Re: [microsound] adorno essays

[Aaron Ximm <ghede@xxxxxxxx>]

> you).  Bill's use of EVERYTHING was -- in my eyes -- an emphasis, not a
> hyperbole.  Just imagine how that sentence would sound if spoken aloud,

Uncle!

> all: why do Americans immediately think of socialism when it is a question of
> __reducing social extremes___ or considering societal influences in the first
> place?  A sociological view is not a socialist view.  Considering social

Well, there are two easy answers to that one: (a) a culture conditioned by
the cold war, which polarized one's relationship to "socialism" in both
directions ~ witness the perpetual love/hate embrace/renunciation of
Marxism on that dischoate thing, the American left; and (b) one of its
side effects, the selective reworking of "continental philosophy" in many
American academic institutions that (at least in my day) presented
contemporary hermeneutics as having two blood types:  the marxist, and the
psychological (Freud-Jung-Lacan).

You're right that I chose (rhetorically) a few examples from the
totalitarian left, when I might as well have chosen a few from the
totalitarian right.  And I think you nail me precisely when attributing
that (subconcious) knee-jerk to being American.

> on their view of 'pure art' seems to smell of soviet gulags.

Well... as I write elsewhere, I'm not a purist in that sense either:
I would paint it, too, as extremism.  The middle path, that's me!

> pissed by American politics at the moment that I might lose my balance.  (Now
> this is really off topic).

Well, it is and it isn't ... my personal over-sensitivity to totalization
is (I introspect for the first time) contextualized by the deeply
disturbing direction and momentum of American politics, specifically, the
erosion of nuance (to brandish my favorite word) and dialogism (polyphony
of meaning?) in public discourse.

More on-topic, I find my own thinking about my (sound) work increasingly
explicitly colored by current events.

I have always approached my work with surface concerns that are (to judge
from a lot of the topics on this list) reactionary: execution of rigorous
process, for example, in my current project; or fairly conventional
notions of composition.  If I have always considered the less obvious
political ramifications, I have never before been preoccupied them.

I feel myself compelled to do so ~ it seems the times demand it. I'm not
sure what that will mean.  In the crudist terms I find myself full of
ideas for work that is more provocational, very goal-oriented and
self-conciously intended to be (to use an old old idiom)
conciousness-raising.

My brother is a very committed Zen Buddhist. He told me he takes it as a
moral imperative that all of his energy should be bent on political action
in these times. His clear implication (delivered without judgement) is
that this imperative falls on all of us with the sense to be alarmed.

I know that he is right, yet... I find myself unable to stop "making art"
in order to, say, organize and mobilize.  Is this a problem?  I'm still
deciding.

Here in San Francisco there is the easy excuse that the city is full of
people willing to do that footwork for me.  I console myself with the
thought that doing "good work" makes a contribution of its own.

But what about you folks?  Is anyone finding themselves changing their
work in response to their current political situation?

I have inferred that many of you consider your work *always* to have been
grounded in or motivated by or speaking to these concerns: in which case,
I'm curious ~ are you finding a more receptive audience?  Are you
considering working with a cruder but perhaps more transparent rhetoric?

If Rome is burning, what is fiddling, and what is fighting?

In a world I have been repeatedly told has been revealed to be structured
around the flow of (dis)information, paradigm, meme, can fiddling be
fighting?

 aaron

  ghede@xxxxxxxx
  http://www.quietamerican.org

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