in which I give too much credence to the History Channel

I’m taking a short break from what will hopefully be more posts on music and music-related matters to enter a piece of dismay toward a select population of human beings. I try not to dwell upon the foibles of my fellow sentient, carbon-based, hairless ape bipeds, but there is one in particular that is nothing more than irascible: the idea or suggestion that humans are not responsible for such things as the Pyramids, Machu Picchu, or other ancient wonders of the world, but alien beings, extraterrestrials, are.

On cable television and upon the lips of many a conspiracist there is spoken speculation rife with “proof” hailing from ancient texts that the technologies, drive, will, and inspiration to create early technological wonders and architectural feats of derring-do came from “above.” Prophets of old spoke of visions where they encountered “flying machines” or beautiful creatures that could not appear to be human upon first glance, and many a modern person has taken this out of the original contexts and decided that extraterrestrial visitors imbued us with the knowledge to break the surly bonds of earth. Stonehenge, the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens – but especially the Pyramids – were, say these modern charlatans of human ability, not just divinely-inspired but extraterrestrially-wrought, with beings from beyond Gaia and the Solar System instructing us how to cut stone blocks precisely, fit them precisely, and orient them precisely in order to serve some astrological or astronomical purpose and to simultaneously fill our fellow human beings with an awe and reverence at the might of rulers.

The bases the current speculators have for these extra-cosmic pedagogues are thin: primarily, the absence of proof of extraterrestrial intervention, in a coup of detournement, becomes the open door for proof that it could have happened. This is akin to stating that because Toronto did not burn to the ground in 1837 does not mean there is no proof that it did not burn down in 1837. Speculators also point to the continual reverence of Sky and Solar deities across early civilizations, be they Egyptian, Vedic, or Indian. The problem here is a lack of grounding in Jung and Campbell: every early civilization created and subsequently revered solar, lunar, and celestial deities. These are universals across Civilization for the very simple reasons that solar, lunar, and celestial cycles were less understood than other natural phenomena. It sounds daringly trite, but the sky was the last unexplored (in a sense) territory of the human condition only until Montgolfier and the Wright brothers: we as a human society could not conquer it, nor tame it, nor show dominion over the actions. As early civilizations slowly progressed, more was learned about the placement of stars, the movement and phases of the moon, and so on – early mystic and mythological associations were attached to Equinoxes and Solstices, to New Moons and Full Moons, and, especially, to eclipses – which, at least with the ancient Babylonians and Chinese, were eventually categorized and compiled into cyclical predictor charts which have proved largely correct. Otherwise, it is easy to understand the naïve logic of veneration for the celestial: to use Mongolian animism as an example, the Sky itself is the overlord deity – it is largely uniform in color, has a predictable cycle, and is the only natural entity that seems to be ever present, unchanging; the only deity from which a human cannot hide. Conflating, however, the mythical mystery of the sky with the notion that physical bodies came from beyond it to give us knowledge is a grotesque denial of our own shared humanity: ingenuity.

The Old Testament and Vedic Scriptures collectively discuss visions of chariots coming down from the sky with people of import on board, sharing ideas of flying machines or tools or prophecies to which humans must heed. The prophets who wrote down or communicated otherwise these visions, these incidents, must be questioned here as well: long before the days of the FDA and NIMH, food and drink were largely replete with toxins, and those with physical or mental medical problems were, if they were from important families or high breeding, treated as prophets or mystics or soothsayers. Today, we would know these conditions by name: dementia, epilepsy, food poisoning, toxemia, and otherwise. (If they were of low breeding or not of nobility, the result is the same as today: a perceived rambling madman occupying the streetcorners of society) The visions are highly figurative, lucid or quasi-lucid hallucinations brought on by poorly-cooked food, spoiled wine, rancid water, or cerebral degeneration, and, with the floridity of the bastardization of translation and reproduction, we cannot take any of this writing literally unless we too are prepared to subscribe to vindicating and verifying occurrences and conversations had on the brink of ephemeral or permanent insanity as utter and complete truth. Those speculators who search out the early Flying Machines in Vedic scriptures supposedly wrought from the gods (confused with Aliens in this case) are as dangerous, intellectually, as Fundamentalist Dogmatics following the Abrahamic traditions. Those speculators’ mission is not far off, either: convince as many nonbelievers through the use of skepticism applied to logic as a transformative means to permanently embrace and sanctify myth as proof. We have no room for that in the study of history, theology, or science.

