What is good about Pop Music?

[borderpolice]

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

I'm afraid that debunking is cargo-culting by neuroscientists hustling for research grants. How the human brain works is not, I repeat: NOT understood at all. There isn't even an empirically adequate understanding of a <I>single neuron</I>. Sorry.

 

[blissblogger]

various points

>yr position is very much like Rudolf Otto's in The Idea of the Holy: a magnificent book, and the origin, I >think, of the term 'numinous' --- I'm sure you're familiar with it, but Otto argues that religious experiences >are characterised in terms of the 'mysterium tremendum' - the mysterious, awe-ful and dread-ful

never heard of it, Kpunk, sounds absolutely fascinating -- another one for the ever-expanding must-check-out list


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


"reduced to a collective thumbs-up" -- i would question this term, why would an expression of mass unanimity necessarily be regarded as a reduction of something? these things have occurred you know--large numbers of people feeling near-as-dammit the same thing! happens all the time in soccer stadiums. happens in riots. happens with spontaneous outpourings of grief. happens at raves, gigs, clubs. at move theatres. there's even been the occasional revolution! not always a good thing -- mob violence, popular justice, lynchings etc -- but not always a bad thing either. think you are revealing yer bourgeois individualist prejudices a bit there mr barnes!


Borderpolice:
>Well, how do you know it was a dud? Did you test the pills?
>Nah? Didn't think so!

so you're saying, despite really wanting to have the E-xperience, i would somehow trick myself into feeling good E as dud E?! that don't sound terribly plausible.

your explication of the mimesis theory is really interesting -- it's so intricate. in the end though i don't buy it. it seems to empty out the whole dimension of the aesthetic, the affective, the emotional. in your description liking music comes across as this enormously complex game of socialisation, with no point.

it reminds me a bit of Bourdieu's theories, which are interesting and telling as far as they go, but always seem to point towards the implication that the only reason people invest in particular kinds of music or art is as a form of social cohesion or social distinction -- consolidation of one's membership of one group, and defining oneself as others. again chucking pleasure and afffect out the window.

that's why i found sarah thornton's club cultures book, with its bourdieu derived 'subcultural capital' concept, in the end unconvincing -- cos it made irrelevant what would be appear the whole point of club and rave music ie. intense aesthetic pleasure, bodily pleasure etc. for her it was all about hierarchies of cool and inclusive/exclusion devices

also your theory of change is quite odd too -- are you saying that society is changing all the time, slowly, by itself -- and therefore doesn't need any help from specific individuals or groups of humans, and in fact can't be pushed forward by conscious efforts -- sort of gradualism without any scope or purchase for human agency, right -- that seems to fit what kpunk was saying about the mystification re. Society as this quasi-divine entity that has its own agenda and is like Nature or something...

as with the mimesis theory, it's something a/ doesn't convince me as true b/ is so bleak and depressing i would resist it even it were true

(you'll just have to trust me that b/ is not determining a/ )

 

[Tim F]

Borderpolice don't you dare self-deprecate, these last few posts have been awesome!

I had this sudden flash of "YES! He is right!" (which I wasn't certain about immediately prior; or at least hadn't yet turned my mind to that question) with your reference to dance moves.

I've always been fascinated by what I would call the infectiousness of dance moves - when I'm at a club I'll see someone make some particular move and, somehow before I've even registered that I'm impressed or enamoured by it, it's like my body is watching and learning that move and I'll feel my limbs either flow or snap into it. The sensation is of some sort of physical compulsion, or perhaps rather that my body has become liberated to the point of being a stronger social "agent" than my consciousness (supposedly in the driver's seat) is. But of course it's really the same thing that happens when someone uses a word I don't know in a sentence and yet I can understand exactly what is being said without puzzling over it; the mind is so well trained at picking up what is necessary for building social interactions that it can do it at a preconscious level. Significantly, I never start doing this only for my mind to catch up and realise "oh no, actually that dance move looks <i>awful</i>." But the fact that I'm instantly copying moves from someone near me while still feeling like my body has an unmediated connection to the music kinda cuts through the binary between music's-direct-impact/social-mimesis.

Language is a really good analogy for the whole debate really because it demonstrates how smoothly such a system functions practically. What I find interesting is that, however much we question the concept of language as expressing an inherent and stable meaning, our <i>practical</i> use of language almost always implies the exact opposite. I mean, Foucault may start his lectures halfway through and Lacan may enjoy being impenetrable, but students reading their texts still work on the unspoken assumption that there is some meaningful idea being expressed "behind" the text, that there is a signified called "Lacan's theory" which can be considered separately to the particular words he uses to express it; in short, that these ideas can be paraphrased.

The possibility of paraphrasing a post-structuralist is not however based on a sort of old fashioned essentialism but rather a pragmatic ethos called "near enough is good enough" (there's also a capitalist component to it in terms of how we think about value and equivalence, but I think of this as more an epistemological condition of possibility than a major factor; we couldn't think this way under feudalism whereas we can under capitalism, but that doesn't mean that doesn't mean that every instance of pragmatic equivalence is a direct intervention by Capital) upon which all social interactions are based; the awareness of the instability of language is repressed for the sake of smooth social interaction. One would assume that Derrida didn't get overly concerned by the play of differance in language when he bought milk from the local shop (though he might actually! He's probably not the best illustrative example...).

