#aestheticis

Listen

By the way, while I was trying to become re-AdamCurtis-pilled, I also watched HyperNormalisation from 2016 and was startled to see Patti Smith deployed there as a synecdoche of the very phenomenon for which I similarly introduced her here, namely, the autodestruction-by-commodifying-politicization of the counterculture, the likely cancellation of William S. Burroughs by people who own shirts that say Not Gay as in Happy but Queer as in Fuck You. Yet as Curtis proceeded to portray Smith as a babbling, vapid, stoned teenager, I wondered what on earth justified this often smug Englishman’s scorn. He exposes every attempt to emancipate humanity—anarchism, liberalism, communism, and all points between—as only erecting more prisons, yet unlike the artist he condemns he doesn’t conclude from this the real impossibility of certain public solutions, that nothing humanly meaningful, like ethics or aesthetics or spirituality, can scale up to nation- or empire-size in our technological epoch without becoming both monstrous and stupid. Instead he blames every failed utopia, including Smith’s bohemia, for inducing a Matrix-like dreamworld to distract us from “real politics.” But his own examples of systems and movements from Reagan’s to Obama’s, from Mao’s to Xi’s, from Qaddafi’s to Assad’s, from Occupy to the Arab Spring, show this fetish of “real politics” almost never to have existed in the modern world. In the absence of a political program, what does his withering historical survey amount to but another dream, just another slogan for a shirt? His rebuke of Patti Smith—a shallower reprise, to draw some recent threads together, of Habermas’s rebuke of Foucault and Derrida—redounds upon himself, as when Socrates, the hero of a satirical tragic drama, bans the satirists and tragedians.

dreaming lips

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray