An early concentration on supporting the “high arts” was supplemented in the 1970s by structures and policies to support a wider range of cultural activities in New Zealand’s local and ethnic communities. Policies came to be concerned with encouraging community participation as well as supporting cultural practitioners. This shift in policy reflected the concept of cultural development promoted internationally by UNESCO.
what was ok in the 70s is not ok now. Note also the shift is to cultural development. It comes endorsed by UNESCO. However as a replacement for support of professional artists and arts institutions, cultural development may be readily conflated with the policies of development economics such as were rolled out in developing countries in the early phases of the New International Economic Orderthat replaced the Bretton Woods system.
1 = “high arts” [it’s outrageous that an official government website page in 2023 uses this phrase, high arts, as if to signal both the elitism of certain cultural activitiesand that ‘we’ know which ones they are (cf. here)] – support for professional artists and arts institutions – “the best possible art by professional artists for the most diverse possible audience” (Nicholas Hytner, from here)
2 = supporting a wider range of cultural activities encouraging community participation
and 3 = (specific to Nz Aa? or generalisable to sectors of the population lacking privilege for reasons due to gender, class and race in any country) honouring obligations of equal access and opportunity to Māori, specifically under the Treaty, and to Pacific peoples
the three areas are different and irreducible one to the other, any such reduction being a levelling down of state-funding and support, an excuse to cut costs while claiming a social-moral goodbased on an unspokenconsensus as to what constitutes such a good
Here are the social-moral do-gooders’ smiling faces and their social-moral do-gooding purposes and principles, and no mention of the cultural elitism implied by high arts or ulterior motives, like the sustaining of CNZ as the only fully funded arts organisation in New Zealand Aotearoa:
[CNZ’s] purpose
[CNZ’s] purpose is to encourage, promote and support the arts in New Zealand for the benefit of all New Zealanders.
[CNZ’s] Guiding principles
The principles [it] follow[s] include recognising and upholding:
the cultural diversity of the people of New Zealand
the role in the arts of Māori as tangata whenua
the arts of the Pacific Island peoples of New Zealand
participation, access, excellence, innovation, professionalism and advocacy.
note the avoidance of the word and the notion institution. For the Ministry for Culture this is covered by the term “high arts” and that 70s thing. From CNZ we can expect the word organisation, which is not the same thing.
I wrote an earlier post here about the autumn edition of Metro Magazine‘s special report on what it called the curious case of the collapsing culture. Editor Henry Oliver called it a crisis.
I answered my critical response to Metro‘s coverage here.
The reason for the current post follows, Nicholas Hytner’s response to the cultural crisis the UK is undergoing. He is much more creative than I am and points to the improbability that one funding agency can deliver on two remits, both supporting the professional arts and arts institutions and at the same time providing the means for community participation at all levels in culture and in the arts. (see below)
It’s like the old distinction between Theatre in Education and Drama in Schools. TIE was about professional practitioners coming to schools and performing for students and being paid to do so. Drama in Schools is about the students themselves performing, perhaps under the guidance of a professional but this is not guaranteed. The students of course benefit from both as we might were both supported.
Maybe the way forward is for the arts to use sport as a model. There are two distinct funding bodies for sport. UK Sport has, in its own words, “a very clear remit at the ‘top end’ of Britain’s sporting pathway, with no direct involvement in community or school sport”. And it wins us medals. The other, Sport England (which has equivalents in the other home nations) invests in sport and physical activity to make it a normal part of life for everyone and gets us out on the track at the weekend. Both functions are vital.
[Nicholas Hytner’s] proposal, then, for a Labour government [in the UK], is to fund, in addition to the Arts Council, a new body as expert in its field as Sport England. In doing so, recognise the importance of participation in the arts with its own funding stream, to which new community-based initiatives as well as established education and outreach programmes can apply. And re-establish the arts in schools.
Meanwhile, focus the Arts Council’s existing grant on making the best possible art by professional artists for the most diverse possible audience.
What constitutes the surface, stage, the theatre as a political field—its strategic importance for us—is not its representative nature, is the same as what constituted first its suppression and now its redundancy, its gathering of differences without loss of identity or difference. This conduces to conflict, but not the conflict of opposites, the conflict of disparates, the conflict of decisions; and, as we have said, decisions without consequence apart from on the surface, where they surface, concerning how they move. The same movements can be seen in both humour and in sexuality, the same political stage in its various phases.
