Famous historical fights: Gramsci vs. Il Duce

With the Murdochs back in the news again,  hegemony springs to mind, and with it the genesis of the idea.

Gramsci developed Marx and Engels’s theory of the economic superstructure, introducing the concept of hegemony into the general lexicon, and got locked up by the Duce for his troubles.

  

VS.

In brief - too, too brief - the theory goes: all aspects of life are determined materially (Marx & Engels, Die Deutsche Ideologie) which is the economic superstructure (Preface to a Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy), the controlling class of which employs the dissemination of information and judgments about values which justify and retrench that superstructure in terms of its desires (Gramsci, Prison Writings). The family – that is a bourgeois lie which produces new workers. The state – that is a bourgeois weapon to organise against the proles. Art – reflects the bourgeois lifestyle and the economic realities underpinning the apparently universal, objective ideals of Enlightenment.

According to Spengler’s history, the question of free will is the fundamental, sacrosanct dilemma of the Western ideology. Perhaps that is why Marxist determinism failed – fundamental inability to stomach the notion that all aspects of living are determined by the capitalist net. That, and the incessant obsession with revolution for its own sake (valorised in ’68; transformed in ’89 by the anti-Communist/ pro-capitalist revolutions across the Eastern Bloc). And the stupidity of the world envisaged by Marx post-revolution. Seven billion people ‘fishing, hunting and criticising art’ in a harmonious world beyond laws? Get real.

Is it a case of mistaking incidental consequences for deliberate entrapment by ideology? The proliferation of media can be seen as a direct and intentional consequence of 1. The capitalist’s desire for profit; or 2. The capitalist’s desire to fragment the desires of the working/ all classes – and I think the heterodox approach, including all classes in the critique of capitalism works better and sounds less like something from before the Modern Second Peloponnesian War – in order to water down resistance to the capitalist model of political economy. Doesn’t 1 logically precede 2? Hasn’t it been shown abundantly that ideologically-inspired adjustments to the economy will fail, and that the market determines itself?

Don’t get us wrong, Burning Pyre deplores the reductionism of our managerial capitalism, which sees life narrowly as the pursuit of economic interests, but we cannot imply that the ideology precedes the reality. Spirit/ Mind adjusts to material circumstances, Hegel taught. The making of money precedes the desire to make people think that they can only be happy by pursuing the ideology that making more money makes happy.

Hegel über Marxismus!* Duce oltre Gramsci!

On the other hand, we are perfectly willing to accept that something akin to Stockholm Syndrome prevents people from criticising the economic form of capitalism. How much harder is your job if you disagree with the principles on which it is founded, the incentive mechanisms used to ‘gee’ it along, and the organisational structures which are set up by the coal face, so to speak? Cognitive dissonance indeed.

So the Murdochs advance number 1 – making money – whilst influencing minds to their own agenda, which is not necessarily the capitalist one, other than by incidence. Propasphere is a much more accurate term to describe the illusion of objectivity under limited-consensus mass media.

 

*This tete-a-tete draws us into a debate about to what degree Hegel is the herald of liberal democratic capitalism of the Kojéve-Fukuyama variety.

Ivor Fox Frenzied Attack: a (limited) retrospective

IFFA were a duo of musical and video geniuses who fired up the "no-fi no-lie" genre to limited success (64 views on YouTube is shit, basically). Wither away into musical obscurity, o IFFA, you greatest-named band of all time, but let this be a tribute which burns still on our pyre:

Music for Airports cont'd

From the will, the ‘I am’ of rock n roll heroism:

which was cruelly and wonderfully sent-up in punk

to the apparent absence of will; the tranquil, eastern resignation of Music for Airports, with its tentatively struck piano notes and ethereal female ‘ahh-ing’. It is music of the West’s late mysticism as yet unborn, in Spengler’s schema of history a feature of the wintertime of civilisation, but with a strictly Western spin – this is not music of the nothing, but music of the something. In Music for Airports, the Western ear hears not the formless Self of the Upanishads, nor the extinguished nirvana of the Dhammapada, but shapes and sounds and landscapes the eye has never seen! This music, this ambient soundscape is not an escape from the world but – a doorway to new worlds, worlds in which heroes are not shaped like rock stars (1978) or footballers (2012) and humanity is not ground down by a daily routine of manual labour (1978) or customer service (2012), but worlds which the word can barely grasp. The tracks are ‘called’ 1/1, 1/2, 2/1 and 2/2 for Christssake! Later ambients (including Eno’s sequels) would later succumb to the synaesthetic urge to coax the listener down a particular doorway with track titles like ‘An Arc of Doves’ and ‘Among Fields of Crystal.’ The pure form of (Western) ambient is boundless, seeking its way through a multiverse on the crest of barely-formed matter!