As already mentioned, the primary source of irksomeness I see in all of this is the absolute denial of the capabilities for human ingenuity and advancement pro se. To state as though fact and believe it as such that Alien creatures visited human beings in order to instruct them in the ways of creating ancient, massive monuments both subtly and overtly points to a fundamental difference in how I and these speculators approach humanity. We are capable of detecting patterns – even domesticated and wild animals detect and sense patterns – and figuring out ways of prediction. We are capable of demonstrating mathematical and technological advances as means to improve our lot as societies. We are capable of creating a culture and lifeways that record and exhort our past and present. It took a few hundred thousand years, but humans eventually figured out how to create fire. It took tens of thousands of years after that, but after generational observations of growth rates of plants and water cycles, we began cultivating our own food and domesticating animals. It took a while, but we developed mathematics. It took a while, but we figured out how to shelter ourselves from the elements. It took a while, but we eventually started assigning mythical and mystical meanings to the world around us – only after we were able to come up with free time and grow to a critical mass that would allow for a creative class of human beings. To suggest that we as a Civilization would never have the ability to create architectural wonders, be they in total vanity or for sacredness, or make technological leaps, to sanctimoniously state that we needed help, has wide-ranging ramifications on our status as human beings now, providing us with an escape mechanism to blame esoteric entities for our perceived, short-term failures as a society, enabling us to think that we are not capable of discovery and innovation, and giving credence to a mental subjugation that has held back advancement and which allows human beings to settle for less. The centralized message, in a sense, is to be espied no differently from core messages of Organized Religions: you are powerless, and you are simply too stupid to solve your own problems and too naïve and cognitively bankrupt to create anew, because The Beyond is the only realm from which inspiration and safety come. The most disturbing and underlying thought here is that humans are not responsible for their own creations. The implications of this statement are all-encompassing, exempting us from any sort of obligation to ourselves, each other, or our own world. This is a powerful sentiment that allows a belief in the anarchic, an allowance for coldness and total detachment from our own actions, an allowance for complete and total disillusionment and despair in the capabilities of humanity.

This is not to begrudge belief – or, rather, Belief. I do not deny the power of it: it is a powerful solace, one that allows us to seek momentary refuge from the antipode of human innovation and creation: destruction and misery wrought by ourselves against ourselves. No matter how rationally and logically grounded we may be, we encounter moments of pure, visceral, incomprehensible pain or worry or loss – our natural instinct is to find answers, to engineer explanations, to invent solace for ourselves during the darkest moments until we are settled enough to reunite with our cogency. But the dependence upon Belief outside of these austere confines promulgates the acceptance of an unseen, indiscriminate authority through which all our actions must be judged and all our movements monitored. Supplication to this perpetual surveillance in an unhealthy manner again permits us to bolt shut the doors of belief in other human beings, the notion that humans can (and do) work jointly in order to solve, engineer, create, and progress.

As such, it is important for those who yield to the blind authority of extraterrestrial speculation to understand that their common ancestry with irrational Religious Fanaticism is pernicious – both rationally and scientifically. To hear the statement “aliens did not teach the Egyptians how to build the Pyramids” and retort “who is to say they didn’t?” is the basest, lowest form of illogic, of creating proof out of the absence of proof. To elevate extrasolar interventionism as the means of our Civilization’s developmental grace is to adhere to statements precluding our ingenuity and reasoning, and is to allow philosophical bases of anti-humanism to take root. It denies our past as problem-solvers, and our future as problem-solvers.

But, then, maybe the little green men will come back and tell us how to fix all our current broken systems since we’re having a difficult time, collectively, correcting the errors and uniting Civilization to correct the errors, despite plenty of evidence pointing to eventual disasters regarding climate, politics, wealth, access to water, and so on. In the meantime, let’s kick back and wait for outside assistance.

Longer Questions That May Never Be Answered

If we were to put a moratorium on creative arts – that is, if we were to actively stop the creation of “new” artworks across disciplines – for a full generation, 25 to 30 years, what would be the result? How would the creative spirit thrive during that interstice? Would people create works subversively? Would the populace that survived the silence awaken with a deeper appreciation and understanding of dance, or art music, or poetry, or sculpture? Would we forget how to create? Would we forget our techniques? What of the children born during the silence – how would they cope? How would they be able to reinsert themselves into the world of artistic creation? Would they be startled or appalled at the idea of people freely expressing themselves through scores or canvases? Would we subsist on previously-created works for a full generation? If so, how is that truly different from the mainstream artistic world as it is now? What would happen to pop music? Would we enter a new Renaissance period where years of ideas accumulated creates a driving push into The Next Phase of creation? Or would we go backward?

