Burke



Burke

Psychology of Form 

“form is the creation of an appetite in the mind of the auditor, and the adequate satisfying of that appetite” (35)

form is the fulfillment of expectation, then… but why do we expect these forms? the denouement? certain literary tropes? can form be dangerous? lead to the blasé?

(37) the hero as subject but an over-glorified one (we must focus on the psychology of the audience, says Burke, not of the hero)– Lacan, objet petit a, the interpollated subject, Zizek, Althusser, Laclau and Mouffe – how does this relate to notions of subject put forth by contemporary cultural studies? Does Burke’s psychology of form just re-subjectify the audience?

(37) atrophy of the psychology of form

(38) “One reason why music can stand repitition so much more sturdily than correspondingly good prose is because music, of all the arts, is by its nature least suited to the psychology of information, and has remained closer to the psychology of form.”

“Every dissonant chord cries for its solution, and whether the musician resolves or refuses to resolve this dissonance into the chord which the body cries for, he is dealing in human appetities”

This is the problem, though, too – have we been enculturated in these musical matters or are they intrinsic in us and thus universal? Does a minor triad make everyone sad, pensive, reflective… or just us Westeners? Or some portion of us?

Burke discredits music’s ability to relay information, though--I think of, here, Phil Ochs and protest singers of the late 60s and early 70s, for example)

(40) folk tales, folk art --- like music in their lack of complexity

early games, I think, like Super Mario Bros., work similarly, with the easy overcoming of obstacles…

but what is he really saying here? “Thus it is right that art should be called a ‘waking dream’”

This is ludicrous – music, art, games… they are part of our reality. To call them dream-like is to relegate them to an inferior position in our lives. We are here. And we make music.

Zizek… “reality must be an illusion in order for it to function as reality” – and yes, we might approximate that lack of a lack, some Lacanian Real when we drink alcohol, we listen to music, we immerse ourselves in a beautiful film… it is not an illusion but part of our immediate biological existence - we choose to turn on the TV, turn up the radio, etc.

“It is, rather, the audience which dreams, while the artist oversees the conditions which determine this dream” (40)

I like this, though… there is something here. Ideology. It’s a Marxist sort of ideology. For they know not what they do, but they do it….

Burke admits here that the artist has control over the work being created, getting away from this sort of Platonic divine-inspired poet (Ion of Chios or some such example) …

The artist… Burke writes, “He is the manipulator of blood, brains, heart, and bowels which, while we sleep, dictate the mould of our desires.” (40)

Burke really makes the artist a powerful person… but ultimately a rhetorician. But the creation of art is not always a process with such an idea of “how will the audience react?” – often it is an expressive enactment of how the artist feels, or is just some spontaneous creation or epiphany or explosion of ideas (or form…)

the explosion of form

eloquence (40)

what are the “rudimentary laws of composition” (40-41) … ?

difference between style and form? (41)

“it would be a great mistake to see art merely as a weak representation of some actual experience” (43)

art as a “factor added to life” (44) – now art is just remediation, it seems…

art has become life, everything we do is art…

no, nothing we do is art… our signs, our streets, our buildings, our clothing, none of it is aesthetically pleasing or expecting of our desires

art is that secret place where we go to fulfill our fantasies

Burke:

art is… “the exercise of human propriety…” (45)

no…. no. Well…

no.

I like this analogy with the “styole” and “diastole” .. .the up and down, the rhythm of the life like the rhythm of art, the heart, the physical organ and the metaphorical rise and fall of expectation and action, suspense and resolution

blindness of religion becomes the deepest truth of art… this struck me strangely, not sure what to make of it.

