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 Cultural Decline

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bitchcraft
Harmsway
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Harmsway
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PostSubject: Cultural Decline   Cultural Decline EmptyMon Jan 12, 2015 7:40 pm

A provocative article: https://philosophynow.org/issues/58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond

Quote :
"This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded."
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bitchcraft
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PostSubject: Re: Cultural Decline   Cultural Decline EmptyMon Jan 12, 2015 7:51 pm

Harmsway wrote:
A provocative article: https://philosophynow.org/issues/58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond

Quote :
"This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded."

That quote should be the board motto for Bond and Beyond.

Especially for those with big post counts.

Uh-oh.
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Largo's Shark
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PostSubject: Re: Cultural Decline   Cultural Decline EmptyMon Jan 12, 2015 9:49 pm

"Weightless nowhere of silent autism."

That's a great lyric weighting to happen...

It's a thought-provoking article, but reading through it I thought this passage was a little tenuous.

Quote :
Cinema in the pseudo-modern age looks more and more like a computer game. Its images, which once came from the ‘real’ world – framed, lit, soundtracked and edited together by ingenious directors to guide the viewer’s thoughts or emotions – are now increasingly created through a computer. And they look it. Where once special effects were supposed to make the impossible appear credible, CGI frequently [inadvertently] works to make the possible look artificial, as in much of Lord of the Rings or Gladiator. Battles involving thousands of individuals have really happened; pseudo-modern cinema makes them look as if they have only ever happened in cyberspace. And so cinema has given cultural ground not merely to the computer as a generator of its images, but to the computer game as the model of its relationship with the viewer.

Pre-CG effects such as back projection, optical printing, matte paintings, stop motion, puppetry and animatronics helped make both the possible and in many cases impossible, look artificial - but that was part of their magic. The only difference is that audiences (and intellectuals such as Alan Kirby)  didn't have computer games as a frame of reference.
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PostSubject: Re: Cultural Decline   Cultural Decline EmptyMon Jan 12, 2015 10:05 pm

bitchcraft wrote:
Harmsway wrote:
A provocative article: https://philosophynow.org/issues/58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond

Quote :
"This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded."

That quote should be the board motto for Bond and Beyond.

Especially for those with big post counts.

Uh-oh.

if only we had the admin powers to make it so. colgate
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Harmsway
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PostSubject: Re: Cultural Decline   Cultural Decline EmptyMon Jan 12, 2015 10:19 pm

Largo's Shark wrote:
"Weightless nowhere of silent autism."

That's a great lyric weighting to happen...

It's a thought-provoking article, but reading through it I thought this passage was a little tenuous.

Quote :
Cinema in the pseudo-modern age looks more and more like a computer game. Its images, which once came from the ‘real’ world – framed, lit, soundtracked and edited together by ingenious directors to guide the viewer’s thoughts or emotions – are now increasingly created through a computer. And they look it. Where once special effects were supposed to make the impossible appear credible, CGI frequently [inadvertently] works to make the possible look artificial, as in much of Lord of the Rings or Gladiator. Battles involving thousands of individuals have really happened; pseudo-modern cinema makes them look as if they have only ever happened in cyberspace. And so cinema has given cultural ground not merely to the computer as a generator of its images, but to the computer game as the model of its relationship with the viewer.

Pre-CG effects such as back projection, optical printing, matte paintings, stop motion, puppetry and animatronics helped make both the possible and in many cases impossible, look artificial - but that was part of their magic. The only difference is that audiences (and intellectuals such as Alan Kirby)  didn't have computer games as a frame of reference.
Yeah, I don't buy that section, either.
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PostSubject: Re: Cultural Decline   Cultural Decline EmptyMon Jan 12, 2015 10:37 pm

I'll also add that it seems to be a fairly old piece, or at least written by an author who's being living in a bubble for the 10 years. Ceefax, GLADIATOR, LOTR, Big Brother and so on, it's old hat now. I'd be be more interested in reading something contemporary - have these trends worsened or has 'pseudo-modernism' produced any lasting fruits?

Edit: Ah, just read that it's from 2006.

Kirby's age and inherent snobbery is evident in his dismal of 'dance music' (along with playlists and presumably by extension - remixes) as ephemeral, vacuous and inferior to rock and pop (pop being such a broad term). Pop culture is clearly not his forte. No discussion on influence of Reich, Eno, Glass, Young and Riley, African diaspora rhythms, makes his argument rather glib. And if you're going to talk about audience interactivity, why leave our Cage's aleatoric music or jazz improvisation?

Quote :
The roots of pseudo-modernism can be traced back through the years dominated by postmodernism. Dance music and industrial pornography, for instance, products of the late 70s and 80s, tend to the ephemeral, to the vacuous on the level of signification, and to the unauthored (dance much more so than pop or rock). They also foreground the activity of their ‘reception’: dance music is to be danced to, porn is not to be read or watched but used, in a way which generates the pseudo-modern illusion of participation. In music, the pseudo-modern superseding of the artist-dominated album as monolithic text by the downloading and mix-and-matching of individual tracks on to an iPod, selected by the listener, was certainly prefigured by the music fan’s creation of compilation tapes a generation ago. But a shift has occurred, in that what was a marginal pastime of the fan has become the dominant and definitive way of consuming music, rendering the idea of the album as a coherent work of art, a body of integrated meaning, obsolete.

According this, the spokesman of pseudo-modernist pop music is Brian Eno.


@20:14 onwards
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Harmsway
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PostSubject: Re: Cultural Decline   Cultural Decline EmptyMon Jan 12, 2015 11:30 pm

The article clearly has a "cranky old man" thing going on, but the broad strokes of his argument feel right to me.
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Fairbairn-Sykes
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PostSubject: Re: Cultural Decline   Cultural Decline EmptySun Feb 08, 2015 4:00 am

"Cranky old man" is the default persona of a BAB poster until established otherwise, I think.
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PostSubject: Re: Cultural Decline   Cultural Decline EmptySun Feb 08, 2015 5:03 am

Interesting article. As for the BAB default persona, I'm often cranky, but I don't have the "old man" status that makes it endearing.

I'm still a kid (the 93 in my name was my birth year).
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