Is there such a thing as a musical avant-garde anymore? Have we succeeded in shocking everyone into complacence, or is cultural literacy that advanced and uniform – that is, has a critical mass of understanding been met? I find it difficult to believe that either is true, but this creates a dangerous cosmic interplay of relativistic thought. A soybean farmer in Arkansas may never have heard of Xenakis or Lady Gaga – would either matter to him or her? Do we enter the dark chambers of "it’s new to you but not to me, and that’s acceptable"? Gravely seriously, though, what constitutes the New in music – other than having been just composed?

Is the term “experimental music” anymore just a marketing gimmick or a way to appeal to an already self-selected audience of cognoscenti, the pretentious, and/or gallery-hoppers? When we parse the semantics of "experimental," do we end up with the unified pluralism that all new music is in some way experimental and we need some degree of musical literacy to label something truly Experimental or more in line with Conventional models? Should we rather just make way for history and deem Experimental Music its own subgenre from the mid 1950s until the early 1980s when “experimental” veered into (or was concretized as) Performance Art?

Oh, hello. I didn't see you sitting over there, poor neglected blogorino.

My mind has been connecting some academic dots for a while, and while I'm not at the point yet to fully elucidate some of my most recent internal discourse, I figured I could at least be less neglectful and give a general idea of some topics I have been mulling over. They're exciting and enticing, for certain. Understand that these are rough sketches that make perfect sense to me. I am, as they say, all about some feedback.

Semiotica-Erotica
Largely, an exploration into the past thirty to forty years of postmodern discourse and field of ideas unveils a bit of heavy-handedness when it comes to transcendental characteristics of closed or open sign-signified systems vis-a-vis Lacan and Derrida, with so much as inspecting the readings done on them by Lyotard and Baudrillard revealing a kind of fetish characteristic over one aspect of this discourse: while not specifically gendered, the deconstructionist (and post-deconstructionist) reading of linguistic symbologies in a sense sexualizes its own content. Disrobing the closed systems and denuding open systems, there has been a slow rise in the approach to deconstructionist philosophy of ritual and sustained academic pleasure in it. So much so that at this stage that Fukuyama (for one) can be completely discredited: neither are we at the end of history, nor are we at the end of semiotics. While I disagree with any eschatological reading of philosophy/history, a pretense of sophistry on the part of structuralist/early-poststructuralist hangers-on can be observed as little more than a repeated act to derive some sort of pleasure.

Liquid Fragmentation
In a less (perhaps) disturbing realm, I turn to the concept of technologically/societally-created/aided social fragmentation. Any volume by Zygmunt Bauman, and select writings of Baudrillard, Kristeva, and Habermas, will speak about, poke and prod at, and engage the concept of modernity being a breaking device, a clever tail-eating serpent that both created and was created by a weakening of the social fabric of humanity and the demise of community. This, of course, has been popularized in such works as Bowling Alone and others, and still more less-technical philosophising has been done in the popular sphere to invoke some sort of awareness and action from its readership in order to restore humanity to a world of connection and unification, less homogeneous heterogeneity and happy-unhappy individual isolationism. While Bauman et al briefly touch on these points, I have only seen any extensive theorizing on the subject in one place (Liquid Modernity) and at that only subdued: the subject I speak of here is a concept of Liquid Fragmentation. Perhaps the moniker Fluid Fragmentation would be more fitting: while sociologically this is not a radical concept, in terms of ontological readings of religious ideologies it has the potential to be galvanizing. The central framework is that societies, groups, clusters, and even individuals suffer from yet perpetually celebrate the notion of fluidity and liquidity, that an identity is a continual, breathing, near-sentient thing: while not pernicious inherently, its application has some room giving us pause: identity creation, symbol creation, and crystallization of the unified are typically things we come to celebrate once those are in place and - barring for the minute any Bagdikian or Adorno reading on mass media being the message rather than the mediums - if we legitimize and non-problematize the notion of morphological identity we allow ourselves a permanent yet constantly shifting form of fragmentation. Marriage name conventions, street addresses, jobs, hair colors, tattoos: these are all small things that point to a permanent flux rather than a permanent break and do indeed become signs for ourselves; yet, each shift becomes a form of fragmentation distancing oneself and (if I can sneak in Adorno) pseudo-individualizing us through marked isolational activities.

