MIKE WROTE:
<snip>
in any case, my concern in asking about music was not to inquire into its semantic or semitoic, or affective force . . .
it was to ask how we can begin to talk about the REASON for musical choices without reviving the dead auteur
doesn't the question "why?" always imply telos, and is there telos without agency and intention???
</snip>
I wonder if it is of any use to start by considering how this type of
problem has been approached by literary, rather than film, scholars. The
response of the New Critics, for example, was to assume that the
text--especially the poetical text--is an autonomous whole whose complex
relation of parts gives rise to meaning. Any poetical device--rhyme,
alliteration, meter, and so on--is significant in its coherent relation
to this meaning structure. Hence the question of 'why' a device is there
is to be answered not by exhaustive and exhausting references to a
poet's biographical circumstances, but by assuming the poet to be
producing a coherent structure despite his or her intentions. Thus, if
one is to assume that the film director or auteur, to paste the
nomenclature in, is producing something coherent (and i suppose that
incoherence could be factored in here, too, if that is the overall feel
of a work), then the 'meaning' of film music, for example, is simply to
be found in how it relates textually to the other devices (shot
selection, dialogue, all that jazz). From the New Critical perspective,
'meaning' must precisely be 'reason', since any stroll beyond the
confines of what is there on the page (or on the screen) is simply a
merry little skip down the garden path of human biography, and anyway
unnecessary given their gambit that structural autonomy is the result of
any artistic intention. We happily bypass psychology, since
considerations of authorial mind-set and reader's (spectator's) response
are predetermined, or at least meet, in the text under analysis. This is
the material basis of the critic's explorations, and anything else is
'speculation', however well-intentioned and backed up with interesting
biographical facts (even that chatter in the edit suite).
As for teleology, I reckon you could argue that that can be found
anywhere. Take the starting assumption here, for example, that the text
is an autonomous whole: doesn't this remind you of, say, that kind of
Spencerian evolutionism that argues that the tendency of the universe is
an inexorable movement toward complexity?
AC.
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