Yeh, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man ...

Jesus christ, must I spell it out? Thought this was a no-brainer: MUSIC TASTE IS SUBJECTIVE = TRUE. NO ONE HAS THE AUTHORITY TO JUDGE OTHER PEOPLE’S OPINIONS = TRUE. BUT IS THAT EVER GOING TO STOP ANYONE = HELL NO.

Stumbled across the above on Tumblr a little while ago. Is there ever a more terroristic, totalitarian demand than this rabid insistence on the unassailable truth of artistic relativism? Though couched in the language of a libertarian anti-authoritarianism, this remains inevitably an argument to ram down someone's throat, to insist upon bluntly (in BLOCK CAPITALS no less) and then sit back smugly assured of one's own superiority. This is not an argument. There is no rhyme or reason behind this essentially religious belief in the impossibility of a judgement of value. It is a defence against all arguments, a refusal to engage in any sort of rational discussion. It is an "I am rubber, you are glue" for adults (chronologically defined).

Picking up a riff from a Poetix post of a few months back, the insistence that all opinions about music are purely subjective and critical authority is nonexistent at best, ultimately stems from the acceptance of the capitalist realist injunction to "live without ideas" - to live, essentially, without thinking. If someone tells you that the Mr Blobby song is just as worthy a piece of art music as The Art of the Fugue, then who are you to question them? If they claim 'Deutschland Uber Alle's is superior to Mahler's Third Symphony and the entire works of Mendelssohn, who are you to doubt the sanity of their judgement? Why stop and think, but, hang on, that's ridiculous isn't it?

And that is the point: from the mouths of its adherence, this injunction is always expressed in the tones of common sense necessity, so obvious as to require no justification, and yet the slightest examination will inevitably reveal the absurdity of the claim. So, if Michael Bolton's publicist says that Michael Bolton is the greatest composer of all time, this statement should be given the same weight in music-historical studies as the counter claim by a stack of esteemed musicologists that the honour belongs to Mozart? Now, don't get me wrong, I am not arguing that the aforementioned academics are necessarily right, and certainly not that they are right de facto by virtue of their status as academics. I am, however, saying that someone is right, that there is a right and a wrong, even if no divine angel will never descend to the earth and reveal to us the final glittering truth. We may never be externally assured of the truth of our judgements but that does not make them invalid or unnecessary. To demand that all taste is subjective is little more than the admission that one has no faith in one's own judgements, defensively applied to everyone else in a sort of well-if-I-can't-then-neither-can-anyone-else dog in the manger-ish sort of attitude. It is an inferiority complex disguised as a principled liberalism.

Apart from anything else it also displays a kind of proud ignorance of the way taste and judgement are actually formed, the implication always being that my taste is subjective precisely because it is unique to my personal being, formed in a vacuum without any outside influence. But like the atheist's lucky rabbit's foot, critical categories and discursive strategies work whether you believe in them or not. Your supposedly free and autonomous 'subjective' tastes are already thoroughly imbued with socialised assumptions, more or less uncritically absorbed, that render them anything but personal. There is no 'taste' in a vacuum. And nothing is ever just your opinion (man).

Just a slow slow slow slow suck

I wasn't going to write a blog post in response to Steven Shaviro's post about 'slow cinema'. I felt too intimidated. I felt like, well, I've only seen a handful of the films he's talking about, and only a handful of the historical antecedents to which he refers - surely I'm not qualified to write a proper essay on the subject. I'll just moan about it on Twitter instead. That'll do, wont it? Well, apparently not. (Not for a certain bowel-damaged 'parasite on architecture' of my acquaintance anyway.) But then it struck me that, really, it wasn't necessary. The initial argument is sufficiently problematic that, in a way, it isn't necessary to have seen any of the films in question in order to critique it.

