Dial "M" for Musicology

the aesthetics of politics, part XXVIII

Phil Ford

Deepest respect and gratitude to Jonathan for the beautiful memorials he posted to his father. Deep bows of regard to Samuel Irving Bellman, whom we did not know, but whom we would have liked to. 

A random cranky political observation (did you miss those?): I've been following the Henry L. Gates imbroglio in a very vague way, mostly by reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog, which is almost the only political blog I still read. (Also: Dave Chappelle.) So I don't know all the angles. I feel I ought to, since this seems like a good academic-blog post topic, but there it is. But the unpleasant experience of seeing cable-news hamsters trotting out the old it-would-be-the-same-if-it-were-a-white-guy, you're-just-playing-the-race-card lines, has recalled to my mind something James Baldwin wrote in his essay on Norman Mailer: "the really ghastly thing thing about trying to convey to a white man the reality of Negro experience has nothing whatever to do with the fact of color, but has to do with this man's relationship to his own life. He will face in your life only what he is willing to face in his." Being an anglo Canadian I don't have anything to say about what it's like "trying to convey to a white man the reality of Negro experience." But I do have experience being a white man, and I say Baldwin got it right. There is this reluctance in some quarters (including, at a certain point, in myself) to admit that other people's experience might be different from your own, not for reasons of individual and contingent experience, but for impersonal systemic reasons. Especially if that system is racism, which would imply that we have something we might feel bad about. God forbid anyone should harsh our mellow. 

I'm a big fan of James Kochalka, so this might be a good time to post the video for his song "Don't Trust Whitey." 

I love Kochalka as the embodiment of whiteness, dressed up in a 18th-century perruque and knee breeches, running around stealing a kid's tricycle and grabbing fistfuls of a stranger's dinner. There is just the right degree of irony in the line "don't trust whitey/he lies and he lies and he lies/I'm not whitey/this is just a disguise." This is often sort of there in the background when white people write about race; there's this half-buried hope that you can disavow white privilege just by saying you have. I've gotten interested in whiteness as a concept (Richard Dyers's White is a must-read), and there's a lot more to be said about it all -- but then I would be doing that white thing of always wanting to put whiteness back in the picture. There I was, starting in on Henry Louis Gates and now I'm just talking about being white. The usual thing, I'm afraid. Dyer is remarkably good at avoiding the obvious pitfalls.

Anyway, on another topic, I have a couple of new articles out. Actually, one is not so new anymore, but I have unaccountably not mentioned it. It came out when I was sick back in December/January, so I guess it slipped my mind. It's in Jazz Perspectives, which is for my money the best and most necessary new journal in music academia, and it's called "Hip Sensibility in an Age of Mass Counterculture." Download it. Back when it first came out, Michael Kramer, a historian at Northwestern who deals with American rock culture and is a generally awesome guy, wrote a great blog post about something about "radical parallelism" that I had written. Michael wrote one of the most perceptive things anyone has ever said about my stuff. I'll quote lavishly, so you have something meaty to read (god knows I haven't given you much lately): 

. . . making politics the causal factor has been one of the markers of radical parallelism. The more unlikely the linkage, the more scholarly chips one acquires in placing the bet. “My little corner of specialized cultural scholarship matters,” this approach proclaims, “because it reveals the operations of a larger political power guiding everything.” This perspective has been important for overcoming antiquarianism (though one might argue that something was lost when we started to insist that everything had to be politically relevant or was pointless to study). It was also crucial for previously marginalized topics: legitimizing their political importance was a way of staking a claim for the study of women, the poor, and others who used to get left outside the old-fashioned historical record of great (usually white and typically elite) men. 

But now that antiquarianism is a bad word in academia, and since previously marginalized topics have increasingly moved to the center of scholarly focus, the problems of privileging the political have become more apparent. In particular, the more narrowly-defined idea of the political tends to monopolize the more elastic and curiously multivalent cultural domain. 

I think what Ford’s post hints at, in some fashion, is a de-privileging of the political. What if we flipped it? What if the political was subsumed in larger cultural forces? Culture, in both the abstract, anthropological sense of beliefs and the material, artistic sense of artifacts, is so dense — so able to contain tensions, incoherencies, conflicting tendencies — that it might be the better realm to privilege. Making culture the dominant track rather than politics might take pressure of the reduction of epochs to one dominating element. Maybe cultural containment shaped political policy during the Cold War? 

Or maybe an infinite loop develops between culture and politics, so that we need new terms, particular to their specific contexts, that identify more fragile, tentative, overlapping tendencies rather than one coherent, all-powerful logic? Can we re-purpose the liberating but clunky tools of social theory for subtler interpretive projects?

Worth saying again: "What if we flipped it? What if the political was subsumed in larger cultural forces?" This is exactly what my whole thing is about. It may not be your thing, but it is my thing. The goal of pop music scholarship has almost always been to find a political understanding of the aesthetic: my goal is to find an aesthetic understanding of politics. I particularly like Michael's notion of the "infinite loop between culture and politics." Which brings me to the other article I've published, this one just out in the Journal of Musicology: Music at the Edge of the Construct. It's maybe the closest I've come to really twisting those strands of politics and representation into a loop, or maybe a Möbius strip. It's part of JM's double issue on the Cold War. I haven't yet sat down to read most of the other articles, but still it's clear this publication is gonna put y'all on notice and bring Cold War studies into musicology with a sharp call to order. We've long needed some sort of between-two-covers survey of current musical work in the Cold War studies field, and now we have it. It should go without saying that there are many more excellent music scholars working on the Cold War, including musicoloblogger Phil Gentry, so interested parties are encouraged to dig deeper and find out what's out there. (For a start, here's the AMS Cold War interest group member list.) Peter Schmelz's introduction and Richard Taruskin's afterword are particularly worth reading, the former as a fine overview of the conceptual and methodological problems of coupling politics and music, the latter a powerful critique of the perennial (and typically Cold War) desire to uncouple them. 

A Fallacy Needing A Name

Jonathan Bellman

Surely there must be a name for the logical fallacy of extrapolating a universal principle from one’s own personal experience.  I look in vain for one in David Hacket Fischer’s classic Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (1970).  (This was a book of such a reputation that Richard Taruskin once referred to it as “a scurrilous tract”—if I remember correctly—but I was of the impression that he meant it affectionately.)  Perhaps the reason Fischer didn’t deal with it is that historians would not generalize from anything so unitary.  Still, it deserves a name, because at least in music it is all too common.

 

Here is an illustration. “Look, when I compose a symphony, I [do X]; when Beethoven composed a symphony, he [did X].”  I swear, that’s an exact quote of something I once heard.  One doesn’t know whether to laugh or weep.  It is as if the person is daring you to call him out.  “Are you kidding?  What are you thinking?  Beethoven, and…you?”  It does not matter that he may have accidentally been right.  A trivial example would be that, yes, you both put notes on paper.  That you write symphonies, however, does not privilege your experience in doing so to the point that you can explain others’ with any assurance. 

