>What bothers me is any sense that there exists anywhere a value that
offers anything other than a pretence to the rebuttal of ephemerality and
particularity.
First of all, thanks cris for another luminous and patient response.
Regarding the comment above: what do you imagine to be the tendency of
such an aversion? Isn't it somewhat totalizing to require, or at least to
propound so vehemently an 'everywhere' in which there are no 'anywheres'
where resistance to ephemerality is other than pretencious? Is anything
-worth- saving, permanently? Would you say that the extension of the
franchise to women, for example, is a politically coordinated expression
of value that OUGHT to accept its ephemerality? Or is the deck loaded so
as to outlaw such an example? Also - in defence of ephemerality - why
must its imminence be considered a "rebuttal", or at least, why is it
considered as such here? Is ephemerality necessarily negative? If so,
why be supportive of it? Is this a reactive, disguised necessitarianism?
Having an idea of your commitment and of your work, I would never presume
so. But the question stands, doesn't it? I don't believe that
ephemerality is necessarily or even principally negative (Nietzsche lays
this out fundamentally in several texts, perhaps initially in the second
Untimely Meditation); but would you say that 'forgetting' or transience
occurs not only because of power shifts amongst prescriptively interested
parties, but also because some works (of whatever kind) actually -posit it
as a principle that their effect should be transient-? Doesn't much pop
music seem, not only retrospectivley, to have posited this principle? I
listen to a shitload of pop, btw, but still discriminate between pop
bands, think that some are better than others, and think that those who
would consider the spice girls 'better than' Messiaen would do so either
from wilful contrariness or from a lack of effort or opportunity. The
latter two explanations are, I believe quite firmly, -disadvantages-.
Would you be so confident as to say to the woman driving the bus, whose
material circumstances have made it, for her, particularly unlikely that
she would ever have the time to spend coming to terms with Messiaen's
work, that her possible dismissal of that work is in fact entirely valid?
Wouldn't she retort (I think that she might): "It's alright for you to say
so - you've had the time to listen to it. I have not, and I regret it."
Of course, not every woman driving every bus would say so. Most probably
wouldn't be inclined to say such a thing to someone 'such as' ourselves.
But aren't you overlooking the lack of privilege - a real and determining,
financial factor in many people's lives - that frequently leads to their
inability to be interested in so-called 'high' art? Do we have the right
(let alone the disposition) to tell people, or even to support the idea,
that an 'ignorance' deriving from relatively deprived material
circumstances is so valid that deprived individuals OUGHT NOT to feel any
anxiety about this? You have your spice girls, and that's fine for you?
Isn't any disagreement with this attitude intrinsically a subscription to
transcendent valuations?
Thanks again for your post -- more soon, k
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