[sc]airquotes (ix)—in praise of dick-thinking

Herb Goldberg
The Hazards of Being Male
(1976)

---

[22]

3. The Wisdom
Of The Penis

...

The essence and ultimate joy of male sexuality lies in the experience of total arousal, the moment when nothing in the world exists except the woman beside him, ... —desire at such a peak that no fantasies could possibly intrude ...

... it is a state most men have experienced at some time in their lives before they allowed their sexual spontaneity to be mired in the intellectualizations about "sexuality," derailed by abstractions about "meaningful relationships" and "sharing," alienated from their own experience by a destructive emphasis on techniques, and numbed by scientific teachings about the physiology of the woman and himself. That, to my mind, is the essence of much of the so-called new sexual enlightenment—the "progress" and the problem.

While women's sexuality has been misunderstood and they've been confused and degrated [sic] by psychoanalytic interpretations ... men, I believe, have been seriously and negatively affected by such labels as "latent homosexuality," "fear of intimacy," "mother fixation," "repressed hostility toward

[23]

women," "fear of failure," ...

Undoubtedly these all contain a basis in truth, but instead of facilitating his growth, the major impact of these concepts and terms have been to propel the male into greater self-consciousness, guilt, and self-accusatory reactions. Belief in these ideas often causes him to distrust his own unique sexual responses.

The beginning of a new male consciousness in the area of sexuality will first require, along with being fully aware of his feelings, a different way of interpreting his responses. ...

... It is true that a boy is given more exploratory privileges and has traditionally been allowed a wider latitude in terms of sexual indulgence. However, cultural evaluations of his sexual behavior have been far more harsh.

Impotence

... In our culture the subject has become an almost maniacal preoccupation.

[24]

... While lip-service is paid to the fact that impotence is a two-way problem, it is the male who is in the majority at the sex therapy clinics. The image of the female's role in male impotence is still largely one of helper—a sometimes supportive, sometimes resentful spectator waiting for him to overcome his problem.

...

The psychoanalytic and psychiatric approach to impotence, which involves tracing back and exploring early experiences and traumas, has a basis in reality but is a little like treating

[25]

food poisoning by exploring early eating habits. It neglects the fact that the real cause may be in the present, with the body appropriately responding to something that is seeks to avoid.

... The vast majority of men are of course capable of becoming erect under certain conditions and with certain women. So-called impotence is almost always a pair-specific phenomenon, that may be making a powerful statement about the man's feelings about the relationship toward the particular woman he is in bed with. Ironic as it may seem, most men, would rather feel they have a medical problem than say very simply to their intimate, "I don't want to make love to you." In other words, acknowledging impotence and claiming, "I've got a problem," is easier than expressing the feeling, "I'm not turned on by you." Therefore, instead of seeing himself as impotent, I would encourage him to say "I don't want to have sex with you." I would have him translate "premature ejaculation" into, "I want to get this over with as fast as possible." I would encourage him to explore and understand his negative responses to the particular woman or situation rather than assume the burden and then try to overcome the "symptom."

My clinical experience indicates that the man who diagnoses himself as impotent is often experiencing something within his relationship or about his partner that is killing his desire. However, the feeling message is only being telegraphed by his body response and is not being recognized in his conscious brain.

A colleague of mine is treating a forty-one-year-old man who became impotent after he lost his job. The patient previously was informed by one well-meaning doctor and had also read in several magazine articles that his inability to achieve erection had something to do with the fact that he associated his job with his masculinity ... An in-depth interview with his wife revealed that she was secretly deeply resentful about his unemployment and blamed

[26]

him for his lack of foresight. Out of guilt, however, she never told him, but she did say to the therapist, "He knew it was bound to happen and he could have done something about it in time, if he had really wanted to." The man's penis was perceiving her unspoken anger and her attitude of rejection toward him and was refusing to "make love" in the face of her anger and rage.

...

