jammin' culture
One of the notable features of this new media form is its tendency to concentrate very much on events and concrete political actions. One rarely finds discussions of wider issues of political strategy never mind any engagement with issues around contemporary culture, lifestyle, philosophy or ethics.
Jeremy Gilbert in"Anticapitalism and culture"
Fim de ano, não podemos concluir sem a mais óbvia das revisões: a d'OS POSITIVOS. Óbvio, não evidente. Mas pertinente. O nosso instinto para incidir as teses sobre os media slash digital em 2016 revelou-se premonitório, o acrescento "BD" o kink impossível de evitar. Se ainda mantemos algum tópicos — um! — em abstracto é porque o queremos crescer como nosso se o podermos resguardar de curiosidade alheia ou até sermos chamados à sua conclusão inevitável. Tentamos cumprir com as nossas metas de engagement em cultura contemporânea, modos de vida, filosofia e ética, na tradição — mais rasteira e bastarda — de um ex-K-Punk por exemplo, sobre o qual dedicámos em sua memória escritos alheios:
His blogging a vengeful, resentment-driven assault on a cultural and political world (...) the point was the creation of a new network, something that would supplant and destroy the world of….well, you can fill in who.
in "'Writing of a sort that wasn’t supposed to exist anymore': Mark Fisher Remembered (1968 – 2017)" 17 jan 2017
São poucos os textos que borbulham à superfície dos media respeitáveis que interpretem cultura pop para as massas sem o jargão académico mas movidos pela vontade de criar pontes de resistência e até, quiçá, da sua apropriação. Artigos como o publicado ontem no jornal habitual — por alguma razão, habitual...: "All I want for Christmas is a film that doesn’t preach capitalism" 25 dez 2017. Breve sino: $$$, media, televisão, cinema, e até os comics servem de referência, entrada directa às teses.
Cinema is the least revolutionary of the arts: it happily plugs autocracy and hyper-capitalism with the Avengers franchise, and Ironman the pretend philanthropist and stupid Batman — infantile billionaires who save the world with weapons that you might conceivably buy in the Conran Shop should you fall down a wormhole to Chelsea. Christmas films — those set during Christmas, and those we habitually watch between Christmas and the new year — are as reactionary. They preach social conservatism and the compassionate possibilities of capitalism. Meanwhile, if you aren’t chosen for wealth and good fortune, they preach acceptance and gratitude. Suck your fate down, for there are no real gifts at Christmas. Don’t yearn for what you can’t have, or attempt to transcend your fate; if something exciting does happen to you, wish it away quickly, with a prayer.
in "All I want for Christmas is a film that doesn’t preach capitalism" 25 dez 2017
Não é rocket science, mas é importante dizê-lo quantas vezes necessárias. Do mesmo jornal, entrada mais recente que repetimos em resumo da nublosa de frentes tratadas neste espaço que se tornaram óbvias com o passar do tempo — 2017 foi um ano em acelerado em transformações radicais. Da importância de manter a crítica:
No country is governed by a Capitalist party, although there is no shortage of capitalism on the planet. There have been Socialist parties for socialism, Liberal parties for liberalism and Communist parties for communism. Yet acolytes of the most powerful model of all are reluctant to brand themselves with its name. One reason is that the word “capitalism” was popularised by its critics.
in "The Guardian view on capitalism without capital" 26 dez 2017
Da importância do novo $$$.
Wealth is no longer in factories, pipelines or retail outlets. What makes the new era different is the extent to which value has become detached from the tangible, and the corresponding social and economic consequences.
The rise of a handful of vast corporate powerhouses whose business models have no instructive precedent from the analogue-era forces a reappraisal of the way capitalist economies work. The top seven highest valued companies in the world are all in the technology sector [and] specialise in products that do not exist in three-dimensional space. Their fortunes and market dominance have been built on nebulous concepts: models, brands and algorithms. Their capital is not anchored to specific jurisdictions. That makes them hard to regulate and hard to tax. These are patterns of economic globalisation that pre-date the digital revolution.
in "The Guardian view on capitalism without capital" 26 dez 2017
Da importância da cultura popular de massas.
