What is good about Pop Music?

moment of impact

the whole social vs. "visceral" element introduced reminds me of the debates over great man history, etc. (& really, as always with these things, it's best to talk them out in the concrete of particular songs, etc. but eh...) i don't think there's ever music you're not "prepared" for in a sense -- i.e. there's music which takes you by surprise, which jolts yr. system and your connections and understandings in new ways, but it's still acting in dialogue with and by virtue of yr. prior accumulated musical experience. lots of moments of jolting change can only be understood by recovering the framework of the time, by reminding yrself of what it was like before that sound was created, and hence the strangeness of canonized things posessing a freshness that has to be "taught."

As for this political thing... (another thread anyone?)... surely it's evident what role art in the broadest sense has politically now that we don't we are deprived much visionary art and have our noses rubbed in the crotch of the empirical... the chief political function of art is to expose not what Breton called the paucity of reality but the paucity of realism... the way in which commonsense so-called reality is merely a tissue of uninteresting fantasies....

s_clover said:

the whole social vs. "visceral" element introduced reminds me of the debates over great man history, etc. (& really, as always with these things, it's best to talk them out in the concrete of particular songs, etc. but eh...) i don't think there's ever music you're not "prepared" for in a sense -- i.e. there's music which takes you by surprise, which jolts yr. system and your connections and understandings in new ways, but it's still acting in dialogue with and by virtue of yr. prior accumulated musical experience. lots of moments of jolting change can only be understood by recovering the framework of the time, by reminding yrself of what it was like before that sound was created, and hence the strangeness of canonized things posessing a freshness that has to be "taught."

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Ok, well that's as concise a statement as I could wish for of everything I utterly detest about cult studs.

Naturally, nothing about it is true... it's a retrospective narrativization which a priori screens out the possibility of incursion... i.e. it is how things look from the perspective of the perceptual-conscious system... but the perceptual-conscious is only possible on the basis of a founding trauma which it represses but is totally shaped (warped) by ...

Nothing is familiar. Everything is uncanny. Especially 'you'.

Dominic:

"that is, we intially had (1) music that afflicts (2) the body which then dances

you made the terms (1) the direct sonic-physical relationship and (2) the social appartus

once the terms are shifted, the argument follows --

but you've established nothing b/c you haven't shown that the body's movement affects the music (in the way that the orchid affects the wasp)"

Okay, I'll concede this. But that's why I don't want to use the virus model, because the thing about viruses is that, while they work better under certain conditions (ie. if you slept out in the rain all night), these conditons are purely physical. Whereas music's affectivity and hence effectiveness is affected by all sorts of not-directly-physical social conditions as well (by not-directly-physical, I mean factors of socialisation which are convoluted responses to the fact of physical existence (eg. sign systems) - in the same sense that consciousness is a convoluted (and perhaps accidental) response to the fact of physical existence).

As I quote below, Mark says that the social is an entire field of viruses. This complicates the virus model above because it suggests the body is responding to a multitude of "viral" forces, some physical and some not-directly-physical, and many not arising from the music being played but something else altogether. Ie. this definition of the virus removes the ontological priority which the previous model gave to physical sensation; physical sensation and the socialisation with which it co-exists become uneasily co-existing forces, competitive viruses contesting the terrain of the body and consciousness. I hope I'm not misrepresenting Mark because I would totally agree with this and it would be nice for us to agree on something!


"Almost... but the base-superstructure metaphor doesn't go far enough really, in that it implies a lack of immanence, whereas my problem with the way you are constructing this precisely that transcendent dualism: the (implictly) non-reflexive 'physicality' of the sound versus the reflexive 'social'

By contrast, I would want to insist that there is no beyond of the virus or of the physical... the social itself is a field of viruses, intensities which replicate via subtle differentiation... and of course part of the benefit of talking about viruses is that they (particularly retroviruses) are extremely reflexive.. .they learn and adapt... and the apparently 'negotiated' behaviour of the meat components of sonic viruses is just one vector of their mutation... "

Okay, as I said above, I think I could agree with this. I have never insisted that the social experience of music is radically disconnected from "non-reflexive physicality" - only that attempting to get from physical experience of a specific thing (eg. the music being played) to conscious perception cannot be achieved in one or two easy steps, as our consciousness is never directly reflective of the "real" physical state of affairs but is, as you say:

"a retrospective narrativization which a priori screens out the possibility of incursion... i.e. it is how things look from the perspective of the perceptual-conscious system... but the perceptual-conscious is only possible on the basis of a founding trauma which it represses but is totally shaped (warped) by ... "

The point is that socialisation/symbolisation/repression/signification - all of these inter-related terms which attempt to explain how we function as social beings - form the basis upon which we can reflect/judge music. Now one could as easily use the viral metaphor to explain this, insofar as perhaps the perceptual-conscious system is the "first" pathology, the first symptom we develop and adjust to as a result of our contact with social viruses.

The problem is, I don't think <i>any</i> of our music criticism dislodges this first pathology (I hope you won't be offended Mark when I say that all of your descriptions and judgments of music imply a perceptual-consciousness system from which you can make descriptions/judgments), so from a practical perspective it may as well be transcendental. Even the combination of ecstasy and really great dance music doesn't dislodge the pathology fundamentally (although it gives it a good kicking!), because the perception of the experience itself remains a retrospective narrativisation.

"I'm now clearer (I think) on what you mean by social... but for me this is not 'social' at all, quite the opposite, it is a form of anti-collective individuated connosieuring... this is what I find so difficult about cult studs, this INSISTENCE on that position of audience transcendence... but it's a broader problem I have with any theory that starts with experience... it is so anti-structuralist, so anti-systemic...."

I'm not sure how you got this from what i'm saying, but i may be misunderstanding you.

I guess I would argue that collectives are never fully stable insofar as they are never closed, never focused solely around their founding principle (eg. a certain type of music and its effects). Every member of a collective is individual insofar as the constellating web of social forces and interactions which marks out their "position" always exceeds the boundaries of the collective ie. a junglist might have a conversion experience and listen only to jungle and only go out to jungle parties, but that doesn't mean that their prior history as a b-boy or cheesy quaver raver or punk rocker or [x] doesn't undermine slightly the consistency of their experience of collectivity compared to other collective members (this is borne out empirically in eg. Simon's tracing of different punk or hip hop influences throughout dance scenes in <i>Energy Flash</i>). Individual bodies never enter into an area of viral contamination (the collective) disease-free.

