Modernism/postmodernism

[nnudl]

Just wondered if there were any thoughts regarding the position of the variety of improvised music usually discussed here (EAI, post-AMM work, mixing with sonic art ....ish) relative to the categories modern/postmodern. Is such a distinction appropriate, relevant or useful?

I find the question quite interesting, particularly since EAI sounds to me to be the closest music to minimal visual art (usually modernist), unlike musical Minimalism (usually deemed postmodern).

[Dan Warburton]

Hasn't there been a thread about this before, somewhere? Not an area I feel like being drawn into, I'm afraid, not because I'm not interested in it (I am), but because it'd take too much time to discuss. For a start, I find your "musical Minimalism" very vague - you'd better give us a good definition of the M word (and there's a world of difference for me between, say, Niblock and Riley) before we even get near Mo or PoMo.

[Charon]

MoPoMoSo

[schiksalgemeinschaft]

funny, I just used this in an email conversation a couple of days ago. I wouldn't have copy/pasted it otherwise...

"Heidegger and Derrida are often referred to as "postmodern" philosophers. I have sometimes used "postmodern" myself, in the rather narrow sense defined by Lyotard as "distrust of metanarratives". But I now wish I had not. The term has been so over-used that it is causing more trouble than it is worth. I have given up on the attempt to find something common to Michael Graves's buildings, Pynchon's and Rushdie's novels, Ashbery's poems, various sorts of popular music, and the writings of Heidegger and Derrida. I have become more hesitant about attempts to periodize culture - to describe every part of a culture as suddenly swerving off in the same new direction at approximately the same time. Dramatic narratives may well be, as MacIntyre has suggested, essential to the writing of intellectual history. But it seems safer and more useful to periodize and dramatize each discipline or genre separatly, rather than trying to think of them as all swept up together in massive sea changes."


Richard Rorty (who else?), Essays on Hedegger and others. Philosophical Papers volume 2, 1991, page 1.

[William Hutson]

i only ever use the term postmodern with regard to jameson and harvey, and never when describing music.

[negative potential]

But Jameson and Harvey are Marxists who use the term to try to periodize certain trends in the arts and connect them to larger societal shifts. They are not "postmodernists" in the sense the term is usually thrown about, as a lazy synonym for post-structuralist philosophers (leaving aside for now the issue of whether "post-structuralist" itself is a rather lazy catch-all term).

Also, while there is some preciousness in CPM (Rowe's conceiving of the 4g project as a "string quartet", for example), none of it really seems to be motivated by an ironic intent and there doesn't seem to be much tendency toward pastiche, or any of the other stuff that is claimed to characterize "postmodernism" in the arts. If anything, I thought John Zorn was supposed to be the archetype for that sort of thing.

[Robert G]

Oddly enough, I was just thinking about how the latest Organum release Sorow could be postmodern in that you have several elements (in this case, musical instruments from several different cultures and historical periods) being removed from their contexts and cultural baggage, and then included in the piece without them, on David Jackman's own terms. It made me think of how David Shields' book Reality Hunger is made up of nothing but other people's writings, pulled without citations or permission, and used on Shields' own terms (though for better or worse, they were still cited by the publishers so no one would sue them).

I could though be thinking about postmodernism wrong though, as I'm not a philosopher, so this is just a thought of mine.

[schiksalgemeinschaft]

postmodern in that you have several elements (in this case, musical instruments from several different cultures and historical periods) being removed from their contexts and cultural baggage, and then included in the piece without them, on David Jackman's own terms.

the thing is stuff like that happened already (for instance) in medieval literature, as pretty much every 'standard' definition of pomo (including the pastiche and irony NP hinted at). I guess it comes down to sampling bias, more or less.

Moreover I hardly see any difference between postmodernism and modernism. The terms are useful as periodization (but why not use decades or half centuries instead, much easier), but not as descriptive or prescriptive terms.

[negative potential]

Moreover I hardly see any difference between postmodernism and modernism.

I largely agree with this, and I think years from now cultural historians might regard the phrase "postmodernism" as arising from the faulty assumption that the 1945-1973 period of capitalism being some sort of "standard" against which to measure everything else, whereas in reality it was a rather atypical period in the history of capitalist society.

I was more concerned with stating that even by the widely accepted characteristics of what is supposed to constitute "postmodernism", I don't think CPM is very postmodern. In fact, if we accept Keith Rowe's postulate that musical innovation lags behind the visual arts (which I don't like because of the built-in teleological assumptions), then CPM is actually a high-modernist movement of the 1920s!

[RFKorp]

I only listen to neo-anti-post-modernist music.

[jon abbey]

In fact, if we accept Keith Rowe's postulate that musical innovation lags behind the visual arts

FWIW, Rothko believed the opposite, the best quote I can find is "I became a painter because I wanted to raise painting to the level of poignancy of music and poetry".

