The Contemporary DIY Experimental Music Scene in Los Angeles: Metamodernity and Philosophical Hermeneutics Andrew J. Kluth, C. Phil. University of London Saturday, July 2, 2016. (TITLE SLIDE) Thanks so much for the opportunity to present my research today. I was worried I might be in a lion s den situation as this is ostensibly a Critical Theory for musicology meeting and I m here to espouse the relevance of philosophical hermeneutics to music study. Adorno had made it clear in his Negative Dialectics that he wasn t a fan of Heidegger s theoretical formulations of Being, finding it particularly problematic that his isness is paralogical and unperceivable by mind as, for Heidegger, it was something more like a non-conceptual undergoing. But with the differing approaches already presented, I feel like I m in good company. (OUTLINE SLIDE) It has been noted that the postmodern moment has passed leaving those of us who think about these things to formulate useful characterizations of a different structure of feeling in ascendency. I have been doing fieldwork research in Los Angeles DIY experimentalist community and, while there, have noted that the theoretical map of postmodernity no longer matches the territory. To that end, I want to speak today about a different theorization of modernity one called the metamodern. I ll offer an explication of metamodernism and how it helps to characterize Los Angeles contemporary DIY experimental music scene DIY here as Do It Yourself being implicit of acting outside institutional conventions. However, as I will show, this theoretical formulation leaves us with something of an open paradox which, I will argue, can be mediated through an epistemological and ontological shift. I find the characterization of aesthetic experience developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer some of whose work is indebted to Heidegger s onto-phenomenological project can help make sense of the affective vehemence I note in music in general, and Los Angeles DIY experimental music scene in particular. This is admittedly a lot to cover and will in no way be exhaustive. Therefore the theoretical accounts I m able to provide are inevitably reductive as the arguments I
offer are precipitative. Still, it is my hope it will be interesting to share my own attempts to understand this complex relationship of art to social reality. (SLIDE) I ll be referring to postmodernity both as a structure of feeling, a neologism Raymond Williams coined to refer to an ungraspable but recognizable character of social experience in solution as well as a shorthand for describing cultural products as epiphenomena of a social reality reflecting the decentered, disintegrated, de-historicized state of the postmodern subject. Regarding the postmodern in music, I ll refer to a cherry-picked version of Jonathan D. Kramer s 2002 (SLIDE) list of characteristics of postmodern music that attempts to account for structural differentiations as well as sociocultural changes in production and reception of musical works. (READ LIST) For him, postmodern music: (1) is not simply a repudiation of modernism or its continuation, but has aspects of both a break and an extension; (2) is, on some level and in some way, ironic; (5) shows disdain for the often unquestioned value of structural unity; (8) considers music not as autonomous but as relevant to cultural, social, and political contexts; (9) includes quotations of or references to music of many traditions and cultures; (11) embraces contradictions; (12) distrusts binary oppositions; (13) includes fragmentation and discontinuities; (15) presents multiple meanings and multiple temporalities; (16) locates meaning and even structure in listeners, more than in scores, performances, or composers (BLANK SLIDE) By Kramer s criteria, postmodern works can be identified by their incorporation of a-historic quotation, pastiche, parataxis, etc., to portray a postmodern subjectivity characterized by irony, dehistoricization and rejection of grand narrative, melancholy, and exhibitionism. Depending who you ask, postmodernism manifests in different registers. Still, I d argue that they all share an opposition to ostensibly modern utopism, Teleological progress, grand narratives, organicism, and the reign of Reason. 2
(SLIDE OUTLINE) Regarding my ethnographic research - one of my sites has been a DIY space in the rather apocalyptic looking but quickly gentrifying warehouse district just south of downtown proper called the wulf. (SLIDE) Founded by two graduates of the California Institute of the Art in 2008, the wulf. has played host to almost 225 events of music, film, dance, and art in its eight-year tenure. Let s take a look at the sort of music I m talking about when I refer to experimentalism in Los Angeles. (SLIDE - SHOW VIDEO). For this presentation I ll be referring to work done at the wulf. in particular, as I see is as exemplar of the other venues in the scene. But similar practices take place at other DIY spaces such as (SLIDE VENUES) Betalevel, Human Resources LA, Automata, ArtShare LA, Pehrspace, Non Plus Ultra, The Smell, etc. Interestingly, many of the composers and listeners at the wulf. talk about their experiences of musical works and practices in ways that are not characterizable by the usual assumptions about postmodern cultural production. For example, one composer/performer excitedly told me that experimentalist works at the wulf. are, for him, at least, about changing the world. And his works in particular are about (SLIDE) reframing people s conception of what sound and music can do; sound and music can do anything! Noting the openness of experimentalism, another informant stated that the wulf. is (SLIDE) the last venue where I can naturally experience myself within an alternative world apart from the oppressive world that surrounds us it feels like all we have left. Further suggesting the ability of experimental music to open worlds and broaden horizons of self-understanding, the same informant poetically stated: It s just open. It s more about stepping into a field rather than killing the father. (SLIDE) Ok, so what? I certainly don t suggest that experimental music practices have any kind of monopoly on musical affect. And we know that participants in all sorts of musicking 3
