What is good about Pop Music?

[k-punk]

I certainly wouldn't seek to suggest that either all gay men or all gay scenes uncritically adored Kylie. However at the ones which do encourage it there is a collective denial of this actual diversity, <i>as if</i> Kylie was the authentic music of the gay male experience. I should note that as a matter of fact I've never met a gay man who <i>detested</i> Kylie who I liked, but this may be a chance thing (though I've of course now met many people in both camps and in between).

No-one surely is implying that anyone is suggesting that all gay men like Kylie: no-one here that is. But it IS implied, strongly, elsewhere. I suppose though I don't accept the concept that there ARE gay men in some quasi-naturalized way: to be gay is not only to have a certain sexual preference, it is to make a double affirmation, not only of a particular sexual preference, but also of the claim that people can be categorised according to their sexual preference. The original point of Queer Theory (before it got colonized by Gay Studies) was precisely to make this (Foucauldian) move.

"It seems to me that they are two ends of a continuum rather than a simple opposition: both the solitary straight consumer and the community member belong to the pleasure principle, to a reactive REaffirmation of particular prescribed affects.

Mark, how do you consider Geezaesthetics to be particularly affirming the pleasure principle?

Because, for a start, of its name and the attendant pub conversation imagery.

What is being a geeza if not belonging to a certain bleary beery community of shared enjoyment? Now this enjoyment is one level up from dancing or listening to Pop. It is, in this respect as in many others, the worst of all worlds: neither a 'naive' immersion in the Thing itself nor an honest theoretical analysis, just some beer-sodden place in between. It's an enjoyment of criticism itself, but only as long as criticism is pre-theoretical and non-intellectual, or can seem that way. i.e. 'We are critics as soon as we listen to a record, watch a film, experience any art of any kind. Any reaction, from rapture to depression of the off switch, is an act of criticism.'

One of the things that is most depressing about Geezaesthetics, and the Cult Studs discourse from which it comes, is this elevation of opionist exchanges into the highest form of enjoyment and culture. 'We place the highest possible value on criticism that makes us talk more, anything to enhance our conversation.' There you have it: a manifesto for the chattering classes, which at least has the benefit of honestly presenting the values of the chit-chatoisie.

I'm not joking when I say that the Geezaesthetics manifesto should be put alongside the American Constitution as a clear statement of bourgeois values. Pop is 'raised up' to be a worthy subject of the Conversation, just as any theorist must be 'brought down' to the level of a converser - otherwise she is getting above herself. Because the claim that 'no-one is above the conversation' is a way of saying: no-one is above us and our opinions. But as a Pop fan, I don't consider my own response equal to that of the Pop; I want to be subordinated to the Pop, lesser than it. I don't have any problem whatsoever with that. What I do have a problem with is the aggressive aesthetic egalitarianism of Cult Studs geezas who want to say, there's nothing there except your own response, what is ultimately important is our pub conversation.

So it seems to me that the shared enjoyment - both in the case of Kylie-loving and pub conversing - is a kind of meta-enjoyment. 'Look at me, enjoying this.' (Incidentally, partly this reflects my feelings of crashing disappointment at going to GAY, whose 'fun' aesthetic and compulsory PoMo queening about mean that everything is in inverted commas. Dancing is done merely as a statement.)

Do you entirely disagree with my stab at what I thought geezaesthetics was about or do you consider it irrelevant or...?

think I've answered this above, and you're certainly right that I needed to fill in the gaps...

And is the straight consumer solitary or in the pub? Which is it?

Well, being in a pub IS usually a kind of solitude, so the opposition doesn't strike me as convincing. The relevant opposition to sitting in a pub or being in a car would be engaging in some sort of crowd dynamic: being at a gig or on the dancefloor. Not that these things immediately guarantee an escape from atomised consumerist subjectivity.

I think you're missing the social quality of geezaesthetics, and playing down the distinction between critical engagement and enforced mystical enjoyment which you were one of the first people to make on this thread

I have under-emphasised it, but geezaesthetics is a form of opinionist mysticism it seems to me. It wants to say that, ultimately, criticism = opinion, which everyone has a 'right' to, and no-one can know better than you about.

The social is not the collective... The collective involves a dismantling of atomised subjectivity; it is not one atomised subject conversing with another. It often involves what is a priori deemed impossible in the Geezaesthetics world: namely, a recognition of false consciousness.

- is it <i>only</i> the fact that the person being discussed in the pub is Kylie which makes what is going on a function of the pleasure principle? If the discussion was about Roxy Music would it be okay? 'Cos discussions about Roxy Music would I imagine certainly fit into the Geezaesthetic brief. Actually it's always been implied that if there is a geezaesthete "consensus" artist/band it's Dexys Midnight Runners...

Yes, well anything can be fed into those conversations, by their nature. But the issue is their role in culture it seems to me. Roxy would never have come about in a cultural context dominated by Geezaesthetics (jeezus, as for me, the very NAME is enough to kill everything Roxy stood for), just as the cultural dominance of Geezaesthetic values means that it is Kylie who is popular now.

"*One interesting thing about Popism as described by Tim/ Alex Thomson is that it has a kind of concealed aggression about texts AND consumers that, precisely because its ATTENTION to consumers (and I hope that such attention can be somewhat more nuanced than saying, a 'hipster thinks "I am cool"') is actually very different to how most consumers think about pop."

It would strike me as a very strange point in the discussion to start defending what the average pop consumer "knows" about their own enjoyment. And if you *do* think that popism is precisely "defending what the average pop consumer "knows" about their own enjoyment," then perhaps geezaesthetics (as Alex/I see it) falls outside yr negative definition of popism?

Part of what is irritating about Geezaesthetics and Cult Studies is its bizarre mystificatory reverence in respect of the phenomenology of people's enjoyment, as if this is ineffably complex. It actually isn't; Thomson's list is a litany of cliches, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. It also strikes me as uncontroversial to claim that most Pop fans who aren't middle class meta-critics don't subscribe to the meta-critical account of their own enjoyment. The analogy I would make is with Wittgensteinian 'language games' as applied to religion. Wittensteinians enthusiastically claim, in a so-called defence of religious belief, that 'no-one can judge' religious beliefs because they are playing a different language game. But it doesn't seem to me controversial to say that most religious believers would baulk at the idea that they are simply 'playing a language game', no more or less valid than any other.

 

[borderpolice]

Interesting discussion!

Part of what is irritating about Geezaesthetics and
Cult Studies is its bizarre mystificatory reverence in respect of the
phenomenology of people's enjoyment, as if this is ineffably
complex. It actually isn't; Thomson's list is a litany of cliches, but
that doesn't mean it isn't true. other.

People's enjoyment is ineffably complex. For otherwise, why would it
be so unpredictable? And that it is unpredictable is immediately
obvious from the workings of the entertainment industry, which
essentially performs a random walk in the space of possible
entertainment, where most offerings, most bands for example that get
pushed, fail commercially. If you can do better than the entertainment
industry why don't you? One key problem here is how to observe
(others, one's own) enjoyment. Well, how do you?