This doesn't invalidate the collective as an object of discussion, but it does mean that to talk about the impact or purpose or meaning of a given piece of music to this collective as if said impact or etc. was a single substance is pretty reductionist, in the same way as expecting a virus to work on all bodies in the same manner is. The value of the collective is precisely the extent to which it coheres and perseveres despite/because of this differentiated field of experience.

It would seem to me quite obvious that experience can be structured and systemised. My obsession with ideology as a concept is a reflection of this, I think. I don't want to emphasise phenomenology (experience, subjective states etc.) at the expense of structual/systemic theorisation, but I think that the latter, when it attempts to exclude the former, hits a brick wall pretty quickly. This is why Lukacs is suddenly hot property again: there's a growing recognition of the fact that experience and structuralism are not mutually exclusive components within theory.

No-one driving

Tim F said:

Okay, I'll concede this. But that's why I don't want to use the virus model, because the thing about viruses is that, while they work better under certain conditions (ie. if you slept out in the rain all night), these conditons are purely physical. Whereas music's affectivity and hence effectiveness is affected by all sorts of not-directly-physical social conditions as well (by not-directly-physical, I mean factors of socialisation which are convoluted responses to the fact of physical existence (eg. sign systems) - in the same sense that consciousness is a convoluted (and perhaps accidental) response to the fact of physical existence).

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I still think this is a troubling ontology - deeply dualist and implicitly anti-materialist. What ISN'T physical?

As I quote below, Mark says that the social is an entire field of viruses. This complicates the virus model above because it suggests the body is responding to a multitude of "viral" forces, some physical and some not-directly-physical, and many not arising from the music being played but something else altogether. Ie. this definition of the virus removes the ontological priority which the previous model gave to physical sensation; physical sensation and the socialisation with which it co-exists become uneasily co-existing forces, competitive viruses contesting the terrain of the body and consciousness. I hope I'm not misrepresenting Mark because I would totally agree with this and it would be nice for us to agree on something!

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Lol, yes, I think this is fair....
what I don't like about the virus model is its negativism.... i.e. the association with sickness... but it is the easiest way to get across this idea of mutagenic propagation....
another way is simply the Spinozist notion of 'bodies', but the problem is that this is liable to be equated with organisms.... the radica Spinozist thought is that there are nothing but bodies, but these bodies are infinitely re- and de-composable.... there is no question of the physical being acted upon by something else (mind, spirit, whatever)

The point is that socialisation/symbolisation/repression/signification - all of these inter-related terms which attempt to explain how we function as social beings - form the basis upon which we can reflect/judge music. Now one could as easily use the viral metaphor to explain this, insofar as perhaps the perceptual-conscious system is the "first" pathology, the first symptom we develop and adjust to as a result of our contact with social viruses.

The problem is, I don't think <i>any</i> of our music criticism dislodges this first pathology (I hope you won't be offended Mark when I say that all of your descriptions and judgments of music imply a perceptual-consciousness system from which you can make descriptions/judgments), so from a practical perspective it may as well be transcendental. Even the combination of ecstasy and really great dance music doesn't dislodge the pathology fundamentally (although it gives it a good kicking!), because the perception of the experience itself remains a retrospective narrativisation.

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But it is BOTH that the judging and reflecting of music is autonomic and physical (there is no pre-reflective; intelligence is distributed across the skin), AND that the pct-cs system is not what it presents itself as: i.e. a self-present transparency. The problem with saying that 'the perceptual-conscious system is the "first" pathology, the first symptom we develop and adjust to as a result of our contact with social viruses' is that it implies that there is an 'us' that pre-exists social viruses, whereas I would want to keep insisting that trauma is founding and originary and any notion of 'I' is retrospective narrativization. Consciousness as such is a kind of transcendental illusion, since wherever it is, there is continuity - it is nothing more than a type of continuity editor which by its very nature eliminates everything that doesn't fit.

As for 'our' criticism - do we really think that when we write it comes from this spectral entity, the conscious self? Surely nothing could be clearer than that writing passes through you.... Only when writing is going badly is it not like dancing...

"I'm now clearer (I think) on what you mean by social... but for me this is not 'social' at all, quite the opposite, it is a form of anti-collective individuated connosieuring... this is what I find so difficult about cult studs, this INSISTENCE on that position of audience transcendence... but it's a broader problem I have with any theory that starts with experience... it is so anti-structuralist, so anti-systemic...."

I'm not sure how you got this from what i'm saying, but i may be misunderstanding you.

I guess I would argue that collectives are never fully stable insofar as they are never closed, never focused solely around their founding principle (eg. a certain type of music and its effects). Every member of a collective is individual insofar as the constellating web of social forces and interactions which marks out their "position" always exceeds the boundaries of the collective ie. a junglist might have a conversion experience and listen only to jungle and only go out to jungle parties, but that doesn't mean that their prior history as a b-boy or cheesy quaver raver or punk rocker or [x] doesn't undermine slightly the consistency of their experience of collectivity compared to other collective members (this is borne out empirically in eg. Simon's tracing of different punk or hip hop influences throughout dance scenes in <i>Energy Flash</i>). Individual bodies never enter into an area of viral contamination (the collective) disease-free.

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None of this poses any problems for me, but I wouldn't restrict the concept of collectivity to membership of social groupings. Collectivity goes all the way down (or up, whichever way you're starting ), that would be the Marxist-Spinozist point; or, to put it in Deleuze-Guattri-ese, there are nothing but collective assemblages of enunciation. No doubt I'm still not getting what you're saying, but what worries me about what you are saying is that it seems like capitalist ideology in that it not only maintains a place for, it radically privileges, the position of the consumer-connoissieur. As if there was this substantial bricoleur-ego that stands outside and enters into collectivities, whereas I would say that what we call our 'selves' are simpy the agglomeration-production of processes that are 'without a subject': bricolage without a bricoleur.

