Steven Schick will Bring Paul Dresher’s Exploratory Music Theater Production to Z Space

Schick Machine is an ambitious music theater production commissioned by Stanford Lively Arts and Meyer Sound Labs. First performed in Stanford’s Dinkelspiel Auditorium in March of 2009, the full-evening work was the result of close collaboration among composer Paul Dresher, writer and director Rinde Eckert, percussion virtuoso Steven Schick, instrument inventor Daniel Schmidt, mechanical sound artist Matt Heckert, and lighting and visual designer Tom Ontiveros. The objective was to present performances on newly invented musical instruments within the setting of a theatrical narrative.

The protagonist of the narrative is Lázló Klangfarben, whose part is played (in multiple senses of the word) by Schick. A narrator explains that the name is a pseudonym; and the last name is the German word for “sound color.” Klangfarben is an inventor whose mental state is probably about five bottles short of a six-pack. His skills as an inventor have locked him securely in the objective world of Immanuel Kant’s “pure reason.” Indeed, he is so securely locked that he can no longer remember his real name. The plot behind Eckert’s narrative involves Klangfarben recovering and making peace with his true identify, a process that involves memories of his wife, his mother, and his grandfather.

In many respects this is basically a quest narrative of the sort that Vladimir Propp analyzed in his book Morphology of the Folktale, whose core ideas would find their way into Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and George Lucas’ original conception of the narrative behind his Star Wars movies. Every quest involves a journey that can be physical, metaphorical, or both. In this case the journey amounts to one from the perfect determinism of Klangfarben’s objective world into the far less determined subjective world in which his true identity resides. In the performance of Schick Machine, that journey takes place in a space in which Klangfarben encounters both tiny noise-making objects and the huge invented instruments and sound sculptures created by Schmidt and Heckert:

Steven Schick as Lázló Klangfarben in his environment of invented instruments and sound sculptures (courtesy of Z Space)

Those latter have been given poetic names, such as the Peacock (which is a deconstructed pipe organ), the Hurdy Grande, the Tumbler, and the Field of Flowers. However, while most quest folktales end with the “hero” achieving his goal, Eckert has chosen to be more ambiguous about where Klangfarben has arrived at the conclusion of his journey.

Next month the Paul Dresher Ensemble will present a four-performance run of Schick Machine. Performances will be at 8 p.m. on Friday, September 23, and Saturday, September 24, and at 3 p.m. on Saturday, September 24, and Sunday, September 25. They will take place on the Main Stage at Z Space, whose open design will be conducive to constructing the elaborate environment in which Klangfarben’s quest takes place. Adult tickets for the evening performances will be $25 and $20 for the matinee performances. The senior rate will be $20 for the evening performances and $15 for the matinees. The student rate is $12.50 in the evening and $10 at the matinees. Tickets for all performances may be purchased through hyperlinks on an OvationTix event page. Assistance in ordering tickets may be obtained by calling OvationTix customer service at the toll-free number 866-811-4111. Customer service hours (Pacific Time) are from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

Communion

This past Monday I tried to cast the problem of “understanding processes while they are processing” in the framework of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s approach to the discipline of hermeneutics. I appealed to Gadamer’s evocation of the concept of communion to describe the relationship between an individual sitting in the audience and the performance being played before him/her. Gadamer had developed this “secular” approach to communion with respect to a dramatic performance; but there is no reason to avoid translating it to a musical setting.

From that point of view, I would like to consider a particular sentence I encountered in Truth and Method:

Our line of thought prevents us from dividing the hermeneutic problem in terms of the subjectivity of the interpreter and the objectivity of the meaning to be understood.

In other words the act of listening is one of interpretation; but we should not fall into the trap of assuming that listening to the performance of music is a matter of “deriving” some objective “meaning” out of our perceptual processes. After all, as was previously suggested, those doing the performing are most likely engaged simultaneously with the objective world of the symbol systems on the score pages, the subjectivity of bringing expressiveness to the “decoding” of those symbols, and the social world of “real-time engagement” with the other performing musicians. Listening is never a matter of just recognizing and sharing that process of decoding. Rather, it is one of assimilating the expressiveness being conveyed and “inhabiting” (to use the word from Monday’s article) the social world of the performers as something more than a detached observer. It is through the attempt to enter that social world, complete with its connections to the objective and subjective worlds, that communion is established. One might say that, through that communion, the listener escalates from being a mere observer to becoming an “involved” participant, even if that involvement takes place at a distance from the performers themselves. (There may be some connection between this approach to “involvement” and the concept of “care” that we find in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time; but that will require further exploration.)

Most of us are probably more familiar with this sense of physical involvement in settings of rock concerts and, for more limited audiences, the more spontaneous jazz improvisations. However, we can be just as involved when listening to music of any genre from any period of history. Indeed, that is one reason why I fall back so many times on the use of the concept of jamming when writing about performances of pre-Classical music. Sitting in the audience is not just a matter of listening to how musicians are interpreting a score. Rather, it is a matter of “bearing witness” to acts of making music; and communion arises which the scope of such witnessing takes in the objective, subjective, and social dimensions of those acts.

Beauty, Goodness, and Truth

The grouping of beauty, goodness, and truth as three related “transcendental” qualities of being seems to have originated in the fifteenth century with Marco Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s “Philebus” dialogue. It then resurfaces throughout the history of philosophy, probably most notably in the three “critiques” of Immanuel Kant, the Critique of Pure Reason (truth), the Critique of Practical Reason (goodness), and the Critique of Judgment, whose first half focuses on aesthetics (beauty). This Kantian framework, in turn, may have provided the foundation for much of the thinking that can be found in Jürgen Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action. Since much of my thinking about music came out of trying to approach performance as a form of “communicative action,” it may be time to tie this together with yesterday’s thoughts about time.

Habermas’ approach begins by recognizing that communication is a particular instance of personal interaction and that all personal interactions are distributed across three independent “worlds,” the objective, the subjective, and the social. This tripartite division is basically another take on Ficino as handed down through Kant. The objective world is the world of “pure reason,” the subjective world is the world of personal “judgment,” and the social world is the world of “practical reason,” based on goodness for the benefit of all. Each of these worlds, in turn, provides its own approach to the verb-based nature of time. The objective world deals with the mathematics of time-based functions with particular attention to the nature of continuous functions and how they can be manipulated. The subjective world, on the other hand, deals with the passing of time as a psychological phenomenon. This is where we move into the domain of Gerald Edelman, most specifically his book The Remembered Present. The idea behind the title of that book is that “mind” has to “process” the “stimuli of the present.” That processing is not instantaneous; so, by the time the processing has been completed, what mind takes to be the present is actually a memory of what had been perceived in a very recent past.

