The Shift to Vibes: The Birth of a Retarded Avant-Garde

John Ganz in Unpopular Front:

…As for putting on the airs of religion and spirituality, this is probably both the saddest and desperate pose of all and one, if you are a believer, that perilously approaches blasphemy in its violation of the 3rd commandment: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”No wonder then that despite all the holy muttering there is no hint of the pathos and depth that can be conveyed by genuine religious art and sentiment even to sensitive non-believers. It is more spiritually sterile than the secular world it reviles.

So far I’ve skirted the question of politics, namely whether or not there is an incipient fascism here. The scene does in fact represent aa similar sort of petulant, nihilistic petty-bourgeois rebellion, the simultaneous adoption of the aesthetics of cutting-edge modernity and nostalgic yearning for a more wholesome pre-modern past, a fascination with cruelty, the mob, and extreme violence, and a general vulgar cult of doom and decadence that characterized fascist avant-gardes between the wars but I think it’s all too slight, lazy, parochial and self-centered to desire to plunge itself into an anonymous upsurge of a totalitarian movement’s mass energy. Occasional moods of self-destruction notwithstanding, these are not the cultural shock troops. In fact, to say they are fascist adds too much to their cachet, to all the hocus-pocus, working as a form of negative P.R. The myths surrounding fascism still suggests something dangerous and powerful in the public mind, rather than reflecting its historical reality: a stupid and pathetic hysterical outburst of the mediocre and banal.

More here.

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