What is good about Pop Music?

[dominic]

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

this is the kind of grand claim that makes me skeptical . . . .

and it's why i wouldn't entirely dispense with experience as an arbiter of truth

if each of us has a sense of himself -- the "me," the "I" -- then at the very least you have to account for that sense

the sense that there's something separable about "me"

that there's a "me" that stands apart from all that has constituted me

something like the soul in plato -- a soul that is born w/ the body and which then dies w/ body

call me superstitious, but i've yet to be persuaded that each of us doesn't have his own soul or identity that is qualitatively different than the dna or social factors or viruses that constitute it

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 me that has already been constituted by viruses experiences the new viruses as affliction

and i think, moreover, that there is something about this "me" that is not reducible to viruses and dna and all such other factors

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.

experience has to be accounted for, yes

experience explained as the effect of certain structural factors

AND YET experience is also the final arbiter, what must ultimately be appealed to

b/c otherwise what's the arbiter? logical consistency? theoretical elegance?

what's to prevent a perfectly logical account from being nothing other than a beautiful poem?

and really, this is to obscure the meaning of the term "logical" -- which is not so much about consistency as it is about gathering together

contra Nietzsche, it is the consistency of the position, rather than who/ where it comes from, that interests me...

then you're going to far in the other extreme

it seems to me that you have to be interested in both -- i.e., take both seriously

philosophy must concern itself with consistency AND take seriously the speaker's particular nature and position

if the drive for theoretical consistency does too much violence to the truth of human diversity, or if we forget the particular nature of those who make the drive for consistency -- then we've fallen into a kind of error

Any claim about false consciousness is always a claim AGAINST experience.

yes -- but the argument must still appeal to experience in the final instance

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 sympathetic to your argument here

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 i'm also sympathetic on this point, and all the remaining points you make

 

[dominic]

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.

i agree with tim f on this point

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.

yes -- but experience is the ground for any truth claim -- perhaps not the ultimate ground -- but it's certainly what we all work from and, in the last instance, appeal to -- how else do you persuade others if not by way of an account that accords with their own experience?

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.

so are you suggesting that legislative categories can indeed be valid DESPITE being tied to a particular subject position?

this seems to me the proper suggestion to make

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.

yes -- but what about blissblogger's remarks about "fire"?

and again, he's not saying that music that has "fire" is the only music worthy of enjoyment -- merely that it's the most powerful kind of music

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.

or perhaps the perception of political edge has yet to be properly theorized

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.

this seems to me a reasonable argument -- so long as you clarify what you mean here by "ideology"

Very few positions on aesthetics pose problems for capitalism . . . . But I don't think the point of music criticism is the ultimate destruction of capitalism . . . . 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

unless events like punk or rave are premonitions of the truth

i.e., the power of such events may be said to instill in their subjects dissatisfaction with the existing order of things -- this is a side effect of the event's power -- and so the power of the musical event perhaps works as a premonition (or glimpse) of the truly explosive event that will disrupt capitalism

or maybe it's all a matter of carnival

carnivals that are perfectly consistent w/ the perpetuation of the standing order

 

[k-punk]

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?

Well, exactly. And I wonder in which ways this postion differs from that of the so-called Popist straw man? Isn't the reduction of all discourse about music to aestheticist opinionism precisely what Popism was being accused of above?

"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.

1. That isn't answering the question, it's evading it. I'm still not clear on what you think the 'basis of our enquiry' means.

2. It replaces one ambiguity with another. What does 'appeal to experience' mean? That one mentions or refers to 'experience' (which is itself becoming an increasingly mystified category) as part of one's analysis? Or that you treat experience as the first and final narguable arbiter of all discussion as you now appear to want to? I might do the former, but never the latter.

3. This is an ad hominem attack which might at a stretch establish some inconsistency between my theoretical position and how I have practised critiicsm, but that does nothing to invalidate the former.

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.

But 'accounting for' experience is the OPPOSITE of appealing to it. You seem to be sliding from one to the other.

"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.

This is the classic Nietzschean anti-rationalist move; don't talk about theory, speculate about motives. What is your evidence - beyond the circular argumentation you're deploying here and in previous posts - for this assertion about the provenance of judgements?

By 'individual experience' you don't obviously mean ''the experience of an individual person/ subject' - otherwise you would be immediately contradicting yourself when you disavow any special interest in the individual below. Individual experience seems then to mean some phenomenological singularity which you now appear to be treating as primordial. Subjects 'have' these experiences - which seem for all the world IN THE FIRST INSTANCE to be unmediated - which then apparenty function as the sole motivation for any critical stance - or as you might prefer, 'speaking position' - they adopt. It is then, it appears, that 'structural' analysis can come into play: but basically as an theoretical ornamentation of an unarguable baseline aestheticism. Precisely, then, 'a massively elaborated expansion on the statement "i dig it?"'

part two below

 

[k-punk]

Part two

"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.

Once again, this is the Nietzchean orthodoxy underlying Cult Studs. The fact that sometimes such positions can be 'pathologized' does not mean that all positions are pathological.

Legislative categories don't transcend or escape experience and perspective merely because the person espousing them says so.

Nor can all legislative categories be tied back down to experience because a Nietzschean relativist says that they can.

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.

Why? Because music critics have a duty first and foremost to be aesthetes and to recognize music as a relative autonomy?

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.

Yes, but this is Marxist as opposed to Nietzschean perspectivism, and it seems to be highly misleading to use the former to legitimate the latter. For instance, the proletariat have access to the truth of capitalism precisely because they can transcend their positioning within the social system. The position of the proletariat is attained only when people cease to trust their own experience as members of the working class and identify with a universal substanceless subject. This is precisely where the emphasis on false consciousness comes from: until they attain class consciousness, people _experience themselves_ as individuated wage slaves who deserve a life of emiserating labour etc. Hence Zizek's relentless, tireless emphasising of the theme of 'unplugging' : what you are unplugging from is your assigned 'speaking position'.

As for the Jewish issue, my understanding is that Zizek makes exactly the OPPOSITE move to the one you are suggesting. He precisely does not defend Jewishness as a 'speaking position'; that's why he celebrates Freud's Moses and Monotheism which destroys the very basis of the faith, the very idea that there is some 'agalma' that Jews possess. It was the Nazis who ascribed a 'speaking position' to the Jews; Freud's genius, as Zizek understands it, was to have undermined the possibility of occupying that speaking position.

Part 3 below (gasp!!!!)

 

[k-punk]

Part 3

"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.

Well, certainly positions can be wrong. But the most ideological position of all is one that refuses to take a political position; or worse, that assumes that there is some zone - in this case aesthetic - which lies outside the political.

"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 that presupposes the very point at issue: to wit, is there an 'inside' of the aesthetic - i.e. an outside of the political?

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.

Again, what is the evidence for this, beyond speculative supposition in the service of a circular argument? Even as an account of experience, this seems to me profoundly wrong. Surely it is clear that people have PRE-facto dispositions: Goth kids will often be relucant to like pop, hip hop kids will be ill-disposed to like indie etc etc. The point is enjoyment NEVER floats free from 'license to enjoy' - but the idea that such 'licences to enjoy' are ONLY issued post-facto on the basis of an (again, it would seem, unmediated) miraculated 'experience of enjoyment' seems to bear no relation to reality.

The conclusion I would have to draw from your claims here is that, for instance, Greil Marcus wrote Lipstick Traces, trawled through all those situationist and dadaist texts, produced all those disquizitions on the irruption of the political into everyday life, because he 'enjoyed' the Sex Pistols and wanted to rationalize that 'aesthetic preference'? This is to miss the point that the 'enjoyment' of the Sex Pistols primarily consisted in the fact that THIS WAS NOT JUST AN AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE. The whole force of the punk attack on Prog was fundamentally a rejection of the allegedly pure aestheticism of Prog. For punk, pop was bad because it had withered into - perhaps had always been nothing but - a 'leisure' activity ---- surely it should and COULD be about a new way of thinking, living, being....

"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.

So deconstruction is now (merely) a 'postion on aesthetics'? Not a philosophical position about the generation of meaning, the production of subjectivity, the nature of writing and language?

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).

Once again, this presupposes that any writing about 'music' is 'music criticism' in your restricted hyper-aesthticized sense.

