Showing posts with label Shock breakthrough in cultural criticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shock breakthrough in cultural criticism. Show all posts
I like the cut of Roobin's jib
Especially the Marxist appreciation of Marshal McLuhan. Top notch stuff!
Thoughts for the brain - recycled thoughts
I was bumped into Dorian Lynskey's blog 33 Revolutions Per Minute yesterday. I've pretty much always liked the things he's written (though not bought his book - I'm not made of money!), and was pleased to find his website.
Amongst other things it has a version of his article from earlier this year, yet another attempt to nail down the protean problem of the hipster.
"Hipster-hating is seemingly a victimless crime because nobody will admit to actually being one, although if you’re at all bothered by them then you’re probably somewhere on the spectrum".
Indeed. One of the aspects of modern culture people are most concerned with is esoteric knowledge:
"Norman Cook recently said on 6Music that when he started DJing he could unearth a floorfilling obscurity and it would take months for a rival DJ to identify it and track down a copy".
This quality of The Scene is destroyed by pseudo-democratic forms of technology:
"If today’s cratedigging DJ plays a new discovery it’s on a thousand hard drives on the other side of the world by the next morning".
I say pseudo democratic, the audience, the mass have a much bigger role now in shaping culture than ever before. This is why, amongst other things, hipsters are fucking everywhere. They are the recycling agents of late capitalism, exposing and promoting cultural artifacts at a faster and faster rate. The greater the turnover of cultural capital the faster new forms of capital have to be appropriated and turned out. But this is not agency, let alone emancipation. There is still a sharp division, class-based, between those who can and can't participate. In the example given, you need access to a computer (and computer literacy). Not everyone has this.
Esotericism stems from the Middle Ages. It was a solution to passing on knowledge before mass education and mass media. Craft guilts were built on this kind of knowledge and ritual. It was also a response, in religion, to the counter-reformation. These days it is an anti-capitalist urge, to resist commodification and conformity. It fails (though it can produce great art) because it is an elitist outlook.
Amongst other things it has a version of his article from earlier this year, yet another attempt to nail down the protean problem of the hipster.
"Hipster-hating is seemingly a victimless crime because nobody will admit to actually being one, although if you’re at all bothered by them then you’re probably somewhere on the spectrum".
Indeed. One of the aspects of modern culture people are most concerned with is esoteric knowledge:
"Norman Cook recently said on 6Music that when he started DJing he could unearth a floorfilling obscurity and it would take months for a rival DJ to identify it and track down a copy".
This quality of The Scene is destroyed by pseudo-democratic forms of technology:
"If today’s cratedigging DJ plays a new discovery it’s on a thousand hard drives on the other side of the world by the next morning".
I say pseudo democratic, the audience, the mass have a much bigger role now in shaping culture than ever before. This is why, amongst other things, hipsters are fucking everywhere. They are the recycling agents of late capitalism, exposing and promoting cultural artifacts at a faster and faster rate. The greater the turnover of cultural capital the faster new forms of capital have to be appropriated and turned out. But this is not agency, let alone emancipation. There is still a sharp division, class-based, between those who can and can't participate. In the example given, you need access to a computer (and computer literacy). Not everyone has this.
Esotericism stems from the Middle Ages. It was a solution to passing on knowledge before mass education and mass media. Craft guilts were built on this kind of knowledge and ritual. It was also a response, in religion, to the counter-reformation. These days it is an anti-capitalist urge, to resist commodification and conformity. It fails (though it can produce great art) because it is an elitist outlook.
Ulysses on the BBC
Saturday was Bloomsday, 16th of June, the day on which Ulysses is set. This year BBC Radio 4 broadcast a new abridged version of the book. It featured Henry Goodman as Mr Bloom, Andrew Scott as Stephen Dedalus, Niamh Cusack as Molly Bloom and Stephen Rea as the Narrator.
