The Visceral Extends Its Domain: The Rules Of The Game Continues

[koganbot]

Here's the first ever Rules Of The Game Followup Column. Contains metal and morality, romance and longing. Quotes Martin. You're encouraged to comment here, there, everywhere.

EDIT, JUNE 8: Strangely, the link I'd posted in the previous paragraph didn't work after a few days, so I had to track down where the piece was and fix the link.

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

Re: *Kerplunk*

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

there is a great deal of rhetorical hostility and disguised shifting going on there, yes. but i think there are two relevant points that lessen the awulness of what he is doing:

1. poptimism presents to the world as - what? i don't know exactly, but something like a group, or a platform, or a philosophy, or an attitude. given that, it seems there's something questionable about criticizing its critics for making blanket statements about poptimism which can't uniformly be made about individual poptimists, when it seems part of the point of presenting as such a group is that one needn't be held to everything the group is supposed to be held to. i would expect also that k-punk could say he is availing himself of his right to read into the fact of poptimism - to interpret the fact that you've got all these people enthusiastically talking about pop music, and talking in certain ways about it, running polls, etc. he may do a TERRIBLE job of ferreting out your secret motivations, or uncovering the real significance of your actions (vis a vis taking away resentment etc.), but does that make it not a legitimate enterprise? (one that would certainly be improved by his having to confront some poptimists directly.)

2. 'poptimism' - the calls to always be cheerful are IN THE NAME! so if the misreading is led by the rhetoric then this should be no surprise. (i would guess also that there's some implicit, like, distaste for what are perceived as some particular poptimist favorites, i.e.: they like THIS?! and they will brook no negativity about it?! well then...)

Re: *Kerplunk*

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

These are fair points, Josh, and I admit that I tend to take Mark's attacks more personally than I maybe should!

1. It presents to the world firstly as a club night, which he is in the same city as :) And secondly it presents itself as an (open) LiveJournal community, which spends an awful lot of its time evaluating things and is hardly relentlessly cheerful (especially not when the weekly ritual of tutting over the new entries comes round). It doesn't present itself as a platform or philosophy or attitude, I think, as evinced by the fact that all its members have different ideas about what it might be (yes, this is true of almost every platform, but there's usually more attempt to clarify - isn't there?).

2. This is, um, true and undeniable! Sorry! (Though Mark uses "popism" not "poptimism", to be pedantic) - but the adoption of the name carries a level of irony because I nicked it off, or 'reclaimed it from', a Simon Reynolds attack ages ago. I'm not sure what he meant it as - an uncritical cheerfulness, I guess - but it seemed as good a name as any for a club night.

Which of course opens the possibility that Mark isn't talking about ANY of "us" but instead about the original (and still hidden as far as I know) 'poptimists' Simon was talking about.

Re: *Kerplunk*

[(Anonymous)]

I read all Simon's and Mark k's popism/poptimism arguments with interest and good deal of scepticism but am forever irritated by their unwillingness to name a single name, i.e., person or specific clusters of people who they think are part of what they see as the problem. If they're talking about you guys in here, they should say so. (If they're talking about the original popist brigade, they should say so.) So that you guys in here (or whover it is they're referring to) can respond, or so that someone familiar with those being referred to can respond on their behalf, or argue it out somehow/somewhere. As it is, Simon and Mark K are assuming people know who they're talking about, and no one does seem to know--which makes people like myself think they're not really talking about ANYone.

Re: *Kerplunk*

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

in a comments thread i just found at k-punk it seems in 2004 k-punk was naming PAUL MORLEY and NYLPM (with tom as the representative), which strikes me as a) pretty specific and b) good reason for tom to take mark's attacks personally! but this does not really mean it's a good thing to keep talking about isms as if they were determinate positions, anyway.

Re: *Kerplunk*

[(Anonymous)]

ok, well, maybe there was an instance--but in a comments thread in 2004? it doesn't really change my suspicions that they're referring to a figment of a person (and a figment of a person's ideas) rather than to a person or that person's ideas. anyway, in some of Simon Reynolds' more recent diatribes I've honestly not been aware of just who he's talking about.