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.)

I'm completely happy to rule out all aestheticist criticism altogether.

And, sorry, I know I'm supposed to bend my head and say, no, no, my brand of critique doesn't pose a threat to capitalism, I apologize for getting above myself, but actually I do believe it can be effective, which is why I attempt to practise it. No, it won't lead to a cataclysmic collapse of capitalism tomorrow, but reading Badiou, Zizek etc certainly has had an impact on the way I live my life, on how I behave at work, on what struggles I involve myself in, on how I view myself and how I treat others. It poses a challenge to me that I seek to live up to. And of course Pop can function in the same way for me, and has.

Again, this is precisely my irritation with Popism: its obsession with Pop as relative autonomy conceals a deep aggression AGAINST Pop. You are only permitted to discuss your enjoyment of Pop, because Pop can only be enjoyed, and that enjoyment can only be aesthetic. Obligatory trivialization. DON'T FOR ONE MOMENT THINK THAT POP CAN BE IMPORTANT.

But, sorry, I do think it is important, and the reasons it is important have nothing to do with nimble bass lines.

"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.

Not sure what the dig about Lacan is supposed to establish, but I am sure that Zizek is dedicatedly opposed to the bits of cult studs and post-structuralism that you seem to want to celebrate. His postion could not be further from aestheticism and he is a psychoanalyst, so by defintion, he won't be celebrating experience (psychoanalysis being based on the presupposition that 'experience' just is false consciousness).

 

[Tim F]

"As for the Jewish issue, my understanding is that Zizek makes exactly the OPPOSITE move to the one you are suggesting. He precisely does not defend Jewishness as a 'speaking position'; that's why he celebrates Freud's Moses and Monotheism which destroys the very basis of the faith, the very idea that there is some 'agalma' that Jews possess. It was the Nazis who ascribed a 'speaking position' to the Jews; Freud's genius, as Zizek understands it, was to have undermined the possibility of occupying that speaking position."

You're mischaracterising my statement, Mark. I said that Zizek said the Jews were the only ones who could speak the truth <i>about the Holocaust</i>, no that they have an ongoing speaking position as such. My use of "speaking position" is entirely situational, eg. "what position is the speaker in at the moment that they speak?"

"1. That isn't answering the question, it's evading it. I'm still not clear on what you think the 'basis of our enquiry' means.

2. It replaces one ambiguity with another. What does 'appeal to experience' mean? That one mentions or refers to 'experience' (which is itself becoming an increasingly mystified category) as part of one's analysis? Or that you treat experience as the first and final narguable arbiter of all discussion as you now appear to want to? I might do the former, but never the latter.

3. This is an ad hominem attack which might at a stretch establish some inconsistency between my theoretical position and how I have practised critiicsm, but that does nothing to invalidate the former."

To the extent that it's an ad hominem attack, it's because I believe there is a short circuit at work in your position, whereby an attack on the role of experience in any aesthetic judgment concludes with a sleight-of-hand reinstatement of experience. If experience was irrelevant, was not a starting point, the actual sonic or stylistic properties of any piece of music (early Scritti Politti or whatever) would be strictly irrelevant to their worth (the point being that, whatever model you use to explain how one is affected by music, viral or otherwise, these properties are only recognised insofar as they are experienced). Saying that the body has an unmediated relationship to the sonic properties of the music may appear to bypass consciousness but it doesn't bypass experience (and anyway while I agree that the body can be affected by the music without much recourse to consciousness I don't think this ever happens in isolation).

I believe that music can have politically/socially/culturally transformative effects and this is worth celebrating (or decrying in some rare instances I guess), but, in terms of making an aesthetic choice on this basis, it is still mediated through experience. eg. the issue for Greil Marcus is how he experiences the Sex Pistols as politically subversive, what inspires him to start making the connections that he does, and this would be a certain experience of and enjoyment of the Sex Pistols' subversiveness, and a realisation that this links in with other experiences/enjoyments of subversiveness that he has had, eg. with situationist art. Of course Greil (and goth kids and indie kids) can have "pre-facto dispositions" but I think these dispositions are determined more by how their enjoyment has been structured.

I'm not saying that eg. the Sex Pistols' political subversiveness is illusory, that Marcus makes it up to dress up his enjoyment. Rather, I'm saying that it is first experienced and enjoyed, and then theorized and championed. Subversiveness (if you'll allow me to be terribly reductive about it) becomes for Greil what "fire worship" is for Simon.

"Well, certainly positions can be wrong. But the most ideological position of all is one that refuses to take a political position; or worse, that assumes that there is some zone - in this case aesthetic - which lies outside the political."

Well it's lucky that I don't hold such an ideological position. I'm happy to take a political position but I don't assume that in doing so I have escaped false consciousness or ideology (and i certainly don't assume I've done this with regard to my music enjoyment or criticism, which as you say doesn't lie outside the political). As far as I'm concerned, as much as I think that Zizek has more than anyone tried to think through and thus pass through ideology, he remains within ideology as we all do, he doesn't escape what he theorises. It's not that ideology is some inevitable universal, just that i think it's very very very very hard to move outside of.

"I'm completely happy to rule out all aestheticist criticism altogether."

This is the clincher, isn't it? I'm not. I realise that this is a fetishistic persistence on my part, but if you don't share in that fetish I'm surprised that you care about music much at all; it would hardly seem to be the most exciting or crucial pressure-point in the anti-capital struggle.

(re whether there is an "inside" to aesthetics that is outside of politics, I agree with you that there is not; I think of aesthetics not as being devoid of politics so much as being willfully blind towards it most of the time; I myself am wilfully blind insofar as I find that blindness to be a useful and enjoyable pursuit)

"reading Badiou, Zizek etc certainly has had an impact on the way I live my life, on how I behave at work, on what struggles I involve myself in, on how I view myself and how I treat others. It poses a challenge to me that I seek to live up to. And of course Pop can function in the same way for me, and has."

So this sort of answers the above question, but then I remain totally confused as to how it is anything other than the <i>experience</i> of Pop that has had such a profound effect on you.

"And, sorry, I know I'm supposed to bend my head and say, no, no, my brand of critique doesn't pose a threat to capitalism, I apologize for getting above myself, but actually I do believe it can be effective, which is why I attempt to practise it."

I should stress Mark that I wasn't being nasty or sarcastic when I suggested that perhaps your style of criticism was a threat to capitalism. I meant that, precisely to the extent that your brand of criticism is prepared to do away with aesthetics, it potentially becomes more purely revolutionary politics. I cannot hold my own criticism to that standard, I'm afraid. Please allow me to concede to you on this point (indeed, i suspect that this is the ultimate end-point of our argument, and i'm fully prepared to walk away from it at this point - I mean that good-naturedly, by the way). Again though, it makes me wonder at the relationship between your anti-experience position and your claim that Pop has profoundly affected you.

What I would like to particularly stress at this stage (as the conversation seems to be drifting more toward the heated side of things) is the extent to which my own sense of the relationship between my musical enjoyment and my broader philosophy/politics feels as if it as the "questing" stage, and I don't pretend to have worked out anywhere near as coherent a position on these things as you have. This may mean that I should just shut up but I've been loathe to do that because debating these points with you is a good way of running through these issues with myself.

 

[Tim F]

Simon re your comment about <i>Arular</i> coming from nowhere, I wasn't questioning its truth value (an issue better left to the More Maya thread, and since I haven't heard all of <i>Arular</i> I don't really want to engage with the debate except on a tangential level), and your elaboration of your position above is pretty sensible I reckon. But surely you would agree that what that elaboration ultimately attempts to account for is what you perceive as <i>Arular</i>'s lack of fire? If <i>Arular</i> impacted you like a top-notch dancehall and grime record, would you have been so focused on distinguishing it from those?

The response to this question might be (and I'm not putting words into your mouth, Simon, just trying to play devil's advocate with myself) "well, that's impossible, M.I.A.'s music is structurally incapable of impacting in that manner because it doesn't arise from within the internal dialogue of a scene. So asking this question is getting it the wrong way around."

