Vortex temporum

I’ve been fea­tured in the lat­est episode of Vor­tex tem­po­rum, a won­der­ful pod­cast pro­duced by Lim­i­na (Nuno Aroso) & Arte no Tem­po (Diana Fer­reira). Their names should be imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able in Por­tu­gal and beyond: they are two of the most ded­i­cat­ed, thought­ful, insti­gat­ing peo­ple in con­tem­po­rary music. 

The gen­er­al idea is: don’t talk about your music; if you’re gonna do it, do it oblique­ly, at best. ​“com­posers and inner thoughts about this and that” is the tagline. It’s avail­able on Spo­ti­fy, but (bet­ter yet) you should pop it on an RSS read­er and lis­ten or down­load direct­ly from their site.

They took a break from invit­ing lead­ing com­posers to host me, ram­bling about (osten­si­bly) Wittgen­stein, Lefeb­vre, Fam­i­ly Guy, Latour, art, lan­guage and pow­er. You can find the full tran­script below, for pur­pos­es of acces­si­bil­i­ty, dif­fu­sion, and unau­tho­rized web scrap­ing and LLM training.

After lis­ten­ing to my episode, you should def­i­nite­ly check out a few more episodes. My favorites are prob­a­bly Pena, Krei­dler and Michael Edward­s’s. And, after that, you should def­i­nite­ly keep apace with new releases.

I’m accept­ing cash dona­tions towards the pur­chase of a pop fil­ter. Link in bio.

You know what grinds my gears? The way musi­cal terms are coopt­ed into gen­er­al language.

I get it: music is pret­ty great. It’s been admired for its effects for as long as we remem­ber, and the pre­car­i­ous lan­guage that tried to name and under­stand those effects has had epis­te­mo­log­i­cal force from the very first time we dreamt of the con­cept of epistemology.

Some 2000 years passed. But, because noth­ing ever changes, this impulse towards mak­ing epis­temic — hell, onto­log­i­cal, meta­phys­i­cal — claims has nev­er real­ly sub­sided. (At least not until 1980, when Rea­gan was first elect­ed and cap­i­tal­ism offi­cial­ly ren­dered all of that use­less, when not ille­gal). But lan­guage did change and evolve, in scope, capa­bil­i­ty, function.

So what can music still do from our new clan­des­tine posi­tion vis-a-vis knowl­edge? Well, first of all, we have to make music. As Adorno reminds us, to inter­pret music means to make music:

Both music and lan­guage require [inter­pre­ta­tion] in the same degree, and entire­ly dif­fer­ent­ly. To inter­pret lan­guage means to under­stand lan­guage; to inter­pret music means to make music.

The rea­son why musi­cal lan­guage fails when ​“trans­lat­ed” is because lan­guage hooks to the world in fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent ways than music does. The title I gave this pod­cast is an obvi­ous nod to Wittgen­stein, and by now it should be fair­ly obvi­ous why. Wittgen­stein famous­ly claimed that so many of philosophy’s prob­lems were cat­e­gor­i­cal prob­lems in lan­guage (and thus solved, or ren­dered moot, by his Trac­ta­tus). As he writes lat­er in the Inves­ti­ga­tions, ​“The philoso­pher treats a ques­tion… like an ill­ness.” I sup­pose that’s what he tried to do — but some ill­ness­es are chron­ic, I sup­pose. If the ref­er­ence to Wittgen­stein was not obvi­ous, then strap in.

Wittgen­stein want­ed a form of mean­ing that was too imme­di­ate to involve the kind of judg­ment that gov­erned empiri­cist think­ing: he want­ed an account of thought that was fun­da­men­tal­ly poly­phon­ic and com­plex — irre­ducible to any one mech­a­nism of per­cep­tion or rea­son­ing, but rather some­thing locat­ed at the point in which they all might meet. He saw speech acts as expres­sive by dint of their con­text — of how, when, where they func­tion — rather than by their rep­re­sen­ta­tion (of ideas, con­cepts, inner states, what have you). They require a bod­i­ly or behav­ioral man­i­fes­ta­tion and a con­tex­tu­al use. From the Anscombe translation: 