 

It gets dicier, of course, when the matter under discussion is a skill I think I have. “Look, when I improvise, I [do X, or think Y]; so I know that when Chopin improvised, he…”  Don’t I know about improvising, having supported myself in dance studios for four years doing that?  So Chopin and I, we…wait a minute.  Did he think harmonically, or melodically?  Did he just play familiar figurations and travel well-trod paths?  Were some of his improvisations better than others, as with all of us, or was he just stratospherically beyond other musicians?  What about Liszt?  Anton Rubinstein?  Can I talk about them?  Because I hacked through ballet exercises, varying them in certain utterly predictable (to me, at least) ways, does that mean I can speak for the improvisation experience of all pianists, living and dead?

 

[Cue: Sound of a mousetrap being sprung.]  How can any of us be sure how people's minds worked?  Particularly people whose minds are better than ours, by many parsecs?

 

At the moment, I’m writing (desperately, against the clock) a paper dealing with improvised ornamentation in certain historical styles, how important it is in certain repertories, etc., so these matters are much on my mind.  An improvisation event (not involving me, thankfully) is planned at the symposium I’ll be attending this coming week, so I’m hoping my doors will be blown off.  What if one actually had time to spend at the piano?!

 

I intend to report back.  Watch This Space.

Against Parallelism

Phil Ford

Further (long and probably very boring) thoughts on interdiciplinarity following from this pre-Christmas post. 

From McLemee, a Newsweek piece that's been making the rounds ponders a question sure to bait humanities types with a presentist bent: name a piece of culture (book, movie, album, TV show, etc.) that "exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush." So 24, Battlestar Galactica, American Idol, Borat, etc. (Nominate your own in the comments.) It's a great question because it asks us to start writing notes towards a future history of right now; it asks us to look at our own time, the Bush II era, as if it were something that happened long ago, as if we could look at it as a bounded and complete thing, like the Reconstruction or the Great Depression, and see the ways the fears of the time (and it certainly has felt like a time when Americans, who have less to fear than almost anyone on the planet, started being afraid of everything) are made manifest, unconsciously or semi-consciously, in its self-expression. This is a style of thought we have cultivated for other periods of American history. For example, library shelves groan with books on cold war America that seek to find the total logic of the era in its culture. "Cold war culture," in such studies, is not just culture created in the time of the cold war, but culture whose inmost cells contain the DNA script of cold war geopolitics. The script, the DNA of history, is (we would like to think) found equally in George Kennan's "Long Telegram" and Disneyland, the Army-McCarthy hearings and Frank Sinatra's Capitol records: the script lies buried at the root of collective consciousness and writes itself into parallel political, social, and cultural expressions.

There is doubtless something to this. Historical epochs do have deep structures of sensibility, and I spend most of my time trying to find out what they are. (And in the cold war, no less.) But as I've written elsewhere, it's a dangerous game. It is telling that Newsweek asked its critics a question that assumes this kind of thinking-in-parallels; it shows how an academic habit has become part of the intellectual vernacular, which is also the point at which people don't bother to stop to ask questions about logical warrants -- like, you know, is this how cultural history really works? I used to teach a course on American music in the 1950s, and one of the pieces I would assign was Elliott Carter's String Quartet no. 1. Now, what does that have to do with containment, red-hunting, paranoia, or any of those other durable tropes of cold war explication? Carter himself would doubtless answer "nothing at all" -- the work occupies itself with certain musical and aesthetic problems (especially problems of time), and if it is "about" anything, it is surely these. Ah, comes the reply, but the ideology of high modernism (with which Carter's music is richly imbued) is a classic cold-war maneuver of containment. (In this case, it is the culture of the lower orders, the middle- and low-brow, that is being contained.) So if the music has no apparent connection to its time, it is in fact all the more covertly connected to it: the appeal to "purely musical" problems and concerns comes to look like an excuse. Heads I win, tails you lose. This game can be played with anything. We might take "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima" as a somber memorial to its time, but the opposite kind of piece, a cheesy featherweight pop song, sounds sinister when thrown into the harsh raking light of the Bomb, so with very little effort "How Much Is That Doggy In The Window" can become a somber memorial to its time, too. Once an explanatory structure of sufficient abstraction is in place, almost anything can be fit into it.

So we can all see how the torture apologetics of 24 play into the Bush II zeitgeist. I'm not going to argue against that -- any future study of American culture in the Bush II era will doubtless (and correctly) point to 24 as Exhibit A of an America scared shitless and consoling itself with the spectacle of tough guys torturing bad guys. But the details, the details . . . what would you do with Ghostface Killah's insanely great Fishscale or The Big Doe Rehab? What about The Runners Four by Deerhoof or Final Fantasy's He Poos Clouds? And here I'm only naming CDs I have in the car -- I could make the list a lot longer if I thought about it for longer than a blog second. Classical music, and particularly classical music performance, is particularly hard to historicize in this way. OK, so Phil Kline's Three Rumsfeld Songs recommend themselves to the zeitgeist, but what about Hilary Hahn's excellent recording of the Bach concertos? Does zeitgeist-hunting in the particular cultural-studies way we've become accustomed to simply become another way of making historical narratives to which some things belong and other things don't? I seem to recall a certain amount of heavy breathing at this most recent AMS about Carl Dahlhaus's notion of music that belongs to history, that participates in a certain state of the musical material, etc. Well, such notions now seem like just another excuse for canonizing Schoenberg and leaving out Rachmaninoff, or teaching Babbitt and leaving out Barber -- an excuse for Germanocentrism or the modernist old-time religion or both. But the newfangled way of writing "history in the strong sense" is not to proceed from compositional technique but from those "explanatory structures of sufficient abstraction" I just wrote about. 

This is one of those complicated problems I have no ready solution for, partly because these are problems I'm trying to work through in my own work. I'm all about explanatory structures of sufficient abstraction -- it's what I do. I suppose what I'm trying to do in my own work is to refine those explanatory structures enough that they work to illuminate certain pieces of music but don't seek to explain everything -- because when you explain everything, you explain nothing. Marxism, Freudianism, post-structuralism, Schenkerian analysis, etc. can become all-encompassing systems, the belief in which (and fanatically intense commitment to) manifests the academic’s perennial enthusiasm for monisms, great big single things that can explain everything and subordinate all competing systems. The flip side of this enthusiasm for monisms is a mania for decoding: the more intellectuals aggrandize the power of a totalizing system, the more they aggrandize their own power and extend the reach of their interpretations. So perhaps one thing that might be useful in writing interdisciplinary history would be a little humility: you're not trying to find the master key for history, you're just trying to tidy up one little corner of history, make connections, find patterns. You can talk about Les Baxter or Elliott Carter and don't have to worry about which one is more zeitgeisty or participates more fully in the state of the musical material or whatever; you can burrow into the logic of each thing on its own. Or, god knows, you can hook them up, try to see what interesting patterns are created when you look at them together. Carter's first string quartet and Baxter's hit album Ritual of the Savage are from the same year, 1951. Is this a meaningless coincidence or is it interesting? Who knows -- try and find out. But if it doesn't want to fit, don't force it. 

*I* own the sixties, dammit.

