Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Chris
The reason I believe in Santa Claus is that, even though my only plans for the day are to get on a plane in 3 hours, I still could scarcely sleep.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Bloomers
I'm submitting an abstract for a conference, and it's a paper I haven't touched in a while. I re-read (mostly) one of the background articles, and I want to recap it in an attempt to better prepare and organize my abstract.
The article is "The Breaking of Form," by Harold Bloom, in Deconstruction & Criticism. I'm using it as a foil to discuss form in Joel Durand's Athanor.
Bloom's article serves mainly as a polemic against his detractors. His work on poetry--most famously The Anxiety of Influence--was received poorly (and Bloom would say unfairly) by some, and here he seeks to redress the balance.
Bloom's understanding of form, or the creation of form in strong poetry, is that of breaking. The prolonged discussion is on breaking from older (or elder) poets, though this can also, it seems to me, manifest in a breaking from form. Ultimately, these end up being the same thing (for me. Argument to follow). Bloom quotes Kenneth Burke on form: "A work has form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence." Anticipation, especially in poetry, can be formed only through citationality (in music as well): if there is no preceding discourse (or syntax or semiotic system etc.) upon which to base expectations, there is no gratification. The corpus cited, of course, is precisely the o/elders. One wonders if this can be argued in such a way as to keep from dissolving into the old story of patricide.
Two things make this myth (all criticism is a myth, to over-generalize Bloom) more interesting than Oedipus. One is Bloom's capacity to think a history of poetry (or art) without invoking either organicism or any other teleology, however crude or sophisticated. The anxiety of influence is not a natural phenomenon that propels a poet to his (except Dickenson) greatness, but is a historical/cultural (documented in some cases) phenomenon with which we all struggle. The narcissistic aggression of the artist is what makes the work strong. This first labyrinth unsettles me on two accounts: I'm not sure I'm comfortable with a discourse of strength as it is deployed by Bloom, and I am skeptical of any framework with so openly places psychoanalysis (especially Freudian) at its foundation.
The other turn in this otherwise banal story is Bloom's deliberate position in the between. First, Bloom positions himself in between the over-coding and the abyss: "Language, in relation to poetry, can be conceived in two valid ways, as I have learned, slowly and reluctantly. Either one can believe in a magical theory of all language, as the Kabbalists, many poets, and Walter Benjamin did, or else one must yield to a thoroughgoing linguistic nihilism, which in its most refined form is the mode now called Deconstruction." (4) We have on the one hand the over-determination of meaning, and on the other the dearth of meaning. But which we chose is of no importance, Bloom says. In either case the poet/critic must wrestle for freedom from meaning(lessness): "Either the new poet fights to win freedom from dearth, or from plenitude, but if the antagonist be moderate, then the agon will not take place, and no fresh sublimity will be won. Only the agon is of the essence." (5) Again there is the problem of strength, but I would like to suggest that the positive in this analysis of analysis (or rhetoric of rhetoric, as Bloom prefers), is that there is not focus on the actual freedom, but on the struggle. It is in becoming-poet that is the poet, the canal from fetus to infant. The poetry is in the forgotten margin.
This loops us back to influence. For Bloom, a strong "misreading" of poetry (and we can only misread, it seems) involves reading the (anomalous) ratio between poems/poets (but maybe we have only poems; or to follow Bloom more closely, we have only readings of poems). His reading of Ashbery (which I've not yet finished) is closely tied to his understanding of Stevens and Whitman; it is always read as its influence (forget Foucault). Never, though, because that is where we find truth, or the meaning. Only because (I suspect) that is the only way we can ever read anything--Bloom prefigures, perhaps because of a common affection for Derrica, Spivak's scrupulous mistakes. So not only does Bloom deny authorial authority and the immanence of truth or meaning, but he refuses to search for meaning in the text itself, or even in the reader. Instead, meaning (or perhaps better, reading) comes from the space (and time) between one text and another--or perhaps there is only one text already. The reader--centered by virtue of its subject position--is also always already in the margin, perhaps experiencing its own anxiety of influence.
