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/lit/ - Literature

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12910868 No.12910868 [Reply] [Original]

What makes something pretentious?

>> No.12910876

Honestly look at Marx and draw traits from that. Joyce has been accused, but I completely disagree.

>> No.12911253

>>12910868
most of the time it ironically seems to be literally just "2deep4u" whenever I see the word rather than it's actual definition :
"Claiming or demanding a position of distinction or merit, especially when unjustified."

>> No.12911278

>>12910868
Nothing. Descriptively, it's a meaningless word used to criticize stuff they are too fucking dumb to understand. Go on /a/ and see people claiming any show with marginally experimental directing is pretentious, those fags probably think an entry level director such as Lynch in western cinema is "pretentious". Unironically, otaku themselves are pretentious because they think some CGDCT is high art and think actual high art is bad because it's """"""pretentious"""""".

>> No.12911300

>>12910868
Abstruse language, obscure references, pedantic tone, Nietzsche quotes...

>> No.12911311

>>12911300
Arnie's "Conan The Barbarian" movie went over my head, too, anon

>> No.12911316

>>12910876
>Pretentious is what I don't like.
How neutral of you.

>> No.12911361

>>12910868
pretentious:
>Intended to impress others; ostentatious.
>Marked by an unwarranted claim to importance or distinction.

>> No.12911363

>>12911361
>>Intended to impress others; ostentatious.
but what kind of writer has ZERO intention of impressing others?

>> No.12911414

>>12911363
Those that have actually something to say.

>> No.12911449

>>12911278
God I hate /a/ so much

>> No.12911454

>>12910868
shallow thinking affecting greater depth than it possesses. normie shit is pretentious af. most women are pretentious. most artists are pretentious because most artists’ artwork is shit. astrology is pretentious. i’m pretentious

>> No.12911465

pretentious is calling something pretentious
pretentious is also something that someone who uses the word pretentious likes
desu

>> No.12911488

>>12911278
I've come to the rationale that those that claim something to be pretentious are themselves offenders of the same intellectual superiority complex that they are criticizing. In order to call something pretentious, one must hold some standard of intellectual interpretation. I would think any genuine mentality in opposition to the concept of the "pretentious" would sooner ignore it, rather than declaring a work to be so. To call something pretentious requires somebody to be pretentious themselves, effectively. I would assume that those that are drawn to identifying the pretentious also have some level of intellectual insecurity within them. Maybe it's literally just projection. Either way, the use of the term has become so broad that I would say it's not worth using in any concrete analyses. At best, it's just a flavor word. It overgeneralizes. I find often that when somebody describes something to be pretentious, they only mean so indirectly, and that the root of the issue is something more specific.

>> No.12911494

>>12911414
thinking you have something to say is pretentious.

>> No.12911505
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12911505

>>12911449
To be fair /a/ has become entrenched with a massive layer of irony in its attempts to remain untouched by the growth other mainstream hobby boards have seen. You're generally right though, a lot of them are mouth breathing spergs.

>> No.12911507

>>12910868
If it's written by a current year MFA-educated white women

>> No.12911544

>>12910868
In my opinion it's when someone creates art with that self-important tone instead of just creating something genuine and let it be great by itself. I don't know how to explain it. It's like the artist already approach with "my god, I'm so great, look at my art, it's so deep"
It feels like you're watching someone masturbating while looking at their own reflection in the mirror

>> No.12911610

>>12911414
thinking you have something to say means you think what you have to say is important and impressive, which is pretentious

>> No.12911612

>>12910868
the fanbase

>> No.12911665

>>12910868
pretentiousness: delusions of cleverness

causes:
failure of imagination
inability to find fault (e,g, falling in love to an idea, a person, or a piece art)

>> No.12911669

>>12910868
You wrote it/like it

>> No.12911674

>>12911278
I hate that aspect of /a/ as well, they also suck off the word ‘escapism’ in the most pretentious way possible. One other thing I hate about /a/ is the /a/nons who are also /pol/tards.

>> No.12911683

>>12910868
When something presents itself as ‘artistic’ yet has no deeper meaning, it is merely a clothing and a theme rather than something that is actually descriptive of the work, ie: anything that hipsters do, TV adverts, hipster indie ‘artistic’-themed games. For them, something ‘artistic’ is on the same level as a gothic-horror-themed roller-coaster.

Actually, I can assure you that you can expect hipster indie ‘artistic’-roller-coasters soon.

>> No.12911692

>>12910868
Unsubstantiated, condescending, vague, and poorly executed. Commonly misused on substantiated, respectful, clear and tight executions.

