So, now that you've read (or, rather, to entice you to read) Kracauer's "The Mass Ornament," here's a relevant clipshow:
Ginger Rogers in "We're in the Money" from The Golddiggers of 1933. This number opens the movie, and was choreographed by Busby Berkeley. Some endorsements: (1) Listen to the lyrics.* This is what Depression-era feel-good PSAs looked like. (2) Make sure you keep watching through to the end. It takes a turn towards the even-more-bizarre. (3) Please note how heavy-handed this clip is in relation to the readings this week (one of the 1844 Manuscripts we did not read is called "The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society," if it wasn't obvious enough).
The actual Tiller Girls:
And better illustrating some of Kracauer's points about where and how and who can see the spectacle for what it is, what it's meant to be, is one of my favorite Berkeley numbers ever, "By a Waterfall," from Footlight Parade (1934):
And just because Eddie Cantor is the most improbable male star Hollywood has produced:
(Good lord, he's such a fairy.)
And just because it's so gloriously weird (and I mean like possibly the weirdest 8 minutes of cinema ever), "The Ode to the Polka Dot" from his 1943 The Gang's All Here:
* "Old Man Depression you are through, you done us wrong. / We never see a headline about breadlines today. / And when we see the landlord we can look that guy right in the eye / We're in the money, come on, my honey, / Let's lend it, spend it, send it rolling along!" Note that the occasion for this song is putatively the introduction of the new nickel in 1933.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Friday, February 6, 2009
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Is this real life?
Remember what I said about being stoned and skepticism? I know, I know. Cavell is like so last week. However, I thought this might be topical, if goofy. And at times, frankly, a bit worrying.
(via BoingBoing)
(via BoingBoing)
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
TTT
technique
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSdhDyPhyiU
technical (click on image to go to site)
technology
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSdhDyPhyiU
technical (click on image to go to site)
technology
technology - technique - technical - aestechtic
Technological
Technical
Technical
Technique (Meredith Monk)
Lewis Moussard's article - Symbol and Architecture - was informative indeed. The mechanization and efficiency of recent developments have indeed led to a new value of aesthetic both architecturally and artistically.
But my question concerning his functionalist vs. human value aesthetic debate - is whether or not functionalist architecture may not indirectly contribute to new participatory acts of space. Much public art has begun to collectively celebrate these open spaces and new screens/interfaces/skins of these minimalist buildings. Histories of architecture - such as Baroque architecture - is ornate beyond imagination and incredibly value laden. Meant to engage humans in religious experiences, it also contributed to the society of a spectacle - and thereby engaging people in a scripted fashion. So - the point is again - functionalism could also be seen as contributing to celebrations of these structures.
The most obvious examples of these types of acts is the Graffiti Research Lab whose legendary LED throwies are a MASS PHENOMENA WHA!!! But also have designed massive interactive projects on the sides of buildings etc. Again - obvious example - but here is a vid.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Few Comments on Mauss
'Sexual division of techniques of the body'
I must first admit that I was taught to make a proper fist by my older brother. I was also taught to land a punch in a kickboxing class, I can throw a stone (or a softball) overhanded /vertical and a frisbee horizontally...therefore, I resent (just a bit) Mauss's statement that even "if a woman were taught to do these techniques, it would prove to be difficult." Yes I had to be taught, for whatever reason, my male counterparts were born with this innate ability to punch or spit or pee standing up. I have often pondered if this is a genetic differential or just the testostrone. Biology aside, with instruction and practice, we can learn new techniques - no matter the sex.
'Sexual division of techniques of the body'
I must first admit that I was taught to make a proper fist by my older brother. I was also taught to land a punch in a kickboxing class, I can throw a stone (or a softball) overhanded /vertical and a frisbee horizontally...therefore, I resent (just a bit) Mauss's statement that even "if a woman were taught to do these techniques, it would prove to be difficult." Yes I had to be taught, for whatever reason, my male counterparts were born with this innate ability to punch or spit or pee standing up. I have often pondered if this is a genetic differential or just the testostrone. Biology aside, with instruction and practice, we can learn new techniques - no matter the sex.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Technique, Technical, Technology
Technique
Eric B & Rakim
Don`t Sweat The Technique
Don't sweat the Technique(2x)
Let's trace the hints and check the file
Let see who bit to detect the style
I flip the script so they can't get foul.
At least not now, it'll take a while
I change the pace to complete the beat
I drop the bass,'till mc's get weak.
For every word they trace, it's a scar they keep...
'Cause when I speak, they freak
To sweat the technique
I made my debut in '86
Wit a melody and a president's mix
And now I stay on target and refuse to miss
And I still make hits
wit' beats, parties, clubs, in the cars and jeeps
My underground sound vibrates the streets
MC's wanna beef then I play for keeps
When they sweat the technique
Don't Sweat the Technique
They wanna know how many rhymes have I ripped in rep., but
Researchers never found all the pieces yet
Scientists try to solve the context
Philosophers are wondering what's next
Pieces are took to last who observe them
They couldn't absorb them, they didn't deserve them
My ideas are only for the audience's ears
For my opponents, it might take years
Pencils and pens, are swords
Letters put together form a key to chords
I'm also a sculpture, born with structure
Because of my culture, I'm a rip and destruct the
Difficult styles that'll be for the technology
Complete sights and new heights after I get deep
You don't have to speak just seek
And peep the technique
But don't sweat the technique
I speak indiscreet cause talk is cheap
Then I get deep and the weak then complete their
Pull with a seat, never weak or obsolete
They never grow old techniques become antiques
Better then something brand new 'cause it's radiant
And the wild style'll have much more volume
Classical too intelligent to be radical
Masterful, never irrelevant: mathematical
Here's some soothing souvenirs for all the years
They fought, and sought, the thoughts and ideas
It's cool when you freak to the beat
But don't sweat the technique
Don't sweat the technique (2x)
Technical
Technology
Friday, January 30, 2009
TECHNICAL-TECHNIQUE-TECHNOLOGY
TECHNIQUE
TECHNICAL
Buckminster Fuller, 4D Tower: Time Interval 1 Meter, 1928
TECHNOLOGY/TECHNIQUE
TECHNICAL
Buckminster Fuller, 4D Tower: Time Interval 1 Meter, 1928
TECHNOLOGY/TECHNIQUE
songs that don't need theory or criticism
Ideally, it is possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be...just what it is
I know that we have focused on theory/philosophy/criticism's relation to fine art. But when i think of erotics, essences, the ineffable, and things being "what it is" I can't help thinking about records and pop music.
I went to the record store a few weeks ago and found a bunch of records that did not belong in the 50 cent bin. I made out like a bandit and the first chance I got I played them for some friends. Each song was prefaced by information, did you know this track was sampled by so and so, there's a rarer version with a misprinted label, no, yes blah blah blah. Or pointing out unusual or special parts: that beginning is hot, hear that bass boom boom de boom. Then I put on a song that definitely belonged in that bin, a ubiquitous classic. However when played all commentary stopped, there was no all-knowing-secret-info preface (interpretation) and no need to point out sections (formal). But I really love this song and if you asked me why? Her sweet but kind of husky voice? the lalalalalala? the repetitive phone number, namby-pamby, (not so) mystical, mumbo jumbo. no questions remain because it feels right and you just have to hear it!
I know that we have focused on theory/philosophy/criticism's relation to fine art. But when i think of erotics, essences, the ineffable, and things being "what it is" I can't help thinking about records and pop music.
I went to the record store a few weeks ago and found a bunch of records that did not belong in the 50 cent bin. I made out like a bandit and the first chance I got I played them for some friends. Each song was prefaced by information, did you know this track was sampled by so and so, there's a rarer version with a misprinted label, no, yes blah blah blah. Or pointing out unusual or special parts: that beginning is hot, hear that bass boom boom de boom. Then I put on a song that definitely belonged in that bin, a ubiquitous classic. However when played all commentary stopped, there was no all-knowing-secret-info preface (interpretation) and no need to point out sections (formal). But I really love this song and if you asked me why? Her sweet but kind of husky voice? the lalalalalala? the repetitive phone number, namby-pamby, (not so) mystical, mumbo jumbo. no questions remain because it feels right and you just have to hear it!
ok, i promise I won't post anything else after this (i've posted a lot tonight, though mostly in the form of comments on other peoples' posts).
Since I've been trying to catch up by reading the merleau-ponty, a number of things have come to mind. I'm only a few pages in, but I can't help being incredibly excited because of what strikes me as a kind of wondrous optimism. At the same time, I'm skeptical because I've had a number of experiences in my life that, upon reflection, seemed to fall apart. A particular poem by Robert Hass comes to mind:
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
Perhaps it partially comes to mind because of the posting of Lacan further down, but for some reason I feel that somewhere in the Merlau-Ponty essay, or in some corner of this neat thing called phenomenology, there might be something redemptive toward experience, something that was lost with analysis.
Since I've been trying to catch up by reading the merleau-ponty, a number of things have come to mind. I'm only a few pages in, but I can't help being incredibly excited because of what strikes me as a kind of wondrous optimism. At the same time, I'm skeptical because I've had a number of experiences in my life that, upon reflection, seemed to fall apart. A particular poem by Robert Hass comes to mind:
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
Perhaps it partially comes to mind because of the posting of Lacan further down, but for some reason I feel that somewhere in the Merlau-Ponty essay, or in some corner of this neat thing called phenomenology, there might be something redemptive toward experience, something that was lost with analysis.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
A response and a question.
More than anything, I'm wishing that I more deeply understood the Kant reading from last week, because in each of the readings this week, I feel as if I'm attempting to grasp something that's just beyond my reach, or that I'm attempting to recognize a face I've seen before but can't quite actualize. Looking back at my notes from last week, there are a few ideas that come into a soft focus in light of the Sontag and Cavell readings.
Particularly the difference between the judgments that Kant calls "good"; those that are based on reason; those that are objective and the judgments that Kant calls "beautiful"; those that are considered subjective; those that are considered aesthetic.
