Eating my words

[paulhope]

Remember all that stuff I was saying about the film, "Load After Load," playing at the party of My Pal, Foot Foot? I take it back. Shame, shame, shame--what's wrong with me? Here's a problem with having (acknowledging) split motivations for every action

Comments

Re: this is hal

[paulhope]

Thanks for gracing this journal with your comments again, Hal. I miss hearing from you more often.

Also thanks for the link to the Recuperation article, that set me off on a frantic Wikipedia run around Situationalism. I'm conflicted--I have deep emotional sympathy for absurd, nihilistic 'revolutionary' ideologies in their desire to take down The System, but at the same time I don't see any hint of productivity from them--nothing to replace what has been destroyed. So I find myself alternately playing the nihilist or the establishmentarian in discussion, without ever really getting around to developing what I hope is a Third Way.

Segue. I agree with your analysis of hipsterism to a point, but I think you overemphasize the 'consumerist' bit. I don't think a social niche is to be held responsible for others' decision to capitalize on them .

The irony-fetish is deep, though. Here's a too-academic take on it: it's the human coping mechanism borne out of the pessimistic nihilism introduced by Schopenhauer (and others before him, of course) into Western culture that followed the fall of Christianity and Kantian rationalism (I'm way out of my league here--this is rambling?) The festering nihilistic fringe has lived on, because it is logical conclusion of playing by the intellectual rules handed down to us by our forefathers which keep getting expounded on by the faithful.

This high-brow intellectual shit filters through to the less snootily educated by the implicit information processing mechanism that is humanity and its interaction, and manifests itself in communities of the ideologically like-minded.

But ironic hipsterism and its red-state counterpart, radically uncritical Christian fundamentalism, are on the rise because we have socially computed (in a connectivist sense...do you follow? Like a brain, only with people instead of neurons. The media is a hormone flood, to extend the analogy too far) the results of the Platonic framework and in fact Logic/Science and Progress (or maybe Meaning) have diverged; real social reform, the traditional duty of the countercultural, is either (naively) deduced to be impossible (thus hipsterism) or attempted on a ridiculous, archaic intellectual foundation that, for its own preservation, has been severed from reality and, hence, applicability (thus the Intelligent Design charade, for example).

Why am I still writing? Hmmm.

Oh, right, because there seems to be another way adopted by everybody else. And that's hopeful for our generation. Nihilists and fanatics, though sometimes catastrophic nuisances, don't seem to able to grind all human progress to a halt.

Wait--was I talking about hipsters? How did I get onto this topic?

Re: this is hal

[paulhope]

Situationists were an interesting bunch. One of them, Guy Debord, became lastingly famous. they were the primary intelletuals behind the '68 riots in france. I think they saw their work as "liberating" as opposed to negative work + positive work. but yeah, as for them never getting anywhere, you're right

when I called hipsterism consumerist, I wasn't referring to the tendency of mainstream fashion to mimic them. it would indeed be absurd to hold them responsible for that. in fact, I'm not holding hipsters responsible for anything. like I said in another comment (or did I?), I'm not "critiquing" hipsterism, I'm just commenting on the general shape and political dynamics of our culture today. when I said it was consumerist, I was referring to the hipster trend of fetishizing vintage consumer goods or out-of-the-way consumer goods (pabst blue ribbon anyone?). maybe I'm being too reductive though in seeing it as a repetition of commodity fetishism instead of a subversive reaction to it.

I agree that the highest "intellectualism" of philosophy always finds vulgar expression somehow. I don't think it's so much a matter of filtering down, as you say, as everyone reacting to the same changing set of material, economic, and politcal circumstances, the people in their own way, the intellectuals in their own way.

I'm glad you brought up redstate fundamentalism. that really is the conflict of the day, relativism and fundamentalism. I don't understand most of your last big paragraph, but I agree with the parts I understand, the part about social reform being either impossible (hipsters) or quixotic (evangelicals).