Home > Notes from the Underground
I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Another fascinating post from one of the most consistently interesting weblogs, imomus (what follows is my abridgement of a longer post and comments):"I'm not into this thing, fashion goth. It's probably because I'm not into rock and roll, Romanticism, or Christianity. I hate tattoos and piercings and the cult of self-injury. Sex is not evil or wicked. Fashion goth is an aestheticization of pain. Just like a Cranach crucifixion scene. The Marquis de Sade was mounting a critique of the Enlightenment. What's wrong with the Enlightenment?
I think it's because Christianity has never meant anything in Japan. If you get into a Shinto-Buddhist mindset you don't dwell on negativity. Japan is a different culture bloc. Shinto is a fertility religion. It's a mistake to think there's only beauty in pain. Fertility religions celebrate life, whereas Christianity and Islam celebrate death and resurrection. In Japan you have both a populist celebration of the material world (Shinto) and an aristocratic rejection of it (Buddhism). "
While I don't care for Foucault anywhere near as much as I once did, I still find his idea that identity and individuality are simply a construction of whatever discourse are to hand important. As a consequence, I've always tended to feel that since no man is an island (not fully unique or independent from the culture that produced them), the idea of a counter-culture was an oxymoron. The most obvious example was the pose of individuality and rebellion created by punk in the seventies, which always seemed uncomfortably close to me to the conservative ideology that dominated the following decade. Similarly, the more a counter-culture prides itself on a sense of rebellion from conformity, the more it creates its own constrictive codes and uniforms. While I'm not wholly convinced by the way Momus opposes both romanticism and the enlightenment and the oriental and the occidental, the notion that a counter-culture and its host-culture are essentially inseparable is one that deserves greater attention.Labels: Culture, Individuality
posted by Richard 2:10 pm