Ulysses has so much to it, it is effectively a different book every time you approach it. The early chapters were very heavily abridged. While this makes sense in terms of getting the book down to a digestible size, I thought it did lose out of some of Bloom's poetry. Almost from his very first page, Joyce took care to show Bloom's rich inner life, which is contrasted with his outward failure to connect with his wife, Molly, to be emphasised by the events of the coming day. The opening segments of the broadcast showed Bloom as baffled and sad at his predicament, unable to see the greatness inside him. Lots of "she chose me... she kissed me": he is simultaneously pathetic but endearing.
The broadcast came into its own in the second half, the later chapters, where the prose really gets wild. The Oxen of the Sun chapter, set in the hospital, where Bloom and Stephen finally meet, was an actual improvement on the book I thought. In print it is an impressive but difficult chapter, the style obscures the fact that both Bloom and Stephen finally realise what they each have been looking for in each other. The second to last chapter, Ithaca, was superb, showing the beautiful meeting of their minds, poetic and moving.
Henry Goodman was an odd choice for Bloom, especially as Stephen Rea had already played the role (albeit in a straight to DVD film). Andrew Scott, who plays Moriarty in the TV series Sherlock, was excellent as Stephen, a perfect, charismatic role for an engaging ham actor.
As for the social dimension, there was, quite rightly, an emphasis on Bloom's personal struggle against anti-semitism. Joyce was firmly anti-colonial but kept his distance from the reactionary parts (political and artistic) of the movement for Irish liberation. Prejudice toward Jews is shown coming from all sections of Dublin society, displayed in turn by an Englishman (Haines), an Anglo-Irishman (Deasy) and a Fenian (the Citizen). Bloom, for all his travails, was intended by Joyce as a model for the renewal of Irish society: the open-minded, progressive and eloquent new man.
One last observation, both the book and the broadcast shows the general applicability of Permanent Revolution, in particular the odd privilege of social backwardness. Ulysses was written at a point when an oral culture was being transformed, but at the dawn of visual media (James Joyce was a cinema pioneer in Dublin) skipping the literate, linear stage. This is what gives Ulysses it's spark, a most aural, visual, social, performable novel. It deserves a proper film made of it.
Ulysses has so much to it, it is effectively a different book every time you approach it. The early chapters were very heavily abridged. While this makes sense in terms of getting the book down to a digestible size, I thought it did lose out of some of Bloom's poetry. Almost from his very first page, Joyce took care to show Bloom's rich inner life, which is contrasted with his outward failure to connect with his wife, Molly, to be emphasised by the events of the coming day. The opening segments of the broadcast showed Bloom as baffled and sad at his predicament, unable to see the greatness inside him. Lots of "she chose me... she kissed me": he is simultaneously pathetic but endearing.
The broadcast came into its own in the second half, the later chapters, where the prose really gets wild. The Oxen of the Sun chapter, set in the hospital, where Bloom and Stephen finally meet, was an actual improvement on the book I thought. In print it is an impressive but difficult chapter, the style obscures the fact that both Bloom and Stephen finally realise what they each have been looking for in each other. The second to last chapter, Ithaca, was superb, showing the beautiful meeting of their minds, poetic and moving.
Henry Goodman was an odd choice for Bloom, especially as Stephen Rea had already played the role (albeit in a straight to DVD film). Andrew Scott, who plays Moriarty in the TV series Sherlock, was excellent as Stephen, a perfect, charismatic role for an engaging ham actor.
As for the social dimension, there was, quite rightly, an emphasis on Bloom's personal struggle against anti-semitism. Joyce was firmly anti-colonial but kept his distance from the reactionary parts (political and artistic) of the movement for Irish liberation. Prejudice toward Jews is shown coming from all sections of Dublin society, displayed in turn by an Englishman (Haines), an Anglo-Irishman (Deasy) and a Fenian (the Citizen). Bloom, for all his travails, was intended by Joyce as a model for the renewal of Irish society: the open-minded, progressive and eloquent new man.
One last observation, both the book and the broadcast shows the general applicability of Permanent Revolution, in particular the odd privilege of social backwardness. Ulysses was written at a point when an oral culture was being transformed, but at the dawn of visual media (James Joyce was a cinema pioneer in Dublin) skipping the literate, linear stage. This is what gives Ulysses it's spark, a most aural, visual, social, performable novel. It deserves a proper film made of it.
Musings and so forth...
