Re: Ernst Bloch on Jazz, Kitsch and Colportage

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

Don't think I have forgotten that piss-ant Harry Zorn (no relation to John,
I hope), but first I must dispose of Simple Simon.

At 12:49 PM 5/13/99 +0100, simon smith wrote:
>I know little about Bloch, but from a reading of Adorno it is
>very clear that a distinction must be made between 'intellect'
>and thought. In the 'Dialectic of Enlightenment' intellect is
>understood as having developed as a tool of self-preservation,
>and as the imposition of the self-preservative ego on the world.
>Intellect loses sight of the object and becomes paranoia. (See
>for example page 193). The final form of intellectual paranoia
>appears in fascism... 'They see the body as a moving mechanism,
>with joints as its components and flesh to cushion the
>skeleton' (p235, from section titled 'The Importance of the
>Body'.)  *Thought*, on the other hand, is the attempt to
>apprehend the world, to let the object speak for itself. The
>dream of critical thought is of a world of non-intentionality.

It's too bad that someone literate enough to quote Adorno ) a low-level
intellectual capability, to be sure) did not excerise the same attention to
my post.  The whole point of quoting Josephine Baker, probably a more
competent analyst than Adorno with a broomstick up his ass, is that the
vision of the body Adorno complains of is a purely Caucasian construct; it
has nothing to do with a conception of the body, never voiced by any black
person anywhere, that the body exists as some reductive piece of meat
devoid of intellect, or should I say thought.  (The distinction has no
relevance as applied to dance, in any case.)

>The critique of Jazz, the jitterbug, is just that it facilitates >the
reduction of body to a machine, just as it simulates its >liberation.  This
is jazz as I have heard it.

This is to prove only what a pathetic, vapid shit you are.  There is, of
course, no content whatever in this utterance; just a quotation of
authority.  Yet what is at issue here is who has authority in these matters
and on what basis.

If one shifts attention away from constipated European intellectuals and
the dessicated dweebs who fawn over them, one can find a whole different
set of standards from which to evaluate cultural forms.

There are probably not many dance forms in the world devoid of significant
and definite structure, hence devoid of some kind of practice necessary to
master the movements.  The only time I have ever seen completely random,
mindless body movements is when I used to watch left-wing hippies dance.
Some dance forms may be simple; other require much more adeptness at body
movement, whether it be the fancy footwork of European folk dance forms or
the more pelvic approach of West Africa and its descendents.

Now if one wants to deal with the putative mechanistic reductionism of body
momements, I'd like to know the basis upon which one discriminates one form
from another.  Is there any form more mechanistic than ballet, though it be
a high-art form?  (Precisely becuase it is so scientific and mechanical,
everybody takes ballet classes no matter what form of dance they end up
doing professionally).  Or how about the square dance as compared to the
lindy hop?  Every art form has its technique, hence its mechanism.  So the
issue becomes a dead-end unless one has a basis for showing that certain
forms incorporate a degrading mechanistic influence.  However, to accuse
black art forms of being mechanistic while leaving others off the hook is
just a joke.

Now these questions become much more interesting once one frees oneself
from Eurocentric assumptions.  That is, when one accepts the legitimacy of
more rhythmic expressions, in dance, music, or whatever, one can begin to
evaluate the question of mechanistic degradation from within the framework
of a black aesthetic itself.  For those of us old enough to have lived
through the cultural changes of the past 40 years, there are some obvious
watersheds of cultural change.  I don't know how to show that this or that
form either incorporates or escapes from a mechanistic ethos before 1970,
but it is shit-eatingly easy to see what has happened since then.  Both in
music and dance, the machine ethos has demonstrably    becomes manifest
since the 1970s, in the disco era, the breakdance rage, and finally in the
hiphop era.  One can only marvel that, for 200 years of bellyaching about
the dehumanization of man since the Industrial Revolution, we have only
begun to see in the past two decades the final realization of what everyone
has most feared for two centuries.  This is fertile ground for analysis.

Now these are only hints as to how to go about dealing with these issues,
which is all you're going to get via e-mail and much more than you deserve
anyway.  I can easily go the distance with mediocre little pisspots like
Harry Zorn and Simple Simon, but here I'm just going to give some basic
ideas as to how to go about conceptualizing this subject matter.  I'll be
damned if I'm going to do these second-rate academics' work for them
without compensation.