Carroll on Burke “Song above catastrophe…”

http://www.kbjournal.org/carroll

“How does one associate this approach to “better living” that is, an approach through being able to negotiate the “barnyard” of modern life through knowing how to communicate more effectively––to music? Isn’t music meaningless––or, when programmed to history, a hopelessly reduced representation, blame or tribute? Its absoluteness, its purity as sheer “tone” or “shaking air” would seem the antithesis to rhetoric, with rhetoric’s intentional, narrowed meanings its situatedness, its specified audiences, its timeliness. A contemporary understanding of rhetoric as the interestedness of language––coming into focus during Burke’s time, and in part because of Burke himself––does not account for the effective, intentional presence of music in Burke’s work, especially the early texts.”

music as human dignity…

Carroll quoting Burke:

But to the Inventory. Music as a substitute for religion, a secular mysticism, belief without theology. . . . Music as orgy––or music as a mechanism. . . . Music elements do conflict and later submit. Minor disputes become reconciled in larger entities. Themes, first introduced tentatively, may grow powerful and assertive as the whelp ripens to lionhood. Their character, from phase to phase, may be transformed. . . .In the weldings and modifications, there is even the record of revision—and thus the result is all the more like a process of creation. (536)

lacuna (lacunae plural)

Carroll writes poorly in this section – who is this quote to be attributed to? “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” - sounds like Barthes, too

Carroll: “He extends the analogy: “Music is a vocabulary, and all vocabulary is subject to disruption into dialect. It is not the result of an aesthetic property, but purely through error in codification, that music has been thought of as “universal.’” He explains that the lack of instructions in music (as heard, and which he will exploit a little later in The Philosophy of Literary Form) make the experience of music “irrefutable” and thus seemingly “universal” in its appeal. Taking the example of the idiomatic or dialectal within language, Burke sees music as a less audience-driven medium than verbal language”

Now we’re getting somewhere…

Carroll: “Burke poses a common ideological conflict, most famously captured in Eduard Hanslick’s essay “On the Musically Beautiful” in 1854: how does music carry information, or can it at all, and if so, can it be put to specific use? Hanslick himself was of the “purist” camp, which saw itself as formalists who considered music a separate aesthetic, without tether or bond to language or its formal constraints. Orchestral music in particular, having no allegiance to church or court, could exist outside the constraints of representative tonal constructions. As Burke puts it in his first Dial piece: “Tone seems to share the pudency of pigment at telling a story, or at least at avowedly doing so” (539). Just so: like visual art, music’s force lay outside having to subject itself to the verbal. Burke’s qualifier “avowedly” reminds us that we can always say that a piece of music “reminds” us of something, or “seems to represent” something. But its intentionality is, according to those in the purist camp, anti-intentional––that is, without explicit reference to the pre-existing real.”

Carroll: on performance

“ We don’t have a promise of music criticism, just concert criticism. This is a significant choice, favoring performance, event, encounter, process, the appreciable, manifest audience—over what might have been construed, if posed as “music criticism,” to be the reading of sheet music, the work in suspension, the dry and technical over the drama of the happening—its features, it players, the exigencies of a rainy night, or the beauties or shortcomings of a venue. Polo Grounds. Carnegie Hall.”

Carroll writes, for Burke, that… “And so the encounter with music is the music itself: we are part of it in so intimate a way as to blur the sound as having any source other than our own sensitivities before, during, and after the event itself.”

so here we have the issue of can art carry information? which is what I am essentially arguing – carrying a world, not just the emotions of that world, but the world itself to the mind. this is fascinating.

Carroll on ghosts, dreams, music:

“There is nothing here that suggests the role of music in storytelling, but the reference to The Magic Mountain may recall the uses of music to conjure ghosts, literal and figural, from the minds and memories of the inhabitants of the sanitarium. In The Magic Mountain, music is a medial bridge between the man-made phenomenon of the reproduced sound and the recalled lives of others, ghosts that arise out of thin air like the wavering tinny sound of a Chopin nocturne on an early wax cylinder.”

