Dial "M" for Musicology

Consciousness

There was a young man who said "though

it seems that I know that I know, 

what I would like to see 

is the I that knows me 

when I know that I know that I know."

--Alan Watts (I think)

Today in my seminar we're talking about Kevin Korsyn's Decentering Music, many of whose arguments issue from a widespread assumption within cultural studies: that the notion of the centered self, the independent and self-willed self, is an illusion. Many of those arguments follow from psychoanalytic or semiotic arguments, some of them formidably abstract. As a grad student I always had a hard time quite imagining what such a notion could really mean: I'm, like, not me? If I'm not me, then what am I? What might the alternatives be? 

So anyway, everyone in my seminar has been writing questions for up to cogitate upon leading up to today's class. This was my contribution:

In the passage of pp. 42-46 (and elsewhere), Korsyn maintains that the conception of the individual self as developed in the post-enlightenment West, the self of the Cartesian "cogito ergo sum", is a historically- and culturally-specific invention (i.e., not something that is natural and universal), and cannot therefore serve as the basis for anything that might describe itself as a non-ideological, "objective" study of music. So, in a nutshell, your notion of yourself as a separate, bounded, rational individual, a subject who works on an array of objects "out there" in the objective world -- your ego, in other words -- is an illusion. 

OK, we've heard all this before. Now, the question: using only terms and examples drawn from your own experience, and without appealing to philosophy or cultural theory, can you make this understanding of the self plausible?

So, just throwing that out there. What would you all say? I ask the question because (a) the problem of individual identity is such a universal one in contemporary humanities thought, and (b) the point is seldom argued in any but the most abstract way. Usually we just get appeals to the authority of Lacan or Derrida or whomever. But is it something we can experience? If so, what is that experience? I'm not asking that rhetorically. I think the question of the self is real, not just an airy-fairy pseudo-question dreamed up by bored humanities professors who have run out of real things to talk about. But I'm impatient with any purely abstract statement or explanation, and cultural theory, if it is to amount to anything more than some glass-bead game of shuffling abstract concepts around in some airless realm hermetically sealed from human life, should be able to throw light on things that happen to us in our lives. If it doesn't, then what's the point? 

(Well, I suppose you could argue, a la Milton Babbitt, that then it would be like pure mathematics, where theorems are valuable for their intrinsic beauty rather than their practical applicability to life, though that would be a strangely formalistic argument for a cultural-theory practitioner to make.)  

Thinking with the ear

I'm continuing to work on some of the thoughts I started writing about the other day. Thanks to everyone who responded -- the comments are so good it will take me many blog posts to get through all the questions they raise. And there have been a few blog posts in response: look here, here, here, and here. 

Last time I wrote about performance as a series of deliberative acts vs. performance in a "flow state" and thought about what understanding of self and volition these two states entail. It got me thinking about an old friend -- let's call him Chuck -- who was a music undergrad at the same time as me and with whom I played a little chamber music. This guy was one of the smartest people I've ever met in my life, a sponge for languages, ideas, literatures, whole fields of endeavor. His intellectual restlessness manifested itself in his approach to music; he was a seriously deliberative musician. When we played together, he would plan out everything that would happen in every phrase, every little pause and inflection worked out along the axis of a carefully-prepared analysis. And I, being at that time convinced that such an analytical orientation was indispensable for proper interpretation, went right along. I enjoyed the crossword-puzzle aspect of our rehearsals, the satisfying feeling of figuring out and verbalizing what he and I were to do at any given moment of the piece. But Chuck's playing never lost a certain stiffness, a certain lack of organic cohesion—everything he played sounded as if it were made out of Tinkertoys. And it never really grew past a certain point, as Chuck admitted himself, which is why he ended up doing something else with his life (and meeting with a great deal of success). 

I'd go so far as to say that those musicians like Chuck, musicians who think of performance as a highly deliberative act, are at a disadvantage. I've written before about my experiences studying piano with Michel Block, the result of which has been (among other things) a conviction that the duality between "form" and "content" (or style/substance, surface/depth, etc.) is an illusion. But he also got me past another conceptual blockage: the notion that piano playing can or should be a largely "intellectual," deliberative practice in which one applies analytical insights to the music one performs. This is a kind of dualism, too, because it entails an extreme concentration on critical consciousness and an associated separation from one's performance. One conceives of one's body as if it were a car and the self were a separate thing driving it. The body is unruly and must be disciplined; you can't just play a piece of music any old way your body might want to -- what would Beethoven say? You have to honor his intentions! And this of course entails having intentions of your own, which you enforce on your playing. But when you do that you are always outside of yourself, unintegrated, not flowing. 

