argumate:

kontextmaschine:

I suppose another take on Marianne Williamson and the neomystic turn generally is it’s a turn inward. It takes all the energy floating about that had been aimed at society and structure and turns it to self and sensibility. And that’s a thing that happens, and you’d kind of expect it to happen around now, and diverted into culture the energy can even get pretty golden-agey as the dialectic grinds towards synthesis.

That’s the social unrest of the 60s diverting into the “Me Decade” 70s and “Morning in America” 80s. That’s the revolutionary period of the 1910s being suppressed in the First Red Scare and yielding to the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the Harlem Renaissance.

That’s second-wave feminism falling to an ‘80s pincer move between cultural conservatives and S&M postmodernists – falling as a sociopolitical project. And then its themes got turned inward and coopted and reemerged in the 90s as Wicca, as Lilith Fair, as lesbian chic, as riot grrl, as Xena and Scully and Buffy, as the music I think of as VH1core chick-rock – Shawn Colvin, Natalie Merchant, Meredith Brooks, Paula Cole. As a sensibility, a subculture, a product, an aesthetic (that could be digested into more products, into Target collections and remodeling TV about shiplap and healthy relationships)

what I like about these kinds of broad cultural sweeps is that you can mix them up however you like, for example the ‘60s could as well be counterculture turning inwards to meditation and drug trips and seeing social change as merely an inevitable byproduct of personal enlightenment.

I mean in some sense cultural commentary is meta in that it’s commentary on the usual commentary about cultural swings, ie. “we say that the ‘60s were about this”, not “the ‘60s were about this” or even “this happened in the ‘60s”.

I mean the 60s turn from Civil Rights and Vietnam to drugs and mysticism is a lot of what I mean here by “the 70s” but

Fair, keep in mind that “you can just mix things up however you want to tell any story” is true but the opposite of “you too-mechanistically expect things to follow the exact path as before” is also true

And I get both critiques but I try to thread a path, recognizing that certain themes and sequences and progressions recur but in different order and combination and alliances

Forming an objective understanding of historical progression from material conditions and the repeated playing-out of dialectical cycles is tough but powerful, man