Interior hallway
Unité d'Habitation, Le Corbusier
See more posts like this on Tumblr
#k-pop #Girls' Generation #SNSD #Frantz Fanon #Giorgio Agamben #Flamen Diale #biopolitics #bodyMore you might like
What is my talent? Well, a bear can juggle and stand on a ball and he’s talented, but he’s not famous. Do you know what I mean?
Thomas Mann observes that … religion and politics are not two fundamentally distinct things but that, on the contrary, they “exchange clothes.” It is possible, however, that this exchange can take place only because underneath the garments there are no body and no substance. Theology and politics are, in this sense, what results from the exchange and from the movement of something like an absolute garment that, as such, has decisive juridical-political implications. Like many of the concepts we have encountered in our investigation, this garment of glory is a signature that marks bodies and substances politically and theologically, and orients and displaces them according to an economy that we are only now beginning to glimpse (Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, p. 194).
Can the K-pop star speak?
Each individual K-pop track that I like, I’m pretty sure I like because of its particular musical qualities (I don’t see how anyone of taste could fail to like 2NE1’s “Can’t Nobody,” for instance). But, taken as a whole, the response of white western pop fans (like me) to K-pop does raise in a particularly clear form some general problems with popism. Popists reject the idea that pop songs are the authentic expression of the artist, and this can lead to a position in which the critic gets to determine the meaning of the song. K-pop songs are perfect for this, because the songs have no meaning at all (well, obviously they do if you speak Korean, but to me they might as well be singing “bar bar bar”). So the death of the author becomes an excuse for an orientalism, in which the popist critic must necessarily speak for, and over the voice of, the K-pop star herself.
I saw this in the room dedicated to punk at the Tate’s Women in Revolt!: Art and Activism in the UK exhibition - it looks like it’s scanned from a zine, but I didn’t see a more specific attribution.
“If you’re sulking at the moment, or if at any time you have sulked, write and let us know why, and we’ll agree you were right”