A different form of the wisdom of the penis is illustrated by the responses of a twenty-six-year-old recently married engineer. ... The twenty-nine-year-old wife had had two years of psychology courses and had convinced him that he was really angry toward women because of the way his mother had treated him. ... That sounded plausible to him and he came to therapy wanting to be "cured." Several private sessions with his wife, however, brought to light the fact that she had married him primarily because she was approaching thirty and was concerned that she'd never get married. She revealed that she had never been attracted to him physically and had been faking her sexual excitement right from the beginning. ... His penis was aware of her basic lack of true involvement with him. ...

[27]

...

An associate of mine told me of a patient who had recently gone to bed with the wife of a friend of his and found himself impotent. As he explored his reaction he realized that she probably was only using him to precipitate an end to her own faltering marriage. His body sensed this and wisely kept him out of a potentially explosive and dangerous relationship.

In another instance, a forty-two-year-old man became completely impotent with his wife of seventeen years. However, he was extremely potent during occasional visits to prostitutes. When I first spoke to him he was in an extreme anxiety state regarding his inability to perform sexually. He wanted to be "cured" as quickly as possible. ...

As we spoke at greater length however, it readily became apparent that internally he had been experiencing rage toward his wife for many years. ...

He acknowledged that he felt smothered and engulfed by his wife whom he felt resented him and tried to block his every autonomous move. He had been unable to assert himself with her. Instead he had given up his own activities— ... He simply went to work and came home.

While consciously he rationalized his wife's demands and stated that he felt she was justified in her expectations and requests to have him at home with the children, his penis registered his innermost feelings. It was protesting the annihilation of his real self. It was his "truth teller" and it said that he did not really want closeness and physical intimacy with a woman he felt was destroying him.

There are other examples, some so transparent that they are amusing. For example, an obviously hostile woman who was always putting down men, recently asked me if I could confirm her experience that "just about all men today have impotency problems." Clearly, she was not aware of the impact her

[28]

hostility toward men had on her lovers. She apparently believed that erections automatically appear under all conditions. Her underlying assumption was that men have no emotional reactions when it comes to sex, and that a "normal" man will automatically have an erection when there is a naked, willing woman.

Men are not impotent today. They only are impotent with some women under some conditions and their non-responsive reactions reflect important truths that they must learn to trust and understand.

... Certain kinds of contemporary conditioning techniques and "helpful" and "supportive" advice ... would have done these men great disservice. Their basic distrust of the wisdom of their body responses would only have been reinforced.

... I don't believe that an erection, no matter how achieved, is a good thing simply because it reduces a man's anxiety for the moment. I feel that this attitude robs him of the necessity of owning up to his real feelings about his partner or the relationship in which he's involved. The man who gets his erections by cheating on himself through fantasizing sex with other women, arousing himself with pornography, or using various and sundry mechanical devices is demonstrating disrespect for himself and rejection of his real emotions.

... The penis is not a piece of plumbing that functions capriciously. It is an expression of the total self. In these days of over-intellectualization it is perhaps the only remaining sensitive and revealing barometer of the male's true sexual feelings.

---

Arthur Danto
Analytical Philosophy of Action
(1973)

---

[116]

5

GIFTS

i

'We are not able to move all the organs of the body with like authority',
Hume observes,
'though we cannot assign any reason besides experience, for so remarkable a difference between one and the other.'

'As we are now',
wrote St Augustine,
'not only do our articulate members obey the will — our hands or feet or fingers — but even those that are moved only by small sinews and tendons we contract and turn as we list, as you may see in the voluntary motions of the mouth and face . . . and the lungs do serve a man's will entirely, like a pair of smith's or organist's bellows.'

Like Hume,
Augustine supposed it merely contingent that our 'authority' should be circumscribed as we find it to be,
for there are men capable of doing odd things: 'We see some men's natures far different from others, acting those things strangely in their bodies which others neither do nor hardly will believe.'

So
we could have been framed
with our authority differently seated:
'God could easily have made us with all our members subjected to the will',
he writes,

adding the possibility
which obviously haunted him as a man,
as we might recall from the Confessions,

'even those which now are moved by lust'.

I italicize the word 'now', which occurs twice in this passage. For it was Augustine's curious view that Adam, in paradise, indeed was so framed that he could perform what I have termed basic actions with his sexual organ, and hence achieve the sexual act immune from the contaminations of sin.

