Consecrate for Change

I sat down to write tonight and couldn’t get anything out because I was feeling so gloomy. I couldn’t quite figure out why, but then I listened to some music like:

Gobbledigook

Triumph of a Heart

Then I realized why I was down:

A) I haven’t been listening to enough music lately.

B) I have been taking myself too seriously.

Here’s something else from Badiou, this time from his book Polemics, from the chapter entitled “On Parliamentary ‘Democracy’:

“The vote does not bear on capital questions, which are instead presented consensually by politicians as comprising simply what exists, and not as that which is decided (hence it is said: ‘it’s the modern world’, ‘the world as it is’). Similarly, certain decisions have to be taken in secrecy since they are not conservative enough to withstand the test of the vote. In other words, if important changes take place they do not do so in the field of the vote. Inversely, that which is in the vote’s field is on the whole inalterable. What fascinates and brings about adhesion to the procedure of voting is this guarantee of a decision without object.
On the other hand, a politics encompassing real decisions, I mean emancipatory decisions, is entirely foreign to the vote, because by deciding something liberatory you are designated as being hostile to established interests, interests that, despite being int eh minority, will make enough of a hullabaloo, and will have sufficient control over the instruments of propaganda, to ensure that you’ll be replaced at the next election. And this will be all the more readily done, as people vote to persevere and not to become.

Linking politics to real decisions, those understood not as adhering to the nature of things but as consequences of a will, can only be done by submitting politics both to principles and to practices that depend directly on such principles, rather than to the very strange rule that submits everything to a count of votes.
The vote is in essence contradictory to principles, just as it is to every idea of emancipation and protest….

…the principle of principles, for the modern philosopher, is the principle of equality. Inventing sites and procedures of a political work internal to the popular masses; reviving the word ‘worker’ so that the generality of the maxim of equality is applied throughout every situation (workers’ hostels, factories, streets, cities…): this is our problem at task. What is needed–and we should be in no doubt–is a firm indifference to posts of state and a constantly sustained cordial scorn for electoral prebends. What is needed is a serene and declared supremacy of the active number over the passive number. What is needed is the wax Ulysses used to eep from yielding either to the songs, or to the sirens, or to the blackmail of ‘democracy’. What are needed are new paths, since the key to inventions is what, in teh 1970s, was called la liaison de masse, which essentially means: doing politics directly with those it is made for in the first place, those for whom only the maxim of equality is capable of inscribing existence in its truth.”

An interesting article. Badiou compares this spectacle of financial crisis to a Hollywood blockbuster. What’s really real in this whole debacle is not the nail-biting bankers, nor numbers flashing across screens, nor the lighting fast legislation bolting through governments, but the people who can no longer afford to house themselves watching the whole thing on someone else’s TV. The audience is the real, not the spectacle.

And when we look at the audience instead of the show, we see it was all a sham to begin with.

“So what do we see, if we turn things around in this way? We see, and this is what it means to see, simple things that we’ve known for a long time: capitalism is nothing but robbery, irrational in its essence and devastating in its development. Its few short decades of savagely unequal prosperity have always been at the cost of crises in which astronomical quantities of value disappear, bloody punitive expeditions into every zone that capitalism judges either strategically important or threatening, and world wars that brought it back to health.”

Once we admit this fact we can begin to imagine and practice other types of economies and politics. Read the rest of what Badiou has to say here.

I’m done! I defended my thesis this morning and passed. I felt pretty good going into it, but there was a nagging suspicion in the back of my mind that my professors might walk in tell me my thesis was total crap, throw it on the ground, spit on it, set it on fire, spit on me, and then walk off to read a real book to purge their eyes of the imbecilities they had just been forced to behold.

Luckily that didn’t happen. My committee suggested some revisions, but there was neither spit nor fire.

I should be posting more frequently on here now, so check back from time to time.

Almost done with the thesis. One week to go.

Here’s a great article about how today’s counterculture no longer challenges but instead revels in the nonsubstance of mainstream society and economy. Read it.

