Alles vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.
[”Everything temporal is but a likeness.”]
- Goethe
I was gonna call this post “All for nothing” as a play on the title of the article I’m riffing off, and to join the rapidly growing blogosphere fad of song titling posts (well slowly growing on a bit of this blog) but with Portishead instead of Dylan. But then I discovered the actual title of the song in question.
I was actually thinking about this today when I read Scott McLemee’s piece in Inside Higher Ed - this decade has no name. The “Naughties” never caught on (and for good reason probably). The 2000s is ambiguous. That, I reckon, has done something odd to our time-sense. Maybe there’ve been more periodisations like post-s11, but I, for one at any rate, had hardly realised the decade was coming to an end despite the 08 thing.
What’s interesting about McLemee’s take is that he argues there may be no recognisable Zeigeist in a cultural sense for these times, and when you think about it, in an age where the medium is not the message but the culture is the commodity, the absence of a brand is puzzling. One line of explanation might refer to the postmodern and/or the “end of history” - was there really anything after the 80s? Maybe the defeat of Soviet Marxism symbolised the victory of capitalism (and remember Fukuyama et al?) and all that was solid did really melt into air? Perhaps all is “a pattern of returns, repetitions and responses”, to adopt a phrase of Michael P. Sternerg’s? - what Fredric Jameson means by the postmodern - the cultural dominant of late capitalism.
Can there be an avant-garde when there is no bourgeois taste left to shock? Was Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s sometime student Arthur C. Danto right - art ended along with history (as Hegel himself suggested would happen - contra Kant, art merges into and is sublated by philosophy)? Is schlock, irony, sampling and selling stuff the remainder of what is left of cultural forms? I dunno, but I do find it difficult to point to anything distinct about the culture of this decade. You?
Ps: I actually didn’t plan to talk about the culture wars in this post, but I guess it’ll inevitably come up in comments. Let me just remark that the culture warriors never seem, as far as I can see, (though as far as I can see either, this point isn’t often if ever made,) to call for any new works of art or cultural production. Bring back Shakespeare, whoever, ad infinitum. They’re stuck in a Derridean rut. What’s their schtick if not the self-same pattern of returns, repetitions and responses wanting an authorised pattern of returns, repetitions and responses to be the cultural dominant?
If there was ever an eternal return, it’s the culture wars. Nietzscheans manqué the lot of them.
Pps: Since enquiring minds continually want to know, “late capitalism” is a concept adopted by Jameson from the Marxist economist Ernest Mandel, who wrote a book of the same name. For our purposes, the Wikipedia story of three stages of capitalism suffices:
Third, is late capitalism, which displays such features as the multinational corporation, globalized markets and labor, mass consumption, and the space of liquid multinational flows of capital.
Mandel was actually talking about the postWW2 regime of production, but Jameson tweaked the concept with the aid of social geographer David Harvey, who argued that there was a significant break in the configuration of the capitalist economy which can be (to some degree arbitrarily to coincide with the OPEC oil shock) dated to 1973 - what goes under the orthodox name of “globalisation”. It’s not being argued that the service economy dominates all, or that all is superstructure and no base - that’s an argument more characteristic of the “new economy” theorists, but rather that the tendency of capitalism to privilege accumulation derived from financial and immaterial value is increasingly predominant. That’s completely consistent with the continued incorporation in the former Third World of former subsistence farmers into factory production, etc, etc. NB: I don’t plan to debate this, because it’s off a tangent to my main interest in starting this thread! But it’s there, again, coz it might be raised.
Ppps: Just as Fukuyama can’t be refuted by the trite point that events continue to occur after “the end of history”, nor can Danto’s thesis be refuted by the fact that art and culture continue to be created. What is different is that there is no sense of further progress - Abstract expressionism is replaced by, blah blah, which is a higher form, blah blah. Instead meaning, and reference, are stuck in a feedback loop. To adapt this trope to my argument, it’s the lack of any dominant representation of this decade which is the crux of the thing. Yes, there may be changes in music genre y, or whatever, but what represents and what cluster of works or trends stands in metonymically for this decade as a whole?
Pppps: Interestingly from my pov, Portishead have a new album out, first in eleven years. But here’s Mysterons, 1997 style:
Ppppps: Yep, you guessed it. There’s bricolage in this post.
Quod scripsi, scriptum.
Pppppps: No, Jameson is not a postmodernist. He analyses postmodernity. He deconstructs what he calls “postmodernism ideology”. I’m with him, right?
It’s about analysis and critique, not value judgment. OK with that?
