RIP Raoul Vaneigem

Raoul Vaneigem is one of those thinkers whose thinkige had a massive effect on me for a while - and then dropped away almost completely as other influences came along and my thinking grew more complicated. 

Having initially believed The Situationists were a rock band, the ultimate subversive rock band (I first came across their name in a Melody Maker profile of Malcolm McLaren), I found Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist Internationale in  Blackwells, the Oxford book shop, when I was up for interviews at colleges. I think I stumbled upon it in their huge cavernous basement. This must have been the same day that John Lennon's murder was all over the news. As one symbol of the Sixties dream died,  I started an infatuation with another set of Sixties dreaming. 

Over the next few months I read and reread the slim green large-size volume (that's my well-worn copy above). It's wonderfully illustrated with photographs of Situationist graffiti and Situationist comic strips and collages. And the selection of texts is well chosen and helpfully contextualized by Christopher Gray. I found myself gravitating towards the pieces written by Vaneigem, whose vision was more vitalist and desire-driven than the severe Guy Debord.  In my copy, the Vaneigem essays like "Self-Realisation, Communication and Participation" (a deceptively mild and neutral title: it could be some Pelican volume about education policy or modernized management structures!) and "The Totality for Kids" (much more adrenalizing in tone!) are heavily marked up with pencil - in places almost every sentence struck me as profound and revelatory. 

"A Permament Rag Week" - what a horrific idea!

In this flush of enthusiasm, I also bought Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life - from Compendium in Camden if memory serves. But somehow I never got around to reading it. Other theory totems had entered my life, different Frenchmen.  And I was already having doubts about the Situationist vision. 

I had come across the John Berger quote about how the Situationists had no concept of tragedy and nodded. Their critique of the poverty of everyday life remains acute, albeit with some provisos and adjustments needed. But their ideas of how that would translate into politics are pure fantasy. "Whatever the eye sees and covets, let the hand grasp it!" - mouthed by one of the revolutionaries in a Situationist comic strip that I photocopied and stuck to my student bedsit wall - is actually Viking philosophy, something Mafiosos and Trumpers and libertarian tech-bros would cosign. 

(Ah, it turns out Vaneigem actually created this comic strip - didn't know that! It first appeared in an American underground paper, Helix, in late '68 and then in a 1969 issue of  Internationale Situationniste)

As for this panel, it's something a psychopath could agree with:

It's reminiscent of the famous Blake maxim

"Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." 

Which is generally taken as a libertine's rallying cry (Jeff Nuttall refers to it in his Sixties counterculture text Bomb Culture and mordantly notes that Ian Brady lived it out literally). But I have seen it interpreted to mean the absolute opposite of what it apparently says. 

Then there's the problem with the idea of a life of perpetual play. It ignores the fact that much of life necessarily involves doing things you don't want to be doing. Childhood-as-idyll is supported by the invisible labour of parents and other responsible adults, who do the work of maintaining the protective space that enable it to exist. 

There's three main problems with the utopia envisaged.

One is the question of production - what supports all this plenty, this infinite leisure. The Situationists get round this by talking of a fully automated economy. It's like a narrative short-cut, a cheat - like fantasy fiction where characters have a superpower or magical ability. 

Another question is care. In any society, there are dependents - young children, the elderly, the sick, the mentally distressed. The physical and emotional labour of looking after them means that somebody has to dutifully do things they might rather not be doing, if they were leading the kind of radically selfish, pleasure-principled, impulsive, routine-free life that Vaneigem extolled.  Doing things on behalf of others, sacrificing your own wants, is not only a socially necessary function but part of your growth as a human being.  It is a higher fulfillment than simply pleasing yourself all the time. 

Then there is the question of work itself. Life without meaningful work is empty - a permanent vacation would be a prison sentence.  Any number of examples from literature or history show that decadence - a life of pure self-indulgence and caprice - is a dead end.  If Vaneigem actually lived out his principles, he'd never have written those brilliant essays, or indeed the great number of books he did, including some that must have involved substantial research, like the one about the Free Spirits, those Christian mystical anarchist heretics of the Middle Ages. 

