[readers], 'SELECTED LETTERS FROM READERS', Postmodern Culture v6n3
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SELECTED LETTERS FROM READERS
Postmodern Culture v.6 n.3 (May, 1996)
pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu
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Copyright (c) 1996 by the authors, all rights reserved.
This text may be used and shared in accordance with the
fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be
archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided
that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for
access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of
this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the
consent of the authors and the notification of the
publisher, Oxford University Press.
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The following responses were submitted by PMC readers
using regular email or the PMC Reader's Report form. Not
all letters received are published, and published letters
may have been edited.
INDEX TO LETTERS ON THIS PAGE
About _Postmodern Culture_
Schwartz Review of _Sex Revolts_
Spinelli's "Radio Lessons for the Internet"
Other Offerings
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PMC Reader's Report on [Vol. 6, No. 2]:
Like every other issue.
People act before they think.
the history of acrylic can be told in terms other than analysis:
polymerization of substance is not a fictive lacquer but an immanent
rechaining of actual potential.
see the movie stalingrad.
war indeed.
These comments are from: Paul Freedman
The email address for Paul Freedman is: pfreedma@osf1.gmu.edu
*First of five letters on this topic.*
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PMC Reader's Report on Nice Job:
This page has been VERY helpful in my 11th grade English
research paper, and i just wanted to thank the builder of
this site. It's is hard to find text referances these days.
You did a great job and i probably used this source more
than any of my others...
These comments are from: Jon Trejo
The email address for Jon Trejo is: nebula@prairienet.org
*Second of five letters on this topic*
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PMC Reader's Report on critique:
Perhaps this imminent frenzy of critical post-production
will calm the peripheral aesthetics, where subject remains
pure. To the extent that modern creation depends on the
eclipse of the real by images, cultural critics would seem
especially qualified to analyze it. Elaine Scarry: "it is
when art has become to its makers a fiction that critique
begins." If this is the case, if self-esteem arises from
an investment in certain fictions, then critics of fiction
ought to be able to rule over each of our bodies -- and
establish the moral and political gravity of their own.
What is at issue here are analyses of self and analogies of
it. We will burrow into the histories of critique because
we will see, or at least want to see, criticism itself as a
form of creation. We will project an image of ourselves
onto a field of study and recognize our reflection in it.
Critics of creation already manipulate the Self of their
discourse in order both to attack their violent egoism and
to conceive the struggle itself along imaginary lines.
Vast energies will be expended not only on the histories
and rhetoric of the creation of the Self, but on the
mechanism of rhetoric and critical inquiry, on the
"violence" of the intellect, on the "mobile army of
metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms" that, for
Nietzsche, make up what is called truth.
These comments are from: Scott Morris
The email address for Scott Morris is: sm92+@andrew.cmu.edu
*Third of five letters on this topic.*
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PMC Reader's Report on _Postmodern Culture_
Dear Mr. Unsworth:
Just cruising this morning in my favorite area of interest
which could be broadly defined as cultural/critical theory
and came upon your paper about your efforts at PMC. What I
would like to tell you is that although I am a long time
home pc dabbler your journal was the primary reason I
finally gained access to the internet. I came across some
files from it that had been uploaded to a bulletin board
(Temple of the Screaming Electron) in california. They fell
like manna into a relatively parched, but beautiful, rural
environment in which I live. When I finally realized that
your magnificent journal was only accessible online I
signed up with my local service provider.
I'm a union teamster living in rural Vermont so I don't
have a lot of access to the sort of stuff you have in your
journal and you provide access to from your website. Our
local library is swell, computerized too, but a computer
search under postmodernism or poststructuralism or Derrida
or Baudrillard or Jameson produces zero hits.
Thank you.
Finley
*Fourth of five letters on this topic.*
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PMC Reader's Report on Just trying to create communication:
I just wanted you to know that I really appreciate what
you are doing.
It would an honor if you keep in touch, or send your
messages, and what's new.
By the way, this is my first time on the Net, so do you
know how postmodern issues are touching Music? I mean,
for me, I am trying to apply my ways and senses over the
music that I am composing, and I have to say, the results
are fascinating, even to me.
