shakey ground

Paul Virilio and improvised music

2009-05-16T06:53:00.004-04:00

[reading Steve Redhead, Paul Virilio--Theorist for an Accelerated Culture, 2004] Virilio calls himself a dromologist, dromos means "race" in Greek. He is focused on the speed and acceleration of culture, has been called “the high priest of speed”. His starting point is WWII and military technology; for him that war was never finished, from the point of view of technological development. Speed has continued to accelerate until it has reached the speed of light (internet, cybernetics)--instantaneous, making events and time itself global and no longer local. The human as a local phenomenon, first of all the body, disappears as a cultural given. His concept of the accident is related, since speed as the essence of technological advance brings with it the accident, which is no longer "accidental", i.e. contingent. We have now the "integral accident", that is a necessary part of technological advance, and points to the coming accident which will integrate many disasters through chain reactions. Progress has then reached its finite limit. Accelerated modernity, especially after the end of the Cold War and the impossibility of checking nuclear proliferation, has become dangerous modernity (the terms are Steve Redhead's).

The question for me is in what ways free improvisation draws from current cultural trends, and which trends. Reflecting on Virilio’s categories I am reminded how it is the most contingent music, lacking the substance, the necessity of what is considered significant art. It occurs in real time, instantaneous for players and listeners, then disappears. At whatever speed it goes, no matter how slow or fast, it is still instantaneous, and cannot be criticized with the tools that have been used to analyze art as object. It cannot correct itself and is not responsible for itself any more than Cage's traffic sound outside his window; it is only replaced by the next improvisation, valued in turn for itself. Recording is a futile attempt to capture it and turn it into substance, for it always escapes to the next moment. In this way it is very much a part of our accelerated culture and would not have been conceived of at an earlier age, a post-war phenomenon. Then begins the attraction to what I'm starting to call "absolute" improvisation, which burst the bonds of free jazz in the sixties. Absolute improvisation cannot actually exist but there is the desire to approach a music without givens, as if purified of human hands, non-idiomatic right down to the idiom of each player, a kind of randomizing machine under human control. Cage deplored free improvisation because he said musicians were too steeped in habit to equal pure randomness, such as his coin toss; there would always be the human limitation. But improvisers ignore his strictures, seeking freedom from their limitations of habit.

The accelerated culture is an extension of the myth of progress, which sees the present as necessarily superior to the past. Logically, this should mean that the present is inferior to the future, which is full of promise, as was believed in the Victorian era and has continued in some force in the hopes for specific technologies, such as medical. Yet accelerated culture has broken with the progress myth significantly since, from the time of nuclear competition the future is seen not as glorious and problem-solving but as threatening. The “grand narrative” has collapsed along with the faith that Man will prevail. Celebration of the present, such as the self-congratulation of neo-liberal capitalism after the collapse of Western Communism, has a hollow ring, one with the short reverberation of this month’s advertising slogan. If we were to see the future as having recognized our present shortcomings then we would not celebrate the present as a kind of “last generation”, to be followed by the deluge. It is hard to find any faith, as opposed to hope against hope, that humans will be able to use its wits to overcome the various accelerating calamities multiplying around us. Similarly, the accelerated culture encourages us to avoid looking at what we do from a future perspective, that is critically.

In relation to music, there is a celebration of the present free of criticism, free of the thought that we might some day look back on what we do now and find it wanting, or conversely look at what we did in the past and find it superior. Western artists generally proceeded through a process of criticizing their work, finding problems with it and inventing solutions on their own terms. In my experience this approach is lacking among improvisers; the next improvisation wipes away the last. This is of course not just due to the celebration of the present moment but also to ubiquitous market culture (of which Virilio says little), in which the musical entrepreneur never admits doubts about his or her work. Also the Anglo-American celebration of the hidden artist in every man and woman fits nicely in this uncritical artform. If boosting your self-image and overcoming a sense of inadequacy is part of the picture then you are hardly going to look negatively at your work.

Virilio makes a point about speed creating an aesthetics of disappearance, as in, here this second (instantaneous), gone the next. This parallels the development of photography (I'm also reading Susan Sontag's 1977 book On Photography), which values the multitude of images easily shot by amateurs as highly as those of painstaking professionals (now digital photos and ubiquitous cellphone videos have pushed this even further). The stable object—painting, sculpture, composition—is replaced or at least competes with the unstable, such as cinema, which moves at 24 frames per second, installation art, and improvised music. The art object--the masterpiece (Artaud) and the aura (Benjamin)—disappears in the equal valuation of everything as art. This is all related to the democratizing of art, of which free improvisation is a good example. There is a fine piece in the current London Review of Books by Andrew O'Hagan ("Short Cuts") concerning U-tube, which he calls "the depot of international self-realisation". It links well with Virilio, pointing to the recent instantaneous global success of Susan Boyle's appearance on the UK's Britain's Got Talent. We think of free improvisation as on the other side of celebrity culture, but fifteen minutes (now seconds) of fame, the egalitarianism of everyone as potentially "special", parallels the valuing of every sound and moment, or at least the reluctance to devalue any moment of sound. Here the politics of anti-discrimination reinforces the cultural; every sound has a kind of soul that needs recognition in the light of day, not a dark spot left unexposed (take that, Nietzsche!) Not to mention the relative openness of improvisation to anyone, whether they’ve practiced five minutes or five years on their “sounds”, and the blurring of the amateur/professional distinction, which has something to do with the very nature of this music.

Improvisers have also been highly attracted to electronics (electro-acoustic improvisation, or eai), the core technology for the expansion of the media, providing its speed of response, the ubiquity of the internet, all of which are of significance for Virilio's categories. For traditional, acoustic music the invention of a new instrument has been rare, but with electronic instruments it takes only a year or two for a technology to be dated. This speed of turnover, and the specialized knowledge of what is the latest, is part of the attraction to electronics for many. Moreover, it takes much less time to learn to improvise passably on electronics than on an acoustic instrument. An acoustic player can spend years before being judged proficient, whereas the period for some electronics players is a few weeks before they're on stage and impressing people (I include myself here among those frequently impressed). Even extended techniques on acoustic instruments, which are favored by contemporary improvisers, are much more easily mastered than the elaborate finger and embouchure work of a John Coltrane. The greater popularity of electronics over acoustic instruments among improviser audiences demonstrates that technology speeds up a career just as it gets you from here to there a lot faster.

Virilio says that the now, global real time undivided by time zones, is replacing the local here; history, which is always located in a specific place, disappears into ubiquity. International humanitarianism, for instance, the rationale for American global intervention, recognizes no sovereign states. The instantaneousness of 24-7 engagement with the world through international television and the internet is not just the focus on the now but means that a local event occurs simultaneously everywhere. This is what the virtual means, a substitute for the real (and not, as for Baudrillard, a simulation.) The spectators of a sport event are eclipsed by the television viewers, who must collectively purchase products (implicit in commercial sponsoring) in order to see it. For art, that means not only that the masterpiece is obsolete because everything is art but because it is available around the globe without ever having to see the actual object. Originally this was seen as a great advance in bringing art to more people through books of photographed art (Andre Malraux, The Voices of Silence, 1953), but that was when art was still revered as inhabiting the realm of untouchable heroes. Artists marketing their work today seek to attract buyers by putting it online at a dot com; achieving fame the old-fashioned way is left to the increasingly popular "outsider artist".

By contrast, for the improvised music session, unrecorded or recorded only for participants, is very much here, occurring at one place and time; there is no virutality, no participation without the physical body being actually in the room. In this sense free improvisation escapes the ubiquity of mediated experience; our music is for us, players and listeners, and none other. I often joke, when there are only a couple of listeners, that each gets a larger share of the music than if there were more present. But it is no joke; small-scale and intimate is somehow as natural to this music as it once was to blues. But then I am not typical of improvisers; the stage, where musicians display their developed styles of playing to a hopefully growing audience, has trumped the session. Whether the session will be able to assert itself against the scene remains to be...seen.

I read this over, it sounds like a mish-mash, but, sorry, it's how my mind works on only a quarter cup of coffee. Imagine a half-cup!

Speedup and the middle class professional

2009-05-11T09:57:00.004-04:00

[reading Paul Virilio, The Original Accident] I should point out that here as often elsewhere in this blog I am not claiming to present new knowledge but trying to answer my own questions, which is a different and not a lesser pursuit. The former, the academic or scientific approach, assumes the theories and discoveries of the past and seeks to supplement, verify, revise or overturn them, whereas I am turning questions over in my often troubled mind, perhaps of no relevance to “new knowledge”. For instance, the story below of the creation of the factory worker has often been told, I am simply updating the (Marxist) theme of the white collar middle class (my class, however wayward I may have been) becoming increasingly proletarianized and pauperized, only with far more illusions than the earlier industrial working class had. Why would the educated elite in particular be so much more unable or unwilling to grasp what is happening to them (speedup, increased work load, pressures and hours, reduced real wages, etc.), compared to their social inferiors of the working class who protested vigorously and briefly threatened revolution. Questions like this intrigue me, and as neither academic nor journalist nor aiming to influence others I merely indulge myself in pursuing them.

I’m interested in the kind of shifts over the last fifty years or so in what it takes for people to be content with what they are in relation to what they do. What I mean by this would be expressed today as the kind of job they tend to have, which earlier would have been considered a vocation or profession. I am referring to the kind of contentment in an earlier age that meant accepting unconsciously, without question, one’s lifelong identity as a librarian, a mechanic, a physician, a mailman, farmer, etc. after a period of apprenticeship. There was even resistance to moving up the ladder, from being, say, a teacher to being an administrator (expressed in the phrase, “kicked upstairs”). Today of course there would still be many who would resist such promotion, but I would guess that the resistance is less. Certainly it would be interesting to explore this statistically. But my general point would probably hold, that today one is looked down upon for being content with one’s vocational identity as if limiting one’s options and showing lack of ambition. To stay at the same level is considered stagnation. In my own profession, that of musician, unless one is moving ahead in cd sales, fees for performance, recognition (visibility), one is disrespected.

To finally link this to Virilio, there has been a shift from substance to movement and acceleration. The new substance, what makes people feel they are real, purposeful, and connected with the world, or at least expect to be connected adequately to the world, is movement. Significantly, career is not confined to the upward path from, say, instructor to full professor but encompasses previously questionable spin-offs--scientists become entrepreneurs, hawking and profiting from their discoveries; sociologists and philosophers become talking heads and media stars; historians go on book tours as part of their career. It is not enough to be one thing and do it well; one must have an entire life of entrepreneurship in order to sit back by one’s private pool with a gin and tonic and feel content. Of course this is only the image of success, the expectation, since of course there is no way to feel actual content when speed has taken over one’s life. So surely there is discontent, as there was in the fifties with the business career, but without analysis, public expression (The Organization Man) or target of criticism. There is no target out there, as “the system” (for the sixties’ activists) or the exploited enraged at the exploiters in the earlier version. In this case the appropriate target is within one’s own most positive, hopeful energies. These cannot be touched without risking the collapse of one’s entire system of life accommodations—family, the trajectory of expected fulfillment, consumption patterns, indeed everything that has come to replace the moral and religious standards by which one can stand apart from and judge one’s life.

This shift is seen as an advance over the old, antiquated system, which is indeed rooted in ancient society. The librarian who got paid poorly because she loved books and desired the social good of literacy was the secular equivalent of the medieval monk, who was socially esteemed so long as he was selfless and sacrificing. He or she has been replaced by an employee who is paid according to accomplishment, perhaps initiating a literacy program and getting it funded, to the applause of all, and is competing with all enterprising others. The goal is that of the state, of the statistician, to increase the number of those who can read, not to communicate a love of reading, of thought, of reflection. To be motivated like the selfless librarian is indeed a handicap to advancement. I am not asking the question of whether this is a better system or not, because our judgment of what better would mean would then have to be asked first. I am asking only how did it come about, and to say this happened because it was an improvement, or even inevitable begs the question.

What is called progress here is actually the same process as that which eliminated the skilled mechanic in favor of the factory worker, who was created largely out of another skilled sector of the population, peasantry and small independent farmers, who were forced off the land, i.e. into poverty, by market competition. The knowledge and skill of trained mechanics as well as farmers, knowledge acquired through a lifetime, was irrelevant to the industrial labor required. Unlike the professions, industrial workers had no or little chance for advancement, but what I’m looking at is their relation to work. Industrial workers, beginning in the 18th century, identified not with their skills, whether or not they were satisfied with a piece of work they had done, but with their location within a process. This process yielded objects and a wage based on following instructions from those who were in control of the knowledge and process. The struggle between craft unions (the AFL) and industrial unions (the CIO) ended in the victory of the latter. It was a victory of mass democracy over the small-producer Jacksonian democracy that de Toqueville had witnessed, dominated by independent skilled workers and professionals.

What has happened to librarians, teachers, doctors, engineers and all the professions of yesteryear is that they have been “liberated” from their dependence on privately acquired knowledge and individualist pride of accomplishment, the ability to make things or perform services according to a certain standards in which they were trained and for which they were respected. They have been industrialized, their knowledge computerized, and they are no longer in control of their work life. This has happened in a way that makes it very difficult for them to sense that they have lost anything of value, and so there is little complaint that gets to the heart of the matter.

For each profession we would have to ask how this occurred, what combination of attraction and necessity brought it about. For doctors, it seems like an advance to become an entrepreneur rather than a professional when the latter is expected to maintain a skill level that is increasingly expanding. The entrepreneur deals with changing situations, utilizing what is available and selling what people are interested in; the professional is easily cast as an elitist and is pushed aside in favor of the one who “meets people’s needs” as the client and not medical knowledge defines them. There is at least a tug of war between the two, as the patient seeks empowerment just as every other customer does. You could say that necessity, the threatened loss of patients for some “traditional” doctors, joins with the attraction of entrepreneurship for others, those for instance who have scanned the potential income stats for the various specializations while in med school and have chosen accordingly. Since the eighties, the increased social status of entrepreneurs in all fields influences this shift. The traditional medical establishment, the journals and respected specialists, struggle to maintain the integrity of the profession in the face of this shift.

The marketplace doctor has not replaced the professional standards doctor but this seems to be the trend. The shift that can be seen as a decline, but why associate it with the creation of the industrial working class in the 19th-20th centuries? Doctors have not been pauperized; in fact they have been thriving financially. The marketplace is the new factory in another sense, that it is the place where what is valued is what others want and not what the professional’s judgment tells him or her to impose. It is where the object of useful knowledge is not, or not exclusively, the body and the tools and skills needed to repair it but the manipulation of patients’ fears and desires for medical procedures to greatest pecuniary advantage. In the name of democratic advance, the patient is the new boss, who can be fooled and stampeded but must ultimately be reckoned with if one wants to develop a practice, just as the old factory boss had a bottom line of production quota and efficient operation. And of course the insurance companies, competing with each other for subscribers’ dollars and the lowest payouts possible, overrule professional standards. The doctors used to have the authority to tell the insurance companies what to pay and what to pay for, now the companies are telling the doctors who is boss. The increasing technologizing of their business also reduces doctors to being a factor in production rather than like the bosses, in charge of the process. The emphasis, as any patient knows, is eliminating the personal relation of doctor and patient in the interest of efficiency and turnover (output). So with their large technical knowledge and training doctors may not be assembly line workers, but they certainly do not live up to their self-image of "independent professionals".

And for musicians, “liberated” from the union and the club owners increasingly since the sixties, are they their own boss now or is the anonymous marketplace? Do they determine what music they will do or, if they wish to be respected and paid a decent amount, do they bow to the market?

