WHAT IS GOTHIC FUNK? - A MANIFESTO IN THE FORM OF A PART OF A CONVERSATION
May, 2006
by E. Blair
Conversation between C, E, and J. References a conversation from the previous day, between C, S, and A.
8 May, 2006
Helpfulness: To better understand this conversation, you will probably want to see the movie Garden State, since it's referenced a lot.
C: ...Mies van der Rohe, I guess, who defined the high austere modernist skyscraper, and then there's the ornamented, bizarre, baroque, postmodernist stuff that just seems arbitrary. And then the latest tradition, which is like what S was saying, green awnings and tan sides and really ugly and uninteresting. Those buildings - this article was saying - were all about the view from inside. It's not about the buildings, it's about the views that they give, which is almost self-effacing architecture. So this article is talking about a new style of architecture which is emerging in Chicago, with several examples of works that happened in the last few years. And the example that they give of this building, this Aqua building, it's a pretty straight up-and-down highrise, but in the model they’ve got these [balcony] ridges that come out and buckle, and it's not ornamentation in the postmodernist sense. It's actually supposed to be really really functional, because the idea is that as they take up this space, they're still trying to sell views. They realize that if on one floor, if they project a balcony a few feet further, then that person can see Millennium Park, or Adler Planetarium, or the Sears Tower, or something like that, and that it's not totally random because –
L: - they plan it out according to the height and according to the obstacles –
C: - and then they adjust for providing the right amount of shade, so that people get enough wind, or people don't get too much sunlight, and you get these smooth curves. So you get this really esoteric-looking building. And I mean, it's weird too, because I also coincide a lot of this… People get really confused when they date postmodernism. I hear it associated with the 80s a lot, but the more I read about it, I’m thinking it's more of a 60s or 70s thing. And see, I think a lot of this has to do with – even if a lot of people still have difficulty talking about it – I think chaos theory has been in the public consciousness for a while. This is an incredibly fractal sort of thing.
One of the big arguments that I keep encountering for postmodernism is reliant on physics, and it's a misunderstanding of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. A lot of postmodernist critics will go running with the idea that the HUP prohibits you from saying anything with certainty. Which is not true. It means that firstly, you can't say both the acceleration and the position of an electron – you can find one of the two, which is a big difference from not knowing either. Secondly, it doesn't say that there isn’t both a position and a trajectory, it means that you just can't know them both.
L: At the same time.
C: Yeah. So basically the big disjunction between modernism and postmodernism is that modernism is like, there's a conditionality to language or to communication that prohibits us from seeing the objective truth, so we have to use language and communication in unconventional ways so that we can sort of startle ourselves into seeing it. And postmodernism, being an extension of that, is like, no, there is no objective truth, you can't see it at all. And I feel like that is such an extreme reaction, and such a self-cancelling reaction. And I think it’s politically disastrous, because the conservative elements have never abandoned their claim to the truth; you’ve just got the liberals like “oh, we don't know truth,” so it's really self-defeating. I think that the next distance is that there is a truth, but we can only approach it relatively, and, you know, with limitation. And I think that's the big thrust of this whole thing, on a macro scale.
And I think that the way the [Gothic Funk] parties embody that is that we can plan them to be more party-like, or more art-like, but once we start them up, they are what they are, and they grow organically. And see, I would never have been able to say that, even a few months ago; it was just it felt right, what we were doing. But see I think that that's also where you – like when you talk about enthusiasm, that's part of the idea of it. You can't arrive at this sort of aesthetic by just being critical and thinking of words and systems. It has to have a gut impulse. And in a weird sort of way it seems almost like Romanticism, in the idea that you reach an end to what you can do with your intellect. You can use your intellect plenty, but you have to fall back on your gut at some point.
And see, the postmodernists were terrified of that because they were largely reacting to fascism, and you know, their whole thing was that people became fascist in, like, Soviet Russia –
L: Because they claimed to know something.
C: Well, because it totally played on and exploited peoples' emotions, like the whole nationalist thing. So...
People talk about the late Enlightenment period as being really obsessed with intellectualism, but I think if you look at the critical discourse now… And even things that have been scientifically debunked and the fact that people have to rely on these codes and these interpretation methods – Freudian or Marxist or feminist or whatever – lots of which have contributed a lot – but –
L: Nobody follows their gut.
C: Well, it's like you have to be able to categorize anything to the nth degree, and the problem is that the categorizations are subject to the same -
L: - rules as the things being categorized.
C: Exactly. Yeah.
L: That's what I was saying... I think part of the problem in us defining ‘Gothic Funk’ is the problem in defining any movement. You’re thinking about Gothic Funk and in the back of your mind, you have a set of historical movements, all of these things that have been labeled and categorized, and things are put into them, and works are sold in galleries as works from that movement and bla bla bla – so in your head you have this set of known and understood groups, and you’re trying to make this one too...