But it doesn't seem to me controversial to say that
most religious believers would baulk at the idea that they are simply
'playing a language game', no more or less valid than any
other.

Isn't that the essence of religious tolerance? Be that as it may, why
would believers have privileged insight in whatever the think they
are doing? And why is believers' self-description in terms of what
they do superior to "Geezer's" alleged self-description in terms of
enjoyment?

 

[Tim F]

Mark, yer last point really did explain a lot of things I'd either been missing or misunderstanding.

I see this debate sort of reaching a point where it's going to be difficult for us to move past our own positions towards a resolution - I think there are certain areas where we just fundamentally see music differently.

It appears (and please correct me if I've gotten you wrong or am simplifying too far) that you believe that there are some forms of music with a revolutionary capacity (at least insofar as forming new categories of subjectivity and radically new forms of socialising in a manner that is <i>inherently</i> and unambiguously distinct from Kylie or whatever), and that we have to distinguish between these and other forms of music which encourage us to maintain a sort of bad faith (or, at least, placate our ideological/practical complicity with "kapital"). Furthermore, the task of criticism should at least partially be the process of making this distinction, and drawing attention to (and so hopefully intensifying) the revolutionary capacity of the former.

My position is probably coloured by the fact that I've never had any direct access to a musical/social movement in real time that might appear to me as revolutionary (leaving aside whether or not it actually is), so I simply do not, cannot theorise music in this matter. I can certainly see where you're coming from, and admire it for its conviction and theoretical neatness (at least, the neatness of having one's aesthetic theory subsumed within one's broader philosophy so cleanly), but it simply doesn't chime in with my experience of music - I guess my personal experience to date and the perspective that it has given rise to forms a horizon for what I can "objectively" consider and accept. Of course, if you <i>hadn't</i> experienced music in this fashion either it would probably make your insistence on theory over experience even <i>more</i> consistent, but I suspect that you have or you wouldn't refer so readily to personal examples (early Scritti, Roxy etc.) to illustrate your position.

I guess I see all culture as maintaining a sort of bad faith (insofar as, whatever it is doing, it distorts or distracts away from a confrontation with the most pressing political questions, which hardly need the world of music to hold up a mirror to them) and, given the choice of rejecting it utterly or accepting it for what it is and trying to understand how it works I choose the latter. When you talk about music "creating populations" I conceive of the same process as music articulating or inciting subject positions formerly latent within society's field of possibility - exciting and invigorating for their newness, a localised "revolt" even but not revolutionary per se (the difference between a revolution and revolt being, of course, that revolts never seriously challenge the status quo). But then, likewise, I don't see the difference between "gay" and "queer" as being so politically charged as I used to: even politicised queers never make any demands of the system that it cannot accomodate superficially, at least to a point that renders them acquiescent. Of course, nor do I, so I'm hardly in a position to assign blame! And as revolts (and especially aesthetic revolts) never bring about any significant rearrangement of capitalism (let alone demolition), for me their value is aesthetic not political (needless to say, an aesthetics which prizes the political most highly is in fact a politics) (The fact that I spend more of my time valuing music than I do working towards or even theorising revolution is, from the perspective of the revolution's eternal gaze, indefensible; I will be first against the wall I imagine)

Is this pop-which-produces-populations still a priori better than that which does not simply on aesthetic grounds? Maybe. Certainly if you think that the production of new subjectivities is automatically more exciting, more urgent. Generally they are. But subjectivities are always going to be a reconfiguration of the same basic "symptoms", a way of simultaneously expressing and concealing antagonism, and I think sometimes aesthetes of the left are so focused on the theoretical goldmine of the emergent in culture that they ignore how much the "persistant" can reveal about ourselves (and I mean that <i>simultaneously</i> in a sort of pop psychology "understand yourself" sense and in a rigorous Marxist diagnosis of one's "false consciousness" - I feel the need to put some distance between myself and that term via scare quotes, can we use "ideology" instead?). After all, any examination of transformation requires within it an examination of consistency in order for it to be meaningful. I realised recently that one of the questions at the heart of Skykicking is and perhaps has been for a long time: how are sonics configured and <i>re</i>configured to reassert "timeless" (ideologically reproduced) emotional themes? An interest in the latter does not translate into a respect for them: I have to be honest about my own susceptibility to certain types of emotional narratives in music (whether presented at a lyrical or sonic level) but that doesn't mean I automatically acknowledge their truth value.

On another note, I have to disagree and say that I think people's enjoyment of music is <i>intensely</i> complex, as much as ideology is intensely complex, or (and I have to thank Sterling Clover for reasserting the value of this metaphor tirelessly) as much as language is intensely complex. The fact that language is experienced as straightforward, logical and a matter of agency (as in, I choose the words I use to express myself) does not mean that this is what is actually going on. But since you're interested in the "false consciousness" involved in much of the listening world's reception of music perhaps the music-as-ideology metaphor is the one we should be using primarily here.

I'd argue that one way we might talk about music-as-ideology is precisely in the sense that music reception is <i>not</i> experienced as being particularly complex, and it is when the enjoyment of music is represented as being "simple" that we can talk most meaningfully about its "mystical" component (my boyfriend says of American Idol that Simon Cowell's frequent bouts of inarticulateness, his inability to say why a particular performer was great or awful, might actually be one of the very things that "makes sense" to many viewers, who feel the same way; but that doesn't mean that he is somehow closer to the "truth" of his enjoyment than Randy). Acknowledging the complexity of musical reception is the first step towards <i>overcoming</i> one's reverent awe at its monolithic ineffability; the complex is also the explicable.

 

[blissblogger]

geezer-pleaser

i think the distinction Mark's making re. the collective versus geezaethetic discourse is one between the
social and the merely sociable

practically speaking most of the discussions i have about pop -- in person (often in bars as it happens!), on email, sometimes on the blog at its more off the cuffy mode -- actually have more than a little of the geezaesthetic about them ...

but the idea that this should be upheld as the summit, the very ideal, of discourse-about-music!

