6 August 2009: "Peace,"
This post is about syncretism. Carles composes an ironic encomium to Woodstock in order to problematize its organizing principle, that musical taste can somehow correspond with a suppression of violence. "I remember when ppl used to unite around ‘the best music in the world’ instead of getting ‘all divided’ abt it," he writes, mockingly positing the turbulent late 1960s as a golden age of togetherness. From the monolithic viewpoint of youth culture there was a cultural consensus in favor of marijuana-fogged mediocrity in pop music, and this was idealistically misrecognized as an artistic renaissance that would fuse aesthetics with progressive political goals, the pacifistic sublimation of war and capitulation to the totalitarians masquerading as socialists foremost among them. Instead youthful pacifism was transformed into consumerist passive-ism, and a generation learned to associate lifestyle branding as a sufficient surrogate for a civil society and individual liberty.
As Carles is all too aware, musical taste is the field on which violence among the self-conscious creative class is currently conducted, internalizing a struggle to the cohort that was once fought between generations, and distracting them from actual political engagement. "There really is more to life than ‘peace’, ‘love’, and ‘music’, and they don’t really have much 2 do with 1 another," he correctly notes. They shouldn't be fused in a falsifying synthesis that undermines the accomplishment of any of them. It is as false, Carles suggests, as the Bolshevik slogan upon which it is based: "Peace, Bread, Land." And so Carles subtly and somewhat surprisingly aligns himself with the right wing in the foundational split among the young Hegelians in the 1840s. He would rather ascribe a religious significance to the traditions concretized in the state than champion the dissolution of those ideals into an anarchic mob, as one may readily witness at any contemporary music festival, no matter how putatively progressive or, alternatively, mired in corporate sponsorship.
Efforts to celebrate the allegedly univocal music festivals of the past are nostalgic exercises in false hegemony. Carles declares: "It seems like people honor them as ‘being authentic’ but they seem ‘krappy’ 2 me." Festivals, then as now, merged incompatible cultural elements together in a bewildering amalgam that passed for coherence, modeling how the unified self-concept would come under pressure to disintegrate into disparate channels that mimicked the variety of entertainment channels being marketed to it, all while the presumption that this entropic decay was progress to a more-perfect union was upheld. Better, Carles explains, to regard meaning as a "gimmick", a spectral emanation from the genre-fication of popular culture and the niche-ification of reflexivity. Rather than trap oneself in the conundrum of competitive "specialness" --a contest for the purity of the ego -- one should resist the syncretic impulse for an embrace of unsublated free play: "In order to feel special, u must make 99.9% of the world feel unspecial. I am okay with the way things are 2day." I'm kay, you're okay, Carles is okay.
6 comments:
great
Interesting...how does one look at that space where music and protest intersect, or even the place where music and the promotion of an idea intersect?
A negro spiritual or a song by Joe Hill (famous singer-songwriter and member of the Wobblies, or IWW in the early 20th century, or any song created from perpetual, physical oppression seems to daunt the songs of resistance one encounters today. Even much of the music coming out of the Woodstock era had an impetus - the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement, the feminist movement - that gave the whole scene at least a sense of meaning. But that time has long since past...the modern music festival rarely has an agenda (save for those promoting environmentalism), rarely is free (like Woodstock was) and is run by people who are in no way ashamed of this. And why would the be? The attendees don't care.
If your interpretation of Carles post is accurate, this has major implications for the state of all major media. In fact, if your interpretation is accurate, the vast majority of music, film and television - along with music, film, and TV criticism - is a form of oppression which, as you stated, "distracts (the creative class) from political involvement".
This begs the question, then, if "entropic decay (is) disguised as progress", how could we - 'we' being consumers of music, movies, the 'festival', etc.?
Raises, not begs, the question, Daniel.
...but no attempt to answer it, despite my type-slip?
I think Carles might argue that the dissemination of music in commercial meme form rather than via the byways of an organic folk culture makes it impossible to signify anything other than profit opportunities at various nodal points in the terrain of socio-cultural contemporaneity. A subject would need to de-mediate relations to the given social order and attempt to forge spontaneous bonds of association without using culture-industry tools. The appropriate mode of protest, then, is to listen to noncommercial music and disengage from discourse about commercial entertainment products. A hard road, that surely leads to crushing alienation.
Does 'listening to noncommercial music' and 'discourse about commercial entertainment products' necessarily lead to 'crushing alienation, though?
I could see Carles arguing that much; why else would constantly put words like "meaningful" in quotations? He discretely posits removal from the culture-at-large (as well as from the modes-of-consumption-at-large) as a social death sentence, as something only a naive upstart could possibly find attractive, or even possible.
But I would argue that this outcome is not likely for anyone who removes themselves from these activities...merely, the threat of such alienation is what keeps most young philosophers confined to their armchairs (or, perhaps more accurately, laptops). And it's what keeps them from actually doing what they do in a thousand thought experiments and daydreams everyday (I'm included, so far, in this demographic...and I'd wager you are too)
Are the consumers-of-interest(the subjects of HRO), then, naturally gregarious and so fearful of losing their connections to other human beings that they would willingly give up what they consider any chance of an "actual, meaningful" experience?
This would explain why the 'meaningful experience' is treated, by Carles, as an unrealistic goal for the kinds of people he writes about. Those who wish (no matter how sincerely) to give their lives meaning through attending a concert, or even a music festival, are always going to come up short. These kinds of instances do exist, but I believe Carles would say that they cannot be bought.
Any Opinion?
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