True to its Enlightenment ideals, Europe reaches a rational consensus regarding its debt.

Good job, guys.

1988 or 2008? Raymond Williams Reads the Current Economic Crisis

In a deeply prescient 1988 essay (Afterword to Modern Tragedy), Raymond Williams describes "a widespread loss of the future" he diagnoses in contemporary culture. Williams writes, "the dominant messages from the centre are now of danger and conflict, with accompanying calculations of temporary advantage or containment but also with deeper rhythms of shock and loss. Managed affluence has slid into an anxiously managed but perhaps unmanageable depression." How could he have known? Or, better, how is it that no one remembers that the late 1980s bore a curious resemblance to the early 2010s?

"While the old order is still powerful, even if visibly dying," Williams writes, "it still exercises, even if in new forms, its many determinations. Thus the simple shock of disturbance, the relatively sudden but slowly settling loss of effective continued development . . . spreads at first, beyond values, through the whole of the culture. This indeed is inevitable, since the shock is not only to an abstract social order but to millions of lives that have been shaped to its terms. Thus a capitalist economic order is in the process of defaulting on its most recent contract: to provide full employment, extended credit and high social expenditure as conditions for a political consensus of support." In Williams's prognosis, it becomes clear, things are going to get worse before they get better: a dying capitalist system will continue to exercise its usual determinations in increasingly desperate forms. Your bank will demand five dollars per month for your "privilege" of access to a debit card. Temporary gains will mask the fact that an economy predicated on steady growth has grown all it can, has begun to reach its limits. Worst of all, we will all realize the extent to which, our opposition notwithstanding, our very lives are intertwined with this situation. "Go ahead," the banks will say. "Just try disentangling your life from the way we've structured your finances if you don't like our increasingly desperate measures." Not a rosy picture of Williams's future, or ours.

The Politics of Occupy(ing)

The Occupy Wall Street movement (dare we call it that?) enters its second month with mixed results but with some cause for hope. The protesters' message has been unclear--deliberately so, I am assured; the movement's lack of a clearly established politics has enabled it to attract a broad base of support. Yet there has been a consistent danger that the fledgling movement with radical potential could be co-opted by any number of liberal organizations and made to serve politics as usual. Populist anger is a notoriously unstable political force, admissible of being canalized and harnessed by any number of agendas.

The movement's message of "we are the 99%" is especially salutary at a moment when, as Roger D. Hodge writes, "by 2007 the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans (families earning more than $109,630) were taking in 50 percent of the national income. In 1980 the top 1 percent of Americans received 10 percent of the national income; by 2007 the super- rich (those with income above $398,900) had increased their share to 23.5 percent. The average increase in real income for the bottom 99 percent of American families between 1973 and 2006 was a mere 8.5 percent, whereas the richest 1 percent saw a 190 percent rise in real income" (Harper's). People should be outraged by numbers like this. This, added to the Supreme Court's decision last winter to grant corporations the status of persons in making campaign donations in the Citizens United case, not to mention the major banks' seemingly coordinated decision to implement extensive fees on customers, added to the privatization of any public institution or service within grasp, makes the moment for action all the more urgent.


Mitt Romney's characterization of the occupation of Wall Street as "class warfare" is entirely accurate and should be embraced by those who identify themselves with the movement (the New York Times). As Obama's efforts to work across party lines in coming to an agreement regarding the debt ceiling in August demonstrate, the liberal, rationalist ideal of consensus politics quickly breaks down when one is confronted with an adversary who is anything but rational. Instead, a movement worthy of the name should embrace the rhetoric of class (a "no-no" for far too long in U.S. politics) and welcome its role as an antagonist in a class war that everyone knows has been going on for decades, waged not by the people camping out in Zuccotti Park but by Romney and his cohort.

The movement has received some welcome encouragement from Slavoj Zizek and other figures on the left (Zizek). Zizek echoes the point he makes in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce that we have "privatized profit and socialized risk"; that financial institutions deemed "too big to fail" and therefore worthy of public bailout are the cause of, not the solution to the woes of post-2008 social and economic life.

What should become clear at this point is the sense in which the Occupy Wall Street movement, the protesters against Scott Walker's attempts to break Wisconsin public sector workers' unions, and the SUNY students' walkout, to name just a few instances, are all in league against a common adversary: the trail of disenfranchisement, dispossession, and debt left in the wake of global capitalism's consumption of resources and consolidation of wealth.

The 99 percenters should be clear in their message: what we want is not a correction to the free market logic that organizes our lives but an outright rejection of this logic. A heavily regulated financial sector, a new tax code, or a decoupling of corporate money and the democratic process would merely be welcome first steps against an adversary too obvious to name.

Here we are now, entertain us

Everyone seems to be dragging their old Nirvana cds out--or dropping the $61.46 for the 4-lp deluxe edition of Nevermind now available as a pre-order online. (Nirvana's Nevermind 20th Anniversary Celebrated with Deluxe Reissue Box Set) I must admit I'm tempted. As a cultural phenomenon, Nirvana made its precipitous rise and drug- and fame-addled implosion during a moment of what was essentially the co-optation and mass-marketing of underground rock culture. Not a new trend in the early '90s, surely, but one that had rarely reached the same pitch, at least for a generation or so. For those of us who remember it (which puts us over 30), it's simply too tempting to capitulate to this moment of nostalgia. Forget about the marketing of "grunge" (whatever that was). Forget about the 14 year-olds in Nirvana t-shirts who couldn't possibly remember "the year punk broke" and its cultural aftermath. Listening to these songs at a distance of twenty years makes me blush as I remember how formative this culture was for me at a certain very impressionable age. It also makes me realize, as someone who still cares about rock and roll, how good this music actually was--for what it was, peculiarly good pop culture.