when i first read it, i immediately thought: this is a manifesto for underachievement

if anything it's more like an UNmanifesto, in the same way that a "bloke" in the Hornbyesque sense is neither a man nor an androgyne

going back to the Consumer-ist slant of pro-pop thought, i just don't find it a particularly liberating idea, the notion that meaning is made in the act of consumption... the implication is that nothing inheres in the music itself, that everything is infinitely constru-able and readable and elastic in terms of meaning and affect , that there's no musical object that couldn't produce an intensity for some listener, and equally no music object whose intensity will be perceived or work for every single listener

now the reason this way of thinking is depressing is that --taken to the logical limit -- is destroys any social aspect to music, any social power it might have as a motivating, galvanizing force

if nothing intrinsic inheres to the music object (or art object), it makes it far more unlikely a group of people larger than one will have the same response

whereas if you operate in the belief that fixed properties (or potentials in kpunkian terms) inhere in the music, then that creates the possibility for a unity of response

indeed it would explain why, at various points in pop history, huge numbers of people have felt the same way about certain pieces, or forms, of music

it seems far more plausible to attribute such effects to inherent properties of the music than to somehow imagine that everyone has the same mysteriously synchronised consumer-hallucination

i think of (what i'm calling) Rockism as altruistic, in the sense of being Other-directed -- the Other exists, it can affect me, it can transform me, i want to find out about it, have contact with it

music is that Other, it does things to me regardless of whether i want it to or not

but it is also made by social Others

******
to the point about Ariel Pink
well i've never argued that the scenius-theory is responsible for every kind of great music

these intrinsic properties can be socially generated or by exceptional individuals

Ariel Pink is a reclusive hermit-genius type, clearly

but there are other scenes that are not obviously scenius-like in the pirate radio culture sense but operate with a kind of weak or diffuse sceniotic element... like for instance the free folk/psych-folk explosion, these artists are clearly not lone operators, something larger than them enwebs their activity, certain forces made the kind of music they make seem both timely and possible

and some bands almost operate like small scenes in themselves, there is a definitely following cohering around Animal Collective although Ariel P is not really part of it as his sound is so different

similarly i've been thinking that the whole postpunk period could be seen as a kind of grand-scale scenius, there was a very intense level of connectivity between all those bands, ideas flying about, the music press being weekly played a big role -- you can see it in the role of a group like the pop group as an idea of What Is To Be Done, the Way Head

musicians are almost always operating in a field of possibilities, a web of discourse and sound, within which their genius is affected by the collective conversation

*************

the introduction of the gay audience idea is interesting because an important point to make is that sceniotic dynamics is not only at work in black street genres... the music and atmosphere at Trade and similar nu-nrg clubs in the UK could be seen as prime example of scenius, certainly the music operated on a 'changing same' principle, it was used by a quite specific community organized around sexual preference.... i think various metal subgenres operate as sceniuses... you can almost spot scenius whenever it becomes possible for an outsider to say "but it all sounds the same!" (how i feel about most metal subgenres, while knowing it's an ignorant response!)

******

one of the reasons 'scenius' is not, ultimately, as an anti-rockist concept as i once maybe thought is that it is essentially a form of collectivized auteurism
-- all the fundamental aspects of auteurism (and rockism as i spelled it out in the MIA piece) are present -- intent/content/context/formal progression.... the artistic signature or stylistic consistency operates at the level of the collective rather than the individual (although within that macro-scenius you get micro-geniuses with a signature-within-the-signature, a group like 4 Hero say who aren't purely generic -- at least to those "inside" the music culture, the further you get outside the more generic even the geniuses seem)

.... you can talk about a kind of "will" that the scene has

******

i like the way Mark talks about music and culture, the language of potentials and populations -- i i would have talked more like that a while back maybe -- it's definitely more "sexy' in the theory-buzz sense... what i wonder (and this is not intended to be deflationary) is whether it's actually more like a rewording than a whole new way of looking at things

"populations" sounds a lot like a tribe or subculture .... creating this ex (seeming) nihilo is what music has always done (back to its intrinsic properties and ability to create unities of affect) ... 2-Tone for instance was a movement conjured almost out of nothing although the type of person who responded to the signals emitted by the Specials etc could be analyzed socio-culturally ...
... i know Mark loathes the cult-studs tradition but i think the origianl subcultural analysts like hebdiges and willis did some exciting stuff, that still has applications, in terms of understanding these processes of population formation

and
"potentials" -- is this not dissimilar to the idea that there may be more in a text than the author consciously put in it? i've just finished a book by Camille Paglia reading 43 great poems, it's brilliant, each commentary is like a poem in itself... and there's often a sense in which you think 'well maybe she's reading too much into this one,' or 'did the poet really have this in mind?'. isn't she in a sense liberating potentials in these texts?

liberating potentials maps onto one of the key differences for me between sampling and mash-ups, on the one hand the samper uses an old pop resource as fuel, in the other it's used in a merely citational sense... and of course i think of mash-ups as the ultimate example of Popism turned into "creative" pop practice

*****

solidarity

well if the grimesters weren't making music that i loved and chimed with my tastes and ideas of what's cutting edge etc the feeling of solidarity would be quite a lot more notional

it's a kind of aesthetico-political solidarity perhaps

what seems particularly admirable and interesting is the collision of hunger in that socio-economic generated sense with this perverse insistence on making uncommercial, dark, heavy music

after all if they just wanted to make some bread there's all kinds of music they could make

they want to make it, but do it make music that has aesthetic integrity according to their values

perhaps it's the impossible dream -- (in the current climate).... certainly it's one that their forebears, eg. the junglists, pursued in vain

but it's totally that tension, that diagonal they're trying to walk that is so compelling to me

and the absence of the hunger explains why some musician from outside the scene
could make a grime-facsimile, with all the formal properties present and correct, and it wouldn't necessarily have the same affect

 

[Tim F]

"going back to the Consumer-ist slant of pro-pop thought, i just don't find it a particularly liberating idea, the notion that meaning is made in the act of consumption... the implication is that nothing inheres in the music itself, that everything is infinitely constru-able and readable and elastic in terms of meaning and affect , that there's no musical object that couldn't produce an intensity for some listener, and equally no music object whose intensity will be perceived or work for every single listener"

But Simon, wouldn't you agree (as you kind of said below this) that it is up to the listener to activate or bring out certain <i>potentials</i> within the music, and that no-one listener can exhaustively pin down those potentials? I certainly agree that listeners can get the same things (or sufficiently similar things) out of a piece of music in order to establish a sense of commonality - eg. when a certain sound comes out of the speakers on the dancefloor and it affects you and other dancers in <i>exactly the same way</i> and you smile at each other in acknowledgement (this happened with me and Geeta frequently BTW!). But how does this sound have meaning outside of the context of me and Geeta (for example) both being present on the dancefloor, both primed to get certain things out of what's playing, both smiling ecstatically when this <i>thing</i> happens because we <i>recognise</i> the effect this phenomenon can have on us in particular?

 

[borderpolice]

the implication is that nothing inheres in the
music itself, that everything is infinitely constru-able and readable
and elastic in terms of meaning and affect , that there's no musical
object that couldn't produce an intensity for some listener, and
equally no music object whose intensity will be perceived or work for
every single listener

now the reason this way of thinking is depressing is that --taken to
the logical limit -- is destroys any social aspect to music, any
social power it might have as a motivating, galvanizing force

if nothing intrinsic inheres to the music object (or art object), it
makes it far more unlikely a group of people larger than one will have
the same response whereas if you operate in the belief that fixed
properties (or potentials in kpunkian terms) inhere in the music, then
that creates the possibility for a unity of response indeed it would
explain why, at various points in pop history, huge numbers of people
have felt the same way about certain pieces, or forms, of music it
seems far more plausible to attribute such effects to inherent
properties of the music than to somehow imagine that everyone has the
same mysteriously synchronised consumer-hallucination

I can't disagree more!


