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 baudrillard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label baudrillard. Show all posts
Saturday, June 16, 2012
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.
Friday, May 27, 2011
he knows and knows he knows: taruskin's very wise keynote
I can't tell you the number of times I've sat down to record and subsequently relay my experiences at Performa. There was just so much. For now, the best strategy seems to be to go day-by-day, paper-by-paper.
Whether he realized it or not, Taruskin set a particularly inspiring tone for the entire conference. His keynote, entitled "Where we are now," addressed the all-too-often abstruse discourse surrounding Historically Informed Performance (HIP) and theorized methods for "performative rightness" in the present moment: Taruskin called for knowing, cognizance, awareness, wisdom. Noting HIP's 1920s progenitors, Taruskin pointed out that this obsession with how it ought to be is essentially, a modernist impulse. That historically informed performance practices sought to prescribe one way reeks of modernist ideologies; indeed Taruskin's observation (which to me, now, seems painfully obvious; a why didn't I think of that observation) can be clearly posited in rebellious and transformational twentieth-century epistemology. Looking back now on this modernist performance practice, and our current moment--wherein we seek to rebel against these musico-historical mores--one can easily see HIP as the musical equivalent to an Occidentalist view of history, complete with the generalized, monolithic and exclusively Western we.
With an unapologetically post-modern perspective, Taruskin suggested that "Historically Informed" encompasses a diversity of practices. He asked broad questions: historically informed by whom? for whom? and in what context? He offered these contrasting examples of ostensibly unorthodox HIP. The first was Furtwangler's Bach. Listen, if you will to the following clip, paying special attention to the oft-termed cadenza about nine minutes in.
To a listener bound by rigid (dare I say it, modernist) conceptions of HIP, Furtwangler's Bach is simply appalling. Taruskin pointed out that although--even to the wise ears of the Performa delegates--Furtwangler's playing is deeply romantic, slightly indulgent, and seriously Wagnerian, it creates a connection. That Furtwangler, even in recorded, digitized, and YouTubed disembodiment, was still able to form an ineffable relationship between composer, performer and listener is truly incredible. Furthermore, Taruskin argued that although the playing is indeed romantic, indulgent, and Wagnerian, this type of relationship is historically informed, thus positioning Furtwangler's singular Bach in the realm of HIP.
Moving on to a more contemporary performer, harpsichordist Kenneth Cooper, Taruskin noted that audience response--regardless of the performer's adherence to the often arbitrary rules of performance practice--can signify HIP. Sadly, the recording he shared with us is not available on the 'tube. In my notes, I wrote "rock and roll Bach"; sufficed to say, Cooper played the hell out Brandenberg 5. Cooper's performance, in its overwhelming virtuosity, physicality, and commitment, so mesmerized his audience that upon completion they burst into a chorus of spontaneous applause. Thus, although--like Furtwangler--Cooper's interpretation exists outside of generally accepted HIP dogma, it is indeed historically informed: spontaneous applause was common (and documented) practice for early eighteenth-century audiences.
Although he didn't say it outright, Taruskin intimated on numerous occasions the paucity of communication between contemporary performers and their audiences. One could offer a litany of causes for this phenomenon: recording technology, culmination of exoticized/sexualized/generally othered performing body, the conflation of genius and virtuoso that creates distance...the list goes on. However, given my recent reading I couldn't help but think of what Baudrillard and Virilio might have to say. More than merely the disembodiment resulting from and supported by digital recordings, technology itself participates in the detrimental deflation of our personal relationships. Obviously, this is nothing new. I have, however, become in recent months acutely aware of this detriment in my own life and relationships. I have witnessed, with helpless distance, once meaningful and important relationships crumble at the hands of gChat, Facebook and text messages. Operating under a veneer of concern, the virtual reality created by these devices of technological gossamer provided the illusion of closeness. Their inherent deception--the presumed collapsing of distances via instant communication (this is pure Baudrillard, by the way)--was revealed with the realization that the "intimacy" created through the repetition of disembodied communication only functioned to reinforce the separation and superficiality of virtual relationships. When the time and effort required to craft the friendship was repeatedly replaced by cavalier and careless communiques it was fated to exist solely at the surface, divorced from the depth and meaning it once possessed.