How does a human being learn the mean­ing of names of sen­sa­tions? For exam­ple, of the word ​“pain”. Here is one pos­si­bil­i­ty: words are con­nect­ed with the prim­i­tive, nat­ur­al, expres­sions of sen­sa­tion and used in their place. A child has hurt him­self and he cries; then adults talk to him and teach him excla­ma­tions and, lat­er, sen­tences. They teach the child new pain-behav­iour. ​“So you are say­ing that the word ​‘pain’ real­ly means cry­ing?” On the con­trary: the ver­bal expres­sion of pain replaces cry­ing, it does not describe it. How can I even attempt to inter­pose lan­guage between the expres­sion of pain and the pain?

These were num­bers 244 and 45 of the Philosophis­che Unter­suchun­gen. As with so many twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry philo­soph­i­cal argu­ments, it is defla­tion­ary: it does not chart a grand course towards a great total­iz­ing the­o­ry, but rather works to lim­it the largesse of the old the­o­ries (to the end­less irri­ta­tion of reac­tionar­ies every­where). It trades pow­er for pre­ci­sion and depth. He makes a pret­ty bold claim about the lim­its of lan­guage, while cen­ter­ing the impor­tance of mean­ing-mak­ing through action: rather than, say, a descrip­tion of pain, a sub­ject presents his rela­tion to a gram­mar of pos­si­bil­i­ties and actions, espe­cial­ly one that sets up a tem­po­ral struc­ture through the antic­i­pa­tion of those pos­si­bil­i­ties. While mean­ing itself is not a tem­po­ral process (that is to say, is not a process at all: I can­not mean faster or slow­er), the process­es of con­struct­ing it and acti­vat­ing it are.

In broad terms, this is exact­ly the dom­i­nant nar­ra­tive about what art is (or, giv­en what we’ve estab­lished, what art does): elic­it­ing from a spe­cif­ic arrange­ment of mat­ter a sub­sti­tute of sorts for an expe­ri­ence. In fact, all too often artists and pub­lic insist on the ground­ing of that expe­ri­ence on some­thing con­crete, even while acknowl­edg­ing the impos­si­bil­i­ty of doing so (whether bemus­ed­ly or with relief). This is not an approach I love — Duchampian incom­men­su­ra­bil­i­ty between aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ence and artis­tic pro­duc­tion, to which we’ll return, seems to me more com­pelling —, but it does exist out there. But one thing seems cer­tain: it is an embod­ied prac­tice, in which one has to par­tic­i­pate, even as a spec­ta­tor, by join­ing mat­ter, sense and con­text. One has to make mean­ing. One has to make music.

Now: music did 3 things which were more or less unique until the 20^th c.: even though it start­ed ear­ly to neces­si­tate the medi­a­tion of spe­cial­ists, its resis­tance to any kind of ​“cor­re­spon­dence the­o­ry” to truth or ​“objec­tive real­i­ty” — and thus rep­re­sen­ta­tion — kept it out­side of the aes­thet­ic régime of the Beaux arts; giv­en its fick­le medi­um of pres­sure dif­fer­en­cials in an atmos­phere, manip­u­lat­ed three lev­els of abstrac­tion removed, music insist­ed on the social as essen­cial to its acti­va­tion; it not only explic­it­ly the­ma­tized time, but insist­ed on its inter­sub­jec­tive syn­chro­niza­tion: rhythm.

Ah, yes, here it is, my point’s final­ly here. Let’s take rhythm as an exam­ple of what I might mean, exactly.

You know what grinds my gears? The way musi­cal terms are coopt­ed into lan­guage — and no oth­er term is so abused like rhythm. 