To which I'd then say: Okay, but obviously there are critics who <i>do</i> think that it impacts <i>them</i> in the same manner as dancehall or grime (see Chuck Eddy's rather extraordinary position that M.I.A. outperforms all dancehall since "Under Mi Sleng Teng"!), and those people seem to fall all over the shop from popists to rockists, so it can't simply be related to a meta-position on how we should enjoy. It is something about the enjoyment itself - specifically, your enjoyment Simon, and how it differs from that of others (to put it in K-Punkian terms, what are the structures which have produced your enjoyment as an effect).

And what is this difference:

"but that perhaps is the ideology of my enjoyment that you refer to -- fire worship."

So what we've done very quickly and painlessly is established why you like M.I.A. but are not blown away, contra critic x, y, and z. Of course I felt that this is what you did in your original article anyway, which I was absolutely fine with, but then unlike others I already had a sense of the role of fire worship in your enjoyment.

" 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."

Do any music critics (except Mark perhaps) successfully avoid suffering intermittent crises of faith? I know I have these all the time, though it's a point of honour for me now to never shut down my blog in some grand statement. What propels me to continue is not some revolutionary belief or some insistence on the truth value of my statements but rather the further enjoyment I derive from investing my capacities back into my enjoyment of music. Which is why I have insisted that I am a popist.

 

[s_clover]

are we reading the same zizek?

b/c my reading of zizek is absolutely *against* a position that aesthetic choices of enjoyment are important. zizek near completely insists on at least the *illusion* of autonomy of the "cultural" sphere and the sphere of the real, and near as i can tell is tremendously cynical towards culturalist projects for social transformation, or the delusion that choices of consumption can mean anything, when in fact the most "radical" choice of consumption remains within the *framework* of the consumptive act and so constitutes a displacement of unease with the world-as-it-is in "totality" onto an element of that world, providing a *perverse* enjoyment of mild self-abnegation. the vegitarian yuppie, etc.

i mean, if zizek has a gripe with the anti-smoking lobby, is he really gonna have a problem with drinking COKE?

i mean if you want to say i trivialize pop, i can't speak for anyone else but yes -- i do trivialize it -- i enjoy it as pop and nothing more -- i enjoy the act of consumption as the act of consumption and nothing more, rather than finding some displaced "subversion" within it. i recognize full well that the realm of symbolic exchange is not to be challenged within its rules and logic, with the mistake of substituting an act of consumption for striking a blow against consumerism. you think that's nuts -- fine. but how do you drag zizek into this? if anything, his take on cultural enjoyment is a varient of the old lacanian notion of "talking through the fantasy."

oh, and the zizek subject-position debate seems to bypass his reading of lacan's four subject-positions of discourse? (i.e., the master signifier, the signified, the observer(?), and la petit a -- the last being the position of the therapist, the detective etc., and also a position never fully attained, or rather attaind in the process of laying claim to it; i.e. whose full constitution involves the dissolution of the discourse?)

 

[Tim F]

I tend to agree with yr reading Sterling. Zizek usually revels in his own enjoyment and its pathological quality, and doesn't seem at all compelled to subordinate his tastes to a political programme at all - because of, as you say, his suspicion of the usefulness of doing so.

 

[k-punk]

Are we reading the same Zizek?

Clearly not Sterling: but in what sense have you read Zizek at all? Clearly you've read some of the words (with notable exceptions, see below), but to ask the question 'how dare you bring Zizek into this' actually beggars belief. I mean that literally, I am stunned, aghast.

To go from Zizek's rejection of facile cult studs gestural micropolitics (the view, also rightly exoriated by Baudrillard that watching TV is an act of resistance) to the idea that pheww, coast is clear, get the beers in chaps, it's OK just to enjoy, Slavoj says so, is a leap so stupefying I can hardly credit it. Surely Zizek's most famous move is his critique of enjoyment (i.e. the superegoic injunction to enjoy).

Perhaps a subtle clue that Zizek just might think there are political implications to enjoyment is given in the subtitle of this book.

To be clear:

Like Adorno, Deleuze-Guattari, Baudrillard, cult studs, in fact everyone who isn't a teenager and or an American, Zizek of course recognizes that acts of consumption are inherently and of their nature political and psychoanalytic. He doesn't buy into a silly commonsense binary between consumption and 'serious' things.

He does reject the idiotic notion from cult studs - doubled in consumerism per se - that changing your buying habits (i.e. buying organic carrots from hippies in Wiltshire) is making a political change.

HOWEVER that is not to say that reading or listening to music cannot CONTRIBUTE to a transformative political project. They do so PRECISELY WHEN THEY CEASE TO BE acts of consumption and affect ppl's structure of living.

As for coke, you clearly haven't read his famous analysis of coke-consumption in The Fragile Absolute. It's repeated here

 

[Tim F]

Mark, I think you're unfairly misquoting Sterling, he said "how do you drag Zizek into this?" - it was a question, not an outraged accusation.

Re Coke - well Zizek does exactly what I've been advocating re talking about pop music, which is to attempt to try and account for and explain an experience (the strangely compulsive desire to drink coke) using his theoretical apparatus, in a manner that both explains what the experience actually is and elucidates his apparatus. But it's only an attack on Coke in the sense that it's an attack on all enjoyment in late capitalism; I think the idea that he wants to skewer Coke specifically and that other purchasable drinks are okay is precisely the reaction you rightly say he would detest. I've read interviews with Zizek where he says quite candidly pretty much exactly what you parody Sterling as suggesting, at least in relation to himself: he just follows his enjoyment and then retrospectively tries to wring some use out of it by theorising it. The films he talks about are not those with the capacity to transform the structure of people's lives, but those which he enjoyed and provide a nice metaphor for whatever theoretical angle he's taking.

Which is not to say that you or anyone else Mark should necessarily sink to Zizek's level of (arguably hypocritical) enjoyment, just that I think Zizek (unlike, say, Adorno) doesn't feel particularly motivated to ensure that his cultural enjoyment embodies his revolutionary politics (or, to be cynical, vice versa) - he would acknowledge that his enjoyment is as fetishistic as any other: the Marxist/Lacanian overturning of enjoyment is, as he would say, on the side of what he <i>knows</i>, not what he <i>does</i> (the nice part of the essay above, which is one of my favourites, is how this is then mirrored in his discussion of "immediacy", where people can self-diagnose the cause of their problems but then do nothing about it; which describes a huge amount of my own pathologies!). His desert island selections are hilarious for this reason.

My position is that any over-investment in music is basically guaranteed to be a fetish of this nature.

Mark yr revolutionary brand of musical enjoyment may possibly be non-fetishistic (it's not something I can prove or disprove via the medium of a message board) but it would be dishonest of me to pretend that I enjoy music in this way. I'm pretty sure the basis of my musical enjoyment is a thorough process of fetishization.

 

[s_clover]

y? zzk!

tim, i think yr. selling the analysis of coke slightly short, and also zizek's attitude towards culture. the coke thing is for me a classic "talking cure" that might inspire someone to stop drinking caffeine-free diet coke as they gradually cease to see the purpose in it. or they might get hysterically defensive and call zizek a fraud for denying how much pure enjoyment is in the flavor of caffeine-free diet coke and for overanalyzing the world. or they might decide that they have a perverse enjoyment of the absence of sugare and caffeine and that this feeling of health-thru-self-denial is better when paid for and hence unobtainable from tap water, and continue to drink the coke, but more reflexively. this wouldn't change the world, but it would change the person. if we take coke to be pop (pardon the pun) then one could imagine posing the question "where is the enjoyment in this piece of music?" as worthwhile for precisely the same reasons. but since pop music isn't the same as what i consider gnarly faux-sugarwater the responses would encompass a different range.

also i haven't seen too many zizek interviews/speeches before, and the quirks that are different from his writing are totally cute. everytime he sez "that's another story" i find it disturbingly gut-busting.

 

[k-punk]

Mark, I think you're unfairly misquoting Sterling, he said "how do you drag Zizek into this?" - it was a question, not an outraged accusation.

k fair play

Re Coke - well Zizek does exactly what I've been advocating re talking about pop music, which is to attempt to try and account for and explain an experience (the strangely compulsive desire to drink coke) using his theoretical apparatus, in a manner that both explains what the experience actually is and elucidates his apparatus.

