the velvet howler, Long live the New Flesh.
But, Are You Advanced Enough?
Lou Reed, singing with the Blind Boys of Alabama AND he’s singing a Velvet Underground song AND appears to be enjoying it.
Lukács on Self-Narrative
I sort of wish I had written something like this in the opening of my graduate application statement of purpose, taken from Georg Lukács’s 1967 preface to History and Class Consciousness, which I just started reading tonight (and very much enjoying):
I think that I would be departing from the truth if I were to attempt to iron out the glaring contradictions of that period by artificially constructing an organic development and fitting into the correct pigeon-hole in the ‘history of ideas’. If Faust could have two souls within his breast, why should not a normal person unite conflicting intellectual trends within himself when he finds himself changing from one class to another in the middle of a world crisis?
A Pessimistic Prediction
Contra Matthew Yglesias’s rosy-eyed belief that passing financial reform will somehow prove to be a much easier task for the Democrats than health care was, I offer you these pessimistic reflections on how things will go horribly wrong:
Democrats will outline a “strong” version of the financial reform bill, though it will still basically be objectively watered down in comparison to the hopes raised by liberal progressive bloggers following the many rumors of Volcker’s return to power in the administration.
This “strong” bill, however, will face staunch resistance by bankers (though many bankers and financiers—especially the smarter ones—will also have decided to simply double-down and go along with the administration, probably as a PR move), as well as nihilistic rage by Republicans, who will be able to launch a massive campaign of deception and further rile up populist ire against the Obama administration.
In an effort to please the Republicans, as well as the holdouts in the banking industry, Obama will launch a series of “backdoor” meetings, through which the bill becomes further watered down. Also, no Republican will support it—and Democrats will not call them out on it in public.
Republicans will launch a massive advertising campaign demonstrating how the Obama administration has “colluded” with the financial sector, and that the Democrats are in the pockets of lobbyists and billionaires. Misguided populist rage ensues.
Years later, creepy, plastic-haired Republican is elected president and—thanks to instantaneous Democratic capitulation and a debilitating case of political Stockholm Syndrome—their proposed financial reform bill passes, without requiring any visible negotiations with banks. Bill is even more favorable towards banks, and a massive step backwards from what had even existed before the crisis. Oh, and no one notices except maybe Glenn Greenwald in a blog post too long to sustain attention.
And there you have it!
Shameless Self-Promotion
Oh yeah, I recently completed a redesign of my entire portfolio. If you or anyone you know is in need of some sort of web or graphic design specialist, you should deeply consider pointing them in my direction.
Pessimism Means Fighting for the Impossible
Like a lot of people who voted for Obama, I’m pretty upset about the election results in Massachusetts tonight. On the one hand, I knew full well that Obama would never meet my expectations, which were considerable, and that he had no desire to do so, with his post-partisan belief in abstract “reform,” and even more troubling faith in the Republican Party as acting in good-faith, having been made clear early on in the campaign. I suppose, then, that I’d have no good explanation for why I feel so betrayed and disappointed, and even guilty for being so, as these sentiments bear witness to some small kernel of hope I had that things might be different this time around.
So now I just want to selectively quote Brad Johnson’s brief post over at An und für sich regarding the recent narrative taken up by certain liberal progressives about how this sort of disenchantment was predictable from the beginning given Obama’s lofty rhetoric and promise of hope and change, and that people who took Obama seriously should become more pragmatic, more “realist.” Here’s what Brad writes:
As I reflect on the latest setback to the Democratic party’s legislative agenda in tonight’s election in Massachusetts, I’m reminded of the increasingly prominent narrative making the rounds amongst the A-list liberal bloggers. Basically, so we’re told, we should’ve known better than to expect anything more than what we’ve gotten so far out of an Obama presidency. Sure, he used flashy, inspirational rhetoric to secure an unprecedented coalition of support, but if you really believed the rhetoric, you weren’t actually listening to the message. In effect, those who feel either betrayed or let down are really just feeling the bitter sting that comes on the backside of naivety. Politics is hard; compromise is necessary; Obama has been very up-front about his feeling son Afghanistan, health care, etc. etc etc.
I’m not going to disagree with the practical relevance of this line of thinking. Nor do I underestimate its power as a kind of pragmatic consolation. I am also amongst the first to be annoyed by the residual Obama demagoguery amongst the limousine liberals here in the Bay Area. What I resist, however, is the conclusion drawn: i.e., that those who believed then should either “grow up” or “shut up” now.
…In short, then, it is not the responsibility of the disappointed merely to grow up. More precisely, I should think it is a matter of what they are growing into. If growing up means merely reasoned political pragmatism, then I fear for what the future brings. If it means, however, the disenfranchised become capable of making their demands and expectations effective — that is, of being able to discern the various shades and scales of a leadership’s failure, and responding in such a way that is neither wholly complicitous with its failure or at odds with its professed aspirations — then by all means, let’s grow up, but never shut up.
This all strikes me as exactly right. Furthermore, I think the most problematic part about this whole “realist” attitude about “growing up” is that it’s fundamentally idealistic, in the sense that it relies on the belief that piece-meal progress is the only desirable and possible outcome of the political process. But I think what the past year (and past several years) has shown is that such reform is impossible, that the deck is rigged, yet we continue to play as if it’s a fair game. In that sense, “realism” (and its cynical variants) is at its core an idealism of the present, the most intense form of ideological belief there is: the belief that the system will last forever.