The macro-genesis of Ambient 1 in brief is therefore: the shrinking of the world (McLuhan, David Harvey) brought about by technological innovation (the Wrights) and by the entrepreneur’s pay-out for pursuing his own good (Adam Smith, etc ad nauseum) or actually rampant militarism with an incidental commercial implication leads to the discovery that it actually takes a lot of time to get people to board a plane in an orderly and administratively correct fashion (PanAm?), a time which required a new musak (Brian Eno), a musak for these strange hubs:

It is not the sound of airports - there are no sleepy montages of planes taking off and landing - but for airports, for the people who are in them, waiting, in the midst of slightly less real moments before actual real moments (which take place on arrival). Music of the interstices of modern life.

Three Philosophical Conceptions of Causality

Socratic Law of Causality

Everything that happens, happens for a reason; that is, it is a fact that can be accounted for (Theaetetus, 201d).

Galilean Law of Causality

Everything that happens, happens because it is caused physically to happen.

Nietzschean Law of Causality

Everything that happens can be traced back to a 'discourse'; - although this is not a word Nietzsche used (neither Habermas's Diskurs nor Heidegger's Rede). This discourse arises in the will to power.

Both Socrates' 'accounts' and Galileo's concept of physical cause (Will to Power: 551) are manifestations of a discourse of will to power in which penetrating understanding and the instrumentalisation of the world are aspects of the fundamental principle of individuation and its desire for self-actualisation that ‘determines’ in a sense the basis of its functioning.

In being filtered through the individual’s will to power, causes and effects are matched on the basis of an epistemological schema chosen on the basis of prior demands. Ockham’s razor was one such schema, as was Einstein’s dictum that an explanation should be as simple as possible and no simpler. Schema themselves come from the will to power. Some scholars have suggested not unreasonably that the will to power can be traced back to evolutionary or biological demands (e.g., Peter Poellner), although Nietzsche himself cautioned against biological literalism (it's an interpretative schema, remember?) and proferred the metaphor instead.

Why did he fear going beyond the metaphor? There are two reasons; firstly, because he was a realist in observing the constant revisability of the sciences; secondly, because that way idols lie littering the landscape like a thousand Ozymandiases, and there can be only one poem as good as Shelley's by which to remember them. Nietzsche preached what he preached, even if his practice came up short.

But this is the difficulty of rational life – establishing laws and choosing criteria for values.

We is retronauting: Ambient 1: Music for Airports

BP wants to grasp, like Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, the past, to a degree limited by the information it can procure on the past, about the experiences of the past in its cultural-political-economic context, when it can be bothered. But it’s not Marxist.

This week/ today it’s Music for Airports.

For hipsters and dorks alike, Eno rules. His ambient album, coming two years after ambient collaborations with David Bowie, and after the fiddlings of La Monte Young, Cage, Penderecki, and the drugged noodlings of Tangerine Dream, is the focal point of the ambient explosion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykJg-vE3k-E

In 1978, a few years after the modernising effects of the Equal Pay Act (in force 1975), decimalisation and EU membership (1973), the softening of England to women and foreigners, the decomposition of melodies into sounds, drones, textures became – interesting; beautiful, even. Eno composed public space music: functional, democratic, music for strolling and waiting in public venues. Benjamin would have approved: Eno is a flaneur’s composer, and the flaneur was the subject of the Arcades Project. But as the topic of wandering around enclosed shopping spaces became less interesting to us (the uglier the interiors of those buildings got), so perhaps music for airports will need to become music for space shuttles, for aliens – for whatever. As science fiction reminds us, we never get as far as we think as fast as we think.

The Big Win

The Big Win: A Modern Morality Tale is Barnaby Barford’s latest piece, showing at the Laing Gallery in Newcastle. Barford – who is yet to have a Wikipedia page (and is therefore curiously anonymous for an international prize winner) – satirises in a series of dioramas about the size of a fish tank the hopes and dreams of the sordid British public. Well, one element of our public at least.

In a modern-day Dickensian narrative, a takeaway- and TV-addicted Rab C Nesbitt-type antihero wins the lottery, lives it up for a while and, inevitably, squanders it. It provides the art-going public with a brief platform from which to condescend. BP (Burning Py-izz-ire) would prefer a slightly broader critique, which incorporates the lazy hypocrisy of the art-goer himself, who sniffs at "Rab" here and then on departing the gallery delves deeply into the Propasphere ("Propaganda sphere") - more deeply, because he knows not where he swims.

Is The Big Win "classist"? Probably. But then it sounds eerily like the life of Michael Carroll, sans some of his anti-social abuses (when truth trumps art, art's missing something).

And then we ask: but is it art? Well, it has a clear enough message. Is that the point?

The discussion of art in terms of its meaning, rather than the beauty of its execution, the real riddle of modern art and why most of it – Duchamp’s bog, Schwitters’ shit-house – baffles the bourgeoisie and bores the working class, came about after Kant (Clement Greenberg).

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