For practical social interactions like purchasing milk this kind of daily unthinking repression makes sense, in the exact same manner as reifying commodity items makes sense, at least for the purpose of ending up with a bottle of milk in your hands (puzzling over one's position within a complex and shifting web of social interactions in the act of buying milk might leave you standing in the aisle for hours). Likewise if this practice wasn't tacitly accepted in relation to use of language by academia the business of studying Foucault or Derrrida or Lacan would quickly become close to impossible. But the neccessity or desirability of this constant repression in the context of engaging with music is more of a fraught question. This is because what one has to weigh up is the value of music as something that is "understood" in a social context (eg. what grime means to the grime scene) versus the value of music as accomodating and encompassing a whole field of unstable, differential experiences.

The debate between the two is the same debate re post-structuralism's place in political action - namely, are we destabilising beyond the point where anything meaningful can be said or done? Is it not better to perservere with our shared, stable meanings knowing full well that they are in fact contingent and ideologically produced? Such a question is cynical in the sense Zizek puts forward in <i>The Sublime Object of Ideology</i>, where he redefines ideology: "we know very well what is it that we are doing; and yet we continue to do it (anyway)". We do this every time we talk about a "scene" as having a self-evident and coherent identity, knowing full well that such a thing is strictly speaking impossible. But the relative evil of this "cynicism" depends on the situation; Zizek has major issues obviously with cynical ideology in relation to liberal Western capitalism; he might be inclined to give grime a free pass under the circumstances.

There's a potential third strand between the reification of meaning for the sake of coherent shared understandings and an insistence on deconstructed instability, and this is the act of deconstructive criticism itself. There's a portion of post-structuralist literary theory which asks, "what instability in this text is being repressed so that we can arrive at an agreed upon meaning for it?" (post-structuralism 101) from a more Althusserian perspective ie. "what instability in the text <i>must</i> be repressed in order to reproduce the social status quo?" (I'm thinking of people like Catherine Belsey, Rosalind Coward & John Ellis, even late-period Paul De Man. You could call a lot of this stuff post-Macherey actually). Most of the time this is done to liberate hidden/obscured meanings within a given text and examine how they contradict, undermine or simply reveal too obviously the ideological component of shared social meanings. This point of negativity within a text (the instability that is repressed) is simultaneously the positive condition for the existence of some stable meaning (the text as a sort of Essence-Towards-Incoherence).

The same thing is at work in music and musical scenes: on a general level it is the very repression of the fact that "meaning" is built around mimesis rather than some essential musical quality that allows a scene to maintain its sense of passionate committment, to reproduce itself (and to satisfy Dominic's litmus test question "are you willing to die for it?"). More specifically, certain types of experience of and engagement with the music in question must be repressed in order for the scene to maintain the coherence which implies essence. A good example of this is the extent to which UK Garage had to constantly reassert its heterosexism, its anti-batty-boy stance, to ward off any sort of "inappropriate" reception which the music's femininity might encourage. The point here is that this emphasis on the music's heterosexuality shows not that the music is inherently heterosexual in nature, but rather the very opposite: the experience of gender within this music is a faultline, something to be contested. In other words, in its behaviour, the scene itself demonstrates an awareness that the field of experience in relation to a given piece of music is wide open and up for grabs, but in its ideological conception of itself it must always repress this knowledge.

 

[Tim F]

Simon what's yer position on Foucault's theory of sexuality? Lots of people dislike it for similar reasons you're listing in relation to mimesis & music - that it "empties out" sexuality and thus simply does not accord with the sense of presence they feel in regards to their own sexuality (ie. that there is something fundamental and immutable "there"). Whereas Foucault's point is that it is the very fact that sexuality is felt in this manner that demonstrates its success as a discursive practice; if his point was obvious it also wouldn't be very interesting or crucial. (the counter-intuitiveness of Foucault's position probably explains why so many people who claim to be basing their position on him actually draw on his exact theoretical opposite, a sort of amalgamation of Reich and Marcuse - but just because something feels counter-intuitive doesn't mean it's wrong of course).

Likewise with ideology: it is never experienced as being ideology or it would be useless. No-one ever says "I am being ideological", it's always the other person.

 

[dominic]

i think that borderpolice's mimetic theory has a great deal to contribute to our understanding of how music and music scenes work . . . .

but i suppose i see the mimetic theory as strictly supplementary

that priority still has to go to the music itself, to the "claim" that the music makes on the listener or listeners

the listener feels claimed by the music -- and once he feels claimed he has to work out his relationship both to the music and to other people who likewise feel claimed

and it's in the working out of relationships (what i call politics) that the mimetic theory is most instructive

AS FOR DANCING -- this is not so simple as mere copying of moves (whether consciously or pre-consciously)

granted, when the crowd is vibing, everyone's on the same steady vibe -- i.e., the case where everyone is moving in the same way -- then yes, here there surely must be a mimetic explanation -- AND YET even here it's not that simple -- rather everybody dances the same way b/c somewhere along the line they became CONVINCED that this the best way to dance to the music, that this is the best way for the group to vibe as one

but isn't there also the case of freaky dancing -- the complete and total freak with all the freaky moves -- nobody else dances like this person and nobody else picks up his moves -- and yet if he's a really good freaky dancer, then nobody is going to deny that he's seriously down with the music, that he "gets" the music on a very deep level