In other words, the “realm of the possible” is at once the realm of the purely ideal, the impossible, because the system in place is designed such that it can’t ever really happen, the “possible” can never actualize itself. From this perspective, I would argue, only the impossible is what is possible, because it means changing the system itself, fundamentally altering the coordinates to change how we organize possibility and impossibility. But you can only do that if you, first, accept the fact that the system is plagued by an irreducible antagonism that can’t be contained within it: this is why, although they’re obviously racist, reactionary, astro-turf stupidity (without granting the liberal class bias in this judgment), the Tea Parties contain a utopian element. Although they clearly misdiagnose the antagonism as one between the People and some abstract notion of the all-pervasive “government,” they are at the very least willing to acknowledge the primacy of social antagonism, which is precisely what is lacking in the Obama administration, its fundamental unwillingness to name the antagonism. This is demonstrated by their not exactly shocking decision to not take a hard-line against bankers and big business, which have ruined so many people’s lives in the recent economic crisis.
If each failure made by the exponents of reform, then, makes me feel that I should be even more cynical, even more jaded, and even more pessimistic, it’s important to keep in mind and never forgot that this is only because the possible is impossible if we accept liberal capitalism as the horizon of our eternal present without a future, that the system is here to stay. What pessimism really means is fighting for the impossible, because the impossible is the only real possible alternative to our present sociopolitical nihilism.
Foam Rubber, USA
Chris Frantz thought of the titular chorus after seeing a Parliament-Funkadelic show where the crowd chanted “Burn down the house.” The initial lyrics were considerably different, however. In an interview on NPR’s “All Things Considered” aired on December 2, 1984, David Byrne played excerpts of early worktapes showing how the song had evolved from an instrumental jam by Tina Weymouth (bass) and Chris Frantz (drums). Once the whole band had reworked the groove into something resembling the final recording, Byrne began chanting and singing nonsense syllables over the music until he had arrived at phrasing that fit with the rhythms— a technique influenced by former Talking Heads producer Brian Eno— “and then I [would] just write words to fit that phrasing… I’d have loads and loads of phrases collected that I thought thematically had something to do with one another, and I’d pick from those.”
According to Byrne in the NPR interview, phrases he tried but ultimately didn’t use in the song’s recorded “verses” included “I have another body,” “Pick it up by the handle,” “You travel with a double,” and “I’m still under construction.” As for the title phrase in the chorus, one early attempt (as heard on a worktape) had him singing a different line, “What are we gonna do?”, and at another point in the process, “instead of chanting ‘Burning Down the House,’ I was chanting ‘Foam Rubber, USA.’”
House!
The one that’s not a TV show about medical-specific Sherlock Holmes.
Coming soon from the Criterion Collection. Huzzah.
And while we’re at it… How badly do you want your TV to be more like this?
The Dub Side
After reading this passage From Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, it occurred to me that I tend to seek out and emphasize the dub version of culture:
While singers and DJs offered words of mourning or escape for the sufferers, dub reggae-the mostly wordless music of dread-ran directly into the heart of the darkness. In Perry”s “Revelation Dub,” time was creakily kept by a distended, phasing hi-hat and Romeo’s vocal was either reduced to the low hum of some distant street protest or chopped into sudden nonsensical stabs-“Warinna!” “Balwarin!”- as if all words, even warnings, could not be trusted. The riddim-which Marley would later version for “Three Little Birds,” with its bright chorus, “Don’t worry about a thing, ‘cause every little thing’s gonna be alright”-was swung off its moorings, the textual integrity and authority was undermined. Perry’s sound was the epitome of sipple[meaning slippery, precarious]. Dub answered the question: what kind of mirror is it that reflects everything but the person looking into it?
“Dub had a compelling circularity. It exploded in the dancehall at the moment the tenement yards exploded in violence. Dub was the “B-side” to the soaring visions of the democratic socialist dreamers or the apocalyptic warning of the Rasta prophets. As reggae historian Steve Barrow says, “The music of dub represents literally and figuratively ‘the other side.’ There’s an up and a down, there’s an A-side and a B-Side. It’s a dialectical world.”
On Philosophical Debates
Whenever we are dealing with an “official” progressive succession of philosophers, the truly interesting thing is to consider how a philosopher who was, according to this “official line,” “overcome” or “completed” by his successor(s), reacts to his successor(s)…
What is the philosophical status of these “retroactive” rejoinders? … They do not so much undermine the underlying line of succession … as, rather, bring forth its most interesting and lively moment, the moment when, as it were, a thought rebels against its reduction to a term in the chain of “development” and asserts its absolute right or claim… That is to say, when the Old is attacked by the New, this first appearance of the New is as a rule flat and naïve—the true dimension of the New arises only when the Old reacts to the (first appearance of) the New. Pascal reacted from a Christian standpoint to scientific secular modernity, and his “reaction” … tells us much more about modernity than its direct partisans. The true “progress” emerges from the reaction of the Old to the progress. True revolutionaries are always reflected conservatives.
— Slavoj Zizek, “Fichte’s Laughter,” in Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism, pp. 122-123.
The Anti-Capitalist Transition
David Harvey on the future of capitalism has this to say on communism and the anti-capitalist transition:
Communists, Marx and Engels averred in their original conception laid out in The Communist Manifesto, have no political party. They simply constitute themselves at all times and in all places as those who understand the limits, failings, and destructive tendencies of the capitalist order as well as the innumerable ideological masks and false legitimations that capitalists and their apologists (particularly in the media) produce in order to perpetuate their singular class power. Communists are all those who work incessantly to produce a different future to that which capitalism portends.
Reggie Watts Is About to Explode
He just did a battery commercial and this Pepsi product tie-in. I have no objections because I think he rightfully deserves to be the most famous and well paid man in the American ecosystem.