luka
Well-known member
Here's some notes I just wrote up for you lot.
Simon began by saying that there are many Marks and they are always arguing with one another and contradicting one another and that many people in the audience may find his Mark unrecognisable. There is no consistent plane of Mark. There is a contention of Marks. Which was a way of saying that this talk will be quietly polemical and an argument in favour of his Mark over any other.
He said that what Mark was was a music critic first and foremost in that music is the primary lens through which he viewed the world, music is what he used to think about society and the self and etc. And with this as an excuse Simon then played a series of songs from different decades as a way of demonstrating how music can be political without necessarily being explicitly political, without being agit prop, without lyrics that have any discernible political content.
And what that did was to give that very strange and powerful sense of music as a kind of magic mirror to the collective consciousness and its mutations and progressions and reversals through time. Of what we dream of what we want of what we lack of what we feel and think and fear and aspire to and etc.
He used the idea of Acid Communism, and that book was never written so to some extent we can all imagine it for ourselves, to hark back to the intial explosion of the sixties and the utopian pop impulse and all the social change and fervour that went alongside it. He said the sixties is where the sense of music as a force for social change or even revolution is at its strongest. And what he chose to talk about, primarily, was what he calls The Shout.
The Shout is really just a shout, a liberatory expulsion of air and joyous noise. He mentioned Twist and Shout. He mentioned Help by the Beatles. This unrestrained exuberance of the voice. So the move towards freedom here is, I think, more along a Freudian axis than a Marxist one and a reminder that the struggle for freedom is not just economic but also is fought at the personal psychological level and at the social and cultural level.
So what is won is, for instance, the freedom to move your hips. So what is won is the freedom to raise your voice. What is won is the freedom to puncture decorum at the social level and to overcome repression at the personal level. Later, in a slightly different context he mentioned Lennon's engagement with Primal Scream therapy and left us to join the dots.
The song he played to illustrate The Shout was 'Dance to the Music' by Sly and the Family Stone. And I think what is introduced here is the central role of black music in the '60s and the way that black music comes to stand for a whole range of, sometimes contradictory, ideals for youth worldwide. I would say, most importantly, as liberatory on the one hand and on the other, as a form of resistance.
As an example of black music as a form of symbolic resistance he played 'Splash Babylon' and talked about how Babylon is a much more potent term than neoliberalism for instance because you draw on this religious and mythical frame with all its accrued weight and significance. You place the battle on a higher plane. (This is a move that the Marxists are fiercely opposed to incidentally, this is completely verboten for them. And that in itself is an interesting debate.)
So you have, dance, the shout, the permission or injunction to feel joy, the liberatory aspect and you have the resistance to Babylon and it's evil ways. And these things placed in a religious spiritual mythical context.
Pointing this up is in itself a way to push back against the notion that anything short of total revolution is a failure, of no account whatsoever. A way of saying instead that the battle is ongoing and is played out in culture, in society and within the self and that victories have been won, very significant victories, and freedoms have been gained and change effected through the musical vanguard and that these are freedoms, for example, to feel (bodily, erotically, emotionally, spiritually) and freedoms to speak and act and so on.
What can be represented at a cultural level can then be felt on an individual level and space made for that mode of feeling at a social level. Whether this is tenderness, or anger, or lust or etc.
He used 'Friday on my Mind' by the Easybeats to state the other side of the case, 'I'll change that scene one day' the perpetually deferred revolution and the intensities of the weekend providing the pressure release which allows the entire system to remain functioning and the intolerable to be tolerated.
There was some stuff about the Sex Pistols and some stuff about The Jam.
And then he came back to Mark's (and by extension his own) dissatisfaction with Marxism and its inability to make a space for the imagination (and probably we could use the word desire here also, in the way Deleuze and Guattari use it, as positive and productive rather than keening over a lack) and its failure to encompass what Mark called 'dreamings'. It's failure to come to terms with and make useful alliances with the forces unleashed in the sixties which essentially condemned it to irrelevance and which, as it stands, will always make it an instrument of brutality and not of liberation.
