Theory & Its Discontents

Farewell to a peculiarly German form of song

MENTION that you are going to a concert by Heino, Germany's best-known folk singer, and your sophisticated friends will surely grimace. One musical analyst, Rainer Moritz, calls Heino an "emetic for many generations". Why this visceral reaction to a singer who mixes the flashy outfits of Liberace with the sunglasses of Karl Lagerfeld—and who is on a farewell tour, after 50 years on stage?

The answer lies in a genre of German hit songs known as Schlager, which are the antithesis of what hip 68ers and their spiritual successors groove to, with folksy melodies, schmaltz-dripping voices and simple lyrics. Theodor Adorno, a philosopher and musicologist, once dismissed Schlager songs as musical opium for the working class. But what makes them truly German are their themes. Soon after the war, for instance, they were about sunnier pastures that people could not afford to travel to, particularly Italy. By the 1970s, the topics were drugs, the environment and peace.

Heino's songs have also often been an outlet for feelings that German history has made it hard to express: love of the country, its culture and landscape. His repertoire, listened to on both sides of the Berlin Wall, included modern versions of traditional folk songs, or Volkslieder, even ones that were popular with the Nazis. In Hoyerswerda, which is near the Polish border, they earned him standing ovations from a crowd whose average age was well above Heino's 66. "These songs will still be sung", he pledged, "when Heavy Metal, Punk and Hip Hop have long been forgotten."

Yet his valedictory tour may prove the last breath of the Schlager. "The Hitparade", a popular television show that once featured them, is long gone. They have disappeared from the Eurovision song contest—indeed several recent German entries have been parodies of Schlager songs. Germans now prefer genuine Volksmusik, for instance on "Musikantenstadl", a television show, or ordinary German-language rock bands.

Most Germans are happy about such musical normalisation, though some will miss making fun of Heino. Heino impersonators such as "The Real Heino", once the opening act of Die Toten Hosen, a punk band, will die out. Foreigners, too, should shed a tear over losing one of Germany's more unusual cultural phenomena. Jello Biafra, former lead singer of a punk band, Dead Kennedys, has a collection of Heino records, to show how low you can get musically. And listening to their simple lyrics was always a great way to learn German.

Since Adorno basically HATED popular music I've always been slightly mystified by highbrow rockcritics' love for the guy but maybe it now makes sense in the all-encompassing context of Heino.

xpost, but still...

Popular music criticism, the lowest rung of criticism, is rife with fairly intelligent, but glib, college boys who think that dropping knowledge is chic and attractive, probably to the opposite sex. So, it's very important to have an arsenal of thougth nuggets, little witticisms and truisms (Marxism for Dummies) to insert Madlib style into their otherwise pointless, purely subjective (though sometimes entertaining) reviews.

Speaking of entertainment, that's another reason why Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin etc. show up. So arts reviewers can just revel in the mud, dragging thousands of years of aesthetic theories through the slop to bring down the giants and raise them up, all in the name of jokey entertainment

Theory is sometimes used by theoreticians in academic journals, but no one reads those. And they're certainly not radicalizing anyone. If Marxian art theory somehow developed a political agenda or started prodding institutions, rather than indie bands, critically, then there might be a threat. But Gramsci is perfectly safe as long as we all accept that the hegemon is complete and everlasting.

purely subjective

Call me flippant but I'm a bit mystified at your using this as a negative when it seems more simply descriptive.

But even if the Adorno reference here is sorta skin-deep & ad hoc, the fact remains: Adorno is exhumed pretty regularly in these kinds of discussions, despite being, well, not exactly the ur-popist. The idea of some neolib Economist lackey doing the exhuming, though, seems to be more of (a) a testament to the pervasiveness of Frankfurt School thought in higher-ed humanities depts (all apologies to Mr Eagleton, but we're not quite over Theory yet) probably in tandem with (b) the fact that most people who encounter Adorno et al. don't quite understand the arguments.

So in that sense it's non-threatening, but non-threatening in the way Theory has been for years: apart from the catchphrases (the mirror stage, hegemony, culture industry, simulacra, aporia, &c.), hermetically sealed away from the laity behind a force-field of esoteric cant, stereotypically.

Okay I hope some of that made sense.

And James OTM. I'm guilty of that name-dropping, despite my best intentions, but I think I'm getting better at curbing it. I hope.

it's true his jones is mainly composed music, though it's not really true to say he hated all popular music -- some of his fondest writing harks back to the semi-popular composition of the vienna of his own youth (viz zemlinsky, who no one wd call an avant gardist): haha a redemption of teen "guilty pleasures" (except being smart he could see straight through that little philistine shimmyt)

also early and late adorno -- tho not mid-period, where he wz battlin a massive depression brought on by war, exile, and w.benjamin's death (among many)-- is occasionally very interesting on how records can change yr perceptions of composed, in a good and a bad way: ie its radical potential to cut music into chunks; its focus on texture over over dots on staves etc...

his specific tastes are irrelevant, and the way he gets bashed over the head for them is lame: most theory (of the kind we're discussing) is copied over wholecloth from literature-biased sources; people who spent a lot of time thinking about trhe practice of music (at various levels) are generally overlooked... in fact an awful lot of adorno's work here is also overlooked (there is a LOT of it), in favour of a tiny bunch of pieces which are generally poorly read -- intitally by academic straighties who are frightened of music (ALL music, not just pop), then defensively by music-fans righteously pissed off at the straighties

Of couse, in the article I think he's simply being used as an example of "hip 68ers and their spiritual successors."

But theory and name dropping in itself does not enhance this process.

(his current position is that theory is back!)

also: read this book for me ok thx bye

there are best-ofs out of these -- also there's a coll4ction of his radio broadcasts -- but i don't think they're complete

Mark -- hey, like me with the AMG! (This is stretching the point.)

mostly it is just badly borrowed authority

Because "subjective" appears in a sentence alongside words like pointless, I can understand why you'd think I believe subjectivity is bad. Sorry about that.

the reason you and lovebug have a bad conception of adorno is a result of exactly this problem: he really ISN'T a soundbytes type! (you have to read it ALL)

we know how to argue abt how (say) the nature of the audience is or isn't a characteristic of the band when it comes to POP, but transfer that to accredited intellectuals and our critical responses are way less finetuned

hahaha i wrote something once fer a litry journal and the editor of my piece made me throw in a jameson quote even though i had no idea who he was. i figured it couldn't hurt.

James' point that lack of praxis equals hot air is probably where I would stand on this, so yeah theory is dead if not put into practice on some level.

maybe adorno loses something in translation. but point well taken, if you listened to everything sun ra (or heino!) recorded perhaps the individual components or "soundbytes" would make (more) sense.

i think i disagree w/ the "all music reviews are purely subjective" sub-discussion but it's too nice a day to exhume that moldy corpse.