Yes, but part of the problem I am having with what you are saying now - and I accept that there is no point arguing about fundamental positions, they are so different - is that the term 'experience' is being stretched to cover any response whatsoever to a cultural object. This is problematic enough, but it's pretty clear that Zizek is arguing point that the experience - even in a massively over-expanded sense of the term - is NOT it - enjoyment and experience are not at all the same thing.

Your own account of what Zizek is doing makes a fatal equivocation between 'an experience' and a desire' - surely a desire to consume something is not the same as the experience of consuming it? Desire, for Zizek, as you surely know, is an abstract motor, not a phemeonological spontaneity. Zizek has no interest whatsoever in the phenomenological specificity of consuming coke of the type '.2 seconds after the liquid hits my tongue, I feel the saccharine begin to work on my taste buds; .4 seconds after that, the refreshing coolness of the liquid hits my throat...' The whole point is to show that in spite of the fact that the 'experience' of drinking coke is empty, unsatisfying and even unpleasant, the desire to drink it still persists. The expeience is not primordial, and is not appealed to: it is ACCOUNTED FOR using a structural analysis.

Are you really suggesting that you treat Pop in the same way that Zizek treats coke? This seems to me problematic for at least two reasons:

1. As already established, Zizek is in no way a formalist. The reason he is snootily dismissed by Film Studies bores is that his interest in films is almost entirely theoretical - as you rightly say below, he uses them to elucidate theoretical points.

2. Coke for Zizek is pretty obviously the product of an infernal social desire-engine that produces idiotic repetition compulsions. Are you committed to the same view of Pop? (Genuine question --- maybe this is what you mean by 'over-investment' and 'fetishism'?

But it's only an attack on Coke in the sense that it's an attack on all enjoyment in late capitalism; I think the idea that he wants to skewer Coke specifically and that other purchasable drinks are okay is precisely the reaction you rightly say he would detest.

Yes, but you can't just bracket out the 'attack on enjoyment in late capitalism' as if this is somehow trivial, and what is really important is Zizek's claim that he 'digs coke'.

I've read interviews with Zizek where he says quite candidly pretty much exactly what you parody Sterling as suggesting, at least in relation to himself: he just follows his enjoyment and then retrospectively tries to wring some use out of it by theorising it. The films he talks about are not those with the capacity to transform the structure of people's lives, but those which he enjoyed and provide a nice metaphor for whatever theoretical angle he's taking.

Yes: Zizek isn't some academic Marxist tediocrat subjecting himself to 'experimental' Art films in the name of revolutionary purity. But the point is that Zizek is not a film critic in the way that you are a pop critic: he has no respect for the relative autonomy of films, doesn't discuss his own response to films except structurally. He is not interested in his own enjoyment phenomenologically or culturally, in the cult studs sense of 'culture'.

Which is not to say that you or anyone else Mark should necessarily sink to Zizek's level of (arguably hypocritical) enjoyment, just that I think Zizek (unlike, say, Adorno) doesn't feel particularly motivated to ensure that his cultural enjoyment embodies his revolutionary politics (or, to be cynical, vice versa) - he would acknowledge that his enjoyment is as fetishistic as any other: the Marxist/Lacanian overturning of enjoyment is, as he would say, on the side of what he <i>knows</i>, not what he <i>does</i> (the nice part of the essay above, which is one of my favourites, is how this is then mirrored in his discussion of "immediacy", where people can self-diagnose the cause of their problems but then do nothing about it; which describes a huge amount of my own pathologies!). His desert island selections are hilarious for this reason.

But the very fact he raises these issues is what separates him from the Popist-formalist-aesthete position, which wants to say that enjoyment is the be-all and end-all, the final court of appeal for all cultural analysis. I agree though that Zizek makes few if any 'revolutionary selections' in his work (I think the term 'revolutionary' is long past its uh sell-by date actually); perhaps that is one way in which theory can move on from him.

My position is that any over-investment in music is basically guaranteed to be a fetish of this nature.

But this, surely, is another difference of yr position and approach from Zizek's. However much he may fetishise and enjoy in his everyday lifel he doesn't fetishise his enjoyment theoretically. On the contrary: texts are treated as usable parables, little more.

Mark yr revolutionary brand of musical enjoyment may possibly be non-fetishistic (it's not something I can prove or disprove via the medium of a message board) but it would be dishonest of me to pretend that I enjoy music in this way. I'm pretty sure the basis of my musical enjoyment is a thorough process of fetishization.

There's no question that I fetishize cultural objects ---- but that is one reason why I don't think that cultural enjoyment has much to do with 'experience'. My sensuous experience of a Roxy track is one component of my response to it.. Because I am a 'fan', because of memories, associations, cognitive extrapolations, theoretical gambits, the enjoyment is not at all something that happens in real time....

Ultimately, much of this discussion comes down to a dispositional, not an aesthetic, difference. Even at the level of 'experience' (whatever that is) I have almost no interest in the formal aspects of the cultural object . For me, the cultural object is interesting insofar is interesting insofar as - to return to a Deleuzian register - it alters my perceptions, affects and concepts....(Affects versus experience is something I shd return to actually). I'm interested in it not because I 'enjoy' it but because my enjoyment consists in the way it makes me see the world differently, the way that it takes me out of commonsense reality.

 

[Tim F]

Okay we're edging closer to understanding eachother I think Mark!

"Are you really suggesting that you treat Pop in the same way that Zizek treats coke?"

No, you're right there are pretty huge differences! For one, in the context of my writing I am not interested in only approaching music from a perspective of its theoretical utility (per Zizek) or political/theoritical utility (per yourself, I presume) (I am passionately interested in its life-affecting capacities of music, but I tend to think that to the extent that my life is affected, I - personally - am merely repositioned within ideology rather than broken out of it, hence my fascination with love songs, which interest me not because they accord with my idea of love but precisely because they differ from it so radically). So you'd be correct in saying that my criticism is depoliticised insofar as, while it doesn't pretend that aesthetics and politics are separate, it doesn't attempt to ground its aesthetic appreciation within a specific political objective.

At the same time though I think that Zizek is interested in answering the question "why do I or does anyone else think that I/they like Coke?" as opposed to simply lumping this pursuit of enjoyment into a category that's beneath consideration (which would be the rockist-equivalent move, the "mindless sheep" explanation). So to that extent I think he's approaching cultural objects with a similar respect for the complexity of their affects (NB. I wouldn't say, though, that Zizek "respects" Coke as such).

"2. Coke for Zizek is pretty obviously the product of an infernal social desire-engine that produces idiotic repetition compulsions. Are you committed to the same view of Pop? (Genuine question --- maybe this is what you mean by 'over-investment' and 'fetishism'?"

Yes. I'd go so far as to say that what is true about Coke is even more true about music generally, that, if anything, Coke <i>learnt</i> from "culture" such as art and music. In that sense I kinda disagree with the standard line that Pop has learnt from Coke as such (in terms of efficient commodification) - it's certainly true in terms of production and marketing, but in terms of the "hook" that captures the consumer I think Coke is still a somewhat clumsy approximation of music's much subtler and more insidious forms of interpellation. I have an endless fascination with the latter obv (again, love songs are relevant here!).

I should emphasise here that I say "music" instead of "Pop" because I don't think there's a distinction here, that it's only "Pop" which produces idiotic repetition compulsions.

"Yes, but you can't just bracket out the 'attack on enjoyment in late capitalism' as if this is somehow trivial, and what is really important is Zizek's claim that he 'digs coke'. "

Sorry I didn't mean to imply that at all; if anything I was sort of coming from the other direction - the attack on enjoyment in late capitalism is so obviously the focus of Zizek's thinking that the question of whether he digs coke or he chooses to drink something else is what is trivial (eg. what is true for Coke is also true for coffee, as the existence of the skinny decaf latte no sugar would attest).

"Your own account of what Zizek is doing makes a fatal equivocation between 'an experience' and a desire' - surely a desire to consume something is not the same as the experience of consuming it? Desire, for Zizek, as you surely know, is an abstract motor, not a phemeonological spontaneity."

Yes I would agree with this. But when I say "experience" (and yes it may be an over-expanded use of the term) I mean not only the surface level process of what is felt to be going on but also the perhaps unconscious processes at work which sustain and/or distort this experience. One of the points of the experience of Coke is that, if it really is a not-particularly-pleasant taste, there is something going on which causes us to forget this <i>even as we're drinking it</i>; the structure of our experience is transformed by our desire.