It would seem to me quite obvious that experience can be structured and systemised. My obsession with ideology as a concept is a reflection of this, I think. I don't want to emphasise phenomenology (experience, subjective states etc.) at the expense of structual/systemic theorisation, but I think that the latter, when it attempts to exclude the former, hits a brick wall pretty quickly. This is why Lukacs is suddenly hot property again: there's a growing recognition of the fact that experience and structuralism are not mutually exclusive components within theory.

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But the all-important issue is what comes first: experience or the structure. Of course experience can be systematized post-hoc, but that is to radically evade the implications of structuralism. Something like Barthes' S/Z, in exemplifying structuralism to the point of parodying it, is pitiless in its exposure of the ways in which literary structures produce the experience of literature. Or to take another example, Shiller's Irrational Exuberance, which demonstrates that the kind of 'new era' economic thinking which was dominant in the 90s (there will never be another crash; the laws of economics have now been surpassed) did not in any way issue from any sort of 'negotiation' of individuals with structures, it was (really, strictly) a mind virus that the 'bubble economy' had to propagate in order to happen (Shiller in fact shows that exactly the same thinking always occurs in periods preceding a big crash). In terms of sonic intensities, Susan Mclary's musicology makes substantially the same move: your experience of music is entirely about the impact of sonic and social machines on a 'you' which is nothing more than a network of cause and effects.

Shiller's example is perhaps the clearest in demonstrating how this notion that 'experience comes first' is in the service of capitalism. All Shiller is doing, in fact, is re-stating Marx's claim that the idea that we can start from experience, that experience is somehow some indubitable, baseline real, is the core ideological claim of capitalism.

dominic:

that is, the SITE OF THE POLITICAL since the end of wwii has been music & art & culture

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blissblogger:

one thing i toy with in the conclusion to Rip It Up and Start Again is the horrifying notion that "all this" (the discourses and dissensions coming out punk through postpunk to include, i think, distantly but insperably, the conversation we're now involved in), all this urgency and debate, is in fact a MASSIVE DIVERSION from actual processes of change

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i think a second's reflection will totally reject the idea that the primary site of the political has been music and art and culture; i don't understand the date (surely the '30s was the high point of 'political' literature? in any case there is a history of 'oppositional' culture going back to the 1870s), and i don't understand the conception of politics. i'm talking in the voice of an old corporatist labout voice or anything like that but in the very real changes that have taken place -- the founding of the welfare state, the dismantling of same -- what role did culture play? not, i would argue, a big one. the old sites of political power -- states, business interests, workers' movements -- have been the sites of the political.

at the same time i don't think "this kind of thing" is a massive diversion -- actually the political avant-garde's worst argument has been that eg pop music and hollywood films have been a massive diversion from reality. and of course that argument was the key to the althusser/lacan position: for althusser, '68 failed because the french working classes were duped by divers ISAs, RSAs, RZAs etc etc. nothing to do with the baleful influence of the PCF-dominated unions, for example. but when french film-makers took up althusser's ideas the effects were baleful, and given the maoism of the whole scene it's a GOOD THING that these chaps were diverted from 'politics as such'.

virus

ok what confuses me is that music can do all sorts of things that viruses can't. you either get a virus or you don't. but sometimes you hear music and hate it, or sometimes you're unmoved, or sometimes bored, or sometimes annoyed, or sometimes disappointed, or jerked into a moment of personal recollection, or etc. of course this is all "retrospective narritization" from one point of view -- but it's narritization of a richer field than the binary infected/immune/sorta infected field that a real virus can put forward.

But viruses can do things that music can't do too, lol.

I think the alleged 'richness' of human responses depends, once again, on this secular religion of the aleatory unpredictability of human beings. Human responses are structurally produced by specifiable sonic and social machineries. Narrativization conceals this because by its very nature it is anti-structural - it plugs gaps and produces continuities.

This isn't to deny that the virus thing has problems; it does, for the reasons I suggested above. Cronenberg's imagery of more or less stable, more or less congenial recombinations of bodies would perhaps be a better way of thinking through what is at stake.

What is important to lose though is the dualism behind so many of these positions - sound = physical, human response = cognitive. The so-called high level 'critical' responses to sound are not more cognitive, they are _differently_ cognitive.

Bacon, for instance, famously rejected the idea that he worked from pure inspiration. He compared himself to a tennis player, who if she is good, will be so attuned that her fingers, legs, feet etc will make the right moves without the intervention of the conscious mind. In fact, the lumbering into play of the conscious mind would always spell disaster for someone seriously engaged in sport. Her cognition is distributed all over her body.

Why shouldn't responses to art be of the same type? Dancing is no more or less 'natural', no more or less 'social', no more or less 'theoretical' than writing about music.

Argh I lost my entire response and have had to write it again, so if I don't sketch things out enough below it's probably because I'm impatient with finishing this reply!

"What is important to lose though is the dualism behind so many of these positions - sound = physical, human response = cognitive. The so-called high level 'critical' responses to sound are not more cognitive, they are _differently_ cognitive. "

"I still think this is a troubling ontology - deeply dualist and implicitly anti-materialist. What ISN'T physical?"

I agree that we are dealing with an immanent field of physical processes, but those processes include socialization, interpellation etc.

Saying "not directly physical social factors" is a bit misleading here on my part, I'll admit. To use the viral model, I would simply emphasise that there are always multiple viruses at work in a given situation. When you listen/dance to music, you're both being affected by the virus of the music itself and a multitude of social viruses, which will then influence the nature of the music-virus's effect on you (symptoms, pathology) etc. It's a multilateral relationship - between you and the music-virus, you and social-viruses, the music-virus and the social-viruses. So all I'm arguing against here is the idea of some direct, exclusive relationship between the listener/dancer and the music, especially (and I'd hope you'd agree here Mark) as that idea rests on a privileging of the <i>experience</i> of that relationship as "true", the "indubitable baseline real." The experience of the pathology is used to attribute certain components to the music-virus in and of itself, but of course the question that needs to be asked is: to what extent is this pathology I'm experiencing the result of the music-virus affecting me, the social-viruses affecting me, or one of those affecting the other in its capacity to affect me?

