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RE: [microsound] compassion for hard work

From: "Gunnar Garness" <ggarness@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 

That's funny, I understood her point perfectly.  Sounds to me like she's
SIMPLY stating (which seems refreshingly rare on this list with all the
obtuse academic theory du jour being tossed around) that your work can be
appreciated on many levels outside of the rarefied theoretical frameworks
that you seem to worry about so much.

Theory is not something to be afraid of. We needn't tremble when confronted with yet another mode of communication that attempts to get at the conditions of our modernity. Artists have been reading theory for quite some time to good affect (Rauschenberg and Johns in the sixties and seventies, Kathy Acker and Barbara Krueger in the eighties and nineties, etc.). And of course, theorists engage artistic works of various kinds. Theory is just another kind of music, if one bothers to listen closely enough. It's just a poem of a different kind of meter. And since we live in a time in which so little theory is being done and receiving any kind of attention at all (whereas artists keep pumping out obscene quantities of work all the time and in the most conceptually predictable ways in terms of "aesthetic value"), I'd say that theory is really the only interesting thing going on, and I'd say further that the only really interesting art is that which engages theory to some degree. Now whether one can hear the "theory" in a musical composition or not depends very much on the "training" I'd say. You may not care to listen, which is fine. But I'd say, apropos Nietzsche, that you simply don't have the "ears" to hear "theory." And the solipsism in which one dwells as a result won't look any different to the one that dwells there.


I know it is unfashionable to not use an interdisciplinary approach to all
studies but I've seen enough of that already.

Invoking the rhetoric of "fashion" is always the knee-jerk response one expects from one who fails to "hear," who dwells in his or her "reactive" senses. What's truly fashionable is the notion of a "timeless aesthetic sense," a fashion that lingers like an ugly coat beyond the time of its usefulness.

At some point we have to
realize for the good of our own disciplines that music IS NOT political
theory, visual art IS NOT the same thing as philosophy, and architecture IS
NOT literary theory (on the latter I can speak with some authority).

Please speak with authority, since "authority" is the political issue par excellence. At one moment, academic theory is "obtuse" and presumably indecipherable. Then, one becomes an "authority" on "literary theory" to the point of deciding it's of no use for architecture. Why do we need to be concerned about the "good" of our disciplines? What's bad about our disciplines is their "disciplinariness" (I'm aware it's not a word but I reserve the right to invoke a short term invention--it's ok, I teach writing and I won't let my students do it ever [smiley emoticon here]). When one addresses one's time, everything comes into play when it's necessary. We needn't hang on gloomily to disciplinary boundaries rigidly imposed for a few centuries.

It seems nobody wants to be associated with "aesthetics," nobody wants to
engage in the "star system," and nobody wants to be seen dealing with the
musical "tradition" on this list. That's fine, but I really don't think you
can escape them. Music (physical sound, audio, whatever you want to call
it) is an artifact and it has a life of it's own that will at some point be
out of your control.

It's true that the question of aesthetics is much more complicated one than one gets in such discussions. And you are right in saying that "star systems" are unavoidable. People manufacture them in every area--in "minor" arts and theory as much as in major commodities. God never dies.


Besides, I like Rebecca's attitude and I think it's refreshing.  I think
she'd be far more fun to hang with at a party than some of the humorless
people on this list!

It's OK. Theorists stay home and read books on Saturday night anyway :-)
Yes, it was funny. I laughed. Cute, a tad maternalistic, and just a little uninteresting.

In my honest opinion, naturally,


BA

"...it is easy to find a type of machine to correspond to each society, not because machines are determinant, but because they express social forms capable of engendering and using them."--Gilles Deleuze
"It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is
a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of
pain."--Theodor Adorno


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