New Pet Shop Boys! I’m not sure how I feel about their new album, Super. The singles, “The Pop Kids” (especially) and “Inner Sanctum,” are great, but the rest of the album is less impressive. “Twenty Something” seems like an awkwardly strained attempt to write a zeitgeist song for a zeitgeist they’re not really a part of, and I don’t get the point of “The Dictator Decides” at all (it sort of looks like a political song if you squint a bit, but what aspect of contemporary politics is it actually supposed to be grasping?). Read more↴
I’ve compiled all the tracks I’ve mentioned this week into a mixcloud track, which you can listen to through the player above, and follow along with the post, I guess? The first track is the new Carly Rae Jepsen! Specifically, one of two new tracks from the new Japan-only remix album. “First Time” is great, could easily have been a track from Emotion, except that the extra-punchy synths are more reminiscent of Kiss. The other new track, “Fever,” is less immediately striking, but the lyrics are wonderful (“well that could work but I’m still hot for you”); the remixes are mostly whatever, although there’s a good disco version of “Your Type.” Read more↴
Like Patri Friedman, Pitbull apparently associates freedom with being on a big boat. Also with an acid house cover of “I’m Free,” made famous of course by the Soup Dragons. Which turns out to be a pretty decent song, and Pitbull’s joyful drag parody of masculinity is as charming as ever. Read more↴
Marx is disturbed by the strong resemblance between the activity of the performing artist and the servile duties, which, thankless and frustrating as they are, do not produce surplus value, and thus return to the realm of non-productive labour (54).
In A Grammar of the Multitude, Virno attempts to ground his own theory of virtuosity in work in Marx, and notices Marx’s apparent discomfort that his theory analyses artistic work and “servile” work in the same way. What is it that makes “servile” work servile? The distinguishing feature seems to be that it is work that is never finished, but rather work that has to be continually done again. That is to say, servile work is reproductive work, or what Arendt calls the work of animal laborans, the never-finished work of maintaining the human animal. Arendt hates this sort of work because it doesn’t produce anything that outlasts the animal: it does not create something new, or, in Greek, it is not poiesis.
What Virno misses, though, in his attempt to show the new importance of virtuosity in the post-Fordist economy, is that, while it’s true that neither reproductive nor virtuosic work are poiesis, neither is productive work in capitalism. Read more↴