I should note that I'm not at all interested in formalism in some sort of musicological sense (there was a long and worthwhile discussion of this issue on ILM that I should try to dig up). I'm interested in the formal properties of music, and in the experience of music, insofar as they plug into the desire of the consumer, ie. how our desire is reproduced by specific cultural (and in the case of music, sonic) objects. I guess this is like a Lacanian Phenomenology, and indeed I tend to forget that Phenomenology is <i>not</i> always Lacanian, perhaps because the class I did at uni on phenom. was taught by a Lacanian (from Slovenia, funnily enough! Though I imagine she would dislike Zizek possibly).

Both music and coke are desirable insofar as there are formal absences at work within them - the space of the objet petit a etc. Identifying the music's formal properties won't point directly to the way that our desire interacts with the music, but it can sketch out this space, and the way it arranges the experience of the tangible properties around it (relevant here maybe is Zizek's description of the real creating a certain distortion or warp in symbolisation around it).

"Ultimately, much of this discussion comes down to a dispositional, not an aesthetic, difference. Even at the level of 'experience' (whatever that is) I have almost no interest in the formal aspects of the cultural object . For me, the cultural object is interesting insofar is interesting insofar as - to return to a Deleuzian register - it alters my perceptions, affects and concepts....(Affects versus experience is something I shd return to actually). I'm interested in it not because I 'enjoy' it but because my enjoyment consists in the way it makes me see the world differently, the way that it takes me out of commonsense reality."

See I can totally understand this (as I said above, that kind of, ahem, experience, is something I treasure), but I still see this as being consequent upon enjoyment. Sort of like making good of bad faith? Implied within that is the further qualification that music is interesting not only insofar as it makes you see the world differently, but insofar as you believe it makes you see the world more <i>truly</i>. Is this correct? Or can music which proffers up false idols be an equal source of fascination?

(p.s. I realise and am accepting of the fact that nothing I say will absolve me of being a cult studies bore)

 

[k-punk]

Okay we're edging closer to understanding eachother I think Mark!

lol, yes I think so too...

"Are you really suggesting that you treat Pop in the same way that Zizek treats coke?"

No, you're right there are pretty huge differences! For one, in the context of my writing I am not interested in only approaching music from a perspective of its theoretical utility (per Zizek) or political/theoritical utility (per yourself, I presume) (I am passionately interested in its life-affecting capacities of music, but I tend to think that to the extent that my life is affected, I - personally - am merely repositioned within ideology rather than broken out of it, hence my fascination with love songs, which interest me not because they accord with my idea of love but precisely because they differ from it so radically).

I'm interested in love songs too - but interestingly not because 'my own idea of love' differs from it. I tried to bring this out in my posts on 'Love Hangover' and the one I did at Christmas on Roxy: partly what interests me about love songs is that they reveal the structuration of 'love' - the very fact that they seem meaningful is not due to some emotional communion between listener and performer/writer, but because they emerge from a structure. Of course, awareness of the structure doesn't make you immune to it... on the contrary, being in love is a great deal about reflecting on the state of being in love!

So you'd be correct in saying that my criticism is depoliticised insofar as, while it doesn't pretend that aesthetics and politics are separate, it doesn't attempt to ground its aesthetic appreciation within a specific political objective.

No - but the classic re-description of this would be that the claiming of a space outside politics is precisely political.

At the same time though I think that Zizek is interested in answering the question "why do I or does anyone else think that I/they like Coke?" as opposed to simply lumping this pursuit of enjoyment into a category that's beneath consideration (which would be the rockist-equivalent move, the "mindless sheep" explanation). So to that extent I think he's approaching cultural objects with a similar respect for the complexity of their affects (NB. I wouldn't say, though, that Zizek "respects" Coke as such).

Isn't the Zizekian analysis more about mindless structure/ drives rather than mindless sheep?

"2. Coke for Zizek is pretty obviously the product of an infernal social desire-engine that produces idiotic repetition compulsions. Are you committed to the same view of Pop? (Genuine question --- maybe this is what you mean by 'over-investment' and 'fetishism'?"

Yes. I'd go so far as to say that what is true about Coke is even more true about music generally, that, if anything, Coke <i>learnt</i> from "culture" such as art and music. In that sense I kinda disagree with the standard line that Pop has learnt from Coke as such (in terms of efficient commodification) - it's certainly true in terms of production and marketing, but in terms of the "hook" that captures the consumer I think Coke is still a somewhat clumsy approximation of music's much subtler and more insidious forms of interpellation. I have an endless fascination with the latter obv (again, love songs are relevant here!).

I should emphasise here that I say "music" instead of "Pop" because I don't think there's a distinction here, that it's only "Pop" which produces idiotic repetition compulsions.

Yes, I shy away from the term 'music' in relation to Pop for two reasons, both of them pretty Popist actually:

1. The whole concept of 'music' implies repeatability and 'notatability' - but pop can't be repeated or notated because it is about timbre.

2. Pop isn't just about the sonic components; the record sleeves, photos, interviews etc form part of the Pop assemblage.

"Yes, but you can't just bracket out the 'attack on enjoyment in late capitalism' as if this is somehow trivial, and what is really important is Zizek's claim that he 'digs coke'. "

Sorry I didn't mean to imply that at all; if anything I was sort of coming from the other direction - the attack on enjoyment in late capitalism is so obviously the focus of Zizek's thinking that the question of whether he digs coke or he chooses to drink something else is what is trivial (eg. what is true for Coke is also true for coffee, as the existence of the skinny decaf latte no sugar would attest).

Lol, quite...

"Your own account of what Zizek is doing makes a fatal equivocation between 'an experience' and a desire' - surely a desire to consume something is not the same as the experience of consuming it? Desire, for Zizek, as you surely know, is an abstract motor, not a phemeonological spontaneity."

Yes I would agree with this. But when I say "experience" (and yes it may be an over-expanded use of the term) I mean not only the surface level process of what is felt to be going on but also the perhaps unconscious processes at work which sustain and/or distort this experience. One of the points of the experience of Coke is that, if it really is a not-particularly-pleasant taste, there is something going on which causes us to forget this <i>even as we're drinking it</i>; the structure of our experience is transformed by our desire.

I'm much more happier with this form of words obviously: 'the structure of our experience is transformed by our desire'... But I think that the emphasis I would put here is, predictably, AGAINST experience, in that this kind of formulation shows that there is no experience that is not transformed by desire. To be clear: the point is against the _concept_ of experience rather than against the _content_ of what is sometimes called experience (i.e. sensations etc). In philosophical terms, it is a transcendental critique of empiricism!

I should note that I'm not at all interested in formalism in some sort of musicological sense (there was a long and worthwhile discussion of this issue on ILM that I should try to dig up). I'm interested in the formal properties of music, and in the experience of music, insofar as they plug into the desire of the consumer, ie. how our desire is reproduced by specific cultural (and in the case of music, sonic) objects. I guess this is like a Lacanian Phenomenology, and indeed I tend to forget that Phenomenology is <i>not</i> always Lacanian, perhaps because the class I did at uni on phenom. was taught by a Lacanian (from Slovenia, funnily enough! Though I imagine she would dislike Zizek possibly).

I'm happy with all of this, though I am interested in the ways in which musicology (even though I know nothing about it), neurology (ditto) and structural analysis might mesh...

Both music and coke are desirable insofar as there are formal absences at work within them - the space of the objet petit a etc. Identifying the music's formal properties won't point directly to the way that our desire interacts with the music, but it can sketch out this space, and the way it arranges the experience of the tangible properties around it (relevant here maybe is Zizek's description of the real creating a certain distortion or warp in symbolisation around it).

Yes, well I agree with that 100%!

 

[k-punk]

"Ultimately, much of this discussion comes down to a dispositional, not an aesthetic, difference. Even at the level of 'experience' (whatever that is) I have almost no interest in the formal aspects of the cultural object . For me, the cultural object is interesting insofar is interesting insofar as - to return to a Deleuzian register - it alters my perceptions, affects and concepts....(Affects versus experience is something I shd return to actually). I'm interested in it not because I 'enjoy' it but because my enjoyment consists in the way it makes me see the world differently, the way that it takes me out of commonsense reality."

