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[Dec. 28th, 2008|12:45 am] |
NO AGREEMENTS TODAY, NO AGREEMENTS TOMORROW
Gunshots in the distance tonight; New Orleans, je t'aime. I am very extremely fucking tired after dancing all night at I Luv You James/I Love You Fela at Dragon's Den (being Brown and Kuti, respectively), and am exhausted even after taking a nap before work (extremely not my style, as I tend to be of the William Jarrott school of Never-Sleep-Never-Die). Anyway, some scattered thoughts before I sack the fuck out and watch some Babylon 5.
1. Idea seed: a critique of the "Work Society" as it applies to the Third Reich and the Final Solution. What is novel about the Nazi atrocities is not their inhumanity, as the human capability for genocide was by this time well established by 3,500 years of history, but rather its adherence to the methodologies, protocols, and social customs of the new industrial Work Society. A social model that has persevered and been further perfected in the years beyond the fall of Germany. I will never write this essay, but someone should.
2. One stab at the phenomenology of the "hipster": a new youth culture disaffected with the by-now-very-stale promises of society (the dream of America The Golden Society, the appeal of the step-by-step rise up the professional class, the traditional family structure, and all the rest of the old favorites) alive in an age where all the major subversive movements or revolutionary challenges to the status quo of the past (60's counterculture, punk, and so on) have been commodified. In the absence of a viable means to direct said energy of discontent, it turns to a deep cynicism, a pervading suspicion that regards any passionate belief or investment as a hook to a false promise and therefore absurd. Its cultural nodes instead offer no promises to be broken, no ideology to be betrayed: hyper-self-awareness, a celebration of vacuousness, an obsession with empty aesthetics severed from any ideological grounding. Ultimately, a manifestation of a wider western nihilism, I suspect.
It is worth noting the counterpart of this phenomenon that occurs in radical communities, again rooting from disaffection and disgust with the social order and status quo. The response to said disgust is an attempt to purge the seemingly endless intrusions of the mainstream social order from one's life and community. The ideal of course being the creation of viable social infrastructure able to adequately replace that which is being destroyed. However, too often such infrastructure is not established or is not sound, and the obsessive quest to disconnect-disconnect-disconnect from the toxic at-large society leads to a) a culture of one-upsmanship to prove integrity and commitment to "the cause"; b) a personal paranoia and eventual schizophrenia that grows from the ceaseless self-questioning "is what I am doing true to my ideology, or does it perpetuate or buy into some aspect of the diseased society?", which in turn leads to a certain moral paralysis that severely limits (or even completely disables) the exploration of new possibilities, models, or ideas necessary to any movement with aspirations beyond infinite inertia, this in turn leading to c) the eventual development of a subculture so disconnected and incestuous that it is unable to interface with any other body, sealed in the iron casket of its own rigid ideology that growth or development or evolution is impossible, leaving the culture to marinate and fester in its own fluids, cursing its own errant teleology and yearning for some imagined edenic arcadia of harmony and cooperation, a state of society that never existing, before or after the agrarian revolution and founding of "The State." (Consider, as a side note, Hakim Bey's notion of the pirate utopia: a model of social order enviable in some ways for its structure, but outside of and in fact perhaps in opposition to morality).
Or whatever.
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| Comments: |
how're you liking babylon 5? i can't believe i never watched it before now. i'm in the middle of season three now and i'm completely hooked, despite a few things.
This warrants a longer conversation, so I'll probably send you an e-mail about it later, but I'm in the last few episodes of Season 2 and starting to be pretty drawn in. As you said, there are a few things that bother me, but I think it is pretty great all in all.
Definitely. Hit me up anytime, i have no one to talk to about it around here!
p.s. I would like to have intimate relations with dr. franklin.
In regard to your last paragraph, I would say that the most satisfying cultural experiences I have had since (albeit briefly) attempting to sever connections with "mainstream" culture have been, in fact, my mainstream indulgences, which now give me a feeling of solidarity with the world at large that I wouldn't have had prior to being involved in radical culture.
And in regard to your ideas about the "hipster", the narrowness of your definition surprises me, because the usage of the term seems to be really nebulous.
i like your second idea quite a bit, but as a husserlian purist, i'm extremely troubled by your use of the term "phenomenology," when what you are referring to has little or nothing to do with object-intention modes of consciousness. with all due respect, you're conflating a study of a cultural phenomenon (and its consequent levels of social estrangement) with the philosophical method of phenomenology, which has almost nothing to do with social interactions. use of the method is and has always been confined to the study of first-person existence qua sense-based or intuitive epistemological wills. i'm not quite sure what you'd accomplish in terms of a "phenomenological study of the 'hipster,'" when it sounds like what you actually want to be doing is a sort of buber-inspired ontological investigation of "i-it" object relationships in the manifest social universe. < /philosophy major wankery> also, if you're about to read ulysses, you should definitely get your hands on: 1) a copy of vladimir nabokov's map of joyce's dublin (he taught the course on ulysses at cornell for a while) 2) the semiotic schemata from linari, et al there is no way i could have possibly understood the novel without the latter item, and the former item is a neat look into the mind of two of the most brilliant 20th century authors, so why not?
A Husslerian purist? Does this mean you will not buy Penthouse?
Oh, you said husserlian purist.
Thanks for the Joyce recs. Will keep in mind!
From: (Anonymous)
2009-01-01 06:37 am (UTC)
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http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html | |
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