Outside my department, there’s a bookshelf where faculty leave books they want to get rid of. This being a political science department, most of the books are unutterably dull statistical analyses of votes in congress, or whatever, but last week I did pick up an interesting looking book called Socialist Visions. There’s a great essay in the book that starts with pictures of soviet visions of collective architectures, and ends with a plan for chopping up suburban housing estates and reconfiguring them as communes. Another essay contains one of the stupidest sentences I’ve ever read:
Elsewhere I demonstrate that the symbolization of nature as an object that must be dominated by an ostensible separate subject is generated in the nuclear form of (what Dinnerstein calls) “mother-monopolized” child rearing, and that the emergence of authentic forms of shared parenting established the necessary unconscious basis for a post-objectifying symbolization of nature and the technologies that are its materialization.
I see: the problem of industrial capitalism can be explained solely by reference to child rearing. What is up with (a certain form of) psychoanalysis’s obsessive desire to, as Tocqueville put it, “see the whole man in the cradle”? It’s such an absurd piece of romantic mysticism, imagining that children have some absolutely sui generis fragility, and, in contrast, that adults are totally self-determining. It’s a bizarre re-reading of Freud as if he were the most conventional of liberals.
I must admit, I found the short lived outbreak of 90s-pop hostilities a little depressing. Not because the songs were terrible, although some of them certainly were, indeed the opposite; the music of the early 90s was often so good, current pop music can’t really stand up. I realize there’s a danger of nostalgia, but this isn’t just a matter of subjective taste. The diffusion of acid house and hardcore into chart music that was such a big feature of the early 90s is, in hindsight, kind of amazing, and a positive development that I can’t see much to equal today. Marky Mark is a particularly good example. When I remembered his existence, I had no memory of what the song sounded like; certainly, it didn’t occur to me that a manufactured pop idol would was launched with a song that owes so much to an Italo-house classic. If you want to be depressed, just compare Marky Mark’s amazing track with the contemporary equivalents (James Blunt, maybe, or Daniel Powter).
Well, there are a couple of contemporary trends that give some hope. One would be Timbaland’s remarkable queering of R&B, particularly on the Justin Timberlake album. Pleasingly, this is being picked up by other R&B and hip-hop artists, particularly in the Bay Area, as I discovered from this great hyphy mixtape (mix-podcast?). Particular good is Berkeley group The Pack’s track, “At the Club,” which, unexpectedly, sounds like nothing so much as Belgian New Beat.
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↴
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↴
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…