Re: <nettime> New "thought rhythms'

["t byfield" <tbyfield@panix.com>]

On 4 Oct 2017, at 5:58, David Garcia wrote:

> Don’t try to dig what we all s-s-say.

Funny you should mention that. Some time back I saw some squib go by in 
which one of The Who said that rock is dead, and that that kind of 
creative energy has been flowing into rap. I'd like to think it was 
Townsend, just because I like him, but I think it was Daltrey, who 
always bugged me (most lead singers do, with all their hair and 
strutting around). Either way, the remark surprised me. It's hard to 
imagine that anyone involved in playing Magic Bus on Live at Leeds could 
say such a thing. I mean, it's like Billie Holiday giving up on the 
blues or Bach giving up on the harpsichord — not happening. Which is 
sort of my point. Could it be that this biographical maldistribution of 
conviction — too much early on, too little later in life — is 
peculiar to certain kinds of cultural subgroups? Say, the kind whose 
entire life, more or less, has been bracketed by pundits throwing around 
Yeats quotes about how "the best lack all conviction, while the worst / 
are full of passionate intensity" etc, etc.

"Generations" are regularly batted around as a Thing, and that kind of 
reification requires that they be given some timeless status: "'twas 
ever thus." It's like flight: aside from a few myths or sketches here 
and there, there isn't any historical evidence that flight is "mankind's 
oldest dream" — there's just people starting to repeat that meme after 
aviation became a Thing. New money always(!) looks for old roots, so it 
shouldn't be surprising that new money would dig around for the old 
roots of its central organizing ideas. And generational change is one of 
those ideas: it installs the shifting whims, dynamics, and distinctions 
of consumer culture as a timeless, universal, and inexorable force that 
drives all of history and culture. So, for example, we hear all kinds of 
neurobabble about how "teenage brains" develop, and how the quirks of 
that development force teenagers to behave in certain ways and say 
certain things. The empirical observations about material neurological 
development are mostly true, of course; but the way they're mapped onto 
current social conflicts *as specific causes* is arbitrary and 
ridiculous. Most of all, there isn't any evidence that those mappings 
are trans-historical and/or trans-cultural. The overwhelming evidence, 
worldwide and stretching back into the mists of time, is that there's no 
such thing as generational change, or maybe that it was so. impossibly. 
slow. that. we. can't. even. begin. to. measure. it. Alternatively, by 
the time you introduce enough caveats to make some isolated set-piece 
argument  — say, that ritualized violence among young medieval 
aristocrats was "really" neuroblabla — you've introduced so much 
artifice, equivocation, and abstraction into the argument that you might 
as well be arguing that it's phlogiston what did it. "Generational 
change" as we now know it is mostly a by-product of disposable income 
and the contingent quirks of how it's allocated in a few societies over 
a few decades. Maybe best text on the subject I know of is in the 
opening pages of Colin MacInnes's novel _Absolute Beginners_, when the 
Wizard explains the invention of the teenager.

A few days ago, Keith Hart wrote on Facebook about the moment he 
realized that, as he put it, "all we have against death is song." But he 
wrote that on the occasion of yet another rocker dying. There's a lot of 
that going around right now — the pall of death is hanging around rock 
now, isn't it? And it'll only get thicker. But truth be told, I started 
to lose interest in rap a long time ago, when it embraced that pall — 
and, not coincidentally, lost its sense of humor. But I lost interest in 
most pop music around then, because it all started to seem like it was 
morphing into different kinds of lifestyle MIDI.

The idea of "thought rhythms" doesn't speak (or maybe ~sing) to me in 
quite the way it does to you, but I see what you mean. In a way it's a 
great metaphor because it can help to ~explain a range of reactions to 
generational change: a lot of people shout GET OFF MY LAWN at KIDS 
TODAY, but some learn to listen for polyrhythms, simpatico ways to 
integrate and accommodate unfamiliar rhythms. And if we give it a little 
poetic license, it can also help to explain why some generations are 
really dangerous, like troops stupidly marching in step across a bridge 
(oops), while other generations are more resistant to pathological forms 
of organization — say, the difference between a mosh pit and the grand 
ballroom dances of the interwar years. (Take a few minute to watch the 
opening of Adam Curtis's film Bitter Lake, which uses dance to speak 
entire worlds about that: < http://thoughtmaybe.com/bitter-lake/ >). The 
metaphor also opens up a lot of others doors, too — doors that Amis 
probably wasn't thinking about. Maybe we should think of it as an 
invitation to turn our attention away from ginned-up intergenerational 
stylistic conflict and listen, instead, to rhythms from other cultures.

It's a strange metaphor, part street and part just an updated mini 
version of the theory of mentalités.

Cheers,
T
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