Of course, now class is about to start.......I'll get back to this.
Particularly the difference between the judgments that Kant calls "good"; those that are based on reason; those that are objective and the judgments that Kant calls "beautiful"; those that are considered subjective; those that are considered aesthetic.
Of course, now class is about to start.......I'll get back to this.
Maria Jonsson- the mystical
Found this and took an excerpt when I looked up the hermeneutics of suspicion
The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: A Case
Study from Hinduism
Arvind Sharma
McGill University
HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
Consciousness, which was once considered to be perceptually transparent in a Cartesian manner and linguistically transparent in a Wittgensteinian way, is now considered to consist primarily of the relationship between the hidden and the shown, between what is concealed and what is revealed.2 Consciousness therefore needs decoding, and so also the texts which embody it. This understanding of consciousness is the fundamental assumption underlying the “hermeneutics of suspicion” as it was espoused by Paul Ricœur, who referred repeatedly to the three “masters of suspicion”: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.3 While these three might
appear “seemingly mutually exclusive,”4 for all three “the fundamental category of consciousness is the relation of hidden-shown or, if you prefer simulated-manifested.”5 The basic hermeneutical implication of their thought points in the same direction—a text may not be taken at its face value, indeed the face of a text may be no more than a mask which conceals underlying socio-economic, political, and psychological realities in such a way as to obscure them, or render them more palatable, if not more acceptable.
A hermeneutics of suspicion may be said to occupy a mediate horizon as distinguished from the immediate and the ultimate, where the immediate involves only a literal reading of the text and the ultimate a deeper meaning intended by the author. While the “hermeneutics of suspicion” also seeks to determine a non-evident meaning, such a hermeneutics focuses on a meaning which is different from the author’s intention, whether evident or hidden.
To me, it seems unnecessary to assume that the hermeneutics of suspicion always discloses that which is negative behind a text. It will be my contention that if the rigorous scrutiny of the hermeneutics of suspicion can reveal the negative implications and realities which lie behind a text that on the surface appears to be positive, then it is equally possible that such hermeneutics may also disclose the positive implications which might lie behind a text that on the surface
appears to be negative.
I would like to know what art Cavell wrote about as potentially fraudulent. What music? Does he say?
The risk of art is is very prevalent, and I think of critics, collectors, gallerists and everyone who profits from others art making are afraid of the artist potentially being fraudulent, and as powerful players they are in the game of making the fraud work or not, they can also be fooled and made to look stupid if the artist isn't the "real thing". But this is different perhaps of the possibly fraudulent experience of the artwork itself.
The fraudulence, of not knowing if one has interpreted it right, is one of the great things with art, like solving a mystery. I like the Susan Sontag text a lot and what she writes about French poetry, how silence in poetry reinstated the magic of the word and escaped the rough grip of interpretation. You are told sometimes in advise to your practice to be clear about content, your opinion, and some don't want to hear the word ambivalence, but if the meaning is not entirely clear, is something else spelled out?
Gaugain said: Paint what you see
The inauguration poet Elizabeth Alexander has a poem with the name of (and now I can't find it) an african poet who said: write about what you don't understand, or: write about what you want to understand.
I think about art that is provocative, that can stem from frustration over some situation, from others or ones own prejudices. That art want to create a reaction from it's viewer, can seem offensive and prejudiced at first but can hide a "positive" reason for doing the work, or problematizing the ambivalence to once own feelings toward something that can seem sexist, racist, homofobic.
Something that can be an interesting complex problem can be shunted or told inappropriate in an academic setting, the artist can be swayed away from this kind of work as with this kind of work he/she ethically is on the line too. Susan Sontag writes "Art is useful after all, Aristotle counters, medicinally useful in that it arouses and purges dangeous emotions."
In the Mca parking lot there's an Oscar Wilde quote that say if artists saw the world the way it really was they wouldn't be artists.
Once on the way to go running in the park i saw something white in the bushes. It was a sperm, a white plastic sperm the size of my palm, very graphic, very cute, with a smiley face and white liquid inside. I hid it and I later came back to collect it. On my walk back home a female orgasm echoed between the walls of the buildings lining the street and I thought this is just too good, and here I am with the sperm in my bag.
I was amazed by this little ting, What is it, I wondered.
I like that state of wonderment, of What does this mean?
Then later my friend told me to open it up, something I hadn't thought of, and I screwed it's head off and inside was some milky alcohol, for some hen night, I felt cheated. Opening did that.The spell of fascination for the objects mysterious qualities was broken.
I think about consciousness-true,false, authentic- paranoia- Merleau-Ponty says paranoia is bad, but is it? Or is it the need to solve it that is bad? It's as if expecting crime is on default, as a reaction to an inherent impulse to commit crime. Is suspicion bad? Would we like to leave the mystery unresolved when we (I) feel ( In crime fiction) find the resolve is the inevitable and most boring part?
The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: A Case
Study from Hinduism
Arvind Sharma
McGill University
HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
Consciousness, which was once considered to be perceptually transparent in a Cartesian manner and linguistically transparent in a Wittgensteinian way, is now considered to consist primarily of the relationship between the hidden and the shown, between what is concealed and what is revealed.2 Consciousness therefore needs decoding, and so also the texts which embody it. This understanding of consciousness is the fundamental assumption underlying the “hermeneutics of suspicion” as it was espoused by Paul Ricœur, who referred repeatedly to the three “masters of suspicion”: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.3 While these three might
appear “seemingly mutually exclusive,”4 for all three “the fundamental category of consciousness is the relation of hidden-shown or, if you prefer simulated-manifested.”5 The basic hermeneutical implication of their thought points in the same direction—a text may not be taken at its face value, indeed the face of a text may be no more than a mask which conceals underlying socio-economic, political, and psychological realities in such a way as to obscure them, or render them more palatable, if not more acceptable.
A hermeneutics of suspicion may be said to occupy a mediate horizon as distinguished from the immediate and the ultimate, where the immediate involves only a literal reading of the text and the ultimate a deeper meaning intended by the author. While the “hermeneutics of suspicion” also seeks to determine a non-evident meaning, such a hermeneutics focuses on a meaning which is different from the author’s intention, whether evident or hidden.
To me, it seems unnecessary to assume that the hermeneutics of suspicion always discloses that which is negative behind a text. It will be my contention that if the rigorous scrutiny of the hermeneutics of suspicion can reveal the negative implications and realities which lie behind a text that on the surface appears to be positive, then it is equally possible that such hermeneutics may also disclose the positive implications which might lie behind a text that on the surface
appears to be negative.
I would like to know what art Cavell wrote about as potentially fraudulent. What music? Does he say?
The risk of art is is very prevalent, and I think of critics, collectors, gallerists and everyone who profits from others art making are afraid of the artist potentially being fraudulent, and as powerful players they are in the game of making the fraud work or not, they can also be fooled and made to look stupid if the artist isn't the "real thing". But this is different perhaps of the possibly fraudulent experience of the artwork itself.
The fraudulence, of not knowing if one has interpreted it right, is one of the great things with art, like solving a mystery. I like the Susan Sontag text a lot and what she writes about French poetry, how silence in poetry reinstated the magic of the word and escaped the rough grip of interpretation. You are told sometimes in advise to your practice to be clear about content, your opinion, and some don't want to hear the word ambivalence, but if the meaning is not entirely clear, is something else spelled out?
Gaugain said: Paint what you see
The inauguration poet Elizabeth Alexander has a poem with the name of (and now I can't find it) an african poet who said: write about what you don't understand, or: write about what you want to understand.
I think about art that is provocative, that can stem from frustration over some situation, from others or ones own prejudices. That art want to create a reaction from it's viewer, can seem offensive and prejudiced at first but can hide a "positive" reason for doing the work, or problematizing the ambivalence to once own feelings toward something that can seem sexist, racist, homofobic.
Something that can be an interesting complex problem can be shunted or told inappropriate in an academic setting, the artist can be swayed away from this kind of work as with this kind of work he/she ethically is on the line too. Susan Sontag writes "Art is useful after all, Aristotle counters, medicinally useful in that it arouses and purges dangeous emotions."
In the Mca parking lot there's an Oscar Wilde quote that say if artists saw the world the way it really was they wouldn't be artists.
Once on the way to go running in the park i saw something white in the bushes. It was a sperm, a white plastic sperm the size of my palm, very graphic, very cute, with a smiley face and white liquid inside. I hid it and I later came back to collect it. On my walk back home a female orgasm echoed between the walls of the buildings lining the street and I thought this is just too good, and here I am with the sperm in my bag.
I was amazed by this little ting, What is it, I wondered.
I like that state of wonderment, of What does this mean?
Then later my friend told me to open it up, something I hadn't thought of, and I screwed it's head off and inside was some milky alcohol, for some hen night, I felt cheated. Opening did that.The spell of fascination for the objects mysterious qualities was broken.
I think about consciousness-true,false, authentic- paranoia- Merleau-Ponty says paranoia is bad, but is it? Or is it the need to solve it that is bad? It's as if expecting crime is on default, as a reaction to an inherent impulse to commit crime. Is suspicion bad? Would we like to leave the mystery unresolved when we (I) feel ( In crime fiction) find the resolve is the inevitable and most boring part?
Thoughts about Cavell's text
"Ordinary language philosophy is about whatever ordinary language is about." To me, this Clavell's sentence describes pretty well the concept of Ordinary language philosophy, which I (obviously) found extremely closer than last week's Kant reading. Although I found Kant's text to be extremely complete (no doubt about it), it seemed to be quite distance from the real world, specially in the theoretical "extreme" exactness of his language, which is one of the main Cavell's critiques.
Cavell analysis of Kant's ideas were pretty revealing to me, like his examination of the "Universal agreement" and its two kinds of aesthetic judgements. When he is adapting Kant's Canary wine example he exemplifies how aesthetic judgments can be arguable and shows why these judgments are powerful connectors/isolators of people within their communities.
