Any text which takes an openly ‘revolutionary critical’ approach (Marx : ‘Practical criticism’ and does not take and locate the world “in the form of the object” but takes it “subjectively, as sensuous human practice” -Theses on Feuerbach) is always rejected by most commercial publishers. It is not “academic enough” because ‘revolutionary critique’ grasps social development in terms of a conception which actively engages what is happening now as capital’s crisis unfolds in order to ‘revolutionise’ this world of capital. This is why these wretched publishing businesses will publish some of the dreariest, driest, loftily-detached and most tedious publications because they think they might find a market in the universities, students, etc. It is also why many “Marxists” (especially those with position in academia) compromise and “academicise” their work in order for it to be acceptable for publication. Whilst the most important texts tend to remain unpublished. The German Ideology was not fully published until 1932. Marx and Engels eventually “left it to the gnawing criticism of the mice” in some publishing office somewhere in Germany.

Simon: Erk, don’t ask me about Nietzsche, I’m really just winging it here ;-). I’m not sure that the default position of cynicism is based on uncertainty (“which way should I commit?”). I think it’s more of a defence mechanism in the face of the deterritorialisng effect of capital. When all that is solid melts into air, only a fool would try to hang on to something (which is why trade unionists, radicals, feminists etc are always castigated as stick-in-the-muds resistant to change). It’d be easy in the face of this onslaught to say that we should hold fast to our positions, like unreconstructed tankies defending the Soviet Union, but I like your notion that sincerity is “the self-conscious, open construction of new truths”.

When you were saying ‘lazy cynicism … makes sincere statements of belief both hard to express and difficult to take seriously’, I was screaming inside – what about Nietzsche?! Are you saying scepticism of belief and conviction is a bad thing? Surely beliefs ARE always wrong; like knowledge, except even worse.

And then you bring Nietzsche in at the end (though I don’t quite get the quote) and elaborate more on sincerity, and I wonder if we’re actually on the same page. Could I successfully extrapolate that this idea of sincerity, then, as it’s ‘not about authenticity or truth’, is in part the self-conscious, open construction of new truths (or truth procedures)? A way of moving forward through the (necessary) fog of uncertainty.

Because surely you’re not implying that the uncertainty at the root of our cynicism is just a false consciousness, ideology? To my mind this impossibility of knowledge is the only – or the most – reliable outcome of the history of knowledge.

But maybe I’m too readily conflating knowledge and belief?

Anyway, I think I like this idea of sincerity. Want to know more!

Ah there’s more! Will read this next: http://freelyassociating.org/2015/02/on-explosions-of-sincerity/

Perhaps one way into this is to remember that there is an original and helpful use of irony which employs it as a ground clearing operation. Or as David Foster Wallace says,“a critical negation that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems.” The problems come when irony becomes all-pervasive, preventing any sincere statement of belief from being taken seriously. Perhaps then “explosions of sincerity” should be thought of the same way; as ground clearing exercises from which we can reinsert trace levels of camp and irony to deflate the risk of pomposity and earnestness.