How many ILM discussions (rockism vs. electronic music, Momus vs his detractors) are covert versions of "culture wars" debates, ie. some approximate version of humanism versus some approximate form o

critique of lip-synch = she's not being honest, direct, a "real" musician

defense of lip-synch = get over it, all pop is fake anyway, lipsynching is a post-modern anti-authenticity strategy blah blah blah

Klone = spectre of technology, reproduction / copying, anti-humanism of the endless series, sinister post-modernist relay

See, you can lazily map anything onto this stupid binary!

so: is it customary ILM practice to take a sentence out of context from someone else's post and make a thread out of it?

As with all message boards.

You know you're actually a straw man caricature of your own views, don't you?

At least one.

I have NO idea what the word "humanism" refers to.

I have NO idea what the word "post-modernity" refers to.

my cover is totally blown!

You had me pegged all along . . . .

to express my non-sexuality.

defense of lip-synch = get over it, all pop is fake anyway, lipsynching is a post-modern anti-authenticity strategy blah blah blah

and if you think that BOTH of the above arguments are at least partly full of shit? then what are you?

defense: pop is fake, sure. but even so, yer props should work!

look at all the trouble it got me into!

suddenly I'm being crammed into a ghastly mixed metaphor about being BOTH a strawman AND a caricature, etc.

Eisbar, if both of the diametrically opposed positions seem fishy to you, then congrats: you are a Hegelian. Or a bisexual. Or a tricycle.

Don't worry about it, man. There's an epidemic of this sort of thing around here lately.

though i was kinda serious about the arguments both being full of it. which may have been the point, i know, but it still had to be said!

Eisbar, are you named after the Grauzone song?

yup ... i'm a simulacron of a neue deutsche welle.

but otherwise i'm not sure what the question in this thread title means exactly.

what's with this recent spate of determinedly "lowbrow" or anti-intellectual posts following any post that uses a big word? i find it kind of annoying.

(i think this post is ready-made for the noise board's "excelsior" thread.)

maybe a mandatory haiku policy is in order . . .

By the way, talking of time, I think an SF-Berlin timezone Momus-Matmos pro-celeb wrestling-debating tag-team could see us kicking butt. And speaking of butt, loved your Butt interview, Drew. I think I'm probably the only person on ILM who reads Butt. Certainly the only one who reads Butt while playing the electronic sackbut.

Yeah, but I've been getting bored of haiku recently.
Perhaps all posts should be concrete poetry; the text should be formatted into an image which is an overarching comment on the post itself...

'Whether the songs are pained, twisted, whimsical, or even sometimes weirdly silly, aside from being fantastically musical and expertly played, they are also utterly sincere, and devoid of a single drop of post modern irony. In short, he's the real thing.'

'2 years ago I first heard the crude home made recordings of Devendra Banhart... His voice - a quivering high-tension wire, sounded like it could have been recorded 70 years ago - these songs could have been sitting in someone's attic, left there since the 1930's... When it came time to record new music we were of course faced with the quandary of how to go about it - does he continue making hiss-saturated home recordings, or do we go into a "professional" studio? We mutually decided that it was best to move on - why should he be ghetto-ized as a possible low-fi crank/eccentric? Besides, his songwriting and his guitar playing (in my opinion) have taken such leaps and bounds forward, that we were compelled to record them in a way that made it possible to really hear the performances clearly... we recorded 32 songs (culled from something like 57 Devendra had initially submitted!) in his living room, using the best possible vintage gear. Ideal... Deciding on the final arrangements was ridiculously easy - the songs were so good in their raw state that there was no need to bolster them with sonic fluff or cheap impact.'

You know, there are enough weird assumptions in that text to run this thread through to April 2008.

I also have major problems with 'expertly played' and 'recording in a way that made it possible to really hear the performances clearly', and I find it completely odd that the best way to do this was to 'use the best possible vintage gear'. And 'the songs were so good in their raw state that there was no need to bolster them with sonic fluff...'

What Gira describes seems either naive or willfully perverse. It's Platonic and entirely yoked to 'the metaphysics of presence'. There is a 'real' and 'clear' sound of 'well-played' music which 'production' can only tarnish. The hiss on Devendra's early recordings is merely an impairment, to be banished when the budget allows. To retain it would make him a 'low-fi eccentric'.

The best way to get a 'real' and 'clear' sound is to use vintage gear, says Gira. Ah, you mean tape hiss, wow and flutter? But not quite as much of it as Devendra used to use? But that's not considered 'production', somehow, just as it wasn't 'production' when Devendra made those early hissy recordings that evoked the 1930s so pleasurably for Gira. None of this is 'production' because production is bad. Production is something calculating, something that takes us away from authenticity and 'the natural'.