This is all very well and good until we have to worry about “now” in a communicative setting. It was one thing to be even remotely aware that a subjective “now” is actually an objective “then;” but things become more complicated when we move into the social world. What happens when someone uses “now” as a cue to say, “It is time to press that button?” In many respects that is the ultimate simplification of what it means for a performing musician to follow a conductor’s beat.

However, the complexity of the social world becomes more evident when we think about a string quartet, rather than an orchestra. This is a group of four individuals that, somehow or another, have to establish a shared concept of how time is passing, maintaining that agreement through some form of ongoing monitoring. Indeed, music itself clearly resides in Habermas’ three worlds. The objective world is the world of notation with its associated rules of interpretation. However, an expressive interpretation of that notation requires a move into the subjective world; but that move only goes far enough to cover solo performance. As soon as more than one performer is involved, performance is firmly ensconced in the social world. Performance is thus a matter of how each individual juggles reasoning in the objective and subjective worlds in order to communicate effectively with the rest of the ensemble in the social world.

Sadly, while Habermas appreciated that there was more to linguistics than semantics and pragmatics, he does not seem to have had much background and/or interest in music. Thus, like Kant, all he can provide is a framework for thinking about the performance of music. Putting flesh onto that framework is the task that still needs to be done.

Remembering Marvin Minsky

I just finished reading the BBC News report of the death of Marvin Minsky, who succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 88. Minsky served as adviser for both my senior and doctoral theses. The former amounted to a systematic implementation of some ideas he had been playing around with through which he could compose music with the aid of computer software. The latter was basically an extended analysis of that what implementation could and could not express and what means of expression were involved. As is the case with many doctoral students, it led to a few publications, one of which I particularly enjoyed, since it got me into the Journal of Music Theory, which had been a major source for much of my background research.

I suppose what I remember most about Minsky was that he was a "hands off" adviser. He would let me go off on my own with relatively little guidance, but he would then subject my findings to intense criticism. At the time he was running the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was getting its funding from the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He had other areas of research to supervise to keep those guys was happy. I was a side show. So I had the freedom to run it myself while enjoying the facilities of the Laboratory. My best move came when the composer Ezra Sims became my "unofficial" adviser (and composition teacher); and much of what went into my thesis was the result of not only Sims' coaching but also his own experiences in using my software.

However, even before my graduate studies, Minsky made a mark in the world of computer music that never really got duly acknowledged. What I built for my senior thesis was basically a symbol manipulation system, whose symbols amounted to a hybrid of the fundamental constructs of music notation and the basic operators of a programming language. The former was, in just about any imaginable way, a predecessors of the MIDI coding system. Had Marvin been more concerned about intellectual property instead of chipping away at enormous research challenges, he probably could have made a strong case that what finally showed up in concrete form in my senior thesis would have been prior art for what MIDI had been trying to do. (On the other hand my work with Sims came about through a shared interest in microtonality. One of the first things I did, to satisfy the sort of expressiveness that most interested Sims, was divide the octave into 72 equal internals. My attachment to that representation was why I ignored MIDI during its first years of application.)

On a broader scale I acquired from Minsky the basic precept that finding the right questions to ask is always more important than answering them. In that respect I was glad to see the BBC quoting him on the downside of companies like Google and Facebook getting into artificial intelligence. He sees those companies trying to make money by commercializing things that never worked very well in the early stages of research. (There used to be a joke among graduate students that a thesis was based on a demonstration project that could only be applied to one example and did not even work reliably in that limited case!)

I suppose that Minsky was more interested in intelligence as a process, rather than a product that might eventually be marketed. In this respect he was a direct descendant of Alan Turing, whose "Turing Test" has been bastardized by contemporary technology hacks as a product that can vie in a competition, while Turing himself was more interested in the sorts of processes through which his "Imitation Game" could be played successfully. If those processes worked for a human player, then there was a good chance they could be implemented on a machine.

Minsky's background also endowed him with an appreciation of intelligence having a subjective dimension, that is elements that had more to do with psychology than with mathematics. Mind you, he believed that such subjectivity might eventually be mapped into a more objective domain; but he still knew enough to appreciate the difference. On the other hand I am not sure he appreciated that there was also a social dimension to intelligence, which may explain why he was often so impatient, if not bored, in many of his conversations.

That same comment that objects to commercialization advocates, instead, "giving support to individuals who have new ideas." I suppose that is why he took me on as a doctoral student. However, back when I was still trying to make a living in scientific research, I found very few such individuals when interviewing job candidates. Graduate schools were now coming out a crop of students who were most proficient at following orders, passed from funding organizations down through thesis advisers. I suppose that is why I am now happier these days writing on my own nickel (or, to be fair, nickels coming in part from the Social Security Administration). Even in the world of music, it is getting harder to come across "new ideas;" but I find the odds of finding them at a conservatory are better than those of finding them at even the best of the universities!

"… our pathetic native self"

I just finished reading Janet Malcom's harsh review of Jonathan Bate's recent biography of Ted Hughes, now available online prior to my receiving it in the next issue of The New York Review of Books. I was particularly pleased with her concluding paragraph, in which she dismissed the idea that a biography should be about what the subject was "really" like. Her punch line about that topic was:

If anything is our own business, it is our pathetic native self.

This left me wondering if this was her way of venting about the current mass addiction to social media, suggesting that whose who indulge most heavily are actually the most pathetic. In an earlier age (about which these addicts are totally oblivious), the prevailing motto would have been "Get a life!" In the absence of an authoritative voice to utter that maxim, such addicts can think of nothing to do other what broadcast every detail of "native self" to the entire Internet, neither knowing nor caring about how pathetic that act of broadcasting is.

Self-Documenting without Self

Financial Times writer Gautam Malkani was apparently given permission to write an opinion piece about Benedict Cumberbatch's (probably futile) attempt to get those attending his performances in Hamlet to cease and desist from capturing him (through photographs and/or video) on their personal portable devices. Whether or not Malkani himself wrote the sub-headline, it is a useful enough summary to spare the reader from some of the verbal games he plays that do not contribute very much to advancing his argument, particularly if that argument is flawed in the first place. That sub-headline is:

If we did not digitally document our life, our ‘self’ might cease to exist

That is quite a claim; but, in all likelihood it is as specious as it is compelling.

The logical flaw lies in that verb "document." Digital devices do not document. They capture signals that would otherwise stimulate our visual (and sometimes auditory) sensory organs. In the latter case those signals are, for all intents and purposes, meaningless until mind imposes order on them through a process that I like to call "sensemaking," having picked up that word from former colleagues.

Documentation is a similar process by which we try to make sense out of bodies of objective data that confront us (which may include the images we have captured on our portable devices). In other words documentation is, in a sense, an attempt, usually through writing, to reproduce the results of sensemaking achieved by mind. This brings us to Malkani's scare quotes. Many researchers of the nature of consciousness, such as Gerald Edelman and his acknowledged predecessor Friedrich Hayek, have made compelling arguments that "self" is not only the "engine" of sensemaking but also its product. In other words, to use Malkani's turn of phrase, "self" exists as a result of how we make sense of the signals we capture. It is neither the process of capturing nor the signals themselves.

