(no subject)

[steviespitfire.livejournal.com]

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!!

Comments

Re: Out of my Depth/Unsure What I think...

[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!

Re: Out of my Depth/Unsure What I think...

[steviespitfire.livejournal.com]

I am going to think about this.

Also, I will read some more Kant!