INTERSECTIONALITY OF THE GUT

There's been a lot of debate about intersectionality recently. But all too often, it seems to me, what's being termed intersectionality is little more than a classic ascetic-deconstructive manoeuvre, a way of saying: okay, your argument is all very well and good, but you haven't given sufficient attention to x, and here's a more sophisticated, more rigorous turn of the screw, and another, and so on ad infinitum. Some might view this positively, as dialectical ratiocination, or simply a necessary way of conducting intelligent debate. But right now, in the current moment, in the context of the omnishambles that is the contemporary left, I think these sorts of movements are invariably negative and paralysing.

What is more (and I think this is partly why it took me so long to understand what intersectionality actually is), what's being left out a lot of the time is the "inter" part of the formulation. Invocations of the intersectional credo are most often made along the lines of emphasising - either explicitly, or implicitly through the virulence of their expression - the interests of a single section, a single ideological category. Debate then gets swallowed up by warring capitalised mega-interests - Anti-Racism, Anti-Sexism, Anti-Homophobia, or binary or triadic compounds of the same - which of course very few people in their right minds (on the left at least) would ever really consciously oppose, but which have a tendency to be affirmed in the context of frequently absurdist melodramas of debate in which people who are quite obviously in general agreement become violently opposed to each other on grounds of super-subtle sectional difference.

How, then, can intersectionality be used more positively? I think that, when we look at something like the above picture, we all know instinctively, and with a visceral certainty that relegates debate to the level of relative meaninglessness. Yes, the picture tells us, this person is undoubtedly racist. But she is also anti-feminist, pro-capitalist, and (literally) perched on the pinnacle of a system in which the labour of millions is used to furnish the airbrushed propaganda of new neoliberal Tsars and Tsarinas who differ from their pre-twentieth century predecessors only in a smattering of infinitesimal ways.

The really effective response to this picture should not be banal cries of racism of the kind that we hear from the liberal press (and which Zhukova can try to refute on the grounds that she, as a bien pensant social-liberal-of-sorts, is interested in sponsoring "anti-racist" artworks). Rather, horrors like this should provoke the counterposition of a holistic, socialist, ethical critique in which anti-racism scarcely has to be invoked because it is so obviously an integral part of a wider anti-capitalist, anti-hierarchical movement. Real intersectionality must mean the integration of sectional interests until they need to be emphasised in a sceptical, disintegrative manner only in rare instances.

At the present moment, we need a socialism of the gut way more than we need more hyperbolically nuanced debate. If we can't grasp this and act on it before getting sidetracked into endless deconstructive caveatising, then the left really is doomed to repeat the failures of last half-century, if it even makes it through to the next decade.

POSTMODERNIST REDUX

Further to this debate about retromania (see below, here and here), there's a very interesting article by James Parker and Nicholas Croggon over at Tiny Mix Tapes, which widens the discussion into an attack on contemporary music crit as a whole.

There's a lot of very tasty stuff there, and the article is strongest I think in pointing to a sort of endemic, half-unconscious historicism right across the board in music writing from Rolling Stone to The Wire.

However, I don't quite get the conclusion:

So, the lesson of Cage, Eno, and now vaporwave, Belbury Poly, and even (if read critically) Daft Punk is that history need not be conceived of as an endless hurtling into the future. Indeed, the important thing about these musics is that they not only concern history, but assume a critical position in relation to it — they both critique certain conceptions of history and offer new ones.

Firstly, there's the obvious fact that a group like Belbury Poly is surely the epitome of retromania in its hauntological mode (and I don't buy the argument in the piece that it "makes us question our sense of nostalgia" - maybe it can, but to do so you have to run it pretty hard against itself, because I reckon most people get off on the nostalgia way more than they enjoy the implicit critique).

Also, and relatedly, I'm not sure from these examples (and from the examples of Malevich and Duchamp) what is being held up as a more positive kind of art. In fact, it seems to me - and the authors' use of the word "timeless" is a tell-tale sign here - that what is being avowed is essentially a very specific mid-twentieth century lineage of postmodernist art, the high-art canon of the last few decades of post-modern, post-ideological neoliberal orthodoxy if you like. "Black Square" and 4'33" were indeed modernistic steps forward of a kind, but they were also endpoints for modernism itself, transition works that helped to usher in the postmodern period (of which "retromania" is merely a latter-day extenuation).

