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

[mcatzilut]

So there's two things. There's the thing the conversation is about -- ie: What it is we agree we're talking about, and here that might be social class. That's what is supposedly linking Hopper with Abebe, social class and also kinda this multicultural discourse. So Hopper is arguing that Vampire Weekend are participating in this class; they're colonizing African music, they're using WASP'y signifiers, etc. And then Abebe comes back and says, no, they have legitimate identity claims you're ignoring, they aren't simply participating, they're critiquing, etc

[koganbot]

Look, are you trying to draw me into this conversation? I mean, I could be off colonizing Faye Wong speculating about the relationship between country music and the theme-song to a Japanese videogame that's sung in English by a Chinese woman who was born in Beijing but originally rose to fame singing in Cantonese rather than Mandarin.

I've heard maybe three songs by Vampire Weekend. I've read fewer pieces by Jessica Hopper than that, as far as I know, and haven't read the one you refer to. I've read only one of the posts by Abebe that address the issue, and I take it that he's made a whole bunch more. In that post he said that Hopper was playing a game of one-upmanship, but he didn't address why or how that particular game of one-upmanship came to be. Maybe he addressed the why and the how in some other post, but to leave it at "it's one-upmanship" and "it's posturing" and "people are suspicious of being bourgeois" doesn't get us very far. If he's correct, and what's going on is one-upmanship, this quotation would be useful:

Heroin

[skyecaptain]

I hope you aren't big-upping too much in my own comments, which weren't more than "people don't seem to know what they want to be talking about here" -- my sense is that Vampire Weekend are stuck in some kind of feedback loop in which various empty (w/o context) signifiers like "privilege" and "whiteness" are getting thrown around because...uh, because they wear boat shoes on stage? Anyway, my commentary is limited by the fact that (1) I haven't listened to much Vampire Weekend and (2) I couldn't give two shits about them based on what I've heard. I can't remember a single VW lyric for the life of me! Where's my ammo? I used the phrase "cascade" and pointed people toward your Backstreet Boys column (claiming that they were being very "they don't write their own songs!" ad hoc in their justification of visceral dislike) but other than that don't think I offered a particularly enlightened take

[petronia]

In that post he said that Hopper was playing a game of one-upmanship, but he didn't address why or how that particular game of one-upmanship came to be. Maybe he addressed the why and the how in some other post, but to leave it at "it's one-upmanship" and "it's posturing" and "people are suspicious of being bourgeois" doesn't get us very far.

No, he hasn't, but you're years and years ahead in the thought process as you know yourself. XD; He's talking to ppl who barely recognize that they're playing A Game, in a way that indicates that he only relatively recently named the phenomenon to himself, in his own head.

[mcatzilut]

Do you not want to be drawn in? I guess I felt you did and wanted a segue in -- and I'm offering one from my own personal experience. My mother told me a story about when she used to work as a waitress at a restricted country club. One of the people she was waiting on made an anti-Semitic comment and so she dumped his soup on him and made some retort and quit. I can probably join any country club I want now -- the Mainline in Philadelphia used to be exclusive and now is full of Jews, religious and otherwise including my parents. So clearly I'm hearing something specific in Vampire Weekend, something that speaks to that experience, and I think that's a doorway into talking about this band, but talking about music in general.

Anyway, off-topic question: Have you ever revisited your thoughts on the relationship between Academia and music criticism? I brought up your classroom/hallway discussion in an academia class last week and pointed people towards your book.

[koganbot]

Not off-topic at all, since a not-so-subtle subtext of my post above is that 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. I wouldn't say that academics necessarily do this better, but at least they know that they're supposed to do it. My point about rock critics not honoring the boundary between hallway and classroom is a good one - that they're not willing to shut down their relations to their fellows when pursuing a subject matter - but there's also the problem of rock critics never having mastered basic skills in reading comprehension and logical inference, and their not being paid to extrapolate on their own ideas. So they're not so good at what ought to be classroom virtues.

You're right to notice an ambivalence as to whether I want to be drawn in or not. When in history have rock critics ever sustained an

[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.

[ludickid]

That's my favorite interview ever with Rorty.