"The furious listener who wrote to his radio station after hearing a performance of Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge saying that the piece had reminded him of atom bombs, whereas what he wanted from art was relaxation, exaltation, and edification, understood more in his subaltern repressiveness than the sophisticated connoisseur who simply takes note of such music and weighs up its merits in comparison to those of other products." [194]
"[T]he radicality with which a piece of music presents the various stations along its path from earliest to the latest coincides in great measure with its development." [192]
"Ever since Stravinsky, and also in certain phases of the most recent music, there has been recurrent talk of nondeveloping, static music, most immediately in connection with the kaleidoscopic play of tone color and motive. But all so-called static music is mere illusion as long as it is regarded externally and played off dogmatically against the principle of development." [190]
"[C]larity is not necessarily the same thing as unambiguousness. New music is familiar with ambiguous functional features, and perhaps it is through them that the composition becomes 'integral.' But even the ambiguities must be clearly realized compositionally. The work will fail where the surface of the music fails to explain its function and to interpret the musical content." [189]
"At any rate, the task of giving the music its momentum, its 'inner flow,' as Schoenberg called it, is much more difficult than in music in which the tonal reference system and the surface coherence relieve the composition of the labor of generating its own momentum from within itself." [188]
"Above all, it is the universality of elaboration, the resulting liquidation of the sonata, and the compulsion ot compose in sections of 'fields' that has rendered obsolete the purely dynamic principle of development. It has been replaced the relation of the fields to one another, and the balance among them." [186]
"Klee's comment that art starts at the point where the system no longer works, a comment which in an artist as methodical as Klee of course presupposes the system, is an insight that has not yet been appropriated by the latest generation of composers." [181]
"This preestablished disharmony makes it very hard to create the configurations that transmit tension. The model here lies, above all, in intervals of tension like the major seventh or the minor ninth, which have ceased to be taboo or to induce panic in the citizenry but have driven out the consonant intervals. In the process, however, they sacrificed their own tension, and since they enjoy equal rights with every other interval, they have been neutralized along with them." [179]
"In countless contemporary compositions on varying aesthetic levels one finds such things as irregular figures with the very smallest note values to express the abrupt or wild, as opposed to the even and tame. Not only is this expressive gesture so familiar that it scarcely delivers the shock it would like to, but even the question of its precise musical components has itself become a matter of indifference." [178]
"In spoken language, social coercion and the sclerotic nature of convention have become so powerful that they inexorably shackle even the insubordinate utterances of the individual. In contrast, the language of music can ate least draw strength from its own weakness -- its lack of precise definition." [176]
"Complains that things were different in other centuries, and the desire to recreate something like a universally binding language or music, are in conflict with the current state of composition, as well as the historical trend of the age in general." [175]
"The more consistent and rich a musical structure is ... the more surface identification marks are reduced." [174]
"What is needed now is the formulation of an objective concept of originality, independent of the accidental identity of the composer and of the alien desiderata of the marketplace." [173]
"[T]he composer's subjective originality is of little avail as long as it remains mere gesture and fails to find its way into the structure of the music." [173]
"Now, in isolation, of course, original ideas do not amount to much, especially the vulgar notion that some people think up melodies that have no occurred to anyone else." [172]
"To be sure, the music that was evaluated in terms of its original inspiration also retained an element of bourgeois emancipation, as opposed to stereotyped hierarchical rigidity. But it has long since degenerated into pseudoindividuatliy, the hit song with the melody that is just like all the others and yet stays n the memory thanks to a minimally distinct innovation, a trick, a 'gimmick'." [172]
"It is a mistake to set up a blunt opposition between the complex and the primitive, as is common in a hackneyed sociology with a collectivist outlook. Such a sociology tends all too easily to defer to a well-worn stereotype that accuses modern art of excessive complexity and unnaturalness, and looks to simplicity as a source of renewal." [169]
"Accordingly, a completely resolved, unproblematic piece of either the motor-rhythmic or monothematic type that disarms all criticism can be inferior to a badly fractured 'failure' that demands more from itself from the outset and whose fractures are themselves meaningful; in important works, indeed, the measure of failure itself becomes the measure of significance. Works of art are all the more profound, the more purely they bear the stamps of the contradictions that are implicit in their point of departure, their own possibilities." [168]
"[M]eaning, the spiritual dimension in music, is the kind of transcendence in which its immanent structures gradually culminate: it is more than the sensuous. Indeed, it is created by the dynamism of the sensuous, while not asserting anything other than what it is, what it moves, and what it negates." [163]
"Nowadays a well-harmonized piece is not one that ignores the fact that tonality ever existed, but one that specifically negates it; and by avoiding sonorities or structures borrowed from tonality, such music preserves them within itself through the very process of exclusion." [160]
"If, when confronted by a self-evidently senseless constructivist composition, one asks the composer to explain where the antecedent and where the consequent are in a particular phrase, or what the logical function of each note is, he will answer with talk about some parallel or other between pitch levels, volumes, lengths, timbres, and the like, all of which remain external to the flow of the music and are unable to create meaning as long as they fail to articulate the musical phenomenon itself. But to call composers to account in this way is unfair because musical meaning today can probably no longer readily capture in concepts such as antecedent and consequent that arise indirectly from particular kinds of musical material." [159-60]
"Anyone who opposes spirit and technology to each other in good bourgeois fashion is as far behind the times as the person who simply conflates the two, treating intellectual questions as wholly reducible to questions of manipulating material." [157]
"Needless to say, art has always played a role in scientific progress. Foolish though it would be to equate the two, it would be equally misguided to fall into line with what in American parlance might be called the 'escapist' belief that the more science and technology advance, the more art must retreat into a world of supposedly pure feeling and turn its back on the scientific spirit." [155]
"The work of art cannot crudely be equated to a thing that might subject the logic of its structure to any sort of proof, as for example one might ask whether an object which has a purpose fulfills that purpose." [155]
"[T]he truth is that modern society is so radically different from the conditions to which music history devotes its energies that every analogy drawn from history can be no more than an impotent Romantic gesture." [153-4]
"Whoever still places his trust in a discredited tradition and continues to muddle on in the style of the nineteenth century or simply copies the styles of long-defunct social conditions in a spirit of craftsmanship, while confusing the results with 'classicism' is no more on safe ground than is the latest prepared piano." [152]
"If an audience finds a contemporary piece pretty, and responds with a delicious tingling of the spine because it sounds pleasant or unfolds smoothly or captivates through similar qualities, all this is based largely on the compulsion to repeat, the pleasure of mere recognition: a regressive phenomenon, a piece of unresolved childhood, the very antithesis of the redemption of that childhood through art." [152]
"The fact that every possible variant of art can thrive simultaneously, and that they all somehow or other express the age -- the ghastly expression reflects the ghastly reality -- no more confers legitimacy on them than does the fact of mere existence legitimate anything." [152]
"This is above all the besetting sin of aesthetic pluralism, which is deluded into believing that every conceivable type of music can coincide with any other and with equal validity -- Schoeberg and his successors, Stravinsky, ultimately even Britten." [150]
"In reality there is an overabundance of compositions that are 'right' according to explicitly controllable arrangements, but wrong or senseless in artistic terms." [149]
"[T]he artistic principle of individuation has been intensified to the point where it colonizes every aspect of a work, so that every work, and each of its aspects, must be unique and no longer permits the wealth of deviations that were tolerated, even required, by a universal musical language capable of establishing its objective validity." [149]
"Aesthetic objectivity is itself a process, of which anyone who conceives of the work of art as a force field is aware." [148]
"Our search for musical criteria today should also proceed along much the same paradoxical lines; in other words, we should search for an experience of necessity that imposes itself step by step, but which can make no claim to any transparent universal law. Actually, we miss the point if, as is inevitable in language, we subsume the experience of necessity implicit in the concrete monads of the works under universal concepts, if, in other words, we posit something like rues where none can exist, but only an infinitely sensitive and fragile logic, one that points to tendencies rather than fixed norms governing what should be done or not done." [148]
"Whatever happens musically nowadays is problematic in he full sense of the word, that of a task that cries out for a solution, and one, moreover, in which the difficulty of finding a solution is inscribed in the problem. To treat music dialectically means to submit to this situation." [148]
"[T]onality drags to their door categories that had once been thought independent of particular materials of composition, but which turn out in fact to be intimately intertwined with tonality. This refers above all to categories of musical language and syntax: the traditional methods of constructing forms. Their familiarity seduces us into thinking of them as part of the general logic of music as such, and not just tonality. Nevertheless, they cannot simply be transported unscathed from the world of tonality into something newer. A first, crude idea can be gleaned from reference to the most important traditional form, that of the sonata. Proportion among different parts in the sonata referred fundamentally to proportion among the keys, a matter of modulation and harmony. As soon as the sonata form loses its substance in terms of harmonic content, it is left more or less hanging in thin air. It becomes a construct in the questionable sense that it no longer follows inexorably from the internal musical events, it t no longer coheres with them naturally, let alone harmonizes with them, but is imposed on the textures of sound from outside, organizing them as if from memory." [147]
"There is considerable force in the idea that the given language of music stands in need of reappraisal, that it has become problematic. It is not simply that traditional tonality has gone out of fashion and that anyone who considers himself up to date would be embarrassed to compose using such methods. The fact is, these methods have become objectively false. It is not possible to ignore the mental climate of the age. Even if a composer in the provinces has not learned of the fate of tonality, what he writes does not thereby retain its integrity; it is still flawed and incoherent from start to finish. This is the case with Sibelius's symphonies, perhaps the last ambitious products of tonality in Western art." [147]
"As soon as one starts to discuss music, one enters the realm of thought, and no power on earth has the right to silence this." [146]
"At present, the question of criteria in music is caught up in a polarity that is as sterile as it is problematic. On the one side are those who appeal to firm, even rigid values postulated externally, a kind of hierarchy in the style of the middle Scheler, and who aspire to make musical decisions through confrontations with such values. Such a fixed theory is massively contradicted by the history of music, which constantly proves that what claims to be purely natural turns out to have been the product of creative transformation. For the past few decades, such static value systems have been pleased to call themselves an ontology. The more arbitrary they are, the less they are able to do justice to the living movement of their object; and the more they owe their existence to subjective desire or the will to power, the more violently they claim absolute validity and unchallengeable authority. These thinkers can be contrasted with vulgar relativists who hold that nothing authoritative can be said about the quality of works of art and that there is no arguing about matters of taste, though they neglect the evidence that people incessantly quarrel about such matters and that such a thing as art education does exist." [146]
"If, nevertheless, reflections on criteria cannot always be translated directly into quarter notes and sharps, this is because, wherever music is to be taken seriously, it has undermined any simple relationship to its basic material." [145]
"The question of criteria by which to judge new music calls for reflection not directly on the criteria themselves, but on the methods needed to discover them, if we are to avoid the standard strategies of resistance. But we can scarcely begin by talking of methods as a matter of principle. For the methods cannot be separated from the subject and treated as something ready-made and external, but must be produced in the course of a process of interaction with their subject. In the first instance this means the term 'dialectics' as applied to music, to its intrinsic development and to the consciousness of it." [145]
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Some Ideas on the Sociology of Music
"The sociological interpretation of music is the better grounded, the higher the quality of the music. It becomes dubious in the case of simpler, more regressive, or worthless music. It is harder to see why one hit song should stand higher in public esteem than another than to distinguish between the social significance of public reactions to different works by Beethoven." [13]
"If music on its own initiative makes itself into something desired, something socially useful, something by which human beings may profit, then, by the light of its own truth content, it betrays those human beings. Its relationship to exchange value is, like that of all the arts in our day, dialectical through and through." [10]
