K Punk: classic or dud?

are you suggesting some kind of objective writing about pop music enrique?

yes nrq when what's being discussed are entirely subjective opinions on pop music, the FACTS are exactly what we should concern ourselves with!

xp

to be fair, k-punk is usually talking about political theory, really -- but um hang on no, there has to be some fact-content to criticism. ie 'how is this effect achieved?' is a fairly basic requirement. 'entirely subjective opinions' are best kept to blogs.... oh, i see what you did there.

my problem with reading much k-punk is that i have spent three years studying analytic philosophy and whilst i sort of decides that stuff wasn't "right" it has left me with a liking for clear argumentation. with k-punk it often seems to me he trips himself up over writing what essentially seem to be rather simple points. also i dunno how continental philosophy really works but some of the time he seems to merely use his chosen philosophers as appeals to authority, he could argue the point probably in more depth and more interestingly if he didn't just pull out so and so philosopher to "prove" whatever is the case. i don't read him that often tbh but his ideas seem kind of apocalyptic in a fashion i rather like but they lack urgency.

This is very otm for me, too. I studied a fair amount of continental philosophy during most of my university years as well some analytic, and without making substantive comments about either approach, I found the emphasis on clarity and precision in analytic/Anglo-American philosophy as something to really admire. Making your arguments as clear and transparent as possible is really a virtue in philosophy/criticism/anything, and the posts I've read of K-punk's seem so unnecessarily abstruse. I realize clarity can't always be expected in blog posts, but the points k-punk argues aren't so complex as to warrant such tangled prose.

It's a tough bit, though, because in philosophy you spend all day reading these mostly brilliant thinkers who happen to be completely terrible writers (Kant, Hegel, Marx most of the time, Lacan, Derrida, I mean these guys are truly awful writers. There are some exceptions of course -- Nietzsche is a great writer, I think, and so is Hume, Bertrand Russell, AJ Ayer. It's no coincidence that analytic philosophy takes so much influence from the last three I mentioned.)

It's fairly common, I think, for students of philosophy to think "well, this is just how philosophy/criticism is done -- the issues are so complex that you have to use complex language to describe them." Then these students grow up and become professors, and the tradition of bad writing continues.

with lacan it's supposed to be a deliberate tactic, the bad writing. must have been an odd translation gig: "make as inelegant as you can kthx".

I like him.

But that should be obvious. Cause I'm hoos and I like this kind of shit.

plus he's fostered this whole claque of similar bloggers that make it into even more of a parlour game shut-in

-- r|t|c, Friday, June 29, 2007 9:29 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

http://kinofist.blogspot.com/2007/01/man-does-not-live-by-revolution.html

Is that one article supposed to stand in for *everything* on *both* that guy's blogs?

I mean so what if it's curatorial or hermetic, is it so obviously ridiculous that people want to make a case for a particular aesthetic?

I agree that they could do to engage more with the modern world in a less dismissive way, but humble pluralism on the other side is just as bad.

that one article is on a collective blog that k-punk's involved in and is tied up with a film show that k-punk is involved in. it's a fair sample. there may be a case for the riefenstahl aesthetic -- i doubt it, tbh -- but owen's case for it is terrible. i hate the word 'curate', but that aside, there's nothing curatorial about plucking old films out of an old canon. is there any discovery involved in the enterprise?

He wasn't arguing for the Riefenstahl aesthetic, he was arguing (not very thoroughly) that it differs from leftist modernism, and that the two can't be equated, like liberal critics tend to do.

Is there discovery? Sure, within a narrow field. If you are interested in how the legacy of modernism might fit in with modern left wing politics, then these art history posts are interesting.

He wasn't arguing for the Riefenstahl aesthetic, he was arguing (not very thoroughly) that it differs from leftist modernism, and that the two can't be equated, like liberal critics tend to do.

i am unconvinced that anyone is 'equating' them but, y'know, it's not exactly crazy to point out the manifest similarities. he never explains what his modernism entails anyway. i missed the part about modern left-wing politics in his post but here's how i read it:

There has always been a desperation among cultural conservatives to find the missing diabolical link that ties all their hatreds together.

REF PLZ

In cinema, this role tends to have been played by Leni Riefenstahl. In her work, we find the quickfire montage and sharp camera angles of the Soviet avant-garde, the shadowy chiaroscuro and fluid camera of the German expressionists, and the fixation on mass gatherings so beloved of the Socialist spartakiada public festivals.

ALSO, NAZIS

“A modernism from hell,” Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones called Triumph of the Will, comparing it to Battleship Potemkin in a long think-piece published last year, and thus the sneaking suspicion is quietly implanted, that, irrespective of Nazism, modernism itself was always-already from hell.