"I think the alleged 'richness' of human responses depends, once again, on this secular religion of the aleatory unpredictability of human beings. Human responses are structurally produced by specifiable sonic and social machineries. Narrativization conceals this because by its very nature it is anti-structural - it plugs gaps and produces continuities."

I agree with this completely! On the point of experience as an "indubitable, baseline real", I would simply stress for the nth time that I have <i>never, ever argued this</i>. I agree that experience is structurally produced, that it is in fact entirely inconsistent, fragmented etc. and only retrospectively does it take on some appearance of continuity and "truth". But, again, <i>this is why it is interesting</i>, and why we must continue to start with it as the basis of our enquiry. Those who claim to reject the influence of experience in a discussion like this are almost always being dishonest rhetorically, because no-one seeks to defend or reject certain pieces of music without basing that in a reaction they have had. Saying "I like [eg. M.I.A.'s music] but take issue with [eg. her pseudo-political sloganeering]" is a position which is experienced as a reaction as well as formulated as a theoretical statement.

The reason I came onto this thread in the first place was that the consensus forming implied the existence of certain legislative categories for enjoyment - "musical dilettantism is bad", "liking pop is bourgeois consumerism" etc. which were presented as floating free from the position of the speakers pronouncing them. But as Simon noted, these pronouncements only form through the speaker noticing certain tendencies in <i>their own</i> enjoyment and extrapolating from there (Simon stating this would seem to conflict with his attempts to rehabilitate rockism, which is precisely about legislating enjoyment, but that's another issue). So when Simon talks about such concepts, he does begin from the basis of experience. To assert then that such a position held [eg. "M.I.A. is bad" or "Pop music is bad"] is correct and all those who think otherwise are wrong, misled, gripped by false consciousness etc. is simply privileging the speaker's experience over and above any other person's experience, and turning the former into an "indubitable, baseline real".* Whereas I would say that both reactions are equally socially constructed, and therefore the first task of any music critic is to attempt to understand and deconstruct their own enjoyment, to determine how they as subjects or collectives have been sonically and socially produced.

Simply asserting that there is an objective truth about a certain piece of music separate to how it is experienced is akin to Kautsky-style (I could say Stalinist, but that might get people's backs up unnecessarily) scientific materalism - "Whatever appears to be happening, objectively it is in fact [x] that is happening." The point of course is that there is no ontological distinction possible - appearance and experience are part of reality. That's why "subjectivism" is a flawed concept: it assumes that there is an objective world which is separate to any subjective view of it; but the truth of the matter is of course that our gaze upon reality is always part of reality, and it transforms reality-itself as much as it distorts our <i>perception</i> of reality itself - this is what Zizek refers to as "universalised perspectivism" I think.

"I'm still not getting what you're saying, but what worries me about what you are saying is that it seems like capitalist ideology in that it not only maintains a place for, it radically privileges, the position of the consumer-connoissieur. As if there was this substantial bricoleur-ego that stands outside and enters into collectivities, whereas I would say that what we call our 'selves' are simpy the agglomeration-production of processes that are 'without a subject': bricolage without a bricoleur."

No this is not at all what I'm saying Mark! My point was simply that - as above - no collective's response to a musical virus is characterised by undifferentiated unanimity, because of the multitude of viruses that each component of the collective carry. I'm not interested in the individual ("consumer-connoissieur") for him or herself, but rather insofar as the inconsistency and mutability of the collective is both its condition of possibility and precisely what makes it interesting - the consistency of the collective is as much a necessary fiction as the consistency of the individual subject. It is the question that needs to be asked of both collectives and individuals - "what are the processes that shape your experience, and what is repressed in order to give that experience consistency" - that is important.

I get the impression you're trying to read bourgeois consumerism into everything that I write just for the sake of it.

"Why shouldn't responses to art be of the same type? Dancing is no more or less 'natural', no more or less 'social', no more or less 'theoretical' than writing about music."

I agree (I think it was Simon who said that dancing doesn't signify whereas I would argue that it does); but it's highly popist of you to say this!

Tim F said:

To use the viral model, I would simply emphasise that there are always multiple viruses at work in a given situation. When you listen/dance to music, you're both being affected by the virus of the music itself and a multitude of social viruses, which will then influence the nature of the music-virus's effect on you (symptoms, pathology) etc. It's a multilateral relationship - between you and the music-virus, you and social-viruses, the music-virus and the social-viruses. So all I'm arguing against here is the idea of some direct, exclusive relationship between the listener/dancer and the music

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tim's argument here seem to me valid

and they accord with experience

that is, i've said repeatedly on this thread -- as an axiom -- that music is most powerful when repeated with and alongside others

AND YET there are also cases of music utterly failing when we experience it w/ others -- i.e., the disappointing show, the bad party

SO HOW do we theorize the art of being a party promoter?

that is, how do we make sense of choosing the proper venue, the right kind of space, for the performance and experience of music

and how do we theorize about trying to draw to such space an "interesting" crowd -- i.e., in circumstances where there is no collective or the collective is weakly held together

THAT IS, isn't the promoter a sort of chemist -- i.e., he knows the properties of the music, the properties of the performers, the properties of this space as compared w/ that space, and the properties of different kinds of people -- i.e., he knows how all these properties will likely interact

or if you prefer, how all these bodies and viruses will likely interact

somewhere in all this "virus" talk, we seem to have lost sight of each person's capacity to judge some music good and other music bad . . . .

or is this capacity merely a bourgeois illusion?

that is, music afflicts the body -- but the body may also resist -- and the resistance may be effortless or made w/ some determination

MOREOVER, even if we find music powerful, even if we dance to it, we nonetheless reflect on whether we SHOULD like this or that piece music

that is, mind and body are not simply parallel -- they interpenetrate and inform each other

and granted each of us has been shaped by previous music and social viruses -- but surely there is some room here for autonomy -- the autonomous bodily reaction to sound, the autonomous assessment of whether the music is good or bad

again, i say "some room" for autonomy -- not complete autonomy -- but some

ALSO -- i realize that "autonomous bodily reaction" appears to be a manifest contradiction -- but that's perhaps only b/c we don't give enough credit to the powers of the body -- i.e., "reaction" is perhaps not the right word

"THAT IS, isn't the promoter a sort of chemist -- i.e., he knows the properties of the music, the properties of the performers, the properties of this space as compared w/ that space, and the properties of different kinds of people -- i.e., he knows how all these properties will likely interact

or if you prefer, how all these bodies and viruses will likely interact"

Yes. Although I think many promoters are still at the medieval physician stage.

