K-Punk

catalog

Well-known member
Goldsmiths ppl are running a seminar series, they've collected some misc. k punk bits into a book

HTML:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0eh51Fm8s32QnVZSkRxN0ZHWFU

Sounds good if any of you can go

HTML:
https://fisherfunction.persona.co
 

catalog

Well-known member
read it all last night.
particularly enjoyed "for your unpleasure" and am now gonna go listen to that siousxie album. have always loved the creatures but never really got into the banshees.
but the piece is just good writing.

also the one about mental health issues being not "your" fault called "good for nothing" is really powerful.
good that they're doing these seminars.

i'd like to go just so someone can explain "deterritorialising and reterritorialising" and how they happen simultaneously, with a concrete example.
i do feel like i need to read D-G, but can't really face it.
plus got a really good 5%ers book on the go.
 

luka

Well-known member
This forum used to be full of D&G acolytes but we scared them all off. Craner is the only one left who's read that stuff. He'll have to explain it to you
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Howard Slater's "Deleuze and Guattari for scallies" in Break/Flow was pretty good as I recall but it doesn't seem like it made it online. I might try to have another look at it...

@catalog - is the 5%ers book the Michael Muhammad Knight one?

(Cos I read that earlier this year and liked it)
 

nomos

Administrator
i'd like to go just so someone can explain "deterritorialising and reterritorialising" and how they happen simultaneously, with a concrete example.
You could take 60s counter culture as an example: deterritorializing dominant/mainstream/commercial culture by upsetting its norms and allowing all sorts of otherness to flood in, shifting its boundaries, etc.; but being almost immediately reterritorialized when it's recuperated and co-opted by the very things it was supposed to be unmaking.

Steven Shaviro said this recently: "In the twentieth century, … the most vibrant art was all about transgression. Modernist artists sought to shatter taboos, to scandalize audiences… Offensiveness was a measure of success. Transgression was simply and axiomatically taken to be subversive. But this is no longer the case today. Neoliberalism has no problem with excess. Far from being subversive, transgression today is entirely normative. Nobody is really offended by Marilyn Manson or Quentin Tarantino. Every supposedly “transgressive” act or representation expands the field of capital investment... Far from being subversive or oppositional, transgression is the actual motor of capitalist expansion today: the way that it renews itself in orgies of 'creative destruction.' ... This is why transgression no longer works as a subversive aesthetic strategy. Or more precisely, transgression works all too well as a strategy for amassing both “cultural capital” and actual capital, and thereby it misses what I have been calling the spectrality and epiphenomenality of the aesthetic. Transgression is now fully incorporated into the logic of political economy."
 

you

Well-known member
You could take 60s counter culture as an example: deterritorializing dominant/mainstream/commercial culture by upsetting its norms and allowing all sorts of otherness to flood in, shifting its boundaries, etc.; but being almost immediately reterritorialized when it's recuperated and co-opted by the very things it was supposed to be unmaking.

I'm not great on D&G. But I think the emergence of wellness in business, conviviality and pro-productive practices (previously the mode of a counter-culture) are examples of deterritorializing being co-opted by the 'tungsten carbide stomach of capitalism, where even your hate is re-incorporated' and then re-territorialized for capital gain.

A sad contemporary example of this is morning raves... http://morninggloryville.com/

Get up, dance away, do some yoga, have an (organic and locally sourced) smoothie, feel bright, alert, drink hip-coffee - then go to work and have a great day...

This is de-re-territorializing... The deterritorialized genesis (the free rave scene of the 90s) is fully co-opted, mode and all, into a productivity machine so that bright young things can give that little bit extra in their precarious endeavors for capital.. be it creative work, social-entrepreneurship, Sisyphean-pointless-work admin drudgery or latte-consulting relationship managers.
 

you

Well-known member
One could also say that nootropics and fitness supplements fall into this scheme. Once pharmaceuticals were stolen bought and sold so that people could escape reality... uppers, downers, benzos, dissociatives etc... But now people illegally buy nootropics (drugs mostly derived from Alzheimer research) so that they can work more effectively, nootropics increase vigilance and, it is claimed, cognitive ability. Nootropic-jacked suit business cultures are essentially a total reversal of Mod culture... rather than work the day job and take amphetamines to get the most out of the weekend people take nootropics to get the most out of their (temporally porous, e.g. emails in bed) working week.

The fitness fad takes a similar form, all pills and powders - but not so that the user can escape their reality (a la LSD use...) but so that they can hone their frames into heteronormative ideals. And, of course, why not? Attention and cognition are depleted in the service of The Man. Workers have no agency over their attention or cerebral capacities as these are spent after a day of convoluted communique (ironically enough business speak does resemble Deleuzian jargon) so why not take control over the body instead? You can't control your mind when the working day is done but your pecs are still within your agency.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
"ironically enough business speak does resemble Deleuzian jargon" - on the mark. The imbecility of it all is too much to bear, especially the conviction from those using it that what they are saying actually has meaning, rather than constituting a pitiless assault on meaning.
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
Hardly a remaining D&G acolyte, I exorcised myself during 2003. But yes I've read that stuff.

There was a major turn. The K-Punk lot got into Badiou and Zizek and that kind of "politics".
 

catalog

Well-known member
Hey thanks for all these replies, makes a little more sense.
I guess it sounds, on a skim read, like a lot of postmodern theory (i studied a bit a long time ago) in that its cogent analysis but theres nowhere to go from it.
So trump being more and more extreme, but bizarrely gaining in popularity? Or coversely, "left" leaning ppl complaining abt him and t he upswing in right politics, but continuing with insular, affluent lifestyles?
Maybe thats something else actually.

@johneden yeah thats the one. I love how they renamed new york and also themselves. Remade the city. Its a great read after wsb naked lunch just before.

I'll try track down that d-g for scallies. Is anyone gna go to these seminars?
 

luka

Well-known member
Hardly a remaining D&G acolyte, I exorcised myself during 2003. But yes I've read that stuff.

There was a major turn. The K-Punk lot got into Badiou and Zizek and that kind of "politics".

Lol at the inverted commas! Classic craner.
 

catalog

Well-known member
i did read this but it's still pretty confusing. the one thing that did chime was the nugget about how capitalism requires you to concentrate yourself into one thing, "identity" as something of a prison. And so it's important to break out of that all the time. Might read the original D&G if I suddenly find myself on a three month holiday with no technology.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
The modern mentality was caught with clear-eyed precision by the late British cultural theorist Mark Fisher... The online leftish culture, Fisher said, is driven by a “priest’s desire to excommunicate, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd”.

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...-would-it-take-for-labour-moderates-to-revolt

I'm posting this just because of the quote, no need to get grumpy about the article as a whole.
 
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