UH.

Jones himself puts it as follows, “to survey the cinema of modernism is to recognise its affinity for political extremes, and to realise that we are the lucky ones, enjoying the cinematic echoes of Metropolis in the architecture of Tate Modern's turbine hall before going into the museum cinema to savour those shadows - from a distance.”

OK, JONES IS A BIT WRONG TOO -- IT'S RIDIC TO CALL 'METROPOLIS' MODERNIST, UNLESS HG WELLS IS ALSO A MODERNIST... BUT MAYBE MONOLITHIC NOTIONS OF MODERNISM ARE MAD GAY WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT.

The point here is not just a matter of taste or opinion about different aesthetic styles, but rather embraces the very idea of the aesthetic as such.

AH.

None other than J.G. Ballard himself has put this point plainly. “I have always admired modernism and wish the whole of London could be rebuilt in the style of Michael Manser’s brilliant Heathrow Hilton,” he wrote in the Guardian last year, riffing off the V&A's moneyspinning (“Utopia soap! Only five pounds!”) exhibition Modernism: Designing a New World, “but I know that most people, myself included, find it difficult to be clear-eyed at all times and rise to the demands of a pure and unadorned geometry. Architecture supplies us with camouflage, and I regret that no-one could fall in love inside the Heathrow Hilton. By contrast, people are forever falling in love inside the Louvre and the National Gallery... Fearing ourselves, we need our illusions to protect us... Modernism lacked mystery and emotion, was a little too frank about the limits of human nature’.

JG BALLARD IN OTM SHOCK?

In other words, dehumanizing, unromantic and brutal, modernism failed to respect the frailty of human nature, to the extent that a human disaster then naturally followed.

I DON'T THINK SANE PEOPLE THINK MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE 'CAUSED' THE GULAG... BUT THE EUPHEMIZED "HUMAN DISASTER" HAPPENED DURING THE FUCKEN RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR.

“Death always calls on the very best architects,” Ballard darkly concludes, adding a note of the sinister to this basically conservative schema. Architecture is best left to merely adorn, tradition best left to be venerated, thought best left to be hesitant, and utopia certainly left always to be deferred.

WHY, WHAT ON EARTH COULD HAVE GIVEN BALLARD THIS GRIM OUTLOOK ON LIFE...?

This, then, against the background of the continuuing, pressing social imperative, to fall in love, or to put it another way, to breed.

"SOCIAL"

Elsewhere in his piece, Ballard alludes to the profoundly modernist environs of London Zoo, where last year, a guilty conservationalism, deeply unnerved by the Constructivist legacy left to them by Berthold Lubetkin and his Tecton architectural group, replaced the water of the penguin pool with woodchips, and moved the penguins to another location, in a desperate attempt to encourage them to produce more little baby penguins. So that now, under the impossible swoops and curves of the boards, a pair of porcupines sit disgruntled, contemplating their future, like a young professional, recently married couple, silently watching the news in their small ersatz cottage in some urban enclave somewhere, gingerly taking their first steps on the housing ladder.

PROJECTION MUCH

Dreary conformity, then or fascist death: such is the basic contemporary ideological ‘choice’.

OR DISINTERRING SOVIET AESTHETICS OF THE '20S, OBVIOUSLY

And yet, there are two telling moments in Triumph of the Will which resist the tedium of this trajectory, and suggest that the identification between fascism and modernism is not quite as clear as it is often suggested. These moments occur within minutes of each other, in the scenes shot inside Albert Speer’s vast, abstracted-classical Zeppelinfeld.

First, a distinguishing gesture: Hitler, alluding to rumours of disunity (specifically, the disunity that led to the murderous events of the Night of the Long Knives two months earlier) proclaims that the Nazi Party is, on the contrary, utterly solid. “It stands as firm,” he barks, slamming his fist down upon a stone, “as diese Block hier!” This apparent piece of pure political theatre in fact alludes to a deep ideological division. In response to “Der Ring”, the Bauhaus-centred, left-leaning German modernist architectural collective, the Nazi wing of the profession formed “Der Block”: fixed, where the modernists were dynamic, volkish where they were cosmopolitan, made for eternity rather than for a society in flux. Solid, immutable, fit to last to the end of the Thousand Year Reich. Riefenstahl’s lovingly shot stone incarnates this solidity.

