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]

I hadn't heard your 'authenticity' request before this article (that you want it only as an adjective, not as a noun). If I had heard it before, I would've contested it immediately. After all, the king of 'authenticity,' Walter Benjamin, didn't feel that it needed to operate upon a noun. He said that an object could have an aura or not have an aura. And that aura was totally a function of the object as a unique piece of art. Not as an object when contrasted to similar objects. Something can be inauthentic without relying on trope (genre or otherwise).

Probably, without hearing your answer first, I'm gonna guess you'd have no problem with someone using the word like that. Your problem is probably that when someone says Ashley Simpson isn't authentic, what they mean is she's not an authentic singer/songwriter or something like that. And you want them to make it explicit so that you can parse it. But it can also be used in the Benjamin sense.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I've never understood, and always seriously distrusted, Benjamin's concept here. He's talking about what happens in mechanical reproduction when there is no "original" work that can be...like, hung in a space. And my understanding is that this is potentially a positive development in art, because what "aura" does is encourage a sort of cult of beauty centered on the thing itself and not the content.

And that's the opposite of what I originally though reading the essay, which is that something is "lost" when this "aura" is destroyed (and I also think there's some stuff in there about mechanically reproduced stuff having something, but not an "aura." But I REALLY wouldn't go on my word here, I'm bringing it up in the hopes that someone can clarify).

I have a vague sense of what Benjamin is doing, based somewhat on his sorta "post-script" section in which he outlines "politicized aesthetics" (socialist/revoultionary art) and "aestheticized politics" (fascist/reactionary art). I've never even begun to understand this distinction (does it have to do with how explicit the politics are versus an assumption of politics being implicit in the aesthetic? How can we actually tell the difference? Am I missing the point?). I think the "aura" has something to do with a piece of art being seen as "timeless" in its beauty, so that any politics are basically underhandedly, uh, absorbed into the observer?

Anyway, I don't see what any of this has to do with anything -- If I've seen a film, I've had the experience of art (and it's always possible to fetishize something that's mechanically reproduced -- see the cult of Bolex modern experimental filmmakers, many of whom I like, doing just as much fetishizing of the "source," the film itself, as you might of an art object, making quasi-religious rituals out of the film experience). I just don't see how there being some original "thing" has anything to do with my reception of the thing -- how 'bout a fake that everyone thought was real? To a certain degree with this stuff, it has a lot to do with reception, not the nature of the medium or object itself.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

*originally thought reading the essay.

If anyone who's familiar with "Mechanical Reproduction" wanted to tell me I'm way off-base here, I would be much obliged!

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

My other sense is that Benjamin's expectations of art on all sides of the political spectrum are way too high -- that is, there's a dichotomy between art leading to social change and art working at an almost subconscious level, basically infecting its admirers, at least semi-unawares, with its politics. Which doesn't tell me a whole lot about how people actually view art or how it actually works in their lives. (This is a general beef I tend to have with the majority of theory that addresses the "nature of the medium" type questions and again I'm not sure if it's appropriate here.)

[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.

[koganbot]

Well, it's been a zillion years since I read that Benjamin essay (if it is the one I read), and I'm not getting enough of a sense of his idea to know if I'd agree or disagree. But in specific situations where someone did use the word authenticity without saying what the phenomenon was supposed to be an authentic example of, I'd first try to figure out from context what he really is comparing it to, since often often enough there is an implied comparison.

My experience is that when people are talking about music, even when it's the musical piece rather than the piece's maker that's being discussed, the word "authenticity" arises in relation to whether someone - artist, audience member - is being "genuine," e.g., expressing himself without calculating what he will gain or lose. The problem is that the word "authenticity" is often a dysfunctionally vague way of waving one's hand at this issue - and this issue itself is plenty problematic anyway (how does the artist's calculation or lack of it guarantee what the music does or the music's value?). And byebyepride would know this better than I, but historically I'd say that the word is used in regard to whether someone is living an authentic life and - in relation to music - whether the music arises from or is used in such an authentic life. Living an authentic life usually means engaging with something - nature, war, housing projects, child abuse, drug addiction - more intense or primal than the supposed norm; and you don't get such an emphasis on "authenticity" without there being at least a hint that it is the norm to be compromised or contaminated or fraudulent in some manner.

[koganbot]

Also, if someone were to call Ashlee Simpson (whose name has no y in it) "inauthentic," that person probably wouldn't know what he meant by it other than that he thinks her music is all done by machine or she's a corporate puppet or she's too preppy or she had plastic surgery; by not specifying what comparison he's making, he's giving himself a way of not thinking through his own ideas and not exploring his own social attitudes and prejudices.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

And maybe I have this problem because I hate Benjamin, or don't get Benjamin, or go blank behind the eyes at the thought of Benjamin, but: Why are we talking about Benjamin? Because he happened to use the word "authenticity," which is a word you are also using? What he was talking about when he talked about authenticity is not at all related to what you are talking about when you talk about authenticity.

The, like, single thing that I always remember from Benjamin is the thing about how a stage actor can connect with, and adjust to, the audience -- there is an interaction there that is not present for a film audience. Interaction is authentic, lack of interaction is inauthentic, right? But when someone says, "Ashlee Simpson is not authentic," they are accusing her of adjusting to an audience.

[koganbot]

Well, I didn't bring up Benjamin. But I suppose there's an echo in both Benjamin and the Ashlee hater of the 17th-century Germans who were decrying how modern life and commerce were making life unengaged and inauthentic, adjusting to audiences of course being caused by commercialism, and she's a bimbo corporate puppet anyway, and it's her sister's fault that Dallas lost because she distracted Tony from the real business at hand, blah blah blah.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

I know. But your comment looked like the most logical entry point, so I replied to you rather than the Benjaminer(s).

(And I am being intentionally dense, in a way, because there's a pretty direct connection between Benjamin and the people who say, "Ashlee is inauthentic because she doesn't write songs on her own." Because their complaint is that Ashlee's the film actor, viewed through the lens of songwriters and marketing, not interacting with us at all. Or that the songs are the film actors, viewed through the lens of Ashlee, or something. The point is that there is an intermediate step between art and audience, and that is inauthentic by Benjamin's standards, so whatever, it is connected. [Even if it is bullshit because there is always an intermediate step between art and audience!] But FUCK HE IS BORING and rehashing this doesn't get us any closer to your point, so why do people do it?)

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Haha, should have called them Benjaminions.

Somebody's probably already thought of that.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I am so not a Benjaminion. Frankly I'd like to get that essay and any invocation of it outlawed from any discussion of media theory. Along with a lot of other things. (Ben-ya-MEEN-ion sounds like something they'd say on Ren and Stimpy.)

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

I refuse to pronounce it properly, that's how anti-Benjamin I am.