There is perhaps more I ought to say, particularly by way of critique, but I will forgo that for now, on account of the lateness. The use of this for my abstract is already partly manifest, but I should like to flesh it out some more.
In the original paper I make use only of Bloom's quotation of Burke, and then go on to demonstrate Durand's use of repetition, both on large and small scales, to generate repetition. My analyses (aside: firefox doesn't recognizes analyses?) focus primarily on rhythmic/motivic devises as well as structural (often mistakenly called formal) articulations. I use this in lieu of a more common pitch-class analysis, which seems to me quite out of place in Durand's music, not in the least because of his comment describing his aesthetic for Athanor as "unmodern."
From here Bloom himself becomes more useful. It is interesting to me that Durand could write music like Athanor after studying under Brian Fernyhough, a man who deliberately writes music so complex (or complicated, depending on whom you ask) that even the most virtuosic of performs are constantly, as they perform, forced to decide which mistake they shall make. Athanor stands in stark contrast to Fernyhough's music, just as does that of Reich, Glass and Carter next to the pedagogy of Nadia Boulanger. I worry here that this is too trivial. I'm reading in Durand's music the absence of Fernyhough's. I can complicate this by also reading it for Murail and Grisey, for whom Durand has some respect; the crucial difference here would be Durand's interest or skill with form. This can finally be expanded out to include the "unmodern" and read Athanor particularly as a radical break from and repetition of the modernist--or according to Burke, artistic--refusal of influence. This might suggest that Bloom is writing in circles (which wouldn't surprise, giving his reliance on Freud): if anxiety is posited as a universal for successful art, and if it is typified by absence and difference, then all that is needed to support they hypothesis--and perhaps even to prove it's unescapability--is change.
That's good for now. It's sleepy time.
The article is "The Breaking of Form," by Harold Bloom, in Deconstruction & Criticism. I'm using it as a foil to discuss form in Joel Durand's Athanor.
Bloom's article serves mainly as a polemic against his detractors. His work on poetry--most famously The Anxiety of Influence--was received poorly (and Bloom would say unfairly) by some, and here he seeks to redress the balance.
Bloom's understanding of form, or the creation of form in strong poetry, is that of breaking. The prolonged discussion is on breaking from older (or elder) poets, though this can also, it seems to me, manifest in a breaking from form. Ultimately, these end up being the same thing (for me. Argument to follow). Bloom quotes Kenneth Burke on form: "A work has form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence." Anticipation, especially in poetry, can be formed only through citationality (in music as well): if there is no preceding discourse (or syntax or semiotic system etc.) upon which to base expectations, there is no gratification. The corpus cited, of course, is precisely the o/elders. One wonders if this can be argued in such a way as to keep from dissolving into the old story of patricide.
Two things make this myth (all criticism is a myth, to over-generalize Bloom) more interesting than Oedipus. One is Bloom's capacity to think a history of poetry (or art) without invoking either organicism or any other teleology, however crude or sophisticated. The anxiety of influence is not a natural phenomenon that propels a poet to his (except Dickenson) greatness, but is a historical/cultural (documented in some cases) phenomenon with which we all struggle. The narcissistic aggression of the artist is what makes the work strong. This first labyrinth unsettles me on two accounts: I'm not sure I'm comfortable with a discourse of strength as it is deployed by Bloom, and I am skeptical of any framework with so openly places psychoanalysis (especially Freudian) at its foundation.
The other turn in this otherwise banal story is Bloom's deliberate position in the between. First, Bloom positions himself in between the over-coding and the abyss: "Language, in relation to poetry, can be conceived in two valid ways, as I have learned, slowly and reluctantly. Either one can believe in a magical theory of all language, as the Kabbalists, many poets, and Walter Benjamin did, or else one must yield to a thoroughgoing linguistic nihilism, which in its most refined form is the mode now called Deconstruction." (4) We have on the one hand the over-determination of meaning, and on the other the dearth of meaning. But which we chose is of no importance, Bloom says. In either case the poet/critic must wrestle for freedom from meaning(lessness): "Either the new poet fights to win freedom from dearth, or from plenitude, but if the antagonist be moderate, then the agon will not take place, and no fresh sublimity will be won. Only the agon is of the essence." (5) Again there is the problem of strength, but I would like to suggest that the positive in this analysis of analysis (or rhetoric of rhetoric, as Bloom prefers), is that there is not focus on the actual freedom, but on the struggle. It is in becoming-poet that is the poet, the canal from fetus to infant. The poetry is in the forgotten margin.
