Happy Black Friday Caroline Polachek
william_kent
Well-known member
sus
Moderator
If you want to understand the culture, you've gotta understand what the culture cares about.
Besides, this is my era, this is my society, and I'd rather embrace/experience/understand it than be a turncoat to my age, prop up my own exceptionality narrative with a flight to things past.
The people who are alive now are alive now. When they die, they will be dead. The already-dead are already dead, i.e. not going anywhere. Witness is an ancient word. The Hebrew equivalent goes back before the Old Testament. I think you should bear witness to your age. In part because I don't trust others to—they're doing a shit job as is. In part because when this rich, living moment of shared context is gone, it will exist only as the partial compression of those who testified to it. To live in the past is to live in the testimonies of people who lived in the present. Second-hand existence, second-hand understanding. Naw.
Not to mention everyone thinks their age is shit. Even ages that were cataclysmic, revolutionary, generative. If Dissensus were around in the 60s, everyone would be posting Jimi Rodgers choons and bitching about the hippies. Yeah, sure, the hippies sucked, but what a shame to miss out on all that living, moving culture, in favor of dusty gramophones.
I don't think it does. I think basically this kind of interest in pop culture is seen as girlish. I think most "serious male intellectuals" look like a hypocritical, politically radical asshole who use vented anger "the system" and "modernity" and "the man" to paper over personal failings, both moral and constitutional. Look at the examples of male intellectual culture we see played out today, from the Kantbot sphere, litbro n+1 sphere, the Occupy sphere, the post-Fisher left, the rationalist sphere, the IDW/alt-right spheres: they're dominated not by their embrace but by their rejection of popular culture and modern society. Their problem isn't worshipping Lana, it's fetishizing the past (from Deleuze to Hegel to the pre-Socratics; from grime to city pop to classical music). If you think Dissensus with its "revulsion at modernity" is a break from dominant patterns of "what it means to be a intellectual," you're smoking something. Dissensus embodies many of the stereotypes par excellence of (male) intelligentsia, with some (notable and noble) exceptions like being (roughly) apolitical.
That said, there's no mutual exclusivity between interest in the past and present; I spend plenty of time going through esoterica, going through historical relics. But let's not pretend the fetishization of these relics and esotericas isn't founded on the pursuit of symbolic capital, isn't predicated in a vision of what proper intellectual life consists of, isn't exactly the kind of hipster maneuver this board likes to scorn.
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luka
Well-known member
theres literally 12 year old stabbers on remand with 30x her views
linebaugh
Well-known member
all good and agreeable points but do you never wonder if this actually is what the culture cares about? that your reaching SOCIETY? I dont know anybody who cares about Polachek except you, beiser and presumably everyone like you two. Not that you need to be connecting to the culture to like something, just Im not sold thats whats going on. And I guess a group of intellectuals declaring what the culture is and then backing it up by writing about it as if theyre removed is a kind of culture in itself, but not The culture its purported to be.
I dont think the politically radical guy is the 'intellectual' per se. They have their own lane thats primarily politcal emptied of whatever intellegentsia it might have. When I think of intellectual young people I basically think of you and I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe because the closest space there is to a non political intellectual mainstream is something like pitchfork and thats what this thread is doing
sus
Moderator
Did you blog about grime or did you blog about grime
luka
Well-known member
dissensus was formed at a moment when people were, in fact enamoured of the culture and music around them. it was the tailend of what Simon calls the hardcore continuum. everyone was besotted with grime which i invented in 1999, as well as the various different interlocking scenes which preceded it. yes k-punk hated everything unless he could find a way to shape a blog post around it but everybody always understood that was just him and his depression.
all that music and culture was independent and operated through its own networks, from the pirate radio stations to the venues to the record shops. and it was everywhere. you couldn't escape it. so there is a lived experience of what a bottom-up culture looks like. this is one of the things which distinguishes us from ilx who would scoff at this naive formulation in a lofty and superior way. there is no revulsion with modernity here but there is a suspicion of the Truman Show version of modernity that Limburger correctly accuses you of pushing. the idea that we should uncritically accept the spectacle and bow down to the shining ones is i think sort of disgusting.
just cos its there... pay attention to it by all means, i watched all the Marvel films in a fortnight, but you can take a sceptical and critical position towards them, and really, you have to, becasue its a trough of shit and youre a grown-up and a smart one at that.
you cant feign a passionate engagement with something you are not passionate about and so that leaves you writing what Limburger, again very astutely called fey satires of whatever it was. it's a weak place to write from and you can't generate any real energy from there and its palpable.
craner
Beast of Burden
That was such a rousing post I had to dab my eyes with a tissue.
craner
Beast of Burden
You spoke for a generation, while also carefully not speaking for those in the generation who made the error of posting on ILX instead.
sus
Moderator
It's a better post than mine. Bottom-up vs top-down culture wasn't quite the paradigm I had in mind, more contemporary/domestic vs historical/exotic, but Liner's Truman Show comment makes more sense with the first carving.
I'm not sure it's fair to say I'm a schill for the shiny, you've been gracious enough to read my writing elsewhere so can judge I suppose; and Polachek isn't someone I'll still be listening to in a year. In that sense, I think your "face pressed up to the glass" comment a few days back, about being in the rain, is maybe closer to the truth.
The problem is, I don't know where bottom-up culture I believe in is happening among people my age, so it's not a choice I'm fully free to make. I don't think I'm alone in this—I don't see Linebaugh or anyone else my age around here presenting example of living cultural ecosystems/discourses, which can be a respite from spending your time with fossils, interacting with objects that can't talk back and cannot evolve and were fitted to conditions of a world past.
So if out in the rain, not much life is happening; if I'm unwilling to change myself to get past the doorman indoors—well I might as well watch through the glass. Better than nodding along to the oldheads endlessly about how great the pre-history was. No offense, of course.
craner
Beast of Burden
But is this not just a concession that the past was better than the present?