ALSO -- I think the mimetic theory is a bit too formalistic -- i.e., its formalism is neutral as regards the TESTIFYING and PERSUADING that goes on when people are dancing to music -- i.e., the dancing testifies both to the power of the music and to the fact that yeah man i feel the power of this music coursing through my veins -- or dancing as persuasion, i.e., look at how i'm dancing -- isn't this powerful? don't you agree that this music has got power? and that now i've got the power running through me?
-------------------

Tim F again raises the issue of the massive as being an imaginary construct b/c the massive represses the fact of differential experience, i.e., that each member experiences the music differently OR that often times there are fault lines within the massive, e.g., as b/w the aggressively heterosexual and more gay-friendly folks in the UK garage scene

but I'm not defining the massive in terms of uniform experience of the music

RATHER I'd say the massive consists of those who (1) count themselves as members and (2) are recognized by others as members of the massive -- i.e., Reciprocal Recognition

and this is where the mimetic theory comes into play -- i.e., through dancing and other forms of behavior, other nuances of behavior -- you can convince or persuade others that you belong to the massive

and yet again -- there's always the freaky dancer or the freaky person who somehow gets membership as well

not simply the adept copyist who has mastered every nuance -- but also the freak seemingly incapable of playing by any rules

and as a dj/selector or as internal critic/aesthete as opposed to regular punter/dancer -- you win membership by convincing others that you "get" the music -- and you don't convince others of this through mere copying -- rather you have to have your own "take" on the music

 

[dominic]

i should acknowledge, however, that i'm unable to account for the power of music outside of social settings

that is, the music that most moves me in private probably is bach or some such thing

but at the end of the day i can take or leave bach

so perhaps my understanding of music is pretty damn vulnerable to borderpolice's critique

 

[blissblogger]

fouc'd if i knault

it's been a while since i read History of Sexuality -- but that book and power/knowledge had a huge effect on me in the mid-80s -- but doesn't Monsieur F make a distinction between the apparatus of sexuality and "sex" as this constructed and mystified drive, and the real of "bodies and pleasures"?

that might correspond to a distinction the discourse of music/all the practices etc of "musicking" and actual "rhythm and sound"... or the distinction i made between the various forms of harnessing of music-as-mystery and the mystery itself

in the end the pint (or litre) of milk in derrida's hand is real, and going sour, as he stands there in the supermarket aisle ruminating

*****

re Tim's point re., coyping dance moves

there's no doubt humans have sheep-like tendencies, and that viral 'dance-meme' thing i can recall from
going to raves, it was heightened by mass E synchronisation, that morphic resonance thing of a room of people on the same vibe...

* * * * *
BUT
just as

there's more to speech than just signs... animating it all is will, passion, need, aggression, lust... motivating force

similarly

there's more to music than just something we construct socialisation games around...

i can't help thinking all these construction based theories as being rooted in a kind of evasion or ressentiment towards the sublime, the Real, to that which is bigger than the self,

it sounds empowering, we construct these musical meanings arbitrarily, we can rearrange them how we like...

but it's empowering only in proportion to which it disempowers Power

i think there's something in music that is as much like a punch in the face, or a bolt of lightning, or a sunny day, or a dose of flu, as it is like a newspaper article or conversation

these socialisation games would have to be fantastically complex to explain how i would be predisposed and set up to feel a shiver the first time i encountered the grain-of-the-voice of stevie nicks on 'sara', say (especially as i heard it by accident, on my own, in an asocial environment, radio in my parent's bedroom again, and with subcultural factors at that time -- postpunk discourse --predisposing me to not respond in that fashion towards it but despise it as soft rock)

music is a rapture, a raptor

sorry -- i'm an incorrigible Romantic... when i read camille paglia i find absolutely nothing to disagree with!

 

[tate]

Excellent thread, but have long wondering (while reading the posts, I mean) about the coherence of the categories offered us: popism and rockism.

Somewhere upthread K-Punk referred to rockism and popism as a binary and I am wondering whence this 'binary' ultimately derives its coherence or logic. Are these the only two choices? Are they really a binary opposition? If so, do they derive their binary character from some sort of philosophical or internally-derived musical criteria or simply because a microhistory of music criticism and blogging have presented them as a binary? An honest question, because I see features in both popism and rockism, as they have been presented here, that I would adopt AND shun.

Nota bene on Derrida: Comments suggesting that the guy didn't believe in real things (i.e., milk) are misguided (sorry, Simon, I don't mean to sound snotty, smile). One need only read his earliest work from the late 60s (on very technical issues in Husserl) to see that he very much believed in real things but was profoundly skeptical of phenomenology's ability to account for them.

For what it's worth, Derrida also well understood the dancefloor: I shared one with him at a bar on Bleeker Street, Memphis, Tennessee, in the early 1990s. Dude was getting down. No joke. It was impressive.

