Dialectic: The Ride

Against Dialectics

“I’m not convinced that debate ever advances thinking … Don’t you think you’re wasting your time when you engage in such a polemic? Since war is the most common thing in the world, it causes the indefinite repetition of the same gestures and the same ideas. Neither debate nor criticism makes any advances, except on the social chessboard and in the conquest of power. By what strange aberration were they believed to be fruitful, since they kill?

“What makes for advancement in philosophy, and also in science, is inventing concepts, and this invention always takes place in solitude, independence, and freedom — indeed, in silence. We have a surfeit of colloquia these days; what comes out of them? Collective repetitions. On the other hand, we are cruelly deprived of convents and quiet cells and the taciturn rules of the cenobites and anchorites.

“Debate brings pressure to bear, which always tends to confirm accepted ideas. It exacerbates them, vitrifies them, constructs and closes off lobbying groups. At the very most it sometimes chisels out clarifications, but it never makes discoveries. But unless philosophy is devoted to commentary, it ridicules retracing existing concepts.

“Discussion conserves; invention requires rapid intitution and being as light as weightlessness …

“Polemic never invents anything, because nothing is older, anthropologically, than war. The opposite notion has become conventional wisdom in the Anglo-Saxon world, which today holds sway. It is because it holds sway that this method is propagated. That’s always the strategy of victors. Reread Plato: Socrates always imposes the methodology by which he always wins. Dialectics is the logic of the masters. It’s necessary first of all to impose, in a manner defying discussion, the methodology for discussion.”

— Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus, 37-38

Did You Say Popular?

Simon Reynolds on Vampire Weekend, who at this point are maybe in a phase of Backlash Backlash Backlash Backlash? (Call it dialectical careerism.) I especially like this:

Given the nature of modern media and our crazed archival culture, it's obvious that no halfway sentient band can come into being without premeditation, the meticulous marshalling and coordination of influences and reference points. Knowingness irretrievably entered the water table long ago, and Vampire Weekend simply take this foundation of modern music — the impossibility of not overthinking things, of not riddling your work with footnotes and hyperlinks — and push through to full-blown conceptualism … Pressed to distill that merger's essence to a phrase, I'd offer "form & formality."

And I'm a little uncomfortable about, but basically agree with, this:

They've merely outed the truth of indie, which was never really The People's Music for all its affected sloppiness and "beautiful loser" tropes, instead always much more of an upper-middle-class milieu, the kids recoiling from the commercial and mass-produced just like their parents did via artisanal foodstuffs and antiques.

But I really don't know about this:

How righteous that 2008 should have started with some literally African-American music to herald the election of a literally African-American president. Funny, too, how all the attributes that describe (and, in some eyes, condemn) the band — cultivated and cosmopolitan, calm and collected, cautious and clean-cut — apply so amply to Obama. It's as if history had twisted its way around to arrive at a place where the virtues in our polity are also the virtues in our pop music. Unlike sax addict Bill C. or faux-populist George W., our new prez doesn't have a rock 'n' roll bone in his body, and neither do Vampire Weekend. This year's best, their album is not Gossip Girl set to music, but a soundtrack for the liberal elite taking over.

Talkin' 'bout my generation

"Early impressions tend to coalesce into a natural view of the world. All later experiences then tend to receive their meaning from this original set, whether they appear as that set's verification and fulfilment or as its negation and antithesis. Experiences are not accumulated in the course of a lifetime through a process of summation or agglomeration, but are 'dialectically' articulated in the way described … [E]ven if the rest of one's life consisted in one long process of negation and destruction of the natural world view acquired in youth, the determing influence of these early impressions would still be predominant. For even in negation our orientation is fundamentally centered upon what is being negated, and we are thus still unwittingly determined by it …

"Another fact, closely related to the phenomenon just described, is that any two generations following one another always fight different opponents, both within and without. While the older people may still be combating something in themselves or in the external world in such fashion that all their feelings and efforts and even their concepts and categories of thought are determined by that adversary, for the younger people this adversary may be simply nonexistent: their primary orientation is an entirely different one."

— Karl Mannheim, "The Problem of Generations"