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?)

EDIT -- I've taken out that last bit because disingenuous: I'm not boggled that Nitsuh is (what looks like to me) reinventing the wheel. Media/SFF's way of INTERROGATING THE TEXT I tend to think is quite awful, getting your blame game in my soup etc. but music writers sometimes insist on having this conversation even when they haven't interrogated the text because there is NO TEXT TO INTERROGATE (not in the same way, at least. And you'd disagree with that, no?).

** This is who I think of as the typical Vampire Weekend fan, not "white" at all.

[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 an Oxford comma, by the way. I think we need it, to avoid unnecessary ambiguity.) And there's a difference between knowing what Ashlee's voice sounds like and not knowing what it sounds like, and knowing her various hairstyles and colors and not knowing them. And there's a difference between basing a reading of an article on all of what the article says, and basing a reading of an article on only some of what the article says, while ignoring the lines that contradict one's reading, and so forth.

Now, what Thomas Kuhn pointed out is true: we can't just look at, say, Aristotle's Physics and understand it, since Aristotle doesn't have the same concept of "motion" that we have, and if we read the word with our own concept in mind, the man's ideas come out incoherent and stupid. But the way Kuhn managed to figure out Aristotle's concept - that it was different from Kuhn's own, and what it was - was by paying close attention to the text, by not giving up until he came up with a reading that showed the text as coherent and smart. I don't see what the phrase "there is no text to interrogate" tells us here.* What else is there to interrogate? And if one is interrogating one's own preconceptions about "motion," it's still by way of the text that one is doing so. It's true that Kuhn has to approach the text with some concept of motion - without a culture around it, the text is nothing. But that a text can't stand alone doesn't mean it's nothing.

(I have no idea if I'm addressing what was on your mind. Every text has two worlds, the world that produced it and the world that receives it, and the text can't instruct us what to do with it, what its latent possibilities are for fanfic or for extrapolation or who knows what. That's up to us. But in my experience the better I know a text the better I'll be able to use it.)

You don't have to be privileged to engage in erasure. I'd assume it's hard not to engage in erasure at some point, wherever you sit. But it's probably easier to avoid the negative repercussions of erasing someone if you're more powerful than the people you've erased. But privileged people like you and me - privileged in that we've had high-powered educations - might have also developed at least some skill in how to avoid erasing others, how to notice counter-evidence etc.

(Btw, the reason I haven't jumped into the world of fanfic isn't that I'm indifferent, but just that I don't have time, at least not yet.)

*I can't see from your context whether you or someone else is the person making this claim, that there is no text to interrogate.

[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 take it less seriously. If I write a 2000-word essay about class issues in Titanic or Harry Potter, I feel like I've actually said something about Titanic or Harry Potter. If I write the same 2000-word essay about class issues with regard to Vampire Weekend The Band, so what, I haven't said anything about Vampire Weekend THE MUSIC. Or I have, because I've dyed a whole bunch of onion skins and stuck them under the microscope, but it would feel to me as if I'd said proportionately less.

So this may be me projecting my own feelings onto music critics/writers/bloggers at large. But I really do suspect, feeding back into yr frustration w/r/t what conversations music writers are willing to engage in to what extent, that most ppl who're attracted to writing about music in particular, are attracted because certain strategies appeal to them, and maybe that means certain other strategies are less appealing to them as a group, or they'd be drawn to dissecting other stuff instead. Again, coming from Media/SFF whose online chattering class is rife with ppl whose day jobs are in academia or the sciences... I think the urge is spottily there, though, and that (being a baby steps urge) it wants to feed into a clearly markered "srs academic talk" channel, or Simon Reynolds wouldn't be so popular ahahahaaaa. (He really is! I went to a dubstep gig with a music blogger who said the only critic he read was Reynolds! He was OK with making fun of him though.)

As I said in the earlier comment I'm not 100% appreciative of this tendency in media/SFF debates - I feel like the pendulum has swung too far toward earnestness, and in particular that a great deal of the (dark) energy of fan production is its willingness to be offensive/messy/in bad taste, which also means offensive to us, the in-group. But the issues raised are important. And, yes, all of the above doesn't mean music writers avoid That Stuff entirely, it means that they GEDDIT RONG in a piecemeal fashion. <-- reaaaaally long version of "I agree with agrammar, his was a valuable essay that wasn't about Vampire Weekend The Music at all".

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 ideas

Is 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?

I linked agrammar on my LJ with an obscure-sounding callout, to the many ppl (mostly women!) I know who 1) have the dual depth of fan background I do but are alienated from music writing, or 2) do not want to wade into heavy race/gender/class type online debates despite being heavily involved in both media fandom and music fandom, or 3) have a stake in these debates but do not have the necessary depth of background on one or othe other side. Because I feel sometimes like a crossover conversation could synthesize around me, that the knowledge and the intelligence are there on my flist, but that the willingness isn't. Even on my own part (I do have to get a job, and soon XD;).

** Going back to our "dancing about architecture" exchange. Eg. I can say a huge part of the charm of the 2005 Doctor Who series is that it "sounds like the UK pop that I like," and I might be able to "prove" it by making a mixtape, but in my head this is a... synaesthetic gestalt... that would be very hard to lay out in words. I could state that both are vastly popular and continuously evolved expressions of the same culture, with much of a shared fanbase, and therefore could be expected to demonstrate similarities, and ppl would probably agree, but it would go nothing toward establishing what those similarities actually are when Doctor Who... mostly doesn't even have pop music in its soundtrack? And when it does, it's as likely to be American pop. And the UK pop in this paragraph doesn't mean all UK pop (it doesn't take in dubstep, for instance, although it does rave). /digression by way of example