User:Trashpuppy/Greil Marcus - Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century

SYNOPSIS

LIPSTICK TRACES: A SECRET HISTORY OF THE 20TH CENTURY expounds on a history of negation. Bringing countercultures of the 20th century; punk (and in particular the Sex Pistols), Dadaism, the Letterist International and the Situationist International into relation with one another and with heretic practices and beliefs dating as far back as the 13th / 15th century. Among them: the Brethren of the Free Spirits, the Catharists and John van Leyden in Münster.

The Brethren of the Free Spirits for example were antinomian: ("Nothing is a sin except what is thought to be a sin" / "Those who are driven or led by the Spirit of God are no longer under the law")

Commonality, to use language, be that semantic or the language of life, and distort it in such a way as to create what can only be a noise or shout, something outside of the existing discourse. It is a social critique. But there is also a danger in a complete negation - totalitarianism; if nothing is true, all is possible; everything goes.

"The history of the twentieth century was to be the account of the creation of reality through its erasure"

QUOTES

•" NIHILISM means to close the world around its own self-consuming impulse; NEGATION is the act that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as if seems - but only when the act is so implicitly complete it leaves open the possibility that the world may be nothing, that nihilism as well as creation may occupy the suddenly cleared ground.

The nihilist, no matter how many people he or she might kill, is always a solipsist: no one exists but the actor and only the actor's motives are real.

.... Negation is always political: it assumes the existence of other people, calls them into being"

•"Decor determines gestures"

•"If nothing is true, all is possible"

•"It has been denied the chance to make its own context, to connect to anything outside of itself"

•"To realize poetry means nothing less than simultaneously and inseparably creating events and their languages"

•"The problem of the soul is by nature volcanic. Every moment naturally produces noise. While number, and consequently melody, are symbols presupposing a faculty for abstraction, noise is a direct call to action."

•"When the crisis of language and poetry is pushed beyond certain limits it ends up placing the very structure of society in question. For both the letterists and the situationists that crisis was the goal: to reach it one had to say things others did not understand, and thus provoke them into doubting the ability of their own language to say anything at all"

• "But as you grasp the form of the negation, grasp that form as such is a negation of negation, an affirmation that creation is possible, the world begins to reform - to completely reform"

• "Recklessness, discharge, and upheaval ... at the core of the Hersey, deprived by Christianity and rationalism of all ordinary language, and now audible only in the brutist languages of insanity, crime, dream, perversion, war and revolution"