And to clarify, I'm not saying academic theory is any more important on the everyday level- it's not particularly radical- but they do try to take earlier critics seriously.

*even maybe the mclary wing of musicology, which as far as i know is still fairly embattled

HA that's all I meant. Adorno was also very suspicious about the onset of technology WRT info/art -- if not downright paranoid.

and didn't Walt Benjamin write exclusively about the visual arts?

the hatred is kinda irrelevant, it's the awareness that music has a social life

I'd say the hatred is kinda relevant, which is not to deny that pop music has social-life impact and many parallel meanings. I think when a critic disconnects completely from the musicology involved in understanding music you create a separation from the music itself.

*which wd at the very least include his analysis of how their fans were using and responding to them (the main problem with his analysis of the jazzfan relationship to the jazz record is that it doesn't allow for the same thing he's PRAISING in the composed-music fan's relationship to records) (but if you take his crit as an early attack on ROCKISM it works) (well kinda)

no adorno WASN'T (only) anti-technology: there's stuff in the 20s and the 60s when he's very intriguing about the radical potential of recording AND radio

yet isn't this ROCKISM straight-up in a shot glass?

see I haven't read enuff Adrono cause I saw something from I guess the 30s/40s were he seemed pretty freaked out about recording tech.

I wanted Benjamin to deal w/music and mechanical reproduction.

her husband robert [something] wrote a book about the relationship between baroque scales-practice and heavy metal solos -- steve vai-type solos -- which was also interesting, though i only read that once and had to give it back to someone

but in both cases (at the time) their interest in the social dimension of how music is composed and constructed was bitterly fought by the "establishment"

to be honest i have no idea how this has played out since, anmd i may be years out of date, but i remember phil masstransfer on old-ilm bein very scornful of mclary in a way that made me think she had not expanded her case convincingly within the academic mainstream (he knows a lot more than me abt old-skool musicoology)

Of course, under the "ethnomusicology" (as opposed to "musicology") rubric, there are tons of sociologically oriented pop music studies being done.

x-posts

i don't think benjamin cared abt music the way adorno did: it wasn't a daily part of his life, which i think it really was w.adorno... (which is why i always defend him basically)

but if you extrapolate from the trauerspiel book and arcades then there's a TON of ideas abt form and commodity, use and dreams that you can play with

but i'm not sure it gets taken anywhere

Benjamin was failry optimistic about mechanical reproduction in art, especially film. While the aura of art or the artist might diminish, the reproduction depersonalized the work, opening up its potential as a universal political message cut free from the bonds of the "elite artist." It could provide new ideas to a mass audience without all the bullshit of art collecting, hoarding, and the cult of the artist.

Their views on popular art reproduction are almost exactly the opposite in spirit. Benjamin sees its potential to liberate, Adorno sees its potential to enslave. Had Benajmin lived to see the post-war world, he may have changed his mind. Hard to say.

No James, 95% of what comes out of your mouth is condescending bullshit, you haven't done the reading (in the Voice), and you don't know what you're talking about.

(dialectical as i'm using it = deliberately stating an observation as an apparent contradiction or dichotomy, so as to move us all on off the page where the orthodox analysis merely produces an apparent contradiction)

james that characterisation of adorno applies more in the 30s and 40s than it does in the 20s and 60s (as i keep saying): he WASN'T resistant to reproduction in all time and in all cases

I agree. I'm not sure that much of a case is made in the review for why, in this case, repetition supposedly works.

To demonstrate: (a lot of fucks plus X =) with X representing great thinker/writer/theory/name drop etc.

I think it's simple enough.

I'm sorry for being a dick Frank, but you came in guns ablazing over what? The Village Voice. Basically you're pissed at me for attacking a publication. I'm honestly quite tired of being attacked by what essentially amounts to institutional opinions. The fact you call me simple betrays a complete lack of knowledge. You know exactly shit about me. So please, don't make assumptions.

I work with that book everyday! There's this thing in Reserves called the Critical Theory Collection that's nothing but oodles of twentieth century theory on all fronts. (Needless to say, it is barely ever used, but we know the spines of the books well.)

1. Adorno. The one stop shopper (hee hee) should proceed to "Essays On Music", a 700 page tome which collects the bulk of Adorno's writings on music and it has a great introduction by its editor Richard Leppert which traces the long arc of Adorno's positions as they develop. The poster above who mentions how much Adorno's views shift (mark S?) is OTM. For example, I just co-chaired a panel at a 20th cent. conference (the panel was called "Music, Philosophy, and the Event") at which Ken Reinhard gave a talk called "Wagner and Philosophy" which looked at Nietzsche, Adorno, and Badiou's positions on Wagner, and it was really striking to hear him describe the shifts between the 30s and the 60s in Adorno's sense of the status of Wagner's achievement, and how the political implications of that were subject to major change (though Adorno claimed he hadn't changed his mind, the bandwidth between his early accusations of totalitarian aesthetics / Wagner as "apotheosis of petty bourgeois morality" and his later sense that it was modernism which was effectively suffering from an inhibiting "anti-Wagnerism" suggests otherwise).

2. Nabisco's objection. Yeah, looking over my first post, I am guilty of fabricating that common reader chimera, "the coherent newspaper", i.e. there's really no reason to expect that the politics implicit in the business and op ed pages should line up perfectly with the perspectives on the culture page. The Economist is (not sure who said it up there but it's true) rather left on many social issues (legalization of drugs, gay marriage) but it is not going to quote Jello Biafra saying "trash a bank if you've got real balls" on the Business Page, and it's not exactly stunning news that it won't. I guess this splitting of the difference between the humanities-department-tinged music writing and the stonecold capitalism of the business page is pretty much standard in plenty of other papers.

3. UCLA. Yeah, I was talking just last night to a musicologist friend of mine (he's at Berkeley and does research on the medical aspects of singing technique/instruction in 19th cent. Europe) and I asked him why more musicologists don't pitch papers to the EMP pop conference. He just said "Oh those UCLA people probably do". I like Walser's book "Running With The Devil", especially the last chapter "Can I Play with Madness?" a lot.

I guess part of what I want to talk about is the strange status of theory as something which both "wins you points" if you bring it up AND inevitably irritates people who feel either condescended to or shut out when you bring it up. It's like you can't win. Within a certain muggy terrain where cultural studies abuts music journalism, "theory" seems to be both irresistible and contemptible at the same time.

here is my favourite adorno quote: "Horses are the survivors of the age of heroes"

I like Walser's book "Running With The Devil", especially the last chapter "Can I Play with Madness?" a lot.

