HR Tips from Roman slave owners

One other thing: I don’t really get the “second magnitude” bit. I’ve been reading that as “second order”, which would suggest something like: Chait is trolling the trolls. But that doesn’t seem to make sense in the context.

Henry: “I will say that in my personal opinion Chait wasn’t particularly artistically successful (it wasn’t an especially subtle or elegant troll,”

I think that he got additional demerits for the jacket copy (“Can a white liberal man critique a culture of political correctness?”) but authors don’t necessarily write their jacket copy.

My hall of fame, role-model trolls include Thersites and Michael Servetus.

I accused someone of trolling in an online forum the other day; the reaction was pretty much as if I’d accused them of selling child porn. Which is a shame – the original meaning – something like ‘deliberately making extreme but plausible statements for the pleasure of drawing a reaction’ – was distinct and useful.

That said, I’m not sure about your (re?)definition. I think ‘satire’ is quite broad enough to cover this article. Satire doesn’t just mean making people you hate look silly; it can be very, very dark and very, very straight (sometimes at the same time). Think of the Brass Eye segment where the looming threat of war triggers an automated broadcast of reassuring images of Britishness (“This is Britain, and it’s all right. Everything is all right.”)

However much we might prefer to disguise the harsher side of wage-slavery behind a rhetoric of friendly teamwork, we could benefit from some straightforward Roman honesty. Everyone knew where they stood then – even if, sometimes, that was in the line for crucifixion

Wow!

Reading the whole thing helps one see what Toner’s up to– he takes a little too much care and gets a little too much pleasure in describing the way Romans treated their slaves.

“Confusion to the enemy” was said by Edward Ball? McMaster Bujold? This is what Google gets me. There is something in OT Exodus that doesn’t quite fit. Anyway, CTTE covers three components of trolling: agent, intent, relation.

I have also been bothered for two weeks by the lack of a verb form for “iconoclast.”

Thing is, since I could read I have been so very attracted to confusion and uncertainty. I mean that is what reading and learning is for, to break you out of your comfort zone and muddle your dogmas and desocialize your social constructions so you rebuild as an independent mind. Whatever I believe is wrong, and one page away from disproven. I could endlessly list the names from Socrates through Jesus and Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein and how I come I just today learned of Ernest Becker.

So is this a bad thing to do, to sow dissension in the ranks? Well, it is if you like being part of an army or congregation. The key problematic term in CTTE may be “enemy.” We don’t hate Firesign Theater. And well, I decided that Joyce really wasn’t out to hurt me, no matter how hard it was to see that.

But that was, and still is, almost entirely a matter of faith. Soren K taught me that unreasonable faith was ok fine. It’s all love, and we don’t need to be redundant.

“a much more successful example, if not quite of trolling, then of something closely related.”

No idea what should make this mild satire a specimen of “something closely related” to Chait’s piece. Nobody accused Chait of being satirical. Are you then suggesting that satire is a subcategory of trolling? Roll eyes.

Terry Toner is a Classics Professor at Cambridge and has also written a whole book based on this premise called “How to Manage Your Slaves”.
It has long been held among a certain sort of classically-educated Brit that the ancients (especially the Greeks) were much superior to us moderns because they didn’t kid themselves about being utter bastards. This was Nietzsche’s view too.

@AB #16: Jerry rather than Terry… Agreed that Nietzsche regularly returns to the theme that modern European culture will perish through its lack of slavery, but struggling to think of examples of British classicists making similar claims; the problem is rather than until the last couple of decades the theme of slavery was largely ignored, or reduced to Cicero’s close relationship with Tiro. I’d also say that the Romans were not actually open about being absolute bastards – they claimed never to have fought an offensive war, for example. This is one reason why Tacitus’ accusation that “they made a desolation and called it peace” is so powerful – and of course that was formulated by a Roman.

You’re right, I’ve usually heard the claim made about the Greeks, with whose brutal honesty Roman hypocrisy (and the British emulation of it, ‘Pax Britannica’ etc) is unfavourably contrasted.
These claims are not usually made in print, so I’m afraid I can’t cite anything.