J: I think Gothic Funk is backwards from that. Because in their cases, all these things were made, and then later on, people said 'well we can put these together, because they have this common thing.' Whereas now we’re saying, there is Gothic Funk, and you will make things that are Gothic Funk, you will do things that are Gothic Funk. Instead of things happening and then looking back on everything and saying, 'well these things have these characteristics in common, and therefore, we want to call it a movement.'
L: And so postmodernism is something totally different from Futurism or Cubism, because in the beginning they [the latter two] were announcing, 'this is what we are and this is what we’re going to do.'
C: Well, if you take Surrealism, Futurism, Dada, they’re all Modernism. You could almost say that Modernism is a frame of mind, or a way of interpreting - I mean people would say a way of interpreting art, but you can extrapolate it and say a way of interpreting the world.
L: They’re all frames of mind.
C: Well, but the difference between them is that with, say the groups that we're talking about, the Surrealists or the Futurists, they're trying to define what is happening and by being able to define it, by being able to understand it, to then control the direction it takes and the effects that it has. For example, the Futurists were the intellectual side of fascist Italy - they were politically huge. The Surrealists were politically huge - they kind of petered out - but... I think that's closer to what Gothic Funk is.
Postmodernism is not a terminus; something new is evolving out of it that's going to happen regardless of whether anybody says it or acknowledges it.
But the idea is that if we can realize what these trends are, what they signify, what their significance is, then you can make the most out of that and use it to push in a productive... like what I was saying about politics. I think it is important to realize that the Postmodernist assumption that everything is unstable - including progressive argument - is incredibly destructive to liberal movements and basically voluntarily removes critically enforced art from the equation of politics. It's a really really bad thing to do… If that's correct, then the sooner it's said and the sooner it's out there, the better.
So I think that's where it's important to talk about these things. But I mean it's more like Gothic Funk would be a subset of people trying to say what's going on, as opposed to Gothic Funk being the whole big thing. I don't know what the whole big thing is going to be called.
L: So now I feel like there are a few catchwords for what's happening... The first time C and I met, we had a conversation about Chaos theory - the first email I ever sent you, right? And I feel like it always comes back, somehow, to that idea, so I feel like that's one keyword. And then I feel like... honesty... is something as well... and the non-presence of irony, or maybe that can just be shoved into honesty - I don’t know, honesty is a troublesome word.
J: That’s why I like 'sincerity.' It’s not the same thing, but…
C: But sincerity implies an absence of irony too, I think. Well, no it doesn’t. But I think that people assume that it does. Here's what I think. Irony itself is sort of a self-consciousness. So it's almost ironic irony. It's almost like irony that is aware that it's not the whole picture. If you've got irony that recognizes its own limitations, then you get a sort of self-conscious sincerity. To give an example: this was also a big huge moment that I had. People say that Gravity’s Rainbow [Thomas Pynchon] is one of the great postmodern books, and I think it's not postmodern at all – I think it's the perfect example of what we’re talking about. He's got a quote at the beginning, by Werner von Braun, saying that everything that science teaches him, leads him to believe that there is some sort of spiritual existence outside of death. I'm paraphrasing that, but that's the gist of it. The way most people read that is that that's an ironic statement. The reason it's ironic is that Werner von Braun, I mean he was the guy who got us to the moon, so there's that weird little level to it in terms of engineering, but he was basically the architect of the German rocket program during WWII. So the V-2 bombs that killed thousands and thousands of people, that the whole book is preoccupied with, were him. The thing that I learned in this course I took on Gravity's Rainbow – even though I haven't finished the book yet – was that Stephen Wright made a really compelling argument that even though he acknowledges that it's very very ironic to quote Werner van Braun – who’s responsible for killing all these people – talking about the immutability of the soul, there's a lot in the book that shows that that's not an ironic quote. He [Pynchon] believes what the quote says. He acknowledges that the quote was said by a person -
L: The source is ironic.
C: Yeah - it's like, the man was a hypocrite who -
L: But he takes truth where he finds it.
C: Yeah. And see that is where it's different from, say, Magnolia, where you get these people so throbbing with emotion that there's no awareness of contradiction in their lives. Well, Magnolia might even be a bad example. The Royal Tanenbaums is a better example because that is so "ah my heart’s on my sleeve" sort of thing. Or another good example is Garden State.
L: I love that movie.
J: Garden State was really good.
C: It was, but I don't think there was a drop of irony in it.
J: No! No there wasn't, and I mean, it had characters that were shady, and that it didn't really approve of, but it still treated them with respect, and treated them as multi-dimensional human beings. People who are not perfect, people who have very limited world-views, can't see outside their box – but it didn't ridicule them, or make them objects of irony.
L: I've been trying to figure out why – the moment in the movie where they're standing at the top of that huge canyon –
C: Yeah, I loved that.
L: There's something about that moment that became like a pivotal moment in my life – that moment in that movie – and I've been trying to identify why and I haven't been able to. So I don't know if you guys have any enlightenment on why it was such a forceful… It's not like it was just emotionally inspiring or anything – it's somehow incredibly relieving, and incredibly correct, and incredibly observationally right, and incredibly representative, and I'm not sure of what.