By contrast, I also participated in the creation a relationship completely divorced from virtual identities. The most I can say is that it was exhilarating to craft a friendship, slowly, without acceleration via information. For this reason--whether or not I ever see this person again--I believe the memories associated with the experience will resonate clearly and with more sentiment that those generated by the many years of friendship (mentioned above) rendered meaningless by gChat, Facebook, and the text message.
With my personal experience in mind, I cannot help but think that I am not the only one to whom this has happened. Furthermore, if we accept musical performance as heightened communication--an intimate (and often invasive) touch initiated from a distance but perceived as unsettlingly, and uncomfortably close--we must also accept the deep impact of the aforesaid social reality. More than anything else, this is what I wondered as I walked away from Taruskin's talk. Has HIP become such a formidable practice in our contemporary moment because the idea of relationships--musical or otherwise--is so totally elusive? Perhaps we are not looking to recreate the nuances of ornamental filigree but rather their effect on the listener. Perhaps we are not seeking a prescribed method of performative rightness but rather the freedom espoused and valorized in pre-Mahlerian performance.
So now you perhaps see why it has taken me so long to begin writing about my time in Portugal...
So, Thursday and Taruskin's keynote. The morning began with the following words:
He who knows not and knows not he knows not: he is a fool - shun him. He who knows not and knows he knows not: he is simple - teach him. He who knows and knows not he knows: he is asleep - wake him. He who knows and knows he knows: he is wise - follow him.
With an unapologetically post-modern perspective, Taruskin suggested that "Historically Informed" encompasses a diversity of practices. He asked broad questions: historically informed by whom? for whom? and in what context? He offered these contrasting examples of ostensibly unorthodox HIP. The first was Furtwangler's Bach. Listen, if you will to the following clip, paying special attention to the oft-termed cadenza about nine minutes in.
To a listener bound by rigid (dare I say it, modernist) conceptions of HIP, Furtwangler's Bach is simply appalling. Taruskin pointed out that although--even to the wise ears of the Performa delegates--Furtwangler's playing is deeply romantic, slightly indulgent, and seriously Wagnerian, it creates a connection. That Furtwangler, even in recorded, digitized, and YouTubed disembodiment, was still able to form an ineffable relationship between composer, performer and listener is truly incredible. Furthermore, Taruskin argued that although the playing is indeed romantic, indulgent, and Wagnerian, this type of relationship is historically informed, thus positioning Furtwangler's singular Bach in the realm of HIP.
Moving on to a more contemporary performer, harpsichordist Kenneth Cooper, Taruskin noted that audience response--regardless of the performer's adherence to the often arbitrary rules of performance practice--can signify HIP. Sadly, the recording he shared with us is not available on the 'tube. In my notes, I wrote "rock and roll Bach"; sufficed to say, Cooper played the hell out Brandenberg 5. Cooper's performance, in its overwhelming virtuosity, physicality, and commitment, so mesmerized his audience that upon completion they burst into a chorus of spontaneous applause. Thus, although--like Furtwangler--Cooper's interpretation exists outside of generally accepted HIP dogma, it is indeed historically informed: spontaneous applause was common (and documented) practice for early eighteenth-century audiences.