See I can totally understand this (as I said above, that kind of, ahem, experience, is something I treasure), but I still see this as being consequent upon enjoyment. Sort of like making good of bad faith? Implied within that is the further qualification that music is interesting not only insofar as it makes you see the world differently, but insofar as you believe it makes you see the world more <i>truly</i>. Is this correct? Or can music which proffers up false idols be an equal source of fascination?

It can, of course, be a source of fascination - but the political and ethical questions are what we do about that - whether we think that anatomising fascinations is enough, or whether we choose our fascinations and fixations on the basis of their transformative power.

I guess in my case it's partly to do with coming to pop during the postpunk period Simon describes so well in Rip It Up.. where Pop interrogated itself about its own relevance, where it was dis-satisfied with the thought of being a relative autonomy. Pop thought of itself as important then - not 'merely' as an aesthetic phenomenon (or phenomenology!).


That period was over as soon as hedonism won the day - this was actually tied in with the return of control to the big companies. Dave Rimmer's book Like Punk Never Happened is actually very good on that whole post New Pop/ early Smash Hits era - the Police booking their tour venues on the basis of t-shirts sales, etc etc. The rise of 'fun' actually coincided with a deep depression in pop culture that it has never recovered from: fun meant _only_ fun, i.e. not serious. Part of my animus towards Popism is that it seems to accept this valuation: Pop is trivial, we are told, and what is wrong with that, why shouldn't we spend time doing trivial things? But this critical (or anti-critical) discourse exerts a constant downward pressure on pop production itself, which conforms to the lowered expectations. (I remember being shocked and upset when Julie Burchill started to describe Pop as of no real importance - how can a bit of plastic change the world etc etc. But at least she stopped writing about it! There seems to be a kind of performative contradiction in saying that Pop is trivial, not important, but then spending most of one's time listening to and discussing it. It is obviously important for those people - are we to conclude that the don't think that they important? I fear, in fact, that this is the bent head attitude we've all been coralled into in the long undeath of the post postpunk era...

(p.s. I realise and am accepting of the fact that nothing I say will absolve me of being a cult studies bore)

lol, I wouldn't say that at all. There are many things which set you apart from cult studs tedium, not least of which are prose style and theoretical acuity....

 

[Tim F]

It's an interesting aspect of this rather circular debate that by going so far into it we've actually erupted back at the "surface" somewhat.

"It can, of course, be a source of fascination - but the political and ethical questions are what we do about that - whether we think that anatomising fascinations is enough, or whether we choose our fascinations
and fixations on the basis of their transformative power."

This raises some stumbling blocks for me because again I'm not sure of how to conduct structural analyses of my own responses that don't get tripped up in my experience of those responses - ie. how do i know that I've been transformed by my enjoyment other than by some conscious (but not necessarily reliable) sense that I have been transformed? Or, even if I am transforming or have transformed, on what basis can I determine that it is the music that is transforming me? Isn't it equally possible that I'm projecting onto the
music a reflection of the transformative process that I am going through whose causes lie elsewhere? I'm not saying it's one or the other, just that I'm not sure how you'd necessarily determine without the "belief before belief" which enjoyment/experience provides. (ie. if it is "the music" that transforms you, isn't it likely that it does so by providing a convenient objet petit a in which to locate your desire for transformation?).

Partly it comes down to is an ethics of desire - which sorts of transformation are, um, <i>desirable</i>? I once met a (somewhat unlikeable) woman who once sincerely attested to the transformative power of reality tv shows, saying they'd helped her realise she could "shine" in her own life. From her elaboration of the factual details of her life, it was clear that her social behaviour had indeed changed remarkably. And yet, presumably, this transformation is not the sort you mean. Is it a "false" transformation or merely a politically misguided one? If the former, does that mean that the precondition for a "real" transformation is a liberation from ideology, and can that be something less than a whole-hearted engagement in
revolutionary politics? If the latter, does that mean that the only meaningful basis for judging responses to music is their political efficacy?

At any rate the desire for transformation must exist <i>beyond</i> the particular piece of music at hand. Doubtless cultural conditioning will be instrumental in shaping the sorts of transformations a person is in a
position to undertake, but this gets us back to the conundrum that our responses are never just responses to a single piece of culture under observation.

Dominic might say here that it's not about a single piece of music so much as immersion within a scene, and the scene as a whole conditions the participant to be open to a certain type of political transformation
(expressed in this case as a lack of satisfaction with the political/social status quo). But this seems to me to be the type of "structural" observation one makes only as an interested observer, ie. as someone who has already undergone the interpellation which they attempt to explain. I would have to
assume that there were outside observers (Marxist or otherwise) who dismissed the "rave dream" from the start as being merely another form of youth culture that was, um, "always already" co-opted by capital. To such outsiders, whatever emancipatory potential some ravers might perceive within their weekend activities, this would be simply another example of false consciousness, a fetishization of rave with a political patina as justification.

(the sexual revolution is a good reference point here) (of course even if this is true it doesn't deny that rave could have concrete and beneficial social/political/cultural effects - the same is true for
liberal feminism, human rights discourse, liberal multiculturalism etc.) (and of course what is true for rave is as true for post-punk, US hardcore, hip hop - the moment pre-selling out is always, from the perspective of the disinterested outside observer, a moment of collective misunderstanding of the fact that the scene is by definition "sold out", capitalised.) (ie. in the Jamesonian sense all these movements are made possible only insofar as they are moments in late capitalism).

It strikes me that the raver's answer to this skepticism is simply the fact of their own passionate belief, their faith in the genuiness of their transformation (predicated on an experience as such); their zeal (which Dominic talks about) is what for them prevents this moment being <i>objectively</i> a mere perpetuation (via niche marketing) of capitalism. Per Zizek (in his reading of Lenin through Lukacs through Hegel), this is the Lenin-style leap-of-faith: raving as an act which cannot be legitimised by the Big Other of scientific materialist diagnosis or etc (including structuralist analysis) because according to any such criteria the act would fall short of its ambitions/potential - it is therefore self-motivated, it is fired by a faith which is inevitably quasi-mystical. But is the faith pathological? That is the question.

Zizek agrees with Kant (and with myself ha ha) that with any alleged "ethical act" there is always the inescapable risk that it was actually done for pathological reasons (ie. enjoyment, narcissicism etc.). Zizek would go on to say that, while that is the case, ethical acts (ie. Real acts) nonetheless do occur, and the challenge is to recognise them for what they are. I would agree with that but I just don't know how to distinguish between the two when it comes to people's responses to music - esp. if we accept that responses to music are almost by definition pathological. Again the Lenin-via-Zizek answer is to say, why are you still waiting for some form of legitimation or guarantee when we have faith that our position is right and righteous (or, perhaps, will retrospectively be conferred rightness/righteousness in the changed landscape post-act)? This is a bit like yr K-Punk posts recently re Ratzinger etc. maybe.

And that's fine, but if we're using that as a basis then perhaps in these sorts of debates what is at stake is a politically motivated revolutionary faith rather than a consistent rule about music as such; neutral structuralism ultimately concludes that all acts are pathological and an insistence otherwise is built on a faith that cannot be proven by structural analysis, only felt. And, moreover, an argument like "[x] piece of music is more transformative than [y]" is a "universal" that is grounded in a particular social-historical moment, political objective and transformative possibility (all of these being constellated in... experience? Someone help me out here my brane is sore). It all becomes very circular, because if we do accept this then the question is consequently, okay but isn't that experience inherently unreliable?

This is what I meant about the "short circuit" in the argument. In that sense I never meant that you talking about Scritti Politti was inconsistent with the theoretical position you were putting forward; it was totally consistent, but currently I can't help but see it as being the inconsistency in the theory itself. And it's not just you Mark obv, this is the moment when I find it difficult to trace Zizek's footsteps as well; my route to Zizek was via <i>The Sublime Object</i> and so I had this vaguely Althusserian reading of him, and then this comes up against something which reminds me almost of Sartre-style Dialectical Humanism. Which is a pretty strange collision...

Because of this I can sort of follow Zizek's recent (as in, er, over the last ten years or so) turn away from Real-as-Impossible to Real-as-very-possible-but-traumatic, but I still have heaps of ambiguities over the exact nature of the ethical act, and I wonder when Zizek talks about it to what extent it's basically shorthand for Badiou (who I need to read a lot more of).