These comments are from: Issa Boulos
The email address for Issa Boulos is:
imad-ibrahim-boulos@worldnet.att.net
*Fifth of five letters on this topic.*
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PMC Reader's Report on Schwartz's Review of _Sex Revolts_,
PMC 6/2:
In PMC 6.2, Jeff Schwartz raises a particular problematic
that is continually grappled with at conferences on
popular music and in examining books featuring popular
music studies -- the serious examination of the music
itself. Schwartz's concerns about musicology being
"hostile" (with the exception of "radical" musicologists
Brett, McClary, and Walser) and cultural studies being
"incapable of rigorous engagement," completely overlooks
the role that ethnomusicology may play in the explication
of not only the social/cultural context of popular music,
but also the "formal, technical, or semiotic analysis of
the medium and texts in question" (Schwartz). I think
young ethnomusicologists (like myself) and musicologists
are bringing the study of popular music into the academy
without fear of invalidation. I know it will be
necessary to teach music-lovers how to articulate
"real" musical information in more musicological and
ethnomusicological ways then that currently practiced in
general. The American public is being musically educated
almost entirely by music critics (i.e., VH1's _Four on the
Floor_). My own research in ethnomusicology specializes in
popular/vernacular music and gender. I examine issues of
gender and popular music from the standpoint of
music-making experiences practiced in the everyday and in
institutional contexts (i.e., handclapping games,
double-Dutch, and the music-making process involved with
sampling). Musical analysis or semiotic analysis of music
need not be represented as conventional music notation, but
there are quite a few advantages to being able to enlighten
the "resistant" musicologists by showing them the
legitimate structural features of, for example, the musical
grooves of Public Enemy through conventional notation. Or
to highlight the complex musical forms located within
various genres of popular music, everyday music-making, and
to attempt to represent the subjective listening experience
so highly prized among popular music affecionados.
Schwartz ultimately raises a critical issue, which
musicology, ethnomusicology, culture studies, and sociology
need to seriously engage through actual musical and
semiotic analysis of the codes that shape musical sound,
the meanings that inflect musical appreciation and
discourse, and the elements of sound the function both
within and without modern conventions of music theory and
aural cognition of popular music. Popular music studies
must move past the constant re-interpretation of fan-dom
and star-dom with its stereotypical gender codes. It's
time to struggle with how pitch, timbre, tone, rhythm,
dance, and the more significant compositional process of
live and recorded music-making shape and problematize
social codes and individual expression of gender, race,
ethnicity, class, kinaesthetics, sexuality, and sexual
preference (to name only a few of the dimensions that
represent identity in popular music). For example, the
music and the roles that women artists play in the creative
process as musicians, producers, performers, etc., such as
Me-shell Ndege Ocello (bi-sexual neo-funk composer and bass
player), Alanis Morisette (eclectic vocalist and composer),
Tori Amos (classical pianist and alternative rock composer
exploring sexuality and religion), K.D. Lang (lesbian
"performance artist" of song), BOSS (gangster rap duo), or
the incredible rap finale by Ursula Rucker on The Roots
debut CD (1994) are telling us a great deal about
problematizing conventions of musical sound, grain of
voice, and style that extends beyond popular music and
engages the sounds of classical and "world" musics.
Ultimately, it's the music that is turning us on. Making
us think about other music and style. Changing our ways of
seeing, hearing, and talking about the world, its
subcultures, and its people through music. Continuing to
privilege the social context of popular music can only
serve to perpetuate the hegemonic and dialectical
appreciation of Western "high" art music as an autonomous
musical phenomenon. I appreciate Schwartz's review of _Sex
Revolts_ for publicly acknowledging this critical need in
the study of popular music.
These comments are from: Kyra D. Gaunt
The email address for Kyra D. Gaunt is: kgaunt@umich.edu
*First of three letters on this topic.*
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PMC Reader's Report on "The Sex Revolts" review:
Bravo! Excellent critique not only of this work but of
the genre of "pseudo-musicological" journalistic views
of popular music. As a composer and writer on all kinds
of music (like Riot Grrrl, etc.), I know well that the
writing in this area has been largely compiled by
journalists, music critics, etc. Even the musicologists
you name, however (Brett, McClary and Walser), tend to
rely less on their critical faculties when approaching
this music (see esp. the use of metaphor in, say,
McClary's "Feminine Endings"). If I may request a
response, I'd like to know what you thought of _Queer
Noises_, the new British book on pop music's undercurrent
of homosociality. I, personally, found it less than
successful (I don't even remember the author's name, at
this point! Oh, wait, I think it's John Gill.) Anyway,
just curious. Thanks again for the interesting review.
