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

bad dress rehearsal = good performance?

Yesterday, I presented a rough draft of the big paper and in doing so several facets of my project were illuminated. 1) "Rebellion and Reclamation" is not a twenty minute paper. 2) R and R is no so much of an answer to the question of performing eighteenth-century music in the twenty first century, but rather a series of questions regarding the body and its relationship to musical and artistic practice. This, clearly, is the problem: "the body and its relationship to musical and artistic practice"?! I may as well call it 'On Being Alive: Aesthetics, Phenomenology, and Subjugation.' Right. More specifically, I completely bumbled what I wanted to say about the evolution of time (manipulation/experience of, use as disciplinary practice, connection to late-twentieth century "un-reality") from the monastic tradition to the enlightenment, to nascent and modern capitalism. For my own piece of mind:

The body, Foucault tells us, provided a primary locus for political and social control in the eighteenth century. Appropriating temporal controls from religious sources, the eighteenth century establishment utilized various mechanisms to manipulate behavior and create ideological norms that would function as disciplinary practices. Bodies were thus disciplined not only by observation and classification, but by a system that intentionally manipulated the perception and utilization of time.

Indeed, it was not enough to merely exist in time, rather the concept of disciplinary time required purity and "precision." [1] This urge to temporal cleanliness belies the epoch's predilection for order: a purity of form and function, of purpose and execution. Structure--spatial and temporal--is espoused; filigree eschewed.

Foucault describes a "anatomo-chronological schema of behavior" Noting that in these disciplinary practices, "the act is broken down into its elements; the position of the body, limbs, articulations is defined; to each movement are assigned a direction, an aptitude, a duration; their order of succession is prescribed. Time penetrates the body and with it all the meticultous controls of power." [2] In this instance, Foucault references the disciplinary practices associated with military training, however, one could just as easily apply his description of a deconstructed act to a musical practice. [3]

In the nineteenth century, Marx observed the insidious collusion of time and work. The mechanized temporality introduced via conventions and inventions of the eighteenth century functions not only as a disciplinary practice, but also a means by which the individual worker is dehumanized. Man is both deindividualized and transfigured. Becoming an interchangeable part in a vast capitalist machine, the work and the worker coalesce in a modern manipulation of temporality and meaning. This hybrid of form and functionality is monstrous; its post-modern manifestation rife with myriad implications.

For Baudrillard, time--in its perception and utilization--mimics our present relationship to materials and information. Technological advances have collapsed our perception of time. Intoxicated by speed and the absence of temporal mediation, our virtual personae exist not only outside the body, but also outside linear time. Time, like information and material, has proliferated into an omnipresence of static sameness.

[1] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 151
[2] Ibid, 152
[3] When I originally wrote this, I gave myself a good hearty pat on the back for original thought in my observation. Last night, I dove into Paul Virilio's The Art of the Motor, only to find this passage waiting for me: "...that quasi-military conditioning music allows with its rhythmic codes, regressing to the classic scales of archaic music, associated with notions of distance, timbre, and echo." (48) Similar, no?

when nothing is beautiful anymore (except edith wharton)

There exists an apocryphal tale: the day Charles Ives stopped composing was the day he announced, "nothing sounds good anymore."

Although dubious in its origins and accuracy, this anecdote has remained with me since first I heard it. The disparity and hopelessness that, ostensibly, motivates such a statement is staggering. Ives's supposed utterance is indeed spurious, however the idea that one can become so saturated with sameness that the dichotomy of good and bad no longer exists articulates so perfectly one facet of the post-modern aesthetic. Or could it be that Ives, so inundated by post-war angst and early twentieth century sonic detritus, could no longer conceive a cogent expression? Who is to say, really. What is more thought provoking is 1) the lack of contrast that results from the saturation of imagery (this part of Greenberg's kitsch, by the way) and 2) the effect that an increase--and yes, an inundation--of stimuli has on the artistic psyche. Maybe I'm being a little dramatic, but in the wake of re-reading The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (and you know, all that time I spent ruminating on Baudrillard) I couldn't help but think of Ives as a victim of twentieth century saturation/stimulation/commodity fetishization/etc.

