Recently, I had occasion to revisit some of my notes from the last days of my time in Des Moines. Weeks ago, a rainy Saturday found me reading Baudrillard's The Spirit of Terrorism. In looking over my notes, the following passage jumped out at me. Baudrillard writes:
"In the traditional order, there is still the possibility of giving something back to God to nature, or to whatever it might be, in the form of the sacrifice. This is what ensures the symbolic equilibrium between living beings and things. Today we no longer have anyone to whom we may give back, to whom we may repay the symbolic debt - and that is the curse of our culture. It is not that giving is impossible in this culture, but that the counter-gift is impossible, since all the paths of sacrifice have been neutralized and defused." [1]
He follows this by stating that "there inevitably comes a response in the form of a negative countertransference, a violent abreaction to this captive life, to this protected existence, to this saturation of existence. This reversion takes the form either of open violence (terrorism is a part of this) or of the impotent denial characteristic of our modernity, of self-hatred and remorse - all negative passions that are the debased form of the impossible counter-gift." [2]
It is this idea of actual and symbolic self-immolation in response to saturation and secular sameness has particular resonance for me. Baudrillard is right on the proverbial money. It is cousin to the abundance of choice: when we can choose to watch/see/read/be anything, our human experience is troubled, gray, removed and dissociated. Like a apathetic adolescent splitting flesh or reveling in nutritional deprivation, lacking relief our global body seeks self-destruction. Indeed, corporeal (individual or societal) manipulation is the last recourse of the desperate. In asserting power over life in the form of death--symbolic, actual, total--the originating agent (be it person, organization, or government) rescinds Christian dogma and centuries of cultural conditioning. Death alone is our mode of access to singularity; the willful appropriation of such phenomenological profundity is not only imbued congruent gravitas, but also with awesome, hyperbolic, and symbolic force.
Baudrillard writes: "Here then, it is all about death, not only the violent irruption of death in real time - 'live', so to speak - but the irruption of a death which is far more than real: a death which is symbolic and sacrificial - that is to say, the absolute, irrevocable event." [3]
It is a good read. As always, Baudrillard is a little bit of a downer, but like DFW, he knows. And that is inspiring.
1. Baudrillard, Jean. 2002. The spirit of terrorism and requiem for the Twin Towers. London: Verso. 102
2. Ibid. 102-103
3. Ibid. 17
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Saturday, May 19, 2012
back to the jest
After taking a little break from David Foster Wallace's magnum opus, I was happy to revisit it in recent weeks. It is, like the title cartridge, dangerously compelling. The text is sensual and honest, and for me, a testament to fin-de-siecle hypercorporeality. As disconcerting as the Jest often is, it is also deeply comforting and equally inspiring. David Foster Wallace knew: he saw what was happening and had the courage to write it down. Certainly, it is not for the faint of heart, but it is a near-perfect articulation of the moment: prophetic hyperbole written with staggering virtuosity, heart-wrenching clarity, and the poignant essence of our corporeal reality. Like the best art, it is about being human--being both frail and extraordinary; touched by ineffable and necessary suffering.
"It's a kind of emotional novocaine, this form of depression, and while it's not overtly painful its deadness is disconcerting...Kate Gompert's always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy--happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love--are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location." [1]
"It's a kind of emotional novocaine, this form of depression, and while it's not overtly painful its deadness is disconcerting...Kate Gompert's always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy--happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love--are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location." [1]
1. Wallace, David Foster. 1996. Infinite jest: a novel. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. (692-693)
Thursday, May 3, 2012
deleuzional
I want to write a little about a couple of books that are changing my life. But before I do that, here is some recommended reading:
Gilles Deleuze/Claire Colebrook
Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity/John Marks
Dialogues/Deleuze and Parnet
What is Philosophy?/Deleuze and Guattari
Bergsonism/Deleuze
Music and the Ineffable/Jankelevich
The Sonic Self/Cumming
The Nick of Time/Grosz
Introduction to Metaphysics/Bergson
Matter and Memory/Bergson
If you want to think about sound, music, temporality, and corporeality, I would recommend almost any combination of the above.
Gilles Deleuze/Claire Colebrook
Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity/John Marks
Dialogues/Deleuze and Parnet
What is Philosophy?/Deleuze and Guattari
Bergsonism/Deleuze
Music and the Ineffable/Jankelevich
The Sonic Self/Cumming
The Nick of Time/Grosz
Introduction to Metaphysics/Bergson
Matter and Memory/Bergson
If you want to think about sound, music, temporality, and corporeality, I would recommend almost any combination of the above.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
more reading
I've been doing a lot of reading lately and no so much writing, so for the moment please enjoy the words of persons-far-more-eloquent-than-I.
Manning Marable/The Great Wells of Democracy; Cornel West/Race Matters; Susanne Langer/Feeling and Form; Ellen Dissanayake/Art & Intimacy; Ta-Nehisi Coates/The Beautiful Struggle; Elizabeth Grosz (ed)/Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures
Cornel West on nihilism:
"...For as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic threat is that without hope there can be no future, that without meaning there can be no struggle."1
Elizabeth Grosz on Time:
"Time, or more precisely duration, is an extraordinarily complex term which functions simultaneously as singular, unified, and whole, as well as in specific fragments and multiplicitous proliferation. There is one and only one time, there there are also numerous times: a duration for each thing or movement, which melds with a global or collective time."2
"This is what time is if it is anything at all: not simply mechanical repetition, the causal ripple of objects on others, but the indeterminate, the unfolding, and the continual eruption of the new"3
Bergson as quoted by Grosz
"Thus the living being essentially has duration; it has duration precisely because it is continuously elaborating what is new and because there is no elaboration without searching, no searching without groping. Time is this very hesitation"4
Langer on music as the "Image of Time"
"The semblance of this vital, experiential time is the primary illusion of music. All music creates an order of virtual time, in which its sonorous forms move in relation to each other--always and only to each other, for nothing else exists there. Virtual time is as separate from the sequence of actual happenings as virtual space from actual space...Inward tensions and outward changes, heartbeats and clocks, daylight and routines and weariness furnish various incoherent temporal data, which we coordinate for practical purposes by letting the clock predominate. But music spreads out time for our direct and complete apprehension, by letting our hearing monopolize it--organize, fill, and shape it, all along. It creates an image of time measured by the motion of forms that seem to give it substance, yet a substance that consist entirely of sound, so it is transitoriness itself. Music makes time audible, and its form and continuity sensible.5
1. West, Cornel. 1993. Race matters. Boston: Beacon Press. 15
2. Grosz, E. A. 1999. Becomings: explorations in time, memory, and futures. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 18