...I clearly must now love Walser.

I need to read more Adorno I think.

I support people bringing up theory in their musical discussions in principle, because it suggests to me that they might have reflected on their own ideas about music and how these relate to how other people see music and (more importantly) the world, rather than simply having this undifferentiated grey blob of conviction.

Theory of course isn't the only way to get or demonstrate this kind of reflection.

In practice this doesn't really happen that often, and perhaps even use of theory tends to have the opposite effect - a mere bolstering of conviction via the application of a get out of jail free card: "Adorno is thinking about my argument so that I don't have to!"

But I don't think this is the fault of theory or would-be theoreticians specifically so much as a general tendency to use knowledge as a prop for conviction-maintenance, rather than conviction as a catalyst for knowledge-expansion...

Man, I wanna channel dead theorists now. I'd rake in the cash. Wait, no I wouldn't.

a friend of mine told me over the phone on wed that it was "disgusting" that i hadn't finished it yet :(

eagerly awaiting yr book (subject's near & dear to my heart)

Mark, what I think of the Keith Harris piece I linked - and putting aside the question whether it's condescending and whether it's good (I think it's good, and I don't think it's condescending, since I don't feel he's saying "Oh, this is good for Ca$h Money product"; I think he thinks these are talented smart people whose output is problematic): Well, I like it, one reason being that it's totally conflicted. That is, he's saying (and proving, with all those Lils) that hip-hop is often mired in copycatting and repetition, no label more so than Ca$h Money. He's then saying that calling a label or genre repetitive and unoriginal is lazy criticism, even when the charge is true, since in itself there's nothing wrong with repetition. BUT he does think there's a problem with Lil Wayne's repetitiveness; so he's then got a task that he doesn't really undertake, which is to tell us why repetitiveness is wrong in this instance. (By the way, I like that album a lot more than Keith does.) And he points out (though he doesn't have the space to elaborate) that the market can demand and reward originality as much as it demands and rewards repetition. This seems like an extraneous point, since he hadn't been talking about marketing up to now, but with all those Lils at the start it's not only an obvious issue, it's one that the people who'd slam Ca$h Money for its repetitiveness would concern themselves with, and Keith is concerning himself with them. And so that's something else that's going on, his arguing with and differentiating himself from some of his colleagues. But I sure got the sense that he doesn't eschew either their romanticism or their socioeconomic interests.

The Big Tymers part of the review is ace, conveying not only an ethos and what he can of a sound, but giving us Mannie's wit.

As for the use of theory, he doesn't have the space to go into the use of novelty and repetition in the market, but for a two-sentence description he's done well, and he's not doing it to say "I know some theory" but to actually communicate something about the argument (that is, if you're going to say that repetition is market driven, well so is novelty, and these artists - slackers though they may be - are in business). So I see absolutely nothing wrong with his inserting theory here, given that other than using the word "Adorno" he does nothing to bonk you over the head with the idea that he's using theory - in fact, he states what he can of his theoretical argument rather than flashing "theory words theory words" at you in lights. I'm basically fine with his review, though if Keith were to suddenly appear on this thread I'd probably ask him to dig into himself deeper. Given that neither repetition nor originality are good or bad in themselves (and what's being repeated or created has a lot to do with whether you like the result), why does he care about Wayne's or Mannie's repetitiveness?

This seems like a very simple observation but I don't think people acknowledge it enough when talking about these concepts!

My problem with ILX theory threads is that we don't actually discuss theory on them; instead we - or you - summarize or allude to other people's theories.

(Or am I confusing myself with the entire culture?)

That's not a response to what you guys said, just an observation.

*(though not the conflictedness in regard to Adorno, whom I've read little of, and none in four years)

i meant the avg reader may not be hip to marxism and the dialectic method of arguing and get put off by the circularity, references etc.

fwiw I thought the linked piece was less conflicted than badly organized but i'm obv way old-school i.e. not an adorno head.

"Any reason I give for disliking something can and will be given as a reason of mine for disliking something else."

In other words, I love Liz Mitchell's clear and empty singing; I hate Joan Baez's clear and empty singing.

Of course I can elaborate, say that Joan's singing is soggy, whereas Liz's is as clear as a running brook. Oops, that doesn't work, as brooks are kind of wet themselves. And anyway, I'm sure to find someone I love whose vocals are absolutely drenched. Amy Lee, perhaps, but not until she learns better when to turn her faucet on full and when to moderate the flow. You see, my problem is that the drenchings lose impact through overrepetition.

I really like the consistency of Liz Mitchell's vocals.

There's something I call The Boney Joan Rule, which goes as follows:
"Any reason I give for disliking something can and will be given as a reason of mine for liking something else."

In other words, I love Liz Mitchell's clear and empty singing; I hate Joan Baez's clear and empty singing.

Of course I can elaborate, say that Joan's singing is soggy, whereas Liz's is as clear as a running brook. Oops, that doesn't work, as brooks are kind of wet themselves. And anyway, I'm sure to find someone I love whose vocals are absolutely drenched. Amy Lee, perhaps, but not until she learns better when to turn her faucet on full and when to moderate the flow. You see, my problem is that the drenchings lose impact through overrepetition.

I really like the consistency of Liz Mitchell's vocals.

But in fact in my Linda Perry review I said that her singing is "almost - or often - too ugly. Nonetheless, you don't mistake her for anybody else."

(Like, someone's going to walk into Kmart and buy my book.)

Then under that schema, saying that "neither repetition nor originality are good or bad in themselves" shouldn't make sense but maybe we're (er I'm) getting confused as to when "originality" used as value-neutral and value-positive.

I assume this has to do with weird contradiction in music criticism: it's a form in which the personality is very much an issue (both in terms of the subjectivity of taste and in the mythic construction of the critic greats), but readers by and large don't actually want your personality slung all over a review. And when your word count is already densely packed with idea stuff, I think there's a tendency for some to try and tweak all the little words in between to inject themselves in.

*bows* Much thanks. I always like to think that I'm trying (not always succeeding!) to create perfect little miniatures.

Musically I think repetition allows the musician to focus more on texture, rhythmic complexity, and sometimes rather advanced harmony. Hip Hop fits the story/song model in that the music serves as accompaniment for narrative, not unlike troubadour music in the western art tradition.

Repetitious music is good for work, duty, ritual, and sex because it conforms to the rhythms of every life, mimicing the repetition necessary to live and carry out tasks which are repetitious. Professionals and workers probably find solace in something that provides an analog to what they experience everyday. Work, slave, and a lot of pre-baroque religious music and martial music is repetitious for that reason- it instills order and reaffirms the actor's role in society or the world.