"and granted each of us has been shaped by previous music and social viruses -- but surely there is some room here for autonomy -- the autonomous bodily reaction to sound, the autonomous assessment of whether the music is good or bad"

But on what basis can music be good or bad except by reference to previous music and social viruses which have afflicted us?

What appears to be "autonomy" in this sense is, I would argue, more a result of the sonic/social differentiation between components (I'm resisting using the word "individuals" for Mark's benefit) in any collective. Which isn't to say that the body is merely passive; rather that the space for action is a space created and opened up by the operation of "viruses".

"MOREOVER, even if we find music powerful, even if we dance to it, we nonetheless reflect on whether we SHOULD like this or that piece music"

Is this not a case of our response to a particular virus (the music we hear) then being mediated through the operation of other viruses which have, as one of their symptoms, may have created musical and social codes which issue an injunction against the symptom (enjoyment) of the first virus?

One might even say it's <i>all</i> the pathology of experience; the capacity to reflect on the worth of a particular pathology is not itself extra-pathological, but is merely the operation of a conflict of pathologies, a symptom of their contest for control of the body.

This is why it is necessary to have a supreme skepticism towards the self-evidence of any our reactions to music; but because these reactions are ultimately the subject of discussion (explicitly or implicitly), this skepticism requires us to foreground our experience and investigate it rather than marginalise it.

huh

i'm getting v. confused here, or maybe have been all along.

ok. obv everything is an interacting process and there's no absolute individual ego and one can't distinguish the purely "physical" from other "levels" and blahblaahblahblah so yeah everyone shares therefore some universal-perspectival whateverwhatever.

but then once elements of music (not a track itself obv, b/c that's another assemblage of rhytmic viruses sonic viruses whateverwhatever) are simply some viruses among many, then the whole thing lets go of whatever bite the "viral transmission" thing had in the first place!

this, i think, is what i appreciate about latour's recent move. rather than positing some metaphysical "event" he simply points out that constructionism is by now a very easy and established move to make, and the difficult task is establishing reasonable categories (suitably humble in their claims) of analysis to better understand the surprises and complexities of the constructive process in a action.

i mean dancing (or better yet, not dancing) is obv. a form of "criticism" as is writing. but the point is to deliniate the difference between the two (and between high and low and etc.) in actual practice.

the constructionist move isn't made just once -- rather it's a constant check in the process of establishing a richer and more complex story.

getting ppl. to examine the conditioning and encoded meaning in their notions of "individual" taste is well and good, but getting someone to alter their taste on this basis is one of the cruder, easier, and least effective moves to make. rather, i've found that it's generally the return to the original sites of taste that is the most nuanced and important. ppl. don't grow by rejecting things from repulsion so much as by stages of successive fascination and boredom.

(related and good question -- how does one distinguish between "shallow" boredom of incomprension and "genuine" boredom of deep comprension, or is that always an after-the-fact call?)

(doubly related notion -- perhaps pop music is "good" becuz by definition it is never fully subject to deep comprehension and "genuine" boredom, by virtue of posessing a synchronic rather than genre-marked definition?)

Tim F said:

Saying "not directly physical social factors" is a bit misleading here on my part, I'll admit. To use the viral model, I would simply emphasise that there are always multiple viruses at work in a given situation. When you listen/dance to music, you're both being affected by the virus of the music itself and a multitude of social viruses, which will then influence the nature of the music-virus's effect on you (symptoms, pathology) etc. It's a multilateral relationship - between you and the music-virus, you and social-viruses, the music-virus and the social-viruses.

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Agreed, except this implies that there is a 'you' who isn't viruses....

So all I'm arguing against here is the idea of some direct, exclusive relationship between the listener/dancer and the music, especially (and I'd hope you'd agree here Mark) as that idea rests on a privileging of the <i>experience</i> of that relationship as "true", the "indubitable baseline real." The experience of the pathology is used to attribute certain components to the music-virus in and of itself, but of course the question that needs to be asked is: to what extent is this pathology I'm experiencing the result of the music-virus affecting me, the social-viruses affecting me, or one of those affecting the other in its capacity to affect me?

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Again, I'm broadly in agreement with you, except for this notion of a 'me' which is afflcited by rather than constituted out of viruses...

"I think the alleged 'richness' of human responses depends, once again, on this secular religion of the aleatory unpredictability of human beings. Human responses are structurally produced by specifiable sonic and social machineries. Narrativization conceals this because by its very nature it is anti-structural - it plugs gaps and produces continuities."

I agree with this completely! On the point of experience as an "indubitable, baseline real", I would simply stress for the nth time that I have <i>never, ever argued this</i>.

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I don't think I implied that you did; I think it has become clear that this is not the basis of our disagreement. However....

I agree that experience is structurally produced, that it is in fact entirely inconsistent, fragmented etc. and only retrospectively does it take on some appearance of continuity and "truth". But, again, <i>this is why it is interesting</i>, and why we must continue to start with it as the basis of our enquiry.

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There's an ambiguity here, I think: what does 'basis of our enquiry' mean? Is experience what has to be accounted for (where that accounting would involve all kinds of structural factors) - or is it the final arbiter, what has to be utlimately appealed to? With a genuine structural analysis, you start off with structures and end up with structures and treat experience as an effect of structures, nothing more.