>> No.12911697

>tfw overrated myself while at the same time doubting my talent at every corner

Self delusional pretentiousness at best

>> No.12911703

>>12910868
it's something that by existing make people feel ashame of their ways of wasting their times. Look at people exclusively watching capeshit, they know what they are doing is shameful (that's why these movies are full of "self aware" quips) because they know there are better stuff out there so instead of opening their mind, they just call these "pretentious" as an excuse for their laziness

>> No.12911917

>>12910868
If /lit/ reads it then it's almost certainly pretentious.

>> No.12911979

!!! Attention !!!
Dear Nick Land fanatics

The 4chan football event which takes place 4 times a year will soon come and we need to vote new players in. Nick Land still hasn`t made it on the team sadly. Go to the poll in the OP of this thread and vote him in. He is not in the suggestions, so you need to suggest his name.
>>12910202
#Accelerate

>> No.12912254

>>12911278
Any "high art" anime is pretentious by definition. If you read the word "pretentious" and your first association is with anime and otaku, you are probably affected by some level of pretense as well.

>> No.12912383

I think someone is pretentious when there is a dissonance between the value he gives of something and the actual value, is a complicated matter because something unvalued doesn't mean it will always be invaluable, or that is invaluable to everyone, so... there's the limit of my understanding, i open to enlightenment.

>> No.12912445

>>12910868
Being a brainlet while reading it

>> No.12912777

>>12911300
It's funny because your use of the abstruse would be considered pretentious by your own definition

>> No.12912843

self-overestimation
e.g. a book with nothing particularly original about it that clearly views itself as an entry in the canon

>> No.12912865

>>12912777
Abstruse is not an abstruse word (lmao),
words like Apodictic are.

>> No.12912877

>>12911544
its fine for an actually great piece of art to know its great (shelley, byron, joyce, practically every major post-romantic male author knew their works were important and would be read long after their deaths)
but when the likes of easton ellis write as if they will surely be canonized when anyone with a bit of foresight can tell you they have no staying power we call it pretense

>> No.12912890

What makes art truly pretentious is when it tries to do something great and grand, but fails miserably at it.

>> No.12912947

a book who's writer tells inside it while he's narrating that he isn't sure about the events or the character's thoughts just add that layer of deepness to it , e.g : *the reason of what the character is doing something for*+ "or whatever the hell he was thinking"

>> No.12913793

It's not pretentious, OP, you're just not smart enough.

>> No.12914012

>>12911300
Oh hey that's my writing.

>> No.12914411
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12914411

>>12912254
Utena is /lit/‘s patreon anime, along with with Bernard-Sama

>> No.12914423

>>12912865
>Apodictic
That word gives me a bonnet

>> No.12914477

>>12911278
yeah but honestly /a/ was never intended to be a board for critical anime viewership. It's just for a certain temperament of weebs to shitpost. How long you've been around and how many shows you've seen is more important than how you evaluate anything.

>> No.12914485

>>12914477
Well, it did replace /b/ (anime/random) as the place to talk about anime - so some level of quality was expected.

>> No.12914493

>>12910868
When it pretends it is something it isn't.

>> No.12914497

>>12910868
Pretentious is when someone is trying to get away with half baked grand concepts but has no substance to back them up.
If you can't make your work accessible to the common man then you're letting the language take precedence over the ideas.

>> No.12914505

>>12910868
Anything that presents itself as a priori knowledge.

>> No.12914658

>>12910868
Purely tone. Any perceivable "level" of art is irrelevant, as both high and low art can avoid being pretentious. The eminent sense of the superiority of the creator of a work is the main source of a labelling of pretentious, but smaller factors like word choice and sentence structure can contribute alongside the tone.
Tl;dr it's not the post, it's the smug anime picture alongside it

>> No.12914709

>>12910868
Mediocre readers.

>> No.12914736

Approved

>> No.12914910

Most people would probably label shit like Ulysses or The Colour of Pomegranates or Primer or Trout Mask Replica or Neon Genesis Evangelion as pretentious because they're """""difficult""""" but to be honest the stuff that comes to mind when I think of pretentious is shit like Black Mirror, precisely because it isn't remotely difficult or unique or perceptive but it and its fans think it is.
I fucking hate Black Mirror. The show itself is average from what I've seen but the whole attitude surrounding it is peak pseud

>> No.12914933

"pretension" is a meme. it's not a real thing.

pretension implies knowledge of intent which is ontologically unknowable. it's a subconscious accusation. it's meaningless. it has no value.

>> No.12915174

>>12911665
If you cannot fall in love with flaws and find tragedy beautiful then you're a gross idealist, materialist or nihilist.