To me, reproducing, deliberately and self-consciously, the sound of the past is an absolutely key part of post-modern music-making, and yet Gira denies there's anything post-modern about Banhart's records. It's ironic!

I should probably say 'art rock' instead.

A recording made now that sounds like a 1930s recording is an example of post-modern irony, whether that's deliberate or accidental.

This is true and obvious, but it's funny how much mythic pull old sounds have. We (or some of us...or Michael Gira at least...) say something sounds like it could have come from the 1930s by way of establishing this whole authenticity thing, as if the 1930s (or 1830s, or whenever) was any more real and less self-consciously constructed than our own time. The rockist world view at its most cartoonish partly boils down to old = real and new = fake. This doesn't only infect music criticism, obviously -- it's also a cartoon definition of conservatism, which is obviously what the whole "rockism" thing is getting at. (And in music, it doesn't only infect rock. The most obvious example is the continued persistence of scratchy needle noises on hip-hop tracks.) Anyway, I've just always found it amusing that people listen to, say, the Carter Family, and hear it as old-timey or authentic or something, when at the time it was contemporary pop music recorded on state of the art equipment. (As, for that matter, were Sousa marches recorded on wax cylinders.)

On the other hand, I think the more fervent of the anti-rockists sometimes buy into the same bullshit -- rejecting canonical works, say, just because they're canonical. Denying Springsteen or Dylan or the Beatles the right to exist outside those musty halls, punishing the music for the offenses of its most ardent defenders. Matters of personal taste aside, I don't understand people who can get the joy in "Toxic" but miss it in "Badlands."

(stopping this post now before continuing on to post-modernism...)

Momus, that is astonishing. I know nothing about The Independent Group. I look forward to reading that book. That blurb though still leads me to argue (for the sake of this thread and begging your indulgence) for the dehistoricization of postmodernism, inasmuch as the precursors listed--Dada, Futurism, Surrealism--themselves fall short of epochal designation unlike Drew's Atomic Age which clearly achieves it. Rather these movements may be regarded (for the sake of argument) updated metonymies for our proclivity to send-up and pastiche authority and official culture which probably accompanied our first stories around the camp fires in the waybackwhen and will continue to result in cultural color commentary until the end times. Yesterday's Dada is today's Postmodern, and so forth before and beyond ad nauseaum. The same cannot be said for the revolution wrought by the threat of the atomic bomb. That situation and its concomittant paradigms--basically the real threat of world annihilation--are unique in human history. (If I'm being bitchy I hope you consider me an engaged if smartass student as opposed to a mere agitator.)

That said, it also seems to kind of be over, doesn't it? Part of the conceit of postmodernism was that everything had been done -- Modernism pushed things as far into abstraction as you could go, and so you either had to retreat into some more traditional means of representation or step outside the whole chronology and treat it as your plaything.

But of course, everything hadn't been done. Nobody had blown up the World Trade Center, for example. But September 11 is just a symbolic turning point, if it's even that. The real point is that postmodernism still was within the Western Enlightenment tradition, and that entire tradition has reached a point (because of gloablizing economies, cultures, technologies) of needing to adapt to new circumstances in ways that are going to require new ideas and new connections and new means of representation and communication. Rhetorically, both the left and right in the West seem flummoxed at how to cope, applying rancid 19th century overlays (capitalism vs. socialism, imperialism/colonialism) or 20th century analogies (War on Terror as substitute for WWI/II/Vietnam/Cold War, take your pick) in ways that don't really fit. Likewise, postmodernism seems ill-equipped for the present moment, which calls for synthesis much more than deconstruction. Digital media itself, at first glance a postmodernist dream (it can take everything apart and turn it all into equal-sized bits, and then rebuild it anyway you want), is producing all manner of mutant forms of communication that are more fundamentally forward-looking than anything with "post" as a prefix can really account for.

Or so it seems to me.

Well, we're talking about cultural history here, so the events are bound to seem a bit less incandescent than atomic bombs. But I don't see why you would want to 'dehistoricize' postmodernism.

Continuing my case for 1956 of Pomo's Big Bang year, over in Paris Barthes is writing 'Mythologies', his book of essays on such things as the way the new Citroen looks like a medieval cathedral and the way Charlton Heston's hairstyle looks suspiciously modern in a Hollywood gladiator movie. 'Mythologies' is still the template for cultural journalism today. Meanwhile, Jean-Luc Godard, a journalist at Cahiers du Cinema, is raving about populist British / American directors like Hitchcock and John Ford, as you can see from the Top 10 lists he starts publishing that year. The Top 10 List becomes an important part of pomo ephemera / trivia culture, still big on this very board!

