Re: [microsound] miles of styles of philosophes

[Stephen Hastings-King <roachboy@xxxxxxxxx>]

projections involve responses shaped by (social-historical) rule sets (or
institutions).
these rules range from genre outward to quite broad social matters.
any response to any cultural object involves rules.
questions concerning the origin, nature, institutional enframedness,
legitimacy and binding nature of these rules are all political.
so it follows that the most useful ways to stage these questions may well be
found in political philosophy--or in philosophy more generally---and not in
discussions too narrowly focused on directly musical questions--or on
aesthetic philosophy.  aesthetics is a subset of larger-scale normative
frameworks.  it is not a free-floating area of thought.  aesthetic
philosophy is among the densest type of ideological thinking: existing
social norms are most thoroughly in force around definitions of that which
transcends them.  transcendence needs to be controlled, quarantined, placed
socially and politically in authorized spaces.  the business of
transcendence is one undertaken by authorized specialists in transcendence
production.  there are special buildings around where you can go to look at
or listen to outputs generated by authorized specialists in transcendence
production.  while you are visiting, you can have a Moment during which you
loose yourself.  this sense of loss of oneself is not one of freedom from
instituted social norms: it is a total projection through those norms: you
presuppose them in the act of forgetting about them.

while i think that the only coherent relation to the marxist tradition at
this point has to be predicated on closure (in the decon/heidegger/nietzsche
sense, in the "closure of western metaphysics" sense)--anything that enables
folk to relativize their social position and by extension to relativise
their responses is a good thing.  because it is only in relativizing your
responses that you can start to see the structures that shape those
responses.  these structures are indices of what binds you to what exists,
of the extent to which you reproduce it, the extent to which you are it.
it is good, i think, to be suspicous of immediacy.  it is also good not to
loose the ability to indulge immediacy.  but it is good to be suspicious of
it.

stephen

On 1/30/07, Ian Reddy <dr144@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> >one thing about certain kinds of sound, when they hit
> >you, when you are alone, for example, this perosnal
> >experience, when you hear something cool, that you
> >dont hear any hype about beforehand, and it creates
> >this separation from alienation, this curiously
> >numinous bubble, albeit momentary, until someone else
> >says, oh, you're listening to that, didnt you hear the
> >really great first album, or someone say its crap and
> >you no longer feel intimate with it even if you dont
> >care what someone else thinks. what the blogger guy
> >says makes sense in terms of emotional range only. is
> >all digital music in a sense governed by an irony
> >(related to a high level of self-consciousness) that
> >doesnt allow for the feelings such as joni mitchell
> >might sing about? does the full range of human emotion
> >demand words or demand the discarding of words?
> >anyway, its about your own fantasy formations, your
> >wildest imaginations, isnt it. what you desire.
>
> I think that in art, emotion is something either projected
> onto the work or it is something acted out by the performer.
> No work of art is a raw emotional outburst - that's impossible
> as art and music are obviously mediated through the intellect
> and already existing cultural forms.  I suggest that Joni Mitchel is
> performing her emotions through song.  Also certain sounds are
> culturally constructed as being connected to certain emotions (such as the
> connection of low droning sounds to feelings of gloom) and the artist
> often exploits these connections or we simply project them onto a
> work.  So....in brief I do think that art can provoke an emotional
> response BUT I also think the emotion we experience is drastically
> different from the emotion we speak of as being present in art, and
> probably not the same thing at all.
>
>
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