But I don't think that it's a bad thing or an exclusive element of modern or contemporary society. Humans have listened to rhythmic and repetitious music for centuries and there was never a time, I would contend, when the whole of Europe embraced the more complex classical traditions. Even a superstar like Wagner wasn't appealing to some guy in the Bavarian highlands, whose music was probably pretty basic.

Even in a theoretical worker state or a "classless" socialist society, there would be a need for toil, tasks, social interaction (dances) and moments of meditation. And repetitious simple music would serve for all these functions. It would be just as totalitarian imposing complex music arranged in movements on people as force feeding them pop music. People need simplicity, they need music that speaks to the rhythms of life.

I don't think historicsm should be applied to music- there is no teleology in it. There is no liberation from simple catchy music in my estimation.

Brevity is a wonderful thing to have a handle on. I could use some in my writing.

And that said, I'm going to run off, perhaps for days (I belong on other threads where I need to be writing stuff that I can possibly cannibalize for remunerative work), without my raising a single philosophical issue myself.

If some of the relative newbies here are puzzled as to what I'm talking about, maybe someone could point them to the Kuhn or the Derrida thread.

Nabisco said: If theory is "safely dead and non-threatening" in this article, it's because, according to the author, the theory's antiquated and point-missing; Adorno can call this "musical opium for the working class," but the next word in the text is BUT." "

Right, but my point is that this author still felt there was something to be gained by quoting Adorno, in the very teeth of his disagreement with him. If you just think Adorno's wrong and that's that then you don't bother with him, but the stance in relation to theory here is more ambivalent. Also, the author of the piece seems to cling to a bit more of a fence-sitting stance about the phenomenon of Heino's enduring popularity; the article is not a defense of Heino's art but a "gee whiz, why is this guy so dang popular? And who likes him anyway?" kind of thing.

The only non-Marxian or personal philosophy I really draw on when I'm talking music is phenomenology. I talk about music in functional social terms and a subjective experiential phenomenon.

Wow man, that's a deep observation.

Kogan said: "ILXors talk about "Theory," but by and large they refuse to theorize."

I think the combative gauntlet flinging gesture you've just indulged in with that list of 'very honorable men' who stand accused of insufficient theorizing on a message board provides eloquent testimony to why you aren't finding people jumping at the chance to "have a conversation" with you on your own terms, particuarly since, given your alleged hostility to conversation in which shorthand references to other philosophers / thinkers / theorists / theories are made, the only thing that would count as "having a conversation" would be one in which people spontaneously did work in primary philosophy online with each other off the cuff. Which, by the way, I have yet to see you do either. But perhaps I missed the part where you gave birth to an entirely original ontology or ethics or watertight and systematic and wholly original aesthetic theory?

The "talking about theory" vs "theorizing" distinction is vague, perhaps productively so from a rhetorical point of view, as your invocation of it (without any clarification of where you would draw the line) casts you as the lonely voice who clings to truth and standards in a world of shabby and pretentious fakery, a beloved position of "anti-theory" punditry that stretches from Camille Paglia to Roger Kimball to Allan Bloom etc.

Okay, I ought to know better than to rise to this kind of gesture, but having been goaded into having a conversation with someone who intends to flounce out of view immediately after denouncing others for not engaging him in a conversation (nice move) let me state the obvious: ILX is a place where people chat in a loose and offhand manner, and it leans heavily towards lightly skimming through pop cultural topics as they bob and float across the media day. It's just not the forum for extended argument building. Of any kind.

Though I have a degree in philosophy and read and write about particular aspects of intellectual history (primarily 16th century English literature, but also psychoanalysis) I have never claimed to be a philosopher. Hence I don't "philosophize", with you or anyone else. I do not have a coherent ontology, nor a coherent ethics, nor a watertight theory of aesthetics "of my own". I have committments and opinions, but it would extremely pretentious of me to think that they amounted to "a philosophy of my own", just as it would be extremely pretentious of me to think that my offhand online musings constituted "doing philosophy". I have too much respect for the real thing to pass off such conversations as equivalent to the lifelong task of doing work in primary philosophy. Like many educated people, I tend to shop around, read what I can, assess various work in distinct areas, and struggle to cobble together something more or less coherent out of what I have read and what has already been thought. That's why if a topic in ethics comes up, my attempt to have a discussion about it will range across Kant and Nietzsche and Williams and Scheffler (or my dim memory of same), shot through with tentative and modest "I think . . . " observations which are largely reactions to said thinkers. To people who don't read this stuff, that's name-dropping and pretentious. So be it. To talk about these individuals, their writings, and the historical trajectory that joins them is to "talk about theory" and, according to you, it is thus not to "theorize". Oh well. The trouble is that when you read philosophy you see that developments within philosophy do tend to emerge through a reaction to other writers: Plato is talking about Parmenides, Nietzsche's talking about Plato, Heidegger talks about Nietzsche, Wittgenstein's bouncing off Moore, Derrida's thought emerges through dialogue with Husserl, etc. i.e. the heavy hitters in the history of philosophy talked about theory AND theorized, and sometimes the "aboutness" was a necessary preliminary to the "theorizing". That said, I'm not a heavy hitter. And neither are you. You're not a primary philosopher. You're a music critic, and it's your job to say something interesting about music. You may draw upon philosophy in order to do that, but I would be way out of line expecting that you will have an original sui generis metaphysical / ethical / ontological and systematic worldview. I would be very surprised to learn that in fact you have developed just such a thing (it's no insult to just say honestly that I would skeptical). Sorry to come on strong but it seems way of out line to castigate strangers online for failing to live up to standards you've cooked up which you are in no position to satisfy yourself and which aren't germane to the context in which chit chat on a message board occurs.

Two questions:

1.Do you expect every guitarist to chop down trees and build their own guitar?

2. Do you consider yourself a philosopher?

this is my problem with everything. i don't understand how exposure to other's more developed philosophy would make you want to completely subvert your own budding theories and lose respect for your mind and building understanding.

xpost - i knew you were doing to say that and i can see how it might feel that way, but if you're unwilling to engage in any level of philosophical discussion (and call it different names - i just have opinions, committment etc.) i think something is going on.

anyway...staying out.

Drew: the approach I would take--and advocate taking--is late-Wittgensteinian, abjuring the hedgehog's one-big-idea quest for something overarching & coherent & systematic, opting instead to tackle philosophy in a therapeutic, piecemeal fashion, addressing debates, dilemmas, &c. as they present themselves.

