Against The Literary Imperative

literature/the novel: "a lie that tells the truth"

so...

=pre-industrial infotainment?!
e.g. when the latest trove of freshly leaked government records is not nearly entertaining enough to hold the attention of an audience whose record keeping is not quite so thorough. instead, storytime! ergo the collective appointment of mandarin technocrats to digest the proverbial federalist papers on our collective behalf. ergo the offense taken to such appointees, drawing as they do equal attention to our own deficiencies as to any justly-sounded alarms. down with the mandarins! unless they entertain us! (and unless we may continue to reason anecdotally! especially if we are 'oppressed'!) thus is the political colonized by the aesthetic and the aesthetic colonized by the political; thus are the minds and souls of the people conquered, in their own names, so as to preserve psychic domicile over a dead land mass; thus the suddenly-old saying about 'letting the terrorists win' metamorphoses from talk-radio zinger to supremely useful figure of speech to the master narrative of our time; etc., etc. so no more art for art's sake k? cuz that is a lie that just plain lies. and we won't stand for that any longer.


...perhaps more specifically...

=victorian infotainment?!
i.e. for those tough household spills wherein The Truth in its unadulterated form is simply unspeakable. in its place, a little white lie! just this once! for your own good! hence a privileged position for literature among The Arts, the lesser castes aspiring half-heartedly to do what literature does vis-a-vis Great Big Truths and Little White Lies. all hail literary thought, the bounty paper towel of the left, soaking up spilled grape juice a whole glass at a time while the leading national brand just turns to grapy pudding. don't make grapy pudding, kids! make art!


...but...!

this place of literature in The Arts and in Society can (and should) (and must) be deconstructed in the best sense of that term. perhaps owing to the impenetrable language in which this has been undertaken by academics, word seems not to have reached the (wo)man on the street that sometimes (or, uh...perhaps most of the time??) a lie is just a lie. less excusable yet is the effect of such "privileged positions" on the internal political dynamics of the professional art world: as in the wider political and social world, a subclass of Limousine Liberals emerges, an art-ontological Bourgeoisie who not only wield the greatest explanatory power but know it too. hence more is more: more narrative, more amplitude, more ethnicity, more mixing of media, more shouting over each other just to be heard; and yes, ever more consequentialist mendacity in purported service of deferred truthtelling. whew!! damned if you don't have to deconstruct just to get through the day!! damned if a profusion of Little White Lies isn't the most effective concealment of one Great Big One!!


hence the guiding rejoinder to the given truism:

"If truth-telling is so important, why not just do that? What are all these indirect paths we keep hearing about and what is lost/gained by way of each one?"

the aestheticist 99% demand answers.


...to wit...

=an aesthetically nihilist (or at least agnostic) social imperative for literature (and its imitators, all the other Arts)

that is, an imperative to address itself (themselves) to social matters which demand corrective Truth-Telling on account of a prevailing Lie which is presently doing more harm than good. (this is nothing like the Little White Lies that literature tells! those we are proud of!)

but of course there are *other* socially valuable functions for art and literature, and there are *other* aesthetics which have prospective value/potential but which necessarily are at odds with this narrow social imperative. further, wider social imperatives necessarily beget value systems, and any value system grown up around such concerns is bound to reinscribe itself on the narrow internal value systems of artists and artmaking. this, then, becomes the opposite of the liberationist gesture which activist artists would like to posit for it; rather, it clutters the social world of critical and popular reception with arbitrary proscriptions and inhibitions, above all a deep distrust of the ineffable which is anathema to so many extraliterary artistic traditions in so many ways.

Armchair Deconstruction: The Sound of Music, and The Silence of Musicians Who Are On Their Way

Before music rescues the von Trapp children from the militaristic tyranny of their grieving father, before it is co-opted to show that "nothing in Austria has changed," and before it serves as a diversionary tactic against Nazi captors frothing at their proverbial mouths, we are reminded, just for good measure, of something we already knew: that the people who actually make the music are quite unreliable in virtually every other way.

In medias res we meet our heroine Maria, lost in song and waxing metaphysical, reciting a relatively recent Alpine gloss on the much more ancient Harmony of the Spheres. It is mid-afternoon by the time her alarm clock finally rings, at which point the daydream gives way to cold reality: She is late. Again. Just like musicians always are.