Burke: “Thereby you have had, in effect, an immediate vision of an ultimate oneness (thanks to symbolic manipulations that have brought many disparate things together). You have had the direct feeling of this principle. You have “got the idea.” (291-292)”

getting away from the Sausserian split: the “oneness” – I like it

Carroll writing awfully again: “Do these stories display a rhetoric of music, as do the critical pieces to follow only a few years later? I think that they do, if only sketchily, and only with the kind of hindsight that Burke used generously to understand the narrative of his own varied career as a thinker and writer—and only if we read the musical content as poorly-prefigured “ideas” placed in the way of a narrative movement as stones are on a path: to dimensionalize, to deepen, to slow down the walk, to give roundness to what were narratives of which Burke was not so interested in as stories but as vessels for other kinds of discourse. One was the nature and meaning of music.”

Carroll again being a dope: “What sort of rhetoric—in music? One finds in his next column a partial answer, perhaps, as Burke mulls over an opera based on Gertrude Stein’s “Four Saints in Three Acts,” with music by Virgil Thomson. Opera is exerting its influence, as usual, but here it allows Burke to expound further on the tonal/verbal binary he discussed in The Dial columns: what meaning can there be in the tonal? He answered, then, with the unavoidable metaphorical bridging of the tonal to the verbal. Given its performance in some situation, and for some audience, the tonal will always “recall” emotions as well as provoke them, and will anchor those emotional responses in the individual experiences of the audience members—or perhaps, now, several years later, their collective experiences.”

But this is like Barthes idea of music giving “to do” – to make, to cause, a catalyst… the forward-moving nature of music, where something like folk music “recalls” – recalls histories, cultures, ideas, …

Just more “Burke expresses no doubt that music is the trigger of these nationalistic outbursts of applause, not the music as “pure” but the music tainted, in this case, with a national furor, a nationalistic disease or psychosis that the rhetorical art of music can alone synthesize and perform. Such now is the function of music, in ways alike to Cicero’s good orator and good man: not so willingly judged as a technical phenomenon but as a device of the moment to capture the spirit not of the composer’s mind, not of the form’s own capacities, but of the dreams and wishes of the audience.”

the immortality of the musician through recording (jokingly attributing this to the magic scrolls of Egypt) – how does this relate to the “death of the author” (or “artist”?) and how does that relate to

Burke and pushing a medium… via Carroll : “Burke calls this “the problem of the expert,” for which Burke doubts “there will ever be a final answer. . . . It is an irreconcilable dualism inherent in our complex social structure” (27). The “dualism” is a kind of collapsed continuum of reception, in which communication is more or less a function of the non-specialist. In other words, the artist, whose medium is some sort of language, faces rejection as he works more and more on the nature of the medium itself, since he will be pushing that medium, or use of that medium, away from the received procedures.”

how the recreation of music leads to its rhetorical situatedness:

“But Burke lets fly with a very brief comment that would seem to undercut his own refusal to answer or solve this dilemma, and at the same time he pushes the debate into a rhetorical solution of sorts: Copland “did not discuss the ways in which a work is or is not contemporary” (27). While elaborating briefly on this remark having to do with how continuous we consider the threads of history to be, the remark may indicate the situational response that Burke has been working from all along: the music in itself has no effect, but its performance here or there does. Not only could a composer like Toscanini make a nineteenth century composer more “contemporary’ in the performance of his symphony at the Polo Grounds, the demographics of the audience would affect its ontology as well. In short, the contemporariness of a work is no longer inherent in the work itself—but in the reception of it, as Burke has demonstrated in both The Dial and the Nation columns on the eventfulness of the musical event.”

the music, to be rhetorical, must be an event, I guess, according to Burke

metaphor of the chord, very much like Manovich’s fractality or divisibility of digital media…