While I think this binary opposition of talking about theory vs. theorizing, esp. putting the latter over the former, is a noble attempt to spark original intellectual labor, it denigrates the idea of dialogue between thinkers/thought. And dialogue should be involved in both talking about theory & theorizing; even the most adventurous minds didn't develop these autonomous, island-like philosophies--like Drew said, they were reacting, in dialogue, maybe even performing an Oedipal "strong misreading."

Susan, I certainly hope you don't feel that I've accused you, or anyone for that matter, of being dumb. I was just responding to Kogan's provocations and explaining how I feel about a distinction that he was drawing. I'm happy to talk about all sorts of things, and do. I just don't regard that as "doing philosophy" in the sense that I take that to have been done by Plato, Hegel, Kant, and, yes, Wittgenstein. If that means that I have a weirdly pious and worshipful and self-abnegating modesty on this topic, we can talk about that too. It's been on my mind lately with reference to the peculiarly ambitious and systematic work of Alain Badiou, who seems to be doing primary philosophy in the manner I have described above (if his just translated into English tome "Being and Event", which I'm in the middle of reading, is any indication), though he is also the author of works which are very much in the hated-by-Kogan category of "talking about theory". I just don't think of myself as a philosopher, but I don't see that as any barrier to having a good conversation, and I hope/trust that such conversations continue.

I think there is something about theory as a critical preoccupation which prevents us from being able to answer these questions easily. Perhaps it's that theory itself is at one end of the posited binary theory+practice=praxis, such that the practical "life" component of theory only appears to exist outside of itself, in some projected synthesis that is always yet-to-come. So when we discuss "theory" itself, it's always abstracted, a bundle of ideas which may be correct or incorrect depending on where one's theoretical allegiances lie - but those allegiances themselves are very hard to explain or justify.

Music criticism is different: because what is being responded to is a direct sensory perception, which we then try to unpack in the form of ideas or explanations or rationalisations, we're always openly starting from a praxis-of-sorts and working backwards: "this music does [x] to me and I think this is why..."

Over at Dissensus, in some posters' attempts to treat music like theory, they necessarily attempt to suspend from discussion or contemplation this practical foundation of all critical conclusions - probably on the grounds that this foundation constitutes some easily manipulated sensory perception and thus can't be trusted; only pure theory can give rise to real truth, meaningful answers. But it's hard to get past the question, "in that case, what made you decide that this particular theory explained how this music functions? What is the basis of your allegiance, if its correctness cannot be conclusively proven?"

But this question is one that music's emphasis on sensory experience foregrounds; the same cannot be said for theory, for the very reason that respectable theory doesn't officially make any appeals to our immediate sensory perception.

I'm unjustifiably excluded from Frank's list above, perhaps because I tend to blunder into attempting to answer questions before realising too late that I have no idea what I'm talking about.

"But what happens when you're asked if you "really believe" in Derrida, or Adorno, or Freud? Or, to put it another way, what happens if somebody asks you about the status of your interpretative claims?"

Or, to put it yet another way: "Why do you believe in Derrida, Adorno or Freud?"

To say "because they are correct/because their theory is true" is an answer, but it tells us little, not because there is no truth but because truth does not materialise merely because it is invoked. One still has to put forward an arguement for truth... to, in effect, theorise the theoretical or practical legitimacy of the theory. Ultimately in any conversation or argument or debate the truth is both real and also agreed upon - this in much the same way that a person charged with a crime can be both actually innocent and found innocent at trial, these two things being distinguishable phenomena and perhaps entriely unrelated... But in discussions of theory, we tend to always skip the jury's verdict and head straight to the sentencing: "working on the (unspoken) assumption that we agree that Adorno is true, the correct application of Adorno is as follows...." Even when we do pass verdict, we tend to rely on the right of juries not to have to explain their decisions - but jurors and theory-fans pass their verdicts for a whole host of reasons, all for the purpose of establishing an agreed upon truth with they can feel comfortable believing is also actually true.

As you note above, generally speaking I don't think theory is actually held to the benchmark of "truth", perhaps partly because it is these sorts of claims to truth which one would need to make on theory's behalf which theory tends to be suspicious of. So when we're asked to defend theory (generally, or a theory in particular) we tend to use the lesser test of, er, "adequately conceived" - in other words, the notion that the theory cannot immediately be disproved or exposed as internally inconsistent and contradictory, and, furthermore, that it can provide us with an answer to the following questions.

But if theory is adequately conceived, the next question is "for what purpose"? Why embrace a theory merely on the basis that it is adequately conceived for the purpose of explaining something which is not actually interesting or relevant or worth wondering about? What justifies the allegiance the theory-fan feels to a particular theory? If a theory excites you because it answers a particular question, why is that question worth answering? Has it not been answered sufficiently before?

So to that extent, asking "what is your allegiance to Adorno, and what do you hope to gain out of using him?" is the same as, or very similar to the question "what is the truth of Adorno?"

I think what Frank has tended to do is ask these sorts of questions in threads on theorists, esp. "why is that question worth answering? What value does the question and the answer have to you?"

Frank Lentricchia's renunciation of theory in Lingua Franca (September/October 1996, p. 64): "Tell me your theory and I'll tell you in advance what you'll say about any work of literature, especially those you haven't read."

As for Tim's inquiries into the capacity of X or Y theory to generate truth, the absense of such a capacity from the discussion of theories in general, whether this capacity holds more importance than an "adequately conceived" internal logic, whether any of this justifies allegiance to X or Y theory, &c. . . . I feel most people pledge allegiance to theories out of residual academic trends on one hand, and maybe a perceived correspondence to reality on the other. W/r/t the latter: for instance, psychoanalytic criticism getting embraced out of a personal recognition of one's own subconscious motivations, Frankfurt School fans witnessing the apparatus of the culture industry for themselves, and so on. That is, maybe the extent of our "belief" in a theory matches the extent to which the theory conforms to our view of the world/society/reality/whatever.

I think the question "Why do you believe in Derrida, Adorno or Freud?" is likely to produce answers that split into two categories:

1. Truth (I think theory y is substantially correct)
2. Pleasure (I enjoy the puzzle-solving feeling of watching a reading of object x in terms of theory y take shape)

Once it becomes a matter of answering "what is your personal motive for believing in Freud?" with explanations of belief like "well his account of aggression reminds me of my own childhood experiences etc." I lose interest. I don't think such stories are actually a compelling substitute for the applicationist work that said person has done with Freud about a text that I happen to have read, i.e. maybe Abraham and Torok believe in Freud for one reason and maybe they believe in him for another (and I'm sure they would be fascinated to think about why) but all I really care about is the fact that their work of Freudian criticism "The Wolf Man's Magic Word" is a fucking amazing work of Freudian criticism. What in particular in their own life has made them into the Freudians that they are isn't terribly interesting (to me), i.e. it's really not their grounds for belief but their moves as writers / interpreters that I'm interested in. Furthermore, the fact that their version of Freudian criticism is different from Julia Lupton's and different from Shoshana Felman's etc. suggests that 'the tools", when used well, are *not* as predictable in their outcomes as Lentricchia's waggish remark (or Ian's lucky guess) suggests.

and sure, there are places where it can be stipulated that everyone has a firm grounding in whichever school or set of ideas is under discussion, but those places as a rule don't include cd reviews in weekly or daily newspapers or music message forums. i'm not saying anyone who wants to bring adorno into a discussion of 3-6 mafia at the oscars (for example) needs to provide some kind of adorno cliffs notes; just that there are ways to do so that bring adorno's ideas concretely and coherently to bear on the subject at hand. and, more to the point, anyone who can't bring them concretely and coherently to bear maybe shouldn't be invoking them in the first place.

Having said that, your enjoyment of and appreciation for a fucking great piece of Freudian criticism probably rests on a prior acceptance of the legitimacy of Freud as a theorist who is worth spending time on and with - either on the grounds of the truth he reveals or the pleasure he inspires... in the same way that in order to take a judge's sentencing seriously we first need to accept the jury's verdict as legitimate, even if we don't know why it's legitimate.

I think the hard thing for believers to do is provide non-believers with that sense of legitimacy. If you're a student of theory, you've effectively accepted a theorist as legitimate before you actually decide whether you think they're right or interesting - at least insofar as you're prepared to struggle through their work in the hope of enjoyment or insight. The very fact of studying theory in this sense is a bit like accepting in advance the rules of the court - you may decide ultimately that a jury's decision was incorrect, and you might even write a brilliant scholarly text of jurisprudence which demonstrates what the best decision would have been, but you nonetheless persevere with the notion that the legal construct we deal with is the best way to arrive (however imperfectly) at truth and justice.

Perhaps on ILM discussions of theory are a bit like lawyers debating different judicial decisions, who cannot really answer why they think their legal system has legitimacy in the first place, why the laws are worth obeying, etc.

For me, it's also interesting because the era of high theory = the era of pomo primacy, and that "truth," in these circles, remains a debilitatingly complicated notion, if not a quaintly anachronistic one. Along these lines, I'd be interested to know what it means for a theory to be "correct" because whatever one's grounds for correctness are (correspondence to reality, for instance?), that'd more or less serve as their grounds for belief in the theory proper.

Man, I'd missed this quote when it came out (right when I was leaving grad school as well). It appeals to me greatly.

absent the substance of their arguments, those names are just mystical incantations, and rather than being used to further discussion they can be used to seal it off by appeal to a body of select, secret knowledge.

Obviously I share Gypsy's frustration, but one of my ideas is that the names are not just being used as mystical incantations - or even if they are mystical incantations, there's no "just" about it. That is, if you're an anthropologist studying a mystical religious sect, you don't say to yourself, "this is bullshit; it's just a bunch of mystical incantations," but rather you try to understand how those incantations function in that sect, what's going on in the social practices to which they belong.

As for sealing off discussion, it's my observation that people here seal off their own discussion. In any event, if Mark returns, I'd like to ask him what advantage there is in substituting the word "dialectical" for the word "conflicted." I'm not saying that there are no advantages; I'd just like to know what they are. And my experience is that I'm more likely to get a useful answer if Mark presents his ideas as "Mark Sinker's ideas" rather than as "Teodor Adorno's ideas," even if the former are one hundred percent derived from the latter.

*Is "uninvitingness" a word?

personally, i have always seen theory as a tool. hell, i can barely muster the rigor needed to go deeply into anyone. i pick and choose from here and there and use those elements to get me thinking. theory should begat theorizing as art should begat art.

speaking of benjamin, theres a halfway interesting essay on the role of the critic now and benjamin at ctheory

http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=506

A conflicted view point might hold two contradictory ideas, but dialectical assumes a resolution. If I'm conflicted about an artist I might say something like "on one had I can see that the artist's music is a result of capitalist relations between the artist, the record label, and the consumer, but on the other hand the artists is saying something important about said relationships. The importance of the message is contradicted by the means used to present it. I can't help but to love and hate it."

Dialectically speaking, I might say something like: "The artist was created by consumer capitalism and otherwise would not exist, but he provided a statement that is antithetical to the market, using the very market itself, effectively dealing a blow to capitalism through its own apparatus." It's negative reasoning. The political act negates its social premise.

I need to go look at the original article again so I can actually talk about this.

and (earlier): (dialectical as i'm using it = deliberately stating an observation as an apparent contradiction or dichotomy, so as to move us all on off the page where the orthodox analysis merely produces an apparent contradiction)

i then explained (admittedly somewhat compactedly) why i thought it was useful to make a link between the two ideas when two people using the different words (who actually agree about a lot of things) were whacking each other over the head

one of the problems i have with pragmatism (=rough term for the area frank is coming from) is that i think it can tend to a kind of compacency (it DOESN'T in frank: as he says, he wants people to push into the conflictedness and become aware of it) --

the complacency would be of the following form i think: "these ideas appear to conflict but that's because they apply in different parts of life -- once we know more about how life connects them, the conflict will vanish" ie there's a kind of laissez-faire, things-will-work-themselves-out tendency within a lot of pragmatism... i guess i prefer an approach which gets to the potential nub BEFORE we have a war on our hands, and formalising conflicts or potential contradictions with a view to seeing a way out, is one way of doing this

"2) theory still constitutes a hoard of cultural capital"

I think his point that people follow theory for reasons of pleasure is a real important one especially on this particular forum. But maybe I'm misreading him.

I also think Frank's point about people doing more theory is a good one--people seem to have far too precious an attitude about theory, both in terms of the exclusivity and in terms of being a bit too impressed at the intelligence of certain theorists while ignoring that they are not very good writers and/or actually full of crap. I tend to regard theory as I would any other art object (rather than regarding art objects as theory as Tim said they do on Dissensus), but I guess that makes me weird. It does, however, allow you to work with the theory without "believing" in it per se--just like you don't have to "believe" in Elton John for him to be a useful gateway into Antony or whatever.

harris stops before he gets to the pointing bit, i think

currently james is magicing the contradiction away entirely without seriously addressing it -- this is a common tactic of commodified academic "adornoism", which i think he's a bit stuck inside (ie borrowing the authority of others, not thinking for himself, which harris is certainly doing)

i'm not going to touch the issue of condescension, i don't think -- i just now didn't get a job i quite wanted, and my grumpiness levels are high

dialectical as i'm using it = deliberately stating an observation as an apparent contradiction or dichotomy, so as to move us all on off the page where the orthodox analysis merely produces an apparent contradiction

I don't quite understand this. That is, I state something as an apparent contradiction or dichotomy - "as a Lil Wayne fan, I want his next album to be similar but not identical to his previous album" - in order to move us to a new page that - maybe - doesn't treat the contradiction/dichotomy as a contradiction or dichotomy but as something else? Is that what you're saying. In any event, "similar but not identical to" actually isn't a contradiction or a dichotomy, and I'm not sure what you mean by "dichotomy" anyway. That is, in general usage, "similar" and "dissimilar" aren't either/or terms like an on/off switch but rather are comparative terms like loud and soft (something's louder or softer than something else, something's more or less similar/more or less dissimilar). And, for that matter, in general usage, "identical" and "different" are also comparative. "Identical" can mean "absolutely no difference" but rarely does. And "different" almost never means "different in every possible way." So, um... well, what's at issue in being "dialectical"? It's pretty obvious why I might want to buy a Big Mac that is just like the one I ate yesterday but I won't want to buy Tha Carter if it's the exact same album as 500 Degreez except with a different title, since I already own 500 Degreez. (And I'm not sure that the terms "capitalism" and "romanticism" play a role in my preferences here, since I can log onto a new ILX thread hoping that it's similar but not identical to previous threads, but threads aren't being sold or bought.) So is "different but not too different" a dialectical tension? Why isn't the word "tension" sufficient? Lil Wayne could confound everyone by making his next album sound a lot like Alanis Morissette, and who knows, I might end up liking it more. And maybe this would mean a drastic redefinition of Lil Wayne, or maybe Wayne going Alanis would nonetheless retain a connection to previous Wayneness. Again, is there anything contradictory or dichotomous in this process?

erm, let's try this: "as a Lil Wayne fan, I want his next album to be down w.the homiez but set on pluto" -- at first glance, this makes no sense... so either i am an idiot who doesn't know the meaning of words, OR my conception of "down w.the homiez" or "set on pluto" is not the same as yours -- the resolution pointed towards here would to quiz me to find what i mean by one or other (ok that'sa bit feeble: someone pick me a good conflict)

dialectics is a way to state the (yes yes apparent) conflict so that it sends you chasing after the big bouncing ball of deeper understanding or involvement -- it's not a counter to the idea of it to say "oh but that isn't a conflict once you look at it"

(it's like in science where you frame the experiment so as to produce the result which brings down the theory being tested)

I'll try to look at and address the other article everyone is talking about sometime later today.

potentially dialectical: the problem or doing the same thing becomes a virtue (?) in that "Cash Money's success encapsulates capitalism as ritual, with the reassurance of repetition referring back to an older, more stable tradition." which i suppose is bad becuz he is talking about capitalism and not art, but is also good because it rescues the pre-capital stability of tradition from the instability of capital through its v. repetition of capital driven formula.

So then "Big Tymers' Hood Rich is the first Cash Money album to make the same old song sound different." = enough repetition of the same thing produces a different thing.

dunno if i buy it all in this case, but that's the dialectical gist -- i.e. not abstract opposition nor conflict in KH's mind but a process of conflict and resolution in the world writ large.

I can write a book lamenting current marketing conditions, and the book can be marketed using current marketing techniques, as the only choice I have. Is this a contradiction? Perhaps, but not necessarily.

Yes, ILX is being weird at the moment; I fled ilx.p3r.net for ilx.wh3rd.net. TS: p3r vs. wh3rd.

they kill conversations quicker than raid.

Yeah, I'm a bit tired of it myself actually. hehe.

anyway, what is derived from this model?

http://shopping.redorbit.com/edmunds/images/be36809ef78787919844e0a14492d5eb.jpg

I mean, if you look at most of my posts above and elsewhere you can see that I totally reject a negative approach to music based on the commercial aspect of it. Production and distribution doesn't enter into my likes and dislikes.

(also i however disagree with kh over 500 degreez in that i think it is different from both earlier and later lil wayne. there actually ended up being a total trope that was fairly bogus about the "consistency" of hot boyz product that just meant ppl. weren't listening carefully or even if they were that it was easier to pretend they weren't.)

Here's a clue or two -- what gets called "Volksmusik" on German television has next-to-nothing to do with actual German folk music. TV Volksmusik is Schlager with accordians, and TV Volksmusik shows also include Schlager without accordians. And Heino's retirement is a lousy example of the death of Schlager. He has always self-identified with the Volksmusik name more than Schlager -- it's just that, not being Bavarian, he doesn't do the dialect schtick and therefore won't strike idiot journalists as obviously "German" (so he must be a SECRET Nazi!) If you want to talk about "the death of Schlager", you talk about Ralf Siegal's failures at Eurovision recently (and counter with the fact that Germany keeps sending his productions in anyway!), you talk about Roy Black playing shopping malls and then killing himself, you talk about Patrick Lindner being more famous for being "the gay Schlager star" than for anything he's ever recorded.

The big point: Theory is the last refuge of journalists who can't get their facts straight.

Haha, well said.

i then explained (admittedly somewhat compactedly) why i thought it was useful to make a link between the two ideas when two people using the different words (who actually agree about a lot of things) were whacking each other over the head

I just scrolled through the thread and never found - or didn't recognize as such - that explanation.

I've yet to grasp how you're using the word "dialectical."** Right now I won't take a shot at what it means myself. What follows might or might not have anything to do with dialectics, but has to do with something I'm trying to puzzle through:

In normal usage there are areas where the words "contradiction," "conflict," "tension," "ambivalence," "incompatibility," and the like tend to bunch up and overlap, one becoming more-or-less interchangeable with the others - which is usually fine. But I think where the issue is social and intellectual change - and how contradictions, conflicts, etc. are an impetus for such change - we have to separate out "contradiction" from the other words. This is because the human mind won't abide a contradiction - is probably hard wired not to - so contradictions get resolved or eliminated over time. Once you recognize something as a contradiction, the motor is now running, and things will change. Whereas conflicts, tensions, ambivalences, and incompatibilities may get resolved or eliminated, but may not, may survive forever. You can live with conflict but not contradiction. You're not going to persist in believing both that he's pointing a gun at you and that he's not pointing a gun at you. But "I don't like you but I love you" can be eternal. Or, if it changes, this is not because you've turned on the anticontradiction machine. The anticontradiction machine isn't part of this mechanism.

(Is it always true that contradictions get resolved or eliminated over time? Well let's dogmatically say it is, and go on, while noting that "contradiction vs. noncontradiction" is a comparative relationship like "loud vs. soft," different people might have different contradiction thresholds just as they have different pain thresholds, hypocrisy seems rampant enough for one to think that the threshold is too high in some people, and someone has to recognize the contradiction in the first place for the motor to start running.)

You can probably see where I'm going and what might be at stake here. The advantage of categorizing or presenting something as a contradiction is that you're seeing it as inherently unstable. But the risk in doing this when you shouldn't - in categorizing or presenting conflicts as if they were contradictions - is that you're playing a game of pretend with yourself, imagining instability where there isn't any. E.g., that you love your daughter but can make lots of money by selling her into slavery may be a conflict, but it's not a contradiction, and calling it one isn't going to make it one.

If I don't want a man to sell his daughter into slavery, I might tell him that he's contradicting himself when he says that he loves her and that he's going to sell her into slavery. But to myself I'll just say that the man is conflicted, since to call it a "contradiction" is to pretend that his behavior is inherently unstable and that it can't persist. Or I can call it a "contradiction" but note to myself that this contradiction isn't strong enough to be a transformative one. (One does hope that the man's inner conflict is strong enough to be transformative, but one can't guarantee this. One can't say that the conflict is inherently transformative, as one can say about actual contradictions.)

OK, here's the crux: Take a phrase such as "the cultural contradictions of capitalism." It implies that capitalism will change (not necessarily end, but change) - that's what I infer from the phrase, anyway. (There's a book with that title, but I've never read it.) Whereas the phrase "cultural conflicts within capitalism" doesn't imply a change. Hell, maybe we can make money off those conflicts, have a stake in preserving them. So which is right? Cultural contradictions or cultural conflicts? (This isn't to say that a culture can't have both contradictions and conflicts, or that conflicts can't themselves result in change, just that it's not the guaranteed change you get with contradictions. For instance, the impulse to have other people's beliefs coincide with one's own isn't the same as the impulse to remove contradictions.) Should we apply the word "contradictory" to cultures and social processes?

I'm recommending that we don't - at least not when what is on our mind is social and intellectual transformation. Unfortunately, I'm realizing I'm not sure what my own conventions are for using the word "contradict."

Someone can hold contradictory beliefs. Someone can make contradictory assertions. But a landscape can't contradict itself. So "contradictory" applies to beliefs and assertions, but not to landscapes. And if my account of a landscape is contradictory then my account is wrong.

OK, but if my account of a person is contradictory, it's also wrong. Yet I have no problem calling a person "contradictory" if he makes contradictory assertions or he issues contradictory instructions or he says one thing and does another or if his behavior is erratic or he changes his mind all the time.

I won't call a landscape contradictory, since landscapes don't make assertions or have beliefs.

But wait, suppose there are people on my landscape. Aren't they then part of the landscape? So, can't I at least say that the landscape contains contradictions, since it contains people who are sometimes contradictory? I'd say "No." But then maybe I shouldn't call people "contradictory" either. Keeping my eye on the ball here, which is the issue of intellectual and social transformation, I'll just say that when transformation is what is on our mind, we should remember that when we call a person "contradictory" we're basically talking about his assertions and beliefs, not about the entirety of his mental processes.

I actually sat down this morning and wrote a couple of pages on the subject of whether neural processes can be contradictory. My answer is "No," and my first justification for this "no" is that a thought or an assertion can contradict some other thought or assertion but a state of the body can't be said to contradict another state of the body, since bodily states don't make assertions. But is this true? There are probably neural processes that correspond to assertions and beliefs, so one can ask why I'm not willing to call neural processes contradictory. My reply would be that, unlike beliefs and assertions, neural processes aren't out in the social world of justifications and reasons. But I'm not comfortable with this reply, since it implies that sentences are out in the social world but that the bodies that emit them aren't. This is absurd. What I will say is that if you want to talk about how bodies exist in the world of social justifications and reasons, you're better off speaking of "beliefs" and "assertions" (and of "persons" who hold or make them) than of "neural processes."

My general principle would be to refuse to call any process - social process as well as bodily process - "contradictory." But there's no deeper principle from which I derive this one. My main reason for the principle is that it stops us from setting the contradiction threshold too low. And I'm being circular here, saying on the one hand that contradictions are inherently transformative, and then saying on the other that we shouldn't call something "contradictory" unless it's transformative. But I don't consider that circle vicious, since I'm just making a recommendation about usage.

A quick thought about whether communities - as well as individuals - can be said to hold beliefs and make assertions. I'd say yes they can, but that we have to be careful when saying that a particular one actually does, given that it's a lot easier for people within a community to agree to disagree than it is for a person to agree to disagree with himself. I'd say that one thing that holds a scientific subdiscipline together is that its members refuse to agree to disagree. So a disagreement in the subdiscipline won't stand forever.*** Anyway, this striving for intellectual coherence doesn't hold for most other communities (e.g., groups of rock critics, groups of philosophers, etc.) much less for whole societies or social systems or economic systems or cultures.

(**Mark, if you want to follow up, what might be useful is to answer my frequent question, "What's at stake?" For example, if I were to add "dialectical" strategies to my writing, what would I be adding, and what would I gain by adding them? Or, if without knowing it I'm already being dialectical, what would be lost if the dialectics were stripped from my prose? I mean, yes I'm trying to say things that send us chasing after the big bouncing ball of deeper understanding, but surely "dialectics" means something more rigorous than that, and I'm skeptical about such apparent rigor. For me to use the word would be to pretend there I was employing some underlying method, and I don't see that I am. Anyway, my Teena Marie and my John Conlee pieces might be interesting test cases. The Teena Marie is one of many that has the plot, "Girl gets critic, girl loses critic, girl gets critic," and in the final stage the apparent flaw in Teena that lost me is now seen to be something of a virtue, one of the things that wins me over in the end. In the Conlee I claim that his songs only seem to be about defeat and that it's in his perseverence - in the face of disaster and in being a disaster - that he's triumphant. And then I bring up my favorite of his songs, "She Can't Say That Anymore," and say that in this one the defeat really is a defeat. I don't see dialectics here, but you might, and if you tell me where they are, then maybe I'll understand what you mean.) (I've given you the plot of these reviews, but of course there's other stuff going on too, not least the story of how the reviews relate to the rest of the world. E.g., my Teena Marie piece has one sentence that mentions "punk rock" (in quotation marks), but the whole piece can be considered a critique of postpunk alternative rock.)

(***Not that I've actually studied scientific communities or know this first hand. Kuhn has said that after a scientific revolution you're likely to have more specialties and subspecialties than you'd had before; this is one way to "resolve" disagreements within a specialty, I suppose: having the specialty break into two or more new ones.)