Rules Of The Game #31: Rockism And Antirockism Rise From The Dead

[koganbot]

Here's my latest, in which I reveal myself to be a rockist, unless that's not what I'm revealing. I also don't come to a conclusion about what rockism is. Stay tuned for the exciting sequel.

The Rules Of The Game #31: Rockism And Antirockism Rise From The Dead

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

Dave,

I wrote a paper once which basically tried to explain how Benjamin achieves the goals he's set out (which is to make a definition for art that is useless for fascism). I've found certain passages of Work of Art particularly more useful for understanding his theory. Which I'd be happy to copy/paste if you're interested.

Otherwise, Benjamin is saying that in a mechanized, industrial (both coded words for a Marxist in the 1930s) society, something is lost by reproducing artwork. What is lost is the immediacy, the closeness, the aura of the object. Its uniqueness becomes challenged. It is no longer authentic. (Adorno challenged this as reactionary, and Duchamp challenged this as artistically untenable.)

The real question is how do we reappropriate Benjamin's definitions in our pop music conversation. This is somewhat the question I'm dealing with while I work on my senior thesis. Obviously some of Benjamin's insights are no longer applicable. When you record an artist, remaster the copy, then copy a track from an album onto your computer onto your iPod and play at an iPod party, there's a distance from the original work of art. But authentic can mean other things, and sometimes, discerning the aura is a gut-thing. Can you FEEL the aura? Does it feel immediate? And since we're far into pomo, most pop music is going to be critiquing that distance. The criticism in Voice review of the Raveonettes (http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0808,302411,302411,22.html) is somewhat trying to sort out what the meaning of singing from a distance is. What does it mean that I'm reviewing the Raveonettes from a distance, and has the reproduced work really transversed any distance? The final line of my review is intentionally direct and intentionally crude - I'm broaching the distance myself (It's also an in-joke for some of my friends. It broaches a distance in that, as well).

Anyhow, what I really wanted to say before I distracted myself was: Think about how the Nazi fascist machine used iconography and symbols and you'll get the idea of Benjamin's problem with fascist use of art (look at Triumph of the Will - I did another paper on Benjamin + Triumph at one point).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Well yeah, but I don't see with what they DID with the medium has any relevance to the fact that it's not a singular, unique object. (It is a singular, unique art experience, in the sense that you're not going to go into the theater and see something totally different that calls itself Triumph of the Will).

What is lost is the immediacy, the closeness, the aura of the object. Its uniqueness becomes challenged. It is no longer authentic.

So anyway, I guess I just don't see why this isn't a misuse of language; it just means that "immediacy and closeness" have something to do with being a space that contains a verifiable original art work. Which has nothing to do with the immediacy and closeness of Ashlee Simpson's songs.

That is, nothing is lost (except maybe file quality) in transferring music from performance to computer to disc to iPod. I don't understand why you would start with the assumption that something should be "lost" when there's no one unique object-in-a-room I can engage with.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

but a lot of things are by implication no longer available -- the company of the makers, the social relations and intimacy of artist and audience (or in the case of benjamin's religious artefacts, of the community of first use, the sense that for exampke catholicism as the history of itself as an institution is a guarantor of Right Interpretation, of correct handling of the material leading to correct result...)

benjamin's argt is that in the era of mass-production this is OBVIOUSLY unobtainable -- we may want to be chums w.britney, some of us may delude we actually ARE, but there is inevitably (just by the numbers) a gulf for almost all of us: into our yearning for such gulfs to disappear, for connection to be possible once more across all the connunity, for loneliness and social division to be assuaged or dissolved, all kinds of Really Bad Politics hold court (i think this is benjamin's intuition, if not his explicit argument; an art which acknowledged this loss AND ALSO the value of the trade-off in the form of a democratic liberation from the oppressive past, a call for a GOOD politics out of an art practice which acknowledged its own shaping -- which is kinda routine-issue arts-and-crafts truth-to-materials modernism actually)

(and there's instantly a good strong counter-question how benjamin's or adorno's use of literary montage -- adorno called it "constellation"? -- operates as a self-revealing-hence-self-policing technique in this sense?)

[koganbot]

So, not having read the Benjamin in several decades, I'll just respond to this as if it were Mark's ideas (though I realize that they're not):

It's an argument about knowledge, and I don't get it.

(1) You're saying that it's owing to my not having a unique original at hand that I therefore know less about the social context that created Britney's Blackout than I do about the social context that created a unique individual 17th century Dutch painting I see in a gallery?

(2) Are you saying that I would understand your ideas better if I were to read them in your handwriting than to read them on a message board, again because the handwriting brings us closer to the conditions of how it was produced?