            
 * If “form is the creation of an appetite in the mind of the auditor, and the adequate satisfying of that appetite," then is it possible that form can be dangerous? Can it lead to the blase? The trite, the meaningless, the "oh I've seen this before" (35)?
 * Secondly, why do we have these expectations? Are they enculturated or intrinsic?
 * Burke writes that: “Every dissonant chord cries for its solution, and whether the musician resolves or refuses to resolve this dissonance into the chord which the body cries for, he is dealing in human appetities” This is the problem, though – have we been enculturated in these musical matters or are they intrinsic in us and thus universal? Does a minor triad make everyone sad, pensive, reflective… or just us Westeners? Or some portion of us?
 * Burke writes that music doesn't cater to the psychology of "information" as well as the psychology of "form" - and Carroll also notes this in Burke. But does this mean that music cannot relay information at all? Or a different sort of information? American folk music, for example, carries historical tidbits and so on in its lyrics... or the protest singer-songwriters like Phil Ochs of the late 60s... but Burke is talking about a non-lyrical music. Have we lost something by letting our music become inundated with words (38)?
 * art as a dream... “Thus it is right that art should be called a ‘waking dream’” - and the Zizek quip I love to quote: "reality must be an illusion in order for it to function as reality" - What I am saying here is that I disagree with Burke. Art is an integral part of our reality and though it may help us reach peaks of euphoria or inspiration or help us crawl back to a sort of Lacanian Real, it is still very much a material element of life and to think otherwise is to relegate it to some hippie-Platonic-Ionian-Bohemian position
 * that being said, Carroll's notes on Burke's thoughts about the musical "event" are important here - because in the musical event, the concert, the performance... this is a premeditated event, it is scripted... it is unlike a dream entirely, unless there is room for improvisation, even aleatoricism
 * But here we have, in other words:“It is, rather, the audience which dreams, while the artist oversees the conditions which determine this dream” (40) - this gives much power to the artist. I like Burke, here. But what if the artist is not careful - then we see something like Justin Bieber and his record company goons ideologically brainwashing millions of little children, right? Or no. I mean to say that Burke assumes the musician is already a rhetorician, which is true historically (as composers were trained in classical rhetoric and applied it to composition, Burmeister, etc.) but this may not be true even in Burke's time, and especially not now...
 * What are the "rudimentary laws of composition"? Burke is being evasive, maybe. He wants to talk about a rhetoric of music but he won't go there. Carroll doesn't want to say too much about it, either, though there's mention.
 * I like this line, about art once being "an added factor to life" - I think that art is that secret place where we go to fulfill our fantasies, our illusions... not the experience of illusion itself.
 * And I like this “And so the encounter with music is the music itself: we are part of it in so intimate a way as to blur the sound as having any source other than our own sensitivities before, during, and after the event itself.” - This is problematic for digital music, which is replayed constantly, transmitted, turned into data, mixed up, mashed... there is no final instance of music. Or is there? Is the physical instrumentation of a piece its 'end'?
 * Carroll being interesting for a bit: "... music is a medial bridge between the man-made phenomenon of the reproduced sound and the recalled lives of others, ghosts that arise out of thin air like the wavering tinny sound of a Chopin nocturne on an early wax cylinder.” - this almost approximates what I'm getting at with game music, about its ability to world (verb) or reworld or to carry worlds, or maybe ghosts of worlds? I'd hate to go there, but then Baudrillard, the ghost is like the illusion, or maybe the Lacanian reflection, the narcissistic recreation of our own universe...
 * On the thought of universality... what if we're living in a multiverse? What would multiversality mean? I'm going to coin that one.
 * I disagree with this stand-point (not Carroll's own but he's explaining this rift): "As Burke puts it in his first Dial piece: “Tone seems to share the pudency of pigment at telling a story, or at least at avowedly doing so” (539). Just so: like visual art, music’s force lay outside having to subject itself to the verbal. Burke’s qualifier “avowedly” reminds us that we can always say that a piece of music “reminds” us of something, or “seems to represent” something. But its intentionality is, according to those in the purist camp, anti-intentional––that is, without explicit reference to the pre-existing real.” - Music must be an explicit reference to the real... it is the real. It is the vibration of the real.