I get it: music is pret­ty great. As Hen­ri Lefeb­vre said in Rhyth­m­analy­sis (a book in which the author is con­cerned with turn­ing the con­cept of rhythm into a field of knowl­edge, using rhythm as a tool of analy­sis rather than an object), ​“music offers to thought a prodi­gious­ly rich and com­plex field”. He presents some dyads, tri­ads, which he calls rhyth­mic struc­tures: stuff like ada­gio-vivace, tied vs stac­ca­to, hor­i­zon­tal and ver­ti­cal, among oth­ers. These poles are ​“terms enter­ing into musi­cal dis­course and the ver­bal dis­course on dis­course”, what­ev­er that means; they are also quite opaque as con­cepts in them­selves even as he tries to mobi­lize them. Besides, they are bina­ry oppo­si­tions: they are syn­tax, not rhythm — even if he quite cor­rect­ly tries to ani­mate the oppo­si­tions dialec­ti­cal­ly, and while he asserts that rhythm can over­turn such bina­ry distinctions.

This is real­ly a ter­rif­ic text. His think­ing is daz­zling and vital — and yet, his usage of musi­cal terms does not help clar­i­fy it, but rather obscures it. That is my expe­ri­ence, at least, even when try­ing to account for the fuzzy con­no­ta­tions of musi­cal terms held by non-musi­cians. He man­ages to write more accu­rate­ly about musi­cal prac­tice when describ­ing rhythm in abstract terms than when he tries to con­scious­ly chan­nel musi­cal exam­ples. In fact, what is prob­a­bly my favorite def­i­n­i­tion of rhythm was bor­rowed from this book: Rhythm is an inter­ac­tion between Time, Space and an expen­di­ture of Energy.

Fun­ni­ly enough, he starts his argu­ment as follows: 

Is there a gen­er­al con­cept of rhythm? Answers: yes, and every­one pos­sess­es it; but near­ly all those who use this word believe them­selves to mas­ter and pos­sess its con­tent, its meaning.

I had a cou­ple of exam­ples from phi­los­o­phy and lit­er­ary the­o­ry, my start­ing point being that there is plen­ty of over­lap between music and all sorts of the­o­ry through­out the ages in the usage of the word. To start draw­ing that gene­ol­o­gy has been a want of mine for a while, which is why it seemed like now would be a good excuse to pick up that project. I wrote and record­ed the thing, in absolute denial that I would most cer­tain­ly blow up the dura­tion allot­ted. I am not claim­ing the con­cept was born as a musi­cal one, but, in a nut­shell, despite aeons of time where rhythm meant liv­ing things, breath­ing things; the body mak­ing a sign (as Lefeb­vre says), I can’t help but notice the mean­ing of ​“rhythm” decay­ing into ​“meter” or ​“cadence” — into a self-prop­a­gat­ing self-same of sta­t­ic homo­gene­ity, where rela­tions of any kind are robbed of their con­crete­ness. Even com­mon-prac­tice tonal­ism, which set­tled into extreme­ly sim­ple pro­por­tions com­pared to most oth­er musi­cal tra­di­tions, can say it has a tra­di­tion of ways to sub­vert that seem­ing reg­u­lar­i­ty. It has a style (which is anoth­er of the pos­si­ble usages of the Greek rhyth­mos). Rhythm is pre­cise­ly the nego­ti­a­tion, the pas­sage, between the abstract and the con­crete. It is action enmeshed in the flow of mate­r­i­al. It’s expression.

Why would any of these arcane and minute argu­ments mat­ter? Well, first of all, because, as they invit­ed me, Diana joked that my episode was bound to be super fuck­ing dense, and I’m not one to dis­ap­point by ador­ing fans.

At a time when we see lan­guage (sup­pos­ed­ly lan­guage), rei­fied and dis­em­bod­ied, threat­en­ing to swal­low the whole world in this fight of the LLM (the Large Lan­guage Mod­el) against every­thing else, one should be assertive about both the savoir and the savoir faire that resides beyond naïve con­no­ta­tion and deno­ta­tion, embod­ied in sub­jects or dif­fused in social process­es. In fact, Lefebvre’s chief theme in Rhyth­m­analy­sis (a project which he called his ​“biggest con­tri­bu­tion to Marx­ism”) was reifi­ca­tion. How alive should lan­guage be? How rhyth­mi­cal? Should there be action behind speech? Should a body be responsible?