"The idea of a dynamic unity, a totality, in traditional great music was nothing but the idea of society itself." [9]
"The gestural language of Chopn's music is aristocratic -- in a sense that would have to be specified concretely. Its popularity, however, stems precisely from this aristocratic manner. We may say that it transforms the ordinary citizen, who aspires to hear himself in its mellifluous melancholy, into a gentleman. Music that is alive today is bourgeois in its entirety; prebourgeois music is played only our of historical interest." [9]
"Neither a composer's origins nor his life history, nor event eh impact of his music on a particular social stratum, yields any compelling sociological insights." [9]
"The composer's subjectivity is not something added on to these objective conditions and desiderata. It proves its worth precisely because it elevates his own impulse, which of course cannot be imagined out of existence, and merges it with that social objectivity. This means not only that he is tied to the objective social preconditions of production, but that his own achievement is itself social, even though it is the most subjective thing about him, a kind of logical synthesis of his own nature. The compositional subject is no individual thing, but a collective one. All music, however individual it may be in stylistic terms, possesses an inalienable collective substance: every sound says 'we.'" [9]
"Empirical studies that take audience responses as their starting point, on the assumption that they constitute the ultimate, secure foundation for scientific data, lose validity because they fail to see these responses for what they have become, that is to say, as functions of production. And incidentally, we must note that what used to be thought of as artistic production has now been replaced by a production process organized and controlled on the pattern of industrial processes, a change that has affected the entire realm of music for the consumer. Furthermore, the difficulties of nailing down the social effects of music are scarcely smaller than those involved in discovering the meaning of their intrinsic social content. In the end, all that can be determined is the opinions of interviewees about music and their relationship to it. These opinions, however, have been preformed by social mechanisms such as propaganda and the selection of material on offer, and hence remain inconclusive in themselves. What respondents think of as their relationship to music, especially in the form in which they verbalize their experience, falls far short of what actually transpires subjectively -- in terms of both individual and social psychology. If, for example, they claim that what attracts them to a piece of music is its melody or rhythm, they will normally have only a very hazy idea of what those words entail. They will use those concepts to designate a vague, conventional meaning: in the case of rhythm, no more than the interaction of the formal beat with syncopated deviations from it; in the case of melody, the easily identified top part in eight-measure periods. The analysis of one's own musical experience is a problematic business for anyone who has not made a special study of music or who lacks exceptional ability and training in introspection. Moreover, reliable experimental methods that are intended to avoid such difficulties by relying on precise counting and measuring lead nowhere. Whether a listener's pulse quickness, and so forth, is an irrelevant abstract in a discussion of his specific reaction to music he has heard." [6-7]
"Sociological research that would prefer to avoid the problems of analyzing production and to confine itself to questions of distribution of consumption remains imprisoned in the mechanisms of the market and hence gives its sanction to the primacy of the commodity character of music, even though to investigate this quality should be one of the foremost tasks of a sociology of music." [6]
"By virtue of tis basic material, music is the art in which the prerational, mimetic impulses ineluctably find their voice, even as they enter into a pact with the processes leading to the progressive domination of matter and nature. This is the material to which music owes its ability to transcend the business of mere self-preservation, an ability that led Schopenhauer to define it as the immediate objectification of the will and to place it at the apex of the hierarchy of the arts. If anywhere, it is in music that art rises above the mere repetition of what just happens anyway. At the same time, however, this material fits it for the constant reproduction of stupidity. The very element that raises music above ideology is also what brings it closest to it. Asa a carefully cultivated preserve of the irrational in the midst of the rationalized universe, music becomes negativity pure and simple, as this is rationally planned, produced, and administered by the Culture Industry. This irrationality has been calculated down the nth degree, and its sole effect is to ensure that people are kept in line. As such, it constitutes a parody of the protest against the dominance of the concept of classification, a protest of which music is uniquely capable when, as with all the great composers since Monteverdi, it subjects itself to the discipline of the rational. Only by virtue of such rationality can it transcend rationality." [6]
"There can be no doubt that the history of music exhibits a progressive process of rationalization. Its different stages are the Guidonian reforms, the introduction of mensural notation, the invention of continuo and of equal temperament, and finally, the trend to integral musical construction, which has advanced irresistibly since the time of Bach and has now reached an extreme. But rationalization -- which is inseparable from the historical process of the bourgeoisifcation of music -- represents only one of the social features of music, just as rationality itself, Engightenment, is no more than one aspect of the history of a society that is still developing in an irrational and 'natural' manner even today. Within the global development in which music shared in the progressive emergence of rationality, music at the same time always remained the voice of all who fell by the wayside or were sacrificed on the altar of the rational." [5]
"Taken globally, the function of music in society is mainly to act as a diversion. Questions such as whether Mr. X plays Beethoven's G Major Piano Concerto better than Mr. Y, or whether the voice of the young tenor has been put under too much of a strain, have scarcely anything to do with the substance and meaning of music. But it all contributes to the creation of the cultural veil, the concern with spirit degraded to the level of 'education,' which prevents countless listeners from obtaining any perception of more essential realities. The neutralization of music through its reduction to matters of cultural activity and cultural chitchat would itself be a rewarding subject of investigation by a sociology of music, as long as it refused to collude in that neutralizing process. But to attempt to combat that neutralization by simply invoking the living power of music to affect people, without realizing the extent to which music depends on society as a whole, is to capitulate to ideology even more abjectly. Music is especially prone to that capitulation because its nonceptual nature encourages its listeners to think of themselves as feeling subjects, to give their thoughts free rein, and to think whatever ideas happen to come into their heads. Music functions as a kind of wish fulfillment and vicarious gratification, but unlike film it does not really get caught in the act. This gratification extends from dozing off -- the promotion of a condition that largely precludes any rational or critical behavior -- to the cult of passion, the philosophical irrationalism that has been so intimately linked with the repressive and violent social tendencies ever since the nineteenth century." [4-5]
"The nonconceptual nature of music deprives us of the kind of evidence for our insights that in the case of traditional literature appears to be legitimated by its contents. Hence assertions about the intrinsic ideological character of music are constantly in danger of being reduced to mere analogies. The only remedy here is a technical and physiognomical analysis that describes formal features as elements of an organized musical meaning (or that points tot eh absence of such meaning) and goes on to infer social significance from those features. The task is to articulate the social meaning of the formal constituents of music -- its logic, in short. How to learn or practice this is something that is scarcely capable of abstract formulation. Attempts to achieve it tend to be arbitrary and to be justified only through internal consistency and the ability to shed light on music's individual features. The crucial task facing a sociology of music -- the task of socially decoding music itself -- resists the kind of positivistic verification of tangible realities of the sort provided by data about musical consumption or the description of musical organizations, but which shies away from analysis of the music itself. The precondition of a productive sociology of music is to understand the language of music. This goes far beyond anything available to the sociologist concerned merely with applying his own categories to music, but also far beyond anything communicated by the official and ossified musical culture of the conservatories or university musicology." [4]
"Some Ideas on the Sociology of Music"
in Sound Figures (1978)
Theodore Adorno
"If music on its own initiative makes itself into something desired, something socially useful, something by which human beings may profit, then, by the light of its own truth content, it betrays those human beings. Its relationship to exchange value is, like that of all the arts in our day, dialectical through and through." [10]
"The idea of a dynamic unity, a totality, in traditional great music was nothing but the idea of society itself." [9]
"The gestural language of Chopn's music is aristocratic -- in a sense that would have to be specified concretely. Its popularity, however, stems precisely from this aristocratic manner. We may say that it transforms the ordinary citizen, who aspires to hear himself in its mellifluous melancholy, into a gentleman. Music that is alive today is bourgeois in its entirety; prebourgeois music is played only our of historical interest." [9]
"Neither a composer's origins nor his life history, nor event eh impact of his music on a particular social stratum, yields any compelling sociological insights." [9]
"The composer's subjectivity is not something added on to these objective conditions and desiderata. It proves its worth precisely because it elevates his own impulse, which of course cannot be imagined out of existence, and merges it with that social objectivity. This means not only that he is tied to the objective social preconditions of production, but that his own achievement is itself social, even though it is the most subjective thing about him, a kind of logical synthesis of his own nature. The compositional subject is no individual thing, but a collective one. All music, however individual it may be in stylistic terms, possesses an inalienable collective substance: every sound says 'we.'" [9]
"Empirical studies that take audience responses as their starting point, on the assumption that they constitute the ultimate, secure foundation for scientific data, lose validity because they fail to see these responses for what they have become, that is to say, as functions of production. And incidentally, we must note that what used to be thought of as artistic production has now been replaced by a production process organized and controlled on the pattern of industrial processes, a change that has affected the entire realm of music for the consumer. Furthermore, the difficulties of nailing down the social effects of music are scarcely smaller than those involved in discovering the meaning of their intrinsic social content. In the end, all that can be determined is the opinions of interviewees about music and their relationship to it. These opinions, however, have been preformed by social mechanisms such as propaganda and the selection of material on offer, and hence remain inconclusive in themselves. What respondents think of as their relationship to music, especially in the form in which they verbalize their experience, falls far short of what actually transpires subjectively -- in terms of both individual and social psychology. If, for example, they claim that what attracts them to a piece of music is its melody or rhythm, they will normally have only a very hazy idea of what those words entail. They will use those concepts to designate a vague, conventional meaning: in the case of rhythm, no more than the interaction of the formal beat with syncopated deviations from it; in the case of melody, the easily identified top part in eight-measure periods. The analysis of one's own musical experience is a problematic business for anyone who has not made a special study of music or who lacks exceptional ability and training in introspection. Moreover, reliable experimental methods that are intended to avoid such difficulties by relying on precise counting and measuring lead nowhere. Whether a listener's pulse quickness, and so forth, is an irrelevant abstract in a discussion of his specific reaction to music he has heard." [6-7]
"Sociological research that would prefer to avoid the problems of analyzing production and to confine itself to questions of distribution of consumption remains imprisoned in the mechanisms of the market and hence gives its sanction to the primacy of the commodity character of music, even though to investigate this quality should be one of the foremost tasks of a sociology of music." [6]
"By virtue of tis basic material, music is the art in which the prerational, mimetic impulses ineluctably find their voice, even as they enter into a pact with the processes leading to the progressive domination of matter and nature. This is the material to which music owes its ability to transcend the business of mere self-preservation, an ability that led Schopenhauer to define it as the immediate objectification of the will and to place it at the apex of the hierarchy of the arts. If anywhere, it is in music that art rises above the mere repetition of what just happens anyway. At the same time, however, this material fits it for the constant reproduction of stupidity. The very element that raises music above ideology is also what brings it closest to it. Asa a carefully cultivated preserve of the irrational in the midst of the rationalized universe, music becomes negativity pure and simple, as this is rationally planned, produced, and administered by the Culture Industry. This irrationality has been calculated down the nth degree, and its sole effect is to ensure that people are kept in line. As such, it constitutes a parody of the protest against the dominance of the concept of classification, a protest of which music is uniquely capable when, as with all the great composers since Monteverdi, it subjects itself to the discipline of the rational. Only by virtue of such rationality can it transcend rationality." [6]
