Poptimism THORT for the day

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

"pop is a map of the world at large (everything else is a map of 1xcommunity at small)"

That one submitted by dubdobdee.

Comments

oops again

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

hence the counter-argument is NOT more [xx]-ish type stuff, but a completely different mode of response

cosmology

doesn't the art model for epistemic shifts, or whatever they're called, often features artists doing something they don't entirely themselves understand at the time, which other people explain back at them afterwards?

Re: oops again

[koganbot]

Most certainly the shifts in art and science are somewhat different given that arts never have periods of totally dominant paradigms in the way that a science can ("totally dominant" meaning that if you're not working within the paradigm you're not a part of that science). (Not sure what you mean or gain by the adjective "estemic.") But one point that Kuhn made about the history of scientific paradigm shifts might also apply to art shifts, and that point may be something of the opposite of what you're saying. That is, Kuhn thinks the "explaining back at them afterwards" results in bad history that doesn't help us to understand what the innovator was actually doing but rather tries to fit the innovator into the patterns that his innovations led to, which are somewhat different from the innovations themselves. Which is to say that you can't understand Kepler if you're placing him into the Newtonian cosmology that he led to, and this is because the three laws of his that made it into Newtonian cosmology had meant something different within the systems that he himself was trying to create. They seemed to him to cohere with ideas that other people subsequently tossed aside.

"Art" examples might be the generally lunkheaded way feminists c. 1971 tried to read mid '60s Stones stuff like "Under My Thumb," and also my own misreading to counter the feminists' stupid readings. E.g., the feminist ex post facto reading would be that Jagger had been celebrating the double standard, where woman is responsible and subservient to the man but the man is neither responsible to or subservient to the woman - whereas if you listen to the "Under My Thumb" in the context of their other songs and in contrast to the other music of the time dealt with the romance cycle, you see something very different (i.e., Jagger continually playing untrustworthy narrators who are unable to admit their connection to the people they're pretending to dominate or be indifferent to, but Jagger not necessarily dissociating himself from the urge to be dominant or indifferent). But then you get me c. 1971 saying that Jagger puts switches and shock effects into his lyrics to make you uncomfortable with the male-female patterns he's describing, hence "Heart Of Stone," "Under My Thumb," "Back Street Girl," "Lady Jane," "High And Dry," "My Obsession" are attempts at changing those relations. This reading may not be altogether wrong, but it's certainly projecting the needs of me in 1971 onto Jagger in 1966. (Another reading would be that Jagger in 1966 was ambivalent about how much interconnection and how much independence he wanted - he wanted both! - and that this ambivalence enriched his songs and enriched his life. And that he had - and liked - a certain amount of restlessness in regards to the way things were, without necessarily wanting to tranform anything but without necessarily not wanting to transform anything. That seems true to 1996.)

So "explaining back to you" means telling you you were doing something different from what you did. And people can do this to themselves in writing their own history, writing about their transitional work not as if it were transitional but as if it had fully arrived at the outcome.

Re: oops again

[koganbot]

"The Last Time" (which Tom should have given a 10) has the greatest - and one of the longest - fadeouts in music, and Jagger's repeating over and over "I don't know" because the narrator really doesn't know whether the relationship should be over or not, and it also contains a threat similar to the one in the song's gospel source ("this could be the last time" means you might not know when you might die, you might not know when your friend might die and you won't see him again, you could meet your maker at any moment): this affair could end any second. This could be the last time. May be the last time. I don't know.

Re: oops again

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

epistemic = i was thinking of paradigms and meant "paradigmatic"!

(epistemes is what foucault calls paradigms, i think) (except theyre probably importantly different -- however since the only reason i used the word was by mistake i'm not going to bother to find out, at least not right now)

i guess i'm wondering if "bad history" is a problem in art the way it may be in science? (i actually think it probably is, having just created a counter-example about how romero didn't know "night of the living dead" was "about vietnam" till people told him afterwards, and how if he'd know this he wouldn't have been able to make it particularly well -- propblem w.counter-example being a. it's totally made-up (romero was pretty clear about what he was doing and why), and b. the reason this kind of reductive after-the-fact "well actually it's all about [x]" stops people doing good work from the off is because it's very rarely true)

"in the end... it's about loneliness"

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i ended the "if..." book by saying this: which was a rhetorical device obviously (it's about lots of things), but is a way of saying that anderson's own experience of loneliness -- his commitment to it, in fact -- had a shaping effect on his sense of form; in particular his sense of how to end his film (and of course i was very consciously thinking about how to end my book)

i don't in fact believe this was front-and-centre conscious on anderson's part, at least in the sense that he had decided to "make a film about loneliness" (if he had decided to do that, it would have been quite another film, and maybe not about schools at all): he tended to be fairly (too?) open about what he considered his aims and intentions in any given film

but i think once you start to think about this element in his personality, you see very clearly the impasse his politics and film-making had run into -- why he never again made as strong a film, for example

i think with aspects like form,by which i mean the feeling about when something is well-made, or the "right shape", or completed, or "what you meant", the impulse(s) can sometimes be operating at a very deep, unconscious or intuitive level, which you are resisting when operating in conscious modes: not least because these decisions are being made towards to end of a project, when your will to engage with the things that took you into it may be exhausted (as indeed may you, functioning on instinct getting something done)