highimpactsex | sincerity, a strange word

i've been reading a lot of Thoughts and Opinions from many people lately and one of the terms that keeps popping up, especially in discussing a subset of video games (like Undertale), is sincerity. the idea behind sincerity is to describe a less ironic, more honest approach from the creators. if games are more like a dialog, then the conversation is more straightforward and less annoying to decipher.

and i think that's a very tantalizing idea. unfortunately, i've been wondering if language is ever like that.

a politics of sincerity?

i'm taking a lot of cues from this article by richard seymour. there, the writer argues how orwell's Politics and the English Language may not be up to snuff. orwell's main concern (and one shared by many leftists) is that clear language is needed. those damn theorists and politicians are too obfuscating.

it is noteworthy that orwell brings up a "communist pamphlet" as an example of bad writing that " illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer":

4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

he brings up dying metaphors, pretentious diction, and so on to make a point: don't be pretentious and be clear with your own writing. but as seymour writes, it's very strange for the guy to be against with "foreign" mainstays of the english language like status quo. for orwell, his understanding of sincerity is wrapped around being weirdly modest:

Orwell’s argument, leading to his ‘six rules’ for writing, seems to be aimed against excess. The bulk of his rules worry about too many words, too many syllables, too much extravagance. The bigger, the fancier and more foreign terms, the more likely he was to cavil. To ‘pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry’ is unpardonable affectation. Even the anxiety about ‘pretentiousness’ indicates an aversion to excessive ambition, getting ideas above one’s linguistic station (as in, pretention to the throne). But amid all this is a strange reticence, with a great deal left unsaid. What was the civilizational decay that Orwell sensed in language? What is so terrible about ‘primary’ and ‘predict’? Why is shorter necessarily better? Why ‘always’ cut out a word that can be cut out? Do writers really ‘think wordlessly’ about any object, as Orwell thought they should try to do? Does anyone?

the ideal writer in orwell's view, as seymour ironically suggests, would be the british politicians nigel farage and boris johnson. perhaps, even more so, a bigoted writer could cut to the chase and just say "kill the (insert minority here)". that's very sincere and honest of them to display their bigotry after all.

and there are many scenarios where orwellian sincerity is just unwarranted. i like to quote another giant excerpt from this very interesting essay:

In any case, to expect sincerity as a rule might be far too optimistic about the circumstances in which writing takes place. There are political positions which can only be defended ‘by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face’, as Orwell claimed, and then there are those which can only be defended by arguments which are illegal, or widely deemed immoral, or likely to result in death threats, or costly to one’s career, or just incompatible with a reactionary common sense. Wildean paradox, the games played with truth and masks, the guileful confounding of common sense, are all ways of being insincere to a political purpose: all strategies for making the unsayable sayable. The love that dare not speak its name could be defended more directly, but only by arguments which most people could not bear to hear. As follows from this, even the defence of political repression which Orwell sensed in the equivocations of some left-wing writers, can come in a seemingly unequivocal form. ‘Hang Mandela’ was once easier to say without equivocation than, for example, ‘Victory to the IRA’. Ultimately, the demand for sincerity often betrays the authoritarian impulse of the inquisitor. It was the exiled Czech writer and former Prague Spring activist who, at the denouement of the Cold War, summarised the regime’s demand for sincerity from its subjects. ‘“Don’t lie!” “Tell the truth!”,’ Kundera wrote, ‘are words which we must never say to another person in so far as we consider him our equal.’

i think most of us don't like that kind of authoritarian sincerity, but the way we tend to pose that language of sincerity onto Language itself is very reminiscent. this is the kind of sincerity that drags people out of their closets, the kind of paranoid nationalist rhetoric you see on social media these days, and the kind of verbal threats that traumatize people: to hell with those pretentious queers, it's all about the simple conservatism of heteropatriarchs of the world. this is what i think about sincerity in most circumstances.

so when we encounter such wonderful rhetoric, we might want to be a bit insincere and mask ourselves a bit. we may impose a certain ironic detachment (self-deprecation) to distance ourselves from the situation, to joke about the dark things of life, etc.

is our usage of ironies here sincere or insincere? i don't think people have really thought much about it when they deploy this word. likewise, the idea that people "hide behind" jargon and neologisms is ironically insincere. sometimes, when you wanna talk about something that's abstract no one has talked about, you just have to invent it. it's not like whoever came up with the term "capitalism" or "science" was insincere. sure, there's words that seem to be invented for the sake of it, but people also love to bad faith folks for using certain languages (think the discourse around pronouns). so i want to think of sincerity more critically and actually understand what people want out of it.

because i do think sincerity is a nice word that definitely has meaning but its ambiguity can lead to such thinking like this.

an aesthetics of sincerity?

my nemesis, david foster wallace, once penned up the worst graduation speech of all time, but it is honestly the manifesto of the "New Sincerity" literary movement, so i gotta talk about it. i'm of course talking about the "This is Water" commencement speech talked in kenyon university.

