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Okay so my take on New Crit is this: it was a positive thing as a radical break from the accepted canon and its strict close-reading formalism demanded that we confront work on its own terms, and try to derive standards from the integrity, structure, etc. of the work rather than from classic standards. But once people started doing this, the terms of the work began to spiral further and further afield until it became clear that EVERYTHING was the domain of the work -- hence intertextuality, the death of the author, etc as explosive resolutions of the contradictions in the new-crit package.
I tend to think rockwrite could use more new-crit in the limited sense of close-reading, attention to structure. Generally I see sweeping cultcrit comments which pay no close attention to the actual music involved, or conversely blowbyblows of the music which just describe it rather than understand it. My fav. thing about Kogan, for example, isn't any of this hallway/classroom metatheorizing etc. but just that he can actually write in a thoughtful way about how a particular human voice sounds and how that fits with other aspects of the music. This is something incredibly rare.
But mainly my new crit comment was a throwaway joke responding to "New Rock Criticism" because the idea of rockwrite adopting that posture to the music seems mildly absurd. Which is also what makes it a good idea.
The means question is an interesting one. I think the "fallacy of meaning" is rilly a criticism of direct point-to-point correspondances which attempt to neatly map music onto culture via some hegelio-freudian mishmosh. AKA "punk signifies rebellion" "loud guitar riffs signify masculinity" etc. (some of the stuff which irritated me about Sex Revolts on the Feminized Noise thread).
But I dislike the end of the third paragraph too. Because what "No Panties" means is that Trina doesn't give away love for free. But "Trina doesn't give away love for free" isn't what I can do with "No Panties" -- dance, sing, sing as a joke to a girl I'm dating if she buys me an expensive gift, relate, judge, nod my head, etc.
Otherwise yr. imagining listeners who are no more complex than apple-jacks girls "It just IS, OKAY!?"
But also if you're asking "what does apple-jacks mean" you can get different answers "A cereal", "frosted, sort of apple flavored, but jacked up, you know!", "I guess the ad execs want us to think 'frosted, sort of apple flavored, but jacked up, you know!'","Nothing, it just IS, okay", "It signifies the free associative play of late capitalism".
So the point is for the crit-theorist asking what it means is getting into an argument about what type of meaning you want, i.e. what your job is supposed to investigate. For the consumer, asking what it means is context driven and in part asking them which context they want to bring to bear on it -- not identical with what they do with it, but tied to it.
I think Mark's real point then is why does Firth want to bother with academia at all? Sure sociology might enliven cult-stud, but why bother with EITHER when yr. talents are at a different level of granularity?
― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Wednesday, 29 January 2003 22:50 (twenty-one years ago) link
eleven years pass...