OH MY FUCKING GOD

Second, an apparent blot on the copy: soon after Hitler reminds us of the Reich's firmness, the camera pitches up to gaze at the swastika-festooned tribune above him. Unmistakeably, running up and down it, is a lift with a cinematographer perched inside. Our attention isn’t exactly drawn to it, but it isn’t hidden either. What is happening here? Could it be that Riefenstahl is indulging in a kind of pseudo-Brechtian laying bare of the device? Are we being reminded of the construction of reality that lies behind all this?

OH MY FUCKING GOD

As it is unlikely that this was simply a mistake (it's all too meticulous for that) it can perhaps be seen as a signature, along the lines of Hitchcock popping up here and there in his films.

OH MY FUCKING GOD

After all, the construction isn’t really threatened by it: it doesn’t provoke thought in the sense of the modernist ‘making strange.’ Indeed, it doesn't really provoke thought at all, rather, seeming to serve instead an essentially narcissitic, parasitic, even idiotic function - like the’Hi Mom!’ of the US soldiers in the background of television news, undistracted by the destruction they’ve created.

OH MY FUCKING GOD. NB: EXACTLY HOW BORING IS THE NOTION OF "LAYING BARE THE DEVICE" AS MASTER-DEVICE OF "MODERNISM"?

The use of artificial light in this film is one of the elements that most disturbed Weimar avant gardists.

INTERESTING TO KNOW BACKSTORY HERE. I GUESS THEY WERE DISTURBED IN EXILE...

Riefenstahl's montage always takes care to emphasize electric lettering, ironically a technology pioneered in Germany by the Jewish architect Erich Mendelsohn. He, of course, was horrified to see his creation used so powerfully by the Nazis, though, they did not, of course, use it on any buildings even remotely resembling his own. Notice the moment we see, lit up at night, the house where Hitler is staying: a shining swastika and a burning “HEIL HITLER,” beaming out from a kitsch set of tweedy Bavarian lodgings.

I'M MISSING THE POINT HERE

The asynchronic film sound advocated by Dziga Vertov and Hanns Eisler also finds a strange correspondent here.

EVERYBODY WAS ADVOCATING THIS BY THE EARLY THIRTIES, NOT JUST EISLER AND VERTOV.

The first quarter of Triumph of the Will is silent, with a tacked-on soundtrack, a glutinous melange of music and cheering, overdubbed onto it.

BIT LIKE IN HITCHCOCK'S EARLY SOUND FILMS THEN, ONLY MORE NAZI

What we hear is not what we see. No one speaks in synch until we reach the conference room: thus, we are given to understand the Nazi hierarchy of power amounts to an essentially natural one, with Nazi leaders in effect identified as the men possessing the most fundamental temporal fidelity.

"THUS" DOING A LOT OF WORK

The lovingly shot boys of the first quarter, gaily wrestling, showering, cutting each others’ hair, evoke the body culture of Weimar, a social trend also foregrounded in the only Communist film of the Republic, Slatan Dudow and Bertolt Brecht's 1932 masterpiece Kuhle Wampe. And yet, again, despite this apparent similarity, a vital distinction pertains here as well. For all her jollity, with Riefenstahl, everything is much more stiff, sexless, ritualized, wholesome, and crucially, male, in marked contrast to the explicit feminist undercurrents in the earlier film.

OK

This last point draws attention to a wider historical division between fascist and communist bodies. As curious as it may seem, in the pre-1933 period even nudists were politically polarised, with Adolf Koch’s socialist naturists pitted against both the Free Sunland movement and propagandists for the “nordic nude” like Hans Suren.

WHY IS THAT "CURIOUS"?

Photographs of Suren and his beautiful boys immediately evoke Riefenstahl with their hard, glossy, tensed bodies. Think also of the sequence late on where, intercut with the speeches, we see a succession of gloriously cheekboned Aryan youths, staring forwards, shadowed via stunning chiaroscuro into angular abstracts.

For all her formal daring, the true relationship of Riefenstahl to the avant-garde, can be summed up quite succintly, in the seemingly endless parade of marchers that takes up much of the last third of Triumph of the Will. Germany, it seems, is on the move again, and the effect is either hypnotic, or utterly interminable, depending on your boredom threshold, or perhaps, your politics. In either case, the crucial point is this: here, whatever else we see, the cross-cutting always takes us back to Hitler, who salutes each new flank.

At one point it is broken up by percussive cannon blasts. At a similar moment in Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin, each blast leads to a chain of association, outside of the immediate subject along lines of thought and development. Here, each blast only returns us to Hitler.

OH SNAP, THAT'S COMFORTING

At another point we see a row of tanks, immediately followed by Chariots, carried along by galloping horses. Thus the mechanised warfare of Nazism, aligns itself ethically with the outmoded forms of the past. The technical properties of the State and the Director may be sometimes innovative, but in the end, the ideas they carry herald something far more atavistic.

