[lbo-talk] Situation / Context

[Carrol Cox]

These are loose terms and I may want later to use other terminology. For the
present, however, I would use "context" in a fairly narrow sense. The
context of a performance of a Mozart Concerto would be the concert hall, the
size of the audience and the audience expectations created by advertisements
for the concert (an incomplete list of course). The _situation_ as I shall
use it here is a broader concept. Someplace in the Cantos Pound quotes a
German officer saying something like, "Hey, stop that mathematical music"
(crudely remembered), referring to Mozart. I don't know the date of the
alleged comment. The situation would include many of the historical
conditions which made such a comment possible. In the 1950s if one wished to
hear a live performance of Vivaldi one had to go to Carnegie Hall at 4:30
a.m. Musicians from various musical groups gathered together at that time to
perform Vivaldi. The context would consist of the same factors as listed
above for a Mozart Concerto. But the situation would involve the activities
of two musicians in the early 20th-c (one woman, one male: I forget their
names now), the writings and conversations of Pound and Wyndham Lewis, the
literary developments that had made the comments of such men hold some
weight. There would be other factors of which I am unaware. One can see the
overlap here with my earlier post on audience: the audience for a Vivaldi
concert at 4:30 a.m. would surely bear a different relationship to the
performers than would the audience at a more conventional concert -- and
this would of course generate a quite different attitude towards the
performance than in a Vivaldi concert today, when the Four Seasons have
become the most frequently played music on classical radio stations. There
would also, of course, be a sense of adventure in the 1950s performances
lacking  now, a sense of exploring new terrirtory. By the early 1960s,
walking down an Ann Arbor street around midnight there would be a high
probability of Vivaldi music floating down from some student room. It was
still for the most part coterie music however, which would have definite
impact on the listening experience.

Or consider reading The Holy Family in 1845, in 1850, or in 1950. These are
radically different _situations_ as I am using the term. The context of such
a reading would depend (among other things) on the age of the reader,
his/her previous knowledge of the Manifesto, whether it was a book found on
alibrary shelf, assigned in a class, etc.

All these matters, like audience, are crucial in determining the genre of
the work, and thus the relationship between reader and text. (Note that
genre is a slippery term: the same text may be of a different genre in a
different context.

Carrol