report that it somehow moves them. My interest in experimental practices centers on the way in which the onus of labor often moves from the performer to the listener. These works don t lead you around or tell you how to feel. They are often performed at extremes of quietness or loudness, lack any kind of organic structure, include enormous silences, and incorporate distinctly non-traditionally musical sounds. One endures these pieces; dealing with boredom, angst, discomfort, but also sometimes inhabiting a mode of play. Intentionally interacting with works as such, one might experience a cognitive black hole, or a productive wandering of the mind; a lighting up of sometimes disparate corners of meaning as one s mind encounters the structuration of sounds and silences in their temporal unfolding. One interlocutor at the wulf. put it this way (SLIDE) [Y]ou can make these leaps that don t make sense, you know? And you can really find new information in that way, right? Like, by putting together things that don t make sense and finding something new that you wouldn t have been able to had you followed through in some logical way. So it s kind of something that can exist outside of logic. Or, by breaking logic. So it s kind of this paradigm-expanding exploration. And I think that, for me, that s what interesting. That finding new things, or, understanding things a bit more through practice and through implementation as opposed to merely, you know, the theoretical. It s applied philosophy, I think. This sounds suspiciously like the kind of paralogical, non-conceptual Being I d mentioned that Heidegger and Gadamer were fond of. But more on that in a bit. (BLANK SLIDE) There s a reflexivity here with regard to how these aesthetic experiences make some scene participants feel; this structure of feeling charging this Los Angeles music scene. It seems to be working itself out by playing sometimes simultaneously with ideas of melancholy and hope, knowledge and naivety, apathy and empathy, fragmentation and wholeness, and earnestly 4
looking for universal truths without expecting to find them. This is redolent of (SLIDE) Kramer s first characteristic of postmodern music that it is not simply a repudiation of modernism, but a continuation that has aspects of both. In order to consider how we might rigorously characterize this structure of feeling that expresses these subjectivities in superposition, one that oscillates between a modernist enthusiasm and postmodern irony, I introduce a relatively new theoretical formulation the metamodern. (SLIDE OUTLINE) As previously noted, the postmodern moment has passed and cultural production in the globalized world is no longer characterizable as such. Dutch philosophers (SLIDE) Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker (2010) have posited a useful formulation of this new cultural dominant in ascendancy one they call metamodernism. A quick definition: (SLIDE) this modernism is characterized by the oscillation between a typically modern commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment the prefix meta refers to such notions as with, between, and beyond We contend that metamodernism should be situated epistemologically with (post) modernism, ontologically between (post) modernism, and historically beyond (post) modernism. (BLANK SLIDE) Further characterized by an ideal of informed naïveté, or, pragmatic idealism, metamodernism oscillates between poles of modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity. Noting that in spite of the End of History suggested by postmodernity s rejection of telos and Lyotardian metanarratives in general, artists nonetheless have begun to create works that function as if an historical horizon still exists. Vermeulen and van den Akker note that (SLIDE)...the cultural industry has responded in kind, increasingly 5
abandoning tactics such as pastiche and parataxis for strategies like myth and metaxis, melancholy for hope, and exhibitionism for engagement (V&vdA 2010, 5). The meta-reflexive nature of metamodernism the superposition of modernist and postmodernist subjectivities is particularly important and sets up the paradox I d noted in my opening. It can be seen in that (SLIDE) [t]he current, metamodern discourse acknowledges that history s purpose [telos, dialectical sublation, realization of Hegelian Spirit, etc.] will never be fulfilled because it does not exist. Critically, however, it nevertheless takes toward it as if it does exist. Inspired by a modern naïveté yet informed by postmodern skepticism, the metamodern discourse consciously commits itself to an impossible possibility (V&vdA 2010, 5). Vermeulen and van den Akker suggest that metamodernism moves for the sake of moving, attempts in spite of its inevitable failure; seeks forever a truth that it never expects to find. (BLANK SLIDE) This seemingly impossible possibility is not impossible at all as it obviously exists practically. While not a theoretical panacea, it resonates well with that subjectivity I witness in Los Angeles communities of experimental music that eschew nihilism for an assertion of meaning, and the impossible possibility of pursuing identity and community in a field of cultural production more apt to disintegrate the subject. This in musical works made by reason by computer algorithms, calculated structures for musical realization, etc. but that manifest unreasonably or by chance, all while manifesting for subjects a kind of alithea; unconcealment, or the disclosure of truth that which Heidegger called the work that art does. This, of course, brings me to the final theoretical conceit of my ambitious presentation, the introduction of ideas from philosophical hermeneutics to make sense of the seemingly paradoxical nature of the metamodern structure of feeling as related to music and aesthetic experience. (SLIDE- OUTLINE) My deployment of philosophical hermeneutics will work to 6
