Wonderful…

“Personally I preferred the talks that took a broader view, such as Lauren Graber’s review of a book dealing with race in trance raves at Goa,…”

Was it Saldanha’s Psychedelic White? I’d be curious to hear how that talk/discussion went. I chatted with him when he spoke in Montreal last year. Interesting link to Mr. Goodman’s forthcoming project too.

I think “living differently” is a statement about the utopian idea that it is possible to somehow escape capitalism by (for example) living in a squatted commune, or producing commodities which are anti-capitalist in some way (like an economic form of anti-matter?). So yeah everyone tries to do the best they can, and look – here are a whole new set of products for you to spend your wages on to help you have a good time…

Greg – I will have to get back to you later

Hello to both of you!

“(Trivialization in our existence is partially due to ) an end of realism, the end of a belief in absolutes, the end of belief that the world is ready made to be our home, with all the rules to be kept already laid down and built in. People are becoming de-traditionalised, nomadised, casualized, as the old fixed points of reference disappear — Instead of marriage a series of relationships, instead of a home, a series of addresses, instead of a career, freelancing, instead of belief, whatever one is currently “into” ,instead of stable identities , pluralism and flux; instead of society, the market and one’s own circle. Culture seems to have become all fringe and no mainstream. Popular (and essentially trivial) beliefs multiply exceedingly; but it’s all a fad. None of it is to be taken seriously, because it is not clear that anything is, or can be taken seriously anymore. There is a complete break with the past along with the rapid movement of capital, people and ideas around the world. There is a pervasive sense of groundlessness and outsidelessness. “Is that all there is? You mean this is it?” This loss is becoming so complete so quickly that very soon historians will find it very difficult to re-imagine what it was like to genuinely believe in something

( c/f “The Time of The Angels” Don Cupitt 2003 )

“In the old consciousness, identity was something metaphysical — now it increasingly has become simply a corporate ID — not a substance but a sign. Reality itself has become only an effect , something conjured up within and by the motion of signs. The line between drama and documentary,reality and fiction has become blurred.” ( “After God”, Introduction, ix )

“in modern, media led culture , we have in effect a return of the Middle Ages: it used to be the church that supplied everyone with an imaginary world in their head — now the media do that job,with celebrity as the new sainthood– in the all encompassing anonymity of the new global culture.” “This change has ruptured Europe and America, but also other cultures — In the new high rise post modern cities of South and East Asia,the wipe out of tradition is breathtaking –without any obvious resistance or regret,and within a single lifetime — It is perhaps the most severe and sudden cultural rupture in the whole of human history.The new global technological culture brings with it a very naturalistic cast of mind. The world is like a communications network. Everything is open,public,accessible and all on one level. Nothing is deep and nothing can be kept hidden for long. There is no secure privacy — the world of signs is a flowing , one level continuum with no one outside and no secret places.The presumption is that we can draw at least one clear line between the public and the private, between objectivity and subjectivity ,or between the dominant culture and the counterculture — But post modernity as a cultural condition has been constituted precisely by the erasure of these very distinctions. The public realm, the sea of meanings — is outsideless and and endless,nothing is fixed;everything moves and shifts together. It engulfs everything ,incuding values , private life,selfhood and the counterculture. There is no way of hiving off a little cluster of meanings ( absolutes, certainties, or fundamentals) and preserving them unchanged. On the contrary, –as the long history of religious esotericism demonstrates — meanings and truths kept unchallenged and out of the public view very quickly deteriorate into simple nonsense.”

“Eveything nowadays is beginning to float on a free global market — not only money and prices — but also linguistic meaning , religious truths and moral and aesthetic values.” “In the new understanding of culture as a system of signs in motion ,the world of symbolic meaning in which we live is an unanchored floating continuum. All reactions against it must use its vocabulary and are therefore part of it, and will be engulfed by it. You cant really drop out. There is nowhere to drop out to. Your protest against the system remains a part of the system.”

INTRODUCTION vii — xv ) Chapter — “The Time of the Angels” ( 74–79) “(Nietzsche asserted that) once central authority broke down — he imagined Bacchanalian revel: with the end of realism, all free spirits run riot.”

Even discussing the minutiae of how that process occurs sounds banal,cliched, or hackneyed by now,but I feel it’s true — Knowledge and “wisdom” can remain ghettoised within capitalism, and just be disseminated through ( suspect on many levels to many people ) like Freedom Press, or the same “radical” concepts can be packaged differently and wrapped up in shiny new covers — and sold in Borders.

Which ever way you choose, it’s still commodified/reified/fetishised ( I told you discussing it reduces it to almost laughable cliche! ).

As Home says, until findamental relations between people are radically altered — I can’t see any way round it. Unless one becomes a trappist hermit monk, living in a forest or mountain….which, on many levels, is about as real and anti commodity as you are going to get, but I don’t know many people who’d want to choose that path….

Rant over — better get down to Borders to buy “Spectre of Marx” or The Sun or something….

Great column John….