>> No.12916263

>>12915174
what's wrong with idealism

>> No.12916327
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12916327

It is pretentious if it pretends to have meaning where there is none. If something communicates sophisticated meaning in a sophisticated way many with fail to comprehend it's meaning and think it is merely pretending to communicate. These things are not pretentious, despite being sophisticated. If everything sophisticated seems pretentious to someone they must be dull.

>> No.12916579
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12916579

>>12911363
What kind of human has zero intentions of impressing others?

AS LONG AS THERE IS SELF THE NEED FOR ADMIRATION IS INHERENT IN ALL OF US

WE ARE ALL ATTENTION WHORES

>> No.12916816

>>12916327
>It is pretentious if it pretends to have meaning where there is none
isn't it quite pretentious to declare that you have the ability to objectively identify "meaning" and "sophistication"?

>> No.12916820

>>12916327
but nothing has meaning

>> No.12916826

>>12914477
>long you've been around and how many shows you've seen is more important than how you evaluate anything.
this applies to books too though, the child who reads nothing but Doctor Seuss can not give you opinions that matter on literature

>> No.12916851

everybody is pretentious
humans are pretentious arrogant little wasps by nature

>> No.12916854

>>12916820
Everything has meaning, meaning is the way something interacts with anything it isn’t. A sentence has meaning because the author intends for it to communicate an idea. If a sentence has no idea to communicate it has less of an affect on the mind of the reader, and therefore is less meaningful. (Communication and meaning are linked with respect to writing because the meaning of writing is to transfer information between humans so the extent who which it can do that denotes it’s meaning)

>> No.12916856

>>12916579
Now THIS is projection: you see a characteristic that is omnipresent in your life, and assume it is the same for others. This in turn reinforces your perception of the world and yourself, such that getting out of it is difficult. I feel sorry for those who have to tolerate your presence.

>> No.12916944

>>12916856
Seriously take a look at what makes people happy... Love, belonging, friendship, sucess, power, sex, all qualities that when missing make one miserable.
Self esteem is the perception you have of yourself based on the reactions of others, why are we always comparing ourselves to others then? Why are we miserable when people reject us? This is how the self works, If you still think you're the exception now that's pretentious

>> No.12917030

>>12916816
Sophistication merely means two steps above average scholarly depth

>> No.12917483

>>12911278
same shit with VNs
I hate VNs so God Damn Much

>> No.12917576

>>12914910
KYS

>> No.12917706

>>12910876
Marx is the complete opposite of pretentious.
Contemporary "X Theorists" however...

>> No.12917753

>>12917483
This mostly applies to Fate

>> No.12917792

>>12911488
You're correct when you say that people who use the word hold intellectualism in esteem, however this doesn't constitute a contradiction. Everyone who thinks the absence of X is bad obviously does so because they think X is good.
You can make a parallel between popsci and actual science, Buddhism and feel-good bullshit, etc.
>>12910868
Hard question. Initially I thought that pretentious was someone who feigned possession of a certain cultural capital, since I thought that the classical definition of pretentiousness as feigning intelligence was weak since there is no determinate way in which intelligence ought to be socially expressed. Then I came in contact with some people and I realized that they're cultural capital IS the ability to pretend, to manipulate words and concepts in order to have a certain social impact. So I don't actually know what pretentious means and nowadays I just use the word "profundism" (I don't even know if this word exists in English, it ain't my first language) to describe the usage of rhetorical techniques to enhance the immediate profundity of a intellectual claim and add a layer of socialization to it. A classic example would be how your average cultural/critical theorists writes apodictic sentences that sound more or less the same. eg stuff like "We must be radically radical", "in the Era of Anal Capitalism our (notice how these writers always use the plural) mission is to do X and Y". This obviously means that I can't use the word to describe any work of art since art is already in the domain of the rhetorical and doesn't necessarily have any claim to absolute truth. When I talk about art I just use the word "dumbfuck" to connotate aesthetics tainted by a crude socialization.

Sorry if this sounded pretentious.

>> No.12917797

>>12917792
their*, fucking phone

>> No.12917932

>>12910868
Begging the question.

>> No.12918704

>>12911278
That's why /lit/ constantly gets so many anime threads, they want to discuss NGE and Utena and other arthouse anime rather than moeshit
The same thing happens with comics and video games and even just cinema, /lit/ is seen as the 'good taste' board

>> No.12918895

>>12911316
>>12917706
Marx was incredibly pompous, which is tantamount to being pretentious.

>> No.12918913

>>12918895
I should add, he was pompous without any substance to back it up, both in the methodology
of his theories and his personal life.

>> No.12918917

>>12918895
Marx's not pompous at all. Some part is das kapital read like an econ textbook.

