Jameson's Elegy

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

[from Jameson's Marxism & Form]
>Finally, we must observe that inasmuch as Western music is not natural but
>historical, inasmuch as its development depends so intensely upon the
>history and development of our own culture, it is mortal as well, and has
>it in it to die as a genuine activity, to vanish when it has served its
>purpose and when that social need which it once answered has ceased to
>exist. The fact that the production of so-called classical records has
>become a big business in the present day should not make us lose sight of
>the privileged relationship between the golden age of Western music and a
>Central Europe in which a significant proportion of the collectivity
>performed music and knew it from the inside, in a qualitatively different
>fashion from the passive consumers of our own time.

I suppose that Jameson's tone comes from the Frankfurt school of cultural
pessimism, but why does he have to sound so elegiac? Even limiting our
concern to "Western classical music," it seems to me that more--rather than
less--people all over the world have come to possess an ability to play the
piano, the violin, etc. as well as the desire to "understand and
appreciate" music as art (be it "high" or "low" or uncategorizable). The
real history of "Western music," I think, doesn't fit into Jameson's
narrative of decline (from active producer to passive consumer). Why does
he ignore elements of "democratization" and "globalization" that are also
part of this history? In other words, why is he so undialectical?

As to the disappearance of the "social need" to which (in Jameson's mind)
"Western music" answered, I say, "good riddance!" Though the passage cited
by Doug doesn't specify the nature of the said "social need," it must have
had a lot to do with providing background music to the business of marriage
(as in Jane Austen's novels).

Yoshie