Pretentiousness, taste, and why people were so mad about Wuthering Heights
In the algorithmic era, it is hard to have individual taste. It is hard to even remember what that is. Taste has always been difficult to define; it is inherently subjective and more of an impression than a fact. You can sense when someone has it, whether it is good or impressively bad. Taste is more than correctly identifying the ‘right’ thing at any moment. It speaks to a breadth and depth of understanding that surpasses mere aesthetics. It might be what saves you in the coming AI jobs apocalypse. Kyle Chayka summarised the process of developing taste well in his book Filterworld:
“Taste requires experiencing the creation in its entirety and evaluating one’s own authentic emotional experience to it, parsing its effect. (Taste is not passive, it requires effort.)”
When most of your attention is devoted to content that is algorithmically targeted toward you in short form video, second-screen TV shows, or even advertising, you lack the time and space necessary to fully evaluate how you feel about it and why. Endless scrolling enables you to see an infinitesimal number of new things and in doing so overwhelms you to the point you are dissuaded from deepening your understanding about an existing or burgeoning interest.
Still, no one wants to be seen as a person that was assigned their new shoes, interest, or hobby by an algorithm. Human nature is to want to fit in while at the same time fearing being seen as a follower (no pun intended). If something must hit your feed for you to discover it, chances are it is also being served to people in your approximate location and demographic. Your best bet for appearing to have a genuine interest in a new item, type of art, or way of living rather than seeing it on a feed is to start talking about it before anyone else does. Even if you have a high enough screen time or a well-curated enough feed to achieve this, the time for unironically enjoying something before it is oversaturated and always referred to with the prefix “viral” is limited.
The flip side of this phenomenon is an over-identification any interest someone had (however minor) prior to recommender systems. Pre-algorithm, you would come across things organically or by chance, inheriting your dad’s favourite band or having a life-changing experience reading the assigned book in high school English class. Kyle Chayka referred to these discoveries in Filterworld as ‘serendipity’. Counterintuitively, given the smaller pool of information, this meant there was more variety to what a person’s specific hyper fixation could be, contrasted with the current situation where every response to a Hinge prompt or corporate icebreaker seems to be selected from a pre-set menu of options.
When you suffer the indignity of your chosen totem becoming FYP fodder, even if it had previously been accumulating dust in your childhood bedroom, it can feel like a part of your personality is being stolen away from you. Instant access makes it fair game to people that never had to go to the library to find a book on it or wait for their parents to get off the phone to spend hours loading sparse web pages about it. From now on, you can’t bring it up without people assuming you saw the same Instagram post as they did. That can sting. For some, it was enough to have them wish death on a much-hyped Hollywood director for her crimes against literature, cinema, and the production schedule for another season of Euphoria.
The response to “Wuthering Heights” (scare quotes Emerald Fennell’s own) drew accusations on one side of pretentiousness and misogyny and on the other of anti-intellectualism, smut-rotted brains, and anti-feminism. I won’t repeat them here. Full disclosure, I have not (yet) read the book or watched the film. As such, I chose to mostly abstain from the conversation. While watching from the sidelines I wondered: why have I only ever seen women accused of pretentiousness when they’re outraged about an adaptation? Men may be disappointed, hostile, or taking something made for children too seriously, but I’ve never seen their furore labelled pretentious en masse.
Pretentiousness is explained by Dan Fox in Pretentiousness: Why It Matters:
“The Latin prae – ‘before’ – and tendere, meaning ‘to stretch’ or ‘to extend’, give us the word ‘pretentious’. Think of it as holding something in front of you, like actors wearing masks in the ancient Greek theatre”.
Pretentiousness is an age-old accusation. It swims alongside anti-intellectualism, class-based anxieties, and a general allergy to striving. Unlike straightforward thought terminating cliches (e.g. ‘it’s not that deep’), it serves a dual purpose as an effective circuit breaker for discourse and personal attack. A single word allows you to instantly undermine the perspective and arguments of the other person by implying their very basis for entering the conversation is disingenuous and lacks credibility. It is no wonder, then, that it is so often lobbed against specific demographics. Historically, these were undergraduates, indie musicians, and purported fans of the classical arts. Increasingly, online, it is anyone that is vocal about a deep interest in something / anything. A summary punishment for the crime of caring about context, purpose, or execution – of seeing anything or anyone as something beyond short-form content to momentarily interact with and / or forget forever.
“We smell pretentiousness when we believe something is trying to stay out of reach from us” – Dan Fox
The recent taste discourse du jour was why everyone was trying to dress like Carolyn Bessette Kennedy after the release of Love Story, an FX series based on her relationship with JFK Jr. It quickly, as it tends to, turned into a discussion about pretentiousness when someone made a video about how taste cannot be obtained by pure impersonation of someone else’s. In a video provocatively titled ‘nobody has good taste anymore’, creator Tamsin Wong spoke about how friction is a necessary component for developing personal taste; along with multi-sensorial experiences outside of the visual snippets the internet provides. This is a sentiment most sensible people would agree with. However, being on the internet is often incompatible with being sensible. An Australian podcast, Style-ish, had an outsized reaction to the video on their show, dismissing Tamsin as ‘pretentious’ and telling her to ‘touch grass’ (apparently missing the irony that this was the entire point of her original video.)