1

As Linda Dowling has argued, beneath the debate between sense and reason in matters of taste was the “question of how legitimacy is to be achieved in the liberal polity, how a state that derives its authority from the consent of its people may pretend to be founded upon anything more secure than […] the restless, irrational appetites of an ignorant population.” To counter such irrational forces, Shaftesbury conceived of taste as a force that educated one to choose virtue and reason over pleasure, thereby fostering an ideal political order. Building on Shaftesbury’s theories, Kant’s philosophy of aesthetic judgment placed artistic consumption in explicit opposition to the kind of sensual consumption by which the pornographic reader made use of his “art,” claiming that “A pure judgment of taste has, then, for its determining ground neither charm nor emotion, in a word, no sensation as matter of the aesthetic judgment.” Disinterested aesthetic contemplation was figured as antithetical to the kinds of physical reaction prompted by the pornographic. Throughout the eighteenth century, the aesthetic was viewed in its most dominantly understood forms as an invisible social contract. The aesthetic was no hedonistic cult of individual sensibility, as it came to be figured later in the nineteenth century, but rather a binding structure between what Kant saw as “on the one hand, the universal feeling of sympathy, and, on the other, the faculty of being able to communicate universally one’s inmost self – properties constituting in conjunction the befitting social spirit of mankind, in contradistinction to the narrow life of the lower animals”(CJ 226). Art was that which allowed the growing community of educated and propertied individuals to represent itself to itself. (Allison Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity)

2

It does not follow from this that there is no meaning in speaking of the culture of an individual, or of a group or class. We only mean that the culture of the individual cannot be isolated from that of the group, and that the culture of the group cannot be abstracted from that of the whole society; and that our notion of "perfection" must take all three senses of "culture" into account at once. Nor does it follow that in a society, of whatever grade of culture, the groups concerned with each activity of culture will be distinct and exclusive: on the contrary, it is only by an overlapping and sharing of interests, by participation and mutual appreciation, that the cohesion necessary for culture can obtain. A religion requires not only a body of priests who know what they are doing, but a body of worshippers who know what is being done. It is obvious that among the more primitive communities the several activities of culture are inextricably interwoven. The Dyak who spends the better part of a season in shaping, carving and painting his barque of the peculiar design required for the annual ritual of head-hunting, is exercising several cultural activities at once - of art and religion, as well as of amphibious warfare. As civilisation becomes more complex, greater occupational specialisation evinces itself: in the "stone age" New Hebrides, Mr. John Layard says, certain islands specialise in particular arts and crafts, exchanging their wares and displaying their accomplishments to the reciprocal satisfaction of the members of the archipelago... (T.S Eliot, Notes on Culture)

3

the whole structure of popular music is standardized, even where the attempt is made to circumvent standardization. Standardization extends from the most general features to the most specific ones. Best known is the rule that the chorus consists of thirty-two bars and that the range is limited to one octave and one note. Complications have no consequences. This inexorable device guarantees that regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced. The primary effect of this relation between the framework and the detail is that the listener becomes prone to evince stronger reactions to the part than to the whole. His grasp of the whole does not lie in the living experience of this one concrete piece of music he has followed. The whole is pre-given and pre-accepted, even before the actual experience of the music starts: therefore, it is not likely to influence, to any great extent, the reaction to the details, except to give them varying degrees of emphasis. Serious music, for comparative purposes, may be thus characterized: Every detail derives its musical sense from the concrete totality of the piece which, in turn, consists of the life relationship of the details and never of a mere enforcement of a musical scheme. The frame of mind to which popular music originally appealed, on which it feeds, and which it perpetually reinforces, is simultaneously one of distraction and inattention. Listeners are distracted from the demands of reality by entertainment which does not demand attention either. Distraction is bound to the present mode of production, to the rationalized and mechanized process of labor to which, directly or indirectly, masses are subject. This mode of production, which engenders fears and anxiety about unemployment, loss of income, war, has its “nonproductive” correlate in entertainment; that is, relaxation which does not involve the effort of concentration at all. People want to have fun…. The question is further to what degree music—insofar as it might intervene in the social process—will be in a position to intervene as art. Regardless of the answers which might be given, here and now music is able to do nothing but portray within its own structure the social antinomies which are also responsible for its own isolation. Music will be better, the more deeply it is able to express—in the antinomies of its own formal language—the exigency of the social condition and to call for change through the coded language of suffering. It is not for music to stare in helpless horror at society: it fulfills its social function more precisely when it presents social problems through its own material and according to its own formal laws—problems which music contains within itself in the innermost cells of its technique. The task of music as art thus enters into a parallel relationship to the task of social theory. (Adorno, “On the Social Situation of Music”, Music and Mass Culture)