It is thus not sex but lust which is the root of sin, and hence the domination by the flesh of us rather than the domination by us over our bodies, which is the fallen state. Paradise accordingly is a condition we may get some glimpses of from our present powers of direct action, executing intentions without the concomitant torment of desire.

I am not at all certain that
it is a merely contingent matter
that voluntary erection
lies outside the boundaries of direct action.

For curiously enough,
a man who were able to erect at will
might in fact be impotent in the received sense,
which is an incapacity for genuine

[117]

sexual response;

where response implies
precisely the absence of
that order of control
Augustine supposes our first parent
to have exemplified.

A man who had direct control, or who was obliged to exercise direct control, would be a man without feeling, erection being the common expression of male sexual feeling.

And it is in some measure a logical truth that if erection were an action it would not be an expression, and the entire meaning of sexuality would be altered were tumescence something over which we had 'authority'.

Hence feeling,
or lust, if you will,
is not so contingently related to erection
as Augustine's argument implies.

But
perhaps it is his claim that there would in fact have been no sexuality in paradise:
a wry conjecture in the light of post-Freudian sexual romanticism.

[sc]airquotes (viii)—The Determinist Connexion

"The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics. If the operations are needed, the inevitability of infecting the whole system during the operation has to be considered. For in operating on society with a new technology, it is not the incised area that is most affected. The area of impact and incision is numb. It is the entire system that is changed. The effect of radio is visual, the effect of the photo is auditory. Each new impact shifts the ratios among all the senses. What we seek today is either a means of controlling these shifts in the sense-ratios of the psychic and social outlook, or a means of avoiding them altogether. To have a disease without its symptoms is to be immune. No society has ever known enough about its actions to have developed immunity to its new extensions or technologies. Today we have begun to sense that art may be able to provide such immunity."
(McLuhan, Understanding Media, 64)

To have a disease without its symptoms is to be immune.
Sounds like a pretty good epigram for my blog, ca. 2021.

Does anyone else find it funny that in a mere coupla pages we have gone from

starting with the effect and then inventing a poem, painting, or building that would have just that effect and no other

all the way to

No society has ever known enough about its actions to have developed immunity to its new extensions or technologies

?

Is this not to obliquely concede that those nineteenth-century conceptualists evinced a rather spectacular

epistemic arrogance

in their disregard for the

limitations that prevent us from unfrying an egg

?

Is it not pretty f*ing weird to propose that

art may be able to provide such immunity

by

controlling these shifts in the sense-ratios

if the artist cannot even control the

effect

of a work of art on any particular recipient

?

It's not a totally crazy idea, actually, but it is extremely blunt, majoritarian, and intolerant.

Absolute control over the reception of a work might be labelled a problem of organized complexity whereas the sense-ratio issue, being a bird's eye view concern and hence less-than-absolute in conceit, can be reduced to a problem of disorganized complexity. I'm borrowing from Jane Jacobs here, who borrowed thusly from Dr. Warren Weaver:

"The classical dynamics of the nineteenth century was well suited for analyzing and predicting the motion of a single ivory ball as it moves about on a billiard table . . . One can, but with a surprising increase in difficulty, analyze the motion of two or even three balls . . . But as soon as one tries to analyze the motion of ten or fifteen balls on the table at once, as in pool, the problem becomes unmanageable, not because there is any theoretical difficulty, but just because the actual labor of dealing in specific detail with so many variables turns out to be impractical.

"Imagine, however, a large billiard table with millions of balls flying about on its surface . . . The great surprise is that the problem now becomes easier: the methods of statistical mechanics are now applicable. One cannot trace the detailed history of one special ball, to be sure; but there can be answered with useful precision such important questions as: On the average how many balls per second hit a given stretch of rail? On the average how far does a ball move before it is hit by some other ball? . . .

" . . . The word 'disorganized' [applies] to the large billiard table with the many balls . . . because the balls are distributed, in their positions and motions, in a helter-skelter way . . . but in spite of this helter-skelter or unknown behavior of all the individual variables, the system as a whole posesses certain orderly and analyzable average properties."
(The Death and Life of
Great American Cities, 430-431)

certain orderly and analyzable average properties

So what are the orderly and analyzable average properties of a minimally-regulated marketplace of rational first-world art consumers?

