Monday, June 3, 2019
odd bods of the postpostpunk Eighties (1 of ???)
Somewhere between The Residents and Prefab Sprout
Between 10cc and Ghost Box
(More precisely - between Godley & Creme and The Advisory Circle).
Dave McCullough was a supporter (here's his interview with the band for Sounds) and may have been instrumental in Sudden Sway signing to Blanco Y Negro.
Although they'd be exactly the kind of thing Mike "El" Alway would get behind too
Well, I was looking around for info about them, or some kind of considered take, or act of memorialisation, and not finding much at all bar an old ILM thread - and what do you know, there's a proper - and proper brilliant - piece about them written by none other than Phil Knight, over at the old Eighties collective blog Faces On Posters Too Many Choices, in part because he hails from the same town as the group - Peterborough.
That'll save me the bother of trying to write about them.
They were very much not where my head was at in the mid-Eighties - I do remember certain Melody Maker colleagues going all gaga about Spacemate and doing some kind of feature that involved a guided audio-tour of wandering around the city wearing headphones with the record on... so I never paid them much mind at the time... but of course now they seem rather intriguing and perhaps an interestingly peculiar flowering of late postpunk or New Pop gone prog...
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Phil Knight sez:
On the subject of seeing through neoliberalism before it even happened, check out this essay on the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce:
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/dead-end-left
It starts off boringly enough on a series of obscure Catholic theological debates in the late 1960's, but as you read down it you will start to feel your brain collapse.
that's a very interesting essay. What do you think of Jordan Peterson Phil, in terms of the sort of re-sacrilization of the world, human nature, hierarchy of values stuff mentioned in the essay? I mean not Peterson's ideas as such but what his huge popularity speaks to...
I haven't got a strong opinion on Jordan Peterson, tbh, because I haven't read him in any depth. From what I know of him, I think he is fulfilling a real need, but I have characterized him elsewhere as being a mercenary in the culture war - i.e. he is actually making a lot of money in being "reactionary". See also Douglas Murray.
What interests me in Augusto Del Noce is that the Catholics (and I'm a very lapsed Catholic myself) have long had a strong critique of capitalism, and it seems that many of them were anticipating Neoliberalism long before it happened. Also, many of the most pungent analyses of Neoliberalism at the present time come from devout Catholics, e.g. from Adrian Vermeule, Adrian Pabst, and Patrick Deneen.
Obviously, from our corner of the internet, these people are intensely reactionary (Mark Fisher hated Christianity, and hated Catholicism particularly). But where they are all strong is that they understand that "Neoliberalism" isn't some kind of perversion of the progressive instinct. It is the summation of the inner logic of liberalism, and has been incubated for at least three centuries. This is actually a fascinating essay:
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/01/liturgy-of-liberalism
Obviously, this kind of stuff is disturbing, because it tends to suggest that the most effective opposition to capitalism doesn't come from sexy Marxism-infused progressive leftism, but from reactionary Christian conservatism. Or, at the least, there is common ground between religious reactionaries and anti-capitalist leftists.
But this is where we are. I don't think it is possible at the moment to pick a clear side and say "ergo I am good". If neoliberalism is overcome, I think it may well be through social conservatism, which is inherently bad for e.g. sexual minorities.
i don't know if Mark Fisher hated Christianity, i remember he wrote an appreciation of St Paul (probably influenced by reading Badiou who i think - this is secondhand, could be wrong - thought of St Paul as a true revolutionary, the first (or one of the first) in a mold that included Lenin et al.)
he was also into Spinoza, who was all about transcending "sad passions" (i.e. desire, bodily appetites, wordly needs, ego) etc and achieving a serene above-it-all state of ascesis
also i think there is a suppressed or disguised religiosity behind a lot of the different strands of leftism - Corbyn to me is very clearly in the tradition of the Quakers, that whole nonconformist virtue-oriented, self-denying line of Protestantism dissent.. the pacificism, the community politics, the frugality, the love of protest and demonstrations and speaking out against every kind of ill in the world
also i think on a subconscious level - aside from the geopolitics, the hatred of American foreign policy, the support for Palestine - there is a kind of deep-down agreement with the jihadists on the part of many in the left: that the West is thoroughly rotten, decadent, corrupt with permissiveness... sort of "they hate and despise us, for good reason"
Phil Knight sez:
I think "the left" is so heterogeneous these days that it is almost impossible to define. I think it is probably better to refer to "the progressive blob", with the right increasingly becoming "the nationalist blob". Certainly many people who describe themselves as "left wing" or "socialist" are really just liberals.
I agree about the disguised religiosity, and I think that what ultimately underlies a lot of progressivism is the desperation to have a totally clean conscience - to feel as though nothing that you desire or do has any negative impact on anyone else, in any way, ever. The climate change furore at the moment is indicative of this - lots of people making symbolic gestures to obviate their own guilt in causing the problem.
I also agree about Israel/Palestine, but I think this is to an extent the radical left needing a single unifying Manichaean cause to replace South African Apartheid. The attempts to characterize Israel as an "apartheid state" are an obvious giveaway. I have quite a lot of sympathy with the Palestinians, but the Israelis for all their faults are not the almost comically unrepentant racist bad guys that the South Africans were.
There's also a historical ignorance at work. If you know anything about the Persian, Ottoman, Mughal, Chinese empires etc., you'd be aware that the European empires were not especially cruel or exploitative. Quite the opposite, in fact. It always makes me laugh when people go on about how wicked the CIA/MI5 coup against Mohammed Mossadegh was, when this was trivial compared to the carnage the Iranians dished out over the centuries.
think that what ultimately underlies a lot of progressivism is the desperation to have a totally clean conscience - to feel as though nothing that you desire or do has any negative impact on anyone else, in any way, ever.
Roth's American Pastoral is really good on the pathologies of a certain type of liberalism...do yoou know it? the radical 60s daughter becomes a Jain and ends up wearing a mask so she wont inhale any insects etc it's rather nightmarish and the film version doesn't really capture it....the flipside of this terror about ever doing anything negative is the elevated pleasure you get in condemning the impure of thought and deed of course...
yeah exactly - to be the least oppressive person possible, the least contaminated by connection to systems of domination and exploitation
it's understandable but a futile pursuit ultimately given that we are enwebbed in all these things
Phil Knight sez:
I haven't read Roth, not being a fiction reader and all, but for me, this takes me back to Isaiah Berlin's (I think correct) idea of "agonistic choice". i.e. that all decisions should involve the recognition of compromise, limitation etc.
So that any honest position requires a degree of agonising prior to being arrived at. What Berlin was arguing for was to embrace the agony of decision making rather than evading it. We are all flawed characters who make imperfect decisions based on compromised information in agonising situations. How can we possibly be correct?
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