(by the way, i forgot to name my own name, in the first post--this livejournal stuff still confuses me)
scott woods

Re: *Kerplunk*

[koganbot]

Scott Woods! The notorious Paris Hilton fan! Who has a column of his own in the Las Vegas Weekly.

Re: *Kerplunk*

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think they were probably more on the mark in 2004 than now! Of course I don't expect someone who decided then I was a bad thinker to have kept up with me (especially as I'm quite foggy and inconsistent anyway).

Re: *Kerplunk*

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

it might be worthwhile then (maybe only for me) to find out why one (e.g. me) could THINK that it presents as an attitude or platform or philosophy or etc. my first hunch is that 'it's a club night and a livejournal community' is a little disingenuous. (haven't you written, like, ARTICLES called 'what is poptimism?' and whatever?)

Re: *Kerplunk*

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

No, I don't think so - I've seen other people ask those kind of questions though, including people I'm sympathetic to. And of course it would be quite possible - indeed I HOPE it would be possible - to read a bunch of stuff I've written and work out from it what I think about pop from there: working it out is one of the reasons I *write* it.

So there is disingenuousness here - in fact it's a bit deliberate, given that I don't enjoy arguing with Mark or Simon, and that I don't feel I gain anything from it (unlike, I have to say, arguing with several of the other people here, or listening humbly to them argue at me). My situation is this: I enjoy writing about pop. Assuming I am one of Mark's targets, if I argue with Mark and decide he is right about me, I will at the very least enjoy doing this less (since I don't get the impression that correcting or improving "Popism" is the aim here). If I argue with Mark and decide he is wrong about me, I will have wasted a lot of time and rancour on it. Either way, who benefits? (Mark's point of view might be that the world benefits from the dangerous ideology of popism being silenced: tough luck world, say I).

Re: *Kerplunk*

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

i thought some about the most recent piece of 'evidence' i remembered about how poptimism presents itself to the world - your pitchfork columns - and so i went to look at them and realize that i read absolutely everything into them! good lord! i wonder how that happened. (incidentally it is a shame you had to change it from 'the sentimentalist', which seems far more apt a title.)

couldn't mark change his mind if you argue with him?

Re: *Kerplunk*

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I have tried! I am not a terribly good arguer I think, and I get the feeling Mark isn't great at being argued with (judging by his ban on all comments boxes).

(I'd actually forgotten that the PF columns are called that! - I just think of them as "Pitchfork Column")

Re: *Kerplunk*

[koganbot]

The problem, Josh, isn't so much that K-Punk created a composite, and didn't name names or quote anyone, but that he projected the stupidest possible arguments onto the "popists," one that couldn't stimulate thought in anyone. And I don't know how to use his counterarguments (what he was saying about Potter and postpunk was too vague, and his bizarre claim that "Popism's calls to be always cheerful about mass culture are very much like being told (by our class superiors, natch) to be content with our lot," which reads to me like hysteria) to stimulate my own thought.

Re: *Kerplunk*

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

i believe what concerned me more was the rather quick-seeming move to write off someone. it may be that with the appropriate appreciation of the background conversation(s) in place, it wouldn't seem that quick at all.

in the past hour or so i've looked at various posts and comments and seen you, mark s., and tom all refer to the working out of your own thoughts (as a personal priority). and i think it's clear from the way that k-punk posts that he's pretty interested in his own thoughts, apart from however much he may stay in dialogue with some like-minded bloggers and others.

i don't know what to say about that, really, but it strikes me that there may be a significant connection between a refusal of conversation (of attention to what other people say, let us say; or being ready with reasons for writing someone off), and the focus on working out of one's own thoughts.

this seems surprising to notice in people who i believe are so deeply concerned with conversation across certain social and intellectual divides.

