Paragraphs from "Militant Nudes", Elizabeth Hardwick, in the NYRB in 1971

Troubling Images: 1.) Professor Theodor W. Adorno, at the University of Frankfurt, was, not long before his death, the audience for—or the object of—a striking bit of symbolic action. Adorno, a distinguished philosopher and the teacher of many leftist students, had come to be worried about student zeal for immediate action, about spontaneity, random rebellion, and, of course, the possibility of repressive actions by the government. And how was the sacred old father rebuked? A girl got up in the classroom and took off all her clothes.

A bit of The Blue Angel here? No, perhaps the key is found in the famous scene in Swann’s Way. Mlle. Vinteuil, making love to her girl friend, puts the photograph of her doting, gifted father on the table next to the sofa so that the girl can spit on it. Proust says about the scene: “When we find in real life a desire for melodramatic effect, it is generally the ‘sadic’ instinct that is responsible for it.”

“Sexuality”—the word has become a sort of unfleshed abstraction as it trails along with liberty, fraternity, and equality in the youth revolution—is suddenly political. The body, the young one at least, is a class moving into the forefront of history.

In Gimme Shelter, a brilliant documentary film about the Rolling Stones and their concert outside San Francisco that ended in murder, several accidental deaths, and an outburst of desolation, anger, and danger that is thought to have signaled the end of something in the rock and roll scene—in this film a number of people, mostly girls, take off their clothes. Each has an expression both blank and yet sure that something is being done, accomplished, signified. They stand there in the crowd, enclosed in their sad flesh, as lonely as scarecrows among the angry, milling thousands. The gestures did not cause a head to turn and all one could feel was that the body, the feet, the breasts were foolishly vulnerable, not because of any attractions they might have for the crowd, but merely due to the lack of protecting clothing. The nude bodies were no match in dramatic interest to the fabulously dressed performers, whose tight pants, scarves, snakeskin boots, spangled boleros, red silk ruffled shirts, represented what is meant in the entertainment world by a “personal statement.”

2.) Huey Newton in New Haven, visiting Bobby Seale in jail. “If Ericka and Bobby are not set free, if the people can’t set them free, then we’ll hold back the night, there won’t be day—there’ll be no light.” The eschatological mode has in modern times wearied the Christian world, but it served them well enough for centuries and so perhaps militant leaders sensibly feel there is some life left in this style. At the Black Panther convention recently—a small and dispirited gathering according to journalists—Huey Newton outlined the program: “First, focus on closing down Howard University, second on liberating Washington, and third the seizure of the White House.” Liberating Washington. The seizure of the White House. For a little group of the faithful these words perfectly represent the “schizophrenic bind” R. D. Laing writes about. If the words are not genuinely taken seriously and only a pretense about them is kept up, this creates an impossible and corrupting cynicism very difficult for all except leaders to live with; if the commands are treated as genuine their insane and sadistic nature will unhinge all who try to act them out. This is perhaps what is truly meant by the phrase, revolutionary suicide—the killing in oneself of the uses of reality by submitting to “the program.”

The film, Ice, and the novel, Dance the Eagle to Sleep, are both imaginary projections of revolutions and civil wars to come, and there is a coercive and mystical inevitability claimed, not directly but aesthetically, that links them with the program Huey Newton gives to his followers. And the concentration upon revolutionary “balling” in the novel goes back in my mind to the poor professor in his classroom, to the mysteriousness of the girl’s answer to the professor’s worries. 

...The activism in Ice and Dance the Eagle to Sleep is not a replacement of deadening alienation but simply an addition to it. Even though Ice was filmed in the basements and bookstores and streets of New York City, one often feels in it a memory of the suffocating boredom and darkly sexual crowdings of an old army post, the kind of waiting and frustration that made soldiers before Vietnam long for some action. So, after a few years of threats and promise of revolution, rebellion, change, militant encounter, Ice and Dance the Eagle to Sleep are tours of active duty at last.

...Trash is a homosexual film produced by Andy Warhol and directed by Paul Morrissey. The Groupies has to do with deranged, obscene girls who follow rock stars around, hoping to sleep with them, if one may use such a drowsy, untimely phrase for these wandering, never-sleeping hunters. The Groupies is a documentary, although there is considerable staginess in it; Trash is a concoction that is also a real life thing part of the time.

The nature of sexuality is repetition. Phallic compulsiveness is an exaltation of repetition and yet a reduction to routine of the most drastic kind. Still novelty and challenge never lose their hold on the imagination and in the phallic hell, the center of interest will be reserved for the refusing, even for the impotent. The hero of Trash is an impotent junkie. He wanders through the long hours of the film, quiet, handsome, mysterious, stoned, but arousing almost insane desire in everyone he meets. In a world of compulsive sex, dramatic interest can only be achieved by complications, particularly since every frontier of practice has been crossed.

...In Gimme Shelter, Mick Jagger, Grace Slick, Tina Turner—the rock stars—are a disturbing contrast to the dull, sullen, angry hundreds of thousands who have come to hear them. For one thing the performers are working and even if the pay is outrageous, the acts somewhat tarnished by time, there is still discipline, energy, travel, planning, and talent. Each one is a presence, unique, competitive, formed by uncommon experiences. The crowd, however, is just a huge clot of dazed swayings, fatuous smilings, empty nightmares, threatening hallucinations, and just plain meanness. 

There is death everywhere, and of every sort, in the dead, drugged eyes and in the jostling, nervous kicks and shoves. Everyone is a danger to himself and to others. One could be stabbed by a “mystic” who thought he was God or Satan; or choked by the lowering, alcoholic violence of the Hell’s Angels just for brushing against one of their sweating arms. Someone is having a baby—another corny freakout, you find yourself thinking. The owner of the Altamont Speedway, where the concert took place, wants the birth mentioned in the media as a “first.” “Easy, easy,” Grace Slick pleads from the stage. “Why are you people fighting?” Mick Jagger wants to know. After the concert, two young boys were killed when a car left the highway and crashed into their campfire. Another young man, drugged, fell into a canal and was drowned. 

Thinking about the predatory girls who call themselves “the groupies,” remembering their obscene reveries and their moronic self-exploitation, one wants to hold back from description. One of the young men connected with the film said, in a press interview, that he was horrified by the girls and that they were stoned out of their minds all of the time. The girls are hoarse and coarse and not one arouses pity of the kind we feel for the pimply, snaggletooth synthetic girl. Holly Woodlawn, in Trash. All are despised by everyone, by the cameramen, the producers, the rock stars, just as Holly is despised by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey.

The main life of Trash comes from the perverse, proletarian vitality of Holly Woodlawn, who comes across to us as rotting skin and bones, kept alive by the blood of mascara and the breath of discarded clothing from the city’s trash barrels. Still, the people in charge of the film show their hatred by a long, boring, hideous scene in which Holly buggers herself to some sort of satisfactory exhaustion with a beer bottle. This scene is pure sadistic contempt and is also gratuitous, since it is unreal, even strangely unconvincing. Or not strangely.

The groupies take plaster casts of the parts of rock stars—or they claim the stars as the origin of their “collection.” The idea came to one of them, she says into the waiting microphones, when an art teacher said one could make a plaster cast of “anything hard.” “Wow,” grunts the groupie. She later describes herself in the more delicate moments of the casting as being “very gingerly.”

Certainly these girls are in extremity, pushing out beyond the horizon. Yet they are not much more freakish nor are they more obscene than the teen radicals in Dance the Eagle to Sleep. In the novel, Joanna, the girl most admired and desired by the boys, is serenaded with a little song that goes:

Joanna has a hairy cunt.