This allows us to turn Malkani's conclusion on its head. The more obsessed we get with capturing the signals around us, the less obliged we seem to feel to "make sense" of them, which is to say to "document" them. The reductio ad absurdum is that we shall become mindless drones, sucking up all of the signals around us but leaving interpretation to someone else (except that there is no "someone else"). Rather than compensating for dementia, an obsession with capture contributes to further erosion of the capacity for sensemaking. Welcome to the world of the "hollow men!"

Polling Privacy and Security

Let's begin with the hard data that Lance Whitney presented in his Security & Privacy article for CNET News this morning:

Among 1,005 Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post, 56 percent said they believe that tracking phone records is an "acceptable way" to investigate terrorists. Taking the opposite view, 41 percent consider the practice unacceptable, while 2 percent weren't sure. 

Drilling further, 62 percent believe it's important for the government to track down potential terrorist threats even if that affects personal privacy. On the flip side, 34 percent said the government should not interfere with the privacy of its citizens even if that limits its power to investigate possible threats. 

Finally, 45 percent think the government should be able to "monitor everyone's e-mail and other online activities if officials say this might prevent future terrorist attacks," while 52 percent said they were against this practice.

This need not be surprising, but it would have been nice to know a bit about the poll itself. With a sample space as small as 1005, we deserve to know a bit more about its origins. Also, every pollster knows about how to frame questions in order to bias answers.

In other words, at the very least, one cannot really attach very much to these results without a hyperlink that provides a more thorough account of the polling process. The Pew Research Center is an independent think tank, but that tends to mean that their polls are supported by outside funding. It is unclear whether or not The Washington Post provided all of that funding; but, even if they did, it is important to remember that there is never any such thing as a "totally objective" poll. Thus, we have a right to know where subjective bias entered the process in this case.

Materialism and Teleology

The latest issue of The New York Review of Books has a fascinating article by biologist H. Allen Orr entitled “Awaiting a New Darwin.” The piece is a review of Thomas Nagel’s latest book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, which came out last September. Nagel is as disciplined in philosophy as Orr is in biology. Both have a longstanding reputation for the clear exposition of propositions based strictly on logical reasoning, rather than rhetorical showboating. Orr makes it clear that Nagel’s book should not be casually dismissed, but he makes it equally clear that he does not feel that Nagel’s claims have been adequately warranted.

Nagel’s point of departure is a familiar one, based on the nature of human consciousness. Nagel’s position is that consciousness is too subjective to be reduced to a materialist explanation based on the physical nature of brains and neurons (and, perhaps, matter itself). With this as a premise, he then claims that the current Neo-Darwinist model of natural selection cannot explain how consciousness came to be and offers, as an alternative, an approach he called “natural teleology.” Orr tries to clarify this approach with the following sentence:

Natural teleology doesn’t depend on any agent’s intentions; it’s just the way the world is.

Without going into details, I feel it necessary to recognize that, for many (Jürgen Habermas being a particularly good example), teleology is a highly objective process. From a mathematical point of view, one may think of it as the achievement of some goal, which may be represented as a point in some multidimensional landscape. The “world as it is,” so to speak, is another point in that landscape and teleology is concerned with how those two points are connected by a path and how that path may be found. This boils down to the mathematical problem of optimization, which means that Nagel seems to be advocating an objective technique to explain how we arrive at a subjective phenomenon, a materialist stance if ever there were one.

On the other hand the philosopher Isaiah Berlin has written very critically about the inadequacy of optimization (or, in his terminology, Utopian thinking). Berlin’s basic argument, nicely formulated in his essay “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” is that any Utopia, like that point of optimization on a multidimensional landscape, is static, meaning that, one a society or an individual “gets there,” so to speak, there is nowhere to go! Thus, in the subjective world, the only “static state” is death; and in the broader ecological scope of the natural world, even death is not a static point.

At least some of the materialist Neo-Darwinists are aware of this puzzle. Thus, the traditional Darwinian model of evolution through natural selection has given way to what has come to be called coevolution. The basic idea is that there is still a landscape; but the shape of that landscape changes to reflect what its “inhabitants” are doing. As the landscape changes, the “optimum point” on that landscape also changes. This means that, wherever you happen to be on the landscape, you have to keep rethinking the direction you want to go in order to get closer to your goal. This strikes me as what makes “natural” teleology natural, rather than merely mathematical. Back in October of 2011, I suggested that, because of coevolution, there may never be that “ideal” cure for the common cold. Every time new medication comes along, the landscape changes, and the cold virus follows natural selection according to a change in the criteria for fitness. (In that same post I suggest that the common cold is not that different from malware.)

Nagel never mentions coevolution in his book. However, Orr does not cite it either as a materialist school of thought. Many of its advocates came out of early research in artificial life, although Darwin himself described it in On the Origin of Species. To be fair, however, Nagel’s book is a short one, only 130 pages, which he uses simply to establish his position. Here is hoping that he develops that position in greater depth and that his digging will lead him to coevolution!

Another Order not Understood

From time to time I am still fond of quoting my favorite sentence from Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn:

Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.

I was reminded of it today while venturing into a 2001 paper by Caroline Palmer, Melissa K. Jungers, and Peter W. Jusczyk. The introduction includes this rather eyebrow-raising sentence:

Expression in music performance can be systematically affected by both structural dimensions (harmony, melody, rhythm, meter, etc.) and nonstructural dimensions (affect, tempo, other interpretive decisions), and it is often difficult to separate the two.

Actually, it is not that difficult to figure out how the authors achieved their separation. The "structural" dimensions are basically attributed captured by music notation; and anything else is "nonstructural!"

It might be better to say that those "nonstructural" dimensions are not as objective as the "structural" ones; but that just means that their structure arises from subjective, or possibly social, factors that may not be understood, probably through lack of trying. The fact is that description that can only be distilled to what is represented objectively in notation will never get at the actual practices of performing music, where notation plays a role but not always the dominating role. Ultimately, the authors' judgment reduces to that of the drunk looking for his lost keys under a lamppost because the light is better there.

Passing By

My reading of Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra has now progressed to the third part.  One of the chapters that piqued my attention there is "On Passing By."  The "punch line" here is:

… where one can no longer love, there one should pass by.

This triggered a memory of a quote from the French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu, which back in 2008 I was fond of citing in a variety of political settings:

There is nothing worse than to pass unnoticed ….

In this case, however, it is time to fill in that ellipsis:

There is nothing worse than to pass unnoticed: thus, not to salute someone is to treat him like a thing, an animal, or a woman.

In other words both Nietzsche's "passing by" and Bourdieu's "passing unnoticed" amount to the same act, which I have also called "objectifying the subject."