As such, and taken together with the argument against time viewed as an "endless hurtling into the future", I don't really see that anything is ultimately said in the article beyond a restatement of the end of history ethos that the retromania argument takes as a starting point of its diagnosis.

What seems to be being rejected is the idea that art/music can make active, purposive (rather than passive) social interventions that impinge upon democratic forward-movements, and I'm afraid we've had more than enough of that sort of thing for way too long now.

THE SUBLIMATION OF THE SOAR

I was geet pleased to write one of the first Quietus Essays. File under strains of tentative futurism in 2010s pop.

Hopefully there's more good stuff to come in this new series.

2013 POP

This was the best year for the pop single I can remember:

10. Sky Ferreira, "You're Not the One"

9. Miley Cyrus, "We Can't Stop"

8. Lana Del Rey, "Summertime Sadness" (Cedric Gervais Remix)

7. Pusha T, "Numbers on the Board"

6. Taylor Swift, "I Knew You Were Trouble"

5. Naughty Boy, "La La La"

4. Duke Dumont feat A*M*E, "Need You (100%)"

3. Rizzle Kicks, "Lost Generation"

2. Lorde, "Royals"

1. Chvrches, "Gun"

Trendier addenda:

INTROS

I'm going to nominate some categories (partly picking up on stuff already thrown up on the decade blogs and elsewhere):

THE SPOKEN WORD RALLYING CRY

THE ANOMALOUSLY GOOD DIAMOND-IN-THE-ROUGH FRAGMENT

THE STATEMENT-RIFF

THE SEPARATE MINI-SONG

THE CORRECT USE OF THE BLUES JAM (AS OPPOSED TO STICKING IT IN THE MIDDLE/END OF THE TRACK)

THE GARAGE BAND UNCOVERS PRIMITIVIST MAGIC

THE INDISPUTABLE

(Carl has already nabbed it, but great minds etc ...)

NOTES ON ITV'S LUCAN

Caught the first episode of this last night. So far it's fine social-realist TV drama in the tradition of Our Friends in the North, Tinker Tailor, Red Riding, etc, and certainly better than anything the Beeb have done this year I reckon. (Definitely better than last year's shambolic effort in this regard, anyway.)

 

There's quite an interesting political thread running through it, too. Christopher Eccleston is deliciously demonic as gambling club owner John Aspinall. An unusual amount of script space is given over to Aspinall's Randian dialogues full of references to Alpha Males, biological determinism, the survival of the fittest, the importance of accepting the growth of an inferior underclass, and all that shite. He's basically a walking Adam Curtis theory, a right-wing crank grumbling about the power of "the Miners" in social-democratic post-war Britain, a sinister Blimp full of embittered determination to reassert what he calls the "natural order". Of course, the character is all the more shady because his views will become depressingly mainstream some ten years after the early-seventies moment that provides the backdrop to Lucan's narrative.

Another interesting thing is the way this class narrative is synthesised with a powerful feminist argument. Egged on by Aspinall's reactionary Alpha Male spiel, Lord Lucan starts to intimidate his wife Veronica - mentally and physically - in an attempt to get her committed so he can win custody of his children. Fortunately, this is the progressive early seventies rather than the Downtonite 1920s, so the courts decide in favour of the independent, sound-of-mind woman against the imperious, bullying aristo. The tragedy is that the working-class nanny who has supported Veronica in the run-up to the trial is bludgeoned to death by a crazed Lucan at the end of the first episode.

The symbolism here - of a brutal, quasi-Darwinian patriarchy reasserting its authority after a period of "effeminate" egalitarianism - is not difficult to grasp. The unheimlich contemporary relevance - bearing in mind certain recent uber-Darwinian pronouncements of the British Conservative Party - is also striking.

And then you realise who Aspinall's step-nephew is:

There can be no more denying it ...

The conspiracy theory is the true realist art form of the twenty-first century.

ONE VERY RIGHT THING ...

... about Mark Fisher's "Exiting the Vampire Castle" piece is its underscoring of "a set of snobbish and condescending attitudes that it is apparently alright to exhibit while still classifying oneself as left wing".

