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I was just explaining to someone that one of the main problems Arabs have in dealing with Western culture is that they can't seem to discern or discriminate between its internal codes or understand that Western culture is not one, single aesthetic regime. It's a densely stratified system of class codes, generational codes, racial codes, subcultural, ideological codes, that natives read instinctively and outsiders flatten into a single undifferentiated signal called "the West." (I think Indians have the same problem) So you'd find, in the 2000s, grown-ass Arab men, I mean really middle aged serious artists, established musicians, earnestly copying NSYNC or Britney Spears. They didn't register at all that this was music for 14-year-old American girls. They just saw successful Western pop with sleek Western aesthetics. The aesthetics code was completely invisible to them. The Gulf is the ideal laboratory for this because wealth removes all economic friction from consumption. When you can buy anything, the only remaining filter is taste, and taste is precisely the thing that requires a cultural literacy you cannot purchase. So you get the famous Gulf aesthetic: a villa combining Louis XIV gilding, Dubai modernist glass, Versace furnishings, and a Rolls Royce with ghetto-fabulous chrome, all experienced by its owner as a single coherent statement of prestige. But in the West, at least before mass migration and its vape shop aesthetics referred to below, each of these items belongs to a completely different, often mutually hostile, aesthetic world. French baroque is old-money nostalgia or Trump-land glamor. Modernist glass is the aesthetic of rationalist negation, liberal soulless soulcycle people. Versace is the Italian fashion house that Black American hip-hop culture adopted as a signifier of defiant philistinic excess and proud tastelessness. Etc. Etc. These things are not supposed to go together. And this is ultimately why the Third Worlder became the hero of postmodernism and poststructuralism. Not despite this condition but exactly, EXACTLY, because of it. The dissolution of all codes into all other codes, the inability to distinguish high from low, sacred from profane, ironic from sincere, all are floating signifiers that could refer to anything and nothing, etc. this is the fulfilled academic left dream of dissolving Western civ into a one flood of undifferentiated slop. Deleuze wanted the dissolution of all stable identities. Derrida wanted the collapse of all hierarchies of meaning. Lyotard wanted the end of master narratives that organize experience into coherent wholes. Isn't walking through the shopping malls in Louis Vuitton and listening to Lil Wayne, is the living embodiment of all these theories? a subject with no center, no taste, no discriminating principle, chaotic, fragmented, rootless, genuinely believing in nothing because he never had the codes to believe in to begin with.