3. Ibid 28
4. Ibid 25
5. Langer, Susanne Katherina Knauth. 1953. Feeling and form; a theory of art. New York: Scribner. 109-110
Manning Marable/The Great Wells of Democracy; Cornel West/Race Matters; Susanne Langer/Feeling and Form; Ellen Dissanayake/Art & Intimacy; Ta-Nehisi Coates/The Beautiful Struggle; Elizabeth Grosz (ed)/Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures
Cornel West on nihilism:
"...For as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic threat is that without hope there can be no future, that without meaning there can be no struggle."1
Elizabeth Grosz on Time:
"Time, or more precisely duration, is an extraordinarily complex term which functions simultaneously as singular, unified, and whole, as well as in specific fragments and multiplicitous proliferation. There is one and only one time, there there are also numerous times: a duration for each thing or movement, which melds with a global or collective time."2
"This is what time is if it is anything at all: not simply mechanical repetition, the causal ripple of objects on others, but the indeterminate, the unfolding, and the continual eruption of the new"3
Bergson as quoted by Grosz
"Thus the living being essentially has duration; it has duration precisely because it is continuously elaborating what is new and because there is no elaboration without searching, no searching without groping. Time is this very hesitation"4
Langer on music as the "Image of Time"
"The semblance of this vital, experiential time is the primary illusion of music. All music creates an order of virtual time, in which its sonorous forms move in relation to each other--always and only to each other, for nothing else exists there. Virtual time is as separate from the sequence of actual happenings as virtual space from actual space...Inward tensions and outward changes, heartbeats and clocks, daylight and routines and weariness furnish various incoherent temporal data, which we coordinate for practical purposes by letting the clock predominate. But music spreads out time for our direct and complete apprehension, by letting our hearing monopolize it--organize, fill, and shape it, all along. It creates an image of time measured by the motion of forms that seem to give it substance, yet a substance that consist entirely of sound, so it is transitoriness itself. Music makes time audible, and its form and continuity sensible.5
1. West, Cornel. 1993. Race matters. Boston: Beacon Press. 15
2. Grosz, E. A. 1999. Becomings: explorations in time, memory, and futures. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 18
3. Ibid 28
4. Ibid 25
5. Langer, Susanne Katherina Knauth. 1953. Feeling and form; a theory of art. New York: Scribner. 109-110
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
modernist, beautiful genius, or both?
Having just finished D.H. Lawrence's Twilight in Italy, I am completely enraptured. Sometimes I allow myself to forget the importance of art and spirit for the late-nineteenth century cognoscenti: in a world experiencing the death of God, the idea of Art and of the Mind (with a capital A and M, respectively), really meant something. Especially now, looking back at some of the texts I studied in the throes of my fin-de-siecle research, I can't help but compare Lawrence to people like Bahr, Klimt, even the ostensibly disparate Schoenberg and Stravinsky. To all these men, a nostalgia for the past prevailed--although expressed in a wide spectrum of references form the Greeks, to Byzantium, to baroque dance forms, and to ancient rituals--and was indeed, a major force of motion in their intellectual and artistic outputs. They were seeking an answer (or more aptly, the answer) and an antidote for nineteenth century material excess. In any event, if you want a break from theory, spend some time with D.H. Lawrence in Italy...just another piece of the 1890-1914 puzzle. Below are a couple of my favorite passages.
"The twilight deepened, though there was still the strange, glassy translucency of the snow-lit air. A fragment of moon was in the sky. A carriage-load of French tourists passed me. There was the loud noise of water, as ever, something eternal and maddening in its sound, like the sound of Time itself, rustling and rushing and wavering, but never for a second ceasing. The rushing of Time that continues throughout eternity, this is the sound of the icy streams of Switzerland, something that mocks and destroys our warm being." (155)
Another favorite:
"It is as if the whole social form were breaking down, and the human element swarmed within the disintegration, like maggots in cheese. The roads, the railways are built, the mines and quarries are excavated, but the whole organism of life, the social organism, is slowly crumbling and caving in, in a kind of process of dry rot, most terrifying to see. So that it seems as though we should be left at last with a great system of roads and railways and industries, and a world of utter chaos seething upon these fabrications: as if we had created a steep framework, and the whole body of society were crumbling and rotting in between." (165)
"The twilight deepened, though there was still the strange, glassy translucency of the snow-lit air. A fragment of moon was in the sky. A carriage-load of French tourists passed me. There was the loud noise of water, as ever, something eternal and maddening in its sound, like the sound of Time itself, rustling and rushing and wavering, but never for a second ceasing. The rushing of Time that continues throughout eternity, this is the sound of the icy streams of Switzerland, something that mocks and destroys our warm being." (155)
Another favorite:
"It is as if the whole social form were breaking down, and the human element swarmed within the disintegration, like maggots in cheese. The roads, the railways are built, the mines and quarries are excavated, but the whole organism of life, the social organism, is slowly crumbling and caving in, in a kind of process of dry rot, most terrifying to see. So that it seems as though we should be left at last with a great system of roads and railways and industries, and a world of utter chaos seething upon these fabrications: as if we had created a steep framework, and the whole body of society were crumbling and rotting in between." (165)
Saturday, January 21, 2012
making, meaning, knowing
After reading text after text about institutional racism and sexism, I turned to my brilliant sister for some reading suggestions. Something uplifting. Her answer? Ellen Dissanayake. With only a chapter remaining of Art & Intimacy, I am positively giddy. Like so many other authors/books that have changed my life, I cannot wait to talk about, write about, and assimilate Dissanayake's ideas. For now, the following:
"The challenge...was, in all acts of life, to transform the contaminated and impure into the culturally infused and human. This--no more and no less--was the meaning of life."1
In an era permeated (perhaps even defined) by toxicity, Dissanayake's observation of the Yekuana culture becomes all the more pertinent and (for me at least) poignant. Sullied by capitalism, industrialism, and a kind of mutated Enlightenment individualism, we are bereft. We scramble for truth and hold fast to illusion. Could it be that the paucity of transformational making is to blame? In a society where the simple acquisition of material goods is valorized and the complexity and nuance of empirical knowing virtually absent, fulfillment and meaning are indeed diaphanous and distant.
As I read Dissanayake, I couldn't help but think of the unique and damning problems that come with the performing arts. What happens when "making" does not result in an object? For example, in the life of a musician--where that which is made is temporal, transient, and without artifact--the issue of "hands-on" knowing produces an unpredictable (and yes, often toxic) series of psychological ripples. We make yet produce no object, we strive for the Truth/Notion/Idea through a means that requires isolation and elitism (in contrast to Dissanayake's assertion that art and relationships go hand in hand). We toil so that we might contribute to that dangerous dialectic of the intentional and the ineffable.
