poptimists | (no subject)

steviespitfire.livejournal.com posting in

Apologies if this is incoherent or obvious. I've been toying with it since an attack of insomnia last night. It is a bit muddled. And long.

freakytigger's recent posts have been pretty much OTM for me in that they seem to be building up a list of first principles of "taste". You know, that people have good reasons for listening to the music they do; that listening is made up of a series of moments. The fact of their self-evidency doesn't seem to make a difference in the long debates on the ILM thread(s), where participants seem intent on scrabbling around for facts (like sales, image, aesthetics or whatever) in attempt to give coherence to their -ism over the other. Perhaps, this can work but...

I'm not convinced by either -ism. If we want a task, I'd say continue along freakytigger's lines, and pare it back to the listener! Give the listener more credit! The one thing I get from the the attacks on either side of the -ism debate is a lack of respect for the other. One camp thinks that the other is just wrong and vice versa: ignoring that both, no doubt, have their good reasons for liking what they do, when they do, how they do, etc etc. And I'm not just talking about us internet mentalists--I'm talking about your average Sugababes/Keane fan--they will have their "good reasons" too! It's something to do with a rapport that I build up with the music I listen to: when I listen(ed) to it, how it makes me feel in particular...the longer and stronger this rapport breeds the rockist/rockist-about-pop. It's what makes talking about the music we like so difficult.

I don't know. This seems obvious.

I guess I'm saying we should try and be clear-headed about these things. Why does there have to be a popist/rockist "backlash"? This seems to imply something petty, spiteful, pointless, to me. Is it a pipe-dream to hope for measured responses!!

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From:

byebyepride.livejournal.com

I don't think poptimism needs a particular response to rockism -- it IS a response, as in an attempt at a different way of living (I like Tom's idea of hacking your music taste very much) i.e. it is a moral activity (but in post-C18th discourse, morals and criticism are directly hardwired together, which is why rockism is so affective, and arguing about music really is arguing about (the good) life. Accepting you may never escape 'rockism' would be a guardrail against thinking you can (the path which leads to the 'radical' and 'subversive' fallacies, or the 'innocent', 'neutral' and 'natural' fallacies (which all return the operator directly to rockist jail [do not pass go, do not collect 200 credits].) It wouldn't mean not trying.

And yes, the other half of my argument would indeed be that rockism might not be as rockist as all that: canons and things which present themselves as 'objective' are both active and evolving i.e. the fact that the canon is secretly very flexible is the best thing about it. The listmaking on ILM isn't really about canons, so much as a long bout of mutual masturbation (in the bad sense) aka community building, circling the wagons.

I don't think we need some kind of return to objectivity in the sense of something which lasts 'for all time', just the recognition that judgements of taste need to be linked to history / truth rather than simply a question of 'this is what I like, and this is how / why it moves me in the way it does'. Of course those questions aren't a waste of time, they just don't go far enough. Also I suspect most rock talk has space for them anyway (guilty pleasures?): they don't undo the 'some music good, some music bad' front directly.

And no, poptimism is either a) a name for 1 line of flight (but is probably itself already multiple, since it is only a name, and you can see we all think it means something different already) or b) a name for all those lines of flight (but I think that would be misleading, because by definition what we are trying to escape is the authority of the single name, even when that name acknowledges multiplicity: rockism has space for pluralism).

The problem with the categorical imperative as I see it, is that it is an impossible ideal: which doesn't lessen its force. (actually this is a bit more complicated, by I don't have time to explain). Similarly in this particular line of flight, the aspiration to 'pop' would be impossible, but that would not make it any less desirable. The risk is that this line of flight is rather more rockist in some senses, since it implies a continuous self-overcoming which can only be grasped in terms like 'authenticity'... This would be the sadism of the categorical imperative (smells of cruelty -- nietzsche) coming back to haunt us. So another popism would be the negotiation between this moral poptimism, and e.g. pleasure. Also the recognition that rockism is, like dubdobdee's THING, not as monolithic or even as 'rockist' as it might at first seem.

So hacking your music taste would include hacking the imperative to hack, which is both continuing and turning back on 'hacking' / poptimism. (This is my understanding of what happens in my two favourite philosophers, at least).

From:

steviespitfire.livejournal.com

Dude! Please be clear that I'm not baiting or winding you up, btw! :) I've never really thought of judgements of taste as linked to truth...but, actually, linking it to morals in this way, it's starting to become a bit clearer for me...

You are a scholar and a gent. I wish you did have the time! :(

Tom, come back and talk about taste-hacking. I'm not sure I quite understand.

From:

byebyepride.livejournal.com

Oh no I appreciate the questions immensely, I wish I had more time too!! -- hope I didn't sound tetchy! (just too brief!) ha ha some of this stuff is explained in my forthcoming book (wanky wanky) on Adorno. Dubdobdee has proof of its existence.

From:

steviespitfire.livejournal.com

I meant re: truth-linked-to-taste that I'd never thought much that I could properly explain to another person why I liked what I liked. I mean, certainly not the sensation of listening itself, the feeling...and perhaps I thought too that "This is good" didn't have any meaning other than for the person uttering it. i.e. "good" was just something which had a personal resonance?

I can see the flaws in this view along Kantian lines though...

From:

byebyepride.livejournal.com

Well my Kant is a bit hazy, but as i understand it he tries to reconcile the problem of taste as someone like Hume sees it (viz we all have different tastes, is there an objective standard, Hume sort of says No) by accepting that aesthetic judgement is subjective (i.e. everyone's different) but also objective (i.e. we accept the validity of other people's judgements). The importance of an aesthetic judgement (if there is one) is that it proves there is freedom, just as only a moral judgement in accordance with the categorical imperative (i.e. acting according to duty rather than 'because' it's my duty) is a free one. This passes into romantic aesthetics (via e.g. Schiller) as 'freedom only comes through art'. My version is more sceptical: i.e. if there was any art, there would be freedom. Where I go against Kant is in bringing history in: i.e. in certain historical circumstances freedom in his sense may simply be beyond my capabilities; at which point (and in every post-Hegelian theory of art as in some way bound to time and to history (the development of human spirit as freedom-from-necessity)) real criticism i.e. aesthetic judgements would prove that there was such a thing as history in the sense of progress. Lacking that we dwell in some kind of in-between, unredeemed world, and find ways of acting accordingly.

The 'judgements of taste' are only 'judgements of value for me' I find suspicious because it basically denies the existence of freedom in any way more meaningful than 'I think my judgements are freely made'. And while freedom may be an illusion, I can't accept that one should act as if it was an illusion. It's quite typical of a C20th sociological view that it drops the truth claim in aesthetics (tastes are relative to cultures etc.) but this is a cop-out IMHO. There are complex historical-philosophical reasons for the rise of this view, bound in large part to the insufficiency of late C19th value philosophy (on the one hand too idealist, on the other too miserably sociological), which sees a realm of fact and a realm of value as indefinitely kept apart.

That's the short answer!