"There can be no doubt that the history of music exhibits a progressive process of rationalization. Its different stages are the Guidonian reforms, the introduction of mensural notation, the invention of continuo and of equal temperament, and finally, the trend to integral musical construction, which has advanced irresistibly since the time of Bach and has now reached an extreme. But rationalization -- which is inseparable from the historical process of the bourgeoisifcation of music -- represents only one of the social features of music, just as rationality itself, Engightenment, is no more than one aspect of the history of a society that is still developing in an irrational and 'natural' manner even today. Within the global development in which music shared in the progressive emergence of rationality, music at the same time always remained the voice of all who fell by the wayside or were sacrificed on the altar of the rational." [5]
"Taken globally, the function of music in society is mainly to act as a diversion. Questions such as whether Mr. X plays Beethoven's G Major Piano Concerto better than Mr. Y, or whether the voice of the young tenor has been put under too much of a strain, have scarcely anything to do with the substance and meaning of music. But it all contributes to the creation of the cultural veil, the concern with spirit degraded to the level of 'education,' which prevents countless listeners from obtaining any perception of more essential realities. The neutralization of music through its reduction to matters of cultural activity and cultural chitchat would itself be a rewarding subject of investigation by a sociology of music, as long as it refused to collude in that neutralizing process. But to attempt to combat that neutralization by simply invoking the living power of music to affect people, without realizing the extent to which music depends on society as a whole, is to capitulate to ideology even more abjectly. Music is especially prone to that capitulation because its nonceptual nature encourages its listeners to think of themselves as feeling subjects, to give their thoughts free rein, and to think whatever ideas happen to come into their heads. Music functions as a kind of wish fulfillment and vicarious gratification, but unlike film it does not really get caught in the act. This gratification extends from dozing off -- the promotion of a condition that largely precludes any rational or critical behavior -- to the cult of passion, the philosophical irrationalism that has been so intimately linked with the repressive and violent social tendencies ever since the nineteenth century." [4-5]
"The nonconceptual nature of music deprives us of the kind of evidence for our insights that in the case of traditional literature appears to be legitimated by its contents. Hence assertions about the intrinsic ideological character of music are constantly in danger of being reduced to mere analogies. The only remedy here is a technical and physiognomical analysis that describes formal features as elements of an organized musical meaning (or that points tot eh absence of such meaning) and goes on to infer social significance from those features. The task is to articulate the social meaning of the formal constituents of music -- its logic, in short. How to learn or practice this is something that is scarcely capable of abstract formulation. Attempts to achieve it tend to be arbitrary and to be justified only through internal consistency and the ability to shed light on music's individual features. The crucial task facing a sociology of music -- the task of socially decoding music itself -- resists the kind of positivistic verification of tangible realities of the sort provided by data about musical consumption or the description of musical organizations, but which shies away from analysis of the music itself. The precondition of a productive sociology of music is to understand the language of music. This goes far beyond anything available to the sociologist concerned merely with applying his own categories to music, but also far beyond anything communicated by the official and ossified musical culture of the conservatories or university musicology." [4]
"Some Ideas on the Sociology of Music"
in Sound Figures (1978)
Theodore Adorno
Monday, April 19, 2010
Autobiography of Red
"Raising a camera to one's face has effects
no one can calculate in advance." [135]
"It sort of rustles as it moves because it's full of boiling chunks of solid rock." [109]
"Herakles was watching.
Do you hear the rain? he said. Rain? Geryon adjusted the earphones. The sound
was hot as a color inside." [108]
"It was the year he began to wonder about the noise that colors make. Roses came
roaring across the garden at him.
He lay on his bed at night listening to the silver light of stars crashing against
the window screen. Most
of those he interviewed for the science project had to admit they did not hear
the cries of the roses
being burned alive in the noonday sun. Like horses, Geryone would say helpfully,
like horses in war. No, they shook their heads.
Why is grass called blades? he asked them. Isn't it because of the clicking?
They stared at him." [84]
"The word each blew towards him and came apart on the wind. Geryon had always
had this trouble: a word like each,
when he stared at it, would disassemble itself into a separate letters and go.
A space for its meaning remained there but blank.
The letters themselves could be found hung on branches or furniture in the area.
What does each mean?" [26]
"Homer's epithets are a fixed diction with which Homer fastens every substance in the world to its aptest attribute and holds them in place for epic consumption. There is a passion in it but what kind passion? 'Consumption is not a passion for substances but a passion for the code,' says Baudrillard." [4]
Autobiography of Red (1998)
Ann Carson
no one can calculate in advance." [135]
"It sort of rustles as it moves because it's full of boiling chunks of solid rock." [109]
"Herakles was watching.
Do you hear the rain? he said. Rain? Geryon adjusted the earphones. The sound
was hot as a color inside." [108]
"It was the year he began to wonder about the noise that colors make. Roses came
roaring across the garden at him.
He lay on his bed at night listening to the silver light of stars crashing against
the window screen. Most
of those he interviewed for the science project had to admit they did not hear
the cries of the roses
being burned alive in the noonday sun. Like horses, Geryone would say helpfully,
like horses in war. No, they shook their heads.
Why is grass called blades? he asked them. Isn't it because of the clicking?
They stared at him." [84]
"The word each blew towards him and came apart on the wind. Geryon had always
had this trouble: a word like each,
when he stared at it, would disassemble itself into a separate letters and go.
A space for its meaning remained there but blank.
The letters themselves could be found hung on branches or furniture in the area.
What does each mean?" [26]
"Homer's epithets are a fixed diction with which Homer fastens every substance in the world to its aptest attribute and holds them in place for epic consumption. There is a passion in it but what kind passion? 'Consumption is not a passion for substances but a passion for the code,' says Baudrillard." [4]
Autobiography of Red (1998)
Ann Carson
Monday, April 12, 2010
The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
"Any created object, visual or analytic, conceptual or photographic, has to condense all the dimensions of the game into a single one: the allegorical, the presentative (mimicry), the agonal (agon), the random (alea) and the vertigious (ilinx). Recomposing the spectrum. A work, an object, a piece of architecture, a photograph, but equally a crime or an event, must: be the allegory of something, be a challenge to someone, bring chance into pay and produce vertigo." [215]
"The more daily life is eroded, routinized and interactivized, the more we must counter this trend with complex, initiatory sets of rules." [215]
"According to Ilya Prigogine, we intuitively sense the irreversibility of physical phenomena and time's arrow is irreversible. But we may hypothesize a reversible process at the very heart of time, and at the very heart of thought. A dual arrow of time, a dual arrow of thought (according to some scientists, the elementary physical laws are reversible, that is to say, their mathematical expression is unchanged if the temporal variable is reversed). How can we reconcile this reversibility with the irreversibility we observe on the basis of the commonplace intuition we have of time?" [201]
"Every process growing exponentially generates a barrier: the speed barrier, the heat barrier, the information barrier, the transparency barrier, the Virtual barrier. And that barrier is insuperable." [192]
"The feminine and the masculine are not 'interactive': that is ridiculous. Life and the world are not interactive -- life isn't a question-and-answer session or a video game. There is nothing interactive in words when they are articulated in language. Interactivity is a gigantic mythology, a mythology of integrated systems craving integration, a mythology in which otherness is lost in feedback, interlocution and interface -- a kind of generalized echography." [188]
"On the symbolic plane there is only one way to pay back, and that is the counter-gift. If that is impossible, then there is vengeance, which is itself a form of counter-gift. Compassion here is useless and perverse: it merely adds to the inferiority of the victim. Moreover, this ruse of repentance is a particularly underhand manoeuvre on the part of those in power, since it means stealing from the people the last of their rights, their only opportunity for political participation: the chance to unmask and condemn the powerful. It is the same with the media and the news sources when they put themselves in the dock and engage in self-criticism. They rob the public of the last of their rights as citizens -- the right not to believe a single word they are told. Just as advertising, by affecting a self-deprecating ironic tone, short-circuits our opportunities for deriding it. This kind of deterrence is at work everywhere: 'citizens' are deprived of their right of revenge and their capacity to take reprisals." [171]
"The corruption of ideas is no exception. They too follow a much more cynical, subtle trajectory than the pathways of reason, and the networks of thought that are created bear only a distant relation to truth. It is this cunning which means that, as soon as they are invested with power, politicians immediately turn against that which, or those who, carried them to power, just as intellectuals very quickly turn against the verg ideas that inspired them." [169]
"Such is 'real time', the time of communication, information and perpetual interaction: the finest deterrence-space of time and events. On the real-time screen, by way of simple digital manipulation, all possibilities are potentially realized -- which puts an end to their possibility. Through electronics and cybernetics, all desires, all play of identity and all interactive potentialities are programmed in and auto-programmed. The fact that everything here is realized from the outset prevents the emergence of any singular event. Such is the violence of real time, which is also the violence of information." [132]
"Art has always denied itself. But once it did so through excess, thrilling to the play of its disappearance. Today it denies itself by default -- worse, it denies its own death. It immerses itself in reality, instead of being the agent of the symbolic murder of that same reality, instead of being the magical operator of its disappearance." [112]
"Art, in its form, signifies nothing. It is merely a sign pointing towards absence. But what becomes of this perspective of emptiness and absence in a contemporary universe that is already totally emptied of its meaning and reality? Art can now only align itself with the general insignificance and indifference. It no longer has any privileged status. It no longer has any other final destination than this fluid universe of communication, the networks and interaction." [109]
"The idea of art has become rarefied and minimal, leading ultimately to conceptual art, where it ends in the nonexhibition of non-works in non-galleries -- the apotheosis of art as non-event. As a corollary, the consumer circulates in all this in order to experience his non-enjoyment of the works." [107]
"What could miraculously reassure us today about the essence of art? Art is quite simply what is at issue in the world of art, in that desperately self-obsessed artistic community. The 'creative' act doubles up on itself and is now nothing more than a sign of its own operation -- the painter's true subject is no longer what he paints but the very fact that he paints. He paints in the fact that he paints. At least in that way the idea art remains intact." [107]
"Do we not prefer any old parallel universe to the real one? Any old double life to the one given to us? There is no finer parallel universe than that of the detail or the fragment. Freed from the whole and its transcendent ventriloquism, the detail inevitably becomes mysterious. Every particle wrested from the natural world is in itself an immediate subversion of the real and its wholeness. Like the fragment, it has only to be elliptical. It has only to be an exception." [103]
"The silence of the image is equalled only by the silence of the masses and the silence of the desert." [102]
"Objects are merely a pretext for light. If there were no objects, light would circulate endlessly and we would not even be aware of it. If there were no subjects, thought would circulate infinitely and there would not even be any echo of it in consciousn ess. The subject is that upon which thought comes to rest in its infinite circulation, that against which it reflects. The object is that upon which light comes to rest, that which reflects it. The photograph is the automatic writing of light." [102]
"Lichtenberg speaks, in one of his aphorisms, of a tremor: any act, even an exact one, is preceded by a trembling, a haziness of gesture, and it always retains something of it. When this haziness, this tremor, does not exist, when an act is purely operational and is perfectly focused, we are on the verge of madness." [99]
"The photographic image is the purest because it simulates neither time nor movement and confines itself to the most rigorous unreality. All the other forms (cinema, video, computer-generated images) are merely attenuated forms of the pure image and its rupture with the real." [97]
"The ultimate violence done to the image is the violence of the computer-generated image, which emerged ex nihilo from numerical calculation and the computer. There is an end here to the very imagining of the image, to its fundamental 'illusion', since in the process of computer-generation the referent no longer exists and the real itself no longer has cause to come to pass, being produced immediately as Virtual Reality. There is an end here to that direct image-taking, that presence to a real object in an irrevocable instant, which created the magical illusion of the photograph and made the image a singular event." [95]
"Images that ultimately bear witness, behind their alleged 'objectivity', to a deep disavowal of the real, at the same time as a disavowal of the image, which is assigned the task of representing that which does not want to be represented, of violating the real by 'breaking and entering'. In this sense, most photographs (but media images too, in general, and all that makes up the 'visual') are not true images. They are merely reportage, realist cliché or aesthetic performance, enslaved to all the ideological systems." [93]
"The Iconoclasts of Byzantium smashed images to erase their signification (the visible face of God). While apparently doing the opposite, and in spite of our cult of idols, we are still iconoclasts: we destroy images by overloading them with signification; we kill images with meaning." [92]
