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

[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.