Carpe Omnia

thenewinquiry:

By Malcolm Harris

The dissonance between the two poles, between puppy and wolf, altar boy and Rosemary’s baby, is the heart of Odd Future’s sound

[…]

“But more than just missing Tyler’s perceptive acuity, this kind of criticism forecloses the chance to look at Odd Future’s music as fiction, to see it as an attempt at truth, as artists’ creation rather than the simple abstraction of their selves. Taken through this lens – one afforded gratis to novelists and Lady Gaga – Odd Future’s fantasies of rape and murder belong not simply to them, but to the society in which they’re embedded. Odd Future is so threatening as art because American society has a problem drawing a distinction between violent youthful alienation as a developmental stage (witness “emo”) and the moments when it spills out as acts of death (school shootings, teenage suicides, self-mutilation). Odd Future – and none of its members more than Tyler – shatters the wall between, drawing a straight line from unrequited puppy love to rape, from compulsory schooling to suicide.”

[…]

(Source: thenewinquiry)

But even at this early stage this attempt at a solution could not limit itself to the explanation and interpretation of the phenomenon of art. If only because, as it has been shown, the principle thus discovered was, from its inception, indissolubly bound up with the various conceptions of nature so that its most obvious and appropriate function seemed to provide a principle for the solution of all insoluble problems both of contemplative theory and ethical practice.

Georg Lukacs History and Class Consciousness (1971) (pg. 138)

A) Explains what Inception is about

a1) that reality is a social construction

a2) that reality is not a mental construction: objects do not act on their own (but that in capitalistic society the motion of objects in unknowable to us though we cause it).

B) Explains why most criticism of Inception is a failed attempt to explain our current historical-material stage.

b1) in particular, that anyone arguing about what happens at the end miss the point. the end is meant to expose a dialectic.

b2) the dialectic being that ‘art’ exposes the intractable conflict between idealism and praxis, or, in other words, the dream and the real.

C) Even uses the word inception!

D) Is the sort of crazy writing I have to wade through on a daily basis