Suggestion. If we are going to speak about Foucault's History of Sexuality, could we specify which volume? Not to sound contrary, but it matters whether one is speaking about the general comments made in the introductory volume or the more detailed analyses, say, regarding Greek culture and texts, in the later volumes. Thanks.

 

[dominic]

i should acknowledge, however, that i'm unable to account for the power of music outside of social settings

that is, the music that most moves me in private probably is bach or some such thing

but at the end of the day i can take or leave bach

actually i want to take some of these remarks back

for the most part i listen to music in private

but while listening i *imagine* hearing the music in a social setting

for instance, if it's a song that i first heard at a rave or from that time period, then i imagine myself dancing to the song alongside others, competely lost in the music, at a rave or club in 1991 -- or in the case of really good house at the hacienda in 1986 -- even though i've never been to manchester!

or i fantasize about playing the song to likeminded people at a party or something, if given the right opportunity

and if i cannot imagine the track competely taking over people, seizing people, enrapturing people -- seizing others with and alongside me -- then i don't have much use for it

is this a song that can rock the party? -- rocking the party means sweeping people away from their conversations, interrupting the games of seduction and mating rites that people play, taking them out of their own private reverie as they're standing against the wall -- and rocking them with the music

and actually bach is music that seizes people and transports them -- the same is true of symphonic music, the entire classical tradition -- at a symphony people are indeed enraptured by the music (or at least some of them are) -- so yes, bach is strong music (when played at a xian mass or whatever)

so as a matter of fact, i listen to music by myself -- on my lonesome ownsome -- but i *imagine* myself in another time or place -- and the crucial question for me is this ----- were i at a party or club or bar or whatever, is this music that could take over the situation and the people there?

 

[dominic]

If we are going to speak about Foucault's History of Sexuality, could we specify which volume?

i think they mean the introductory volume, as that's the one that everyone's read -- or has had the most influence on modern thought

 

[dominic]

and so, when viewed retrospectively, the difference b/w music that has the power to seize people and music that is simply "pop" music is this . . . .

"pop" music reminds of us of another time in our lives, where we were, who we were with, what the weather was like that year -- we think about things other than music

whereas "powerful" music causes us to fantasize about being seized by music while being somewhere else

this is admittedly rather simplistic -- but i thought i'd throw it out --

i.e., somebody way way way upthread remarked that one of the reasons people like "pop" music is that it reminds them of other times in their lives, where they were during a particular summer, etc

so i say this as a belated response

 

[k-punk]

there's more to music than just something we construct socialisation games around...

i can't help thinking all these construction based theories as being rooted in a kind of evasion or ressentiment towards the sublime, the Real, to that which is bigger than the self,

it sounds empowering, we construct these musical meanings arbitrarily, we can rearrange them how we like...

That is absolutely right... again an echo of Otto, who characterises religious experience as that which is much vaster than the self, which makes the self feel like nothing... which is precisely OVERpowering, not empowering...

I guess I'll never understand what for me will always seem like an impluse of resentful mastery in which the self is reasserted over what overcomes it... For me writing about pop is an attempt to deal with that overcoming....

i think there's something in music that is as much like a punch in the face, or a bolt of lightning, or a sunny day, or a dose of flu, as it is like a newspaper article or conversation

Surely much much more like them than the 'conversation' ... all those language-based theories have always been profoundly unconvincing when faced with pop... you are dealing with sonic intensities that simply are not structured in the way that language is... language is one type of code, not the only type of code...

As for the mimesis model, one of the great virtues of 'Rhizome' in A Thousand Plateaus is to kick that right into touch... it can't account for anything... the temporality is all wrong... do birds 'copy' each other when they flock? Flocking, propagation, contagion are infinitely better models... memes not mimesis...

And this difference thing:

1. It seems to be taken on trust that people's responses to music etc are infinitely complex... this idea tha human beings are unpredictable and ineffable (when actually they are drearily predictable for the most part) is the last residue of religion in the bad, supernatural, theistic sense.... it's the same impulse that lies behind denying neurological reduction, as if there is something necessarily mysterious about the material configurations we are. It's only a matter of contingency, a matter of time...

2. Why is difference interesting? Surely what differences there are can be attributed to uninteresting socio-animalistic factors... Much more interesting is seeing a crowd possessed by an entity, wave, beatform, ridden by a loa...

music is a rapture, a raptor

sorry -- i'm an incorrigible Romantic... when i read camille paglia i find absolutely nothing to disagree with!

You're not what I would call a Romantic, though, Simon; your interlocutors are. The key Romantic move, a kind of garbled Kantianism, was to reduce everything to human imagination. The fag end of this is in the dreary reader/listener response position, which has subtracted anything raptor-ish about culture. It all comes from inside, so we are told.

 

[k-punk]

(and tim is right about a good many things, but especially that the ILX/NYLPM crowd are hardly 'geezers' in the footballer sense - the name was an inside joke, wasn't it?

But who IS a 'geeza' then and what is the point in using such a depressingly delibidinizing, disintensifying and normalising term? Once again, surely it's necessary to distinguish positions from people: of course, people don't stick to aesthetic-philosophical positions (for reasons of lack of consistency as much as anything else) but that doesn't mean that such positions shouldn't be critiqued.

