harry poptimer and the tides of snobbery

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i read this us blogger cz
a. he is grebt at getting to the nub of wonk-pol debate crisply and amusingly (not unlike freakytigger)
b. his spelling is TERRIBLE (not unlike barnetape

his comments threads (on say race issues, or health policy, or iraq) are generally between 5-25 comments long. This time the sub opened the hatch WHILE STILL SUBMERGED...

Comments

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

did you read ALL of those comments??

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i read it last night when there was still only like 80

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Does anyone attempt to um summarise anything at any point? I gave up after 20 or so. (& also when the "everyone likes a cheesburger sometimes" argt turned up, usually a good 'stop reading now' point)

(Tho I scrolled down to see if the debate had widened to POPMUZIK, but it hadn't)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i doubt there's much of value to summarise -- the point you made abt what always went wrong at ilx in "these kinds of argts" will be 20 times worse here

what fascinates me is the frustrated intensity -- something here really burns and chafes and matters, and potter is just the portal-of-the-moment

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Is it a wish for politics to map onto aesthetics, do you think?

(The issue in the bit I read seemed to be "What should intelligent people read?" and more widely "What should they be like?")

(Is this a leftist blog or a rightist one, if those distinctions still make sense in the pol-blogosphere?)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

leftish (FSVO) (where S = the US), with splurts of allegiance to libertarian

more like a wish for politics to somehow "have already passed through the filter of the aesthetics that our gang gets" -- where "our gang" is something comfortably assumed shared but also intensely complex (ie it's NOT just generational, as it was in the 60s; all kinds of conflict carries on within it)

it is a MASSIVE shared dissatisfaction with the cultural filters in place

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

bit of course fuelled also by an intense disagreement abt what would be better (abnd what the politics of enabling this improvement would be or will be or will have to be)

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

i had a sub to the atlantic for a short while

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

i am afeared to click on anything potter at the moment for fear that years of reading will be spoil'd for me

my feelings (having not plunged in to the full thread):

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i. ok this argt is a total hot-button thing right across culture -- as witness the urgent angry scale of the debate WITHIN a political subculture (smart/young/liberal/blah blah)
ii. "we" are sayin/have sed wayd more interestin stuff abt it than these our pol-cult overlords (as i say i like matt yglesias, but i think HE'S the outlier even on his preffered topics, and fairly -- if amiably -- conventional on pop or film or, as here, novels)
iii. note by "we" i am actually including our more notorious glam-meritocracy feud-foes
iv. there is i intuit a BIG OPEN SPACE to be seized here, which no one is NEAR thinking clearly about, EXCEPT US (sorta) -- i guess several of my projects this year (inc. L*R*B; dalek5; my attempts to break into quasi-academia) batten on exactly this shapeless intution, and so does lollards and FT generally, in its quiet-spoken way 9hurrah for us)
v. it is like being back in the early 60s, as the village voice and the very early rock mags discovered a whole entire unsatisifed readership hungry to be fed, who didn't even know who they were yet
vi. with the caveat that this readership -- as of now -- is very badly burned by what the voice-rockwrite trip turned towards
vii. i am talkin abt W1RE 2.0, this time it's transglobal and collective ("all shall love me and despair")

Re: my feelings (having not plunged in to the full thread):

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

haha and not called W1RE 2.0 obv

Re: my feelings (having not plunged in to the full thread):

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Frank's DDR would be another example of iv I guess.

Re: my feelings (having not plunged in to the full thread):

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

absolutely

Re: my feelings (having not plunged in to the full thread):

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

OK -

can we define "this argument" - is it as simple as "is mass culture good?" Surely not.

Do you really think there's a "whole entire unsatisfied etc."? - my gloomier prognosis would be that culture has been fenced off as a 'think what thou wilt' zone, so people barrel into these debates not because they want to 'debate' or explore anything per se but because they want to bellow and let off steam - there's an anger at the very idea of critics, of people telling us as culture-consumers what to think. What replaces criticism? - maybe this is the debate.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

mass vs specialist (pop vs rock) is i think a safety-first marker for a much more complicated argument -- the Great Wrong Debate, basically, which everyone sort of knows (hence the venom) but few can get beyond

i. it's about gatekeepers, yes: and gatekeeping is implicitly political, and tied into the power-structure-as-is
ii. the energy i think is "THE GATEKEEPERS SHOULD BE US"
iii. but then it immediately gets looped back into the issues of populism ("how do *I* not get swamped"), and respresentation ("ok the CRITIC is me but i am time-poor hence i designate dubdobdee as my foodtaster") and low self-esteem ("how do i know what is there; how do i know how it works; how do i trust my judgement")
iv. the key for me is our old geezaesthesis friend, the conversation about the thing is as much art as the thing itself -- in fact it may be BETTER art than the thing itself (tho obv it is often worse also) -- and the conversation above all is the thing "we" are the critics of (the gang as the author of the gang, and as audience)

[(Anonymous)]

(Apols for the repetition of pub-talk but there we are). The thread has some great examples of the desperation to be the underdog in this thread (a desperation I've been daftly calling "the will to unpower" over pints).