[QUOTE Those who claim to reject the influence of experience in a discussion like this are almost always being dishonest rhetorically, because no-one seeks to defend or reject certain pieces of music without basing that in a reaction they have had. Saying "I like [eg. M.I.A.'s music] but take issue with [eg. her pseudo-political sloganeering]" is a position which is experienced as a reaction as well as formulated as a theoretical statement. The reason I came onto this thread in the first place was that the consensus forming implied the existence of certain legislative categories for enjoyment - "musical dilettantism is bad", "liking pop is bourgeois consumerism" etc. which were presented as floating free from the position of the speakers pronouncing them. [/QUOTE]

While I would NEVER say that 'liking pop is bourgeois consumerism' - I would, of course, say that certain accounts of liking Pop are consumerist ideologies - I don't have a problem with legislative categories for enjoyment, naturally; for me the idea that legislative categories are bad is a cult studs doxa that really should be questioned now. For me, the problem with rockist 'legislation' is not that it legislates - it is that its legislation is wrong-headed.

Also, I have no problem with statements floating free from speaker position. Are you suggesting that the only legitimate statements are those that are tied to a particular, presumably embodied, subject position? Again, I would resist that cult studs orthodoxy utterly. The issue for me is not 'speaker position' but theoretical position: contra Nietzsche, it is the consistency of the position, rather than who/ where it comes from, that interests me...

But as Simon noted, these pronouncements only form through the speaker noticing certain tendencies in <i>their own</i> enjoyment and extrapolating from there (Simon stating this would seem to conflict with his attempts to rehabilitate rockism, which is precisely about legislating enjoyment, but that's another issue). So when Simon talks about such concepts, he does begin from the basis of experience. To assert then that such a position held [eg. "M.I.A. is bad" or "Pop music is bad"] is correct and all those who think otherwise are wrong, misled, gripped by false consciousness etc. is simply privileging the speaker's experience over and above any other person's experience, and turning the former into an "indubitable, baseline real".* Whereas I would say that both reactions are equally socially constructed, and therefore the first task of any music critic is to attempt to understand and deconstruct their own enjoyment, to determine how they as subjects or collectives have been sonically and socially produced.

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You know that I won't buy any of this.

For a start, it is a circular argument. It is assuming that there is no such thing as truths, that all there are embodied perspectives - and what is the evidence for this - only the claim that this must be true. Any claim about false consciousness is always a claim AGAINST experience. But it is also a claim against the relative autonomy of aesthetics. 'Deconstruction', by contrast, is a transdentalization of the aesthetic; which is to say, a suspension of the ethical and the political in the name of the complexities of the 'text' and its reception.

I'm still not clear what force the concept of 'social construction' has here: how does it operate, what does it do? As far as I can glean, the point of invoking such a concept is entirely negative: it is employed solely to refute the notion of an unmediated encounter with the sonic. And what is the point of 'deconstructing one's experience'? Why do it? This seems to the closest thing to a bottom line here: the tracing back of one's enjoyment to certain 'social' factors. But unless there is some ethical or political - which is to say LEGISLATIVE - impulse here, all you are left with is the kind of resentful guilt-mongering demystification that Brit cult studs made its own. That is what I have always found so depressing about cult studs: its apparent populism (hey you can't tell people what to like!) nevertheless is always accompanied by what it professes to object to in other positions (namely the belief that you can know better than other people what their enjoyment is). Simply pointing to the 'social' 'construction' of one's enjoyment seems to me of no more significance than doing a chemical analysis of coca cola... The issue is not how the experience of coca cola has been constructed by stim of certain bio-social responses, but whether people SHOULD drink coca cola at all...

And what is repressed in such relativist discourses is their own legislative impulses - i.e. we quickly encounter the familiar relativist paradox whereby the legislation that legislation is bad is immediately disavowed. Such inconsistencies are of course treated as vindications of/ within deconstructive discourse.

Simply asserting that there is an objective truth about a certain piece of music separate to how it is experienced is akin to Kautsky-style (I could say Stalinist, but that might get people's backs up unnecessarily) scientific materalism - "Whatever appears to be happening, objectively it is in fact [x] that is happening."

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Better Stalinism than Nietzschean cult studs obviously!

part 2 below

part 2

The point of course is that there is no ontological distinction possible - appearance and experience are part of reality. That's why "subjectivism" is a flawed concept: it assumes that there is an objective world which is separate to any subjective view of it; but the truth of the matter is of course that our gaze upon reality is always part of reality, and it transforms reality-itself as much as it distorts our <i>perception</i> of reality itself - this is what Zizek refers to as "universalised perspectivism" I think.

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But you sound to me as if you are pushing that in the Nietzschean direction - collapsing appearance into reality - when the other alternative is to push everything onto the side of the 'objective' (I'm none too happy about this binary either). To say, in other words, that the gaze isn't part of or transforms reality - how does this not reinforce the binary that is ostensibly being deconstructed? - but that the gaze is itself produced by the Real.

My problem with what you seem to be saying here and in general is that there is no space from which to criticize aesthetic choices.... The Marxist-Spinozist-punk position would straightforwardly say that people can be WRONG... both ethically and epistemologically... It would deny that this position is yet another 'perspective', arguing that it is only from the perspective of perspectivitism that it can appear that way. The point is that there are standards (ethical, veridical) that are independent of human beings.... This seems to me to be the fundamental point of divergence between 'Popists' and others... Anti-Popists are happy to be judgemental, to take the risk of holding an ethical positon, a committed stance THAT MAY TURN OUT TO BE WRONG.... But relativism can never be wrong, because it has removed the very category...

"I'm still not getting what you're saying, but what worries me about what you are saying is that it seems like capitalist ideology in that it not only maintains a place for, it radically privileges, the position of the consumer-connoissieur. As if there was this substantial bricoleur-ego that stands outside and enters into collectivities, whereas I would say that what we call our 'selves' are simpy the agglomeration-production of processes that are 'without a subject': bricolage without a bricoleur."

No this is not at all what I'm saying Mark! My point was simply that - as above - no collective's response to a musical virus is characterised by undifferentiated unanimity, because of the multitude of viruses that each component of the collective carry. I'm not interested in the individual ("consumer-connoissieur") for him or herself, but rather insofar as the inconsistency and mutability of the collective is both its condition of possibility and precisely what makes it interesting - the consistency of the collective is as much a necessary fiction as the consistency of the individual subject. It is the question that needs to be asked of both collectives and individuals - "what are the processes that shape your experience, and what is repressed in order to give that experience consistency" - that is important.