This was the main problem with my own playing before I started working with Block: my playing was "ticky ticky," as Block liked to say. Re-learning to play the piano at about age 20, I had to lose this sense of an imperial ego that was controlling everything and learn to play selflessly. I spent a summer playing very simple things -- the kinds of things that had always given me trouble. Another teacher of mine, James Tocco, once remarked that I played better when the music was complex and worse when it wasn't. I didn't know what to do in a simple lyrical piece. If the form offered no real difficulties (just a typical character-piece ABA shape), if the texture was just uncluttered melody-and-accompaniment, if the point was just to project a singing melody, I was unstrung by the overtness of it all. I wanted to make a statement, send a message, and the simplicity of this kind of music frustrated that desire. My big realization after spending a summer playing such pieces was a variation on Samuel Goldwyn's "if you want to send a message, call Western Union." There's a kind of practice where you don't think about what you're playing, you listen to it -- that's all, just listening. You're making discriminations, but they're different from rational, intentional discriminations. It's sort of like when you hang a picture and step back and look to see if it's straight. You're not thinking in the usual way, and not just zoning out, either (the worst kind of playing, automatic-pilot zombie mode) -- you're thinking with the ear. Another dualism, between the mind and the senses, collapses. 

As a teacher, Block was famously mercurial and eccentric, given to obscurities of speech and action in lessons. I was thrown by this at first. I would come in and play some simple songful piece Bloch had asked me to play and he would say or do something very obscure -- suddenly going on about Barbra Streisand, or saying "ticky ticky" (and nothing else), or playing the left hand of the piece while poking out the right hand melody with a pencil eraser. What he wasn't doing was saying play this part a little faster, or a little quieter, or with a little more pedal, or whatever. His teaching was deictic -- a process of "direct pointing," as those who practice Zen think of it. The reality of sound is not found in verbalized concepts, but only in itself. So if the reality of sound in itself, beyond or prior to all concepts, is what you're after (or what you want your student to grasp), you can't talk about it -- you can only point. 

That "reality of sound in itself" thing is the hard part, isn't it? It's the point where we become aware of the extreme limitations of language. Recent scholarly thinking on "presence" (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht), "the drastic" (Carolyn Abbate), and "performativity" (you name it) and so on are ways of redescribing the same phenomenon—the simple mute thereness of actuality, what Buddhists call "tathata." It's not for nothing that one of the links to my earlier post connected my ruminations to Buddhism. Indeed, many of these thoughts, though gestating a long time within my work as a humanities scholar, appear to take on a new significance in the light of Buddhist thought, and Zen in particular, which I have been thinking a lot about lately. Music throws a light on Zen, and vice versa. This is perhaps fodder for some future blog post.

No one understands you

Following up on my last post:

When I was at Stanford, doing research at the Hoover Institution archive (a bottomless well of ephemera related to exotic and untenable political opinions), I was looking into the late-1960s/early 1970s historical moment in which countercultural notions of revolution seemed kinda-sorta plausible. On of the things I found in the New Left collection was a digest of the "underground press" called Source Catalogue Communications. It listed publications (some of them profoundly obscure) in order of affinity group -- black liberationist, women's liberationist, gay, Chicano, etc. One of the categories was "high school movement." Did you know there was a radical high school student movement analogous to the collegiate SDS? No? That's because there wasn't one. Not really, anyway -- at least nothing much beyond a few wildly self-dramatizing high-school publications that lasted one or two issues before disappearing (presumably after a stern lecture from Dad in the family den). But a "radical high school movement" could be posited in advance of any such movement actually materializing because it made sense to imagine that very young people would form an autonomous and radical political consciousness. This was the logical extension of an already well-entrenched habit of New Left thought. 

One thing the New Left borrowed from Marxism was a particular mechanism of radical critique. George Orwell somewhere writes of how the animals in Animal Farm develop a Marxist-style critique of human power: from the point of view of the animals, the class lines that divided men were really only illusions, symptomatic of transient and shallow eddies in the world current. Men might fight among themselves, but when faced with revolutionary animals they would unite against a common enemy. Thus it could be proven, in proper dialectical fashion, that the mechanics of class struggle are secondary to the true engine of world oppression, the domination of animals by humans. This is a parody of Marx's critique of the bourgeoisie: they only seemed to favor universal rights in opposition to the hereditary power of the landed classes, but when faced with proletarian revolution they would show their true colors and band together with their erstwhile enemies. Marxist critique then could argue that it got at a more fundamental truth than any of its competitors -- than, for example, the ideas associated with liberal politics. It was a style of critique that knocked the legs out from under its competitors by asserting a kind of radical consciousness that sees things at a deeper level.