What are the orderly and analyzable average properties of Southern California day laborers vis-a-vis instrumental music consisting entirely of dissonant counterpoint?

What are the orderly and analyzable average properties of holders of graduate jazz performance degrees while playing from an unmetered performance score with a high degree of independence among the parts, and how does this first set of orderly and analyzable average properties compare with those of the same cohort when playing from The Real Book (Fifth Edition, in C)?

As matters of disorganized complexity these questions are child's play. In each case many of us have a pretty solid depth and breadth of experience from which to make strong inferences vis-a-vis the system as a whole, be that the marketplace system, the day laborer system, or the graduate jazz accreditation system.

But

as soon as one tries to analyze the motion of ten or fifteen people within a marketplace, an audience, or (this is the real pisser) a band, then things get rather dicey.

I want to suggest that the limits of McLuhan's "determinism" as a policy or platform are shown up by this exercise. As a matter of system-level intervention it may be possible to achieve some degree of foresight, some "orchestration" of media which optimizes some system-level trait. But this has political implications for any special balls who don't fit the analyzable average. (Listen to me getting all intersectional and libertarian at the same time.) These units may well be driven batty by the orchestration which cools off the more strictly average among their cohort. "Technological determinism" (if that's what it is) either assumes uniformity in the population or it pleads ignorance of diversity. McLuhan fruitfully identifies some new problems, but there is a very old problem here too.

[sc]airquotes (vii)—The Challenge and Pretense of Conceptual Art

"It was Bertrand Russell who declared that the great discovery of the twentieth century was the technique of the suspended judgement. A.N. Whitehead, on the other hand, explained how the great discovery of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the technique of discovery. Namely, the technique of starting with the thing to be discovered and working back, step by step, as on an assembly line, to the point at which it is necessary to start in order to reach the desired object. In the arts this meant starting with the effect and then inventing a poem, painting, or building that would have just that effect and no other." (62)

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

"If you have the right models...you can predict with great precision how the ice cube will melt—this is a specific engineering problem devoid of complexity... However, from the pool of water you can build infinite possible ice cubes, if there was in fact an ice cube there at all. The first direction, from the ice cube to the puddle, is called the forward process. The second direction, the backward process, is much, much more complicated. The forward process is generally used in physics and engineering; the backward process in nonrepeatable, nonexperimental historical approaches.

"In a way, the limitations that prevent us from unfrying an egg also prevent us from reverse engineering history." (196)

N.N. Taleb
The Black Swan (orig. 2007)
2nd Ed. (2010)

Incidentally, Taleb also takes aim at Russell and the suspension of judgment:

"We cannot teach people to withhold judgment; judgments are embedded in the way we view objects. ... It is not possible without great, paralyzing effort to strip these small values we attach to matters. Likewise, it is not possible to hold a situation in one's head without some element of bias. ...

"Philosophers since Aristotle have taught us that we are deep-thinking animals, and that we can learn by reasoning. It took a while to discover that we do effectively think, but that we more readily narrate backward in order to give ourselves the illusion of understanding, and give a cover to our past actions. The minute we forgot about this point, the "Enlightenment" came to drill it into our heads for a second time. (Taleb, 202)

Time for another Enlightenment, I guess. Or maybe the Plague will suffice.

"The lesson for the small [matters] is: be human! Accept that being human involves some amount of epistemic arrogance in running your affairs."

So, re: the peculiar arrogance of believing that any work of art can have just that effect and no other on all of the people who might encounter it...is this a small matter?

"Do not try to always withhold judgment—opinions are the stuff of life. Do not try to avoid predicting—yes, after all this diatribe about prediction I am not urging you to stop being a fool. Just be a fool in the right places." (Taleb, 203)

Is artmaking the right place to be a fool? In most ways, yes, emphatically, it is perhaps the best such place. But is this also true re: prediction about the audience? How about re: epistemic arrogance about the audience? If so, what hellish effect or concept does that betoken?