It think you miss a crucial mechanism for the social construction of
musical pleasure: mimesis. It's a rather general concept, but in the
present context it means that pleasure, more precisely: observing
other people's pleasure, is contagious, in the same sense that
yawning, gobbing or sexual excitement is. To oversimplify [and i
emphasise oversimplify because clearly there are other ideosyncratic
elements to musical preferences]: we like a certain form of music
because our friends do, or those we admire, or at least those who are
around and we don't mind. Mimetic imitation is fundamental to all
human socialising -- the language learning one sees in children is
only one blatant example. And this is also at work in pop music. I'm
not saying that this is the only mechanism that allows the emergence
of a(n unstable) distinction between good and bad music, but it seems
to be the most powerful one, and the only one that is genuinely
social, the rest is essentially private.

The beauty of explaining musical scenes, the high probabilities of
shared musical tastes, using mimetic phenomena (in addition to random
order-from-noise kind of effects that are always at play when large
numbers of fairly similar entities interact locally) is that it can
dispense with intrinsic qualities of music (apart from things like:
must be humanly audible and the like) which is unavoidable in view of
the extreme variations in shared musical taste in time and space, yet
without sacrificing the social aspects of music.

 

[blissblogger]

all consuming vs socially constructed

"But Simon, wouldn't you agree (as you kind of said below this) that it is up to the listener to activate or bring out certain <i>potentials</i> within the music, and that no-one listener can exhaustively pin down those potentials?...

But how does this sound have meaning outside of the context of me and Geeta (for example) both being present on the dancefloor, both primed to get certain things out of what's playing, both smiling ecstatically when this <i>thing</i> happens because we <i>recognise</i> the effect this phenomenon can have on us in particular?

don't think we're necessarily in disagreement here except there's a sense in which your emphasis somehow makes it seems like one voluntarily chooses one's responses to music... it puts the power back in the consumer's hand and less in the music as a force

i'd ask: what 'primed' you except some earlier, ecstastic, maybe even life-changing encounter with those sounds?

ecstasy is a good word to use because i'd say music can operate analagous to a drug ... it has certain inbuilt effects that in most cases happen

some people don't enjoy E, some people (somehow manage to) have bad trips, some people feel the ecstastic feeling but it's not a feeling they want in their lives

that doesn't mean that the neurological effects aren't in the drug and ready to activate a person who is so disposed to be activated

how each person will respond to E is nuanced by set and setting, their own psychology, how blocked they are, what their expectations are and what they want to get out of it --and one's isubsequent nterpretation of what happened to you on E will vary as will the extent to which you allow it to change your life or your ideas

-- but the core sensation is broadly the same

to use mr border police's terms, there are socially imitative aspects of the E-xperience that vary quite wildly from scene

but there's no doubt that there's an actual X-perience with intrinsic properties

now you might say well music isn't neurochemical but i'm not sure, there's a whole brain and nervous system scientific side to music ... rhythms affect the body... geeta wants to write a book about music and neurology, right?

the disagreement i have with the idea of socially constructed meaning etc as per Border Policeman's post is that it sounds awfully complicated and doesn't ring true with how music HITS you... the way the response feels unmediated and instant and involuntary....

as much as there's a heavily acculturated side to music taste, there is also a part that dips below the horizon of choice into the involuntary ... maybe even the pre-cultural... c.f. sexual attraction, food,

both of those are things that have elements of the culturally constructed and elements that are primal or somatic

that's where i disagree with kpunk's rationalism -- i think the essence of music is utlimately mysterious and what we're debating about a lot of the time is the social deployment of a mystery, the discourses around the uses of a mystery or magic, how it's been harnessed to various ends

 

[borderpolice]

the disagreement i have with the idea of socially constructed meaning
etc as per Border Policeman's post is that it sounds awfully
complicated and doesn't ring true with how music HITS you... the way
the response feels unmediated and instant and involuntary....

Agreed, "the essence of music is ultimately mysterious and what we're
debating about a lot of the time is the social deployment of a
mystery, the discourses around the uses of a mystery or magic, how
it's been harnessed to various ends". We will not get further with
unraveling this mystery, as long as we don't understand how human
brains work, which most likely means never. What we can do is see how
people react to music in different contexts. Here the evidence in
favour of a strong mimetic element is overwhelming or at least seems
so to me. One can quite easily test this empirically by exposing
individuals to new music, on their own, with friends at a party,
surrounded by threatening strangers and so on. Don't you know the
feeling when you fall in love with somebody and suddenly start liking
the same music they do, even where you might have sniffed at what they
liked before you met them? On the other hand, as the example of
solitary development of musical preference shows, the mimetic approach
cannot be an exhaustive explanation for any individual's tastes, but
it seems to cover most of the social effects of music, that is, what
we can and do discuss.

To be sure, the phenomenology of the music experience would sometimes
be couched in terms of being hit and that's appropriate because
the mimetic aspects work on a level below consciousness before it it
becomes conscious where it often manifests itself as a sudden revelation,
so there's no contradiction.

Consider the simpler case of yawning: it is an irresistible force,
isn't it? Yet would you not agree that it can also clearly be
triggered by observing someone else's yawning?

I would also guess that being "hit" by music is a relatively rare
phenomenon, it doesn't happen every day to me f or example, and where
it happens there is always a history of social aspects.
I don't think it is a coincidence that so many reports about why someone
likes or loathes a given bit music talk other others' alleged responses
to that music (LTJ Bukem is too middle class etc).

 

[borderpolice]

but there's no doubt that there's an actual X-perience with intrinsic properties

There are fascinating sociological studies where volunteers took
different types of drugs and placebos, while either not being informed, or
being misinformed as to what particular drug they were given. The
participants, even hardened druggies had a surprisingly hard time
working out what they've been given. [NB: I read about this in mid 1990s
rave culture texts which I have gotten rid of]

 

[blissblogger]

potty!

it's all quite loony, this social mimesis stuff!

you're saying, what, that people like stuff for copycat reasons, they're copying other people's responses, and those people are copying others...

it sounds incredibly implausible, and convoluted

what about musics where there's no readily observable form of physical response to the music (classical say)... when i listened to Holst or Beethoven's pastoral symphony on my own as a 10 year on my parent's radiogram, who was i copying as i swooned to it? i'd never been to a classical concert. i mean, i might have heard at an early age my parents saying 'this is good music' or my mum saying 'i love this bit' but i don't recall them behaving in any outward copy-able way... it's all very internalized, the response

how through mimesis do you learn the emotional grammar of classical music in all its subtlety?

