The deplorable generation

Re-reading these comments it's apparent this La Medeleni thing in fact worked as a sort of period Friends. "Oh, I hate that Michael! He's so smug!" sorta... well, basic internal processing. Gotta start somewhere, as it were.

Ultimately Diana's point stands : neither has group identification anything to do with anything else, nor can there be found (projected -- yes! but found, never) meaning in its coincidental overlap with anything else. The muzzled generation, the Friends generation and the La Medeleni generation have in common merely the most bluntly banal "they're generations". There's no more literature in the endless tons of paper fashioned into "masks" than there's into the endless tons of paper fashioned into "the book" as publicly consumed, or "the sitcom", or whatever else, because there's no more meaning in group activity than there's in any other natural phenomena. Because groups aren't human.

Collections of human lives -- distinguished from the groups by the complete absence of group identity or any notion of groupitude (much like Trotsky's substitutionism, by the time the category becomes reified therefore it also becomes meaningless, not merely practically but necessarily and outright devoid of even the capacity for meaning) -- be they however large, are still as human as the individual, in the hands of the anthropologist ; so the fact that all corpses I've so far examined have a scapula does indeed give the presence of scapulae meaning, and the fact that however many peasants repeated to their children some version of the same tale does give that tale meaning, but strictly because they'd done it for their own reasons, as counterdistinct from

De foame nu dau popii ortul! Eu iarna singura-mi tes tortul, si umblu si eu cum socot ca-i portul.

which is to say "for the '''reason''' that that's what other people do, or '''it's what's done'''" or any other reformulation of female thought -- the central point of which problem being that mere recognition's no kind of cognition, and the mother's innate recognition of her offspring no kind of basis for a relationship in and of itself. People might (hilariously, and ludicrously, and everything else) get excited over hearing "the music of their youth", through the association it carries with their idealized selves in their own mind, for having coincidentally been in the background as their lives unfurled ; but there's no youth in the noise and no meaning in the association.

Obviously recognition forms some portion of cognition necessarily, and necessarily it sits at the basis of it, and were I strictly incapable of recognizing a scapula I'd therefore be strictly incapable of recognizing scapulae. Nevertheless, basic and fundamental as it might be, recognition belongs with, and must be classified with, naturalia, not idealia -- under pain of doom. My (however innate, however intrinsic, however deeply held or seemingly inseparable) observation that two instant apples are indeed both apples is part of phenomena, and outside of humanity (and therefore inescapably inadherent to meaning). It's of the nature of having a heart attack, not in the vein of writing an article (that one ; or any other).

This then yields the identification of an entirely novel type of pollution : as more and more lists are miscast as groups (aka "identity politics") the necessary correlate of meaning in human society (lists ; not groups) becomes untenable, with the predictable result of generalized loss of meaning, from social processes to individual perceptions of society. Much like people spending time spreading salt in their environment might soon discover themselves incapable of farming (generally speaking incapable, not for any clear reason but merely through the "inexplicable" failure of crops and subsequent famine -- for which no doubt more salting will be recommended by their salt god as the only possible cure & remedy) people going about trying to groupify lists of people end up with their ears caught in a yet-another replay of the collapsed empire tragedy / historical drama.

Ultimately all generations are deplorable, and for that reason specifically : they're generations.