Afterwards, comes the huge question thrown by Cavell about what should be considered as art. Instead of waiting "what time will say" in this respect, he states that "the dangers of fraudulence, and of trust, are essential to the experience of art". If I understood well (which I am not pretty sure), he is talking about the risks involved in the role and experience of the audience. As viewers we can only argue about an artwork's aesthetic quality or meaning (but not be certainly sure or prove anything logically). Being the audience implies then the inevitable risk of not been "right" (taking right as what an informed viewer would judge, which would include us in his/her community. But, then we should define what an informed viewer is...). So, talking about something intrinsically subjective, what I wonder is if it still makes sense to question or talk about the fraudulence of an artwork, or indeed what is considered to be art, as I think it highly depends on the connections created between artwork and viewer (which will not probably be universally arguable due to its subjectivity), and more importantly as it is an ever changing concept with more and more blurred boundaries. I found in this regard (I mean, interpretation, which is one of the reflections a viewer makes when experiencing an artwork) a very clear analysis in Sontag's text.
Julio
Cavell analysis of Kant's ideas were pretty revealing to me, like his examination of the "Universal agreement" and its two kinds of aesthetic judgements. When he is adapting Kant's Canary wine example he exemplifies how aesthetic judgments can be arguable and shows why these judgments are powerful connectors/isolators of people within their communities.
Afterwards, comes the huge question thrown by Cavell about what should be considered as art. Instead of waiting "what time will say" in this respect, he states that "the dangers of fraudulence, and of trust, are essential to the experience of art". If I understood well (which I am not pretty sure), he is talking about the risks involved in the role and experience of the audience. As viewers we can only argue about an artwork's aesthetic quality or meaning (but not be certainly sure or prove anything logically). Being the audience implies then the inevitable risk of not been "right" (taking right as what an informed viewer would judge, which would include us in his/her community. But, then we should define what an informed viewer is...). So, talking about something intrinsically subjective, what I wonder is if it still makes sense to question or talk about the fraudulence of an artwork, or indeed what is considered to be art, as I think it highly depends on the connections created between artwork and viewer (which will not probably be universally arguable due to its subjectivity), and more importantly as it is an ever changing concept with more and more blurred boundaries. I found in this regard (I mean, interpretation, which is one of the reflections a viewer makes when experiencing an artwork) a very clear analysis in Sontag's text.
Julio
Against Interpretation
Susan Sontag's text made me think in Lacan's concept of the real.
THE REAL (Lacan): The state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language. Only as neo-natal children were we close to this state of nature, a state in which there is nothing but need. A baby needs and seeks to satisfy those needs with no sense for any separation between itself and the external world or the world of others. For this reason, Lacan sometimes represents this state of nature as a time of fullness or completeness that is subsequently lost through the entrance into language. The primordial animal need for copulation (for example, when animals are in heat) similarly corresponds to this state of nature. There is a need followed by a search for satisfaction. As far as humans are concerned, however, "the real is impossible," as Lacan was fond of saying. It is impossible in so far as we cannot express it in language because the very entrance into language marks our irrevocable separation from the real. Still, the real continues to exert its influence throughout our adult lives since it is the rock against which all our fantasies and linguistic structures ultimately fail. The real for example continues to erupt whenever we are made to acknowledge the materiality of our existence, an acknowledgement that is usually perceived as traumatic (since it threatens our very "reality"), although it also drives Lacan's sense of jouissance.
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/psychoanalysis/definitions/real.html
When Sontag writes: "In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art".
And also: "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art"
In one pole we are pure sensory experience in the other an hypertrophy of the intellect, pure explanation, interpretation, dead words. But being pure sensory experience means to be unable to use language, unable to name things, which is extremely painful.
When she talks about Transparence, about "...experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of the being what we are" I wonder how close we need to be to Lacan's real, if are what we are, and we are pure desire, pure animal without langauge.
THE REAL (Lacan): The state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language. Only as neo-natal children were we close to this state of nature, a state in which there is nothing but need. A baby needs and seeks to satisfy those needs with no sense for any separation between itself and the external world or the world of others. For this reason, Lacan sometimes represents this state of nature as a time of fullness or completeness that is subsequently lost through the entrance into language. The primordial animal need for copulation (for example, when animals are in heat) similarly corresponds to this state of nature. There is a need followed by a search for satisfaction. As far as humans are concerned, however, "the real is impossible," as Lacan was fond of saying. It is impossible in so far as we cannot express it in language because the very entrance into language marks our irrevocable separation from the real. Still, the real continues to exert its influence throughout our adult lives since it is the rock against which all our fantasies and linguistic structures ultimately fail. The real for example continues to erupt whenever we are made to acknowledge the materiality of our existence, an acknowledgement that is usually perceived as traumatic (since it threatens our very "reality"), although it also drives Lacan's sense of jouissance.
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/psychoanalysis/definitions/real.html
When Sontag writes: "In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art".
And also: "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art"
In one pole we are pure sensory experience in the other an hypertrophy of the intellect, pure explanation, interpretation, dead words. But being pure sensory experience means to be unable to use language, unable to name things, which is extremely painful.
When she talks about Transparence, about "...experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of the being what we are" I wonder how close we need to be to Lacan's real, if are what we are, and we are pure desire, pure animal without langauge.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Critique of Critique—if I understood anything.
Over all I would have to say that I was most interested in the Eve K. Sedgwick and the Susan Sontag essays. Sedgwick’s essay was a bit difficult for me to grasp at times, for my background is so limited when it comes to the literary references. Through searches I somewhat understand the notion of “Hermeneutics of Suspicion”, but fear I’m missing the meaning completely. In the next class would love to discuss the issues that surround the meaning and look at The Three that define the term in this essay. I feel this term of hermeneutics may also be a useful term to define when looking to future readings.
In addition this week’s readings reminded of the first time I read Heart of Darkness and my intuitive reaction to the book at the tender age of 19. I was horrified (no not a pun) by the writing and could not replace the idea that Conrad may have mistreated the situation. Of course I was fought to the death about my interpretation based upon my inability to separate the work form the artist. Was I wrong to interpret it this way, I still question? Not sure if I remember the argument or the text so well at this point, but non-the less these readings reminded me of the event.
PS Maria Jonsson just texted me and ask for forgiveness in posting in the morning. Her Internet is down at home and said she will share her thoughts first thing tomorrow.
Over all I would have to say that I was most interested in the Eve K. Sedgwick and the Susan Sontag essays. Sedgwick’s essay was a bit difficult for me to grasp at times, for my background is so limited when it comes to the literary references. Through searches I somewhat understand the notion of “Hermeneutics of Suspicion”, but fear I’m missing the meaning completely. In the next class would love to discuss the issues that surround the meaning and look at The Three that define the term in this essay. I feel this term of hermeneutics may also be a useful term to define when looking to future readings.
In addition this week’s readings reminded of the first time I read Heart of Darkness and my intuitive reaction to the book at the tender age of 19. I was horrified (no not a pun) by the writing and could not replace the idea that Conrad may have mistreated the situation. Of course I was fought to the death about my interpretation based upon my inability to separate the work form the artist. Was I wrong to interpret it this way, I still question? Not sure if I remember the argument or the text so well at this point, but non-the less these readings reminded me of the event.
PS Maria Jonsson just texted me and ask for forgiveness in posting in the morning. Her Internet is down at home and said she will share her thoughts first thing tomorrow.
On Wittgenstein and Fraudulence
First off, I would like to share with you guys a link to a film about Wittgenstein directed by Derek Jarman. It was recommended to me by a professor in the GD department and I think it could be a helpful/fun watch. You can watch the entire thing here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2608378371506756422
I also have some quick commentaries regarding the issue of fraudulence in the Cavell reading, which I see some people have already brought up in previous posts.
To me, it seems that in his discussion of fraudulence Cavell falls into the same 'linguistic' trap that he (and Wittgenstein) identify as the source of otherwise insignificant philosophical problems. In other words, Cavell's rather obscure distinction between genuine and fraudulent 'art' resorts to the same kind of out-of-context use of essentialized and absolute language that he wishes philosophy would purge itself of.
-We impose a demand for absoluteness upon a concept, and then, finding that our ordinary use of this concept does not meet our demand, we accommodate the discrepancy as nearly as possible (77)
In reading through the entirety of his argument(s) I feel that his weakest claim is that the potential fraudulence of a work of art is essential to the aesthetic experience it represents. Although perhaps I am misunderstanding his argument, is seems like he is saying that distrust in the object of art is an essential part of aesthetic experience, which is not exactly the same as Kant's claim that aesthetic judgement is made with objective conviction because it is made at the risk of potential isolation.
If the question of whether or not atonal compositions are music is rendered irrelevant through the simple act of immersing oneself "within the experience of such compositions" (84) then so can the question of an art object's authenticity through a viewer's aesthetic experience of it.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2608378371506756422
I also have some quick commentaries regarding the issue of fraudulence in the Cavell reading, which I see some people have already brought up in previous posts.
To me, it seems that in his discussion of fraudulence Cavell falls into the same 'linguistic' trap that he (and Wittgenstein) identify as the source of otherwise insignificant philosophical problems. In other words, Cavell's rather obscure distinction between genuine and fraudulent 'art' resorts to the same kind of out-of-context use of essentialized and absolute language that he wishes philosophy would purge itself of.
-We impose a demand for absoluteness upon a concept, and then, finding that our ordinary use of this concept does not meet our demand, we accommodate the discrepancy as nearly as possible (77)
In reading through the entirety of his argument(s) I feel that his weakest claim is that the potential fraudulence of a work of art is essential to the aesthetic experience it represents. Although perhaps I am misunderstanding his argument, is seems like he is saying that distrust in the object of art is an essential part of aesthetic experience, which is not exactly the same as Kant's claim that aesthetic judgement is made with objective conviction because it is made at the risk of potential isolation.
If the question of whether or not atonal compositions are music is rendered irrelevant through the simple act of immersing oneself "within the experience of such compositions" (84) then so can the question of an art object's authenticity through a viewer's aesthetic experience of it.