It’s the kind of cunt I want.

I get on my knees and grunt 

For a touch of Jo-Jo’s hairy cunt!

Still the groupies contain in every swagger and delusion genetic reminders of their parents, longing for the kiss of celebrity; aging Stalinists seem to haunt the memories in Ice; Holly Woodlawn says in the film she was born on welfare and while that is probably a fiction there is no reason why she might not have been. Hell’s Angels and the vaguely disoriented crowds are both caught up in mindless anarchy. What can one make of these deaths, since death is the feeling most clearly projected by radical and freak, girl and boy: death by drugs, by the misery and dreariness of the commune; death by political enemies, death to political enemies, death in “regional actions,” by helicopters raining destruction on teen tribes, death at the free rock festival, in the eyes of Miss Harlow, the little groupie with frizzy hair.

At his trial, perhaps feeling the sorrow of his complicity in the death of Che Guevara, Regis Debray said: “The tragedy is that we do not kill objects, numbers, abstract or interchangeable instruments, but, precisely, on both sides, irreplaceable individuals, essentially innocent, unique….”

Something pitiless and pathological has seeped into youth’s love of itself, its body, its politics. Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy. But the life around us is not a pageant of coldness and folly to which we have paid admission and from which we can withdraw as it becomes boring. You feel a transcendental joke links us all together; some sordid over-soul hangs out there in the heavy air. No explanation—the nuclear bomb, the Vietnam war, the paralyzing waste of problems and vices that our lives and even the virtues of our best efforts have led to—explains. Yet it would be dishonorable to try to separate ourselves from our deforming history and from the depressing dreams being acted out in its name.

After the squalor of Trash, The Groupies, and Dance the Eagle to Sleep, one comes back to the girl in Professor Adorno’s class. What did she think her bare breasts meant? What philosophy and message could this breathing nude embody? In one of his last essays Adorno wrote, “Sanctioned delusions allow a dispensation from comparison with reality….” And he also said, “Of the world as it exists, one cannot be enough afraid.” The students may have known all about the second idea, but perhaps they could not forgive him the first.

“Sanctioned delusions..." including his own.

Martin Jay, "Adorno in America." 1984

Rather than reduce Adorno to any one star in his constellation, be it Western Marxist, elitist mandarin, aesthetic modernist, or whatever, we must credit all of them with the often contradictory power they had in shaping his idiosyncratic variant of Critical Theory. 

Adorno was a Western Marxist, elitist mandarin, aesthetic modernist. If he could be read as any one alone, he'd have been forgotten. 

If you can't read a text against itself you're reading for work, like a bureaucrat reading a report. It's private reason. Adorno was a conservative. Like Eliot in his office, he's a Burkean bureaucrat, a pedant of historical romance. Wallace Stevens was Mallarmé as an insurance executive. These are contradictions that can only be resolved as art.   

repeats. "Doing philosophy" 

Although he took a keen interest in the great British philosophers - he later discovered and edited some new letters by Hume - he shared Cassirer's dismay at the blinkered approach of the analytical philosophers who dominated the Oxford scene: ignoring the historical context of thinkers such as Leibniz, the only thing they wanted to know was whether his statements were true according to their own criteria.

Overall, Seaford’s book is interesting, insightful, and combines expertise in ancient sources with careful reasoning. It certainly offers an invaluable discussion of the origins and cultural contexts of early Greek philosophy. But Seaford’s concern with the historical explanations of Greek philosophy suggests that his book may not appeal to scholars interested exclusively in the philosophical content and argumentation of Presocratic texts. The author often explicitly minimizes intellectual explanations of a philosopher’s views in favor of socio-political, religious, and psychological factors (219; 253–4; 273). In fact, he insists that comprehending the relevant cultural factors is necessary for understanding Presocratic metaphysics. We must, he maintains, avoid treating ancient philosophy as if it were created in a “historical vacuum” (10), even if this threatens most Presocratic scholars' "control of their subject and the autonomy of 'doing philosophy'"

again. The Absurdity of Brian Leiter 

And again

working, reworking... the last paragraphs 12/22

"A teacher of mine, Abe Ajay, an arch modernist, a friend of Ad Reinhardt who worked with him at The New Masses, used to complain that Beethoven ruined his music with images. 'All those wonderful notes and then... Birds!!'"

In art as in philosophy the questions relating to mimesis are the same in 1950 as in 1906 and 1860. Abstraction means abstraction from.  The works of art acknowledged as the highpoints of the time record the same desperate stab at representation: the crises of Manet and Picasso reenacted on new ground. With few exceptions later  art concerned with the “tragic and timeless” is an art of intent, made of a few gestures done with an air of high seriousness. I can enjoy the works of the Zero school without asking them to carry more than their weight. Rauschenberg’s best early works have all the terror in the nightmares of a closeted Willy Loman, or a character out of Tennessee Williams, without the melodrama. His best works are figurative and crushingly intimate. But Barnett Newman’s paintings are claimed to be in the grand tradition, and the claim is hollow. My glib cocktail party version of this is seen in the two images, of Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis, from 1951, and a still from the last scene of John Ford’s 1956 film The Searchers.  Both are attempts at representation and the thematics are nearly identical: the individual in the American landscape.  But where one originates in the specific and resolves to something approaching grandeur, but a grandeur only allowed for after an acknowledgement of tragedy and irony, both concerning the story and the artifice of film, the other is unabashedly both grandly self-aggrandizing and grandly unspecific.  Of the two, Newman’s high art is the one that deals in the wishful thinking foundational to kitsch.  But it’s also foundational to Modernism itself.  Modernism is aspirational, and kitsch is the ultimate in aspirational logic: to dream is to succeed; pretense is reality.  But again there is the difference between aspiration—desire—and its description.  

Pollock is a harder case; but the literature on him as well is still caught up with the romance of overreach.  I’ve spent a lot of time with Clark’s Pollock in Farewell to an Idea[i] Overreach is what the book is about.  Writing on the 19th century Clark pulls ideas out of material substance, but by the 20th he begins to push them in.  Despite his protests it was clear by then that he was never as interested in the working class as he was in the revolution, and we know now they’re not the same thing.  Farewell to an idea (more than once I’ve written it as “Requiem…” ); so he has no problem transitioning from Pollock to Adolph Gottlieb.  Gottlieb ended as kitsch, and Pollock began with it: look at Guardians of the Secret.  But Pollock at his best made paintings that even as a child reminded me of Uccello.  I remember that because I always thought that was strange, and beautiful.  Clark’s language reenacts the crises of modernity as defined by Modernism. His recent book is as mannered as its subject. Farewell to an Idea is an elegy, and a fitting one, but it doesn’t answer my questions about Pollock.  

Pollock’s paintings are commonly associated with music, with ‘free’ jazz, Coltrane or Ornette Coleman. I’m going to take a different tack, not because jazz doesn’t is the obvious parallel, but because it is. But it’s not the parallel favored by the high-brow intellectuals of modernism: the philosophers, for whom the parallels need to be high-brow as well (and more serious than art.) 