From this point of view, what appears as little more than neglect on the surface may actually serve as a precursor to violence.  While reviewing the episodes of the first season of Caprica in preparation for the beginning of the second, I was struck by one exchange between the Adama brothers, Joseph the lawyer and Sam the hit man.  Joseph asks Sam how he kills someone;  and, after considerable resistance, Sam finally spits out, "Tell yourself it's not real."  In other words create the mindset that you are only manipulating objects, which, in a sense, is precisely what is happening in the virtual world that figures so heavily in the plot line.  Today the BBC ran a video story about the coming release of "Saw II: Flesh & Blood," the second video game to spin off of the series of movies of the same name.  Presumably, this too depends on the player telling himself (herself?) that "it's not real."

The question, however, is why we have such a history of creating such situations for ourselves, whether it comes to the "objectification" of slaves, Jews in concentration camps, or terrorists hiding in caves.  (What is the drone if not the ultimate instrument in a video game?)  Nietzsche seems to suggest that this comes about "where one can no longer love;"  but he never takes on the question of either why or how one comes to the loss of that capacity.  Perhaps he saw the loss of love as one of those inevitable forces of nature, no different in category from a devastating flood;  and through his own objectifying lenses he saw those forces as being of little consequence in the grander scheme of things.  Can we be just as objective, or is it time to recognize that there are consequences that, too, cannot be passed unnoticed?

Productively Counterproductive

Benjamin Netanyahu can say whatever he wants to distance both himself and any "official" Israeli position from Avigdor Lieberman's speech to the United Nations;  but the content of Lieberman's speech is the moral equivalent of toothpaste out of the tube, not to mention the truly Faustian bargain that Netanyahu had to make in order to form a government in the first place.  Were this sort of thing happening in any other country, we would declare the inability of a prime minister to exercise control over any member of his cabinet, particularly a foreign minister, with a broader view of national interest in mind to be evidence of a "failed state."  In this case, however, the country is Israel;  and even the faintest suggestion that such a phrase may be applicable is as off-limits as photographs of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on crutches used to be.

The good news is that there is at least one Israeli who knows how to take stock of a situation like this.  His name is Avishai Margalit, he is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and, for the purposes of this argument, he is the author of the book On Compromise And Rotten Compromises.  His Wikipedia entry provides an excellent summarization of the thesis of this book:

The book ^[14] deals with political compromises: what compromises are morally acceptable and what are to be rejected as unacceptable, or "rotten." The argument of the book assigns great value to the spirit of compromise in politics, while warning against rotten ones. A rotten compromise is taken to be a compromise with a regime that exercises inhuman policies, namely systematic behavior that mixes cruelty with humiliation or and treats humans as inhuman.

If we accept Max Weber's thesis that the study of politics is basically the study of the power to exercise authority, then, from a political point of view, the noun "regime" can be applied to a political institution within a country, as well as to the country itself.  This is an important perspective, since every coalition government is a product of compromise and therefore should be subject to Margalit's criteria for "rottenness."  With these criteria as a guideline, we should consider the BBC account of Lieberman's remarks to the United Nations:

In his speech, the leader of the right-wing nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict hinged not just on practical issues but on "emotional problems", such as the "utter lack of confidence".


"That is why the solution should also be a two-staged one," he said. "We should focus on coming up with a long-term intermediate agreement, something that could take a few decades."


"We need to raise an entire new generation that will have mutual trust and will not be influenced by incitement and extremist messages."
He also said the guiding principle for a final agreement should not be "land for peace, but rather exchange of populated territory".


"We are not talking about population transfer but about defining borders so as best to reflect the demographic reality," he added.


Mr Lieberman said the "other misguided argument is the claim that the Palestinian issue prevents a determined international front against Iran".


"In truth, the connection between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is precisely reversed. Iran can exist without Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, but the terrorist organizations cannot exist without Iran."


"Relying on these proxies Iran can, at any given time, foil any agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, or with Lebanon."

What may be most important is that, in the midst of his laundry list of terrorist organizations, Lieberman has scrupulously avoided the use of any language that recognizes any of the people involved.  He thus applies the rhetorical device, which seems to be particularly popular among conservatives representing the vested interests of the powerful, of "objectifying the subject," keeping off the table any recognition that this is a matter of human beings taking motivated actions.  To deny any consideration of motive is, in Margalit's framework, to treat the acting human as inhuman.  To this we may then at least hypothesize factors of cruelty and/or humiliation behind Lieberman's talk of "demographic reality."

In the context of this reading of Lieberman's text, the walkout by Palestinian delegates during his speech is entirely understandable.  However, I would take issue with Permanent Observer Riyad Mansour's effort to be diplomatic about the affair, telling a Reuters representative:

This man is completely detached from political reality.

On the contrary I would suggest that Lieberman understands the political reality all too well.  He knows that he has gotten his position through a truly rotten compromise, he appreciates the power now at his disposal, and he has never been shy about exercising that power from the time of his appointment.  This is nothing more than his recognizing another opportunity to recognize that power.  He is the metaphorical leopard whose spots can never change.

From this point of view, "failed state" rhetoric misses the point.  More important is that the Israeli government has sanctioned the formation of a power structure through a rotten compromise.  How, then, are the other governmental institutions of the world to deal with this structure?  Can they arrive at a consensus, with or without the United Nations as a setting for debate;  or will they just muddle along with the status quo, as they have traditionally been wont to do?  When we consider just how drastic the consequences may be (not to mention those consequences that have already ensued), muddling certainly does not seem like an option for the well-being of the world at large;  but, like it or not, it may be as inevitable as entropy.

When Conservatives Made Sense

Having written yesterday about my rules of thumb for deciding what I read from the screen and what I read as marks on paper, I though I would reflect on a reading experience from the latter category that I just completed. This was Alan Wolfe's online review of the new edition of Robert Nisbet's The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom, which was published on the Web site for The New Republic. I am not shy in confessing that I am very selective in reading anything that The New Republic publishes, but I was drawn to both Nisbet's title and my respect for Wolfe as a writer. After all it was only last July that I was writing about the extent to which the sense of community identity had come under siege in the wake of the rising obsession with "social networks;" so this seemed to be a good time to bone up on some of the more traditional thoughts about community that the world the Internet has made was willing to consign to the dustbin of history.

I quickly discovered that there was more in this particular dustbin than the book itself. There was also an academic practice that would probably be dismissed as unforgiveable heresy today. Having acknowledged that The Quest for Community was "one of the major works of American conservatism" in the Fifties, Wolfe reflected on the quotation with which he began his review:

The uneasiness, the malaise of our time, is due to this root fact: in our politics and economy, in family life and religion—in practically every sphere of our existence—the certainties of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have disintegrated or been destroyed and, at the same time, no new sanctions or justifications for the new routines we live, and must live, have taken hold.

