Where have all the big ideas gone, wondered Neal Gabler, in a recent, much talked about and much derided essay for the New York Times, before fingering the culprit: information and the tsunami it rode in on, the Internet. Much like the salt-laden waters of the Dead Sea, we can happily float along the information superhighway, born on the impregnable density of data, but as a result, we have a problem. The mental logistics of creating something out of endless possibility are daunting. With our finite capacities overwhelmed, we can only survey, archive, curate.
It is almost trite to point out that the past century had, perhaps, too many big ideas for our collective good or that we are still wrestling with meanings of fundamental ideas, such as liberty and equality. But as Gabler’s key point is one of commonplace psychology, it is indisputable: We need limits — and without them, information is just a new opium for the masses.
But even this may be an overly generous reading of our cultural situation. According to the British comedian Stephen Lee, who wrote a less-talked-about but arguably more provocative essay for the Financial Times, the problem is content; what information becomes when form is mutable. Imagine, he asks, if the Japanese robot Transformers were to seize control of all human culture? Well, they kinda have, as he delineates the creative thought process of the marketplace: “Can the comic become a film? Can the film become a game? Can the book become an e-book? Can the song become a ringtone?”
Without fixed forms, we are robbed of a specific kind of contemplation. This is why, he says, we all need to resist “digital recalibration.”
The languid presence hanging over this longing for a fixed world is the arch 19th-century aesthete, Walter Pater, and his imperishable dictum that “all art constantly aspires toward the condition of music,” which strives to unite form and content.
As Simon Reynolds notes in his giddyingly insightful new book, “Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past,” this is precisely what the digital age works against. Once upon a time, in the ’60s, ’70s, and early ’80s, pop music kept the banner of modernism flying. To be young was to be shocked by an endless stream of newness, from heavy metal to synth pop. Yes, these reflected influences from the music of the past, but each phase still managed to sound remarkably different and relevant. By the oughties, this newness had evaporated, and in its place there was just the recycling of the immediate past.
The digitalization of music had given rise to new forms of distribution and creation, and as the entire history of recorded sound became available to anyone with a computer, music finally succumbed to postmodernism. Form no longer had a fixed stylistic context, or a particular historical meaning — you could mix and match everything in endless ways because on the Internet, everything is always available and nothing dies.
As Reynolds puts it, “all the advantages we have today in terms of technology and how to get good sounds have resulted in a crisis of ‘well-made’ music, where producers are scholars of production and know how to get a great period feel, yet it seems harder and harder to make music that actually matters in the way that the music that inspired them did in their own day.”
Whether you agree with Lee and Reynolds or not, these are nothing if not stimulating ideas, and if you are of a particular vintage, it is hard not to find them compelling. To be over 35 is to be a child of a certain kind of revolution, a product of fixed forms and styles. No amount of criticism pointing out how cultural decay was with us in this past is going to stop us from feeling that. Actually, now the decay is qualitatively different – that we have reached the end of cultural history because culture is no longer about creation, it’s just about recreation and repurposing the immediate past.
It is not surprising that the speed of recent history — economic and technological — should leave us feeling uneasy at the disappearance of so many fixed forms even as we enjoy the quantitative pleasures of accessing anything we can think of, anywhere, and at any time. It’s only when we are reminded that a mortgage should be a mortgage and not a traded security that we can think about the importance of book being a book and nothing else.
This desire for constraint, for a thing to be one thing and not another, may reflect transient cultural anxieties or it may signal a deeper unease. The aesthetic dilemma used to be whether Dylan was as good as Keats, but the fact that neither simply recycled or tweaked suggests that the digital revolution is counter-revolutionary. It undermines our inherited belief in Romantic self-definition, the idea that we are all artists of our own souls, obligated to originality. I only hope that the generations who once created constant revolution now still have the energy to rebel.
It is almost trite to point out that the past century had, perhaps, too many big ideas for our collective good or that we are still wrestling with meanings of fundamental ideas, such as liberty and equality. But as Gabler’s key point is one of commonplace psychology, it is indisputable: We need limits — and without them, information is just a new opium for the masses.
But even this may be an overly generous reading of our cultural situation. According to the British comedian Stephen Lee, who wrote a less-talked-about but arguably more provocative essay for the Financial Times, the problem is content; what information becomes when form is mutable. Imagine, he asks, if the Japanese robot Transformers were to seize control of all human culture? Well, they kinda have, as he delineates the creative thought process of the marketplace: “Can the comic become a film? Can the film become a game? Can the book become an e-book? Can the song become a ringtone?”
Without fixed forms, we are robbed of a specific kind of contemplation. This is why, he says, we all need to resist “digital recalibration.”
The languid presence hanging over this longing for a fixed world is the arch 19th-century aesthete, Walter Pater, and his imperishable dictum that “all art constantly aspires toward the condition of music,” which strives to unite form and content.
As Simon Reynolds notes in his giddyingly insightful new book, “Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past,” this is precisely what the digital age works against. Once upon a time, in the ’60s, ’70s, and early ’80s, pop music kept the banner of modernism flying. To be young was to be shocked by an endless stream of newness, from heavy metal to synth pop. Yes, these reflected influences from the music of the past, but each phase still managed to sound remarkably different and relevant. By the oughties, this newness had evaporated, and in its place there was just the recycling of the immediate past.
The digitalization of music had given rise to new forms of distribution and creation, and as the entire history of recorded sound became available to anyone with a computer, music finally succumbed to postmodernism. Form no longer had a fixed stylistic context, or a particular historical meaning — you could mix and match everything in endless ways because on the Internet, everything is always available and nothing dies.
As Reynolds puts it, “all the advantages we have today in terms of technology and how to get good sounds have resulted in a crisis of ‘well-made’ music, where producers are scholars of production and know how to get a great period feel, yet it seems harder and harder to make music that actually matters in the way that the music that inspired them did in their own day.”
Whether you agree with Lee and Reynolds or not, these are nothing if not stimulating ideas, and if you are of a particular vintage, it is hard not to find them compelling. To be over 35 is to be a child of a certain kind of revolution, a product of fixed forms and styles. No amount of criticism pointing out how cultural decay was with us in this past is going to stop us from feeling that. Actually, now the decay is qualitatively different – that we have reached the end of cultural history because culture is no longer about creation, it’s just about recreation and repurposing the immediate past.
It is not surprising that the speed of recent history — economic and technological — should leave us feeling uneasy at the disappearance of so many fixed forms even as we enjoy the quantitative pleasures of accessing anything we can think of, anywhere, and at any time. It’s only when we are reminded that a mortgage should be a mortgage and not a traded security that we can think about the importance of book being a book and nothing else.
This desire for constraint, for a thing to be one thing and not another, may reflect transient cultural anxieties or it may signal a deeper unease. The aesthetic dilemma used to be whether Dylan was as good as Keats, but the fact that neither simply recycled or tweaked suggests that the digital revolution is counter-revolutionary. It undermines our inherited belief in Romantic self-definition, the idea that we are all artists of our own souls, obligated to originality. I only hope that the generations who once created constant revolution now still have the energy to rebel.