Classical musicians are modern people performing a historical art. As with lawyers, historical research is part of the job. That’s the strength and weakness of  performance of the classical canon: the works are no longer part of a living tradition. The strength and weakness of jazz is that it developed in the shadow of a great but dying one. You get the sense that in the mid 20^th  century of a  century of a mutual sense of jealously and even awe between the classically trained and the brilliant autodidacts (or their heirs), and tragedy mostly attached to the latter. The Swing era will be remembered as a brief period when people working in a popular form thought of themselves as making art without the need to capitalize the word. Like the great Hollywood films of the same era the art comes out of the craft through great effort but not fuss. I don’t think it’s worth arguing anymore than jazz produced the most important music of the first half of the 20^th century. But for now this is a sidebar. I’m interested in historians and craftspeople as opposed to philosophers, and the best discussion I’ve found of the tension between expression and communication, between emotion and form, is an exchange between two pianists in the classical tradition known also as scholars, but not pedants. 

    

Alfred Brendel describes a moment in one of Beethoven’s piano sonatas when the “chains of music itself” are thrown off.  This moment comes as the end of a slow progression towards an aesthetic or anti-esthetic “musical self-immolation” Modernism has always flirted with self-immolation, in art and politics: the sloughing off of the physical mediating form in the desire for pure experience.  And in the context of communication, of human exchange, that pure experience is one of unification, of one person with another, with a group, or with “the absolute.”  I’m going to include a long passage from the exchange between Brendel and Charles Rosen in the New York Review because it both explicates and exemplifies the tensions of the Modernist relation to culture and the meaning of culture and cultural history in the modern era and the present.  It’s a wonderful exchange between two people fully engaged with—and within—the tradition they’re discussing.  And very clearly Pollock’s in there too.

Brendel: In Charles Rosen’s review of William Kinderman’s highly stimulating book on Beethoven [NYR, September 21], he raises a question about a quotation from one of my articles.  The context from which this quote is taken is readily available in my book Music Sounded Out (“Beethoven’s New Style,” page 71).  To sum it up: During the inversion of the fugue of opus 110, the constraints of polyphony are shaken off in a gradual process of foreshortening that is a feature of the movement’s return to life.  

…At the same time, the appearance of the augmented theme in its original, upward shape initiates a process of liquidation: when the basic key of A flat is reached, the texture has become virtually homophonic.  The goal of revival has been attained.  But Beethoven proceeds even further.  The lyrical hymn in A flat that carries the piece to its end becomes more and more euphoric until another, ultimate liberation is achieved: finally, after an exertion that surmounts two fortissimo diminished seventh chords, the “chains of music itself” are thrown off.  This last extreme effort amounts to a kind of musical self-immolation; it needs to be conveyed by the performance before silence takes over.  In my view, only an extreme metaphor could do it justice.

Rosen: I made no criticism of Alfred Brendel in my review.  I only wrote that I assumed he meant something specific by the grandiose expression “the chains of music itself”; I was reproaching William Kinderman (who occasionally writes program-notes for Brendel) with quoting from the work of other scholars out of context in a way that makes their phrases seem empty and pretentious.  There was, therefore, no reason to refer to Brendel’s book, although I am glad that it is readily available, since I was sure that the particular metaphor had some justification.  I agree that the lyric euphoria of the final page of opus 110 is extraordinary.  In his letter, however, Brendel has now added the additional metaphor of “musical self-immolation” which is less persuasive.  It is not so much its lack of clarity that is unfortunate (who is being immolated, Beethoven, the pianist, or the sonata itself?) but the Wagnerian resonance which can be applied to Beethoven only with a certain lack of tact.  Beethoven’s pretensions may be as great as Wagner’s, but they are less morbid and less coarse.[ii]

This is a conversation as I said from within a tradition, and an outsider is left to wonder what those last sentences with the words ‘tact,’ ‘morbid’ and ‘coarse’ even mean.  The definition of theology is the use of terms of objective knowledge in discussion based on subjectivity and sense.  But we live within our subjectivity and in this sense we live within theology. We can’t escape but we communicate, indeed the only way we do so, is by comparing terms.  

In fact Rosen’s letter made me laugh out loud and at the end I felt a shiver: the shiver I’ve felt watching great actors play with an audience.  Tact in Rosen’s sense is one’s proper relation to the question of the curtain in the Wizard of Oz; which one should maintain even knowing what’s behind it. And the shiver I felt is the shiver of recognition that the priest you’re arguing with is as much of an atheist or an ironist as you are, but that the fact of a godless world is nonetheless irrelevant. 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 being asked to judge a poetry competition where the  entrants are asked to write on the same subject. Comparing the results you’re not comparing the poems’ relation to the objective truth of the idea, event, or object -their assigned subject- but the poets’ ability to build a complex and evocative description out of their perceptions and responses.  You’re not judging the ability to see a thing in absolute terms, but the ability of each poet to make you see what they see, which still must begin with the assumption that at a basic level you already do, since the object or theme has a common, public, form. From a simple commonality, a common denominator, a tea pot or spare tire, each participant is asked to develop a perspective which is then reformulated in language (returned) as a new and more complex common form.  The process is one of group mimesis,  collectively developed representation, through conversation and debate of individuals about the community and the world they share.  The external world -in an absolute sense- is secondary to the social, and to the method of description, the world as experienced and responded to in time. This is the foundation also of the rule of law. 

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 pseudo-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, from fascism to The Singularity, or mere collective reflex: the community of tech geeks, fetishists and junkies. 

The experience of the sex act is social, formal, communicative, and if the world is seen as the social realm, world-creating.  The moment of orgasm as reflex is aformal, asocial (isolate), ecstatic and if the world is seen as social, world destructive.  Sex as performance is a form of communication; orgasm is artless.  The pretense of an ‘art’ of orgasm is vulgar.  The popular understanding of Pollock’s work is as an ‘act’ of ‘expression,’ as orgasm not structure.  Mondrian saw structure. The what and how of communication for Pollock’s work are complex; as complex in their way as the question of orgasm in Beethoven.  

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: of pure instrument.  Wagner is preaching to the choir (and Pollock is in there somewhere); 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.  

If communication is a circuit, reflex is a short.  The fantasy of the premature ejaculator is a state of eternal orgasm. It’s also the logic of the perfect economic man.  The mania for progress becomes no more than simply the desire to go faster.  If knowledge is measured in conclusions not in processes then the shortest distance between two points, the short circuit, is the obvious choice. Pornography and technical illustration is the model of art in a technocracy: immediate gratification. This is the crux of the struggle over the human imagination that begins in the 18th century, with the rise of idealist anti-humanism.  

In 2003, I asked Jack Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale, if there were any discussion between legal scholars and musicologists and historians such as Richard Taruskin, known for criticizing theories of originalism in musical performance.  In the various overlapping intellectual interests that marked my childhood, the connection was taken as a given.  I still take too much for granted about what others take for granted, but Balkin was the right person to ask.  Here’s Taruskin, from his keynote address at the conference, “Law, Music and other Performing Arts” at U.T.  Austin in 2002

About ten years ago I received out of the blue an offprint of an article[iii] from the University Pennsylvania Law Review… by Professors Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas and Jack Balkin of Yale…. I read it with fascination and gratitude, the latter simply because the authors had so well understood the position I had taken in the debates about what was then known as authentic performance practice in music. My musical and musicological colleagues seemed unable to hear what I was really saying when I said that their ideas of historical performance practice, on which the claim of authenticity was based, derived from a selective reading of history in the service of a modern—or, more strongly, a Modernist—ideology. 

All works of art… are subject to social mediation.  It is, indeed, the price of living…. Ought it to require a musicologist and a pair of legal scholars to come up with such a truism?  Maybe not, but apparently it does.[iv]

If all communication is communication among individuals through mediating forms -of which language is the prime example- then beyond the most rudimentary functions we operate always on speculative induction and generalization, and we should be clear: we build most often on foundations of desire and hot air.  Only in language can you live on the 10th floor of a building that doesn’t reach the ground.  It amazes me that philosophers have built careers without having to respond to our model of the law as formalized adversarialism: mandated moral semi-consciousness. My ignorance is why I took for granted that more than one or two scholars of constitutional law would have read Taruskin. I assumed philosophers understand that we’ve chosen the rule of law because we understood the dangers of the rule of reason. 

