k-punk

Here are the new kind of men

Badiou: The new man is a real creation, something which has never existed before, because it emerges from the destruction of historical antagonisms. The new man of communism is beyond classes and beyond the State. ..[T]he new man is conceived against all envelopes and all predicates, in particular against family, property, the nation-state. This is the project of Engels’ book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Marx had already underlined that the universal singularity of the proletariat is to bear no predicate, to possess nothing, and in particular to have, in the strong sense, no fatherland. This conception of the new man – anti-predicative, negative and universal – traverses the century.	Bernard Sumner: There was a huge sense of community where we lived. I remember the summer holidays when I was a kid: we would stay up late and play in the street, and 12 o’clock at night there would be old ladies, talking to each other. I guess what happened in the ‘60s was that the council decided that it wasn’t very healthy, and something had to go, and unfortunately it was my neighbourhood that went. We were moved over the river to a towerblock. At the time I thought it was fantastic; now of course I realise it was an absolute disaster. I’d had a number of other breaks in my life. So when people say about the darkness in Joy Division’s music, by age of 22, I’d had quite a lot of loss in my life. The place where I used to live, where I had my happiest memories, all of that had gone. All that was left was a chemical factory. I realised then that I could never go back to that happiness. So there’s this void.
Metamatic	Joy Division

Two pieces on 1979-80, two versions of Ballardian pop: Metamatic as the anticipation of a new kind of human being that wouldn't arrive, and Joy Division as the mourning for an era that was already gone and the (unwitting) anticipation of a time to come, ours... Bernard Sumner's comment above is telling: 'We were moved over the river to a towerblock. At the time I thought it was fantastic; now of course I realise it was an absolute disaster.' At the time... now of course... But what if a population had been produced that could found have enjoyment from tower blocks? What if anti-modernist commonsense ('now of course'...) had not prevailed?

Also well worth a look: this on Joy Division, myth and suicide...

Posted by mark at October 5, 2007 07:11 PM | TrackBack