RE: [microsound] compassion for hard work

[Gunnar Garness <ggarness@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bill Ashline [mailto:bashline@xxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Sunday, September 10, 2000 1:23 AM
> To: microsound@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: [microsound] compassion for hard work

  But let's not forget that the
> demand for
> plain English has also always been an imperial gesture as well.
> The demand
> registered by A.J. Ayer against Martin Heidegger, a philosopher he had no
> interest in trying to understand.  "Plain English" indeed
> sometimes works as
> a demand, but the writer also has an equally important demand:  "take the
> time to read closely."  In a time where the political right and
> conservative
> academics get their kicks in calling relatively new ideas obtuse,
> obscure,
> incapable of plain English prose, and moribund, without usually
> bothering to
> read much more than a page or two at most, when one aligns one's own
> rhetoric in the same way, one comes dangerously close to
> anti-intellectual
> stupidity.

Are you attempting to aligning me with with the political right or
conservative academics?  Anti-intellectual stupidity?  Give me a break!
Whatever particular problems you have with academia should be taken up with
the offending parties.  Why don't you figure out who your real enemies are
and please just leave me out of it.  My request (not a DEMAND, mind you
unless you just really have to play the drama queen) was simply that if we
want to discuss these issues, let's discuss them in an intelligible way.
Dropping highly specialized theoretical terms into run on sentences or ones
that are strangely missing verbs, subjects, punctuation, etc does not help
anyone's argument (or credibility) in the least.  No matter how often I
"take the time to read more closely," the statement will still be a
collection of words that sound impressive yet fail to mean anything.
"Communication" it is not...pretension perhaps.


 This is a pretty limited reading of deconstruction.  The fact
> that Derrida's writings had to do with "writing" as such does not
> limit the
> application.  To demand such a limit is to commit the
> "intentional fallacy,"
> the mistake that the field of purview of any discourse is always
> limited to
> the intentions that the author had in writing.  Viewing architecture as a
> matter of "building" buildings is also a very limited view of
> architecture.
> Architecture is a concept as well as a practice.  It was the concept that
> got picked up by the architectural theorists which had an influence
> practices of design.


You obviously have not heard that the there are multitudes of theories about
the "craft" of architecture and what it means to "build."  I am not speaking
of the term in merely the pragmatic sense.  When these detail oriented
concerns align themselves with larger concerns about human perception and
experience you have a truly spiritual architecture that does not ignore the
"basics" while it aspires to higher concerns as well. (You seem to see the
"basics" as some sort of regressive political term associated with Harold
Bloom types).


> This has to do with the pedagogy of your program and the purposes for
> undertaking the subject more than the relevance of Derrida to
> architecture.
> As far as the "craft" of architecture and buildings falling down,
> I could be
> snide at this point and say that given the state modern design in many
> quarters, it's just as well.


Touché.  But it may also have to do with the fact that about 90% of the
world's building (and by that I do mean "building" in the practical sense)
is not required to involve an architect.


> See?  The best thing that we can do for most disciplines in
> universities is
> change the "basics" by doing away with the current structure
> which stodgily
> maintains turf boundaries and refuses novel and creative syntheses.  The
> current structure was imposed in the 17th century, and in the
> humanities it
> forces specializations in century packages and the like.
> Shakespeare read
> Menander but Menander isn't included in the English curriculum
> because it's
> Italian, you know.  This is just one example of "disciplinary"
> stupidity and
> I could certainly spend the rest of this beautiful afternoon regaling you
> with more.  In the field of philosophy, disciplinary practices
> have almost
> completely wiped out opportunities for work in continental
> European thought
> in Anglo-American universities all in the name of "plain English
> prose" and
> "common sense."  Only literary studies and certain of the social sciences
> seem to have a moderately more open mind.  Psychology meanwhile is still
> goose stepping behind behaviorism to a large extent, and so I
> would stay the
> state of our disciplines and their "good" is a very sorry one
> indeed, which
> makes me worry even more about their "basics."


I would state that there is a significant difference between the disciplines
of architecture, music, visual art, etc.  and those of the humanities of
which you are speaking.  Architecture, for example, has never quite fit
comfortably in the academic world.  The institutionalization of architecture
is a relatively recent phenomenon.  Our education has become extremely
fragmented and certainly doesn't stop with a Bachelor or even a Masters of
Architecture.  One of the problems with this institutionalization is that
many professors are not really architects.  They have never left the academy
to learn from the other 75% of our education and subsequently encourage
student projects as physical manifestations of Literary Theory (or political
concerns, etc...) at the expense of the nuts and bolts (which they often
don't understand anyway).  This does not always happen and I feel I was
fortunate enough to have some great professors who were just as well versed
in architecture as they were in woodworking, Ovid or Lacan.


> As for architecture, I assume you've read Mark Wigley and
> Hollier's book on
> Bataille called "Against Architecture"?


Yes, I have it.  While it is interesting it's not a huge inspiration for me.
And now I think if we are going to further this discussion I think we ought
to bring it around to the topic at hand...music.  We are probably
aggravating a lot of the members of this list.


Gunnar