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koganbotSir Dubdob, in his new blog, cites Adorno quoting his dead friend Benjamin to the effect that philosophy is a process which permits the "configuration of an idea as a totality" to emerge from opposing extremes. Dubdob then chides Adorno for picking only Stravinsky and Schoenberg as his extremes of modern music.
I commented:
So I would urge you all to suggest some other extremes, beyond the four or six I've mentioned.
(Having not read the Adorno book, I could imagine someone defending Adorno by saying that Stravinsky and Schoenberg present extremes not of "music" but of a particular cultural locale from which one could then develop the idea of a totality of the idea for that locale. Not that I know what "totality of the idea" means here. In any event, Mark defends the idea of juxtaposing what we view as our relevant extremes, even while knowing that those "extremes" are inevitably parochial.)
"Music-'N'-Stuff": I'm dissatisfied with the term "music." Words like "rock" and "pop" and "jazz" all imply something broader: worlds that include notes and singing and rhythm and such but without those notes-singing-rhythm-and-such necessarily being more central than other parts of those worlds, the convos and the outfits and the traffic jam (during which the radio or ipod plays) and the gossip and the clubs.
I commented:
Strange (or not strange) that Adorno apparently thought there were only two extremes. Why not 23 extremes? Or at least we could draw a three-dimensional graph, which only gives us three axes, hence six extremes to work with, but we could come up with an infinity of extremes from those six simply by deciding that anything that's an extreme on one axis is extreme no matter where else it is on the others; for, if we have something that's on the extremely chicken-screaming end of the chicken-scream/chicken-blasé axis, on the one hand, but is dead in the middle on the piccolo/tuba axis, on the other, we've created an extreme of a different flavor than something that's at the chicken-scream extreme but is heavily piccoloed, yet different also from that which is full chicken-scream but heavily tuba'd. (Haven't yet chosen my third axis. Night-Train/Jiyeon is a possibility, though someone could argue that that is too similar in spirit to chicken-scream/chicken-blasé.)
So I would urge you all to suggest some other extremes, beyond the four or six I've mentioned.
(Having not read the Adorno book, I could imagine someone defending Adorno by saying that Stravinsky and Schoenberg present extremes not of "music" but of a particular cultural locale from which one could then develop the idea of a totality of the idea for that locale. Not that I know what "totality of the idea" means here. In any event, Mark defends the idea of juxtaposing what we view as our relevant extremes, even while knowing that those "extremes" are inevitably parochial.)
"Music-'N'-Stuff": I'm dissatisfied with the term "music." Words like "rock" and "pop" and "jazz" all imply something broader: worlds that include notes and singing and rhythm and such but without those notes-singing-rhythm-and-such necessarily being more central than other parts of those worlds, the convos and the outfits and the traffic jam (during which the radio or ipod plays) and the gossip and the clubs.