This loops us back to influence. For Bloom, a strong "misreading" of poetry (and we can only misread, it seems) involves reading the (anomalous) ratio between poems/poets (but maybe we have only poems; or to follow Bloom more closely, we have only readings of poems). His reading of Ashbery (which I've not yet finished) is closely tied to his understanding of Stevens and Whitman; it is always read as its influence (forget Foucault). Never, though, because that is where we find truth, or the meaning. Only because (I suspect) that is the only way we can ever read anything--Bloom prefigures, perhaps because of a common affection for Derrica, Spivak's scrupulous mistakes. So not only does Bloom deny authorial authority and the immanence of truth or meaning, but he refuses to search for meaning in the text itself, or even in the reader. Instead, meaning (or perhaps better, reading) comes from the space (and time) between one text and another--or perhaps there is only one text already. The reader--centered by virtue of its subject position--is also always already in the margin, perhaps experiencing its own anxiety of influence.
There is perhaps more I ought to say, particularly by way of critique, but I will forgo that for now, on account of the lateness. The use of this for my abstract is already partly manifest, but I should like to flesh it out some more.
In the original paper I make use only of Bloom's quotation of Burke, and then go on to demonstrate Durand's use of repetition, both on large and small scales, to generate repetition. My analyses (aside: firefox doesn't recognizes analyses?) focus primarily on rhythmic/motivic devises as well as structural (often mistakenly called formal) articulations. I use this in lieu of a more common pitch-class analysis, which seems to me quite out of place in Durand's music, not in the least because of his comment describing his aesthetic for Athanor as "unmodern."
From here Bloom himself becomes more useful. It is interesting to me that Durand could write music like Athanor after studying under Brian Fernyhough, a man who deliberately writes music so complex (or complicated, depending on whom you ask) that even the most virtuosic of performs are constantly, as they perform, forced to decide which mistake they shall make. Athanor stands in stark contrast to Fernyhough's music, just as does that of Reich, Glass and Carter next to the pedagogy of Nadia Boulanger. I worry here that this is too trivial. I'm reading in Durand's music the absence of Fernyhough's. I can complicate this by also reading it for Murail and Grisey, for whom Durand has some respect; the crucial difference here would be Durand's interest or skill with form. This can finally be expanded out to include the "unmodern" and read Athanor particularly as a radical break from and repetition of the modernist--or according to Burke, artistic--refusal of influence. This might suggest that Bloom is writing in circles (which wouldn't surprise, giving his reliance on Freud): if anxiety is posited as a universal for successful art, and if it is typified by absence and difference, then all that is needed to support they hypothesis--and perhaps even to prove it's unescapability--is change.
That's good for now. It's sleepy time.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Lost in Translation
One of the books I found at Magus (for $1!) is Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates. I bought it for Spivak's article, "The Politics of Translation," about which I knew nothing; but for a buck, it was worth a shot (also excited about art critic Griselda Pollock's "Painting, Feminism, History.")
So I read it. I think it's important.
"How does the translator attend to the specificity of the language she translates? There is a way in which the rhetorical nature of every language disrupts its logical systematicity. If we emphasize the logical at the expense of these rhetorical interferences, we remain safe. 'Safety' is the appropriate term here, because we are talking of risks, of violence to the translating medium." (178)
Spivak is talking about a number of things here. Spivak clarifies what she means when contrasting logic and rhetoric: "Post-structuralism has shown some of us a staging of the agent within a three-tiered notion of language (as rhetoric, logic, silence)." (179) Though Spivak doesn't engage directly in discussion silence, she has a clear interest in retaining (or emulating?) rhetoric. Being faithful to precise meaning (logic) may (does) destroy the rhetoric that gives a piece its intimacy (by breaking it's systematicity). However, adhering to rhetoric is dangerous, as one might do violence to the logic of the text (and one's reputation).