1.Dissanayake, Ellen. 2000. Art and intimacy: how the arts began. Seattle, Wa: University of Washington Press. 78
"The challenge...was, in all acts of life, to transform the contaminated and impure into the culturally infused and human. This--no more and no less--was the meaning of life."1
In an era permeated (perhaps even defined) by toxicity, Dissanayake's observation of the Yekuana culture becomes all the more pertinent and (for me at least) poignant. Sullied by capitalism, industrialism, and a kind of mutated Enlightenment individualism, we are bereft. We scramble for truth and hold fast to illusion. Could it be that the paucity of transformational making is to blame? In a society where the simple acquisition of material goods is valorized and the complexity and nuance of empirical knowing virtually absent, fulfillment and meaning are indeed diaphanous and distant.
As I read Dissanayake, I couldn't help but think of the unique and damning problems that come with the performing arts. What happens when "making" does not result in an object? For example, in the life of a musician--where that which is made is temporal, transient, and without artifact--the issue of "hands-on" knowing produces an unpredictable (and yes, often toxic) series of psychological ripples. We make yet produce no object, we strive for the Truth/Notion/Idea through a means that requires isolation and elitism (in contrast to Dissanayake's assertion that art and relationships go hand in hand). We toil so that we might contribute to that dangerous dialectic of the intentional and the ineffable.
1.Dissanayake, Ellen. 2000. Art and intimacy: how the arts began. Seattle, Wa: University of Washington Press. 78
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
recommended reading (what i've been doing instead of writing)
Soon enough I'll be writing about all of the following: Marshal McLuhan/Understanding Media; Katharine Park/Secrets of Women; Angela Davis/Women, Race & Class; Patricia Hill Collins/Black Feminist Thought; bell hooks/Ain't I A Woman; bell hooks/Art of My Mind; Eco/The Name of the Rose (a delightful escape from feminist theory and Infinite Jest); Eco/History of Beauty; Michael Bull/Sound Moves. Also this.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
consider the following from infinite jest
"...Joelle's limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgement of her commands seems like magic, both clogs simply gone, nowhere in sight, and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the unclean medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still hanging in the glasses corner, hair of the flame she's eaten now trailing like legs of wasps through the air of the glass she uses to locate the defaced veil and what's inside it, loading up the cone again, the ashes from the last load make the world's best filter: this is a fact. Breathes in and out like a savvy driver [...] and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub's lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids' blood, bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching." (240)
"And his younger and way more externally impressive brother Hal almost idealizes Mario, secretly. God-type issues aside, Mario is a (semi-) walking miracle, Hal believes. People who're somehow burned at birth, withered or ablated way past anything that might be fair, they either curl up in their fire or else they rise. Withered saurian homodontic. Mario floats, for Hal." (316)
I admit that Infinite Jest has me completely rapt. But when you read the above, can you really believe that I would have any other reaction? Just read it. DFW writes about brotherly love and drug addiction with the same poignancy, elan, and breathtaking honesty; in doing so, he articulates the paradoxical complexity and sameness of life at the turn of the millennium. A failed sublation; the promise of transcendence forever out of reach.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
hungry selves and dfw's "stomach-level sadness"
There's something particularly sad about [being a human being in America at the turn of the millennium], something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.1
These words of David Foster Wallace as quoted in All Things Shining resounded tonight as I read Kim Chernin's borderline whackadoo neo-Freudian The Hungry Self. Certainly interesting--if a bit extreme; in the end, worth the handful of hours spent reading it. With the aid of some considerable (and at times disturbing) matricidal overtones, Chernin argues that prevalence--one might say, epidemic--of disordered eating in our contemporary world is a proliferation of the "problem with no name." An emptiness incapable of articulation; a transmigratory frustration. Transferred from mothers to daughters, the suffering and indeed deferred dreams of the second wave function as a hollow void to be filled with preoccupations about food.
So often I have thought about the specifically American relationship to food: we are body obsessed over-eaters, under-eaters, fad-dieters, constantly occupied by caloric ruminations. Reading Chernin, I had to ask, do our obsessions stem from a fundamental inadequacy? A (literal) "stomach-level sadness"? Is the promise of the American Dream (and the inability to achieve it) our ultimate undoing?
1. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Sean Kelly. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. New York: Free Press, 2011.
These words of David Foster Wallace as quoted in All Things Shining resounded tonight as I read Kim Chernin's borderline whackadoo neo-Freudian The Hungry Self. Certainly interesting--if a bit extreme; in the end, worth the handful of hours spent reading it. With the aid of some considerable (and at times disturbing) matricidal overtones, Chernin argues that prevalence--one might say, epidemic--of disordered eating in our contemporary world is a proliferation of the "problem with no name." An emptiness incapable of articulation; a transmigratory frustration. Transferred from mothers to daughters, the suffering and indeed deferred dreams of the second wave function as a hollow void to be filled with preoccupations about food.
So often I have thought about the specifically American relationship to food: we are body obsessed over-eaters, under-eaters, fad-dieters, constantly occupied by caloric ruminations. Reading Chernin, I had to ask, do our obsessions stem from a fundamental inadequacy? A (literal) "stomach-level sadness"? Is the promise of the American Dream (and the inability to achieve it) our ultimate undoing?
1. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Sean Kelly. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. New York: Free Press, 2011.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
for the ladies
A short post, since I'm more than a little fried having read Bitchfest yesterday and The Body Project today. All these books about the female body (you'll remember that it hasn't been that long since I evangelized for The Beauty Myth and Backlash) are part of a burgeoning paper on image, body, and performance (could I be any more broad?!). The abstract is forthcoming, but I'll be using Wolf, Mulvey, Faludi, Butler, Foucault (duh), Virilio and everyone's favorite media studies prophet, Marshall McLuhan. Maybe even a few nuggets from Infinite Jest and All Things Shining. Some questions I am asking: What is the correlation between the shift from internal to external body and the omnipresence of the image? How is the eighteenth-century concept of the woman-as-consumer transformed in the twentieth and twenty-first century when everything from skin to hair to menstruation has become commodified? How has the advertising image replaced the mother as a figure of authority and specifically female knowledge? What is the effect of this? How does the modern American preoccupation with hygiene manifest itself in the treatment and socialization of women? What is the connection between technology, hygiene, efficiency and the body in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? What are the specific implications for women? How has Foucault's concept of biopower been transfigured and translated in our contemporary moment?
Sunday, October 9, 2011
infinite jester: communication
Once again, DFW comes to the rescue with a near-perfect articulation of the communication quagmire in which we presently find ourselves. I've written before about my troubles with technology and the modern world. Yes, we've heard it all before. With each day, each time I use Skype/Facebook/gChat, I am reminded of my conflicting complex relationship to technology, only complicated further by my past as a musician. As performers, we communicate directly, intimately. As instigators of sound, we "touch" our audiences--the sound we produce vibrates within the individual bodies of the attentive mass below us. Perhaps it is this idea of communication that causes so much strife for us in particular when communication becomes disembodied (the telephone, Skype, and the extreme case, instant messaging). Being so used to a forced and immediate intimacy, a surface communication--flat and superficial--creates unease and deep discomfort. Furthermore, as musicians, we are disconcerted by the distortion of power that disembodied communication creates. We are the instigator, the attacker, we initiate sound that penetrates a helpless vulnerable body. When communication becomes distant and disembodied, this power relationship is disrupted.
