Relativism: So What? (Part Seven): Beats me; I wrote an article about it but that's as far as I got

[koganbot]

Int: In Philosophy And The Mirror of Nature, you attacked Putnam's early philosophy. What do you think of his more recent work?

Rorty: I think our views are practically indistinguishable, but he doesn't. He thinks I'm a relativist and he isn't. And I think: if I'm a relativist, then he's one too.

Int: Why do you think Putnam sees you as a relativist?

Rorty: Beats me. I wrote an article about it, but that was as far as I got.

. . .

Int: Do you disagree with any of Davidson's views?

Rorty: I can't think of anything we really disagree about that doesn't seem to me a verbal issue, but Davidson may have a different view of the matter. Well, one thing is that he keeps saying truth is an absolutely central concept, and I can't see what makes it central or basic. I take Davidson to be saying that truth, belief, meaning, intention, rationality, cognitivity - all these notions are parts of a seamless web, and that seems to me a useful point to make, that you can't have any of these notions without all the others. It's just that he then wants to say, "And truth is in the middle." I can't see why you have to have a middle.

Int: Putnam has also criticized you for deemphasizing truth.

Rorty: Putnam keeps saying that you have to have what he calls "substantive truth." I take Davidson to be saying: there's not much pointing in saying truth is substantive. I don't think Davidson has any better idea than I do what Putnam means by that. Nonetheless, he somehow attaches a weight to the notion that I can't seem to attach to it.
--Interview with Richard Rorty in January 1995 by Joshua Knobe

I'm intending to resume my "Relativism: So what?" series but want to relate it to some other bubbling thoughts, e.g., (1) Given that alienation is my addiction, my default mode, my heroin, am I capitulating to my addiction by avoiding the current rockwrite/musicwrite convo about (e.g.) Vampire Weekend and social class? Or would I be capitulating to that addiction way more if I dove into that conversation? I mean, I've only been thinking about the class thing and the no-success-like-failure thing for forty-two years, but my experience tells me that the convo will be nothing more than pretend, that other than Dave and Tom no one involved in it even wants to start thinking about social class, or knows how, even if class is what they think they're thinking about (and I can talk to Dave or Tom any old time). But since I haven't explored the convo, or Vampire Weekend, I don't know this. I really have little hope. It's like (metaphor I heard the other day) going to starving Ethiopians and asking for food. (2) This generalizes to the two Deaths I was talking about at the end of Microwaving A Tragedy: you're dead if it's all about the other dude, about her/his response, what s/he's gonna do next; but you're just as dead if you don't make the effort to understand the other dude. It rains when you're here and it rains when you're gone, but maybe I just need different dudes. (3) For my own sake I'd like to be less harsh, without being less smart; this involves finding my way to go "Hmmm, what can I learn here? Can I open myself up to its surprise?" without overlooking the basic dysfunction of the conversation. Or do we need to rip up the conversation, forget the dead we've left, find a new world not to be so harsh in, so that I'm no longer the guy who wrote points 1 and 2? (4) I've been calling "relativism" a stand-in issue, a substitute for facing the interpersonal, cross-cultural, intergalactic whatever. So these bubbles will be the deep background of that "relativism."

Comments

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

So there's two things. There's the thing the conversation is about -- ie: What it is we agree we're talking about, and here that might be social class. That's what is supposedly linking Hopper with Abebe, social class and also kinda this multicultural discourse. So Hopper is arguing that Vampire Weekend are participating in this class; they're colonizing African music, they're using WASP'y signifiers, etc. And then Abebe comes back and says, no, they have legitimate identity claims you're ignoring, they aren't simply participating, they're critiquing, etc.

But then there's the second thing, which is kinda what the conversation could be about, or what it's about for the individual participants. For me, it's about my Jewish identity - and the claims I have to being Jewish as opposed to being simply White. And that's what's REALLY going on in the conversation, even if Hopper + Abebe might not see that themselves. It's not totally unlike your comment about knowing what Dylan meant even better (or differently) than what Dylan meant. So when I say that Vampire Weekend is partially about a history of Jewish relationships to old WASP wealth, I know that's really what it's about. So there's a certain relativism there, you could say.

In the end tho, I think Abebe is really arguing not necessarily for the specifics, but arguing that you should be willing and able to make the second kind of argument. You shouldn't come in deciding that the band is really about being bourgeois or whatever. You should come in and as the evidence moves you, maybe the kind of argument you're making changes too.

[koganbot]

Look, are you trying to draw me into this conversation? I mean, I could be off colonizing Faye Wong speculating about the relationship between country music and the theme-song to a Japanese videogame that's sung in English by a Chinese woman who was born in Beijing but originally rose to fame singing in Cantonese rather than Mandarin.

