An Emergent Order

[germaphobian]

ok, but that's exactly the point - it's self-referential claim made within its marxisms own theoretical framework. So marxism, like any other system, already runs on it's own binary code exploitation/emancipation, bourgeois/proletariat, oppressor /oppressed or something like that (it also ties in with the very importnat idea of his that to observe is to make a distinction) and that's how, from within the confines of it's own operational closure, it observes it's enviorment (again "enviorment" being the sum total of all the other systems, not some sort of raw, ground zero reality).
so there is no sense is which marxisms, or any other system, can claim to be an objective meta-system that understands all the other systems outside it's own code.
what should also be obvious is that there is no hirearchy of systems, each system just works to maintain it's own integrity blindly running it's own self-referential code. i suppose it's also important to mention the very important detail that the purpose of this binary distinction as the base operation of every and any system, is to reduce the compelixty and messiness and noise of their enviorment, otherwise they wouldn't be any kind of functioning state of things at all.
also, in no sense systems are seperate bubbles floating in vacuum, they are structurally coupled, they irritate each othe and they resonate with each other. the biggest disasters usually come when this structural coupling breaks down.

btw, pretty much the same could be said about Land's theories, since he's been mentioned here couple of times, because they too are based on these same misunderstandings and fallacies of hireachy and inner workings of systems and sub-systems.

 

[pattycakes_]

you seem depressed and demoralised. this kind of fatalism will eat you out from the inside. Not that I can or am capable of investing time in helping you, , I have my own mental health related shit to deal with (sadly.) But you probably need to reassess your priorities and get into new things and abandon the big philosophical questions if you are using them to justify your mental state at any one point. no, not healthy at all.

I mean yeah I'm depressed, idk who wouldn't be with the current state of the world, if they're actually paying attention. Have my own battles too obv. Who doesn't. Demoralized not sure. Don't think so. Def not asking for help on Dissensus lol. Not spending much time with big philosophical questions either. None of what's covered in this thread, nor the classics either. Not sure where you're getting justification from.

I think a lot of things are simply unknowable and a lot of philosophy is nothing more than thought exercises that don't offer much in the way of relatability or useable tools for everyday life. Can be entertaining sometimes sure, but I tend to like reading people who are able to make things easier to understand, and glaze over pretty quickly when it comes across as self indulgent/complex for complexity's sake. It all seems a bit dick swingy and enabling of pretentious people by giving them big names to drop.

Some people can be artful with it though and they can be compelling, but they're the exception imo.

just don't use this sort of thing as an alibi is all I'm saying.

For what exactly?

barty's excitement might have been artificially inflated to a degree but it was clearly there and people will clearly be excited about things, no matter if you find them vapid. I think a lot of 2010s music isn't all that but it doesn't really bother me, because I don't conduct my battles on the terrain of culture. I often think the dislike towards autechre's more abstract works comes from these sort of cultural critiques which I just find kind of childish as time passes. Tilting at windmills, quixotic. I haven't heard many compelling criticisms about their craft as such.

Not sure what barty has to do with it. I mean he's allowed to do his thing, and I'm allowed to feel how I feel. For me sound design as music just doesn't do a lot for me these days which is why I prefer the more tunelike Autechre, like the tune you posted from draft 7.30. I don't get why you're so militant about it tbh, speaking of childish. I mean a lot of what goes on in this forum is pretty childish, just with big words. I don't have much in the way of strong feelings either way for AE.

I guess the easiest way I can put across what I'm getting at here is just look at this thread of 27 pages and nearly 550 posts. What did it achieve? Who did it serve? Was any of it useable? Was the initial premise worth exploring, or did its own question already provide the answer? Will anyone take anything away from it or will it just be part of the noise wall? Is it not in some ways much like sound design as music? Interesting to experience once, twice, perhaps? But will it reward repeat listenings? No right answers obviously, but I'm sure you can guess mine.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Real shame the hypothetical fruit wasn't a mango.

 

[germaphobian]

btw, pretty much the same could be said about Land's theories, since he's been mentioned here couple of times, because they too are based on these same misunderstandings and fallacies of hireachy and inner workings of systems and sub-systems.

and last thing; the single biggest problem with postmodernists - which really has crushed their line of thinking - was kind of the same or at least similar: they denied (or didn't recognzie) their own codes and self-referentiality; that's exactly the sense in which Luhmann is radically different thinker. you cannot level that accusation that his anti-foundationalism is it's own kind of foundation or something like that, because the self-criticism is already in-buil in his theory, since it fundamentally is a theory about how systems observe observations observing while being trapped in their own opretaional closure (which the avoids infinite regress). just a different beast.