I will now sensei-mcmanus (definition: trying to get a reaction that holds the potential to derail the conversation):

@12 is an example of trolling (definition: see definition 1 + hiding, within a plausible argument reaching an unorthodox conclusion, a ridiculous premis).

Ridiculous premis? That instances in which trolling can conceivably occur (blog threads, etc…) exist to break you out of your COMFORT zone and muddle your dogmas and desocialize your social constructions so you rebuild as an independent mind. Intellectual interactions are primarily about creating consensus: what is true will be a social construction in which individuals are all working for the hive mind.

It is, after all, so very capitalist-individualist to argue that the individual can be constructed separately from the social. & likewise problematic to suppose that one’s ego could intentionally deconstruct its comfort zone.

Roman slaves at least had Saturnalia. The good old days. No such luck for the modern-day wage slaves.

‘Testimony only acceptable if extracted by torture’ sounds an awful lot like what we do to terrorists and ‘terrorists’. Then again, in my darker moments I’m convinced the ancient regime is making a comeback. Torture? Check! Lettres de cachet? Check! Collapse of distinction between executive and judicial functions? Check!

Because the thread wasn’t derailed enough.

Dole Office Clerk: Occupation?
Comicus: Stand-up philosopher.
Dole Office Clerk: What?
Comicus: Stand-up philosopher. I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and meaningful comprehension.
Dole Office Clerk: Oh, a *bullshit* artist!
Comicus: *Grumble*…
Dole Office Clerk: Did you bullshit last week?
Comicus: No.
Dole Office Clerk: Did you *try* to bullshit last week?
Comicus: Yes!
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I humbly submit that Saturnalia merged with the new fangled Christian faith back in Roman days to make the celebration Christmas.

http://youtu.be/uozouZVoSpA

Well, the idea seems to be that trolling is an art form (of sorts), so should be judged aesthetically. But of course, artistic productions can have social and discursive functions, and one might even have theories about how best to accomplish these. So perhaps, what we need is for someone to convincingly put forward the Social Realist view of trolling.

I wasn’t being entirely serious. I mean, I don’t know what to think about any of this, partly because I don’t think I’ve given it much thought before today.

But yes, of course trolling is a discursive tactic. Which is why it seems rather brilliant to think of it as an art form instead!

https://www.google.com/search?q=trolling+lulz

there isn’t _one_ way that we judge acts of discourse, and what the appropriate criterion of evaluation in depends on what _kind_ of act of discourse one os dealing with. This is quite uncontroversial, I take it. So e.g. how you evaluate a joke is quite different from how you evaluate a sincere assertion.

This means tho that—assuming that trolling is a distinctive kind of discursive act—we can’t simply say that trolling ought to be evaluated the way other acts of discourse are evaluated. We first need to determine how to evaluate the kind of discursive act that trolling is. And at this point, the possibility is at least left open that trolling is a kind of discursive act the primary evaluation of which should be on aesthetic grounds.

Totally agreed. I absolutely agree that it should be judged aesthetically: first, as a function of judging it “however it is we judge acts of discourse,” hich requires deciding what kinds of discourse they are, thus what kinds of judgement are called for; second, possibly as a function of judging it as an aesthetic endeavor. I just don’t think that it should primarily be judged as an aesthetic/artistic endeavor, because I think that’s rarely the primary intent of its creator.

One thing I do know is that “trolling” is called “disruptive” only from within the discourse.
The troll can’t disrupt if she is ignored. And then she is subaltern.

Which global voices do we hear on the evening news, over at Slate?

I am somewhat confused thinking about the emphasis on aesthetics here .
Is an argument being made that “trollish” comments /articles should be judged on aesthetic grounds to a greater extent than non-trollish comments?
If so, would it be right to presume this is because in judging a comment/article to be trolling one therefore nullifies the content of the piece since it is judged to be trolling it is necessarily insincere/merely provocative?
If that is the argument it sort of seems circular….

> but it can’t be wholly tongue-in-cheek, otherwise there would be no point in writing the book

It can’t be wholly tongue in cheek, because management, as a problem, is always the same, figuring trying to minimize the principle agent problem. the problem would remain exactly the same even in some actual glorious worker’s utopia. It was written to be morality porn, something to make people like Ze Kraggash feel superior. It’s so low effort it shouldn’t even qualify as satire.