The danger brings us to Spivak's second theme: the crisis. Though she doesn't dwell on the possibility, I think the central motivation behind Spivak's conception of a good translation is one of not managing crises. Being safe is always being complicit. The translator (of Third-World texts) has to behave dangerously, both for the sake of the text and for those who are invariably represented by the translation (because all texts represent, even when they are not intending to), because a lot is at steak.
The generality of the first quotation above led me to believe Spivak covertly meant this article to be not only about literal (and literary) translation. Spivak makes this clear when she talks about "Translation in General," and Toni Morrison's Beloved. The details will be forgone here; it is principally important that Spivak is talking about, in some instances, translating form English to English, or translations in which no language is involved, or translation itself is resisted.
Which is where I come in. As usual, I'm going to take writing on a very serious subject (the lingering effects of colonialism and the current effects of multi-national capitalism), and apply it to music. After all, in a very real sense, music fits the post-structural conception of language. Indeed, a great deal of the music-theoretical literature is on justifying the rhetorical in terms of the logical, and the most often cited example of John Cage's avant-gardism is 4'33", in which not a note is played (though this piece is never, to my knowledge, analyzed). Much of music theory, one might say, is about being safe: about effacing the rhetorical in favor of logic.
So this article finds its way into two of mine. The most apt is my paper on aesthetics. Spivak serves to understand the margin, and to understand all music as in some ways marginalized. I must be careful not to degenerate into discipline hating.
Secondly, I can work this into the end of my paper on minimalism, as an alternative to the distrust of metaphoric depth and penetration.
So I read it. I think it's important.
"How does the translator attend to the specificity of the language she translates? There is a way in which the rhetorical nature of every language disrupts its logical systematicity. If we emphasize the logical at the expense of these rhetorical interferences, we remain safe. 'Safety' is the appropriate term here, because we are talking of risks, of violence to the translating medium." (178)
Spivak is talking about a number of things here. Spivak clarifies what she means when contrasting logic and rhetoric: "Post-structuralism has shown some of us a staging of the agent within a three-tiered notion of language (as rhetoric, logic, silence)." (179) Though Spivak doesn't engage directly in discussion silence, she has a clear interest in retaining (or emulating?) rhetoric. Being faithful to precise meaning (logic) may (does) destroy the rhetoric that gives a piece its intimacy (by breaking it's systematicity). However, adhering to rhetoric is dangerous, as one might do violence to the logic of the text (and one's reputation).
The danger brings us to Spivak's second theme: the crisis. Though she doesn't dwell on the possibility, I think the central motivation behind Spivak's conception of a good translation is one of not managing crises. Being safe is always being complicit. The translator (of Third-World texts) has to behave dangerously, both for the sake of the text and for those who are invariably represented by the translation (because all texts represent, even when they are not intending to), because a lot is at steak.
The generality of the first quotation above led me to believe Spivak covertly meant this article to be not only about literal (and literary) translation. Spivak makes this clear when she talks about "Translation in General," and Toni Morrison's Beloved. The details will be forgone here; it is principally important that Spivak is talking about, in some instances, translating form English to English, or translations in which no language is involved, or translation itself is resisted.
Which is where I come in. As usual, I'm going to take writing on a very serious subject (the lingering effects of colonialism and the current effects of multi-national capitalism), and apply it to music. After all, in a very real sense, music fits the post-structural conception of language. Indeed, a great deal of the music-theoretical literature is on justifying the rhetorical in terms of the logical, and the most often cited example of John Cage's avant-gardism is 4'33", in which not a note is played (though this piece is never, to my knowledge, analyzed). Much of music theory, one might say, is about being safe: about effacing the rhetorical in favor of logic.
So this article finds its way into two of mine. The most apt is my paper on aesthetics. Spivak serves to understand the margin, and to understand all music as in some ways marginalized. I must be careful not to degenerate into discipline hating.