And I wouldn't have the faintest ideas as to how Spinozian ethics would potentially get around all of this!

And I should note finally that I don't really have a point to all this! I guess I'm just trying to work out in my own head how these sorts of distinctions can possibly be made.

"I'm interested in love songs too - but interestingly not because 'my own idea of love' differs from it. I tried to bring this out in my posts on Love Hangover' and the one I did at Christmas on Roxy: partly what
interests me about love songs is that they reveal the structuration of love' - the very fact that they seem meaningful is not due to some emotional communion between listener and performer/writer, but because they emerge from a structure. Of course, awareness of the structure doesn't make you immune to it... on the contrary, being in love is a great deal about reflecting on the state of being in love!"

Actually I don't think this is different from my enjoyment of love songs, I think you just worded it better...

"Isn't the Zizekian analysis more about mindless structure/ drives rather than mindless sheep?"

Yes, I wouldn't like him much otherwise!

"I'm happy with all of this, though I am interested in the ways in which musicology (even though I know nothing about it), neurology (ditto) and structural analysis might mesh..."

Totally!

"2. Pop isn't just about the sonic components; the record sleeves, photos, interviews etc form part of the Pop assemblage."

I presume you agree though that all other forms of music do this too, openly or secretly? (eg. no scene is more fetishist about record sleeves than IDM) In this sense, as much as popism is often rockism about pop, rockism is often popism about rock... (and even with eg. classical music there were all sorts of "frames" that were equally part of the picture, so to speak).

 

[borderpolice]

tim, your last post is interesting in that it shows clearly the
impasse one reaches when using "transformative powers" in various
senses as ultimate reference point of musical analysis. the problem
with this approach, one that has bedeviled most social thinkers and
has only recently been given satisfactory solutions, is this: society
is seen as something essentially static, with dynamic elements,
change, added as an afterthought (eg revolutions). In reality it's the
other way round: society is a complex dynamic process with islands of
stability arising from lack of observational precision and emergent
processes. Once the fundamentally dynamic character of music is
appreciated, transformative powers as be-all and end-all of musical
analysis diminish in importance and rhetorical force.

Your comment "how do i know that I've been transformed by my enjoyment
other than by some conscious (but not necessarily reliable) sense that
I have been transformed? Or, even if I am transforming or have
transformed, on what basis can I determine that it is the music that
is transforming me?" puts the finger on a second weakness of analyses
under the banner of transformation. the real casual relationships are
way too complex for humans to get a grip on, as the fact that 9 out of
10 bands promoted by the music industry fail commercially testifies,
and hence any social causal relationship we express is but socially
constructed attribution habit: "action is system" as Parsons
reiterated, or, even more precisely, "Actions are produced by
communication" a key insight of his most famous pupil. Hence,
transformative powers, rather than being an unproblematic vantage
point, as is an underlying assumption of much of the analysis here, is
just as fraught with problems as are all the proposed alternatives.

I'd be interested in discussing the following related questions.

(1) why does almost everybody here accept explanations of the
"transformative powers" type, despite the blatant inability to come up
with analyses that live up to the causal challenges it poses?


(2) what is the reason for the list-making zeal, for the desire to
rank music, to say X is better than Y, in public, which appears to be
a need of the transformative powers school?

(3) why does the entire discussion about pop-music here remain
virtually silent, despite some attempts of mine last week, on one of
the most important and also least hidden aspects of pop-music, it's
connection with sexuality? the lyrics, the dances, the glances, all
this screams out to be looked at in terms of the organsiation of
sexual desire.

 

[k-punk]

It's an interesting aspect of this rather circular debate that by going so far into it we've actually erupted back at the "surface" somewhat.

lol, but I prefer to think of it as a spiral I think!

"It can, of course, be a source of fascination - but the political and ethical questions are what we do about that - whether we think that anatomising fascinations is enough, or whether we choose our fascinations
and fixations on the basis of their transformative power."

This raises some stumbling blocks for me because again I'm not sure of how to conduct structural analyses of my own responses that don't get tripped up in my experience of those responses - ie. how do i know that I've been transformed by my enjoyment other than by some conscious (but not necessarily reliable) sense that I have been transformed? Or, even if I am transforming or have transformed, on what basis can I determine that it is the music that is transforming me? Isn't it equally possible that I'm projecting onto the
music a reflection of the transformative process that I am going through whose causes lie elsewhere? I'm not saying it's one or the other, just that I'm not sure how you'd necessarily determine without the "belief before belief" which enjoyment/experience provides. (ie. if it is "the music" that transforms you, isn't it likely that it does so by providing a convenient objet petit a in which to locate your desire for transformation?).

I agree with all of this, but that is why I would resist the thought that Pop is about 'music' or 'experiences'. As I've said above, I think that Underground Resistance go too far when they say that certain sounds are in themselves liberatory. But there are clearly certain potentialities of certain sounds that are not in place with others. Was talking to Kodwo about this last night - how the guitar sound in Snow Patrol et al is PHYSIOLOGICALLY depressing before you even get to the mewling of the vocal content.

The postpunk discussion last night at Boogaloo made it abundantly clear that was exciting - or as I prefer, inciting - about that period was the way in which the sounds were one part of a continuum (and by no means necessarily the most important part) which embraced theory, literature, film, art... The investment in Pop was almost a strategic one, i.e. it was the most effective means of propagation. But far from leading to a poverty of affect at the level of the sound, this led to some of the most powerful and compulsive Pop ever.... Partly this was because there was no shame in being intellectual, and it was wonderful to hear Paul Morley last night being so strident about that.

Partly it comes down to is an ethics of desire - which sorts of transformation are, um, <i>desirable</i>? I once met a (somewhat unlikeable) woman who once sincerely attested to the transformative power of reality tv shows, saying they'd helped her realise she could "shine" in her own life. From her elaboration of the factual details of her life, it was clear that her social behaviour had indeed changed remarkably. And yet, presumably, this transformation is not the sort you mean. Is it a "false" transformation or merely a politically misguided one? If the former, does that mean that the precondition for a "real" transformation is a liberation from ideology, and can that be something less than a whole-hearted engagement in
revolutionary politics? If the latter, does that mean that the only meaningful basis for judging responses to music is their political efficacy?

It is a real transformation, but it is not a transformation outside capitalist-consumerism but within it. I hope you'll agree that Zizek is at his best hammering the consumer-cap cult of self-expression, self-improvement etc.

Efficacy isn't the issue - that would lead down the route to pragmatism, and we've all seen where that ends up. I wouldn't say it is the only meaningful criteria, but for me it must trump all other criteria. Something which changes and challenges me, which introduces me to new concepts, which makes me view my everyday life in a new way, is of more worth than something which merely entertains. The point is that all of those things - transformation, challenge, concepts, etc - are not opposed to enjoyment, far from it. That is what the dictatorship of the passive consumer quotidian-worldly reality-pleasure principle insists: enjoyment must be entertainment, nothing more.

At any rate the desire for transformation must exist <i>beyond</i> the particular piece of music at hand. Doubtless cultural conditioning will be instrumental in shaping the sorts of transformations a person is in a
position to undertake, but this gets us back to the conundrum that our responses are never just responses to a single piece of culture under observation.

Yes, the 'belief before belief' thing is very interesting - I was actually teaching this last week in relation to Pascal. For the benefit of others who might not be familiar with this argument, this is where Zizek uses Pascal's wager - Pascal's claim that it is better to believe in God than to be an atheist, because, if the believer is right, they gain eternal bliss and if they are wrong, they merely forego some 'earthly pleasures' - as an example of a kind of 'primitive commitment'. On the face of it, it would seem that you can't just 'make yourself' believe in God (or anything else for that matter). But Pascal, uncannily in line with contemporary research on the formation of beliefs and behaviour, says that, no, this is wrong: if you act 'on the outside' as if you have the belief, by 'going through the motions' of all the rituals, worship etc, real faith will 'grow in your heart'. Interestingly, forcing people to do things (even when they have no subjective belief in them) is now acknowledged to be the most - perhaps the only - effective way of treating people with severe depression.