@44

Two stars out of five, Well targeted to produce outrage, but the clumsy use of leftist jargon and Ad Hominen make the effort too obvious.

@LFC #43: I was thinking of Toner following that specific Marx remark, which doesn’t engage with the US situation at all, rather than Marx in general. Entirely agree about the need for a comparative approach to the study of slavery, but that’s something that Toner – at least in the book – deliberately denies himself, by choosing to present his material as if it’s a Roman slave-owner offering advice. He can ensure that the reader picks up lots of implicit parallels to present-day managerialism, but has no way of offering a broader account of slavery without stepping outside his chosen form.

I have also been bothered for two weeks by the lack of a verb form for “iconoclast.”

Vandalise.

@JPl, I would need a specialised parser to understand that post.

Jim Buck @50. No. I can vandalise things which have no cultural importance and to which no deference is given. Railway embankments, for example.

Ah, I see that I took this–so close to the tone of a certain kind of glib-management-theory-building-on-the-new-institutional-economics-book,–too seriously, having actually read some of those books, and thought the OP was arguing that this language would be not only accurate to managers’ behavior, but actually persuasive to them, being the language they themselves use. (How can those two things be different?! you might ask, and well you might.)

Bob mcmanus makes the point that cassander, even dressed up in his Übermensch costume, still has the intentions of a clerk, and is pissed that everyone is aware of it. Genuine Übermenschen, if they existed, would be impossible to spot, and not just in this forum.

I disagree with bob to this extent: thinking one’s own thoughts is difficult, but not impossible. Doing so, however, is by definition an anti-social act, no matter how much it may be disguised by tact, irony, or sheep’s clothing. It’s the sort of distinction that a wise person never mistakes for an entitlement.

bob mcmanus: “If one speaks in opposition to the hegemonic discourse, one remains within it and uses it. “Rights.” But can one transit the discourse, and choose to not speak within it, but speak to it? If one tries, it will of course look like nonsense from within the hegemony.”

The also-quoted bit about subalternity is to the point, but what many people miss about trolling is that no one within the troll/trolled location has any real power. No one is subaltern, because obviously everyone is being heard in some sense. But no one is one of the people actually in charge of our societies, because they don’t waste their time commenting or reading comments. The offended tone that you sometimes hear from one of the upper-level media pundits isn’t just nostalgia for the old days when the Internet didn’t exist, it’s also frustrated social climbing, a complaint that they thought they were part of the upper elite and why do they still have to participate in this.

So yes, there are local power relationships in which some people pretend to be disciplinary (they ban people, “provide content”, police discourse etc.) and other people pretend to be liberatory (they mock, troll, satirize, and otherwise transgress). But it’s all essentially a middle-class activity. That is not to devalue it, but to talk about its limits. Sometimes people get their wires crossed and posters start to mock their commenters, or commenters start to try to ban people, and that’s generally a bad sign because of the mismatch of tools and results.

But in terms of aesthetics… the true aesthete has to be conscious of the characteristics of the form. HR tips from Roman slave owners works because the writer is writing from a position of mock authority (identifying with corporate leadership, purporting to give it advice) but actual powerlessness, despite a putative position as authorized social wisdom-giver.

The verb you’re looking for: kill-yr-idols.

bob mcmanus: “I am generating a mental model of a plethora of overlapping intersecting whatever virtual communities”

Those communities all exist, in some sense, but they have voluntary entry and exit. You brought up Watamote before, and there’s a scene in which she’s listening to four kids from her classroom talk to each other (they’re four kids with drawn-in faces, recurring characters) and one of them complains to the others about popular people, and how they should all just die, and the four kids laugh. And our protagonist thinks resentfully about how those four kids are popular and how they should just die, or something similar, with no apparent internal awareness that she just thought the same thing they said, because the four kids are at least one step up from her and that’s really all that matters.

High school is the beloved setting for this kind of thing because it’s the last involuntary setting that’s smaller than the society itself. Everyone in a First World society has to go to high school, and no matter what social clubs and so on they join, the full hierarchy is there and everyone gets implicitly compared with everyone else. (That was the illustration that I remember someone using to explain Piketty’s _Capital_ — that the full hierarchy wasn’t really there at the high school, that the really elite rich kids had their private high school that no one else even saw.) Cyber communities don’t have that, because people take on pseudonyms and change them and drift in and out.