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But it is the opposition between collectives and individuals that is the problem for me. As if 'collective' just meant 'group of individuals', as if there were some 'private' space beyond collectivity...

I get the impression you're trying to read bourgeois consumerism into everything that I write just for the sake of it.

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No, I'm honestly not. I just can't distinguish your position from a sophisticated version of consumer capitalism is all. Ultimately, my problem would be with deconstruction as a methodology. It's abundantly clear that deconstruction poses no problems for capitalism at all --- how is providing a nuanced account of a consumer response an ATTACK on consumerism rather than a re-presentation of it?

I'm also especially puzzled by the relationship of Zizek to your position. Again, I'm sure I'm STILL not getting it, but it seems to me that much of your position is what Zizek has been most dedicated to destroying over the past couple of decades...

"Why shouldn't responses to art be of the same type? Dancing is no more or less 'natural', no more or less 'social', no more or less 'theoretical' than writing about music."

I agree (I think it was Simon who said that dancing doesn't signify whereas I would argue that it does); but it's highly popist of you to say this!

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No, it's more the Kodwo position, I would have thought. I didn't say dancing 'signified', though, that would be grotesque!

"Agreed, except this implies that there is a 'you' who isn't viruses...."

I would distance myself from that implication.

"There's an ambiguity here, I think: what does 'basis of our enquiry' mean? Is experience what has to be accounted for (where that accounting would involve all kinds of structural factors) - or is it the final arbiter, what has to be utlimately appealed to? With a genuine structural analysis, you start off with structures and end up with structures and treat experience as an effect of structures, nothing more. "

The problem here is that you <i>do</i> appeal to experience Mark - your own comments in relation to Scritti Politti are good examples of this. And it's precisely because everyone who discusses music in the intimate manner that we do implicitly appeals to experience that it is what needs to be accounted for. No-one in this debate is sufficiently disinterested enough to get around this.

"While I would NEVER say that 'liking pop is bourgeois consumerism' - I would, of course, say that certain accounts of liking Pop are consumerist ideologies - I don't have a problem with legislative categories for enjoyment, naturally; for me the idea that legislative categories are bad is a cult studs doxa that really should be questioned now. For me, the problem with rockist 'legislation' is not that it legislates - it is that its legislation is wrong-headed. "

I don't have a problem with legislative categories per se either, but in this case they seem to mostly be arising <i>out of</i> individual experience (again, individual experience is what is implictly being appealed to even as it is outwardly scorned), and so there is somethingly deeply contradictory about them.

"But it is the opposition between collectives and individuals that is the problem for me. As if 'collective' just meant 'group of individuals', as if there were some 'private' space beyond collectivity... "

I have been attempting to avoid this oppositional terminology in my last few posts for this very reason. Again, I disavow any interest in or commitment to the status of the individual within the collective. What interests me is the fact of difference within the collective, but that difference can be expressed in components of which the individual is but a part, or components which make up the individual - components and individuals are not synonymous.

"Also, I have no problem with statements floating free from speaker position. Are you suggesting that the only legitimate statements are those that are tied to a particular, presumably embodied, subject position? Again, I would resist that cult studs orthodoxy utterly. The issue for me is not 'speaker position' but theoretical position: contra Nietzsche, it is the consistency of the position, rather than who/ where it comes from, that interests me..."

My concern is not that statements are illegitimate if they're not tied to a particular subject position; rather, it's that they're often presented as not being tied to one when in fact they are. Legislative categories don't transcend or escape experience and perspective merely because the person espousing them says so. Especially when the evidence being put forward to support them is experience! In other words I'm somewhat loathe to trust someone who is a music critic first and foremost when they claim that liking or disliking certain musics is philosophically/politically unsound.

BTW, as to whether what I am saying disagrees with Zizek, I suspect that he would say that "speaker position" is very important, only not in the same way that most post-structuralists would. As I understand him, for Zizek there is a single truth to any particular situation and only the repressed, abject speaker-position has access to it - eg. the jews in relation to the Holocaust; the third world/sweatshop workers/slum dwellers in relation to modern capitalism etc. Their "truth" is that they <i>are</i> the truth of the situation.

"For a start, it is a circular argument. It is assuming that there is no such thing as truths, that all there are embodied perspectives - and what is the evidence for this - only the claim that this must be true. Any claim about false consciousness is always a claim AGAINST experience."

I'm not claiming that there are no truths, but I always immediately suspect any position which sets itself up as being anti-ideological in symmetrical opposition to false consciousness. You know that Western capitalists did this all the time in relation to Communist Europe.

"My problem with what you seem to be saying here and in general is that there is no space from which to criticize aesthetic choices...."

There is a space, and that space would of course be outside the aesthetic (or, rather, outside the aesthetic's terms of reference). But none of the grand claims I ever see rockists or anti-rockists or anti-popists make ever seem to be genuinely motivated by some extra-aesthetic imperative. What motivates the Anti-Popists who are happy to be judgmental, to hold ethical positions, other than their own aesthetic criteria? The political edge which can be attributed by critics to grime/post-punk/pop-that-creates-populations/Bob Dylan/Bob Marley/etc. seems like post-facto argument-bolstering to me, a restrospectively issued license-to-enjoy. Which isn't to stay that the perception of a political edge can't itself be enjoyed, but then we are still stuck at the enjoyment level.

Simon can say that M.I.A.'s music falls short for him because she comes from "nowhere", but this attempt to come up with an explanation that fuses the political, social, cultural and aesthetic is ultimately a way of explaining an aesthetic preference. As Simon himself says, his conclusions arise out of patterns within his own taste, his own experience of music. So again experience creeps in as the implicit ground. To determine whether these preferences might have some extra-aesthetic political validity, we would need to understand the ideology of Simon's enjoyment.