And it's a reminder that Mark's formative intellectual influences are, more often than not anti-Hegelian if not outright anti-Marxist. There's an interview with the CCRU in which he talks about the huge liberatory energy surge he found unleashed by ditching the oppositional leftist discourse of the time.
And partly (largely) this was about Mark wanting to produce, to generate concepts, ideas, events, dreamings, work and finding all these forces arrayed against him from depression, lassitude, inertia, to the academy and it's rules, it's standards of academic rigour, it's norms and prejudices, to society and class and etc etc and this makes everything which works to frustrate individual productivity and creativity and functionality into an Enemy whether it's the bad conscience of liberals the Marxists need to subordinate everything to the worker's revolution or etc
This central and non-negotiable need to create, to do the work he has to do.
A student asked Simon what happened to turn that Mark into the Capitalist Realist Mark and Simon said, well he had to enter the real world. He had to get a job at a sixth form college and he was suddenly confronted with the fatalism and apolitical apathy of his fellow teachers, the depression and lassitude and nihilism of his students, the appalling working conditions and so on. And it woke it up to how terrible life is. I think that's true. I knew him at that time and remember talking with him about how the Nick Land image of Capitalism as gleaming machine of ruthless efficiency simply doesn't measure up to the reality of idiocy, squandered time, redundancy, misallocation and waste (of resources but most tragically of human potential). It's a fantasy and a destructive one.
So this is an interesting tension within the life and the work and I think Simon wanted to posit Acid Communism as a way of resolving this at a higher plane. To reabsorb the acid dreams of the sixties into the left and thereby give it back its libidinal motor. To move it away from economic reductionism on the one hand and idpol factionalism on the other. And that music, as a source of dreamings, is central to that. Always asking for more without being limited by any notion of the realistic, a place where even the parameters and limits of the body can be redrawn and reimagined.
Simon began by saying that there are many Marks and they are always arguing with one another and contradicting one another and that many people in the audience may find his Mark unrecognisable. There is no consistent plane of Mark. There is a contention of Marks. Which was a way of saying that this talk will be quietly polemical and an argument in favour of his Mark over any other.
He said that what Mark was was a music critic first and foremost in that music is the primary lens through which he viewed the world, music is what he used to think about society and the self and etc. And with this as an excuse Simon then played a series of songs from different decades as a way of demonstrating how music can be political without necessarily being explicitly political, without being agit prop, without lyrics that have any discernible political content.
And what that did was to give that very strange and powerful sense of music as a kind of magic mirror to the collective consciousness and its mutations and progressions and reversals through time. Of what we dream of what we want of what we lack of what we feel and think and fear and aspire to and etc.
He used the idea of Acid Communism, and that book was never written so to some extent we can all imagine it for ourselves, to hark back to the intial explosion of the sixties and the utopian pop impulse and all the social change and fervour that went alongside it. He said the sixties is where the sense of music as a force for social change or even revolution is at its strongest. And what he chose to talk about, primarily, was what he calls The Shout.
The Shout is really just a shout, a liberatory expulsion of air and joyous noise. He mentioned Twist and Shout. He mentioned Help by the Beatles. This unrestrained exuberance of the voice. So the move towards freedom here is, I think, more along a Freudian axis than a Marxist one and a reminder that the struggle for freedom is not just economic but also is fought at the personal psychological level and at the social and cultural level.
So what is won is, for instance, the freedom to move your hips. So what is won is the freedom to raise your voice. What is won is the freedom to puncture decorum at the social level and to overcome repression at the personal level. Later, in a slightly different context he mentioned Lennon's engagement with Primal Scream therapy and left us to join the dots.