Of course, there could be vastly less drudgery in the world, less exploitation and meaningless, repetitive, soul-deadening labour.  But the satisfaction of a job well done, a task completed is undeniable. After all many of the things we consider play involve effort, discipline, teamwork etc - from children's games to sports. "Play" often mimes aspects of work: it's liberated work, maybe. The idea of "work" infuses dance culture - "work that body". Blake said exuberance is beauty; perhaps exertion is bliss, or can be. 

Below are some passages that were edited out from my epic piece on Malcolm McLaren in the London Review of Books that wrestle with Vaneigem and Situationist from an all-grown-up perspective:

Severe in style and stern in tone, Guy Debord accentuated the negative and was ultimately destined for suicide. Raoul Vaneigem, whose writing pulsed with vivid vitalism and who’s still alive at age 87, was the “fun” Situationist. Like many others, I was particularly drawn to the Vaneigem texts in Leaving the 20th Century. Rather than conjuring a sense of the Spectacle’s multi-tentacled omnipotence, Vaneigem would write about the resistant power of desire. His assertion that a Mallarmé poem should be reason enough for revolution appealed to my teenage Romanticism, even though I’d never heard of Mallarmé and didn’t care much for poetry at the best of times. 

“The Totality for Kids,” one of the Vaneigem essays reprinted in Leaving, originally appeared in  Internationale Situationiste with the title  “Basic Banalities.”  Vaneigem’s drift here is similar to Max Weber’s line about disenchantment and modernity. Once, humans existed in a primordial state of sacred unity with Nature, and with other members of the tribe. But then, in grim succession, came the invention of class, market capitalism, the modern state, industrialism, bureaucracy, technocracy, and the mass media. Community and immediacy gave way to exchange-based economics, the specialization of roles, and the commodification and reification of all experience. “Totality” refers to how things once were, in the lost idyll, and how they’ll be again, after the revolution, when automation has eliminated all drudgery and we’ll live as Peter Pans in a future-paradise of nonstop play and pleasure.  McLaren would turn this idea into a song, Bow Wow Wow’s 1981 single “W.O.R.K.”, which imagined microchips putting patriarchy out of business: “T.E.K. technology / is demolition of daddy.” 

That’s why it’s “the totality for kids”. Totality means non-alienation: life without boredom, constraints, separation. Kids live there already, some of the time at least, mostly when they’re playing, rather than detained in school. Johan Huizinga’s 1938 classic Homo Ludens would have been an influence, and the Situationist emphasis on play chimed with currents in the counterculture, like agit-prop pranksters the Yippies. Rivaled by “take your desires for reality” and “it is forbidden to forbid”, probably the most famous Situationist graffiti slogan is “under the pavement lies the beach”. “Pavement” signifies the pedestrian surfaces of the city, escorting citizens to workplaces or shops, sites of entertainment or education, and, once every few years, to the voting booth. “Beach” means paradise – utopia as permanent vacation – another way of living that lurks latent, inches beneath the deadened skin of workaday routine. 

“We are only concerned with the moments when life shatters the glaciation of survival,” Vaneigem wrote, describing the Situationists as an “almost alchemical, experimental group within which the realization of the total man can be started.” Another exhilarating Vaneigem essay in Leaving the 20th Century bears the deceptively dull and sensible-sounding title  “Self-Realisation, Communication and Participation”  and is taken from his first book, titled in English The Revolution of Everyday Life.  Riffing about unshackled desire and radical honesty, calling for the end of hierarchy, roleplay and the concept of self-sacrifice, Vaneigem climaxes with the clarion call: “There are no limits to creativity. There is no end to subversion.” 

That electrified 17-year-old me, but today I find neither assertion wholly convincing, or alluring for that matter.  “No end to subversion” sounds a bit exhausting. The limits of creativity seem obvious: on the individual level, it can just dry up, for no apparent reason. The idea that each of us teems with inexhaustible inner riches and that it’s only our current social arrangements holding us back seems naive. Insufficiency might be baked into the human condition. John Berger identified the lack of a sense of, well, lack as the big flaw in Situationist thought. “They ignored the everyday fact of tragedy, both on a world and personal scale….,” he wrote in  New Society in 1975, thereby missing “the need to find meaning in tragedy”. 