Now this conflict, these conflicts, only resolve in the story, which, as we know, is a poor excuse for staging them. The narrative, along with the desires to either stick to it or to change it, gives the weakest excuse for the violence of the conflicts, which never reach the violence of their potentiality. The violence is not necessary; this is what qualifies the surface, the stage, theatre as a political field, as opposed to what we might call blood sports: it does not require violence.
We might consider here what rape as an example of sexual violence does, or plucking out, popping one’s eyes, or having a redhot poker shoved up one’s arse, they promote the plot. In other words, they mediate. So in relation to theatre, we are also talking of unmediated conflicts.
At one end, conflicts have, take from the story, their excuse. We can immediately see what this means in terms of changing the narrative. It means to focus on contingency and may feed into the desire but does not issue in change. At the other end, they have their terminus in a violence that never actually arrives.
In the story, the violence may not be put off until the end. It may arrive in the middle. The one who desires change more than anything, the young revolutionary, runs out and presses her point: she wants to puncture, to rupture and burst like a melon, the asinine complacencies of those who want to stick to the story. Yes, it’s usually a young man.
And he is histrionic in his masculinity. It is the necessary thing! This toxin. But it could just as easily be played by an actress, say the one who lost her lines, and turn to comedy.
Yes, so the plot jumps forward. It has been given a kickstart. But, whether the violence was ill or well conceived, it is one without the freedom in the act.
The freedom is to perform the action, but the action is now bound to a subject. The rape decides on who is the rapist and who is raped. And the issue is resolved in the name of the rape, or the punch, the stab, or the rupture some insist on, to shake things up, so the action, as they say, solves nothing. It simply mediates, is the mediate point, for a whole new series of conflicts.
Judgement may come, may not: it too is a violence. And what it does is suture the ragged edges of the wound. It is, as they also say, the continuation of war with other means. The paradox would seem to be that in the effort to render a discontinuity a continuity is produced.
The paradox of politics, of the state, is that the peaceful state of society is enforced by its hegemony over the means of violence, of violent force. So that it was not so peaceful after all. Or it was peaceful only for as long as there was no violence.
The logic here has the pretension of being ironic; or of participating in the gutter humour of, I told you so: fascist pigs! When in fact the logic is exactly that of humour. Or of sexuality. Or, we are saying, of theatre: it holds the contradictory ideas at once. We see both the violence and its potentiality in peace together.
And note von Clausewitz’s use of the word means, Mitteln. Violence is nothing but the continuation of the state because of a mediation that is always in potentiality. The theatre, as the surface of the state, is this political phase space for having, gathering discontinuities, without requiring either their resolution into identities or violence in the mediation of their differences. That is, it is so, when it is so. And so we will have to return to the suppression of theatre and the depression of its resources.
…
note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.
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I wrote that we don’t at first know the answer. The immediate answers—like democracy, and philosophy, a Greek invention; a bunch of poofs in tights pretending they’re kings and queens; a beast that will eat your heart (this was my father’s description); a colonial artform, isn’t it?; a place of terror, cruelty, poverty, boredom or entertainment… or the people who make it that… or these foisted on an unsuspecting public by whose presence or absence it is defined—seem to refer to the place and time they were given rather than to the thing they would describe. And this in turn would seem to point to a certain type of realism with regard to the question.
A certain type of temporality or temporalising would seem to apply to theatre that theatre is product of, and, producing which, it is the embodiment of, or space for. The answers given possess immediacy and are possessed of or subject to immediacy, much as if they were all talking at once on the stage. What is lacking, and why they must be abandoned, is that it all happens at once.
There is no rising up to be done. To accede to being the platform for a bunch of poofs in tights… Or to being a poetic or a pscyhoanalytic place of terror, and so on. But there remains the question asked us, asked us by the answer given, which is what it asks of us: it is the beast that would eat your heart. Surely only if you wore your heart on your sleeve?
And that we don’t want to rush in with answers points to the certain type of realism of being a theatre of theatre. It is insofar (in so far only?) as it is where one wants to be. Where. One. Wants… If it is where one wants to be, we can choose where, but not when.
And then there, we give the answer at once, in the immediacy of the moment. Or withhold it, knowing that as soon as given it is not good enough, that it will be abandoned. It will be, same as we said it. Same as we never did.
