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(Thanks Abe)

A mainstream newspaper writing about an academic conference on the subject of black metal:

You can imagine several orders of hostility toward “Hideous Gnosis,” a six-hour theory symposium on black-metal music that commenced on Saturday afternoon at Public Assembly, a bar and nightclub in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Not just because plenty of people like to make fun of academics discoursing on youth culture but because the subject was something like the music that dare not speak its name. [...]

One commenter on the online-forum page of the metal magazine Decibel summed up a certain kind of black-metal fan’s attitude toward the symposium. This music, the contributor wrote, “has nothing to do with being intellectual and everything to do with not wanting to try and break every little thing apart” for analysis. [...]

Was the afternoon humorous, ridiculous or at least ludic? Not really. (It could have used a few more dozen spectators and a temperature boost of about 15 degrees.) To the contrary, it felt necessary. Despite what black-metal musicians might proclaim — Ovskum, an Italian singer and guitarist, was quoted in one of the symposium’s lectures as saying, “my music does not come from a philosophy but from a precritical compulsion” — their work is basically philosophy. It is theoretical, a grid for looking at life, with ancient roots. It could use a critical apparatus, and though the afternoon’s many citings of Continental philosophers like Lacan, Derrida and Bataille might have seemed ludicrously distant to the practice of black metal, such writings relate to the subgenre’s big subjects: death and time.

New York Times: Thank You, Professor, That Was Putrid

When we look at Michael Jackson, I believe we’re looking at the future of our species. Michael is a creature from a future in which we’ve all become more feminine, more consumerist, more postmodern, more artificial, more self-constructed and self-mediating, more playful, caring and talented than we are today. But it’s hard to use those adjectives, because they’re Either-Or adjectives and he’s from the world of Yet-Also, a world I believe we will all come to live in if we’re lucky, a world where there is no more authenticity-by-default-through-brute-necessity and no more “human nature”. A world of pure synthesis, pure self-creation.

Jackson is what all humans will become if we develop further in the direction of postmodernism and self-mediation. He is what we’ll become if we get both more Wildean and more Nietzschean. He’s what we’ll become only if we’re lucky and avoid a new brutality based on overpopulation and competition for dwindling resources. By attacking Jackson and what he stands for — the effete, the artificial, the ambiguous — we make a certain kind of relatively benign future mapped out for ourselves into a Neverland, something forbidden, discredited, derided. When we should be deriding what passes for our normalcy — war, waste, and the things we do en masse are the things that threaten us — we end up deriding dandyism and deviance. And Jackson is the ultimate dandy and the ultimate deviant. He can fly across our Either-Or binaries, and never land. It’s debateable whether he’s the king of pop, but he’s undoubtedly the king of Yet-Also.

Consider all the extraordinary ways in which Michael Jackson is Yet-Also. He’s black yet also white. He’s adult yet also a child. He’s male yet also female. He’s gay yet also straight. He has children, yet he’s also never fucked their mothers. He’s wearing a mask, yet he’s also showing his real self. He’s walking yet also sliding. He’s guilty yet also innocent. He’s American yet also global. He’s sexual yet also sexless. He’s immensely rich yet also bankrupt. He’s Judy Garland yet also Andy Warhol. He’s real yet also synthetic. He’s crazy yet also sane, human yet also robot, from the present yet also from the future. He declares his songs heavensent, and yet he also constructs them himself. He’s the luckiest man in the world yet the unluckiest. His work is play. He’s bad, yet also good. He’s blessed yet also cursed. He’s alive, but only in theory.

Momus: Never land

(via Metaphorge)

“Protocol” emerges from a problem. The problem is an historical one: What is the system of organization and control that is endemic to the distributed networks that currently encompass the globe? And further: How do the specific transformations within material life bring into being a set of participatory techniques and behaviors? The concept of protocol is an attempt to “give a face” to this hitherto faceless form. But in giving a face to the formerly defaced a new cycle begins, one in which–I hope–the very asymmetry of historical transformation can be met and understood within one’s own discourse without glamorizing one component or the other (the tree or the rhizome).

Culture and Communication: We Are the Gold Farmers

See also: Essay on Galloway’s book Protocol (PDF)