This critique played out in the New Left, but in an increasingly fractured way. At the beginning of the sixties it is a critique leveled against liberals in a civil-rights context: northern liberals appear to oppose southern reactionaries, but in reality both are united in their opposition to black people. African Americans, then, had a consciousness of their own condition that liberals and reactionaries alike did not have -- a privileged consciousness of oppression. At about the same time, though, the young -- meaning the collegiate youth who made up the SDS -- started to think of youth as a category similarly left out of the consensus and with a similarly unique consciousness. And from here any number of groups could posit their own radical consciousness, each marginalized by all the others: Native Americans, women, gay people, Chicano/as, poor whites, etc. But no-one could agree any more on which radical consciousness was more foundational than any other -- or, to put it more crudely, who was the most oppressed. And as a result the New Left split into mutually uncomprehending groupuscles, and the vision of a grand unified movement of the Left faded in the early 1970s.  

One little line from Source Catalogue Communications underscores this point. It is a quote from Our Time Is Now, a publication of the “high school movement” that “explains that high school students are forming their own consciousness, and shouldn’t be treated (by SDS organizers or anybody else) as embryonic college students.” This was in 1970: whoever wrote was simply rehearsing a well-worn trope. By then, any New Left groupuscule could claim its own radical awareness, whose particularity and un-co-optedness would be jealously guarded. The thinking goes, We're young, but we're not college students. We are oppressed in ways that college students can't even begin to understand. As the more-oppressed we claim the right to have our own institutions, our own underground papers, our own movement, uncontaminated by college students. The pocket-sized radical consciousnesses claimed by the “high school student movement” foreshadows the similar factionalization of identity politics circa 1992. 

And it was as self-defeating in the 1970s as it would be in the 1990s, because once one claimed unique perspective as a warrant for one’s own group one had made an epistemological end-run. One had staked a claim to radical consciousness and said (in effect) shut up and listen, now, to this new voice of conscience; we have been silenced by you for too long. But while this rhetoric is powerful -- it gets people to shut up, at least -- it removes the theoretical possibility of real communication. If you assert the consciousness of oppression that privileges your voice as uniquely yours, on what basis could anyone understand you? And how then would anyone care about your oppression? Francis Davis once wrote about the free-jazz/poetry/political rantfests he remembers from the early 1970s, “the confusing gist of which was likely to be that only blacks were culturally equipped to understand jazz and white people ought to be ashamed of themselves for not supporting it in greater numbers.” And this is the same habit of mind one finds among hipsters of all stripes, who resent uncool outsiders and at the same time resent the cultural "mainstream" that doesn't understand their music. This is why hipsterism is ultimately self-defeating.

All of this is to illustrate what I wrote about more abstractly in the previous post: we understand people when we assume that they share enough of our experience and way of thinking -- that their minds are something like ours. This isn't the same thing as saying that people are exactly like us, or that people will always be as rational as we ourselves are. It is just to say that when you set yourself up on a hermeneutic pedestal, placing yourself above your interlocutors, you won't have a conversation. Classical performers are constantly enjoined to do this, but for the opposite reason: we're supposed to act as if we are puny vermin unworthy of lacing Beethoven's boots and put him on the pedestal. But the effect is the same -- no conversation, no interpretation. 

Bach is an ass

Jonathan's nifty post about a fallacy in search of a name -- the bad habit of extrapolating from one's own psychology to, say, Mozart's -- has drawn approving comment. There's a certain kind of music person who likes to issue annoyingly presumptuous statements about major composers -- as if someone like Brahms is a schoolboy on whom they are issuing an end-of-term report. Such persons have an unspoken assumption of familiarity with the elders, an assumption that Brahms or Mahler or whomever is a peer with whom they may join in learned colloquy and sometimes (more in sorrow than anger) bring to account for their failings. Byron Almen and I knew an irritating composer at IU back when we were piano students who was especially prone to this sort of talk -- for almost 20 years we've had a running joke about it, sometimes yelling "Bach is an ass!" at parties. (See, it makes you sound sophisticated.)

But Jonathan craftily sprang a trap towards the end of his post:

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?

