smarter New Age still dumb
Arthur Magazine is an infuriating mix of smart music writing and bad, bad pseudospiritual expectoration on the future, bashing dumb New Agers while promoting a smarter future of spiritual enlightenment is still not smart enough! I don't want a New New Age of no-bullshit anti-gurus -- courtesy of Rabbi Rushkoff and Daniel Pinchbeck. These guys, like their predecessors, Ken Wilbur and company have read Hegel second hand, and are predicting all sorts of disasters in the future that are meant to help us all grow spiritually. -- This is according to these heavy thinkers the REAL meaning of the Age of Aquarius!!!
Thanks, but no thanks! Read Marx, read Walter Benjamin, read some real thinkers for God's sake, and get back to me on commodity fetishism before you dribble on about your synthetic vision of the future of mankind. What is so SAD is that the music coverage and some of the other writing is fantastic (Chris Goss for instance). So I am really angry that Angelenos once again serve up good music writing with bad philosophy. ARRRRGGGGHHH...
Thanks, but no thanks! Read Marx, read Walter Benjamin, read some real thinkers for God's sake, and get back to me on commodity fetishism before you dribble on about your synthetic vision of the future of mankind. What is so SAD is that the music coverage and some of the other writing is fantastic (Chris Goss for instance). So I am really angry that Angelenos once again serve up good music writing with bad philosophy. ARRRRGGGGHHH...
7 Comments:
Yes, I agree. quite awful. But to continue the threads on experimental poetry and then on design,and now on comodity fetishism, I ask:
Is there art without fetishism? Is there desire without fetishism?
What is the deeper issue on fetishism? Can we answer it with "its a matter of degree, or the right balance"?, must we reject it all together, or does it have a more subtle role, which has not yet been fully articulated?
Preliminary answer: it is a question of economy. Exchange must not be only in terms of monetary and material wealth. Obove all, the idea of economy must be understood by the broader culture to include a broader spectrum of human relations.It is also a matter of habit. So we are speaking of a shifted economy?
So I guess there is after all a "spiritual" element, but not without comodities either. And let us not forget, what we find so revolting about New Age spirituality, is that it _is_ a fetishized comodity! A treasured opium. And its fetishization and marketing displaces and effaces its more subtle possibilities. Perhaps indeed, this is the case in part because it shuns discussion and dialectic.
I think we can pit the fetish against the dialectic -- and see what we come up -- or who is left still swinging.
i will have a more serious answer soon -- but let's try this thought experiment --
the commodity fetish is that which tries to monopolize sensuality -- and has to a very large degree succeeded, those who do not succumb to its seduction and actually privilege sensuality without commodities are at great risk of becoming addicts or other socially marginal types.
This is the true crime of commodity fetishism -- monopolization of seduction and promises of happiness.
the fetish subsumes sensuality for the pervert as well.
in a sense, there is nothing more sexually charged than either, but charged in such a way that what is destroyed is exactly what is promised --
happiness, pleasure, polymorphous perversity
just bumped into this link... if you would bother to read my book on psychedelic shamanism, Breaking Open the Head, you would find a lot of material on Walter Benjamin, who was crucial to my thesis, as well as discussions of many other thinkers.
Kneejerk dismissal of "spirituality" (or exploration of consciousness) is as uninspired as the mindless embrace of New Age.
Daniel Pinchbec,
I admit to not having read your book, but in the July issue of 2005, your sense of historical time certainly contained nothing the betrayed familiarity with Walter Benjamin.
I don't dismiss spirituality in a knee jerk way -- I just think that what I read of yours and most new agers' accounts have an very impoverished notion of spiritual life -- I'll read your book and get back to you --
I have to agree that the purportedly smarter new age is still stupid precisely in the way it proposes less intelligent and more intelligent appropriations of new age spirituality.
you might check out Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," which discusses the concept of messianic time.
best,
dp
Pinchbeck,
I write books too and if you took the time out to read some, you'd realize that I have written quite extensively on precisely that Benjamin essay!
I'll read your book even if you won't read mine.
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