Wolfe observed that these were not Nisbet's words but a citation from the writings of C. Wright Mills, who was as much a representative of left-wing thinking in the United States as Nisbet represented the right. Here is how Wolfe described this particular meeting of minds:

As hard as it might be to imagine in our wildly polarizing times, thinkers from both the right and the left once found themselves intellectually linked. What joined them together was something called the theory of mass society. Flabbergasted by the seeming success of totalitarianism, and worried that its effects lingered on in the form of overweening state power, corporatist private institutions, and popular susceptibility to advertising and image-manipulation, writers such as Nisbet and Mills were among the many, including Hannah Arendt, Edward Shils, Joseph Schumpeter, Dwight Macdonald, and Richard Hofstadter, who put mass irrationality ahead of class interest in their understanding of their society, and turned to European thinkers such as José Ortega y Gasset and Emil Lederer for such an analysis.

That is quite a laundry list of social theorists, and it is more than a little disconcerting to realize that their very conception of mass irrationality has become rather feeble in the context of the world the Internet has made.

This brings us to what I felt was the key paragraph in Wolfe's account of Nisbet's thinking:

Nisbet can be understood as a conservative communitarian. Although he was more concerned with oppressive state power than he was with corporate dominance of society, he recognized that bigness in any form was alien to his vision of a good society. “Not all the asserted advantages of mass production and corporate bigness,” he wrote, “will save capitalism if its purposes become impersonal and remote, separated from the symbols and relationships that have meaning in human lives.” One can only imagine Nisbet’s reaction to corporations that treat human communities as ruthlessly as the natural environment. I cannot see this man as an apologist for BP or as a fan of globalization.

Indeed, one cannot imagine a better example of that alienating "bigness" than Tom Friedman's vision of globalization, which has enabled that "corporate dominance of society" on a scale far broader than Nisbet could have ever dreamed. How has that dominance (which I have preferred to call "the war against the poor") been achieved; and why do I associate it with the world the Internet has made? The reason is that focus on technology begets a focus on the objective world to the exclusion of the influences of the subjective and social worlds. Back in 2007 I summarized that focus as follows:

It is the ultimate objectification of the subject, which is to say, the reduction of anyone not in that ruling class to slavery (or, if you prefer Hayek's terminology, serfdom).

In Wolfe's language a world without subjects is a world without "the symbols and relationships that have meaning in human lives," which takes us back to those two major social risks that Jürgen Habermas identified in the writings of Max Weber: the risks of loss of meaning and loss of freedom. Unfortunately, things do not look any better today than they did when Habermas wrote about Weber in his Theory of Communicative Action. Indeed, if all those thinkers from the Fifties could not dig us out of the dark pit of mass irrationality, is there any reason to believe that current thinkers can do a better job?

Phenomenological Music Theory

Yesterday afternoon, while gathering background material for an Examiner.com review of a recent Brilliant Classics collection of Pyotr Tchaikovsky's ballet music (along with a few other selections) performed by Ernest Ansermet conducting his Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, I found an interesting sentence in the Wikipedia entry for Ansermet:

In Ansermet's book, Les fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine (1961), he sought to prove, using Husserlian phenomenology and partly his own mathematical studies [Ansermet began as a mathematics professor at the University of Lausanne], that Schoenberg's idiom was false and irrational.

Arnold Schoenberg died in 1951; but, even ten years after his death, there were still strong factions willing to attack him at the drop of a hat. Furthermore, not only was Schoenberg not around to defend himself in 1961 but also many of his staunchest defenders were probably more deserving of attack on grounds of the nature of human consciousness than Schoenberg was.

Consider, for example, the misconceived enthusiasm of René Leibowitz, who got caught up in the mathematics behind the permutation of twelve tone rows and lost all awareness of the music that employed those rows. In 1945 Schoenberg wrote a letter to him that tried to reprimand him with the words:

I do not compose principles, but music.

This is very much in the same league as another of my favorite Schoenberg quotations:

My music is not modern; it's just badly played.

I suspect that what bothered Ansermet most about Schoenberg's music was not the music itself but the scholarly obsession with only talking about that music in the most objective terms. Since he was no slouch in mathematics, he probably figured he could take on all of those amateurs fooling around with permutation groups on the mathematical ground they so cherished and understood so poorly. Furthermore, when it comes to confronting the inadequacies of the objective world, Husserlian phenomenology is as good a weapon as any.

The problem is that, if we follow Edmund Husserl's guidance into the subjective world, we find ourselves on turf where words like "false" and "irrational" do not amount to very much. In what Friedrich Hayek called the phenomenal world in The Sensory Order, there is no true-or-false about the way in which our consciousness organizes physical sensations, nor does the rationality of a logical calculus pertain to how that organization is achieved. Ultimately, Ansermet did not need to resort to mathematics to bash in the skulls of those who recognized only permutation groups. All he needed was a platform to enjoin those "amateurs" to spend less time looking at the score pages and more time listening to well-played performances. From a theoretical point of view, Husserl offers some interesting lenses through which we may consider the act of listening; but, considering the patience it takes to negotiate many of his texts, Ansermet probably could have selected a better advocate. On the other hand, had he been more willing to embrace the full scope of Husserlian phenomenology, Ansermet would probably have been less inclined to attack Schoenberg himself in the first place!

Another Division into Three Worlds

One of the major repercussions of my personal efforts to make sense of the writings of Jürgen Habermas has been my ongoing effort to recognize distinctions between the objective, subjective, and social worlds and to avoid cross-world confusions. With my more recent reading of Friedrich Hayek's The Sensory Order, I now also find myself thinking in terms of distinctions between the physical and phenomenal worlds. However, when I was recently reviewing for a friend some past work I had done in geology, I realized that this was only a portion of another more general three-world view, which Hayek actually recognized in The Sensory Order but never pursued in any great depth. Hayek recognized that the "sensory order" we impose on our phenomenal world is a product of observation; but he also appreciated that our capacity for observation is often enhanced by measuring instruments, such as a telescope or microscope. I wish to argue that, as our technologies for building such measuring instruments has grown more sophisticated, measurement itself has achieved the status of a "world" of its own that mediates between the physical and phenomenal worlds.

This is, by no means, an original insight. In retrospect I would have to say that I was first exposed to it through one of the programs in Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man series on PBS, which was followed not much later by a Nova program entitled "Through Animal Eyes." In both cases the point was the same, observation depends on equipment, whether that equipment is biological or mechanical.

