Re: [microsound] miles of styles of philosophes

[Stephen Hastings-King <roachboy@xxxxxxxxx>]

afternoon better mood let's see.
which buildings?
why any number of those official respositories for the material you can
collage together to form the "Great Conversation" within a particular
genre--museyrooms galleries--clubs concert halls--all the spaces about which
i cant help but be ambivalent--on the one hand, it's good to be able to see
and listen to stuff--on the other, the sense of quarantine, of separation:
from the processes that go into making things, from the aspects of social
life from which they come, about which they speak (one way or another)
toward which they are addressed.  the Reification Biz.

who authorizes?
well at one level anyone who makes stuff authorizes themselves to engage a
medium, the genres that operate, the traditions that structure each genre.
but anyone who makes stuff also knows that this self-authorization, while
necessary, only goes so far if you want to make your work public.  to what
end make your work public?  any number of reasons.  but if you do want to
make your work public, it becomes quickly obvious that there are any number
of intermediaries who occupy positions of cultural power by generating
classifications, who construct producers by situating them through
classification, who stream outputs toward or away from their audience.
record labels, critics, radio folk, academics...and on the other side, those
who control access to the special buildings within which the Authorized
Objects of the moment are displayed/encountered.
within aesthetic theory, in the end, it is the theorist who authorizes.
this authorization is not neutral: it generally relies one way or another on
the accepted canon of Legitimate Producers which happens to be in force at a
given period.
this seems to me neither good nor bad in itself: just the way of things.
if you want your work to become public that is.
if you dont, for whatever reason, then none of this applies directly.
but if your work is not public, then what is it?
i dont know the answer to that.  i suspect there are many.

answer questions?
sure.  if i can.

you dont need to be a marxist to use marxian styles of analysis:
agreed.  i dont really know what being a marxist means at this point.  but i
do find alot about the modes of analysis within the marxist tradition to be
useful, powerful even.  but you have to be critical about them too.  it is
not, and never was, a space outside the capitalist order that it opposed.

variation:
emotional responses to cultural objects is not unstructured.  you dont get
around political questions by referring to immediacy.  immediacy is a kind
of forgetting of these problems.  that is why i said what i did about
relativizing your responses.  there are always rules that shape your
reactions to what you encounter: there is no space outside.  so the
important issue, it seems to me anyway, is your relation to them.

stephen