I think these different perspectives stem from comparing the area one is totally immersed in to other areas that one observes more from the outside (although of course Rowe is also a fantastic painter).

[Robert G]

I guess it comes down to sampling bias, more or less.

What do you mean by this?

Moreover I hardly see any difference between postmodernism and modernism. The terms are useful as periodization (but why not use decades or half centuries instead, much easier), but not as descriptive or prescriptive terms.

Can you explain this?

[schiksalgemeinschaft]

I guess it comes down to sampling bias, more or less.

What do you mean by this?

Moreover I hardly see any difference between postmodernism and modernism. The terms are useful as periodization (but why not use decades or half centuries instead, much easier), but not as descriptive or prescriptive terms.

Can you explain this?

Viz. the first question. We tend to forget the complexities of other time eras, we kinda forget they happened. The sample we base are judgements on is (probably most of the time) not big enough. Did you know the magnetic field of the planet has been directed southwise numerous times in it's history? The field flips relatively often, yet not like clockwork. Still, we, as a species, have never experienced that all our compasses all of a sudden start pointing south.

For instance, the Don Quichote was/is a highly ironic meta-narrative from 1605, already. There are long medieval texts that are entirely sampled, etc. Add to that the thing that much books, roles, tablets, etc. of different cultures in the past haven't even been preserved, and that those that are preserved are not always easy to interpret. Today I read in the paper that a german religious historicist claims, convincingly as far as I can tell, that Jezus wasn't crucified, (not even to a T), but strung to a simple pole. The common belief is a result of a translation mistake.


Viz. second question, and a result of what I just said, if you want to make it into a easy narrative, I think it boils down to this: in the "postmodern" era, people (mostly Western, mostly white, male, and at universities studing Arts) era started to finally see that things were even way more complicated (on all accounts, both physics, sociological, cultural, ethcis, epistomological, psychological, etc.) than people thought 50 or 100 years, or millennia, ago. This partly happened because of stuff and tools like electro microscopes, brain scans, nuclear experiments and continuously larger and larger telescopes.

Most of the people working for and attending the human and art science departments at universities started to see, in one way or another - and much more clearly than that they've had in the West centuries and centuries before -, that it basically boiled down to the fact that one had to agree on the terms first, before one could say anything of value. So language became more of a focus for a while - something that Wittengenstein had already pointed out much earlier. But then again, thoughts about those language issues, and about materialism, about predestination (behaviourism, anybody?), about contingency, are contained in texts from India that are 3000 years old. (So, again, it's simple a matter of how big your timeframe is, and how sharp your view throughout.)

Those people started to look at the Arts with that kind loosely defined, but of course all slightly or even widly different mindsets, and thought they discovered all knew kinds of things like sampling, irony, mise en abimes, playfullness, all kinds of Umwertungs aller Wertes, the free form, permutations, the meta, the mixture of genres, etc, while all those things have been around for ages (again, Don Quichot, the Reynard Cycle, even the Bible, the list is endless, etc.).

So concluding, it probably safe to say that was/is a "difference", or at least has become a much more important factor (most notably and successful in the Western world), has been (and probably still is) the major increase and improvements on information technology that, let's say started with writing and then printing (+ more or less general alphabetization=), electricity, photography, and then, after the war, into the "postmodern" age, radio-signaling, TV, satellites, internet, data-storage and transmission in general. That, plus general people mobility: car, train, plain. Add to that some wars, the atom bomb. And yes, capitalism, etc.

And true enough, since the sixties/eighties some artists have been reading stuff by those so called "postmodern" white male thinkers and have been inspired by them. Some haven't read (or heard about) those books, but were none the less also inspired by all the technical events going on, by the atom bomb, by whatever, and kept on making art, preferably in different (or more perfectioned) ways than artists before them. And yes, Duchamp and Cage (inspired by thought thousands of years old) made some game changing statements too (resulting in an opening up the definition of the word 'Art', and hence opening up much more possibilities). And of course a lot of people, mostly hobbiest (or people working for a non-academic/high art world public), continued making art like a century ago.

So, besides the bigger (and still growing) influences of all those technical/scientific innovations, I don't see any essential difference between modernism and postmodernism, esp. since Duchamp was give or take 1917, and the lightbulb was invented in 1879, and Darwin died in 1882 - why not, let's throw Charles in the mix too!



(In the same line of reasoning, it's probably mostly "19th century industrialization" that formed, or triggered, the dividing/transitional lines between romanticism and modernism.)