I've heard maybe three songs by Vampire Weekend. I've read fewer pieces by Jessica Hopper than that, as far as I know, and haven't read the one you refer to. I've read only one of the posts by Abebe that address the issue, and I take it that he's made a whole bunch more. In that post he said that Hopper was playing a game of one-upmanship, but he didn't address why or how that particular game of one-upmanship came to be. Maybe he addressed the why and the how in some other post, but to leave it at "it's one-upmanship" and "it's posturing" and "people are suspicious of being bourgeois" doesn't get us very far. If he's correct, and what's going on is one-upmanship, this quotation would be useful:

Heroin is the most popular addictive drug used by Negroes because, it seems to me, the drug itself transforms the Negro's normal separation from the mainstream of society into an advantage (which, I have been saying, I think it is anyway). It is one-upmanship of the highest order... The terms of value change radically, and no one can tell the "nodding junkie" that employment or success are of any value at all.
--LeRoi Jones, Blues People, 1963

And as Nitsuh points out, this sort of anti-success one-upmanship is part of middle-class culture too, and mainstream American culture, obv., or we wouldn't be engaging in it. So how did it get here? (Not to be self-involved and all, but this is the question that huge hunks of my book wrestle with, starting from the preface and the entire first section and going onward from there. But a particularly relevant after–Real Punks piece of mine on the subject (if it is the subject) is "The Rules Of The Game #14: The Death Of The Cool." (I assume the title of Nitsuh's post is coincidental; that he never knew of my column, but he, like me, does know the Jean Renoir film.))

You shouldn't come in deciding that the band is really about being bourgeois or whatever. You should come in and as the evidence moves you, maybe the kind of argument you're making changes too.

Well, who would argue with this? But this obvious procedure breaks down all over the place, in writing, thinking, reading, listening. And from what I can tell, lotsa readers, writers, and editors are fine with the breakdown.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I hope you aren't big-upping too much in my own comments, which weren't more than "people don't seem to know what they want to be talking about here" -- my sense is that Vampire Weekend are stuck in some kind of feedback loop in which various empty (w/o context) signifiers like "privilege" and "whiteness" are getting thrown around because...uh, because they wear boat shoes on stage? Anyway, my commentary is limited by the fact that (1) I haven't listened to much Vampire Weekend and (2) I couldn't give two shits about them based on what I've heard. I can't remember a single VW lyric for the life of me! Where's my ammo? I used the phrase "cascade" and pointed people toward your Backstreet Boys column (claiming that they were being very "they don't write their own songs!" ad hoc in their justification of visceral dislike) but other than that don't think I offered a particularly enlightened take.

My sense is that this particular conversation isn't worth getting into. But I would like to open up pop music to the media literacy world, at which point I'll come back here and bring you in, quite forcibly, since there's a lot yet to be written and said. Provided I'm not all talk about it (we'll see).

[petronia.livejournal.com]

In that post he said that Hopper was playing a game of one-upmanship, but he didn't address why or how that particular game of one-upmanship came to be. Maybe he addressed the why and the how in some other post, but to leave it at "it's one-upmanship" and "it's posturing" and "people are suspicious of being bourgeois" doesn't get us very far.

No, he hasn't, but you're years and years ahead in the thought process as you know yourself. XD; He's talking to ppl who barely recognize that they're playing A Game, in a way that indicates that he only relatively recently named the phenomenon to himself, in his own head.

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

Do you not want to be drawn in? I guess I felt you did and wanted a segue in -- and I'm offering one from my own personal experience. My mother told me a story about when she used to work as a waitress at a restricted country club. One of the people she was waiting on made an anti-Semitic comment and so she dumped his soup on him and made some retort and quit. I can probably join any country club I want now -- the Mainline in Philadelphia used to be exclusive and now is full of Jews, religious and otherwise including my parents. So clearly I'm hearing something specific in Vampire Weekend, something that speaks to that experience, and I think that's a doorway into talking about this band, but talking about music in general.

Anyway, off-topic question: Have you ever revisited your thoughts on the relationship between Academia and music criticism? I brought up your classroom/hallway discussion in an academia class last week and pointed people towards your book.

[koganbot]

Not off-topic at all, since a not-so-subtle subtext of my post above is that music critics don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation, i.e., won't put effort into working out and communicating their own ideas and into understanding other people's and into following through on possibilities and problems of the various ideas. I wouldn't say that academics necessarily do this better, but at least they know that they're supposed to do it. My point about rock critics not honoring the boundary between hallway and classroom is a good one - that they're not willing to shut down their relations to their fellows when pursuing a subject matter - but there's also the problem of rock critics never having mastered basic skills in reading comprehension and logical inference, and their not being paid to extrapolate on their own ideas. So they're not so good at what ought to be classroom virtues.

