either/or versus plus/and

blissblogger

Well-known member
****warnining****this one could get a little abstract****warning*****

Noticed a bit of musico-philosophical mini-meme in circulation

Matos had this blogriff on my "where you're at/where you're from" blogriff, in the course of which he declared:

“For a lot of us in the [pro-camp], it went without saying that plus/and trumps either/or as a guiding principle..."

and on the Other Board someone else said something like "either/or is for chumps"

and then in the M.I.adonnaHonda/"we aren't living in a black-and-white world, so I ain't no black-and-white girl" thread, another person was decrying Either/Or logic.

Two's a coincidence, three's a trend!

Now is this notion--"plus/and" > "either/or"--some sort of well-established philosophical distinction i'm not conversant with? It has a tang of Logic about it.

Anyway, it struck me as having a lot of applications and get to the nub of certain dissenssions and debates abroad at the moment

Strip away the actual details of any given argument and you'll find people divided into Either/Ors or Plus/Ands -- Clear Vision versus Subtle Shades .... or to revert to more loaded terms, fanatics versus dilettantes

Both sets of adherents, interestingly, would claim that their proposition is closer to the True Nature of Reality.

For instance, the Plus/And argument is that the world's is a complex place, not black and white, don't simplify the issues, polyvalent, etc etc

The Either/Ors would argue: actually no, in real real life, you're constantly faced with stark choices, from the mundane (which entree on the menu) to the profound (love; career -- for most people it's impossible to be a doctor AND a lawyer,; politics--you can't vote Republican AND Democrat, and so forth).

Being emotionally of an Either/Or bent (while still having, i hope, the mental suppleness to see the Plus/And, Subtle Shades aspects of things), I would tend towards polarising things, while seeing the opposite stance as "having your cake and eating it" or not taking a stand

This also has applications to the whole music consumption issue.

Plus/And is the logic of downloading. When there's no cost and no limit to your storage capacity, there is simply no earthly reason to desist from the "and... and ... and..." imperative. Illegal downloading has removed music from the scarcity economy.

Plus/And is the logic of the all-you-can eat salad bar.

Which i understand only too well, being the kind of person who will load up the plate with a little bit of everything, making myself bloated and nauseous in the process

Either/Or though is the logic of difficult choices in a scarcity economy
-- of having X amount of allowance to spend on records
--- of skipping a meal to buy a record (something i've never done i hasten to add, although you always hear people claiming to have done this)

I would say that the world still largely operates on a scarcity economy

and that moreover Life itself is a scarcity economy, you've only got so much time/energy, hence the Aesthetic Morality of Finitude

Finally i would say that Either/Or is a logic of intensification, whereas Plus/And is an addititive logic

Both have their downsides obviously

Either/Or, taken to the extreme, becomes narrow-minded

Plus/And, which seems to becoming the dominant principle of culture in the sense of there being so many options, choices, information, etc, tends to promote a kind of super-sated indifference, in the precise sense of differences not mattering -- entropy -- and also a kind of self-erasing open-ness
 
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hamarplazt

100% No Soul Guaranteed
blissblogger said:
Now is this notion--"plus/and" > "either/or"--some sort of well-established philosophical distinction i'm not conversant with? It has a tang of Logic about it.

...

For instance, the Plus/And argument is that the world's is a complex place, not black and white, don't simplify the issues, polyvalent, etc etc

The Either/Ors would argue: actually no, in real real life, you're constantly faced with stark choices, from the mundane (which entree on the menu) to the profound (love; career -- for most people it's impossible to be a doctor AND a lawyer,; politics--you can't vote Republican AND Democrat, and so forth).
But isn't it exactly the complexity of the world that makes the choices choices? If there wasn't all these shades and angles, you probably wouldn't even have to think about what you were doing.

As for logic, either/or is logic, and complexity is the "real world". To be able to make the nice and clean either/or-distinctions, you'll have to define some borders in the mess of the real world. I suppose that's what critics and theorists do most of the time; trying to make sense of something not really following our personal aesthetic rules, trying to create a system where it all fits.

Eventually, I think there's an inherent value jugdement in calling the complexity-position plus/and. Now, I'm a complexity-man, but I'm certainly not a plus/and-man. Recognizing that the world is full of grey areas is, I think, a necessary step if you're going to make useful theories. But that doesn't mean that you'll have to indulge in everything. And it actually seems to me that either/or is the irresponsible/lazy position, choosing not to deal with things being messy and problematic, a kind of I know what I like and I'm staying with that, thank you-position. The us or them, with or against, good vs evil etc postion.

