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Waterproof Jacket & Gonna Gay Marry You
Waterproof Jacket
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I’ve been working on this for a while, but I think it’s where I want it to be now. Made mainly from loop manipulations, most of which originally standard garageband loops if I remember correctly. It is contrived, but at least I mean what I’m saying.
Lukács on Present Politics
I’m just finishing up Lukács’s brilliant essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” and was struck by this passage which seems to describe in perfect detail the present political situation characterized predominantly by the ideological struggle between neoliberalism and social democracy, the latter of which has increasingly become the willing agent of the former. Unfortunately, Lukács’s somewhat optimistic solution to this antinomy in “bourgeois thought”—rooted in the worldview of the early 1920s when a communist world-revolution seemed imminent—is the so-called “standpoint of the proletariat,” which, thanks to its unique position in the capitalist machinery, is capable of transcending the reified dualism through its ability to grasp history as a concrete dialectical totality. But what happens when—to quote Dylan—”the buyin’ power of the proletariat’s gone down” and “history,” for all intents and purposes, has ended?
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):
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:
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.
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?
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)…
Collective Projects, Plural Pronouns
I’m just on the verge of finishing Fredric Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic, and expect to write a larger post soon analyzing Jameson’s notion of “making History appear,” but I noticed one rather minute tendency of Jameson’s that I wanted to point out now, which is that Jameson frequently refers to a collective “we,” “us,” and “our” in his writing, particularly those sections that have a sort of messianic or utopian import. For example, at certain points throughout the book Jameson writes, “But pathos here will commit us to the attempt to transform Ricoeur’s project…,” “A few preliminaries before we can make so audacious a claim…,” “Our question must then turn on the affinity between…,” and so on.
Dialogue as Monologue
In his discussion of the problematic of Kantian synthetic judgment and the “paradox of pedagogy” found in Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis, as put forward in the Meno, Kojin Karatani makes the following intriguing remarks:
Who is Utopian Today?
…Those who manage to convince themselves that the order of the Other is here to stay, that the statist power of the present is firmly grounded and basically secure, are the ones clinging to a shaky arrangement with quiet desperation. Those who roll the dice betting on act/event-level transformations are, contrary to senseless common sense and vulgar popular opinion, sober realists; today’s self-declared “realists” (i.e., those banking on the indefinitely enduring continuity of current circumstances) are the ideologically intoxicated utopian idealists enthralled by dreams of a nonexistent, unattainable stability.
Uniting Subject and Structure
Last night, as I was reading Adrian Johnston’s Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change, I noticed an interesting isomorphism between Badiou and Kojin Karatani (Žižek fits here as well, I’m just too lazy to pull out efficacious quotes):
Contingency and Catastrophe
Perhaps this has some bearing on a past excerpt I posted, but either way I really enjoyed this passage from Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic where he discusses Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness at some length:
Ontological, But Not Realist
Levi has recently posted an argument on psychoanalysis and ontological realism, which I felt was worth responding to, if only because he tries to annex psychoanalysis towards object-oriented ontology, a view that I am obviously opposed to.
Philosophy and Crisis
Slavoj Zizek in an interview with Michael Hauser:
So I think that, I’m very traditional basically, that German idealism, the metaphysics of German idealism, still offers the best conceptual tools to deal with the crisis we are approaching. Because, as Hegel knew, philosophy and crisis are always connected. All philosophy, it’s clear, Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, even Plato. Plato—you cannot imagine Plato without the political crisis of Greece. No wonder that Plato’s representative book is The Republic which typically, although you have all of Plato’s ontology there, the metaphor of the cave and so on, but nonetheless all this emerges to answer which kind of political order do we need.