Notes and thoughts about Cavell’s “Music Discomposed” and Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations II”
Notes and thoughts about Cavell’s “Music Discomposed” and Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations II”
Music doesn’t have the same critical feed back
The main criticism of music is with its newness. If newness is the measure of quality then has anyone created a definition of what makes something new?
Cavell States about the history of music, that it contains no criticism of music but instead it only makes notes on the details of notations, instruments, and processes.
Formulas for successful or even unsuccessful music are immeasurable. If that is the case then is criticism even possible. The thing that makes a song “bad” is the same thing that makes another song “good”.
He speaks of fraudulence within music as a disease. But my generation is a generation of appropriation. Everything is a remix.
I feel that when Cavell wrote this article that the notion of the remix (for many critics of music) would be considered fraudulent. He states that in art, fraudulence is not as easy to detect as forgery or counterfeiting. He states that there is no one feature, or definite set of features that can be describe.
Now musical taste within popular music seems to change so much faster than in previous years. Things that we where listening to two years ago seems old and outdated.
The trends of today’s artists are to make music that crosses genre. (Snoop Dogg records a country album or Little Wayne records a rock album). If the genres of music are mixing more frequently as more music is being produced then what is the bases of criticisms.
I like Orson’s example of classical music for a couple of reasons.
The first being that it makes me think of Mozart. Mozart’s music was considered edgy and sometime offensive in his time. Time has proven him a genius. Will time do the same thing for current popular music.
The other reason I like Orson’s example of classical music is the word “classical” itself. Where as it used to be considered “popular music” at some point it was named “classical”. This relates back to the Wittgenstein article and the idea of Ordinary Language.
Why is it classical? When did it become classical? So instead of classical should it mean European Art Music from 1730 A.D. to 1830 A.D.
(SIDE BAR BEGIN)
So I of coarse went to Wikipedia for answers.
The term 'classical music' did not appear until the early 19th century, in an attempt to 'canonize' the period from Johann Sebastian Bach to Beethoven as a golden age.[8] The earliest reference to "classical music" recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from about 1836.
(SIDE BAR END)
The idea is of ordinary language really is really messing with me. As I begin to better understand its meaning. I can’t help to think that I am not being clear in what I am saying and writing. Even looking back at what I have written in this blog I question the amount of metaphors used and wonder if I am using them because I am having difficulty finding the words to explain my thoughts.
My wife has been very helpful in process of understanding this term. She says that we argue about Ordinary Language all the time. That she will ask me a question and I will give her a short answer thinking that it should explain everything. But she places just as much value on the words that aren’t said and my body language as she does on my verbal response.
My understanding is that people tend to create layers in what we say by using metaphors and examples which are suppose to explain things indirectly. The problem with this is that many times speaking and writing in this more complex way can leave openings for different interpretations of what is being communicated.
My wife and I spoke about the bible as an example of a text that is filled with metaphors and hypothetical situations that are meant to invoke and teach religious lessons, but sometimes is received as literal example of an occurrence. Their have been many divisions of religious sects and wars based on the interpretations of holy scriptures.
My thoughts may be completely wrong or backwards. I am open to any suggestions that are contrary.
Music doesn’t have the same critical feed back
The main criticism of music is with its newness. If newness is the measure of quality then has anyone created a definition of what makes something new?
Cavell States about the history of music, that it contains no criticism of music but instead it only makes notes on the details of notations, instruments, and processes.
Formulas for successful or even unsuccessful music are immeasurable. If that is the case then is criticism even possible. The thing that makes a song “bad” is the same thing that makes another song “good”.
He speaks of fraudulence within music as a disease. But my generation is a generation of appropriation. Everything is a remix.
I feel that when Cavell wrote this article that the notion of the remix (for many critics of music) would be considered fraudulent. He states that in art, fraudulence is not as easy to detect as forgery or counterfeiting. He states that there is no one feature, or definite set of features that can be describe.
Now musical taste within popular music seems to change so much faster than in previous years. Things that we where listening to two years ago seems old and outdated.
The trends of today’s artists are to make music that crosses genre. (Snoop Dogg records a country album or Little Wayne records a rock album). If the genres of music are mixing more frequently as more music is being produced then what is the bases of criticisms.
I like Orson’s example of classical music for a couple of reasons.
The first being that it makes me think of Mozart. Mozart’s music was considered edgy and sometime offensive in his time. Time has proven him a genius. Will time do the same thing for current popular music.
The other reason I like Orson’s example of classical music is the word “classical” itself. Where as it used to be considered “popular music” at some point it was named “classical”. This relates back to the Wittgenstein article and the idea of Ordinary Language.
Why is it classical? When did it become classical? So instead of classical should it mean European Art Music from 1730 A.D. to 1830 A.D.
(SIDE BAR BEGIN)
So I of coarse went to Wikipedia for answers.
The term 'classical music' did not appear until the early 19th century, in an attempt to 'canonize' the period from Johann Sebastian Bach to Beethoven as a golden age.[8] The earliest reference to "classical music" recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from about 1836.
(SIDE BAR END)
The idea is of ordinary language really is really messing with me. As I begin to better understand its meaning. I can’t help to think that I am not being clear in what I am saying and writing. Even looking back at what I have written in this blog I question the amount of metaphors used and wonder if I am using them because I am having difficulty finding the words to explain my thoughts.
My wife has been very helpful in process of understanding this term. She says that we argue about Ordinary Language all the time. That she will ask me a question and I will give her a short answer thinking that it should explain everything. But she places just as much value on the words that aren’t said and my body language as she does on my verbal response.
My understanding is that people tend to create layers in what we say by using metaphors and examples which are suppose to explain things indirectly. The problem with this is that many times speaking and writing in this more complex way can leave openings for different interpretations of what is being communicated.
My wife and I spoke about the bible as an example of a text that is filled with metaphors and hypothetical situations that are meant to invoke and teach religious lessons, but sometimes is received as literal example of an occurrence. Their have been many divisions of religious sects and wars based on the interpretations of holy scriptures.
My thoughts may be completely wrong or backwards. I am open to any suggestions that are contrary.
On Phenomenological Jargon, or, this might help with Merleau-Ponty
(Clearly, I'm prepping texts in the order I gave you over the weekend.)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher, the most important philosopher of embodiment.
Once again, wikipedia to the rescue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Merleau-Ponty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy)
Every time I read the Preface to The Phenomenology of Perception (which happens with embarrassing frequency) I forget just how packed full of awful phenomenological jargon it is. I'm always left with this feeling of luscious philosophy; but while I'm in the middle of it, I'm continually surprised at how much work it takes to unpack some of those sentences. (The funny thing is, this Preface was the very first phenomenological text I ever read, and still found it to be completely accessible and voluptuous.) For our purposese here: don't bother. Latch on to what resonates, move past the jargon.
The basic gist of this piece of writing is this: Phenomenology is philosophy dedicated to the most accurate description of the world possible, and all the method and jargon are in the service of this very accurate description. No, for serious. Despite the awful words like "eidetic" and "reduction" and "positing" and "natural attitude," this description, like those of Balzac, Proust, Valéry, Cézanne, is and must be filled with equal parts attentiveness and wonder (and a dash of jargon, I suppose). This philosophy does not start with doubt, but realizes that doubt is the negation of a world always "already there": "We must not, therefore, wonder whether we really perceive the world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive" (xviii). And so that philosophy must concern itself with perception, and in perception find our only way of being open to and present to the world in which we find ourselves. In phenomenology, we find in ourselves not an "inner core of our being," but rather, paraphrasing (!!!) Merleau-Ponty, we find ourselves destined for the world. In order to make this available to reflection, we must cultivate attentiveness to the world, and wonder at the world. Phenomenology does so in the guise, almost, of art. (Merleau-Ponty speaks of the "art of imagination" as being necessary.) The description we arrive at will never exhaust ourselves, or the world. Human finiteness and human unknowingness are identical. It is our condition to be finite, and to be unknowing about ourselves and the world. It is the world's essence to be inexhaustible--that is, also, mysterious. We cannot know ourselves fully; we cannot know the world fully. Phenomenological description will not only acknowledge this, but move toward it, embrace it. It strains at limits of philosophical langauge, it attempts to say what cannot be said forthrightly. If this is the source of a veritable explosion of jargon, it is also the deep kinship of phenomenological philsophy and art: it attempts to bring into being an experience of the world which is not expressible in language. Merleau-Ponty is the philosopher who best understands this.
Of course, this Merleau-Ponty is buried alongside obscurity both jargonistic and merely obscure. As always, move through that which you cannot follow, and get to those moments where what he is saying resonates somehow with you.
For now, I'll leave you with th is. Look for this post to be updated to redact a little of what Merleau-Ponty is after, some cutting through the bullshitty jargon. (Just be glad I didn't assign Husserl himself. I almost did. For serious.)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher, the most important philosopher of embodiment.
Once again, wikipedia to the rescue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Merleau-Ponty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy)
Every time I read the Preface to The Phenomenology of Perception (which happens with embarrassing frequency) I forget just how packed full of awful phenomenological jargon it is. I'm always left with this feeling of luscious philosophy; but while I'm in the middle of it, I'm continually surprised at how much work it takes to unpack some of those sentences. (The funny thing is, this Preface was the very first phenomenological text I ever read, and still found it to be completely accessible and voluptuous.) For our purposese here: don't bother. Latch on to what resonates, move past the jargon.