These comments are from: Renee Coulombe
The email address for Renee Coulombe is: rcoulomb@ucsd.edu
*Second of three letters on this topic.*
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PMC Reader's Report on Schwartz: Review of Press/Reynolds'
_Sex Revolts_:
While I'd concur with most of Schwartz's assessments of
_Sex Revolts_, I wish he'd been able to spend more time
on the problems of analyzing specifically musical aspects
of pop. While musicological analysis, if wielded
carefully, can yield important insights into the musical
workings of pop, its applicability is limited by the terms
of its own historical development, as McClary, Walser, %et
al%, point out (even if sometimes they ignore their own
advice). The basic problem is that most post-war popular
music, certainly in America and in England, and to varying
degrees elsewhere, valorizes texture and rhythm far more
than melodic or harmonic information. No big revelation
this -- but since those last qualities are the qualities
around which Western musicological analysis has grown,
that analysis is relatively ill-equipped to address what
makes pop work: the complex affective semiotics of its
rhythmic and textural spatiality, the way the *sound* hits
you.
To resort to impressionistic, vague language here often
seems the only alternative to the failure of more rigid,
analytical language to come even close to conveying the
impact and effects of the music under analysis: it's like
nailing the wind to the water. (I succumb to my own
diagnosis, it seems . . .)
Sound often begins to seem irreducible, non-repeatable,
impossible to reproduce. Rap producers, for instance,
often justify sampling as the only way to capture a
complete sonic precis of particular old records: only
those instruments, those musicians, in that room with
those mics, recorded on that board by a particular
recording team -- and only on that take -- bear exactly
the sonic signature desired.
If even sound seems incapable of speaking itself, what
chance has language -- except in its attempt to fray,
fuzz, distort its own bounds, in imitation of music
itself? Which makes me wonder: why does Schwartz
think a more rigorous and scholarly engagement with
cultural studies thinkers would lead to a less
impressionistic account of the workings of the music itself
-- as his last criticism strongly implies, following
immediately upon his critique of Reynolds and Press's
musicological shortcomings? The writers he mentions resort
to rather imagistic language in their work on music --
while conventional musicology fails notoriously to describe
the musicality (as its performers must engage it) even of
its native, proper music, the Western art music tradition.
These comments are from: Jeffrey Norman
The email address for Jeffrey Norman is: jenor@csd.uwm.edu
*Third of three letters on this topic.*
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PMC Reader's Report on [Spinelli's "Radio Lessons for the
Internet," PMC 6.2]:
I just finished reading the very interesting article
comparing the Internet to the early days of radio. I
would have to agree with you that the Internet is
currently over-utopianized. However, I do believe that
the capability of people to become producers rather than
consumers is very strong on the Internet. For example,
imagine if musicians and underground film makers could
put their work onto the Internet! I think it would
be extremely cool if people could broadcast their work
through the Internet, cheaply and with high-quality.
However, this might not happen if the protocols of the
Internet increasingly become owned by corporations. For
example, the premier streaming audio standard on the net is
currently RealAudio; do you realize how expensive it is to
buy a RealAudio server? To service only one-hundred people
costs something like five or ten thousand dollars; it's
crazy.
But you did raise a very interesting point. Why is the
Internet so much more interested in the "process" than
the "destination"? And why are most of the discussion
groups on the Internet oriented around consumption? Those
are two very interesting points "you" (if I am talking to
the writer of this article) brought up.
The thing that always bothers me is: if I could completely
recreate society, how would I do so? What am I asking
society to do anyway? What is the "good life"?
Is it to make sure no one ever goes hungry? Is it to
attempt to achieve the ideal of justice? Personal
freedoms?
Is it to better enjoy the material comforts of life, or
is it to reach for something higher?
A lot more questions than answers!
Anyway, good article. Hope you have some interesting
responses to what I have sent you.
These comments are from: Brad pmc Neuberg
The email address for Brad pmc Neuberg is: bkn3@columbia.edu
* First of two letters on this topic.*
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PMC Reader's Report on "Radio Lessons for the Internet:"
The rhetorical tone of early radio and early Internet
definitely have striking similarities. However, I would
suggest to Mr. Spinelli to also look into the developments
in Internet technology to see that the Internet may be
headed in the direction of radio and television.
Without the specific newspaper article next to me, I have
read that many cable television providers and even
satellite television providers are looking into ways
of creating a "cable modem", a one-way modem that acts as a
high speed receiver. While advocates of the cable modem
point to its significantly higher speed than a traditional
phone modem, they also assume that users will spend more
time "downloading content" than uploading. As the cable
modem provides inexpensive access to most homes (many would
use an "internet terminal" to browse web sites and launch
remote applications), the individual's ability to transmit
information will be just as limited (possibly by only
having a phone line out) or eliminated altogther.
