Recently, I have been plagued by a certain bugbear related to my political development. I am a proponent of the Situationist International’s theory of recuperation, a fascinating idea that discusses the nature of capitalism’s subsumption of avant-garde and boundary pushing art into the bounds of accepted, sterilised, and unchallenging work. When capital is rendered unable to destroy the works of art and other ideas that threaten the traditional values it upholds, it will instead adapt, and filter those works into the public eye as sanitised, pro-capital work that retains none of the revolutionary spirit it upheld originally - an example of this can be seen in the punk movement, with its shift from boundary pushing art and a spirit of self sufficiency from capitalism in its inception, to lazy overproduced pop and £70 fishnet tops in the modern era. Capital marches to subsume all art into a form that it can control.
However, to frame the issue I have been faced with when thinking of this, I introduce the band “Intolitarian”, and other bands of their ken. Intolitarian is run by a gentleman named “Antichrist Kramer” - an overt fascist whose his music espouses the vile hatred and sickness that his ideology peddles in. However, his music exists within a current within art that I would describe as genuinely avant-garde and boundary pushing - he is a noise musician who creates art that pushes sonic boundaries, and whilst his music is terrible, it is far enough from the zeitgeist within music that it can still reasonably be considered a part of an artistic tendency that has not yet been recuperated into capital - an unsanitised avant-garde production, produced by a fascist. This to me, should be impossible, and so I have been ruminating on what this means and how it can be understood.
But there is an angle under which I understand it as the recuperation that it is. For Intolitarian’s music isn’t just bad, it’s bad in a particular way. Reviews lambast it as aimless, pointless - extremity perhaps, but extremity made up of bland guitar work and horribly unchallenging noise textures, a failed attempt to do justice to the richness of experimentalism that this style of music is heir to. Mixed with this is a very literal approach to peddling hate - to really lampshade how vile he is, Kramer includes spoken word passages as interludes that espouse racial hatred and other such foulness; that is where the recuperation has occured. Intolitarian take a form of extreme art, that historically succeeds in delivering the raw form of human anger, and takes it from it’s avant-garde roots into a thing that exists purely to deliver his bigoted views - bigotry that serves capital! As this bigotry is a fundamentally capitalist thing, the original spirit of the art has been reduced to a way of merely delivering a certain very violent area of capital. It takes a form of fundamentally aimless and artistically challenging hatred and repurposes it into a staunchly counter-revolutionary effort, and in doing so whilst it may arguably uphold boundary pushing elements from ancestors in the genre, but does not succeed in furthering them. Thus those who would develop on from intolitarian's work would create more banal and fundamentally conventional work - this is a recuperation of a beautifully avant-garde style of music into another banal effort that merely serves one of the many tentacles of capital.
Aimless anger is what must be understood here. Intolitarian are able to use this style of art to deliver their own vile message because the style of art itself contains a type of anger that is in itself aimless and neutral. Using art to deliver pure ideas of human emotion is a beautiful thing, but we must beware aimless and fruitless anger. The potential for it to be warped into an anger that befits a capitalist cause is something we must be aware of and know to avoid. When we define ourselves as oppositional, full of rage and rancour at nothing in particular, it may feel gratifying, but we poison ourselves in it. Worse, we poison our work into something that invites itself to be co-opted by capital! Inviting this very recuperation into our houses. To underline my own point, I attach a slightly edited excerpt from a piece of poetry I have written prior, concerning the subject of rage:
“anger is a corrosion;
to spit acid,
one must corrode their own tongue."
To engage in your justified anger is beautiful - revolutionary anger is a powerful force and one that will be instrumental in the deposition of capitalist rule. But forget not your love. The revolution will be won by force, but the soul of communism is one of joy and love. A true revolutionary spirit is one that pursues a truly free world where all are able to express the truest forms of connection between people, a spirit that has a real joy for the ideas behind communism, not just one that positions itself as an angry opposition to capital and hopes that by spitting enough venom its way that it can avoid recapitulation into capital. Capitalist perversion comes for us all in a capitalist world, and so we must use most of all the thing the capitalism can’t turn against us - our love!