1) the proletariat aren’t inherently ‘woke’, so proletariat music doesn’t necessarily have to be anti-capitialist, anti-racist, feminist, etc.
2) without a common enemy, human beings tend to fight amongst themselves
4) the bourge aren’t able to stop this internal conflict because they don’t have a common enemy. they don’t have a common enemy because the impact of political decisions doesn’t effect them
5) technology is the focal point of human civilisation. our environment, politics, communication, art, etc. is defined by it.
6) art can only be as important as technology if it is concerned with technological advancement
7) ben watson likes free improv because his discourse is concerned with commercialism vs anti-commercialism. to him, the factory is a signifier of commercialism
8) third sees factories as inevitable and thus doesn’t reject them
13) as a fan of electronic music, third likes timbres to be novel and new rather than reflecting something we’re already aware of
14) third values escapism that is cognitive obliteration rather than a kind of stepford wives like sense of denial
15) third doesn’t mind music in which there may be individual tracks or artists that don’t fit into his broader aesthetic vision, but the overall genre should
16) third likes music that sounds like tangible materials, but sound detached from how they are made. 90’s hip hop’s not so great at this because you can hear drums, bass guitars, etc. whereas with jungle you don’t know what the fuck the sound is
What is music for? As a communist? What should it be doing? What's it's ideal function?
What is music for? As a communist? What should it be doing? What's it's ideal function?
this complies with a bourgeois tendency then third?
it expresses a tranquility and lushness that is escapist. it is clearly a fantasy. a distraction.
is has no grit. nobody has a dirty asshole in the world this song presents.
the instruments are all familiar, we know what they signify. nothing that feels simultaneously novel and tangible.
no metal. no concrete. no aggression.
it doesn't overpower you. it gives space for the ego to exist. it is music of the individual not a collective consciousness.
It’s a mistake to appraise Ardkore in terms of individual tracks, because this music only really takes effect as total flow. Its meta-music pulse is closer to electricity than anything else. Ardkore has abandoned the remnants of the verse-chorus structure retained by commercial rave music. At the Castlemorton Common mega-rave in May, MCs chanted “we’ve lost the plot”. Ardcore abolishes narrative: instead of tension/climax/release, it offers a thousand plateaux of crescendo, an endless successions of NOWs. It’s an apocalyptic now, for sure: Ardkore fits only too well the model of terminal culture that Paul Virilio prophesies in The Aesthetics Of Disappearance: “a switch from the extensive time of history to the intensive time of momentariness without history”. This emergent anti-culture of instantaneity will be inhabited by a new breed of schizophrenic subject, whose ego is “made up of a series of little deaths and partial identities”.
No narrative, no destination: Ardkore is an intransitive acceleration, an intensity without object. That’s why the MC patter sounds more appropriate for a rollercoaster than music – “hold tight”, “let’s go”, “hold it down” – and why Techno is all you’ll hear at fairgrounds these days. Does this disappearance of the object of desire, this intransitive intensity, make Ardkore a culture of autistic bliss? Certainly, sex as the central metaphor of dancing seems remoter than ever. Rave dancing doesn’t bump and grind from the hip; it’s abandoned the model of genital sexuality altogether for a kind of polymorphous perverse frenzy. It’s a dance of tics and twitches, jerks and spasms, the agitation of a body broken down into individual components, then re-integrated at the level of the entire dancefloor. Each sub-individual part (a limb, a hand cocked like a pistol) is a cog in a collective desiring machine. Which is why dancers so readily pick up moves from each other. The dancefloor’s like a primal DNA soup. It’s pagan too, this digital Dionysian derangement whose goal is to find asylum in MADNESS.
All of the French currents put at center stage a text of Marx which, in the long run, may be more important than all the other new material that started to come to light in the 1950′s and 1960′s: the so-called “Unpublished Sixth Chapter” of Vol. I of Capital.36 It is not known why Marx removed it from the original version of Vol. I. But it is a materialist Phenomenology of Mind. Ten pages suffice to refute the Althusserian claims that Marx forgot Hegel in his “late period”. But the affirmation of the continuity with Hegel’s method is the least of it; the fundamental categories elaborated in the text are the distinctions between absolute and relative surplus value and what Marx calls the “extensive” and “intensive” phases of accumulation, corresponding to the “formal” and “real” domination of capital over labor. These are introduced in a very theoretical way; Marx doesn’t attempt to apply them to history generally. But the French ultra-left started to periodize capitalist history around exactly these distinctions. “Extensive” and “intensive” phases of capitalist history are not unique to Marxists; they have also been used by bourgeois economic historians as descriptive devices. One current summarized the distinction in its essence as “the phase which de-substantiates the worker to leave only the proletarian“.37 In that sentence is the condemnation of the whole Gutman school of the new labor history. The transition to “intensive” accumulation in the 6th chapter, is presented to the “reduction of labor to the most general capitalist form of abstract labor”, the concise definition of the mass production labor process of the 20th century in the advanced capitalist world. The new labor history is one long nostalgia song for the phase of formal domination.
I feel we are making some headway but I'm still trying to work out how the communist theory which is very cool and interesting relates to music. Any time I ask Eden he mumbles something about treating dinner ladies with respect then disappears in a cloud of old swp newspapers