Tony Blair’s favourite band
U2 as Badiou-ian revolutionaries? Unlikely. Surely the problem with Blairite capitalist culture is not a _lack_ of “yearning, the horizon, the utopian”, let a lone a lack of “hairy-chested wailing.” On the contrary, capitalism now thrives on a certain sort of passion. U2 are a great engine for constructing a ’sincerity’ with no content (they mean nothing, but they _really mean it_). This is the same sincerity that is at issue when arguments about the Iraq war shift to discussions of Tony Blair’s character, with what he _believed_ in the run up to the war. The absence of WMDs serves to retrospectively make him _more sincere_; thus, the more wrong Tony Blair turns out to be, the more justified he can claim the invasion was.
The affects of passion and sincerity are the cornerstone of what k-punk calls innocynicism, the ruling ideology right now. It’s no surprise that U2 suddenly became cool again in the late ’90s: but, now more than ever, it’s important to remember just how shit they are.
Incidentally, is Joshua Tree where Foucault used to go to drop acid with Geo’s landlord’s mate? Or was that a different, more northerly, desert?
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Brilliant. Couldn’t agree more. That whole issue about “really meaning”, the pathos set up before that “lack of meaning” must also be related to what I perceive as a deep flaw in self-reflexivity -which already in Freud’s age began to fail its diagnostic task.
Self-reflexivity NOW is just another mechanism that enables functioning. It’s as if the “crisis situation” of the romantic subject is being produced as enjoyment now. Excuse the Zizek jargon, it just came outthat way.
cheers
Comment by steff @ 8/28/2005 10:44 am
they mean nothing, but they really mean it
Brilliant post by Tim at the Wrong Side of Capitalism, which manages to precisely identify the parallels between Blair and U2. (Strangely, the post he was responding to seems to have disappeared.) It also makes a very serious point about…
Trackback by k-punk @ 8/28/2005 10:35 pm
“U2 suddenly became cool again”: on which planet did this happen? and on which planet were they ever cool in the first place? I seem to have managed to avoid it for the past 20-odd years. Lucky me.
Comment by Jim @ 8/29/2005 1:04 am
There was an attempt to rehabilitate U2 when ‘Pop’ came out in 1997. It looked like it had failed, but then when ‘All that you can’t leave behind’ was released, the rehibilitation campaign was retroactively declared succesful, and music journalists and Radio 1 DJs were falling over themselves to big up U2.
Comment by Tim @ 8/29/2005 5:06 am
They weren’t part of the catholic conspiracy then Tim? :-)
Comment by mark k-p @ 8/29/2005 6:35 am
i meant the anti-catholic conspiracy obviously!
Comment by mark k-p @ 8/29/2005 8:04 am
With Bono running for Peace Nobel Prize alongside the equally nonest and hollow German chancellor, this post should be written on big walls.
Comment by Classless Kulla @ 8/30/2005 9:36 pm
Didn’t he drop acid with Carlos Castaneda and then saw a giant Victorian Super-Nanny invent sexuality (or “its current cultural forms”)? They then headed to Big Sur and found some alligators in a pond.
Comment by steff @ 9/6/2005 6:02 pm