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

[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.