One of David Byrne’s lyrics for The Knee Plays, music intended for Robert Wilson’s The CIVIL warS, a work intended for an art festival, to coincide with the LA Olympics in 1984, that never took place, goes that the sound never leaves the theatre. It builds up. This is why being there is more important than knowing what is going on. Until, when everyone leaves, the accumulated sound leaves with them:
To become forever part of the landscape In no particular order.
…
note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.
at 9:16 am on 16 November 2020, M. John Harrison wrote on Twttr:
Complexity, weirdness, characterisations like little stained glass sideshows. Characters do things because they want to. Equally, the text shows you something because it wants to. I see a book controlled by its own mood swings and emotional surfaces. But then I always do.
…
Today I’ve been writing about hikikomori and the cynicism–without experiencing it–of the answer to this ‘social problem’: restating the social imperative–to participate, engage, make contact, connect–that led to their being shut-in; as if in the great transparent snowglobe or bubble of communications’ technology–aka affective data industries.
…
The smartest people I knew at school lost their brains when they reached puberty. What is intelligence in children?
What is intelligence to children?
How do children understand intelligence?
Andrés Barba’snovels, The Luminous Republic (2020 in translation from Spanish to English), and Such Small Hands (2008 in translation), give an idea of an intelligence belonging to children. Here children are not captured in or at some kind of developmental state or stage. Neither is there moralising about the capacity to form judgements, the judgement-forming faculty belonging to morality, that children are said not to have acquired; nor in these books do we see an emotional view–in the image of which children’s inner emotional lives create their worlds: no magicking and no sciencing.
The intelligence of children is shown to be that of reason, of a reason unencumbered by … a hesitation here: is it experience of which children’s use of reason is unencumbered? is it judgement? or the judgements of others of which children’s reason is free? … No.
I would say that children’s use of reason is free because it is free of play, unencumbered by play–or free of a freedom with conditions. It is free of the kind of freedom that comes with conditions, the conditions that play has, where you might say to me, You’re not playing any more!
Children’s use of reason does not have parameters within which it has play. The reason of children is free of the parameters of play, unencumbered by the conditions experience of others–the word of others–might impose.
Where did I read that children’s perception of the world was close to that of schizophrenics?
Deleuze writes in The Logic of Sense that we have to take care not to mix metaphors, to go from the series of children, poets, to madmen, madwomen. He cites the example of Artaud against Carroll.
And it would be possible to go in the opposite direction to a similar effect and similarly to err. To go from the pure reason of children, via the application of pure reason in the adult world, that is, science, to the madness of things like human instrumentality or holocaust. The madness of the human object.
According to this second madness that is a surfeit of reason, what is in reason would be insensitive. It would lack empathy. Its very neutrality and purity would have become its liability.
Children lack emotional maturity–a phrase that has evolved with a hole at each end. One end eats what the other shits. What one end eats the other shits.
The automaton-like reason of children. Yes, this only goes so far to explaining it. What it lacks is not emotional experience, the experience of consequence. It lacks system.
And the lack of system of the use of reason in children is the same as that lack of system Kundera finds–and I suspect Deleuze finds–to be characteristic of Nietzsche. Nietzsche lampoons the savants for their system. Kundera places this ‘freeing from system of philosophy’ in apposition with ‘freeing from form (the rigidity of the sonata in particular)’ characteristic of Beethoven, the winning of new freedoms … that can be referred to the problem facing any artist, which has to be answered each time anew–I can’t think of a better word, although I don’t like it, neither anew nor afresh. This problem can be usefully compared with what Julio Ramón Ribeyro (whom I talk about further and cite a reference for below) says about the novel: “For some time now, French novels have been written by professors for professors. [The citation of Ribeyro below might shed light on why it is French novelists.] The French novelist today is a gentleman who has nothing to say about the world, but very much to say about the novel.” And, “Each new writer cross-checks his work with that of the writers who came before, not with the world. In this way we reach rarification in the novel’s material, which could be confused with esotericism.” New writers, Zambra [another novelist, cited below] writes that Ribeyro writes, “try to make of their work not the personal reflection of reality, but rather the personal reflection of other reflections.” [see xv in the work cited below]
Deleuze and Guattari say of Nietzsche’s aphorisms–and speak in a similar way of Kafka’s researches–that they must be plugged into the world. That is, they came from the world. Not its reflection. Not in esoteric abstraction from it. Not trying to curry favour with the taste-judges of today on Instagram. And are not founded, therefore, in emotional maturity, that maturely sets its own expectations of consequence. Ambition.
The reason of children is free of system.
This the works of Andrés Barba show.