Paul Virilio

2009-03-31T10:29:00.002-04:00

[Reading Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, 1997] When I read Marshall McLuhan in 1967 I was horrified at the world he described coming into being, the eclipsing of print at the hands of electronic media. I could find no way to protest or deny what he was saying; the handwriting was on the walls for all to see. At the time it confirmed me in my sense of not truly belonging to the present, desiring instead what the world was discarding and drifting further from what I had preferred as reality. I could only see myself as an “old” leftist, but unlike them I was too young to take a stance opposing youth rebellion, which embraced the media-oriented new world.

What Virilio describes in the current world is much the same as the earlier McLuhan but I read him with a different response. Yet there is no real shift here. McLuhan apparently welcomed the transformation as a utopia coming into being, shifting from his critique of advertising in the fifties to an optimism regarding the new medium of television and its inevitability (he coined the phrase “the global village”). As an admirer of technological advance, what he saw as passé was anything resisting the dissolution of the “hot” linear media, which implied a subject standing apart from content rather than merging with it as with the cool tv-based media. As that resistant and anachronistic subject myself I could not see a means of resistance, felt disabled, speechless before the critique of speech itself. Virilio, on the other hand, (a committed Catholic like McLuhan, incidentally) did and still does speak and critique this development as of questionable value. His analysis tells us that the global village is not the boon to mankind but its destroyer, instead of expanding the universe for us it has been closing it off.

My receptiveness to this today is partly the difference of the sidedness of the two writers, my sense of being denied by McLuhan and emboldened, given my voice by Virilio. But it also rests on a real change over the last forty years. As with the shift in the appeal of Communism and the Soviet Union for the Left, an embarrassment from which it has not recovered, we have to look at how the sides themselves changed. In the sixties technological progressivism, faith in its juncture with science, was still alive and favored the electronic media as an ally, evident in “the whole world is watching” theme of marches and occupations of buildings by young radicals. It was as if television, with which the younger generation had grown up, could not help but be on the side of positive world change, at least if one were fed the right images, which was the function of those activists. The war-weary parental generation had stamped “children are the hope of the world” on their progeny; part of that hope was the medium that had entranced those children in the fifties. Short of nuclear weaponry, which did not fit the schema, only reactionaries would have denied that whatever new technology provides is for the good of mankind.

The assumption of civil rights and anti-war body-on-the-line fighters was also a childlike trust that adult culture could and should reflect “mankind”, a positive sign wherever it appears in the decade. If there is injustice and evil in the world it is only because a handful of people have hidden it from view, and so the work of freedom and anti-war fighters is to expose and publicize it, converting the innocent and ignorant (southern whites) into knowing opponents of evil. Once people are shown the truth of evil how could they not condemn it? (The unresisting population of Germany during the Nazi era was not taken into account in this illusion.) Exposure and publicity had been the traditional role of progressive muckrakers; however, print reaches only the rational mind whereas television impacts the emotional body which must be moved. The image alone—especially the moving image of television nightly news, practically immediate to the event and giving a sense of participation that was virtual—was essential to the conversion. “I was blind but now I see”—the Evangelical and Enlightenment "dare to know" embraced here. Conversion was the model of political change, by the direct means of a police nightstick for the radicals and by the tv image for the passive masses. The only recently discovered magic of the tube, its ability to create a trance-like gaze and credulousness beyond the imagining of religion, seemed to be on the same side as the mass political movements of the past. It was an apparent irony that the democratized culture-in-a-box which the liberal power elite sanctioned for the populace and could not itself resist, the box that true Americans were enshrined in their homes like a gift they were unworthy to deserve, was actually a secret weapon on the side of those who expected the overthrow of that elite. The new world of justice was one that not only included the revolutionary cool media but would rest upon it. Exposure would be the means, and if “now I can see for myself” was not convincing then post-hypnotic suggestion would do the trick. Any critic of television as a medium, it was assumed by young radicals, was not only curmudgeon but was opposed to the kind of political and social change required by and promised by history.

If there is little positive, utopian vision credible today it is not simply that the utopias of Communism and Revolution have collapsed. Any sense that there is a future for which we can organize and work towards has withered in the face of the all-present Now of instantaneous communication, which has swallowed up both past and present. This is Virilio’s argument applied to the Left, which shifted long ago from its critique of popular media to an embrace of it, that is, it critiques content, not the media itself. It waits in the wings to be called on as a talking head, competing for precious air time. If it is commonly said today that there is no longer a left and right of a political spectrum, such that the Left can only be self-styled and protesting too much, this is part of the explanation. The Left, with its Marxist/scientistic background is scared to be accused of anti-technologist Luddism, and can’t develop a critique of the present that might include themselves or end up divisive. So my question is, can we single out the technological advance of weaponry for opprobrium and yet uphold the rest of it as benevolent to humankind, and if we do find a way to critique the submergence of science under technology can we face the charge of clinging to the past?

2008-12-11T06:06:00.004-05:00

Difficult to write because I am full of fear, afraid of hurting myself more by writing and then hating it than by not writing, which is almost equally painful. I have simply the job of watching the two gauges; when the level of pain of not writing exceeds that of writing then I will swing the lever over to the other side and begin doing it, as I am now doing. It follows this rule, however: only after beginning to write do I realize the balance must have shifted. I try to force the change but can't; that is part of the pain. I’m not in control of the respective pressures, there is not even any inevitability to trust in.

For most, I would guess, writing flows naturally from confidence, reinforced by the prospect of praise and support or of critical antagonism, which arouses the fighting spirit in those who need that motivation. In either case it is social context that fuels and determines it, whether an email or a treatise. And this context is assumed by every writer. Both support and opposition are proof that one is a real live person; it assumes there is no existence that is not mirrored. I will hazard that some besides myself long to speak only to oneself, to ground oneself in some soil more nourishing than the variable reflections of others. Prayer is the only silent speech, that is, if we never let others know our prayer or that we even have this speech. This can be a living relation to an unknown and unknowable (un-manipulable, un-representable) void which does not reach out to receive it; a letter that is never mailed or is returned to sender. Prayer then is purposeless, meaningless, non-communicative, words assembled in the void and for the void, and swallowed in the void. And yet, time well spent, for reasons that do not need defending.

This then is the only way I can understand such writing of mine, as prayer in the void, a kind of mist that cannot be aimed in any direction. It is not for you and it is not for me, that is, it does neither of us any measurable good. I can say the same basic ideas in different forms, repeat myself endlessly, and it doesn’t matter, since I’m not trying to reach some higher plateau, some original, deeper thought that will attract attention from readers, from Reason itself, or from a God. It has a purity that has not been sought, and cannot be disappointed to be found impure.

2008-05-23T10:06:00.003-04:00

The Left From Within

revised Sept. 1 2008

I would like to see an open self-critical space where the left spends some time on itself without thinking of how we wish to be viewed by others or what is our effect.

1. within means not coming from another place on the spectrum, such as the right or the ultra-left, which would fundamentally deny the voice of the left. The discussion space to be opened is not primarily focused on the spectrum view of opinion, and yet due to the us and them division into which American politics has settled, people do at least sort themselves out as one or the other. Another division might develop that would be more helpful than the current spectrum view: those who consider such a critical space valid and those who do not.

2. within means also painfully close to our subjectivity rather than within our collective opinion. This is our Studs Terkel moment, when we speak of our experience, how we came to feel what we do and formulate our opinions, how we identify ourselves, etc. This space would distinguish between inheriting or absorbing political opinions from our family and social milieu and entering into political awareness out of apathy, as in the sudden “radicalization” experience of the New Left period, which still grounds the politics of some older leftists (like myself) and needs to be confronted. The aim is to find where commitment and sacrifice and action is decided, all of which are radically individual and cannot be expected necessarily to put us in a favorable light in relation to others.

3. a space for discussion behind closed doors and yet as fully public as we can make it, as if there were a microphone inside the room that caught it all and projected it out to anyone interested to listen. We share this as unselfconsciously as possible, there are no doubt many who would want to know what is our motivation. This would ignore as harmful the usual effort to hide internal criticism from the outside, as a public relations error. We should not fear that others will take advantage of our supposed weaknesses; that itself is a prime weakness, a notion of politics that we inherit and will defeat us, leaving us wonder how that could have happened. The effort to maintain a front is just another sign that the left finds no way to distinguish itself from the society of the spectacle.

4. a space that is critical, not aimed at a critique. The door to explore is kept open and participatory rather than closed by an artiuclated position that redefines us and must either be adopted or denied. A critical space is not intended to create unity, the political goal and shibboleth the left has largely allowed itself to conform to; this goal itself needs to be examined. Hopefully this process will burst the seams of the unity-of-common-opposition and allow some real debate to take place, in which the good guys may not be all on our side. The left needs to live more dangerously, which means not bend every effort to become stronger. A front of unity and strength defers the real arguments that need to happen, since one cannot aim at becoming stronger without an image of what that strength would accomplish. So this project is neither fully pragmatic nor fully theoretical, but aimed at understanding what we have done historically and individually, today and in the past, in the effort not to make corrections but simply to put ourselves as human beings in the center of our political life. In other words, to begin at the beginning. Obama cannot do this for us, he cannot be what we are; we can only do this fundamental political work ourselves. Without this I believe we are poised not for victory in November but for defeat: absorbtion of our energies into the mediatized mainstream, the splitting of the left into those who are and are not part of the new consensus, and the final shutting of the door to political participation by ordinary and not media-selected people--ourselves. With this we stand the best chance for the left, one that knows not only what it stands for but why it stands at all.

5. This is a space of full contestation, as much face to face as we can muster on the internet, and imagining, if not looking forward to, a time when we can actually meet and discuss. This is not just for those who have devoted themselves to shaping or providing the research for political opinion but open to full and equal participation of all who take their own commitment--and non-commitment--seriously.

2008-05-16T10:48:00.002-04:00

Face to face political argument

I have re-written this entry so many times it seems that nothing I say will satisfy me. Undaunted, I plunge ahead once again. I am focused on something that does not seem to be a part of what is considered politics today, and yet it is vital to the kind of political effort I would like to see and can imagine.

America is poised on the threshold of another major political shift, analogous to what began with Nixon's 1968 campaign, when he recognized and developed a new anti-liberal constituancy, the silent majority. This direction was supplemented after Nixon's defeat by the organizational work of what became the New Right, which managed to completely reverse the image of Conservatism. Goldwater and his followers had been labeled elitist and dogmatic, such that Nixon could not even refer to them in 1968. In a short twelve years the Right consolidated its success in the 1980 Reagan election.

The shift we are looking at now with the Obama campaign is in the direction of the left, but lacking several major elements, among them self-organization (compared to the anti-gun control, anti-abortion, anti-busing groups, which the New Right appropriated), and real ideological change, a new way of thinking, which is my interest here. In the earlier shift, people had to feel that New Deal liberalism no longer represented them, and they had to reverse their very self-perception as political beings. Partly this meant a breakdown of altruism as luxury one could not afford; liberalism meant some form of sacrifice for others “less fortunate”, an image of society as an organic whole rather than a collection of self-interests. Moreover, at that time party membership was more like traditional belief, as if it would be an irrevocable, personal stain for one who had voted “all my life” for the Democrats to move to the other column, something like the rule that “I have never crossed a picket line”, now largely a forgotten maxim. Liberalism on a practical level was held together by family, class, neighborhood allegegiance. Breaking this was a major accomplishment of the Right, de-traditionalizing politics, an irreversible and radical change. The shift can be viewed from a radical perspective as politicization, bringing into the process, empowering, those who had taken their political choices for granted and had been on the political sidelines for years. These were liberals who became radicals, as in “I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!” They were first given a spokesperson, Nixon, and then ten years later became themselves empowered to organize for what they perceived as their interests. What the right did is what the radical left had aimed at: wake up (consciousness raising), get angry (speak your mind), and organize for change (mobilize).

Of course there's a question of which side of the bed you wake up on, what you get angry about. But the radical left and radical right seem to agree, in their activist, expansive periods (both of which are past) as to what political activity is about.

Without going further into that past story here, let us at least ask what precisely we want to see happen. I leave aside results we might agree on--the withdrawl from most world military commitments in favor of attention to domestic needs, etc. In my view, putting the results first is part of the notion of politics that is the problem. Let's assume, if we can, that we don't know what we want and instead ask: what do we want to be doing as our political activity?

The right, back in the seventies, took their cue from the radicals, who in the end could only antagonize liberal america, proclaim it as the enemy. If we choose to inherit anti-liberal radicalism, as leftist anti-Obamists do, we are making a mistake. But it is important to try to locate that mistake, which I see as deep rooted in the notion of politics as a matter of EITHER proclaiming one's considered political opinion and seeking to rally others to it OR manipulating others into holding opinions that they have failed to consider seriously. This characterization obviously favors the former, and so it collects people who stand on their opinion and believe, in effect and often verbally behind their backs, that those who don't agree are stupid or lazy, that is, their views are not truly their own because they have not come to them out of consideration or did not value “thinking for themselves”. The political task then becomes to get people to be more like us, people who presumably think for ourselves about what is the right, ethical direction to take.

How would we begin to get out of our mistake?

There are many directions to take up at this point, I will focus on one: face to face argument. Here is a possible form of political engagement which illuminates what is wrong with the radical left conception of what is to be done.

To be continued!

2008-05-14T12:00:00.004-04:00

I am curious

I am curious about my curiosity, seeking to know what it is I seek, why it turns this way rather than that, its continuity and disruption over my lifetime, and its presence right now. I am watching it as it moves from one object to another, picks up speed at certain points, and crashes in confusion and disappointment. I am taking my object-seeking as an object and working to understand it as a story that includes this moment.

Here is the interplay of world and person, with two perspectives: myself as an individual in the world, and the world as it appears in myself through the chosen objects of my searching. This is St. Paul’s distinction between being “in the world” and “of the world”, but without the directive to value the former and avoid the latter. This is a dialectical pair that needs some effort of separation in order to create a story of oneself that respects both the self and the world in their mutuality. How have I gone about constructing my specific world, and how has the world widely known and available constructed me? The world is a vast reservoir of often conflicting and changing possibilities of which I have chosen certain ones at certain times over others, and I can build up the story from within, with the self as responsible agent. This perspective aims at self-mastery, the Socratic goal of “Know Thyself” informed by awareness of how this mind works, its passions, and what it chooses. The other perspective locates this individual in the world as one among many. What I choose is available to and embedded in a specific social and historical context, and my choices have bound me to some and put me in conflict with others, have given me a particular identity that I would not have in another culture or time.

It was especially in an earlier writing project that I concentrated on the first perspective. I was the isolate in retreat standing at the mouth of my cave and looking deep into it, trying to retrieve and reconfigure my past, to put myself into words, with the goal of leading myself out of despair and defeat. This can be simplified to: I am the one who takes responsibility for making my world—you might also say, for getting myself into a jam. The corollary is that the world, the Other as a unified object, stands over against my world, which I must understand if not defend and hide. As the individual in extremis one struggles in private away from the world, the site of trauma. The longing to recover the world in love (which includes the acceptance of struggle) is a different moment. Such writing is ambivalent, incomplete, since it can’t help but objectify the being of the individual. Unearthing it through writing makes the self available even when it is securely hidden in the closet (my familiar image in such periods: one hand alone poking out of the earth, furiously writing). In this mode, for instance, I have worked to understand the role various events played in the formation of my sense of purpose, how that is still active today and what weakens it. My questions have included: how have I revealed myself in my past, how am I that same person today, one being traumatically twisted, broken, recovering. I’ve wanted to circle and trap any missing links to myself, engaging my shame of being a concrete, unique and destructible subject and struggling to overcome it.