"Of news coverage we are the hostages, but we also treat it as a spectacle, consume it as spectacle, without regard for its credibility. A latent incredulity and derision prevent us from being totally in the grip of the information media. It isn't critical consciousness that causes us to distance ourselves from it in this way, but the reflex of no longer wanting to play the game. Somewhere in us lies a profound desire not to have information and transparency (nor perhaps freedom and democracy -- all this needs looking at again). Towards all these ideals of modernity there is something like a collective form of mental reserve, of innate immunity." [84-5]
"People tell you the computer is just a handier, more complex kind of typewriter. But that isn't true. The typewriter is an entirely external object. The page floats free, and so do I. I have a physical relation to writing. I touch the blank o written page with my eyes -- something I cannot do with the scree. The computer is a prosthesis. I have a tactile, intersensorty relation to it. I become, myself, an ectoplasm of the screen." [81-2]
"And is there really any possibility of discovering something in cyberspace? The Internet merely simulates a free mental space of freedom and discovery. In fact, it merely offers a multiple but conventional space, in which the operator interacts with known elements, pre-existent sites, established codes. Nothing exists beyond its search parameters. Every question has an anticipated response assigned to it. You are the questioner and, at the same time, the automatic answering device of the machine. Both coder and decoders -- you are, in fact, your own terminal. That is the ectasy of communication. There is no 'Other' out there and no final destination. It's any old destination -- and any old interactor will do. And so the system goes on, without end and without finality, and its only possibility is that of infinite involution. Hence the comfortable vertig of this electronic, computer interaction, which acts like a drug. You can spend your whole life at this, without a break. Drugs themselves are only ever the perfect example of a crazed, closed-circuity interactivity." [81]
"Machines produce only machines. The texts, images, films, speech and programmes which come out of the computer are machine products, and they bear the marks of such products: they are artificially padded-out, face-lifted by the machine, the films are stuffed with special effects, the texts full of longueurs and repetitions due to the machine's malicious will to function at all costs (that is its passion), and to the operator's fascination with this limitless possibility of functioning. Hence the wearisome character in films of all this violence and pornographied sexuality, which are merely special effects of violence and sex, no longer even fantasized by humans, but pure machinic violence. And this explains all these texts that resemble the work of 'intelligent' virtual agents, whose only act is the act of programming. This has nothing to do with automatic writing, which played on the magical telescoping of words and concepts, whereas all we have here is the automatism of programming, an automatic run-through of all the possibilities. It is this phantasm of the ideal performance of the text or image, the possibility of correcting endlessly, which produce in the 'creative artist' this vertige of interactivity with his own object, alongside the anxious vertige at not having reached the technological limits of his possibilities." [80-1]
"In the mirror we differentiate ourselves from our image, we enter upon an open form of alienation and of play with it. The mirror, the image, the gaze, the scene -- all these things open on to a culture of metaphor. Whereas in the operation of the Virtual, at a certain level of immersion in the visual machinery, the man / machine distinction no longer holds: the machine is on both sides of the interface. Perhaps you are indeed merely the machine's space now -- the human being having become the virtual reality of the machine, its mirror operator. This has to do with the very essence of the screen. There is no 'through' the screen the way there is a 'through' the looking-glass or mirror. The dimensions of time itself merge there in 'real time'. And, the characteristic of any virtual surface being first of all to be there, to be empty and thus capable of being filled with anything whatever, it is left to you to enter, in real time, into interactivity with the void." [80]
"What are we to do with an interactive world in which the demarcation line between subject and object is virtually abolished? That world can no longer either be reflected or represented; it can only be refracted or diffracted now by operations that are, without distinction, operations of brain and screen -- the mental operations of a brain that has itself become a screen." [78]
"The screen reflects nothing. It is as though you are behind the a two-way mirror: you see the world, but it doesn't see you, it doesn't look at you. Now, you only see things if they are looking at you. The screen screens out any dual relation (any possibility of 'response'). It is this failure of representation which, together with a failure of action, underlies the impossibility of developing an ethics of information, an ethics of images, an ethics of the Virtual and the networks. All attempts in that direction inevitably fail. All that remains is the mental diaspora of images and the extravagant performance of the medium." [78]
"It is the same with text, with any 'virtual' text (the Internet, word-processing): you work on it like a computer-generated image, which no longer bears any relation to the transcendence of the gaze or of writing. At any rate, as soon as you are in front of the screen, you no longer see the text as a text, but as an image. Now, it is in the strict separation of text and screen, of text and image, that writing is an activity in its own right, never an interaction." [76]
"When an event and the broadcasting of that event in real time are too close together, the event is rendered undecidable and virtual; it is stripped of its historical dimension and removed from memory. We are in a generalized feedback effect. Wherever a mingling of this kind -- a collision of poles -- occurs, then the vital tension is discharged. Even in 'reality TV', where, in the live telling of the story, the immediate televisual acting, we see the confusion of existence and its double." [75]
"This is the fall of dreams into the psychical domain, 'the fall of the imagination into the psychological swamp' (Hélé Béji). This fall into the psychical domain means, in fact, that dreams no longer have any prophetic value: to do so they would have to originate in a transcendence, the transcendence of night, and come from elsewhere, whereas they are now merely a mode of interaction with oneself." [70]
"Now, what makes exchange possible if not the abstract transcendence of value? What makes the exchange of language possible if not the abstract transcendence of the sign? It is all these things that are eliminated today, ground to dust. The same vertiginous deregulation is visited on both value and the sign. Not the real, but the sign and, through it, the whole universe of meaning and communication is undergoing the same deregulation as markets (doubtless it even preceded the deregulation of the world market)." [67-8]
"We have abolished the real world. What world remains, then? The world of signs? Not at all. We have put paid to the real world and, in the process, done away with that of the sign. It is the murder of the sign that paves the way for Integral Reality." [67]
"If the people puts itself in the hands of the political class, it does so more to be rid of power than out of any desire for representation. We may interpret this as a sign of passivity and irresponsibility, but why not venture a subtler hypothesis: namely, that this passing of the buck proceeds from an unwittingly lucid intuition of an absence of desire and will of their own -- in short, a secret awareness of the illusoriness of freedom?" [54]
"Reality will have been only a fleeting solution then. Indeed, it merely succeeded others, such as the religious illusion in all its forms. This truth, this rationality, this objective reality -- which we took in exchange for religious values, imagining that we had moved definitively beyond them -- is only the disenchanted heir to those same religious values. It does not seem ever genuinely to have gained the upper hand, as it happens, nor does it appear that the transcendent solution is entirely past and gone or that God is dead, even though we now deal only with his metastases." [43]
"If thought cannot be exchanged for reality, then the immediate denial of reality becomes the only reality-based thinking. But this denial does not lead to hope, as Adorno would have it: 'Hope, as it emerges from reality by struggling against it to deny it, is the only manifestation of lucidity.' Whether for good or for ill, this is not true." [36-37]
"In the end, it is the strangeness of the world that is fundamental and it is that strangeness which resists the status of objective reality. Similarly, it is our strangeness to ourselves that is fundamental and resists the status of subject. It is not a matter of resisting alienation, but of resisting the very status of subject." [36]
"Such as it is, the world is without causal explanation or possible representation (any mirror whatever would still be part of the world). Now, that for which there is neither a meaning nor a definitive reason is an illusion. The world therefore has all the characteristics of a thorough-going illusion. For us, however, whatever its metaphysical beauty, this illusion is unbearable. Hence the need to produce all the possible forms of a simulacrum of meaning, of transcendence --- things which all mask this original illusoriness and protect us from it. Thus the simulacrum is not that which hides the truth, but that which hides the absence of truth." [32]
"Immersion, immanence and immediacy -- these are the characteristics of the Virtual." [31]
"Time itself, lived time, no longer has time to take place. The historical time of events, the psychological time of affects and passion, the subjective time of judgement and will, are all simultaneously called into question by virtual time, which is called, no doubt derisively, 'real time'." [30]
"The computer-generated image is like this too, a digital image which is entirely fabricate, has no real referent and from which, by contrast with analogue images, the negative itself has disappeared -- not just the film negative, but the negative moment that lies at the heart of the image, that absence that causes the image to resonate. The technical fine-tuning here is perfect. There is no room for fuzziness, tremor or chance. Is this still an image?" [28]
"Integral Reality is also to be found in integral music: the sort you find in quadraphonic spaces or can 'compose' on a computer. The music in which sounds have been clarified and expurgated and which, shorn of all noise and static, is, so to speak, restored to its technical perfection. The sounds of such music are no longer the play of a form, but the actualization of a programme. It is a music reduced to a pure wavelength, the final reception of which, the tangible effect on the listener, is exactly programmed too, as in a closed circuit. It s, in a sense, a virtual music, flawless and without imagination, merging into its own model, and even the enjoyment of it is virtual enjoyment. Is this still music? The question must be open to doubt, since they have actually come up with the idea of reintroducing noise into it to make it more 'musical'." [27-28]
"'Does reality exist? Are we in a real world?' -- this is the leitmotiv or our entire present culture. But it merely expresses the fact that we can no longer bear this world, which is so prey to reality, except by way of a radical denial. And this is logical: since the world can no longer be justified in another world, it has to be justified here and now in this one by lending itself force of reality, by purging itself of any illusion. But at the same time, by the very effect of this counter-transference, the denial of the real as such grows. Reality, having lost its natural predators, is growing like some proliferating species. A little bit like algae or even like the human race in general. The Real is growing like the desert. 'Welcome to the Desert of the Real'. Illusion, dreams, passion, madness and drugs, but also artifice and simulacrum -- these were reality's natural predators. They have all lost energy, as though struck down by some dark, incurable malady. We have, then, to find an artificial equivalent for them, since, if we do not, reality, once it has attained its critical mass, will end up destroying itself spontaneously, will implode of its own accord -- which it is, in fact, currently doing, giving way to the Virtual in all its forms. It is in the Virtual that we have the ultimate predator and plunderer of reality, secreted by reality itself as a kind of self-destructive viral agent. Reality has fallen prey to Virtual Reality, the final consequence of the process begun with the abstraction of objective reality -- a process that ends in Integral Reality. What we have in virtuality is no longer a hinterworld: the substitution of the world is total; this is the identical doubling of the world, its perfect mirroring, and the matter is settled by the pure and simple annihilation of symbolic substance. Even objective reality becomes a useless function, a kind of waste that is ever more difficult to exchange and circulate. We have moved, then, from objective reality to a later stage, a kind of ultra-reality that puts an end to both reality and illusion." [26-27]
"The reality-fundamentalists equip themselves with a form of magical thinking that confuses message and messenger: if you speak of the simulacrum, then you are a simulator; if you speak of the virtuality of war, then you are in league with it have no regard for the hundreds of thousands of dead." [23]
"Any questioning of reality, of its obviousness and its principle, is deemed unacceptable and condemned as negationist. The charge against you: what do you make of the reality of misery, suffering and death? Now, it isn't about taking sides on material violence or on the violence of misfortune -- it is about a line you are forbidden to cross, the line marking a taboo on reality, a taboo also on even the slightest attempt at interfering with a clear division between good and evil, on pain of being regarded as a scoundrel or an imposter. The affirmation or contestation of reality, of the reality principle, is, then, a political choice, and almost a religious one, in that any infringement of this principle is sacrilegious -- the very hypothesis of simulation being perceived, deep down, as diabolical (it takes up where heresy left off in the archaeology of the thinking of evil)." [22-23]
"The eclipse of God left us up against reality. Where will the eclipse of reality leave us?" The Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact [21]
"Things have no origin any longer and no end, they cannot develop logically or dialectically any more, but only chaotically or randomly. They are becoming 'extreme' in the literal sense -- ex terminis: they are beyond the limits." At the reception of the Simens Media Prize
"What we also see here, too, is a characteristic recourse to a third term that stands outside the apparently given dichotomy of production / destruction: 'seduction' is, as it were, the option fro left field (Baudrillard also says it is the 'feminine' one, but that is another matter), the term that comes from outside the structure -- from 'elsewhere'. Chris Turner: The Intelligence of Evil: An Introduction, page 8.
