Fucked up
Remember Aryan Post-punk/girl band Aryan Blue? They were being discussed all over the blogosphere a few months ago, because although they look like the cutest little Olsen twin knock-offs, they are actually the children of a neo-nazi mother who has indoctrinated them into national socialism. Anyway, after I read Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz(better translation: If This Is a Man), I was looking around on the Interhighwayweb, reading about concentration camps and the people who deny them. I found the significance of this girl band's name. Kos talks about it here. Here is the explanation of the title from the news article
But there is a further significance to the title, which I didn't see posted on any blogs and isn't described in the above article: Prussian Blue is a bright blue residue left on walls and other surfaces in places where Zyklon B is used extensively. Holocaust deniers cite a lack of it in death camps to argue that Zyklon B was only used in low levels for delousing.
Naming a band of two little kids after this shit is pretty fucking despicable. This reminds me of a scene in Der Untergang (The Downfall): when Goebbels and his cunt wife kill their children, because, as his wife says, they don't want them growing up in a world without National Socialism.
"Known as 'Prussian Blue' -- a nod to their German heritage and bright blue eyes -- the girls from Bakersfield, Calif., have been performing songs about white nationalism before all-white crowds since they were nine."
But there is a further significance to the title, which I didn't see posted on any blogs and isn't described in the above article: Prussian Blue is a bright blue residue left on walls and other surfaces in places where Zyklon B is used extensively. Holocaust deniers cite a lack of it in death camps to argue that Zyklon B was only used in low levels for delousing.
Naming a band of two little kids after this shit is pretty fucking despicable. This reminds me of a scene in Der Untergang (The Downfall): when Goebbels and his cunt wife kill their children, because, as his wife says, they don't want them growing up in a world without National Socialism.
posted by Austin 5-000 at 12:41 PM
3 Comments:
All right, maybe you can untangle your post a little bit for me. I think I understand Lyotard's notion of the differend, although I find his example of it (Auschwitz) suspect. According to his explanation, since any eyewitness to the gassings at Auschwitz is a priori already dead, and a Holocaust denier (Robert Faurisson) will only accept the truth of the Final Solution from an eyewitness account, there can be no established criteria for deciding disputes between the two parties. Litigation is not possible, since the plaintiff has no recourse to an agreed upon "language agreement context" or whatever bullshit, and so is deprived of his voice.
I think the Auschwitz example is a poorly chosen one. For one thing, no Holocaust denier that I have ever read about has been seriously interested in the validity of gas chamber stories purely out of an academic, historical pursuit of truth. They have been neo-Nazis, fascists, and racists, and these views have a tendency to obscure any and all historical fact in the name of ideology. Also, the Holocaust (and specifically the gassing of Jews during the Holocaust) has been described as an "indisputable historical fact" by the Superior Court of California in the Mermelstein vs. Institute for Historical Review case. Even for the most diehard postmodernists and pragmatists, having an accepted court case behind you is about as good an "agreed upon criterion" as you could hope for. In other words, what Lyotard takes as an instance of the "differend" is really just a case of a few vicious hatemongers not getting their way; I fail to see postmodernism entering the fray one way or the other. Am I missing something?
This just brings me back to a criticism I often have of the postmodern age: it ain't so damn special. I have argued before on this blog that the "Culture Industry," while certainly beefed up in the age of late capitalism, is not an inherent product exclusively of late capitalism or of postmodernity, whichever you prefer. In the same way, I just can't get my head around the idea that the postmodern "death of metanarratives" has spawned a new form of revisionism and a need for a new ethics. It's just the same crazy (actually, "crazy" would relieve them of their moral responsibility, so let's say "vile") assholes with perhaps a literary critic or two now among their ranks. But perhaps you hold to the same skepticism (you say "which I think is questionable"). I'm just not sure to what exactly that phrase refers.
