Or, Dissonance, Baby. Laurie Penny alerts us to a major cultural breakthrough:
For those who missed it, Laurie’s own contribution to this “deeply, unapologetically intellectual” venture can be savoured here.
As Laurie’s own work demonstrates, the New Inquiry has plenty to thrill the pretentious leftwing radical. One contributor tells us that she went to Casablanca to work on her “dissertation on Moroccan hip hop and neoliberalisation,” before mulling the inevitable question: “Is rap the battleground between Muslims?” Other contributors ponder musical composition as a “liberation from late industrial capitalism,” and “the hypercommodification of music and our resulting alienation from musical creativity and pleasure.” Yes, we – thee and me - are alienated from musical creativity and pleasure. What, you didn’t know? That’s why we need music as “collective resistance” against, er, capitalism, free markets, bourgeois values, etc., which are presumably very bad for us, albeit for reasons never quite made clear.
And there’s an excited endorsement of the fatherless family, or “anti-family,” in which we’re told, based on nothing much, “a couple cannot raise a child better than one [person] can.” Apparently, the “diffusion” of the family unit – i.e., absent fathers, instability, hardship and subsequent dependence on the state – “is one of the most exciting things to happen to the American social pattern since sexual liberation.” Another noted contributor is the anthropology lecturer and Occupy cheerleader David Graeber (mentioned here and here). Graeber has “written widely on the relation (real and potential) of anthropology and anarchism,” and on “magic as a tool of politics,” and lists “smashing capitalism” among his long-term goals. As grown men do.
Yes, it’s all “fantastically exciting.” So don’t even think about laughing, you black-hearted scoundrels.