[lit-ideas] Re: The Order of Aurality
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 07:27:21 +0000 (GMT)
________________________________
From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
Torgeir wwrote
"There is no music before language."
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
> The context and meaning of this is not clear, but taken as a bare statement
>it seems to belong to that category of self-regarding dogmas that may have
>special appeal to students of language: dogmas that language is 'fundamental',
>or 'primary' or that language is 'central' or the 'royal road' to
>understanding - so that, for example, the view that thought is
>'language-dependent' is liable to be accepted by such people on the nod and
>without much thought (language-dependent or not).
That students and theorists of language should hold to views that suggest
reality is somehow linguistic, or even that (almost) everything we know or
everything that is the case is somehow linguistic, bears comparison with
prevalent dogmas in other fields: the mathematician who believes everything is
at root mathematical, the physicist who believes everything at bottom is
physical, the historian who believes everything is 'historical' (although, in
fairness, do students of geography think that fundamentally everything is
geographical?) Xenophanes noted that the gingers of his time worshipped ginger
gods, the dark-haired worshipped dark-haired gods etc. and inferred that, if
they could worship gods, animals would likewise each worship a god in their own
likeness. Something similar seems to happen to students of specific
subject-matters - that they reify their subject-matter into a something that
expresses or reflects the deepest, philosophical truth. (Here
a dose of a pluralist, interactionist 'metaphysics' like P's might help, as
well as some having to work in disciplines with a very different intellectual
basis).
It may be speculated that the 'linguistic turn' in so-called analytical
philosophy may not have been so sharp and readily made had philosophers been
typically drawn from students of mathematics and physics, rather than
'Greats'/'Classics' (to which, for example, philosophy was long appended at
Oxford) which centres intellectually on the close linguistic analysis of texts
for their variant meanings. Almost certainly the putting on a pedestal of
'Classics' led to the debacle of Oxford at first putting its people with a
First in Greats [regarded then as its greatest minds] on the task of breaking
the Nazi communication codes (disaster was averted by Churchill who saw through
the charade, not having had the benefit of a university education to blind him).
>Ezra Pound wrote
'Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance.
Poetry begins
to atrophy when it gets too far from music.'—Ezra Pound, >
This is a very different order of thought to the somewhat bare assertion of
Derrida. But how true is it? (How far is "too far"?) If we look for
counter-examples, we might take J.S. Bach whose great music contains examples
that are clearly modelled on dances and others that are not. Can we rebuff the
ones that are not modelled on dances as counter-examples by insisting that
nevertheless they do not depart "too far from the dance"? But this surely just
atrophies "dance" as any kind of explanation for the strength of music. The Art
of Fugue is a masterpiece of music, and no way atrophied, but surely it is also
as far from "the dance" as we might imagine music can be? In fact, The Art of
Fugue has probably more aesthetically to do with mathematics and structural
symmetries/assymetries than with dance; and we might ask whether Pounds first
point is any more true than saying music begins to atrophy when it departs too
far from mathematics or some sense of
structure.
The link between poetry and music seems stronger than between music and dance
(to me anyway): whereas facilitating and reflecting "dance" is only one
function of music (aside from "dance" itself notoriously facilitating and
reflecting copulation), poetic language does typically have some kind of
musicality and this often seems vital to its poetic strength. Nevertheless,
closer examination might bring out that the 'musicality' of poetic expression
is of quite a limited or distinct kind compared with the musicality of music,
and may even have a distinct cognitive and aesthetic basis.
So, while interesting, Pound's observation raises a host of further questions
and, from a theoretican's POV, invites some kind of explanation for the
linkages made. This is what is importantly missing from these kinds of bare
assertion.
Donal
Who highly recommends the Koroliov [piano] and the Emerson String Quartet
versions of The Art of Fugue (the much lauded Moroney version on harpsichord
makes the music sound like a something coming from the loud-speaker of a creepy
ice-cream van that is not selling ice-cream but heroin; but then harpsichords
tend to have that affect).
England
It is "affect", isn't it?
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