A very clear example of this centuries-old eternity is undoubtedly Oneohtrix Point Never's latest album, Magic Oneohtrix Point Never. The disc is an intimate concept album, in which Daniel Lopatin (the mind who gave birth to Oneohtrix Point Never) puts into music the radio flips formats, those moments in which American radios change their "biology", ceasing to be, for example , a radio that mainly broadcasts easy-listening and becoming a soft rock radio. The Oneohtrix Point Never album is a concept album that speaks, therefore, of eternity in two senses. First, it is a disc explicitly dedicated to a phenomenon now obsolete and relegated to the fictions of collective memory, largely replaced by the torrential streaming of podcasts, memes and videos. Secondly, and coming out a little from these dull reflections from Video killed the radio star, Lopatin's record is a hymn to technical, real, material eternity; a reflection on the transcendental time that underlies every cultural phenomenon. By repeating and sublimating the phenomenon of format flips, Lopatin shows how subjective and individual death has been abolished by the constant work of impersonal and technically mediated time. The radio becomes the utopian but paradoxically real pulsation of an unnatural and inhuman time, out of any coordinate.
By staging what, in fact, are small inorganic deaths, Oneohtrix Point Never demonstrates its absolute impossibility, banning all nostalgia (after all, you cannot regret what is eternal ...), and puts us in front of the complete defeat of chronological, anthropic and linear time in favor of a post-historical and eternal time that keeps coming back on itself like a snake or a spiral - a positive inorganic spironomy that necessarily escapes the finitude of our lives and in which we can participate, often involuntarily, through our fictions and our artifacts. Quoting Lopatin himself: "My music is better when things change and transform […] when the dial turns on itself".
Nonetheless, with all due respect to these aesthetic and theoretical efforts to kill the moonlight and put an end to the passage of time, it must be noted how, in contemporary cultural criticism, this passion for spiraling eternity is a minority passion, largely relegated to a group of outbreaks. We must surrender to the evidence, as Linda Trent already suggested in the 1990s, of how cultural chronopolitics has atrophied and has become an anemic cult of nostalgia, an obsession and an anthropomaniacal fixation on our finitude and our dear memories.
The most painful side of this marginality is certainly noting how a sad pseudocritical vulgate has been built on the idea of technically reproducible memory dissolved by the subject of memory itself and, more specifically, around the corpse of Mark Fisher. It is easy to see, in fact, how a turbid mass has spontaneously assembled and brandished the remains of the British theorist to justify a resentful and, at worst, pretense attitude towards the world mediated by our expanded memory. Armed with Capitalist Realism, exhibited as the Little Red Book of a Pale and Agonizing Cultural Revolution, and ready to accuse every enemy of being infected with the disease of theoretical vampirism, this group has transformed Fisher's work into a sad invective against stagnation ( cultural and economic) contemporary - a work of denunciation morally detached from this same presumed stagnation and freed from any kind of internal contradiction. With the tone of someone who knows a lot, this congregation of spirits in exile, far from the promised land of the revolution, has hung its curses on the door of "neoliberalism" - an ultra-polysemic term, capable of encompassing everything in itself, without need of too many explanations or clarifications - and she has relegated herself to her black corner where she can mourn the slow cancellation of the future, unaware of how the present constantly produces escape routes from majority time.
The point at which this type of Fisherian readings concentrated in a more virulent way, reaching its peak, was certainly the criticism of hauntology, the denunciation of all those cultural forms that slavishly repeat the ghosts of a dead past and buried or a future that has never materialized.
Over time, however, it became increasingly difficult to understand how these Ghostbusters were fighting the good fight of the revolution, admonishing, without too many practical or political implications, all those who did not give a shock to the system and forcing the artist or public figure of turn to simultaneously demonstrate a total extraneousness to neoliberal ideology and an almost unnatural capacity to give birth, ex nihilo, to cultural works that are absolutely and undoubtedly new, or that at least do not settle too quickly on the social conventions of the world around them. It almost seems that this type of criticism has progressively become, in Italy and abroad, a sterile test of abstract strength, aimed at cleansing the artistic landscape from any non-revolutionary power, from any movement that is not located outside the present. and above the social stagnation in which, objectively, we find ourselves living. Quotes such as: "" Repetition "is the name that designates our cultural condition, a culture that reproduces an infinity of remakes of other remakes. While the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties were characterized by well-defined styles in design, fashion, music and art, from the nineties to today it seems to live in a gigantic remix. We are trapped in a boomer culture loop ”have become empty forms of criticism, aimed at denouncing a cultural state that is morally decadent, but materially unassailable. To date, they are indistinguishable from the complaints of an ordinary hypercapitalist billionaire in withdrawal from an economic boom and from novelties that are easily marketable to his fellow men. Among other things, the quote above is from Peter Thiel.