>> No.12918941

>>12917792
10/10 post.

>> No.12918959

>>12918917
Have you ever read any of his more rhetorical work, or how he interacted with other people in his field? IIRC he even throws around pretensions that certain conjectures made in Das Kapital are "obvious" or "apparent" where in fact a fairly substantial leap in logic has been made (e.g. some of the stuff in Volume 3 about real vs. fictitious capital).

>> No.12919278

My identifier is when the people claiming a work is great don't feel the need to argue for it or only like it because it supposedly holds a high level of esteem. I'm not going to go around and call people brainlets for not liking my art but I need an argument for why. I don't really care if people like stuff I don't. The problem is when they can't explain their reasoning and fail to communicate or rather have poor arguments based on contextual evidence. I feel like most people are faking interest to conform a lot of the time.

>> No.12919534

>>12910868
bump

>> No.12920565

>>12910868
Something that is trying hard to appear deep or intelligent.
However, it is not always attributed fairly. There are anti-intellectual people who throw it around, because they feel humiliated by their lack of comprehension. Obscurity and "big words" don't make an author autmatically pretentious. It is the intention behind the writing, how much it is designed to get that reaction out of readers. If someone's attention is significantly dedicated to get you to recognize their depth or intelligence, they will have less of it available for actual insights. It is also a sign of insecurity - to come up with something of value, you must have confidence in your ability and if you need others to believe in you, you probably don't trust yourself enough, which will affect the quality of your writing.

Some authors are intetionally obscure, with an elitist stance towards their readership, not writing for the common man. There's nothing wrong with that.
Others, like Hegel for instance, are a mix of that and an autistic writing style - someone who writes down thoughts for himself, being content if they're clear enough to their own perception.

>> No.12922204

>>12920565
>Something that is trying hard to appear deep or intelligent.
how can you tell the author is "trying" to do something?

>> No.12922366

>>12922204
Well, I don't know, I wasn't necessarily assuming the reader's perspective. What they're doing is pretentious.
But maybe you can watch out for other signs of "exhibitionism" in the author. I don't think you can prove it unless the lack of effort is too obvious, but you can get a feel for it, an intuition. Someone who is pretentious will often try to copy those who are successful. They will possess a shallow understanding of what makes those other authors successful and mostly copy at the level they can understand, the level of appearances, which might reveal them.

>> No.12922444

>>12922204
How can you tell that you understood what the author meant?

>> No.12922845

>>12910868
You should know this instinctively. It's usually just when you judge something as the author trying and failed to sound insightful instead of being sincere. Usually with failed attempts at using flowery prose. Sometimes people might confuse genuine elitism (at least in comparison to who they are talking to) with a pretentious desire to just make themselves look better by comparison.

>> No.12922930

>>12917792
>the classical definition of pretentiousness as feigning intelligence was weak since there is no determinate way in which intelligence ought to be socially expressed
This is pretty pretentious desu. What do you mean by this? That we can't accurately judge something as pretentious as they might be "merely pretending"? What do fraudulent displays of intelligence have to do with genuine, if perhaps unconventional displays of actual intelligence?

>> No.12924427
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12924427

What do you call this?

>> No.12924687

>>12924427
Autiseasm

>> No.12925721

>>12911361
The spookiest kind of pretentiousness is where the claim to importance is ratified and made real by the force of great masses of moron followers, at the same time that the claim to distinction is warranted only for exceptional skill at fraud or manipulation. Demagogues, psychopaths, cult leaders, technocrats, inventors of extraordinarily pernicious ideas or methods. Some of them aren't even pseudointellectuals, but evil ones, emotionally retarded if not otherwise stupid. I like the archaic "fiend" for that, and popular culture is simply accurate in portraying the typical mask for that as a buffoon's--which as it slips, that's to take readings of who notices.

>> No.12925794

if we accept that pretension is the act of holding shallow things in high intellectual esteem, then we must also notice that the act of calling something pretentious is in itself pretentious, regardless of context. the same sort of thing happens with postmodernism, as any criticism of postmodernism is in itself postmodern in most* concepts
*I'm not entirely sure how to define the exceptions in a consistent, non-arbitrary way, so if you want to argue this point, go ahead and consider yourself the winner of that argument

>> No.12925946

tl;dr: 2deep4u

>> No.12925990

>>12916826
How is that an apt comparison? I'm not talking about watching hello kitty and nothing else. It's certainly possible for someone to watch 25 'classic' anime and have a better judgement on them either because he puts more thought and observance into what he watches or has a history of critical evaluation or both, than some fat sack NEET that watches 1000 shows of anything with little thought or frame of reference beyond what anime or his visual media has showed him. This is what the vast majority of /a/ are: experienced but having no sensibility whatsoever.