JESUS CHRIST

1st I wasn't trying to defend that article.

It doesn't even try to say why constructivism is better politically (just thin refs to Brecht and montage). The anti-liberal bit is kind of lifted from Zizek, and he does that better.

There is much better stuff on 'The Measures Taken' blog, but if you are looking at it from a position completely hostile to the Soviet avant-garde etc. then I wouldn't bother.

in what sense was it an 'avant-garde', within soviet art? i am interested in it in terms of how it was interpreted as such in the west. the main theoretical problem so far as i see it is that the more you play the "avant-garde meets masscult" thing, ie "zomg eisenstein + disney1!!1!!", the more you admit that the two categories are severely wanting. or you would do if you didn't have an axe to grind... to me 'avant-garde' implies some kind of resistance, and not necessarily a leftist one. by definition, soviet state employees were not any kind of resistance. but generally that scene gives me the creeps, big time.

The constructivists were already against the categories 'avant-garde / masscult' all the way back then.

You can say they were disingenuous about it, but it was part of the rhetoric.

he's OK

i like k-punk a lot

k-punk is the klaxons of cultstud.

So, good then?

I think it's like anything else. If you understand what the person is saying it at the level intended then there is quite a lot to be gained from it. If you don't, then you might choose to find ways to assail it.

I'm sure there are people who would think that even the most pedestrian ILM thread is overly "intellectual". Even "classic or dud" is too much for some people's brains to handle.

BAN SAXBY D. ELDER

Ban the wisecrackers who think the "ban ———" prank is the height of ROFLness.

I sometimes read K-Punk. He has some interesting things to say, and talks about lots of music/lit/books/film that I like, but, more often than not, I disagree with his general point of view.

His whole political outlook seems to come from a very rarefied academic world that has little connection to what some of us might call "real life". He continually implies that the world right now is about as bad as it ever has been, and he seems to pine for the late 70s.

I find this to be very perverse and nonsensical, but then I live in middle class Austin, TX and everything here is peachy keen, so WTF do I know...

strung out on jargon/perverted by language/doesn't make a lick of sense

saxby's post was retarded, i'm not going to respond to that shit reasonably.

dude, you might have a real problem...

No shock to not get a reasonable response from you. I guess we can all look forward to a caps-riddled rant though.

I was actually keeping it pretty light. I don't really see what the big controversy might be (although some people might not realize that i was just kidding about the klaxons being "good").

I think it's like anything else. If you understand what the person is saying it at the level intended then there is quite a lot to be gained from it. If you don't, then you might choose to find ways to assail it.

is a remarkably lame attempt at pwnj. you could always engage with the arguments. or even say what you gain from it.

http://westvillage.punt.nl/upload/dec2006/a2112064.jpg

This is my reasoned response to this thread.

I like some of the writing he does for Fact Magazine just fine. On his blog though he does succumb to his worst tendencies - too much jargon, referrals to authority, confirmation bias, and ideas cloaked in lit-speak. Also, the Hauntology line he and Reynolds have been pushing is a little too precious for my taste. It's like he and Reynolds are looking for sounds or movements on which to hang their pet ideological baggage. Death of music, well maybe, but often he seems ignorant of the historical antecedents. Hasn't canned muzak performing the same environmental function as the ubiquitous I-pod been around since the fifties? Only difference is the listener can select his own background noise. He definitely needs an editor.

ban "always already" plz

also, what moodles said.

i don't read k-punk much any more because as others have said, once you've 'got' his aesthetic you kind of already know what he's going to say about pretty much anything. plus i can't really be bothered getting to grips with any of his theory.

having said that, i still think lots of his writing about music is fantastically readable, and that when he wants to, he can pull of a great combination of the detailed sonic analysis (FACTS) with breathless enthusiasm. he has often made me want to rush out and listen to whatever he's writing about - which means i've listened to some stuff i don't like, but i guess he's doing something right.

I like some of the writing he does for Fact Magazine just fine.

pwnj = Piscataway, New Jersey?

Also, I was just keeping it light. I wasn't in the mood to get into all the bullshit you got into.

Ban me.

