Celebrities like "Bob Dylan" and John Lennon of course may take stands like anyone else--although 'Bob Dylan" is an out-and-out libertarian, male chauvinist, and money-grubber and John Lennon was at best a very mixed bag personally and politically (though with the saccharine McCartney IMO a far better poet than Dylan, not that this matters).
How many people under the age of seventy give a damn about either of these ephemeral characters? Relatively few, I imagine. History has moved on and these old celebrities have even less right to command our attention than they did in the overrated period of allusive pop culture beginning in the mid Sixties. Some people enjoy their vaudeville antics; some, no doubt, prefer Harry Styles. There are probably a few still who resonate to Red Nichols and the Five Pennies. It's all the bloody same. Addiction to celebrity cults and personality cults is a social disease. It fosters all sorts of other addictions and is essential to the depletion of popular agency on which late capitailism depends for the reproduction of ideology as well as the generation of fictitious capital from "intellectual property." This is not really the specific point for Marxmail, however. The deeper issue here IMO is the role of Capital K Culture on the Left generally. Briefly, i think that the Rolling Stone assertion that the virtuous must be always drunk on sintellectualized form of art--which means as much addiction to a certain version of critical thinking as well as "artists" and their "work"--as well as mind-altering substances--represents a longstanding tendency of the left that is overdue for critical revaluation. This tendency need not be naive. Georg Lukacs, in the Theory of the Novel made a sublime case for the great tradition of the European model, defending the likes of Balzac, as opposed to socialist realism and naturalism, as "great epic literature." The question is really whether, even in its most sublime form--let alone the pretentious and idiotic Rolling Stone form--such a view is really necessary on the left. More than ninety percent of what Europeans call classical culture is lost. Is this a cause of suffering among the wretched and those threatened with immiseration? Human culture is the one resource that can eventually regenerate no matter how we feel about it. Our age--teetering as it seems to be on the brink of biological extinction--faces a crisis far more serious than any ever seen before in human history. How much "cultural" nostalgia and OCD fetish-fondling--especially nostalgia for the middle of last week and all its fetishes, which is the essential keynote of pop culture since the Beatles--is mandatory under the circumstances? -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#4453): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/4453 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/78804199/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