Phil Ford

A couple of weeks ago I did a paper at EMP, the experience of which was a drag -- tepid reaction and a tiny audience, which got a bit smaller when Robert Christgau, who walked in late, walked out again a few minutes later. But he saw enough, I guess, to style it the worst paper presentation he saw. Now, I dunno, maybe it really did suck. I have no objectivity about my own stuff. But the reason Christgau gives for his rough grading gives me something to think about, though not what he presumably would want me to think about.

His [i.e. my] problem: indicated no knowledge of any difference in historical importance or political acuity between the Weathermen (dead wrong but smart and momentous), Timothy Leary (never a political figure even when he claimed to be), and the Manhattan pseudo-anarchists who briefly gathered under the rubric Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers (marginal publicity seekers without even minimal follow-through).

I actually don't disagree with what he's saying about these figures. Well, most of it. Christgau seems pretty confident in saying what is and isn't political when the boundary was never clear at the time and hasn't gotten a whole lot clearer since -- blurring that boundary was, after all, the point. But the basics seem sound enough: the Weatherman had more detailed critiques and a more intellectual style, grounded in canons of Marxist thought, than the others; Leary was either a fraud or a trickster (maybe both?) who became "political" when it suited him; and the UATWM talked big but didn't really do much more than throw some trash into the Lincoln Center fountain.

But this doesn't change my argument. Not that Christgau would have known what that was, since he left long before I was done.* Though to be charitable, I suspect that Christgau and I are after different things. On this point, he's a splitter, and I'm a lumper. What Christgau seems to want is to understand the revolutionary imagination of each groupuscule separately: if each one proceeded from a slightly different notion of "revolution," and if each differed in the effectiveness and authenticity of its political commitment, then it doesn't make sense to lump them together. On the other hand, I think that you learn something from tracing the strands of revolutionary thought and (more to the point) sentiment that bind different groups and different ideologies -- hard-political and countercultural, in various mixtures -- into a single (albeit loose) historical entity.

Now, I guess I could say "let's agree to disagree" and leave it at that, but it seems to me that there's something else going on here that has less to do with historiography in the abstract and more to do with personal investment in history. The terms by which Christgau wants to separate these groups from one another (being "smart and momentous" versus being "marginal publicity seekers," etc.) show nothing so much as an unreflective acceptance of the same stale categories by which veterans of the 1960s have always tried (and usually failed)** to write a convincing analysis of their fondly-remembered youth. Christgau wants to say that some radicals were realer than others—but what does it mean to be real when the ruling notion that underwrites all these different groups, the idea of sudden, total, and irrevocable Revolution, is itself a kind of fiction? The assertion that Weatherman was "momentous" and others were just poseurs hides the familiar metaphysics of authenticity, or doesn't hide it at all, actually, it's right there on the surface. But as I've said a couple of times, we're all at a point where we all know that "authenticity" is just an ideological mystification and yet lack any way of understanding ourselves and our music without it.

And Christgau's difficulty in answering Joshua Clover's question after his own paper was a symptom of that. Christgau had spoken knowingly of the pop-crit habit of finding transgression in the music we happen to like, but Clover afterward suggested that Christgau was doing the same sort of thing, finding a voter instead of a revolutionary at the end of every song. (Can't quite remember how Clover put it, it was better than that.) For a while Christgau affected not to understand what Clover was talking about, but after an uncomfortable silence he offered that what he really meant was that he "misses the monoculture." Now, that's a whole separate issue that I won't get into, except to say that I sure don't miss it, and when I hear Christgau saying he does, I'm guessing that part of what he misses is the power that comes of being its arbiter. 

But what the exchange showed is that while Christgau reviews a million new records each year—he keeps busy, say that for him—the basic shape of his thought, the way he views things, hasn't changed much since the 1970s. And it's a way of thinking that, for all the bourgeois meliorism it's picked up in the years since, still sentimentalizes the "ideals of the sixties," as they're always called, honoring the knucklehead Maoist-Debrayist adventurism of Weatherman as a real pushback against a real oppressor and defending the purity of their revolt against usurpers -- much the way rock critics of the old monoculture days, back when rock was hegemon, would praise some bands as unco-opted agents of cultural resistance and damn others as sellouts to the Man, or (for those who picked up a little Adorno), the "culture industry."

The problem with presenting conference papers is that, in order to stay within the 20-minute time limit, you can talk about what you think about, say, Weatherman and Timothy Leary, but you can't really say much about why you think that way. The warrant of my interpretations is a notion that the various manifestations of political protest in the late 1960s/early 1970s share a certain sensibility that grows from a belief in a cultural hegemony that must be resisted by aesthetic creation, either of art or the self. (This goes even for the most political types, like Weatherman, which veered towards a cultural-hegemony critique shortly after going underground.) But from my point of view, there's no oppressive cultural dominant, no "Man," just a shared belief in there being one, and a range of aesthetic self-stylings available to those who do believe. And this warrant is necessarily going to remain in the background for a 20-minute paper, but it was still obvious from the tenor of the talk, which I think explains Christgau's indignation. You can't expect someone like that to enjoy a point of view from which there are no distinctions of authentic and co-opted, radical and poseur -- a point of view from which the distinctions between Weatherman and UATWM and Timothy Leary pale beside their shared investment in a fantasy. (Or, in rather more diplomatic cultural-studies terms,  a "political imaginary.")

But people like Christgau won't go away any time soon, and they always have one advantage: I was there, and you weren't. Of course, one could as easily reply that the people who were there are the worst authorities for their own experience, because the issues of the 1960s refuse to die***, and those with an investment in those times, something from the past they have to defend in the present, are not going to proceed in the spirit of disinterested inquiry. But we've been having this historiographic argument for a long time, and we'll keep having it until the boomers are gone. And maybe even still after that. Now this is why I want to write about this kind of stuff: it's fascinating in itself, and it's so obviously relevant to things that matter now. And yet for young American scholars, writing about the 1960s is always going to be a minefield, for the same reason that French scholars are always going to have problems dealing with their own signal moment of modernity, the French Revolution. (Revolutions, again.) Francois Furet, a revisionist French historian whose work on the French Revolution stirred up the same sorts of passions as revisionist work on the 1960s does now, wrote about this phenomenon:

Historians engaged in the study of the Merovingian Kings or the Hundred Years War are not asked at every turn to present their research permits. . . .