Also, the economic limitations of broadcast on the
internet are as real as those in radio: an inexpensive
FM transmitter and antennae might cost in the $15,000 to
$20,000 range for a used transmitter with a 1500 watt
capacity. A web server with a fast enought connection
to the internet to allow large numbers of users is
similarly priced. However, as an internet user, I can
at least transmit responses to other individuals
broadcasts and even make information accessible to lay
people.
These comments are from: Jack McHale
The email address for Jack McHale is: jmchale4@ix.netcom.com
*Second of two letters on this topic.*
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PMC Reader's Report on [Barker's "Nietzsche/Derrida,
Blanchot/Beckett: Fragmentary Progressions of the Unnamable,"
[PMC 6.1]
Although perhaps your various digressions on the theme
of fragments might at some time and at some place disclose
an aperture onto the very view which every fragment, by
force or by cunning, forces onto the reader, at least in
Nietzsche, it remains an open question as to the
difference between a fragment and an aphorism. Think, for
example, of Novalis, from whom Nietzsche undoubtably
received the art of anti-hegelian writing you are so fond
of . . . Now, the serious question only begins after you
have said what you desired to say, namely, can we
articulate the difference, and hence the movement, from
the fragment to the aphorism. My claim is simple: until
you acheive the style of thinking -- or writing -- where
the aphorism sheers away from the mere fragment, you
invariably miss the point of what Blanchot will name the
writing of the disaster and Derrida will urge us to call
the margin.
These comments are from: Chad Finsterwald
The email address for Chad Finsterwald is: pfinster@acs.bu.edu
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PMC Reader's Report on Paul Mann's "The Nine Grounds of
Intellectual Warfare":
Clausewitz took the extremely difficult subject of
warfare and explained it in simple, understandable terms.
You have taken a relatively simple econcept ("I critique,
therefore I'm not!") and spun so much hyperbole into it
that it requires a dictionary and a case of beer to get
through it. I found many pearls of wisdom, but the
oyster shells are up around my waist. I wonder if you
didn't fall into the pit you dug for others.
These comments are from: Mike Johnson
The email address for Mike Johnson is: b205s1.ssc.af.mil
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PMC Reader's Report on Thomas Pynchon's _Vineland_:
When I stumbled on a remaindered hardbound of _Vineland_
(while working in my local Barnes & Noble non-superstore,
since closed) I was amazed that anyone could capture the
stresses of trying to keep the experiences of living in
the '60s (in my case, in Central Square, Cambridge MA)
as a New Left activist both alive and moving through
what has been made of them by their direst opponents
(The New Right whose NeoAscendancy now controls
Congress). Surely nobody who lived those years and is
still living them as a forwardable experience has any
illusion as to what actually happened, least of all
Pynchon. Laborious academicization of the book is a form
of engagement, but dissipates its gravity, by breaking it
down into a series of discretionary notes. For a
non-academic poet & journalist, this acts as an
unnecessarily self-checking reduction of what a survivor
like myself uses as an encoded, portable experience. I'm
not disabled by the '60s: I'm infuriated by the inability
of non-participants to appreciate its continuing effects on
the survivors as beneficial. This is no illustrated
cartoon history we lived. I might also mention that
_Vineland_ is (as was not even noted) in California. We
who lived the '60s in Cambridge, MA had a dramatically
different experience only some of which has been preserved
as fiction (by Marge Piercy in _Dance the Eagle to Sleep_)
since we did not intend it to be fictionable while we lived
it. Finally, when I sent one of my copies of _Vineland_ to
John Brennan, a Boston College (Class of '63) classmate who
later got his PhD at U.C.-Davis, I inscribed it: "An
American Mahabharata." I suggest you see it as that: a
minatory epic of reversals as terrifyingly instructive to
warring imperial clans who knew they were -- the 60s was
the Civil War of my generation. That the New Right appears
to have won is evident; that they will control its history
is not, citing this essay as an attempt to refute it.
Thanks for the intent. I'm sure Pynchon appreciates it. I
do. Now write it again as a popular article that the
general public can digest. The ideological action
continues in the Public World, not the rarified section of
the illustrated/annotated edition. Pynchon didn't write
_Alice in Wonderland_, he wrote _Vineland_ (CA).
These comments are from: Bill Costley
The email address for Bill Costley is: sunset@gis.net
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