So I’m in the final stretches of the thesis. I’ll be done in 2 weeks and will begin posting more regularly after that.

For now, pleas listen to this. It’s a recent episode of “This American Life” that explains just how dire our current financial meltdown is and why the bailout, as it stands, won’t solve the problem.

Feeling a bit cynical today. I got to listen to some really great music this weekend. Some good friends–AshMae, Rachel, Spencer, Sam–played good things at the Sego festival in Provo on Saturday, and I danced and shook my body and felt quite alive. Then last night Sigur Ros played in Salt Lake and there were some pretty beautiful moments. But, I always come away from those experiences feeling pretty ambivalent. I know that a lot of people are having genuinely happy experiences, but I can’t help feeling like, in many instances, music has just become a medium for people to show how fluent they are in the language of cool. Even worse, although it’s related, is the sensation that ipods and concerts serve the carnivalesque function of providing places to blow off steam and forget for a moment that our lives within our capitalist socioeconomic surroundings are stupendously monotonous, unimaginative, and completely lacking any transcendence; in other words, we go to concerts on the weekend to forget about our 9 to 5 jobs, our majors that we don’t find interesting but need to complete in order to get a 9 to 5 job, etc., etc. We go to the communal rites of cool to prove that our souls haven’t been erased by the necessities of everyday life, but really we are just assuaging our thread-bare consciences enough to be able to return to the amoralities of the daily grind. We idolize the creative because we forfeited our own right to creativity long ago. (This last point is a little less applicable to the Sego experience, where there was much more a sense of a communal sharing and enjoyment of each other’s efforts, but even still, so much of what we produce is not made to be beautiful, but likeable, cool.) The way that we ‘enjoy’ music most of the time is directly analogous to the structure of our society: a very small elite class of creators/performers imparts its goods for consumption to the silent masses who have lost all confidence in their own ability to speak or create.

What would egalitarian creation and enjoyment look like?

That’s a matter for another post, but, for now, here are a few quotes from Adorno’s 1938 essay “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” (still relevant after all these years):

“If one seeks to find out who ‘likes’ a commercial piece, one cannot avoid the suspicion that liking and disliking are inappropriate to the situation, even if the person questioned clothes his reactions in those words. The familiarity of the piece is a surrogate for the quality ascribed to it. To like it is almost the same thing as to recognize it. An approach in terms of value judgments has become a fiction for the person who finds himself hemmed in by standardized musical goods…

“In one of his essays, Aldous Huxley has raised the question of who, in a place of amusement, is really being amused. With the same justice, it can be asked whom music for entertainment still entertains. Rather, it seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all. It inhabits the pockets of silence that develop between people molded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility. Everywhere it takes over, unnoticed, the deadly sad role that fell to it in the time and the specific situation of the silent films. It is perceived purely as background. If nobody can any longer speak, then certainly nobody can any longer listen…

“The star principle has become totalitarian. The reactions of the listeners appear to have no relation to the playing of the music. They have reference, rather, to the cumulative success which, for its part, cannot be thought of unalienated by the past spontaneities of listeners, but instead dates back to the command of publishers, sound film magnates and rulers of radio. Famous people are not the only stars. Works begin to take on the same role. A pantheon of bestsellers builds up….This selection reproduces itself in a fatal circle: the most familiar is the most successful and is therefore played again and again and made still more familiar…

“Music, with all the attributes of the ethereal and the sublime which are generously accorded it, serves in America today as an advertisement for commodities which one must acquire in order to be able to hear music…

“Their only relation [between the consumers of hit songs and the hit songs] is to the completely alien, and the alien, as if cut off from the consciousness of the masses by a dense screen is what seeks to speak for the silent. Where they react at all, it no longer makes any difference whether it is to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or to a bikini…”

Listen here to one of the best interviews (more of a monologue actually) that I’ve heard in a long time, especially on the subjects of the Wall Street meltdown, the state of global capitalism, Sarah Palin, and Kung Fu Panda.

This is also a good/frightening article about the meltdown/bailout. Read it please.

Read about it here.

Oh my.