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/

Mentioning a working class background may seem glamorous or cool to some, but what we are talking about here are the very non-glamorous feelings of shame, embarrassment and inadequacy. Tone of voice is sufficient to trigger that feeling of inadequacy: that is partly the reason that the sepulchural tones of Radio 4 drive me into a rage, the plummy, affectless voices sending the implicit message that any excitation is some juvenile deviation from commonsense mundanity. (Owen is just developing a concept of 'mundanism', which does seem absolutely central to Popism and other variants of deflationary hedonic relativism. Notice the way commonsense mundanism is integral to ruling class anti-intellectualism - see for instance Pseud's Corner and ILM - with Oxbridge graduates pretending to be plain, common men who just don't understand Theory but who know, by george, that it's damn silly.)

lol

http://www.shocktees.com/images/film_logo/tshirts/large/tshirt-fl0103.jpg

see for instance Pseud's Corner and ILM - with Oxbridge graduates pretending to be plain, common men who just don't understand Theory but who know, by george, that it's damn silly

Is he right? never got the whiff of Oxbridge around here I must say....

xpost - well maybe...

My pro-bourgie mindset has been allowed to go on unchecked for too long. Kudos for K-Punk for having the balls to say something. Maybe he can then spam the e-mail inboxes for everyone on here again so we can all have our attention drawn to his point?

well, most of the freaky trigger gang went to oxford, is what he means. and um so did i. the idea that pseud's corner and ilm represent the ruling class is probably a bit of a stretch, though. perhaps i've been reading the wrong kind of theory.

it takes a bit of intellectual gymnastics to at once say that these oxbridge guys are clever chaps (ie they're "pretending" not to understand "T"heory), then accuse them of anti-intellectualism. personally, i do understand theory insofar as i can be fucked to. i'm not pretending not to understand it; just that what i understand of it i disagree with. and it's not just me, it's "highly regarded" top-flight marxists who i agree with.

it's not really about commonsense things -- but bigger stuff like its attempt to do away with materialism (timpanaro), with socialist strategy (perry anderson), with the practice of history (e. p. thompson). those names tell you how old the critique of "T"heory is. zizek is some kind of postmodern, CGI version of the old leftist philosopher gods of the '70s, he's a tadpole.

i studied marx for a-level, marx at oxbridge, and marx since then. i don't think rejecting "T"heory can be equated with anti-intellectualism, and i also don't think "T"heory can be identified simply with marxism.

saying that notions of "the commonsense" have been polluted by capitalism makes sense, but it's bad reasoning and worse tactics to say "and therefore all commonsense is wrong."

well, most of the freaky trigger gang went to oxford, is what he means

OK, Thanks

Think k-punk is otm about class in the piece quoted above, whatever about the swipe at ILM

"Simply by pitching a tent on the lawn in front of the library and following a programme of collective auto-didacticism, the event posed questions about access to education and the possibility of anti-capitalist dissidence."

right, only... this wonderfully autonomous event was still held at a university and was organized by students. and presumably used the toilets paid for and kept in soft paper by the neo-liberal administration.

"Hence Oxbridge types will happily call themselves novelists even if they have never written a novel, or curators even if they have never curated any events."

really?

"in my experience, so many members of the ruling class resemble Daleks: their smooth, hard exterior contains a slimy invertebrate, seething with inchoate, infantile emotions."

YAAAAOOWWWWW

One of the tensions that came up when I had Cognitive Behaviour Therapy was over precisely the issue: I refused to accept that I (or anyone else) had intrinsic value.

Dude sounds like he needs a visit to a little place called the "Watercooler Thread".

haha.

"But better that hell than the empty certainties of ruling class confidence."

if he wasn't a putz i would sympathize with him here. but to him, me going to poxbridge makes me "one of them" already. the hot news about the ruling class is that their famous confidence is largely a projection tied up in social ritual, same as it probably is in other classes -- certainly in the middle classes. most english people of my acquaintance have, in private, some kind of class anxieties. they also have other kinds of anxieties, believe it or not! some of them suffer illness and bereavement and loneliness, or so i hear. certainties, empty or otherwise, seem pretty thin on the ground.

but not to accept the intrinsic value of people seems far worse a view of humankind, to my mind, than the no doubt sloppy and neo-liberal and human rights-oriented view that everyone has worth and deserves universal rights, etc.

He seems like a very serious fellow. I don't have anything against what he's trying to do, but I often have a hard time following him.

"intrinsic value' and 'worth and (deserving of) universal rights' are a bit different, no?

you could consider it a desirable state of affairs for everyone to have a range of entitlements and duties in exactly the same measure, and this to be a baseline index of 'social worth' and still consider 90% - or even 100%- of people to have no 'intrinsic value'

xpost

why would you want that outcome if you didn't think people had intrinsic value? i said i thought everyone had worth, which is just a synonym for value here. i get that some people are keen on taking the moral imperative out of left-wing politics.

http://www.qwantz.com/comics/comic2-748.png

rofl

y know i'm kinda glad he has control of a blog rather than my local council