It's already clear what will replace postmodernism. Posthumanism. The era of gentech, the blending of manbrain and machinebrain, of the posthuman and of 'digital flesh' (copyright Arthur and Marilouise Kroker) is the next thing. Never mind humanist, postmodernism may well be the last cultural movement that's 100% human.

This is a bit like Benjamin's "aura" applied retrospectively isn't it. I was thinking about this in relation to kitsch collectables the other day: the rapid turnover of capital results in commodities transforming in our imagination from being standard manufacturing belt replica commodities (devoid of aura) at the time of manufacture and sale to taking on the aura of being one-of-a-kind works of artistry/craftmanship by dint of their scarcity. Such reevaluation/re-valuation appears kitsch when we are still aware of the humble beginnings of the art, but over time as even that historical awareness disappears the sense of kitschness drops away too, such that the appreciation loses all awareness of its own irony, becomes "genuine".

(on a slightly related note: I think Tom E has this idea that pop music styles reach their lowest ebb of fashionability about seven or eight years after their popular peak, and then after that they can slowly move towards a resurgence of interest, archival compiling and ultimately revival. Perhaps that seven year period is the period within which said pop artefacts have a decreasing level of cultural value, but their presence (whether in terms of cultural ubiquity, radio dominance or sheer number of CDs in the rack) is still in surplus. A resurgence in the artefacts' value can begin when its cultural presence (and availability) slumps beneath the level of interest in it, creating a deficit relative that interest.)

This is probably all pretty obvious, but they were new thoughts for me!

Which leads me to make this point--I'm overstating my case for dehistoricization to provoke discussion about the attitudes that shape postmodernism having always already existed. Aren't there always Barthesean and Godardian (sp?) figures in every era prepared to make it new by refocussing attention on the superficial (and the playful? the unserious? the childish?) to undermine stale othodoxy? And doesn't this occur on the level of High Culture as a synechdoche for "authenticity," the everyday sarcasm of the non-educated non-privileged? Coleridge's and Wordsworth's celebration of "common speech" in the face of stale Augustan diction springs to mind as a precursor to Godard's insurrection against the Tradition of Quality in French film.

Yeah, I think 9/11 is a totally pomo event. It's not a good place to mark 'the end of pomo'. Bin Laden is a completely pomo phenomenon, in the sense that his Islamic fundamentalism is in a simple dialectic with the west's 'aesthetics of plenty'. In fact, you could argue that Bin Laden is a pomo rockist in just the same way that Gira sets Banhart up to be. Bin Laden and Banhart both exist in the present and use postmodern technology and the media to further their goals, but condemn the contemporary and harken back to a notionally more 'pure' time when people were 'less corrupted'. This apparent denial of postmodernism is actually an integral part of its dialectics. Bin Laden probably gave pomo an extra 20 years of life when he arranged 9/11. It was looking, in the 90s, to be morphing into 'the posthuman'. But Bin Laden brought things back to the old pomo binaries: sincere / ironic, real / fake, past / present, anorexia / bulemia...

Yes, that's exactly what I mean about 'last year's irony is this year's sincerity'. That's why you can't write off irony. Irony is a site of shifting attitudes, a place where we explore ambiguities we feel. The Independent Group were leftists who were fascinated by the capitalist imagery of America, for example. They used irony to explore the contradictions in this stance. 'Richard Hamilton practises an ‘ironism of affirmation’ toward Pop culture (he borrows the phrase from his mentor Duchamp) or, in his own words, a ‘peculiar mixture of reverence and cynicism’.

You may laugh at this prediction now, but you won't laugh in 2012: the point at which postmodernism turns into posthumanism is the moment when Arnold Schwartzenegger becomes president of the US. That's the point at which the pomo fight between the authentic and the fake morphs into the posthuman fight between flesh and digital flesh.

I personally think a lot of the most interesting ideas of the last few decades have come from the scientific rather than philosophical realms (to the extent that they're different). I'm thinking especially of chaos theory, and even more of complexity theory, which provide whole new prisms for seeing all of this stuff through, and point toward some ways of joining science and religion, tradition and innovation, in a sort of unified cultural theory. The basic concept of emergence gives new depth and flexibility to the old dialectic models.

Obviously I'm mostly talking out my ass, since I'm not a scientist or a philosopher. But complexity theory seems especially well suited to wrestling with emerging global culture and crises, as well as with the mindfuck explosion of digital technology.