 

[0bleak]

I can totally picture a back to basics something or other

What does "back to basics" entail, because I'm imagining something horribly conservative and conventional.

I mean, musically, almost everything is still really basic.
I just listened to the three songs listed at the top here:

Billboard

www.billboard.com

and if you would have told me back in 1990 that this is what the year 2025 is going to sound like, I would have just said to shoot me now.

and hip hop doesn't seem to be faring any better - take one of the most popular songs in the last year, Not Like Us - basic as fuck production.

 

[0bleak]

Maybe we've just produced too many films, etc. and there was always a finite number of ideas and combinations available.

I'd say it's the exact opposite - there are infinite ideas and combinations, but people really just want very minor variations of what they already know.

 

[pattycakes_]

What does "back to basics" entail, because I'm imagining something horribly conservative and conventional.

Rawness. Retreating from the overproduced Baskin and Robbins, baby voiced, vocal fried uncanny valley and being unafraid to totally fuck off the pleasing the most people possible/stats/private equity based hell axis we're currently revolving around. Fuck big budgets. Fuck glamour and fame. Fuck ukuleles and cuteness and being resold our childhood in slightly more adult packaging. Fuck Disney sanctioned melancholy. Let's get some fuckin nuts shit happening to snap us out of this godforsaken mundanity curse that offers not a drop of nutrition for the mind or soul and instead only goes to serve the corporate overlords.

I mean, musically, almost everything is still really basic.
I just listened to the three songs listed at the top here:

Billboard

www.billboard.com

and if you would have told me back in 1990 that this is what the year 2025 is going to sound like, I would have just said to shoot me now.

You and me both.

and hip hop doesn't seem to be faring any better - take one of the most popular songs in the last year, Not Like Us - basic as fuck production.

It's weird isn't it, how we had this massive peak more than a quarter century ago and then it did a kind of tabula rasa where the means of production were seized by the proles, but what have they done with it? It's all fucking mush now. Gray, heartless, defanged mush. We need people with fucking guts and grime coursing through their wild and ragged brains to electrify and snap people out of this hypnotic state. Otherwise it will continue to devolve to the point where we're literally listening to the cringiest nursery rhymes that will keep everyone in a catatonia and we'll all be living in nursing homes from age 5, being spoon fed some weird yeasty substance with a blank look in the eyes and drool on the chin.

 

[pattycakes_]

I'd say it's the exact opposite - there are infinite ideas and combinations, but people really just want very minor variations of what they already know.

Only some of those are worth hearing though.

 

[pattycakes_]

Also wouldn't mind some simple good old fashioned songs too. Even if that is conservative. And I mean, is it? You telling me you wouldn't want a Fleetwood Mac level song writing group now instead of the Swift and Sheerhan shit? Gimme some shit people will still remember in 20 years they can sing along to in a drunk unison at 3am in a stinking dive bar with a Terminator landscape outside the tobacco stained windows.

 

[thirdform]

Only some of those are worth hearing though.

maybe your aesthetic conservatism is precisely why you can't get excited?

You keep trotting out this deflection of 'doesn't do much for me' which is fine in and of itself, noone is here to police your tastes, but then you think you are indexing a real malaise in contemporary culture (which I would concede you are hinting at) but then you remain stuck and just resort to your personal hang ups.

 

[thirdform]

I guess the easiest way I can put across what I'm getting at here is just look at this thread of 27 pages and nearly 550 posts. What did it achieve? Who did it serve? Was any of it useable? Was the initial premise worth exploring, or did its own question already provide the answer? Will anyone take anything away from it or will it just be part of the noise wall? Is it not in some ways much like sound design as music? Interesting to experience once, twice, perhaps? But will it reward repeat listenings? No right answers obviously, but I'm sure you can guess mine.

Why are you asking me as if I am the accused? I wouldn't have been so agnostic as to start the thread, I rarely change my convictions unless absolutely necessary (and sometimes it is.)

Which is my point, you are arguing with me from the same vantage point as version, even though both of you are talking at cross purposes. Ask him why he started the thread, not me!

When I provide answers, both of you resort to well we can't know it. So is it a pity party? We work with what we know. That is being called human. We work with things-for-us, we observe what they are useful for, we observe properties of chemicals, solids, trees, wood, gases, fire, etc.

If you want exaltation, love or wonder to fill that human hollow, then that is not something which can be assuaged by a forum thread or even by argument, but again, that is a personal response, it isn't any kind of (structured) mode of communication for us. everyone compensates for the incompleteness of their sense of self through various means. this is inevitable.

 

[pattycakes_]

maybe your aesthetic conservatism is precisely why you can't get excited?