…
Speaking before–although whether this is in the sense of ‘in front of’ in spatial or temporal terms is uncertain*–the fifth anniversary of the Paris climate accord, Greta Thunberg said “there was a state of complete denial when it came to the immediate action needed, with leaders giving only distant promises and empty words.” The same Guardian article [here] reminds us of her solo school strike that “snowballed into a global youth movement” (strange choice, snowballed).
More effective than going on strike from school might be following Greta Thunberg’s example and going on strike from being children.
What if all the children of the world walked out on their parents, their caregivers, accusing them of the grossest incompetence?–bearing them into a world for the calamity facing which they, the adults, take no responsibility–proclaiming their care, their love, for children equates with setting them into a situation which they, the children, are helpless to reverse or stop–by making children, parents, grownups, are, in fact, making them children, that is, helpless!
So they should quit.
So, they leave being children from henceforth to the adults.
We have seen that most of the adults who wield real power are in fact children.
Children, walk out! Go on strike!
Walk out on your own heavy responsibility of being helpless!
Emotionally immature? Not at all!
You have reason! And reason gives you the reason to act!
In other words, stop performing as children. You don’t even get paid!
Take control!
Sieze it!
… Or,
Steal it!
*[it’s not in fact uncertain. The UN-led summit on climate change has been … postponed. A one-day online summit replaces it. One day! Ridiculous when students are paying to attend classes day after day online.]
{also, see here for a nice summary timeline naming climate change milestones … or nails in the coffin … or just stages in the snowball picking up speed …}
…
“A man should neither conceal nor misrepresent the facts concerning the way in which he conceived his thoughts. The deepest and most inexhaustible books will certainly always have something of the aphoristic and impetuous character of Pascal’s Pensées.” — Nietzsche, The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values, Trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, available online here, section 424 p. 342
Considering its source, in the volume The Will to Power, selected from the notebooks by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, wife of Bernard Förster, whose antisemitism she endorsed, the original German source of the foregoing in the Nachlaß eludes me.
Nietzsche’s strongest statement of affinity with Pascal is cited with approval by Kundera in Testaments Betrayed, the first section of Part Six, “Works and Spiders” which I quote in full:
“I think.” Nietzsche cast doubt on this assertion dictated by a grammatical convention that every verb must have a subject. Actually, said he, “a thought comes when ‘it’ wants to, and not when ‘I’ want it to; so that it is falsifying the fact to say that the subject ‘I’ is necessary to the verb ‘think.'” A thought, comes to the philosopher “from outside, from above or below, like events or thunderbolts heading for him.” It comes in a rush. For Nietzsche loves “a bold and exuberant intellectuality that runs presto,” and he makes fun of the savants for whom thought seems “a slow, halting activity, something like drudgery, often enough worth the sweat of the hero-savants, but nothing like that light, divine thing that is such close kin to dance and to high-spirited gaiety.”
“Elsewhere Nietzsche writes that the; philosopher “must not, through some false arrangement of deduction and dialectic, falsify the things and the ideas he arrived at by another route…. We should neither conceal nor corrupt the actual way our thoughts come to us. The most profound and inexhaustible books will surely always have something of the aphoristic, abrupt quality of Pascal’s Pensées.”
“We should not “corrupt the actual way our thoughts come to us”: I find this injunction remarkable; and I notice that, beginning with The Dawn, all the chapters in all his books are written in a single paragraph: this is so that a thought should be uttered in one single breath; so that it should be caught the way it appeared as it sped toward the philosopher, swift and dancing.”
Nietzsche to his sister on the subject of her–it can be assumed?–future husband:
“It is a matter of honor to me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal regarding anti-Semitism, namely opposed, as I am in my writings… I have been persecuted [pursued; verfolgt?] in recent times with letters and Anti-Semitic Correspondence sheets; my disgust with this party … is as outspoken as possible, but the relation to Förster, as well as the after-effect of my former anti-Semitic publisher Schmeitzner, always bring the adherents of this disagreeable party back to the idea that I must after all belong to them…” – from here
…
apologia pro vita sua
…
“It’s not uncommon for music superstars, after decades atop their scenes, to try to demonstrate fluency in the music of prior generations to bolster their claims to contemporary authority.” — Jon Caramanica on Bad Bunny, NY Times, 2.12.2020
…
sadopopulism:
“Permitting either the State or the individual to use murder as part of a political or ethical process forecloses any hope of partaking in a legitimate future. It is like the vengeful Marquis de Sade who, locked in his prison cell, dreamed of a twisted oligarchy that sustains itself through the murderous consumption of everything other than itself. However, the killers are unable to escape the very logic of their system, and they inevitably fall victim to the violent energies they have been fueling.”