-- gypsy mothra (meetm...), October 30th, 2004.

ha

If the authenticity of the Mayan calendar holds up, this will be the moment the Earth comes into harmony with the rest of the universe.

Have you seen the latest video from him (and i realize by saying that it almost seems like I'm talking about a pop star more than a terrorist)? As an American constantly bombarded with the national political state of mind (confusion, apathy, anger, whathaveyou) tt feels so incredibly surreal to hear Bin Laden saying that Bush misled us.

Perhaps w a different president it would make me upset or whatever, but enough American people have been fed up with Bush for so long that we are at a point where we can hear this horrible man and actually agree with him.

Before we hunt down and kill him of course.

1. He looks good, like the clothes.
2. That's the man who took those buildings away, the ones I used to like seeing towering over East Broadway. And killed thousands of people.
3. I wonder if Bush has killed more people? I suppose it depends how you calculate it.
4. It really does seem like Bin Laden has seen Michael Moore's 'F9/11', or at least had it described to him. Because of the 'My Little Goat' thing and because of the way he brackets Bush with the Saudi rulers. Then again, these things are established facts. They're not the property of Moore, and they don't become less true just because Bin Laden says them.
5. He actually makes a reference to voting scams in Florida.
6. Protection racket-style menace -- 'I'm just trying to find the best way for you not to get hurt.'
7. I wonder if we could get Bin Laden blogging? I mean, he could 'update' daily with a video, an audio message, or just a letter, and be on a Friends list with lots of other Evil People.
8. He seems to be mellowing with age.
9. This doesn't really threaten new attacks.
10. What did the bits Al-Jazeera held back say? US diplomats negotiated with the network before the tape was shown. We can only assume that the bits shown are a compromise reached by the two sides. Perhaps in other parts of the tape Bin Laden said something that would tip the election clearly one way or the other. As it is, it's unclear who it helps.

well, if you believe the latest reports that calculate civilian deaths in Iraq to be above 100,000, then yeah, I would say he has. And if you add Afghanistan to the equation...

It still seems unclear whether we are talking about Postmodernity as a historical phase or whether we are doing a character sketch of the figure of the Postmodern-ist and trying to come up with candidates for who is or is not an "agent" of Postmodernity. This is (and apologies if this all sounds way pretentious) a bit similar to Derrida's move in relation to Deconstruction: Derrida said that the texts he wrote about were already "in deconstruction", that is, he did not feel that what he staged were interventions that did a something to them, that applied a theory called by others "deconstruction", complete with doctrine and dogma, rather, he felt that he was revealing the fissures, slippages, aporias that were already present within the philosophical systems and texts under analysis. The texts and systems themselves were themselves "always already" (hi Spencer) IN DECONSTRUCTION, with no need for a "deconstruction-ist" agent at all. This move struck some as highly disingenuous (as if Derrida was saying "little old me? why I haven't touched a thing") and always rang as a highly performed display of modesty, if not sleight of hand. I think the same can be said about Postmodernism as a historical state of being, versus the conception in which there are people who going around *making* Dolly Parton appear to us as postmodern by flagging or pointing out her combination of silicone prosthetics and geewhiz Tennessee mountain home shtick.

I am also reminded, and this gets closer to Momus' Bin Laden example, of a recent talk Slavoj Zizek gave about the people in Brazillian slums being the foremost postmodern/posthuman subjects. It is not about cultivating an empowered, sleek mastery of technological trinkets or flaunting/revelling in consumerist alienation or surfing the ceaseless flow of value-neutral info-surfaces etc etc. Rather, it is the people who fall outside the cracks of any support system, the people in refugee camps who aren't covered by the birthright/citizenship model of human rights who thus occasion a crisis/collapse in how we think through what a nation is/does, the people in "failed states" and lawless "no go" areas in Brazil's favelas where the police will not enter, who are the most exemplary subjects of Post-modernity. They don't just entertain doubts about historical master-narratives, they are the ones whose lives are lived in a kind of disavowed/abjected "failed state" inside the state apparatus itself. It was a talk that pissed a lot of people off and raised many doubts, but it was interesting as an extension and re-location of Post-modernity from a kind of doctrine about ideological freefall back to a kind of political/materialist mapping of where we can see the greatest collapses in political/economic structure. Dunno if this just amounts to going up to the next homeless person you see and saying "congrats! you're now the bleeding edge of post-modernity!"

Isn't there a song on Devendra's Rejoicing in the Hands where he sings "it's like an old folk song / that you've never heard before / still you know every word" seems like a pretty canny location of himself as precisely a new songwriter who is NOT a throwback but who is self-conscious and aware of his relationship to tradition and is teasing us and himself about that fact.