Surprise surprise, as I read Infinite Jest several mornings ago, I found David Foster Wallace articulating so perfectly my thoughts. Behold, the DFW "truth nugget":
It turned out that there was something terrible stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn't been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they'd been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only elephony. They'd never noticed it before, he delusion--it's like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenance only in the context of its loss. Food old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume hat the person on teh other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation...let you enter a kind of highway-hypnoyic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in teh room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet--and this was he retrospectively marvelous part--even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end's attention might be similarly divided. [...] This bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infinitely gratifying from an emotional standpoint: you got to believe you were receiving somebody's complete attention without having to return it. Regarded with the objectivity of hindsight, the illusion appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it would be like being able both to lie and to trust other people at the same time.
Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable.1
Indeed, David Foster Wallace was writing about what it was to be "a fucking human being."2
1. Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest: A Novel. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996 (145-146)
2. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Sean Kelly. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. New York: Free Press, 2011 (22)
Surprise surprise, as I read Infinite Jest several mornings ago, I found David Foster Wallace articulating so perfectly my thoughts. Behold, the DFW "truth nugget":
It turned out that there was something terrible stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn't been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they'd been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only elephony. They'd never noticed it before, he delusion--it's like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenance only in the context of its loss. Food old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume hat the person on teh other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation...let you enter a kind of highway-hypnoyic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in teh room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet--and this was he retrospectively marvelous part--even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end's attention might be similarly divided. [...] This bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infinitely gratifying from an emotional standpoint: you got to believe you were receiving somebody's complete attention without having to return it. Regarded with the objectivity of hindsight, the illusion appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it would be like being able both to lie and to trust other people at the same time.
Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable.1
Indeed, David Foster Wallace was writing about what it was to be "a fucking human being."2
1. Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest: A Novel. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996 (145-146)
2. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Sean Kelly. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. New York: Free Press, 2011 (22)
Saturday, October 8, 2011
octavio paz on music
"The paradox of music, a temporal art like poetry, lies in the fact that music's characteristic manner of taking place is recurrence. The kinship between music and poetry is based on their both being temporal arts, arts of succession: time. In each of the two recurrence, the phrase that returns and is repeated, constitutes an essential element; the motifs intertwine and disentwine so as to interwtine once again; they are a path that ceaselessly returns to its point of departure only to depart once more and return again. The difference between the two lies in the code: the musical scale and the word. Poetry is made up of rhythmic phrases (verses) that are not only units of sound but words, clusters of meanings. The code of music--the scale--is abstract: units of sound empty of meaning. Finally, music is architecture made of time. But invisible and impalpable architecture: crystallisation of the instant in forms that we do not see or touch and that, being pure time, elapse."
Paz, Octavio. Essays on Mexican Art. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993. (6-7)
Paz, Octavio. Essays on Mexican Art. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993. (6-7)
Monday, October 3, 2011
overwhelmed by d.f.w.
I told my sister that I had started Infinite Jest; her response: "Prepare to have no life for the next two weeks."
How right she was. The prose is completely engrossing; my attention rapt, Wallace 'has' me. Akin to losing oneself in the magnificence of nature, or the painterly virtuosity of Gericault, or the conceptual elegance of Barnett Neumann, the experience of Infinite Jest is one of near-mystical transcendence. Completely sensual, the text engages the visceral mind, recalling imagery containing our collective memories of embodiment.
"The same small breezes make the rotted palms along the condominium complex's stone walls rustle and click, and a couple of fronds detach and spiral down, hitting the deck with a slap. All the plants out here are malevolent, heavy and sharp. The parts of the palms above the fronds are tufted in sick stuff like coconut-hair. Roaches and other things live in the trees. Rats, maybe. Loathsome high-altitude critters of all kinds. All the plants either spiny or meaty. Cacti in queer tortured shapes. The tops of the palms like Rod Stewart's hair, from days gone by." (44)
"These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light--the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer." (46)
Aside from this verbal virtuosity, the "truth nugget" abounds in Wallace's work. Two examples hit me this morning, one about the experience of loss, the other the experience of American culture.
'Hey Hal?'
'...'
'How come the Moms never cried when Himself passed away? I cried, and you, even C.T. cried. I saw him personally cry.'
'...'
'You listened to Tosca over and over and cried and said you were sad. We all were.'
'...'
Hey Hal, did the Moms seem like she got happier after Himself passed away, to you?'
'...'
'It seems like she got happier. She seems even taller. She stopped travelling everywhere all the time for this and that thing. The corporate grammar thing. The library-protest thing.'
'Now she never goes anywhere, Boo. Now she's got the Headmaster's House and her office and the tunnel in between, and never leaves the grounds. She's a worse workaholic than she ever was. And more obsessive-compulsive. hen's the last time you saw a a dust-mote in that house?'
'Hey Hal?'
'Now she's just an agoraphobic workaholic and obsessive-compulsive. This strikes you as happification?'
'Her eyes are better. They don't seem as sunk in. They look better. She laughs at C.T. way more than she laughed at Himself. She laughs from lower down inside. She laughs more. Her jokes she tells are better ones than yours, even now, a lot of the time.'
'...'
'How come she never got sad?'
She did get sad, Booboo. She just got sad in her way instead of yours and mine. She got sad, I'm pretty sure.'
'Hal?'
'You remember how the staff lowered the flag to half-mast out front by the portcullis here after it happened? Do you remember that? And it goes to half-mast every year at Convocation? Remember the flag Boo?'
'Hey Hal?'
'Don't cry, Booboo. Remember the flag only halfway up the pole? Booboo, there are two ways to lower a flag to half-mast. Are you listening? Because no shit I really have to sleep here in a second. So listen--one way to lower the flag to half-mast is just to lower the flag. There's another way though. You can also just raise the pole. You can raise the pole to like twice its original height. You get me? You understand what I mean, Mario?'
'Hal?'
'She's plenty sad, I bet.' (42)
And the second, on the rampant escapism in American culture:
"American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels." (53)
How right she was. The prose is completely engrossing; my attention rapt, Wallace 'has' me. Akin to losing oneself in the magnificence of nature, or the painterly virtuosity of Gericault, or the conceptual elegance of Barnett Neumann, the experience of Infinite Jest is one of near-mystical transcendence. Completely sensual, the text engages the visceral mind, recalling imagery containing our collective memories of embodiment.
