rave era as recapitulation of the sixties

[shiels]

I suppose I've never been completely convinced by the idea that if only we behave in a certain, goal-oriented way, like serious, revolutionary adults, capitalism will crumble. I was trying to explain this to Shiels the other day.

That’s a misrepresentation and you didn’t really try…

I think your issue is that you don’t like the tone of anti-capitalists. Humourless communists, that whole thing, I dunno. I get that. When I first encountered kpunk I thought, this fella is just a grump and he’s projecting his misery onto culture, seeing all this music and film through morose-tinted glasses.

And of course marxist critique only is dry. But to wave it away completely with a brain like yours… maybe its wilful ignorance, you want to maintain allegiances.

It isn’t his most thrilling writing but capitalist realism quite simply fleshing out the argument that mental health is political, re-politicising it.

and a huge factor is due to isolation, austerity, precarious work. The gradual loss of collectivity and solidarity tracing back to thatcher but as third rightly says a process set in place by economic approaches that go back to the great depression and ww2

 

[thirdform]

politics can go either way. it's a red herring.

I mean I reject the construction of acid communism to begin with, unlessits 93 gay biker bear dungeons playing old jammin unit and walker records at 170 BPM and breaking the space time barrier but that's for another debate...

I think most leftists in the UK don't realise that they are being rendered surplus to requirements as a new kind of technocratic rational authoritarianism takes hold. This has been going on since the end of WW II but it certainly became apparent after the fall of the USSR and the Iraq war, though its hard to fully accept this belief, the resistance of the patient to the psychoanalysts prognoses and so on...

I also don't think most leftists in UK actually are willing to think through what a revolution in an advanced capitalist country like this would look like. The ruling class certainly figured it out, British jobs for British workers. our proletariat has been domesticated to go to war against their brothers and sisters to protect what little crums it has been able to obtain.

 

[thirdform]

That’s a misrepresentation and you didn’t really try…

I think your issue is that you don’t like the tone of anti-capitalists. Humourless communists, that whole thing, I dunno. I get that. When I first encountered kpunk I thought, this fella is just a grump and he’s projecting his misery onto culture, seeing all this music and film through morose-tinted glasses.

And of course marxist critique only is dry. But to wave it away completely with a brain like yours… maybe its wilful ignorance, you want to maintain allegiances.

It isn’t his most thrilling writing but capitalist realism quite simply fleshing out the argument that mental health is political, re-politicising it.

and a huge factor is due to isolation, austerity, precarious work. The gradual loss of collectivity and solidarity tracing back to thatcher but as third rightly says a process set in place by economic approaches that go back to the great depression and ww2

It's quite ironic in that regard though, todays religious anti-communists are about as humourless it is possible to be. not like the early christian gnostics at all. You're more likely to find that sort of energy in east german hard techno or northern happy hardcore. or even the grittier end of grindcore. Not that I'm saying Luke is an anti-com, but he does have that argument that Marxists reduce everything to rational calculation and deprive things of their innate beauty, but so do conservatives, even more in fact.

 

[shiels]

And third, I think this repoliticisation of mental states is useful to your ideas on psychosis. And thinking about psychedelic culture

What is the cumulative effect of people perceiving and creating in these states?

Which ways of thinking, perceiving, organising and acting does the psychedelic experience modulate or enable? How can these effects be applied in other medium and contexts? Without drugs. Without permanent psychosis.

 

[thirdform]

And third, I think this repoliticisation of mental states is useful to your ideas on psychosis. And thinking about psychedelic culture

What is the cumulative effect of people perceiving and creating in these states?

Which ways of thinking, perceiving, organising and acting does the psychedelic experience modulate or enable? How can these effects be applied in other medium and contexts? Without drugs. Without permanent psychosis.

Well anecdotally as someone who has suffered from psychosis - if we consider psychosis as a form of disablement, I think this open up avenues for a greater awareness of interdependence. I certainly remember coming out of hospital the last time and thinking, you know, there is an unspeakable barrier here now, many of my old friends are still friends, but they aren't really good mates or comrades anymore. not out of any fault of their own, i hasten to add! But the segmentation of these social bonds necessitates this kind of guarding your distance. and I think distance is a big impedament to solidarity, either geographically or economically or socially. It's what Marx talks about in the 18th Brumair, about how the atomised peasant cannot have class consciousness in the way that people arranged into a sack of potatoes do. This isn't to call for a vanguard party to fix things or anything.

 

[thirdform]

More pertinently I think aveues can be opened up. what does the schizophrenics language tell us? its word salad, but what is it alluding to? Too much hospitalisation of psychosis revolves around it being incoherent gobbledygook, even on the left. The schizophrenics state is not important, so long as they are domesticated. this seems dangerous to me.

 

[shiels]

That’s schizoanalysis isn’t it?

 

[thirdform]

That’s schizoanalysis isn’t it?

I suppose but I find things like schizoanalysis, psychoanalysis to still to be restricted to the setting of the clinic. my point is we need to go beyond it.

like in ancient china: pay your doctor when you have no symptoms, don't pay him when you're ill for a nocked up arbitrary medicinal diagnosis.

we need to dispense with the idea of the stable mental state, collectively.

