spatch

In other news, we're having a funeral for irony because it appears to be well and truly murdered.

EDIT: But maybe that's the point. If Mothersbaugh & Co. have indeed pulled a good one over Disney, then more power to 'em.

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From:

sanityfaerie.livejournal.com

I will start with the end, and work towards the beginning, with random skips throughout.

- What, exactly, is wrong with "safe"?

- There's no guarantee that your attempts at being subversive will produce the elements that form the new dominant paradigm. It's true. At the same time, there's no guarantee of sucess in life at all, particularly when you're working in a system as huge and fuzzy and complex and strange as social dynamics, and particularly when your goals are directly opposed by someone else who also has goals.

- Of course, treating "mainstream" like one thing is a massive oversimplification. On the other side, simplifying is sorta neccessary when you're dealing with systems that are literally too complex to comprehend, and many of the basic ideas hold true, except that you're pushing one or more subsections rather than the whole, and you can target your message to a degree, and thus push harder with less effort.

- Over time, that which is "unacceptable freak" becomes "tolerable freak". That which is "tolerable freak" becomes "edgy, maybe cool". That which is edgy and possibly cool eventually hits the slide into accepted normal. If you look back along US history, this happens with some regularity, particularly recently. Often, you force the society to accept you legally, and a generation later they accept you (for the most part) morally. Lather, rinse, repeat until, a few generations down the road, you and your pet subculture are as normal as you want to be.

Actually, I imagine, to a great degree, we choose to be freaks. Obviously, this isn't the case across the board. Gender preferences, for example, are pretty hardwired, one way or the other. In many cases, though, we choose to be fringy because the fringe is where all the intelligent, dynamic, rebellious people are, and we want to be like that, and be with them, and not resemble the rest of the world. We create a fringe to be in, and then push it far enough to be actively disturbing, and then try to cram it down the uberculture's throat, and force them to accept us when we've deliberately made ourselves something they don't accept.

- Incremental change is not minimal - it just takes time. It won't have but so much of an effect in your lifetime, but your children will feel it, and their children will definately feel it, and it sticks. Look at the speed the mainstream changes. Look at the changes we've made. Look at the places where people have focused their power. The "anti-liberation" movements are there because people in power, and people with money, and people in mass are pushing them,and they're not being effectively opposed by mass or money or power.

- What do you mean by "maintained its integrity"? They use nearly the same words, nearly the same beats. If it is no longer subversive, that is because the mainstream has moved to consume it - which is what being successful at subversion is all about.

Think of the mainstream as an enormous blob of the acceptable and the encouraged. If your message and your life are unacceptable, and you apply your will against the manstream, and, due in part to your actions, you fit neatly into the "acceptable" area ten to twenty years later, with the appropriate props for being "old school" from those who followed after you, then that's a success. If you think it's not, then I would dearly like to understand your reasoning, because it makes no sense to me.

If you're not in it to make life better for yourself and people like you, then why are you here, and can you justify that reason morally?

I dunno - it seems like we're functioning under fundamentally different ideas. I see the mainstream as something to be accepted for what it is, changed to allow you to better live your life, and improved overall whenever possible. You seem to think that that whole idea of "dominant paradigm" as an unpleasant one.

From:

dcart.livejournal.com

The best way that I can think of to describe my objection to this notion that the mainstream can be successfully subverted is one of form vs. substance. I'll use the punk movement as an example here. If punk rock was just about listening to loud, fast music, doing funny things to your hair and wearing black t-shirts, then the movement did a wonderful job of subverting mainstream culture. If it was about the DIY culture, about opening up the mass music creation process to something other than pretty, over-produced pop/rock bands, about creating alternative systems of mutual support, etc, then it failed to subvert the dominant paradigm at all. In my opinion, the former was largely just window dressing, the "freaking the norms" of which you speak while the latter was the substance of the movement. Mainstream culture does a wonderful job of picking those forms (the window dressing, the stuff that is essentially safe to the powers that be) and making that mainstream while marginalizing the stuff that could actually change how people live and the powers to whom they bow. If making your movement "pop" simply allows the powers that be to turn it into another look that people can buy at the mall rather than changing the debate, then you've failed. It's my contention that in the overwhelming majority of instances, that failure is exactly what you end up with.