Mark I hope you realise that I was trying to delineate yr position from Ben Watson's! My post was meant with some spirit of reconciliation etc.
"As I've said before, I'm sceptical about the possibility of separating these two levels, and certainly of conceiving of the myth/ sonic fiction/fantasy as some separable, retrospective and Imaginary element."
Yes I think this is correct actually, this is why I deliberately constructed my opposition so as to use the same words - to paraphrase myself, "specifically observable imaginary relationships with music in the world" versus "imagined specificity of the music's relation to the world". As if to say, this is the same thing going on, only flipped around. My use of "myth" wasn't intended to imply "untrue" so much as collectively established - the "sonic fictions" we as a society tell about ourselves as a community/society etc. rather than the sonic fictions we individually tell about ourselves (<i>either</i> as individuals or as members of a community - I'll come back to this).
"Aha... a value judgement. What are records more worthy of being lionized than others, and what criteria have been used to make this evaluation? 'Less abundant today'... how are you making that judgement? Is it an objective judgement?"
Mark I've never been against value judgments, I'm just against value judgments which pretend they're not value judgments! (i'm guilty of doing that too obv, we all are at one point or another). Whether we think the issue is that there are not enough good records or that there are not enough good myths, we're making a value judgment either way. My point was more that talking in terms of myth rather than of individual records gets us closer to what we're actually discussing here - this regardless of whether myths today are deficient or abundant. I think you agree with me on this point though, so let's continue.
"Who would deny that the 'source alone' can account for music's effects? The problem for me with consumerist aestheticism is that it goes from that weak claim, which no-one would contest, to rhetorically downplaying the importance of anything but the consumer's reception, almost like a Husserlian 'bracketing out' of anything outside the immediate subjective experience."
Perhaps there are two issues at work here: firstly, that the source alone cannot account for the music's effects (the weak claim); and, secondly, that the "source alone" is <i>itself</i> partly a product of the consumer's reception - the identity and the background of the artist is something which is experienced as much as the music itself (more generally, just to be clear, this has always been my point re individual reception: not that it's more important than broader social effects, but that it taints everything). It's not individually constructed of course - or at least not <i>solely</i> constructed by the individual, but rather by the joint effort of the individual listener, social discourse and, of course, the artist (and their manager, record label etc.). The "source alone" is not something we can really discuss as some unmediated reality which exists separate from and prior to the moment of reception - so maybe it's not so much a case of bracketing it outside of the immediate subjective experience, but rather bracketing it <i>within</i> the immediate subjective experience. Which might similarly raise your hackles, but it's a slightly different process at work I think...
"How is the word 'social' being used here though? Only in the very weak sense of 'involving human beings'. What worries me here is the recuperation of the term 'social' to affirm precisely what its rhetorical force in social theory originally meant to deny, because this sounds to me like a post-Thatcherite IPop ontology in which the existence of the social is not denied, it is redefined to mean a series of more or less isolated consumers having their own private epiphanies, in their own time."
I actually don't much like this idea either, and I'm resistant to the notion of some sort of total critical subjectivity (ultimately a cop-out as much as some idea of total critical objectivity) which reduces the experience of music entirely to the individual level. But the miniature explosions I was talking are not merely the private epiphanies of the thatcher-pod, but also the smaller scale social interactions and transformations surrounding music as experienced in schools, dancefloors, bedrooms, and <i>then</i> how these can link up into some overall social effect (which is not internally unanimous and identical, even though mythologically it may present itself as such).
I think <i>Velvet Goldmine</i> provides a nice example of glam being experienced <i>simultaneously</i> as private epiphany and as a broader social transformation... in fact to reaffirm your point, the distinction between the two is not even clear, and even the protagonist's private epiphany is utterly socially loaded, his private time is itself a public offence against his family's claustrophobic conservatism. Conversely, the protagonist's account of glam <i>as a movement</i> is indubitably shaped by his own experience of glam: we lose a sense of what the meaning of kids running through the streets is for him if we discard his bedroom antics soundtracked by the Bowie-figure (I'm not suggesting you'd advocate ignoring this Mark- bear with me for a bit!).
It's a perspectival trick at work maybe: either glam was a single big bang which individuals were all infused with (the Event), or it was a contagious fire of many smaller explosions all occurring together and bouncing off one another (glam as totality of social effects). I don't think either reading is necesarily incorrect, but thinking in terms of the Event requires a final reduction of all musical experiences into two camps (Event vs Non-Event) whose categorisation is impliedly essential (with the corrolary that the process of distinguishing between the two is somehow straightforward, logical, objective etc.). Whereas I think the distinction between social effects and an Event is primarily grounded in the magnitude of its different types of impact.
The difference between "specifically observable imaginary relationships with music in the world" and "imagined specificity of the music's relation to the world" is therefore not so much between the individual experience and the collective experience, but in terms of who is the imagined speaker: when the protagonist in <i>Velvet Goldmine</i> immerses himself in glam both individually and socially, he is witnessing and partaking within the former - he is a tiny explosion describing the proximity of other tiny explosions which are all giving off light and heat. When we talk about the latter, it is from the perspective of the world itself perhaps, trying to capture what is <i>necessarily</i> common and essential and true of all those explosions (i.e. The Event).
I'll make another post re mindless entertainment soon!