Predictably I think, this is exactly the form a lot of the criticisms of the piece have taken. Lots of the contra comments on Facebook and Twitter have adopted exactly that "tone ... as if they were a schoolteacher marking a child’s work, or a psychiatrist assessing a patient" MF identifies.

People have tended to refer to the Vampires' Castle piece using words like "crude" or "incoherent". Then there's this slightly noxious piece (which, with its link to a photoshopped caricature, verges on character assassination). The starting point of the critique here is that "the reasons given [by MF in the Vampires' Castle article] ... do not lead to the conclusions he offers", that "it does not follow its own stated reasons". In other words, the teacher steps in to reprimand the pupil who hasn't polished his argument just-so.

FFS, the article is actually called "B-grade politics"!

Here again: "... a case of someone who’s read a bit of philosophy and theory but simply doesn’t understand the subtlety of the claims advanced therein."

And here: "What I would recommend Fisher is to do some reading". [sic]

Stepping outside of the internecine left for a moment, right-wing blogger Harry Mount made a very similar move earlier this month when he tried to discredit the "spoilt and childish" Russell Brand. Apparently, Brand's big problem in his journalistic writing is his overuse of "long, Latinate words that desperately scream 'I'm clever' at the reader". So according to Mount, Brand should "grow up" and "get a little more Anglo-Saxon" in his writing. These are highly contentious issues of style, about which there has been much debate for aeons. But Mount offers his maxim (Anglo-Saxon words=good, Latinate prose=bad) with the absolute authority of the High Tory schoolmaster.

Very different examples, but I think they're evidence of exactly the sort of imperious "reprimanding" tendency the Vampires' Castle conceit is trying to expose and challenge.

A SHORT NOTE ON THE BRAND THING

How about this ...

1) The whole thing has very little to do with class, or, more accurately, the main issues of contention don't. That's not to say that class isn't very important to the wider arguments and to Russell Brand's personal narrative in general, just that it seems to have been introduced in a slightly irrelevant fashion in this instance. To be honest, I blame Facebook and its universe of crossed wires.

2) Debating Russell Brand's sexual politics is valid and necessary.

3) Overwhelmingly, the Newsnight interview was a brilliant, inspiring, moving, and somewhat out-of-the-blue incursion into mainstream discourse of certain key tenets of left politics. It is difficult to quantify the actual efficacy of something like this, but even if just on the level of morale and affirmation of political belief, hope and empowerment, Brand's intervention was magnificent.

4) As such, a real danger - and without wishing to misrepresent anyone else's argument, what I think the slightly mis-aimed criticisms of "identity politics" were trying to get at - is that a hugely positive (not to mention somewhat rare) assertion of left values in a space where that might actually mean something becomes nullified and negated by discussions about Brand's individual class and sexual credentials that, while clearly massively important in a wider sense, are not directly, immediately relevant to his statements about widening inequality, the moral bankruptcy of mainstream politics, the imaginative possibility of revolution, and so on.

5) The overall effect of this sort of nullification/negation is impasse, disillusionment, infighting, those "classic left-wing" curses, and leaves the door open for people further to the right to come in and truly dismantle what could have been a subversive and inspiring moment in cultural discourse.

6) Case in point: that wondercunt from Peep Show, who now comes out as a weirdly impassioned Blairite ultra, lecturing Brand in the New Statesman this week with all the snideness and callow intelligence of a public school debating team captain: "We tried [revolution] again and again, and we know that it ends in death camps, gulags, repression and murder. In brief, and I say this with the greatest respect, please read some fucking Orwell".

7) Do you think Robert Webb realises that Fucking Orwell was in fact a novelist, and not a political historian, much less a prophet of twenty-first-century hopes and dreams?

CALUM HOWARD REMIX

Sublime sounds from Newcastle's most insanely talented button-presser Calum Howard.

DAD'S FIRST WALKMAN

  
A grey wraith in a blue leather case,
Still a marvel in some respects;
Reminder of a sci-fi world,
Of buried futuristic sects.

After 1979
Our reeling hopes were all erased,
But the last tape can be wiped again
And the dreaming past can be rephrased.