The point I keep trying to make is that, of course, NO-ONE is a popist, NO-ONE is a geeza: the demand to enjoy (and only enjoy) is not something that anyone can live up to... but that doesn't mean that popism and geezaesthetics aren't extremely powerful discourses....

they even disavow the association, though it seems to have pushed k-punks buttons nonetheless)

No, really, it's quite the other way round... they started to hound ME when the suggestion was made that y'know, there might be something more to pop than can be got to via pub conversation opinionism... the idea that this position - totally hegenomic, with support from most of the humanities subjects in university and most of the media, indeed the voice of commonsense in person - is downtrodden and misrespresented is really one of the most laughable things about it....

 

[dominic]

And this difference thing:

1. It seems to be taken on trust that people's responses to music etc are infinitely complex... this idea tha human beings are unpredictable and ineffable (when actually they are drearily predictable for the most part) is the last residue of religion in the bad, supernatural, theistic sense.... it's the same impulse that lies behind denying neurological reduction, as if there is something necessarily mysterious about the material configurations we are. It's only a matter of contingency, a matter of time...

excellent point!

which is not to say that we're all alike, either

but often in philosophy the best thing to do is argue contrary to prevailing opinion

even though the truth of the matter is unknown

i.e., who really knows how similar or different our experiences of music are

especially in the case of dance music -- i.e., compared w/ jazz and classical music the music ain't all that complex -- therefore if everybody's getting down to the music, if the place is rocking, and people are seized, etc, then it's not at all unreasonable to assume that they're having more or less the same experience -- i.e., emphasizing differential experience here amounts to emphasizing the trivial

 

[dominic]

however, there does seem to be some tension b/w the following propositions:

(1) there is more uniformity and less complexity in people's responses to music, experience of music, than prevailing theory (opinion) acknowledges

i.e, as among members of the same scene -- obviously if you're not part of the death metal scene, your response will be radically different than a member's response

-- though this may take us back to why different people join different scenes, i.e., there are socio-empirical factors that predispose people to joining particular scenes (or no scene at all) but there is also the quasi-religious phenomenon of simply being seized by the music, i.e., the conversion experience -- why are some seized by these sounds and not others?

(2) the "pub" conversation cannot do justice to such responses and experiences -- or at any rate fails to "intensify" the response or experience

perhaps the apparent contradiction can be resolved by saying that the pub ethos is hostile to notions of being seized, of quasi-religious experience, of intensity, and so forth

 

[dominic]

That is absolutely right... again an echo of Otto, who characterises religious experience as that which is much vaster than the self, which makes the self feel like nothing... which is precisely OVERpowering, not empowering...

i disagree

that is, I suspect that Otto is using some notion derived from Hegel whereby the slave is OVERpowered by the lord -- i.e., the slave feels the prospect of death in his bones -- i.e., the slave who previously had vain thoughts about himself is shaken to the foundations -- he had vainly conceived of himself as more than a mere creature, he imagined he existed as being-for-self -- and yet the lord brings him to his knees b/c in the end the slave values his life more than freedom or recognition

and Hegel in turn was working out of the Protestant tradition -- i.e., the fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom

but I think that in the case of music -- or at least dance music -- the overwhelming feeling of being seized by the music is EMpowering -- it's what makes you dance -- we could even say that this comes out of the Quaker and Pentecostal traditions

btw when i was in my very early 20s i used to buy used paperbacks compulsively -- shopping bags full of used paperbacks for $5 -- as though if i owned the book i'd somehow possess the knowledge in the books -- even though i'd likely not get around to reading all these books until an old man in his 80s -- so i ended up donating most of the books to charity -- and yet i kept several of the books w/ intention of reading at some point -- hopefully before age 80 -- and one of the books was Rudolf Otto's "Idea of the Holy" -- currently in my parents' basement w/ most of my other books

 

[Tim F]

I think this argument is being pulled into binaries for the sake of argument (or ha ha "the conversation") - neither Borderpolice nor myself have at any stage suggested that scenes don't produce a conformity or a consensus regarding the experience of music; merely that this conformity and consensus is only possible <i>given</i> the differential social setting which it presumes - I mean this is so obvious it's actually a tautology: the social experience of music is social.

Dominic, Simon and Mark all argue against the "reductive" position of music-as-social-enunciation, and fair enough, there is a basic affective materiality to music which sign systems and socalisation don't account for. But this does not need to be a scarce transcendental sublime, some mystical property which jungle and Stevie Nicks' voice possess and which other music does not. When Simon talks of being utterly arrested by "Sara" (and I can sympathise with that!) it sounds like he is being arrested by his own capacity for experience of difference as per Deleuze (see my earlier, perhaps second post on this thread where I went into more detail of this). Experience of difference is the basic property of value within material art, whether sensually visual (painting and sculpture), textual (literature), textual/sonic (poetry, lyric-based music) or purely sonic (sonic-dominant music eg jungle). It is not mystical, merely difficult to articulate - insofar as all forms of signification which might practically express or articulate (ie. paraphrase) this experience are based simultaneously on difference-via-mimesis and a <i>repression</i> of the awareness of said difference. This is what Foucault is referring to with his concept of "iteration".