Is perhaps one of the problems with art in this “postmodern” age, that it takes forms we don’t readily recognise as culture, eg video/DVD art, popular music that from time to trime achoeves the excellence of the more elite [?] cflassical music, performance poetry, song lyrics instead of poetry, even movie, rap poetry and dancing, etc, etc. What I’m suggesting is that in this late capityalist (yuk!) age, art is frequently taking forms we don’t recognise as art, and therefore do not consider avant-garde.
Kim, your post is a perfect example of the way I conceive the ’00s - the decade of the mash-up. (note - not a pejorative).
For perhaps the first time, there is an emerging and rapid democratization of information not seen since the printing press. Not necessarily “high art”, but facts, opinions, music, films, literature. In the past, our artists and opinion makers were truly elites in that they had privileged access to things the rest of us did not - we were constrained by geographical boundaries which limited imagination. Now, if somebody says your favourite band was influenced by Neu!, you’re no longer scratching your head at a (now defunct) Brash’s, you’re at Emusic or on a torrent site finding an album. If you want to question some polemic in the newspaper, it’s a simple matter of being able to check the sources yourself then post a referenced critique. It’s easy to bring together disparate points of view because the research is easier - it’s multiple tabs in your browser where before you needed access to a library.
For the record, I remember buying the first Portishead album when it came out and thinking it fitted that ouvre of artists who re-imagine a non-existent past (like early Chris Isaak) rather than just re-create it (like Oasis or later Chris Isaak), and it was probably from music culture that most of the mash-up culture gets its best instincts. It is music heads and literature nerds (inveterate collectors) who in the past have taken pleasure in drawing together threads of influence, and it’s that culture which is rapidly spreading and defining the age.
Biggest prediction: the end of the Bible as a definitive source of archetypes. If Steinbeck were alive today, he wouldn’t be writing “East of Eden”, he’d probably be basing a book on the life of Jimi Hendrix.
You’re onto something there, David, I reckon.
Apropos of David’s comment about the Bible, I recall over 20 years ago when I was studying the English Civil War, the lecturer lamenting that he now had to explain basic Xtan tenets to students, whereas even ten years earlier it was assumed all students had absorbed such knowledge since childhood.If I remember rightly, there were sometimes similar problems with students in medieval history.
So that’s why Gibbons and Lee Harris have been quiet.
“This is the voice of the Mysterons…” Brings back memories of Captain Scarlet - the puppet show for kids featuring suicide bombers, collapsing sky-scrapers and other inter-planetary terrorism. Ahead of its time.
I’m more or less content to let comments run on this, but on your point, David, I guess what’s interesting is whether the decade of the mash up constitutes anything different from what I was trying to indicate in terms of referentiality towards past styles and forms. Not saying it doesn’t, mind, but it’s worth thinking about some distinctions between communication and production in this context?
Kim wrote:
The difference is that the act of juxtapositioning past styles and elements becomes the art, not the product itself which is by necessity ephemeral. By way of example, the use of the “funky drummer” James Brown sample in hip hop. It’s a nod to the man who said “say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud” and speaks directly to a culture that understands the importance of James Browns exhortation, but floats by if you don’t recognise it. If you do recognise it, it informs and fills out what can be a difficult genre of music. These are new archetypes, used in the old ways (i.e. they seek to compress an older “building block” story) but the major difference being we have infinitely more to choose from, given the growing access to information. It has become possible to compress a highly complicated concept into a much smaller space because the building blocks are far more varied and more widely understood. On the other hand, it leads to a lot of lazy rubbish, like every other computer animated kids film that used “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen to indicate lost love.
What I think is missing from the “end of history” narrative is that by the time you hit 40, it seems like you’ve seen it all (war / peace / boom / bust / socialism / conservatism / liberalism) and everything starts to look like television repeats. In reality, it’s much more like the Mark Twain quote (history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme). Thinking that history is ending implies a kind of convergence of ideas, where clearly the world seems to operate on a contracting/expanding paradigm, only each time thoughts and ideas contract and expand, they take off on a slightly different tangent and just as wildly divergent as the last time (i.e. in this round, it’s not communism vs capitalism, it’s greens vs. market liberalisation).
So, I don’t think the mash-up decade indicates anything like convergence and the end of history, and while the use of archetypes hasn’t changed much (production wise) the fact that there are more to choose from has lead to new meta-patterns of artistic and rhetorical expression. The “end of history” is just a convenient conceit for the world weary.
I should probably point out that Lawrence Lessig doesn’t agree - he thinks creativity will be stifled by copyright (although the mash-up meme was present even back in 2001). The Future of Ideas