it begins with him intentionally introducing a contrived allegory about fish going wtf is water. but he cuts it short with the following ironic remark: "If at this moment you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish." he frames his authorial voice not as the "wise old fish" but as someone offering banal but obscure truths: "The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about."

and this back and forth goes on and on. if you enjoy this kind of "see, i'm a normal white privileged person just like you and i'm not like giving you direct advice" sincerity, you'll definitely enjoy this speech. i won't bore too much of my readers and the sickos who want to read it can go ahead and read it in full, but the idea of the speech is that he wants to be all homey and down to earth in preaching what he admits is very simple wisdom: "You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship..."

if i were a student listening to this crap, i'd probably be snoring. i view this attempt to be sincere as failing. i don't know if i would call this insincere per se -- it clearly seems like this is wallace's sincere attempt in being sincere and going "i just wanna offer my two cents but not say it's dogma" -- but its tryhard nature really annoys the hell outta me. his whole defense of why you took this humanities degree amounts to "you're given the choice to think differently and therefore empathize with people" and it's quite bereft of any substance.

and i think that's the issue of any work striving to be sincere. in waving away dishonesty and irony, these works are more interested in posturing as being sincere, as being the "good humble guy" who's keeping it real. it's the aesthetics of sincerity without the actual sincerity. the artifice is so obvious, so "please pat me on the back because i'm so humble" that it hurts my soul.

i don't think works like Undertale are like this because we know toby fox likes what they're working within, but i'm sure readers may conjure up some works and people they've met who are this tryhard. so let's move on.

an ethics of sincerity?

so if we can't gauge the writers/creators' sincerity, what can we really discuss about sincerity? honestly, i think it just comes down to us. are we taking this work seriously?

oscar wilde's preface to Dorian Gray is worth considering here because it lambasts critics and readers who might read this with an agenda against homosexuality. since he basically wrote some gay novella, he was aware people might bad faith this very hard. hence, this legendary preface.

if the artist is just someone who creates beautiful things, the critic is someone who "who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things." in other words, wilde sees the goal of a critic to rephrase and articulate the work. both artist and critic are working alongside each other in this project.

but a critic who betrays this trust by seeing "ugly things in beautiful things" is corrupt. it is their rage that misreads the text and turns them into something grotesque. if they inspect beyond the surface and symbol already indicated in the text, then it is at "their peril". indeed, "it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors." the good or especially bad faith here reflects on the critic more than the artist.

here, i think we see what wilde means by sincerity. he objects how critics may distort the work of art into a teaching tool of morals and will be disgusted at an artist doing their own thing. wilde finds the so-called sincerity of such critics lamentable. these critics may view themselves as doing honest, good work, but this betrayal of trust is in effect quite insincere when viewed by the artist. if the critic does not view the work as it represents its own beauty, then the critic is clearly doing a shitty job.

what makes the works of toby fox and other developers sincere might therefore not be directly coming from the works themselves. sure, a good chunk of the effort comes from these creators. they are, in effect, expressing themselves in particular and beautiful ways. without their input, no work exists. but it is also up to us critics to apprehend their beauty too. we need to train ourselves the ways of seeing to understand, comprehend, and finally grasp their beauty.

if we don't know how to view a beautiful work in the way it demands us to, we can't honestly say a work is sincere or if we're being sincere with the work.

a relational view on sincerity

in other words, i view sincerity less as "its own thing" or the affects emanating from a work and more as a relationship between reader/critic and the creator/work. it's a kind of trust. the work and the critic are essential in building this relationship we call sincerity. if they don't trust each other, this whole sincerity thing collapses.

i'm sure we know folks who read the most favorite and personal works in the most bad faith way possible and got burned out by this insincerity. they might be our friends or even ourselves. it stings and people will rightfully call out this bad faith-ing.

but i also think this means we can't really aim for sincerity or honesty, at least directly. it's like going "i'm a good person" all the time. the reason we know it's fake is because there's no context, no comparison to other "good" people out there. it's "good" and "sincerity" in a vacuum. we're always working with contexts here. there's always a relation to something.

so i think in effect sincerity is really this important relationship between us, language, and the objects we choose to study. it is a gaze, an eye on the things we find most interesting and insightful. when that relationship crumbles do we find ourselves being hostile and stuff. and we can't really demand ourselves and the works to be sincere -- it's not only authoritarian but also impossible. no one can be sincere at will.

sincerity is a strange word, but it's an important word trying to describe something that we treasure. we want to describe creators and works we love as "sincere" because we admire them for their virtues but in reality, it's actually describing our relationship to them. or rather, sincerity is that specific relationship in how we are interpreting and articulating their virtues. it's a mode of criticism, of understanding that we are trying to communicate to each other something deep and poignant.

sincerity is perhaps what people really mean when art is a tool of communication.