There's a neat little article in today's Graun, OK so it's yet another article bemoaning the decline of rock and roll. In this case it is linked to the influence of gay culture on pop music, a fascinating story.
There's beginning of an understanding, I think, that rock music is the jazz of the 21st century. There will be many great records made, no doubt, but rock and roll will never occupy the same position it did, at the centre of pop culture, again. There's a flavour of that in the piece. But the article misses another crucial (and immediate) reason for the decline of rock and roll. Pop/rock/whatever is in decline because it is based on affluence - young people with disposable income and free time. Young people don't have these things anymore.
The article is also another interesting example of the strange conclusions people, ostensibly left-wing, can reach once they accept traditional notions of artistic value. Example:
Leave aside the obvious point about fame being a post-religious paradise on Earth; isn't it odd that we should regret the democratisation of culture? The author adds the caveat 'apparent'; 'apparent' is probably a twinge of doubt in the author's mind: do I really oppose democracy? Modern popular culture is, in the main, anti-democratic. This can't be stressed enough.
There's beginning of an understanding, I think, that rock music is the jazz of the 21st century. There will be many great records made, no doubt, but rock and roll will never occupy the same position it did, at the centre of pop culture, again. There's a flavour of that in the piece. But the article misses another crucial (and immediate) reason for the decline of rock and roll. Pop/rock/whatever is in decline because it is based on affluence - young people with disposable income and free time. Young people don't have these things anymore.
The article is also another interesting example of the strange conclusions people, ostensibly left-wing, can reach once they accept traditional notions of artistic value. Example:
Savage thinks rock's ongoing prosaicness is symptomatic of a wider cultural shift. "There's a current mode of solipsism, where you don't want to be challenged, you just want to have your own life reflected back at you. It's down to the way the internet has grown up, the whole apparent democratisation of the idea of skill – that skill and experience don't matter and that you're as good as anyone else. There's the disastrous impact of reality shows, the whole impulse to be famous, the idea that fame is the way to go."
Leave aside the obvious point about fame being a post-religious paradise on Earth; isn't it odd that we should regret the democratisation of culture? The author adds the caveat 'apparent'; 'apparent' is probably a twinge of doubt in the author's mind: do I really oppose democracy? Modern popular culture is, in the main, anti-democratic. This can't be stressed enough.
Fantasy, abstraction and reality...
The age of electronic media has broken down linear, sequential space and, therefore, made linear, sequential thought obsolete. We live in an age of integral consciousness and to live integrally means to live mythically.
That is a rough summation of McLuhan-ism. We need not take it literally to see the value in the statement, value in terms of politics, culture and ideology. To explain:
Politics
The predicament of the bourgeois liberal outlook was summed up quite neatly by the philosopher, one F Mercury:
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide,
No escape from reality.
Which is not bad, I think. The reality we directly experience is alienated and atomised, a thin sliver of the general context. Yet we cannot understand even that smaller section of reality without access to the greater context. Any attempt to build up a picture of reality piece by piece might seem oh-so objective, but is of course doomed, by the restless changes in social context if by nothing else.
We have to think in terms of archetypes, in terms of abstractions. One of Marx’s most crucial insights was establishing through his critique of political economy the existence of objective points of view within capitalism. There are the bourgeois and proletarian points of view, and there are bourgeois and proletarians with points of view. One is measured against the other, the critical renovation of consciousness described by Gramsci.
Without this abstraction, this ‘myth’, we would lose our link with the greater context; reality becomes a landslide, something which happens to us.
Art ‘n’ stuff
One of the difficulties with direct realism in art is it's partial and one-sided, or else it’s unreal. The non-ideological work is merely the most ideological. Its assumptions are taken as self-evident. Fantasy, magic-realism, elastic reality (as it’s called in The Simpsons) are much more truthful, realistic methods.
Recent interest: the fascination with vampires. Vampires are strongly associated with aristocracy. They are also associated with sexuality. This has become much more pronounced in recent pop culture. Vampires are now pretty much benign. Take Edward Cullen from the Twilight series, or Bill Compton from True Blood: they are a strange combination of potency and rigid self-denial. Pop culture is trying to work out conflicted notions of sexuality through vampirism.