Other holes can be poked. The equation of spectating with passivity and isolation would need some rethinking.  For sure, watching TV can be vegetative and junkie-like. But anyone who’s lived in a couple, a family, or shared house knows how viewers make fun of –  and fun out of – the shared experience of watching. The popular Channel 4 program Gogglebox turns this into entertainment, capturing the mocking wisecracks but also the emotional responses of families and friends as they watch that week’s notable programs. Debord no doubt would scorn Gogglebox as the Meta-Spectacle.  But the Situationist belief that mass entertainments are necessarily lonely, soul-less affairs is belied by many of our experiences seeing films in packed cinemas, going to rock concerts, clubs or raves, attending large sports events.  It’s here that their pronouncements have the tell-tale whiff of high-culture snobbery, redolent of those literary types who used to speak proudly of not owning a TV. 

What’s wrong with passivity anyway? Independently of McLaren’s particular use of their ideas, Situationist ideas filtered into punk and postpunk through the do-it-yourself ethos. Groups like the Desperate Bicycles cried out that this was “no time for spectating” and urged young people to throw aside apathy, form their own bands, and self-release their own music. Making your own record or fanzine was an ethical imperative, an egalitarian counterblow to the hierarchy of professionalism and centralized media. But most of us, most of the time, are better off as “passive” recipients of superior work made by more creative others, rather than straining to assemble our own efforts. Immersive surrender to a great work of art is not subjugation;  it’s liberation, an escape from the confines and limitations of your own self.  

The Situationist critique would also need adjustment for the age of the internet, social media, and game culture. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube (slogan: “Broadcast Yourself”) require the conceptualization of The Spectacle 2.0.  Disengagement, nonproductivity, the refusal to interact or generate content might actually be the subversive responses here. Even the ever-changing forms of “talking back” to mass-media – parodies, meme collages, fanfic, and other forms of punk-redolent iconoclasm, which conceivably fall under the Situationist category of détournement-  might just be a whole new frontier of distraction: insubordinate and ludic impulses captured and converted into profit (“recuperated”, to use the Situationist term). The ever-flexible Spectacle triumphing again, enough to drive Debord to a second suicide.  

Although the Situationists disdained popular culture, there is something “rock’n’roll” about their ideas and turns of phrase, like the slogan “La vie VITE”. They exalted youth and admired juvenile delinquency. The original French title of Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life is Traite de savoir-vivre a l’usage de jeunes generations – which roughly translates as Guide on How To Live for the Use of the Young Generation.  That seems like a big nod to the widely felt sense of youth as a transnational class that had emerged to consciousness of its own power in the 1960s, turning the instinctive insurrection of the 1950s into ideology. 

Compare Vaneigem’s “We demand everything” with Jim Morrison’s “We want the world and we want it now”. The Doors singer drank deeply from the same sort of philosophers and poets as the Situationists, which helps explain the claims he made in the group’s Elektra Records press release: “I like ideas about breaking away or overthrowing of established order — I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning.” Morrison’s successor Iggy Pop frenziedly strove to turn a spectacle (the rock band performing onstage) into a situation, through self-abasement and breaching the barrier between artist and audience: a Dionysian impulse expressed on the Stooges song “Fun House” in the lines “We been separated / A little too long… Livin’ in division.”  

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So long Raoul, thanks for the thinkige 

He lived to a ripe old 92 - wrote over 20 books (hardly a life of leisure, slacking off) 

His work can be found here.

Edith edicts

"At the time I began to write, a change in the direction, imagery, and rhythms in poetry had become necessary, owing to the rhythmical flaccidity, the verbal deadness, the dead and expected patterns, of some of the poetry immediately preceding us.

"Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning. Rhythm was described by Schopenhauer as melody deprived of its pitch."