>> No.12926002

i despite pretentiousness and i see it manifest itself on /lit/ in a few different ways, including
-thinking that enjoying a book that other people find difficult to understand makes you "smart", or "superior"
-thinking that writing something that other people find difficult to understand makes you "smart", e.g. writing an absurd realism type story about a man who transforms into concrete blocks and smells girl's feet, which is really about living in a capitalist postmodern society, and thinking it makes you a better writer than the typical genre fiction writer
there is always some kind of effort to seem intellectually superior, when in reality, it has no merit

>> No.12926041

>>12911363
it means when its the primary purpose, 'look at how smart I am, look at how deep this is', its when they produce a meaningless product that at surface level can appear to be intelligent but when looked at more thoroughly theres more pretending than the real product. As if it were made not to entertain but to gain social status through an illusion.

>> No.12926049

>>12915174
you can find fault and love it, that definition only claims its bad if you cannot FIND the flaws or admit them.

>> No.12926058

>>12926002
agreed

>> No.12926316

>>12926002
Very true. Too many people trying to compensate for something in this way, when it doesn't actually take a genius to pick up a book, read it and pretend that you have enjoyed it. You didn't even have to find authors with the help of your own taste and intellect when /lit/ provides you with book suggestions to feel superior to the pleb.

>> No.12926384

>>12926002
>-thinking that enjoying a book that other people find difficult to understand makes you "smart", or "superior"
I mean, isn't that often true? What else is smartness other than the ability to understand difficult to understand things, and is this understanding not a prerequisite for enjoyment in most cases?

>> No.12926477

>>12926384
I'll tell you what truly makes you smart. For example: Understanding the proof of the Poincaré conjecture

>> No.12927060

nissam taleb is pretentious in his Incerto, best example I know

>> No.12927120

>>12910868
I fucking hate the word pretentious when it's used incorrectly. I'm not trying to impress you with the books I read or the music I listen to because it's for me and not you. When it comes to art I think the same definition applies as well. If the author is trying to impress the reader more than care about it's message than that's pretentious.

>> No.12927152

>>12926002
>writing an absurd realism type story about a man who transforms into concrete blocks and smells girl's feet, which is really about living in a capitalist postmodern society, and thinking it makes you a better writer than the typical genre fiction writer
that was meant to be more fun than anything im pretty sure

>> No.12927173

I don't like to throw the word 'pretentious' around; I feel like it's often used in the wrong context to describe practically anything that strives to attain a greater depth than the mainstream.

My personal idea of what the word means is almost entirely based around a friend I had in sixth form. He pretended to be into all kinds of high-brow shit, but didn't really engage with it on a level that wasn't shallow (if he actually engaged with it at all). I met him a while back after not seeing him for several years, and he'd adopted this bizarre sociolect that doesn't exist in anything but satirical takes of 'the art world'; he says he's training to become an actor.

>> No.12927313

style over substance

>> No.12927375
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12927375

In my opinion the word pretentious should only be applied to creative endeavours, such as books, film, music and so forth. To me, it enters into pretentiousness when it is not truthful in its own purpose, and instead has an alterior motive. Most often this motive is to demonstrate the audience of the creators own knowledge, the audience is supposed to be amazed at their insight and depth of knowledge, this could take the form of overly complex words, obscure references and even self complimenting.
This can be boiled down to ‘if the work exists with the purpose of boosting the ego of the creator, it is pretentious.’

>> No.12927396

>>12927313
Substance only matters in non-fiction. Culture of resentment moron.

>> No.12927608
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12927608

If it is written after 1900 it is pretentious, with only Mein Kampf excepted.

>> No.12927628

>>12927396
idiot

>> No.12927816

>>12911494

And essential for producing a work of literature.

>> No.12927821

>>12910868
Nick Land

>> No.12927899

>>12927821
this

>> No.12928180

>>12911278
>Nothing. Descriptively, it's a meaningless word used to criticize stuff they are too fucking dumb to understand

what if you´re dumb and you tried to sound intelligent


that´s pretentiousness, dum dum

>> No.12928182

>>12916327
/thread

>> No.12928245

>>12912890
>>12914493
>>12912843
This is the jist of it I think, it's is absolutely fine to be mediocre and self-aware, where pretentiousness comes is without the self-awareness. Likewise I think it's possible to be very good and pretentious. Just the mismatch between self-image and actual ability at any level imo.

>> No.12928520

>>12911465
the only good post

>> No.12928667
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12928667

>>12927608
>that gif
you just made that didn't you