Ennio Morricone - Here's to You (In Concerto - Venezia 10.11.07)

Here's to you, Nicola and Bart
Rest forever here in our hearts
The last and final moment is yours
That agony is your triumph

Beethoven : Violin Concerto in D major op.61 by 庄司紗矢香 (Shoji Sayaka); Conductor: Roger Norrington; NHK Symphony Orchestra

Marxist criticism of Literature

    The sociology of literature concerns itself chiefly with what might be called the means of literary production, distribution, and exchange in a particular society... but taken by itself it is neither particularly Marxist nor particularly critical. It is, indeed, for the most part a suitably tamed, degutted version of Marxist criticism, appropriate for Western consumption. 

   Marxist criticism of literature aim to explain the literary work more fully; and this means a sensitive attention to its forms, styles, and meanings. But it also means grasping those forms, styles, and meanings as the products of a particular history. 

   Henri Matisse: all arts bears the imprint of its historical epoch. but the great art is that in which this imprint is most deeply marked. 

   Most students of literature are taught otherwise: the greatest art is that which timelessly transcends its historical conditions. 

    The production of ideas, concepts and consciousness is first of all directly interwoven with the material intercourse of man, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the spiritual intercourse of men, appear here as the direct efflux of men's material behavior .. we do not proceed from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as described, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at corporeal man; rather we proceed from the really active man... Consciousness does not determine life; life determine consciousness. 

                     ---- Marx and Engels: The German Ideology (1845-6) 


    In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces, the sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. 

                  ------   Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)


   From economic structure (-- say the capitalist who owns those means of production and the proletarian class whose labor-power the capitalist buys for profit) emerges a superstructure - certain forms of law and politics, a certain kind of a state, whose essential function is to legitimate the power of the social class which owns the means of economic production. But the superstructure contains more than this: it also consists of certain "definite forms of social consciousness" (political, religious, ethical, aesthetic, and so on), which is what Marxism designates as ideology. The function of ideology, also, is to legitimate the power of the ruling class in society; in the last analysis, the dominant ideas of a society are the ideas of its ruling class.

  Art, then, is for Marxism part of the "superstructure" of society. It is part of a society's ideology. 

   To understand literature, then, means understanding the total social process of which it is part. 

   Georgy Plekhanov: The social mentality of an age is conditioned by that age's social relations. This is nowhere quite as evident as in the history of art and literature. Literary works are not mysteriously inspired, or explicable simply in terms of their author's psychology. They are forms of perception, particular ways of seeing the world; and as such they have a relation to that dominant way of seeing the world which is the social mentality or ideology of an age.  That ideology, in turn, is the product of the concrete social relations into which men enter at a particular time and place; it is the way those class-relations are experienced, legitimized and perpetuated. Moreover, men are not free to choose their social relations; they are constrained into them by material necessity - by the nature and stage of development of their mode of economic production. 


   But we do not understand ideology either unless we grasp the part it plays in the society as a whole - how it consists of a definite, historically relative structure of perception which underpins the power of a particular social class. This is not an easy task, since an ideology is never a simple reflection of a ruling class's ideas; on the contrary, it is always a complex phenomenon, which may incorporate conflicting, even contradictory, views of the world.  

  Take, for example, the great Placido Gulf scene in Conrad's Nostromo.... the radical pessimism ... cannot simply be accounted for in terms of "psychological" factors in Conrad himself; for individual psychology is also a social product. The pessimism of Conrad's world view is rather a unique transformation into art of an ideological pessimism rife in his period - a sense of history as futile and cyclical, of individuals, as impenetrable and solitary, of human values as relativistic and irrational, which marks a drastic crisis in the ideology of the Western bourgeois class to which Conrad allied himself. ... his historical situation allows his to access to such insights. Whether those insights are in political terms "progressive" or "reactionary" (Conrad's are certainly the latter) is not the point - any more than it is to the point that most of the agreed major writers of the twentieth century - Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence - are political conservatives who each had truck with fascism. Marxist criticism, rather than apologizing for that fact, explains it - sees that, in the absence of genuinely revolutionary art, only a radical conservatism, hostile like Marxism to the withered values of liberal bourgeois society, could produce the most significant literature. 

   It would be a mistake to imply that Marxist criticism moves mechanically from "text" to "ideology" to "social relations" to "productive forces." It is concerned, rather, with the unity of these "levels" of society. Literature may be part of the superstructure, but it is not merely the passive reflection of the economic base. 

      According to the materialist conception of history, the determining element in history is ultimately the production and reproduction in real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. if therefore somebody twists this into a statement that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure - political forms of the class struggle and its consequence, constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc. - forms of law - and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the combatants: political, legal, and philosophical theories, religious ideas, and their further development into systems of dogma - also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggle and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. 

                     ---- Engels: Letter to Joseph Bloch (1890)

Communication: What does it mean?

There are two strands of thinking in communication studies.

In one view (Lippmann, Bernays, Lasswell), communication signified something like the dispersion of persuasive symbols in order to manage mass opinion.