The historian of the French Revolution, on the other hand, must produce more than proof of competence. He must show his colors. He must state from the outset where he comes from, what he thinks and what he is looking for; what he writes about the French Revolution is assigned a meaning and label even before he starts working: the writing is taken as his opinion, a form of judgment that is not required when dealing with the Merovingians but indispensable when it comes to treating 1789 or 1793. As soon as the historian states that opinion, the matter is settled; he is labeled a royalist, a liberal or a Jacobin. Once he has given the password his history has a specific meaning, a determined place and a claim to legitimacy.” (François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster, p. 1)

Those scholars my age or younger who find themselves working on America in the first three decades after WW II: get ready. Have your research permit handy. You will be asked for it. In many ways nothing has changed in the 12 years since Rick Perlstein wrote his Lingua Franca essay Who Owns the Sixties?, which dealt with the "possessive memory" of sixties veterans and the resulting turf wars between Gitlin's generation of scholars and younger writers like David Farber and Doug Rossinow. The excellent 2002 Routledge essay anthology Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s includes a weary note in the acknowledgments section:

The gestation of this project witnessed a whole set of obstacles, setbacks, and quirky or menacing characters that would not have been out of place in your average sixties flashback. Over the past four years we were confronted by faux Hopi curses; the "possessive memory" of certain veterans of the era who took umbrage at anyone outside their ranks writing "their" history; photographers who sold us vintage photos for the volume, but insisted we meet them at 11 p.m. in Washington Square Park and bring cash; and peer-reviewers who treated us like a neo-Stalinist cell that had fatally deviated from the party line. (p. v)

I've had to deal with a certain amount of that, and so have other friends of mine -- especially the "possessive memory" part. (Not as much the Hopi curses.) Eric Drott (one of the most brilliant scholars working on the postwar avant-garde) ran the 1968 evening panel at the AMS national meeting in Los Angeles a couple of years ago and encountered a number of people pulling the old what-the-hell-do-you-know-sonny routine as well. It can't be helped; it can only be borne. But we're not going away either.****

*And with the ostentatious rudeness of someone who sticks around at a concert until the Boulez and then leaves moments after the piece starts: the thing had an air of Making A Point, that Some Things Are Not To Be Tolerated.   

**All exceptions duly noted, of course -- for ex., they don't come more archetypally 1960s-veteranish than Todd Gitlin, whose Years of Hope, Days of Rage is, for all its unavoidable biases, an astonishing, wonderful book.

***As we've seen again and again in the present Obama-Clinton campaign -- the Weatherman even put in an appearance! -- with Clinton doggedly dragging us back into the cultural-war issues that got seeded in the 1960s and 1970s and Obama trying to get past them. There is, with Clinton and her supporters, the same habit of thinking of everybody in terms of demography, as if the only thing that matters is that she would be a woman president, or as if the choice between her and Obama is really only a choice between a woman and a black guy. Obama's not free of this kind of thinking either, and as Carl Wilson has pointed out, it's an ideological inheritance that no-one, left or right, seems able to shake. The relevance to this particular blog post is probably pretty obvious: I don't think that the social position of various actors in the 1960s radical left determines their cultural position, but it's hard for people to imagine there's any other way to see it.

****Of course, if I live long enough, there's a special hell waiting for me in like 2050: some young jerk is going to come up with boldly revisionist reading of the current decade, and I will find myself asking "how can someone who wasn't even born then talk about the Bush years?" 

Better Inside Shooting Out

Jonathan Bellman

In the October 22 issue of The New Republic, Richard Taruskin has a lengthy review article on three books (by Julian Johnson, Joshua Fineberg, and Lawrence Kramer) that address, one way or another, conserving the classical tradition. Taruskin opens his article by raging at the Joshua Bell busking experiment, which well deserved his ire. Those already familiar with Taruskin are rightly wondering whether they should cluster about the authors for support or simply bolt for cover. It’s the latter; Taruskin is at his hilarious, blistering best here, because nothing—so far as one can tell—infuriates him like sacralization and its attendant ossification. The first order of business is to demolish Julian Johnson’s neo-Adornian screed, which is presented as equal parts aesthetic superciliousness and appallingly arrogant dismissals of popular music. He proceeds to Fineberg, with whom he initially shows more patience but then dismisses with a wave of his hand when he is discovered pitching spectralism, which seems to be more cause—or dare I say pose—than technique or aesthetic or approach or anything else that can be usefully described. He has more time for Larry Kramer, yet still bounces phrases like “Nor is Kramer’s account entirely devoid of vainglory and invidiousness,” “Kramer makes his only—inevitably, ignorant and prejudiced—comparisons between the classical and the popular,” and the rather more direct “this is balderdash” in Kramer’s direction. This is the book he takes the most seriously of the three, and far kinder observations are made, but still—one almost feels the whip-crack. As a friend once said to me, “If no one’s gunning for you, cowboy, you really ain’t nobody.” Cold comfort, but I suppose true. By the time Taruskin described Johnson’s book as “a sort of Beyond the Fringe parody of a parish sermon in some Anglican backwater” …Debbie had to tell me to shut up and stop reading choice phrases so she could work. The fact is that his turns of phrase make me mad with jealousy. I laughed aloud for five minutes at “The idea that in popular culture production equals consumption was already a canard when it was first handed down from Adorno’s delphic armchair.” Delphic armchair?! I could write for a century and never come up with something that wickedly pithy. The knockout punch follows almost immediately: “That [Adorno’s] followers still parrot him only shows how utterly ideology trumps observation in the world of ‘critical theory,’ of all academic approaches the least critical by far.” Unimprovable, and something I’ve wanted to say for twenty years. Twenty-eight words. (Tonight my fourteen-year-old son happened to ask about postmodernism, having overheard us mention it in conversation, and he observed that my tone of voice was the one usually I usually reserve for Fundamentalism. I said, “Fundamentalists believe there is absolutely one clear and incontrovertible truth, and they believe it rigidly, dogmatically, and unquestioningly. Postmodernists believe there are no incontrovertible truths, and they believe it rigidly, dogmatically, and unquestioningly.” See what I mean? Lame by comparison: sad, thin gruel.) I don’t agree with Taruskin’s whole article, by any means. Taruskin is free to dismiss Norman Lebrecht as “a sloppy but entertaining British muckraker” if he wishes (I think Lebrecht’s Song of Names deserves better), but surely Blair Tindall, narcissistic ex-oboist who can’t decide if she’s an oboist, a crusading journalist, or a Bad Girl With A Pen (Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music), merits the same unflinching treatment? Taruskin accords her “the smartest and most constructive take on the situation.” Her book struck me, to the contrary, as an exhibitionistic tell-all (Sex and drugs in surprising locales among musicians! Stop the presses!) by someone boundlessly resentful that whatever myths she internalized as a young person—and there is no indication that some healthy cynicism at a young age wouldn’t have enabled her to prepare more intelligently for artistic life—turned out not to be true. The stew of whiny resentment and confessional titillation had me running for the vomitorium. I never made it past halfway through. Perhaps the article was so amusing for me because I am in sympathy with the anti-sacralist sentiment: the composers were living, breathing human beings; contemporary musicians of whatever flavor are not only living, breathing human beings but tend to be howlers at the moon and spitters of fire, and no musician I know enjoys the smug, moralizing, clueless blue-hair who pays some bills but insists on dictating, participating, commenting, orating. As a longtime Rock fan, I also share the disgust at those who look down on it while putting classical (or Jazz, or the pop from another [their] era) on a pedestal. Ultimately, though, this doesn’t take me very far; these are all fairly cheap shots. If the traditional appreesh gambit and eat-your-broccoli approach to classical music is demonstrably counter-, or at best un-, productive, what to do? Of course, that is not the business of Taruskin’s piece, and he doesn’t seem to want to go beyond “keep listening”—not his gig. It’s a subject I continue to think a lot about, though, in measure because of the kind of institution I teach at, in some measure because of my atypical training and route to musicology, and in some measure because what I think is most evident and apparent and interesting, the front door to art music after which you discover everything else, is precisely what very few or nobody at all discuss in terms of music education or appreciation or however you want to put it. So: next blog I’ll try to offer a thought or two of a practical nature, because deep down I don’t think that “just keep listening” answers the call, either, when we are discussing musical repertories a century and more old.