This has been valuable research but I am here posing the alternate perspective, one that stretches towards sensing and finding specific points of continuity with the world. This Other is by definition not myself but here I find myself radically reflected in it. It is because I am of the world that I have something to do with it. The formula here is: the world creates me, with the corollary that I welcome this. I must sense my mind and behavior as not at all unique and chosen but pointed in a certain direction by the world into which I have been and continue to be born. There was a line I read long ago in Ernst Troeltsch’s Historicism and its Problems that reflects this perspective: “You cannot escape your historical skin.” The moment I saw it I was frozen in fear, surprised at my reaction, as if a huge weight had crushed me and all my hopes. Yet this weight became transformed, connecting me with the world in a way that my personal struggles for self-understanding could not, as if I had to prove that I was a subject against all odds. Added to other forms of determinism I studied, especially the sociological, the effect for me was paradoxically not at all quietistic, defeated by the huge list of determinations, but activist, pushing me towards political engagement, the world in its movement.

The two perspectives work together and against each other, with no a priori guidelines of how they may be balanced. Each perspective must be pursued recklessly all the way to the bottom. The struggling isolate I* has no choice but to resist the I* caged by its cultural options and vice versa. In playing music for instance, I would not be searching each sound as that which I intimately choose, as true for me alone, if it all added up to mirroring current fashion. At the same time my music has a place and meaning that I cannot claim to have determined myself, and I publicly resist the ideology of Art that does claim this. I will not choose between these two perspectives, I choose rather to be both in some kind of shifting, antagonistic harmony that never settles down.

In concert, these two perspectives yield a writing conceivably of greater interest to readers. Like my music, all my serious writing has been aimed not at others but through me for others, I risk here the word sacrifice. When I stand at the door of my cave I speak a language that I myself must strive to understand, but when I am wandering about, as now, then I am making myself universally available and speaking of us. Although others might gain something by reading themselves into my personal delving, the addition of this other perspective engages readers more directly, for it concerns a culture and choices that are common to others. It is just possible that my particular curiosity might lead to an insight

II.

This particular thread begins with wondering why, fifty years ago, my heart suddenly raced at the first sentence I ever read of Marx: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” For me it was not just the literal meaning of those few English words that struck me, a sweeping claim that could be laid out alongside alternatives. I did not dismiss it as a reductionist theory of society and history, as a college student might today. Could I have studied Marx as just one among many theorists when he was considered by those around me as the primordial motivator of America’s enemies?

All objects of our attention, possible paths, answers, ethical choices are mediated by our culture; they are the points at which the individual most truly meets the culture, transforms and recreates it. It is others who arouse us—crash into us—and force us to become the subjects we subsequently imagine ourselves to have become through our free choice. These others are historically specific and cannot be reduced to eternal archetypes. Marx's statement above, that begins the textual body of The Communist Manifesto, would hardly raise an eyebrow today when Marxism no longer holds the positive/negative charge it did in 1958; it does not divide people along lines of life and death struggle, friend and foe. Few would read Marx’s texts as a secret that our world was trying to keep from us, as “fighting words”, as I did back then.

Further on I came to this: “a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift and joins the revolutionary class”, and I felt a place had been carved out for me in the world scheme. I saw the words of Marx as a guideline of how to understand the world and take my place in it, a world divided that included me. It was a heavily charged interpellation that challenged all others, including the call to be a Christian and the call to be a functioning member of society, such as a musician, my childhood dream. Without knowing it I was searching for an alliance with Marx and would have believed practically anything he said. I took him as my master, who would provide me with teachings that would illuminate my situation and support me. At the same time it would give me something to do, a job without social status, for the revolutionary is not acclaimed by society as a musician or professor could hope to be. My work would fulfill me only by submerging me in the most important historical task.

The context of this personal Event was middle class America in the fifties. The common view at the time was that world history is a battle ground between forces that could be reduced to good and evil, the view later presented more explicitly by the Reagan and Bush II administrations than by Eisenhower. Instead of identifying the evil as Marxism and Communism, as my classmates no doubt did, it was America that I opposed, at least the upper classes and the American Way. The reasons for this I easily find in my personal history: my disappointment with Christianity and middle-class Christians, who I felt betrayed Jesus; envy/rejection I felt in my close proximity to the wealthy and my anger at my (conservative) father for distancing himself from me. I was predisposed, waiting for Marx to be dropped in my lap.

To see the ways I was over-determined, and that with other personal factors I could have gone the other way, detracts in no way from my current validation of that experience. At the time I was attracted to the solid ground Marx promised, the freedom from personal confusion in a view I could take as objective and foundational, a justification for my nameless rage. Later when I discovered the reasons that were particular to me, that Marxism was in part a faith I had chosen, I ran into difficulties. In the mid-seventies I also read critiques that helped me see Marxism in perspective, and it was painful to realize how vulgarly and unthinkingly I had accepted so much. I cleared out much of my belief system with nothing to replace it, politically immobilized.

One aspect remained which I will mention here. Marxism is one of those complex events that gains power partly from being situated right at the border between understanding and doing, interpreting the world and acting in it. My power drive towards historical knowledge and understanding was released by Marx only because I could imagine that through that study I would participate on the side of revolutionary change. When it became apparent that academic study would not do that I had to leave. I did not want to validate even a part of Marx's teaching without some revolutionary contribution, and in the academic world that was not and is not possible. Especially at a time when Communism was the dividing line of “which side are you on”, to express any aspect of Marxism was to will it, to place yourself on the side of doing and risk taking a hit.

Marxism, grounded in the white-hot conjuncture of knowing and doing, theory and praxis in dialectical relationship, has not failed to arouse problems for those it touches. Marxists themselves, as for leftists in general, have contributed to its defeat by self-righteously externalizing the causes of these problems and refusing to examine the roots of their belief system.

Reading Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, discussing Alain Badiou’s categories of Being and Event, I come across something directly a propos:

“Let us take the Marxist thesis that all history is the history of class struggle: this thesis already presupposes engaged subjectivity—that is to say, only from this slant does the whole of history appear as such; only from this ‘interested’ standpoint can one discern traces of the class struggle in the entire social edifice, up to the products of the highest culture….the allegedly ‘objective’, ‘impartial’ gaze that is not in fact neutral but already partial [is] the gaze of the winners, of the ruling classes.” (p. 137)

Now that Marxism is no longer a forbidden temptation, is there anything today that fulfills this function?

2008-05-13T13:38:00.003-04:00

Second letter to a friend

If you read this text of Zizek on Democracy Now, at the end you'll find something that seems to confirm the impression you tell me that "your generation" gets from Zizek, and that you object to: license to be politically unengaged. He would reverse the 11th thesis on Feuerbach and say it's time to interpret the world and not change it; the left is too engaged in changing. But if you check the context of this you can see that he is giving an impetus to dis-engagement, standing back from the usual leftist stance, rather than not becoming active in the first place. Zizek is addressing people who have already become enmeshed in the left but have not thought through their categories of understanding, not those who want an excuse not to even think about their choices, and instead cover their fear of risks by following a star. I take it his latest book In Defense of Lost Causes is also along these lines.

A first-hand illustration of what I think Zizek is getting at: in 1974 I created a one-man project, growing out of a protest letter to the first Gulf War that I circulated to everyone I knew, a couple hundred people, many of whom responded positively. My project following that was Letters, an invitation to a public space of writing in which to understand, criticize what we are doing politically. I asked people to respond to each other, like letters to the editor, only there would be no editor, only each other, and it would be a private network. I got several letters of people expressing their political feelings, but not at the level of awareness that goes beyond mutual support. The assumption was that our agreement on fighting government policy was the political foundation. I also wrote to the Progressive Magazine, suggesting it could be a forum of the sort I was looking for, and got a polite rejection from the editor. I should have continued the project but felt isolated, became discouraged and quit.

If I had known Lacanian categories then I would have concluded, the core of the Left is a Big Other, obscured by an ideology of radicalism (going to the root of things). This Big Other is in some way always a step ahead of any rooting out, of getting under itself, so It is actually preventing us from being radicals in any thoroughgoing, disturbing sense. We progress or fall back but in ways that are always defined for us. (Always my analogy to music: it is like the way improvisers have now become a role and are seen from outside themselves, such that they don't really have to face the ugly fact of not knowing what to play. In a way they consider that they have already improvised before they begin to play; they have achieved improvisation). Every attempt by someone to find out why we must honor and obey this Big Other is automatically feared and avoided as harmful, self-destructive, an outsider with malicious intent. If you question It you are actually (and here is the continuing Stalinist core of the left, which would say "objectively") on the Right. Now, the left that young people find themselves in the midst of has inherited this whole notion of correctness, of moralism, which means you are obliged to step on the toes of the bad guys, the fundamentalists, the racists, etc.--transgression against someone else's Big Other gets its kicks right here--but don't step on the toes of your own Father.
Since the fall of "really existing socialism" almost twenty years ago, the embarrassing link of the left to Stalinism has disappeared from view, and with it the attack from the right that the left was really dogmatic, which means theory-driven, ideological rather than pragmatic, that is, unamerican. This was a defeat only to that part of the left that felt it needed some link with a revolutionary past, and through that with Marxism. However, it strengthened that part of the left that was more interested in practical politics--think globally, work locally. This part traced the failures of the left to the turn of the 70's when some had confused the "genuine" left with Maoism, the Weathermen, Panthers, etc. There has always been a huge majority of the left that had at least a hierarchy of beliefs that could be safely asserted, such that they could not give the kind of support to eastern Europe resistance to Communism that the anti-communists could. As late as 1982, Susan Sontag was considered a traitor, at least an embarrassment, for her accusation that the left had protected Communism from valid criticism (her Town Hall speech).

After 1989-1991, the left can be activist, and play a purely constructive role, demonstrating and writing, and be perceived as united (the "overzealous" who embarrassed it were now political correctors on the campuses). Leftist organizers and activists can ignore a Marxism that had been linked to it simply by the existence of socialist countries claiming to base themselves on Marx. Philosophy, however, as understood in the West is generally seen as something other than a social order, it is the questioning of all forms of order, including that of its own practitioners. So Marxism as a philosophy, as a stumbling block of self-criticism, could be left behind, guilty by association with the failed socialist "experiment". It's not just that the left wants to think of itself as questioning its enemy and not itself. It has to do with the left imagining itself as a movement, which can only go in one direction. This is politics, the practical question of how to be effective, getting the job done, reflecting back like all politicians on what it looks like, how the press sees it. And criticism from within, as in Obama's camp, looks bad.

The left has then no way to criticize itself from within; all criticism is from the alien other side, the dark side of evil. Americans especially need to be as light and bright, clean and incorruptible as possible (which rules out "true" radicals actually holding political office, of course). The American Left-Liberal coming from Dewey was always embarrassed that it was joined at the hip to a dominant philosophy like Marxism, since it interpreted that in a Stalinist way, as the Book, a scripture that had to be taken literally. Even dialectical thinking, which requires us to see beyond an us/them antagonism, could not be wrenched away from top-down Stalinist/Maoist authoritarianism. The left does not want a unified correct theory to stand in judgment, yet it also ridicules the normal working of philosophy which yields conflicting philosophers, who are so cranky and individualist that they always differ from each other, and so are unable to come to the same Party. There were all these splinter groups, that couldn't decide on how to symbolize the failure of the 1917 Revolution, how to characterize the USSR--as a deformed workers state, or whatever other term would distinguish one splinter from another and prevent a unified front. Marxism made the Left look foolish, whereas the right (after Goldwater, at least) could come together on all its basic ideological terms in the interest of gaining political power.

So now, when Zizek says, lets learn what look critically at what beliefs we must be holding given the evidence of our actions, some will of course use this as a way to stand on the sidelines. Every time you jump into such a situation you might be found to defend something that later you will have to criticize. And thus the left re-creates itself and its defensive self-image.

2008-05-06T12:06:00.003-04:00

Letter to a friend

You were talking about whether you should take Zizek seriously when he has become something of a philosophical rock star to your age peers. You feel a split, in general alienated from them, and want to be critical of their choices, or of how they see Zizek. From them you have gathered that he supports their interest to stand above politics and not to engage, and this turns you away from him. There are many interesting questions here: one of them is, what are we really trying to do when we read someone who brings with him or her a certain aura, a frisson of fame/notoriety? What are we looking for? All of our reading of serious non-fiction is motivated by some kind of desire, which can't be symbolized by and reduced to specific questions we want answered. We may be attracted by two seemingly contrary motives that succeed each other as moments. Seeing the crowd forming around Zizek, for instance, we are partly attracted in the same way they are, asking ourselves, "what is the charisma here that draws them, what message does he have that I might also want?" We must then accept that we are in this moment part of that "crowd mentality" that wants to consume him for the same reason others do. We see everyone screaming for the beautiful package and we can't help asking, as they also do, what's the mystery inside? Here we must confess to having no identity apart from others. Yet in the very next moment, seeing ourselves do this repels us as a betrayal of our independence, our desire not to consume like the others but to be genuinely interested for myself as an individual who can pick and choose for my more intimate, personal needs. These I do not necessarily share with others--the mind I say I value as "my own". So we feel a contrary impulse, to recuperate ourselves with an almost violent reaction, which means to explore him against the crowd.

This then splits into two possibilities: either to discover that the crowd is foolish to find anything of value in him, OR to find that the crowd is attracted only for the wrong or superficial reasons. Wrong reasons would be that he does not in fact profess what he does--and we are then obligated not only to point out the mistake but to say why others would choose to misread him. The superficial reason would be because they are attracted to the package only, wanting to be seen as a hip follower, etc. rather than to his hidden, in a sense more mundane message, which to pursue they would have to lose their hipness and not pretend to be so knowing about him. In other words, if Zizek is the fool we denounce him as a charlatan or if the crowd is foolish we defend him against his false followers, who are using and distorting him unconsciously for their own purposes. In either case we are drawn to engage him in a genuine way, that is non-academic, where we get to define and assert our own motives for and uses of this labor of understanding, rather than as part of the institutional project. This brings in the element of passion, which is blind and destablizing, and for these reasons anathema to the disengagement academia prefers.

What is interesting in what you say about the crowd's take on Zizek is that their passion for him would partly conform to the quietism the traditional academy would prescribe. That academy would advocate only the freedom not to make "absolute" judgments, that is, commitment to judgments based on reasons outside the current standards of accepted science. In fact, what I get from Zizek himself is quite the opposite, that there is no avoidance of choosing; one cannot choose not to choose, and all choices are political in that they relate to our well-being on the planet. If the "buzz" around him is that he exudes an aloof cynicism and withdrawal, then people have isolated some texts I haven't come across, or it would be worth knowing how such a distortion could take place. I suspect that people are drawn, right now at least, to the image, the personification of engagement, but don't know how to take the further step to being such a person. If Zizek is the Father, the Moses, then we surely must know that he can't enter the promised land himself; everyone must, as the gospel says, go through that lonesome valley by themselves. His young followers must leave the academic Mother (or the rebellious Child of more politicized faculty) and walk out into the lonely world where no one will bless them and shelter them, where they will have to take the consequences for every mistake they make. The same was true with the coffee-house existentialist engagés of the fifties; they had to first feel their way into the role of being actually politically committed before they--or at least their sixties successors--could actually find themselves doing it.