You could also put it this way: either/or is the idealist position, complexity is the pragmatic one. I think it's best to have a bit of each, but then, that's allready complexity.
 

ice bat

(cheshire cat)
Interesting!

Isn't the marking-off of such an axis, or pair of axes, itself a deeply Either/Or-ish sort of thing to do? I mean the evidence is there, certainly, but still.

Think I'm very much an Either/Or person, with probably (okay, definitely) a lot less of the flexibility/openness of the Plus/And axis than I could use, but I reach for it when I can.

Then again, on the Plus/And tip, I've illegally downloaded a lot of music in the past year and a half, JUST BECAUSE I COULD. Predictably the amount of it that means fuck-all to me -- that I find myself even capable of enjoying -- is proportionally small. The real, and very significant to me, payoff is that quite a large percentage of the stuff I end up really liking is well outside of anything I ever would've bought or even paid attention to in the Era Before Illegal Downloading -- hello Boredoms, Mountain Goats, Amerie!

It occurs to me that there are opinions, tastes, worldviews that seem Plus/And-ish on the face of them but are in fact profoundly Either/Or-ish, but for whatever reason wish to deny or conceal that aspect. No doubt the reverse also happens. (I am of course incapable of adducing any examples.)

The crux seems to be deciding which sort of stance is more useful and illuminating ("and/or", ha, fun, god forbid) in a given set of circumstances.
 

henry s

Street Fighting Man
"I welcome the problems and exploit the uncertainties. By embracing contradiction as well as complexity, I aim for vitality as well as validity." "I like elements which are hybrid rather than "pure," compromising rather than "clean," distorted rather than "straightforward," ambiguous rather than "articulated," ... redundant rather than simple; inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear." ... "I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning ... A valid architecture evokes many levels of meaning ... its elements become readable and workable in several ways at once."

-from "Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradictions in Architecture, 1966

these statemements more or less kicked off post-modernism in architecture...they also sound like sound bites from various electronic music debates over the last several years...it's interesting how this "richness of meaning" translates into much better music than buildings...(the first few waves of po-mo architecture, at least, alienated all but the historically literate with mega-esoteric referencing w/o a hint of Mannerist charm)...

anyway, architecture being "frozen music" and all, I'm always interested in the overlaps...
 

DJ PIMP

Well-known member
Dualism is a convenient pitfall of language.

Its only when we stop counting the leaves that we enjoy the shade of the maple tree.
 

Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
Good spotting of the trend. You're right, I think this goes to the heart of a lot of debates.

I'm a plus / and, e-prime, zetetic / model agnostic kind of guy both by emotional temperament and intellectual (self) training.

And right now I'm bathing in the glow of experiencing loads of tearing ragga jungle at a fantastic club night last night, and everything is beautiful.
 

DJ PIMP

Well-known member
They said to him, "Then shall we enter the (Father's) kingdom as babies?"

Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom]."
 

zhao

there are no accidents
will come back to this when I have more time. for now I will just say:

the biggest proponent for Either/Or thinking is (you know what's coming next don't you?) -

George Bush.
 

DJ PIMP

Well-known member
Yeah, I was going to say binary masquerades behind a mask of righteousness, which in turn explains how society becomes so twisted, because the dark has to balance the contradiction and shortcomings of the supposed light. People focus, or pretend to be one, at the expense of the other, which leads to the peverse, distorted forms and modes behind the scenes.

Binary in extreme is like grey matter taken to an intensity, and then simplified out of context, so that it loses the entirety of its meaning.

But I went for maple trees and jesus instead, because thats happier.
 
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zhao

there are no accidents
bleep said:
Its only when we stop counting the leaves that we enjoy the shade of the maple tree.

a man after me own heart... if I didn't have someone already... :)
 

DJ PIMP

Well-known member
confucius said:
a man after me own heart... if I didn't have someone already... :)
Why would you even think that if you weren't looking for someone else?

Or have I misinterpreted what you did not say?
 

treblekicker

True Faith
My take on it is that I think that the either/or is in decline. This is a difference to the history of recorded music to date.

But, perhaps what's happening is a widening of the either/or to one limited by time instead of by identification or cost. Why is plus/and in the accendace? Because plus/and becomes more possible for more people in a digital age. A digital copy is easier and through P2P or iTunes, Bleep etc the plus/and becomes a realistic possiblity for something that was previously only possible for people with a lot of money or people who had the opportunity to listen to the large amount of different kinds of music through their job - the music journalists.

Everyone of course has the one limit in far how they can take the plus/and route - time. So much of modern marketing to this audience is about the classic money rich, time poor dichotomy and even those with the opposite condition I would say are exposed to more music because the cheapness of digital music (shades of Oscar Wilde) mean that we are exposed to so much more music, so much more diverse music than before. So no one anymore cannot see the links that provide part of the joy with the both/and narrative.