"1. It seems to be taken on trust that people's responses to music etc are infinitely complex... this idea tha human beings are unpredictable and ineffable (when actually they are drearily predictable for the most part) is the last residue of religion in the bad, supernatural, theistic sense.... it's the same impulse that lies behind denying neurological reduction, as if there is something necessarily mysterious about the material configurations we are. It's only a matter of contingency, a matter of time..."

Mark being "drearily predictable" and being "simple" or "straightforward" are so far from being the same thing that I'm astonished you conflate them here. Ideology's success in producing similar, predictable subjects is not a function of its simplicity! Again, the correct analogy here is with language - choosing the right words in a given context usually appears to be both the simplest thing in the world and an almost unconscious, unmediated process. And if you ask different people to provide you with a synonym for one word it's hardly going to be surprising that most will offer up the same alternative word, or maybe one of a very small group. But this very dreary predictability is the result of a very complex and counter-intuitive system whose complexity and counter-intuitiveness has to be actively over-looked by the subject in order for them to feel confident saying anything at all!

Sonics and Language are not the same, of course, but I think patterns of <i>recognition</i> are at a fundamental level the same across different signifying systems, which is to say that the success of a signifying system can be measured by the extent to which it is not recognised as such - the extent to which what is being "recognised" by the subject is experienced as a direct presence, an unmediated essence, rather than some sort of socially agreed construct or placeholder.

The irony is that in most writing about music this is tacitly acknowledged. When Simon talks about the history of the mentasm or the amen isn't he talking about the way in which a certain differential affect - a strange and harsh metallic squiggle, a percussive flash and skitter - is transformed into a social signifier via repetition and mimesis? A jungle track which uses an Amen is automatically meta-jungle, jungle about jungle, but the mistake would be to assume that the Amen is therefore a transcendental sign, that it is the <i>essence</i> of jungle. If the Amen had only ever been used in one jungle track, its status would primarily be that of pure sonic difference. The velocity of the sample, its place within the structure of the track, its status as a "breakbeat", all these things would still signify "jungle" - and to this extent all jungle is meta-jungle - but the <i>internal structuredness</i> of the Amen, the way the each beat within the Amen relates to the others, would have been valuable only insofar as it was an expression of some basic irreducible material differential uniqueness.

Instead we have a situation where the Amen is <i>recognised intimately</i> by the jungle listener as a sign within a signifying system; the track evokes simultaneously all the jungle tracks which have used the Amen <i>and</i> all the tracks which haven't - which is to say, the value of any particular deployment or use of the Amen rests in its difference both from other Amen tracks and more generally from non-Amen tracks. The amen-revivalism of a few years back - prior to the resurgence of properly breakbeat dominated jungle - is a good example of this: the amen was not primarily used to differentiate the host track from 2-step jungle at the level of sheer sonic difference (for otherwise, why use the amen in such a manner that it fit in with 2-step tracks so easily? Why leave it largely intact, not chopped up? And why just use the amen and not any breakbeat? Why this drum pattern in particular?); an equal factor in its use is a pledge of fidelity to the amen as a consensus signifier of jungle, and thus to jungle as a diachronic signifying system.

It's tempting to conclude therefore that we're talking about a tug of war between differential affectivity (chop up the sample, bring in another sample) versus sign system fidelity (adhere to the same sample and use it in the same way); this would allow us to fairly quickly choose the former over the latter. But of course, differential affectivity is always also a signifying act - using an interestingly chopped up Amen also says "hey, listen to me, I sound kinda familiar - yes, that's right, I'm an Amen! You know me! And yet you don't! I sound different! By my existence I challenge your conception of what an Amen is! And, if I'm really convoluted, what a jungle rhythm is too!". It's not a case of a scene starting off unconsciously and naively sonic and then devolving into meta-commentary - it's <i>all</i> meta-commentary, intertextuality. There's no binary between the two types of experience, but rather a simultaneity and complementarity (is that a word?), in the same way that our eyes see the "real" empirical world and the sign systems by which we make sense of that world simultaneously. And of course one of the ways we experience differential affectivity in music is hearing sonic deviation in the context of a sort of sign-system fidelity - the persistant and sonically identical use of certain samples and sounds within radically different sonic terrains (or the inverse, the morphology of specific sounds within a consistent sonic terrain; but this is just a perspective-trick artificial distinction of the same process). 'Ardkore roots'n'futurism, innit?

Part 2 below.

 

[Tim F]

This brings us back to the point I made above: differential affectivity is always overlaid by sign systems, and is <i>simultaneously</i> part of sign systems. When Simon talks about the pure unmediated pleasure and shock of Stevie Nicks' vocal in "Sara", I assume that what is happening is that he is experiencing the enjoyment of differential affects within the sonics whose simultaneous signifying components he cannot "recognise" as he doesn't have access to the right sign system (which may be something as simple as having heard lots of Nicks' vocals before, understanding how she uses them to convey certain impressions of emotion etc.). This, perhaps, is "Pop" listening in the sense that Mark uses it: something that feels like mystical, unreasoning enjoyment. And certainly the experience of hearing "Sara" wafting from another room in the family home and being enraptured by it is something like an archetypal popist narrative: the arresting quality that music can have when one is not in a position to place into a sign system context. Is this not something quite similar to a person seeing their first cubist painting for the first time, not understanding at all the sign system at work but being arrested merely by the sensuousness of the use of paint itself? It's not mystical or unreasoning at all, of course. It just appears and is experienced as such.