You keep trotting out this deflection of 'doesn't do much for me' which is fine in and of itself, noone is here to police your tastes, but then you think you are indexing a real malaise in contemporary culture (which I would concede you are hinting at) but then you remain stuck and just resort to your personal hang ups.

Just because I don't dig ganz graf doesn't mean I don't want to listen to anything out there. I mean nowadays Coil and TG are more my bag if I want brain blisters. The fruitless zone of intensity is real imo. And that's all that's left to explore as far as new things go from my viewpoint. Literally nothing I've heard that's come out in the last 10-15 years has made me go wow, this is totally new what the fuck even is that etc. And you know what, that's totally fine. Nothing lasts forever including musical innovation.

Having to knock someone because they don't share your pov just seems a bit insecure or something.

Why are you asking me as if I am the accused? I wouldn't have been so agnostic as to start the thread, I rarely change my convictions unless absolutely necessary (and sometimes it is.)

They were rhetorical questions.

Which is my point, you are arguing with me from the same vantage point as version, even though both of you are talking at cross purposes. Ask him why he started the thread, not me!

I'm not even trying to argue here. It's pointless arguing based on taste.

When I provide answers, both of you resort to well we can't know it. So is it a pity party? We work with what we know. That is being called human. We work with things-for-us, we observe what they are useful for, we observe properties of chemicals, solids, trees, wood, gases, fire, etc.

Right and that's all I'm putting across. What I know/have experienced and then if you want to interact we can and that might end up being a discussion. But if you're going to always play contrary Mary it's most likely always going to end up here.

If you want exaltation, love or wonder to fill that human hollow, then that is not something which can be assuaged by a forum thread or even by argument, but again, that is a personal response, it isn't any kind of mode of communication for us. everyone compensates for the incompleteness of their sense of self through various means. this is inevitable.

Yeah, I mean, that's right. But isn't what I'm saying at all. Maybe try a few less straw men?

 

[germaphobian]

Also wouldn't mind some simple good old fashioned songs too. Even if that is conservative. And I mean, is it? You telling me you wouldn't want a Fleetwood Mac level song writing group now instead of the Swift and Sheerhan shit? Gimme some shit people will still remember in 20 years they can sing along to in a drunk unison at 3am in a stinking dive bar with a Terminator landscape outside the tobacco stained windows.

my girlfriend listens to this constantly. dosent it sort of fit?

 

[thirdform]

Just because I don't dig ganz graf doesn't mean I don't want to listen to anything out there. I mean nowadays Coil and TG are more my bag if I want brain blisters. The fruitless zone of intensity is real imo. And that's all that's left to explore as far as new things go from my viewpoint. Literally nothing I've heard that's come out in the last 10-15 years has made me go wow, this is totally new what the fuck even is that etc. And you know what, that's totally fine. Nothing lasts forever including musical innovation.

Having to knock someone because they don't share your pov just seems a bit insecure or something.

To continue following this example, I would actually prefer it like luke if you hated AE, but that's not the point I'm making. What I'm saying is you should own your prejudices about sound design music. I have many prejudices, against indie rock, trance, Justin Beiber, etc, but I am happy to concede they are prejudices shaped by my cultural consumption. Yes, taste is subjective, so much so good, but taste isn't just about what you like/what you don't like, it's also cumulative. Humour me for a second and imagine you are Patty Stockhausen, you would probably find Autechre's restrictions in dance rhythms primitive and kitschy. So it's about where you look at it, right?

 

[germaphobian]

my girlfriend listens to this constantly. dosent it sort of fit?

or this

 

[germaphobian]

or this

isn't this like a better version of tailor swift?

 

[0bleak]

Also wouldn't mind some simple good old fashioned songs too. Even if that is conservative. And I mean, is it? You telling me you wouldn't want a Fleetwood Mac level song writing group now instead of the Swift and Sheerhan shit? Gimme some shit people will still remember in 20 years they can sing along to in a drunk unison at 3am in a stinking dive bar with a Terminator landscape outside the tobacco stained windows.

I dunno. I've kind of been over "songs" for the last few decades.
I'd rather hear trad music from other cultures.
As far as electonic music goes, we haven't really even started exploring alternate tuning systems, and needless to point out that you can still make "pretty" "songs" with alternate tunings. The only thing that immediately comes to mind in that regard is Beauty in the Beast from Wendy Carlos, and that's from 1986.

 

[germaphobian]

I dunno. I've kind of been over "songs" for the last few decades.
I'd rather hear trad music from other cultures.
As far as electonic music goes, we haven't really even started exploring alternate tuning systems, and needless to point out that you can still make "pretty" "songs" with alternate tunings. The only thing that immediately comes to mind in that regard is Beauty in the Beast from Wendy Carlos, and that's from 1986.

 

[germaphobian]

 

[germaphobian]