There is however a downside. In the last ten years or so we've seen a decline in music based youth cultures. Because there is so much choice there is less room to hermetically over focus on a particular niche and create subcultural meaning for groups that become a cult with its own rituals, dress, slang etc. These things still exist but to continue to have subcultural meaning they must resist codification/vocalisation and therefore significance because to do so in a digital culture(which is an intensification of existing media) would mean commoditisation because the costs of establishing subcultural capital have fallen so significantly.

Therefore the kind of nebulousness of both/and becomes percieved as a more valid stance because of its diversity it can't be commodified in the same terms. It does become commodity, but as the degree zero everyone believes in which makes it harder to percieve as there is no or, no other in such a system to compare to - everything becomes and.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
bleep said:
Or have I misinterpreted what you did not say?


oh no... I've just sent a link of this thread to my girlfriend, because it's an interest of hers... and for her to find me flirting with another man online... she already knows of this boy from the office who is... how shall I put it... extra nice to me...

let's just nip this in the bud: what I said was purely a figure of speech and bleep, you are very nice and smart (and I'm sure very cute), but I have no interest at this time to pursue any kind of relationship besides a platonic exchange of ideas on this forum.
 

Tim F

Well-known member
Saying that "either/or" = making a choice is true in one sense, but it's also about choosing to not make choices, or, perhaps, to not <i>see</i> choices.

When George Bush says "you are either with us or against us", he is obv. choosing sides, but he is also choosing <i>not</i> to choose between different modes of intransigence/opposition to US global politicking: he reduces all of these things to a flat plane of wrongness. So in a sense he is actually using the "plus/and" logic, having his cake and eating it too by being allowed to unconditionally support all dodgy US behaviour on the grounds that it's <i>not terrorism</i>, and coming down hard on all political adversaries on the grounds that they are <i>not fighting terrorism</i>.

Likewise, pronouncing an "either/or" musical rule ("of [x] and [y], only one can be good, and I say [x]") is a good way of avoiding having to make a choice <i>within</i> the categories in question ("both [x] and [y] can be worthwhile, but they themselves can be divided into good and bad according to a separate rule or rules, which we'll call [z]"). The fan who says grime <i>not</i> dance music, for example, is not necessarily making any more choices than the dilettante who dabbles in grime but chooses to avoid the stuff (s)he considers to be less interesting (whether it's because it's not catchy, not enough like hip hop etc. - [z] can be anything).

All this is the fundamental basis of hegemonic politics: the aim of the game is to divide the field in two (good vs bad) by rendering everything on each side <i>equivalent</i> to one another. Hence people who argue that the world can be divided in terms of class struggle tend to downplay dividing the world in terms of "clash of civilisations" or gender equality - class is either/or for them, so gender and culture is plus/and.

In other words, it's not a question of whether you use "either/or" or "plus/and", whether you want to make a choice or not, because each approach implies and relies upon the other to give it consistency. The question is, rather, "what choices are important to you?" "What do you consider to be a choice worth making?" "What makes this choice an either/or or plus/and?"

In terms of music criticism, the pitfall is thus not being too plus/and (or being too either/or) but that of not articulating your position well enough: not convincing the reader that your either/or choice is one worth making, not convincing them that all other choices can be reduced to plus/and.

What we can say - more in political terms than "real" terms - is that some either/or choices are less convincing than others depending on the context and the audience. To bring the elephant in the room into this, the division between authentic and inauthentic will probably <i>never</i> convince me, because I don't think anyone could ever articulate it persuasively enough for me to go along with them, to believe that this binary can actually <i>divide the field</i> and make everything on each side equivalent to one another. Having said that, I might be convinced to make the same <i>actual</i> choice (i.e. between two pieces of music of allegedly differing levels of authenticity) if the choice was presented to me in different, sufficiently well-articulated terms.

"Where you're at/where you're from" is not a choice that, in its current articulation, I'd be particularly inclined to make, because it seems to dissolve the other choices I'm interested in making w/r/t music, constructing what strikes me as a false unity b/w all "froms" and all "ats". But that doesn't mean that I'm not interested in making choices at all, in distinguishing between good and bad in a different way.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
There is another angle on this - existentialism. So much of today's culture is anti-existentialist because it makes it impossible to choose, or to make any choice that's meaningful. As Deleuze puts it in 'Postscript on the Societies of Control, we are in a world today in which 'nothing is ever completed'. For Deleuze, this corresponds to the condition Kafka (in The Trial) ominously designates as 'indefinite postponement'. With modularity of education and work - another way of describing post-Fordist 'precarity' - we are in a situation in which no option is ever closed but no commitment can ever definitively be made.