But the cyber communities are still at base part of the larger society. They’re interesting in their own right, but they can’t really be evaluated except in context, and the context is that their local power is illusory.

OK. I did feel that my use of the word “community” was overly generous. I googled “inventing the barbarian cavafy” and found this quote from Shadi Neimneh which seems to speak to you (bob)

“The imperial subjects in Cavafy‟s poem define themselves in contrast to the barbarian other. But since this other is most probably their creation with no objective reality, it fails to show up and thus disproves their privileged status and even very existence. Identity, it turns out, is something made and questioned in discourse. And if identity is not a given, this leaves it as a matter of representation. It might be an exaggeration to claim that the other is simply an idea or a creation because power relations govern racial ones and thus other people, but my point is that there is a process of mythmaking, fabrication, misrepresentation, and distortion that goes in our thinking about and theorizing of the other.”

“I have also been bothered for two weeks by the lack of a verb form for ‘iconoclast.'”

Break icons. Or icon-break, if you insist on one word and allow hyphenization as they do on PTI in “What’s the Word” segments.

I tend to take people at their words, especially on the Internet where I can’t see their expressions or hear their tones of voice, so I assume people who express strong contrary opinions mean them, or else are acting as a ‘Poe’. So “don’t feed the troll” (in response to such opinions) I take to mean: it’s no use engaging that person, you won’t change their mind; rather than: engaging them will give them the satisfaction they’re seeking. Okay, it probably means some of both, but I don’t know if I’ve ever actually encountered a pure troll in the classic meaning defined previously on this thread. (Usenet was not before my time but it was before my Internet time.)

“the obvious Marxist rhetoric”

‘Wage slavery’ is not Marxist rhetoric, it’s common sense. It maybe not be immediately obvious to middle-class westerners, because we don’t do any labor. But look around you, at the things you wear, things you use, things you consume. Someone had to motivate the wage-workers in those Bangladeshi factories somehow.

To make inconclusive a verb just add -ing

“I have enjoyed a pleasant morning fruitfully iconoclasting with friends over brunch”

‘I have also been bothered for two weeks by the lack of a verb form for “iconoclast.”’

I propose “break icons.”

22:It is, after all, so very capitalist-individualist to argue that the individual can be constructed separately from the social.

I didn’t ignore you, I just didn’t have an answer for you, or anything witty. Taken aback, as it were. You are right.

Volosinov? Bakhtin? Jean-Jacques Lecercle? D & G? Too much to read.

I feel old and tired sometimes.

I’ve read a strange amount of James C. Scott’s books, since I got three of them at once and somehow ended up reading all of them at the same time (and I’m not done with two of them). But based on what I’ve read so far, I think it’s the best of his books. (_Seeing Like a State_ has been so referenced by other people so often that it no longer feels new; _Two Cheers For Anarchy_ seems like it’s a short recap of everything in his other books).

He is very clear that he’s being specific to South East Asia, but this seemed to me like an academic being careful. More general conclusions are not really supported by the book, but if I want to use the idea as a metaphor in a comment box, I don’t think that anyone is going to pull out James C. Scott a la the McLuhan scene in Annie Hall to contradict me.

I am still not convinced about the idea that trollish comments/articles should primarily be approached aesthetically. I can sort of see the point with the Roman Slaves article since Henry finds that it creates an Uncanny Valley sensation — then approaching it solely on aesthetic terms would provide a degree of subjectivity by objectifying the writing to overcome the uncomfortable Uncanny Valley feel.

But like JimV I tend to take people/commenters at their words — but in my case I think this is from growing up in a very small town — one friend did realise this once and would have fun making things up that I would think were very interesting but they were untrue.