True Blood is an example of elastic reality at work. It is a magical melodrama. As well as vampires it has fairies, shape-shifters, maenads and such like, existing as if normal in the modern United States. This flexible reality is also a means of talking about civil rights, particularly LGBT and ethnic minority movements. It gets to the core of such subjects, I think, much more quickly and easily through fantasy than direct realism.
Cultural commentator in shock conclusion: "pop's not what it used to be"
If rock stars are our functional equivalent of Greek gods, cultural criticism is our version of scholastic debate. The big wheel has turned, now the arrow is pointing at grunge. Everyone it seems agrees that, while great music was made, in the end the music industry killed the Seattle Scene. Where did it all go wrong?
Colin Horgan of the Graun isn't sure but does an interesting turn trying to find out.
Two points have to be mentioned. (1) All culture is in some way retrospective. Any completely original sight or sound is in fact a new combination of old ones. Things have to be that way. Inspiration must predate composition. (2) It is difficult to make an unambigous case for Generation X passion and activism without acknowledging its obvious passivity. The climax to the generation's consider anthem is, after all, "I tried so hard/So hard to find/Oh well/Whatever/Never mind". Exhausted acceptance of the system began long before the Strokes, Is This It?
The conclusion?
There's just one problem. Who gives a flying monkey-wotsit if rock and roll is dead or not? The idea that pop music is some kind of vector for significant social change is based on a brief conjecture, mostly an illusion, sustained by baby-boomer arrogance. The 1960s counterculture fought its toughest battles in the United States. In the end, however, it was an attempted alternative capitalism. There is no capitalist alternative to capitalism, as all the current headscratching about the recession and the sovereign debt crisis should just be further proof. You either accept the system or you don't... as Kurt Cobain found out.
The author hints at a reason why this slow death is taking place. The medium of rock and roll is (or was) the single*, which is now an almost defunct form. At the smallest scale the cultural cycle is so fast now rock and roll seems a pedestrian art now. Whole cultural phenomena can rise and fall while a rock band spends 18 months diddling about recording its new album.
* A sub-medium would be the radio.
Colin Horgan of the Graun isn't sure but does an interesting turn trying to find out.
Two points have to be mentioned. (1) All culture is in some way retrospective. Any completely original sight or sound is in fact a new combination of old ones. Things have to be that way. Inspiration must predate composition. (2) It is difficult to make an unambigous case for Generation X passion and activism without acknowledging its obvious passivity. The climax to the generation's consider anthem is, after all, "I tried so hard/So hard to find/Oh well/Whatever/Never mind". Exhausted acceptance of the system began long before the Strokes, Is This It?
The conclusion?
In this context, hipster nostalgia makes a crazy sort of sense: rather than summon the energy for a defining statement of anger or outrage, Gen Y has only mustered a shrug, and waited as the consumerism that grunge initially fought off washes over.
"It's sad to think what the state of rock'n'roll will be in 20 years from now," Cobain told Azerrad. "It just seems like when rock'n'roll is dead, the whole world's gonna explode … it's already turned into nothing but a fashion statement and an identity for kids to use as a tool."
Rock'n'roll has gone from a linear derivative art form to an abstracted, nominal designation. It's not dead, just more or less spent.
There's just one problem. Who gives a flying monkey-wotsit if rock and roll is dead or not? The idea that pop music is some kind of vector for significant social change is based on a brief conjecture, mostly an illusion, sustained by baby-boomer arrogance. The 1960s counterculture fought its toughest battles in the United States. In the end, however, it was an attempted alternative capitalism. There is no capitalist alternative to capitalism, as all the current headscratching about the recession and the sovereign debt crisis should just be further proof. You either accept the system or you don't... as Kurt Cobain found out.
The author hints at a reason why this slow death is taking place. The medium of rock and roll is (or was) the single*, which is now an almost defunct form. At the smallest scale the cultural cycle is so fast now rock and roll seems a pedestrian art now. Whole cultural phenomena can rise and fall while a rock band spends 18 months diddling about recording its new album.
* A sub-medium would be the radio.
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