Rosen contra Brendel continued. Something I'm working on elsewhere

Rosen and Brendel are both arguing explicitly from within their culture because what they are each interested in, indeed preoccupied by, is not the truth value of that culture -or of culture as such- but its ability to foster a wide range of categories of event and experience.

Imagine yourself as the judge of a poetry competition where every poet is asked to write on the same theme, or in response to the same object. What you’re judging in examining and comparing the results is not the truth about the object as external substance but the ability of the poets to construct complexity out of it, with the understanding that that complexity, of their individual perceptions and responses, must be communicable. You’re not judging their ability to see a thing in absolute terms but their ability to make you see what they see, which also must begin with the understanding that at a basic level you already do, meaning the object or idea has a common form.

The format of exchange follows a simple logic: starting from simple commonality (a low common denominator), each participant is asked to develop a ‘perspective’ which is then reformulated in language (returned) as a new and more complex common form. This whole process is one of group mimesis: of communally developed representation of the world and of the community itself. The subject matter, the external world, is secondary, but not irrelevant. Or rather what is primary is not the world but the act and method of description of the world, the world as experienced and notated -transliterated- in time. So the vulgarity in Wagner and incipient in Beethoven -hence the need in Rosen’s terms for ‘tact’- is not the vulgarity of subject but of the composer’s assumptions about and attitude towards language. Beethoven is in a line of gradation with Wagner, Gerome and Helmut Newton, in the sense that Wagner indulges a bombast that Beethoven at his best merely passionately describes. Wagner’s music is written for Wagnerians in the same sense that Newton’s photographs are made for voyeurs, yet identification –as pseud0-community - is encouraged but not yet a requirement. All communities are communities of selves and others. Collective identity, as imaginary collective unity, is either a false –unrealizable- ideal or mere collective reflex: the community of fetishists and drug addicts. Wagner is preaching to the choir; Gerome is a soft-care pornographer playing to an audience; Newton and his audience are almost interchangeable, his form of communication identification with the masturbator which is to say barely communication at all, one step away from the final shift, the final descent, from interpersonal communication to masturbation in public.

What Rosen is debating with Brendel is the increasing presence of instrumentalism in form: the growing tendency to craft to reflex that reaches its apogee in the illustration and the false community of the fetish. Reflex is pure instrument. If communication is a circuit, reflex is a short. But if knowledge is measured in conclusions not in processes then the shortest distance between two points , the short circuit, is the obvious choice. This is the crux of the struggle over the human imagination that begins in the called ‘Enlightenment’ of the 18th century.

Jean Leon Gerome The Snake Charmer, 1889. Helmut Newton Saddle 1, 1976.