Strange Bedfellows

Jonathan Bellman

Quite by accident I find myself listed in the Wikipedia New Musicology Article as a New Musicologist. This stopped me dead in my tracks. Moi? After the amount of sounding off I’ve done about it? Wikipedia, noch? New Musicology was for a long time a label used both as proud, confrontational self-identification and vilifying accusation. This started, roughly, when I was at a very vulnerable point in my professional life: on the job market. Old Musicologists were considered to be, by outsiders, crabbed, unmusical pedants who Controlled The Whole Field and did nothing but root in archives, grazing passively amongst Ockeghem manuscripts, Tudor choirbooks, and Beethoven sketches. Supposedly, they considered themselves to be the Only True Musicologists. New Musicologists, in contrast, trumpeted their interest in all kinds of new methodologies (of varying value, and which I will not critique here), and in the Voices Of The Marginalized: Gays, Minorities, Women, etc. In the late 1980s and 1990s, I and many others believed that the job market was largely controlled by fashionable NM interests, which was cause for great personal bitterness. (It would be disingenuous to act as if some of that resentment didn’t survive into my Sept. 18, 2006 Radical Musicology blog.) Young people associated with this area, by contrast, were of the opinion that their views were being repressed by the Entrenched Powers of Old Musicology, The Man and so on, and they cited—with some justification, probably—departments that would never hire women, that were bastions of the musicological old-boy network…basically, that were everything they were trying to correct. “Balkanized” best describes the situation. Into the field blundered yours truly, trailing a DMA in Piano Performance Practices and (among other things) an interest in musical exoticism, specifically the style hongrois, the Hungarian-Gypsy style of Schubert and Brahms and many others. In some ways I came in on the ground floor, being one of the first to outline the dialect in terms of its constituent musical gestures, and to map out the sociology of “hearing Gypsies,” including Europe’s wretched treatment of Roma and the idea of using Romani musical accent, so to speak, in formal compositions as a way of getting beyond typical musical discourses of the nineteenth century. It is not hard to see how the connection between my work and New Musicology was made, but my lineage was really neither Old nor New Musicology: as a student of Leonard Ratner, I was really interested in musical styles and topics, and my interest in the style hongrois proceeded from that more than any outsider’s awareness. (I had some good models, such as Thomas Bauman—also at Stanford then—with his treatment of the “Turkish” style in his terrific Cambridge Opera volume on Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio.) The fact that I have not been very sympathetic to post-colonial musicology, which is one of the places musical exoticism led, has been cause for some pretty harsh criticism, particularly in the UK. So being lumped in with some who have—well—pilloried me leaves me a bit bemused. What this illustrates above all is the idiocy of labels, which we tend to wear much the same way mobs in banana republics wear pictures of military leaders. “I’m with the X group; don’t mess with us.” Is that really, truly, the best we can do, particularly in the intellectual realm? Today (older, and having negotiated the professional rapids to the point of being senior faculty) the labels Old Musicology and New Musicology seem a bit embarrassing, inidicative of a kind of mindless, grade-school, red-team vs. blue-team tribalism. “Old” and “New” as unavoidably values-laden adjectives is reminiscent of Liberal and Conservative. For example, as a political liberal (not so much “left” or “progressive,” really: LIBERAL) I am in a constant state of boiling rage because of the way W, Bill O’Reilly, James Dobson and other Republican Administration, Media, and Church Death-Eaters have hijacked and distorted the term. I am old enough, however, to remember when (at least in the worldview of a Eugene McCarthy-supporting 10-year-old) “Conservative” meant essentially a snaggle-toothed, 60-IQ Southerner cackling at a lynching. How different are those kinds of stereotyping and intellectual laziness, really? We’re liberals, but like most liberals I’ve known our family is conservative (whatever that means) in many ways—sociologically, educationally, economically. The labels persist nonetheless. It seems that as a species, we are hell-bent on convincing other life-forms (should they exist) that we have the mental (and moral) capabilities of plankton. Is there really no other possible model for anything than a binarism? (Guest-lecturing at Stanford, Leo Treitler once suggested, in answer to a question, that we ought to “eschew binarism,” but I’ve never noticed anyone taking him up on this point.) I hope the authors of the Wikipedia article keep me there as a New Musicologist, if they feel some of my work qualifies me for that designation. Anyone who knows me or my other writing (or my AMS-L posts or this blog) will be puzzled, probably, by that inclusion. Fact is, I would rather not fit snugly into anyone’s category of anything, preferring to sort of fit into several. I think it was LBJ who said “If two men agree on everything, only one of ’em’s doing the thinking,” and that holds true for intellectual categories; a comfortable fit makes you easy to pigeonhole. Being a rank-and-file, card-carrying member of ANYTHING should always be regarded with the greatest suspicion, because the easier your beliefs are to categorize, the easier they are to appropriate and distort.

History in its underwear

Phil Ford

Barnet Bound has a good post in response to my own from a few days ago. In the first part he thinks a bit about how parallelistic thinking* is still valuable despite whatever may be said against it, and he's right. For one thing, any kind of political or social interpretation of music would be impossible without it, and my own work would basically disappear if I were denied the ability to draw speculative lines between various nodal points within a total system of culture. To get back to my original parody post, I don't think the basic idea of reading unspoken (and perhaps unconsciously-held) social attitudes in architectural details is silly in itself. For example, the hideous McMansiony architecture I've gotten to know rather well during my time living in Austin** seems to me to encode certain social pretentions, not least the desire for a cut-rate appearance of prosperity. The odd proportions of vaulted grand foyers that are just a tad too narrow (because whatever kind of house it is, the lot it is built on is basically a tract lot) seem to me to bear mute witness to the contemporary middle-class gamble that the appearance of success will turn into success itself.

The thing is, I live here, I know these neighborhoods, and I know what it's like to live here. So while my architectural interpretation here is speculative, it's built on the kind of intimate daily experience of life in early 21st-century suburbia that some future historian of this period will have to built up painstakingly and at second hand.*** Which means that the key here is research. To avoid making specious, superficial parallels, you have to develop a feel for that fine grain of history through a lot of reading -- not just published stuff either, but the archives of people and institutions connected to your chosen field of history.

And what do you get from archival research? It's hard to put it briefly and well, but I guess I'd say that you have the feeling of being backstage at history. Reading Allen Ginsberg's Howl, for example, puts you in the audience: you're watching as Ginsberg cuts the figure of a ragged-robed Old Testament prophet of the Atomic Age, filled with apocalyptic visions of Moloch. Spend time with the Ginsberg papers, though, and you can see Ginsberg off-stage; you can more clearly measure the distance between the public persona and the private person. Reading the unpublished notebook of a depressed, stoned 25-year-old Ginsberg a few years before Howl, you see someone who looks less like an ecstatic mad-eyed shaman and more like George Costanza, pissed off at himself for being stuck in Patterson NJ and living with his Dad, underemployed, and unable to get laid. It's like wandering backstage at The Magic Flute and seeing Sarastro smoking a cigarette and playing cards. Spending time in archives gives you the chance to see history in its underwear.

