Lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living

Britney Spears explains the commodity form

We’ve all probably imbibed, in one form or another, a left-wing culture criticism that draws, in one way or another, on Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of the culture industry; even I find it difficult to like Paris Hilton sometimes. But their essay is more interesting than the reflexive anti-commodification that is now so common. As Owen pointed out when I mentioned this before, you can occasionally see a glimpse of utopian possibilities in popular culture in the Frankfurt School, and this strain is even more pronounced in Benjamin. I talked to our local Marxism reading group about this a couple of weeks ago; here’s what I said: Read more↴

The idiocy of anti-communism

Maybe it’s just distance giving me more perspective, but I don’t remember that Start The Week used to be quite so offensively gliberal. A friend pointed me to last week’s edition, in which Simon Sebag Montefiore and Robert Service discuss whether or not Stalin was literally a pirate, and all the most unthinking anti-communist cliches are wheeled out. Sebag Montefiore unveiled his exciting archival research that showed that Stalin used to rob banks for the Bolsheviks (research presumably carried out in a GCSE history text-book), while Service made the controversial claim that, if it hadn’t been for the outcome of the Second World War, Eastern Europe would not have become communist (yes, I think it’s fair to say communism would have done less well in Eastern Europe if the Nazis had won the war). Read more↴

I have not yet begun to fight

Watch: Marky Mark – Good Vibrations

This is, unexpectedly, a really good song.

90s pop war

This may not fit infinite thought’s strict criteria, as it was never technically a hit, but it was, for a confusing couple of weeks, regularly played in the Coffee Shop in Neighbours…

Watch: Frente – Ordinary Angels

The collapsing Soviet Union in dance music form

antigram and infinite thought‘s 90s pop war reminds me that I meant to post this video a while back, but I don’t think I ever did.

Watch: Snap – Rhythm is a Dancer

I forget why I was going to post it, but then, it’s not like it really needs any justification. Read more↴

Support from an unexpected source

Adam points to the annoying habit among people doing academic work of moralizing about the “relevance” or accessibility of their work, and, I think, gets to the heart of what’s wrong with the way this usually proceeds. By positioning themselves in opposition to academic “irrelevance”

the speaker can make a double assertion:

  1. The common people are right to be suspicious of some intellectual work, which really is useless at best or counterproductive at worst.
  2. I, however, do not do that kind of intellectual work and am very suspicious of it myself.

The problem with this is that by focusing on the individual’s choice of academic style, this kind of move distracts from a critique of the exclusionary power structures of academia. Read more↴