Stalin's devastation is often used to discredit the ideas of Marx, willfully ignoring the fact that Stalinist and Marxist ideas are not only discontinuous but quite often mutually exclusive.
To take one example dear to recent debates in TCOTB (this corner of the blogosphere), Marx is certain that art expresses historical conditions while, contra, Stalin's socialist realism poses art as able to impress itself on those conditions, agitprop designed to condition the consciousness of the historical actor. Art, in other words, can get people to behave in certain ways. Along with the wingnuts who sue Judas Priest for contributing to teen suicide, and blame Marilyn Manson for Columbine, that's what Joe Stalin thinks.
Oh, also David Brooks.
The Times' very own wingnut proposes, in a column you're supposed to pay for, that the riots in France are actually caused by gangster rap's aesthetic hegemony. Not my word, his:
The images, modes and attitudes of hip-hop and gangsta rap are so powerful they are having a hegemonic effect across the globe.
Here, however, is his critical apotheosis: In other words, what we are seeing in France will be familiar to anyone who watched gangsta culture rise in this country. You take a population of young men who are oppressed by racism and who face limited opportunities, and you present them with a culture that encourages them to become exactly the sort of people the bigots think they are — and you call this proud self-assertion and empowerment. You take men who are already suspected by the police because of their color, and you romanticize and encourage criminality so they will be really despised and mistreated. You tell them to defy oppression by embracing self-destruction.
It sounds so reasonable, so sane — until you realize he's proposing that gangster rap's worldview, in the US and France and elsewhere, might actually be, you know, invented out of whole cloth just to put evil images in the minds of folks who otherwise would be good tax-paying Christians. That it couldn't possibly be about something; that it's not conceivable that it might resonate with an audience exactly because it's about something that's already true in the world. Chuck D's "CNN of Black America"? Men die every day for lack of what David Brooks swears isn't contained there.
Brooks' fantasy is doubly extraordinary. It's a totalitarian wet-dream (sublimated as concern) about the power of the image-sphere, its ability to maintain its mind-bending force even as it floats free of history itself. At the same time, it offers an utter contempt, paternalistic and elitist, for the denizens of daily life about whom he purports to care, who couldn't possibly be having a recognition about their own lives in the art they choose.
Soldier on, columnist of steel!
Posted by jane at November 10, 2005 12:21 PM | TrackBack