yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
I recently read a decent piece on DeLillo's Cosmopolis and the seeming impossibility of resistance to capitalism - https://web.archive.org/web/20160809052249/https://thepointmag.com/2014/criticism/foes-god

In a 2005 interview with the French magazine Panic, DeLillo outlined part of the problem:

'You know, in America and in Western Europe we live in very wealthy democracies, we can do virtually anything we want, I’m able to write whatever I want to write. But I can’t be part of this culture of simulation, in the sense of the culture’s absorbing of everything. In doing that it neutralizes anything dangerous, anything that might threaten the consumer society. In Cosmopolis [a character] says, “What a culture does is absorb and neutralize its adversaries.” If you’re a writer who, one way or another, comes to be seen as dangerous, you’ll wake up one morning and discover your face on a coffee mug or a t-shirt and you’ll have been neutralized.'

i had that feeling when i saw that mark fisher feature in the financial times
 

firefinga

Well-known member
...Of course, the original first wave of electro was heavily accompanied by Breakdance. Seems to be totally forgotten today, Breakdance that is...
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
Walking round London during office hours youare made very vividly aware of the imposed rhythms, which are natural only to the extent that they are regulated by the time scales of addiction and hunger and to a lesser extent, attention.

The workers are kept in their pens until caffeine or nicotine or food craving affects productivity. Then they're allowed outside to make the necessary biochemical alteration. The scale of it and the synchronisation of it is a powerful, even overwhelming experience. This is of course not remotely profound or original but every time you're made aware of it its a shock.

I very much like the modern architecture which lays this bare. The huge segmeted transparent building eith the hundreds and hundreds of work pods in endless rows within. It's like a sexy version of the matrix. It allows you to visualise these units as batteries.

the book you mentioned and the post above makes me think of the concept of the dérive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dérive
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
DeLillo outlined part of the problem:[/I]

'You know, in America and in Western Europe we live in very wealthy democracies, we can do virtually anything we want, I’m able to write whatever I want to write. But I can’t be part of this culture of simulation, in the sense of the culture’s absorbing of everything. In doing that it neutralizes anything dangerous, anything that might threaten the consumer society. In Cosmopolis [a character] says, “What a culture does is absorb and neutralize its adversaries.” If you’re a writer who, one way or another, comes to be seen as dangerous, you’ll wake up one morning and discover your face on a coffee mug or a t-shirt and you’ll have been neutralized.'
[/I]

Wrt deLillo - well, if the way you want to resist capitalism is to be an individualist famous writer, of course you're going to get co-opted because capitalism fetishises the 'exceptional' individual. Plays right into its hands. You have to resist as part of the collective in order to avoid this logic - and the collective IS the machine.

So antihumanism could be seen, as someone has said upthread, as music/art from the perspective of the machine - from the perspective of the workers who are the machine, from our perspective (unless Jeff Bezos is lurking here) when we see ourselves at a macro-level, rather than from that well-worn (cynical?) romantic perspective of us as free beings that dominates pop culture. And maybe that's why antihumanism can feel so emotive even when it's anti-emotional. The world is antihuman.

Brilliant thread: Thirdform you have really brought the obscure tunes here. Hardly heard any of these, and 90% killer.
 
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luka

Well-known member
As a famous writer and exceptional individual deeply committed to the Kollective I belive that there is a feedback loop in which the E.I is the product to some extent and the pride of the collective and in return the EI feeds back into the collective and raises its collective level. They are part of the same machine and shouldn't be separated. Not everyone is DJ Hype but what's DJ Hype without jungle.

What a writer journalist does is take a conversation and make it hierarchical. So they become the mouthpiece for all these anonymous hidden inputs. What a forum does is return that vertical to the horizontal.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
encourage the masses to see art in the same way they are encouraged to see wealth - that a few people created it all on their own in isolation, and that they hence deserve all the plaudits and all the wealth.
 

luka

Well-known member
Another one is

Don't have a wank when there's no spunk in the sack

But that's about economics
 

luka

Well-known member
This is also why when I got nomos book and saw dissensus wasn't in the index I chucked it in the bin
 
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