The basic gist of this piece of writing is this: Phenomenology is philosophy dedicated to the most accurate description of the world possible, and all the method and jargon are in the service of this very accurate description. No, for serious. Despite the awful words like "eidetic" and "reduction" and "positing" and "natural attitude," this description, like those of Balzac, Proust, Valéry, Cézanne, is and must be filled with equal parts attentiveness and wonder (and a dash of jargon, I suppose). This philosophy does not start with doubt, but realizes that doubt is the negation of a world always "already there": "We must not, therefore, wonder whether we really perceive the world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive" (xviii). And so that philosophy must concern itself with perception, and in perception find our only way of being open to and present to the world in which we find ourselves. In phenomenology, we find in ourselves not an "inner core of our being," but rather, paraphrasing (!!!) Merleau-Ponty, we find ourselves destined for the world. In order to make this available to reflection, we must cultivate attentiveness to the world, and wonder at the world. Phenomenology does so in the guise, almost, of art. (Merleau-Ponty speaks of the "art of imagination" as being necessary.) The description we arrive at will never exhaust ourselves, or the world. Human finiteness and human unknowingness are identical. It is our condition to be finite, and to be unknowing about ourselves and the world. It is the world's essence to be inexhaustible--that is, also, mysterious. We cannot know ourselves fully; we cannot know the world fully. Phenomenological description will not only acknowledge this, but move toward it, embrace it. It strains at limits of philosophical langauge, it attempts to say what cannot be said forthrightly. If this is the source of a veritable explosion of jargon, it is also the deep kinship of phenomenological philsophy and art: it attempts to bring into being an experience of the world which is not expressible in language. Merleau-Ponty is the philosopher who best understands this.
Of course, this Merleau-Ponty is buried alongside obscurity both jargonistic and merely obscure. As always, move through that which you cannot follow, and get to those moments where what he is saying resonates somehow with you.
For now, I'll leave you with th is. Look for this post to be updated to redact a little of what Merleau-Ponty is after, some cutting through the bullshitty jargon. (Just be glad I didn't assign Husserl himself. I almost did. For serious.)
Hermeneutics in the land of shadows
I kept thinking about Andy Goldsworthy during this week’s readings or, more specifically, the movie made about him directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer, “Rivers and Tides”. In this film Goldsworthy speaks about his work but it is more of a description of process than explanation of outcome. For Goldsworthy form and content are inseparable, the content is the form. There seems little use in attempting to break down Goldsworthy’s time-sensitive, outdoor creations into metaphors for social issues. To hear him speak is to understand his personal connection to the material choices he makes, to interpret other motivations might be a mistaken course.
“It is a matter of describing, not of explaining or analyzing.”
p. ix, Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty (quoting Husserl)
“Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.”
p. 6, Against Interpretation, Sontag
“…any paraphrase, the best, will only be an approximation.”
p. 76, Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy, Cavell (paraphrased)
But what about artwork that doesn’t fit into this idea of necessarily conjoined form and content? In video, for example, the actual form is up for debate. Is it magnetic tape, a spinning disc, a beam of light, the viewer? As much as I like Goldsworthy (and especially that movie) there are dozens of examples of artworks that I truly love that demand a closer reading, often requiring information that cannot gleaned from just the presented form. How do other forms of art fit into these notions of interpretation? Do they become fraudulent if idiomatic rather than metaphoric?
“…the dangers of fraudulence, and of trust, are essential to the experience of art.”
p. 188, Music Discomposed, Cavell
“The only exposure of false art lies in recognizing something about the object itself, but something whose recognition requires exactly the same capacity as recognizing the genuine article.”
p. 190, Music Discomposed, Cavell
“You often do not know which is on trial, the object or the viewer: modern art did not invent this dilemma, it merely insists upon it.”
p. 190, Music Discomposed, Cavell
I’m wondering after all this reading whether research done outside of the actual experience of looking/hearing/immersing oneself in the sensory experience of art could be part of the form, too. When I first saw some images of Dario Robleto’s “I won’t let you say goodbye this time” I was moderately intrigued. When I found out the seedlings in the photographs were cultivated from tomato seed launched into space from the doomed Challenger and then left to float until they could be picked up six years later by the doomed Columbia, I gained a considerable interest in the project. The work was opened to me, not closed down. Perhaps importantly, I discovered these facts by hearing the artist speak, not from a piece of criticism. Or maybe I just like to live in the shadowed world of meanings.
“To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it.”
p. 4, Against Interpretation, Sontag
“What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?”
p. 8, Sontag
“It is a matter of describing, not of explaining or analyzing.”
p. ix, Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty (quoting Husserl)
“Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.”
p. 6, Against Interpretation, Sontag
“…any paraphrase, the best, will only be an approximation.”
p. 76, Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy, Cavell (paraphrased)
But what about artwork that doesn’t fit into this idea of necessarily conjoined form and content? In video, for example, the actual form is up for debate. Is it magnetic tape, a spinning disc, a beam of light, the viewer? As much as I like Goldsworthy (and especially that movie) there are dozens of examples of artworks that I truly love that demand a closer reading, often requiring information that cannot gleaned from just the presented form. How do other forms of art fit into these notions of interpretation? Do they become fraudulent if idiomatic rather than metaphoric?
“…the dangers of fraudulence, and of trust, are essential to the experience of art.”
p. 188, Music Discomposed, Cavell
“The only exposure of false art lies in recognizing something about the object itself, but something whose recognition requires exactly the same capacity as recognizing the genuine article.”
p. 190, Music Discomposed, Cavell
“You often do not know which is on trial, the object or the viewer: modern art did not invent this dilemma, it merely insists upon it.”
p. 190, Music Discomposed, Cavell
I’m wondering after all this reading whether research done outside of the actual experience of looking/hearing/immersing oneself in the sensory experience of art could be part of the form, too. When I first saw some images of Dario Robleto’s “I won’t let you say goodbye this time” I was moderately intrigued. When I found out the seedlings in the photographs were cultivated from tomato seed launched into space from the doomed Challenger and then left to float until they could be picked up six years later by the doomed Columbia, I gained a considerable interest in the project. The work was opened to me, not closed down. Perhaps importantly, I discovered these facts by hearing the artist speak, not from a piece of criticism. Or maybe I just like to live in the shadowed world of meanings.
“To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it.”
p. 4, Against Interpretation, Sontag
“What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?”
p. 8, Sontag
Fraudulence
I thought I would continue the discussion of fraudulence, as it was one of the issues that stuck in my mind following the readings. I always consider the realms of music, poetry and art as an ongoing conversation. Fraudulence, perhaps, is referring to those voices that are raised that are repeating something that has already been said, or just making noise (unsuccessful noise?!) The Snoop Dogg making a country album is also an interesting example to this discussion. Snoop Dog, whether you like his music or not, can be appreciated for his contributions to rap music as well as his innovation in that field. Mr. Dogg making a foray into country music seems like a valuable extension (for both genres?) of an already successful practice. This mixing and matching of genres and artistic output seems especially valid in the current cultural sphere.
Could a work of art be successful and, at the same, time fraudulent? I think the contemporary landscape is filled with examples—Backstreet Boys, Avril Lavigne, (I think these might be easy examples, I think my list can go on and on but I am sure my bias would filter in).
Just a few thoughts.
Faheem's post
Music doesn’t have the same critical feed back
The main criticism of music is with its newness. If newness is the measure of quality then has anyone created a definition of what makes something new?
Cavell States about the history of music, that it contains no criticism of music but instead it only makes notes on the details of notations, instruments, and processes.
Formulas for successful or even unsuccessful music are immeasurable. If that is the case then is criticism even possible. The thing that makes a song “bad” is the same thing that makes another song “good”.
He speaks of fraudulence within music as a disease. But my generation is a generation of appropriation. Everything is a remix.
I feel that when Cavell wrote this article that the notion of the remix (for many critics of music) would be considered fraudulent. He states that in art, fraudulence is not as easy to detect as forgery or counterfeiting. He states that there is no one feature, or definite set of features that can be describe.
Now musical taste within popular music seems to change so much faster than in previous years. Things that we where listening to two years ago seems old and outdated.
The trends of today’s artists are to make music that crosses genre. (Snoop Dogg records a country album or Little Wayne records a rock album). If the genres of music are mixing more frequently as more music is being produced then what is the bases of criticisms.
I like Orson’s example of classical music for a couple of reasons.
The first being that it makes me think of Mozart. Mozart’s music was considered edgy and sometime offensive in his time. Time has proven him a genius. Will time do the same thing for current popular music.
The other reason I like Orson’s example of classical music is the word “classical” itself. Where as it used to be considered “popular music” at some point it was named “classical”. This relates back to the Wittgenstein article and the idea of Ordinary Language.
Why is it classical? When did it become classical? So instead of classical should it mean European Art Music from 1730 A.D. to 1830 A.D.
(SIDE BAR BEGIN)
So I of coarse went to Wikipedia for answers.
The term 'classical music' did not appear until the early 19th century, in an attempt to 'canonize' the period from Johann Sebastian Bach to Beethoven as a golden age.[8] The earliest reference to "classical music" recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from about 1836.
(SIDE BAR END)
The idea is of ordinary language really is really messing with me. As I begin to better understand its meaning. I can’t help to think that I am not being clear in what I am saying and writing. Even looking back at what I have written in this blog I question the amount of metaphors used and wonder if I am using them because I am having difficulty finding the words to explain my thoughts.
My wife has been very helpful in process of understanding this term. She says that we argue about Ordinary Language all the time. That she will ask me a question and I will give her a short answer thinking that it should explain everything. But she places just as much value on the words that aren’t said and my body language as she does on my verbal response.
My understanding is that people tend to create layers in what we say by using metaphors and examples which are suppose to explain things indirectly. The problem with this is that many times speaking and writing in this more complex way can leave openings for different interpretations of what is being communicated.
My wife and I spoke about the bible as an example of a text that is filled with metaphors and hypothetical situations that are meant to invoke and teach religious lessons, but sometimes is received as literal example of an occurrence. Their have been many divisions of religious sects and wars based on the interpretations of holy scriptures.
My thoughts may be completely wrong or backwards. I am open to any suggestions that are contrary
The main criticism of music is with its newness. If newness is the measure of quality then has anyone created a definition of what makes something new?
Cavell States about the history of music, that it contains no criticism of music but instead it only makes notes on the details of notations, instruments, and processes.