 

[Woebot]

I mean I reject the construction of acid communism to begin with, unlessits 93 gay biker bear dungeons playing old jammin unit and walker records at 170 BPM and breaking the space time barrier but that's for another debate...

I think most leftists in the UK don't realise that they are being rendered surplus to requirements as a new kind of technocratic rational authoritarianism takes hold. This has been going on since the end of WW II but it certainly became apparent after the fall of the USSR and the Iraq war, though its hard to fully accept this belief, the resistance of the patient to the psychoanalysts prognoses and so on...

I also don't think most leftists in UK actually are willing to think through what a revolution in an advanced capitalist country like this would look like. The ruling class certainly figured it out, British jobs for British workers. our proletariat has been domesticated to go to war against their brothers and sisters to protect what little crums it has been able to obtain.

ha, yeah i actually deleted that post before you replied to it.

i don't really want to go into politics - AT ALL - i just don't think it's a particularly illuminating prism through which to look at anything. it's just about tribalism/factionalism. culturewars.

there's plenty of well-meaning on both sides of the divide. FIGHTING EACHOTHER.

change is slow.

maybe in 2200 they'll think it's insane that we ate animals or had private property - just as we think slavery [as it was practised] was abhorrent or that women didn't have the vote.

 

[WashYourHands]

The world is schizoid already.

One thing with psychosis is the obvious wrestling with thresholds that can melt & manoeuvre in their own time & under the condition’s own jurisdiction. Case study - John Balance. Love’s Secret Domain was such an incredible lp, but the way Coil moved on with ELpH & Black Light District was majestic, parallels with Weatherall’s turn to Two Lone Swordsmen. Comedown music for a ruptured culture? Not sure, but most of this music will stand up as well in 50 years as it does today. Problem was, by pouring oil on the coil fire, by seeking to stare into the abyss, by daring to attempt to retrieve gold from this muse, Balance effectively obliterated himself, first through alcohol, then by 2 trips every morning (allegedly) until his death. The brutality of psychosis is one thing, testing your resolve against it by encouraging it though, without supervision, can lead to deeply tragic results.

When the party was winding down, close friends turned to heroin, alcohol & with poorly managed mental health conditions compounded by too many evangelical journeys into the abyss through DMT, they’re no longer here. Too young, too much life to live & no coming back. Saw the same thing with my Dad’s generation. Old UFO & Hawkwind heads, who revelled in festivals & tripping, but found heroin, alcohol & benzodiazepines over the rainbow. There’s a warning without finger-wagging, judgemental hysteria. You only get one mind. Best to look after it.

 

[luka]

As Matthew says politics is idiotic by definition. There's no way to enter that conversation and say anything that means anything, let alone anything intelligent or useful.

 

[WashYourHands]

the whole haight-ashbury experiment - with alternative systems of healthcare (the free clinic) police (the hells angels) HALO (free legal advice) food distribution (the diggers) that was an attempt to build a true counterculture

but yes as you point out. the psychoanalyst dernberg criticised mcluhan's optimistic view of the haight system though (this from my book) "Their community was not the independent counterculture they might have wished. It was actually a subculture which mirrored the straight world in its shortcomings, allowed its members to continue in their regression and/ or plateauing, and depend on society.”




really horrific stories from the haight and naropa. again in the book.



very true. and generally postponed having children until it was all done and dusted. i remember very few young children milling about in the rave years. we were the children.

Hey, do you have a title for said text? Bit of an obsession with said cultures & perspectives on them. Happy to pay if in print.

 

[luka]

Washyourhands, have you been here before, under different names? Your rambling, anecdotal style, your affiliations and sympathies, your taste and your age all feel very, very familiar.

 

[luka]

he’s projecting his misery onto culture, seeing all this music and film through morose-tinted glasses.

That's right, you've got it. That's all it was.

 

[WashYourHands]

I dare to ramble.

 

[luka]

But there were other strands to his thought that are energising and alive still. The ones that run counter to the Eeyore stuff

 

[luka]

the other thing to bear in mind here is that dissensus is a machine for generating conversation and any mention of the word capitalism has always operated as a circuit breaker. Someone says the word and the conversation shuts out. You can't go any further. Oh, it's the fault of 'capitalism' is it? Let's go back to ranking our top twenty synthpop records then.

 

[luka]

It's inane. No one is allowed to use that pointless woolly word ever again.

 

[shiels]

Fuck up

 

[shiels]

ha, yeah i actually deleted that post before you replied to it.

i don't really want to go into politics - AT ALL - i just don't think it's a particularly illuminating prism through which to look at anything. it's just about tribalism/factionalism. culturewars.

there's plenty of well-meaning on both sides of the divide. FIGHTING EACHOTHER.

change is slow.

maybe in 2200 they'll think it's insane that we ate animals or had private property - just as we think slavery [as it was practised] was abhorrent or that women didn't have the vote.

What did you all make of this ?

https://frieze.com/media/jeremy-deller-everybody-place-incomplete-history-britain-1984-1992