Never trust a textualist
Conversation
This *especially* applies to textualists of your own writing if you’ve written enough that that can be a thing.
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The trick to counterprogram textualists is to avoid not logic, but aesthetics. The best raw material for textualists is a sparse skeleton of closed, axiomatized ideas with a skin of apophenia fodder, all pulled together with a consistent emotional mood and sensory aesthetic.
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Textualist traditions are basically fandoms of a core set of texts with a cloud of hemeneutically bound commentary around it. Vulnerable minds lock on to the cognitive ease of navigating that body. It’s low-friction thoughtspace with striating laid out.
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Lock-on as in missiles that lock on to heat signatures. Except here it is lower-than-reality entropy signature so cool signatures. An escaped reality. Textualists are cold-seeking missiles. Throwing these off your tail requires missile avoidance maneuvering.
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You gotta be jinking. Always be jinking. ABJ. Otherwise the textualist zombies will find you, swarm you, and eventually kill you. navyflightmanuals.tpub.com/P-1208/Jinking
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It’s not that I think of readers as adversaries necessarily, but the worst ones fly faster, turn faster, and carry an explosive charge in their heads. The only thing that allows writers to avoid getting blown up by them is that you know where you’re going and they don’t.
Replying to
The best readers are slightly lazy ones who will read some unpredictable random sample of stuff you write, combine it with other random stuff they’re reading, and sort of go on their own quests and pay attention to you while you’re in field of view. They won’t “follow” you.
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You don’t want “followers” unless you’re either crazy, stupid, or power-hungry enough to *want* to create a zombie army of textualists poring over your shit, red string in hand. You want casually attached readers giving you continuous partial attention with highly variable depth.
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Replying to
Umberto Eco called a textualist a Model Reader who created a Model Author that didn’t actually exist
From books.google.com/books?id=4Hu_8
Summary signosemio.com/eco/textual-co
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