(3) What about the social context of use? Are you saying that people who danced to a live band in the 1920s understand the social context of their dancing better than people who dance to a DJ now?

Anyway, it may be true that in general modern cosmopolitanism means that we have less of a feel for what's being said to us or given to us as culture than we would have living in a smaller world 600 years ago, but the singularity and the uniqueness of the artwork would have nothing to do with it. Rather, it's the fact that artworks and expressions travel that would be the critical factor, mass reproduction being merely a means that helps them to travel. And of course through this travel we get to know more about people and ideas that would formerly have been different, so even if maybe we know less about the music we're hearing, since it wasn't made by the person next door, we know way way way more about music that was made 7,000 miles away, and are closer to it.

[koganbot]

through this travel we get to know more about people and ideas that would formerly have been different

Meant to write "formerly have been distant"

[koganbot]

In any event, a counterargument would be that while Thomas Kuhn (if he were still alive) may be unaware of aspects of Greek culture in the 3rd century B.C. that would help him to understand things about Aristotle's writing, these aspects not being discernible in the historical record, he may well understand Aristotle's thought better than most or maybe even all of Aristotle's contemporaries in that he has available to him a large body of Aristotle's work that he can look at as a whole and make coherent sense of them* and he has the ability to discuss them with a wide number of colleagues, and also has available modern concepts of psychology to understand Aristotle with, these concepts not being available to Aristotle's contemporaries, etc.

I pick Kuhn because he's the fellow who understood that he had to go through a paradigm shift to understand Aristotle's ideas of physical motion, who realized that he was dealing with a different mode of thought that he had to learn as if it were a foreign language. But my point is that this was doable because a sufficient quantity of Aristotle's ideas could be reproduced for Kuhn to comprehend them, the ideas being reproduced by words and on paper (or something) and then the words being copied and then after Gutenberg mechanically reproduced hence brought closer to a lot of people.

So it seems kind of arbitrary to emphasize social distance.

Or, for instance, if you want to understand my ideas you may do better than someone here in Denver who knows me but doesn't have access to the internet; that person can ask me questions, and I can answer them and discover ambiguities in what I wrote owing to that person's questions, hence can make my ideas clearer to him or her. But you may well know more about my ideas because you can discuss them with a larger collective of other people on the internet - including me - who can bring up all sorts of questions and ideas about what I'm saying, and also you and not my local friend are closer to the context I say it in, since my ideas are a response to ideas of people like you more than ideas of anyone I've met in Denver, "mass" reproduction being the context in which I'm saying my ideas.

*well, I realize that a hunk of Aristotle's writing didn't survive either, such as dialogues he is supposed to have written (right?)

[koganbot]

make coherent sense of them

Er, make sense of it, that is (Aristotle's thought and work)

[koganbot]

(Also, I don't mean to imply that Kuhn wrote about Aristotle's psychological makeup, but just was floating the idea that we may have ideas now that help us to understand things about Aristotle that his contemporaries couldn't have understood. In other words, I don't want to privilege Aristotle's original context. Aristotle's contemporaries probably have a leg up on us, but this is not because the context they were in was the original context but merely because they know things that have been lost to us. If enough of these things hadn't been lost, but in fact had been reproduced, then maybe the advantage would be ours, and as I said, we may have some knowledge that gives us the advantage.

[(Anonymous)]

Not to get overly detail oriented, but I don't think it's really appropriate to periodize postmodernism by thinking of the here and now as "far into pomo." The concept of postmodernism is really problematic because it's invoked far too often and too abstractly. If we're going to talk about postmodernism, though, maybe it's best to think of it as a lens rather than a time -- we can find elements of the postmodern in 1820s Paris, in Benjamin's work (think about the fragmented nature of the Arcades project), and in the way you might be conceptualizing your current discourse on pop music. Are you sure, though, that you're actually taking a postmodern approach?

Getting back to the point at hand, I do agree with your assertion that "authentic" doesn't necessarily have to refer back to something -- in this case it's acting kind of like a synonym for "real" (whatever that is...). But, like most buzz words, "authentic" (or "authenticity") can have different meanings in different situations. Are we referring to a recording's connection to the original performance? Are we referring to a band's similarity to a musical precursor? Are we referring to an unmediated (or, less mediated) quality of sound (ie. some sort of fidelity)? Is there a different referent for "authenticity"? Thinking about the different implications of asking each of these questions might help sort out this debate over how to appropriately use the term.

[koganbot]

"Postmodernism" was also on my list of words that needed to be abandoned. So were "subjective" and "objective." But the word I ended up writing most about was "irony," which unfortunately can't be abandoned because when used correctly it serves useful purposes that no other word can manage, but it's often used terribly.