It kind of goes:

PERSON WHO ENJOYS SOMETHING POPULAR: I find this [popular thing] a rich and valuable experience and I like talking about it.

CRITIC: this popular thing is not as good as another, unpopular thing. It is bad and its predominance is obscuring the better thing.

PWESP: Dude I hate it when you elitist guys don't take popular stuff seriously, it can be rich and valuable

C: the problem is not that it's popular it's that it's rubbish

PWESP: Says who? You're establishing yourself as a cultural elite and keeping me and The Ordinary People down.

C: Shut up! Everywhere I turn people are talking about [popular thing]! It's on the telly and the radio and every conversation in the pub and the charts and everywhere. It's YOU who's keeping ME down (oh and by the way you should know better).

The argument never gets back to being a conversation about [popular thing] or even about the criticism of [popular thing]. It becomes this struggle for the (apparent) moral high-ground of The Oppressed and it sucks mightily. There are many points above where the conversation could be kept about the thing, or the criticism, or both, but no-one can leave an accusation of OPPRESSOR unanswered.

bopkids

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

it's a basic meme of the counterculture and (post-war?) "undergroundism" -- which is (this is my dalek argt anyway) the [yuk word alert] recuperation of avant-gardism... viz that instead of be serenely nietzschean/aristocratic/botherd as per old-skool modernism*, it is totally endlessly totally passive aggressive -- it SO wants to be loved, but its strategy is to victim-bully its chosen lover into demonstrating love

cf the 70s dynamic of the politics of victimhood, identity politics ect ect -- i think this totally battened on 60s pop culture's actually quite strange mix of "they have the guns but WE HAVE THE NUMBERS" (we = the people!) and "sumfn is happnin, but you don't know what it is, DO YOU, MR JONES?" (appeal to shared secret knowledge)


*ok this is a bit of an exaggeration -- wagnerism was a pioneer element in modernism, and it had a whole layer of play-the-victim, viz its anti-semitism

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

hmmm logic in second para there very condensed -- will have to think that bit through much more clearly now i look at it written out, think i have chosen rather NON-passive-aggressive quotes to exemplify the contradictory 60s er Thing: which i consider "new under the sun", and the cloud-cover under which we still travail blah blah

[(Anonymous)]

Lotsa proper modernists seemed to believe that their cultural and political activities seamlessly supported each other, something whihc has become more difficult for a whole heap of reasons.

Also popcrit inherited from the 60s counterculture forebears the language of political struggle. Part of the deal is apparent unreason can be justified by the difficulties of underdogness.

Notes again due to 0 time available, sorry.

bopkids

Re: my feelings (having not plunged in to the full thread):

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this sort of thing while painting the ceiling. I have an idea for a ludicrously over-ambitious book which would blow this wide open. (kinda!)

Re: my feelings (having not plunged in to the full thread):

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I think I differ because I am less interested in the conversation -- since I have fewer folk to go to the pub and talk about this stuff with. Also literature = classic zone of 'I sit and struggle with myself in private'!

Re: my feelings (having not plunged in to the full thread):

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

or rather -- the conversation is internal dialogue / dialectic, or is virtual in some sense. You are all figments / projections of me anyway.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i can put that better:

if the conversation is also art, then all art is always also part of a conversation -- was then, will one day be is -- and we are all co-authors of and fine judges of conversations

this is simultaneously a mundanist levelling and an acknowledgment of the dense richness and invention of the "everyday"

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

since you said the magic word ('everyday') and i was just thinking about it today while reading, maybe this is my sign to devise a way to get you to read part iv ('skepticism and other minds') of cavell's 'claim of reason'. (maybe i can join forces with dr. t to lobby and manipulate you!)

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

i read quickly through a couple of things in rorty's 'philosophy and social hope' last week before i left the twin cities. i wonder if one of the points he made might not be relevant here.

a. he sketched a model of education-as-socialization-and-individuation, where the socialization is rightly done for the good of all, and done up through the end of high school; the individuation is necessary for the development of a healthy electorate and society, and is done in college.
b. the individuation is mainly done by reading books and talking about them (ha).
c. professors should be able to follow their own projects of individuation so that they can demonstrate them / exemplify them / model them to the students, and as such
d. should be allowed to choose whatever books they want, where one of the uh 'suggestions' - requirements? is that
e. they choose books that are 'classic' enough to be part of common culture so that they will actually have books that they can
f. talk about with grandparents, people who went only to high school, whatever

(i am sure in misremembering i have misrepresented something or other.)

anyway, one thing that struck me about the general shape of the responses in that comment thread was how they hewed so much toward a selfish kind of individuation; how their favored examples did not paint a picture of a very internally individuated group; and how little interest there seemed to be in books that were part of common culture. at best, the common culture on display was heavily dependent on cultural gatekeeping mechanisms / fashionability / the reigning left-geek literary tastes of the past 10 years - and so i'm hesitant to call it 'common culture' even in a restricted sense of 'common'.

i'm not sure how this bears on quality or kind of conversation.

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

e: choose -enough- books that are classic enough, i think it was