Which is why you really should go and read Barnet Bound's post. He makes a point that I've often stewed over -- how few research grants are targeted specifically to Americanist research. My wife likes to tease me about how other professors' spouses get to tag along on research trips to, say, Naples or Paris, and all I have to offer is Newark NJ (home of the redoubtable Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies Archive). But beyond this, as BBound points out, "there is precious little money out there to encourage archival work in American music":

If you are doing European music, well, sometimes it seems like people are tripping over themselves to give you money. The AMS has no less than three travel grants for research outside of the United States, the Bartlet, the Wolf, and the Powers grants. At my own University, there is a travel grant for research in Europe that my colleagues regularly get, plus a grant within my department for travel which is limited to music before 1950. Plus, there are a number of interdisciplinary centers at my school which give quite a bit a support to musicologists, but are limited in spirit if not name to non-American research: centers for medieval and renaissance studies, for 17th- and 18th-century studies, and so on. And then of course there are the various federal programs like the Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, the FLAS, and so on. There are no equivalents for these Eurocentric programs, in the AMS, at my university, or in my department.

Tell it. Scholars who work on John Cage or Duke Ellington have to do the same kind of archival digging as those working on Haydn or Josquin, and it ain't cheap.

*Is this a word? No? Well, it is now!

**To all you people who think Austin is a rock'n'roll village with cute sleepy streets of tall old trees and picturesquely dilapidated bungaloes, well, it is, but only if you earn 200K a year and can afford to buy a house downtown. To everyone else, it's off to the suburbs with you, and Austin's sprawl looks like sprawl everywhere.

***Of course, what our future historian has that I don't is distance: my comments here are doubtless inflected by class prejudice (i.e., the traditional middle-class disdain for the middle class), my dislike of living in the 'burbs, and various things I'm too blinkered even to be self-aware about.

Radical Parallelism

Phil Ford

Yesterday I wrote a post about my new house in Bloomington and went off on a parody jag that took a swipe at a certain kind of America-studies writing on cold war culture. It's a faux-Adornian style I find weirdly easy to write. Thinking it over, there's a certain standard operating procedure that, once learned, is pretty easy to follow. Its basic form is (1) the fashioning of a concept abstract enough to plug equally well into phenomena on both large (geopolitical) and intimate (sex, family life, pastimes) scale, and (2) the simultaneous deployment of said concept on said phenomena, done in such a way that it is never clear what the exact causality is between those different phenomena -- whether the homologies observed across contexts are are directly related to one another, caused by some third factor, or are really only metaphoric.

OK, that's pretty abstract. Let me offer an example.  "Containment," for example, has become a way to explain pretty much everything that happened in American culture through the two decades after the end of WW II. George Kennan argued that the U.S. should limit Soviet power through the support of pro-American proxies in a worldwide American "sphere of influence"; perhaps the same logic applies equally to private life during the cold war? Thus Elaine Tyler May's well-regarded study of American gender and family dynamics in cold war America (Homeward Bound) suggests that the geopolitical logic of containment applied equally well to the place of women in suburban America:

In the domestic version of containment the "sphere of influence" was the home. Within its walls, potentially dangerous social forces of the new age might be tamed, where they could contribute to the secure and fulfilling life to which postwar men and women aspired . . . More than merely a metaphor for the cold war on the homefront, containment aptly describes the way in which public policy, personal behavior, and even political values were focused on the home.

Morris Dickstein cites this passage in his Leopards in the Temple, a book that helped inspire my own interest in cold war culture. While Dickstein concedes that "containment" fairly well describes the way conservatives treated New Deal liberalism, he insists that domestic and geopolitical containment are not parallel entities, and that this argument draws its apparent plausibility from "a verbal melding of two forms of security, two kinds of containment":

But 'containment' is a metaphor, a questionable analogy between personal and international security, the home and the world. Moreover, it suggests that the prevailing social force of the postwar years was constriction, policing, and intimidation, a sort of emotional McCarthyism. Yet for all its constraints, this was a period of unparalleled economic growth and social mobility, when the lives of many Americans changed more than they had in the previous two centuries. What containment really means is that revolutionary hopes for egalitarian social change, which flared up during the economic crises of the 1930s, died down during the prosperity that followed the war. This is another way of looking at the period through the eyes of the 1960s or through the critical lens of academic disciplines that flowed from the  sixties. It scarcely acknowledges what May herself calls 'the potentially dangerous social forces of the new age.'

This kind of nails it, I think. With all respect to May (whom I met at the Mailer symposium in November and who is a fine scholar and cool person), her style of interpretation relies on what Gerald Graff calls "radical parallelism": the habit of understanding developments in the separate spheres of culture, politics, and society as symptomatic of one another. This style of thought evolved within the sphere of 1960s radical critique, whose dashing style (and intellectual success) was owed to the habit of making bold and speculative connections between things normally considered unrelated. You might ordinarily blame the Vietnam quagmire on bad war planning or bad foreign policy, and you might blame police violations of black civil rights on racism, but the classic radical move would be to see both situations as parallel manifestations of a deeper "root cause," like, for example, sexual repression/frustration in the American white male. (This was the sort of argument Norman Mailer liked to make.)

This giddy free-form drawing of parallels between everything is actually a lot of fun. And once you get started you can just keep on going, as I found in writing my own avowedly bogus architectural hermeneutics. You can be caught up in the sheer pleasure of the intellectual exercise of drawing parallels, which is not such a bad thing, in a way, except that the patterns that emerge tend to reinforce whatever beliefs you had going in. Which is, when you think about it, the opposite of what you're supposed to be doing as a scholar. You're really not supposed to go out into the world looking for confirmation of unexamined moral, political, aesthetic beliefs, although god knows everyone does it to some extent. In the historiography of cold war America, though, the problem is that everybody (more or less) has the same monolithic image of the 1950s: Leave it to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, tailfins, sexual repression, duck-and-cover, etc. You know the drill. But 1950s culture was really far more complicated than this. Since the radical hermeneutic gymnastics I've described developed in part to explain the 1950 (and thus to explain why the 1960s had to happen), they continue to be applied to 1950s in a routine way, always discovering the same villains (consumerism, the Bomb, red scares, alienation, etc.), and always writing about them in a breathless style that manages to suggest that these completely conventional historical images are somehow shocking, that the writer has managed at last to knock over the bland Disneyland facade and show us the dark underside of the American Imperium, etc. And yet since everybody does this, as Andrew Hoberek has pointed out, there is now a kind of cold-war-studies recipe: "take a 50s text that hasn't been discussed yet, explain how it reflects an ambivalent liberalism hostile to political extremes (or designates some group as subversive, or denigrates the radical legacy of the 30s), and publish."* Which isn't the same thing as saying (as the New Criterion types do) that the 1950s were the Last Good Time in America. Joseph McCarthy was a douchebag, and his style of political demagogery was by no means unusual in its time.

