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Brassier - Genre Is Obsolete
"Genre Is Obsolete" belongs to Brassier's realism line, where abstraction, truth, and rational critique are used to pressure-test the archive's more charismatic inheritances.
Archive condition
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Core idea
These pages matter because they show one major route by which the archive is forced into clearer argumentative language. Brassier's realism turns the afterlife of Land and the CCRU into a problem of truth, abstraction, and rational critique rather than scene myth or stylistic intensity alone.
The mechanism is pressure through philosophy. Sellars, Laruelle, Badiou, nihilism, and realism all become ways of testing whether concepts survive once they are detached from their original scene charisma and forced into stricter conceptual articulation.
That matters because this section is about philosophical afterlives, not only loyalty or rejection. Brassier keeps the archive alive precisely by refusing to leave its concepts in their original rhetorical atmosphere.
How to read this text
Read for how realism, truth, or abstraction are being defined before following the page into its local debate or target.
Track where the page tests Land or post-CCRU concepts against a stricter account of philosophy. That pressure is usually the real hinge of the text.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 2
61 *An earlier version of this article was originally published in Multitudes, No. 28, Spring 2007 Genre is Obsolete* Ray Brassier
Definition · paragraph 3
Two groups are exemplary in this regard: To Live and Shave in L.A., led by assiduous American iconoclast Tom Smith, whose dictum ‘genre is obsolete’ provides the modus operandi for a body of work characterised by its fastidious dementia; and Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, headed by the enigmatic Swiss deviant and ‘evil Kung-Fu troll’[1] Rudolf Eb.er, whose hallucinatory audiovisual concoctions amplify the long dimmed psychotic potencies of actionism.
Definition · paragraph 10
In this regard, the ‘noise’ genre is undoubtedly a cultural commodity, albeit of a particularly rarefied sort. But so is its theorization. And the familiar gestures that vitiate the radicality of the former are paralleled by the reactionary tropes which sap the critical potency of the latter.
Definition · paragraph 3
It is at once a specific sub-genre of musical vanguardism and a name for what refuses to be sub- sumed by genre. As a result, the functioning of the term ‘noise’ oscillates between that of a proper name and that of a concept; it equivocates between nominal anomaly and conceptual interference.
Definition · paragraph 12
But by forcefully short-circuiting incommensurable genres, Shave and Runzelstirn engender the noise of generic anomaly. It is the noise that is not ‘noise’, the noise of the sui generis, that actualises the disorientating potencies long claimed for ‘noise’.[13]
Appears in sections
Brassier, Grant, and Speculative Realism Primary section
Analytic and speculative receptions of Land and the CCRU through Brassier, Grant, and adjacent philosophical lines.