I suspect that one of the reasons I am now thinking in these terms is that it is relevant to the current situation in the Gulf of Mexico. I have given this problem considerable thought, because some of the best years of my career as a researcher took place at the Schlumberger-Doll Research Laboratory in Ridgefield, Connecticut. I was there as part of a team that was basically concerned with providing Schlumberger with better software, and the specifications for that software had a lot to do with the way in which Schlumberger ran its business. The "core competency" (as we say now) of Schlumberger was measurement technology; and the value of that competency to the oil business still cannot be overestimated. After all the most important part of the oil business concerns what is below the surface of the earth, which makes it even more removed from our capacity for observation than much of what we see through telescopes and microscopes. The Schlumberger brothers began processes of invention that I assume continue to the present day that involved harnessing principles of electromagnetism, radiation, acoustics, and other disciplines of modern physics to develop instrumentation that would tell us what was underground. Some of that equipment could be used to identify where you wanted to try to drill a well, but most of it involved measuring devices dropped into the bore of the well as part of the drilling process.

The signals provided by those instruments could be called "observables" only through some stretch of the imagination. One could not, at an intuitive level, "see" what was there through the mediation of this equipment. Thus a major part of the oil business revolved around the analysis of measurement data for interpretations that told you things like where the oil was and what you would have to do to bring it to the surface. In Hayek's terms this means that analysts had to bring "sensory order" to the abundance of data provided by the measuring equipment. In theory that order could be grounded in the physical theory of how the equipment worked. To put it simplistically, the underlying physics would explain everything. Unfortunately, this was not necessarily the case for a variety of reasons. Some of the measurements were based on statistical sampling, and you did not always know whether or not the samples were representative. In other cases the behavior of the equipment might depend on physical properties of the earth that had not been anticipated. Thus, there was an inevitable disconnect between the physical world and the "measurement world."

This was probably the setting in which I first learned that not everything could be reduced to understanding the equipment. Sometimes you also had to understand the behavior of those responsible for doing the interpretation itself. It was how I discovered workplace anthropology before realizing that it was an intellectual discipline. The good news is that my decision to shift the focus of my research from the "measurement objects" to the "interpreting subjects" was, for the most part, well received by those subjects. These were guys who enjoyed talking about what they did, primarily because it was the most reliable means through which their skills could be passed to the next generation of interpreters. As far as they were concerned, talking to me was no different than talking to a new kid on site; and I still thank them for the most memorable years of my career in computer research.

None of this is meant in any way to apologize for what happened in the Gulf of Mexico on BP's watch. I was never an expert on safety procedures, but I knew how important they were. Nevertheless, I think it is important to recognize that it is extremely unlikely, if not impossible, to identify definitively what actually happened down where the drilling was taking place, let alone what is happening now. Anything that will ever be offered as "observation" will always be mediated by equipment; and not all interpretations of the signals from that equipment are necessarily "perfectly reliable" (whatever that may mean). Uncertainty is part of the job, and any investigation into what actually happened can only address whether or not BP was taking appropriate actions in the face of that uncertainty. Knowing what I know about our government, I have a hard time believing that either our Executive or Legislative branch has the resources to make such a judgment; and I can only hope that they will at least be able to draw upon the expertise of those more familiar with this aspect of the oil business.

Putting a Price on "Free" Information

Those who have decided that they have heard the information-wants-to-be-free barbarism too many times will probably enjoy a report by Jo Wade on the BBC News Web site under the title "Paying the price for a free web." In many ways this report reflects the spirit of Robert Greenwald's documentary about Wal-Mart, whose subtitle was The High Cost of Low Price. The IMDb page for this 2005 film summarizes it with the tagline, "It will change the way you think, feel - and shop…." Wade clearly believes that it is about time we change the way we think and feel about how we use the Internet. The basic argument is the usual one: Most Internet users do not realize how much personal information they are revealing to others. The value of Wade's report is the way in which its conclusion reduces this situation to terms as clear as those Greenwald had invoked in making his case against Wal-Mart:

Every day Google gathers millions of search terms that help them refine their search system and give them a direct marketing bonanza that they keep for months.

Every week Facebook receives millions of highly personal status updates that are kept forever and are forming the basis of direct advertising revenue.

Every month free newspapers plant and track a cookie tracking device on your computer that tells them what your range of interests are and allows them to shape their adverts and in the future, even content around you.

So you're not just being watched, you're being traded. The currency has changed.

The currency is now information - your information. Businesses can use that information to make big money.

Daily we hand over the minutiae of our lives in return for a convenient and free web.

As an observer of technology, I have railed for some time against the way in which Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology has turned "desubjectivized" customers by turning them into objects that are manipulated and processed by software. Wade has framed the conclusion of this report in a way that takes this argument to the next level: The Internet user is no longer "just" an object; the user is a commodity. Now for some time there are have arguments about the extent to which the ruling class has turned the rest of the world into a slave class through mechanisms such as that of a "consciousness industry;" but a commoditized individual is nothing more than a slave. One no longer needs a consciousness industry to keep that individual from failing to recognize his/her enslaved state. One need only dole out some kind of gratification, such as "free information!"

Insulting the Victim?

Ina Fried has continued to track the Sidekick data-loss story for CNET News. However, as I tried to indicate on Sunday, this is a case where we need to go beyond the "facts of the story," so to speak, and interpret those facts in an effort to derive useful lessons-learned. Such interpretation is often facilitated by trying to align the evidence we have with models from the past (along the lines of the "thinking in time" strategy of Richard Neustadt and Ernest May); so we can then draw upon those models to draw inferences and make decisions. I proposed two such models on Sunday, the narrative of Robert Heinlein's 1940 story "Blowups Happen" and the Northeast Blackout of 1965. The former was a fictitious account of how to deal with the problem of a technology failure having catastrophic consequences for an unexpectedly large number of people. The second involved a failure that affected 25 million people but probably not on the catastrophic scale that Heinlein had considered. I neglected to mention 9/11 as a possible model, primarily because, from a narrative point of view, this is still very much a narrative-in-progress; so it would be hazardous to reason from a model that has not yet reached a point of closure.

Nevertheless, our experiences since 9/11 may help us focus on the sorts of questions we should be asking in planning our actions. Two questions stand out as worthy of consideration:

1. How do we compensate for the physical damage to "get things working again?"
2. How do we compensate for the personal damage to the victims of the physical damage?

Last night Fried ran a follow-up report, which indicates that these questions are being addressed by T-Mobile, if not by Microsoft. Regarding the first question:

T-Mobile said late on Monday that it may yet be able to recover Sidekick users' information that it had previously thought was lost as part of a massive server failure by Microsoft's Danger subsidiary.

"Recent efforts indicate the prospects of recovering some lost content may now be possible," it said.

As Fried observes, this "marks a significant change in tone." I would characterize that change as a shift from "What's done is done" to "We're working on it." From the point of view of recognizing that "customer relationship" is a social, rather than technical, matter, this is definitely a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of how the second question has been addressed:

Those who do suffer permanent data loss will get a $100 "customer appreciation card" good toward T-Mobile service or products, the carrier said in a statement.

"For those who fall into this category, details will be sent out in the next 14 days - there is no action needed on the part of these customers," T-Mobile said. "We however remain hopeful that for the majority of our customers, personal content can be recovered."