"The same small breezes make the rotted palms along the condominium complex's stone walls rustle and click, and a couple of fronds detach and spiral down, hitting the deck with a slap. All the plants out here are malevolent, heavy and sharp. The parts of the palms above the fronds are tufted in sick stuff like coconut-hair. Roaches and other things live in the trees. Rats, maybe. Loathsome high-altitude critters of all kinds. All the plants either spiny or meaty. Cacti in queer tortured shapes. The tops of the palms like Rod Stewart's hair, from days gone by." (44)
"These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light--the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer." (46)
Aside from this verbal virtuosity, the "truth nugget" abounds in Wallace's work. Two examples hit me this morning, one about the experience of loss, the other the experience of American culture.
'Hey Hal?'
'...'
'How come the Moms never cried when Himself passed away? I cried, and you, even C.T. cried. I saw him personally cry.'
'...'
'You listened to Tosca over and over and cried and said you were sad. We all were.'
'...'
Hey Hal, did the Moms seem like she got happier after Himself passed away, to you?'
'...'
'It seems like she got happier. She seems even taller. She stopped travelling everywhere all the time for this and that thing. The corporate grammar thing. The library-protest thing.'
'Now she never goes anywhere, Boo. Now she's got the Headmaster's House and her office and the tunnel in between, and never leaves the grounds. She's a worse workaholic than she ever was. And more obsessive-compulsive. hen's the last time you saw a a dust-mote in that house?'
'Hey Hal?'
'Now she's just an agoraphobic workaholic and obsessive-compulsive. This strikes you as happification?'
'Her eyes are better. They don't seem as sunk in. They look better. She laughs at C.T. way more than she laughed at Himself. She laughs from lower down inside. She laughs more. Her jokes she tells are better ones than yours, even now, a lot of the time.'
'...'
'How come she never got sad?'
She did get sad, Booboo. She just got sad in her way instead of yours and mine. She got sad, I'm pretty sure.'
'Hal?'
'You remember how the staff lowered the flag to half-mast out front by the portcullis here after it happened? Do you remember that? And it goes to half-mast every year at Convocation? Remember the flag Boo?'
'Hey Hal?'
'Don't cry, Booboo. Remember the flag only halfway up the pole? Booboo, there are two ways to lower a flag to half-mast. Are you listening? Because no shit I really have to sleep here in a second. So listen--one way to lower the flag to half-mast is just to lower the flag. There's another way though. You can also just raise the pole. You can raise the pole to like twice its original height. You get me? You understand what I mean, Mario?'
'Hal?'
'She's plenty sad, I bet.' (42)
And the second, on the rampant escapism in American culture:
"American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels." (53)
Friday, September 30, 2011
infinite jest, day one
'My application's not bought,' I am telling them, calling into the darkness of the red cave that opens out before closed eyes. 'I am not just a boy who plays tennis. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I'm complex.
'I read,' I say. "I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it." My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect.
'But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk. Let's talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you guys right under the table,' I say. 'I'm not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.'
I open my eyes. 'Please don't think I don't care.'
I look out. Directed my way is horror. I rise from the chair. I see jowls sagging, eyebrows high on trembling foreheads, cheeks bright-white. The chair recedes below me.
'Sweet mother of Christ,' the Director says.*
David Foster Wallace loved words. But more than a deep love--and thus intimate understanding--of words, Wallace's prose reveals his intrinsic instinct for rhythm, time, and thus coercion. He takes us with him. Sentences pile upon one another, gaining momentum and weight; culminating in a crash: "Please don't think I don't care." Palpable and heavy, Wallace's words have dimension and history.
* Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest: A Novel. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996. (11-12)
'I read,' I say. "I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it." My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect.
'But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk. Let's talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you guys right under the table,' I say. 'I'm not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.'
I open my eyes. 'Please don't think I don't care.'
I look out. Directed my way is horror. I rise from the chair. I see jowls sagging, eyebrows high on trembling foreheads, cheeks bright-white. The chair recedes below me.
'Sweet mother of Christ,' the Director says.*
David Foster Wallace loved words. But more than a deep love--and thus intimate understanding--of words, Wallace's prose reveals his intrinsic instinct for rhythm, time, and thus coercion. He takes us with him. Sentences pile upon one another, gaining momentum and weight; culminating in a crash: "Please don't think I don't care." Palpable and heavy, Wallace's words have dimension and history.
* Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest: A Novel. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996. (11-12)
Monday, September 19, 2011
monday morning phenomenology
"To see is to enter a universe of beings which display themselves....Thus every object is the mirror of all others. When I look at the lamp on my table, I attribute to it not only the qualities visible from where I am, but also those which the chimney, the walls, the table can "see"; the back of my lamp is nothing other than the face which it "shows" to the chimney. I can therefore see an object insofar as objects form a system or a world and insofar as each of them treats the others around it like spectators of its hidden aspects and a guarantee of their permanence."
Carman, Taylor, and Mark B. N. Hansen. 2005. The Cambridge companion to Merleau-Ponty. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 76.
Carman, Taylor, and Mark B. N. Hansen. 2005. The Cambridge companion to Merleau-Ponty. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 76.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
backlash + the beauty myth: first impressions
Recently, I had the opportunity to read Backlash and The Beauty Myth in close succession. Worse (or better, perhaps) yet, I chose to reread The Transparency of Evil and The History of Sexuality in concert with Faludi and Wolf. The result, as those close to me will attest, was an overabundance of conversations centered on sentiments such as “the world is going to hell” and “I’m so angry about the culture of the nineties.” Indeed, Faludi and Wolf created a haunting picture of the world into which the women of my generation were born. Below I have written some preliminary thoughts on my experience and reactions to the aforementioned texts. However, more than just the feelings of anger and hopelessness Wolf and Faludi stirred within me, their accounts of the third-wave woman’s complex condition inspired several avenues for musical and cultural research--avenues I look forward to exploring over the next several weeks.
I would encourage everyone to engage with these texts, difficult and uncomfortable though they may be. A wise man once said, “you can never be truly free until you understand your conditioning.” Go. Read!
Cognizant only of image, commodity, and base sensations, we drift through a gray peril punctuated by unsettling sameness. Our experience has flattened and spread. Although once noble, the present condition of humanity represents a toxic leak contaminating the sacred, the pristine and the immaculate. Where the child was once a capsule of potentiality and hope, she is now, since the most recent fin-de-siecle, disfigured, grotesque. Like the prodigious birth, like the sixteenth-century horror, like the aberration of unmitigated otherness, late twentieth-century youth entered a world of hostile categories vigorously enforced by a virtual reality and a subtle violence.
We learned that being alive was being abused. We learned that to suffer for beauty was a kind of perverted noblesse oblige. To be thin was to be virtuous and extremes of asceticism and hedonism were strict poles by which we were to model our lives. The uncompromising binary was queen; we were taught that the ideal woman existed in constant conflict: at once living the second-wave dream while yearning for the mystique of feminine docility and domesticity. We learned that to be a woman was to maintain a tenuous balance and willingly endure its pain. We learned to expect violence.
