k-punk
Spectres of Mark
Tim F said:I certainly wouldn't seek to suggest that either all gay men or all gay scenes uncritically adored Kylie. However at the ones which do encourage it there is a collective denial of this actual diversity, <i>as if</i> Kylie was the authentic music of the gay male experience. I should note that as a matter of fact I've never met a gay man who <i>detested</i> Kylie who I liked, but this may be a chance thing (though I've of course now met many people in both camps and in between).
No-one surely is implying that anyone is suggesting that all gay men like Kylie: no-one here that is. But it IS implied, strongly, elsewhere. I suppose though I don't accept the concept that there ARE gay men in some quasi-naturalized way: to be gay is not only to have a certain sexual preference, it is to make a double affirmation, not only of a particular sexual preference, but also of the claim that people can be categorised according to their sexual preference. The original point of Queer Theory (before it got colonized by Gay Studies) was precisely to make this (Foucauldian) move.
"It seems to me that they are two ends of a continuum rather than a simple opposition: both the solitary straight consumer and the community member belong to the pleasure principle, to a reactive REaffirmation of particular prescribed affects.
Mark, how do you consider Geezaesthetics to be particularly affirming the pleasure principle?
Because, for a start, of its name and the attendant pub conversation imagery.
What is being a geeza if not belonging to a certain bleary beery community of shared enjoyment? Now this enjoyment is one level up from dancing or listening to Pop. It is, in this respect as in many others, the worst of all worlds: neither a 'naive' immersion in the Thing itself nor an honest theoretical analysis, just some beer-sodden place in between. It's an enjoyment of criticism itself, but only as long as criticism is pre-theoretical and non-intellectual, or can seem that way. i.e. 'We are critics as soon as we listen to a record, watch a film, experience any art of any kind. Any reaction, from rapture to depression of the off switch, is an act of criticism.'
One of the things that is most depressing about Geezaesthetics, and the Cult Studs discourse from which it comes, is this elevation of opionist exchanges into the highest form of enjoyment and culture. 'We place the highest possible value on criticism that makes us talk more, anything to enhance our conversation.' There you have it: a manifesto for the chattering classes, which at least has the benefit of honestly presenting the values of the chit-chatoisie.
I'm not joking when I say that the Geezaesthetics manifesto should be put alongside the American Constitution as a clear statement of bourgeois values. Pop is 'raised up' to be a worthy subject of the Conversation, just as any theorist must be 'brought down' to the level of a converser - otherwise she is getting above herself. Because the claim that 'no-one is above the conversation' is a way of saying: no-one is above us and our opinions. But as a Pop fan, I don't consider my own response equal to that of the Pop; I want to be subordinated to the Pop, lesser than it. I don't have any problem whatsoever with that. What I do have a problem with is the aggressive aesthetic egalitarianism of Cult Studs geezas who want to say, there's nothing there except your own response, what is ultimately important is our pub conversation.
So it seems to me that the shared enjoyment - both in the case of Kylie-loving and pub conversing - is a kind of meta-enjoyment. 'Look at me, enjoying this.' (Incidentally, partly this reflects my feelings of crashing disappointment at going to GAY, whose 'fun' aesthetic and compulsory PoMo queening about mean that everything is in inverted commas. Dancing is done merely as a statement.)
Do you entirely disagree with my stab at what I thought geezaesthetics was about or do you consider it irrelevant or...?
think I've answered this above, and you're certainly right that I needed to fill in the gaps...
And is the straight consumer solitary or in the pub? Which is it?
Well, being in a pub IS usually a kind of solitude, so the opposition doesn't strike me as convincing. The relevant opposition to sitting in a pub or being in a car would be engaging in some sort of crowd dynamic: being at a gig or on the dancefloor. Not that these things immediately guarantee an escape from atomised consumerist subjectivity.
I think you're missing the social quality of geezaesthetics, and playing down the distinction between critical engagement and enforced mystical enjoyment which you were one of the first people to make on this thread
I have under-emphasised it, but geezaesthetics is a form of opinionist mysticism it seems to me. It wants to say that, ultimately, criticism = opinion, which everyone has a 'right' to, and no-one can know better than you about.
The social is not the collective... The collective involves a dismantling of atomised subjectivity; it is not one atomised subject conversing with another. It often involves what is a priori deemed impossible in the Geezaesthetics world: namely, a recognition of false consciousness.
- is it <i>only</i> the fact that the person being discussed in the pub is Kylie which makes what is going on a function of the pleasure principle? If the discussion was about Roxy Music would it be okay? 'Cos discussions about Roxy Music would I imagine certainly fit into the Geezaesthetic brief. Actually it's always been implied that if there is a geezaesthete "consensus" artist/band it's Dexys Midnight Runners...
Yes, well anything can be fed into those conversations, by their nature. But the issue is their role in culture it seems to me. Roxy would never have come about in a cultural context dominated by Geezaesthetics (jeezus, as for me, the very NAME is enough to kill everything Roxy stood for), just as the cultural dominance of Geezaesthetic values means that it is Kylie who is popular now.
"*One interesting thing about Popism as described by Tim/ Alex Thomson is that it has a kind of concealed aggression about texts AND consumers that, precisely because its ATTENTION to consumers (and I hope that such attention can be somewhat more nuanced than saying, a 'hipster thinks "I am cool"') is actually very different to how most consumers think about pop."
It would strike me as a very strange point in the discussion to start defending what the average pop consumer "knows" about their own enjoyment. And if you *do* think that popism is precisely "defending what the average pop consumer "knows" about their own enjoyment," then perhaps geezaesthetics (as Alex/I see it) falls outside yr negative definition of popism?
Part of what is irritating about Geezaesthetics and Cult Studies is its bizarre mystificatory reverence in respect of the phenomenology of people's enjoyment, as if this is ineffably complex. It actually isn't; Thomson's list is a litany of cliches, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. It also strikes me as uncontroversial to claim that most Pop fans who aren't middle class meta-critics don't subscribe to the meta-critical account of their own enjoyment. The analogy I would make is with Wittgensteinian 'language games' as applied to religion. Wittensteinians enthusiastically claim, in a so-called defence of religious belief, that 'no-one can judge' religious beliefs because they are playing a different language game. But it doesn't seem to me controversial to say that most religious believers would baulk at the idea that they are simply 'playing a language game', no more or less valid than any other.