Above I say "we" I can see my own patterns of following/rebelling, not with regards to Zizek--when I stumbled on him I had no knowledge of how hip he is today--but with regards to other heroes. Usually I wait until they are safely obsolete, and then abandon them if they come in vogue again! We cannot escape being consumers, satisfying our need for goods material and spiritual by means of choices that seem to come from our personal knowledge. But to do this we can't ignore what the world around us is doing, that is, the open-air marketplace, which arouses doubts about our choices: why is everyone rushing over to that table? Are their asparagus better than these I just picked up? On the one hand we are confident in our knowledge, on the other, we prudently allow for our ignorance. These two seem to come in percentages and we can observe how people, including ourselves, work with the imbalances that are bound to appear in our various personalities.

Loosely related to these two moments I would pose two opposing ideal types: the specialist expert, the savant, the one who needs to trust to the highest degree all that he or she pronounces, and so must restrict authoritative statements to a narrow range of competence. In relation to others one feels a great need to be trusted, to reduce challenge and conflict to a minimum, observing clear rules of how to deal with opposition and associating with others who share that commitment. Here is the traditional academy that I refer to above, it is the rule of a self-defining community. There is a hierarchy of one's own knowledge with the "area of competence" at the peak, and a community is founded on this ideology. Ostensible security then is a cover for a vast sea of insecurity; in saying one thing I tacitly acknowledge my huge uncertainty about everything else, to the point of fearing to tread on another's bailiwick, recoiling in horror that I might offend the other and provoke a hostile attack on my own small tract. To paraphrase Sartre, the hell of insecurity is other people, who don't respect property lines and like wandering cows come trampling on my grapes just to find something more to eat, something that is not appropriate to them. At the other extreme is the generalist, the wandering cow, who takes in a huge amount of information about all kinds of things, and does not hesitate to opine on practically anything. This one might make bold assertions but doesn't have the command of details to back them up with an authority that would be respected by the specialist. This figure can be often be refuted as inaccurate, ill-informed, and confuted as the egoist who weaves theory out of thin air for the sake of dazzling the gullible (I think the so-called intellectual "babe magnet" fits in here). So the specialist appears confident in his/her mental powers but in fact must limit the field of judgment in order to appear so; the generalist appears confident but is vulnerable to charges of building castles of theory on the sands of ignorance, so it is a confidence that seems to come from personal boldness, extraversion, rather than being rooted in anything solid. This figure is scorned as one who has the answer to everything, and therefore the truth about nothing.

What confuses the picture is that while the specialist is authority, and has respectability enough to turn all opponents into rebels, it has this for an inescapable price: all authority is suspect--even the most buttressed academic knows that. Specialized authority (think of the academic philosophers who don't think Zizek--or Deleuze--is even worthy of being called a philosopher) is based on a fear-driven ego, and may at best be accurate and precise in statements but in the end cannot say what purpose that knowledge (the kind of knowledge the university still enshrines as sacred) is for. Simply to have it? To even speak of a desire to know means to drive towards a place beyond safe boundaries, it is to ignore the safety of boundaries.

I tried to conceive this as a balanced two-pole image, with the specialist on one side and the generalist on the other, with the mean as the position of choice, the should. But I fooled myself, I couldn't help but find the generalist more attractive, as if this were the role of the intellectual, as opposed to the scholar. The generalist takes the greater risk of being ignored and condemned as wasting his or her own time as well as that of others who pay attention to them; this would bother some but instead attracts me. So ultimately this is an argument that has reached my life--my life as an academic, renunciation of that for a committed politics, renunciation of that for the specialization of playing one kind of music on one instrument, then back into generalized study, etc. I go to the marketplace thinking I know just what I want to buy, see the crowd moving--history itself envelops me, then I feel deceived, "I want my life back", etc. Now I am moving again, after a long period of specialization, and what I do is no longer of any importance, instead it is what the world does that is beautiful.

For a brief coda, Zizek is attractive partly because he is a generalist, and this is a good reason for people to be attracted to him before they know anything of his ideas. He stirs people up, and we need to be stirred up in order to get moving under our own steam.

2007-09-29T07:45:00.000-04:00

9/28/2007 - revised 5-4-08

From my personal journal:"Playing on this last tour awakened me to a demon I hold within myself. I realized one night that the feeling of inadequacy which is so familiar to me as a musician is actually a kind of possession by an alien, hostile power. My confidence, of which I am normally unaware, is sucked out of me and with it my actual power to play in a way united with the others. I came to this realization afterwards, at a point where I felt absolutely destitute and helpless, having no right to be on the stage with the others, in all appearance very strong and confident players. I felt crushed by them, robbed, but in reflection I knew there was no truth to this, so what diminished me must have lain waiting in my own mind. It has been my habit to take this sense of inadequacy at face value, as the insuperable reality, only challenged by my desire and effort to overcome it. In this case however my effort collapsed, futile, beyond any previous point of struggle. I have resisted it as one tries to shut a door against an intruder; such an action is only a confirmation of the intruder, through the pressure I feel exerted on the door. Yet I can see now that motivating this struggle and masking it is its antithesis: the intruder is also the confident belief in my power, which I fear not because it is false but because I imagine it offending others and isolating me. Hidden from my conscious thought, I have operated as if self-humiliation were useful and necessary to keep my expansive ego from taking charge of my self-estimation, a necessary counterbalance to the illusions and consequences of pride. I can even imagine myself wanting to believe I am inadequate and the desire leading to this kind of possession as the triumph of that belief."

“This fits well with my earlier [twenty years ago] understanding when I was playing solo that I had completely merged with a demon, a Dionysus whom I allowed to rule for the duration of my moment of playing. I expressed this at the time in Theatre of the Moment, which I read now as a text through the lens of this new insight. Then I was surrounded by rage at the world for betrayal of my revolutionary hopes and guilt at my inadequacy to find a way to continue to be engaged. What I was sure of was the musical IT which I entered each time I performed, which took me over and which I trusted--at least this could not betray me, I felt. Ultimately it did, and put me in the same ambivalent situation I am in now and trying to work my way out of. And isn't this the same pattern I followed when my political ecstasy was broken [in the mid-70's] and I stepped out of that skin and began to question myself?”

"At any rate, the metaphor of “possession” comes in right here to help resolve this. I cannot step outside of what I believe or want to believe myself truly to be, but I can step outside a possession, which is a kind of personification of internal antagonisms. Once outside I can go further: if it is a demon that tells me that nothing I do can be valid as music, then I can say to it, “you must know better what music is; you do the playing”. I escape the consequences of praise or blame for what I play, the ugly aftermath of the ego. If I can invite a possession to take over in this way then I can see it for what it is, whereas if I fight it and am humiliated by it time and again then I cannot possibly see what I have allowed in without invitation. The power of a demon is that it is taken seriously as unassailable reality, one half of a duality that calls out for its counterpart, the mistake in the opposite direction, of merging with my power and being unable to be aware of what I am doing. If there is a corner of my self which neither is it nor fights it then I can have a more playful relation with it; it simply accompanies me and is not my antagonist."

“This is a kind of surrender, and music, politics, and religion all engage some form of surrender. The question is, whether we can direct it in any way, eyes wide open to which way we are going and what we are experiencing.”

"Demons whisper secrets to us. For some the secret is that we are more powerful or more loved than we really are, that we deserve all, certainly more attention than we get. For others it is the opposite, the secret is that we are unworthy of attention. (And our egalitarian culture encourages the former demon!) Such demons can work in pairs within the same person; one voice will be telling us we are nothing while another is saying we are everything. I might feel inadequate, humiliated, unloved by the world but operate out of a belief that my true worth will ultimately be vindicated. When it is obvious that I am being praised or honored or given attention then I must rectify this picture by contradicting it, wrecking it in some way, what psychologists call compensation. The false humility of the famous (on radio interviews, for instance) is a commonplace; they do not wish to appear to be enjoying their fame to the extent that they do. It might look like a humble and virtuous embarrassment but actually it comes from a desire not to have one’s self-image ruined and a fragile harmony destabilized. In my dynamic, it is all out of fear of confusion, of being just something on the planet, not everything and not nothing. The mind races to extremes, and seeks to create balance by holding the extremes at the same time, and withholding this knowledge of what is going on, rather than settling for what seems a mundane compromise in the middle."

Now I leave that journal and allow a different question, why have I offered part of my personal writing in a publicly accessible blog? Have I been caught in the drift of contemporary culture, which argues that we, the "we" led by artists, have no private space of expression that is of any worth? All private value is to be made public, available, shared—an extension of the egalitarian faith that predominates. The private church confessional became the public breast beating of the Protestant; the private psychiatric couch became the "personal is the political", and now the artist statement, auto/biography, and blog. Once Luther proclaimed (and later probably regretted) that every man is his own priest; now every man woman and child is his/her own artist, creator, publisher.

Whether I like this evolution or not I am to some extent an example of this trend. I can see the debasement of art into the ambition of Everyman, the proliferation of boring cd's and blogs. I refuse to draw the line, as every entrepreneur does: “Hey, my stuff is a cut above the others!” I have to sift through these artifacts of postmodern effluence and choose which to pay attention to without the aid of what were once called artistic standards, the 18th century myth of universal "taste". In the view of Romantic and Modernist aesthetics, art was considered scarce, artwork unique, valued in each instance as the masterpiece, and the Artists clearly separated from ordinary mortals. Duchamp himself came out of that world. He was sufficiently confident to be distinguished as an Artist that if he were to label something as art it would be taken by others as such. But this chess move against Art could not be continued indefinitely, eventually it had to turn back on itself. Duchamp did not forsee the historical move by which Everyman would become Artist. Now the readymade and the readymade artist are universal in place of Art and Taste; if everything is art then nothing is, or at least it is highly problematic and subjective. Income made from art now derives from shrewd entrepreneurship and a dependence on the distinction between what is and is not of market value, which modernist haute culture spurned.

So I reluctantly submit to be included in this trend, aware that I am in some kind of mainstream here and do not wish to poke my head above the level of ordinary mortals, as the Artist once did. Yet I put my personal journal in quotes, indicating a separation, a privacy I will not allow to be violated, if only in being the one to choose what I offer publicly. I have no words, no standards for predicting what that will be. Perhaps I need to feel that what I experience of myself behind the screen, in my green room, might be of value to others in seeking their self-understanding, as in my political writings their (our) liberation from the entanglements of current ideology. I work to refine my writing so as to be clear, concise, and to develop reasonably, while thinking of the reader's work as paralleling my own. So it has something to do with a desire to have a positive but not grandiose image of myself and my work on the planet. An illusion, perhaps, but not a demon that haunts me.

2007-03-09T10:40:00.000-05:00

Improvisation as a musical practice is an exercise in placing awareness at the center of experience and maintaining it. The center is pure immanence, the here and now presence of world and mind, not limited to sound. It is not the world as “out there” nor the mind of a subject as “in here”, but the mind in continuum with the world as an element of its texture. Participation does not even require one to make a sound. It is not first of all a matter of an ego focused on choosing what sounds one makes oneself, nor bringing concepts to the experience, not even concepts of sound experience. It is neither focused nor unfocused but 360 degree reception, receiving equally what comes from others and from oneself. Whatever one might quite validly prepare through practice on an instrument or through the development of concepts is left aside, neither effectively employed nor actively discarded.

This is similar to certain forms of eastern meditation, which works continually to accept what is, that is, what appears in the mind as phenomenon. It contrasts with the effort to establish a relation between a unitary subject and a transcendent God, or to embody a spirit or Idea. Improvisation is not the dialectic of theory/practice, that is one does not enter the experience seeking a practical result, not even good music, out of a theoretical strategy that hopes to arrive there. Like meditation, one does not measure it by results; it is a wasting of clock time, the time of a session escapes the functional meaning of time in our culture and cannot be justified. It is the doing without the doer. Just as meditation is neither fervently seeking a goal nor lazy, improvisation is neither seeking good music nor is it sloppy and distracted. The sound/silence we might record, listen back to, and identify as music will have tension and release, if only as starting and stopping points, but improvisation as experience has none of these, much less an analysis of what happens as tension and release.

In the midst of the experience we are without means of judging it, which would require a transcendent code, such as we quite reasonably work out for various genres of music. Improvisation is the only practice yielding what might be called music (i.e. valued) that has a ground and primary orientation free of theory, of binary choices (good/bad), and of a hierarchy of practitioners and results. It is however very capable of subtlety and development, such that we can sense our level of awareness and know when we are off the track--distracted by trying to do something impressive, for instance, or something we planned beforehand, or by acting aggressively or impulsively (often confused with spontaneity). If we pronounce our partners wrong in what they do it is out of frustration with our own inadequacy of attention and receptivity; that is what is meant by the frequently stated "there are no wrong notes". It is more common to complain that something "isn't working", which is impossible to reduce to a universally applicable code. Understood as one form of music among others, improvisation can be either valued (“good”) or not, and there can be discussion that extends beyond subjective opinion to establish some common assumptions. However, as a practical activity such distinctions interfere with the effort at hand.

As animals we have developed the ability to focus whatever senses are necessary to our biological needs, to foreground what experience and instinct has taught us is significant and distinguish from “noise”, which refers to interference with our project. The western subject, or ego, owes something to this in the effort to establish and promote its interests in what was perceived as a hostile world, requiring conquest or manipulation. The rise of improvisation has something to do with the collapse of this historical and western-based form, with which Modernism was still associated. It recognizes that we do not need to listen in this way, that we can hear the universe and will not be destroyed by neglect of what might harm us. And, by the same token, we do not need to create weapons for our protection or advancement. That is, we of course defend ourselves and watch out for danger in many areas of our life, we need strong egos for mental health. We are even quite justified in defending our musical output against critics, but we do not need to be doing these things when engaged with sound.

Improvisation lacks the adversarial stance taken by the historical Avant-garde, which has retained its links to Modernism through the politics of movements, effectiveness of various strategies, progressive overcoming of older aesthetics and the like. It is not even about freedom, as formulated in the atmosphere of the sixties, which gave free jazz much of its social meaning. On the other hand, it relates strongly to much of what has been labeled postmodern aesthetics. For instance, when in 1964 Susan Sontag spoke of an opaque art of surfaces, without seeking depth of meaning through interpretation, an art of silence, she could have been speaking for improvisation, which was beginning its modern evolution right about that time. It fulfills much of what she describes as "an erotics of art".

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Above I have likened improvisation to meditation; here I wish to break away from all the implications of that analogy. Meditation is a discipline that anyone can apply and develop, but it is not an art form strictly speaking, since there is nothing that comes out of the experience that can be evaluated, chosen or rejected. In improvisation one responds, which is a step taken past awareness, and the response is received by others in various ways. Improvisation as experience is the root source of a music, which takes its place among other musics and is performed, evaluated, appreciated or not. The players may be very experienced at improvising, very aware and responsive to everything going on, and yet as music the result can be not only uninteresting to everyone who hears it but also useless in any way that music historically has been culturally used and defined. It might become music, a smaller category within that of sound, only through an intervention by one player who is assertive and purposeful. An improvisation can be cautious to the point of rejection of all strong feeling and conflict, whereas music is characteristically tied to feeling in its largest range. We would not expect improvisation to be painful, for instance, but music can hurt us, destroying as art always can our complacent and conformist sensibility. Even silence, associated with calm in meditation, as music can be a sword in the hands of musicians affirming a space that others would fill with their trite display of emotions.