And here we suddenly find ourselves in deep waters, because while it's fun (indeed necessary) to poke fun of the "Bach is an ass" guy, does his error lies in his presumption that he and Bach are the same sort of people and could therefore understand one another? Such an assumption underlies an entire tradition of hermeneutic philosophy wherein an interpretation, whether by a scholar or a performer, is a (virtual) conversation with an (absent) interlocutor. To continue Jonathan's example: the latter day scholar, armed with a certain first-hand knowledge of improvisation, seeks to extrapolate from that knowledge and understand something of Chopin's improvisatory practice. It goes without saying that Chopin and the latter-day scholar (LDS) have never met. And yet the LDS is asking Chopin* questions, and Chopin is supplying answers; in his scholarly practice, the LDS is creating a heuristic Chopin he can bounce ideas off, and if he's keeping it real (being an honest scholar and not just turning Chopin into his sock puppet) the answers he's getting back are sometimes unexpected. You might object at this point that this is only a self-indulgent fantasy, since Chopin never had any idea that some guy named Jonathan Bellman would be writing about him one day. And yet, as Elisabeth Le Guin points out in Boccherini's Body (online excerpt here), her groundbreaking study of performative interpretation, there *is* a degree of reciprocity in this hermeneutic relationship. 

Yet I do claim it as reciprocal. My role constitutes itself as follows: as living performer of Boccherini’s sonata, a work which he wrote for himself to play, I am aware of acting the connection between parts of someone who cannot be here in the flesh. I have become, not just his hands, but his binding agent, the continuity, the consciousness; it is only a step over from the work of maintaining my own person as some kind of unitary thing, the necessary daily fiction of establishing and keeping a hold on identity: different perhaps in urgency and accuracy, but not, I think, in kind. As this composer’s agent in performance, I do in this wise become him, in much the same manner as I become myself. My experience of becoming him is grounded in and expressed through the medium of the tactile.

As a performer, she finds a version of herself in the music she plays -- "that which is supposed in the voice of the executant," in a phrase borrowed from Rousseau's Dictionnaire de Musique. And perhaps what goes for performers goes also for scholars, or indeed any kind of interpreter. I make an utterance in the expectation that it will be understood, and, so doing, I envision (or at least have an enabling tacit background assumption about) the kind of person who will understand that utterance. In speaking, I am positing a speaker, and in interpreting, my interlocutor (whether physically present to me or not) is entering that role. Donald Davidson, one of the most important philosophers to carry on this line of thinking, has argued that this is a basic, non-negotiable aspect of all communication. If you cannot assume that your interlocutor (real or virtual) shares the same basic habits of mind and standards of rationality as you, then there is no basis for any kind of interpretation at all. "If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behavior of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our own standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything at all." (Davidson, "Radical Interpretation," in Truth and Interpretation, 137.)

In answer to Jonathan's question -- How can any of us be sure how people's minds worked?  Particularly people whose minds are better than ours, by many parsecs? -- we may not ever be sure, but we have to proceed from the assumption that other minds work basically the same way as ours. We don't have any choice, because the alternative is to say nothing at all. 

*or what there is left of Chopin, which means the scores, letters, second-hand accounts, and so on.

Torture and the Angel of History

Most of the discourse on music and torture has been about the use of music in torture, the most distinguished example being Suzanne Cusick’s JSAM essay, though I might also mention my own blog debate on the subject with Jonathan Bellman and the public discussion that followed the Society for Ethnomusicology’s statement against torture. But today I want to talk about the moral fact of torture—its terrible distinction as the final frontier of human degradation—and how we might use music and sound to mark our crossing into that frontier. When torture appears in our civic life, something final and irrevocable has happened, and the moral fact of torture falls with a thud on our collective consciousness. If Norman Mailer were still alive, he would doubtless call this situation existential: it is a moment that defines both torturer and tortured forever after, and in that moment, when a nation decides to “go there,” to pull that trigger, it is an act of existential will. This says nothing about the morality of the choice, merely that a choice has been made, and that we have signed up for the consequences, though no-one may know what they will be in the end. Quickly, then: I want to think about moments where state violence registers itself on the consciousness of a society, and how such moments might be depicted.

One of the peculiar features of the GWOT era has been the redefinition of torture as the “new normal.” What the Bush administration has done above all has been to move the goalposts of discourse, so that being in favor of torture has become a permissible—indeed, at times mandatory—opinion on the conduct of war. Torture has gone from being something against which we define our national identity to being something on which reasonable people might disagree. And under such circumstances the question of what intellectuals can do about torture finds one answer: they can preserve or build or simply inhabit a view of civilization to which torture can never be assimilated. And in their imaginative work they can depict a civilization that does come to accept torture as finding itself in some new, unknown, incommensurate state from which there may be no return. And this is what Suzanne Cusick’s JSAM essay does when she writes that torture is a “condition of sin”—a sin of self-betrayal—which leaves no-one untouched: “resistance to it, once the dynamic is engaged, is futile for interrogators, detainees, commanders, and citizens alike.”