"Know how to rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause."
(ibid)

Artworks which themselves do harm to the audience are rare and exceptional. Many of these are indeed "conceptual" works in the sense used here, but that is beside the point. What's the harm in a little old fashioned bohemian pretense? In isolation from all the rest of it, nothing at all. But we are the opposite of isolated these days, and so I do wonder about the system-level impact of all this free-floating dissimulation. I wonder if each of our little white lies about ourselves and our art, and most especially about its effect on audiences, if all of this is not precisely the kind of signal distortion which ultimately ramifies into toxic identity politicking and alt-right conspiracy mongering; into a Global Village not in the reductionist sloganeering sense but in the pejorative, racialist sense of "village" that a 19th Century British anthropologist might have uttered with a hiss. Take credit for enough that is not real and eventually you will have theorists of the Cultural Marxist conspiracy giving you credit for all manner of unreal things beyond your wildest dreams. i.e. Be careful what you wish for. Perhaps the frustrations of the actual Marxists could teach us artists something about the folly of starting with the effect.

A more fitting credo:

"What an artwork represents is quite insignificant. What the artist believes it represents is also insignificant. The effect the artist wanted to achieve is itself without interest. What the observer believes he sees in the artwork is in itself insignificant. The only thing that means something is the objective and real effect the art has exercised on the observer. That is the artistic reality."
(Asger Jorn, quoted in Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn, 201). 

[sc]airquotes (vi)

"The Partnership for 21st-Century Skills, a coalition of business and education leaders and policy makers, found, for example, that education in dance, theater, music, and the visual arts helps instill the curiosity, creativity, imagination, and capacity for evaluation that are perceived as vital to a productive U.S. work force. And the Conference Board, an international business-research organization, polled employers and school superintendents, finding that creative problem-solving and communications are deemed important by both groups for an innovative work force. Additionally, IBM, in a 2010 report based on face-to-face interviews with more than 1,500 CEOs worldwide, concluded that 'creativity trumps other leadership characteristics' in an era of relentless complexity and disruptive change."

Sunil Iyengar and Ayanna Hudson
Who Knew? Arts Education Fuels the Economy
Chronicle of Higher Education
10 March, 2014


Has anyone who conducts these studies or writes these articles ever tried to get a job armed with an arts degree?

[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.

[sc]airquotes (iv)

"Acquiring a familiarity with a particular style of improvisation frequently involves performing the same piece, or limited group of pieces, over and over. This allows the musician time to become intimately familiar with one particular stylistic "groove", to experiment with different possibilities within the parameters of its aesthetic, and in so doing to "push back" the limitations of a proscribed form of spontaneous creativity to an acceptable distance. The fact that North Indian musicians tend to study and perform in a relatively small number of ragas -perhaps fifteen - during the course of a lifetime illustrates this tendency. Dexter Gordon's repertory, as another example, contained a surprisingly finite number of songs which he constantly reshaped and altered over the course of his performance career.

Robin Moore. The Decline of Improvisation in Western Art Music: An Interpretation of Change. International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Jun., 1992), p. 65.

Not much to add here really; just been meaning to get this up in scholarly support of some things I've written recently. I'm struck by how our contemporary musical culture is so at odds with this well-known dynamic, mostly, I would posit, as a result of our capitalistic society, where "eclectic" is often little more than code for "employable." Of course, by this standard, I've undoubtedly overcommitted myself as well; I'm intrigued, though, at the possibility that my diverse musical interests might have deeper commonalities from which issues of style merely distract attention, something that seems more and more apparent even as I continue to collect metiers against my better judgment.

[sc]airquotes (iii)

"The late twenties trend toward larger groups coincided with replacing the tuba with the bass as the focal point of the rhythm section, causing many tuba players to switch instruments. As George Duvivier conjectures, however, few early tuba players 'made a successful transition to the bass, because they had nothing to guide them from a wind instrument to a string instrument.' Consequently, 'they made up for their deficiencies by slapping the bass, twirling it, and being active.'"

Berliner, Paul F. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. 130.

