Genre

 August 2, 2022

To myself, I often despise when people ask "what kind of writing do you do?" because I do not like to boil down what I do to a brand or a catchphrase. The question of Genre is often an albatross around the neck of someone whose goal is to write something to be of use, to be informing and exciting, but also activating - of some hidden potentiality in the reader. What is the anti-genre? What is the flipside of a generic definition - where the reader may in the act of reading discover a genre in themselves but the writer doesn't cleave to a particular definition except for the effect that it, his writing, may evoke when mixed with the flavor of the time and the nature of the audience? 

I'm not sure what's got me philosophizing about genre and my own work again, other than, perhaps, Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan over the CHIPS Act, which opened up a lot of cultural room for a sort of celebratory philosophical interlude. 

I had a teacher once who would on occasion mention the literary issue of genre with an air of significance: as a substantial secret. And I get what she meant on some level - the dual signification of the word "character": as in, it's impossible to tell how "good" a person is without also determining what kind of person they are. 

I don't think that what genre someone consumes in their reading or information is completely dispositive of their character on either of those levels. But the existence of genres in popular art is in and of itself a meta-education on the existence of different kinds of characters in the human race, all of which can be of equally good character. To slightly strain the logical reasoning...it stands to reason that what matters in distinguishing types of characters can't all matter to whether they are of good character. 

There were, for example, some people in Taiwan that were locked up by the State for one reason or another, and some of those reasons were pretty flimsy reasons, such as, these were the "kinds of people" where were dangerous to the State. Taiwan had a pretty brutal period of military rule before it was fully democratized. This is in the distant past by now. Some, and I'd say, a good number of those people were actually of good character, which just goes to show that the distinction between the two kinds of character is often not understood. I'd say a good number of people privately thought that a lot of the people who got locked up were of good character too. It goes to show that a lot of what States or "the State" does is blind to whether people are of good moral character or not. Things are a little better now but they are not perfect. Taiwan disassembled its martial law system and is now one of the most democratic places in the world. People get the benefit of the doubt there more than they used to. But they still have to deal with the ever-presence of China’s associated threats. There's no one genre that describes Taiwan either, now that I think about it. It knows sorrow and joy, all the emotional weather of the human soul. Some parts are transcendently beautiful and some parts are astonishingly normal. 

To catch back on to the the thread I'm following overall, Taiwan is no more problematic an ally than the others we have. It has a problematic past, but it is now the most open democracy in East Asia. And its past is no more problematic than our own. What is most important is that it's our most important ally for securing a high-tech economy for the U.S.A. in manufacturing jobs, and for keeping tabs on and controlling our geostrategic competition with China. Getting up to speed on manufacturing semiconductor chips well, and better than future competitors in China and Southeast Asia, will take some doing, and may require that we dip into these deeper places once in a while. 

What we need to focus on when it comes to the issues at hand and the work to be done, when we look at what we could gain through this enhanced geostrategic and economic advantage the CHIPS Act would provide, is how do we do it in such a way that justice and fairness are served, and the benefits accrue to the workers in the American economy, not only to the 1%, the billionaire class, or the robber barons of our technofeudalist contemporary, however you wish to put it. For example, if this bill could benefit Intel, have we adequately considered, "stateside" (as they say in diplomacy) whether Intel workers are adequately unionized so that they benefit from the advantage that will accrue to Intel from the potential of this bill? We do have a certain problem of forgetting about that in the planning stages of economic policy. And how can we get more people into good-paying union jobs in the high-tech sector, which will expand on account of this bill? We have one picture of what a unionized blue collar job looks like in this country, but actually that's another "thing" that has no inherent "genre" when it comes to aesthetics and personality, and so forth.

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