From all that he's written I have to assume that Mark would disapprove strongly of this sort of enjoyment on the grounds that it's unexplained (hence mystical) individual (hence bourgeois) enjoyment (hence non-revolutionary); it lacks the allegedly revolutionary (I would disagree) qualities of created populations. But the point of created populations is that what they're doing is inventing ex nihilo brand new <i>sign systems</i>, brand new ways of relating <i>to</i> and through music as a series of significations rather than as a direct sonic force.

This is where I suspect I disagree with Dominic as well, when he claims that it is the direct sonic force of the music which claims the listener who then engages in scene politics in order to assert her claim to being claimed. The point of being claimed by a scene is that one is claimed by the sign system overlaying the music, one is <i>interpellated</i> by it! This doesn't mean of course that scene members don't engage with and enjoy the differential affectivity at work in the music - the point is that they're engaging at both levels.

The dilettante who hears and enjoys a jungle track is also engaging at two levels: the sonic affectivity of the music and their own, pan-genre sign system by which they make "sense" of music. The inevitable rockist distortions that occurred in the rock press's treatment of dance music throughout the nineties is a very good example of this occurring: one could not expect a rock fan to "get" dance the way a dance fan does by listening to a single dance album because that album is not enough for the listener to establish a meaningful sign-system internal to dance music for the purpose of "making sense" of what they're hearing. Instead the experience of sonics is inserted into the pre-existing sign system(s) present - eg a "rock mindset". And this is why we got eg rock critics praising Orbital solely for their melodic sensibility, in the process making two mistakes - missing a lot of the experiential (enjoyable) value to be had in a) dance music, and b) Orbital specifically. And this happens at multple levels of course: the house/techno fan who "gets" Orbital may not automatically make sense of jungle etc. And, in a popist-not-rockist sense, one gets the same problem when someone like Chuck Eddy blanketly dismisses all current dance music scenes as being "too subtle" (another example of how most music critic errors actually tend to cut across both popism and rocksim).

There is of course though no automatic right or wrong that we can point to - Simon may have chosen to valorise purists over dilettantes of late but in his rejection of "adhedonic" post-Mills techno in the mid-nineties there was an equal acknowledgment that constructing ever-more-restricted sets of sign systems may have a deleretious impact on the experience of music. Simon cannot guarantee that such techno producers and fans secretly don't <i>enjoy</I> their music (and since enjoyment is so disapproved of around here it would hardly matter if they didn't anyway!). The objection presumably arises from the fact that the sign system is too anorexic and hermetic for people outside of it to meaningfully engage with (ie. converse with, ie. <i>have a conservation with</i>). So there's this tension at work: between not using sign-systems that are sufficiently specific to the music at hand, and thus forcing an awkward relationship between the differentially affective component of the music and the inappropriate or overly-broad sign system being used as an explanatory model; and, on the other hand, restricting the sign-system to the point where a) the sign-system itself is impenetrable, and b) the space for differential affectivity begins to become compromised. And this tension is both practical-and-productive; its permutations can be seen writ large in the story of the 'ardkore continuum. But it's first and foremost a <i>socially constructed</i> tension.

 

[tek tonic]

"reduced to a collective thumbs-up" -- i would question this term, why would an expression of mass unanimity necessarily be regarded as a reduction of something? these things have occurred you know--large numbers of people feeling near-as-dammit the same thing! happens all the time in soccer stadiums. happens in riots. happens with spontaneous outpourings of grief. happens at raves, gigs, clubs. at move theatres. there's even been the occasional revolution! not always a good thing -- mob violence, popular justice, lynchings etc -- but not always a bad thing either. think you are revealing yer bourgeois individualist prejudices a bit there mr barnes!

especially in the case of dance music -- i.e., compared w/ jazz and classical music the music ain't all that complex -- therefore if everybody's getting down to the music, if the place is rocking, and people are seized, etc, then it's not at all unreasonable to assume that they're having more or less the same experience -- i.e., emphasizing differential experience here amounts to emphasizing the trivial

both of you seem to be arguing that if masses of people take the same actions (dancing, rioting, purchasing one elvis record each) as somehow implying that the same feeling must have made them do it, but in my opinion, that doesn't follow. observe a photo of two people dancing at a rave. one might be rushing on E, completely lost in the moment. the other might be feeling self-conscious about her dancing, thinking about the DJ or the tune, wondering when her boyfriend will return from the toilets, etc. the fact that they're dancing and appear to be enjoying themselves doesn't mean they feel the same way about the music, and i would argue that such a difference is hardly trivial. i don't think you can credibly argue that dancing = experiencing intense aesthetic pleasure, so i don't see how you can argue that certain pieces of music contain inherent qualities that provoke that reaction (and further, how you can argue that without these inherent qualities, it CAN'T provoke that reaction).

even if the experience of hearing this music is subtly different for every listener, they can still celebrate the commonality between their reactions. she likes Bob Dylan because his politics are right-on, he likes Dylan because he finds the lyrics poetic and profound, they both become giant lefties and start a hippie commune in Vermont. what's anti-social about that?