no it's quite loony! sorry -- don't mean to be rude

the thing about the drugs is interesting, the placebo effect --

however all i can say (and many a raver will back me up with bitter experience) there's been many many occasions when i was more than predisposed to have all the right E-static reactions, if anybody was in a state to will themselves to feel those feelings, that was me, and the pill has been a dud -- ie. effectively a placebo -- and there's been no effect

and there are measurable physiological (and neurological) effects of the drugs that are not imaginary

(mind you in partial support of your theory, one of our posse always seemed to have an E-static time of it no matter how duff the gear, she was primed for that release, really up for it perhaps... and it's also true that having had those experiences you can culturally learn them -- with the right mood/vibe and some alchohol i can reach close to those feelings subsequently without any chemical -- well, illegal chemical -- help. but whether i could access them w/o ever having had the E-xperiences in the first place... it definitely changed me forever)

the hardened druggy in these tests i suspect would be so keen to feel the feelings they might hallucinate them -- also it's that context of trust isn't it, if the person giving the drugs is scientific or a doctor then you might be inclined to take their word

more generally, i wonder where the resistance to the idea of things having intrinsic properties comes from? it seems such a bleak view of the world somehow

again it seems to diminish, or demean, the idea of the transformative power of anything, to regard it as a social trick we play on ourselves -- or equally an individualistic response, an act of reading

 

[k-punk]

i think the distinction Mark's making re. the collective versus geezaethetic discourse is one between the
social and the merely sociable

Quite, yeh...

practically speaking most of the discussions i have about pop -- in person (often in bars as it happens!), on email, sometimes on the blog at its more off the cuffy mode -- actually have more than a little of the geezaesthetic about them ...

but the idea that this should be upheld as the summit, the very ideal, of discourse-about-music!

Yes, but it is no accident ... if you read Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil you'll find this bleary-eyed levelling impulse totally nailed there.... the aggression of this so-called egalitarianism, which wants to pull everything down to the level of a drunken exchange of 'opinions'...there's a class agenda, too, that really irks me... this kind of middle class discourse, modelled on its own fantasies about the working class, now has the social power to impose itself on the working class

Tim, one thing that puzzles me is why you pledge any sort of affinity with geezaesthetics... I have to say, whenever I read your writing, the LAST word that comes to mind is 'geeza'

going back to the Consumer-ist slant of pro-pop thought, i just don't find it a particularly liberating idea, the notion that meaning is made in the act of consumption... the implication is that nothing inheres in the music itself, that everything is infinitely constru-able and readable and elastic in terms of meaning and affect , that there's no musical object that couldn't produce an intensity for some listener, and equally no music object whose intensity will be perceived or work for every single listener

now the reason this way of thinking is depressing is that --taken to the logical limit -- is destroys any social aspect to music, any social power it might have as a motivating, galvanizing force

That's it, precisely... this cult studs mantra is poisonous and, again, is about the aggressive milk-snatching tendencies of the academic middle classes.. 'you thought you were being swept away by something outside yourself, but, really, kids, it ALL CAME FROM YOU...'... the hackademics pull back the curtain at the end of the yellow brick road... and you find yourself looking into a mirror...

(btw I don't have much if any problem with the likes of Hebdige (indeed I've quoted him in the past): they hadn't reached the ludicrous state of resentocratic reductionism in which cult studs finished up)

The whole concept of social construction is in sore need of a kicking.

Once, the move Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche made was radical: when people talked about God, they were really only talking about the social. The divine was the social's projection of itself beyond itself.

Now, when people are talking about the 'social', they are really talking about God - in the sense that they are invoking a mysterious First Cause, something that has an almost unlimited power to produce any and everything, but which has no explanatory power and itself cries out for explanation.

The radical thought that is lost here is not that 'everything is social constructed' but that the social, too, is constructed... and is therefore REconstructable.

There is no Society.

Tim, I think the questions you raise re: inherent revolutionary potential of sounds are actually very open... Someone asked me precisely this at the noisetheorynoise conference: do I think that certain sounds IN THEMSELVES bring about social/ behavioural changes? I mean, that is the view of Underground Resistance.. but, however much I sympathise with that, it seems to me going too far

The important thing, I suppose, is that I simply don't regard music as a relative autonomy... I'm old enough to remember a time when the LAST thing that ppl in groups would talk about was 'music'... indeed, that might be one of the definitional features of Punk ... the demystification (but not desublimation) of 'music', and by extension, ALL so-called aesthetic so-called relative autonomies...

I'm afraid I don't relate at all to this thing about knowing smiles to others in clubs... that's just sociabilty for me... ... But then I am the sort of person who goes on his own to clubs and doesn't really want anyone to talk to him when I get there... because I'm seeking another mode of collectivity beyond the sociable...

Contagion and innoculation are better models than construction... That's what voodoo is all about... and cybernetics....

 

[k-punk]

Neuropunk, again

that's where i disagree with kpunk's rationalism -- i think the essence of music is utlimately mysterious and what we're debating about a lot of the time is the social deployment of a mystery, the discourses around the uses of a mystery or magic, how it's been harnessed to various ends

But that implies there aren't _magicians_ ; that magic 'just happens' and there aren't discoverable principles by which it can be made to happen.

Actually, Simon, in terms of philosophy of religion - and in many ways, I think that is what WE'RE talking about, in an attempt to resist these socio-consumerist reductions - yr position is very much like Rudolf Otto's in The Idea of the Holy: a magnificent book, and the origin, I think, of the term 'numinous' --- I'm sure you're familiar with it, but Otto argues that religious experiences are characterised in terms of the 'mysterium tremendum' - the mysterious, awe-ful and dread-ful

Needless to say, I have enormous sympathy with Otto's position...

it has been subject to an apparent debunking... neurologists have shown that the apparent experience of the 'wholly other' turns out to be something that can be simulate-stimulated in the lab with the right neuro-probing...

But I think it is important to resist the idea that this is in fact a debunking... this plays into the Romanticism that I'm so keen to flush out and dismantle... because the cult studs socio-consumerist reductio ad blandum IS the dessicated, degraded re-statement of the idea that everything comes from the imagination.... Romanticism insists that material explanation (demystification) must also mean desublimation...

Yet there are any number of reasons not to accept this. One is the 'voodoo death' approach pioneered by Walter Cannon.... Cannon showed that neither an empiricist debunking of voodoo sorcery (empiricism and Romanticism have always been twins: both collude in the conviction that there is NO OUTSIDE) nor a supernatural explanation were adequate to the phenomenon.... this is something reinforced by Wade Davis in his Cannon-influenced exploration into Haitian sorcery in The Serpent and the Rainbow (Wes Craven made a garbled film version of this)... voodoo requires belief, but belief is immediately physical, neurological, a set of CNS autonomic responses...

Damasio's book on Spinoza makes the same point ---- as does neuroeconomics ---- emotions are far less ineffable and mysterious than ppl think --- but at the same time, they don't lose any of their sublimity through being analysed ----

That's neuropunk....