"The violence of an epoch is responsible for the technical experiments of painters and poets of today. How to attain speed is the problem. And, as far as poets are concerned, to do this we must study the effect of texture on rhythm. These experiments are, for the most part, of a violent order. And if you ask why rhythms have become more violent, the answer is: this is an age of machinery, a wild race for time, confined within limits that are at once mad and circumscribed. Try to get out, and you will knock your head against the walls of materialism. This state of things is mirrored in modern syncopated dance-music, which removes music from the world of inspiration (which evolves itself organically from the inner need of the artist and brings it into the world of machinery where form is superimposed as a local idea). There is no time or space in which to dream. It is because of this that in those poems which deal with the world crumbling into dust, or with materialism building monstrous shapes out of the deadened dust, I, for one, use the most complicated dance-rhythms which could be found, or else syncopated rhythms which are not dance-rhythms."

Edith Sitwell, from Taken Care Of: An Autobiography

(via Andrew Parker)

Her ideas about what she was trying to do might be more interesting than the poems themselves

"The poems in Façade are in many cases, virtuoso exercises in technique of an extreme difficulty, in the same sense as that in which certain studies by Liszt are studies in transcendental technique in music."

"The technical experiments in these poems consist, for the most part, of enquiries into the effect on rhythm and on speed of the use of rhymes, assonances and dissonances placed not only at the end of lines, but at the beginning, and in different and most elaborate patterns throughout the verse, and, too, there are enquiries into the effect on speed of equivalent syllables. By this I mean that if you use one three-syllabled word, it has a greater speed than the three one-syllabled words which might have been used as its equivalent. The use of two rhymes placed immediately together at the end of each of two lines, sound like leaps in the air.

‘ “Sally, Mary, Mattie, what’s the matter, why cry?”

The huntsman and the reynard-coloured sun and I sigh;’

Other experiments were made to discover the effect on rhythm of thickening and thinning, sharpening and softening, consonants, as in certain lines of the ‘Waltz’:

‘The stars in their apiaries,

Sylphs in their aviaries,’"

And here are some Wildean wisecracks and barbed comments from Edith: 

"I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her "a beautiful little knitter"."

describing Virginia Woolf in a letter to Geoffrey Singleton (11 July 1955)

c.f Woolf's dismissive comments about James Joyce

"I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty... But I am too busy thinking about myself." 

As Andrew notes, this is very Morrissey-esque, which is to say very Wildean. 

And then more of an aphorism: 

"What is the special privilege of youth? It is, I think, the power of looking forward, the firm belief that the future holds something that is worth possessing, and that, therefore, one can let the present moment drop from one without regret and without fear."

In the inner sleeve of Welcome To the Pleasuredome, ZTT offers a bunch of merchandise, including the Edith Sitwell Bag For Life's Little Luxuries. I wonder if anyone sent off for these and other things ? e.g. Andre Gide socks, Sophisticated Virginia Woolf vest, Jean Genet boxers shorts etc, all modelled by Paul Rutherford and Claudia Brucken

 "[The young British] see standards as inhibiting. I see them as defining. They see tradition as deadening. I see it as nourishing. It may be that, as an American, I idealize the British situation. But I hope not as absurdly as they idealize ours. In 1959 I gave a talk on mass culture at a Universities & Left Review forum in London. I expected the audience, which was much younger than I, to object to my lack of enthusiasm for socialism, though it was distressing to find them still talking about capitalism and the working class in the simplistic terms I hadn’t heard since I left the Trotskyists; the problems we thought about in the ’thirties seem to be just coming up now in England; the illusions we were forced to abandon seem still current there. But what I was not prepared for was the reaction to my attacks on our mass culture. These were resented in the name of democracy. Hollywood to me was an instance of the exploitation rather than the satisfying of popular tastes. But to some of those who took the floor after my talk, Hollywood was a genuine expression of the masses. They seemed to think it snobbish of me to criticize our movies and television from a serious viewpoint. Since I had been criticizing Hollywood for some thirty years, and always with the good conscience one has when one is attacking from the Left, this proletarian defense of our peculiar institution left me rather dazed.