As it happens the book I am reading has a chapter Truth and Truthfulness in Narrative that partly looks at how people often separate content from style (Henry’s aesthetics) in writing — but it argues that style and content are inseparable. The author quite beautifully looks at the impact of landscape on the tenor and style of his writing — and the impact of this on the truthfulness of his representation of character and events — in this case finding his depiction of his mother somewhat inadequate:

“Strange though it may sound, my sense of that life, of the ideas that informed it, was given intensity and colour by the light and landscape of the area. … More than anything, however, the glorious, tall, burnt-yellow grasses (as a boy they came to my chest and sometimes over my head) moving irregularly against a deep blue sky, dominated the images of my childhood and gave colour to my freedom and also to my understanding of suffering. In the morning they inspired cheerful energy of the kind that made you whistle; at midday, in partnership with an unforgiving sun and alive with insects and other creatures, they intimidated; but in the late afternoon, towards dusk, everything was softened by a light that graced the area in a melancholy beauty that could pierce one’s soul…
Religion, metaphysics or the notions of fate and character as they inform tragedy, are suited to that light and landscape…. For that reason tragedy, with its calm pity for the affliction it depicts, was the genre that first attracted my passionate allegiance: I recognised it in the concepts that had illuminated the events of my childhood.
…
Perhaps it sounds absurd, but I hoped that the events and the characters of the story I told would be bathed in the light and colours of that landscape. I hoped that in the telling of it I could achieve the same calm pity that I attributed to tragedy as a literary genre.
…
My mother was never at ease in the landscape. It was alien to her and she seemed alien to it…. just as my mother was ill at ease in the actual landscape of Central Victoria, so she is ill at ease as a character in a book whose narrative genre is conditioned by that landscape and its natural congruence with categories of character, fate and metaphysics…. Perhaps that genre is not one in which she can appear fully individuated, fully a presence in the world, a distinctive perspective of it. I do not know whether that is true, but this clearly is true: genre is essential to narrative and it opens and closes possibilities of characterisation.”

So now I have thought about it more — I think that judging something to be trolling is not an aesthetic judgement — it is a character judgement about the writer.

Then if you make this character judgement, as above, you may want to objectify the comment/article by conducting an aesthetic appraisal of their comment/article rather than engaging with it in dialogue.

@ronan
I haven’t read J. Scott and thus won’t say anything substantive about his books. But just to mention that H. Farrell, iirc, reviewed Art of Not Being Governed along w another book by someone else (don’t remember which); I don’t recall the review’s substance really though I bkmarked it at the time (I think Henry referenced it here). Also, there was a symposium on Art of Not Being Governed a while back in Perspectives on Politics, iirc. There were five or six briefish reactions to the book. S. Krasner as one might guess was sort of critical, along the lines of ‘states are not as bad as Scott thinks’ (that’s of course a simplification of what SK said).

bob mcmanus @63
“DD tried to expand or narrow the commentariat to his post the other day (Greek voices) and got little but trolls. Regulars and lurkers and visitors, who is the CT community?”

That was a very strange thread indeed, and I’m still thinking about it, and not at all happily. It showed me that there are pretty much no other CT readers in Greece – which makes me very peripheral to this community. But it also showed the poster himself had not imagined there were no readers in Greece – Greek followers of CT, and that was equally revealing.

Was that thread strictly-speaking one long troll-fest, or was it one massive derailing consisting of free-association remarks by regulars who were ticked off at DD but who then proceeded to enjoy themselves riffing off each other?

I have a hard time discerning trolling/trolls on CT threads. For me, trolling is online discourse which involves bad faith arguments generated to provoke/hurt others. Neither satire nor irony are practiced in bad faith, though both are frequently practiced in righteous anger and/or outrage. I suppose one could characterize particular instances of trolls/trolling as witty or clever, even brilliant, but how can discourse which originates in bad faith be aesthetically satisfying?

mattski@83

I think I’d consider that passage a “Gothic spoof”. It’s a genre I’m not fond of, and so maybe I’m biased – clever, witty, brilliant, perhaps aesthetically pleasing for Fans of Gothic Spoofs. But I would say it was written in trollerian bad faith.

dbk,

Well, it was a little tongue-in-cheek. But as a rule, wouldn’t you agree that almost anything can be an art if the practitioner is sufficiently skillful/inspired?

I know of a few Greek CT readers, including myself; just didn’t have anything to contribute to that particular thread.