— Joseph McClellan, Michel Onfray’s translator, on Camus (in The Translator’s Introduction, A Hedonist Manifesto: The Power to Exist, Trans. Joseph McClellan, (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015), xi-xxxviii, xvi)
…
These themes meet in the shared theme of brutality, a subject on which the following sheds some light:
“What mysterious alchemy vaults people who were largely ignored, or at least by their own lights insufficiently valued, in their own time to this privileged niche in the imagination of their posterity is never fully explainable and is not to be confused with reputation in the conventional sense. … Musing on one of these cult people, their admirers often exclaim, “’ink what she would have accomplished had she lived.” — from here
ink what?
from the same: “In the early 1950s in Cambridge, Massachusetts, [Susan] Taubes and her then husband, the rabbi and philosopher of ideas Jacob Taubes, were the closest friends of my parents, Susan Sontag and Philip Rieff. … It was left to my mother to identify [Susan Taubes’s] body. Much later, she told me: ‘I will never forgive her . . . and never recover from what she did.'”
..
.
In literary land this week: the Bad Sex in Fiction Award has been cancelled, Roald Dahl’s family has apologized for his anti-Semitism, and John Freeman has been named Knopf’s new Executive Editor. — from lithub book marks bulletin 12/11
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“Ribeyro’s face is that of a law student who had contempt for the legal profession, or a Lima native who wanted to live in Madrid, who in Madrid dreamed of Paris, in Paris longed for Madrid, and so on, chasing grants and lovers, and especially in search of time to waste writing, in the solitude of Munich, or Berlin, or Paris, again, for a long stay.”
— Alejandro Zambra, in his introduction (“Ribeyro in His Web”), to Julio Ramón Ribeyro’s The Word of the Speechless [which might have been better mute, closer to the Spanish: La palabra del mudo], Trans. & Ed. Katherine Silver, (New York, NY: NYRB, 2019), vii-xvi, vii.
Ribeyro called the diary he wrote, which spans four decades (“Even in the most confessional pages of his diary, an impersonal mood persists,” writes Zambra, “that keeps him safe from exhibitionism or anecdotalism.”
(“Ribeyro writes to live,” he continues, “not to demonstrate that he has lived.”
(“A fragment from 1977 is, in this sense, revealing: ‘A true work must start from the oblivion or destruction (transformation) of the writer’s very self. The great writer is not one who truthfully, in detail and intensely, describes his existence, but one who becomes the filter, the weave, through which reality passes and is transfigured.'” [Ibid. viii]) La tentación del fracaso.
… we have just discussed it. And together, as a team or nation or society or whatever the hell it is, we can do it! We can beat this normality back into the slimy hole from which it has once again begun to slither. Or the right off the barren promontory from which it has once again begun announcing itself. Like those poles with loudspeakers on them announcing the party line. We can hack it down, we can Hone Heke axe it down because the flag should not be a loudspeaker.
All that needs to happen… perhaps I should put it in bullet points, talking points, Trump decision points, that he prefers above facts … but it is no more than a suggestion. A necessary one.
All that needs to happen is that you and I and yours and mine, that we tell the government 2 things:
government is about taking over permanent control of those controls that control the economy–including taking power over them from off the so-called automated mechanisms and systems of the market: such automatic systems were anyway installed sometime, their operation managed and maintained, by actual people, so can be suspended;
we are going into lockdown on an annual basis. We are appropriating social isolation. We, the people. Whether bosses and managers and businesses and so on like it or not, every year, for a period not shorter than 4 weeks, we do not go to work, to school, and so on, except to engage in essential industries: we need food, and obviously, from our experiences this year, toilet paper and some other basic goods (and wine, or sake, or vodka, beer, marijuana, and other legal highs), and we need access to medical facilities for the vulnerable, and the vulnerable equally need our care, and the little errands we might run for them which make all the difference in our communities. And then we choose a date… And we do it.
This is better than the occupy movement, if you think about it.
But you want to know if the good will of banks and lending institutions and landlords and service providers for electricity and gas and water and telephone and internet connection will be there in the absence of a pandemic, like COVID-19?
We must insist that the government insists that it is.