Although he didn't say it outright, Taruskin intimated on numerous occasions the paucity of communication between contemporary performers and their audiences. One could offer a litany of causes for this phenomenon: recording technology, culmination of exoticized/sexualized/generally othered performing body, the conflation of genius and virtuoso that creates distance...the list goes on. However, given my recent reading I couldn't help but think of what Baudrillard and Virilio might have to say. More than merely the disembodiment resulting from and supported by digital recordings, technology itself participates in the detrimental deflation of our personal relationships. Obviously, this is nothing new. I have, however, become in recent months acutely aware of this detriment in my own life and relationships. I have witnessed, with helpless distance, once meaningful and important relationships crumble at the hands of gChat, Facebook and text messages. Operating under a veneer of concern, the virtual reality created by these devices of technological gossamer provided the illusion of closeness. Their inherent deception--the presumed collapsing of distances via instant communication (this is pure Baudrillard, by the way)--was revealed with the realization that the "intimacy" created through the repetition of disembodied communication only functioned to reinforce the separation and superficiality of virtual relationships. When the time and effort required to craft the friendship was repeatedly replaced by cavalier and careless communiques it was fated to exist solely at the surface, divorced from the depth and meaning it once possessed.By contrast, I also participated in the creation a relationship completely divorced from virtual identities. The most I can say is that it was exhilarating to craft a friendship, slowly, without acceleration via information. For this reason--whether or not I ever see this person again--I believe the memories associated with the experience will resonate clearly and with more sentiment that those generated by the many years of friendship (mentioned above) rendered meaningless by gChat, Facebook, and the text message.
With my personal experience in mind, I cannot help but think that I am not the only one to whom this has happened. Furthermore, if we accept musical performance as heightened communication--an intimate (and often invasive) touch initiated from a distance but perceived as unsettlingly, and uncomfortably close--we must also accept the deep impact of the aforesaid social reality. More than anything else, this is what I wondered as I walked away from Taruskin's talk. Has HIP become such a formidable practice in our contemporary moment because the idea of relationships--musical or otherwise--is so totally elusive? Perhaps we are not looking to recreate the nuances of ornamental filigree but rather their effect on the listener. Perhaps we are not seeking a prescribed method of performative rightness but rather the freedom espoused and valorized in pre-Mahlerian performance.
So now you perhaps see why it has taken me so long to begin writing about my time in Portugal...
Sunday, May 1, 2011
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?
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?
Saturday, April 2, 2011
baudrillard everywhere
I am not ashamed to admit that I am completely obsessed with The Transparency of Evil. You know that feeling when you read something and it articulates so perfectly all that you think about a particular topic, or your own personal circumstances? It is officially joining the ranks of books-that-changed-my-life, right next to The History of Western Philosophy, Peace is Every Step (a lovely antidote to ToE, actually) The History of Sexuality, Aristotle's Poetics, Feminine Endings, Discipline and Punish, and Siddhartha (yes, yes, make your jokes if you must).
Baudrillard writes with impressive elan: passionate and sobering but always beautiful. To me, his book is incredibly inspiring. An expression of our deeply troubled historical moment, The Transparency of Evil embodies the arguably bifurcated post-modern spirit. Indeed, the intoxication of immediacy and virtual equality fosters both bacchanalian ecstasy and profound despair--the result, an orgy of aporetic emptiness. But despite such a distressing message, Baudrillard's text contains within its elegantly crafted words an intrinsically hopeful--if subtle--message. The experience of reading ToE is deeply satisfying, comforting, and for lack of a better word, beautiful. That this type of response is still possible in the epoch of Transaesthetics and the Telecomputer Man, speaks to human nature: our instinct for edification, survival and yes, beauty (what can I say, I'm an eternal optimist).
I bring it up again, because this (in response to this [in response to this]) came across my Google Reader recently. Both Bergman's and Kuchar's posts are diversions (George Crumb is a total hipster, by the way), however reading Davidson's review, I couldn't help but think about Baudrillard (because, as I just said, I am completely obsessed with the Transparency of Evil).
Admittedly, I am not so familiar with the so-called new New York School. I went through a "phase" some years back, but nothing that would really qualify me to make any sort of meaningful aesthetic value judgments. My personal taste notwithstanding, what interests me more is Davidson's critique in all its Baudrillardian overtones. I've excerpted the review below, with added emphasis for passages that I found particularly resonant in the context of ToE.
