luka

Well-known member
The idea of the limit is abandoned. The CCRU is about as close as you get in the '90s I suppose.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
They recognised that French theory fits in better with people like Leary, Burroughs, Ballard, McLuhan, than with boring old academic stuff. It's all part of the counter culture and LSD and so on.
Yeah this sounds right.
 

luka

Well-known member
Disreputable gurus, snake oil salesman, LSD shamans, voyants, hams, charlatans, rogues, hucksters, visionaries. The only sort of people I have any interest in.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Like you mentioned earlier the occult is an essential part of this.

I think so, but I am struggling to think of any thing overtly occult that Semiotext(e) did. I guess some of the nonce Hakim Bey / Peter Lamborn Wilson's stuff.

My guess is that they have disparate groups of audiences and at one end there are the LSD shamanic psychonauts and at the other end the serious bookish communists who might not be so directly immersed in psychedelia.
 

sus

Well-known member
I really enjoyed I love dick, just seemed to have the right amount of everything. Then I read torpor and it was a bit too grim, I started the other one, angels in America is it called? And it seemed OK but then I lost interest cos it was a PDF and too hard to read.

Aliens & Anorexia!

I thought it was good, not quite as full of adrenaline as ILD, but yeah reading on PDF is tough
 
The idea of the limit is abandoned. The CCRU is about as close as you get in the '90s I suppose.

Is part of the reason this kind of writing can’t sustain these days about the credulity, freedoms, semi-anonymity afforded by collective operations? As fallible individuals with basic needs and insecurities and questionable income streams and messy love lives these people are easily reduced, dismissed, laughed away but as a collective you can say stuff you don’t live up to

The twitter age of self branding plays it safe, calculated controversy for capital, which makes real risky transgressions and boundary pushing in the politics and theory sphere less likely. The extreme excommunication of cancel culture etc
 

sus

Well-known member
I think it's less likely counterculture has disappeared and more likely that culture has exploded/atomized and there are many niches with their own weird thing that are countercultural in some sense

But these things take time; everyone working in Semiotext(e)'s prime thought they'd missed the boat on avant...
 

luka

Well-known member
Is part of the reason this kind of writing can’t sustain these days about the credulity, freedoms, semi-anonymity afforded by collective operations? As fallible individuals with basic needs and insecurities and questionable income streams and messy love lives these people are easily reduced, dismissed, laughed away but as a collective you can say stuff you don’t live up to

The twitter age of self branding plays it safe, calculated controversy for capital, which makes real risky transgressions and boundary pushing in the politics and theory sphere less likely. The extreme excommunication of cancel culture etc

Cultural cowardice.
 

luka

Well-known member
When I said their fanzines I meant re/search I couldn't rememeber the name of the thing
 

john eden

male pale and stale
When I said their fanzines I meant re/search I couldn't rememeber the name of the thing

Yeah RE/SEARCH was the big one - the first proper massive US anthology of weirdness. But Semiotext(e) did some good anthologies too about US counter culture, German, Italy.

RE/SEARCH also inspired stuff like the slightly fashier Apocalypse Culture series and the UK's Rapid Eye. These things were like the textbooks I absorbed when I was supposed to be doing actual school/college stuff.
 

luka

Well-known member
Yeah RE/SEARCH was the big one - the first proper massive US anthology of weirdness. But Semiotext(e) did some good anthologies too about US counter culture, German, Italy.

RE/SEARCH also inspired stuff like the slightly fashier Apocalypse Culture series and the UK's Rapid Eye. These things were like the textbooks I absorbed when I was supposed to be doing actual school/college stuff.

I've got semiotexte USA. I've got a rapid eye and maybe an apocolypse culture too I always buy these things when I see them in the secondhand shops.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
All got a real seediness to it which it shares with post-punk, industrial etc people with nob piercings etc

Yeah that side of it hasn't aged at all well. Still people doing all that with even less imagination and style though... there is more dignity in going to those 1980s hits nights with Bucks Fizz and T'Pau.
 

sus

Well-known member
All of us long for a countercultural movement with energy

Where does this energy come from? Where do you find it? The discovery of a radical new form? Or does that part actually come after the enthusiasm
 
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