There is something quite democratic about the improvisation experience. The social politics of it are not just theory but show up in concrete injunctions that are everywhere apparent even when violated. One is expected to be able to improvise with any other player, at least with any other experienced improviser. This is most evident in Anglo-American culture, but also true of improvisation internationally. For other forms this would be repellent, for they are more frequently based either on playing only with “the best” or in specific band formations which tend towards stability and exclusivity. If a country musician were to play in every band that was possible to play in he or she would be going against the rules, whereas an improviser who did the same could not be faulted for failing the requirements of the musical form. This is what makes improvisation socially broader than any other form, and links it not to the Avant-garde but to the democratic spirit of the sixties.

The form of the experience might be open to all sound and all makers of sound, but the improviser as musician, that is as a creative artist, is necessarily an elitist, who makes choices based on intentions, skill and experience. You may play with everyone who knocks on your door (as Derek Bailey did) but actually make an effort to play only with those who excite your interest, and they might be few and far between. An improvisation session that happens to be recorded or performed can be of great value as an experience but outside the moment or the players themselves terribly boring. A certain kind of boredom can be quite interesting, exploited as art, if care is given to the frame around it; boredom has been well explored since the sixties. But without that frame it can be enervating to a spectator (and musicians are often tempted to spectate what they are doing), and without spectators (i.e. listeners) real or imagined we would hesitate to say a collection of sounds is music. The spectator in us wants to get to the point; which is specifically what is lacking in the improvisation experience.

In other words, I CAN play with anyone, but as musician I am required to ask myself, who do I WANT to play with. Improvisation keeps the door ajar, one never knows how others will evolve in a direction that will suddenly arouse oneself. But ultimately it is each creator of music who decides very undemocratically who to join with to make music, based on anticipated or intuited results. Not to mention with whom performance would be possible, given one's public status. And there is nothing fundamentally improvisational about that kind of calculation.

So there is a distinction between improvisation as practice and as a form of music, as there is between the player and the musician. In my view one is not higher than the other; they are in fruitful if frustrating dialectical tension. Sometimes there appears to be an absolute contrast, but on closer inspection it is rather a matter of two poles with everything located somewhere in between. Players at a casual session can have in the back of their minds the notion of rehearsal for an ultimate performance, a testing of who one would prefer to play with. And players can present what they do as music to an audience, with predictable time limit of “pieces”, but still acknowledge to themselves that it is primarily an experience for themselves to which non-players are invited to listen.

The tendency in our time, now that improvised music has become a genre competing with others (since the late nineties), is for the experiential aspect of improvisation, which does not aim at musical pieces or the “best” groupings, to take a back seat to performance and behavior that is normative for all other musics. Performance is expected to be the best the players can do rather than just what they find themselves doing. The democratic aspect of improvisation, meanwhile, manifests itself as the door open to talent. Given the prominence of quickly assembled electronics and attraction of specialized extended techniques, this means improv is possibly the fastest track to career success (getting an audience to a performance) of any form of music today. Ironically, it is doubtful that the actual experience of improvisation will be recognized as the ground of the music, as Zen meditation is of various Japanese arts, since in the West the arts tend to be focused on production and the marketplace, and ever moreso as the market economy gobbles up all traces of art.

From my point of view, the tension between improvisation as playing/listening experience and as music form is a good thing--inextricably linked and productive of new directions and experiences. Hopefully this tension will continue to be productive and not resolve itself in the direction of a stable genre, as have jazz and classical music. Right now musicians themselves, and not record producers or promoters, are in the collective driver seat. “Genre” implies limits and an accepted interpretation, but improvisation is wide open, listeners and players alike seem to have few boundaries to what they consider valid. This is such a contrast to the locked-down mainstream culture as to almost give us hope.

2007-03-07T09:07:00.000-05:00

18.~~~~~~~~

The First Reader

Reading over no. 17, I stumbled on an amazing omission. I had written “as soon as I realize the huge difficulty I would have in destroying my writing I know that I am seeking to go outside myself to these others.” But what of the value of communicating with myself at a later time, of self-confrontation, of creating a greater unity for my life? Doesn’t that warrant saving my writing from the fire, and hasn’t that in fact been fundamental to all my reading and re-reading?

There is a paradox within the activity of writing that I rediscover here: the very fact of language as medium, medium of thought as a painting is a medium of visual images, requires one to imagine, at times unconsciously to create, another identity than oneself. In writing books and blogs, rather than shopping lists, the recipient of writing is an identity either as friend, neutral, or antagonist who is necessary as a foil to our own identity. Thinking, hence writing, is motivated towards selected others, as a glance at our continual mental chit-chat would tell us. The act of writing is “interested”; in writing a blog or a book, at least, one seeks the continuity of one’s self, a self-identity, through the very imagining of an other as reader. Even in the most heated thrall of the process, most fully “possessed” by the illusion of ourselves alone and heroic, ranting in the most individualized style—at that moment our bodies are in fact seized by the imaginary readers we fabricate. At the height of our belief that we have fully expressed ourselves, our passion is the simulation of an other’s.

I’m not trying to say anything new here, just restating crudely the philosophers and cultural critics who have been tearing apart the “bourgeois subject”, the Author and Artist, not to mention truth seeker, as heroic figure from at least the Romantic era through Modernism. The language of self and other, identity and continuity, fits into certain discourses of at least the latter 20th century. However, here I am discovering this vocabulary and these themes for myself, grounded within my process, and finding often by surprise that my life, spanning the eras of high modernism and current post-postmodernism, responds to some aspects of contemporary thought. I am at least influenced by the fact of occasional coincidence of my thinking with that of people who have promoted their thinking in a public forum, subject to debate and contradiction, as I have not chosen to do.

I am drawn to this point about writing for others because I want to understand what would be necessary to write for myself, to know the self I am who writes and has written what I have. What is it to be the first reader? Not proof-reader, not editor, but self-reader—to find myself as my own other. This effort relates more to the discipline of self-knowing, such as Gurdjieff and his followers articulate (Ouspensky’s “self-remembering”), than to philosophy and cultural studies. And it is certainly paralleled by my other dominant and practical question: how do I play music for myself, how do I keep from being engulfed in the social resonance of my sounds, how am I the first listener.

To another reader of postmodern critique this might raise the issue, whether I am a reactionary, against the grain of history attempting to resurrect the dead author and artist of Modernism. An alternate view would see me as reacting to the ways in which this postmodern theme, too well taken, has collaborated with the pluralistic, diversified marketplace. Then I would be trying to map out the territory of an integrity, an existence, which is not for sale.

[Along these lines, you might be interested in the essay, Improvisation and the marketplace. Click here.]

2007-02-22T08:03:00.000-05:00

17. ~~~~~~~~~~

I come to this again and again, and it seems still not often enough: the act of writing for oneself is always compromised by the fact that it is a medium, and therefore could communicate to others. Like playing music "for myself". It seems simple to put thoughts into words, an act which alone makes it possible to know our thoughts (I’m on the side of those who say we can’t think without words--if thinking is an act at all rather than vague feelings, then it is at least a movement to articulate). But even in the most private writing, each page of which is afterwards tossed away without regret, there is something communicated from the self to the self, however momentarily, selves which are by the very act of such communication distanced, other to each other. What is other to me can also be other to those who are not me. And as soon as I realize the huge difficulty I would have in destroying my writing I know that I am seeking to go outside myself to these others. They have come inside this self, I have let them into the most hidden places I nurture. Suffering seeks to be known; the voice may cry in the wilderness, or the falling tree in the “empty” forest, but someday will resonate in some ear somewhere. Even the most cynical writing has this hope, this poverty.

How can we possibly know, or feel secure that we know, the value of what we do apart from some relation to others? Is there anything sad about that?

The question then is, where is the stopping point of that security, how far do we have to go to feel our act is complete. The human (and this is a Western concept, so it refers only to the dominant humans, the problematic ones, those spreading their seed) is the being that cannot finally be done with anything. Now that I have done this, what do I do with it? Who will it touch, what will it move, where will it go, etc.? Every act embodies its goal, and the goal is meaningless without a series of goals that stretch into the infinite future, not just of oneself but ultimately of the whole human race. We are embedded in a context that stretches from past to future, but at each point looking around to find what is our fit with others. Continuity seems to be our distinctive task, to triumph over discontinuity, perhaps after reveling in it. Each is coextensive with the whole, each of us looks over our collective shoulder at all the others to know who we are, what is our effect. How is my driving--call this number and let someone else know, since by myself I cannot. The idea that I can have my goals separate from what others do or want is the necessary illusion. My act is always incomplete therefore, both because it needs the context of other acts to define it and it needs the other to confirm it. And all solutions are temporary, contingent.

Fear has to be seen in this context. To escape fear we can only create a real or imagined environment of trust, which we call love. Self-love gives us continuity with all our acts; other-love gives us continuity with others. Fear, in its many forms, is the absence of this, or one might say the realization of the truth that love, continuity, is always constructed, an endless work of rebuilding what wants to fall apart. Fear is our natural condition that we seek to deal with, to alter. After mother-love everything is downhill, or at least an uphill struggle, so the pessimistic analyst tells us. It may be the other way around, that love is the reality and fear the illusion, or false belief, but this does not appear to have been the viewpoint of human beings up to the present. Fear--disjuncture, loss, suffering--seems the normal inclination; love--coherence, continuity, meaning--is the project we must undertake that goes against that grain.

Where this excursus begins is with the question of writing, whether it is possible truly to write, or by extension to think, for or by oneself. Or act in any way in one’s life. And the answer is no, and must be strongly affirmed. It is not possible to finish anything, there is always the extension to other acts, which are problematic, and to other people. Everything we do is contextual, and this would be fine if we had a choice, but since we don’t we are compelled to choose and decide against the objective situation: what do I want. I can do this superficially, like cruising the shelves of desires, or surfing the net. Or I can turn towards what comes from the deepest layers of my self. Who am I, in the light of this infinite continuity with others, seems a foolish question and so is embattled. I go to this inner space, this place of solitude, where I am supported by no one and defend myself against no one, where I can stare in the face my desires to be who I am. This space does not exist, it is not included among existents. It is not a human space, because it does not link me to others, does not help me in my troubles, has no reason, no function, try as I might to give it one.

I stop here with a jolt, as I realize that to round off this thought would be the kind of “good form” in writing that I refuse, offering something to a reader that will complete the process….

p.s. The arrival of this very text to this place illustrates the dilemma of public versus private writing that I keep buzzing around, the unfinished question. It was written originally in my journal for my own “process”, as they say in therapy, then became an object trouvé when I opened the file six months later, which I now publish in this public form. Part of postmodern culture is the disappearance of the truly (not even “hidden”) private, and it comes about by my own hand—I am one of the assassins of the private in myself, and I seem to advocate it even as I lament. Yet the choice to cross the threshold into the public sphere vacillates between two poles: to present what one wants to see accepted by others and be rewarded by this, and to simply make available one’s self-thought, without the attachment to seeing oneself mimed in others or paid for the effort. It is the latter, a reckless move, which some might say provides me with an excuse for contributing to this destruction. Inevitably one could interpret is “released” (as they say of recordings) as merely that portion of my private world that I think is somehow discourse suitable for the world, self-censored. This is a dilemma that I would present as suitable, the very trap of advocacy. Can we parent our self-thought, bring it to ourselves and into the world as one birth, without it re-presenting ourselves in a world of representations, and without us as parents agonizing over its fate? This is an open question, for I am constantly seeking to discover how I am surreptitiously being rewarded, ego-involved. If there is an I behind every we of available discourse, as I claim, then there is an attachment I can ferret out and articulate.

2007-01-20T09:01:00.000-05:00

16.~~~~~~~~~~

There is so much to be said, so much that clamors in this brain to be said, and it is impossible to stop. I shift from envying those who can maintain a calm flow, like a river not subject to the seasons, to daring—and it takes a high-pitched state of boldness—to despise them. And that shift itself, how I long for a partner in crime who does not patronize me for that, who is as close to me as the fingers that type this. All we can ever know or have a right to know is our honesty, and how febrile, how debilitating it is. We cannot be honest for anyone else. We train in this school of shame at ourselves, cowering at our boldness as if it belonged to another who wielded fierce weapons. The discipline is not against us but for us, our necks on the chalk line, a discipline that refuses the reward of knowing we can communicate, that these words might possibly be shared. This is the private world, where we are finally allowed to love ourselves and ignore praise and condescension. A private death with no mourners. When I know I cannot allow anyone to read or hear me then I know I am at the proud center, the tree in the forest, whose falling will be for myself alone. And this alone is what I will offer to others, without apology for whatever interruption it might cause. Hearing the resonance myself is enough, but the resonance is in the air, and so strikes everyone within earshot. I cannot suffer as the creator without suffering also as witness.

All art, meaning that which lives in contempt and undisclosed fear of what seeks to understand and include it, is the willful accident in the midst of this contradiction. Artists are no elite above the common herd but are most humbled by our prosaic, incestuous need for the other, to validate, mirror, understand us, come to me Jesus, Buddha, with your embracing forgiveness and mothering. Then the childish reaction—we’ve had enough. There is no middle ground, no synthesis, no wisdom. And no neat conclusion (as in non-fiction, in theory) that can tie the whole together in a single more useful truth.

2007-01-15T08:13:00.000-05:00

15.~~~~~~~~~~

What do we express to others and what do we keep hidden? It seems that our culture continually renews itself, or reproduces itself, by expanding the realm of what one is encouraged to express and contracting other expression as belonging to species that have become extinct. Of the latter, for instance, it is commonly believed that we can understand the speech of a nineteenth century minister but his categories have become obsolete and permanently useless. The former is what tends most to be noted and anticipated. Once we discover something for ourselves we give it, or validate it, by making it public. This is itself a result of historical development, a concomitant of the history of democratization and social leveling. The conjuncture can be traced back at least to the Protestant Reformation, which proclaimed every man his own priest--interpreter and confessor--at the same moment as it urged everyone’s sin to be publicly exposed to others. Similarly, one can read philosophy, from the Enlightenment on through the Romantics, Marx, Freud, the post-structuralists, as sharing in this dynamic of revealing the heretofore hidden key to understanding what appears on the surface, exposing the sins of naiveté. Truth, or at least the truth useful to a particular moment in time, is what is now widely suppressed or repressed and will someday be known. To be the holder of a truth others have yet to learn or be convinced of is an ego-motivator of vast energy, evident in daytime tv and the press as much as academic theorists.

Each time a new realm of the private is opened up there is some kind of scandal, as if all barriers have been broken and nothing is safe or sacred. But then an adjustment is made to the new situation, only to be violated once again. A common view of primitive society is that such violations are ritualized, frozen and repetitive, whereas our culture—now world culture—has broken out of ritual sacrifice and violation and can validate each successive exposure as truly new, telling us something we did not know about ourselves just at the moment we most need to know it. Then this becomes historicized, no longer disturbing truths that reveal anything to us but rather belong to the past, and the subject of study, of sympathetic treatment and an attempt to understand why they caused such a fuss. This is our version of ritualized transgression and reconciliation, creation followed by consolidation and institutionalization, a component of the overarching and still vibrant faith in progress.

There is no identity between what happens on the level of empirical social history--what one is commonly encouraged to reveal and or conceal in a family, to friends, or in a blog--and the uncovering of the secrets of society/ego/language by Freud, Marx and the post-structuralists. The former implies, as does the notion of sin, that one knows what is hidden and chooses either to reveal it or not; the hidden is easily accessible to the individual. The latter attempts to expose what is denied, repressed, covered over, by a dominant ideology, whatever is the current common-sense view of the world. This “hidden” is general for society and requires a wrenching out of common habits to be uncovered. But the two are analogous; they hinge on the familiar belief that to show more of what has been previously hidden is a transgression and a liberation, however slight or large the consequences, and might possibly begin a new chapter of personal or social existence. And this goes a long way to defining what “the new” means in our world.

