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/183/ Acid Bunga Bunga ft. Mike Watson (Patreon)

Published:
2021-03-30 06:00:03
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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Content

On memes and the counter-culture.

Theorist and curator Mike Watson advances the argument for "acid leftism". What is this, and why do we need a new counter-culture? Is contemporary leftism lacking a utopian imaginary?

Plus: slow memes and fast memes; the democratisation of art and media; and generations: which ones became conservative, which one might not?

Running order:

(00:04:15) - Interview with Mike Watson

(01:02:00) - 'Afterparty' discussion on what a counter-culture might look like today

Readings:

Can the Left Learn to Meme? , Mike Watson, Zero Books

The Acid Left, YouTube channel

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin (pdf)

Files

Comments

Konrad

Why bother with acid when you can fry your brain with theory like this guest? Very odd Bunga episode.

W

looks like my kinda of staff.

Blake

Why is this guy arguing for a new counterculture movement after the last one destroyed the left through middle-class hedonism?

Olivia Chigas

Unfortunately i completely disagree with his analysis of the dilemma in art schools- I graduated from a top US art school in 2016, and I felt there was FAR too much emphasis on a post-modern ideal of ‘expressing yourself’ and not nearly enough emphasis on building technical skills and networking for a career after school. This postmodern model is failing, in my opinion. If we look at Picasso, he was sketching on par with renaissance masters by age 12, and continued to attend fine art academies until his early 20s. He learned to master the technical skills and THEN was able to innovate and break the rules. The problem now is that every just tries to break the rules, but they don’t even fully understand the rules in the first place. I believe there is a parallel here in his desire for a new counter-culture...

Scott Kirkland

This whole episode was pretty weird. But this dude’s reading of the Frankfurt school was bizarre. If you’re going to do theory, at least do it well. This is the kind of stuff that gives it a bad reputation. I mean, memes as providing some kind of aesthetic break from the monotony of capitalist spectacle? Come on, dude!

Bernhard Pirkl

I was surprised that nobody mentioned Angela Nagle's book

Nathan Beesley

Imagine thinking that the left's problem over the last 50 years was that it wasn't engaging with culture enough...

Yoni Egg

There is no left satire as it's not actually challenged by the status quo.

Ruben Traynor

The guest completely misunderstood what Fisher meant by acid communism, which was meant to be a direct response to a left which is afraid of power, instead emphasising UBI and automation as a means to allow a more universal post work society, a basically accelerationist position centred around key political goals. I am not sure why he thought Fisher meant this to be a sort of hippy nostalgia rather than trying to make something new, seems perverse to make any of these things purely aesthetic.

Eli A

This is the first time I've felt compelled to comment. Love the show overall! But this guest was the definition of academic cultural mutual masturbation. Very little concrete to engage with compared to your usually amazingly grounded historical and theoretical political discussions.

Paul Brewer

I'm not as hostile to this episode as some of the other commentators but I don't think Acid Leftism is conceptually the answer -- yet/if at all. On the other hand, the collective dismissal of 'culture' as a possible 'soft underbelly of Capitalism' might be a little hasty. I do think that the way Capitalism co-opted the 1960s Counterculture was more contingent than perhaps it might seem nowadays. The cause of this phenomeon might well be that the Counterculture itself was rooted in an ideology in which 'all that is solid melts into air', in the sense that it was an acid aimed at dissolving pre-modern institutional survivals that still gripped society. As such it could easily be culturally appropriated by Capitalism. That perhaps raises the issue of whether by defniition a Marxist Culture can be a countercultural agent against Capital, since socialism is a successive stage of development and thus in a sense 'completes' the work of Capital. On the other hand, the nature of cultural discourse might indicate that culture is the terrain on which an ideology of collective experience could be re-established, rather than on the stony ground of workplace re-mobilisation (see the outcome of the organising campaign in Bessemer recently). The evidence just doesn't seem conclusive yet for any of the voices in this episode.