Granted that it is never easy to put a price on pain and suffering, $100 sounds like a pretty cheap way to deal with personal reactions to this problem; and providing that compensation through a "customer appreciation card" just rubs salt in a wound whose pain is highly subjective. One can imagine that there are going to be customers who would like nothing better that to sever entirely their connections to T-Mobile, and it is hard to imagine their opinion being changed by the prospect of doing another $100 worth of business with the carrier at that carrier's expense.

The intrusion of impersonal technology into making decisions about people has been the latest swing of the pendulum in business attitudes towards customers. We have seen the two extremes of "the customer is always right" and "the customer be damned;" and we know that the pendulum will continue to swing. These days the basic attitude it that dealing with customers is no longer a matter of skill, because training procedures now tend to presume that all relevant activities may now be facilitated, if not entirely assumed, by Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. This is not to suggest that CRM technology puts a price on buying back the favor of an offended customer, but the technology does encourage the mindset that any personal problem can be solved by writing a check. There are probably many irate customers out there who would like nothing more than to see T-Mobile crash and burn, not realizing (or not caring) that none of the alternatives are likely to be any better (or, for that matter, worse). The best we can hope is that this whole affair will kick the pendulum back in the direction of treating the customer as "subject, rather than object;" but this seems about as unlikely as the prospect of engineering practices that design for recovery as much as for functionality!

The Way We Really Were

My wife cannot stand Mad Men. For all I know, she is so put off by all of the characters that she may well regard the intensity of my attention to this program in the same light as the guilty pleasure of going to a carnival freak show. From James Baldwin's point of view, she may be right. Hilton Als' piece about Michael Jackson for The New York Review included a quote of Baldwin's claim that "freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated—in the main, abominably—because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires." There is certainly no delicacy in the ways in which Mad Men treats its characters, all desperately clinging to their Fifties values in the period immediately following the election of President John F. Kennedy. However, that uncompromising (not necessarily abominable) treatment appeals to my interest in "origins mythology." Having become a culture without a sense of history, we can celebrate the 40th anniversary of Woodstock by listening to the music and ignoring how that enormous party came to be; but there is something that depresses me about remembering Woodstock without remembering the "profound terrors and desires" of the youth culture that inspired the gathering in the first place. Those terrors and desires live and thrive in the Mad Men scripts, recalling a time when racism and anti-Semitism were socially normative and when women both knew and kept "their place."

On the other hand my wife has also acquired a revived interest in the films of Otto Preminger; and, as a result, last night we began to watch Advise & Consent, which I had recorded on our VTR during our vacation. In its own way this, too, is a freak show of normative social practices; and, at a time when we seem to be experiencing political behavior at its vilest when the future of our health care is at stake, the film serves the interests of "origins mythology" particularly well. For those of us old enough to remember the 1960 Presidential campaign and the "profound terrors and desires" it awakened over the prospect of changing the status quo, all of the characters in the film are familiar. They were carefully crafted, originally by novelist Allen Drury, to avoid identification with specific individuals; but we still know them very well, even if they are no more than stereotypes.

Both Mad Men and Advise & Consent are fascinating because, in both cases, we now see how their respective narratives played out into unexpected futures, both of which seem to have converged on a general loss of our sense of humanity. Both advertising and politics are far more depersonalized today than they were half a century ago. Whether it involves purchasing consumer products or voting for candidates, we have been reduced to numbers in databases at the mercy of experts who claim they know how to interpret those numbers. Thus, we can read both narratives in terms of what they tell us about the beginning of a descent. Under better circumstances we might then be able to read those narratives for suggestions about reversing that descent; but our "culture without a sense of history" his little interest in such a reading. To the extent that we enjoy the narratives at all, it is for that amusement once provided by carnival freak shows; but we are deaf to those echoes that Baldwin heard in considering those freaks.

The Curse of Overqualification

I may be writing from Maine, but I am keeping my San Francisco Chronicle RSS feeds active. Thus, being on Eastern Time, I got the jump on this morning's piece about the job crisis by Jill Tucker. Her basic point concerns an aspect of the unemployment crisis that seems to have received little attention in Washington:

When Robert Stovall applied for a job Sunday, he hid something from his past.

It wasn't an arrest, a firing or an outstanding warrant. It was a doctorate in public administration.

He really wanted the job at Kohl's department store.

Out of work more than a year, and with hundreds of resumes unanswered, the 58-year-old in the pale blue suit and thin black tie was among the more than 1,000 people expected to apply this week in a Burlingame hotel conference room for the 150 or so jobs at the chain's new department store opening soon in Millbrae.

And he didn't want to appear overqualified.

After a long career working in the nonprofit world of youth and foster care and with a master's degree in counseling (still on his resume), he gave himself long odds for a Kohl's job, resigned to paying his mortgage with a home equity line of credit instead of a paycheck.

So just what qualifications are at stake for this particular job? The official line from Kohl's is that they are not asking for very much:

"If you can smile and say hello, we can teach you all the other facets of working in a Kohl's store," said district manager Jason Bittner. "But we can't teach you how to smile and how to want to help customers."

Presumably, then, counseling would be an asset, while the general attitude of reflective inquiry associated with a doctorate would be a liability. My guess is that the liability has less to do with whether or not Stovall can engage with others helpfully and more to do with the risk that he might ask too many questions during his training. In other words Kohl's, along with just about every retail outlet like them, now operates under a training regimen that basically deskills the nature of customer relationships. As a corollary, a business process that takes the skill out of engaging with the customer also takes the humanity out of the customer. Thus, where once "any successful salesman could tell you the quickest path to failure was to treat the customer as an object, rather than a subject," the "objectification of the subject," now taken for granted in the Customer Relationship Management world of telemarketing and the Internet, has become business-as-usual in the world of face-to-face retailing. From that point of view, Kohl's is probably right in assuming that Stovall is overqualified to engage with customers the way they want him to; and that does not bode well for those of us who are likely to be retail customers at any establishment that follows the same model that Kohl's does.

A Very Small Value of "Semantics"

I have now encountered several articles from a variety of my RSS feeds on Google's supposed "semantic stance" towards search, which was launched at Searchology 2009. Having now read Tom Krazit's report for the News division of the CNET Web site, I think I am beginning to form some impressions. On the basis of the few examples I have seen, I have decided that I am reminded of an old joke very popular among engineers (and just as unpopular among mathematicians):

π is equal to 3 for very small values of π (or very large values of 3)

One may call Google's new approach to the delivery of search results "semantic" for very small values of "semantic." Thus, the example that Krazit illustrated, involving the delivery of a rating in the display of a search result from Yelp, basically involves an a priori agreement between Google and Yelp:

1. Google agrees that the rating is the part the search result that the user most wants to see
2. Yelp agrees to represent the contents of its pages in a way that makes it easy for Google to find that rating

This may be a small step towards honoring Ludwig Wittgenstein's precept that the "life" of a sign (or, in Google's case, a keyword) lies in how that sign is used; but it is unclear that it can be generalized beyond cases in which the use of that sign is represented by nothing more than an a priori agreement to provide another sign (whose relevance cannot help but be highly context-dependent). Put another way, any view of use that is limited to an association with one or more other signs overlooks the extent to which the user of that sign is a motivated agent. Any inference one makes as to how to deliver information about such a sign/keyword must be guided by the motives of the searcher who invoked that keyword. Wittgenstein would have loved to find a viable way to deduce motives from signs, but he was doomed to frustration. So the best he could do was analyze the nature of his frustrations, and in doing so he educated the rest of us in why questions of semantics are a subtly elusive as they are.