I am not arguing against this ideological prejudice, only noting it as such. One might say, I take note of it to stay one step ahead not of the belief itself but of the naiveté of automatically believing it.

2006-12-21T07:40:00.000-05:00

14.~~~~~~~~

Genres are publicly acknowledged categories that, among other things, guide readers and writers as to how to understand a text. New genres are occasionally named when critics recognize that the known categories are inadequate for valuing a variety of work that can be grouped together. Without any intention to create anything new, I find myself working in an "area" or dimension of writing that is in the middle of genres. It is neither fiction, where you can be extremely bold in the handling of reality, because you can't be held accountable for it as literal event or person. Nor non-fiction, where you assert only what you consider a valid truth about the world common to others, and are assumed to be pleased if others agree with you. Nor is it autobiography, where you are permitted to speak honestly on the assumption that you hold some prior significance for others. That is, others must consider you a model to project themselves into, and yet one of a kind. I write with some aspects of all these, where I am completely free, imaginatively seeking to discover and test my actual thinking, but do not advocate myself or my thought as a model for others. This is privately generated, without attempting to change or hope for change in others and with no thought of being a writer in any professional (competitive) sense. Yet it is public writing, in which I share my thoughts, allow myself to be seen, and value what I've done on some level as I would value an artwork I choose to present to anonymous others. And I can imagine others doing something similar, that this is not a one of a kind activity but a discipline that requires careful choices.

Part of this discipline is based on the desire for the writer truly to know his or her own thought, and to face it as part of the reality of one’s particular being. The discipline is a humility in front of oneself, before anything goes to others. For instance, each time you share something you've created you are potentially engaged in a compromise, at least the hint of a lie. That is, you have to ask yourself, do I want to be understood, and if I do, then how far do I go to achieve that, how may I have unthinkingly begun with an image of what a reader might understand and worked backwards to my own thought. Are the deepest mysteries that I face in my self--this, my self, every self—are they communicable? I think of Americans especially as being unwilling to imagine that they are not. For us, communication is everything, and to hell with what cannot be understood. So in seeking your thought you must doubt or at least wonder if it is truly yours, and this takes you deeper into your being.

The discipline of this kind of writing is to stay focused on expressing the true thought that you have, and not drifting into the effect of thought, or effectiveness of the writing. Working with that thought, finding the motivation for it and stepping outside it freely as if it were not your own--this communicates something of value apart from what is effective. Effectiveness is tied to what will accord with the greatest or at least a sufficient number of imagined others. Or will irritate, in a way that creates a controversy, hence a public. You are effective as a writer if you make yourself in some way an object for others, to slide along with or rub up against. To do this you must want to make a difference, whether it is a lofty ideal or a personal ambition. And this is what I do not want to do.

For instance, I almost said, "for years" I have been working on this certain kind of writing, etc. That would be true, but I know I would add that only to give weight to what I'm saying. It would fit as an autobiographical statement, but would not add anything to what I wish to express. It would be a kind of boast, and I know how much I would like to boast and be considered an important person by others, how sly I can be. So if I have the chance to control that, then I cannot allow it to appear. I cannot allow myself to be proud of my writing in any way, any more than of my music. Simply put, it detracts from what is really most important to me, which is, to work through whatever "stuff" I am working on in an honest way, finding where it takes me.

Clarity is another matter, it is a practical matter that cannot be dismissed. When I go back over writing I’ve done in the past that I have not edited for clarity I often do not understand it, or suspect a misunderstanding. One thought does not flow from another, and I wonder what fills the gap. I cannot assume that I am the same person that wrote it, and I want to know that person. There are many ways of reading, but one of them is to attempt to know the writer’s intended thought as accurately as possible. If pronoun references are ambivalent then one might easily project into it what one would like the writer to be saying. If you write first for yourself then you would want to know where your mind was going. As you approach greater clarity you often discover hidden contradictions, willful obscurity. And if you’re sharing this it is necessary to imagine it read by another, if you don’t have a trained editor working on the text. The distance from one’s thought, needed for self-development, is complemented in a more mundane way by the skill of editorial distance. This aims at a text where thoughts flow from each other, that reveals meaning rather than obscures it, and yet does not sacrifice meaning for simplicity. Easier said than done.

I find this a compelling question, even if rhetorical, that arises from this sort of writing: what good does it do us to discover what we believe to be true? Next, do we really want to be responsible for what we think--what is our motivation here? And why should we want to share this process with others, when we eliminate the desire to do them some benefit? Are we prevented from sharing this because we can’t find a satisfying reason to do so?

2006-12-06T09:23:00.000-05:00

13.~~~~~~~~~

[reading Walter Benjamin, "Art in the Age of Mechanical Production" in Illuminations ] Reading art through the lens of the social conditions or mode of production at the time it is produced makes art an it apart from the artist. This might seem to be a painful alienation but paradoxically it can free us (the artists) to construct our own standards of value. How so? Because if we aren’t responsible for the conditions then we can treat them as imposed against our will. Once separated we can side with our will in its individual complexity against the generally imposed form, which tends to be univocal. Mechanical reproduction, like any mode of production, spreads out from its beginnings as novel invention and becomes the standard, defining art for an Age, part of the code outside of which one is not to be understood by others. The effect is first noticed, then assumed and ignored as the necessity of progress. Yet the possibility exists, once this code and its roots are identified, for us to realize that we are already outside it, forced outside by virtue of perceiving how mechanical reproduction, for instance, has become part of the code of art. Driven by the desire to become fully responsible for what we do (indeed, this is one of the contradictions which is bundled in the code) we can feel the pull generated by social forces. Our alienation from the code of how art is defined, hence potentially from our own artwork and the forces motivating it in ourselves, far from being denied as foolish ("how can we help being determined by the Age") might be reinforced and justified as the foundation of its advance. That is not so far-fetched, since Western art has generally been considered as the history of progressive alienation from the dominant code, a history of transgression rather than the continual elaboration of a singular tradition.

Thus we, as the artist, are turned inward rather than outward towards market forces, toward an always unstable reconciliation with ourselves rather than with the Age. This enables us to define ourselves as giving and communicating without dependence on being received and confirmed. This is love without looking for a return of love from the outside, yet an absence of regret, anguish or resentment, because the terms of inner reconciliation have been met.

In older, more religious terms that cannot be restored--and art has its origins in the cult, before it was called art--we create out of the purity of the heart; the opening to divinity is the road to our communication with our world. When we want salt at the table, we must say so to our neighbor and be understood by our common utterance; when we want art, which is a self-reconciliation no one else can give us, we turn to ourselves and stretch ourselves to the most profound self-understanding of which we are capable, a thrashing about or a recovery that is truly awe-ful. Others will understand our strange behavior to the extent they share this experience in themselves. We do not make them understand, we respect them enough that they should understand themselves.

In cult art "what mattered was [the art objects'] existence, not their being on view." (p.224) Cult art arose in the communal context, in which it was shared and not evaluated or owned by individuals, valued in a way that would not be considered value today. This is a world we can barely imagine. But as artists we can each see ourselves in the position of that community, even though we cannot accept the terms. What we create is not for us a commodity value, for the market, but of use for ourselves, like growing our own vegetables. As de Kooning said, "I paint to have something to look at”; exactly what one wants to look at is constantly subject to doubt and change.

This describes an improbable possibility, the route one would have to take in order to be free of the pressures of creating what is of value, as defined outside ourselves. It is equally improbable that our age, along with its confusion of art with its reproduced and marketed facsimile, also yields artists who resist the urge to create things of value, or to be "contemporary", and yet it does.

2005-09-16T07:49:00.000-04:00

12.~~~~~~~~~~~

Pointless beauty

If we live long enough, and can remember the beliefs that held our lives together at earlier times, we might come to realize that we now occupy a spot 180 degrees from where we once were. And to the extent we can accept our changing without self-judgment, we might see that these positions do not fundamentally contradict each other but form a greater unity. For this to happen involves another requirement, something like suffering and isolation because of the road we have chosen. It strips us of the arrogance of belief, of the prized and confident status of the "true believer" in oneself, and leaves us with a clarity of vision that can come no other way, and can only barely be communicated. The most important change that evolves is how we are with who we are. Instead of inhabiting a house we choose, we realize that we are the house we have not chosen.

Perhaps as we pass deeper into life we come to what looks like the end of a road, where we turn around and greet ourselves now coming towards us, our many selves, with joy and understanding. I’m so glad to see you again, we might say.

When I was young I wanted my life and work to have meaning, to have a point, to represent me. I wanted to have some place in the world that would produce an effect that I would judge as good. Money, fame and respectability I saw as pointing towards goals of individual security that were of no use to me since they were of so much use to the world. I wanted something else, that did not benefit me personally but served a higher purpose than my private existence. I was suspicious of all personal benefit beyond my basic survival needs. Political work, organizing for revolutionary change, came to fill that need, at a time when revolution was in the air. What I scorned about art was that it seemed to serve the very society I wished us to change, and the artist was one more functionary, including those who said art had some benefit in changing society.

That revolutionary dream and movement collapsed; in doing so it revealed to me that the turning of the world was in charge of my self-definitions. Out of a need for something to sustain my spirit I began to play music, and I entered a new dilemma. I refused to call what I did art, or myself the artist, but rather one who played music to pursue his pleasure, which was to improvise freely. Of no use to society, this could hardly be called a role or profession. The improviser was the one kind of musician that could not, certainly in the 80’s in America, be considered an entertainer. We were unpaid, and I at least had no expectation of ever being paid. We had no audience, only listeners, often reluctant; we played as an activity and did not fulfill a genre. Each time I saw a partner turn in the direction of entertaining, as a so-called underground artist or a more conventional musician, I felt abandoned and isolated, and realized that I myself could only be a fraud at that game.

After envy and rage at the music world, time and again, comes the realization that I have another place for myself, a place in myself, that I betray but is ultimately inalienable. This is a place that has no name, no identity, and so is pointless from the perspective of the world. I have come to name this as the place of beauty. Pointless until it yields things called art, as pointless as religious experience until it yields religious belief, or love until it yields a relationship, rage until it finds the target of anger, or life until we are gripped by the fear of death. To the desire to be special, to excel, to create something, it has nothing to say. Art teaches us things, can be judged, analyzed so that we can benefit from it, and its practitioners are valued by reputation if not by money. Beautiful is an adjective we can apply or refuse to award to things of art or nature, a matter of taste and dispute. Beauty, however, is a place that is no place. To come from beauty is to have nowhere to go.

To say these things does not create a better world, any more than playing gives the world more beauty.

For years I refused the word beauty because I could not free it from the social meanings it has been given, could not make it my own word. It was a word I would have to define in order to satisfy others. I was under the spell of ideology, of society’s control of language; like the word “God“ (and how many other words!), I did not dare “beauty” to be determined by my experience. I adopted the scorn for the word common to the avant-garde, suspicious of conventional sentiment and feeling, from which it vainly and tragically hopes to free itself. It turns beauty into something so rare and precious that none of us would dare claim to be engaged or associated with it; at best it can be an achievement of past culture. But if beauty is no thing and has no place then it is available to all at all times. That which has no future or past can only be present. When we ask ourselves, why are we playing?--and pause a moment, really needing to know--then we realize it is not to create any thing, but to enter and experience this barely nameable place that has no place except in our experience.

2005-09-03T07:17:00.000-04:00

11.~~~~~~~~~

Nothing is profound in itself but in the gaze that looks in a certain direction and finds no end. Looking into an open well that the light does not penetrate, you strain your eyes to make things out in the dark. After a lapse of time when you are patient, you can make out something dimly, but even so it seems you are gazing at nothing and everything at the same time. The dimness brings the imagination into play; you participate in what you see. You might try to convince others of something you think is profound, but you are only trying to arouse desire, or to find those who gaze in the same direction and can share the experience. We are fascinated most by questions that cannot be answered, whose every answer opens the door of the question further rather than closing it. The door comes off the hinges, then the jamb is removed, finally the wall itself is seen to be permeable. What is profound is what we most want to get inside of, and there we will find ourselves lost and yet strangely at home, searching and at peace at the same time. We want to get inside and then find ourselves engulfed, swallowed in the abyss.

The desire for depth contradicts the fear of helplessness when we are lost, when we feel that what is around us is harmful because we haven’t nailed things down. This is a fear men especially don’t like to admit; our job is never to be lost. Others around us want to make sure that every question is productive in a way they can follow. In order to accommodate them we will mask our gaze as the desire to understand and control, to come to conclusions that can stand on their merits without us. Or to satisfy our self-image that we “make a difference”, which means, to leave some valued mark on the earth before we die. But when our gaze into the deep does come to the point of conclusive answers it quickly becomes dull, bored, without imagination. Philosophy, religion, music, art, the academic world--what doesn’t succumb to this?

For some, the desire for revolution has been profound, for no one can tell us what would happen if people were to believe they could choose the shape of their world. Revolution has been a space of dreaming and adventuring, and will be again. A certain imagination is opened by the thought of this, a door no one knew existed until the French people opened it in 1789, not knowing where they were going. But to direct and administer a revolution demands one answer and must put an end to all questions, and eliminate those who would continue them. That is why successful revolutions like the French and Russian lose their depth and become, as everyone says, a mockery of their origins.

God too is a word that for a few still stands for the unanswered question, the search into depth. God is a word of imagination and myth, which means that an endless number of stories can be told, even contradictory, and they all work to point us to our depths, where we cannot recognize ourselves. To turn the word into the source of explicit answers for everything, from the beginning to the end of time and being, is to presume that no unanswerable question ever has a right to be asked. From this viewpoint it is foolish, weak, and even evil to have any unfathomable depth inside us that needs searching. All that depth is projected onto a Father who most of all will protect us from ourselves, the depth of self-knowledge. He will pave over the depths as if they were so many potholes, filled to enable the smooth flow of our traffic. To have such a God, which is the God of religion, is to look into a bottomless lake and see only our reflection.

2005-08-29T06:56:00.000-04:00

10.~~~~~~~~~~~

A well-accepted tenet of contemporary liberalism is the blessings of individuality, as in “each person is an individual“ and presumably we should view ourselves as individuals first of all. This is not a starting point for reflection but the stopping point of a belief system, an ideology that claims wisdom, a directive: “Be an individual, make sure your thoughts are your own!“ It goes along with, “don’t trust anyone!“ As such it is an assertion of rights to be recognized, thrown against a background of the pressure to conform, which in liberal thinking has taken on the image of the tyrant or commanding God. As an ideology, it does not include a respect or interest to explore the content of individuality when that content resists the assertion of individuality. Moreover, it obscures another viewpoint, that of the interrelation, the connectedness of minds, which has a subtlety that is harder to demonize than the tyrant. It is easier to stand against the coercion of one’s mind by another than the interrelation of our mind with another.

There is no individual mind, just as there is no individual art. That is, in the concreteness of the individual content is absolutely unique, however similar, but the form of the mind is relation. Mind is the very making of relation, the desire of relation, the interplay of relations. A fascination, which seems so individual, is a desire for relation. Each is specific, existing among the myriad of possibile fascinations, yet this myriad is the context without which the one could not exist. A claim to superior validity is an assertion of one relation over another, one that we make at one moment, replaced or reinforced at another moment. How important could it be to notice and speak of some relations--for instance, ask this question--and not others?

