"Agreed, except this implies that there is a 'you' who isn't viruses...."
I would distance myself from that implication.
"There's an ambiguity here, I think: what does 'basis of our enquiry' mean? Is experience what has to be accounted for (where that accounting would involve all kinds of structural factors) - or is it the final arbiter, what has to be utlimately appealed to? With a genuine structural analysis, you start off with structures and end up with structures and treat experience as an effect of structures, nothing more. "
The problem here is that you <i>do</i> appeal to experience Mark - your own comments in relation to Scritti Politti are good examples of this. And it's precisely because everyone who discusses music in the intimate manner that we do implicitly appeals to experience that it is what needs to be accounted for. No-one in this debate is sufficiently disinterested enough to get around this.
"While I would NEVER say that 'liking pop is bourgeois consumerism' - I would, of course, say that certain accounts of liking Pop are consumerist ideologies - I don't have a problem with legislative categories for enjoyment, naturally; for me the idea that legislative categories are bad is a cult studs doxa that really should be questioned now. For me, the problem with rockist 'legislation' is not that it legislates - it is that its legislation is wrong-headed. "
I don't have a problem with legislative categories per se either, but in this case they seem to mostly be arising <i>out of</i> individual experience (again, individual experience is what is implictly being appealed to even as it is outwardly scorned), and so there is somethingly deeply contradictory about them.
"But it is the opposition between collectives and individuals that is the problem for me. As if 'collective' just meant 'group of individuals', as if there were some 'private' space beyond collectivity... "
I have been attempting to avoid this oppositional terminology in my last few posts for this very reason. Again, I disavow any interest in or commitment to the status of the individual within the collective. What interests me is the fact of difference within the collective, but that difference can be expressed in components of which the individual is but a part, or components which make up the individual - components and individuals are not synonymous.
"Also, I have no problem with statements floating free from speaker position. Are you suggesting that the only legitimate statements are those that are tied to a particular, presumably embodied, subject position? Again, I would resist that cult studs orthodoxy utterly. The issue for me is not 'speaker position' but theoretical position: contra Nietzsche, it is the consistency of the position, rather than who/ where it comes from, that interests me..."
My concern is not that statements are illegitimate if they're not tied to a particular subject position; rather, it's that they're often presented as not being tied to one when in fact they are. Legislative categories don't transcend or escape experience and perspective merely because the person espousing them says so. Especially when the evidence being put forward to support them is experience! In other words I'm somewhat loathe to trust someone who is a music critic first and foremost when they claim that liking or disliking certain musics is philosophically/politically unsound.
BTW, as to whether what I am saying disagrees with Zizek, I suspect that he would say that "speaker position" is very important, only not in the same way that most post-structuralists would. As I understand him, for Zizek there is a single truth to any particular situation and only the repressed, abject speaker-position has access to it - eg. the jews in relation to the Holocaust; the third world/sweatshop workers/slum dwellers in relation to modern capitalism etc. Their "truth" is that they <i>are</i> the truth of the situation.
"For a start, it is a circular argument. It is assuming that there is no such thing as truths, that all there are embodied perspectives - and what is the evidence for this - only the claim that this must be true. Any claim about false consciousness is always a claim AGAINST experience."
I'm not claiming that there are no truths, but I always immediately suspect any position which sets itself up as being anti-ideological in symmetrical opposition to false consciousness. You know that Western capitalists did this all the time in relation to Communist Europe.
"My problem with what you seem to be saying here and in general is that there is no space from which to criticize aesthetic choices...."
There is a space, and that space would of course be outside the aesthetic (or, rather, outside the aesthetic's terms of reference). But none of the grand claims I ever see rockists or anti-rockists or anti-popists make ever seem to be genuinely motivated by some extra-aesthetic imperative. What motivates the Anti-Popists who are happy to be judgmental, to hold ethical positions, other than their own aesthetic criteria? The political edge which can be attributed by critics to grime/post-punk/pop-that-creates-populations/Bob Dylan/Bob Marley/etc. seems like post-facto argument-bolstering to me, a restrospectively issued license-to-enjoy. Which isn't to stay that the perception of a political edge can't itself be enjoyed, but then we are still stuck at the enjoyment level.
Simon can say that M.I.A.'s music falls short for him because she comes from "nowhere", but this attempt to come up with an explanation that fuses the political, social, cultural and aesthetic is ultimately a way of explaining an aesthetic preference. As Simon himself says, his conclusions arise out of patterns within his own taste, his own experience of music. So again experience creeps in as the implicit ground. To determine whether these preferences might have some extra-aesthetic political validity, we would need to understand the ideology of Simon's enjoyment.
"Ultimately, my problem would be with deconstruction as a methodology. It's abundantly clear that deconstruction poses no problems for capitalism at all --- how is providing a nuanced account of a consumer response an ATTACK on consumerism rather than a re-presentation of it? "
Very few positions on aesthetics pose problems for capitalism, Mark. But I don't think the point of music criticism is the ultimate destruction of capitalism (if it is then my own is profoundly pointless). The celebration of the politics of the explosive act/event (which, and correct me if I'm wrong, someone like Bourdieu might say is the only thing that can really disrupt capitalism) (and I hardly consider post-punk or glam or grime or whatever to qualify as an event of such magnitude) is all well and good, but it kinda cancels out aesthetic criticism entirely. Rockism, popism, anti-popism... all of those fade into irrelevance in the face of the kind of requirements you're setting (I could be wrong though, maybe your brand of critique really does pose a threat to capitalism.)
But anyway I'm more heavily influenced by someone like Machery than I am by deconstructionists per se.
"I'm also especially puzzled by the relationship of Zizek to your position. Again, I'm sure I'm STILL not getting it, but it seems to me that much of your position is what Zizek has been most dedicated to destroying over the past couple of decades... "
Zizek isn't opposed to post-structuralism/deconstruction/cultural studies point blank, although he might strongly oppose certain recurring strands within them. Disputes over eg. whether Lacan was a transcendentalist and whether that's a good or bad thing aren't a good enough reason to just walk away from 50 or so years of lots of insightful (if occasionally flawed) thinking.