Is there a way out of this frustration? If there is, I doubt that it will have anything to do with new ways of packaging search results, such as what Google has now dubbed "Rich Snippets." My guess is that any progress will come from taking a more verb-based approach to search, recognizing that search is a motivated action and trying to satisfying the searcher through some beneficial exchange of communicative actions, rather than just plunking a collection of Rich Snippets in front of the searcher and hoping for the best. This will require reaching beyond the objective world of more sophisticated systems of signs to represent the content of Web pages into the subjective world of the searcher, which is where all motives reside. This is likely to be difficult but not impossible. We tend to understand the motives of others through the conversations we hold with them. Perhaps, if Google were to spend as much time on building models of those conversations as it builds on building metadata models of all the pages on the World Wide Web, they might finally crack the problem of how to deliver a more semantic approach to search and the delivery of search results.

Linguistic and Musical Performance

Those who, at one time or another, have struggled with Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax probably remember his "fundamental distinction between competence (the speaker-hearer's knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations)." Section 2 of the first ("Methodological Preliminaries") chapter is entitled "Toward a Theory of Performance." It runs about six pages in length, leaving the reader with the impression that performance is little more than as set of "implementation details" that can be derived from those models behind his theory of competence; and that is pretty much all Chomsky had to say about performance in his 250-page book. It is also worth noting that Chomsky believed that any model of semantics would similarly be grounded in a model of syntactic competence.

Revisiting Chomsky reminded me to how important it was that Jürgen Habermas chose to shift the playing field from a theory of syntax (or, for that matter, a theory of language that afforded less secondary attention to semantics) to a theory of "communicative action," returning the emphasis to performance as a particular form of human behavior through which communication takes place. This shift had it origins in his search for a "universal pragmatics," which serves as a valuable reminder that, while pragmatics had been a major element in semiotic theory, it was totally absent from Chomsky's Aspects. Whether or not Habermas' subsequent Theory of Communicative Action ultimately resolved that search for a universal pragmatics is less important than the fact that his research introduced a major paradigm shift from attention to language-as-artifact to communication-as-behavior.

I bring attention to this paradigm shift, because I think it may guide the way we think about the performance of music, whether or not such performance conforms in any useful way to Habermas' model of communicative action. Most important is that Habermas' theory is grounded on the principle that communication spans the three "worlds" we inhabit: the objective world, the subjective world, and the social world. The performance of music also spans these three worlds, and I shall now try to outline why I take this to be the case.

In many ways the objective world of music performance is not that different from Chomsky's world in which linguistic performance is derived from the abstract structures of syntactic competence. As its name implies, the objective world is a world of objects; and there is a rather wide variety of objects that figure in the performance of music. From a Chomskyan point of view, the primary objects would be artifacts of notation; and performance is a matter of how those artifacts are interpreted, very much in the same vein as the approach to performance in Aspects. However, where music is concerned, the instruments that produce the actual "acoustic signals" are also objects; and there are many rigid approach to pedagogy that attempt to reduce the basics of performance to a relationship between performer-as-object and instrument-as-object, trying to "micromanage," so to speak, the physical actions of the performer. Similarly, we should also think of recordings of performances as objects, which is why I have had particular interest in the extent to which the visualization of those objects may facilitate (or impede) our skills in listening. Finally, just as there is a pedagogical strategy to viewing the performer as an object, there are (highly?) limited ways in which the performer may view other performers as objects, providing such information as specific cues or the general beat, which rarely proceeds with the consistency of a metronome.

However, if we are to view the performance of music as a communicative action, then we need to recognize that, like any other communicative action, the actions themselves are motivated; and, when we introduce the concept of motive, we move from the world of objects to the subjectivity of the individual doing the communicating. In the bluntest of terms, you cannot communicate without having something to say and without having a reason to say it. It is that need for a motivated reason that led (motivated?) Habermas to view communication through the lenses of his "universal pragmatics;" and it is this move to the subjective world that Chomsky tried to abstract out of the picture of linguistic behavior. Unfortunately, our understanding of this subjective world is probably the weakest of the three worlds of the Habermas framework. The problem is that there are few data points upon which we can draw for why people choose to perform music at all; and most of those data points come from interviews, which have a surface structure that may not always reveal a more informative deep structure. One might suggest that an understanding of the subjective world requires a shift from the mindset of music theory to that of psychoanalysis. However, the one time I heard a psychoanalyst lecture about music, he was discussing Ludwig van Beethoven; and there were serious flaws in his reasoning!

We understand the social world better because performing music is almost always a social matter, within which very rich communicative actions take place. In chamber music those actions take place through the tightly-coupled social network of the entire ensemble. In a larger ensemble, such as an orchestra, the network is more hierarchical, usually involving intervening layers of concertmaster and section leaders between most of the performers and the conductor. The study of this social world is also facilitated by the extent to which most (if not all) of those communicative actions need to be explicit. Thus, we can take advantage of video documents of performances to inform us about those communicative actions in ways that audio recordings can never do. Nevertheless, we need a better understanding of how to read the "raw data" of such video recordings, just as I (and many others) have tried to take on the problem of visualizing the contents of audio recordings. Even then, however, any video document is only a fragment of the entire process, since it abstracts away all of the communicative actions that have taken place in the rehearsals (which is why not all communicative actions are necessarily explicit) that preceded the performance (not to mention a richer history of communicative actions in the "life story" of the ensemble itself).

Perhaps the only conclusion one may draw from this excursion is that any analytic study of musical performance involves more difficulties than any mere human scholars can manage. However, this is one of those rare cases where I have to confess to being optimistic about technology. If nothing else, technology continues to make progress in making manageable large masses of data previously thought to be unmanageable. Such manageability is often arrived at through groping efforts, trying out certain information processing techniques, discovering their limitations, and developing new techniques to compensate for those limitations. However, if we compare our understanding of musical performance today with what we knew fifty years ago, when the very idea of "information processing" was just beginning to rear its head, there are plenty of grounds to conclude that we have made progress in our groping. If my "big picture" of musical performance is still beyond our current scope of understanding, it may still help us to choose where we next want to grope.