"Deep down, things have never functioned socially, but symbolically, magically, irrationally, etc." In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, page 68.
"With the decline of psychoanalysis and sexuality as strong structures, one may catch a glimpse of another, parallel universe ... a universe that can no longer be intepreted in terms of psychic or psychological relations, nor those of repression and the unconscious, but must be interpreted in the terms of play, challenges, duels, the strategy of appearances -- that is, in the terms of seduction." Seduction, page 7.
"It is impossible to destroy the system by a contradiction-based logic or by reversing the balance of forces -- in short, by a direct, dialectical revoluion affecting the economic or political infrastructure. Everything that produces contradiction or a balance of forces or energy in general merely feeds back into the system and drives it on." Le ludique et le policier et autres textes parus dans Utopie [1967/78] page 335
"The more daily life is eroded, routinized and interactivized, the more we must counter this trend with complex, initiatory sets of rules." [215]
"According to Ilya Prigogine, we intuitively sense the irreversibility of physical phenomena and time's arrow is irreversible. But we may hypothesize a reversible process at the very heart of time, and at the very heart of thought. A dual arrow of time, a dual arrow of thought (according to some scientists, the elementary physical laws are reversible, that is to say, their mathematical expression is unchanged if the temporal variable is reversed). How can we reconcile this reversibility with the irreversibility we observe on the basis of the commonplace intuition we have of time?" [201]
"Every process growing exponentially generates a barrier: the speed barrier, the heat barrier, the information barrier, the transparency barrier, the Virtual barrier. And that barrier is insuperable." [192]
"The feminine and the masculine are not 'interactive': that is ridiculous. Life and the world are not interactive -- life isn't a question-and-answer session or a video game. There is nothing interactive in words when they are articulated in language. Interactivity is a gigantic mythology, a mythology of integrated systems craving integration, a mythology in which otherness is lost in feedback, interlocution and interface -- a kind of generalized echography." [188]
"On the symbolic plane there is only one way to pay back, and that is the counter-gift. If that is impossible, then there is vengeance, which is itself a form of counter-gift. Compassion here is useless and perverse: it merely adds to the inferiority of the victim. Moreover, this ruse of repentance is a particularly underhand manoeuvre on the part of those in power, since it means stealing from the people the last of their rights, their only opportunity for political participation: the chance to unmask and condemn the powerful. It is the same with the media and the news sources when they put themselves in the dock and engage in self-criticism. They rob the public of the last of their rights as citizens -- the right not to believe a single word they are told. Just as advertising, by affecting a self-deprecating ironic tone, short-circuits our opportunities for deriding it. This kind of deterrence is at work everywhere: 'citizens' are deprived of their right of revenge and their capacity to take reprisals." [171]
"The corruption of ideas is no exception. They too follow a much more cynical, subtle trajectory than the pathways of reason, and the networks of thought that are created bear only a distant relation to truth. It is this cunning which means that, as soon as they are invested with power, politicians immediately turn against that which, or those who, carried them to power, just as intellectuals very quickly turn against the verg ideas that inspired them." [169]
"Such is 'real time', the time of communication, information and perpetual interaction: the finest deterrence-space of time and events. On the real-time screen, by way of simple digital manipulation, all possibilities are potentially realized -- which puts an end to their possibility. Through electronics and cybernetics, all desires, all play of identity and all interactive potentialities are programmed in and auto-programmed. The fact that everything here is realized from the outset prevents the emergence of any singular event. Such is the violence of real time, which is also the violence of information." [132]
"Art has always denied itself. But once it did so through excess, thrilling to the play of its disappearance. Today it denies itself by default -- worse, it denies its own death. It immerses itself in reality, instead of being the agent of the symbolic murder of that same reality, instead of being the magical operator of its disappearance." [112]
"Art, in its form, signifies nothing. It is merely a sign pointing towards absence. But what becomes of this perspective of emptiness and absence in a contemporary universe that is already totally emptied of its meaning and reality? Art can now only align itself with the general insignificance and indifference. It no longer has any privileged status. It no longer has any other final destination than this fluid universe of communication, the networks and interaction." [109]
"The idea of art has become rarefied and minimal, leading ultimately to conceptual art, where it ends in the nonexhibition of non-works in non-galleries -- the apotheosis of art as non-event. As a corollary, the consumer circulates in all this in order to experience his non-enjoyment of the works." [107]
"What could miraculously reassure us today about the essence of art? Art is quite simply what is at issue in the world of art, in that desperately self-obsessed artistic community. The 'creative' act doubles up on itself and is now nothing more than a sign of its own operation -- the painter's true subject is no longer what he paints but the very fact that he paints. He paints in the fact that he paints. At least in that way the idea art remains intact." [107]
"Do we not prefer any old parallel universe to the real one? Any old double life to the one given to us? There is no finer parallel universe than that of the detail or the fragment. Freed from the whole and its transcendent ventriloquism, the detail inevitably becomes mysterious. Every particle wrested from the natural world is in itself an immediate subversion of the real and its wholeness. Like the fragment, it has only to be elliptical. It has only to be an exception." [103]
"The silence of the image is equalled only by the silence of the masses and the silence of the desert." [102]
"Objects are merely a pretext for light. If there were no objects, light would circulate endlessly and we would not even be aware of it. If there were no subjects, thought would circulate infinitely and there would not even be any echo of it in consciousn ess. The subject is that upon which thought comes to rest in its infinite circulation, that against which it reflects. The object is that upon which light comes to rest, that which reflects it. The photograph is the automatic writing of light." [102]
"Lichtenberg speaks, in one of his aphorisms, of a tremor: any act, even an exact one, is preceded by a trembling, a haziness of gesture, and it always retains something of it. When this haziness, this tremor, does not exist, when an act is purely operational and is perfectly focused, we are on the verge of madness." [99]
"The photographic image is the purest because it simulates neither time nor movement and confines itself to the most rigorous unreality. All the other forms (cinema, video, computer-generated images) are merely attenuated forms of the pure image and its rupture with the real." [97]
"The ultimate violence done to the image is the violence of the computer-generated image, which emerged ex nihilo from numerical calculation and the computer. There is an end here to the very imagining of the image, to its fundamental 'illusion', since in the process of computer-generation the referent no longer exists and the real itself no longer has cause to come to pass, being produced immediately as Virtual Reality. There is an end here to that direct image-taking, that presence to a real object in an irrevocable instant, which created the magical illusion of the photograph and made the image a singular event." [95]
"Images that ultimately bear witness, behind their alleged 'objectivity', to a deep disavowal of the real, at the same time as a disavowal of the image, which is assigned the task of representing that which does not want to be represented, of violating the real by 'breaking and entering'. In this sense, most photographs (but media images too, in general, and all that makes up the 'visual') are not true images. They are merely reportage, realist cliché or aesthetic performance, enslaved to all the ideological systems." [93]
"The Iconoclasts of Byzantium smashed images to erase their signification (the visible face of God). While apparently doing the opposite, and in spite of our cult of idols, we are still iconoclasts: we destroy images by overloading them with signification; we kill images with meaning." [92]
"Of news coverage we are the hostages, but we also treat it as a spectacle, consume it as spectacle, without regard for its credibility. A latent incredulity and derision prevent us from being totally in the grip of the information media. It isn't critical consciousness that causes us to distance ourselves from it in this way, but the reflex of no longer wanting to play the game. Somewhere in us lies a profound desire not to have information and transparency (nor perhaps freedom and democracy -- all this needs looking at again). Towards all these ideals of modernity there is something like a collective form of mental reserve, of innate immunity." [84-5]
"People tell you the computer is just a handier, more complex kind of typewriter. But that isn't true. The typewriter is an entirely external object. The page floats free, and so do I. I have a physical relation to writing. I touch the blank o written page with my eyes -- something I cannot do with the scree. The computer is a prosthesis. I have a tactile, intersensorty relation to it. I become, myself, an ectoplasm of the screen." [81-2]
"And is there really any possibility of discovering something in cyberspace? The Internet merely simulates a free mental space of freedom and discovery. In fact, it merely offers a multiple but conventional space, in which the operator interacts with known elements, pre-existent sites, established codes. Nothing exists beyond its search parameters. Every question has an anticipated response assigned to it. You are the questioner and, at the same time, the automatic answering device of the machine. Both coder and decoders -- you are, in fact, your own terminal. That is the ectasy of communication. There is no 'Other' out there and no final destination. It's any old destination -- and any old interactor will do. And so the system goes on, without end and without finality, and its only possibility is that of infinite involution. Hence the comfortable vertig of this electronic, computer interaction, which acts like a drug. You can spend your whole life at this, without a break. Drugs themselves are only ever the perfect example of a crazed, closed-circuity interactivity." [81]
"Machines produce only machines. The texts, images, films, speech and programmes which come out of the computer are machine products, and they bear the marks of such products: they are artificially padded-out, face-lifted by the machine, the films are stuffed with special effects, the texts full of longueurs and repetitions due to the machine's malicious will to function at all costs (that is its passion), and to the operator's fascination with this limitless possibility of functioning. Hence the wearisome character in films of all this violence and pornographied sexuality, which are merely special effects of violence and sex, no longer even fantasized by humans, but pure machinic violence. And this explains all these texts that resemble the work of 'intelligent' virtual agents, whose only act is the act of programming. This has nothing to do with automatic writing, which played on the magical telescoping of words and concepts, whereas all we have here is the automatism of programming, an automatic run-through of all the possibilities. It is this phantasm of the ideal performance of the text or image, the possibility of correcting endlessly, which produce in the 'creative artist' this vertige of interactivity with his own object, alongside the anxious vertige at not having reached the technological limits of his possibilities." [80-1]
