Oh, hi down there!
And since my iPod is brokified, which for me is akin to having my fellow athiest-in-a-foxhole abandon post at the first sign of a firefight, I've been subsisting on the same cultural effluvia as before, with the exception of Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï, Hithcock's Strangers on a Train, and Sophie Fienne/Slavoj Zizek's The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, none of which are portable, which is for the best when you really think about it.
Adorno: good at figuring out what is wrong with art, popular culture and the relationship between people and capital, bad at seeing anything positive in anything, ever.
Our search begins with critique. We critique the undialectical straightjacket of modern science and its cloak of pseudo-objectivity, yet an alternative to the contemporary scientific method remains elusive. We critique the structural mechanics of capital, especially in its neoliberalized, free-market form, but alternative modes of economic organization lack the clarity and simplicity of capital exchange and monetary valuation, which David Harvey correctly points out are perhaps the only universally understood measuring stick for value. Critiques of the unjust and exploitative power relations that shape the world economy are as convincing and affecting as ever (in particular see Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums), and yet these power relations remain obdurate, for the simple reason that the world economy requires immiseration and poverty in order to discipline labour and establish fertile conditions for competitive locational advantage and Schumpeterian “creative destruction”. In sum: Marxian critiques of cultural, political and economic formations are often accurate in pointing out their failings, but what often seems missing is the transcendent end of critique, with a vision of a better world in mind.
David Harvey wrote in Spaces of Hope something to the effect of “a ship that knows not where it sails can make no use of the wind”. I am a firm believer in this. What is the point of criticality if it isn’t driving us towards a better world? What is a better world – more personal gratification? Economic stability? Social justice? In effect, what is point of understanding all the failings of capital if there is no understanding of love, death, sex, religion, family, or communication? As the elder Marcuse succinctly put it, “not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production”.
And so we come to beauty. I won’t take this time to try and figure out what it is, or how my conception of beauty is shaped (Pierre Bourdieu, you and I can have that conversation another time), but I am slowly coming to the realization that I need to take more time to appreciate it. There are significant hardships awaiting us if we don’t significantly change the architecture of our collective politico-economic sphere, but these changes are meaningless unless I/you/we understand what we are changing for. This is a deeply philosophical quandary, and not one that I can answer at the moment with any sense of depth or profundity, but I do know this: I am taking some time, possibly the rest of this summer, to try and understand how my ideals of beauty are formed, and experience this beauty in the fullest. This will probably involve making a lot of mistakes and doing things that I know on a rational level to be kind of foolish, but, you know, sometimes even I have to give myself a break.
Last night I attended a fundraiser for Comrad Sound, a small local arts/community development centre in danger of closing. The fundraiser was packed full of energetic, intelligent, enthusiastic people of a variety of demographics. It was beautiful.
Other beauties: David Cross – Bigger and Blackerer, Wolf Parade – Expo 86, Angels of Light – Everything is Good Here/Please Come Home and split with Akron/Family, Washed Out – Life of Leisure, Karl Polanyi – The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Tom Waits – Bone Machine, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Kurt Vonnegut – Armageddon in Retrospect, Earth – Hex; Or, Printing in the Infernal Method, activism
"A Klee drawing named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
- Walter Benjamin
Yeah, whatever.
