Thinking About Emo

I was thinking about the current media fad for “Emo” when I read this (subsequently censored and deleted): people are tired of pretentious assholes telling them what to think and want to go back to something simpler, instinctive and genuine. emotion is beginning to matter more than intellectual analysis.

It’s all about whether we live in an era of increasing “authenticity”, or not. Postmodernism basically carried forward the Enlightenment project of “modernising” the human animal into a rational being after the mid-century revanchist diversion by several competing socially conservative ideologies that fought for supremacy during the Great European Civil War.

Modernism was not without its discontents. During the early part of the 20th Century these neo-Romantics were called various names: fascists, national socialists, and monarchists. They rejected the idea of a rational human being and instead agitated for the creation of a sensational being. These Vlkisch tendencies emerged quite strongly during the 1960s and 1970s in the guise of “New Age” spirituality, revelatory religion and ethnic politics and the increasing primacy of the rhetoric of body motion and gesture as discourse. The current US fad for “authentic” displays of public emotion and declarations of faith can be seen as a typical expression of a narrative strain within a culture more predisposed than many to Great Awakenings.