cases would, have gone back to their communities to teach, to read, to lead, to work.

Lately, in spare moments, as I wait for the kettle to boil, I’ve noticed that I keep thinking of ‘The Professor of Parody’. And I keep wondering whether this whole situation—the situation of The World to which I can only, y’know, gesture broadly— might be, in some sense, a just brutal reminder of our collective failure to internalise the ‘Professor of Parody’ critique.

Maybe the Year of Our Lord, Twenty-Twenty-Two, is the year that we’ll all have to face the facts: Martha Nussbaum was basically correct when she wrote her critique of Butlerian discourse fetishism a full twenty-three years ago. And then she was basically correct (and basically ignored) in every intervening year. And now notions of ‘practicality’ and ‘feasibility’ and ‘reality’ are—at least amongst middle- and upper-class genpop—empty signifiers that one is encouraged to sneer at. Only the abstract vibe of ‘ironic grift’ remains acceptable.

This comment was the tipping point for me. Not even the rationalists seem okay. Sure, yes, they’re holding onto a ‘do real things’ mentality. But it’s tenuous at best. The default reaction is “this won’t work, because material things don’t work; signification is the real locus of struggle”.