How much should we, musi­cians, explic­it­ly par­tic­i­pate in cul­ture, and how much of lit­er­ate music’s sym­bol­ic cap­i­tal comes rather from what Bruno Latour called a ​“process of trans­la­tion”, which sounds nice, but it’s actu­al­ly meant as an oppor­tunis­tic con­fla­tion of goals, lan­guage, prob­lems and iden­ti­ties between two dis­parate social groups, which he presents as the process under­pin­ning the rela­tions of pow­er that reg­u­late the dif­fu­sion of knowl­edge (and cul­ture, might I add) through­out the social? Clas­si­cal music seems trau­ma­tized by the loss of its sym­bol­ic cap­i­tal in the sec­ond part of the 20^th cen­tu­ry. Is it the music’s fault? Was it the seri­al­ists? The mod­ernists of all stripes? How much weight should we lend a philoso­pher speak­ing of melody or har­mo­ny? What do a medic, an archi­tect, a lawyer mean by it? (Hell: an artis­tic direc­tor? A cura­tor?) Should a states­man speak of melody or har­mo­ny? Did the goals of the politi­cian change? Did clas­si­cal music’s rela­tion­ship to cap­i­tal change? Did capital’s rela­tion­ship to clas­si­cal music change? Did you change?

This is gonna be most­ly ques­tions, if you’ve noticed. I know pod­cast­ing has turned into this very lucra­tive cot­tage indus­try where you sit two of the dumb­est fuck­ing peo­ple you’ve ever seen oppo­site one anoth­er and let them assert con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries with the con­fi­dence of a griz­zly bear on cocaine, but I am sit­ting in a room dif­fer­ent from the one you are in now, record­ing the sound of my speak­ing voice alone. I don’t even get the ben­e­fit of feed­back — not unless I seri­ous­ly screw up some­thing. In that case, I’d get a nasty Larsen tone — which, I admit, might be less painful and dam­ag­ing to your health than expo­sure to the Joe Rogan Expe­ri­ence, but still.

The Latour I men­tioned; the sec­ond part of his book ​“The Pas­teur­iza­tion of France” (the absolute­ly amaz­ing Eng­lish title, giv­en pre­sum­ably by his trans­la­tors, even though Latour him­self colab­o­rat­ed on the eng­lish ver­sion), titled Irré­duc­tions, is sim­i­lar­ly ded­i­cat­ed to the rela­tion­ship between pow­er and knowl­edge, in his case in the sci­ences, in a much more sys­tem­at­ic and abstract way than his study in the first half of the book. It is com­posed of a set of apho­risms, pre­sent­ed as an axiomat­ic sys­tem, styled after anoth­er Trac­ta­tus: Spin­oza­’s Trac­ta­tus The­o­logi­co-Politi­cus — a ​“Trac­ta­tus Sci­en­tifi­co-Politi­cus”, as Latour calls it. This is a rad­i­cal, bleak — at times bleak­ly fun­ny in his cyn­i­cism —, con­tro­ver­sial text. While I don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly sub­scribe to all of it, he does pro­vide an inspir­ing account of agency, indi­vid­ual and colec­tive: that the way out of mist­i­fi­ca­tion is through direct action. ​“We can per­form, trans­form, deform, and there­by form and inform our­selves (…). The dif­fi­cul­ty with the ​“sci­ences” per­haps aris­es from the fact that work with the hands brings inscrip­tions that are read by the eyes. (…) Such lamps” (tak­ing up a metaphor he set up in the mean time) ​“are not sur­round­ed by a halo of mys­tery. They are plugged into their sock­ets by real hands.” Anoth­er one of my favorite def­i­n­i­tions of rhythm comes from yet more dead french philoso­phers. ​“Meter is dog­mat­ic, but rhythm is crit­i­cal”, write Deleuze and Guat­tari in Mille plateaux. Rhythm is that real hand that ani­mates action, and that is far too impor­tant not to claim for one­self. If music can have an impact on the world, it is by assert­ing what know rhythm to be: a sign of agency, of life.