Secondly, I can work this into the end of my paper on minimalism, as an alternative to the distrust of metaphoric depth and penetration.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Dangerous Magus
The problem with a good used bookstore is that it costs me the same to shop there as it does to shop at any other book store. I could go to the U book store and get two good books for $30, and feel like I just tossed too much money at something I won't read for quite a while, or I could go to Magus--you know, just on the way to the bus, as something fun to do for a few seconds--and spend the same $30. The problem is now I've got 8 new (old) books to read when I can't even finish the stuff I've already got going. At least I knocked off one of the books from my list: No longer need bell hooks' Resisting Representation.
Maybe I can weave some of it into the queue.
Maybe I can weave some of it into the queue.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Via Reddit
Thanks Erik, for wising me to reddit.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7100295.stm
There seem to be (to simplify) three positions re: gay rights. It's not an issue, it's an issue, and it's not an issue. At least the Anglicans have made it to phase two.
Edit: Just read this in "9 Chickweed Lane": "Good work is taken for granted. That leaves us with little else to celebrate than the bungled and criminal." Unrelated to the above.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7100295.stm
There seem to be (to simplify) three positions re: gay rights. It's not an issue, it's an issue, and it's not an issue. At least the Anglicans have made it to phase two.
Edit: Just read this in "9 Chickweed Lane": "Good work is taken for granted. That leaves us with little else to celebrate than the bungled and criminal." Unrelated to the above.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Philotopic
I may have thought up a way to expand my paper on philosophy and music. The paper ends (awkwardly) by suggesting that John Cage's work (and that of others) exists in the margin between music and non-music, and that this margin of undefinability is created by the (often gendered) reification of "true" music. (I don't spend enough time discussing the positive, that is to say generative, side of this process. I think I give the impression that I am damning the entire enlightenment tradition, but it is important to note that it is through that tradition that the margin can be created. Apologist?)
I would like to take some time to refine this position. I may have inadvertently implied that Cage's habitation of the margin is a result of his status in the avant-garde. Were this the case, composers from Schoenberg to Lachenmann would sit in this same place.
But I don't think that works. What I'd like to do is use the writings of Schoenberg to establish his debt to Hegelian thought as well as the 19th century German organicists, such as Goethe (articles have been written on this, so I won't need to do too much original reading, which will ease some of my burden). I'd also like to spend some time with Adorno's "Vers une musique informelle" to distinguish between the late Darmstaat serialists, whose debt is to Hegel and Marx, and Cage. Is it problematic here merely to point at debt as evidence? I think so. Especially since Cage's debt is supposedly to Zen Buddhism, the genealogy of which is utterly foreign to me.
So I think what will be important is to read the texts from Adorno and Schoenberg as what they are: source texts. That is to say that their influences, for lack of a better word, are certainly important, in so far as they are tangible, but it is more important to see where they stand in their work itself. I may have to talk to Dr Durand about connections between Lachenmann and Adorno; I don't remember seeing them clearly.
The main point though is to partially recapitulate Peter Burger, who distinguishes between three avant-gardes. I don't want to be so general (and indeed haven't the time to do the necessary work), but I do hope to point at the danger of generality by positioning each of these composers, all of whom are on the edge of music, in different places in regard to institutional validation.
I would like to take some time to refine this position. I may have inadvertently implied that Cage's habitation of the margin is a result of his status in the avant-garde. Were this the case, composers from Schoenberg to Lachenmann would sit in this same place.
But I don't think that works. What I'd like to do is use the writings of Schoenberg to establish his debt to Hegelian thought as well as the 19th century German organicists, such as Goethe (articles have been written on this, so I won't need to do too much original reading, which will ease some of my burden). I'd also like to spend some time with Adorno's "Vers une musique informelle" to distinguish between the late Darmstaat serialists, whose debt is to Hegel and Marx, and Cage. Is it problematic here merely to point at debt as evidence? I think so. Especially since Cage's debt is supposedly to Zen Buddhism, the genealogy of which is utterly foreign to me.
So I think what will be important is to read the texts from Adorno and Schoenberg as what they are: source texts. That is to say that their influences, for lack of a better word, are certainly important, in so far as they are tangible, but it is more important to see where they stand in their work itself. I may have to talk to Dr Durand about connections between Lachenmann and Adorno; I don't remember seeing them clearly.