offer a model for exactly this efficacious capacity of music and perhaps make sense of the impossible possibility that reshapes social reality by transcending it from within. In music study, it is de rigueur to assert that music does something. We wouldn t study it if that weren t a tacet assumption. We understand this via our own experiences as listeners or performers; we hear from others all over the world that music augments people s lives. Apropos to this presentation, I hear this from people in the scene in LA to which I ve been referring. Music study has been trying to get to the bottom of this power of music for a long time. One approach popular since the late 19 th century has been to study music positivistically; to analyze and take it apart. This can be interesting, but when pressed about the thing being studied, sometimes ends mired in the quagmire of music s problematic ontological status. The New Musicology looked instead to music s complicity in cycles of ideological production, reproduction, and power dynamics therein. But the power of aesthetic experience occasioned by music to refigure a listener s world is still only noted, not rigorously addressed. This is where I make an epistemological and ontological move in theoretically approaching aesthetic experience based on the works of Hans Georg Gadamer (SLIDE) that recognizes music as an activity framed not as thing, but as experience, and kind of knowledge. By extricating the object of study from methodological approaches which apprehend it as either an object available for formal analysis or a text only understandable as an ideologically complicit cultural product to be decoded, the theoretical structure offered by philosophical hermeneutics recognizes musical works as phenomena that musicians and listeners undergo and be-with on a plane between the significant realities of ideological inscription and utopian imagination. In building his aesthetic model, Gadamer starts from an onto-phenomenological position forwarded by Martin Heidegger: that we have our being understandingly, as meaning makers; 7
hermeneuts. This hermeneutic position which also reflects Gadamer s position, is summed up well by Robert E. Palmer (SLIDE) (1969). He says: Hermeneutics as a theory of understanding is, in consequence, really a theory of ontological disclosure. Since human existing is itself a process of ontological disclosure, Heidegger will not allow us to see the hermeneutical problem apart from human existing. Hermeneutics in Heidegger, then, is a fundamental theory of how understanding emerges in human existence. His analysis weds hermeneutics to existential ontology and to phenomenology, and it points to a ground for hermeneutics not in subjectivity but in the facticity of the world and in the historicality of understanding (137). (BLANK SLIDE) I argue that the model offered by Gadamer that grows out of Heidegger s ideas is applicable to music. While all of the subtleties and significance of this model of being are outside the scope of this presentation though this will get a bit jargony for a moment it suffices to say that by said model, the ontological mode-of-being of perceiving subjects can be understood to be composed of a constant engagement in the process of meaning-making while temporally undergoing experiences that, by means of the ever-engaged hermeneutic circle that characterizes being-as-understanding, builds the meaningful world in which subjects understand themselves and their contextual situatedness. This suggests that musical works are in the post-structuralist sense a kind of text, but not objects. In his opus, Truth and Method, Gadamer identifies a clue to the ontology of the work of art in the play of a perceiving subject s engagement with a work, while also casting it as a mode of experience and type of knowledge. Furthermore, (SLIDE) [T]he human sciences, he says, are connected to modes of experience that lie outside science: with the experiences of philosophy, of art, and of history itself. These are all modes of experience in which a truth is communicated that cannot be verified by the methodological means proper to science (xxii). By this turn, Gadamer recovers aesthetic experience as a means of non-propositional knowledge about 8
the world capable of destabilizing ideological domination. And I d guess that for many of us that have ever been affected by a musical work, this kind of thing sounds familiar. (BLANK SLIDE) In conclusion, this capability of aesthetic experience and, implicitly, experimental music, to transcend seemingly ideologically concretized social realities and even the reality of cultural dominants and refigure them from within is precisely the power of art. Metamodernism s impossible possibility of informed naïveté knowingly trying to create meaningful art in a cultural field potentially unable to support meaning is reminiscent of, but different than that unattainable utopia posited by the Negative Dialectic. Rather, it is quite practical and observable as, at the wulf. in Los Angeles as elsewhere, we see assertions of myth, wholeness, community, and meaning in spite of the overwhelming presence of the culture industry. Experimental music, of course, has no monopoly over aesthetic experience, but exemplifies here the vehemence of art to refigure subjective and social reality; the power of fiction to rupture ideology. (SLIDE) The deployment of musical experimentation to create, play with failure, and to kick at the walls of instrumental reason shows music not as a thing, but an engine of ontological disclosure with the possibility to increase a subject s self-understanding and being-in-the-world in spite of proscriptive knowledge otherwise. This is the (para) logic of metamodernism; this is the power of art here manifest in a DIY experimental music scene in Los Angeles to challenge ideological concretization; to create and connect new webs of meaning for people in social realities that transcend the postmodern. Thank you. 9