Manufacture of consent among dispersed populations.

symbols are not just aesthetic ornaments but prime movers of social organization;
strategically cultivated perceptions lost or won battles and sent men in the trenches to their graves. 

Lasswell: if the mass will be free of chains of iron, it must accept its chains of silver.

if the will of the people, the feste Burg of democracy theory, was little more than a bog of stereotypes, censorship, inattention, and libido to be manipulated by experts or demagogues, what did that say about the rationality of the public?

Lippmann: popular irrationality could be both malleable and intransigent. 

Carl Schmitt: people's faith that government business got done through public discussion in a parliament that reflected public opinion in general was little more than a joke.

Marxist theoretician Georg Lukacs: the revolution process was inseparable form the development of class consciousness on the part of the proletariat and hence involved choosing the right slogans and rallying cries. 

Neither Lippmann nor Lukacs believed in the spontaneous self-organization of popular will; each gave a major role to a "vanguard," whether of social-scientific experts or intellectual party leaders.

===================================================

A second version (C.K. Ogden, I. A. Richards) saw communication as the means to purge semantic dissonance and thereby open a path to more rational social relations.

communication as the accurate sharing of consciousness.
the twin enemies of communication: the impasse of solipsism and the veritable orgy of verbonmania: 
inaccessible individuality and mass gullibility.
mixing the symbolic and emotive functions of language.

remedy: Lippmann argued for elite rule; Ogden called for an educated public
Communication = education
in both macro and micro application:

language is a necessary but flawed instruments: words ... are at present a very imperfect means of communication.
language ties us dangerously to our primeval origins: tens of thousands of years have elapsed since we shed our tails, but we are still communicating with a medium developed to meet the needs of arboreal men.

Indeed, the word-magic so prominent in early human cultures - the belief that the names gives power over the thing - has not declined but increased in the twentieth century, thanks to the ability of the "symbolic apparatus" to disseminate cliches. 

Whereas propaganda preyed on atavistic word madness, semantic analysis would provide a medium of communication for the needs of modern scientific men and women. 

since meaning is in the mind of the beholder, the labyrinth of solipsism always looms. 

communication for Ogden and Richards was not the coordination of action or the revelation of otherness, but a matching of minds, a consensus in idem: a language transaction or a communication may be defined as a use of symbols in such a way that acts of reference occur in a hearer which are similar in all relevant respects to those which are symbolized in the speaker. 

identity of consciousness between speaker and hearer.
psychology therefore remains the best science for studying communication.

communication as contact between minds via some delicate and error-prone sign medium.
Communication is are rare and fragile as crystal. Their mentalism (心理幻术： 魔术师假冒具有特殊的心智力，如心灵能力或数学奇才) logically entails the specter of miscommunication.

lonely crowd is so vulnerable to the wiles of propaganda!
communication as an insummountable barrier.
interpersonal desolation figured as sexual malfunction

The Waste Land (1922) by T.S. Eliot

I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirm a prison.

Lukacs gives a class analysis: he sees solitary self-hood not as a general existential condition but as a specifically bourgeois plight: the system of private property creates souls who know only the freedom of preying on other isolated individuals.
Capitalist reification brings about simultaneously an overindividualization and a mechanical objectification of people.

isolation and propaganda as two sides of the same coin.
claustrophobic self-hood, with fear of the impossibility of communication. 
   

Beethoven ~ Minuet G Major

Vladimir Lenin's view on Journalism

    Media "is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organizer."

    Precise facts, indisputable facts—they are especially abhorrent to this type of author, but are especially necessary if we want to form a proper understanding of this complicated, difficult and often deliberately confused question. But how to gather the facts? How to establish their connection and interdependence.

     The most widely used, and most fallacious, method in the realm of social phenomena is to tear out individual minor facts and juggle with examples. Selecting chance examples presents no difficulty at all, but is of no value, or of purely negative value, for in each individual case everything hinges on the historically concrete situation. Facts, if we take them in their entirety, in their interconnection, are not only stub born things, but undoubtedly proof-bearing things. Minor facts, if taken out of their entirety, out of their interconnection, if they are arbitrarily selected and torn out of context, are merely things for juggling, or even worse.


    The inference is clear: we must seek to build a reliable foundation of precise and indisputable facts that can be confronted to any of the “general” or “example-based” arguments now so grossly misused in certain countries. And if it is to be a real foundation, we must take not individual facts, but the sum total of facts, without a single exception, relating to the question under discussion. Otherwise there will be the inevitable, and fully justified, suspicion that the facts were selected or compiled arbitrarily, that instead of historical phenomena being presented in objective interconnection and interdependence and treated as a whole, we are presenting a “subjective” concoction to justify what might prove to be a dirty business. This does happen ... and more often than one might think.

    V.I. Lenin: Statistics and Sociology from "Lenin Collected Works" (vol 23) published in 1964 in Moscow, Page 271-277. The original was published in the magazine Bolshevik No. 2, 1935.

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No.1 by Lang Lang; Bavarian Radio SO; Conductor: Mariss Jansons

Encores 42.18 a Chinese piece, 46.08 The Flight of a Bumblebee.