 

[dominic]

What then is the value of Ariel Pink - music which is certainly not pop in the sense it's being used here, but which is almost inevitably geared towards individual consumption/engagement? Most of the music that I like could "pass" under yr restrictvie definition of value, and you're also talking about my absolute favourite way of experiencing and engaging with music, but if I'm understanding you correctly then I think there's a lot of (often very rockist!) music and music fans who are left out in the cold.

first let me say that i've yet to hear ariel pink -- this is the kind of thing i'll eventually get around to investigating based solely on blissblogger's and woebot's enthusiasm

but i suppose that ariel pink lacks the potential for binding the listener into a "political" relationship

ariel pink can at most bind the listener into a "private" relationship -- and i'm not sure if such music has enough power to "bind" or "claim" someone -- it may simply only move you or make sense to you, but not enrapture you -- such that at the end of the day you can take it or leave it

i don't see how music could truly seize the listener and yet not become a field subject to competing claims of ownership, a site for anxieties about one's relative status, a site for deference to others, a site for acquiesence, in short a site for politics

that is, if music seizes one listener -- then that music must seize many listeners -- b/c that is one of the properties of the music, i.e., the property of seizing or claiming -- and so the music creates the (political) question of relationships among the many listeners it claims
--------------------

that is, the only music i've ever really felt claimed by is rave/house/junglistic hardcore music

and i then extrapolate from my own experience to attribute this feeling of being claimed to loyalists (subjects) of all other music scenes

-----------------------------------

and yet i should note that in the case of ariel pink, as with all "weak" music, a kind of secondary politics will develop b/c people will inevitably argue about the proper assessment of ariel pink

now once arguments about ariel pink go into circulation, once assessments of ariel pink are made known -- then other people will rally to this camp or that camp -- and here i have to imagine (again not having heard ariel pink to really conjecture) that it will be a kind of belle & sebastian phenomenon -- i.e., the composition of various camps will reflect ordinary socio-empirical positions and predispositions, though it'd require a sophisticated social analysis to map out this process

and yet some people will presumably have more "integrity" and relate to ariel pink in a way that is not simply determined by their socio-empirical position

so there's still lots of politics

(also -- when music is truly powerful, the listener doesn't worry about his integrity as such -- he is simply claimed by the music -- though he will have questions about his relationship to others who are claimed -- or perhaps he may worry about his temporal or spatial distance from the original music scene)

hmmmmmm -- starting to feel like i'm making this stuff up out of thin air! -- that is, i feel like i've stopped thinking, and that i'm now constructing convenient models

 

[dominic]

so maybe the "value" of ariel pink is in its refracting light or some such thing

perhaps it helps us develop finer, more sensitive critical habits

again, i'm saying this based on what i've read about ariel pink -- i haven't the faintest

maybe it's the pleasure of melancholy

i don't know

again, i think that most music i encounter i could take or leave -- destined for the trash heap at some point

so perhaps it has no real value if you don't feel claimed by it

so now i suppose i've gone and "mystified" the nature of ariel pink's value by calling it valueless, i.e., how can something have no value if people like it and to one extent or another value it?

 

[dominic]

I understand entirely the point Mark is trying to make re "populations". I think you're talking more about rave than all scenes eg grime and dancehall though - the point with grime and dancehall is that the music appears to signify and be linked to a real actual pre-existing community that is not merely created by the music, and this appears to be the basis upon which Matt/Simon distinguish them from pop/M.I.A. Rave is in another category, and that is actually quite a crucial point because it means that, in the split between rave and gay men who like Kylie, *grime is on the side of the gay men who like Kylie*

yes -- i was talking more about rave scenes

or rather, i argued up thread that 89/92 rave scene was a produced population -- but precisely b/c it was a produced population, and not an organic community w/ "real world" bonds to hold it together, that the lines along which the scene did fracture largely corresponded w/ preexisting socio-empirical camps & identities, i.e., 92 prog house for hipsters, serious techno for student class, several years later in america funky breaks as white suburban teenage option

also, i think that blissblogger's point that even rave was not made ex nihilo has a certain amount of validity

but i tried to address this by describing rave as an open field over which different groups vied for ownership

whereas with grime it's already known in advance who the stalwarts of the scene are

though it's important to remember that we're saying all of this from a white middle-class point of view, i.e., the actual grime massive may be more akin to a population than we give it credit for -- i.e., the actual massive = those who count themselves as members and are recognized by others as members

and the field may be more open and contested than we give it credit for (or to be accurate, that i'm giving it credit for)

You might say in response . . . that the distinction between the grime scene and gay Kylie fans is (as you said before), gay men don't stake a strong claim of ownership in Kylie. Have you ever seen Kylie perform live? I think you'd find that the sense of stepping into a particular sub-culture's territory would seem near-overwhelming. It's like gay pride day.

i don't know enough to really say

but i suspect that the gay relationship to kylie is a bit more ironic or campy

i.e., would gays be willing to die (figuratively speaking) to validate their claim of ownership over kylie

that is, i think farley jackmaster, ron hardy, and all "the children" in chicago were ready to die for house

the willingness to die comes from the sense of being claimed -- that's why you join the scene -- b/c of the power of the music's claim over you, you then make claims about your relationship to the music -- a claim that necessarily involves making claims about other people's relationship to the music -- and yes, when a scene is dynamic, truly happening, the next big thing, there'll be issues about posers and trend-spotters and so on and so forth -- i.e., it will become apparent that some people want to join the scene for less than "pure" reasons -- and others will be "self righteous" in asserting the nature of their relationship to the music, i.e., they'll claim to be the leaders ----- again, this is all about politics

and yet it's also about art -- b/c the self-righteous become the djs -- and the djs provide their "take" on the music -- they've been claimed & this is their take on it

and other righteous brothers and sisters get down to the music -- they get down to the music b/c they "get" the music

and in getting down to the music they purport to reveal themselves as truly "getting" the music

i.e., when people dance in public they're making a claim of ownership -- i own this dancefloor, i control this dancefloor

and by way of example -- if you go to an old-skool jungle night (at least in america) you can tell exactly who was into jungle in the 94/95/96 b/c they have a way of dancing that ravers from times before and after do not have -- it's quite remarkable -- as if the way of dancing had been formed in a crucible

they all must have gotten the music in the same way -- or else a few got the music in this fashion, and the claims that this few made were so convincing, that others felt bound to advance their claims by using the same forms

--------------------

again, i've never been to kylie concert -- so i really can't say

but i used to always go to show tunes night at this bar that the very gay owner of this restaurant where i used to work owned -- it's all about camp and celebration and extroversion and knowing the lines -- it's not about feeling claimed by the music in one's bones

 

[dominic]

and of course what the scene allows for is collective ownership

we getting down to the music together -- we are all claimed by the music -- and we own this music

 

[Tim F]

I'm not supposed to be posting right now so a couple of quick points i'll expand later if necessary:

"don't think we're necessarily in disagreement here except there's a sense in which your emphasis somehow makes it seems like one voluntarily chooses one's responses to music... it puts the power back in the consumer's hand and less in the music as a force

i'd ask: what 'primed' you except some earlier, ecstastic, maybe even life-changing encounter with those sounds?

ecstasy is a good word to use because i'd say music can operate analagous to a drug ... it has certain inbuilt effects that in most cases happen"

Simon I entirely agree with you. I think that music-as-it-is-experienced is the only sensible grounds from which we can build a discussion about music, but that does not mean at all that I assign any level of agency or control to the listener. When I say "primed" I could equally say "fashioned", "shaped", even "produced".