This prompts the good sisters themselves to break into song and recount for us in exquisite detail the full litany of Maria's dialectical fissures. Neither the abbey walls nor any others can contain Our Lady; rather, she herself is uncontainable, an enigma, as full of good qualities and boundless energy as she is thoroughly unable to harness them to any controlled or rational end, and most especially not toward her chosen vocation. She is a wonderful person, of course, but one we'd rather not be burdened to deal with directly. You might say that it is cleaner and more expedient for all involved that we opt merely to appreciate her from a safe distance in lieu of actually experiencing her in full. We take solace, or so we say, in knowing that such people are out there, somewhere, undoubtedly doing more good than harm, even as we consciously and unconsciously avoid entanglement. After all, "Once entangled, twice a no-show."

Given such a detailed accounting of pros and cons, the unusually sympathetic, enterprising, or just plain perceptive among us may of course be quite capable of drawing their own, more charitable conclusions. Such it is that by the time all is said and done Maria has had her trajectory profitably redirected by an elder who has seen it all before, improbably bringing release (of at least two kinds), nurturance, and mentorship to the von Trapps after such amenities had seemingly died along with their former matriarch. A good-old-fashioned feminist deconstruction would not be out of place here, and it should take priority over the more parochial issue of music's position in society. But like any marginalized group, musicians too can always count on artifacts of mass culture to invoke those timeless archetypes which are most easily recognized by a fearfully conformist bourgeois audience (Seriously, which groups are not marginalized by this demographic?), and indeed to see the fear no less than the archetype itself reflected therein. Here, then, is one more reminder to leave a little extra time in case the traffic is bad.

Reports of My Demise (viii)

As the seminal "sociobiological" account of the origins of many contemporary gender differences, anthropologist Lionel Tiger's Men In Groups is guaranteed to leave a bad taste in the mouth of social constructionists everywhere or their money back. This notwithstanding, his sidebar on the question of decoupling the notions of violence and aggression is, in my opinion, worth taking seriously. In it, he seeks to establish a "statement of difference between effective action which is part of a process of mastery of the environment, and that particularly intimate form of mastery which involves the violation of an organism's personal space and the infliction of physical pain." (159) This distinction, he continues,

allows more general use of the term 'aggression' so that it refers to a process rather than an event. Sociologically it implies a mode and direction of social organization rather than an actual circumstance of intimate intrusion. I want to regard aggression as a 'normal' feature of the human biologically based repertoire, a type of behaviour intrinsic to man's being and to his effective interaction with his social environment. Violence is not necessarily part of all or any of these. (159)

In short, all violence is aggressive but not all aggression is violent.

There are at least two important lessons here for musicians. First and foremost is that the mimetic "violence" of late-period Beethoven or Coltrane is generally overstated. Real musical violence lives in the realm of conceptual pieces which call for the destruction of instruments onstage or the lobbing of explosives into the audience; it lives where acoustic instruments and electronic playback alike are amplified to the point that they become irreparably injurious to the human sensory organs at which they are literally and figuratively aimed; and it lives anywhere lyrical content is introduced which is, relative to its audience, disturbing enough to inflict lasting emotional harm. Interstellar Space certainly is aggressive, but played at a reasonable volume for voluntary audients, it is not injurious, and so I would argue not inherently violent; neither people nor instruments are irreparably damaged by it. Saxophone reeds and drum heads are, after all, consumable items; I have heard colleagues liken the former to tampons.

Now, perhaps all of this is relative. Perhaps there are indeed people whose expectations of what music, art, and public deportment ought to be can be so traumatically violated by "dark," "angry," aggressive music as to emerge from the experience with permanent emotional scars. But when such mimetic or metaphorical violence of a player "attacking" an instrument has become so disturbing as to be received as real violence by the spectator, has a breakdown not occurred, certainly in cultural convention, but I would not hesitate to ask in common sense as well? The seeking of a perfect allegorical resemblance between the technical parameters of an art form, the physical-technical gestures necessary to execute it, and an imagined utopian world without violence is one of the less constructive inheritances of postmodernity. It is a textbook case of left becoming right, a faux-liberationist tack with a decidedly repressive outcome.

The second and final point I want to draw from this is hinted at by Tiger's use of the term "mastery" and the distinction he makes between gaining it over one's environment and over one's fellow (wo)man. I am admittedly a bit out of my league here, but it seems that the notion of mastery has taken a similar deconstructionist beating as that of aggression, and for not much better reasons. Here, though, I think it is at least possible to grant the relative nature of the concept without disavowing its usefulness. Indeed, the political problem peculiar to the art world of very particular aesthetic values being installed and enforced on the institutional level often relies on culture- and ideology-specific notions of mastery for its rudder, but I would argue that this is something of a separate question from that of mastery's abstract value and potential. Baby > Bathwater.

