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[livejournal.com profile] dubdobdee over on the [livejournal.com profile] poptimists answer record/fanfic thread:

some of the prob with "theory-dependent" crit -- not just music crit either -- is that there's a deferred fandom going on: viz yr "allowed" to be critical of tarantino but you have to treat eg foucault [but basically insrt guru of choice]* as if it's a different level of thinking; there's a very hierarchical and reverential (and frankly religious) attitude towards the "texts" you are using to interpret, at the expense of the texts you being "critically" interpeting... it's all so relentlessly one-way

i once said to one of the dullards-in-question that i was frankly more interested in interpreting kierkegaard in the light of crazy frog than vice versa: result = a nervous larf, and mark's "joke" filed under "contrarian anti-intellectual populism" i expect

*of course within "theory" you get to cast your chosen anti-gurus as strawmen-to-pitch-into, which is then confused with being "critical" of theory -- but the relationship of desire and fascination among thinkers really can be explored by treating it as a (very unself-aware) species of fanboyism, in which ilxish laundrylists of facts are wheeled out to smother unbeleivers in jargonised scorn...

Date: 2009-03-20 11:30 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dubdobdee.livejournal.com
i am hallway and you are classroom (and i will regret sayin this when i am sober)

Date: 2009-03-21 11:11 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dubdobdee.livejournal.com
less drunkly (hence not being merely cheeky in order to get a rise):

i) you don't cite authorities much to establish quality, do you? it seems to me the discussions get kept separate -- when you're talking about greil marcus you talk about greil marcus, when you're talkin about debbie deb you talk about debbie deb
ii) i am very conscious in my own writing of interweaving levels -- it's why i work in short blocks of text -- of "types of engagement"; so that the effect -- i hesitate to call it an "argument"*, usually, arisies out the the crackle or smooch of discursive styles and sensibilities... this means i need a fairly clear sense of the "cartoon response to [x] in discourse B", because this cartoon response (in someone else's head) is precisely what i want to play with...

*indeed i 'm actually quite bad at backtracking and casting these move in the form of rational argument, because it would generally require an atypically non-speedread study of some area of intellectual enquiry that i haven't yet made, which would take me a long time to carry out to my own satisfaction

Date: 2009-03-22 11:02 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dubdobdee.livejournal.com
except it gains some of its energy -- when it works, when it has any -- from apparent incongruity: ie depends on the level-think of others, to be funny or pertinent or whatever... the fact that i don't believe in something doesn't mean i don't co-opt the forcefield of the beliefs of others to gin up surprises or slippy turns or just gags

(this is generally an interesting territory, with pointed comedy: does satire attack the foibles of society in such a way as to remove them? or does it actually excuse and buttress them? if you constantly make jokes about all politicians being corrupt, do you challenge the corruption or enable it?)

Date: 2009-03-21 03:17 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] skyecaptain.livejournal.com
I don't think either of y'all actually split into hallway/classroom very easily yourselves, from what I've read. But it does seem like, milieu-wise (whether you like it or not, usually not) Mark seems to be most agitated with clasroom-thinkers who are pretending they're in the hallway, and Frank seems to be most agitated (or rather, stuck with) hallway-thinkers who are pretending they're in the classroom. Reductively the difference between the crippling (boring) pseudo(?)-academic deference of big-T theory guys while pretending it's in the interest of PHUN and the dabblers who organize themselves into conceptual classroom hierarchies (most of the rockcrit world). In both cases you have a worst of both worlds scenario with no attempt to actually break down or transcend the split itself, just sort of superficially invert the properties while keeping the deeper structures of hallway (no real intellectual engagement) or classroom (deference, reverence, visibly demonstrable "hard work" in the form of jargon, etc.).

Date: 2009-03-22 02:16 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] skyecaptain.livejournal.com
Actually, the way you've put this, I think my own formulation is backwards; in your examples above, Reynolds/K-Punk can often bring classroom terminology, a sense of "I've done my homework already, so I don't need to examine this particular problem even if my homework doesn't apply," to do pure hallway bullying and/or dismissal (usually the latter; if they're bullies, they're not very good at actually getting under skin the way true bullies do).

What I mean by the opposite formulation, the classroom hierarchy of rockcrit, is something I actually just kind of floated for the first time in the comment there, but I guess what I think it means is that there is a sense of Importance imparted to the enterprise of music criticism that strikes me as a kind of "take your medicine" mode of engagement: Carl Wilson's Celine book can dip into this, though it doesn't primarily reside here, and I see it as an integral part of the evolution of Pitchfork's house tone. Roughly it's a kind of studious examination that rarely actually has much of a pulse but is also lacking in, e.g., the most basic academic discipline that, dry as it may be, at least has stuff like a methodology, a process of inquiry, etc. So it's a deadness that's distinctively classroom, but the problem is that there are unanswered questions, the key one being "why is this important" (so what). That can often be an intellectual exercise that requires some outside-the-classroom thought, the classrooms for rockcrit being borrowed from all over the place, be it codified assumptions about what kind of music gets to convey what kind of information (this music is for the head, this music is for the body) or more direct influences from academia and cultural studies ("we must examine this because it really is a thing that ought to be examined"). I still haven't worked all of this out in my head yet, though.

Date: 2009-03-22 11:07 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dubdobdee.livejournal.com
my initial claim -- insofar as it has life beyond a drunken and regrettable and self-hating gag -- is that i think frank, by temperament and intent, does skew much more toward teaching and the teacherly than me (he has a goal in mind; an approach to thinking and exploration he would like to impart - and perhaps as much a whole bunch of approaches he would like to DEpart); whereas i, by temperament and approach, skew more towards "doing the show here now, improvising its form out of the material to hand"

Date: 2009-03-22 10:21 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] skyecaptain.livejournal.com
Reading over this again, I'm not sure what I mean to say here. Except to say that I do think something about rock criticism in my own critical lifespan has become strikingly fuddy-duddy, often a condescending exercise in understanding that seems to require a lot of hand-holding through the dangerous terrain of cultural difference, or something. When it's cultural difference that makes rock criticism exciting; not just obvious cultural differences, sanctioned ones, but unsanctioned ones, between Frank's common high school archetypes, between social organizations that exist conceptually or disparately rather than concretely (conceptually instead of geographically, maybe?). I raised the idea of Culture Lube, a kind of lameness that can be used to alleviate friction between two seemingly opposed groups (in the coinage I was distinguishing Christian/evangelical-mainstream from non-Christian/evangelical mainstream). In that case, it was for a specific purposes -- there are rifts in understanding that express themselves in political and cultural organization even though "us" and "them" are perhaps closer (in their cultures -- music f'rinstance) than they like to admit being or are willing to admit being.

But this tendency, when applied to rockcrit, seems to deflate the fun entirely, and by fun I don't just mean it in a frivolous-fun sort of way. What I mean is it seems to get rid of the very stakes of engagement, tries to turn passion into reasoned mush. This is the academia drive; the difference is that the mush isn't even particularly well-reasoned, which is to say it takes the worst tendencies of academia (dispassion, occasional condescension) and throws out the kind of legwork, peer review, etc. that makes much of academia's existence so valuable. Again I'm not sure what relation this has to what we're talking about, these are just demons that keep swirling in my head, and I'm not sure if their persistence is a personal issue that I have -- in articulating my points, in working it out conceptually -- or if it's really out there.

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