Having grown up around lawyers and literature professors –readers of fiction– debates over rationalism and irrationalism left me almost speechless. I’d forgotten that Plato hated lawyers as much he hated poets, and that his ideal was Sparta. The rule of law is the rule of public language and the public description of the world. Under the rule of reason justice is ad hoc, devolving always into the rule of the reasonable as defined by the strong. 

Taruskin is a musicologist. Brendel and Rosen are performers who write criticism, and as soloists are advocates for the causes that they choose.  Jobbing lawyers, like orchestra players, don’t always have a choice.  From the NY Times obituary of John Mortimer, Barrister and novelist, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey

Doing these cases,” he wrote, “I began to find myself in a dangerous situation as an advocate.  I came to believe in the truth of what I was saying.  I was no longer entirely what my professional duties demanded, the old taxi on the rank waiting for the client to open the door and give his instruction, prepared to drive off in any direction, with the disbelief suspended.”[v]

How in the context of modern social life does one make a statement or a proposition that acknowledges both the integrity of that statement—the speaker’s desire that it be ‘true’—and the possibility, most often the fact, that it doesn’t operate on that universal level?  How do we manage irony and belief, and the dual imperatives of integrity and sociability?  The passage above is the statement of a man who spent his life as a performer in the theater of law.  He understood the question, and his career was predicated on the response most of us take too much for granted to ever bother articulating.  Taruskin on the other hand, defending the “authenticity” of performing in and for the present,  defends censorship, even to the point of  arguing that we should stop listening to Prokofiev, regardless of the music itself, simply because he worked for Stalin.[vi] By his logic the greatest art of Europe, or any other culture beyond a few tribes of hunter gatherers, should be in deep storage. Concert halls should be silent. In his arguments with Rosen[vii] and Daniel Barenboim[viii], both get the better of him easily. Taruskin: “As one who regards Rosen’s literary output—all of it—as Cold War propaganda…”[ix]  Rosen replies[x], but it’s not worth the effort to go into details.  I’d argue with all of them that Schoenberg’s serialism was a desperate attempt to escape becoming a Hollywood competitor of Erich Korngold, famous for Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood –listening to Verklarte Nacht, I can’t help seeing Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland– and that Milton Babbitt’s music and  writing, “Who Cares if you Listen”[xi] aka “The Composer as Specialist”[xii] (a title too perfect by half) fit with every example of post war rationalism I’ve described: scholastic formalism, positivism, erudition as art, dead ends imagined as progress.  I’d argue that there are “bad” or “inappropriate” ways to play Bach, as there are “bad” or “inappropriate” ways to interpret the constitution. But those are arguments to be made and answered in debate, and censorship is refusing to argue and then demanding others do the same. No one mentioned above would disagree with Taruskin’s critique of originalism, just as none of them would agree with Babbitt’s diktats. Rosen was a friend and performer of his music, but he wasn’t a follower; Babbitt lost his argument from authority well before he died. Take away the positivistic moralism and the work is left to stand on its own, and the description and manifestation of a kind of desire, from a place and time. It will stand or fall as record or relic. In the end the terms are not Babbitt’s or Taruskin’s. History is the judge.  

Joseph Kerman on Babbitt the theorist.

His writing of the 1950s had developed into a strange amalgam. Conjoined with a fanatical scientism, a search for quasi-logical precision of reference which tortured his syntax into increasingly Jamesian spirals for very un-Jamesian ends, there was an undertone of distress, even rage, erupting into repeated assaults and innuendos directed against various predictable targets. This scarcely contained emotion issued obviously (and openly enough) from the same sense of modernist alienation as was expressed very differently by Schoenberg or, to take an even more extravagant case, Adorno. But while Adorno was telling anyone who would listen at Darmstadt and Donaueschingen that modern music was decisively cut off from decadent bourgeois culture, Babbitt at Princeton was pointing out that avant-garde music could find its niche after all – though only by retreating from one bastion of middle class culture, the concert hall, to another, the university. Like pure science, he argued, musical composition has a claim on the university as a protector of abstract thought. (The complicity of composition and theory, it will be seen, was crucial to this argument, the complicity of theory and mathematics extremely helpful.) Instead of lamenting the no-doubt irreparable breach between avant-garde music and the public, composers like mathematicians should turn their backs on the public and demand their rightful place in the academy. Otherwise ‘music will cease to evolve, and in that important sense, will cease to live'.[xiii]

“Jamesian spirals for very un-Jamesian ends.” Kerman restates my arguments, marking the same line from the subjective but impersonal to the ‘objective’, formality to formalism, elision to denial, from bourgeois culture to technocratic anti-culture. But he ignores that Babbitt’s and Adorno’s prescriptions are variations of the same institutionalism, with the same positivist, Weberian, contempt for art. If Babbitt’s art succeeds it succeeds in spite of this. The undertones in his essays,  "of distress, even rage, erupting into repeated assaults” is matched in his music. The parallel is not science or mathematics but the other art music of its time: free Jazz. Formal logic is a cover.

Expressionism in the atomic age is the product of technocracy and the bomb, the emotion escaping the denial of emotion; it's the melodrama behind positivism, from Vienna to Weimar to New York, the relation of Strangelove to von Neumann. This is what Brendel and Rosen, and Kerman, as exegetes, interpreters not pedants, who are neither positivists nor emotionalists, rationalists nor irrationalists, are describing and debating. If music is formal, how can a gesture that breaks with the form, function within it? Rosen says Brendel defends farting in Church; he misses the logic behind the change. If Beethoven puts an explosion at the end of the metrical line, then formal art has become mimetic. One of my teachers, Abe Ajay, an arch modernist, a friend of Ad Reinhardt who worked with him at The New Masses, used to complain that Beethoven ruined his music with images. "All those wonderful notes and then... Birds!!" Abe wasn’t joking, but I laughed. This is what Schoenberg and Babbitt rebelled against, not Beethoven but the only option for those following him into the 20th century: the vulgar romance of Korngold and the program music of Hollywood, music of the classical western tradition no longer independent, now subservient to another form, the art of images. 

---

[i] T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, Yale University Press, 1999

[ii] Letters, New York Review of Books, Volume 42, Number 18, Nov. 16 1995

[iii] Sanford Levinson and J. M. Balkin, “Law, Music, and Other Performing Arts”. 139 U. Pa. Law Rev. 1597 (1991) Available on the web: http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/writings.htm#C

[iv] Richard Taruskin, The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays, California, 2008

[v] Helen T.  Verongos  “John Mortimer, Barrister and Writer Who Created Rumpole, Dies at 85”,

NY Times,  Jan 17, 2009

[vi]  Taruskin, “Prokofiev, Hail... and Farewell?”, New York Times, April 21 1991;  

Taruskin, On Russian Music, University of California Press, 2010, p. 10

[vii]  Rosen "From the Troubadours to Frank Sinatra" (two parts), New York Review of Books, February 23, and March 9 2006. 

[viii]  Daniel Barenboim, “Music’s Dangers; An Infringement”, New York Times Dec 23, 2001  

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/23/arts/l-music-s-dangers-an-infringement-765147.html

[ix]  Taruskin, “Afterword: Nicht blutbefleckt?” The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 26, Issue 2 Spring 2009.

[x]  Rosen, “Music and the Cold War”, New York Review of Books, April 7, 2011

[xi]  Milton Babbitt, “Who cares if you listen?”, High Fidelity, Feb. 1958

[xii]  Anthony Tommasini, “Finding Still More Life in a 'Dead' Idiom”, The New York Times,  October 6, 1996

[xiii] Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology,  Harvard University Press, 1986  p. 101 

A repeat from a few years ago. I'm still tired:

Pedantry is a form of immaturity, but pedants by definition see themselves as the most serious of serious adults. Though their opinions adapt, the pedantry is constant; the illusion of consistency is all that matters.

I forget how many times I've said this. Weimarization begins with an elite isolated from the experience of the larger community: one part openly corrupt, concerned with wealth and power, the other engaged with intellectual formalisms, earnestly but as a result of the arbitrariness of their constructions -the foundations are contingent- with the same concern as their peers for power politics, on a much smaller scale.

America and technology have spread the neotenization of the elite to the broader middle class. Our new sophisticates have the arrogant provincialism of the petty bourgeois.

Academics as a group are the most unobservant, unintellectual, anti-intellectual people I know, and yet they see themselves as justified in leading. The academicization of intellectual life, bureaucratic reason from Max Weber to the Frankfurt School, is the proximate cause of the rise of the radical right. If technocracy is authoritarian rationalism, the governing of individuals as tokens, as the mass, irrationalism becomes the only model for life as individual experience. Anger is the only agency that's left.

Weber was a model of technocratic anti-humanism. Adorno was a petulant, moralizing, self-hating adolescent. Benjamin was a child. They were the confused children of technocracy.

If you live for ideas then you're living for the next test. Every experience must fit into one or another narrow predetermined category, living life by inches, or by millimeters. Mechanistic authoritarianism is fundamentally perverse, and it dumbs you down.

Art schools and degrees in creative writing: the academic study of ourselves by ourselves is a prescription for brittle mediocrity. Film schools are still trade schools; that saves them from the worst of it.

I'm tired of being right. I just want to enjoy my life.

I'm living in a silent film Portraying Himmler's sacred realm Of dream reality

updated below

On Facebook messenger, I read a long thread of my classmates' memories of Richard, which the condescending guy who looks like Moby has been collecting for a piece he's writing for the New Yorker. Some people's recollections echoed my own, painting a picture of a socially awkward guy with a strange affected accent (since dropped) who mocked people if they hadn't read the right things. Other responses reminded me of everything I dislike about University of Chicago. "Maybe if he had spent more time studying Shakespeare he would have questioned the veracity of his views," one woman wrote. "His arrogance likely inhibited any true self discovery." (Imagine having that opinion about anyone. Now imagine that being your opinion on a nazi.) There were pictures, including one from a Halloween party of Richard dressed in a toga. I think I have a similar one around here somewhere. He was dressed as Caesar, if memory serves--a group costume, with two other classmates dressed as bloodstained Caesar and the Ghost of Caesar. (What did I tell you? The worst.) In the Facebook thread, Moby was soliciting photographs. "If anyone has a photo of him with anyone of color, please send those especially," he wrote. You know, I think I may have mentioned this, but lately I feel like I'm losing my grip. 

After graduating high school in 1997, Spencer went to the University of Virginia, where he double-majored in music and English and became deeply involved in avant-garde theater, trying out and discarding various radical ideologies like costume changes. The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche made a lasting impression; Spencer found his critiques of equality and democracy darkly compelling. He identified with the German philosopher's unapologetically elitist embrace of "great men" such as Napoleon Bonaparte and the composer Richard Wagner. Yet Spencer found little in Nietzsche about the organization of the state; it was only after entering the humanities master's program at the University of Chicago that he discovered Jared Taylor, a self-proclaimed "race realist" who argues that blacks and Hispanics are a genetic drag on Western society.

Jarman's Caravaggio

Years later, Spencer would through his Radix Journal help spread a metaphor used to explain the jarring experience of waking up to a different worldview. In the 1999 movie The Matrix, the character Morpheus (who is black, incidentally) offers Keanu Reeves a choice between taking a blue pill—"the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe"—or a red pill, which shows "how deep the rabbit hole goes." In the alt-right's telling, the so-called "normies" swallow the blue pill, digesting the fiction of racial equality, while those who get "red pilled" are stripped of the virtual-reality cloak that blinds them, waking up to the shattering realization that liberalism is just a mirage designed to obscure the hard, ugly truths of a world programmed by genetics. "You're destroyed by it," Spencer says, "and put back together again."

After getting red pilled—foremost from his exposure to Taylor online, he says—Spencer began quietly pursuing related ideas through his academic work. He was attracted to the writings of the late University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss, a Jewish German-born philosopher who had been accused by some of supporting fascism. Spencer's master's thesis was an analysis of German philosopher Theodor Adorno, who he argued was afraid to admit how much he loved the music of Wagner because Wagner was an anti-Semite championed by the Nazis. "If you looked at what I was doing, there was a clear interest in radical traditionalist right-wing German philosophy, a semi-fascist type thing," Spencer says. "But there was always plausible deniability to it all."

By the time he entered Duke as a Ph.D. student in European intellectual history in 2005, his views were on his sleeve. Fellow students recall Spencer openly sharing his opinions on biological differences between races and endorsing books such as Harvard professor Samuel Huntington's Who Are We?, which argues that Hispanic immigrants are less suited than Europeans for assimilation....

Spencer laments that Trump may have shown up too late to win over an increasingly diverse country, but too early to fully benefit from the alt-right's emergence. A bigger, more organized alt-right could become an effective opposition movement that is catered to by politicians who need its votes to win elections. Spencer believes this may even coalesce around a more liberal set of economic ideas—nationalized health care, a higher minimum wage—but with those policies only held together by the glue of "white culture." "We weren't quite ready for Trump, but we need to get ready right now," Spencer says, reprising the case he says he has been making lately to potential donors, in hopes of acquiring prestigious office space for NPI in Washington. "We need a footprint that says, 'We're here, we're queer, get used to it.'"

"...he double-majored in music and English and became deeply involved in avant-garde theater, trying out and discarding various radical ideologies like costume changes."

Should I really have to telegraph the obvious?

I haven't said much about Yiannopoulos because it was always so obvious: the insecurities, the pretension, the need to feel superior, the desire to be treated as inferior, by someone; the need to wallow in shit.
Hari, again.

“For Kuhnen, there was something supermacho about being a Nazi, as well as being a homosexual, both of which enforced his sense of living on the edge, of belonging to an elite that was destined to make an impact. He told a West German journalist that homosexuals were ‘especially well-suited for our task, because they do not want ties to wife, children and family.’”

etc

"A more vivid proof, not mentioned by Butler, may be found in Ginsberg’s recent echoes of the totalitarian apologetics offered by some of the Modernists of the 1920s and 1930s."

Of course Spencer was right about Adorno. And Adorno now has a tag.

What repelled Wilkes -- and others invited to the parties -- was both the water Cunningham put in the hot tub and the congressman's penchant for using it while naked, even if everybody else at the party was clothed. Cunningham used water siphoned directly from the polluted Potomac River and never changed it out during the season. "Wilkes thought it was unbelievably dirty and joked if you got in there it would leave a dark water line on your chest," said one person familiar with the parties. "The water was so gross that very few people were willing to get into the hot tub other than Duke and his paramour." That was a reference to Cunningham's most frequently seen girlfriend, a flight attendant who lived in Maryland. One of these parties started at the Capital Grille with Cunningham ordering his usual filet mignon -- very well done -- with iceberg lettuce salad and White Oak. Wilkes used the dinner to update Cunningham on the appropriations he wanted. Cunningham then took the whole group back to the boat where they drank more wine, sitting on white leather sofas while Cunningham told more war stories. Cunningham then took his clothes off and invited all to join him in the polluted hot tub that was hidden from the neighbors by a white tarp. There were no takers.

The denouement

Mr. Spencer said he was worried about being attacked again.

“I don’t think I could go out to an inauguration event without bodyguards or a protest or a conference,” he said. “I am more worried about going out to dinner on an average Tuesday because these kind of people are roaming around.”

On Periscope, Mr. Spencer also expressed concern about the spread of the footage of the attack online.

“I’m afraid this is going to become the meme to end all memes,” he said. “That I’m going to hate watching this.” 

...Mr. Spencer’s video was recorded from what he described as “a safe space.”

Safe spaces: academic fantasy politics, of students and professors: Yale and Mizzou etc. (read the three links in order).

Amusing that Spencer appeared to be crying at the end of the video of him being slugged, similar to the autistic racist student videographer who cried over merely being criticized. And added fun again: the videographer, Mark Schierbecker is now "Kayla" Schierbecker.

Pedantry is a form of immaturity, but pedants by definition see themselves as the most serious of serious adults. Though their opinions adapt, the pedantry is constant; the illusion of consistency is all that matters.

I forget how many times I've said this. Weimarization begins with an elite isolated from the experience of the larger community: one part openly corrupt, concerned with wealth and power, the other engaged with intellectual formalisms, earnestly but as a result of the arbitrariness of their constructions -the foundations are contingent- with the same concern as their peers for power politics, on a much smaller scale.

America and technology have spread the neotenization of the elite to the broader middle class. Our new sophisticates have the arrogant provincialism of the petty bourgeois.

Academics as a group are the most unobservant, unintellectual, anti-intellectual people I know, and yet they see themselves as justified in leading. The academicization of intellectual life, bureaucratic reason from Max Weber to the Frankfurt School, is the proximate cause of the rise of the radical right. If technocracy is authoritarian rationalism, the governing of individuals as tokens, as the mass, irrationalism becomes the only model for life as individual experience. Anger is the only agency that's left.

Weber was a model of technocratic anti-humanism. Adorno was a petulant, moralizing, self-hating adolescent. Benjamin was a child. They were the confused children of technocracy.

If you live for ideas then you're living for the next test. Every experience must fit into one or another narrow predetermined category, living life by inches, or by millimeters. Mechanistic authoritarianism is fundamentally perverse, and it dumbs you down.

Art schools and degrees in creative writing: the academic study of ourselves by ourselves is a prescription for brittle mediocrity. Film schools are still trade schools; that saves them from the worst of it.

I'm tired of being right. I just want to enjoy my life.

rewriting

Kuhn, quibbling over the meaning of words

At the start a new candidate for paradigm may have few supporters, and on occasions the supporters’ motives may be suspect. Nevertheless, if they are competent, they will improve it, explore its possibilities, and show what it would be like to belong to the community guided by it. And as that goes on, if the paradigm is one destined to win its fight, the number and strength of the persuasive arguments in its favor will increase. More scientists will then be converted, and the exploration of the new paradigm will go on. Gradually the number of experiments, instruments, articles, and books based upon the paradigm will multiply. Still more men, convinced of the new view’s fruitfulness, will adopt the new mode of practicing normal science, until at last only a few elderly hold-outs remain. And even they, we cannot say, are wrong. Though the historian can always find men -Priestley, for instance- who were unreasonable to resist for as long as they did, he will not find a point at which resistance becomes illogical or unscientific. At most he may wish to say that the man who continues to resist after his whole profession has been converted has ipso facto ceased to be a scientist.

"No one in my tradition believes that the words are very important."
Go here.
The unfailingly earnest "discover" the universal fact of politics, and the absurdity of life.

I was raised in a bubble, familiar with the criminality of the 20th century, but insulated from the mediocrity.

Rorty, Falafel and the Mirror of Hummus

Though the historian can always find men -Priestley, for instance- who were unreasonable to resist for as long as they did, he will not find a point at which resistance becomes illogical or unscientific. 

But can we then find a way of saying that the considerations advanced against the Copernican theory by Cardinal Bellarmine -the scriptural descriptions of the fabric of the heavens- were "illogical or unscientific?" This, perhaps, is the point at which the battle lines between Kuhn and his critics can be drawn most sharply.

Kuhn does not give an explicit answer to the question, but his writings provide an arsenal of argument in favor of a negatIve answer. In any case, a negative answer is implied by the argument of the present book. The crucial consideration is whether we know how to draw a line between science and theology such that getting the heavens right is a "scientific" value, and preserving the church, and the general cultural structure of Europe, is an "unscientific" value.[footnote]

Rorty is a creep. The defense of "the general cultural structure of Europe" is the subtext of -or pretext for- the theological argument; the discussion itself is a discussion of text. If the unscientific argument is proffered for Machiavellian ends, as subterfuge, then its use becomes scientific. On its own, it is not. "Beyond a reasonable doubt" is enough. The philosophical pedantry is mind-numbing. He's finding ways to avoid the technical because the technical is merely mechanical, and he wants life to be more than mechanical.  He's like a man who thinks he has to be weak and ineffectual in order to fit the role of feminist. His reference to heritability of intelligence below implies that he believes it as science.

[Footnote] Another example of the same sort is the question raised about "objectivity" by Marxist critics of the traditional distinctions between areas of culture. See, for example, Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, 1964), chaps. 6-7· More concretely, we can ask whether there is a clear way of separating out the "scientific" value of getting the heritability of intelligence right from the "political" value of discouraging racism. I think that Marcuse is right in saying that most of the ("bourgeois") intellectual apparatus of the Enlightenment is required to make this distinction. Unlike Marcuse, however, I would hope that we might retain the distinction even after discarding one piece of the apparatus-epistemologically centered "foundational" philosophy.

Like Marcuse and the rest, he can't separate the capacity for computation from a telos. But he wants to find a way. He can't recognize that the triumph of Reason as he defines it, and how his opponents define it as well, is triumph of hard determinism.  None of them can separate science as a tool from those who use it.

Marcuse

In the social reality, despite all change, the domination of man by man is still the historical continuum that links pre-technological and technological Reason. However, the society which projects and undertakes the technological transformation of nature alters the base of domination by gradually replacing personal dependence (of the slave on the master, the serf on the lord of the manor, the lord on the donor of the fief, etc.) with dependence on the “objective order of things” (on economic laws, the market etc.). To be sure, the “objective order of things” is itself the result of domination, but it is nevertheless true that domination now generates a higher rationality -- that of a society which sustains its hierarchic structure while exploiting ever more efficiently the natural and mental resources, and distributing the benefits of this exploitation on an ever-larger scale. The limits of this rationality, and its sinister force, appear in the progressive enslavement of man by a productive apparatus which perpetuates the struggle for existence and extends it to a total international struggle which ruins the lives of those who build and use this apparatus. 

...Outside this rationality, one lives in a world of values, and values separated out from the objective reality become subjective. The only war to rescue same abstract and harmless validity for them seems to be a metaphysical sanction (divine and natural law). But such sanction is not verifiable and thus not really objective. Values may have a higher dignity (morally and spiritually), but they are not real and thus count less in the real business of life -- the less so the higher they are elevated above reality.

Outside this rationality, one lives in a world of choice: to go to the movies or go to the beach. Is that a problem?

The difference between  pre-technological and technological Reason, is not the “objective order of things”.  The difference was that what had been seen as under the command of God, now  -seemingly- was under the command of man.

Modern philosophers are unwilling to accept the fact of an un-universal view (both subjective and fragmentary) of an objectively existing world. Their options are to see the universal view as absolute and true; to see it as true and somehow morally wrong, with the need to make room for eros, or humanity, or art; or to see the world itself as nothing but subjective.

A practicing scientist can accept without conflict the propositions that there is no universal view, and that the world itself is not entirely subjective; that we can say rocks exist without saying that we can see rocks from every angle simultaneously or that my experience of rocks is the same as yours.  To discount the experience of rocks is to see rocks not as absolute but as generalization.  The Reason feared by Marcuse and Adorno is bureaucratic not Platonic. And the political decision to discount the experience of rocks ends only in discounting the experience of rocks for the majority, since the rule of reason is the rule of an elite minority, and the elite will indulge the experience of rocks, and champagne, and caviar, as elites do. To value the experience of rocks is not to say that rocks are nothing but subjective, but to value the multiplicity of subjective experience of universally available things.

Philosophers as rationalists and pedants are concern trolls.  Actual scientists as practicing empiricists can appreciate both generalizations and specifics. Science geeks are scientists after the model of philosophers, giving us John von Neumann and Strangelove.

Rorty

Philosophy as a discipline thus sees itself as the attempt to underwrite or debunk claims to knowledge made by science, morality, art, or religion.

Philosophy claims to be able to correct the mistakes of science and therefore everything else.  The claim is absurd on its face. The next question is whether it can be placed above art; that question reduces whether it can be placed above other forms of art. The answer's no.
--

The "epistemological" as opposed to "hermeneutic" reading of the Canadian constitution is forbidden in Canadian legal argument.

A repeat from January 2013, because sadly it will never grow old. It's been getting a fair amount of hits recently. Taruskin is smart, but he overplays his hand absurdly.
---

Richard Taruskin. For use here and maybe elsewhere. Annotations here and in the links.

..."The relation of the music to the action is unaccountable," he thought, unable to comprehend the reason why Shostakovich would have "the heroine and her lover strangle her husband on a large stage-sized four-poster bed to a lively dance tune." But the reason is clear enough: the dance tune is there to dehumanize the husband, and to diminish the heroine's crime to a matter of cruelty to animals at worst. What condemns him is nothing more than the fact of his being a part of Katerina's hated environment: he is the beneficiary of the social system that oppressed his wife, and that suffices to just justify his "liquidation." And all of this is conveyed to us by the music alone….

In one way only was Shostakovich faithful to Leskov: in his shockingly
naturalistic portrayal of Katerina's sexual passion. It is lust, pure and
simple, that he portrays; ignited by a rape, it turns Katerina into a love-slave, giving the lie to the claim that she is a liberated, aggressive woman in an age of feminine passivity, that her audacity is another justification for her crimes. In fact, the carnal theme is exaggerated in the opera beyond anything in Leskov. The rape music reaches its climax with an unmistakable ejaculatio praecox, followed by a leisurely detumescence. The salacious trombone glissandos that portray the behavior of Sergei's member achieved instant world fame when an American magazine dubbed them an exercise in "pornophony."...

"The music croaks and hoots and snorts and pants in order to represent the scenes as naturally as possible. And 'love' in its most vulgar form is daubed all over the opera. The merchant's double bed is the central point on the stage. On it all the 'problems' are solved…. This glorification of merchant-class lasciviousness has been described by some critics as satire. But there can be no question of satire here. The author uses all the means at his disposal and his power of musical and dramatic expression to attract the sympathy of the spectators for the coarse and vulgar aims and actions of the merchant's wife, Katerina Ismailova.  Lady Macbeth is popular among bourgeois audiences abroad. Is it not because the opera is so confused and so entirely free of political bias that it is praised by bourgeois critics? Is it not perhaps because it titillates the depraved tastes of bourgeois audiences with its witching clamorous, neurasthenic music?"

The third paragraph is Stalin. The quote at the top is Elliot Carter.
"The Opera and the Dictator: the peculiar martyrdom of Dmitri Shostakovich", The New Republic, March 20, 1989. The last paragraph.

In the liberal West, as we have been proudly reminded in recent weeks, we do not believe in banning works of art. If it is because we believe that they cannot threaten life and morals, then we are more vulnerable than we imaged to the dehumanizing message of this great opera. If it's because we believe that ethics has no bearing on aesthetics, then the process of dehumanization has already begun. If, for its inspired music and dramatic power, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is to hold the stage today, it should be seen and heard with an awareness of history, with open eyes and ears, and with hearts on guard.

Moralists are a confused bunch. "If it is because we believe that they cannot threaten life and morals" It isn't.  [leading here].  "Democracies have freedom of speech not because governments grant it but because the government is not granted the power to take it away." [leading here] The speech of both members of the American Nazi Party and of Sarah Silverman, on stage or on the street, is protected by the 1st amendment.

Taruskin on John Adams' Klinghoffer
"Music's Dangers And The Case For Control" NYT Dec 2001

In a fine recent essay, the literary critic and queer theorist Jonathan Dollimore writes that ''to take art seriously -- to recognize its potential -- must be to recognize that there might be reasonable grounds for wanting to control it.'' Where should control come from? Unless we are willing to trust the Taliban, it has to come from within. What is called for is self-control. That is what the Boston Symphony laudably exercised; and I hope that musicians who play to Israeli audiences will resume exercising it. There is no need to shove Wagner in the faces of Holocaust survivors in Israel and no need to torment people stunned by previously unimaginable horrors with offensive ''challenges'' like ''The Death of Klinghoffer.''

Censorship is always deplorable, but the exercise of forbearance can be noble. Not to be able to distinguish the noble from the deplorable is morally obtuse. In the wake of Sept. 11, we might want, finally, to get beyond sentimental complacency about art. Art is not blameless. Art can inflict harm. The Taliban know that. It's about time we learned.

More from, the Guardian  Interview with the librettist in 2012.   Taruskin attacked Barenboim in the same piece. Barenboim responds.  See also Nir Rosen and Joan Rivers


[if the video's gone: Sarah Silverman, The Aristocrats]
The Musical Mystique TNR, 2007

Belief in the transcendent human value of creative labor has always invested German romantic aesthetics with the trappings of a secular or humanistic religion. In the twentieth century, such a theory of art could be seen as a bulwark against totalitarianism. Adorno held it up as a counterforce also to the instrumentalizing and rationalizing tendencies of "administered" capitalist society, which turns human subjects into objects of economic exploitation. Since he was trained in music, he held up classical music in its least compromising forms (epitomized in the famously esoteric work of Arnold Schoenberg) as the chief example of "truth-bearing" art, as opposed to the dehumanizing popular music churned out by the culture industry for mass dissemination. 

Skeptics of this viewpoint, while often appreciating the loftiness of its aspirations, have pointed to the ease with which high ideals can shade into complacency, autonomy into irrelevance, and disinterestedness into indifference. My admittedly tendentious diction ("serve," "vehicle") signals my own skepticism as to the genuineness of its disinterestedness. This skepticism is not mine alone. Many have noted the relationship between this highly individualistic and self-celebrating concept of art and the social emancipation (or more accurately, the social abandonment) of artists with the demise of reliable aristocratic patronage, and suspected it of seeking a compensatory advantage. "Materialist" historians have long investigated the relationship between its high-minded claims and actual marketing strategies. 

Particularly as it pertains to music, the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy was pre-eminently a congeries of German ideas about German art that consoled and inspired the Germans at a particular point in German history. Even in the nineteenth century, it never won much credence in France or Italy or Russia (though Britain was susceptible). Now that the whole twentieth century has run its course and German music has run aground, the claim of universality is threadbare...

["...it never won much credence in France" (a link to Baudelaire). "L'art pour l'art". Nietzsche, in the original, uses the French]

And then later

To ask "what does it mean?" is death for music; but to ask "what has it meant?" can be illuminating. The one imposes arbitrary limits, the other welcomes all comers to share in the pleasure of engagement and response…. 

Higher is not automatically better; but opponents of snobbish pretension would be foolish to lose sight of the reality of the high-low gamut.

From the introduction to On Russian Music

It is yet another unfortunate consequence of the "poietic fallacy" that these pieces should have been read as attacks on Prokofiev–and "personal" ones at that, since they do not always reflect my opinion of the quality of the music, but rather my reaction to the ethical issues that its performance raises. He may not be altogether spared, but the "blame", if that is what one choose to call it (or the "problem", as I would prefer), is shared by all of the participants in our contemporary art world: composer, performer, audience, critics, mediating structures and institutions. “What is under critique in these pieces is not ‘the music itself’ but the whole network of social relations that comes into play in the maintenance of the activity we call ‘classical music’

Continuing an argument made first in an op-ed in the NY Times in 1991 that's not on the web, though the letters to the editor are.

Taruskin defines the "poietic" fallacy as "the conviction (or in practice the default assumption) that composers are the only significant historical agents in music and that scholarship should be an aspect of their defense against social mediation." 

The first paragraphs of Chapter 20, "Prokofieff's Return"

In January of 1990 Kurt Masur, soon to be appointed music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, led the San Francisco Orchestra in a program that included Sergey Prokofief's familiar cantata based on his music to Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 film, Alexander Nevsky. The program had been set long in advance, and I was hired to write the notes for it. I did so during the summer of 1989, and was forced to confront anew the old problem of "political" art.

… Both film and music were shamelessly hyperbolic, dramaturgically blatant. They were, in short, propaganda. Could such a project possibly give rise to a first class work of art?  

"Like it or not, the answer is yes" I wrote in 1989, and went on to praise Prokofieff's music for its outstanding stylist and technical qualities, particularly the deftness, the originality, and the expressiveness of the orchestration. I felt I was making an effective answer to that complacent dictum that we tend to mouth in the West without reflecting: that art, to be authentic, must be politically or even morally "disinterested" (read: aloof). I quoted a letter that Ned Rorem had recently written to the editor of the New York Times, in which he had rehearsed his old refrain that "the more an artwork succeeds in politics the more it fails as art". Alexander Nevsky, I contended, succeeded both as politics and as art, and put the lie to what I called Mr. Rorem's smug and self-validating platitude. 

And then I went to the concert. Between the summer of 1989 and the beginning of 1990 the world had changed. Not three weeks before the performance, the contorted corpses of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu had shown up on television, the most startling evidence yet that totalitarian authority in Europe had suddenly collapsed.

The last

"Suffering and great as the ninetenth century whose complete expression he is, the mental image of Richard Wagner stands before my eyes," wrote Thomas Mann at the beginning of an immortal essay. We might not wish to claim a comparable greatness for Prokofieff. His sufferings were imposed, and his century was awful, the most atrocious and spiritually vacant in human history. But between man and times there was the same fatal congruence. As we say good riddance to the century, we may also find ourselves saying farewell, and sorry, to the man.

I'm not much interested in John Adams' music or in contemporary "classical" music. It's either academic or vulgar. And the struggle of Zionists to allow themselves to come to terms with their culpability is not something I'm able to take very seriously, at least intellectually. But art is concerned with honesty more than intellect. I love Titian's paintings for Philip II; I wouldn't expect a 17th c. European Protestant or an Amerindian to enjoy standing in front of a portrait of the leader of his torturers. That's another issue. Velazquez, in his works, has a conflicted even ironic distance from his own claimed beliefs that adds an intellectual aspect to his art, but I wouldn't use that to demand more. If I refuse to see Zero Dark 30, as I refused to see The Hurt Locker it's more from the fact that I'm too near to the events while at the same time too aware of world outside the American imagination to have the patience to watch America begin -and no more than that- to come to grips with the events of the past 10, 40 or 100 years. The US is responsible for more destruction than bin Laden was ever be capable of.  Chomsky is right: "Uncontroversially" George Bush's crimes "vastly exceed bin Laden's." But that says nothing about the films as art, only about my ability to be a disinterested observer, not objective but removed. There's an issue when a culture becomes so insular and defensive that even a disinterested viewer finds little to look at, but there's a lot to look at in American culture.

I can't help but add Charles Rosen's review of Taruskin's Oxford History, in the NYRB.
Quoting Taruskin

William, (Guillaume), seventh count of Poitiers and ninth duke of Aquitaine (1071–ca. 1127), was the first European vernacular poet whose work has come down to us. The tradition, socially speaking, thus began right at the top, with all that that implies as to “highness” of style, tone, and diction…. A troubador’s subject matter was the life he led, viewed in terms of his social relations, which were ceremonial, idealized, and ritualized to the point of virtual sacralization. In keeping with the rarefied subject matter, the genres and styles of troubadour verse were also highly formalized and ceremonious, to the point of virtuosic complexity of design and occasional, sometimes deliberate, obscurity of meaning.

while adding this

I shall make a poem out of [about] nothing at all:
It will not speak of me or others,
Of love or youth, or of anything else,
For it was composed while I was asleep
Riding on horseback.

And this, and this. The last is hanging on the wall above my desk. It cost a pretty penny.
---
Taruskin now has his own tag, including posts where he's not mentioned, but where his association with law is relevant.

I saw Zero Dark 30

Two by Leiter, reposted in order.

George Lakoff: the Right-Wing Wins Because of Oxford Philosophy
This is not a joke, he really said it:

[Liberals] don't understand their own moral system or the other guy's, they don't know what's at stake, they don't know about framing, they don't know about metaphors, they don't understand the extent to which emotion is rational, they don't understand how vital emotion is, they try to hide their emotion. They do everything wrong because they're miseducated. And they're proud of that miseducation. Oxford philosophy reigns supreme, right? Oxford philosophy is killing the world.

Columbia's Philip Kitcher interviewed...
...at 3AM, but not by Richard Marshall. He is mostly discussing his recent work on Thomas Mann.

"Experimental philosophy" is experimental psychology poached by Oxford philosophers desperate for something more solid, and Leiter used to brag that he didn't talk to people from comp lit departments.
Now he's linking to a discussion of fiction as philosophy.

Lakoff's puffery is annoying and his arguments are obvious, or should be.

The model of a critical art, in the sense both of Adorno critique and political performance (why Dukakis lost and Clinton won), is a model or weakness. Criticism is response and response qua response is passivity. The connection between wonkish liberalism and Kafka doesn't run only through Bentham but through the library, the world of books, while most life is in the street. The theory of politics is not the practice of it; the ironizing of authority is not the wielding of it. If your only touchstones are what you're responding to or rebelling against then you're defining yourself as living in someone else's shadow. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery; the art of critique is minor art and the politics of critique is failure.

Revolution is not a value in itself, though it passed as one, and neither is science, though it too, etc...