---Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> quoted:
>
> Hence the willed "ugliness" of modern music in general, as if, in this
> state of pathological hebetude and insensibility, only the painful
remained
> as a spur to perception.
This is getting at something, and the scare-quotes aroung "ugliness" could use some elaboration. There's a class and a race issue around this as well. Some days ago I posted Schoenberg's realization and acceptance of being bourgeois. Like Stevens, he needed leisure time to develop his aesthetic. The ability to work towards innovation was a class-based privilege. Still this doesn't detract from it being a spur to perception.
Another artist I've mentioned, the pianist Cecil Taylor, during the 70's more or less explicity tied an aesthetic, with its density and opacity of sound, to a racial ideology. He was concerned with how and where European music colonizes African-American music, of what African-American music is or might be (I'm thinking of his early to mid-70s work). One can hear a great intersection of Taylor's interest in both in _Air Above Mountains_, a solo work, and _Dark to Themselves_, a group work. The "ugliness" served a more or less explicit ideology. Obviously this aesthetic direction is central to late Coltrane and Albert Ayler, up to Charles Gayle, a musician whose lived homeless for periods of time. Gayle's music, as much as it's heard, can definitely be a spur to perception against the pablum of the culture industry.
Much of current European improv, the likes of Derek Bailey and Anthony Braxton, doesn't sound too amenable to appropriation by the culture industry. It doesn't seem the culture industry would be interested in much of their work in the first place!
(By the way, Daniel, you might be interested in Adorno's essay on Scheonberg in _Prisms_. I haven't been able to send excerpts from _Style and Idea_ to you due to limited computer access. That essay opens with lines from Keats about unheard melodies being sweeter, along the lines of my comments about reading music over hearing music.)
>
> The parallel with language is only too clear, and it is enough to
evoke the
> fad for rapid reading and the habitual conscious or unconscious
skimming of
> newspaper and advertising slogans, for us to understand the deeper
social
> reasons for the stubborn insistence of modem poetry on the
materiality and
> density of language, on words felt not as transparency but rather as
things
> in themselves.
This is similar to what Charles Bernstein dubbed the "Artifice of Absorption." He and many other language poets were interested in incoporating anti-narrative uses of language in there works, so that words were felt as things. For Bernstein, greatly influenced by G. Stein, the project involved for one thing an investigation into how ideology tunnels through narrative. But much of his poetry runs on repetitive "licks". As with Schoenberg, his work towards innovation comes from a bit of an education-privilege. In many ways, also, his "innovation" ideology is what gets warped in the call for "innovation" in the world of marketing and corporate culture, its culture industry parallels. He makes this explicit in an essay where he calls for fighting innovation with innovation. Hmmm. . .
So also in the realm of philosophy the bristling jargon of
> seemingly private languages is to be evaluated against the advertising
> copybook recommendations of "clarity" as the essence of "good
writing":
As I'm reading more bourgeois economists, as well as Marx, I'm realizing what at first looks like jargon often has a basis in a tradition of literature, or has a plays a definitional, taxonomical role that I'm not aware of. But there's bound to be some jargon, or what sounds like jargon or fuzzy thinking, in any discipline or field of study. It's a matter of acquaintance with the works. From what I've read in philo and lit-crit, Psychic Life of Power has a very low jargon quotient. There is brief mention of self-esteem.
Alec
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