This cornucopia of new music seems perpetually promising. It bristles with allusions and brims with ambition—yet it somehow feels stifled by all that freedom.
[...]
Today’s styles need not be born of deep experience; they form out of collisions that bypass history and geography.
[...]
These well-crafted but oddly familiar works display the virtues of facility, versatility, and curiosity, but they also showcase a group that seems disoriented by its own open-mindedness. Composers who could do anything somehow don’t.
[...]
Despite their gifts and alertness to the moment, [the new New York] composers seem muffled, bereft of zeal. What they badly need is a machine to rage against and a set of bracing creative constraints.
Davidson seems to be articulating that orgy of aporetic emptiness: compositions teem with Schnabel-esque excess thus they result in something that registers as "tame" or lacking "angst." Judgments like good and bad are hollow; reductionist at best. However, whether or not these composers are aware of it, their music--according to Davidson--seems to be articulating Baudrillard's description of our historical moment: an epoch of saturation, immediacy, and apathy induced by hyper-stimulation.
As far as any musical criticisms are concerned, I'm going to do some listening and get back to you.
Baudrillard writes with impressive elan: passionate and sobering but always beautiful. To me, his book is incredibly inspiring. An expression of our deeply troubled historical moment, The Transparency of Evil embodies the arguably bifurcated post-modern spirit. Indeed, the intoxication of immediacy and virtual equality fosters both bacchanalian ecstasy and profound despair--the result, an orgy of aporetic emptiness. But despite such a distressing message, Baudrillard's text contains within its elegantly crafted words an intrinsically hopeful--if subtle--message. The experience of reading ToE is deeply satisfying, comforting, and for lack of a better word, beautiful. That this type of response is still possible in the epoch of Transaesthetics and the Telecomputer Man, speaks to human nature: our instinct for edification, survival and yes, beauty (what can I say, I'm an eternal optimist).
I bring it up again, because this (in response to this [in response to this]) came across my Google Reader recently. Both Bergman's and Kuchar's posts are diversions (George Crumb is a total hipster, by the way), however reading Davidson's review, I couldn't help but think about Baudrillard (because, as I just said, I am completely obsessed with the Transparency of Evil).
Admittedly, I am not so familiar with the so-called new New York School. I went through a "phase" some years back, but nothing that would really qualify me to make any sort of meaningful aesthetic value judgments. My personal taste notwithstanding, what interests me more is Davidson's critique in all its Baudrillardian overtones. I've excerpted the review below, with added emphasis for passages that I found particularly resonant in the context of ToE.
This cornucopia of new music seems perpetually promising. It bristles with allusions and brims with ambition—yet it somehow feels stifled by all that freedom.
[...]
Today’s styles need not be born of deep experience; they form out of collisions that bypass history and geography.
[...]
These well-crafted but oddly familiar works display the virtues of facility, versatility, and curiosity, but they also showcase a group that seems disoriented by its own open-mindedness. Composers who could do anything somehow don’t.
[...]
Despite their gifts and alertness to the moment, [the new New York] composers seem muffled, bereft of zeal. What they badly need is a machine to rage against and a set of bracing creative constraints.
Davidson seems to be articulating that orgy of aporetic emptiness: compositions teem with Schnabel-esque excess thus they result in something that registers as "tame" or lacking "angst." Judgments like good and bad are hollow; reductionist at best. However, whether or not these composers are aware of it, their music--according to Davidson--seems to be articulating Baudrillard's description of our historical moment: an epoch of saturation, immediacy, and apathy induced by hyper-stimulation.
As far as any musical criticisms are concerned, I'm going to do some listening and get back to you.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
quick thoughts on baudrillard
Perhaps there is no such thing as a quick thought on Baudrillard. Nevertheless.