Downloading, as Simon rightly observes, is central to this 'plus-and' culture of apparent excess. You could also think of software packages like photoshop which make any 'choice' only ever provisional, since it is possible at any stage to go back and alter it.

This postmodern proliferation of options contrasts with the modernist impulse of existentialism, which maintains that you only have once chance... the starkness of the existentialist predicament - you either ACT or you don't - is lacking now.
 

Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
k-punk said:
There is another angle on this - existentialism. So much of today's culture is anti-existentialist because it makes it impossible to choose, or to make any choice that's meaningful.
Just the kind of difference of opinion / position I was looking for from the K-Punk nexus, whom I perceive to be firmly wedded to either / or, the verb "to be", the excluded middle etc, lots of stuff I don't like. But K-Punk and (almost certainly, I haven't read them but I don't know, but lets face it they're hot) the writers he quotes are aware of the intellectual point of view I have. So I'm interested in that critique of plus / and.
 

Tim F

Well-known member
The tying in of so-called dilettante "plus/and" approaches with capitalist consumption that is usually endorsed in this and many other threads is I think something that can be questioned: the idea appears to be that we can distinguish between THE choice (the one existing outside of or against capitalism) and mere <i>choices</i> (or, in Mark's terminology, "options") which are manufactured by capitalism, and exist merely to stimulate consumption.

Fair enough, but the problem is that capitalism also relies on the promotion of <i>mere options</i> as THE choice, the one that's going to change your life, the one that <i>counts</i>. Capital recognises that we live in an economy of scarcity of consumers, where any public <i>acknowledgment</i> of the flattening out of consumption to the status of mere options is inimical to the success of particular products. Hence one of the concerns that record labels have about downloading culture is not merely that people are stealing music, but also what happens when stealing is abolished and the market is predominantly using a paid download system: this new flat plane makes it very hard to sell yr product! How do we manufacture "aura" in this environment?

As Tom Ewing once cannily pointed out, the main use of rockism is as a marketing strategy: it connects musicians who appear to promote certain values with an audience who cares about that sort of thing (this ties in with Simon's complaints that there's not enough time or energy not to be rockist in a world characterised by a surfeit of product - in other words, at some point we just have to give up and put our faith in certain marketing strategies). Either/or in this sense is ultimately about <i>niche marketing</i>: create a choice which masquerades as THE choice for a certain market and laugh all the way to the bank.

I'm being careful not to try to promote one approach over the over, because (as I said in my previous post) these are really just two sides of the same coin, but I think it's worth pointing out that this is also true w/r/t/ capitalist consumption. E.g. whether you decide to reject M.I.A. or not, you're still acting according to the logic of the market.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
ah i must have misunderstood the plus/and position then Tim

[and can anyone explain what that actually means -- plus/and -- why is it formulated that way and not and/plus.... why is there even a slash between the words? and is it actually a term of philosophical origin?]

see i thought that "plus/and" explicitly meant -- you don't have to choose here, you can have both. i saw it as very much a "why get all worked up?" intervention. A deferral of choice, or denial that there needs to be a bifurcation at all.

i'd just as soon ignore the elephant because i'm interested in the wider, and deeper, applications of the opposition.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

there does seem to be a bit of a self-preening aspect to the various plus/and endorsements, a bit of virtuous moved-beyond-your-atavistic-mindset-into-an-infinitely-complex-reality-that-requires-much-more-subtle-thinking sort of vibe!

but i'm wondering how does this nondualistic, anti-binary whatever approach actually translate into practical life, which is a minefield of either/or choices from the incredibly petty and insignificant to the profound and life-altering

likewise invoking George Bush to discredit either/or strikes me as cheap and lame -- he's one of the crudest exponents true but all politics is about either/or, it's just that most politicians are more subtle and alert to nuances of the situation, their either/or decisions based on the context of any given dilemma, a costs and benefits analysis

-- but politics is full of such decisions, if we spend it on X we don't have enough in the budget for Y.... alliances etc

Plus/And has a bit of a Blair Third Way tang about it .... you could say the UK in the 70s was crucified by Either/Or.... one of the central conflicts being Either the Workers, via their unions/Labour party closely tied to the TUC, are in control OR the bosses are in control. Thatcher managed to decide that conflict

But Blairism "resolves" this by suspending it, deferring the conflict, or more like just muddying up everything into this fog of amorphousness. Things seem like they've changed but they haven't really. That seems like a "plus/and" argument -- the workers/the people (the Labour party, still notionally named after them) are in control, except they're not.
 
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