The main point though is to partially recapitulate Peter Burger, who distinguishes between three avant-gardes. I don't want to be so general (and indeed haven't the time to do the necessary work), but I do hope to point at the danger of generality by positioning each of these composers, all of whom are on the edge of music, in different places in regard to institutional validation.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
(d)erections
Returning to an earlier post about Spivak and Agawu: When our guest speaker talked about Agawu's book, he said Agawu was making use of Spivak's "strategic essentialism" in order to establish a politics of the same in which music, on a global scale, is defined by the immanence of tone. Leaving aside for the moment what tone is, and why it is could be said to define music without also incorporating speech and lonely trees, I'd like to comment a bit on what I see as Agawu's misuse of Spivak.
Because of Spivak's intellectual debt to Derridian deconstruction, I think it's unlikely that she would deploy strategic essentialism to buttress or even quarantine a concept. Agawu's claim seems to be that, since we have to have a working definition of music in order to study it in a cross-cultural context, we need to chose a solid definition that will serve our strategic ends. For Agawu, those ends are the disruption of Western (or Northern) aesthetic hegemony. Whether it is possible for a metropolitan scholar, even one from the third-world intellectual diaspora, to accomplish this--whether it is indeed even possible to think the non-Western in the context of late capitalism--doesn't seem to be questioned. But again, I digress.
My understanding of "strategic essentialism" is from Spivak's phrase: "One cannot help but essentialize, but one must essentialize strategically." (I don't know the book or the page, but I'm pretty sure that's close to verbatim) When Spivak says this, she's coming, according to her, directly from Derrida. Derrida, something of a defeatist, but in an empowering way, has also claimed that narrative is inescapable, and that feminism is another form of phallocentrism. What s/he is pointing at here, I believe, is the impossibility of beginning (without a ground). Because knowledge is abyssal, because it does not stand on firm ground but instead only upon knowledge, there must be those "facts" which we implicitly take to be true. And in order for our discourse to be both critical and mutable, we must take these essentials on implicitly, but be able to undermine them when confronting them. So reifying tone as the essential quality to all music is precisely not what Spivak is advocating. On the contrary, what she's saying is that when we say "music," the implication of tone already exists: stating it outright does nothing to clear this up (unless it is done critically) but does do much to reify the term, preventing it from being mutable. In short, Agawu takes the fluid term (the catachrestic term) "music," and makes it rigid, erecting it as the center for his new hegemony. It is, it seems to me, the opposite of a deconstruction.
Because of Spivak's intellectual debt to Derridian deconstruction, I think it's unlikely that she would deploy strategic essentialism to buttress or even quarantine a concept. Agawu's claim seems to be that, since we have to have a working definition of music in order to study it in a cross-cultural context, we need to chose a solid definition that will serve our strategic ends. For Agawu, those ends are the disruption of Western (or Northern) aesthetic hegemony. Whether it is possible for a metropolitan scholar, even one from the third-world intellectual diaspora, to accomplish this--whether it is indeed even possible to think the non-Western in the context of late capitalism--doesn't seem to be questioned. But again, I digress.
My understanding of "strategic essentialism" is from Spivak's phrase: "One cannot help but essentialize, but one must essentialize strategically." (I don't know the book or the page, but I'm pretty sure that's close to verbatim) When Spivak says this, she's coming, according to her, directly from Derrida. Derrida, something of a defeatist, but in an empowering way, has also claimed that narrative is inescapable, and that feminism is another form of phallocentrism. What s/he is pointing at here, I believe, is the impossibility of beginning (without a ground). Because knowledge is abyssal, because it does not stand on firm ground but instead only upon knowledge, there must be those "facts" which we implicitly take to be true. And in order for our discourse to be both critical and mutable, we must take these essentials on implicitly, but be able to undermine them when confronting them. So reifying tone as the essential quality to all music is precisely not what Spivak is advocating. On the contrary, what she's saying is that when we say "music," the implication of tone already exists: stating it outright does nothing to clear this up (unless it is done critically) but does do much to reify the term, preventing it from being mutable. In short, Agawu takes the fluid term (the catachrestic term) "music," and makes it rigid, erecting it as the center for his new hegemony. It is, it seems to me, the opposite of a deconstruction.
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