If cliches about the two kinds of music ("good music and the other kind") have worn thin by this stage in the game, so be it, but at least for me this one only resonates more deeply with age and experience. There are whole genres of music I loathe whose masters nonetheless get over to a certain degree, and for me that is why mastery still matters. Do what you love and invest the entire fabric of your being in it. It won't beget a perfect world, but it might at least make our time left in the one we have a trifle more enjoyable and fulfilling. As a child of the 80s, I was weaned on this kind of motivational talk; now I often feel as if I have lived, for not all that long, to see it deconstructed out and compromised away. Perhaps this is just an inevitable rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. The self-esteem stuff was always overbearing and precious, but frankly I think it might be the last line of defense against a marauding nihilism that is the inevitable consequence of a post-rationalist, post-aestheticist, post-purpose society. Certainly if even art cannot be a safe outlet for aggression, there is little to look forward to.

Hearing Modernity (iii)

Olivia Lucas on Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: Meaning of a Format:

The approach to history here is never teleological; instead, it emphasizes the contingency of all events and artifacts. The book addresses the fact that the mp3 could have been invented thirty years earlier than it was, and uses this fact to interrogate the assumption that technological capability alone leads to invention. The emergence of the mp3 in 1993 was the result of a long history of people, institutions and technologies.

Okay, okay, I get it. I mean, not really, but kind of. No musical style or technique is universally applicable anymore, but everyone in a society lives under the same set of social, political, and economic conditions, and the better we understand them, the better equipped we are to make and consume sound/music. The idea of replacing music theory with acoustics in the core curriculum actually has always kind of appealed to me for the same reason: we all live under the same physical laws, even if our Musical traditions are vastly different and irreconcilable. Why not go all the way? Isn't embracing "the contingency of all events and artifacts" going to do more for more students of sound and music alike than sweating out the gory details of how "a minority of aesthetes" chose to spend their putrid little lives?

I honestly am not sure. It seems we will find out in due time. I do wonder, though, just to belabor the point a bit more, what becomes of the last thousand years of willfulness in Western music? Are we to behave as if it never happened? Today, given enough data from which to extrapolate, computers can spit out convincing sound-alikes in the style of virtually any classical composer; and yet simply by virtue of being first, the original works themselves tell us so much more about the world we live in and how it got to be that way. Sociology, meanwhile, can explain or excuse the work, but it can't perform or compose it. The former are ideal academic pursuits; the latter never fit quite so well. Perhaps it's better, then, that academia do Sound Studies rather than Sound Making; that it focus on what it's good at and leave the creative, subjective work that it never really knew how to properly approach or nurture to be done outside its walls. Isn't that what people like me have been saying for a long time? And yet it was the academics' unhealthy distance from real live musical practice that prompted those complaints in the first place. Seen in that light, instituting a yet further distance suddenly becomes a lot less appealing, and the very point of doing so rather unclear. That's my main problem here. As long as there has been music, practitioners have always already been analysts, historians, and most of all, teachers and mentors. That aspect of music predates modern academia and promises to outlive it. The story of the academic perversion of the time-honored mentor-disciple relationship is one of increasing distance from musical practice; of enforced insularity as an inevitable product of a particular kind of hierarchical structure in the organization of such institutions; and of people with no particular interest in or ability for teaching or mentorship half-assing their way through it in exchange for a much-needed paycheck when the society they live in presents them with no alternative income source. The strongest backlash against this monstrosity was bound to come from far enough beyond its walls to ensure that those leading it didn't entirely understand or appreciate the value of a properly functioning version; they simply wanted their own demands met, their own self-importance validated, by whichever institutions they happened to be looking at after being shot with Cupid's envy arrow, and where such things were not immediately forthcoming, they set about burning the whole thing to the ground. Ergo, Sound Studies, the new and improved, politically correct version of Sound Making, where everybody gets a trophy, no one has to practice, and the only prerequisite is fluency in a coded language of five-dollar words. In all seriousness, there is undoubtedly important work to be done here should its exponents demonstrate the ability to learn from the history of the institutions they've worked so hard to penetrate; it so often seems, however, that this history has simply been dismissed as a dark age without being fully digested, the very notion of aesthetic contemplation considered beyond redemption, and our nose thus cut off very much in spite of our face. There are other questions, too, like what becomes of the "music makes kids smart" narrative after every last piece of physical and mental exercise inherent in the traditional Western musical experience has been decolonialized right out of it, and anything less than a Partchian mania for first principles is pathologized as reactionary propaganda? It is not for nothing that Christopher Small, The People's Deconstructionist, builds his widely-read book "Musicking" around the notion that music is something people do; it would seem rather obvious, though, that art which anyone can make, which requires no specialized knowledge or skills, is inherently non-transformative, art with zero "extrinsic" benefits, if you will. Who cares, then, how many people it reaches?