-- Momus (nic...), October 30th, 2004.

does this mean anything? do you intend it to mean anything? or is it just more wordplay?

Either way, I'm not sold on "post-humanism" as much more than a handle for grad students to hang dissertations on.

i'll still read his web site occassionally, there are some real gems there. (ironically he seems to "write for an audience" better on his web site essays than he does here!!)

does this mean anything? do you intend it to mean anything? or is it just more wordplay?

Perhaps I shouldn't have used 'terminate' in both terms there. What I meant was that Schwazenegger will be elected for his reputation as a tough guy but will actually be more significant as a symbol of the age of man-machine combination. Since I've identified Schwarzenegger as the turning point between the postmodern and the posthuman, what I'm saying is that he will be elected on a security platform that relates to a postmodern dialectic between the 'bulemia' of the west and the 'anorexia' of islamist terrorism, but that his presidency will usher in a new paradigm, a new dialectic between the human and robotic. These two elements are already apparent in his persona. The American public will think they're electing a 'tough guy' -- in fact they'll be electing a 'robot'.

argument proceeds not by logic but by puns, wordplay...semantic likenesses and oppositions. in which something sounding clever is the surest measure of its truth. i like momus is very good at this.

I think speculatively and playfully, erecting structures, games and metaphors quickly and dismantling them quickly too. It's not a style of argument that advances implacably towards a single, central, immobile 'truth' because that isn't my view of the universe. What it does do is put small lights down in various parts of the terrain which throw enough shadows to give some idea of the topography. I don't think it's a monologue at all -- in fact dialogue is one of my favourite forms (and the one thing I really admire Plato for) and I do my best thinking dialectically, bouncing off other people's points like I'm bouncing off yours right now. It seems to me that this thread has many voices, and that we all basically understand one another and are getting along fine. Sometimes I get a little tired of being treated as if I invented semantic oppositions, or as if the unstable and metaphorical nature of language is somehow my fault. Anyway, the lucky thing is that, on some level, language works and we communicate, even if people occasionally say things like 'I like Momus is very good at this'. (For which, thanks.)

Now, I wonder if cultural attitudes cluster and bunch up the same way political attitudes are supposed to (but don't always do)? In politics -- and this may be one of the great fictions of politics -- you're supposed to have linked, clustered views. Even when the views linked are contradictory. For instance, a Republican is supposed to believe 'Thou shalt not kill', and to apply that to unborn babies, but not to foreigners killed in the wars or prisoners on death row. My suspicion is that these attitude clusters are not logical but magnetic. In other words, someone has a self-identity as a Republican, shares a couple of the necessary presuppositions, and sort of gravitates towards a whole cluster of attitudes as if drawn by a magnetic force. Consistency of identity is more important than consistency of reason.

So does that work here too? Amateurist and I agree on the genius of Jacques Tati, but not on other things. My views on 'rockism' seem to be shared by a lot of people here, but my views on 'hipsters' aren't. I think even the 'and he dresses stupid' remark is a shot in the culture wars, because obviously I dress to express my values. If I dress in a silly way, it's because I think it's important to be silly!

with regard to political beliefs, at least, i think this is true and borne out by recent studies on voting habits.

with regard to political beliefs, at least, i think this is true and borne out by recent studies on voting habits.

...in the context of contemporary america. i don't know whether this holds for all places at all times.

Drew Daniel (because it's his line, cut and pasted by someone else)

I did happen to start the thread, though I'm not sure I poached Drew Daniel's line or some -no-name's-

Foucault
Derrida
Barthes
Lacan
Zizek

I really don't understand this thing about 'postmodernism has always existed'! Is it like that Bjork song where she said cars and TV sets are part of nature, and have been kept inside a mountain down the ages, ready to emerge when the time was right? Is this the intellectual equivalent of Creationism, this need to assert that everything was created at the same time, and no evolutions have happened since.

(BTW, yes it was Drew's line. He even queried whether this happens a lot on ILM. I think he was surprised to see a thread started with his own thought, like woman being plucked from man's rib in the Old Testament!)

(BTW2 if you feed Matmos into Musicplasma it tells you they're close to two Icelandic bands, Manitoba and Boards of Canada, so I suppose they're in a cold part of the planetary system! Whereas Momus is -- bizarrely enough -- rather close to Madonna, which I guess is a hot place, though not necessarily where I want to be!)

If you like the death penalty, you'll love pre-emptive war! Customers who bought abortion also bought gay marriage.

By the way I'm not trying to pick a fight; I'm just tweaking your nipples--you have after all qualified your entire corpus with the name of the Graeco-Roman god of criticism!