The argument goes something like: the slow contemplative nature of films by directors such as Bruno Dumont, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Bela Tarr, Pedro Costa and others has formed a kind of cultural hegemony, a "default international style" in modern arthouse cinema that is in some way obscuring or displacing the far more innovative work of other directors such as Claire Denis, David Lynch, Wong Kar Wai, Takeshi Kitano, and Guy Maddin, and that anyway making slow films has already been done by Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Jancso and Akerman so this whole slow thing is just retrograde and pointless anyway.

To start off with, I'm not entirely comfortable with any generic category that includes three such different directors as Bruno Dumont, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Bela Tarr, least of all one that goes by the name of 'slow'. Sometimes things happen very quickly, alarmingly and confusingly quickly, in films by all three of these directors. Perhaps you could say that all three directors are interested in time, and the manipulation of cinematic tempo, but this is one of the fundamental aspects of cinema. There are very long, slow moments in Welles, in Hitchcock, is that slow covered then? To suggest we need make no more slow films because Antonioni has already done it is rather like saying - in fact almost precisely like saying - that we need no more slow music because Mozart - or Morton Feldman - has already written some very nice slow pieces.

If Mr Shaviro's horror story had come true, and the world's second run cinemas were filled with nothing but these very slow films in which nothing really happens, then undoubtedly we would have a problem on our hands. But this very possibility is negated by the enormous success of those directors in his second list, almost all of whom seem to me rather better exposed than those supposedly hegemonic slowcoaches. If any director is the acceptable face of contemporary arthouse auteur cinema then it is Claire Denis, if any director a popular byword for 'weird' cinema it is David Lynch. Yes, they make good films but I don't see why that should stop Dumont, Tarr and Weerasethakul from also making their own very good films. What light does saying that Takashi Miike makes very good films really shed on the issue at hand?

What is nice about those films in which sometimes thing happen very slowly and shots sometimes last a very long time, what is nice, at least, about that aspect of some films, is that you can tell that they have thought about it. Digital technology has done some wonderful things for cinema but it has also encouraged an attitude in some that one can just film anything, film as much stuff as possible, then sort it out later, in post-production. This, if anything, is becoming a sort of 'default international style' particularly amongst directors of adverts, pop videos, and television shows, many of whom might become the film makers of tomorrow. In the face of this, it is always gratifying to see a very long sequence that has clearly been very well thought out, of the sort that Tarr's seven and half hour epic, Satantango is absolutely full of.

Make it Boring!

After the excitement of election night - undoubtedly the most mediatised general election night in British history, permeated on all sides by the TV debates, automatically updating 'live' webstreams and Twitter feeds, 24 hour commentary - the disappointment, but also the boredom. Alain de Botton in The Guardian is as vacuous as ever, merrily reducing 'philosophy' to the level of an airport self-help book, diagnosing our "nostalgic, helpless" post-election frame of mind. But de Botton does remind me of a curious feeling in the days immediately following the Big Night, that after weeks of scaremongering and ramping up the tension, there was a perceived necessity on the part of the political class to go round calming things down a bit, recalling Mario Tronti's notion of democracy as 'anti-political' - "There is a process of depoliticization and neutralization that pervades it, impels it, stabilizes it." Throughout the horse trading between Lib Dems and the two other parties, it was felt essential for some senior politician to pop up on the news every now and then to assure everyone - and most particularly 'The Markets' who have become, as is rather convincingly argued by Aditya Chakraborty here like a kind of new religion, the most prominent face of the Big Other today - that everything was going to be alright, and nothing much was going on. It was rather like those moments when the disembodied voice of the London Underground announces that there are "no unexpected delays or closures" (because that is now more newsworthy and noteworthy than when there are). The most bizarre aspect of this act of suggestive stabilization, this process of making boring the news again, was the sudden resurrection of former prime minister, John Major who spent much of last weekend touring the TV studios insisting on not very much at all. It's as though someone at Tory Party central office had got in a panic - shit, people are interested in politics again, what are we going to do? I know, we'll send them our most boring man, a man so dull he was depicted on Spitting Image with grey skin, talking mostly about the peas on his dinner plate. Let's roll out John Major! Nothing to see here ...