The 21st century postmodernists have let the 20th century musico-academic terrorists win. Distrusting the power of beauty to elicit irrational behavior, or perhaps possessing no ear for it themselves, they can't seem to understand why anyone else would have use of it; and so the play of contingencies and constructivisms is supposed to fellate our minds the way music once did our ears. I'm a smart guy, so...almost. But not quite. I have ears, not ice, where my heart should be.

Hearing Modernity (i)

From an essay by Ian Power:

For the first ninety or so years of modern liberal arts education in the United States, the study of music meant the study of classical music, much like the study of literature was that of Great Books. As the advent of critical theory in other humanist disciplines began to expand the scope of scholarly study, music (somewhat grudgingly) began look to critical theory as well; with, for example, music theorists looking to phenomenology, and musicologists looking to gender studies. But perhaps most critical to the study of sounds themselves was the rapid expansion of ethnomusicology, which not only exposed academia to different musics, it brought to music departments a laundry list of ways of thinking about and experiencing music that were much different from the Western classical situation. There came to Western ears far more to tell of societies (contemporary and past) in which the boundaries between music and daily life were not so clear; where purposeful noise was integral and not polluting. In addition to these, scholars began to turn ears to contemporary consumers of American popular culture, much of which produced music that was not to be sat and listened to, but danced to, shower-sung to, run to, eaten to, and shopped to.

An important point goes customarily unremarked upon here: in the bygone era of cultural consensus (or the appearance of it), the arts nonetheless did not seem to fit very comfortably into the academic mandate, and it was never particularly gauche to suggest so. Canonical old-world musical figures like Berlioz, Wagner, Debussy, and Prokofiev certainly had their own strained relationships with the academic musical thought of their respective times, which is to say years or decades before music (of any kind) had gained its foothold in American academia¹. With cultural consensus came the threat of enforced convention, and as goes one, so goes the other, or so it seems this cadre of sound scholars would have it.

The distinction here between "music" and "sound" is well-taken, and has shaped my own world more so than my overwhelmingly lines-and-dots-oriented work might outwardly indicate; in any case, I'm certainly not here to argue that classical music is the only kind worth studying. One wonders, however, if a precipitous lurch towards sound necessarily resolves the longer-standing tension, held over from the age of music, between academic theory and real-world practice; or if, in fact, as an almost purely academic construction (and at that, one taking significant cues from, of all places, critical theory), a field like Sound Studies merely threatens to transform the problem of studying music into something bigger, messier, and even less utilitarian than the paradigm it purports to supersede? Insofar as the "practice" of sound is less intention-driven than that of music, does it not pose a proportionately less tractable condition?

Indeed, the disintegration of cultural consensus was never music's problem alone: after all, with the "boundaries between music and daily life" now suitably shattered, what good is the study of sound without 1000 years of music as its contextual counterweight? Could Sound Studies justify its own existence without this backdrop? Throughout the musical era, the glaring and elementary epistemological problems inherent in the gesture of subsuming creative artistic disciplines as they were then understood within the academic environment as it was then manifested were nonetheless papered over, dwarfed as they were by music's (not sound's) larger cultural significance. Sound Studies, meanwhile defines such top-down, monolithic frameworks right out of its worldview; from what source, then, is its necessity taken to spring?

The matter of the arts justifying their own existence, in academia and elsewhere, is a frequent, if often indirect, topic of conversation these days, and rightfully so; yet no one I'm reading from either a musical or a sonic viewpoint is suggesting that both music and sound could be truly endangered academic species. I am beginning to take seriously the notion that they are; that more people think so than say so; and that we can learn something about the whole mess by studying these and other stakeholders' behavior. As a mostly musical creature myself, the rather calculated academic maneuver by soundists to dump the entire weight of postmodern cultural fragmentation onto the backs of us musicians strikes me as an omen, since these are the people that, if they understand anything, understand both culture and academic politics intimately.

Certainly with strict regard to music, the costs of pluralism (of which I have been a strong proponent here) are steep. The first is trite but all-encompassing: as a practical matter, schools of music can no longer provide comprehensive music education when the very notion of music has (rightly, I think) been exploded into something as varied as the individuals who sustain it and as vast as collective human intellectual endeavor itself. In other words, schools can neither expect their graduates to know everything nor can they afford to teach it to them. The second, equally trite and equally all-encompassing point: qualitative evaluation in the arts was a dicy proposition from the start, and in a self-consciously pluralistic educational environment, it is impossible almost by definition. If art and academia were always strange bedfellows, someone is sleeping on the couch for the foreseeable future. Does excising the study of art from the study of sound really solve the problem? Does it create another?