these socialisation games would have to be fantastically complex to explain how i would be predisposed and set up to feel a shiver the first time i encountered the grain-of-the-voice of stevie nicks on 'sara', say (especially as i heard it by accident, on my own, in an asocial environment, radio in my parent's bedroom again, and with subcultural factors at that time -- postpunk discourse --predisposing me to not respond in that fashion towards it but despise it as soft rock)

isn't this what tim was saying earlier? ("The assignation of objective value to music or certain patterns within music necessarily implies that "best practice" music criticism would involve a repression of one's personal reaction, that we should reign in our musical "id" and subordinate it to what we "know" to be true.") if postpunk discourse (presumably a fairly rockist one) says that the human league or whatever is the true site of the raptor-ish feelings you desire, and then 'sara' makes you feel the same way, then surely postpunk discourse has to find a way to account for your swooning over stevie nicks' voice? you can argue that stevie nicks' voice contains intrinsic properties, but that clearly contradicts the postpunk dictum that soft rock is to be despised. so you either repress your reaction to 'sara' in the name of aligning yourself with postpunk, or you accept that postpunk can't account for your discovery that legit/DIY/proper punk music isn't the only enjoyable music out there.

But who IS a 'geeza' then and what is the point in using such a depressingly delibidinizing, disintensifying and normalising term? Once again, surely it's necessary to distinguish positions from people: of course, people don't stick to aesthetic-philosophical positions (for reasons of lack of consistency as much as anything else) but that doesn't mean that such positions shouldn't be critiqued.

The point I keep trying to make is that, of course, NO-ONE is a popist, NO-ONE is a geeza: the demand to enjoy (and only enjoy) is not something that anyone can live up to... but that doesn't mean that popism and geezaesthetics aren't extremely powerful discourses....

absolutely, critique the position and not the person, but the popist position you're constructing is inconsistent with popism as i've seen it practiced. the geezaesthetic manifesto isn't inherently anti-intellectual (unless "conversation" automatically precludes intellectualizing one's experience). it's openly pro-criticism, and makes allowances for communities while acknowledging that the pub table is not necessarily a community in itself. i just don't see how you can assail a version of popism that most popists don't seem to endorse.

 

[Tim F]

"This is where I suspect I disagree with Dominic as well, when he claims that it is the direct sonic force of the music which claims the listener who then engages in scene politics in order to assert her claim to being claimed. The point of being claimed by a scene is that one is claimed by the sign system overlaying the music, one is interpellated by it! This doesn't mean of course that scene members don't engage with and enjoy the differential affectivity at work in the music - the point is that they're engaging at both levels."

Just want to expand slightly on this point, because I know that Dominic will has issues insofar as he argues this:

"-- though this may take us back to why different people join different scenes, i.e., there are socio-empirical factors that predispose people to joining particular scenes (or no scene at all) but there is also the quasi-religious phenomenon of simply being seized by the music, i.e., the conversion experience -- why are some seized by these sounds and not others?"

Firstly I'd argue that when Dominic talks about having a claim over music by virtue of being claimed by it, he is talking about interpellation as per Althusser - eg. the play on the word "subject": in the process of interpellation one is both "subjected" as subordinate to the Big Subject (the ideological system; the musical scene) and formed as a "subject", ie. recognised by the system, perhaps even honoured. A basic example of this is the fuedal system, where the condition of possibility for power and status is the subordinate relatonship to the monarch.

But the problem with Althusser's theory of interpellation for many is that it never adequately explained how we can be seized/interpellated by the Big Subject without the grounding principle of already being in an interpellatory relationship - how does one go from being outside the feudal sytem to being a tenant-in-chief?

Zizek adds a new layer to this process when he contrasts Althusser's interpellation with Pascal's ideas on religious faith - namely, that if you are not gripped by religious faith, all that is necessary is to ensure that in all your effective social behaviour you act <i>as if</i> you are and you will find that you come to believe anyway. Zizek says interpellation works in the same manner. The very material, social nature of ideology is such that in performing these actions, by acting <i>as if</i> you believe, you will come to be interpellated by the ideology anyway. In musical terms this means that if you continually engage with the particular signifying system of a certain scene you will begin to understand that system and see yourself in relation to it.

But this is not behaviourist reductionism - it does not mean that the content of a person's belief is the sum total of their social actions. Because what that behaviourism doesn't explain is what it is that convinces a subject to engage in the ideological practice/sign system in the first place, if they don't have any sort of attendant belief. The cause is a kind of "belief-before-belief", a conviction that engaging with the Big Subject will suture permanently the gap in their subjectivity, protect them from the trauma of the Real. Hence mentioning Pentecostalism is very on-point indeed! What else is religious faith but a "deal with God"? "I will believe because in believing I will be saved." You could say that a musical scene is <i>exactly</i> like a Church in this manner.

When Dominic argues that being "claimed" by music is a self-evident and "real" process and that the working out of the social meaning of this claim is "politics", he seems to be using a realist/positivist model of politics - that politics is just the process of managing real-but-competing interests. What his theory seems to leave out is that no interests are the pure expression of uncomplicated "real" subject positions; all interests are the result of ideological formation and hegemonic enunciation.