Formulas for successful or even unsuccessful music are immeasurable. If that is the case then is criticism even possible. The thing that makes a song “bad” is the same thing that makes another song “good”.
He speaks of fraudulence within music as a disease. But my generation is a generation of appropriation. Everything is a remix.
I feel that when Cavell wrote this article that the notion of the remix (for many critics of music) would be considered fraudulent. He states that in art, fraudulence is not as easy to detect as forgery or counterfeiting. He states that there is no one feature, or definite set of features that can be describe.
Now musical taste within popular music seems to change so much faster than in previous years. Things that we where listening to two years ago seems old and outdated.
The trends of today’s artists are to make music that crosses genre. (Snoop Dogg records a country album or Little Wayne records a rock album). If the genres of music are mixing more frequently as more music is being produced then what is the bases of criticisms.
I like Orson’s example of classical music for a couple of reasons.
The first being that it makes me think of Mozart. Mozart’s music was considered edgy and sometime offensive in his time. Time has proven him a genius. Will time do the same thing for current popular music.
The other reason I like Orson’s example of classical music is the word “classical” itself. Where as it used to be considered “popular music” at some point it was named “classical”. This relates back to the Wittgenstein article and the idea of Ordinary Language.
Why is it classical? When did it become classical? So instead of classical should it mean European Art Music from 1730 A.D. to 1830 A.D.
(SIDE BAR BEGIN)
So I of coarse went to Wikipedia for answers.
The term 'classical music' did not appear until the early 19th century, in an attempt to 'canonize' the period from Johann Sebastian Bach to Beethoven as a golden age.[8] The earliest reference to "classical music" recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from about 1836.
(SIDE BAR END)
The idea is of ordinary language really is really messing with me. As I begin to better understand its meaning. I can’t help to think that I am not being clear in what I am saying and writing. Even looking back at what I have written in this blog I question the amount of metaphors used and wonder if I am using them because I am having difficulty finding the words to explain my thoughts.
My wife has been very helpful in process of understanding this term. She says that we argue about Ordinary Language all the time. That she will ask me a question and I will give her a short answer thinking that it should explain everything. But she places just as much value on the words that aren’t said and my body language as she does on my verbal response.
My understanding is that people tend to create layers in what we say by using metaphors and examples which are suppose to explain things indirectly. The problem with this is that many times speaking and writing in this more complex way can leave openings for different interpretations of what is being communicated.
My wife and I spoke about the bible as an example of a text that is filled with metaphors and hypothetical situations that are meant to invoke and teach religious lessons, but sometimes is received as literal example of an occurrence. Their have been many divisions of religious sects and wars based on the interpretations of holy scriptures.
My thoughts may be completely wrong or backwards. I am open to any suggestions that are contrary
"Is there no real way out of this air of self-defeat, no way to get satisfying answers?"
p. 76, Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosopy, Cavell
There is no way to get satisfying answers. Further, there is no need to answer questions such as “can one paraphrase a poem?” For an artist, entering into the discussion immediately admits defeat by way of admitting to a latent content that one can understand rationally.
“When Croce denied the possibility of paraphrase, he at least had the grace to assert that there were no metaphors.” p. 79
I agree with Benedetto Croce’s argument made in “Aesthetic as Science of Expression & General Linguistic”:
“These and all other determinations of modes or degrees of expression reveal their philosophical nullity when the attempt is made to develop them in precise definitions, because they either grasp the void or fall into the absurd.”
Is it all so complex as Cavell pretends? Is Juliet not the sun? Does Romeo orbit her? Is he not warmed? Does his increasing proximity cause his death? The measure of a poem is not the latent content, the message, and how “creatively” or “lyrically” or “clever” it is hidden. It is the way in which a system is built in such a [ ] way as to invent sensations escaping the language to which they are inexorably bound in rational speech. To reconnect these words to reality in repulsive. I cannot do better than DH Lawrence in his Introduction to Harry Crosby's “Chariot of the Sun”:
“Poetry is a matter of words. Poetry is a stringing together of words into a ripple and jingle and a run of colours. Poetry is an interplay of images. Poetry is the iridescent suggestion of an idea. Poetry is all these things, and still it is something else. Given all these ingredients, you have something very like to poetry, something for which we might borrow the old romantic name of poesy. And poesy, like bric-a-brac, will forever be in fashion. But poetry is still another thing.
The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention, and 'discovers' a new world within the known world. Man, and the animals, and the flower, all live within a strange and forever surging chaos. The chaos which we have got used to, we call a cosmos. The unspeakable inner chaos of which we are composed we call consciousness, and mind, and even civilization. But it is, ultimately, chaos, lit up by visions. Just as the rainbow may or may not light up the storm. And, like the rainbow, the vision perisheth.
But man cannot live in chaos. The animals can. To the animal, all is chaos, only there are a few recurring motions and aspects within the surge. And the animal is content. But man is not. Man must wrap himself in a vision, make a house of apparent form and stability, fixity. In his terror of chaos, he begins by putting up an umbrella between himself and the everlasting chaos. Then he paints the underside of his umbrella like a firmament. Then he parades around, lives, and dies under his umbrella. Bequeathed to his descendants, the umbrella becomes a dome, a vault, and men at last begin to feel that something is wrong.
Man fixes some wonderful erection of his own between himself and the wild chaos, and gradually goes bleached and stifled under his parasol. Then comes a poet, enemy of convention, and makes a slit in the umbrella; and lo! the glimpse of chaos is a vision, a window to the sun. But after a while, getting used to the vision, and not liking the genuine draught from chaos, commonplace man daubs a simulacrum of the window that opens onto chaos, and patches the umbrella with the painted patch of the simulacrum. That is, he has got used to the vision, it is part of his house-decoration. So that the umbrella at last looks like a glowing open firmament, of many aspects. But alas, it is all simulacrum, in innumerable patches. Homer and Keats, annotated and with glossary.”
“...the dangers of fraudulence, and of trust, are essential to the experience of art.”
- Music Discomposed, Cavell
While he is correct, unfortunately Cavell attempts to use his dog’s breakfast (a phrase for the brain taken from Kurt Vonnegut and used here to indicate derision for rational thinking in the realm of art) to plow through this issue. Despite coming so close to art, especially from the bottom of 192 to the top of 193, Cavell reduces art to a communicative tool, a way in which to communicate an experience one already knows in a format that must necessarily use information that another person already knows. Thus, for Cavell, art becomes reconfiguration of “the same” in order to communicate the inexpressible. What he is missing is the discovery that takes place in the aesthetic experience of the artist and then between the artist and those experiencing the results What he fails to grasp is the removal of rational process, rational thought, from the authentic artistic experience. There is “no one” there”, if “one” is a rational being, at the moment of an artistic breakthrough, or via Deleuze and Guattari, there is a pack, or Elias Canetti, a crowd. There is an absence and a multiplicity but never a one, never an experience, never an individuality. There is no rational intention. Yes, one communicates but it is a very special sort of communication that Cavell begins to open to and, unfortunately, at the same moment, slams back into a rational experience.
Adam Trowbridge
Monday, January 26, 2009
Thoughts, Comments, Miscellaneous
While I'm still struggling through many of these readings, I've made some notes along the way...
With Cavell's Music Discomposed, all this talk of 'fraudulence' and 'trust' in reference to art just doesn't seem appropriate, as if he thinks every artwork needs to be submitted for Judge Judy's seal of approval. 'Unsuccessful' seems a better term, less harsh and without all the legal connotations. But when Cavell starts talking about modern composer's feeling they've 'lost their audience', it rings true, having heard many complaints from my own composer friends of the poisonous influence of academia resulting in boring, lifeless 'musical' compositions that are all intellect with little, if any, beauty or feeling involved, written for no one outside the realm of academia.
And then I think of Michael Nyman, who seems a one-trick pony prone to 'phoning it in.' I recently screened a version of The Man with a Movie Camera featuring Nyman's score (ca. 2003) and several sections were carbon copies of the music he had done twenty-plus years ago for Peter Greenaway's The Falls (ca. 1980). This is where I do begin to question the 'genuine' intent of some art, where it seems to be an arbitrarily re-hashed version of something that has gone before. In the case of Nyman, his relentless (and somewhat flatulent) music seems an appropriate accompaniment to Greenaway's absurd and hilarious faux documentary, but it doesn't play as well with Vertov, and if you recognize it from the 1980 Greenaway film, you start to feel cheated and scandalized.
(The classical music world has its own problems today, including a frozen repertoire and even standard expectations of how each piece in that repertoire is to be performed. A declining public interest in classical music keeps orchestras locked in to broad and familiar pieces, yet the audience still often lacks familiarity with the material and the ability to discern good performers from atrocious, hence Andrea Bocelli has a career.)
Not that I'm proposing that artists should be re-inventing the wheel at every turn, or trying to make art in a way no one has before, which seems increasingly impossible on a planet of billions; in my own work I frequently revisit past themes, images, and do some re-pasting of my own (not to mention using found & appropriated footage), and I believe it's a legitimate tactic. I find the criticism of 'It's been done' pretty weak. But there are occasions when it does seem that the lack of effort or thought is glaringly obvious. There are those who will never accept repetition of an artistic idea, or the use of fabricators, or a 'remake', etc. so you'd better know what you're doing, or at least be able to defend the choice.
So this is where I start to feel really bogged down, and thank god for Susan Sontag. Ultimately all interpretation is subjective and often reductive. There is an inclination towards 'definitive' interpretations/versions/translations of works that not only limit the pleasure of experiencing a work 'raw' without preconceptions, but such declarations can be totally off the mark. Specific examples elude me, but there are plenty of instances in which artists have bemoaned the fact that their work has been completely misinterpreted, sometimes irreversibly so. At best, we all have to take this business of aesthetic critique far, far more lightly than the academic world seems comfortable with. We can derive pleasure from discussing and debating the impact & success of a work, bearing in mind that we will always be trying to pin down something which isn't meant to be categorized or defined, but experienced individually.