Herbert Marcuse: One-Dimensional Man

   Does not the threat of an atomic catastrophe which could wipe out the human race also serve to protect the very forces which perpetuate this danger? The efforts to prevent such a catastrophe overshadow the search for its potential causes in contemporary industrial society.  These causes remain unidentified, unexposed, unattacked by the public because they recede before the all too obvious threat from without - to the West from the East, to the East from the West.  Equally obvious is the need for being prepared, for living on the brink, for facing the challenge.  We submit to the peaceful production of the means of destruction, to the perfection of waste, to being educated for the defense which deforms the defenders and that which they defend.


  ... the fact that advanced industrial society becomes richer, bigger, and better as it perpetuates the danger.  The defense structure makes life easier for a greater number of people and extends man's mastery of nature.  Under these circumstances, our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. ... and the whole appears to be the very embodiment of Reason.

   And yet this society is irrational as a whole.  Its productivity is destructive of the free development of human needs and faculties, its peace maintained by the constant threat of war, its growth dependent on the repression of the real possibilities for pacifying the struggle for existence - individual, national, international.... the scope of society's domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than ever before. Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living.

   aim of a critical theory of contemporary society... analyzes society in the light of its used and unused or abused capabilities for improving the human condition. ... implies value judgment.

  1. the judgment hat human life is worth living, or rather can be and ought to be made worth living. This judgment underlies all intellectual effort; it is the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical) rejects theory itself.
  2. the judgment that, in a given society, specific possibilities exist for the amelioration of human life and specific ways and means of realizing these possibilities.... Social theory is historical theory, and history is the realm of chance in the realm of necessity. Therefore, among the various possible and actual modes of organizing and utilizing the available resources, which ones offer the greater chance of an optimal development?

  ... the critical theory must abstract from the actual organization and utilization of society's resources, and from the results of this organization and utilization. Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such "transcending" analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory. 

   But here, advanced industrial society confronts the critique with a situation which seems to deprive it of the very basis. Technical progress, extended to the whole system of domination and coordination, creates form of life (and of power) which appears to reconcile the forces opposing the system and to defeat or refute all protest in the name of the historical prospects of freedom form toil and domination. 

   ... Contemporary society seems to be capable of containing social change - qualitative change which would establish essentially different institutions, a new direction of the productive process, a new modes of human existence. This containment of social change is perhaps the most singular achievement of advanced industrial society; ... the integration of opposition...

Ludwig van Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D major op.61 by Arabella Steinbacher

Mozart's Violin Concerto No.3 - Albrecht and Steinbacher

Dvořák : 4 Romantic Pieces by Arabella Steinbacher & Robert Kulek

Antonín Dvořák : Vier romantische Stücke für Violine und Klavier op. 75, B.150

Nr. 1 Allegro moderato
Nr. 2 Allegro maestoso
Nr. 3 Allegro appassionato
Nr. 4 Larghetto

Agents of Power by J. Herbert Altschull

    In order to be effective, the wielders of power, the shapers of public policy, must maintain control over their population in the macro arena of ideas and beliefs and in the micro arena composed of the channels of communication - newspapers, radio, and television.

   The narcotic of power is eternal... The history of human relationships is a history of power.... History has shown us the unstable nature of power relationships... And there will be more rebellions.

  It is resources that permit power to maintain and strengthen itself. Without resources, power cannot survive.... Some of the required resources... are easy to identify: arable land, mineral and fuel deposit, the requisite tools, and the technical skills. Some cannot be identified so easily...: the information and the mesmerizing uses made of information.

  Power itself is neutral... Power may be used for good or for ill.

  Shifts of power have occurred... the victory of commercial forces over communist doctrine.... the appearance of victory is premature.... Dissonance in the melodies of the symphony of the press are easily audible despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of what George Bush mistakenly identified as the new world order.

Introduction

... We are likely to conceive of the earliest press as a device designed to provide "news" to the "public."

  Our ideas are copied from our impressions... our impression are likely to be based on our experience with our hometown newspapers, local network television stations, and weekly newsmagazines. 

   It was the invention of the printing press more than any other event that shattered the medieval world and gave rise to modernism... ultimately destroyed the power of the clergy and the nobility; it also led to new forms of political, economic, social, cultural, and religious systems. The press never separate from these developments, but a part of them. 

   It was principally as factors in the distribution of goods that the news media emerged as instruments of communication. 

  (In ancient Rome,) the journalist (correspondents) who supplied the information were personal slaves; later, many came to look on themselves as wage slaves - that is to say, captives of the market. Indeed, today's journalist work for what might be called "news factories" financed not be owners or even by employers but rather by commercial interests the journalists never meet and whose existence they often do not recognize. 

  "surveillance of environment" (Harold Lasswell). Information is not a matter of societal responsibility or desire but a matter of need, ... society's individuals in a position of power... cannot continue to assert their power unless they are able to keep an eye and ear on the world they inhabit.... press responsibility is an intellectual cosmetic coating over the raw power needs of those in a position to control their environment. Information is power, ... control over information is necessary for the gaining and maintenance of power. 

   The media must be used as agencies of social control.

  

Gabriel Fauré - Apres un Reve, Cello and Piano