Just wanted to post, belat­edly, a link to Ms. Dark’s excel­lent inter­view with Gopal Bal­akr­ish­nan in Lana Turner, since I have of late found myself non­plussed by the skep­ti­cism with which what seems an utterly uncon­tro­ver­sial, even triv­ial, claim is too often met—that cap­i­tal­ism will come to an end.

The fail­ure of this phase of cap­i­tal­ism, pre­sag­ing maybe wider prob­lems and fail­ures of cap­i­tal­ism, is that end [of his­tory], again, posing the ques­tion what it means for some­thing to come to an end. Cap­i­tal­ism, one is fairly sure, will not come to an end in the same way the Roman Empire did or Feu­dal­ism did or even the Soviet Union did. So we should be able to track the vec­tors of a declin­ing system in ways that allow us to grasp the speci­ficity of our own sit­u­a­tion, to gauge, as it were, the var­i­ous levels and dimen­sions at which a system can be con­tin­u­ing for­ward and then other levels at which it might be flat-​lining. And so I think we’ll have very com­plex prob­lems of both thought and polit­i­cal prac­tice in this coming period.

But I would encour­age every­body not to think about the his­tor­i­cal prob­lem of the future of our way of life: cap­i­tal­ism. Is it long for the world? How much longer? What might we do both to improve con­di­tions in the here and now and to think about alter­na­tives to it. Every­thing, as we know, all modes of social life, even­tu­ally come to an end and I think we’ve been a bit too accus­tomed in this period that we’re just coming out of to think that that truth, while cer­tainly true of every­thing that came before, might not be true of us. And if it were true of us, it might some­how be the case it would only matter in the very long term. And I think we might increas­ingly be con­fronted with evi­dence that that is not the case.

1/ From “Antagonism and Crisis,” Joshua Clover’s talk for the Rethink­ing Poet­ics conference:

But what do we lose, in this nuanc­ing? We lose too much. If we don’t lose much descrip­tively, we lose the one idea, the one real sit­u­a­tion that the dis­tinc­tion has been trying to pre­serve: that there is a fun­da­men­tal antag­o­nism, that it has two sides, and that they are set against each other in a dynamic that is not eter­nal and abstract but con­crete and his­tor­i­cal. And the loss of this idea is unhap­pier for poetry than any hap­pi­ness we might gain by doing away with the distinction.

…

Anyway this Third Way, this Amer­i­can Hybrid, gen­er­ally uses the lan­guage of “get­ting past” the fun­da­men­tal antag­o­nisms between the dominant-​mainstream and the emergent-​experimental (these terms are inex­act, but fairly well-​understood). The con­cep­tion of the hybrid is that we can simply choose to leave the antag­o­nism behind.

2/ From the intro­duc­tion to Clover’s inter­view with MIA in the new Believer:

Rioter or pas­sen­ger, out­sider or insider, rev­o­lu­tion­ary or sell­out? The cat­e­gories don’t work so well these days, if they ever did. This is the point, inevitably, of the music, and it is the music that mat­ters. It is art for a moment when cat­e­gories aren’t work­ing very well, when things are falling apart and cen­ters aren’t hold­ing. It does not try to con­tain this sit­u­a­tion but to reg­is­ter it, to give it a feel­ing, to get a sense of whether it might indeed be late in something—pop music, his­tory, the U.S. empire.

1/ Jane Dark:

Over at the sud­denly and excel­lently renascent Ads With­out Prod­ucts, the sud­denly and excel­lently erst­while CR has been making a vital record of the guilty half-​repressed flow­er­ing of nation­al­iza­tion talk in the national dis­course — patiently noting that while the mea­sures dis­cussed are always simul­ta­ne­ously dis­avowed, and not really full-​nationalization (much less social­ism), it remains the case that

…every time they dress the win­dows with this sort of talk, every time the gov­ern­ment play­ers offer the argu­ment that Gen­eral Motors or Chrysler would have been better man­aged by respon­si­ble, sane, and forward-​thinking bureau­crats rather than their board and cor­po­rate man­age­ment, they turn the wheel of dis­cur­sive nor­ma­tiv­ity a click toward state man­age­ment and the eco­nom­ics of planning….

…

[W]e fear one could make what is, in effect, a quite con­trary claim.

…Read More…

The com­plete absence of coun­try music on the whiplash­ing summer-​music chart New York put together last week is even less sur­pris­ing than the New York Times’s sim­i­lar sin of omis­sion a few weeks ago. And yet if New York is really, as I sug­gested to a friend the other day, the People mag­a­zine for people like us, you’d think they might try to imag­ine an “us” with a little less con­stricted sense of what counts as summer sonic fun.

There’s some­thing to Jane Dark’s sug­ges­tion that these blind spots are all about class, but I don’t know if that fully explains it. I mean, hell, in every respect save dis­pos­able income and zip code, I’m at the demo­graphic heart of the class their ads are gun­ning for, right down to Dr. Hakimi’s Art of Oral Har­mony. But there I go again, lis­ten­ing to—and, shh, even liking!–coun­try music.

Not that I’m too wor­ried; we all, some­how, find our own ways to sur­vive the dik­tats of glossy-​magazine taste. But still you have to wonder what it’s going to take to make coun­try music safe for the archi­tects of medi­ated cool, when even the high-​profile defec­tions of Jack White, Robert Plant, Jewel, Jes­sica Simp­son, and Jon Bon Jovi couldn’t do it.

You have to wonder, that is, until it hits you: Hootie!

Darius Rucker will save us all.