Sontag is right on the money. Too often I find art critiques endlessly circular and ultimately meaningless in their frustratingly convoluted path to extrude significant, proclamatory meaning.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
On Ordinary Language Philosophy, or, this might help reading Cavell
Right at the beginning of "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy," Cavell says that he wants to suggest "resemblances between one kind of judgment recognizable as aesthetic and the characteristic claim of Wittgenstein--and of ordinary language philosophers generally--to voice 'what we should ordinarily say'" (74).
This, I'm afraid, could be awfully opaque if you don't know what Wittgenstein's characteristic claims look like (although the brief excerpt from the Philosophical Investigations should give you a little bit of an idea), or what ordinary language philosophers do all day.
The Wikipedia entry on ordinary language philosophy is actually helpful and quite brief:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_language_philosophy
But I'll give it my own spin here.
When you were in college and stoned out of your brain (ok, maybe when I was in college and stoned out of my brain), it inevitably occurred to you (me) that even though your (my) friend who just passed you (me) the bong acts like your (...) friend, he secretly might really not like you, or be unbelievably annoyed by you, or hate you. That all of his apparent goodwill and his liberal sharing of his pot was just an elaborate ruse to some inscrutable, villainous end, or merely the drudgery of a sense of obligation. That what you see of him is actually a mask. The fancy word for this position is skepticism. (And it's also a form of doubt, which, if you'll recall from last time, is what Descartes was really good at, and what produced an irredeemable distance between subject and object, or what made the subject an island onto itself. And what Kant was trying to overcome in his Critiques. And it also is something like the position that what film images give us is never or cannot be the object itself.)
One response to this is, "you're stoned, you're paranoid, don't be silly." Which is sort of a flat assertion of the reality of reality, which probably won't be very convincing if you're stoned and paranoid and human faces look like masks. (Or if your sober and alienated and human faces look like masks, for that matter.) Another response would be to list all of the friendly things your friend has done, to list acts of fidelity, to accumulate evidence of his amity. And this will only be marginally more convincing, and probably only for a brief second if you've worked yourself up into a good frothy paranoia, since every item of evidence will, inside your (my) stoned little brain, always be open to doubt--that all these apparent acts and aspects of friendship are disingenuous, or false, or hypocritical, or insincere, or didn't really occur. When faced with this caustic paranoia, somebody else sitting in the room might reply (if our false friend is absent, or deaf), "wow, you know, you're probably right, he really is an awful hypocrite, and you can't ever really know what another human is feeling." In this case, the paranoia has become contagious (this is a good chunk of what Eve Sedgwick is on about in her essay for this week). (NB: My rather sophomoric example of stoned paranoia here is not meant to be [merely] sophomoric; I promise you I'm not being patronizing. One of the points I want to be making here is that this doubt is not really some dry, intellectualized, affected, obnoxious intellectual claim, but a whole emotional and affective position, that you can be inside it, that you can feel it. I think this is not an indifferent point.)
Ordinary language philosophy responds to this by picking at your words, which ends up being way more convincing against paranoia than an accumulation of evidence. It thinks of itself as a kind of therapy (I'm being literal here; Wittgenstein says that flat out). Its response would be that your claiming that "you can never really know what other people are thinking or feeling" is actually just a linguistic sleight of hand, that you're forgetting (intentionally or not, under the influence of drugs or stone cold sober) what you mean when you say "know." What could it possibly mean to say that you cannot ever really know what somebody else is feeling? You're trying to get the word "know" to be more absolute, more watertight, more pure than what it actually is. Which is to say, what it ordinarily means. Which is to say, how we in fact use the word. You're wanting it to mean something other than it does. This is the sense in which ordinary language philosophy makes appeals to "what we should ordinarily say when..." or "what we mean when we say..." This looks like: "What we should ordinarily say when we see somebody cry out and writhe in pain is that he is in pain." (Another way ordinary language philosophy makes the same point is to ask when we say that we know somebody is in pain, versus when we ordinarily would merely say that he is in pain. What would the situation be in which you would feel compelled to say not, "he is in pain," but rather "I know he is in pain"? When it is in doubt? But why should it be in doubt? When he is hiding his pain, or denying it, etc. This sort of philosophizing can go on for quite some time, and Cavell is occasionally and unforunately longwinded in collecting examples of this sort around when we should say that a paraphrase of a poem is exactly or approximately what it means, etc. I am of course always terse.)
Cavell voices it this way in "Aesthetic Problems": "we impose a demand for absoluteness... upon a concept, and then finding that our ordinary use of this concept does not meet our demand, we accomodate this discrepancy as nearly as possible. Take these familiar patterns: we do not really see material objects, but only see them indirectly; we cannot be certain of any empirical proposition, but only practically certain; we cannot really know what another person is feeling, but only infer it" (77).
Ordinary language philosophy insists that what words ordinarily mean is what they mean, that philosophy has no special privilege to autocratically define words. (Seeing is seeing, we are certain of things, and we can, in fact, know what other people feel.) He points out that unless somebody questions us on our seeing/certainty/knowing, we will usually feel pretty confident in our seeing/certainty/knowing. But then somebody starts philosophizing (or passes the joint), and we find ourselves in doubt.
That is to say, for ordinary language philosophy, philosophy's contagious paranoia is something to work against, and that it is something that must be worked against. That we should work to overcome Descartes, and the isolation of the subject. I'll just reference what we said last time: Kant's aesthetics is the ground for our ability to have a community (aesthetics as the common/communal sense).
So Cavell's point here (and I'll let him make the argument the rest of the way himself) is that, if it is to be humane, philosophy needs aesthetics, and it needs art, and both of these in the service of overcoming the isolation of the subject. (And that analytical philosophy, in its willful ignorance of art, becomes somehow inhumane. But here you need not worry yourself about analytical philosophy, which is another kettle of fish.) All of which is to say, where Cavell seems particularly obscure, feel free to just move on through those sections to get to his discussion of sparkling wine from the Canary Islands.
This, I'm afraid, could be awfully opaque if you don't know what Wittgenstein's characteristic claims look like (although the brief excerpt from the Philosophical Investigations should give you a little bit of an idea), or what ordinary language philosophers do all day.
The Wikipedia entry on ordinary language philosophy is actually helpful and quite brief:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_language_philosophy
But I'll give it my own spin here.
When you were in college and stoned out of your brain (ok, maybe when I was in college and stoned out of my brain), it inevitably occurred to you (me) that even though your (my) friend who just passed you (me) the bong acts like your (...) friend, he secretly might really not like you, or be unbelievably annoyed by you, or hate you. That all of his apparent goodwill and his liberal sharing of his pot was just an elaborate ruse to some inscrutable, villainous end, or merely the drudgery of a sense of obligation. That what you see of him is actually a mask. The fancy word for this position is skepticism. (And it's also a form of doubt, which, if you'll recall from last time, is what Descartes was really good at, and what produced an irredeemable distance between subject and object, or what made the subject an island onto itself. And what Kant was trying to overcome in his Critiques. And it also is something like the position that what film images give us is never or cannot be the object itself.)
One response to this is, "you're stoned, you're paranoid, don't be silly." Which is sort of a flat assertion of the reality of reality, which probably won't be very convincing if you're stoned and paranoid and human faces look like masks. (Or if your sober and alienated and human faces look like masks, for that matter.) Another response would be to list all of the friendly things your friend has done, to list acts of fidelity, to accumulate evidence of his amity. And this will only be marginally more convincing, and probably only for a brief second if you've worked yourself up into a good frothy paranoia, since every item of evidence will, inside your (my) stoned little brain, always be open to doubt--that all these apparent acts and aspects of friendship are disingenuous, or false, or hypocritical, or insincere, or didn't really occur. When faced with this caustic paranoia, somebody else sitting in the room might reply (if our false friend is absent, or deaf), "wow, you know, you're probably right, he really is an awful hypocrite, and you can't ever really know what another human is feeling." In this case, the paranoia has become contagious (this is a good chunk of what Eve Sedgwick is on about in her essay for this week). (NB: My rather sophomoric example of stoned paranoia here is not meant to be [merely] sophomoric; I promise you I'm not being patronizing. One of the points I want to be making here is that this doubt is not really some dry, intellectualized, affected, obnoxious intellectual claim, but a whole emotional and affective position, that you can be inside it, that you can feel it. I think this is not an indifferent point.)
Ordinary language philosophy responds to this by picking at your words, which ends up being way more convincing against paranoia than an accumulation of evidence. It thinks of itself as a kind of therapy (I'm being literal here; Wittgenstein says that flat out). Its response would be that your claiming that "you can never really know what other people are thinking or feeling" is actually just a linguistic sleight of hand, that you're forgetting (intentionally or not, under the influence of drugs or stone cold sober) what you mean when you say "know." What could it possibly mean to say that you cannot ever really know what somebody else is feeling? You're trying to get the word "know" to be more absolute, more watertight, more pure than what it actually is. Which is to say, what it ordinarily means. Which is to say, how we in fact use the word. You're wanting it to mean something other than it does. This is the sense in which ordinary language philosophy makes appeals to "what we should ordinarily say when..." or "what we mean when we say..." This looks like: "What we should ordinarily say when we see somebody cry out and writhe in pain is that he is in pain." (Another way ordinary language philosophy makes the same point is to ask when we say that we know somebody is in pain, versus when we ordinarily would merely say that he is in pain. What would the situation be in which you would feel compelled to say not, "he is in pain," but rather "I know he is in pain"? When it is in doubt? But why should it be in doubt? When he is hiding his pain, or denying it, etc. This sort of philosophizing can go on for quite some time, and Cavell is occasionally and unforunately longwinded in collecting examples of this sort around when we should say that a paraphrase of a poem is exactly or approximately what it means, etc. I am of course always terse.)