Re: *Kerplunk*

[koganbot]

My intuition is that trying to engage Mark K-Punk in a discussion on this issue would be an exercise in codependence. Reading him further might not be, or engaging with him on another issue, but my intuition is that he's no Meltzer or Adorno. Of course, I am speaking in ignorance, and intuition can be wrong since, being intuition, it's not thought through. But this sentence is a giant warning flag to stay away: "Popism's calls to be always cheerful about mass culture are very much like being told (by our class superiors, natch) to be content with our lot."

In my book I'd said that Rorty needed to reengage the people who'd beaten him up in high school. But I'd add now that he shouldn't pick one who's only there to try to beat him up again. And maybe putting Rorty in a room with Meltzer would be pointless - depends how hostile or delusional Meltzer turns out to be. But then, maybe one of us could stand in for Meltzer.

Re: *Kerplunk*

[(Anonymous)]

Hi! I feel dumb to be talking with some people that are like heroes to me and doing it to defend (or contextualise) K-punk in some points. Also I’m sorry if my English skills are so poor and some sentences didn’t make much sense, the typos, etc.
First of all, I also don’t get this nu-rockism thing. I mean, if Popism is a response to Rockism, and so is working with the same set of values and rules (and prejudices and problems) that the second one, and nu-rockism is something like a response against Popism, we are exactly on the same place… Also I don’t know any real blogger or musical critic that shares all of the characteristics that define “popism”. Sometimes they look like the people who post on the Popjustice forums, other the people in Poptimists, other personal attacks to specific persons, so they are kind of really gross generalizations. So my post is to try that people here doesn’t do the same about K-punk.

K-punk is Marxist, and so is set in a specific discourse, with words meaning definite things. All the “paranoia” that is running in the text cited above, is his fight, or the fight of a collective, against Kapital, etc. But I mean, this is part of the lot and if you disagree with those ideas or ideology,or you could not dig that, doesn’t mean is the only thing he is talking about, the same way that if you can’t stand the metaphors about high school or sociology, doesn’t mean Frank Kogan is just only about that.
This paragraph is him at his worst.Probably when he means “high culture”, he doesn’t mean “classical music” (I know he cites the example there, so it’s confussing…). What it is supposed to be so great about post-punk is not that they used recourses from classic music (I don’t know: dissonance, atonality, this and that from concrete music, tape collages, improvisation, etc.) that less or more were used before (Velvet Underground, prog rock, psicodelia, etc.), but from contemporary philosophy (I mean, Adorno give lectures on Darmstad about dodecaphonic music, so there was an interdisciplinary discourse of currente ideas on high art, etc.). So if people uses ideas or applied them to their music taken from Gramsci, or Scritti Politti had this background based on Lacan and Derrida, etc., they are liberating those ideas from academia and bringing them to people who could not access to those texts (and yes, they only should go to a library to buy the book, but the thing is how you get to know which are the books and the guys and the time which you could invest to do it). And you then had people like Morley, or Penman, discussing the same things on the musical press and talking with the artists about them, so people get this background even if they had left school to work with their fathers or whatever and couldn’t find time to work his way to that. Probably much elaborated memories from that time, but, well, their ideal of debate on the public arena.

This thing about philosophy isn’t a small problem at all. In “Real Punks Don’t Wear Black”, pages 342-343, you can read the following:

“Philosophy. Chapters 3 and 4 of Richard Rorty’s “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” are important not merely for his demolition of philosophy, but for the never-quite-articulated question, “So why do these guys care?” I like Rorty’s vision later in the book of the postphilosopher: “the informed dilettante, the polypragmatic, Socratic intermediary between various discourses. In his salon, so to speak, hermetic thinkers are charmed out of their self-enclosed pratices. Disagreementes between disciplines and discourses are compromised or transcended in the course of the conversation” (My mission once this book is published is to get someone to back me financially on starting a Department of dilettante Studies somewhere, sort of the son of WMS, maybe, or an ILX that pays.)

Re: *Kerplunk*

[koganbot]

This post makes me extremely happy. I hope we hear from you again, whoever you are.