The song he played to illustrate The Shout was 'Dance to the Music' by Sly and the Family Stone. And I think what is introduced here is the central role of black music in the '60s and the way that black music comes to stand for a whole range of, sometimes contradictory, ideals for youth worldwide. I would say, most importantly, as liberatory on the one hand and on the other, as a form of resistance.
As an example of black music as a form of symbolic resistance he played 'Splash Babylon' and talked about how Babylon is a much more potent term than neoliberalism for instance because you draw on this religious and mythical frame with all its accrued weight and significance. You place the battle on a higher plane. (This is a move that the Marxists are fiercely opposed to incidentally, this is completely verboten for them. And that in itself is an interesting debate.)
So you have, dance, the shout, the permission or injunction to feel joy, the liberatory aspect and you have the resistance to Babylon and it's evil ways. And these things placed in a religious spiritual mythical context.
Pointing this up is in itself a way to push back against the notion that anything short of total revolution is a failure, of no account whatsoever. A way of saying instead that the battle is ongoing and is played out in culture, in society and within the self and that victories have been won, very significant victories, and freedoms have been gained and change effected through the musical vanguard and that these are freedoms, for example, to feel (bodily, erotically, emotionally, spiritually) and freedoms to speak and act and so on.
What can be represented at a cultural level can then be felt on an individual level and space made for that mode of feeling at a social level. Whether this is tenderness, or anger, or lust or etc.
He used 'Friday on my Mind' by the Easybeats to state the other side of the case, 'I'll change that scene one day' the perpetually deferred revolution and the intensities of the weekend providing the pressure release which allows the entire system to remain functioning and the intolerable to be tolerated.
There was some stuff about the Sex Pistols and some stuff about The Jam.
And then he came back to Mark's (and by extension his own) dissatisfaction with Marxism and its inability to make a space for the imagination (and probably we could use the word desire here also, in the way Deleuze and Guattari use it, as positive and productive rather than keening over a lack) and its failure to encompass what Mark called 'dreamings'. It's failure to come to terms with and make useful alliances with the forces unleashed in the sixties which essentially condemned it to irrelevance and which, as it stands, will always make it an instrument of brutality and not of liberation.
And it's a reminder that Mark's formative intellectual influences are, more often than not anti-Hegelian if not outright anti-Marxist. There's an interview with the CCRU in which he talks about the huge liberatory energy surge he found unleashed by ditching the oppositional leftist discourse of the time.
And partly (largely) this was about Mark wanting to produce, to generate concepts, ideas, events, dreamings, work and finding all these forces arrayed against him from depression, lassitude, inertia, to the academy and it's rules, it's standards of academic rigour, it's norms and prejudices, to society and class and etc etc and this makes everything which works to frustrate individual productivity and creativity and functionality into an Enemy whether it's the bad conscience of liberals the Marxists need to subordinate everything to the worker's revolution or etc
This central and non-negotiable need to create, to do the work he has to do.
A student asked Simon what happened to turn that Mark into the Capitalist Realist Mark and Simon said, well he had to enter the real world. He had to get a job at a sixth form college and he was suddenly confronted with the fatalism and apolitical apathy of his fellow teachers, the depression and lassitude and nihilism of his students, the appalling working conditions and so on. And it woke it up to how terrible life is. I think that's true. I knew him at that time and remember talking with him about how the Nick Land image of Capitalism as gleaming machine of ruthless efficiency simply doesn't measure up to the reality of idiocy, squandered time, redundancy, misallocation and waste (of resources but most tragically of human potential). It's a fantasy and a destructive one.
So this is an interesting tension within the life and the work and I think Simon wanted to posit Acid Communism as a way of resolving this at a higher plane. To reabsorb the acid dreams of the sixties into the left and thereby give it back its libidinal motor. To move it away from economic reductionism on the one hand and idpol factionalism on the other. And that music, as a source of dreamings, is central to that. Always asking for more without being limited by any notion of the realistic, a place where even the parameters and limits of the body can be redrawn and reimagined.