But then again, it isn't so unusual in our own time now, either. Which is an interesting thought. If you want to ask, what did a repressive political climate do to American culture in the 1950s, one thing you might do is ask, what effect is it having on us right now? Would we apply the same logic to ourselves as we do routinely to Americans in the 1950s? I would suggest that we wouldn't, but since this post is already pretty long, I'll say why next week. You see, I am finally getting around to finishing the thought I began more than a month ago, in my long post on contemporary politics. (The point of which has since been amply demonstrated in Jonathan's post on Nalini Ghuman.)

*Andrew Hoberek, "Cold War Culture to Fifties Culture," The Minnesota Review: A Journal of Committed Writing 55-57 (2002): 146.

Narcosis

Phil Ford

Another post on the EMP pop conference. The stated theme for this year was "waking up from history," but during the New Orleans panel, someone (Ned Sublette, maybe?) commented that it might just as well be waking up to history. Which got me thinking . . .

Marshall McLuhan argued that when media reach inside our skulls and scramble our wires, we (unconsciously) insulate ourselves from the resulting disorientation with a self-protective stupor he called the "narcissus narcosis": we see only the things the media show us, not the media themselves. Maybe there's an analogous phenomenon in history, a historical narcosis. Maybe it takes massive cataclysms like Katrina to wake us from a narcosis that protects us from a certain kind of historical self-awareness, an awareness of ourselves as creatures in moving through, and subject to, history.

Historical narration -- telling the story of a life in a way that subordinates that life to a larger chronological pattern -- is something we're more comfortable doing to other people. Sartre once wrote that this mode of narration is almost insultingly inapposite to any recounting of our own experiences. He tries to describe a meeting with a friend in the style of American newspaper reportage: "And they ordered two beers and said that war was hateful. Paul declared he would rather do anything than fight and Jean said he agreed with him and both got excited and said they were glad they agreed. On his way home, Paul decided to see Jean more often." Sartre points out that such a mode of narration contains a degree of irony that we would almost invariably feel uncomfortable applying to our own circumstances. "It will not take you long, however, to decide that you cannot use this tone in talking about yourself. However insincere you may have been, you were at least living out your insincerity, playing it out on your own, continuously creating and extending its existence from one moment to the next. And even if you got caught up in collective representations, you had first to experience them as personal resignation. We are neither mechanical objects nor possessed souls, but something worse: we are free."* It's worth noting that the awe-inspiring testicularity of Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night consists in applying this narrative tone to himself for an entire book. Giuseppe Verdi was fond of writing historical operas whose drama comes from characters who are nailed to the cross of history, but none of those characters was ever named "Giuseppe Verdi."

"Waking up from history" means waking up from a different kind of narcosis. Music, more maybe than any art form, can evoke moments of our own lives. I posted a video of Robert Fripp doing an attenuated version of Frippertronics, and I can't pretend there's any academic detachment in my attitude toward this clip. I just straight-up love this music, and one whiff of it sends me back in time, and I'm 16 and listening to Let The Power Fall and The League of Gentlemen on my clunky second-generation Walkman as I walk through the Northern Ontario woods that shouldered up to the edges of the neighborhood I grew up in, thirty degrees below zero and the night sky an impossible blind black and stars impossibly bright. And what is true for me (and for each one of you, for you all too have your own musical madeleines) is true for songs and their relationship to shared history as well. Music sticks to history just as history sticks to music. A song like, say, Gil Scott-Heron's No Knock seems to demand that we hear its time in the fine grain of its sound. But "waking up from history" means waking up from the narcosis, realizing that music casts a spell: the illusion that music can bring you back to the very naked instant of the history that made it. So there was a thread of melancholy and loss running throughout the EMP pop conference. My own paper was about this melancholy, this sense of loss; but the contributions of Joshua Corning, Sasha Frere-Jones, Jonathan Lethem, Ned Sublette, and Charles Tonderai Mudede all spoke of it. They spoke of how music gives form to impossible objects of desire: resistance, revolution, authenticity, utopia, history itself. But when the record ends and it all vanishes, all we're left with is ourselves.

Then "waking up to history" means, maybe, shaking off this melancholy and finding ourselves in a harder, more dire state, finally seeing ourselves as figures within history. I've mentioned J&B on the Rox before, but didn't say that in recent years the tone of the show -- which J and B still make, on occasion -- has darkened. Bart moved to New Orleans with his wife, and Katrina washed them out like everyone else. The most recent episode of Rox is actually a homemade documentary of post-Katrina recovery. Watch it. Quite by chance I ended up drinking in the hotel bar with Alex Rawls, a music journalist on the New Orleans panel. I told him about Bart's documentary and about how I'm trying to understand what it must be like to be done to rather than doing, a subject of history and not, as we might like to imagine, observers of it, or even (maybe in our egotistical hearts) its masters. Historical self-awareness is a kind of awareness that we, comfortable people that we are, have the luxury to avoid. I didn't put it like that, though. Mostly I said I thought that everything I had seen about New Orleans after Katrina suggested that life there was screwed up in a way that defied easy representation. No, I didn't quite say that, either. What I said was platitudinous, because talking to someone who lived through Katrina is like talking to someone who's been to war or lost a child. What the fuck can you say? You didn't experience it, so you don't know. He was nice about it, but he did agree, gently, yeah, you can't know. He spoke like someone who's been to that other side where things get dire, when you find youself a subject in history.

I'll be honest: before Katrina, I never thought that much about New Orleans. But of all the afflictions that have been visited upon this country in the past few years, Katrina seems in some ways the worst. As the New Orleans panelists noted, if you tell someone from New Orleans that Katrina was a "natural disaster," you've got a fight on your hands. Living in New Orleans means experiencing an infinite variety of official incompetence and neglect -- neglect as an instrument of social policy. You get the sense that certain political types are almost relieved: now that New Orleans has been destroyed, here's our chance to make it more like Provo. The New Orleans panel tried to show how much Katrina is a cultural disaster as well as an environmental, civic, and economic one. Read Larry Blumenfeld's Village Voice article on Nola's cultural recovery. (Blumenfeld was one of the EMP panelists.) The New Orleans police have jacked up their security fee for second-line parades in New Orleans, which threatens to tax this cultural institution into extinction. At least this is how the ACLU is arguing it in their lawsuit on behalf of the the Nine Times Social Aid and Pleasure Club. ACLU lawyer Katie Schwartzmann points out that "At some point . . . the power to tax is the power to eliminate, right? At some point, if the government can put enough fees and enough obstacles in the way of somebody exercising their First Amendment right, then they're ultimately going to eliminate it."

*Jean-Paul Sartre, "John Dos Passos and '1919,'" in Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (London: Hutchinson, 1955), 93.

The Hackistocracy

Phil Ford

First, read this.

A couple of little news items that have stuck in my mind in the past few days:

1. Walter F. Murphy, a Princeton poli sci professor and former Marine colonel, found himself on a no-fly list while traveling to an academic conference:

"I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. "That'll do it," the man said. "

As they say, read the whole thing. Since this has been out there for a few days without anyone disputing it in any major way, I'll assume this is for real.