J: Well, one of the things about that moment, is that despite these three people and how different they are and how different their lives are, in a way they're all looking for something similar, and they all need something similar, and they all have a connection. It's like a catharsis, an emotional catharsis for all of them.
L: Well, yeah. It's an unspoken connection… Maybe this is it: it's not self-conscious. It's not standing back and looking at itself ironically – they just all step up and do this, and then they don't need to talk about it and they also don't need to go over it, which is something I've always been so uncomfortable with.
{C enters}
L: I was just telling her – well you say what you just said.
J: I said it's an emotional catharsis, but it's something even more basic than that, because these are three people who, they come from really different places in life, and they don’t have this great common thread between them –
L: Although they are the same generation, which is an interesting common thread.
J: They're the same generation! Okay, that's really good. That's the one thing they seem to share, and yet they all need the same thing, they all want the same thing, in this really basic and completely inarticulable way.
L: Or even if it is able to be articulated, they're not trying, and that's what the important thing is. What I was saying to her… and this goes along with what you were saying about irony and cynicism. I'm a very self conscious person to begin with; I don't know how much of this is society or just me. I'm always standing back, watching myself. I hardly ever lose track of myself. So part of it I'm sure is just me, but part of it is this whole way of interacting that I think our generation has. If you walk down the street and you're with somebody, and you witness something funny, or you hear somebody say something funny, one of you repeats it to the other, and it gets repeated in the conversation. Like if Jess and I see something funny, some man shouts something, and we start laughing about it. And then I say it again, mimic him, and then we laugh at it again. It's sort of like you have to be hyper-aware and hyper-conscious of what just happened – you can't just let it go, and just viscerally react to it, just laugh and keep walking and understand – because you both know what you laughed at. But yet you have to sort of confirm it and re-confirm it, and re-confirm that it's funny, by going over it again. This happens in conversations all the time, with me anyway. And I've always felt so uncomfortable when I did that but I've often done it, out of wanting to be entertaining and wanting to share a part of that emission of humor, in the company of whoever I'm with. I don't usually do it with people I'm really comfortable with; more when I'm trying to make conversation. Anyway, so it's this whole thing of being hyper-confirming of your situation and the things that are happening around you, and in that sense never allowing yourself to just be immersed in it honestly. And that is why that moment was so exciting, because they don't talk about it afterwards, and none of them plans to do it, and none of them has to convince the others to do it, none of them say, "this is really great, come up here!" It’s just visceral – they experience the desire, they get up there, they do it, they experience the catharsis, and then they get down and leave, and there’s none of this... I mean maybe they do it offscreen or whatever -
[Jess laughs]
C: No -
L: But there’s none of this, like, "wow, that was badass," or "remember when we did this," ... You [addressing C] often describe moments that you’ve had that are sort of like this. But what you’re describing about Gothic Funk – this is the way that I would identify with that, that it's a whole new – it may be a frame of mind but it’s also just a way of experiencing life in which you don't have to be like that.
And that is, to the soul, important to me – because I always thought that I didn't fit in – America, I thought it was American society, because of that way of interacting with people, that I always thought I had to do.
J: Well, what role do you think nostalgia – I mean nostalgia is a big part of that. I feel like there's this hyper-nostalgic culture where it's always "remember when we did this, remember when we did that," and I feel like...
L: It's a very reviewing culture.
J: Yeah, and I feel like in a way - and I mean I know I do it - but it's kind of a hipster thing, too.
L: Yeah! It’s totally got the tone of coolness to it. I mean, that's why I would do it, that's what I was saying, to be entertaining or whatever. When I do it it's because I want to be hip, I want to be funny, I want to be… something. I mean, I'm not wanting to enjoy myself or experience anything, I'm just wanting to command the other person's attention and go over something, and it always makes me feel uncomfortable.
C: Well that’s where… as weird and alienated as I feel from the whole postmodern argument, it's really important and interesting to grapple with, because even though in college I'd take classes on this sort of thing where people would be like, "I don’t understand what this is," – the thing is, I think everybody understands what it is. I think people have a really hard time separating it out into finite boundaries. Like, what postmodernism would say, all down the line – is that you need to reconfirm that something is funny because in every moment when you’re not reconfirming it, it ceases to be stable, it ceases to anchor.
L: Yes! And that's a kind of desperation. You're living desperately.
C: And it's the same thing with the nostalgia. These are all products of... like, whether or not we even know what the word 'postmodernism' is, in some way this has been semantically buried within our culture – that we all behave that way without being really aware of it. But the thing is, it takes just as much energy to maintain this, as –
L: Yes! You’re always maintaining.
C: Anyway. I think that your reaction and my reaction and the reaction that drives this whole thing, you know, is really just, getting exhausted with that way of looking at things.
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