Simon Reynolds is a gobshite

when he says "prematurely closed case" he doesn't mean suffering from neglect but that everyone's already made up their mind on what 20th century modernism means, what it was for, and how we're going to treat it in the future.

well, yes. with the proviso that there was no such thing as a unitary capitalized Modernism: everyone these days seems to be agreed that it was politically progressive, 'radically democratic', A Good Thing, etc. some of it was dedicated to changing the world. but to making it a better place? reynolds is welcome to a world envisaged by wyndham lewis, but include me out.

obviously part of modernism (constructivism) sort of scans as 'left' or utopian. but only in a very 1920s, top-down way. but brecht is a fairly shining example of why one should really back the fuck away from the idea that pre-war modernism, even when left-wing, is something whose passing we should regret.

(i'm mildly creeped out by the way 'utopian' has come to be seen as a A Good Thing in itself. most utopias, free-market or bolshevik (which is hatherley's) are awful.)

er anyway that Reynolds quote is still pretty wack - it makes his whole avuncular patronage of Hatherley et al seem super creepy, I recognise that there is sexual content in the book but the appropriate response to that is not thigh-rubbing "slim and shapely"-style conventional lasciviisms, and by the way "rediscovering... the sexiness of severity" is such a tediously conventional thing, i mean if the visibility of porn aesthetics have taught us anything it is that people find severity sexy, it is possibly the worst way to represent what is quite a clear discussion of the problems of socialism and sexuality.

(xpost)

i love how the word 'continuum' has just ceased to have any meaning for me.

E of C is right - the book is really self-defeatingly sub-Lulu-self-publishing production-wise. Ironically, some of the prose, especially in the conclusion, feels like rambling first draft blog entry too - could have done with a bit more refinement.

Funnily enought, the company behind Zero Books is a wacky new-age crystals'n'meditation outfit. But I do think the imprint is a Good Thing (despite having a few issues with the whole k-Punk archipelago). I'm looking forward to N Power's One-Dimensional Woman.

Owen has a great piece about austerity chic in the new RadPhil mag, incidentally:
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_id=28469

all utopias are awful! that is why we can be reassured by the fact that they do not exist, it is in the name, q.e.d..
(also OH is pretty clear on the existence of Right modernism - i think there's a bit where he talks about Wyndham Lewis being superbly snotty about the italian futurists as technological arrivistes but i can't check it cos - oh! - no index!)

OH pulls out a quote from Ruskin to start with, a quote I did not know but absolutely love:

practical people have a way of saying 'that has been tried, and failed.' Why, of course it failed. Do you suppose everybody ever played off a piece of Right on the eternal piano without striking false notes at first? Failed! - yes, and it will fail fifty times over, depend on it, as long as your fingers are baby's fingers; your business is not to mind your fingers, but to look at the written notes...

For me, I think, this is the thing.

Yes yes austerity chic: I'm worried that being against "austerity chic", being against the way people in the 00s present Modernism graphic-designed into retro acceptability, translates into a sort of against-graphic-design snobbishness, which leads to ugliness, which leads to no-one reading who isn't already of the right sort of tendency. And this is a technique as offputting as the mangled sentences that dear old theory leads itself into, where after a while you suspect that the ruling aesthetic is "this has to be hard to read so you know it's worthwhile."

found that hard to get a grip on. nostalgia for 'benevolent statism' is exactly what i associate his own ish with. am i wrong in that?

i don't know. those posters are creepy. but again, if you self-identify as a bolshevik you don't really get to talk about state brutality/the surveillance society/etc, do you? perhaps the double-standard calls for a little explanation, anyway.

(the tone of rad-phil is always a delight: 'the public execution of jean charles de menezes' is particularly choice.)

xpost

and didn't OH write something recently on the gorgeousness of the new Verso radical thinkers series (they are super gorgeous, if very very similar to penguin great ideas - maybe that's a good thing, they'll blend in, people won't realise they're reading althusser until it's too late, ahahaha)? I suspect I may be inadvertently repeating him by this point.

but i can be rude about zero books where a person published by them cannot - and anyway, realistically, are they any more ugly than routledge? (ans: yes)

xpooosts

do they genuinely self-identify as bolsheviks? good heavens.

fairly sure i've seen OH identify as a bolshevik, yeah. and that is not such a good thing!

OH pulls out a quote from Ruskin to start with, a quote I did not know but absolutely love:

"practical people have a way of saying 'that has been tried, and failed.' Why, of course it failed. Do you suppose everybody ever played off a piece of Right on the eternal piano without striking false notes at first? Failed! - yes, and it will fail fifty times over, depend on it, as long as your fingers are baby's fingers; your business is not to mind your fingers, but to look at the written notes..."

For me, I think, this is the thing.

that's a pretty terrible quote, if we are talking about political utopias. for one thing it reads like social darwinism. i suppose if it's only *your* fingers that are getting bashed then OK.

where are the 'written notes'?

I think I realised my distance from this whole discourse when I really enjoyed John Gray's Black Mass.

(but anyway ruskin's quote could just as easily justify neoliberal revanchism. so laissez-faire didn't work this time and we had a few 'false notes'. well rome wasn't built in a day...)

xpost

lol. i would upset myself if i agreed with john gray.

but probably do sometimes :(

that terrible The Wire habit of capitalising things that don't need capitalising

I really want to start a petition against this or something.