Cyber Ecology
While this has probably been writ about before up to this point, I have honestly not read any academic writing about it; my ignorance of such a topic clearly, obviously, does not prevent it from existing. I've just not done any research on this. (NB - this tends to be my MO: I'll think on a subject for a while, and once I've clarified it to some extent, then I start researching to see how behind I am) In 1998, I started my first webpage and got my first (several) email addresses. Where are they now? What happened to them? Who claimed them? Of course, this is analogous to who we are as fluid-identity-permanent-fragmentation humans (see previous topic), but who is cleaning up the messes we made in the early days of the dot-com? What will happen to MySpace five years from now when only "Tom" (who has not apparently logged in for months!) will be remaining? What, if anything, does this say about our predilections as humans, and, perhaps, as Americans (in this instance)? Benign neglect speaks volumes - and for the first time, perhaps we will soon have some sort of permanent graveyard to see our wastes and wanton excess that is consistently viewable from our own homes and bears our identity; landfills, junkyards... these things bear the mark of anonymity: "that could be anyone's trash - not just mine." Paradoxically, what's missing here is an individual responsibility, an existence in isolation of our consumer sins as outlined in the catechism in each one of our guidebooks to planet Earth. (I think now of a website in particular that keeps old, dead pages permanently cached - I think they've collected something in the neighborhood of 2 billion pages up to this point, and counting) What impact will this have on us - if anything! - if we see all our creations and identities laid bare before us? Will it be another long bookshelf of old romance novels or VHS tapes from an elderly, deceased family member? Will we actually pay attention to it?

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Don't worry, I still think / write plenty about music. But analyses of Shostakovich in technical terms and brainstorms about musicological matters seem less sexy...

EDIT: So, Cyber-Ecology exists ("they" added the hyphen, not me) but isn't quite what I had in mind. Casual glances have pointed me to DARPA (shudder), information storage that's "green" (certainly, an important aspect of this in a less sociological-societal realm), and a bunch of articles about art. If I call it something else and tease out some subtleties, this could be something. Or nothing.

on struggles

It occurs to me that the general consensus of the world is that the inhabitants of this Earth enjoy the conceptualization and the actualization of the struggle. So much so, that this enjoyment of the struggle precludes (and would ultimately negate) any sort of true, total resolution of that struggle.

Were the world citizenry to spontaneously achieve a Utopian idyll overnight, would not there be a nigh-instantaneous Hegelian return to something to fill the absence, a return to a grand-mal dialectic for some/any/all arbitrary reason[s]? If the human-wrought phenomena of the world met some sort of singularity, would human physics interfere and re-demand some sort of overarching jihad in some other avenue of lived experience? While there can be no darkness without light, and vice versa, there cannot not exist the inbetween realm: dawn, dusk. Tepid. Fluid yet solid. This is the murk the human race seems to be caught in, the quagmire in which we seem all too happy to occupy. Some repetitive, circular, perpetual twilight or dawn of our ideas and ideals as gods to be worshiped, striven for, fetishized. We obviously see no limit on the number of, and scope of, our perennial (or self-created, self-designated perennial) struggles, so why stop reifying the Big War of Ideas? Why stop being a sycophantic tribe blindly dancing about the ceremonial fire? Why not be phallocentric in the sheer quantity of struggles? Bigger is better. More is more. We will always find opposition, even in the face of a singular homogeneity - by virtue of the fact that it is, indeed, a unified One that leaves no room for any sort of Other. Pluralism is unattainable so long the collective end-result ideal is a hegemony of Many, a homogeneity of Heterogeny. Any struggle met with resolution can only be resolved by struggling against the resolution, can only be met with the construction of the Differance and the reshaping and re-placing of a power structure.

Any decision made by human minds/hands immediately casts out into the world its opposite effect. This creates a vapor which crystallizes and solidifies as The Struggle. By making a decision, formulating a singularity, we immediately and (im)perceptibly create a new opposition. We create the opposition against people, ideas, the world itself. By eating meat, say, one creates the opposing turbulence of environmental damage, increased world poverty and hunger, spiritual and ethical injustices. By being vegetarian, say, one creates the opposing turbulence of economic negligence or callousness, a complex of perceived (be it real or arbitrary) moral superiority, creation of the opposition to the opposition, other forms of environmental damage not shared by meat-eating...

Struggles group together. They seem to flock together, as birds, as coordinated sounds. Each one cause, struggle, jihad, seems to boost and beget any number, perhaps infinite, of closely-related phenomena, and the chain of relations created from association of struggles to one another ends up dragging the discourse of disparate ideas - say, the relatedness of carbon cap-and-trade in Montreal to women's rights in Saudi Arabia to evangelical movements in Sumatra - into a sort of loosely-woven, yet coherent, net, a net that catches all things buried/open at the hypo/epi/hypercenter which on one hand polarizes and radicalizes the root opposition movements yet on the other hand becomes a Klein bottle net, catching all yet nothing, allowing the arguments to sluice through since the collective effect of this net is to catch only itself and the entire chain of ideological discourse of present day Earth.

Crossroads or a standstill.