I get the impression that many people here think that popism definitely includes an insistence on the subject's <i>autonomy</i> and <i>authority</i> when it comes to musical enjoyment. If this is the case I could no longer call myself a popist I guess. For it is perhaps the very fact that one cannot easily control what one likes that makes me suspicious of rockism. The assignation of objective value to music or certain patterns within music necessarily implies that "best practice" music criticism would involve a repression of one's personal reaction, that we should reign in our musical "id" and subordinate it to what we "know" to be true. I don't think that the id is always right, but I'd prefer to bring it to the surface, to engage in a sort of psychoanalysis of my musical enjoyment, rather than create some sort of seige mentality where I'm terrified of my own reactions because they might contradict some objective principle.

The counter-argument to this Freudian analogy is a Foucauldian one - that, far from a repression/liberation model of enjoyment, we construct and complicate our enjoyment via inserting it into discourse. The binary here is actually not as strong as some assume though, I reckon: what is panicky repression in the name of some objective principle other than a particularly crude form of discursivization?

K-Punk - I don't identify as a geezaesthete or a geeza for that matter. My defence of the former group simply arises from my feeling that they're being misrepresented here where none of them seem to post and so don't have a chance to respond.

But then I don't think people like Tom Ewing or Tim Hopkins really identify as "geezas" in the sense you're meaning.


Dominic - "Camp" is precisely about claims of ownership, even under your expanded definition of being willing to die for [x]. Will expand on this later - must fly!

 

[tek tonic]

going back to the Consumer-ist slant of pro-pop thought, i just don't find it a particularly liberating idea, the notion that meaning is made in the act of consumption... the implication is that nothing inheres in the music itself, that everything is infinitely constru-able and readable and elastic in terms of meaning and affect , that there's no musical object that couldn't produce an intensity for some listener, and equally no music object whose intensity will be perceived or work for every single listener

now the reason this way of thinking is depressing is that --taken to the logical limit -- is destroys any social aspect to music, any social power it might have as a motivating, galvanizing force

if nothing intrinsic inheres to the music object (or art object), it makes it far more unlikely a group of people larger than one will have the same response

whereas if you operate in the belief that fixed properties (or potentials in kpunkian terms) inhere in the music, then that creates the possibility for a unity of response

indeed it would explain why, at various points in pop history, huge numbers of people have felt the same way about certain pieces, or forms, of music

it seems far more plausible to attribute such effects to inherent properties of the music than to somehow imagine that everyone has the same mysteriously synchronised consumer-hallucination

i think of (what i'm calling) Rockism as altruistic, in the sense of being Other-directed -- the Other exists, it can affect me, it can transform me, i want to find out about it, have contact with it

music is that Other, it does things to me regardless of whether i want it to or not

but it is also made by social Others

this point perplexes me. for one thing, if you accept that individual responses to music are as diverse as language (as per Tim and Sterling Clover), then the idea that huge numbers of people have felt the same way about any music seems wildly reductive. did elvis' fifty million fans feel the same way about 'heartbreak hotel', or was it groups of people who were turned on by him, turned off but strangely attracted, liked the guitar sound and various combinations and overlapping categories thereof, reduced to a collective thumbs-up?

also, if meaning is made in the act of consumption, surely the Other (presumably the positive qualities that inhere in music) simply resides in the undiscovered part of the self, and the listener can compare experiences with others in the search for it?

(and tim is right about a good many things, but especially that the ILX/NYLPM crowd are hardly 'geezers' in the footballer sense - the name was an inside joke, wasn't it? they even disavow the association, though it seems to have pushed k-punks buttons nonetheless)

 

[borderpolice]

it's all quite loony, this social mimesis stuff!
you're saying, what, that people like stuff for copycat reasons,
they're copying other people's responses, and those people are copying
others... it sounds incredibly implausible, and convoluted

I apologise if I have not made my position as clear as I should have
done, I'm a bit too busy with work to polish my responses here.

Let me start by stating that I am not saying that all musical
reactions can be reduced to straightforward copying. My position might
become clearer by considering what it tried to explain:

* First there are musical movements, scenes, shared attitudes to
certain music shared across, which exhibit some stability.

* Second, an extreme diversity diversity in these socially shared
reactions. A typical example are Einstuerzende Neubauten, discussed
in another thread. The use sounds that are not even considered music
at all by many or even the majority of the world's population. Yet
the response by fans of EN is quite similar in many ways to the
response that for example Britney fans may have to the music of Ms
Spears. Phenomena like this suggest that the actual musical material
is relatively irrelevant to the socially shared reactions it
triggers, in the same way that certain four legged animals may be
called "dogs" or "hund" or "chien" or "cachorro" in consistent ways.
In other words, the evidence is that in music we have a sign-like
system with essentially arbitrary signifiers.

* Third, reactions to music, whether they are are social (eg. dancing,
talking about music), or phenomenological
(music-as-it-is-experienced by a given individual, essentially and
unavoidably private), are extremely context dependent. It matters
if we hear a piece of music alone or with others, in a church
or in a club, with friends or enemies, tired or alert, whether we
have heard it before or not at all.

* Fourth, there is only a weak connection between any given
phenomenological reaction (music-as-it-is-experienced by a given
individual, essentially and unavoidably private) to any given piece
of music and that individual's social reaction. This is of course
just an instance of the general fact that an individual's behaviour,
how (s)he's taken to act, and how (s)he feels what (s)he is doing is
usually rather tenuous. More importantly here, that
music-as-it-is-experienced is very idiosyncratic, very variable.

In other words, what needs to be explained here is stability and
variance of reactions to music at the same time. I propose to do this
in analogy with how humans acquire and use language: clearly a very
social process that starts out and is maintained by mimetic processes
at a very deep level. That language is learned and reproduced by
memory-driven copying processes is uncontroversial, and I propose
a similar mechanism for music.


I emphasize that these memory-modified mimetic processes alone are
insufficient as explanation, in particular, they do not account well
for the variance in each individual's music-as-it-is-experienced,
mentioned above as fourth point. I don't think anyone has a good
explanation for this, maybe neuroscience will one day come up with a
solution to this riddle, but I don't hold my breath. To deal with this
problem, I propose to take the usual route: name what isn't understood
(how about "ideo-memo-mudul"?) and use this name in explanations of
what can be observed, just like do what Newton did with gravity, Freud
with drives, contemporary physics with force and so on. In other
words, acknowledge precisely what we don't know and what we do.

