Relativism: So What? (Part Seven): Beats me; I wrote an article about it but that's as far as I got

[koganbot]

Int: In Philosophy And The Mirror of Nature, you attacked Putnam's early philosophy. What do you think of his more recent work?

Rorty: I think our views are practically indistinguishable, but he doesn't. He thinks I'm a relativist and he isn't. And I think: if I'm a relativist, then he's one too.

Int: Why do you think Putnam sees you as a

Comments

[petronia]

It's kind of funny because for the past year or two there's been a massive ongoing furore in media fandom (the global community of ppl who write fanfiction online), bouncing back and forth between it and SF/F fandom (writers, readers, editors...), circling around manifestations of race/gender/class privilege in genre narratives and the community experiences centred around these genre narratives - sometimes it's a conversation, sometimes it's a witchhunt. In the parlance of this shakedown, the effect agrammar describes - the way ppl look at Ezra Koenig or the Chinese-American college girl** in his audience and describes them as white - is "erasure", and considered the most sinful manifestation of privilege, because the most unthinking and the most difficult to counter. (If saying "look I'm right here and not who you think I am!" doesn't do it, what possibly will

[koganbot]

You're moving way too fast for me at the end there. If by "text" you mean "transcendent self-revealing text that everyone can examine so as to resolve any and all possible disagreements about what is being said," then indeed there is no text, in music or anywhere else, and if we substitute the word "reality" for "text" we get the same result, that there is no reality.

But those are bad notions of "text" and "reality," as things that are unproblematically and unchangingly there. Is it your opinion that in the world of semipopular music there are just too many things, from hairstyle to song lyrics, to pick one out as the "text"? Nonetheless there's still a difference between having an opinion of the Paris Hilton album based on having heard the album as opposed to having an opinion of the Paris Hilton album while not having heard the album, and there's a difference between having an opinion of the lyrics to "Oxford Comma" based on knowing the lyrics to "Oxford Comma" and having an opinion without knowing the lyrics. (I give a fuck about

[dubdobdee]

i assumed by the word "text" petronia here meant "words" as opposed to "music", and that music-thus-opposed is kinda sorta defined (or at least sketched) by the fact of its not being verbalised or figurative expression -- which means that's there's an extra layer of unresolvability of meaning built in, which isn't there with words or pictures?

(i'm thinking of a quote from levi-strauss: something like "everyone understands music but no one can translate it" -- obviousyly music as we ordinarily encounter it is chock full of verbal and figurative and other translateably expressive elements that aren't by-definition-unresolveable in this sense... but if it has none of the unresolveable elements, is it someting we'd call music at all?)

[koganbot]

One of the items on my list of Articles I Hope Mark Gets Around To Writing Someday is for you to do a follow-through/expansion/rethinking of your post on the ilX Kuhn thread (and here) about music as "ideas willfully unclearly expressed" (taking into account my own commentary on your comments).

In the meantime, there's this:

Gotta run now.

[petronia]

Both your and dubdobdee's comments (moving fast and confusedly because stuff was cohering in my sleepy head just as I was to call it a night - but on some level I trust you to unpack ahaha): music (to me) is a core of non-textual unresolvability surrounded by flaking onion skins of text, and the fun (to me) lies in attempts at translation to/from the world of words where I reside (being a Writer) that are doomed in entirety but fruitful in partiality.** The books, film, TV, theatre that get talked about in popular culture and online have a core of text - they start with words, with a narrative, unless they're of a consciously deconstructive/non-linear/imagistic sort (and we've been taught what to do with that stuff). Ultimately you're right, there is no reality, but the former is still a translation while the latter isn't. In a way this makes Music more fun for me, but I also rarely feel like I'm able to actually solve the issue by dissecting it in words - or even come close, or even that it's worth attempting in that sense - which makes me

holy crapola exceeded comment length

[petronia]

EDIT -- and I wrote ALL THAT without stating my core thesis somehow, which is that this

music critics don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation, i.e., won't put effort into working out and communicating their own ideas and into understanding other people's and into following through on possibilities and problems of the various ideasIs absolutely NOT the case in the community of chatterers who enjoy dissecting eg. the Harry Potter books, and why on earth is that? [insert above essay which tries to answer that 'why'] And can these strategies be imported either way across this apparently impregnable barrier I straddle in my online reading