An intangible digital product or process can be replicated and shared a near-infinite number of times at no additional cost. This makes very rapid commercial expansion possible. It can also make it harder to protect intellectual property rights. This is partly why the big winners are companies that control the platforms on which content is shared, rather than the producers of that content.
in "The Guardian view on capitalism without capital" 26 dez 2017
O acrescento necessário que — novamente — nos devolve à nossa arena.
- Popular culture as a site of struggle between the ‘resistance’ of subordinate groups and the forces of ‘incorporation’ operating in the interests of dominant groups.
- Mass culture is the repertoire, popular culture is what people actively make from it, actually do with the commodities and commodified practices they consume.
Que nos retorna a jeito de enunciação do ano que passa a Jeremy Gilbert e o seu "Anticapitalism and Culture" em estratégias de "culture jamming":
...a generic name given to a range of activities which seek to re-work and re-contextualise elements from mainstream culture in order to make some kind satirical comment on their contents.
Jeremy Gilbert in"Anticapitalism and culture"
Recontextualização e comentários satíricos sobre o mainstream — hint, hint, uma espécie de mission statement entre nós. De intenções mais ou menos descaradas:
What anti-capitalist culture does not engage with to any significant degree is the world of sport, entertainment, popular fiction (cinematic, televisual and literary), music and the other arts which so preoccupies much of the world’s population: in other words, popular culture.
Jeremy Gilbert in"Anticapitalism and culture"
OS POSITIVOS: nope, we got it. E o desafio em 2018, pt1:
Anti-capitalism ought to be able to (...) extend itself beyond the cadres of its committed activists, developing both a language and a set of shared experiences for relatively inactive supporters of the movement and some rigourous philosophical concepts of its own — to create common ground between the self-conscious anti-capitalism and [a] popular anti-capitalism.
2018 pt2:
Pelos teens. Por nós. Para vocês. Quando são os reacionários a gozar com os normies e nós os guardiões do respeitinho pelo status quo e não os seus vândalos maiores, algo se fodeu aqui. Costumávamos ser nós a chocar as avozinhas e eles os meninos de coro pelo decoro. Quando nos tornamos tão seguros e conservadores? Para não nos confundirem com os nazis literais? Sempre do sítio do costume, acrescento tardio — é isto que nos pára?
Rage is contagious. It spreads from one sweaty digital crevice to the next, like a fungal infection. It itches like one too. When sitting at the keyboard, it is difficult to perceive wrongness without wanting to scratch it with a caustic retort. But that provides no sustained relief. One side’s scratch is the other side’s itch. And so the cycle of provocation continues. It is hardwired into the network. We customise our news feeds to partisan taste, digging information trenches along the contours of our bias. Then we hurl pointless barrages of disbelief at the enemy trench. This has become part of the media business model, what has been called the "outrage economy".
in "You can log off, sure. But you can’t stop the outrage economy" 27 dez 2017
Ie, outra variante do "há culpa dos dois lados". Coça o teu itch com o nosso dedo do meio: o artigo não termina sem antes deixar escapar o habitual "por outro lado" comprometido de sempre:
Is common to hear calls for the whole capitalist system to be smashed, usually from young activists who have never experienced the trauma of living through a system in ruins.
in "You can log off, sure. But you can’t stop the outrage economy" 27 dez 2017
Evidentemente o cronista dispensa a economia do ultraje porque parece dar-se bem com a receita liberal — afinal pressupõe que os outros não estão já numa luta diária contra um sistema em ruínas. Esmaguemos ambas e os seus comprometidos: isto não é um diálogo, não há culpa dos dois lados. Costumávamos ter o monopólio do humor, voltemos a este, sem receios de ofender.
Last and least, já que resumimos atrás o ano em BD pelo $$$, chamam-lhe justiça poética, do coração e do seu valor. O nosso kink.
"Fante Bukowski" de Noah Van Sciver
A conclusão perfeita à revisão que termina.