Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Very nice. For a while I've been making a connection between Bruce Sterling's ideas of Atemporality and Dark Euphoria and some of my favourite musical movements. (That's why the hauntology bloggers are all under "Gothic High-Tech" in my blogroll.)

Now I see Bruce Sterling is debating debated Simon Reynolds who's also been tracing the end of musical progress in recent writings.

Should be a fascinating discussion. Hope there's a podcast.

I have a feeling I should be reading Frederic Jameson.

3 comments:

Bill said...

Don't get sucked into that postmodern shit. Read a comic-book summary, and that's enough. Anything more is just wanking.

John Powers said...

Scanning over your link to Fredric Jameson my thoughts turned to Christopher Alexander. I have not read his new books.

The first book I read was "The Oregon Experiment" back in my early college days. Someone in the house had taken advantage of a book club offer to get 4 books for $1 never intending to pay the book club. Ripoff! It was a transformative book to me.

Marxists academics seemed to me then so attached to notions of a vanguard, they made fears that they were recruiting or proselytizing laughable. Maybe they were, but if so, only to some elite, for all others withering personal critique was dished out.

Anyhow, something that made "The Oregon Experiment" resonate so was attention to the flow of money. Alexander is such a polymath he probably understands Marxism, but his ideas about the flow of money seem hardly influenced by it, instead growing out of his efforts to develop a theory of design.

So Alexander opened up a vista for me to see differently without having to take up the heavy baggage of Marxism and be subject to the sadism of disgruntled and dyspeptic professors.

Ha, I always make it about me ;-) when I mean to say Alexander is really deep and interesting in so many ways. Check out "The Production of Houses."

John Powers said...

In re the Jameson link, "But the Lacanian system is threefold, and not dualistic." seems to me a very important insight. I need simple explantions and I like this. Scroll down to "Teamwork and the Talking Stick Protocols" it's just a long paragraph that's been helpful to me for understanding a heterarchy of choice.