- Dwight MacDonald on an early form of British poptimism

Inscape and the hard gem-like flame

Long streamers were rising from over Kemble End one large flake loop-shaped, not a streamer but belonging to the string, moving too slowly to be seen, seemed to cap and fill the zenith with a white shire of cloud. I looked long up at it till the tall height and the beauty of the scaping—regularly curled knots springing if I remember from fine stems, like foliation in wood or stone—had strongly grown on me. It changed beautiful changes, growing more into ribs and one stretch of running into branching like coral. Unless you refresh the mind from time to time you cannot always remember or believe how deep the inscape in things is.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins, journal entry, March 1871 

In his journals, Gerard Manley Hopkins used two terms, "inscape" and "instress," which can cause some confusion. By "inscape" he means the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things, and by "instress" he means either the force of being which holds the inscape together or the impulse from the inscape which carries it whole into the mind of the beholder: 

There is one notable dead tree . . . the inscape markedly holding its most simple and beautiful oneness up from the ground through a graceful swerve below (I think) the spring of the branches up to the tops of the timber. I saw the inscape freshly, as if my mind were still growing, though with a companion the eye and the ear are for the most part shut and instress cannot come.

The concept of inscape shares much with Wordsworth's "spots of time," Emerson's "moments," and Joyce's "epiphanies," showing it to be a characteristically Romantic and post-Romantic idea. But Hopkins' inscape is also fundamentally religious: a glimpse of the inscape of a thing shows us why God created it. "Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:/ . . myself it speaks and spells,/ Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. "

Hopkins occupies an important place in the poetic line that reaches from the major Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Keats, through Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites to Hopkins, Pater, Yeats and the symbolists, and finally to Ezra Pound and the Imagists. His insistence that inscape was the essence of poetry ("Poetry is in fact speech employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape's sake") and that consequently, what he called "Parnassian" poetry (i.e., competent verse written without inspiration) was to be avoided has much in common with the aestheticism of Walter Pater (one of his tutors at Oxford) and the Art for Art's Sake movement, and sounds very much like the theoretical pronouncements of the Imagists of the early twentieth century.

via The Victorian Web

It seems to me that ‘inscape’ is more about a kind of dwelling, of belonging—an intense, beautiful, belonging, a flaming or scintillating—rather than about ‘acting’, or ‘causing’ as with Duns Scotus’s ‘first act’. And whilst the Parmenidean balance of one and many, of unchanging Being and the apparitional world of Doxa, is of relevance to what Hopkins is doing in his verse, inscape is, surely, above all about the inward. Thinking theologically, this is surely a more Augustinianian than Scotian or Thomist thing. Inwardness is central to Augustine. Phillip Cary goes so far as to argue that Augustine invented or created inwardness, in the modern sense in which we consider there to be an inner self, that is ‘a whole dimension of being that is our very own, and roomy enough that we can in some sense turn into it and enter it, or look within and find things there … Augustine invented the concept of private inner space’ 

- Adam Roberts, Hopkins's Inwardness 

‘As kingfishers catch fire’

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins

When I first read this poem it bothered me that kingfishers aren’t red-and-orange, as one might expect a bird ‘catching fire’ in flight might be—though of course, there are various kinds of flame, and it’s very possible that Hopkins is thinking of [his tutor] Pater’s ‘hard gemlike flame’, burning blue from its orange core. But the more important thing is that there is a fire at the heart of things, an inscape fire, as burns in the temple, or the hearth. 

- - Adam Roberts, Hopkins's Inwardness 

“Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, — for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end…..  How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”

- Walter Pater, Conclusion to Studies in the History of The Renaissance

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

-  Gerard Manley Hopkins

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-

Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches.

Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,

Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.

Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare

Of yestertempest's creases; | in pool and rut peel parches

Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches

Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there

Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature's bonfire burns on.

But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark

Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!

Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark

Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone

Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark

                            Is any of him at all so stark

But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection.

                            Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash:

                            In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

                            Is immortal diamond.

-  Gerard Manley Hopkins

K-punk on indie

TECH-NO 

Philip from It's all in your mind - sorry chaps, keep getting the title of your blog wrong - with the latest on the 'technique' discussion .....