In this sense each individual's reaction to music is a combination of
the output of the ideo-memo-mudul and the copied mimetic
responses. The latter are dominant but never determining regarding the
socially observable behaviour. This dominance accounts for the
emergence (in the technical sense) of shared musical scenes, but the
ideo-memo-mudul for the simultaneous wide variety of responses and
musical evolution. An important connection between these two
mechanisms -- although not the only one -- is that copying is itself
imperfect.

Let me describe the mimetic process a bit more. First, and this is
very important to bear in mind, copying is almost never conscious. The
process is inevitably experienced and described in other terms (why do
you dance like this? Because its fun, the music makes me do it! Why
do you dress like this? I just like this colour, the trousers are
comfy! Why do you like Einstuerzende Neubauten? Their music is
revolutionary, subversive, instituting social change, resisting the
neoliberal consensus!), mostly in terms of intrinsic properties of
music. Suggestions that a mimetic process may be at play, that one may
"just" be following fashion, are usually denied emphatically. Second,
each individual experiences music in different contexts which leads to
the aggregation of different mimetic responses in each individual's
memory for socially acceptable behaviour, which is important for
the evolution of social reactions to music. Third, at each point in
time, an individual classifies those, real or imagined, who share
a given physical space, for example as mods or rockers, ravers or policed,
good or bad, and mostly those evaluated as "good" will be copied. This
aids, strengthens and sharpens the mimetic process and leads to the emergence
of few but well-focused musical scenes.

what about musics where there's no readily
observable form of physical response to the music (classical say)...
when i listened to Holst or Beethoven's pastoral symphony on my own as
a 10 year on my parent's radiogram, who was i copying as i swooned to
it? i'd never been to a classical concert. i mean, i might have heard
at an early age my parents saying 'this is good music' or my mum
saying 'i love this bit' but i don't recall them behaving in any
outward copy-able way... it's all very internalized, the
response

For a start, sitting still as a form of receiving music is just as
much social behavoiour as big-fish-little-fish-cardbord-boxing.
Talking about music likewise. Further, and this is important, what
you are copying doesn't necessarily coincide with what you think you'd
be copying. Take little children: isn't it sometimes surprising which
features of their parents they pick up and which they don't? What an
adult conceives of as important, copy-worthy may not be what the
unconscious mimesis module does. Human behaviour, works on subtle
levels, a minute gesture, the tone of voice. In addition, the mimesis
process is memory driven, it feeds back on past experiences. You may
copy or avoid copying certain features of somebody's behaviour,
depending, for example, on whether you like this person, or if you
(your mimesis module) evaluates that behaviour as appropriate to the
situation. The process is reflexive in that one can copy other's
copying behaviour or can explicitly avoid try and avoid it.

how through mimesis do you learn the emotional
grammar of classical music in all its subtlety?

Let me ask a related question: "how through mimesis do you learn the
grammar of the english language in all its subtlety? Human language
acquisition leaves no doubt that very complex sign systems can be
picked up mimetically. Why not the same for music?


For clarity one should also distinguish between (1) one's
phenomenological reaction (music-as-it-is-experienced by a given) and
(2) one's socially observable behaviour. The former, I venture, does
not follow a particular "emotional grammar". As already alluded to
above, the private reaction, produced by the ideo-memo-mudul is highly
context dependent and rather variable. How you react internally to a
certain Bach Cantata, depends on many things, some of them as mundane,
like how often have you heard it before, are you surprised by it, or
bored? Regarding the latter, in particular how one talks about
classical music in the language of emotional response is quite clearly
acquired. This becomes immediately clear when one encounters new forms
of music with an elaborate interpretatory canon. I for example cannot
correlate every single musical choice in Bach with the christian
religious tradition in the way some acquaintances can, because I have
never really immersed myself in this scene. Conversely, these
acquaintances could never write anything about grime in a way that
would be deemed informed by East London teenagers.

the thing about the drugs is interesting, the
placebo effect -- however all i can say (and many a raver will back me
up with bitter experience) there's been many many occasions when i was
more than predisposed to have all the right E-static reactions, if
anybody was in a state to will themselves to feel those feelings, that
was me, and the pill has been a dud -- ie. effectively a placebo --
and there's been no effect

Well, how do you know it was a dud? Did you test the pills?

Nah? Didn't think so!

BTW, I am not in the slightest denying the physical effects. What I'm
pointing out is that the connection between the physical effects, how
we experience them and how we react socially under influence are
three different things that are socially shaped in a very fundamental
way.

[to be continued below]

 

[borderpolice]

more generally, i wonder where the resistance to
the idea of things having intrinsic properties comes from? it seems
such a bleak view of the world somehow. again it seems to diminish,
or demean, the idea of the transformative power of anything, to regard
it as a social trick we play on ourselves -- or equally an
individualistic response, an act of reading

My resistance is a form of Occam's razor. Intrinsic properties are
fraught with all sorts of theoretical and empirical problems, the most
important of which are

* that it's just unclear what these intrinsic properties are and how
individuals access them. Claiming that Dostojevski and Shakespeare
are simply great authors and whoever doesn't see this hasn't
overcome his Oedipus complex is not an explanation.

* that intrinsic properties just don't account for the extreme
variance in human's reactions to music.

* that it doesn't accord well with the results from other science
about human behaviour.

I also don't see why being able to be influenced and influencing of
other people's behaviour and mood by way of mimetic processes should
be bleak at all. Isn't it great that I can make somebody smile and
like a tune because I like it and express this with my body language?

Let's turn the question on its head: i wonder where the resistance to
the idea of things having socially constructive aspects comes from?

Finally, about transformative power: for a start, I don't see why this
is the be-all and end-all criterion for evaluating music. It all
relies too heavily for my liking on an inappropriate understanding of
society as a thing that is essentially like a house: static, but an
outside agency can change it, maybe by painting it red, if that agency
starts with a K; or by rebuilding it from scratch with all rooms the
same size and a large communal area, should the agency be
revolutionary. I see society as an essentially temporal process that
cannot but change all the time, and music as an instance as a
perpetually self-transforming or evolving process. That transforms
the question of transforming: transfroming is not interesting at all.


Having said that, the mimetic theory is fundamentally social, at the
deepest level. Much more so than the intrinsic-properties approach,
which adds the social, change only as an afterthought, somewhat in
embarrassment. The mimetic approach is way better at explaining the
emergence of communities constitutive of and constituted by shared
musical behaviour. If you are interested in linking music and
(non-musical) social movements, you're better off ditching intrinsic
properties and come on board of the mimesis-train, because it may go
somewhere useful for you.

no it's quite loony! sorry -- don't mean to be rude

No offence taken. I'm not good at explaining myself. What I've been saying
is mostly common sense, really. Thanks for listening and relying!