I’ve been ruminating on these two texts for some time, trying to make sense of them within the context of my own socialization, but also within the realm of musical practice. To be a musician is to enjoy a similarly paradoxical relationship with sacrifice, violence and victimization. We inflict the invasive violence of sound upon our spectator while instigating simultaneous symbolic self-immolation. Articulating the phenomenology of music-making is something best left to the experts (Turino! Peirce!), however the body emblazoned by performance constitutes one facet of a complex force-relationship. While we perform music we perform a cycle of violence: our frustrations, our woes, our years of practice transmute into an act of assault; we violate our audience as we have been violated.
I would encourage everyone to engage with these texts, difficult and uncomfortable though they may be. A wise man once said, “you can never be truly free until you understand your conditioning.” Go. Read!
Cognizant only of image, commodity, and base sensations, we drift through a gray peril punctuated by unsettling sameness. Our experience has flattened and spread. Although once noble, the present condition of humanity represents a toxic leak contaminating the sacred, the pristine and the immaculate. Where the child was once a capsule of potentiality and hope, she is now, since the most recent fin-de-siecle, disfigured, grotesque. Like the prodigious birth, like the sixteenth-century horror, like the aberration of unmitigated otherness, late twentieth-century youth entered a world of hostile categories vigorously enforced by a virtual reality and a subtle violence.
We learned that being alive was being abused. We learned that to suffer for beauty was a kind of perverted noblesse oblige. To be thin was to be virtuous and extremes of asceticism and hedonism were strict poles by which we were to model our lives. The uncompromising binary was queen; we were taught that the ideal woman existed in constant conflict: at once living the second-wave dream while yearning for the mystique of feminine docility and domesticity. We learned that to be a woman was to maintain a tenuous balance and willingly endure its pain. We learned to expect violence.
I’ve been ruminating on these two texts for some time, trying to make sense of them within the context of my own socialization, but also within the realm of musical practice. To be a musician is to enjoy a similarly paradoxical relationship with sacrifice, violence and victimization. We inflict the invasive violence of sound upon our spectator while instigating simultaneous symbolic self-immolation. Articulating the phenomenology of music-making is something best left to the experts (Turino! Peirce!), however the body emblazoned by performance constitutes one facet of a complex force-relationship. While we perform music we perform a cycle of violence: our frustrations, our woes, our years of practice transmute into an act of assault; we violate our audience as we have been violated.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
revisiting hegel: some preliminary thoughts
And....we're back. Siete pronti?
I can still remember my first time with Hegel. I jumped into the Phenomenology of Spirit with nothing more than blind ambition, the text itself, and a notebook of blank pages within which my naïve and superficial observations might be inscribed. It was a thrill. It was a puzzle. It was a trial. Foucault writes about spirals of pleasure, power, and knowledge and indeed, my journey with Hegel took the form of this Foucauldian corkscrew. Each paragraph represented a micro-bildungsroman, these cognitive sojourns from darkness to light culminated in—to employ a Renaissance euphemism—the intellectual equivalent of little deaths. From time to time I find myself returning to this ecstasy, extolling the virtues of Hegelian methods, proclaiming the dialectic as a proto-postmodern "truth"-dealer and the progenitor of plurality.
My most recent return to Hegel comes on the heels of finally, proverbially, hunkering down with Judith Butler, preparing to read her early work, Subjects of Desire. However, before delving into Butler’s transcendent rhetoric, I decided to shelve my pride and acquire a guide. Sara Salih’s analysis has been, thus far, illuminating, straightforward, and admittedly non-comprehensive. I anticipate a slightly less rocky road ahead—Gender Trouble and Subjects looming large on my intellectual horizon. In priming the reader for Subjects, Salih provides a particularly lucid explanation of Hegel’s sublation:
“Literally translated, [aufhebung] means ‘sublation’; again, any definition of this word will inevitably be reductive and simplistic, since the German verb aufheben contains three distinct meanings: 1) to raise, hold lift up; 2) to annul, abolish, destroy, cancel; and 3) to keep, save or preserve…Aufhebung therefore refers to the unifying or synthesizing of opposites into a form in which they are simultaneously cancelled and preserved.” [1]
Indeed, the notion of sublation is yet another expression of the dialectic: a process of interaction between the ostensibly oppositional resulting in unification and transcendence. After reading the aforequoted passage, I found myself explaining to a student that "Beethoven trios are like Hegel." His blank stare notwithstanding, my point was that in a chamber music setting, both the individual player's voice and sound are at once preserved, annulled, and transcended. Furthermore, as I internally interrogated my assertion, I concluded that it is not only this musical sublation, nor merely classical phrase structure that reflects the oft-referenced and over-simplified Hegel (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) [2], but also the very process of performance and pedagogy. Like Hegel’s dialectic, musico-pedagogical practices also proceed in asymptotic fashion: each new input spurring an outcome ever-closer, yet condemned to approximate, that which is infinite.
[1] Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. London: Routledge, 2002. (25)
[2] If Zizek says it, it must be so.
I can still remember my first time with Hegel. I jumped into the Phenomenology of Spirit with nothing more than blind ambition, the text itself, and a notebook of blank pages within which my naïve and superficial observations might be inscribed. It was a thrill. It was a puzzle. It was a trial. Foucault writes about spirals of pleasure, power, and knowledge and indeed, my journey with Hegel took the form of this Foucauldian corkscrew. Each paragraph represented a micro-bildungsroman, these cognitive sojourns from darkness to light culminated in—to employ a Renaissance euphemism—the intellectual equivalent of little deaths. From time to time I find myself returning to this ecstasy, extolling the virtues of Hegelian methods, proclaiming the dialectic as a proto-postmodern "truth"-dealer and the progenitor of plurality.
My most recent return to Hegel comes on the heels of finally, proverbially, hunkering down with Judith Butler, preparing to read her early work, Subjects of Desire. However, before delving into Butler’s transcendent rhetoric, I decided to shelve my pride and acquire a guide. Sara Salih’s analysis has been, thus far, illuminating, straightforward, and admittedly non-comprehensive. I anticipate a slightly less rocky road ahead—Gender Trouble and Subjects looming large on my intellectual horizon. In priming the reader for Subjects, Salih provides a particularly lucid explanation of Hegel’s sublation:
“Literally translated, [aufhebung] means ‘sublation’; again, any definition of this word will inevitably be reductive and simplistic, since the German verb aufheben contains three distinct meanings: 1) to raise, hold lift up; 2) to annul, abolish, destroy, cancel; and 3) to keep, save or preserve…Aufhebung therefore refers to the unifying or synthesizing of opposites into a form in which they are simultaneously cancelled and preserved.” [1]
Indeed, the notion of sublation is yet another expression of the dialectic: a process of interaction between the ostensibly oppositional resulting in unification and transcendence. After reading the aforequoted passage, I found myself explaining to a student that "Beethoven trios are like Hegel." His blank stare notwithstanding, my point was that in a chamber music setting, both the individual player's voice and sound are at once preserved, annulled, and transcended. Furthermore, as I internally interrogated my assertion, I concluded that it is not only this musical sublation, nor merely classical phrase structure that reflects the oft-referenced and over-simplified Hegel (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) [2], but also the very process of performance and pedagogy. Like Hegel’s dialectic, musico-pedagogical practices also proceed in asymptotic fashion: each new input spurring an outcome ever-closer, yet condemned to approximate, that which is infinite.
