Re: [microsound] adorno essays

[dbuchwald <dagmar.buchwald@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Aaron,

I have read your mail several times, also the one you wrote to Bill.  I have
problems understanding your writing, partly because of having to read in a foreign
language, I guess, partly (and that is where you got me, I am notoriously bad at
irony; I have problems getting it, especially if I can't see the expression on the
other person's face, but even then ...)
Anyway, if I really understood you this time, it seems to boil down to that we are
all a little over-sensitive at the moment and for very similar reasons.  I
understand your wariness of totalization -- and my sentence "why are Americans..."
is also a totalization, a very sweeping comment which can't be excused with anger
at American politics.  That the reception of critical theory in the U.S. used to be
rather biased and that 'Europeans' tend (or used to tend) to conceive the world
more in terms of sociological differences than 'Americans' do, all agreed.  But
then again 'Americans' and 'Europeans' is also a construction ... stereotyping.
Sometimes it works.  Sometimes it doesn't.

What I really hate at the moment is that again we are all in that old situation:
either you are for us or you are against us.  Old manichaen world views raise their
ugly heads, it's again good against evil, enduring freedom against barbarism, that
old crap again.  Your are right, no space for nuances left; to be in the middle is
one of the hottest spots at the moment: to crititize Israelian plitics without
being an antisemite, to criticize American politics without being anti-American, to
criticize Saddam without waving a flag against Islam.

And while we all try to be as unbiased as possible, to consider all possible
perspectives, to listen to nuances -- the machinery blindly walks on.

Turn music into fighting?  Into a political weapon?  That was the discussion in
Europe in the twentieth/thirtieth (during high modernism) and while the artists
still debated, and while some surrealists joined the communist party (a short-lived
romance, btw) the war-machinery simply changed into a faster gear.  Here I become
or am very European (actually at times I feel almost like an Austrian -- sad,
tired, defeatist) and think: the whole thing is so framed, was so framed from the
very beginning, there is absolutely nothing you or me or whoever could do about
it.  Protest, yes, organize, yes, overtly political microsound music .. I don't
know.

Dagmar

Aaron Ximm wrote:

> > 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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