Remember Remember

Oh no. It's November and I never finished the blog post I'd been trying to write about Halloween and how ghosts haunt everything and how haunting is good. How a song is a kind of spectre and how we are all summoners. About how art is an assemblage of hauntings that unravel the impossibility of authorship, and how to be an artist is not to make a claim on any particular work, but to be a curator and custodian of ghosts. To look closely at any artifact is to understand it is inscriptions all the way down. It would have been about how there is still a need for the artist despite all that, because somebody has to build a place into which we can summon our ghosts, a place for them to haunt us and each other.

In contrast, genAI, LLM-generated art is exorcised art. It is all surface. No friction, no demons, no cracks for the ghosts to inhabit. Does this mean that capital is an exorcist? If so then our task is to become summoners, re-enchanters, spectre-mancers. To reach beyond the world. Or, rather, to reach through the slick, digital froth congealing atop our world, this uncanny, skin-deep mimic of reality, grasp the dirt of the Real lurking in the shadows below, and rip it free of its illusory chains.

I heard mention recently of the 'intentional fallacy', which I hadn't come across before. I gather it refers to the mistake of thinking that when approaching a piece of art, deducing the artist's intentions is what is important. WRONG! What is important is what the art can do or, perhaps better, what you can do with the art. I enjoy the Jamesonian nature of this. The idea that we're all bringing all of our baggage (our albatrosses, our ghosts) to everything that we read or look at or listen to and it’s through and with this baggage that any and all meaning is created.

To me it suggests that all these pieces of art are a kind of communism, fragments of a collective conversation written in artifacts and scattered across history, making a mockery of temporality, talking back and forth as if believing that time only flows in one direction is a lack of imagination on our part.

But then what to make of intentionality from the perspective of trying to make music? I struggle to explain the things I make to myself in anything so cumbersome and explicit as language, but I still need to feel like there is some ineffable thing I am attempting to communicate. Otherwise why would I share it?

The answer, I suppose, is the same answer as usual: embrace the dialectic. Expressing intentionality through music is impossible; making music without intention is to make dead, worthless music. Both are true. Deal with it. So many of my conversations these days end up in confusions like this. I was no fun at parties even before a decade or two of dialectics and Marx - you should see me now!

WHATEVS. This is really only a problem if you think about it too hard. And you don't have to think about music if you don't want to. You can just make it. Or do whatever you want with it. Still. I fell into the realms of over-thinking ages ago and cannot climb out. Dwelling down here can really take its toll on the ability to easily access a sense of uncritical wonder.

Lately I find myself looking for a way to carve out some space to experience music as the force I know it in my bones to be, but without needing every song to sound like the howling of the end of the world, or to be in a room shaking with colossal noise to get there. Because apart from anything else, this tinnitus is not getting any quieter.

This, my bewildering quest for what I am reluctantly calling 're-enchantment' has been ongoing for a lot of this year. A search for a materialist-flavoured magic. I foolishly want to regain access to a power that has the ability to end me in an instant. For a song to crumble me to dust: a thing that I swear has happened so many times in my life that I cannot understand how I am anything more than vapour at this point.

Don't get me wrong though, I also do absolutely want to continue finding ways to make every song sound like the howling end of the world. Not because I need to, but because IT IS COOL.

But Halloween came and went and I never managed to pull all of this together.

Never mind. The Gothic Marxism of Halloween is good, but the celebrating-direct-action-ness of bonfire night is better. Happy almost-blowing-up-parliament-day to all those who celebrate.