Dublin Opinion

Mark Fisher of K-Punk, who also writes for The Wire magazine and a number of other publications has a new book coming out in November. Actually, he has two, the second is a book of essays by various authors writing about Michael Jackson, The Resistible Demise Of Michael Jackson, which he has edited.

“The essays in The Resistible Demise Of Michael Jackson consummately demonstrate that writing on popular culture can be both thoughtful and heartfelt. The contributors, who include accomplished music critics as well as renowned theorists, are some of the most astute and eloquent writers on pop today. The collection is made up of new essays written in the wake of Jackson’s death, but also includes Barney Hoskyns’ classic NME piece written at the time of Thriller.”

The first though is Capitalist Realism, which is so new that it doesn’t even have a blurb on Book Depository. However, if you read K-Punk regularly enough, or come across his other articles and essays you should have a clear enough idea what its going to be about.

Incidentally, the book is published through the newly established Zer0 Books, which describes itself and the world it is reacting against, in a very compelling way:

“Contemporary culture has eliminated both the concept of the public and the figure of the intellectual. Former public spaces – both physical and cultural – are now either derelict or colonized by advertising. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled by expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their interpassive stupor. The informal censorship internalized and propagated by the cultural workers of late capitalism generates a banal conformity that the propaganda chiefs of Stalinism could only ever have dreamt of imposing. Zer0 Books knows that another kind of discourse – intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist – is not only possible: it is already flourishing, in the regions beyond the striplit malls of so-called mass media and the neurotically bureaucratic halls of the academy.”

One of the ideas in Capitalist Realism is explored in his most recent post on K-Punk and is about the postulated connections of everyone’s favourite Krautrock/electronia act with Nazism:

“The militant modernist is of course right to resist any equation of techno-modernity with Nazism. Nazi time, with its mixture of the ultra-archaic and the technologically cutting edge, was in effect an anticipative taste of the postmodern, not any sort of logical conclusion of modernism. The temporality of Kraftwerk, meanwhile, was never one of simple future-orientation. The trans-Europe Express sounds like a steam train, and Kraftwerk’s records are suffused with nostalgia for a future that never came to be. One of the many interesting things about Kraftwerk is the way that this what-if conjecture, this ghost train of German modernism, became the actual (Afrogermanic) future of music.”

I could possibly write several admittedly fairly banal posts on what is being discussed in just a few sentences here, but his point is difficult to discuss at all without going back to Miliant Modernist’s post, which takes issue with a Primer on Kosmische Music’ in Wire magazine by David Keenan. Owen Hatherley quotes a section from the Wire Primer which argues that bands like Kraftwerk:

“As representatives of the first German post-war generation, (…) saw it as their responsibility to raze and rebuild the culture from the ground up while simultaneously distancing themselves from the values of previous generations…in their love of energy and speed, and their revelling in the sound of destruction and mechanisation, whether scoring symphonies for power tools or reducing rock’s sex beat to a metronomic pulse, their adoption of futurist aesthetics and calls for an indigenous German rock felt uncomfortably close to the calls for violent national renewal that plunged Germany into the abyss in the 1930s.”

This associates Krautrock with Futurism, a far-right Italian aesthetic with close connections to Italian fascism which he then, in a further conflation, plugs straight into Nazism purely on the basis that the members of Kraftwerk are German. This is despite the fact that the Nazi aesthetic made clear its distaste for modernism, even for the Futurist variety. Or as Owen Hatherley puts it in his post:

“There’s a criticism you often hear of any art forms that are based on repetition, technology, mechanisation, coherence and a stance towards modernity that sees many of its products as liberatory rather than oppressive. It’s akin to the claim (by Robert Hughes?) that some 1920s Modernist architecture would have been perfect for Fascism - that the majority of Fascists disagreed might be relevant here. It’s all bullshit of the highest order, but expressed as if it were obvious, and as if folk traditions, zodiac esotericism, a keen interest in ‘eastern religion’, getting out of the cities and getting it together in the countryside were not central parts of the Nazi edifice of bullshit.”

So going back to this line in Fisher’s post we can now talk a little more about it:

“The temporality of Kraftwerk, meanwhile, was never one of simple future-orientation. The trans-Europe Express sounds like a steam train, and Kraftwerk’s records are suffused with nostalgia for a future that never came to be.”

Firstly on the lack of simple future-orientation. I think this is exactly right. When writing about Kraftwerk before, I put up a clip of an 70s edition of Tomorrow’s World which described Kraftwerk and their electronic gadgets as the possible future of music.

“Next year KW hope to eliminate the keyboards altogether and built jackets with electronic lapels which can be played by touch”

This is pure cybernetic fantasy where the music is created through the clothes you wear. Another further step would be the possibility of playing the music through implants under the skin, but apart from the ability of technology to provide the possibility of this it also seems undesireable. Its a cliche perhaps, but we still see Stadium rock god holding their guitar like its a huge penis. Extending this to allow them to use their actual body to make the same sounds is a step to far. But Kraftwerks interest in technology doesn’t seem to be based on the idea of progress in itself. Rather they are interested in the merging of human and machine, and the way that the machine can enhance and indeed transform human capabilities. In Trans-European Express the lyrics describe a journey that they have made, and lists the places and people that they meet, including Iggy Pop and David Bowie in Berlin:

“Rendezvous on Champs-Elysees … Leave Paris in the morning on T.E.E. … In Vienna we sit in a late-night cafe …”

But the song title is the name of the train, putting the train itself centre stage. And it is interesting that Kraftwerk base a lot of their music around modes of transport: Autoban, obviously, Trans-European Express, and the recent album Tour De France. The machines of transportation allow the human to travel greater distances with relative ease. But the repetitative nature of the music also reflects the mechanistic sounds of a car engine, a steam train, and constant cranking of the bicycle pedal.

Of course, there is another artist who chronicled the merging of man and machine when the machine itself was a bicycle. Flann O’Brien in The Third Policeman came up with the notion of the molecular theory which describes how the molecules of people who spend a lot of time on their bicycles become merged with the molecules of the bicycles themselves. That Flann O’Brien was a cyberpunk is not too surprising, as he also adapted Karel Capek’s Insect Play, and as if the connections in this post weren’t tenuous enough, Capek is of course the author of the science-fiction play RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots), which is the first use of the word Robot, anywhere, ever.

From the wikipedia overview of RUR:

“The play begins in a factory that makes ‘artificial people’ — they are called Robots, but are closer to the modern idea of androids or even clones, creatures who can be mistaken for humans. They can plainly think for themselves. Although they seem happy to work for humans, that changes and leads to the end of the human race due to a hostile robot rebellion.”

And of course, if the Robots ever do take over, we know what will be played at the victory party…