"Ultimately, my problem would be with deconstruction as a methodology. It's abundantly clear that deconstruction poses no problems for capitalism at all --- how is providing a nuanced account of a consumer response an ATTACK on consumerism rather than a re-presentation of it? "

Very few positions on aesthetics pose problems for capitalism, Mark. But I don't think the point of music criticism is the ultimate destruction of capitalism (if it is then my own is profoundly pointless). The celebration of the politics of the explosive act/event (which, and correct me if I'm wrong, someone like Bourdieu might say is the only thing that can really disrupt capitalism) (and I hardly consider post-punk or glam or grime or whatever to qualify as an event of such magnitude) is all well and good, but it kinda cancels out aesthetic criticism entirely. Rockism, popism, anti-popism... all of those fade into irrelevance in the face of the kind of requirements you're setting (I could be wrong though, maybe your brand of critique really does pose a threat to capitalism.)

But anyway I'm more heavily influenced by someone like Machery than I am by deconstructionists per se.

"I'm also especially puzzled by the relationship of Zizek to your position. Again, I'm sure I'm STILL not getting it, but it seems to me that much of your position is what Zizek has been most dedicated to destroying over the past couple of decades... "

Zizek isn't opposed to post-structuralism/deconstruction/cultural studies point blank, although he might strongly oppose certain recurring strands within them. Disputes over eg. whether Lacan was a transcendentalist and whether that's a good or bad thing aren't a good enough reason to just walk away from 50 or so years of lots of insightful (if occasionally flawed) thinking.

"Simply pointing to the 'social' 'construction' of one's enjoyment seems to me of no more significance than doing a chemical analysis of coca cola... The issue is not how the experience of coca cola has been constructed by stim of certain bio-social responses, but whether people SHOULD drink coca cola at all... "

The difference however is that your objections to coca cola presumably rest upon the fact that it's unhealthy, not the nature of its enjoyment. So the injunction against drinking is based on something other than the enjoyment, it is a subordination of enjoyment to another type of concern. (if your objection is based on the fact that coca cola is a multinational, the logic remains the same)

Whereas with pop music, the question is whether the enjoyment itself is good or bad (or healthy or unhealthy). The injunction against enjoying pop in a certain manner is based on the fact of enjoyment being in that case, as you yourself say, expressive of a consumerist ideology. Presumably your ability to say this is predicated on an assessment of how that enjoyment is socially constructed?

>What motivates the Anti-Popists who are happy to be judgmental, to hold ethical positions, other than >their own aesthetic criteria?

so in your view Tim all music criticism is at heart and in the end just a massively elaborated expansion on the statement "i dig it? This might in fact be the case for all i know, but what's more interesting is to ask: if you think that's the case, then i wonder why do think it's worth bothering to do? because it seems to me nothing could be more pointless than undertaking such detailed anatomies of one's own pleasure. perhaps it is pointless (the thought has crossed my mind a fair few times over the last two decades!) but when i see the tremendous diligence and finely tuned attention to detail you bring to bear in your own writing about music. i just find it hard to believe that you don't secretly believe there's some truth value to your analyses, and that it might be worth doing for some sake or other beyond merely doing it. That might be a myth or illusion but equally i don't see how one could operate, put fingers to keyboard, without believing in it.

>Simon can say that M.I.A.'s music falls short for him because she comes from "nowhere", but this attempt >to come up with an explanation that fuses the political, social, cultural and aesthetic is ultimately a way >of explaining an aesthetic preference. As Simon himself says, his conclusions arise out of patterns within >his own taste, his own experience of music. So again experience creeps in as the implicit ground. To >determine whether these preferences might have some extra-aesthetic political validity, we would need >to understand the ideology of Simon's enjoyment.

didn't particularly want to bring it back to this again but since you've brought it up -- well my position is a tad more complex than that. for a start in the original piece i acknowledged that the record was enjoyable, up to a point. i've never been one of the "it's a shit record/she can't MC for shit" camp. it's enjoyable, but in fact where it falls short is not the hedonics/aesthetics (although they don't seem overwhelmingly compelling to me) so much as all the (thoroughly rockist!) reasons that people had supplied for why she's "important", a "complex artist" etc. Ie. it's the non-hedonic, extra-aesthetic credentials that both the artist and supporters have proferred that I questioned. The lyrics don't stand up for me, I think the point that Space Is the Place guy made about "one liners and moderately interesting beats" captures it well.

In terms of the infamous "nowhere" comment, again I must point out that i said Arular was from nowhere, not MIA. And this is a very clear reference to the fact that while the record is modelled on various musics that operate around scenius-dynamics and are locally situated, Arular itself is unplugged from those scenius-dynamics. Any intertextuality the record possesses is much more of a pop order (the references to Missy and Timbaland -- bit cringy, that lyric, dare i say it) rather than the intertextuality that a dancehall or grime record has, where each record is a part of a greater whole, a contribution to a collective conversation. Arular is much more like a commentary on those conversations (hence my analogies of the essay on the Black Atlantic, or a diasporic studies phD in fine fleshly form -- especially given that the commentary/essay is addressed to an entirely different audience, the music-fan equivalent of academia, ie, bloggerland). (well perhaps not addressed to consciously, but certainly 'read' by -- and maybe addressed to, given there's a thank you in the CD booklet to Paul Kennedy, as far as he can tell, for starting an ILM thread about Piracy!).

Now this unplugging/meta-scenius/meta-street syndrome has a whole bunch of effects, and one of them is a certain lack of "fire"; the pressure that lies behind dancehall/grime/baile/hip hop/etc, that is vented through those musics, is to me palpably absent. It is a cooler record, emotionally, than the things it is inspired by. But of course it's possible that some people may not actually want "fire". For me "fire" is perhaps something like the happy overlap of the aesthetic and the political-social-etc, it's where the two categories are inextricably intertwined and inseparable and possibly even the same thing. It's not unique to scenius-type dynamics or street musics by any means, although in recent years arguably those have been the place to look for it, given the state of rock. but that perhaps is the ideology of my enjoyment that you refer to -- fire worship.

(this of course being far from an exhaustive account of my enjoyment of music, which encompasses a whole bunch of non-fiery musics, most recent on my turntable being Fripp/Eno's no pussyfooting/evening star, durutti column 'LC)