Even if differends do exist on larger scales than the Auschwitz example (and I think they do), I'd hesitate before saying that they could be potentially solved by linguistic arguments about referents, addressors, etc, or that art and the sublime would be the best ways to address grievances. Therefore, taking everything into consideration from my God's eye view, with all the weight of transcendental objective validity behind me, I hencefore declare Lyotard "silly" and will immediately hoist a flag with his defaced picture on it. I will encourage others to make fun of Lyotard and to refer to him only as "Lyotarded." Then we will make the universal sign of mental retardation (a limp horizontally situated hand slapped repeatedly against the chest) whenever his name is spoken.
I think the idea is that postmodern "academic" theory can be used to rhetorically support arguments that carry no weight in an academic setting. Intelligent design is one, and I am sure Holocaust denying is another. For those who care to make these arguments, I would agree with Scranton on how to characterize them: they are retarded and should be called so to their face and to the faces of their parents. Anything less would be morally unjust.
I have several questions and comments for this thread, which I find hilariously abstruse but also the most interesting thing I've read in weeks.
I think perhaps loplop may be misinterpreting me in thinking that while fishstix sees Prussian Blue as a direct effect of postmodernist revisionism (a decidedly particularistic effect, of a certain historicized era), I find a "transhistorical" sameness in it. In fact, "transhistory" (not to be confused with transamerica, starring a Desperate Housewife as a pre-op shemale) seems to be my general label. This would in fact work well for me, since I'm a Classicist who's supposed to believe in eternal questions such as those posed by Plato and Thucydides. Well, I'm not, at least not in a simplistic sense. I definitely think that the racist ideology espoused by Prussian Blue and Holocaust deniers has its own place in history in terms of its strategies, rhetoric, presuppositions, methods of dissemination, etc. One component of this description may be a "postmodern" sense of difference and discontinuity. This I concede.
What I do not concede is that there is "widespread use of the differend" to effectively change the discourse, or that anything new is needed in order to combat the Nazis. Moreover, I find certain attempts at such novel methods (Lyotard) to be less effective than the status quo, although this does not constitute a blanket endorsement of that status quo.
I now turn to the question of the Culture Industry, and the related though not dependent issues of technology and media. I suppose we are arguing over semantic differences, mine most likely being ill informed. If, by Culture Industry, one means the *current* degree to which consumerism and self-image are promulgated by media, advertising, propaganda, social custom, etc then yes, there is a CI. If, however the CI is something new, something which is only possible through a certain form of capitalism and lays claim to unique characteristics, I need to understand it better. If def #1 is the case, then yes, there was a CI of a lesser degree in 15th c Japan, albeit one with more limited and localized production of culture. If def #2 holds, then nothing but the 20th century West is the caretaker of the CI.
Coincidentally, looking at your first post, loplop, what is a "desiring subject"? Also, what does it mean to speak of a "sublime set of reproductive technologies and the completely sublime thing that is the internet"? I am painfully ignorant of the vocabulary.
Also, do you think you could rephrase this statement: "To my mind, however, it is only by way of a ruthless interrogation of narratives and their simultaneous insufficiency and necessity - a failure which can only be accounted for in terms of subjectivity and desire - that we can begin to bring their views together productively." There's that subjectivity and desire again. I need some 'splainin.
I would also interject here that revisionism is precisely *countered* by the multiplicity of sources and narratives available through media. While it is true that it is hard to find "the truth" in this swamp, the internet offers a democratizing force to those who would criticize and check mainstream news outlets. Blog muckraking and fact-checking accomplish this quite often, I think. But I am an old-fashioned Millian liberal in that I say, the more narratives, the better. Not all truths will "rise to the top," it is regretably true, but many falsehoods will be relegated to the bottom.
I am too a bit confused by fishstix's example of the Banana Republic and how it represents postmodernism filling the void left in its wake with Western values. What occupaid that void before the end of metanarratives? How did the project of multiculturalism or sub-altern studies become the tool of the hegemon? Is it always destined to become such a tool?
Thanks gents.
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