Philip is absolutely right about Indie, I reckon. It has shunned experimentalism without mastering musicianship, so it remains mired in some mediocre nowheresville. Drabness : forget postpunk, even at its most brown-rice earnest, it glistened with psychedelic intensity by comparison with Turin Brakes and Doves. What confuses me about Indie is what people see - and hear - in it: I'm genuinely puzzled about what people feel they get from Indie these days.

To answer my own question: it's all about authenticity isn't it? The Indie fan rejects chartpop because it is too plastic and too manufactured; rejects house, techno, garage because they are too synthetic; he/she cleaves to Indie not because of musicianship per se, but because of what musicianship is taken to signify: authentic self-expression. In fact, and this takes us right back to Philip's original comment, this is a direct inheritance from lumpen-punk's ur-igingal error : its confusion of ham-fisted bluster with a pure expressiveness and its eschewal of all other means of expression beyond guitar-bass-drums. 

Who's interested in lumpen-punk now? It was a fundamentalist misreading: ur-punk was only significant in that it blew open a space for post-punk. And: if you want to talk about technique, well, it's astonishing how proficient some of the postpunk musicians were: Levene, McGeoch, Adamson, Wobble. But it wasn't just technical ability that made them unique: it was their (modernist?) refusal to repeat or recapitulate the past, their conviction that if you weren't getting new sounds out of your equipment, you had somehow failed.

And this is it, really: you can be a master of technique without producing any new affect . Conversely, you might have no technical ability, but a tremendous capacity for discovering new sounds, riffs, stabs... And that's what Pop - in the broadest sense - is about: new ways of feeling, new ways of perceiving. 

[date unknown - 2003 or 2004 - the very early days of K-punk blog, which don't seem to be up on the internet - I found this in an old document of cut-and-pastes from his blog I'd made, as I did with several others blogs at that time. Lucky i was a hoarder, eh? With a presentiment that so much on the internet might disappear - already some bloggers had abruptly deleted their blogs.... more from the K-punk early archive soon]

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Mark is really talking about landfill indie here - the post-Britpop slop

But "Indie" is just as capable of inventing "new ways of feeling, new ways of perceiving", despite its relative lack of technique

Shoegaze is a case in point

And it's something I have riffed in the UK talks last week: starting with the idea that someone at Dissensus made, that critics are sensualists, identifying the new forms of pleasure, the new intensities

As do musicians too of course 

So for instance, hearing My Bloody Valentine with conventional ears, you might think "this is badly recorded rock music, badly played guitar, with barely-there / barely audible vocals".

And this was a common initial reaction even from people who became fans - Patti Smith heard Loveless and she told me that at first she thought there was something wrong with the CD player - others have similarly testified that they thought it was a damaged CD or a badly pressed vinyl record

But then you realise that it's deliberate and that it sounds better than conventionally well-recorded, well-mixed rock

It's the new form of sonic ecstasy

Perhaps you need to be guided by the critic-sensualist towards that understanding (cf hearing jungle as more than just a chaos of rhythm, hearing Auto-Tune trap as not a cheap, nasty, over-used effect but as a emerging field of aesthetic action)

Overall, "indie" is an entire genre that could be dismissed as badly played, badly recorded rock music, sung by people who aren't singers. 

But that becomes its own aesthetic - a set of possibilities opened up by bypassing conventional ideas of musicianship, fine playing, clean production, powerful vocalisation. 

Musicophilia

"What trifles constitute happiness! The sound of a bagpipe. Without music life would be a mistake. The German imagines even God as a songster."

"I would believe only in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity."

- Friedrich Nietzsche 

Musicphobia slight return

“the things I detest, for instance: italicized passages in a novel which are meant to represent the protagonist’s cloudbursts of thought. Then background music, canned music, piped-in music, portable music, minstrel music, inflicted music. Concise dictionaries. Abridged manuals. Journalistic clichés: ‘the moment of truth, the moment of truth!’ Humility.”

- Nabokov