And in a certain way this is also the approach of the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, although I want to be careful not to assimilate that film’s Marxist view of history too much to my own bourgeois humanism. Franco Solinas, a Marxist writer who collaborated with Gillo Pontecorvo on The Battle of Algiers, would probably have thought my own attitude a typical bit of humanist sanctimony. The Battle of Algiers shows how the French government crushed the Algierian FLN (Front de Liberation National) with a campaign of torture and murder; Solinas singled out France because it was “at the same time a colonial power and the most representative example of the bourgeoisie, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution. Politically she posed a contradiction between the slogans, phrases, rhetoric—in other words, the form of the bourgeois revolution—and its contents—the everyday practice of domination, oppression, torture.” The torture regime, then, is not an aberration from the ideals of liberal society, but a fulfillment of them. Thus Solinas wishes to show torture merely as a symptom of the pervasive rottenness of colonialism, and refuses to scold the French for torture as such. He makes the career soldier who institutes the torture regime, Col. Matthieu, an elegant, witty, reasonable, and intelligent interlocutor—indeed, radicals in the 1960s often debated whether he wasn’t just as little too sympathetic. Col. Matthieu embodies France and incarnates the force of a liberal state pushed by an opposing historical force to manifest its latent violence. From this point of view, neither the French nor the Algierians (who also commit atrocities) are doing evil: they are simply working through the historical dynamic by which decolonization proceeds.

There is something very cold about Solinas’s analysis: torture is simply a byproduct of capital-H “History,” which means that the broken and mutilated bodies of tortured men are simply the trampled debris left behind by the march of the world spirit. (A view ironically similar to that of the Bush administration’s foreign policy.)* Though it must be said that despite its chilly dialectics the film itself does not minimize suffering—quite the contrary. In one famous scene unnamed Algierians are tortured (in several cases with techniques used by American personnel in the GWOT), their screams silenced on the soundtrack and with Ennio Morricone’s chorale-prelude-like dirge as their only accompaniment. A woman watches silently, tears streaming down her face, and she is the film’s proxy for the viewer. And the music articulates our moral response to what we see as well, and not only in this scene. (In the film’s first scene, for example, a man whom the French have broken has just betrayed the film’s Algierian heroes, and as he comprehends his own betrayal we hear a strain of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.) The music is the thud with which the moral fact of torture is registered on our conscience. It marks the bright line between the present moment and what just happened, a line we have crossed in an act of existential will. What just happened may be the logical next step of history, but it is still an enormity. The extreme dissonance between Bachian music and torture reframes what we see within a point of view far outside the action; I think it is meant to be the point of view of History itself. I never had any idea of what Walter Benjamin’s famous meditation on the “angel of history” meant until it occurred to me that we see in these scenes what the angel of history sees, but what we hear is how he sees it:

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. When we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

*Thomas Ricks' comparison to Bush and Jerry Rubin is weirdly apt here: “They really were going to, kind of, ‘groove on the rubble,’ as Jerry Rubin used to say. They were going to tear it down and see what happened.”

Zen Friday

I got nothing. And now I embrace the nothingness and discover the nothing that nothings eternally.

Hey, that sounds a little like Ken Nordine! Man, I love Nordine. He is, with the possible exception of Fred Astaire, the illest motherf*&^er in human history. 

So what happens when you put Fred Astaire and Ken Nordine together?

TEH COP SHOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"My Baby" was a number from Nordine's 1957 Word Jazz, which has been rereleased, along with the other original "word jazz" albums, in a reissue anthology called You're Getting Better: The Complete Word Jazz Dot Masters. One of my favorite tracks on it is a number called "Charlie Zen," which is Nordine's outer-space prose-poetry accompanied only by a gong of unearthly resonance. It's a bonus cut for the anthology, apparently recorded for one of the original albums but left unreleased until now. Here's a taste.

Yes, I know, very Dharma Bums, very 1950s-hipster/1990s-New-Age, this thing for Zen. But still. Someone somewhere should write a cultural history of Zen in America; a lot of interesting Zen-influenced art has been made here in the last fifty years. And Zen notions are interesting, and, even to my rather religion-averse self, satisfying to contemplate, though I admit I know very little beyond Alan Watts' book The Way of Zen. Watts is probably single-handedly responsible for much of the enthusiasm for Zen in the West. Watts was a wonderful writer and talker, very good at making abstract things concrete, which has earned him a certain amount of suspicion from those who like their mysticism mystical. Among other things, he wrote a very sharp-eyed piece on the hip embrace of Zen in the 1950s, titled "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen" -- one of the best things written on the Beats in the 1950s.