Anything that bypasses meditation is a source of pleasure. In seduction there is a movement from the one to the other which does not pass via the same. (In cloning, it is the opposite: the movement is from the same to the same without passage via the other; and cloning holds great fascination for us.) In metamorphosis, the shift is from one form to another without passing via meaning. In poetry from one sign to another without passing via the reference. The collapsing of distances, of intervening spaces, always produces a kind of intoxication. What does speed itself mean to us if not the fact of going from one place to another without traversing time, from one moment to another without passing via duration and movement? Speed is marvelous: time alone is wearisome." [1]
To me, Baudrillard's philosophical program as presented in The Transparency of Evil is a critique of excess. This particular passage intrigued me as the big paper addresses--among other things--the manipulation, representation and utilization of time in eighteenth century music. Baudrillard's interpretation of time, speed and distance fits perfectly with our present predicament. Inundated by information and imagery of every stripe, immediacy and instant gratification are the twenty-first century modi operandi.
Our society's espousal to pleasure--evidenced by our overstimulated, oversexed, gluttonous, bloated corpus--represents the culmination of nineteenth century telos. After the proverbial orgy, we find ourselves entrapped in an ambivalence induced by the omnipresence of decadence. Life is a puzzle, a virtual farce littered by Busted Bubbles, Angry Birds; technological waste. Intoxicated by excess, our present condition is riddled by the progeny of intellectual, material, and virtual saturation: an aporia of intemperence.
Was that a downer? I bring it up because Baudrillard's text has had a profound impact on my reaction to my present circumstances. Furthermore, if we are to rebel against eighteenth century disciplinary practices so embedded in our psyche (examples of Zizek's unknown knowns), we must understand our present socio-cultural schema. With this cognizance and perspective we can thus identify the transformation, (dys)functionality, and machinations of the lingering and indeed subversive vestiges of eighteenth century disciplinary practices.
If I've said it once, I've said it one thousand times: knowledge is power.
[1] Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. London: Verso, 1993. 79
Anything that bypasses meditation is a source of pleasure. In seduction there is a movement from the one to the other which does not pass via the same. (In cloning, it is the opposite: the movement is from the same to the same without passage via the other; and cloning holds great fascination for us.) In metamorphosis, the shift is from one form to another without passing via meaning. In poetry from one sign to another without passing via the reference. The collapsing of distances, of intervening spaces, always produces a kind of intoxication. What does speed itself mean to us if not the fact of going from one place to another without traversing time, from one moment to another without passing via duration and movement? Speed is marvelous: time alone is wearisome." [1]
To me, Baudrillard's philosophical program as presented in The Transparency of Evil is a critique of excess. This particular passage intrigued me as the big paper addresses--among other things--the manipulation, representation and utilization of time in eighteenth century music. Baudrillard's interpretation of time, speed and distance fits perfectly with our present predicament. Inundated by information and imagery of every stripe, immediacy and instant gratification are the twenty-first century modi operandi.
Our society's espousal to pleasure--evidenced by our overstimulated, oversexed, gluttonous, bloated corpus--represents the culmination of nineteenth century telos. After the proverbial orgy, we find ourselves entrapped in an ambivalence induced by the omnipresence of decadence. Life is a puzzle, a virtual farce littered by Busted Bubbles, Angry Birds; technological waste. Intoxicated by excess, our present condition is riddled by the progeny of intellectual, material, and virtual saturation: an aporia of intemperence.
Was that a downer? I bring it up because Baudrillard's text has had a profound impact on my reaction to my present circumstances. Furthermore, if we are to rebel against eighteenth century disciplinary practices so embedded in our psyche (examples of Zizek's unknown knowns), we must understand our present socio-cultural schema. With this cognizance and perspective we can thus identify the transformation, (dys)functionality, and machinations of the lingering and indeed subversive vestiges of eighteenth century disciplinary practices.
If I've said it once, I've said it one thousand times: knowledge is power.
[1] Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. London: Verso, 1993. 79
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