You're right to notice an ambivalence as to whether I want to be drawn in or not. When in history have rock critics ever sustained an intelligent conversation about social class? Not a rhetorical question. I've just never seen one that went much beyond the staking out of positions.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

It's kind of funny because for the past year or two there's been a massive ongoing furore in media fandom (the global community of ppl who write fanfiction online), bouncing back and forth between it and SF/F fandom (writers, readers, editors...), circling around manifestations of race/gender/class privilege in genre narratives and the community experiences centred around these genre narratives - sometimes it's a conversation, sometimes it's a witchhunt. In the parlance of this shakedown, the effect agrammar describes - the way ppl look at Ezra Koenig or the Chinese-American college girl** in his audience and describes them as white - is "erasure", and considered the most sinful manifestation of privilege, because the most unthinking and the most difficult to counter. (If saying "look I'm right here and not who you think I am!" doesn't do it, what possibly will?)

EDIT -- I've taken out that last bit because disingenuous: I'm not boggled that Nitsuh is (what looks like to me) reinventing the wheel. Media/SFF's way of INTERROGATING THE TEXT I tend to think is quite awful, getting your blame game in my soup etc. but music writers sometimes insist on having this conversation even when they haven't interrogated the text because there is NO TEXT TO INTERROGATE (not in the same way, at least. And you'd disagree with that, no?).


** This is who I think of as the typical Vampire Weekend fan, not "white" at all.

[koganbot]

You're moving way too fast for me at the end there. If by "text" you mean "transcendent self-revealing text that everyone can examine so as to resolve any and all possible disagreements about what is being said," then indeed there is no text, in music or anywhere else, and if we substitute the word "reality" for "text" we get the same result, that there is no reality.

But those are bad notions of "text" and "reality," as things that are unproblematically and unchangingly there. Is it your opinion that in the world of semipopular music there are just too many things, from hairstyle to song lyrics, to pick one out as the "text"? Nonetheless there's still a difference between having an opinion of the Paris Hilton album based on having heard the album as opposed to having an opinion of the Paris Hilton album while not having heard the album, and there's a difference between having an opinion of the lyrics to "Oxford Comma" based on knowing the lyrics to "Oxford Comma" and having an opinion without knowing the lyrics. (I give a fuck about an Oxford comma, by the way. I think we need it, to avoid unnecessary ambiguity.) And there's a difference between knowing what Ashlee's voice sounds like and not knowing what it sounds like, and knowing her various hairstyles and colors and not knowing them. And there's a difference between basing a reading of an article on all of what the article says, and basing a reading of an article on only some of what the article says, while ignoring the lines that contradict one's reading, and so forth.

Now, what Thomas Kuhn pointed out is true: we can't just look at, say, Aristotle's Physics and understand it, since Aristotle doesn't have the same concept of "motion" that we have, and if we read the word with our own concept in mind, the man's ideas come out incoherent and stupid. But the way Kuhn managed to figure out Aristotle's concept - that it was different from Kuhn's own, and what it was - was by paying close attention to the text, by not giving up until he came up with a reading that showed the text as coherent and smart. I don't see what the phrase "there is no text to interrogate" tells us here.* What else is there to interrogate? And if one is interrogating one's own preconceptions about "motion," it's still by way of the text that one is doing so. It's true that Kuhn has to approach the text with some concept of motion - without a culture around it, the text is nothing. But that a text can't stand alone doesn't mean it's nothing.

(I have no idea if I'm addressing what was on your mind. Every text has two worlds, the world that produced it and the world that receives it, and the text can't instruct us what to do with it, what its latent possibilities are for fanfic or for extrapolation or who knows what. That's up to us. But in my experience the better I know a text the better I'll be able to use it.)

You don't have to be privileged to engage in erasure. I'd assume it's hard not to engage in erasure at some point, wherever you sit. But it's probably easier to avoid the negative repercussions of erasing someone if you're more powerful than the people you've erased. But privileged people like you and me - privileged in that we've had high-powered educations - might have also developed at least some skill in how to avoid erasing others, how to notice counter-evidence etc.

(Btw, the reason I haven't jumped into the world of fanfic isn't that I'm indifferent, but just that I don't have time, at least not yet.)

*I can't see from your context whether you or someone else is the person making this claim, that there is no text to interrogate.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i assumed by the word "text" petronia here meant "words" as opposed to "music", and that music-thus-opposed is kinda sorta defined (or at least sketched) by the fact of its not being verbalised or figurative expression -- which means that's there's an extra layer of unresolvability of meaning built in, which isn't there with words or pictures?

(i'm thinking of a quote from levi-strauss: something like "everyone understands music but no one can translate it" -- obviousyly music as we ordinarily encounter it is chock full of verbal and figurative and other translateably expressive elements that aren't by-definition-unresolveable in this sense... but if it has none of the unresolveable elements, is it someting we'd call music at all?)