Jonathan and I had a little punch-up over American popular culture this week, with me digging the Usbybay Urkleybay and Jonathan hatin' (or at least dissentin'). I wrote a comment to Jonathan's post where I came up with what I think is a new hypothesis in American popular culture: we might call it Theory of Pop Culture Complementarity. You can't have just the smart without the dumb, the tasteful without the vulgar, Jon Stewart without Paula Abdul. They are necessary to one another: what pop giveth, pop taketh away, and vice versa. Dumb pop culture gives you the hermeneutic tools to take it apart, which transforms it into smart pop culture. And vice versa. For years we've been hearing tirades against South Park—it's vicious, crude, foul, and wrong, etc. (You say that like it's a bad thing!) And guess what the South Park guys are doing now? Making gentle, intelligent cartoons to the Zen teachings of Alan Watts. Here are a couple, the first of which is called "Life and Music," the second "Prickles and Goo."

There are more at Soul Jerky, where I found these clips. Watts loved music, and I like how he so often resorted to musical metaphors in talking about Zen. Have a good weekend.

Music Blogging as Torture

Phil chides me for my long (1074-word) blog of August 21—in which I took issue with a certain glib fatuousness in musicological discussions of torture, and a certain lame, head-in-the-sand do-goodism in academics’ responses to such things—and he takes (no lie) 1067 words to do so.  Moreover, he begins with “Then we agree! End of debate.” and concludes with “So I take it back, I don’t suggest that the AMS draft a position against torture, because, hey, I don't want to put people through that kind of nonsense.”  So the purpose of these 1067 words, it seems, is in the sentence that follows: “I do, however, think that I, and Suzanne Cusick, and every other academic and intellectual, can do something useful by writing about torture, and that it’s not just posturing.” 

I’ll address that in a moment.  But first, Chris Molla’s comment to my blog likewise pulls no punches:

“Jonathan falls into the trap of conflating the imposition of one person’s taste or aesthetic upon another person with the actual technique of subjecting a prisoner to hours-long sessions of exposure to music at extreme high volumes.”  And then: “This is just the sort of ignorant double-think that cripples efforts to generate any kind of general awareness of the nature and consequences of torture (not only for the victims, but for society at large).”

My comment was: “Given its existence, though, I think I am willing to go on record as preferring the use of music as a torture implement to physical injury or physical or moral degradation.”  The instance Chris quoted from someone else’s Vanity Fair article clearly qualifies as “physical or moral degradation.”  That isn’t music; it is sonic torture, or just torture.  To act as if  “music” is relevant in this discussion is like suggesting that the only differences between a caress and being beaten to a pulp are gradations of intensity.  That, probably, was where I encountered the banana peel (and I’m not alone), succumbing to the temptation to continue talking about music (which, admittedly, probably looked trivial). 

Even in Phil’s original 8-21 blog, though, we are no longer talking about music.  It is torture, physical abuse, and for music types to be particularly offended that music is somehow involved is no more relevant than the hurt feelings of a Beanie Baby collector if people were choked to death on Beanie Babies or the dudgeon of a scotch aficionado  if people were drowned in rare single-malt scotch.  They, and we, deserve no greater sense of offense in the matter, because torture is torture and it’s not better or worse to use something certain people—um—like.  The manner does not compound the ultimate felony because of someone else’s outrage.  Twittering about music at all in such a context implies that we as musicians have a privileged voice when we don’t.  We have the same voice everyone else does on this issue, whether people are being brutalized and destroyed with music or single-malt or choked to death with cute fluffy bunnies.

Now, as to glib fatuousness.  I’ll quote again the phrase I found offensive in Phil’s quote from the Suzanne Cusick article (N.B. she’s at NYU, and is a high-profile figure in our discipline): her comment that the use of music as a weapon in the War on Terror “wounds me as a musician–wounds me in that part of my sensibility that remains residually invested in the notion that music is beautiful, even transcendent—is a practice whose contemplation would always lead me to contemplation of bodies and pleasures. Not bodies in pain.”  What enraged me is that this comment is really more about her offense: not the torture, but how it offends her and her “contemplation of bodies and pleasures.”  Phil asks rhetorically if “protest against torture is the same whether an icky new musicologist does it or when someone more appropriately serious does it, right?”  Then he answers:  “Right. That's exactly what it means. Judge the arguments, not the person making them.”