"In the mirror we differentiate ourselves from our image, we enter upon an open form of alienation and of play with it. The mirror, the image, the gaze, the scene -- all these things open on to a culture of metaphor. Whereas in the operation of the Virtual, at a certain level of immersion in the visual machinery, the man / machine distinction no longer holds: the machine is on both sides of the interface. Perhaps you are indeed merely the machine's space now -- the human being having become the virtual reality of the machine, its mirror operator. This has to do with the very essence of the screen. There is no 'through' the screen the way there is a 'through' the looking-glass or mirror. The dimensions of time itself merge there in 'real time'. And, the characteristic of any virtual surface being first of all to be there, to be empty and thus capable of being filled with anything whatever, it is left to you to enter, in real time, into interactivity with the void." [80]
"What are we to do with an interactive world in which the demarcation line between subject and object is virtually abolished? That world can no longer either be reflected or represented; it can only be refracted or diffracted now by operations that are, without distinction, operations of brain and screen -- the mental operations of a brain that has itself become a screen." [78]
"The screen reflects nothing. It is as though you are behind the a two-way mirror: you see the world, but it doesn't see you, it doesn't look at you. Now, you only see things if they are looking at you. The screen screens out any dual relation (any possibility of 'response'). It is this failure of representation which, together with a failure of action, underlies the impossibility of developing an ethics of information, an ethics of images, an ethics of the Virtual and the networks. All attempts in that direction inevitably fail. All that remains is the mental diaspora of images and the extravagant performance of the medium." [78]
"It is the same with text, with any 'virtual' text (the Internet, word-processing): you work on it like a computer-generated image, which no longer bears any relation to the transcendence of the gaze or of writing. At any rate, as soon as you are in front of the screen, you no longer see the text as a text, but as an image. Now, it is in the strict separation of text and screen, of text and image, that writing is an activity in its own right, never an interaction." [76]
"When an event and the broadcasting of that event in real time are too close together, the event is rendered undecidable and virtual; it is stripped of its historical dimension and removed from memory. We are in a generalized feedback effect. Wherever a mingling of this kind -- a collision of poles -- occurs, then the vital tension is discharged. Even in 'reality TV', where, in the live telling of the story, the immediate televisual acting, we see the confusion of existence and its double." [75]
"This is the fall of dreams into the psychical domain, 'the fall of the imagination into the psychological swamp' (Hélé Béji). This fall into the psychical domain means, in fact, that dreams no longer have any prophetic value: to do so they would have to originate in a transcendence, the transcendence of night, and come from elsewhere, whereas they are now merely a mode of interaction with oneself." [70]
"Now, what makes exchange possible if not the abstract transcendence of value? What makes the exchange of language possible if not the abstract transcendence of the sign? It is all these things that are eliminated today, ground to dust. The same vertiginous deregulation is visited on both value and the sign. Not the real, but the sign and, through it, the whole universe of meaning and communication is undergoing the same deregulation as markets (doubtless it even preceded the deregulation of the world market)." [67-8]
"We have abolished the real world. What world remains, then? The world of signs? Not at all. We have put paid to the real world and, in the process, done away with that of the sign. It is the murder of the sign that paves the way for Integral Reality." [67]
"If the people puts itself in the hands of the political class, it does so more to be rid of power than out of any desire for representation. We may interpret this as a sign of passivity and irresponsibility, but why not venture a subtler hypothesis: namely, that this passing of the buck proceeds from an unwittingly lucid intuition of an absence of desire and will of their own -- in short, a secret awareness of the illusoriness of freedom?" [54]
"Reality will have been only a fleeting solution then. Indeed, it merely succeeded others, such as the religious illusion in all its forms. This truth, this rationality, this objective reality -- which we took in exchange for religious values, imagining that we had moved definitively beyond them -- is only the disenchanted heir to those same religious values. It does not seem ever genuinely to have gained the upper hand, as it happens, nor does it appear that the transcendent solution is entirely past and gone or that God is dead, even though we now deal only with his metastases." [43]
"If thought cannot be exchanged for reality, then the immediate denial of reality becomes the only reality-based thinking. But this denial does not lead to hope, as Adorno would have it: 'Hope, as it emerges from reality by struggling against it to deny it, is the only manifestation of lucidity.' Whether for good or for ill, this is not true." [36-37]
"In the end, it is the strangeness of the world that is fundamental and it is that strangeness which resists the status of objective reality. Similarly, it is our strangeness to ourselves that is fundamental and resists the status of subject. It is not a matter of resisting alienation, but of resisting the very status of subject." [36]
"Such as it is, the world is without causal explanation or possible representation (any mirror whatever would still be part of the world). Now, that for which there is neither a meaning nor a definitive reason is an illusion. The world therefore has all the characteristics of a thorough-going illusion. For us, however, whatever its metaphysical beauty, this illusion is unbearable. Hence the need to produce all the possible forms of a simulacrum of meaning, of transcendence --- things which all mask this original illusoriness and protect us from it. Thus the simulacrum is not that which hides the truth, but that which hides the absence of truth." [32]
"Immersion, immanence and immediacy -- these are the characteristics of the Virtual." [31]
"Time itself, lived time, no longer has time to take place. The historical time of events, the psychological time of affects and passion, the subjective time of judgement and will, are all simultaneously called into question by virtual time, which is called, no doubt derisively, 'real time'." [30]
"The computer-generated image is like this too, a digital image which is entirely fabricate, has no real referent and from which, by contrast with analogue images, the negative itself has disappeared -- not just the film negative, but the negative moment that lies at the heart of the image, that absence that causes the image to resonate. The technical fine-tuning here is perfect. There is no room for fuzziness, tremor or chance. Is this still an image?" [28]
"Integral Reality is also to be found in integral music: the sort you find in quadraphonic spaces or can 'compose' on a computer. The music in which sounds have been clarified and expurgated and which, shorn of all noise and static, is, so to speak, restored to its technical perfection. The sounds of such music are no longer the play of a form, but the actualization of a programme. It is a music reduced to a pure wavelength, the final reception of which, the tangible effect on the listener, is exactly programmed too, as in a closed circuit. It s, in a sense, a virtual music, flawless and without imagination, merging into its own model, and even the enjoyment of it is virtual enjoyment. Is this still music? The question must be open to doubt, since they have actually come up with the idea of reintroducing noise into it to make it more 'musical'." [27-28]
"'Does reality exist? Are we in a real world?' -- this is the leitmotiv or our entire present culture. But it merely expresses the fact that we can no longer bear this world, which is so prey to reality, except by way of a radical denial. And this is logical: since the world can no longer be justified in another world, it has to be justified here and now in this one by lending itself force of reality, by purging itself of any illusion. But at the same time, by the very effect of this counter-transference, the denial of the real as such grows. Reality, having lost its natural predators, is growing like some proliferating species. A little bit like algae or even like the human race in general. The Real is growing like the desert. 'Welcome to the Desert of the Real'. Illusion, dreams, passion, madness and drugs, but also artifice and simulacrum -- these were reality's natural predators. They have all lost energy, as though struck down by some dark, incurable malady. We have, then, to find an artificial equivalent for them, since, if we do not, reality, once it has attained its critical mass, will end up destroying itself spontaneously, will implode of its own accord -- which it is, in fact, currently doing, giving way to the Virtual in all its forms. It is in the Virtual that we have the ultimate predator and plunderer of reality, secreted by reality itself as a kind of self-destructive viral agent. Reality has fallen prey to Virtual Reality, the final consequence of the process begun with the abstraction of objective reality -- a process that ends in Integral Reality. What we have in virtuality is no longer a hinterworld: the substitution of the world is total; this is the identical doubling of the world, its perfect mirroring, and the matter is settled by the pure and simple annihilation of symbolic substance. Even objective reality becomes a useless function, a kind of waste that is ever more difficult to exchange and circulate. We have moved, then, from objective reality to a later stage, a kind of ultra-reality that puts an end to both reality and illusion." [26-27]
"The reality-fundamentalists equip themselves with a form of magical thinking that confuses message and messenger: if you speak of the simulacrum, then you are a simulator; if you speak of the virtuality of war, then you are in league with it have no regard for the hundreds of thousands of dead." [23]
"Any questioning of reality, of its obviousness and its principle, is deemed unacceptable and condemned as negationist. The charge against you: what do you make of the reality of misery, suffering and death? Now, it isn't about taking sides on material violence or on the violence of misfortune -- it is about a line you are forbidden to cross, the line marking a taboo on reality, a taboo also on even the slightest attempt at interfering with a clear division between good and evil, on pain of being regarded as a scoundrel or an imposter. The affirmation or contestation of reality, of the reality principle, is, then, a political choice, and almost a religious one, in that any infringement of this principle is sacrilegious -- the very hypothesis of simulation being perceived, deep down, as diabolical (it takes up where heresy left off in the archaeology of the thinking of evil)." [22-23]
"The eclipse of God left us up against reality. Where will the eclipse of reality leave us?" The Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact [21]
"Things have no origin any longer and no end, they cannot develop logically or dialectically any more, but only chaotically or randomly. They are becoming 'extreme' in the literal sense -- ex terminis: they are beyond the limits." At the reception of the Simens Media Prize
"What we also see here, too, is a characteristic recourse to a third term that stands outside the apparently given dichotomy of production / destruction: 'seduction' is, as it were, the option fro left field (Baudrillard also says it is the 'feminine' one, but that is another matter), the term that comes from outside the structure -- from 'elsewhere'. Chris Turner: The Intelligence of Evil: An Introduction, page 8.
"Deep down, things have never functioned socially, but symbolically, magically, irrationally, etc." In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, page 68.
"With the decline of psychoanalysis and sexuality as strong structures, one may catch a glimpse of another, parallel universe ... a universe that can no longer be intepreted in terms of psychic or psychological relations, nor those of repression and the unconscious, but must be interpreted in the terms of play, challenges, duels, the strategy of appearances -- that is, in the terms of seduction." Seduction, page 7.