Paradoxically (perhaps ingeniously), the dismantling of cultural consensus short-circuits the possibility of the institutional training of music-makers while securing scalable, nearly unlimited avenues of inquiry for pure scholars of sociology and culture. Discourses of mastery and refinement (with, for Cage and post-Cageans, intentionality as their proxy) were the very first targets of the most vehement deconstructionists; all human beings, it turns out, create sound and shit in equal amounts (lots) and with equal effort (none). In an instant, there were no more musicians for academics to train and an unlimited number for them to study. Is it really all that farfetched, then, given, on one hand, the wide-ranging adademic-political implications of such a trend for what are, for the moment, known as music departments, and on the other, the well-documented limitless pettiness and insecurity of academics in marginalized fields of endeavor, to at least take note of all of this from an academic-political perspective?

"The advent of critical theory in other humanist disciplines" and its bleed into musico-academic scholarship is a topic which I'm neither prepared nor qualified to tackle in any mature scholarly way. I will say only that I suspect it deserves to be presented, as it is above, strictly as a history of academia itself, and as such is otherwise about as relevant to modern day musical practitioners as the list of Prix de Rome winners or the competing conventions for labeling secondary dominant chords. The emphasis on the role of ethnomusicology seems more justified, though this should also remind us that rigid convention, refinement of technique, and formal apprenticeship are not exactly unique to our own classical tradition. It is mere delusion to believe that excising them from our culture is inherently a depathologizing or liberationist maneuver.

As all-encompassing as the impact of critical theory can seem in the right circles, as well as the best of it explicates some important recent trends, and as thoroughly at odds as it is (representing fairly well, I think you could say, the facts on the ground) with the very notion of allowing pre-professional training of musical practitioners to dominate academic musical life as it has for several decades, musical academia itself has, of course, not (yet) truly begun to reform itself accordingly, nor has it ventured very far from the usual high-brow Western musical traditions. Last I checked, in fact, the numbers were continuing to explode. The institution I most recently attended, thought by itself and a few others to point the way forward on just these sorts of issues, is, of course, singularly proud of its accredited performance programs in several non-Western musical traditions, again solving one problem only to create another. It turns out that music-makers, those lovable idiot savants who make the entire musico-academic edifice hum, have a peculiar way of going on the offensive to protect their turf, preserving, contriving, and enforcing their own cultural consensuses among micro-communities just large enough (but plenty well-connected) to sustain the old monolithic ways in politically well-placed pockets of resistance. We are an eminently naive, outmoded and vulnerable species which critical theory has nevertheless completely failed to either reform or depose, not through exertion of external pressure, and certainly not through holistic infiltration of the subculture. (Really, how many conservatory brats could begin to understand the first thing about this literature? See the problem now?) As I continue to read about, study, and observe the world around me, the clearer it becomes that the academic training of practitioners of living musical traditions will remain in perpetual conflict with the values of liberationist critical theory unless or until such training ceases to be undertaken at all. So stay safe out there kids; there are Bolsheviks in our bathroom.


¹Of course, it figures that the differences between (1) an old-fashioned (i.e. nineteenth century) national conservatory system and (2) a modern quasi-conservatory system subsumed within a nation's public and private universities are decidedly non-negligible, and would make for a fascinating angle from which to attack contemporary polemics surrounding the orientation and mandate of post-secondary music schools.

[sc]airquotes (v)

Instead of repeating such Western myths of the noncontingency of artworks, why not search for jazz meanings behind the music, in the life-shapes that gave rise to it and that continue to sustain it? Why not, in other words, scrutinize the interactions between our own rules of formation and those we impute to the makers of jazz as the source of our evaluations of it? Why not create a jazz pedagogy in which our construction of the varieties of black life experience takes priority, saving the music–intricately bound up with those experiences, after all–for last, construing it in light of them and resisting the aestheticizing tendency to exaggerate its differences from other manifestations of expressive culture?

...Placing the music first will always distance it from the complex and largely extramusical negotiations that made it and that sustain it. It will always privilege the European bourgeois myths of aesthetic transcendency, artistic purity untouched by function and context, and the elite status of artistic expression. (Such myths concerning the composers of the European canon badly need to be exploded, so it is all the more troubling to see them neatly transferred to African-American composers and performers.) Emphasizing the musical appreciation of jazz only transfers to the study of African-American music the formalist view that remains debilitatingly dominant in Eurocentric musicology, with its continuing emphasis on internalist music analysis." (89)

Gary Tomlinson. Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies. Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 22, Supplement: Best of BMRJ (2002), pp. 71-105.