Um...LOL anyone else? This is the first time I've seen this subject tackled in a scholarly publication, albeit under the rubric of "conjecture," but I think that most of us musicians have conjectured at least a few times in our lives that Guffawing Tubist Syndrome has its roots in something other than the well-known tendency of certain instruments to attract certain kinds of people. Indeed, does the tuba not in fact have two very different such stereotypes, both of which are quite observable and not so completely localized to the different musical traditions we most readily identify them with as to permit attributing them solely to the demands of those traditions?

Part of me is just dying to know if "slapping the bass, twirling it, and being active" was an authentic reaction newly encountered technical limitations, or if it was just one of many possible responses, but the one to which tuba players as a group were disproportionately predisposed. Did young, amateurish, or otherwise unaccomplished bass players of the era who had never played tuba typically succumb to these kinds of antics? Did they learn them from players who used to play tuba? Silly even to wonder these kinds of things, I suppose, but I just can't help it having found myself in too many situations over the years where the contractor ordered a GTS tubist and got stuck with me instead.

Kind of like lead and solo trumpet, or high and low horn, there are high tuba players and then there are hiiiiiigh tuba players. It's tempting to point to this kind of thing as evidence of the continuing inertia against tuba players developing complete musicianship. In truth, I think almost every band would rather have the better player, but it is also true that personality is at least equally important in many New Orleans-style bands and touring brass quintets, and I've read job postings from both types of ensembles which made this abundantly clear, and even one several years ago which generated some heated online discussion for stating baldly that the ideal candidate would be of a certain age (i.e. young and hip). I think the more important point, though, is one independent of matters of personality or overcompensation, namely that over time when such a great number of players of a particular instrument lack technical sophistication, this in fact becomes part of the style, which means the demands on new generations of players become limited, and as Mr. Jacobs famously said, "A limited challenge produces a limited musician," thus compounding the problem. It's fascinating to ponder this through the lens of the oft-cited era of transition from tuba to bass referenced in the above quote, but with documentation being elusive, I'm afraid we're mostly stuck with the kind of conjecture Duvivier offers here, which if nothing else had me laughing quite a bit harder than most scholarly publications ever will.

[sc]airquotes (ii)

"...speaking as a precocious therapist as well as a true philistine, Plato insinuates that mimetic art is a sort of perversion–a substitute, deflected, compensatory activity engaged in by those who are impotent to be what as a pis aller they merely imitate. And who, Plato asks, would choose the appearance of the thing over the thing itself; who would settle for a picture of someone he could have, as it were, in the flesh; or would pretend to be something in preference to being the thing as such? Those who can, do, we might interpret him as having maintained; those who can't, imitate."

Arthur Danto. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1981. 12.


A philistine, my dictionary app tells me, is "a person who is hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts, or who has no understanding of them," which if we define "the arts" the way Danto does I suppose I am. "In the philosophy of science," he writes, "there are no observations without theories; so in the philosophy of art there is no appreciation without interpretation. Interpretation consists in determining the relationship between a work of art and its material counterpart." (p. 113). A problem, I might add, which clearly belongs to a particular art-historical epoch, even if it was always there lurking behind the cloak of improbability: it was not until artworks had known material counterparts (identical objects which were not artworks themselves) that the question he seeks to answer here became a pressing one.

For Danto, the non-art material counterparts serve as a kind of control group: by bringing into higher relief the differences between them and those things identical to them in every way except in being artworks, we home in on the essence of art itself. It is an unusually persuasive approach precisely because it describes so well the reality of the art world. A suitemate of mine here at school, a visual artist, showed a work earlier this year that was painted with mixture of paint and his own blood, but this was not transparent in the work; rather, blood was the final entry on the materials list, which in my lack of art world acculturation I merely skimmed without interpreting. I found the work aesthetically pleasing anyway and offered the compliment, but he was none too happy and an animated discussion ensued later that night with roommates and guests alike polarized into what in the language of Danto you might call the Philistines and the Interpreters. It is thus more clear to me that Danto has identified an important feature of the art world he inherited than that he has located the essence of art. I get the sense from this book as well as his "After The End of Art" that much as music theorists analyze the music which their theoretical tools enable them to analyze, Danto seeks to explain the things that philosophy can explain, and aestheticism is not one of them. (Fine with me, by the way, that we not try too hard to explain it, but I often wonder if simply ignoring it is the best course of action.)