Cavell voices it this way in "Aesthetic Problems": "we impose a demand for absoluteness... upon a concept, and then finding that our ordinary use of this concept does not meet our demand, we accomodate this discrepancy as nearly as possible. Take these familiar patterns: we do not really see material objects, but only see them indirectly; we cannot be certain of any empirical proposition, but only practically certain; we cannot really know what another person is feeling, but only infer it" (77).
Ordinary language philosophy insists that what words ordinarily mean is what they mean, that philosophy has no special privilege to autocratically define words. (Seeing is seeing, we are certain of things, and we can, in fact, know what other people feel.) He points out that unless somebody questions us on our seeing/certainty/knowing, we will usually feel pretty confident in our seeing/certainty/knowing. But then somebody starts philosophizing (or passes the joint), and we find ourselves in doubt.
That is to say, for ordinary language philosophy, philosophy's contagious paranoia is something to work against, and that it is something that must be worked against. That we should work to overcome Descartes, and the isolation of the subject. I'll just reference what we said last time: Kant's aesthetics is the ground for our ability to have a community (aesthetics as the common/communal sense).
So Cavell's point here (and I'll let him make the argument the rest of the way himself) is that, if it is to be humane, philosophy needs aesthetics, and it needs art, and both of these in the service of overcoming the isolation of the subject. (And that analytical philosophy, in its willful ignorance of art, becomes somehow inhumane. But here you need not worry yourself about analytical philosophy, which is another kettle of fish.) All of which is to say, where Cavell seems particularly obscure, feel free to just move on through those sections to get to his discussion of sparkling wine from the Canary Islands.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Notes on readings for this week.
Two repetitions of things I said in class, as far as readings go for this week:
(1) Reread the Wittgenstein, be prepared to talk about it. Stanley Cavell was deeply influenced by Wittgenstein (he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Philosophical Investigations). Having a feeling for how Wittgenstein proceeds (by suggestive fragments, and strangely obscure questions) will help you get what Cavell is doing in his essay(s).
(2) You might consider starting with (& soon, at that) the excerpt from Cavell's "Music Discomposed." It is, as I put it rather unfortunately in class, his attempt to tell us what it feels like to be inside Kant (yuk yuk). It's a description of what a reflective judgment of taste feels like, or one version of it. The selection from "Music Discomposed" is included at the end of the Cavell PDF (most of which is "Aesthetic Problems").
More on Cavell soon(ish).
And one more thing: if you can't manage to get through all the reading this week, the lowest priority is the Eve Sedgwick. It's a fantastic essay with a fabulous title, but if we're not going to get to something, that's the thing we're not going to get to.
(1) Reread the Wittgenstein, be prepared to talk about it. Stanley Cavell was deeply influenced by Wittgenstein (he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Philosophical Investigations). Having a feeling for how Wittgenstein proceeds (by suggestive fragments, and strangely obscure questions) will help you get what Cavell is doing in his essay(s).
(2) You might consider starting with (& soon, at that) the excerpt from Cavell's "Music Discomposed." It is, as I put it rather unfortunately in class, his attempt to tell us what it feels like to be inside Kant (yuk yuk). It's a description of what a reflective judgment of taste feels like, or one version of it. The selection from "Music Discomposed" is included at the end of the Cavell PDF (most of which is "Aesthetic Problems").
More on Cavell soon(ish).
And one more thing: if you can't manage to get through all the reading this week, the lowest priority is the Eve Sedgwick. It's a fantastic essay with a fabulous title, but if we're not going to get to something, that's the thing we're not going to get to.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Blogging Requirements
As part of this course, we will be using a blog, in the place of something like a discussion board on a Blackboard site. In part, this is because it was easier for me as visiting faculty to use free web tools (cf drop.io); and in part, because I really do want what we do to be public. (We can have a discussion about this, however. If folks want our discussions to be more intimate, I can probably be convinced. This will not change the requirement to post/comment, however.) Blog requirements are as follows:
- Every week, you will be required to post something, or comment substantively. "Substantively" here means more than pasting a link, but need not be an essay. Posting can look like an object for our consideration (with some consideration), reactions to the reading, engaged questions, descriptions of your confusions, requests for clarification of said confusions.
- The blog will also serve as a place to post things which might be interesting/provocative/amusing for the rest of us.
- Also, I'll request that when you give your presentation, you'll post related materials (images, clips, text, &c.) about 24 hours ahead of time, so the rest of us can formulate (or at least have) an initial response before arriving in class to discuss your curation.
- Of course, you are also required to follow the blog. This is a communitarian enterprise (or it aspires to be). Make sure
Course Overview
I'll admit up front that, given the circumstances of my being hired to teach this course, the description was written before I knew what I was going to teach. Think of it as artless underdescription. So, I thought I'd give you the high-altitude description of the course (now that the syllabus is complete). Moreover, since I'm going to be out of town on the first day, this also substitutes for the spiel I'd give y'all while you were shopping the course.
There are two parts to this not-spiel:
What this course is about.
How this course is about what it is about.
There are two parts to this not-spiel:
What this course is about.
How this course is about what it is about.
How this course is about what it is about.
The course is organized loosely into four sections. These are not named on the syllabus, since this organization doesn't feel quite strong enough to formalize it quite that much. (But each section does get its own page, which is kind of intentional.) The progression between sections is meant to feel natural, and not "and now for something completely different!"
Part 1: Introduction. Weeks 1–3. This is pretty straightforward. The two weeks are called "What is aesthetics?" and "What is theory?" These are designed to give us a set of common problems (if not common terms) for the rest of the course. And also to give you a sense of where I'm coming from, before we get into the thick of the material.
Part 2: Technology. Weeks 4–7. These four weeks are an exploration of modern technology and its relationship to, and effect on, aesthetics and perception. A traditional notion of techne (which Mumford calls technics) is that it is opposed to art: art is purposeless, techne is suffused with purpose, defined by it. Techne is the manipulation of the world to suit humanity's ends. We will work to progressively complicate this notion, in part by focusing on technology which takes up human perception as its object (or, even in the case of Foucault, human life). Mostly, however, in weeks 5–7, we're concerned to ask after the changes modern technology brings in perception and aesthetics by changing the world, the changes technology brings without explicitly aiming at (the milquetoast version of what we're studying here would be "the law of unintended consequences").
Part 3: Embodiment. Weeks 8–11. These four weeks are dedicated primarily to asking questions around how aesthetics are embodied (a theme broached particularly strongly in Benjamin's work in the section on technology, and continuing in his presence in this section). Here we will move from highly abstract, scientistic notions of the body (in Freud and Bergson) to deeply personal notions of the body (in Barthes). To a large degree, in this section, questions of modernity and modern technology get progressively attenuated here (even if we end with a book on photography), and instead start asking after sexuality, life as it is lived, what aesthetics feels like.
Part 4: Politics. Weeks 12–15. These four weeks ask after what Rancière calls "the distribution of the sensible," the notion that sensibility—here, what can be thought, said, and felt—is the domain of politics, and that aesthetics (in the form of art, or architecture, or new media technologies) can alter this distribution. Aesthetics is politics, literally. The emphasis here shifts to more contemporary theory, and the problem is something like ways of inventing new forms of life (in Wittgenstein's beautifully enigmatic phrase). For all of the thinkers here, a "new form of life" would not be materially, or materiallistically (or whatever the adverbial form of materialist is; I mean to imply Marxism here) new. Rather, it would be more like a change in the atmosphere.
This progression, from technology through embodiment and into politics is something that will, I think, begin to make more sense from the inside. Of course, we will spend an awful lot of time talking about all three topics in all four parts of the course. We will talk more about this in our first session. For now, I wanted to give you a sense of what topics we'll be covering, and, very briefly, how we're going to move through them.
Part 1: Introduction. Weeks 1–3. This is pretty straightforward. The two weeks are called "What is aesthetics?" and "What is theory?" These are designed to give us a set of common problems (if not common terms) for the rest of the course. And also to give you a sense of where I'm coming from, before we get into the thick of the material.
Part 2: Technology. Weeks 4–7. These four weeks are an exploration of modern technology and its relationship to, and effect on, aesthetics and perception. A traditional notion of techne (which Mumford calls technics) is that it is opposed to art: art is purposeless, techne is suffused with purpose, defined by it. Techne is the manipulation of the world to suit humanity's ends. We will work to progressively complicate this notion, in part by focusing on technology which takes up human perception as its object (or, even in the case of Foucault, human life). Mostly, however, in weeks 5–7, we're concerned to ask after the changes modern technology brings in perception and aesthetics by changing the world, the changes technology brings without explicitly aiming at (the milquetoast version of what we're studying here would be "the law of unintended consequences").
Part 3: Embodiment. Weeks 8–11. These four weeks are dedicated primarily to asking questions around how aesthetics are embodied (a theme broached particularly strongly in Benjamin's work in the section on technology, and continuing in his presence in this section). Here we will move from highly abstract, scientistic notions of the body (in Freud and Bergson) to deeply personal notions of the body (in Barthes). To a large degree, in this section, questions of modernity and modern technology get progressively attenuated here (even if we end with a book on photography), and instead start asking after sexuality, life as it is lived, what aesthetics feels like.
Part 4: Politics. Weeks 12–15. These four weeks ask after what Rancière calls "the distribution of the sensible," the notion that sensibility—here, what can be thought, said, and felt—is the domain of politics, and that aesthetics (in the form of art, or architecture, or new media technologies) can alter this distribution. Aesthetics is politics, literally. The emphasis here shifts to more contemporary theory, and the problem is something like ways of inventing new forms of life (in Wittgenstein's beautifully enigmatic phrase). For all of the thinkers here, a "new form of life" would not be materially, or materiallistically (or whatever the adverbial form of materialist is; I mean to imply Marxism here) new. Rather, it would be more like a change in the atmosphere.
This progression, from technology through embodiment and into politics is something that will, I think, begin to make more sense from the inside. Of course, we will spend an awful lot of time talking about all three topics in all four parts of the course. We will talk more about this in our first session. For now, I wanted to give you a sense of what topics we'll be covering, and, very briefly, how we're going to move through them.
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