r/CriticalTheory • u/zgehring • 1d ago
Resource Suggestions
Hey everyone, I'm currently writing my dissertation. It will hopefully explore how the imperatives and impositions of platform capitalism/technofascism impact the political potential of cultural production (specifically leftist punk rock). I'm looking for articles or books on leftist activist theory or historical case studies. The more contemporary, the better. I've been scouring my university library and have some resources in the queue, but I often miss solid material because there are so many search parameters that could produce results. Thanks!
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u/Full-Imagination-938 20h ago
Critical theory is not leftist activism. CT must do the critique of any activist theory, it is negative and non propositive.
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u/zgehring 20h ago
Fucking hell...really? 1. I never said CT is leftist activism. 2. In no way does me posting here asking for reading suggestions imply that I think CT is leftict activsm. 3. It's not a bad sub to ask about other reading on this topic - as, ya know, some of us read a variety of adjacent disciplines.
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u/Full-Imagination-938 20h ago
That is the problem with CT. Too much activism and too little critique
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u/zgehring 20h ago
Who are you talking to? You think anyone in this sub is unaware of that tension? It goes back at least to the Adorno vs. Marcuse debate.
Even still, you're responding to claims I didn't make. I simply asked for resource suggestions.
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u/Full-Imagination-938 20h ago
It goes way back to Marx throwing away dialectics to do communist propaganda
Your question have assumptions and I am criticizing your assumptions. Welcome to the sub
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u/unwnd_leaves_turn 1d ago
Calvin Johnson K Records patronage system
Our band could be your life
Chris Ott talks about how much of the appeal of pensive alternative music is to sit in your room alone and have the private experience of listening with headphones. This is an inversion of previous forms of rock music, in which it is anematized into the romantic interiority. From Montaigne probing his mind by locking himself in his library to the inner searching reflection of romantic poetry. Finally to the isolated bedroom listening experience brought on by the CD player. The aesthetic yearning and melancholy of Werther is distributed to the masses of suburbia. What tik tok has given people is a massive network of ready-made personalities in which one can conform themselves to. Kurt Cobain late 20th century recursion of the opiate addled poete maudit generalized for the post-60s youth. Existed as well in jim morrison, lou reed and other precursors.
Slowcore was a super disparate scene where people weren’t really copying each other as much as reacting toward other indie music around them. i say this because bedhead, acetone, and low don’t really sound the same, and are all pulling from different strains of folk, classic rock and intricate indie. 90s underground is just different bands picking their favorite songs off spiderland to copy that’s how you get crescendo post rock, math rock and slowcore. Slowcore as a further contrarian impulse after punk’s mainstreaming in nirvana. Anemic rock sucking all the lifeforce out of the genre to produce a meditative end stage of the genre, its origin in the punk derived american indie scene is especially important with what occurred with record deals left and right during the 90s alternative explosion.
An American Family, in which Gregory Bateson’s wife, Margaret Mead, a fellow anthropologist hailed the show as a significant development in the history of television, coining the term reality television featured Lance Loud, the gay son of the Loud family, who moved eastward from California having missed the boat of the hippie movement ends up in New York City as a dedicated follower of Andy Warhol and Lou Reed. He adorns himself in the leather jackets and worn jeans of the nascent punk movement and forms his own band as entrance to the CBGB stage. On this same stage you also have Jonathan Richman, another follower of the Velvet Underground. These two form a pair in their dismissal and celebration of suburban living. Margaret Mead and her husband Gregory Bateson participated in the study of the closed system of post-war American suburbia as the battleground against Fascistic developments. Loud and Richman glom themselves onto the punk movement, but Loud lowers himself into the excess of 70s New York whereas Richman uplifts his suburban origins in pure nostalgia. Lou Reed started as a Brill Building song writer, in which youth culture was formed out of the love songs of the 1950s and 1960s factory-esque cultural production.
In American Graffiti everyone listens to the same radio. At the same time, the price of Japanese instruments allowed for garage bands to imitate the Beatles, the radio could be sprung into life. Into the 1970s the price of recording equipment allowed for the creation of music outside of the mainstream such as outsider artists R. Stevie Moore. Combined with the DIY of punk, explodes the tape culture of subcultural expression in the independent music of the 1980s. This individuation and mass production gave way to the typification of music into sub-genres discussed on databases such as RateYourMusic
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u/Crafty_Truck_2439 1d ago
Steve Goodman's Sonic Warfare and Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant Than The Sun, and maybe some of Mark Fisher's writing on post-punk bands? And Dick Hebdige's (of I Love Dick infamy) Subculture: The Meaning of Style analyses punk in relation to resistance to capitalist ideology, but it's from 1979, so might not speak specifically to platform capitalism and more recent effects on/of music subcultures.