I dare, I dare.
>I'm gonna post _long_ quotations from Surrealist
>diatribes against racism, Eurocentrism, capitalism, etc.; and while I am at
>it, I might post on the Situationist International, too. The words "hip" &
>"hep" have their origins in criminal lingo, urban black working-class
>culture, & then later white boys who got "hip" to what's happening.
>Ginsberg, of course, was one of the coolest white boys who got "hip."
But as you well know The Man has since appropriated the term for use in his nefarious designs. I'm still wondering about that peculiar phrase Hirschorn used today in Slate: "'commodification of dissent' voguishness." Terry Eagleton, writing on appropriation and the avant garde in *The Ideology of the Aesthetic*, p. 372:
"... There is also the positive moment of the avant garde, that of Brecht rather than Dada. This proclaims: there is indeed a way of resisting incorporation by the ruling order, whatever the fashionable jeremiads about how they will simply hang Picassos on the walls of their banks. That, claims this avant garde trend, is not the point. If they can place your revolutionary artefacts in their banks means only one thing: not that you were not iconoclastic enough or experimental enough, but that either your art was not deeply enough rooted in a revolutionary political movement, or it was, but that this mass movement failed. How idealistic to imagine that *art,* all by itself, could resist incorporation! The question of appropriation has to do with politics, not with culture; it is a question of who is winning at any particular time. If *they* win, continue to govern, then it is no doubt true that there is nothing which they cannot in principle defuse and contain. If *you* win, they will not be able to appropriate a thing because you have appropriated them. The one thing which the bourgeiosie cannot incorporate is its own political defeat. Let them try hanging *that* on the walls of their banks. The negative avant garde tries to avoid such absorption by not producing an object. No artefacts: just gestures, happenings, manifestations, disruptions. You cannot integrate that which consumes itself in the moment of production. The positive avant garde understands that the question of integration stands or falls with the destiny of a mass political movement.
The avant garde's response to the cognitive, ethical and aesthetic is quite unequivocal. Truth is a lie; morality stinks; beauty is shit. And of course they are absolutely right. Truth is a White House communique; morality in the Moral Majority; beauty is a naked woman advertising perfume. Equally, of course, they are wrong. Truth, morality, and beauty are too important to be handed contemptuously over to the political enemy." ------------------------- Peter