It's been remarked that present culture is over-dominated by the recapitulation of 'baby boomer era culture' (for lack of a better word) and that youth revolutionary culture has been largely subsumed by it. (Is there anything now among 15-30 year olds that is as 'shocking' as rock and roll used to be? I can't say I can find anything. To be sure, there is plenty about which the older generations complain in relation to the younger, but that isn't the same.)
The other thing is, we're never going to stop loss (or, that is, that would be what my money would be on). We'll always be subject to the framing problem. And we might be better off to try and manage our anxiety about the world changing. Because that, to me, seems the real fear: we accept that, for us to exist as we are, the world had to change [at many points] but now we want to arrest, we are the pinnacle of humanity, the only means by which we can remain thus is for either the future never to come (change to be averted indefinitely) or for (as William Gibson pointed out) we have to imagine our future descendants as evolved to the point where their spindly legs and effete physiques barely managed to hold together beneath the crushing power of their ginormous brains[1].
Perhaps this is also connected to why so many complaints are lodged against franchises such as Star Trek and Star Wars and Doctor Who: we're no longer twelve, and we're never going to be again, and we can't get it back no matter how hard we try.
But, also, perhaps it's an idea we're going to have to get used to in a big way, because, if the state of all that currently rapidly decaying early film stock is any indicator, and I would bet that it is, the state of copyright, which will become only more oppressive as the 'knowledge economy' does more of whatever it keeps doing, half of the twentieth century and perhaps everything between now and some truly dystopian societal collapse stands likely to suffocate beneath the oily sea of private ownership where (in some cases) the only person with the rights to a given cultural artifact is the third cousin twice removed of the someone aunt's brother's half-sister's niece by a second marriage, who is currently in a vegetative state, never to emerge; whereas, on the other hand, we have cultural artifacts merely have to owner that anyone can identify at all. So I would be tempted to say that I would wonder if, looking back, future archeologists, if there is any such thing, are going to have quite (generally while imbibing large quantities of alcohol) a time hypothesizing as to why there was such a cultural dark age around this point in history.
Or maybe it's that we have reached and gone past the 'Death of God' (in the actually sense that Nietzsche meant it) and in the interregnum between that which came before and that which came after, we are trying to patch over the destruction of tradition by simply replacing it, trying to fill-in the gap. But, like cracking open someone's chest to replace a meat heart with a plastic toy replica, it just won't work. And neither can it be replaced with a heart from a corpse.
William Gibson's take on this stuff is that subcultures get commoditized a lot quicker - the gap between someone inventing a genuinely new and different style of music and playing it to their mates, to it being in the pop charts and used for advertising, is now collapsed into months or weeks.
Seemingly the only way to resist commoditization was to maintain an extremely shocking subculture of dadaist obscenity; memes that the "normies" wouldn't dare co-opt. That period concluded with the recent US presidential election; 4chan culture is now presidential.
As I said, obviously, the older generation still casts aspersions at the younger, as likely always be. But my point is, at from my view, I can't identify anyone culturally ascendant in the way, say, Elvis was, something uniquely tied to another, as it were, ascendant culture. Even something like, say, Lady Gaga, to me me, seems more David Bowie 2.0 than anything. There doesn't seem to be any flappers, any jazz. Even rap predominates not from the millennial generation but from the 70s and, most predominantly, Gen X. But, of course, maybe the problem is expecting, that's part of the problem, possibly, of existing in that interregnum, it's in normalized and tacitly internalized for some of us to think in terms of cultural churn, of course, while we're probably looking for the very opposite.
And I would agree that capitalism has gotten very good at assimilating and anesthetizing culture. (One need only look at surrealism to see that; or the more recent bourgeois appropriation burlesque.) But in that regard, and in light of this discussion being prompted out of the disappearance of mediums themselves and that which is transmitted through them, as Hans Richter pointed out, gathering together a retrospective on surrealism in a place of cultural sanctioning (a museum) was borderline trivial, whereas so much of the object generative output of the Dadaists was fashioned with and from materials with a life expectancy of a McDonald's hamburger wrapper.