[1] Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. London: Routledge, 2002. (25)
[2] If Zizek says it, it must be so.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
blogging adorno: popular music and the "contrived postures of femininity"
Okay, okay. Time to confess: I have never read Introduction to the Sociology of Music. Once upon a time I tried to read Aesthetic Theory, and I am sorry to admit that my head almost exploded. Recently, a friend of mine began his own serious engagement with Adorno; after a few conversations about these studies, I decided it was foolish for me to sit around twiddling my thumbs with Dostoevsky my only literary/philosophical diversion. Eccolo, "baby's first" Adorno. And since every signature looks, more or less, like this:
I hope that you will indulge me as I post some thoughts daily as I make my way. First off, this is an ongoing project. As I read, I find myself overjoyed by the words on the page. Why it has taken me so long to engage with this text, I will never know; frankly, I'm a little irritated with myself that I didn't crack the damn thing open the day I received it in the mail. In any event, here we are, months later.
Prior to my engagement with Teddy, I took a few moments to read Susan Brownmiller's "The Contrived Postures of Femininity." You know I can't get enough of the disciplined, docile feminine body--Brownmiller's essay seemed to be an appropriate summer epilogue to Foucault, Butler, McClary and the rest. Upon reading "The Contrived Posture...", I had a largely predictable reaction: a lovely combination of anger, sadness, and an undeniable aporia (what can be done? how did we get here?). We should all read this in its entirety, however, in conjunction with my recent reading of IttSoM, I couldn't help but be reminded of the following passage and the notion of an ideal femininity (one that fosters and subsequently manipulates desire) based upon a tenuous balance between that which is crass and that which is cultured. Brownmiller writes:
Slowly, it dawned on me that much of feminine movement, the inhibited gestures, the locked knees, the nervous adjustments of the skirt, was a defensive maneuver against an immodest, vulgar display that feminine clothing flirted with in deliberate provocation. My feminine responsibility was to keep both aspects, the provocative and the chaste, in careful balance, even if it meant avoiding the beautifully designed open stairway in a Fifth Avenue bookshop. [1]
Likewise, about popular music, Teddy pens the following:
On the one hand [popular music] must catch the listener's attention, must differ from other popular songs if it is to sell, to reach the listener at all. On the other hand it must not go beyond what audiences are used to, lest it repel them. It must remain unobtrusive, must not transcend that musical language which seems natural to the average listener envisaged by the producers...
Going on, he writes:
The difficulty facing the producer of pop music is that he mus void the contradiction. He must write something impressive enough to be remembered and at the same time well-known enough to be banal. [2]
So why discuss these passages together? Their commonalities exist in their oblique references to a rhetoric of desire and more importantly (and indeed, more distressingly) cultural technologies of coercion. I have quite a bit to say about Adorno, structure/ornament and femininity, certainly. For now, why don't we just use these two passages as preliminary evidence for such a connection. Let's look at what we have here:
Adorno equates the hit song with its ability to traverse that tenuous passage between submission and dominance, the passive and dynamic, that which is familiar and that which is alien. Likewise, Brownmiller discusses that same delicate balance struck by feminine postures and manners. At once submissive and suggestive, the ideally desirable woman must expertly navigate the murky waters of culturally constructed conceptions of the feminine.
This banal observation aside, broader implications surround Adorno's rhetoric. Again and again Teddy returns to the coercive force of music, that it manipulates its "victims" through a manipulation of desire. I don't know about you, but to me this sounds like Brownmiller and countless accounts of the femme fatale. So I leave you with the following question: do Adorno's aesthetics valorize structure, thus devaluing ornament? And, if indeed we accept this premise (and I think we must), is there something intrinsically masculine about Adorno's philosophy of music?
Okay, well, that was a little more sex and gender-y than I originally intended. Stay tuned for tomorrow: sonic landscapes and the distancing, stratification and reification of social classes.YEAH! Adorno is the coolest.
[1] Ashton-Jones, Evelyn, and Gary A. Olson. 1991. The Gender reader. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. 543
[2] Adorno, Theodor W. 1989. Introduction to the sociology of music. New York: Continuum. 31
I hope that you will indulge me as I post some thoughts daily as I make my way. First off, this is an ongoing project. As I read, I find myself overjoyed by the words on the page. Why it has taken me so long to engage with this text, I will never know; frankly, I'm a little irritated with myself that I didn't crack the damn thing open the day I received it in the mail. In any event, here we are, months later.
Prior to my engagement with Teddy, I took a few moments to read Susan Brownmiller's "The Contrived Postures of Femininity." You know I can't get enough of the disciplined, docile feminine body--Brownmiller's essay seemed to be an appropriate summer epilogue to Foucault, Butler, McClary and the rest. Upon reading "The Contrived Posture...", I had a largely predictable reaction: a lovely combination of anger, sadness, and an undeniable aporia (what can be done? how did we get here?). We should all read this in its entirety, however, in conjunction with my recent reading of IttSoM, I couldn't help but be reminded of the following passage and the notion of an ideal femininity (one that fosters and subsequently manipulates desire) based upon a tenuous balance between that which is crass and that which is cultured. Brownmiller writes:
Slowly, it dawned on me that much of feminine movement, the inhibited gestures, the locked knees, the nervous adjustments of the skirt, was a defensive maneuver against an immodest, vulgar display that feminine clothing flirted with in deliberate provocation. My feminine responsibility was to keep both aspects, the provocative and the chaste, in careful balance, even if it meant avoiding the beautifully designed open stairway in a Fifth Avenue bookshop. [1]
Likewise, about popular music, Teddy pens the following:
On the one hand [popular music] must catch the listener's attention, must differ from other popular songs if it is to sell, to reach the listener at all. On the other hand it must not go beyond what audiences are used to, lest it repel them. It must remain unobtrusive, must not transcend that musical language which seems natural to the average listener envisaged by the producers...