Except that the passage immediately following the one he quoted makes clear that there is no argument being made.  Cusick writes, “It is not my intention here to engage the moral, ethical and political debates around torture, interesting as they are.  Rather, I offer today a rough taxonomy of the complex subject denoted by my title…”  This would be what…post-modern distance?  Fake, pseudo-scientific, “disciplined” “objectivity” was out and unabashed subjectivity is now in, right? 

I recommend that her article be read, for the full context.  Of course, the U.S., Canada, and Israel are the entities who come up for specific mention as those studying or using this kind of torture, a variety of so-called “no touch torture”.  We then spin from a quote of Princeton theorist Edward T. Cone, whom I assume was talking about art-music interpretation: “The goal ... must be identification with the complete musical persona by making its utterance one’s own,” to the author’s earnest thought-question “Could this notion of listening, propagated in elite universities (including those on contract to the CIA) in the last half of the 20th century, have influenced the architects of ‘no touch torture’?”

We then get an account of the blogospheric reactions to uses of music in torture—we at Dial M seem to be retracing others’ steps—and then Cusick’s memories of being pleasantly sonically overpowered as a young person hearing electric guitar and a somewhat older person on the disco dance floor.  Then, imagining (I am not making this up) the experience of a detainee under torture, Cusick writes:

“I imagine it, sometime, as being plunged into it something like the post-modern, post-Foucauldian dystopia where one is unable quite to name, much less resist, the overwhelmingly diffuse Power that is outside one, but also is inside, and that operates by forcing one to comply against one’s will, against one’s interests, because there is no way–not even a retreat to interiority—to escape the pain. What better medium than music to bring into being (as a felicitous performative) the experience of the West’s (the infidel’s) ubiquitous, irresistable [sic] Power?”

There is no argument here, because the author chose not to engage the “moral, ethical, and political debates around torture, interesting though they are,” and no amount of outrage from anyone can make it an argument.  “Interesting”!  Well, that’s strong.  Instead, “taxonomy,” and there is history of the practice, and cultural criticism, and there is autobiography and creative writing.  In a sense it is clever, because the descriptions provoke a kind of outrage, until one realizes that in taking no responsibility for “engaging the political debates around torture” the author has absolved herself of any responsibility to look at the other side—say, the kinds of tortures found in Iraq or Iran, or the rhetoric that is cultural daily bread in such places, or the mass graves.  No, since we’re talking about this kind of torture, we get “the national security state that the US has been since the era of World War II” and move on without whys and wherefores.  I was going to call this “government-issue radicalism” but maybe “anti-government issue radicalism” is better.  Maybe, given the position of the author as NYU professor implying dark things about “elite universities,” “designer radicalism” would also work.

Her article is online, and as I support freedom of speech I encourage the reading of it.  Still—since I’ve been challenged to judge the argument—I find far more posturing (a very adroit, fashionable, polysyllabic posturing) than argument, and by focusing on music and sound only the author allows herself a very convenient, comfortable, and all too common-and-comfy outsider’s position. 

Phil’s passion about the subject, it seems to me, leads him to see something other in this piece than is really there.  My judgment is that if you’re detained and tortured, don’t expect a postmodernist to have your back.

The pop sublime

OK, I just made that up -- "the pop sublime." It sounded good and trendily academical. A lot of academics have been slinging the sublime around lately, creating new customized versions of the sublime, which is to say, the old Kantian notion that one might experience certain things -- the starry sky, a mountain, etc. -- not as beautiful, exactly, but as both exhilarating and terrifying. The sublime registers as a sensation of shock and awe in the face of something inconceivably vaster that oneself and indifferent to one's own puny existence. Adam Krims has lately written of the "hip hop sublime," which got me thinking about the various extensions of the "sublime" idea. The "technological sublime" has been around a while: maybe it was Fredric Jameson who got this ball rolling when he wrote, in his famous essay on postmodernism, that postmodernity marks a point where you can't represent technology anymore -- or more accurately you can't represent the agency of technology, the way it works, its lines of force. According to Jameson, what you represent, as an architect or sculptor or poet or whatever, is "the sense that beyond all thematics or content the work seems somehow to tap the networks of the reproductive process and thereby to afford us some glimpse into a postmodern or technological sublime, whose power or authenticity is documented by the success of such works in evoking a whole new postmodern space in emergence around us." Which is a pretty good description of, say, a William Gibson novel, or The Matrix. So our gasp of mingled fear and pleasure is supposed to come from the moment when we glimpse the whole impossibly huge system of manufacture and reproduction. Or maybe you don't really see the system itself, which is too huge for any mortal mind to encompass, but rather the impossibility of the mental task, and thus, indirectly, the hugeness of the thing itself, like a glimpse of the Gorgon in Perseus' shield.