This time around, Benjamin really got to me. Like most of us, I've had the "we're going to hell" conversation many times: nothing is beautiful, presented with every possibility, we are left in a turbid ether disengaged, disembodied, and cognitively disemboweled. You know, that conversation. Revisiting Benjamin, what seemed a knee-jerk fear-inspired attitude now appeared prophetic; an apparition marked by ineffable veracity.  We are disembodied by technology, daily--what was once reserved for the film star has proliferated into the banal and mundane. Divorced from carnal experience, we exist in virtual multiplicity. Benjamin identified and predicted this crisis in the 30s, and here we are: nothing sounds good anymore.

On a more positive note, I picked up a copy of The Age of Innocence yesterday (a purchase inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates) and, I would be lying if the word-smithing above was not inspired by Wharton's command of her craft. Behold:


Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the Chiverses') one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing-rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d'or)...


And my favorite part:


seeing from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo.


Okay, one more:


The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror and almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the lat Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.


That, my friends, is virtuosity. "...traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation." Gen-ius. Last one, I promise:


She always, indeed, struck Newland Archer as having been rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a rosy life-in-death.


I'm going to go read now. Sigh.

bits and bobs

I'm presently working on many (perhaps too many) projects--and of course, moving, starting a new life, getting ready for baby's first paper session--but during my breaks, I've been catching up on my leisure reading. Some things of interest:

From the Chronicle, a nicely articulated piece about the Bible; Ta-Nehisi Coates *hearts* Edith Wharton and it completely inspired me to read The Age of Innocence (or The Age of Awesome); More Coates (beautiful remembrance of the departed Marable, articulates the best sort of protégé/mentor bond); on undergraduate business degrees (I much appreciated the shout out to philosophy majors!); no more jokes about my practice of meditation (here); Being on Exodus (I'm absolutely inspired to pick up the good book this week--looking forward to investigating posed questions and the plurality of interpretations); From a friend, this is funny. Anything else? Spending time here, with him, revisiting this, and thinking of it in conjunction with this.

a riff on marx

With the deadline of the big paper fast approaching, I've been publishing some paragraphs here as a motivational tool. This morning my thoughts have turned to the transforming temporality of the eighteenth century. How is the passage of time expressed in late eighteenth century art forms (specifically music)? And, furthermore, how do disciplinary practices and cultural context shape both the expression and perception of time? How is time experienced in the body, and how do the contemporary phenomenological inquiries address this?

Obviously, my present project prevents me from engaging in a complete exegesis on the above questions. However, I came across the following passage from Marx as quoted in Lukacs's Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat and couldn't help but incorporating it into my work.

Through the subordination of man to the machine the situation arises in which men are effaced by their labour; in which the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives. Therefore, we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most the incarnation of time. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything: hour for hour, day for day .... [1]

Reading this passage, I was reminded of a discussion I once had on Foucault's History of Sexuality and the introduction of "factory time" in the eighteenth century. We know that there are all varieties of disciplinary practices and controls on the body introduced in the eighteenth century. However, the control and perception of time itself (by way of work) is a far more pervasive and subtle example than say, Bentham's Panopticon.

Marx's concept of time reeks of disciplinary practices originally formulated in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, this notion of being "effaced" by ones own work represents the genesis of Baudrillard's telecomputer man (because I LOVE The Transparency of Evil). The mechanized temporality introduced via conventions and inventions of the eighteenth century functions not only as a disciplinary practice, but also a means by which the individual worker is dehumanized.

As Marx points out, man is both de-individualized and transfigured. Becoming an interchangeable part in a vast capitalist machine, the work and the worker coalesce in a modern manipulation of temporality and meaning. This hybrid of form and functionality is monstrous; its post-modern manifestation riddled with myriad implications.

[1] http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc05.htm#n12

guy debord's "specatular marxism"

A short one from the "drafts" file. Below is an excerpt from some of my class notes on the Situationist International:

Guy Debord, et al--Situationist International rejects materialism;
problem of objects in post 1945 art--society Spectacular Marxism

Am I the only one who finds the phrase "Spectacular Marxism" rib-ticklingly hilarious?

In reality, it ought to read "Society of the Spectacle; Marxism" as in this.

All jokes aside, the SI is pretty great. I'm completely pressed for time, so here is a link to SI online.