I would argue that the whole of popular culture is victim of this severe depression. Compulsory relativism produces a pre- and post-emptive destruction of committed 'belief': all music belongs to a genre, none of which, we are required to think, is better than any other; music itself is 'not that important', 'just fun' (begging the question: what is important? Ah, it must be the reproduction of capital! )

But where does this 'belief before belief' come from? Not in the act of symbolic commitment (which comes after the fact). You must _already_ be committed.... So in a sense it is not about belief before before belief but _commitment_ before subjective belief. Surely it is clear that 'music' can function to inspire such commitment.

 

[k-punk]

Dominic might say here that it's not about a single piece of music so much as immersion within a scene, and the scene as a whole conditions the participant to be open to a certain type of political transformation (expressed in this case as a lack of satisfaction with the political/social status quo). But this seems to me to be the type of "structural" observation one makes only as an interested observer, ie. as someone who has already undergone the interpellation which they attempt to explain. I would have to
assume that there were outside observers (Marxist or otherwise) who dismissed the "rave dream" from the start as being merely another form of youth culture that was, um, "always already" co-opted by capital. To such outsiders, whatever emancipatory potential some ravers might perceive within their weekend activities, this would be simply another example of false consciousness, a fetishization of rave with a political patina as justification.

'Scenes' is going some way, but I think 'event' is better. Not all scenes produce events. Events are where the Impossible becomes realised - when the marionette theatre called everyday life is exposed as just one stage set. Clearly rave did some of that - but the rave dream died, not only in terms of any 'extrinsic' political criteria, but also for itself, as it were. Now, it seems to me that much of the reason why it died was its pyschedelic-Dionysiac refusal of politics. Rave was in many respects like a digital version of the amphetamine-mod 'noonday underground': not a critique of the everyday, but an alternative to it. There was literally no way of 'living the dream'. The ecstasy comedown thing was not simply a contingent chemical problem, but symptomatic of a structural malaise. The dream of 'perpetual night' (ecstatic abandon) is never realisable; it always runs aground on the return of 'day' (responsibilities, money, the quotidian).

The practical questions that seem to me most urgent is: how do we make Pop's critique of everyday life livable and sustainable?

(the sexual revolution is a good reference point here) (of course even if this is true it doesn't deny that rave could have concrete and beneficial social/political/cultural effects - the same is true for
liberal feminism, human rights discourse, liberal multiculturalism etc.) (and of course what is true for rave is as true for post-punk, US hardcore, hip hop - the moment pre-selling out is always, from the perspective of the disinterested outside observer, a moment of collective misunderstanding of the fact that the scene is by definition "sold out", capitalised.) (ie. in the Jamesonian sense all these movements are made possible only insofar as they are moments in late capitalism).

I think part of the problem with the way you are setting things up here is that 'disinterested Marxist observers' are being put in the position of told-you-so miserabilists - but that doesn't seem to me the only possible Marxist position. Being capitalizable doesn't mean selling out; that certainly wasn't the view of Gang of 4, for instance, who pointedly signed to EMI so they could, as Jon King put it last night, maximise their impact. Surely the lesson we can learn from Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard ('there is no subversive region') is that there are no aesthetic objects, no styles, no theories (including the eminently capitalizable gamut of anti-capitalist theories) that cannot be commodified. But that doesn't mean that capital has a priori won (I'll explain this point in my next k-punk post).

It strikes me that the raver's answer to this skepticism is simply the fact of their own passionate belief, their faith in the genuiness of their transformation (predicated on an experience as such); their zeal (which Dominic talks about) is what for them prevents this moment being <i>objectively</i> a mere perpetuation (via niche marketing) of capitalism. Per Zizek (in his reading of Lenin through Lukacs through Hegel), this is the Lenin-style leap-of-faith: raving as an act which cannot be legitimised by the Big Other of scientific materialist diagnosis or etc (including structuralist analysis) because according to any such criteria the act would fall short of its ambitions/potential - it is therefore self-motivated, it is fired by a faith which is inevitably quasi-mystical. But is the faith pathological? That is the question.

Is the issue pathology or epistemological misperception? It seems to me that the individual could be genuinely disinterested but suffering from false consciousness - ACTUAL religious zealots are of this type surely?

Zizek agrees with Kant (and with myself ha ha) that with any alleged "ethical act" there is always the inescapable risk that it was actually done for pathological reasons (ie. enjoyment, narcissicism etc.). Zizek would go on to say that, while that is the case, ethical acts (ie. Real acts) nonetheless do occur, and the challenge is to recognise them for what they are. I would agree with that but I just don't know how to distinguish between the two when it comes to people's responses to music - esp. if we accept that responses to music are almost by definition pathological. Again the Lenin-via-Zizek answer is to say, why are you still waiting for some form of legitimation or guarantee when we have faith that our position is right and righteous (or, perhaps, will retrospectively be conferred rightness/righteousness in the changed landscape post-act)? This is a bit like yr K-Punk posts recently re Ratzinger etc. maybe.

I think framing the issue in terms of 'responses to music' is already collapsing things too far, by presupposing aestheticism, by assuming this encounter with music that can happen without these things being an issue... but there is no such space...

And that's fine, but if we're using that as a basis then perhaps in these sorts of debates what is at stake is a politically motivated revolutionary faith rather than a consistent rule about music as such; neutral structuralism ultimately concludes that all acts are pathological and an insistence otherwise is built on a faith that cannot be proven by structural analysis, only felt. And, moreover, an argument like "[x] piece of music is more transformative than [y]" is a "universal" that is grounded in a particular social-historical moment, political objective and transformative possibility (all of these being constellated in... experience? Someone help me out here my brane is sore). It all becomes very circular, because if we do accept this then the question is consequently, okay but isn't that experience inherently unreliable?

To say that it is 'only felt' presupposes that some people's faith is not veridical. The argument is in a way more Calvinist: such feelings of certainty are a 'sign' that one's faith is correct. The point would be an extension of the Pascal argument: commitment produces belief, which produces real and immediate effects, both in the individual and potentially in the social itself. In other words: fervour is necessary but not sufficient.

This is what I meant about the "short circuit" in the argument. In that sense I never meant that you talking about Scritti Politti was inconsistent with the theoretical position you were putting forward; it was totally consistent, but currently I can't help but see it as being the inconsistency in the theory itself. And it's not just you Mark obv, this is the moment when I find it difficult to trace Zizek's footsteps as well; my route to Zizek was via <i>The Sublime Object</i> and so I had this vaguely Althusserian reading of him, and then this comes up against something which reminds me almost of Sartre-style Dialectical Humanism. Which is a pretty strange collision...

Not so strange perhaps: this is one for Infinite Thought, since her thesis has chapters on both these positions. I think it would be interesting to talk this through, actually (one of many potential 'other threads' that could propagate out of this particular monstrosity....)

Because of this I can sort of follow Zizek's recent (as in, er, over the last ten years or so) turn away from Real-as-Impossible to Real-as-very-possible-but-traumatic, but I still have heaps of ambiguities over the exact nature of the ethical act, and I wonder when Zizek talks about it to what extent it's basically shorthand for Badiou (who I need to read a lot more of).

Yes, I think this definitely could benefit from being talked through slowly...

And I wouldn't have the faintest ideas as to how Spinozian ethics would potentially get around all of this!

Well, isn't it Spinoza (perhaps the single most important influence on Althusser after Marx) who has the resources to explain both structural causality (determinism) as well as the conditions in which it is possible to act (freedom)?

"2. Pop isn't just about the sonic components; the record sleeves, photos, interviews etc form part of the Pop assemblage."

I presume you agree though that all other forms of music do this too, openly or secretly? (eg. no scene is more fetishist about record sleeves than IDM) In this sense, as much as popism is often rockism about pop, rockism is often popism about rock... (and even with eg. classical music there were all sorts of "frames" that were equally part of the picture, so to speak).[/QUOTE]

Yes, naturally - but as I've tried to indicate above, Pop for me is a highly inclusive term (meaning 'not Classical', 'not Jazz'). For me, and this is partly because my earliest encounters of Pop were in the postpunk era (though I didn't know that at the time obv lol): Laurie Anderson is Pop, Neubauten are Pop, even rock is Pop (just bad Pop that would deny its own status as Pop! )