With time to kill in London, I recently wandered into the Nirvana exhibition in Brick Lane. (Nirvana exhibition). The exhibition displayed the usual memorabilia--photos, album cover artwork, Kurt Cobain's hoodie (there actually could have been more material, if anything). Gravitating toward the audiovisual setup at the back of the exhibition space, I found myself spending more time before the screen watching live footage of the band than I'd anticipated I would--genuinely enjoying the music, and not only from a nostalgic standpoint. Ok, I thought, this is an important moment to re-examine.

I recently picked up Joshua Clover's 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing about, which had been on my reading list for some time. 

The book is at times deeply interesting, and at others annoyingly insistent about the cultural and historical value of ephemeral mass culture, a problem often encountered by cultural studies. While virtually anyone would agree that pop music registers, accounts for, and sometimes conditions social change, 1989 takes its wager one step further to read retrospectively onto messy and incoherent pop cultural trends the stable ideologies of fully forged cultural formations. The chapter on gangsta, in which "the criminalization of rap returns as the rap of criminalization," and the one on grunge are surely the book's smartest. (These also treat the music that has held up the best aesthetically: who cares about Jesus Jones, The Scorpions, or George Michael?)

The chapter on grunge--which borrows its title from Nirvana's excellent early song "Negative Creep"--suffers acutely from the same tendency to over-read as the rest of the book: Clover assumes grunge was a stable ideological construct, rather than a series of feints by over-exposed twentysomethings, or worse, a sequence of suggessful marketing gestures coalescing around certain subcultural styles. (Did anyone actually embrace the label "grunge"?)  Yet for all its faults, the chapter scores some excellent points in the ongoing cultural reexamination of punk's uneven cultural intervention. In particular, I think, Clover is correct in seeing punk's musical ham-fistedness ("here are three chords, now start a band") as a sort of rejection of bourgeois proficiency and the professionalization of culture. The logic of the amateur converts consumers into producers, virtually any suburban kid into a potential rock star. Clover is also correct in seeing Nirvana's contribution to this lineage as an inversion of punk's critique, as "punk rock turned outside in, not anti-social but a-social," a kind of self-loathing angst aimed back at society. Yet to talk about "grunge"--and Nirvana in particular--seriously may well be to take too seriously Cobain's lyrics, smart as they may sometimes be, and to read into them a politics that simply isn't there. One other fault one could find with Clover's work is his conversion of early '90s rock subculture to a sort of boys-only club: he invokes and dismisses Riot Grrl--one of the era's most coherent moments, not to mention one of its most interesting politically and aesthetically, in a single paragraph.

Perhaps, though, my real complaint is that the work of Clover and other cultural critics like him misses a point that is both mundane and entirely relevant: this is music I liked, and do like.

Congressional Chest-Man

Amid the shitstorm surrounding congressman Anthony Weiner's overexposed chest, I began to marvel... not at the utter stupidity of it all (which boggles the mind) but at how smooth-chested the congressman is:

And then I began to wonder: whatever happened to good, old-fashioned masculinity?

A Benediction from Thurston Moore

Here's the "official" video T. M. released:

And here's a good one a fan made:

There's an interesting continuity between the two. Weird imagery of war and destruction as counterpoint to a song that may be a little too harmonious for the likes of T. M. otherwise. The soundtrack to my late spring/early summer: Thurston Moore's two new albums--the more properly "pop" album "Demolished Thoughts" (Matador; produced by Beck), on which "Benediction" appears and the more experimental, more dissonant "Solo Acoustic Vol. 5/12 String Meditations for Jack Rose" (Vin du Select Qualitite). The second one in particular really impressed me--a little repetitive but great--definitely in a league with Jim O'Rourke's last one "The Visitor." T. M.'s tribute to Jack Rose--like O'Rourke's apparent paean to John Fahey--is the kind of thing that can give itself up to passive background listening and also sustain the most intensive engagement. This recording also brought my attention to Vin du Select Qualitite's project of presenting limited-pressing vinyl of solo acoustic recordings well worth checking out: http://www.vdsqrecords.com/

The Uneasy Alliance of Political Reform and the Free Market in the Arab World

With the Group of 8's pledge of billions in aid to fledgling democracies in Egypt and Tunisia, democracy is once again being yoked to the free market--as if the one could not exist without the other. Yet democracy--with its rhetoric of equality and popular participation--and liberalism--with its recourse to individual rights and liberties--may, if we take each of these ideals to its extreme, cancel each other out. If I am "free" to pursue my own economic interests unhindered by state intervention, I am also free to exploit you unfettered should you possess a resource that might contribute to my own pursuit of economic development.

Liberal democracy's imagining of a human in the abstract bereft of any specificity, not to mention its human rights-based discourse, has certainly opened it up to criticism from the left. Such an unspecified insistence on the centrality of human rights remains open to a bland leveling effect, rendering it unanswerable to a specific politics of critique and therefore manipulable by hegemonic powers. Yet, flawed as it may be, a politics rooted in a language of human rights must still be the basis of any effective realpolitik when it comes to emerging democracies in the Arab world. The West should therefore provide its aid, but with no strings attached, and no hidden agenda of liberalizing new markets.