(On your last sentence) In one respect, this is very interesting in that, if you want to take Will Self as... Well, let's just say, for the moment, that he is predominantly factually correct in the idea there can be no more avant garde, that there's nothing that can't be said. This then may be existential threat there is to capitalism. That is, we say there is nothing that that capitalism, like some sort of immune response can't envelope and neutralize, then what of the fundamentally apocalyptic nature of capitalism? Which why I will still, only half jokingly, say that Francis Fukuyama, in his ardent support, came the closest any human may ever come to killing capitalism single handedly.
So we need degeneracy in order to define ourselves, yet by merely referencing the same recycled degeneracy, we separate definition. The problem is, is former traditions that existed, the given present generation were not just one with the prior generation, but that generation was in turn subsumed in the larger idea stretching back through the millennia. However, now, that is not the case. Now, with the domination (for lack of a better word) of 'Boomer' culture, Gen X and the Millennials (allowing for little use any of those terms possess) are rolled into the 'Boomer' culture, whereas the 'Boomer' culture breaks from everything before, standing at this post WWII level where the Enlightenment has culminated in the twentieth centuries great project of ultimate modernity. And that's fundamentally different. It's one thing to say that we that we are all together in a given idea of history and culture and place that seems beyond the scope of us all that molds us all; however it is another to be impressed upon to recreate the image of the previous generation, and image with no more depth to it than that of previous generation; here, I think, the dynamic is too close; that is, it is difficult, say, to argue directly in any embodied way with cultural history that is just an idea, however, to sit across the table from that which seeks to replicate themselves in you, seemingly, for the simple egotistical nature of such, is something that will inspire reaction to and, likely, against. Yet, where can this reaction go if everything can be commoditized and therefor anesthetized, rendering it an agent of the creation of the very thing rebelled against?
So they will sell the rebellion. (Let us bring out the freedom torches, please.[1])
Perhaps, then, the next generation will have to extended even the Dadaist project, and make themselves the shoddily constructed cultural products which disappear from history, disintegrating in what trickles through the gutter.
It's been remarked that present culture is over-dominated by the recapitulation of 'baby boomer era culture' (for lack of a better word) and that youth revolutionary culture has been largely subsumed by it. (Is there anything now among 15-30 year olds that is as 'shocking' as rock and roll used to be? I can't say I can find anything. To be sure, there is plenty about which the older generations complain in relation to the younger, but that isn't the same.)
The other thing is, we're never going to stop loss (or, that is, that would be what my money would be on). We'll always be subject to the framing problem. And we might be better off to try and manage our anxiety about the world changing. Because that, to me, seems the real fear: we accept that, for us to exist as we are, the world had to change [at many points] but now we want to arrest, we are the pinnacle of humanity, the only means by which we can remain thus is for either the future never to come (change to be averted indefinitely) or for (as William Gibson pointed out) we have to imagine our future descendants as evolved to the point where their spindly legs and effete physiques barely managed to hold together beneath the crushing power of their ginormous brains[1].
Perhaps this is also connected to why so many complaints are lodged against franchises such as Star Trek and Star Wars and Doctor Who: we're no longer twelve, and we're never going to be again, and we can't get it back no matter how hard we try.
But, also, perhaps it's an idea we're going to have to get used to in a big way, because, if the state of all that currently rapidly decaying early film stock is any indicator, and I would bet that it is, the state of copyright, which will become only more oppressive as the 'knowledge economy' does more of whatever it keeps doing, half of the twentieth century and perhaps everything between now and some truly dystopian societal collapse stands likely to suffocate beneath the oily sea of private ownership where (in some cases) the only person with the rights to a given cultural artifact is the third cousin twice removed of the someone aunt's brother's half-sister's niece by a second marriage, who is currently in a vegetative state, never to emerge; whereas, on the other hand, we have cultural artifacts merely have to owner that anyone can identify at all. So I would be tempted to say that I would wonder if, looking back, future archeologists, if there is any such thing, are going to have quite (generally while imbibing large quantities of alcohol) a time hypothesizing as to why there was such a cultural dark age around this point in history.
Or maybe it's that we have reached and gone past the 'Death of God' (in the actually sense that Nietzsche meant it) and in the interregnum between that which came before and that which came after, we are trying to patch over the destruction of tradition by simply replacing it, trying to fill-in the gap. But, like cracking open someone's chest to replace a meat heart with a plastic toy replica, it just won't work. And neither can it be replaced with a heart from a corpse.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/16/william-gibson...