[schiksalgemeinschaft]

But than again, maybe we should meditate a week about the fact that the concept of Pangaea, Gondwana and continental drift, first written about in 1915, hadn't been accepted in 1950 at all and that it was only accepted in the 60ies, because we accidentally found about about those north-south flips by meticulously scanning the oceanfloor with very senstive magnetoscopes and using digital computers to analyze their data, and that, moreover, that discovery eventually led to the discovery of black smokers on the ocean floor and the insight in 1992 that the oldest life on earth probably stems from places in total darkness, on the deep ocean floor, due to minerals, water and geothermal heat, and not because of water, minerals and ...sunlight.

That, and all those facts' relations to all kinds of different tribal Animism. And that you don't need eyes to enjoy music.

Not?

[jkudler]

i tend to agree with you that modernism and post-modernism are somewhat confused, particularly in music (i wouldn't be as confident speaking about literature or philosophy/theory), though i want to point out that citing this or that historical precedent doesn't necessarily undermine the notion of epochs or eras - if anything, you are kind of engaging in a form of teleology yourself when you talk about don quixote engaging notions that have become more commonplace (or simply identified and named) subsequently; you are just backwards-casting from a contemporary set of tools.

-jesse

[schiksalgemeinschaft]

i tend to agree with you that modernism and post-modernism are somewhat confused, particularly in music (i wouldn't be as confident speaking about literature or philosophy/theory), though i want to point out that citing this or that historical precedent doesn't necessarily undermine the notion of epochs or eras - if anything, you are kind of engaging in a form of teleology yourself when you talk about don quixote engaging notions that have become more commonplace (or simply identified and named) subsequently; you are just backwards-casting from a contemporary set of tools.

-jesse

Yes. I guess I'm saying our set of tools has become better and larger, both hardware (telescopes, computers) as software (language, discourse, theory). And generally, because our sets of tools change throughout time, and those tools change the world we live in, we can roughly divide our civilization into the epochs/eras.

In that respect, I think the invention of the electric guitar, recording technology, computers, etc. are much more important for the history of music than John Cage and the likes - although one could argue Cage & Co opened up the language tool, enhancing possibilities in descriptive & prescriptive talks about music.

The teleology is not implied though, but an unavoidable side effect (a kind of trompe l'oeil, ha, probably the result of our pattern recognition urges) when you describe a succession in time. It's the same reason that make creationists see the work of god when they hear people talk about evolution with Darwins toolset.

[washline]

There are once again parallels in all of the arts regarding postmodernism and modernism. In literature, the age of postmodernism is said to have started with two groundbreaking essays by John Barth in 1969, "The Literature of Exhaustion" and "The Literature of Replenishment." In the first case, the impetus was the sense that the possibilities of creating something new, the modernist or avantgardist motive, had been "exhausted" and that all that was left was pastiche or parody of other forms or the creation of what some might call "impossible" fictions. In one type of postmodern fiction, writers returned to the past in order to find inspiration, as in Nabokov's Pale Fire, a return to 18th century narrative style. With regard to impossible fictions, there were several taxonomies: One form explicitly violates the logical law of noncontradiction and might also be described as a sous-rature world, a world under "erasure." Another type is the so-called "forking-path" fiction, where more than one narrative path or possible world becomes actual at the same time. A third example is the "squaring-the-circle" fiction, where otherwise logically consistent fictions have a capacity to lead to logical paradoxes. A fourth division is the mixing or traversing of ontological levels in a fictional work, what might be called "diegetic violations." The final type of impossible fictions is that of characters inhabiting more than one fictional world: in other words, the problem of the compossibility of characters. Some people say that Joyce's Ulysses marks the beginning of postmodernism, whereas Proust epitomizes modernism. I don't find much compelling evidence for this. Finnegans Wake is the paradigm of high modernism in literature and it came significantly after Ulysses.

In the visual arts, the movement toward the postmodern started already with Duchamp and his anarchic rejection of the artworld via the readymade, the appropriation of real manufactured objects renominated as artworks. This is continued in the fifties with Richard Hamilton's collage work of advertisements from popular magazines, for example, and in the sixties with Lichtenstein's tongue-in-cheek monochromatic animations, and Warhol's appropriated pop images in simulated forms of mass production.

In experimental music, Zorn's pastiches are an obvious reference and so are Oswald's parodies on Plunderphonics. The entire techno/hip hop impetus is postmodern also due to the use of records as source material and the use and manipulation of samples, which undermines the modernist, romantic notion of origins and originality. EAI marks a return to high modernism, in my opinion, but this impulse comes out of another kind of exhaustion, an exhaustion with the notion of being exhausted, the notion that pastiche and parody are the only way to go in a field that has already covered the territory in terms of originality. It does this though through combining techniques that first began in electroacoustic music and musique concrete, albeit with different tools, with techniques that developed from free improvisation. Some people might see such a combination of strategies as postmodern as well, but the music produced in EAI defies easy consumption and accessibility and so it lies more on the side of high modernism.