[koganbot]

One of the items on my list of Articles I Hope Mark Gets Around To Writing Someday is for you to do a follow-through/expansion/rethinking of your post on the ilX Kuhn thread (and here) about music as "ideas willfully unclearly expressed" (taking into account my own commentary on your comments).

In the meantime, there's this:



Gotta run now.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Both your and dubdobdee's comments (moving fast and confusedly because stuff was cohering in my sleepy head just as I was to call it a night - but on some level I trust you to unpack ahaha): music (to me) is a core of non-textual unresolvability surrounded by flaking onion skins of text, and the fun (to me) lies in attempts at translation to/from the world of words where I reside (being a Writer) that are doomed in entirety but fruitful in partiality.** The books, film, TV, theatre that get talked about in popular culture and online have a core of text - they start with words, with a narrative, unless they're of a consciously deconstructive/non-linear/imagistic sort (and we've been taught what to do with that stuff). Ultimately you're right, there is no reality, but the former is still a translation while the latter isn't. In a way this makes Music more fun for me, but I also rarely feel like I'm able to actually solve the issue by dissecting it in words - or even come close, or even that it's worth attempting in that sense - which makes me take it less seriously. If I write a 2000-word essay about class issues in Titanic or Harry Potter, I feel like I've actually said something about Titanic or Harry Potter. If I write the same 2000-word essay about class issues with regard to Vampire Weekend The Band, so what, I haven't said anything about Vampire Weekend THE MUSIC. Or I have, because I've dyed a whole bunch of onion skins and stuck them under the microscope, but it would feel to me as if I'd said proportionately less.

So this may be me projecting my own feelings onto music critics/writers/bloggers at large. But I really do suspect, feeding back into yr frustration w/r/t what conversations music writers are willing to engage in to what extent, that most ppl who're attracted to writing about music in particular, are attracted because certain strategies appeal to them, and maybe that means certain other strategies are less appealing to them as a group, or they'd be drawn to dissecting other stuff instead. Again, coming from Media/SFF whose online chattering class is rife with ppl whose day jobs are in academia or the sciences... I think the urge is spottily there, though, and that (being a baby steps urge) it wants to feed into a clearly markered "srs academic talk" channel, or Simon Reynolds wouldn't be so popular ahahahaaaa. (He really is! I went to a dubstep gig with a music blogger who said the only critic he read was Reynolds! He was OK with making fun of him though.)

As I said in the earlier comment I'm not 100% appreciative of this tendency in media/SFF debates - I feel like the pendulum has swung too far toward earnestness, and in particular that a great deal of the (dark) energy of fan production is its willingness to be offensive/messy/in bad taste, which also means offensive to us, the in-group. But the issues raised are important. And, yes, all of the above doesn't mean music writers avoid That Stuff entirely, it means that they GEDDIT RONG in a piecemeal fashion. <-- reaaaaally long version of "I agree with agrammar, his was a valuable essay that wasn't about Vampire Weekend The Music at all".

holy crapola exceeded comment length

[petronia.livejournal.com]

EDIT -- and I wrote ALL THAT without stating my core thesis somehow, which is that this

music critics don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation, i.e., won't put effort into working out and communicating their own ideas and into understanding other people's and into following through on possibilities and problems of the various ideas

Is absolutely NOT the case in the community of chatterers who enjoy dissecting eg. the Harry Potter books, and why on earth is that? [insert above essay which tries to answer that 'why'] And can these strategies be imported either way across this apparently impregnable barrier I straddle in my online reading?

I linked agrammar on my LJ with an obscure-sounding callout, to the many ppl (mostly women!) I know who 1) have the dual depth of fan background I do but are alienated from music writing, or 2) do not want to wade into heavy race/gender/class type online debates despite being heavily involved in both media fandom and music fandom, or 3) have a stake in these debates but do not have the necessary depth of background on one or othe other side. Because I feel sometimes like a crossover conversation could synthesize around me, that the knowledge and the intelligence are there on my flist, but that the willingness isn't. Even on my own part (I do have to get a job, and soon XD;).



** Going back to our "dancing about architecture" exchange. Eg. I can say a huge part of the charm of the 2005 Doctor Who series is that it "sounds like the UK pop that I like," and I might be able to "prove" it by making a mixtape, but in my head this is a... synaesthetic gestalt... that would be very hard to lay out in words. I could state that both are vastly popular and continuously evolved expressions of the same culture, with much of a shared fanbase, and therefore could be expected to demonstrate similarities, and ppl would probably agree, but it would go nothing toward establishing what those similarities actually are when Doctor Who... mostly doesn't even have pop music in its soundtrack? And when it does, it's as likely to be American pop. And the UK pop in this paragraph doesn't mean all UK pop (it doesn't take in dubstep, for instance, although it does rave). /digression by way of example

[ludickid.livejournal.com]

That's my favorite interview ever with Rorty.