"It is impossible to destroy the system by a contradiction-based logic or by reversing the balance of forces -- in short, by a direct, dialectical revoluion affecting the economic or political infrastructure. Everything that produces contradiction or a balance of forces or energy in general merely feeds back into the system and drives it on." Le ludique et le policier et autres textes parus dans Utopie [1967/78] page 335
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Course on General Linguistics
"Linearity precludes the possibility of of uttering two words simultaneously. They must be arranged consecutively in spoken sequence." [170]
"Everything we have said so far comes down to this. In the language itself, there are only differences. Even more important than that is the fact that, although in general a difference presupposes positive terms between which the difference holds, in a language there are only differences, and no positive terms. Where we take the signification or the signal, the language includes neither ideas nor sounds existing prior to the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonetic differences arising out of that system." [166]
"In French, for instance, the fact that r is usually pronounced as a uvular consonant does not prevent many speakers from pronouncing it as an apical trill. It makes no difference to the French language, which requires only that r should be distinct from other consonants. There is not necessity that it be pronounced always in exactly the same way. I can even pronounce a French r like the German ch in Bach, doch, etc.; whereas I could not in German substitute r for ch because German, unlike French, distinguishes between r and ch." [164-5]
"In any case, it is impossible that sound, as a material elements, should in itself be part of the language. Sound is merely something ancillary, a material the language uses. All conventional values have the characteristic of being distinct from the tangible element which serves as their vehicle. It is not the metal in a coin which determines its value. A crown piece nominally worth five francs contains only half that sum in silver. Its value varies somewhat according to the effigy it bears. It is worth rather more or rather less on different sides of a political frontier. Considerations of the same3 order are even more pertinent to linguistic signals. Linguistic signals are not in essence phonetic. They are not physical in any way. They are constituted solely by differences which distinguish one such sound pattern from another." [164]
"Just as the conceptual part of linguistic value is determined solely by relations and differences with other signs in the language, so the same is true of its material part. The sound of a word is not in itself important, but the phonetic contrasts which allow us to distinguish that word from any other. This is what carries the meaning." [163]
"A language is a system in which all the elements fit together, and in which the value of any one element depends on the simultaneous coexistence of all the others." [159]
"Linguistics, then, operates along this margin, where sound and thought meet. The contact between them gives rise to a form, not a substance." [157]
"In order to realise that the language itself can be nothing other than a system of pure values, one need only consider the two elements which are involved in the way it functions: ideas and sounds. Psychologically, setting aside its expression in words, our thought is simply a vague, shapeless mass. Philosophers and linguists have always agreed that were it not for signs, we should be incapable of differentiating any two ideas in a clear and constant way. In itself, thought is like a swirling cloud, where no shape is intrinsically determinate. No ideas are established in advance, and nothing is distinct, before the introduction of linguistic structure. But do sounds, which lie outside this nebulous world of thought, in themselves constitute entities established in advance? No more than ideas do. The substance of sound is no more fixed or rigid than that of thought. It does not offer a ready-made mould, with shapes that thought must inevitably conform to. It is a malleable material which can be fashioned into separate parts in order to supply the signals which thought has need of." [155]
"From a practical point of view, it would be of interest to begin with units; to determine units, and recognize the various kinds of units by providing a classification. It would be necessary to examine what the basis is for division into words. For the word, in spite of being so difficult to define, is a unit which compels recognition by the mind. It has a central role in the linguistic mechanism. (But a discussion of that topic alone would fill a book.) Then one would proceed to classify smaller units, larger units, and so on. By determining in this way the elements to be dealt with, a science of linguistics would fully achieve its goals, having related all relevant phenomena in its domain to one first principle. It cannot be said that this central problem has ever been tackled, or that the scope and difficulty of it have been realised. Where languages are concerned, people have always been satisfied to work with poorly defined units." [154]
"In most scientific domains, the question of units does not even arise: they are given in advance. In zoology, the animal is the obvious unit. In astronomy, likewise, there are items already separated out in space: the stars, planets, etc. In chemistry, one can study the nature and composition of bichromate of potash without worrying for a moment about whether it is a well defined object. When a science offers no immediately recognizable concrete units, that means they are not essential. In history, for example, is the unit the individual, the epoch, or the nation? No one knows. But does it matter? To study history it is not at all necessary to decide. But just as chess is based entirely on the combinations afforded by the various pieces, so too a language has the character of a system based entirely on the contrasts between its concrete units. One cannot dispense with identifying them, nor move a step without having recourse to them. And yet delimiting them is such a tricky problem that one is led to ask whether they are really there. A language thus has this curious and striking feature. It has no immediately perceptible entities. And yet one cannot doubt that they exist, or that the interplay of these units is what constitutes linguistic structure. That is undoubtedly a characteristic which distinguishes languages from all other semiological institutions." [149]
"The word as a unit is not made up simply of a set of sounds: it depends on other characteristics than its material nature. Imagine that one note on a piano is out of tune. Every time this note is played in the performance of a piece, there will be a false note. But where? In the melody? Surely not. Nothing has happened to the melody, only to the piano. It is exactly the same in the case of sound change. The sound systems is the instrument we play in order to articulate the words of the language. If one element in the sound system changes, this may have various results; but in itself, the fact does not affect the words, for they are, so to speak, the melodies in our repertoire." [134]
"If we cut crosswise through the stem of a plant, we can observe a rather complex pattern on the surface revealed by the cut. What we are looking at is a section of the plant's longitudinal fibres. These fibres will be revealed if we now make a second cut perpendicular to the first. Again in this example, one perspective depends on the other." [125]
"A language is a system of which all the parts can and must be considered as synchronically interdependent." [124]
"A stress law, like everything else in a linguistic system, is an arrangement of elements, the fortuitous and involuntary outcome of evolution." [123]
"But in order to mark this contrast more effectively, and the intersection of two orders of phenomena relating to the same object of study, we shall speak for preference of synchronic linguistics and diachronic linguistics. Everything is synchronic which relates to the static aspect of our science, and diachronic everything which concerns evolution. Likewise synchrony and diachrony will designate respectively a linguistic state and a phase of evolution." [117]
"Ultimately there is a connexion between these two opposing factors: the arbitrary convention which allows free choice, and the passage of time, which fixes that choice. It is because the linguistic sign is arbitrary that it knows no other law than that of tradition, and because it is founded upon tradition that it can be arbitrary." [108]
"... the inventory of signs in any language is countless." [107]
"At any given period, however far back in time we go, a language is always an inheritance from the past. The initial assignment of names to things, establishing a contract between concepts and sound patterns, is an act we can conceive in the imagination, but no one has ever observed it taking place. The idea that it might have happened is suggested to us by our keen awareness of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign." [105]
"The signal, in relation to the idea it represents, may seem to be freely chosen. However, from the point of view of the linguistic community, the signal is imposed rather than freely chosen. Speakers are not consulted about its choice. Once the language has selected a signal, it cannot be freely replaced by any other." [104]
"... if I stress a certain syllable, it may seem that I am presenting a number of significant features simultaneously. But that is an illusion. They syllable and its accentuation constitute a single act of phonation. There is no duality within this act, although there are various contrasts with what precedes and follows." [103]
"Unlike visual signals (e.g. ships' flags) which can exploit more than one dimension simultaneously, auditory signals have available to them only the linearity of time. The elements of such signals are presented one after another: they form a chain. This feature appears immediately when they are represented in writing, and a spatial line of graphic signs is substituted for a succession of sounds in time." [103]
"The word symbol is sometimes used to designate the linguistic sign, or more exactly that part of the linguistic sign which we are calling the signal. This use of the word symbol is awkward, for reasons connected with our first principle. For it is characteristic of symbols that they are never entirely arbitrary. They are not empty configurations. They show at least a vestige of natural connexion between the signal and its signification. For instance, our symbol of justice, the scales, could hardly be replaced by a chariot." [101]
"The link between signal and signification is arbitrary. Since we are treating a sign as the combination in which a signal is associated with a signification, we can express this more simply as: the linguistic sign is arbitrary." [100]
"A linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern." [98]
"This means that a bridging movement may then be necessary in order to reach the position of the vocal organs required for the articulation of the second speech sound. Thus while pronouncing the s in a group sp, the lips must begin to close in preparation for the opening p which follows. But experience teaches us that such bridging movements produce nothing audible, other than one of those fleeting sounds which we can ignore, and which do not in any case interrupt the articulation of the sequence." [84]
"Freedom to link sound types in succession is limited by the possibility of combining the right articulatory movements. To account for what happens in these combinations, we need a science which treats combinations rather like algebraic equations. A binary group will imply a certain number of articulatory and auditory features imposing conditions upon each other, in such a way that when one of them varies there will be a necessary alternation of the others which can be calculated." [79]
"There are special treatises, particularly by English phoneticians, devoted to minute descriptions of the sounds of language." [77]
"For the sign always to some extent eludes control by the will, whether of the individual or of society: that is its essential nature, even though it may be by no means obvious at first sight." [34]
"A language is a system of signs expressing ideas, and hence comparable to writing, the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, symbolic rites, forms of politeness, military signals, and so on. It is simply the most important of such systems. It is therefore possible to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life. It would form part of social psychology, and hence of general psychology. We shall call it semiology (from the Greek sēmîon, 'sign'). It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them. Since it does not yet exist, one cannot say for certain that it will exist. But it has a right to exist, a place ready for it in advance. Linguistics is only one branch of this general science. The laws which semiology will discover will be laws applicable in linguistics, and linguistics will thus be assigned to a clearly defined place in the field of human knowledge." [33]
"The utterance of a word, however small, involves an infinite number of muscular movements extremely difficult to examine and to represent. In linguistic structure, on the contrary, there is only the sound pattern, and this can be represented by one constant visual image. For if one leaves out of account that multitude of movements required to actualise it in speech, each sound pattern, as we shall see, is only the sum a limited number of elements or speech sounds, and these can in turn be represented by a corresponding number of symbols in writing." [32]
"Language in its entirety has many different and disparate aspects. It lies astride the boundaries separating various domains. It is at the same time physical, physiological and psychological. It belongs both to the individual and to society. No classification of human phenomena provides any single place for it, because language as such has no discernible unity." [25]
"The linguist must take the study of linguistic structure as his primary concern, and relate all other manifestations of language to it. Indeed, amid so many dualities, linguistic structure seems to be the one thing that is independently definable and provides something our minds can satisfactorily grasp." [25]
"Language at any given time involves an established system and an evolution. At any given time, it is an institution in the present and a product of the past." [24]
"Suppose someone pronounces the French word nu ('naked'). At first sight, one might think this would be an example of an independently given linguistic object. But more careful consideration reveals a series of three or four quite different things, depending on the viewpoint adopted. There is a sound, there is the expression of an idea, there is a derivative of Latin nūdum, and so on. The object is not given in advance of the viewpoint: far from it. Rather, one might say that it is the viewpoint adopted which creates the object. Furthermore, there is nothing to tell us in advance whether one of these ways of looking at it is prior to or superior to any of the others." [23]
"The connexions between linguistics and physiology are less difficult to unravel. The relation is unilateral, in that the study of languages requires information about the physiological aspects of sound, but can supply physiology with no information in return. In any case, confusion between the two disciplines is impossible. The essence of a language, as we shall see, has nothing to do with the phonic nature of the linguistic sign." [21]
