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Adam Hunter's avatar

This was great of course. But I’m having trouble squaring the idea that Romanticism is a variety of socialism, or even that it’s sympathetic to socialism. The most obvious point for me is that they tended to oppose progress — Frankenstein is a clear example, but Byron in Childe Harold states outright that history is in a process of decay. (He also says that this might only be solvable if a heroic warrior of the old Greek type were to surface and lead Greece, for example, to regain its former glory.) Shelley also in Queen Mab says that civilization is a corrupting influence and that we’re meant to return to the state of nature. A return to the status quo ante isn’t exactly a type of progress.

Maybe this is just a feature of the English Romantics, but it seems to me that their primary outlook is somewhere between the aesthetic and the religious, and that their desire to reverse progress and return to a former way of life has to do with reclaiming a vitality that they saw as lost. Obviously they were interested in politics, but when they addressed it they tended, like Blake, to frame it in terms of religious, cosmic and aesthetic categories.

Anyway that’s my reading but I’m happy to admit I’m wrong.

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Justin Patrick Moore's avatar

It’s interesting about the romantic love aspect of things, because in a way it never really is private. Even when people attempt to make it private, it spills out into the collective through our many threads of connection, into our stew-pot families. Thinking of these connections as “all our relations” as Indigenous Americans might say, the effects of private intimacies become public, in the way a particular coupling can be a good thing for community or through drama, cause more problems for everyone. Thus the private is political.

About the vibes: cultivating a sense of aesthetics, or as the arch-Goth and symbolist (and sorcerer) Joseph Peladan might have it, an ethopoesis. This creation of character is critical in a time when reality is mediated by spectacle and absorbed in simulacra. The way we might create character can be embodied in our activities offline (going to art/music shows, readings, long hikes, walking our pet lobsters). Yet we have the internet for now, and one way to spread the stimmung is through this discourse, and revitalize some of these interrelated movements by getting people interested in them.

P.S.: I’m looking forward to your book, I’ve ordered a personal copy and will put in a request for the library I work at to pick it up. The 1970s were also the age of appropriate technology, a movement those of us interested in degrowth, and things like selective Luddism could glean so much from.

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