Demolish Serious Culture

[Dan Bennett]

So he seems to have taken a quasi-Wittgensteinian line about that "whereof one cannot speak"

There's that fantastic passage in FM which I think supports this. Again, very powerful precisely because of the separation of regimes of thought, and what that separation declines to say.

Everyone has observed the sonic phenomena of a political crowd of dozens or hundreds of thousands of people. The human river shouts a slogan in a uniform rhythm. Then another slogan springs from the head of the demonstration; it spreads towards the tail, replacing the first. A wave of transition thus passes from the head to the tail. The clamor fills the city, and the inhibiting force of voice and rhythm reaches a climax. It is an event of great power and beauty in its ferocity Then the impact between the demonstrators and the enemy occurs. The perfect rhythm of the last slogan breaks up in a huge cluster of chaotic shouts , which also spreads to the tail. Imagine, in addition, the reports of dozens of machine guns and the whistle of bullets adding their punctuations to this total disorder. The crowd is then rapidly dispersed, and after sonic and visual hell follows a detonating calm, full of despair, dust and death. The statistical laws of these events, separated from their political or moral context, are the same as those of cicadas or rain.

I still find the ideas incredibly powerful. Specifically his critique of serialism and the new system of structures (vertical, horizontal, in and out of time) that follow from that critique. If it was a merely technical innovation, or a nitpicking argument with dodecaphony it wouldn't be such a big deal - but you don't need to read much of his writing to realise that it followed directly from a desire to compose music adequate to the task of expressing and considering our relationship to nature. I don't know another musician whose thought is so rigorously ambitious.

[max]

I found all this pretty interesting:




Beyond Chaos, Beyond Coherence
I. That desire should stand head and shoulders above all other mystifications as the most spectacularly effective agent of recuperation in our benighted epoch is the most sickeningly predictable achievement of a principle whose destruction has been the cornerstone of every half-baked orthodoxy from Buddhism to Christianity. With the disintegration of all religious systems in the eighteenth century, the means by which desire was foisted upon the human body underwent a dialectical inversion, enabling the rising bourgeois class to increase the repressive potential of this principle. Desire ceased to be a temptation that if indulged, led to suffering and/or damnation. Instead, it became an agent of the much vaunted gratifications of an illusory future against whose promises the actuality of the present is to be permanently deferred. Accordingly, the present is now rationally organised around the (future) fulfilment of desire. The success of this racket accounts for capital's apparent 'escape'. After two centuries in which to assimilate these facts, only an imbecile would stand up and wail about the continual domination of the past over the present (original sin). And, as if to prove their own idiocy, the self-styled (anti) militants of the (ultra) left continue to babble about the end of history. It should be patently obvious to everyone that under capitalism, desire acts as the central mechanism by which a non-existent future dominates not only the present but the past as well.

That desire should be held up as a 'revolutionary' principle by everyone from bedsit intellectuals such as 'the Pleasure Tendency' (whose name is sufficient to demonstrate the poverty of their theoretical practice) to the softest of the soft cops 'schizoanalysising' us with so called 'anti-psychiatry', serves to make patently obvious the distance between the proletarian movement and all ideologists.

Anyone who promotes the confusion of desire and sexuality, and then reifies this dichotomy into an acceptance of the separation between the present and life, stands in opposition to the revolutionary movement. Desire is the commodified form of sexual (non) relations. It is material proof of separation under capital, the principle by which the poverty and dissatisfactions of daily life are passed off as a 'natural' and 'universal' given.

II. When a group of self-styled 'radicals' such as 'the Pleasure Tendency' define 'art' as 'the commodity form of creativity' (Desire Value and The Pleasure Tendency), they pave the way for the reform of capital rather than its abolition. Art is any artefact, or even idea (conceptual art), packaged and sold as an expression of human values, the human spirit, the human condition &c. That art is valued economically is true enough, but what witless leftists such as 'the Pleasure Tendency' fail to understand is that 'art' is valued economically precisely because of the creativity (labour) put into it.
Creativity is labour raised to moral good, it lends credibility to the ridiculous notion that there is a 'universal' human need for 'expression'. The concept of creativity is just as repressive, moralistic and alienated as that of 'art'. That creativity should be held as the highest goal of human 'life' by self-styled 'revolutionaries' demonstrates the vast gulf between wannabe leaders and the impossible class.

III. The idea that (wo)man is somehow separated from nature is typical of the lies and anti-dialectical inversions propagated by apologists for the imagination. Nature does not exist somewhere outside us, it is a social construction, the BIG LIE propagated by so called 'creative' wo/men. For wo/men to build cities is as natural as birds building nests. If 'urban' environments are unnatural, then so are the lairs and burrows of other mammals. Bourgeois ideologists present our separation from 'nature' as a 'natural' fact that mirrors and explains all the social separations we suffer under capital. However, bourgeois ideologists cannot present us with the date at which our separation from nature occurred because the very idea of 'nature' is a monstrous fabrication. Ecology is the ultimate 'human' ideology. Green politics are based on notions of balance whose basic premises are drawn from the dualities induced by social separation. Ecologist equate change (which is inevitable) with destruction (a relative concept). Only a society fractured to its very core by capitalist social relations would allow concern about the 'future' (the 'desire' to be immortal) to dominate the present (life).
First published in Smile 9, London 1986.











I might be wrong but now that I think about it, I wonder if everyone who posts here became interested in this music through an obsession in aesthetics, and the morality of music? That's not really how I got here but it's why I came back.

[jon abbey]

I might be wrong but now that I think about it, I wonder if everyone who posts here became interested in this music through an obsession in aesthetics, and the morality of music?

yeah, I think you're really wrong.

[Dan Warburton]

+1

[faster]

Ethics and aesthetics are some of the things that got me into free improvisation and have continued to interest me since then.

[max]

its a sick hoax

sad

[Gil Sansón]

Great to see Stockhausen being given the place he deserves. It is apparently hip to throw jabs at the man, since Aphex Twin and the other guys reacted all macho on a few, quite respectful suggestions from an old master who in many ways paved the way for them. His ego was monstrous and his megalomania had no limits. he also made the huge mistake of surrounding himself mostly with acolytes, cutting himself from society at large as direct consequence of this. It's fascinating to see him struggling with concepts of freedom and his (alongside Boulez and the rest) perceived duty to keep the values of the dead masters; for a composer in such a circumstance to abandon or relinquish the responsibility over the music in the score must have felt like high treason. Composers on the other side of the Atlantic didn't share such a burden and were able to assert themselves with the confidence of those that know they are starting something anew, but we still see how the gravitational pull of history placed La Monte Young in the same predicament regarding the role of the composer in music that was improvised along some restricted parameters that were being discovered as the musicians grew familiar with the sound. I sometimes get the feeling that people like some of our most visible provocateurs of today remain unable to think outside historical grids and keep dragging down a discourse that could be much more fun to begin with. I found out that this sort of critique finds a resonance with me when it's done with humor, as in Diego Chamy's performances. In work like this, I don't feel he's laughing at me but rather with me.