But I kind of don't buy it. It seems to me that the "technological sublime" is an aesthetic concept -- a fiction one keeps in mind to heighten the pleasure of reading Neuromancer or watching The Matrix or whatever. It works as a metaphor; it's an as-if way of perceiving something, an interpretation rather than the straightforward registering of something unproblematically out there in the world of consensual reality, like a mountain or an exploding bomb. But you don't gasp in terror and exhilaration at a metaphor. I always feel as if there's something self-dramatizing about people who go on about the "technological sublime," because if you buy into the concept you are saying that the perception of technology really does provoke the old shock-and-awe response. But come on, seriously, it doesn't, unless you really do cringe in fear of your iPod.

But I think people do get into the idea of the "technological sublime" anyway, because it is a dramatically satisfying way of viewing our world. So you can invent various  other "sublimes," all of them united by a shared sense of omigod that's really huge. Like, for example, the hugeness of all the recordings ever made. At UT we have something called the Historical Music Recordings Collection (HMRC), which has something like a quarter of a million recordings. This is only a fraction of all the recordings ever made, but standing there, in the underground vault that houses them, crowded on all sides by shelf after shelf of old records, most of which you've never even heard of, is a sublime experience, sort of. Or you can kid yourself into thinking so. At a rough calculation, it would take 22 years to play all 250000 records, and that's playing records 24/7/365 'round the clock. So the HMRC, and more generally the great abstract Platonic Archive of Sound, the sum total of all the sound ever recorded, of which any real archive is only a fragment, presents the mind with something it can never fully grasp.

So, the pop sublime: the sense of shock'n'awe you feel when confronted by the mountains of pop music you've never heard of. I've recently been listening to a Rhino anthology of psychedelic pop from the late 1960s.  I've heard of very few of the bands on this compilation, let alone the tracks, and almost all of them are great. It's not as if there's some alternate canon out there, hiding behind Dylan and the Beatles and so on, waiting to come into its own; it's that there is an infinity of possible canons, and this foregrounds the arbitrariness of canons per se. Presented with an anthology like this (and Rhino has many of them -- it's their specialty), you can feel the concepts and categories shifting under your feet. It's a moment where, like the narrator of Borges' short story The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, you encounter not only alternative things but alternative conceptual schemes for things:

These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies recall those that Dr. Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese dictionary entitled The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its remote pages it is written that animals can be divided into (a) those belonging to the Emperor, (b) those that are embalmed, (c) those that are tame, (d) pigs, (e) sirens, (f) imaginary animals, (g) wild dogs, (h) those included in this classification, (i) those that are crazy-acting (j), those that are uncountable (k) those painted with the finest brush made of camel hair, (l) miscellaneous, (m) those which have just broken a vase, and (n) those which, from a distance, look like flies.

The best representation for this moment of the pop sublime (a contrived, slightly BS concept I am nevertheless going with right now) is this clip from Doug Pray's documentary Scratch, which shows DJ Shadow, known as the most compendious digger of record crates in all of hip hop, navigating his way through a kind of hip hop version of Borges's Library of Babel.

Gangsta!

From the vaults of the New York Times (by way of Obsidian Wings), the best two-fisted tale of philosophy ever told. Who knew that A.J. Ayer, paragon of English logical positivism, was a total badass?

One of the last of the many legendary contests won by the British philosopher A. J. Ayer was his encounter with Mike Tyson in 1987. As related by Ben Rogers in ''A. J. Ayer: A Life,'' Ayer -- small, frail, slight as a sparrow and then 77 years old -- was entertaining a group of models at a New York party when a girl ran in screaming that her friend was being assaulted in a bedroom. The parties involved turned out to be Tyson and Naomi Campbell. ''Do you know who . . . I am?'' Tyson asked in disbelief when Ayer urged him to desist: ''I'm the heavyweight champion of the world.'' ''And I am the former Wykeham professor of logic,'' Ayer answered politely. ''We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.''

Which they did, apparently.

My Dad was a philosophy professor who specialized in logic and was an admirer of Ayer, with whom he studied. He (my Dad) once contrived a tongue-twister intended to exploit the French-Canadian tendency to add H's to words that begin with vowels and subtract them from words that begin with H: "A. J. Ayer eats hen's eggs."

On a related note: philosopher superhero comics. ("Plato smash!")