He might have claimed bolshevism in exaggeration though - I sometimes feel like I hold left-wing people to unreasonable standards in such a way that they are not allowed to be facetious about matters political?

arrrgh i have to leave the house but I genuinely don't get why you think that's social darwinism? i don't think it's being used about political utopias exactly, i think it's about ideas, and yes it's too romantic and dramatic but the idea that a single failure means that an idea is dead and useless is quite common, i think, and leads to a general crushing hopelessness.

Ruskin then goes on to talk about people learning to use alpine poles, i hope you will not also ask "but what is the mountain, in this analogy?"

darwinism in that it has no ethical content; we go on according to who has the toughest thumbs...

if we're just talking about ideas then yeah fine, go nuts, do the phd, get published, get tenure, it doesn't matter, no-one's getting hurt, and verso's getting paid.

but althusser (for example!) isn't just talking about ideas. he was a high-ranking member of the french communist party when the PCF had a large share of the vote. for example. and yes that's after 1956 and after 1968. it's well after kronstadt.

so to my mind the, er, bruised thumbs of hungary and czechoslovakia (etc, etc) do slightly put the project in question because when your end becomes 'utopia' then the means start to become trivial.

(the exact same thing goes for the neoliberal experiment in chile before anyone jumps down my throat.)

well i for one am glad that someone has had the courage to speak out against the sinister authoritarian 5-a-day campaign. fruit and vegetables! what's next, gas chambers?

Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't Althusser heavily involved in the PCF's turn against Stalinism?

like, wasn't that his thing? an intellectual marxism that was focused on the means of production but rejected teleology, a practical marxism that focused on the worker and rejected the brutality of stalinism?

no, quite the opposite.

that was to your first post not the second one.

ehhh... 'turn against' is overdoing it, by a long way. i think it probably had to say that stalin had sounded various wrong notes, but the PCF was still a very, very reactionary and authoritarian entity. not for nothing did the likes of christopher hill leave the party after '56. it was still aligned with moscow.

part of the lol of althusser's mystifying continued acceptance by young cultural studies students is that the PCF was strongly against may 1968 and all that is taken to represent. i have no idea why he's still in print - not because of all this stuff, just on grounds that he's... useless.

xpost

like, wasn't that his thing? an intellectual marxism that was focused on the means of production but rejected teleology, a practical marxism that focused on the worker and rejected the brutality of stalinism?

― elephants of style (c sharp major), Monday, September 7, 2009 3:04 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i don't really know what "a practical marxism that focused on the worker" means.

It doesn't mean althusser though. He's the opposite of that surely. An abstract marxism that focused on the structure?

idk im just trying to get paid you know?

lol i am getting schooled i thought he had more to do with eurocomminusm than he did. I did get the impression from 'for marx' that he was anti-stalin, but I haven't properly looked at it for ages.

i think he was 'philosophically anti-stalinist' in some respects... but, you know, the same SU that invaded czechoslovakia had been 'de-stalinized' too. it's window-dressing. we all make mistakes, but i sort of feel he's been discredited enough times already – on the philosophical level - not to stay in print.

"we all make mistakes" - tell that to mrs althusser!

http://www.loopsjournal.com/article.php?id=1&aid=22

subtitled 'or, if this is the future, how come the music sounds so lame?'

because it ISN'T SET IN THE FUTURE YOU CUNT.

i <3 the meco version of that track, i ahve the 12" of a re-edit

ye gods. maybe he turns it around but this is so fucking retarded. even the film weren't set in the future it wouldn't make any sense.

when will heads get over the idea that the synthesizer sounds like "the future"?

Probably misremembering, but wasn't that music like the Residents or something?

i would enjoy reading history mayne and everyone else discuss althusser and the pcf on a thread with a more fortunate title!

Reynolds will look even more of a tit when trad space-jazz supersedes UK funky in the continuum.

Hey, Space isn't the future either!

Last person went to the moon in the seventies!

i actually mean that by the way, someone should start it

"we all make mistakes" - tell that to mrs althusser!

LOL

By the way, "radically democratic" always sounds like a pleasant oxymoron.

the whole 'future/past' thing is irrelevant re Star Wars

the real question remains 'why is music by aliens ALWAYS so shit?'

wonder if grimey deals with the cylon origins of 'all along the watchtower'. again, not from the future.

OK, this time I'm angry. Reynold's metaphorically "beards" Joanna Newsome to try and say something (at least 5 years too late) about the beardo revival:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/nov/11/simon-reynolds-notes-noughties-beards

This is the Guardian. It's mainstream journalism written for a lay audience. It doesn't have to be bang up to date. In fact, it shouldn't be.

And at least he can spell Newsom.

i think it was for a serious that looks back at the decade

serious? i meant series

I think the fact that it's looking over the last decade renders it a moot point really, not that that makes it any less pointless and waffly

xxp

Anyway yeah, is he trying to say that Newsom is like a bearded lady in that she is so crazy she could be a circus act (which is retarded), or that she's a woman playing men's music (which is really obviously not the case)? Or something else?

He was really looking in the wrong place if he wanted a bearded lady.

http://www.ondarock.it/images/cover/peaches_8045.jpg

That DOES NOT COMPUTE in Simeybot's universe

its just a bit of fluff

xp she's freak folk. freak folks have beards. therefore she has a beard.

load of pointless tosh, really (especially as there's no excuse for mentioning m*tt v*lentine, in any context). but nice to see the lovely folks at beard mag get a bit of publicity.

its just a bit of fluff

Looks like a full beard to me