By staging what, in fact, are small inorganic deaths, Oneohtrix Point Never demonstrates its absolute impossibility, banning all nostalgia (after all, you cannot regret what is eternal ...), and puts us in front of the complete defeat of chronological, anthropic and linear time in favor of a post-historical and eternal time that keeps coming back on itself like a snake or a spiral - a positive inorganic spironomy that necessarily escapes the finitude of our lives and in which we can participate, often involuntarily, through our fictions and our artifacts. Quoting Lopatin himself: "My music is better when things change and transform […] when the dial turns on itself".
Nonetheless, with all due respect to these aesthetic and theoretical efforts to kill the moonlight and put an end to the passage of time, it must be noted how, in contemporary cultural criticism, this passion for spiraling eternity is a minority passion, largely relegated to a group of outbreaks. We must surrender to the evidence, as Linda Trent already suggested in the 1990s, of how cultural chronopolitics has atrophied and has become an anemic cult of nostalgia, an obsession and an anthropomaniacal fixation on our finitude and our dear memories.
The most painful side of this marginality is certainly noting how a sad pseudocritical vulgate has been built on the idea of technically reproducible memory dissolved by the subject of memory itself and, more specifically, around the corpse of Mark Fisher. It is easy to see, in fact, how a turbid mass has spontaneously assembled and brandished the remains of the British theorist to justify a resentful and, at worst, pretense attitude towards the world mediated by our expanded memory. Armed with Capitalist Realism, exhibited as the Little Red Book of a Pale and Agonizing Cultural Revolution, and ready to accuse every enemy of being infected with the disease of theoretical vampirism, this group has transformed Fisher's work into a sad invective against stagnation ( cultural and economic) contemporary - a work of denunciation morally detached from this same presumed stagnation and freed from any kind of internal contradiction. With the tone of someone who knows a lot, this congregation of spirits in exile, far from the promised land of the revolution, has hung its curses on the door of "neoliberalism" - an ultra-polysemic term, capable of encompassing everything in itself, without need of too many explanations or clarifications - and she has relegated herself to her black corner where she can mourn the slow cancellation of the future, unaware of how the present constantly produces escape routes from majority time.
The point at which this type of Fisherian readings concentrated in a more virulent way, reaching its peak, was certainly the criticism of hauntology, the denunciation of all those cultural forms that slavishly repeat the ghosts of a dead past and buried or a future that has never materialized.
Over time, however, it became increasingly difficult to understand how these Ghostbusters were fighting the good fight of the revolution, admonishing, without too many practical or political implications, all those who did not give a shock to the system and forcing the artist or public figure of turn to simultaneously demonstrate a total extraneousness to neoliberal ideology and an almost unnatural capacity to give birth, ex nihilo, to cultural works that are absolutely and undoubtedly new, or that at least do not settle too quickly on the social conventions of the world around them. It almost seems that this type of criticism has progressively become, in Italy and abroad, a sterile test of abstract strength, aimed at cleansing the artistic landscape from any non-revolutionary power, from any movement that is not located outside the present. and above the social stagnation in which, objectively, we find ourselves living. Quotes such as: "" Repetition "is the name that designates our cultural condition, a culture that reproduces an infinity of remakes of other remakes. While the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties were characterized by well-defined styles in design, fashion, music and art, from the nineties to today it seems to live in a gigantic remix. We are trapped in a boomer culture loop ”have become empty forms of criticism, aimed at denouncing a cultural state that is morally decadent, but materially unassailable. To date, they are indistinguishable from the complaints of an ordinary hypercapitalist billionaire in withdrawal from an economic boom and from novelties that are easily marketable to his fellow men. Among other things, the quote above is from Peter Thiel.