"To require that one should restrict oneself to a linguistic terminology corresponding to linguistic realities is to presuppose that we have already solved the mysteries surrounding these realities. But this is far from being the case." [19]
Course in General Linguistics (1916)
Ferdinand de Saussure
"Everything we have said so far comes down to this. In the language itself, there are only differences. Even more important than that is the fact that, although in general a difference presupposes positive terms between which the difference holds, in a language there are only differences, and no positive terms. Where we take the signification or the signal, the language includes neither ideas nor sounds existing prior to the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonetic differences arising out of that system." [166]
"In French, for instance, the fact that r is usually pronounced as a uvular consonant does not prevent many speakers from pronouncing it as an apical trill. It makes no difference to the French language, which requires only that r should be distinct from other consonants. There is not necessity that it be pronounced always in exactly the same way. I can even pronounce a French r like the German ch in Bach, doch, etc.; whereas I could not in German substitute r for ch because German, unlike French, distinguishes between r and ch." [164-5]
"In any case, it is impossible that sound, as a material elements, should in itself be part of the language. Sound is merely something ancillary, a material the language uses. All conventional values have the characteristic of being distinct from the tangible element which serves as their vehicle. It is not the metal in a coin which determines its value. A crown piece nominally worth five francs contains only half that sum in silver. Its value varies somewhat according to the effigy it bears. It is worth rather more or rather less on different sides of a political frontier. Considerations of the same3 order are even more pertinent to linguistic signals. Linguistic signals are not in essence phonetic. They are not physical in any way. They are constituted solely by differences which distinguish one such sound pattern from another." [164]
"Just as the conceptual part of linguistic value is determined solely by relations and differences with other signs in the language, so the same is true of its material part. The sound of a word is not in itself important, but the phonetic contrasts which allow us to distinguish that word from any other. This is what carries the meaning." [163]
"A language is a system in which all the elements fit together, and in which the value of any one element depends on the simultaneous coexistence of all the others." [159]
"Linguistics, then, operates along this margin, where sound and thought meet. The contact between them gives rise to a form, not a substance." [157]
"In order to realise that the language itself can be nothing other than a system of pure values, one need only consider the two elements which are involved in the way it functions: ideas and sounds. Psychologically, setting aside its expression in words, our thought is simply a vague, shapeless mass. Philosophers and linguists have always agreed that were it not for signs, we should be incapable of differentiating any two ideas in a clear and constant way. In itself, thought is like a swirling cloud, where no shape is intrinsically determinate. No ideas are established in advance, and nothing is distinct, before the introduction of linguistic structure. But do sounds, which lie outside this nebulous world of thought, in themselves constitute entities established in advance? No more than ideas do. The substance of sound is no more fixed or rigid than that of thought. It does not offer a ready-made mould, with shapes that thought must inevitably conform to. It is a malleable material which can be fashioned into separate parts in order to supply the signals which thought has need of." [155]
"From a practical point of view, it would be of interest to begin with units; to determine units, and recognize the various kinds of units by providing a classification. It would be necessary to examine what the basis is for division into words. For the word, in spite of being so difficult to define, is a unit which compels recognition by the mind. It has a central role in the linguistic mechanism. (But a discussion of that topic alone would fill a book.) Then one would proceed to classify smaller units, larger units, and so on. By determining in this way the elements to be dealt with, a science of linguistics would fully achieve its goals, having related all relevant phenomena in its domain to one first principle. It cannot be said that this central problem has ever been tackled, or that the scope and difficulty of it have been realised. Where languages are concerned, people have always been satisfied to work with poorly defined units." [154]
"In most scientific domains, the question of units does not even arise: they are given in advance. In zoology, the animal is the obvious unit. In astronomy, likewise, there are items already separated out in space: the stars, planets, etc. In chemistry, one can study the nature and composition of bichromate of potash without worrying for a moment about whether it is a well defined object. When a science offers no immediately recognizable concrete units, that means they are not essential. In history, for example, is the unit the individual, the epoch, or the nation? No one knows. But does it matter? To study history it is not at all necessary to decide. But just as chess is based entirely on the combinations afforded by the various pieces, so too a language has the character of a system based entirely on the contrasts between its concrete units. One cannot dispense with identifying them, nor move a step without having recourse to them. And yet delimiting them is such a tricky problem that one is led to ask whether they are really there. A language thus has this curious and striking feature. It has no immediately perceptible entities. And yet one cannot doubt that they exist, or that the interplay of these units is what constitutes linguistic structure. That is undoubtedly a characteristic which distinguishes languages from all other semiological institutions." [149]
"The word as a unit is not made up simply of a set of sounds: it depends on other characteristics than its material nature. Imagine that one note on a piano is out of tune. Every time this note is played in the performance of a piece, there will be a false note. But where? In the melody? Surely not. Nothing has happened to the melody, only to the piano. It is exactly the same in the case of sound change. The sound systems is the instrument we play in order to articulate the words of the language. If one element in the sound system changes, this may have various results; but in itself, the fact does not affect the words, for they are, so to speak, the melodies in our repertoire." [134]
"If we cut crosswise through the stem of a plant, we can observe a rather complex pattern on the surface revealed by the cut. What we are looking at is a section of the plant's longitudinal fibres. These fibres will be revealed if we now make a second cut perpendicular to the first. Again in this example, one perspective depends on the other." [125]
"A language is a system of which all the parts can and must be considered as synchronically interdependent." [124]
"A stress law, like everything else in a linguistic system, is an arrangement of elements, the fortuitous and involuntary outcome of evolution." [123]
"But in order to mark this contrast more effectively, and the intersection of two orders of phenomena relating to the same object of study, we shall speak for preference of synchronic linguistics and diachronic linguistics. Everything is synchronic which relates to the static aspect of our science, and diachronic everything which concerns evolution. Likewise synchrony and diachrony will designate respectively a linguistic state and a phase of evolution." [117]
"Ultimately there is a connexion between these two opposing factors: the arbitrary convention which allows free choice, and the passage of time, which fixes that choice. It is because the linguistic sign is arbitrary that it knows no other law than that of tradition, and because it is founded upon tradition that it can be arbitrary." [108]
"... the inventory of signs in any language is countless." [107]
"At any given period, however far back in time we go, a language is always an inheritance from the past. The initial assignment of names to things, establishing a contract between concepts and sound patterns, is an act we can conceive in the imagination, but no one has ever observed it taking place. The idea that it might have happened is suggested to us by our keen awareness of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign." [105]
"The signal, in relation to the idea it represents, may seem to be freely chosen. However, from the point of view of the linguistic community, the signal is imposed rather than freely chosen. Speakers are not consulted about its choice. Once the language has selected a signal, it cannot be freely replaced by any other." [104]
"... if I stress a certain syllable, it may seem that I am presenting a number of significant features simultaneously. But that is an illusion. They syllable and its accentuation constitute a single act of phonation. There is no duality within this act, although there are various contrasts with what precedes and follows." [103]
"Unlike visual signals (e.g. ships' flags) which can exploit more than one dimension simultaneously, auditory signals have available to them only the linearity of time. The elements of such signals are presented one after another: they form a chain. This feature appears immediately when they are represented in writing, and a spatial line of graphic signs is substituted for a succession of sounds in time." [103]
"The word symbol is sometimes used to designate the linguistic sign, or more exactly that part of the linguistic sign which we are calling the signal. This use of the word symbol is awkward, for reasons connected with our first principle. For it is characteristic of symbols that they are never entirely arbitrary. They are not empty configurations. They show at least a vestige of natural connexion between the signal and its signification. For instance, our symbol of justice, the scales, could hardly be replaced by a chariot." [101]
"The link between signal and signification is arbitrary. Since we are treating a sign as the combination in which a signal is associated with a signification, we can express this more simply as: the linguistic sign is arbitrary." [100]
"A linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern." [98]
"This means that a bridging movement may then be necessary in order to reach the position of the vocal organs required for the articulation of the second speech sound. Thus while pronouncing the s in a group sp, the lips must begin to close in preparation for the opening p which follows. But experience teaches us that such bridging movements produce nothing audible, other than one of those fleeting sounds which we can ignore, and which do not in any case interrupt the articulation of the sequence." [84]
"Freedom to link sound types in succession is limited by the possibility of combining the right articulatory movements. To account for what happens in these combinations, we need a science which treats combinations rather like algebraic equations. A binary group will imply a certain number of articulatory and auditory features imposing conditions upon each other, in such a way that when one of them varies there will be a necessary alternation of the others which can be calculated." [79]
"There are special treatises, particularly by English phoneticians, devoted to minute descriptions of the sounds of language." [77]
"For the sign always to some extent eludes control by the will, whether of the individual or of society: that is its essential nature, even though it may be by no means obvious at first sight." [34]
"A language is a system of signs expressing ideas, and hence comparable to writing, the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, symbolic rites, forms of politeness, military signals, and so on. It is simply the most important of such systems. It is therefore possible to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life. It would form part of social psychology, and hence of general psychology. We shall call it semiology (from the Greek sēmîon, 'sign'). It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them. Since it does not yet exist, one cannot say for certain that it will exist. But it has a right to exist, a place ready for it in advance. Linguistics is only one branch of this general science. The laws which semiology will discover will be laws applicable in linguistics, and linguistics will thus be assigned to a clearly defined place in the field of human knowledge." [33]
"The utterance of a word, however small, involves an infinite number of muscular movements extremely difficult to examine and to represent. In linguistic structure, on the contrary, there is only the sound pattern, and this can be represented by one constant visual image. For if one leaves out of account that multitude of movements required to actualise it in speech, each sound pattern, as we shall see, is only the sum a limited number of elements or speech sounds, and these can in turn be represented by a corresponding number of symbols in writing." [32]
"Language in its entirety has many different and disparate aspects. It lies astride the boundaries separating various domains. It is at the same time physical, physiological and psychological. It belongs both to the individual and to society. No classification of human phenomena provides any single place for it, because language as such has no discernible unity." [25]
"The linguist must take the study of linguistic structure as his primary concern, and relate all other manifestations of language to it. Indeed, amid so many dualities, linguistic structure seems to be the one thing that is independently definable and provides something our minds can satisfactorily grasp." [25]
"Language at any given time involves an established system and an evolution. At any given time, it is an institution in the present and a product of the past." [24]
"Suppose someone pronounces the French word nu ('naked'). At first sight, one might think this would be an example of an independently given linguistic object. But more careful consideration reveals a series of three or four quite different things, depending on the viewpoint adopted. There is a sound, there is the expression of an idea, there is a derivative of Latin nūdum, and so on. The object is not given in advance of the viewpoint: far from it. Rather, one might say that it is the viewpoint adopted which creates the object. Furthermore, there is nothing to tell us in advance whether one of these ways of looking at it is prior to or superior to any of the others." [23]
"The connexions between linguistics and physiology are less difficult to unravel. The relation is unilateral, in that the study of languages requires information about the physiological aspects of sound, but can supply physiology with no information in return. In any case, confusion between the two disciplines is impossible. The essence of a language, as we shall see, has nothing to do with the phonic nature of the linguistic sign." [21]
"To require that one should restrict oneself to a linguistic terminology corresponding to linguistic realities is to presuppose that we have already solved the mysteries surrounding these realities. But this is far from being the case." [19]
Course in General Linguistics (1916)
Ferdinand de Saussure
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