4

The identification of popular culture as an instance of a more general process of communication needs to be challenged, for it has had important consequences. In particular, two assumptions have, I believe, hindered cultural studies' attempts to analyze popular culture. The first is structural: the model of communication assumes a relationship between two discrete and independently existing entities: whether between individuals, or between audiences and texts, or between signifiers and signifieds. The result is

that any cultural relation takes on the form of an unspecified and unspecifiable exchange—a mediation—between encoding and decoding. It makes little difference which term in the model is given priority as long as the distance or gap between them remains […] The model remains the same even if one hypothesizes a process of negotiation in which each is granted some power. The distance between them remains sacrosanct. […] The concept of difference entails a sustained critique of any assumption of such guaranteed and necessary relationships. Just as structuralism argued that the identity and meaning of any sign depends upon its place within a system of differences, poststructuralist theories of difference argue that no element within the cultural field has an identity of its own which is intrinsic to it and thus guaranteed in advance. A text can never be said to have a singular meaning, or even a circumscribed set of meanings. Perhaps texts cannot be treated singularly and in isolation: the meaning of a text may depend upon its formal and historical relations to other texts (its ‘intertextuality’) An audience can never be said to have a singular identity, or even a finite set of identities. Each is replete with multiple and unrelated differences, each is potentially infinitely fragmentable. Theories of difference emphasize the multiplicity and disconnectedness within and between texts and audiences. By erasing the identity of the terms of the relationship, the relationship itself becomes impossible or at least necessarily absent. Communication itself is an illusion which it is the critic's job to deconstruct. (Grossberg, We Got to Get out of Here)

5

According to Badiou’s Ethics, the ordinary situation ‘of the human animal’ is determined by self-interest on the one hand and opinion on the other (ES, 46). Its behavior ‘is a matter of what Spinoza calls ‘‘perseverance in being’’, which is nothing other than the pursuit of interest, or the conservation of self. This perseverance is the law that governs some-one insofar as he knows himself. . . . To belong to the situation is everyone’s natural destiny ... ’ (ibid.). Within the situation, opinion (‘presentations without truth’, ‘the anarchic debris of circulating knowledge’, ES, 50) will prevail. The event is ‘an immanent break [in a situation] in which the human animal finds its principle of survival—its interest [and its attachment to opinion]—disorganized’ (ibid.). (Andrew Gibson, Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency)

6

This article concerns the usefulness of attaching a philosophy of the event to popular music studies. I am attempting to think about the ways that rock ’n’ roll functions as a musical revolution that becomes subjected to a narrative of loss accompanying the belief that the revolution has floundered, or even disappeared completely. In order to think about what this narrative of loss might entail I have found myself going back to the emergence of rock ’n’ roll, to what we might term its ‘event’, and then working towards the present to take stock of the current situation. […] 1 Part One: Revolution, Event, Fidelity The translation of Alain Badiou’s L’être et événement into English in 2005 reflects both a widening interest in the work of the French philosopher in recent years and a realisation that ‘event’ has become something of a keyword of the new millennium. The focus on event can

be seen as part of a more general interest in memory, loss, nostalgia and history around this same period. For many in the West, there is a sense that, following the fall of communism and the seeming victory of capitalism, society has entered a period of ‘being’ in which the possibility of an ‘event’ that might proffer something different has become nonexistent, visible only in the rear-view mirror as a receding trace of a future promise. For Badiou, however, whose philosophical project relies upon historical change for its exegesis, the anxious backward glance cast by those for whom the current situation proves unsatisfactory has provided an ideal perspective from which to articulate the emergence of the new. Badiou’s notion of event is connected to unpredictability. For Badiou, an event is something that can – but will not necessarily – occur at an evental site and that occurs as a complete break with the continuum of being. For Badiou the fields of human interaction where such events can emerge are those of science, art, politics and love. An event is a creative, assertive act that breaks with what has gone before and sets in motion a new truth that in turn creates subjects who show fidelity to it. Examples used by Badiou include the French Revolution, Galilean physics, Schoenberg’s twelve-note serialism and the event of any amorous encounter that entails a change for the subjects constituted by that encounter. The event itself cannot be verified, but fidelity to its truth can be maintained after it has been recognised. For Badiou, fidelity to the event is a process that exceeds the event itself, a truth process by which subjects are created. In the case of the Cuban Revolution, for example, we can talk about the event of the Revolution – commonly identified as the victory of 1959 – to reflect the singular nature of this irruption into the established order of a completely new situation. And we can talk about fidelity to this event as being the ongoing project of the Cuban Revolution. But can we, by a deft leap, take a contemporaneous musical example, the emergence of rock ’n’ roll, and speak of the event of this ‘Revolution’ – commonly identified as the ‘victory’ of 1955 – and of a singular irruption into the established order of a completely new situation? And can we talk about fidelity to this event as being the ongoing project of the rock ’n’ roll ‘Revolution’? (Richard Elliott, “Popular Music and/as Event: Subjectivity, Love and Fidelity in the Aftermath of Rock ’n’ Roll”, http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk/2008/Elliott.htm)