Every perception we have of a relation between things takes on its meaning only in the relation with other minds. The organ of the brain itself, in its genetic evolution, is entirely dependent on all those that preceded and contributed to it. If we do not own our brains then certainly we cannot think alone. When we believe we are, when we have the energy that comes from thinking we are the producers of our thought, we are pushing others away and so are not alone. What we are doing is not thinking unless we are aware of this, awareness itself being another word for relation. Thinking is then, in my narrow definition here, a very particular activity of the mind, quite rare. It would be hard to call it a function of the mind. It is vision, a broadening, an expansion that includes the other as condition of oneself, a falling off of the illusion of individual selfhood. It may not interest anyone at all, yet still it is done in relation with everyone.

Writing can be a mode of thinking in that it assumes others, even if imaginary, who could find and share one’s thinking, simply by being expressed in language. Similarly, there is no creating art or music alone, even if our intention is completely otherwise, following the notion of individuality. Performing music, for instance, can either be the demonstration of what we alone can do or have decided to do, or it can be the actual playing we do at one moment, by which we allow each other to enter and share a space. Even a solo can be played in this way, not to create a space for oneself but a space that is shared, even created together at the same time. One plays the sounds that others are giving, just as in writing one gives back the thoughts and images and sounds of words that come from those who read what has been written. And even from those who will never read it--especially those are the ones for whom, or with whom, one writes. One writes, plays, thinks, when one and the other touch. This is the source of pleasure for all these activities, and what all ideologies resist.

2005-08-17T06:43:00.000-04:00

9.~~~~~~~~~

Is it possible to be aware of the mind, when it is only the mind that can be aware? There is nothing new in this question, and yet it continues to move towards the horizon.

I’m fascinated by the way my individual mind moves--it is my moving and playing, that I can observe as my body is still. And then I watch how I/it shifts focus to “the mind”, mine to ours, from individual to species. This mind is the mind, yet it still exists in the sight of this particular mind in one time and place. I can stand between the two and know myself as the link between subject and object, as in, this human is every human. So one of my primal fascinations, which is, why am I fascinated by this or that?, shifts to: why is the mind fascinated, what is fascination. If I follow the pathway of one thought to another it is the mind which is doing this; I am the pathway of the mind.

This is not Buddhist meditation, which requires that one be fully aware of thoughts but hold no interest in them; meditation is pointedly disinterested, cuts at the root of interest as a form of desire. Fascination, which here fascinates me, is rather like a light guiding me down the path of the mind. It is desire, and my desire is to know it not extinguish it. I didn’t say, know about desire, but know it, as the Delphic oracle didn’t suggest to us to know about ourselves but to know ourselves. I take that to mean, face to face and suddenly, or finally, speechless. And I could speak forever about desire, but to know it is to know myself as desire, and to face it speechlessly. That has nothing of renunciation or opposition in it, but nonetheless a kind of extinction and silence. It is extinguished not as something that we overpower but by its own strength and fullness.

2005-08-16T10:19:00.002-04:00

8.~~~~~~~~~revised 12-08

A career is a kind of machine, of which we set ourselves up to be operators. It is intended to manipulate something we think of as nature, not our material but our social environment and our relation to it. We think it is ours to control and serve us, to mold to our interests, only to find that we have built ourselves into it and cannot disobey or escape it. The career is not at fault, it is we ourselves who invite it to take over, believe in it, and can’t imagine we would let it come to dominate. James P. Carse’s description of the relation of humans to the machine could well be applied to the career:

“We make use of machines to increase our power, and therefore our control, over natural phenomena….To operate a machine one must operate like a machine. Using a machine to do what we cannot do, we find we must do what the machine does. Machines do not, of course, make us into machines when we operate them; we make ourselves into machinery in order to operate them. Machinery does not steal our spontaneity from us; we set it aside ourselves, we deny our originality. There is no [individual] style in operating a machine. The more efficient the machine, the more it either limits or absorbs our uniqueness into its operation….Because we make use of machinery in the belief we can increase the range of our freedom, and instead only decrease it, we use machines against ourselves….A machine is not a way of doing something; it stands in the way of doing something.” (Finite and Infinite Games, p. 122-3)

In the past a career was not so much a machine or collection of techniques for self-advancement as it was a socially and economically accepted role in which one chose to place oneself for a lifetime, a step above simply taking whatever job was available. It still had some of the earlier sense of a “calling”, derived from the early Protestant conception of each individual’s sanctified vocation in the world, involving a certain asceticism. To have a career in the twentieth century at least involved some degree of personal interest and discipline, with higher status as a further motivating factor. Career distinguished the office worker from the industrial worker; a secretary was “a career girl” even if she made less than some factory workers and made no moves to advance herself. In the higher ranks of career, one could be considered very highly as an artist, an engineer, or a doctor, and far advanced in one’s profession but not in terms of financial reward. For some the integrity of following professional standards, doing things the proven right way rather than what one was ordered to do, stood above career advancement. This was especially true of professions that were considered implicitly noble and self-sacrificing. Such people saw themselves as giving of themselves for the good of others, like doctors serving a community, scientists and scholars contributing to the store of human knowledge, or even, despite a hostility to bourgeois society, avant-garde artists opening perceptions beyond present limitations. In fact this covered even the obscure artists and others whose career might yield little immediate visible success but who worked on the assumption that they were in touch with the future, the visionary thinkers and scientists before their time.

After the crushing of sixties altruism and utopianism, cynicism about such motivations in the Reagan era and the development of the New Economy of the nineties convinced people that the only valid goals are individual, immediate reward and not social contribution, or at least that the individual need not sacrifice in order to fulfill public need. The individualized career, aimed strictly at advancement over one's peers, has become the means to that end, to which idealistic motivation is an obstruction of old-fashioned vintage. This is the kind of career that is not aimed at status gain over manual labor, but at the singular aim of success. This is not the success of the physicist at the moment of discovery but at the podium of the Nobel Prize, nor of the artist in the studio but at his or her opening in a highly visible gallery and a feature in a major publication.

The importance of idealistic motivation is still alive among artists, however, particularly those who want to feel they are contributing something new and of value to the world, and not just attractive enough to sell. It is the function of this motivation that has changed. In the early twentieth century the avant-garde offered their art to an ungrateful world, or at least could imagine that world ungrateful and themselves oppositional, holding out for higher values. They may have been politically on the left but were contemptuous of popular judgment, instead turning to their peers for judgment. Contemporary artists who honor that avant-garde, however, prefer the appearance of autonomy and opposition while never doubting that their efforts will attract buyers. If disillusioned they will try something else, no point doing something that has been rejected. Unlike their predecessors, they expect and are expected to be appreciated immediately if they are doing anything valuable, and widely enough recognized to draw a significant viewing and buying public. There is no cultural lag allowed if one needs to get gallery shows or performances here and now in competition with one’s peers. A large part of creativity today is finding what arouses a response, a practical problem to be solved, leading to the convergence of the high art and advertising worlds. What does not elicit response is considered elitist, in just the sense that the business enthusiasts and “values” defenders have named elitism as the enemy of democracy. With the explosion of the art market beginning in the fifties and then finally with the nineties’ marketplace populism (the notion that market demand determines ultimate values) the gap between artist consumer and producer has practically vanished. The two flatter each other with their good taste, each serving the other on opposite sides of the bargaining table.

The myth at large, and held often sincerely by artists themselves, is that they live for their art, and so their idealism runs the show. However, their very status as artists is inseparable from the career—the shows, reviews, the contacts, the rising price tags. The same word—strategy—is used interchangeably for artwork and career; whatever works for one will work for the other. Without a strategy you will never get past the entry-level stage, the wide-open door that everywhere proclaims the unity of democracy and market. But when everyone gets to call him or herself an artist then who is the significant*** artist? Only the career can tell: significant equals successful in the complicated hierarchy of demand. So here is the contradiction of idealistic myth and commercial reality, such as one would find rare among doctors or scientists today, whom everyone, including themselves, expects to be mercenary.

Musicians of the past had no such complications. They thought of themselves not as artists but more humbly as skilled workers, providing a service to entertain, selling their skill, bargaining for wages through a union, and deferring to the entrepreneur who was their boss. Musicians were distinguished from composers; even if musicians improvised it was over chord changes that were laid down in writing, of which the composer was owner and recipient of royalties. For some exceptional players, especially singers, there came to be agents who intervened on their behalf (the legendary figure that approaches them from the bar with a promise of a “real” career). Many musicians do still play for weddings and in clubs as cover bands, but generally today they have been upgraded from workers to entrepreneurs of their own ventures without middleman agents. Most musicians need to be recognized in public media and to compete with one another for revenue, rather than to be picked from the crowd on the basis of relative competence. We—I include myself--either manage their own careers or are relatively enough in demand to be able to get gigs with a minimum of this work. This role assimilates us to contemporary artists, whether we call ourselves that or not, and as such we are pressured to acquire the image and self-image of composers—creating rather than reading or interpreting a score--even if we are free improvisers. (In fact, the role required of the contemporary musician is in conflict with the approach of free improvisation, dooming it time and again to the margins, as I have pointed out in numerous writings. The only improvisers who make any kind of living have developed a repeatable style or attractive career trajectory—legend or innovator, etc.) We are expected to have a style, identity within a genre, resume, associates and contacts, perhaps even a philosophy presented in interviews, just like the successful visual artist.

The fact that art has become the entertainment choice for a portion of the urban audience means that we are still judged by our ability to bring in revenue (paying audiences, cd sales) yet must do so in the image of idealistic artists—independent, following our individual muse, etc. It would defeat our project to acknowledge that we are in fact entertainers, dependent on market demand. The artist image obscures the reality that we are a good step down from the working musicians of the past, who did, after all, earn a living playing music, unlike the bulk of musicians today. We have been paid on the cheap, with the status of artists and entrepreneurs, “boss of my own”, liberated from the working class with a self-managed career. The skilled musicians in dance bands in the thirties, on the other hand, were self-acknowledged entertainers. They were largely neglected and unknown, disinterested in pursuing higher status, and are often upgraded today to mirror how musicians present themselves, as artists, just as “outsider artists” are now discovered and brought into the fold. We see them as deserving more, perhaps waiting to have their fortunes reversed. How could anyone be truly happy who is talented and yet invisible? That is the modern blind spot, and there is no vision available today to see beyond this notion, sadly little coming from self-respecting artist/musicians themselves.

Above I’ve called the contemporary career a kind of machine, which tends to take over its operator. For the artist-entertainer, the nature on which the machinery operates efficiently or not is called the art world or the music world. This is the spontaneous nature that we feel needs to be controlled, to serve us, rather than us just going along with it and letting it be, ignoring publicity and image. This world is the audience, the readers, the viewers, the critics, the promoters, the favored venues, the trendsetters who will either help us or harm us, and will have the control over us that we dream of having over them. In fact we can manipulate it, but only if we are willing to be manipulated by it. We might decry others’ manipulations in order all the more to deny that we are doing the same thing with the tools we are more skilled in using.

One musician/entrepreneur told me that the actual playing of music was half of what we were about, the other half was publicity. I have come to the conclusion that to maintain this balance is impossible; one will be master and one will be slave. Not only do audience, readership, viewers of art, not want art to be self-defining, but the shocking thing is, neither do we the artists. That is, we do not behave as if we want art to be what we do, we want it to be what that doing represents to others. Without some reason to advocate the actual playing of music for its own sake, the entrepreneurial side will always triumph. Conversely, if making art is even just 51% it will be impossible not to see entrepreneurial activity as anything but interference, again and again.

To paraphrase Carse, a career is not a way of doing something, it stands in the way of doing something. For thirty years I have tried to see it otherwise, ever since I first realistically imagined myself as a musician. But now I see that it was only my own desire for acceptance, my desire to represent myself to others in some favorable way, that led me into that illusion.
In all I am writing here I am not judging my fellow musicians, on the contrary I am speaking on our behalf, of our deepest dreams and most troubling frustrations and sources of confusion. Many musicians respond to my writings such as this, not insulted but pleased, relieved almost, to see our experience laid out in print, how career and marketplace requirements make it so difficult to play the music we wish to play for others. How many would be improvising, for instance, if they did not have to disguise and apologize for it, sacrificing livelihood for it? People hold in highest esteem the after hours jam sessions of the thirties when musicians played only for themselves. Yet few critics show any interest in what musicians do for themselves today, and too many musicians are confused by standards of financial success and failure into thinking that they have reached their musical heights when their career starts to take off. My belief is that we have not begun to see—or hear--what is possible for us to do.

I am a musician directing my writing primarily to other musicians, and encouraging non-musicians to look over our shoulder at what we might say to each other, if freed of the hype and illusions we generally have to hawk to get a few people to show up at a performance…or a foundation to fund us. We need to see ourselves not as competitors for ever scarcer resources but as people who share in common a situation brought on us and not of our choosing. We cannot be the working class musicians of the past, paid to read a score or do whatever the bosses think will turn out an audience, nor are we fulfilled as entrepreneurs, masters of image creation, dependent on others for our self-esteem. I would say that we deserve to be paid well, but that only brings the response from the music world, “then give us what we want.” So I say instead, we deserve first of all our own self-respect for the years of our lives we give to our love and passion, what we would do without social support or reward, the invisible that we must always distort into visibility in order to justify ourselves.

For our sake I mourn the loss, the absence at least, of what our musical experience could be. I mean ours here in the broadest sense of what is shared: there is no true listener who is not also playing; there is no player who is not at the very same time listening--the two are only inches apart. Music for all of us lies buried under the layers of judgment about what should be played and who should be heard, which indicates just as much what should be unheard and who deserves to be unheard. For the musician, if our desire to be one of those heard drives our music, then our musical experience will follow the fate of that desire and not the actual playing. Only an honest and deep indifference, an indignant refusal to be driven by that desire, no matter how strong it is, can free our music from this.

2005-08-15T06:48:00.003-04:00

7.~~~~~~~~ revised 12-08

At least for now, no one would arrive at this blog except as I direct them individually, and any others to whom they might suggest it. Its location is something of a secret--the formally incorrect spelling in the address alone does something to hide it from those who might otherwise stumble onto it. Its readers then form something of an intentional community rather than a conventional readership; chances are they would know each other, as consumers of writing who scan the blogrolls would not. This is a peculiar relation for writing to have with others, on the border between the one-of-a-kind letter and the text directed to an anonymous audience. As with more accessible blogs, it is facilitated by the internet, the technology that has finally challenged the book. Despite the huge advance of the internet, however, our culture still defines the book as the medium of the most serious writing. Publishers are constrained by economics to be selective, and cultural seriousness means that someone more knowledgeable or at least more powerful than the reader has pre-selected the text. On the other hand, the democratic internet God accepts all, and so has weakly challenged the idea that anything can be serious. Rather it joins market democracy in celebrating each offering as worthy and so equally unworthy. With one hand it giveth opportunity to the writer while the other taketh away presumed value.

The writing of my blog is like a series of letters, yet it is written not in a manner addressed to specific friends but as if offered to anyone. The reader of a letter is a specific you, distinguished from the writer, I whereas in writing for anonymous others, when readers are referred to they will generally be joined with the writer in the universals we or one. Those to whom I've offered the writing of this blog most likely have personal knowledge of me, as in the letter form. However, I am not speaking out of that personal relation but rather creating something in the presence of my friends. Art, whether primarily material or mental, is created for human beings, available to friends, perhaps, but in their existence as humans. Here, this individual you know is attempting to speak to the nature of things, just as any book writer of non-fiction would do, and can be held accountable. So in this form friend and human being are joined; there is this one person speaking, but he displaces himself from the personal relationship in order to think outside that immediacy, and might lead you to do the same. Even though we are not in the same room, we find ourselves thinking together, as intimate as a house concert. This approaches the relationship of friendship known to Socrates and takes a detour around the notion of philosophy that has evolved in the West, confined to elevated and depersonalized texts presented to anonymous others, just as music has evolved in relation to the abstracted audience. I have no objection to this, I merely operate as a writer outside the circle of published writers/anonymous readers as I am outside the ranks of the music world as a musician.

