organise; educate; activate

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

On the other place I said:
Because books and songs are mostly made from bits of other books and songs

Someone replied:

aren't they, following this, also made up from bits of the world, though, bits of tendentiously constructed social histories?

[I had dissed historicism, basically, which is where the phrase 'tendentiously constructed social histories' comes from]

So I said:

'Yes, bits of the world, but does history give you access to bits of the world? Yes, obviously, and no, possibly equally obviously: the story 'I get angry about life so I invent a new form of rock and roll' misses out so much: like, 'what my new form of rock and roll is made from'. The 'made from' question interests me more than the 'why', but generally people are much happier to think in terms of 'why' stories (they have heroes and villains, for a start). If the 'why' stories interfere with the other stories, it seems fair to rule them out of court for a bit, in order to allow the others to surface.

And because the words / notes are bits of the world, and so are the stories we tell about them, there seems no reason to privilege the 'why' stories as giving us some handle on these particular combinations of words / notes. Especially since the particular bundle we happen to be looking at ALSO brings with it certain kinds of 'why' story. And what NO ONE has adequately done yet is examine how the stories rock / pop surrounds itself with are linked (either in terms of intellectual history OR in terms of affect / desire etc.) to the forms used to understand / interpret rock/pop in the academy. i.e. if modern historicism develops out of the same mutation that gives us modern popular music, how can one have an interpretive authority over the other. It would make us much sense to teach a course on the development of cultural studies in Britain using works by the musicians listed as the secondary reading.'

Which conclusion FEELS right, but might be just naff? Thought I'd post in case anyone wanted to continue (i.e. challenge, as much as anything else) this thought NOT on ILX?

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I feel I've asked you this before, but it may have been in the pub and I forgot the answer:

What's "historicism"?

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Oh um, one of those words that everyone uses slightly differently. When I say 'historicism' I usually mean a way of interpreting artworks which is primarily historical i.e. presumes that the most interesting / useful thing that can be said about a work is the way it reflects (crass version) or interacts with (better version) its 'historical' (i.e. social reality) context; also tends to organise its account of art in terms of successive movements. Now, I don't totally disagree with this, since art is also part of a historical world, this isn't wholly irrelevant. But it tends to a) rely on very short perspectives (i.e. this work of art must be related to these particular events rather than to works of art of 'earlier' periods); b) negates the claim of art to escape determination by its historical context, i.e. it takes sides against art from the beginning (often in the name of ideological demystification); c) relies on rather superficial ideas about what history IS; d) narratives of this sort tend to efface particularity (i.e. can you explain why two works produced in the same historical moment should be (so) different), but that leads to a much bigger problem.

(Classic dumbed down version = 'The Industrial Revolution was a time of great change, and so modernist writers sought to invent new ways of writing'. Which isn't wholly wrong, but implies that previous writers didn't try to improve / change / do something different ever, and switches the focus from formal to representative aspects of the art (i.e. the work becomes ABOUT the time in which it was produced, when the connection is much more subtle)).

Usual alternative to 'historicism' = formalism i.e. focus on the work in isolation from its context. Neither is satisfactory (and this argument is sort of all over Adorno) because the formal elements of a work are obviously already social / historical, but the logic by which they are arranged is very often art-related, rather than history-related.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

surely this should be in SUKRAT!?

(who wz the someone?) (kogan is tryin to coax me back onto ilx but the above combined w.my six-month audit of how behind i am (http://dubdobdee.livejournal.com/28760.html) = why i dursn't)

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

OK, yes, prob. should be sukrat :-(

someone = NRQ.

And yes, I should be writing something about Derrida :-(

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

> does history give you access to bits of the world?

There is a difference between listening to someone else's song (or story) and writing your own song, and experiencing the world first hand and then writing a song about it. As a songwriter I find it incredibly difficult to write a good tune unless I've recently heard a lot of music in the same vein, but sometimes I get a hit of inspiration that seems to have cropped up by itself with no discernable link to anything I've been listening to. And it turns out to be great. I would dearly love to invent my own genre and have people be influenced by *my* music.

Wildly veering away from the topic there but never mind...

chuck eddy's position

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i. "does this history rock?" (cf eg tom's review of the persian book in ft)
ii. there is no HIGHER BOARD of JUDGMENT for the question "does it rock?"
iii. but it is not purely (atomistically) subjective either, since "this rocks" includes the judgment "and we all had a blast" (ie *WE* not *I*: "rocking" = partly judged by does it allow us/cause us to create a rocking "we"?)
iv: history -- like rock -- has plenty of rival WES snarlin at one another (the annales school vs the belle lettrists vs -- i don't know who actually)
v: OMIGOD i think i am in the process to dreamin up a "chuck eddy is the althusser it's ok to say yay to" theory
vi. (alex what yr callin "historicism:" here is not what eg popper hates is it?)

Re: chuck eddy's position

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

No: Popper is the odd one out, though, since no-one quite understands why he used that term (actually mine is closer to what British translation at that time called 'Historism', and which he was using 'historicism' to differentiate from; subsequent usage ate him up though). He means: social science which uses evidence from past events to predict future events.

Re: chuck eddy's position

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Historicism in some form is the nu-orthodoxy in Eng Lit.

Re: chuck eddy's position

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

stephen greenblatt?

Re: chuck eddy's position

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

yup. But endemic in theory-lite.

[(Anonymous)]

Have a more positive attitude towards "historicism" probably owing to my not running into the term very often; took it to mean not that the work (or whatever) "reflects" or "interacts with" its environment but that it's part of particular social practices of its time and needs to be understood as such. E.g., Rorty pointing out that certain "basic" or "perennial" issues in philosophy actually only come into existence in the 17th century and others only in the 18th century, and so if you see the ancient Greeks as addressing these problems you're misreading them, since they were using their philosophical terms differently from how we do. "One way to see how analytic philosophy fits within the traditional Cartesian-Kantian pattern is to see traditional philosophy as an attempt to escape from history - an attempt to find nonhistorical conditions of any possible historical development. From this perspective, the common message of Wittgenstein, Dewey, and Heidegger is a historicist one. Each of the three reminds us that investigations of the foundations of knowledge or morality or language or society may be simply apologetics, attempts to eternalize a certain contemporary language-game, social practice, or self-image."

So the point isn't to say that someone's philosophical ideas "reflect their times" or "interact with their environment" in some vague way, but rather to point out that Greek philosophers were playing a somewhat different game from the one that we're playing, and you need to understand their specific game to make sense of what they're doing. (This doesn't mean that your descriptions of what they're doing can't be better than theirs, if your game happens to be history.)

I'm not grasping how a "why" story is more historicist than a "made from" story. Whether you're looking for the "what" or the "why" of Elvis Presley's early innovations, you're still looking at the 1950s.

Historicist Spice