And so to return just briefly to Plato and his insistence on being over imitating, I would say that for me the most powerful thing about abstract art is the fact that it is the real version of itself. I would call this quality "immediacy" if that word had not already been claimed for the opposite usage by those who would insist that every work of art is representational of something or other, and that the higher the degree of abstraction, the less "immediate" the impact (Danto might say the more interpretation is necessary). I think there is similarly something to be said for such abstract works which cannot in any sense be called commonplace, or in other words, whose hypothetical material counterparts do not yet exist. Call my theory "The Fetishization of the Anomalous." The best part about being a philistine, I guess, is that you get to be a hedonist as well.

[sc]airquotes (i)

"One important aspect of Afrological improvisation is the notion of the importance of personal narrative, of 'telling your own story'...

...An Afrological notion of an improviser's 'sound' may be seen as analogous to the Eurological concept of compositional 'style,' especially in a musically semiotic sense. Moreover, for an improviser working in Afrological forms, 'sound,' sensibility, personality, and intelligence cannot be separated from an improviser's phenomenal (as distinct from formal) definition of music. Notions of personhood are transmitted via sounds, and sounds become signs for deeper levels of meaning beyond pitches and intervals. The saxophonist Yusef Lateef (1985-88, 44) makes it plain: "The sound of the improvisation seems to tell us what kind of person is improvising. We feel that we can hear character or personality in the way the musician improvises...

...Interestingly, Cage's critique of jazz also likens it to personal storytelling. Cage's description of jazz seems to liken the music to a ring shout: 'The form of jazz suggests too frequently that people are talking-that is, in succession-like in a panel discussion .... If I am going to listen to a speech then I would like to hear some words' (quoted in Zwerin 1991, 162). This perceptive comment from a composer who could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be portrayed as possessing any affinity with Afrological musical forms, provides some intersubjective justification for the notion that one of the central aesthetic demands made on Afrological improvisers is that the improviser 'tell a story.'

In any event, Eurological improvisers have tended to look askance on the admission of personal narrative into improvisative activity. I believe that, for postwar Eurological improvisers, the ideas of Cage have, again, had the greatest impact in this regard: 'What I would like to find is an improvisation that is not descriptive of the performer, but is descriptive of what happens, and which is characterized by an absence of intention'(quoted in Kostelanetz 1987, 222).

George E. Lewis
Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives
Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 22, Supplement: Best of BMRJ (2002), pp. 241-242



Professor Lewis is more or less beyond reproach, and nothing he says here is debatable in the sense that it is inaccurate. I for one am struck, rather, by what is not said. The validity/usefulness/expressive power of personal narrative would seem to my Eurologically-inclined sensibilities to be almost completely dependent on the nature and content of the narrative in question, and not simply projectable a priori across an entire culture (less yet to others) without case-by-case evaluation of this content. In other words, apples-and-oranges characterizations fail when one prefers Granny Smiths to Clementines and Navels to Red Delicious. Mustn't we be allowed our own value judgments as to who's story matters to us? And if we simply don our dreadlocks and patchouli oil and decide that everyone's story matters, does anyone's story really matter?

Lewis makes no explicit endorsement of such expansive relativism, but nor does he avail himself of a readymade opportunity submit it to the same kind of fruitful interrogation the Eurological view receives in ensuing paragraphs. It's plain enough even to someone like me that, "The sound of the improvisation seems to tell us what kind of person is improvising," so plain, actually, that I'm not sure what we've really established by stopping there. The deeper questions, I think, are about the nature and importance of this knowledge to the listener and the citizen.

In any case, I continue to maintain that I'm not nearly interesting enough to be the focal point of my own music, or alternatively, that if the most interesting thing about my music is that I made it, I've probably not achieved much. The question of individuality, highly valued in Afrological thought according to Lewis et al, is thus related, but nor is uniqueness broadly construed any more sufficient, in my opinion, than narrativity broadly construed to confer value on any given work without considering what is unique and how the story actually goes.