Writing separated from the act of writing, thought separated from the act of thinking, and music separated from the making of music, are all forms of abstraction. The substitution of the object for the activity encourages the further separation of those acting from those receiving, subjects receiving objects. This abstraction creates an audience rather than listeners, students rather than co-creators, a readership rather than readers. In a small way--and all creating is small, concrete in time and place--the form of writing/giving I am engaging here is an attempt to deal with these forms of separation, to heal the painful breaches I face in myself and to offer what I am at this moment coming to understand in my thinking. Like the forms of musical communication I prefer, it is the outcome of the desire I have as I create, to be fully present to myself and to others at the same time. This is a desire in myself, but perhaps it engages something vital in others--in you.

I began by saying “at least for now.” That would also hold true for all the thought and decisions of this writing; thought may be worked through to an extreme degree but in the end it is always “at least for now“. Unlike a book, which has reached a finished point all at once when it is released to the printer, the blog encourages writer and reader alike to think of each entry as a short chapter, complete at the moment it is uploaded, but awaiting the next installment. It is not thought which is frozen but the medium, allowing us the pause to take it in, to respond and for the writer perhaps to recoil, move, shift. Seeing one’s writing as a text is not an end but another beginning; following the nature of thought it will continue to evolve and dispute itself. There is no point when thinking is done with, only temporary arbitrations, articulations, lacking any guarantee of progress or protection from betrayals. Thinking is learning how to think; writing is learning how to write; playing is learning how to play—and that is my standard expression, and at least for now I can’t do any better.

2005-08-14T07:57:00.001-04:00

6.~~~~~~~~~~

Writing for me frequently includes examining my effort and process of thinking, and not just the conclusions. Another word for this process might be self-questioning—self-doubt and the analyzing of assumptions. This is personal writing, meaning, I write for myself but then with some adjustments hand it over to potential readers--and to myself, to view critically at some later point. I do this not as therapy, any more than overcoming a block would send a fiction writer into therapy, but there is certainly an emotional pressure to write in this way that I don’t try to disguise. Those questions I would share with others, such as this very one, are personal and at the same time public in significance, relating to a culture and time I inhabit with others. If I consider myself a writer among writers who leave no such self-referential traces, then I feel on the defensive, even self-accused. What could be the validity of sharing what I write for myself with others? Further, can I make such writing public and not distort what is “for myself”? I can imagine myself alone when I write, but can I write anything truly for myself alone?

My writing comes up against my own criticism of the self-referential turn of contemporary culture, in the urge to put oneself constantly on stage or in print, and in the therapeutic reflex (the self-esteem movement, for example) upholding our social order. Unless I can find my way clear of this dilemma I should consider not publishing this writing and confine myself to the more conventional critique (which I also do at times).

If I am writing personally then I will openly admit to writing only what engages me, what bothers and obsesses me. There can be only what I myself need in the space between myself and what I put down here. The writing will attempt to trace the path of my thinking as accurately as possible and explore the roots of that in my history and psychology. I will be hunting out problems, dilemmas, dishonesty, attempts to deceive myself. Thoughts of what you the reader might want to find in it do not figure in. As I read it at some later point, however, I may feel I have touched on something I wish to express to others, and I edit it to this end. I negotiate, as consciously as possible, the distance of some imagined reader from myself. Some image of what a reader might understand inevitably appears, and a corresponding image of what I am to do as a writer. These are social roles, the producer and consumer of writing, dependent on each other, just as we find in music and art. The producer typically expects to interest and satisfy at least a certain niche of readers, and so works with some hypothesis of what they would want and need, perhaps an antagonistic stimulus. But where do these images come from, and how accurate could they possibly be?

There is a dilemma here I wish to open up to scrutiny—and not just for my benefit. So right here is where the reader, the other, intrudes; there must be some inkling however submerged that specifically this or that point I wish to make in print should be said to others, and not just to myself. We is found in the I. This is distinct from thinking there are others who want to hear it, that I could find a market for these thoughts; almost the reverse is true, that if I felt my thought was already accepted by others there would be no point in saying it. For all my humility about my intellectual powers, then, certainly I am writing from a moral purpose, and choosing out of all my musings what I would like to correct of the world’s received ideas and behavior.

I don’t oppose writing that lacks the self-conscious perspective of the writer; I simply elaborate a space for what I have found myself doing. As with the strange music I play, its value may be restricted and obscure, understandably making little impact on the world, but even so something can be said for it. It engages a certain discipline, first of all accuracy, awareness and honesty. Moreover it seeks to avoid the intrusion of images of the reader and writer leaning over my shoulder as bothersome phantoms. To write anything in a common language, even a diary entry, assumes other readers of this language, and so intimates at least a common humanity of reader and writer. I must have an appreciation of at least one reader, myself, who does not want to be deceived. The reader images, however, that I seek to banish are those aroused by fear of rejection or by the desire to flatter and attract. So as I adjust my personal writing for others I ask, am I thinking this through or am I seeking to gather and fortify a circle of opinion, of which I am the center?

When I seek to write with clarity and consistency I am more likely to face contradiction, confusion and weakness in my thinking, which I must then acknowledge and record. That is not a drawback, it is exactly what I want to do; there is no adventure and little truth if we plan for comfort. Such self-awareness survives the adjustments I make when I make such writing generally available. Perhaps readers of the current age would like to see vulnerability on the part of the writer; they would see that in me (perhaps “refreshing honesty”) and miss the content of thought. No writer can control what readers will do, but they can state their awareness of the possibility of misreading. For most writers, I imagine, there is an end to vulnerability in the finished product; finished means the mind has come to the end of its work and has achieved closure, until the next work perhaps sees the flaws. In writing we are making an object, and by the time of the last edit we can expect to be in control; at that point we will not genuinely be vulnerable to what is now on the page. We can fully affirm every word of it, for we are thankfully outside the thought we have produced and the vulnerability of ambivalence. Writing personally for the sake of thinking itself, however, it is difficult for me to escape anxiety in this way, and so difficult to complete anything. I can never believe that I have adequately nailed anything down, much less take pride in it. I try not to think of myself as cowardly, but the temptation is there.

I can’t deny that I have an image of a reader after all, one who reads and chooses what to read somewhat as I do. If I write for myself then it would follow that I am my own guide to the reader. As reader I pursue what seems to open a pathway to more questioning, often despite the author’s intentions; the absence of closure allows space for my own thought. If I need the writer to say more and he or she is not there, then I get to speak, to continue the other’s writing. I don’t focus on the person of the writer so much as the person the writer evokes in myself. I may not be able to repeat or summarize the writer’s thought, as I could in school, but my own creativity is set in motion. If on the other hand as writer I were to imagine myself required to motivate a reader, then I would lose my bearings. “Say something interesting; spice up the imagery!” So my guiding image of the reader is one who does not want me to abandon my discipline of writing for my own sake, who wants us both immersed in thought.

The danger of presenting personal writing to others is for the writer to use it to direct the focus onto him or herself as an object of interest to readers, a familiar turn of American culture ever since the New Journalism. By doing this one seeks approval for a specific image of oneself, a diversion. It uses the readers to establish a separation from them, as if daring readers to be as interesting. And further, if writing is presented not as a shared space but as the writer’s own conquest and possession, then there is little reason for the reader’s thought to extend and develop the writer’s. Much autobiography falls into this trite category, playing up to contemporary voyeur-exhibitionist taste.

What is it that we truly need to speak to others? Can we say what we want? Can we write freely? As a test, put it this way: can we say things that would create an image of ourselves that we don’t want others to have?

2005-08-01T09:18:00.003-04:00

4. and 5.~~~~~~~~~~~~

That moment when we sense we have found a form for our life that suits us is an event of great significance to us as individuals. It is particular, marked off from moments of the everyday; later, it shines out at us as the foundation of our story. “Now I know what I really am, what I really want, what will fulfill me.” It is an assertion of choice, often a risk against obstacles and well-meaning others; at the same time it seems like the final discovery of something essential, what has been waiting for us as our true nature. It could be a choice of sexual preference, or artistic direction, or political commitment, or an obsession to get to the bottom of some peculiar question. We feel we choose it at the same moment it chooses us, we are at the meeting point of our individual history and the world’s many options. That moment of conscious choice seems magical and subjective rather than a rational conclusion, and frees us from questions about the choice we’ve made. There is even a roadblock of unquestioned absolutism particular to our selfhood that hinders our retreat. For instance, for me the answer to, “why do you play only improvised music?” is not the good reasons I could give for valuing it but the moment that choice became clear to me. That moment of discovery feels like an infinity, without limit to the unfolding of the form. Similar is the moment years before when I heard an SDS (radical student group) speaker in 1965; I knew where I had to go without knowing any of the details, I found out who I already must have been. A few more of these moments would go far to describing the general path of my life.

Each such form is specific, one among many, that we then proceed to fill with content. Each is a possibility for our being to resonate in the world, and only in the world can we be received and assigned a meaning, whether welcomed or rejected. The moment in which the form appears to belong to us and us to it is a conjuncture between our singular self and the world, a moment that one’s life conjoins a moment of the world. Henceforth we define it and it defines us. Since the world is another word for all others and all forms, it is a moment of relation with all human existence, with one’s own existence as a human being. We may be hidden in our lair, our fastness, like a Zarathustra, but we are still only concrete human beings. We are found out by forces within and without, and after that we can no longer rightly maintain the myth of our isolation. That is, we might call ourselves isolates, but that is our form of defining ourselves in relation to others.

Of course there are many forms that are initially given by our family, class and society that we have not chosen but rather inhabit. There is no magic to these forms, we merely learn them as the given, in the unconscious interest of psychic or physical survival. We have not yet developed any reason to resist and reject such forms, nor the ability, drive and confidence to do so. Deferring to family ties, choosing a heterosexual partner, driving on the right side of the road, responding to the friendly greeting at the checkout counter, following automatically the succession of stages in academic life and employment, are diverse examples of forms that the vast majority of us reproduce but have never specifically chosen. It takes little effort to do such things, we could do these things in our sleep. We look around us and find broad agreement and that’s enough reason not to disturb others with eccentric behavior that would call attention to ourselves. Here we are in the mainstream, as are also the narrative form of writing, the song form of music, the masterpiece orientation in art. Today we could also include acceptance of marketplace democracy, for which there is no alternative in sight. The list goes on, down to the details of our gestures and behavior, by which an acute observer can distinguish an American from an Italian with only a moment’s glance. These forms we think as morally and politically indifferent, we might search but cannot find the interest to question them or choose something else, to be something other than what is initially given in our surroundings. In most cases we invest ourselves in such forms so deeply, with ramifications and obligations so convincing, and resistance so perilous to our pleasure system, that to break with them or even imagine what a different form would be like is highly improbable.

It would be interesting, and probably disturbing, to view every form we inhabit as contingent, originally prescribed by our environment and then locked in a security/insecurity system that--how can we not be sure?--betrays us. If only for a few moments, as a harmless exercise of the imagination, we can distance ourselves from our knee-jerk behavior and beliefs that are so familiar we don’t even know they compose who we are. For instance, to consciously walk down the street with a limp, for only one block of a city street, would be frightening and liberating--an enlightening experience we would never forget if only for the flood of self-consciousness chatter we would hear in our minds. One would think, everyone is noticing me, I am lying to all these strangers—and yet really, what does it matter? It seems foolish to do this until we realize that despite our huge claims to have chosen to be who we are (unlike those poor souls of traditional society), we have a huge, anxious and irrational resistance to do this simple thing. We learn that we identify ourselves with forms that only seem to be natural, that we have accepted without thinking. We have defined “natural” as the path of least resistance. This experiment (just one example of harmless nonconformism) threatens to be a permanent change that cannot be rescinded, opening a floodgate to others, a betrayal of our self-concept. Our supposed individuality is highly selective; we don’t really know who we are after all. It opens up the realization that we live in an iron cage of our own making. But if we look for traces of resistance to ourselves not outside but inside ourselves, we can view such paths and self-questioning as a necessary complement to our need for a secure unity. That unity is always there yet outside our grasp; the mind--in its phase as ego--teases us with the thought that we have grasped, comprehended and approved ourselves, or at least we know what we don’t approve of. But there is no end to ourselves, and to the forms, the ways we can be.

A new, chosen form to which we are magnetically attracted is a quite different thing, building rather than threatening our individuality. It seems like a line extending who we truly are towards the world; at the same time, since we have chosen one form among many we are aware of our separation, our distinctness. At any rate it resonates in both ourselves and the world. But we fool ourselves, necessarily, in thinking it will continue to have the same meaning. By choosing it we risk staking ourselves on something that will change and make our relation with the world obsolete and ourselves abandoned. We initially, usually with the boldness of youth, trust something that will carry us through a fluid world, yet as the world changes the form may become a hindrance. Or it may become so much a part of the world that it is no longer a line extending from us in our distinctness. It loses its adventurous and risk-laden character and becomes the norm, diluted, without delineated edge or imagination. This is even considered “success”, when the tension with the world is relaxed in general toleration, as if our goal had been to convince everyone to adopt that form.

If at the moment of our choosing we were to think through this problematic fate we might be more tentative, and not take the bold actions of creative work. There is a tension between our desire to be part of the world, to have a place for our being that resonates with others, and our awareness of the ephemerality of the forms we once blindly chose. Lleftist politics is a good example; the desire to be effective is often hidden behind political ideals, and what “makes a difference” today will probably not do so tomorrow. The moment of choosing founds or changes the story we have of ourselves, our personal myth, in fact it creates a new one with a positive, confident direction. It projects an image of our future, and we forget that a story can only continue, it has no future that is beyond change, dissolution and betrayal.

Our conscious choices, grounding us as autonomous subjects and true believers in ourselves, is immanent to our lives, yet we tend to seek legitimacy for them in some transcendent reasoning. I choose improvisation and so have sought out the reasons that would convince others of its value, transcending my strictly personal choice. Similarly, I work today to transform my political commitment of forty years ago into something valid today, rather than think it just my personal quirk. We can at least imagine a subgroup that might respond to our choices, and we are one of that group. A form belongs only in the world, so it has others who can not only relate to it but adopt it and put energy into it. A form gives us a human community, at least potentially. And that can change more rapidly than one’s own attachment to it.

When our chosen forms lose their energy and capacity as vehicles of self-definition we continue to assert their reasonableness, but now it is in retrospect. Perhaps the form has lost its strength to define us as individuals and become broadly acceptable and routinized, pursued by those for whom the desire is success rather than adventure. Viewing this development enhances the power of “I told you so”, selectively applied. We look at our past choices and think, certainly it is clear that I would go this direction, use this form for my life, my art, politics, etc. rather than another. The choices were inherent in me, natural. I haven’t been wasting my life, we would say; I’ve been accomplishing what I was supposed to do. The unspoken corollary to this is, now I can die in peace, as if this had been the point of the adventure.

In that monologue the mind is teasing us with an image of unity and personal fulfillment, the common theme of our therapeutic society. Better to live at the point where we don’t expect ever to know if our choice was the right one. Absolutely certain that we don‘t know, we move ahead on with the full assurance of the naïve adventurer.