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).

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

Something else:

"In fact, I’d say that as a critic I’m the real deal and Geoff isn’t in that I challenge my readers whereas Geoff throws them bouquets."

Sounds like an argument between being proscriptive and description, which is somewhat at the heart of the rockist/poptomist tension. Geoff wants to talk about Underwood, because people are listening to her already. You want to talk about Miranda, because you think people should be listening to her. But the truth is that neither of you are being totally honest. Because Geoff isn't throwing them 'bouquets' to make them comfortable. He's throwing them 'bouquets' because he thinks that it's more interesting to anthropologize and discuss what people are interested in. And you aren't discussing Miranda to challenge people, but because you find her artistically interesting. If you thought she'd challenge people, but you didn't find her interesting yourself, you'd discard her. Just like if Carrie sounded VERY popular but wasn't actually popular, Geoff wouldn't bother with her.

[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.

Film friend discusses Benjamin, not rockism

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

My friend's response:

"let me know if this helps:

you've kind of got it right both ways -- that's part of the beauty of this essay. Benjamin mourns the loss of the aura, but also argues that, with mechanically reproduced art, it's important to acknowledge that the aura is gone. The significance of the aura might be boiled down to the work of art bearing a mark of its having been made. Perhaps this comes in the form of brush strokes in a painting or layers of soot on a sculpture. When encountering an artwork that has an aura, Benjamin finds it difficult to ignore the unique perspective of the work's maker. In other words, objects are not neutral, and the aura reminds us of this.

Mechanically reproduced art, removed from the touch of its maker, has the ability to appear unbiased. The way that fascist filmmakers manipulated this factor scared Benjamin so he called for makers of mechanically reproduced art to include other elements that would remind viewers that the object in question is not free from bias. With "aestheticized politics," Benjamin basically refers to this practice. "Politicized aesthetics," on the other hand, describes the act of consciously mobilizing art for political ends -- and acknowledging that intention somehow through the formal elements of the work (think dada photomontage). "

Re: Film friend discusses Benjamin, not rockism

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

And my question is still....WHY? Why on earth should a film not be seen as a product of its makers? Wasn't Leni Reifenstahl held directly and personally accountable for her involvement in producing Nazi propaganda? Wasn't Otis Ferguson seeing right through this trash in the late 30's anyway and wondering what sort of dope, even a Nazi, could possibly fall for it? (Answer to both questions is yes.)

Re: Film friend discusses Benjamin, not rockism

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Re: Response from FilmFriend...

"some people did understand the mechanics of film production. his problem was with things like classical editing practices that masked many of the processes of filmmaking. In thinking about Nazi propaganda films, there's a huge change from expressionist cinema, where it's undeniable that there's a lot of manipulation going on... I don't think it's necessarily the whole medium of film that scares benjamin, but, rather, the way it can be mobilized (to aestheticize politics) when put into the wrong hands."

[(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]

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]

Geoff wants to talk about Underwood, because people are listening to her already. You want to talk about Miranda, because you think people should be listening to her.

This is entirely fantasy on your part and has nothing to do with either Geoff or me. Of course I'm referring back to something I wrote two weeks earlier, so I can see why you wouldn't necessarily get what I was saying, but I have no idea where you got that from and I think you're pretty confused. In any event, Geoff barely said anything about either Miranda or Carrie other than to make the claim that Miranda challenges listeners' assumptions whereas Carrie reassures listeners, and the bouquets that Geoff was throwing at we the Miranda fans was to congratulate us for challenging ourselves, which of course doesn't challenge us at all, it just sucks us off (or would if we took it seriously). Whereas I challenge my readers not because I write about Miranda Lambert (my guess is that I challenge them far more by writing about Ashlee Simpson and Taylor Swift, actually, though you'd be right to say that my primary motive is that Ashlee and Taylor are interesting rather than that my writing about them challenges readers) but because I continually ask my readers questions about why people such as us - incl. my readers, presumably - justify music in the way that we do, e.g., by calling certain things "authentic." And right, in this column I didn't go into what it is I do that challenges my readers, but I think it's pretty obvious.

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

Ah. I see where I got confused. I thought you were saying that Geoff was throwing bouquets at his readers by championing Underwood and that you were doing the real deal. Ie: I read "In fact, I’d say that as a critic I’m the real deal and Geoff isn’t in that I challenge my readers..." as saying "therefore voting Miranda Lambert our number one" was somehow more challenging. As in, I know that you were a critic who supported Lambert and didn't support Underwood (at least didn't champion her in the same way) and I was looking at the way that became communicated to the audience. Vis-a-vis, I assumed that when you said "I challenge my readers" you meant by championing Miranda.

What I think I really had difficulty parsing was the audiences you're assuming for yourself and Geoff. Are you assuming that the readers you're challenging are the same readers that he is throwing bouquets at? (Ie: Music critics?) Because while he is lauding you for challenging yourself [with Miranda], he's also making an argument about the relationship between a music critic and his audience. He's saying that you *could've* pandered to your audience and voted Underwood #1, but you like to be challenged, and you're smarter than you're audience, and so you voted Miranda (which, obviously, automatically also challenges your audience).

Am I reading too much into this?

[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.

[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]

Are you assuming that the readers you're challenging are the same readers that he is throwing bouquets at?

Good question. But the poll and his essay were in the Nashville Scene, which is an altweekly (the guys who bought the Voice from Stern and then sold out to the New Times bozos), which presumably has a readership that prides itself on being alt, hence would lean more towards Miranda than Carrie. And the critics in the country critics poll definitely lean far more alt than the mainstream country listeners do.

Also, Geoff cheated in his essay by saying that "Before He Cheats" finished number thirteen in 2007 while neglecting to say that "Before He Cheats" had finished fifth in 2006 (and would have finished higher still in 2007 if he'd combined votes over years the way that Pazz & Jop does), which doesn't put her poll numbers up there with Miranda's but doesn't make her as unliked by critics as he thinks.

Re: Film friend discusses Benjamin, not rockism

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

within ordinary art then and now there is (for whatever reason) a massive tendency to elide the production produce; to idealise the final object and overlook the process of its arrival, treat its making as not just a distraction from the appreciation, but a kind of vulgar interruption* -- even yr point abt leni does this: actually LOTS of people were involved in the making of her films apart from her, from the people down on the floor on the day to the people who ran the factories who deliver the celluloid; and the argument that she was "ultimately" in control is just that, an argument, not a fact

there was a fashion in the late 19th century for orchestras to play behind screen so the sight of the moving arms and puffing mouths would not discompose the blissed-out listener -- that was an extreme development, but the idea that "oh! now we are surely smarter about all this!" is nonsense... there's an essay in the current Film Quarterly (from a well-known film historian and former commissioning editor at the BFI) pointing out how RARE it is that film-making is EVER treated as a contested collectivity... buried assumptions within auteurism as a thesis, the relationship between assumptions of authorship and claims about authority and authenticity, don't just end when you switch an element of creativity and decision-power over to the audience (partly bcz imagined provenance as a glamour can muffle actual provenance as a fact, but it can't erase it...): instead they become hyper-complex, and contestable themselves -- energies of debate and fields of possibility, in fact

(the bit i like in that particular essay is when the bikeboys are all talkin abt the film and all know everything about it <--- they are waiting for the NME TO COME OUT!)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

that's not an asterisk, it's a peephole through into the REVEALED MACHINERY OF MY BRANE

[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)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I looked inside yer peephole and all I saw was everything at once. Derivative.