Be kind, we say, to the planet and to our social and psychic ecologies, for the well-being of our hearts and spirits and minds and what is wrongly called psychological well-being, as if it were treatable (no, it simply exists under conditions which are less internal to human bodies and brains than social, under whatever (economic) conditions are those of society), so also for the social ecology, which term we today must use in preference to the more usual economy–for obvious reasons.
As for the planetary well-being, this should also be obvious. 8% reduction in carbon emissions. Each year until at least the end of the century. 2100.
80 years. 80 lockdowns x 4 weeks–or longer if you like? why not extend for six?
I cannot reconstruct how I have got here, but I can tell you where I have got. You are probably not interested–who is? who has the time to be?–in the journey anyway. The conclusion will be bare. Just a bare line hanging without the scaffold of support.
What we are witnessing is the complete re-orientation of the global economy away from the petro-dollar to the data economy. We are seeing the completion of a process of re-orientation begun during the global crisis which had its inaugural moment with the bombing of the Twin Towers. At this time it became politically expedient to empower tech companies in the collection of data.
Data, farming it, harvesting it, owning it, selling it, mining for it, drilling into it, has become a more profitable industry than the oil industry. The data-dollar has outstripped the petro-dollar. The crashing in value of the petro-dollar and the crisis of oversupply in the energy market brought about by government-imposed lockdowns and the closing of national borders, particularly as it has affected the aviation industry, have leveraged the end of an era. COVID-19 marks the completion of a global re-orientation to the data-economy begun in pre-existing conditions of fear. Now the fear is of physical contact, digital contact is the solution.
It is as a spokesperson for a local social service writes, a contact-less digital solution, that without irony will be the complete solution to the contact tracing it is necessary to conduct. Asking our people to sign-in on a paper register and keep a diary of their movements can only go so far.
Social workers and educators move to online provision of services, often speaking to gains in efficiency and efficacy. Click and collect apps move the smallest transactions online, and whole stores migrate: New Hope is the name of the local dump shop, salvaging what people have thrown out for re-sale; it has now an online presence and offers click and collect, but not yet a proprietary app.
And this is where the frontline is: in compassionate examples and moral justifications. New Hope re-sells to benefit local initiatives. Social services take down names and personal details, aiding contact tracing, for the good of the society. The greater good has once again entered common parlance.
The farming of personal data from apps is for the greater good. For COVID-19 and for the complete re-orientation of the global economy. The complete solution.
I add this fragment as the most complete explanation for the otherwise incomprehensible statements of the POTUS.
…
I add the following fragment as ammunition for the frontline.
I went back to Milan Kundera for his view on kitsch, about the cruelty sentimentality and mawkishness cover over, and recalled how Kundera listened to Varèse and Xenakis, finding, especially in the latter, consolation. He asks himself why? Why, when he could be listening to Smetana? and recapitulating in its patriotism his nostalgia for homeland and for collective belonging.
He writes, equally brutally, perhaps, to the brutality he describes, and again, forgive me quoting at length:
“Despite Stravinsky’s denial that music expresses feeling, the naive listener cannot see it any other way. That is music’s curse, its mindless aspect. All it takes is a violinist playing the three long opening notes of a largo, and a sensitive listener will sigh, “Ah, how beautiful!” In those three notes that set off the emotional response, there is nothing, no invention, no creation, nothing at all: it’s the most ridiculous “sentimentality hoax.” But no one is proof against that perception of music, or against the foolish sigh it stirs.
“European music is founded on the artificial sound of a note and of a scale; in this it is the opposite of the objective sound of the world. Since its beginnings, Western music is bound, by an insurmountable convention, to the need to express subjectivity. It stands against the harsh sound of the outside world just as the sensitive soul stands against the insensibility of the universe.
“But the moment could come (in the life of a man or of a civilization) when sentiment (previously considered a force that makes man more human and relieves the coldness of his reason) is abruptly revealed as the “superstructure of brutality,” ever present in hatred, in vengeance, in the fervor of bloody victories. At that time I came to see music as the deafening noise of the emotions, whereas the world of noises in Xenakis’s works became beauty; beauty washed clean of affective filth, stripped of sentimental barbarity.”
The brain remains a symbol, with all that is entailed under this symbolic existence, nailed at some extremity—perhaps the highest plank—of the vast carpentry we have been calling the symbolic framework of reference, so long as its cognitive functions are identified with representation and so long as these higher functions are so called. Except that it express itself symbolically we should therefore show no small amazement that we cannot trust it.