2. A couple of weeks ago Lurita Doan, the head of the GSA -- one of those dull government agencies that, in other times, we had the luxury of not having to think about -- got in hot water for having held a meeting during which Karl Rove outlined a strategy for defeating house Democrats in the 2008 elections. This would be a violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits civil servants using their offices for partisan ends, and in any event would be yet another example of the Bush administration sleazily attempting to co-opt a part of the government that presidential administrations formerly left alone. Rep. Bruce Braley grilled Doan and showed her slides from Rove's PowerPoint presentation. Her answers induce something akin to the existentialist notion of nausea -- a kind of hermeneutic nausea, a sense of the yawning chasm that can open up between two people who live in the same society and speak the same language and yet somehow can agree on none of the epistemological warrants that underlie the language they share. For example (at about 3:25 into the Youtube video):

Braley: (After showing a PowerPoint slide, titled "2008 House Targets: Top 20", listing electoral information on 20 vulnerable Democrat-held congressional seats) You would agree that a reasonable interpretation of this slide is that it was a political attempt to try to target the top twenty democratic candidates for defeat in 2008?

Doan: No I would not say that, I would say that this is a slide that says "2008 House Targets: Top 20" -- I do not want to try to speculate on what was intended by Mr. Jennings on this slide . . ."

You have to admire the hermeneutic radicalism of this response, although it's also possible, just possible, that she knows what the slide means and is trying to evade responsibility for breaking the law. Who knows? What is truth, anyway?

Here's a useful word for you: kakistocracy, meaning "rule of the worst." Here is my fun new coinage: hackistocracy, rule by a cabal of venal, self-dealing, cynical, sanctimonious, lying, bumbling, bullying hacks.

The thing is, these are hardly the worst things I could have used to condemn this presidential administration, this political culture, this low, lying, contemptible age in which we live. These examples are interesting precisely because they're sort of normal. Another day, another lying hack scuttling for cover after being flushed out from under her rock. Another day, another American targeted by some shadowy, unaccountable extra-judicial mechanism, profiled as an internal enemy, and subjected to petty harassment. Assuming that everything happened just as it was described, the most interesting detail is the clerk's tone of friendly professional assessment. Lesse, attend any peace marches? No? Oh, you said something bad about Bush. There's your problem! It's just sort of normal, a puzzling anomaly to be figured out, like when a supermarket scanner says your bag of peas will cost $15. Is anyone taking to the streets over this? Well, maybe some are, but the point is, nothing appears outrageous enough to warrant it anymore.

I mean, let's do a thought experiment and imagine that we found out that, oh, I don't know, just for a crazy hypothetical parallel-universe example, the US government was holding prisoners indefinitely without charges in secret prisons and subjecting them to torture. Perhaps there was once a time when the phenomenology of such a revelation, an essential aspect of how it comes into world, would necessarily entail spontaneous mass outrage. In a free and democratic nation, torture and secret prisons are inherently outrageous: they exist as boundaries to our very identity, telling us what we are not. But if this was ever true before, it surely isn't now. When outrage at torture and secret jails is simply another political opinion, all the lesser abuses this government heaps on its citizens will appear, too, as things about which reasonable people may differ. On a much more modest scale, the revelation, in the course of your workaday life, that a decorated war veteran and eminent professor was put on a terror watch list for delivering a speech critical of the President, should also automatically come into the world with a shock, with the sound of rending and tearing, a sense that a hole has opened up in your moral understanding of the world in which you live. But after Abu Ghraib, it doesn't. It's just One Of Those Things.

This, I think, is the hallmark the age in which we live, rather than the more straightforward notion of "crushing dissent." I mean, here I am, dissenting, on this blog. The hallmark of our age is the way in which state authority treats dissent -- and speech and expression in general -- with total contempt. It is the way speech and expression have been systematically devalued, by intention and by neglect, by example and by precept, within all spheres of public discourse. I have offered two small example, though one could multiply them endlessly. There is, of course, the cruder kind of state imposition on speech, like the FBI rounding people who kind of look like they might be anarchists. There is the eerie, creeping feeling that settles into your life as you come to realize that you can no longer assume your telephone conversations are private. There is the daily drumbeat of propaganda words, of "surges" and "mixed messages" and "cultures of life" and "extraordinary renditions," etc. And from here flows a more abstract and pervasive debasement of thought and speech, a sense that personal expression counts for nothing; power, everything. Speech matters only in the service of power, and it ends up with no autonomous features, no identity apart from the power to which it is harnessed.

It's time to dust off George Orwell's Politics and the English Language. Academic player-haters like Louis Menand and Stanley Fish might snark at this essay, but Orwell's point still stands:

In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

I don't like writing about politics, though that's not to say I don't have political opinions. I dislike writing about politics for political reasons, if that makes any sense. As I've said elsewhere, I like to describe myself as an anarchist with a mortgage, which means I'm a small-l libertarian, or, if you like, a minarchist. Like Orwell, I believe that politics is "a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia." To be sure, I'm fascinated by politics, but the way an oncologist is fascinated by cancer: politics may be fascinating, but, at the end of the day, it is a force of destruction. For me, power (and politics, which is the systematic administration of power) -- is, like the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings,  inherently evil. Until Frodo came along no hero, however well-intentioned, ever got up the nerve to destroy it, or even renounce it, because he always convinced himself that its great power could be turned to a good end. But of course that never happens; the power of the Ring always perverts those who use it, whatever their intentions. The only way to deal with the Ring is to throw it away. 

So I think it would be a good idea to throw away the Ring, or at least to renounce the notion that I, an intellectual-type person, can make the world a better place as an old-school mandarin Public Intellectual, making lofty ex cathedra statements that the Little People ought to heed. I do not believe that politics would be better if people like me were in control; I only believe things would be better if no-one was in control. No-one, that is, except individuals, making decisions about their own lives. So I believe in those things that minimize the power of politics in people's lives, in personal choice and self-government, in the basic right of people to make decisions about their own lives. Which means, among other things, that I resent blowhards who insist that there is no outside of politics, you have to take a stand, you're either part of the problem of part of the solution, you're either with us or against us, etc. And if you're with us, get in line and start marching. This is why I don't like to write about politics. It is the birthright of every individual not to give a damn about politics -- either my politics or anyone else's. As much as I despise the hackistocracy, even more I despise the idea of turning my blog into its negative image, a hectoring, whinging polemic delivered to people whose assent is extorted by the moral force of "community."

But at the same time it is true that, as Orwell wrote, there is no keeping out of politics. My defense of your right to not give a damn about politics is itself political. And, to continue my politics-as-cancer metaphor,no-one decides to get cancer. Cancer gets you. Likewise politics: this age is marked above all by the politicization of everything, the metastasizing of politics into ever nook and cranny of our lives. This lies at the bottom of the present-day debasement of speech and expression, and anyone who writes about present-day culture has to reckon with this fact.

So what is the experience of living in this culture? How would we tell this story in hindsight? Are these rather abstract things I've ranted about at the front of my mind when I have a drink with my wife at the end of the day, or when I go to a concert, or when I read a book? Are they at the back of my mind? Are they anywhere? What, in short, is the intersection of public and private life? Imagine a future historian writing a cultural history of American in the years immediately after 9/11/2001. What would that look like? More later.