Going on, he writes:
The difficulty facing the producer of pop music is that he mus void the contradiction. He must write something impressive enough to be remembered and at the same time well-known enough to be banal. [2]
So why discuss these passages together? Their commonalities exist in their oblique references to a rhetoric of desire and more importantly (and indeed, more distressingly) cultural technologies of coercion. I have quite a bit to say about Adorno, structure/ornament and femininity, certainly. For now, why don't we just use these two passages as preliminary evidence for such a connection. Let's look at what we have here:
Adorno equates the hit song with its ability to traverse that tenuous passage between submission and dominance, the passive and dynamic, that which is familiar and that which is alien. Likewise, Brownmiller discusses that same delicate balance struck by feminine postures and manners. At once submissive and suggestive, the ideally desirable woman must expertly navigate the murky waters of culturally constructed conceptions of the feminine.
This banal observation aside, broader implications surround Adorno's rhetoric. Again and again Teddy returns to the coercive force of music, that it manipulates its "victims" through a manipulation of desire. I don't know about you, but to me this sounds like Brownmiller and countless accounts of the femme fatale. So I leave you with the following question: do Adorno's aesthetics valorize structure, thus devaluing ornament? And, if indeed we accept this premise (and I think we must), is there something intrinsically masculine about Adorno's philosophy of music?
Okay, well, that was a little more sex and gender-y than I originally intended. Stay tuned for tomorrow: sonic landscapes and the distancing, stratification and reification of social classes.YEAH! Adorno is the coolest.
[1] Ashton-Jones, Evelyn, and Gary A. Olson. 1991. The Gender reader. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. 543
[2] Adorno, Theodor W. 1989. Introduction to the sociology of music. New York: Continuum. 31
Friday, June 24, 2011
something beautiful from the initial pages of the brothers karamazov
"For Alyosha there was no question of why they loved him so much, why they prostrated before him and wept so tenderly just at the sight of his face. Oh, how well he understood that for the humble soul of the simple Russian, worn out by toil and grief, and, above all, by everlasting injustice and everlasting sin, his own and the world's, there is no stronger need and consolation than to find some holy thing or person, to fall down before him and venerate him: "Though with us there is sin, unrighteousness, and temptation, still, all the same, there is on earth, in such and such a place, somewhere, someone holy and exalted; he has the truth; he knows the truth; so the truth does not die on earth, and therefore someday it will come to us and will reign over all the earth, as has been promised."*Can't wait to dive into the rest, it is going to be a good summer.
* Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky. The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts with Epilogue. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990. (30)
Monday, June 6, 2011
quick thoughts on jabes/yael/corbett
Remember this? Once upon a time, we decided to put together an orchestra to perform Sidney Corbett's violin concerto, Yael. Yesterday was the big day, and indeed, a day I will treasure for the rest of my life.
After speaking with the composer, spending time with Derrida, Jabes, and sitting in on rehearsals, I am completely inspired to write volumes on the concerto. But for now (in the wake of what will be remembered as an incredible eighteen hours), I will offer a few observations on Yael inspired by an essay by Derrida. Eccolo.
Derrida writes that the following is the "most persistant affirmation of the Livre des questions."
At the heart of such a statement, exists--I believe--a dialectic: text and context, word and wordsmith engaging in a dynamic exchange of material and conception via performative practices. Sitting in Yael rehearsal yesterday, I couldn't help but reflect on Derrida's assertion and Jabes words.
How might we utilize Derrida's literary criticism and Jabes' text to understand Corbett's musical language? On the broadest level, the connection, confusion, and conflation of author and subject implies a dialectic. However, in applying Jabes to Corbett, we might look to the very essence of musical performance itself. If one accepts the performing musician as he who writes, one can also accept his or her performance (and the hours of practice that precede it) as a force that writes the body in the process through which it is created.
What exactly do I mean by this?
Numerous and diverse cultural theorists & philosophers (Foucault, and more recently Butler and Leppert) have noted the dualistic, dialogic relationship between the physical body and its cultural conditioning. Music, Leppert tells us, functions as a technology for making docile the body. Through the performance of music and dance the body is written while it writes that which is performed.
Corbett seems to work with this concept of cycles and dialog on numerous levels. On a very basic, musical level, the concerto--belying Corbett's studies with Ligeti--is constructed in layered dialectics: each individual part forms textural layers, providing a unique voice that operates both independently and as a larger mechanism of conformity (the orchestra itself). In this sense, Corbett expresses a musical cycle of creation and recreation, but also a broader perspective on authorship and agency.
Indeed, to write and to be written hang on a conceptual scaffold bound to concepts of artistic authority (the author/subject duality). Expanding on this duality, Corbett utilizes a classical orchestra in a ostensibly post-modern way. Composed of individual parts, the orchestra is, metaphorically speaking, a chorus of soloists--individuated yet bound by tradition and musical structure. He creates a dialog between epistemologies: the modern and the post-modern converse, offering a relevant expression of the present human condition.
After speaking with the composer, spending time with Derrida, Jabes, and sitting in on rehearsals, I am completely inspired to write volumes on the concerto. But for now (in the wake of what will be remembered as an incredible eighteen hours), I will offer a few observations on Yael inspired by an essay by Derrida. Eccolo.
Derrida writes that the following is the "most persistant affirmation of the Livre des questions."
You are he who writes and is written.
At the heart of such a statement, exists--I believe--a dialectic: text and context, word and wordsmith engaging in a dynamic exchange of material and conception via performative practices. Sitting in Yael rehearsal yesterday, I couldn't help but reflect on Derrida's assertion and Jabes words.
You are he who writes and is written.
How might we utilize Derrida's literary criticism and Jabes' text to understand Corbett's musical language? On the broadest level, the connection, confusion, and conflation of author and subject implies a dialectic. However, in applying Jabes to Corbett, we might look to the very essence of musical performance itself. If one accepts the performing musician as he who writes, one can also accept his or her performance (and the hours of practice that precede it) as a force that writes the body in the process through which it is created.
What exactly do I mean by this?
Numerous and diverse cultural theorists & philosophers (Foucault, and more recently Butler and Leppert) have noted the dualistic, dialogic relationship between the physical body and its cultural conditioning. Music, Leppert tells us, functions as a technology for making docile the body. Through the performance of music and dance the body is written while it writes that which is performed.
Corbett seems to work with this concept of cycles and dialog on numerous levels. On a very basic, musical level, the concerto--belying Corbett's studies with Ligeti--is constructed in layered dialectics: each individual part forms textural layers, providing a unique voice that operates both independently and as a larger mechanism of conformity (the orchestra itself). In this sense, Corbett expresses a musical cycle of creation and recreation, but also a broader perspective on authorship and agency.
Indeed, to write and to be written hang on a conceptual scaffold bound to concepts of artistic authority (the author/subject duality). Expanding on this duality, Corbett utilizes a classical orchestra in a ostensibly post-modern way. Composed of individual parts, the orchestra is, metaphorically speaking, a chorus of soloists--individuated yet bound by tradition and musical structure. He creates a dialog between epistemologies: the modern and the post-modern converse, offering a relevant expression of the present human condition.
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