2. Hannah Arendt: The author’s intention/expression is not what the art is. This lack of union, this unfocused relationship, is just the case. We don’t have to war, with it or against it, as though there were an ideological commitment to affirm or deny it (though in some cases I suppose it might be, but you might as well have an ideological commitment about the water cycle or the moon phases). The wild multiplicity of art’s appearances and experiences is a fact that is attached to it as a “worldly object,” not the product (and only in some cases) of a particular aesthetic credo that adheres to randomness or chance. Some other distinction might be necessary, though. Where shitty art like The Da Vinci Code and most movies fails is rather through a means-ends equation they embrace from the outset. It sets up and then satisfies predetermined thoughts and feelings, over and over again. Or pop music – love/lust feelings, commodity/shopping feelings. But it’s not the artist’s intents and desires toward the material that get in the way and make this manipulation so gross, sad, nauseating. It’s the presence of an ‘artist’s intention’ and desire to set up an efficient and manipulative transfer of affects and desires (called a song) toward a particular end, much like a commercial, that makes it that way. Any number of styles or genres or any approach to the material could be set up according to this efficient model. Put another way, the particular stylistic content is irrelevant. It’s how it enters the world (never in a vacuum, never on its own) that matters.
OR, Monique Wittig/Linda Zerilli: Instead, storytelling undoes history; history in its capacity to create a bond, a containment. Storytelling can break the sequence of containment through a wild relation to others that is new (not a cliché repetition of suspense/horror/lust). Which makes me wonder where we might find music that had a similarly wild-relating-to-others quality, music as a social practice of storytelling that undoes history’s bondage mode. Sun Ra is the only person that comes to mind. And especially because there is no war there as there is so often in the avant garde, there is no offing of the previous generation to make space for the new – a killing carried out by some spokesMan for the new mode, which, however new the new aesthetic credo, the actions in time and space are boringly old: kill the old king, be the new king. Sun Ra, is he even a musician? He talks more about stories than sounds/notes, talks about forgetting how to play, and his is a band, and he is in the bar, and he dances, and he is known by many names …
kevin sims 