I don't get it...

[JesusAndYourBush]

Last time I was in a mac shop the dev environment was using vagrant to execute in a linux vm.

In Boots in Leeds city centre in the mid 80's there was always a tramp hanging around who used to teach the kids programming, which consisted of him typing 10 PRINT "HELLO" / 20 GOTO 10, then embellisihing it by adding a semicolon after the 2nd quote, etc.

6th Doctor cosplay has let itself go!

[purlieu]

But 'abstract' and 'pure' are aesthetics too.

I didn't realise I was saying otherwise. I'm actually all about aesthetics when it comes to music: I care what the music sounds like, not what it means.

Now, it appears you're arguing that 'what it sounds like' and 'what it means' are often the same thing, which might have some truth, although on a level which makes the entire discussion somewhat moot.

The removal of humanity is a compelling story in certain kinds of instrumental music but that's all it is, and it only really makes sense in contrast to music that embraces humanity.

When I was a kid, I discovered The Future Sound of London (through a video being played on Top of the Pops, of all places), and they almost immediately became my favourite band. For me, music has always had a visual side, possibly because I have very strong associative synaesthesia, and the heavily atmospheric music of FSOL really appealed to me. Their albums would sound like imaginary landscapes to me - not just being atmospheric or suggestive, but I genuinely believed that they were creating landscapes out of sound. I could picture details of the various locations in the nuances of sound, to the extent that it really felt like the music was born of the places rather than the other way around; it felt like something that existed in its own right. Then I got their album ISDN, the first track on which is called 'Just a Fuckin Idiot'. And I really baulked at that, because it sounded like something an angry person would say. Another track is 'Smokin Japanese Babe', which sounds a bit... sexy? The same for 'Snake Hips'. The booklet includes a couple of stories about their whole broadcast philosophy, touring and such, including a reference to blow jobs. And I could not get into that album, because all those titles and stories made it feel like it was made by humans, with angry and hedonistic attitudes. It wasn't a beautiful thing that felt like it had come about entirely naturally, it was just some blokes making a noise. It took me a very, very long time to be able to enjoy most of ISDN, because it was too human.

I'm still mostly like that now when it comes to instrumental music. I don't have any interest in how it was made, what it's about, why it exists. I like it less the more it has an explicit purpose or the more it references obvious musical genres. I'm happier considering it something that wasn't even created by humans, because they it becomes immediately more mundane.

You are fooling yourself if you think it isn't transmitting nonverbal messages from composer to listener just like all other music.

Ask yourself, if these sounds truly have no meaning, why are you invested in them?

Later in life, reading interviews with FSOL, it turns out my interpretations of their albums were totally off-mark. I was absolutely convinced these albums had literal meanings, that they were trying to put these exact images in my head. And of course they weren't. There's no overt purpose or meaning behind any track of theirs, other than to sound like something they wanted to make. But I enjoy my own interpretation of it all, which is why I'm invested in them.

Anyway, I appreciate that I'm maybe treating the definitions more broadly than you, and that by having my own interpretations of music that implies 'meaning', and so on. I suppose my point harks back to the roots of this discussion earlier in the thread: I'm interested in music as sound, and the way I'm affected by that sound. I don't listen to it[nb]mostly, there are examples of lyrics which do move me, but they're not the fundamental reason for my enjoyment of music as a medium[/nb] as a way of understanding politics, or exploring other people's emotions, or connecting the dots between musical and social cultures. My partner often struggles with music that sounds new to her, and she likes to read up on where it came from, what influenced it, who the artist is/was and what they were trying to achieve or communicate in creating the piece of music and such so she can make sense of the music and enjoy it. And that's the polar opposite of me: all that stuff is a killer for my enjoyment, as it takes the magic away and the music just becomes another human product.

[JaDanketies]

The Sigur Ros album Valtari definitely evokes a lighthouse for me.

In fact I was so convinced it was about a lighthouse that I've never even Googled it, I've just been so certain it's about a lighthouse that it seemed pointless looking it up. TIL it is not about a lighthouse.

Anyway it's not just instrumental music where you make your own meaning. Music in a foreign language or with screamed / otherwise incomprehensible vocals works.

Actually I've got a good example of an instrumental album that is obviously what it's supposed to be about - No Man's Sky: Music For An Infinite Universe, by 65daysofstatic. But really almost all 'hipster' music has you making your own meaning. Alt-J for instance might have relatively clear lyrics but you barely listen to them.

[Zetetic]

The shell was bash and now they're moving to zsh. That's no different to most unix distributions... it's debatable whether moving to zsh is good or bad - personally I would like to stick to what is most ubiquitous (and maintains parity with what mirrors the systems things are hosted on).

I wondered if Mojo meant OSAScript/AppleScript, which was pretty neat in the '90s.

As regard *nix shells, it's less relevant what the shell is than the ecosystem of tools you can call from it, I'd guess.

Obligatory mention that PowerShell is pretty neat (if symptomatic of various problems with Windows).

[JaDanketies]

cocaine

[Johnny Yesno]

Johnny Yesno, I used to exactly of your opinion but over the past years I have changed my mind substantially. I used to be adament that all aesthetics and value was an expression of social forces and history. I'm now convinced that holding that opinion is corrosive to the political ideas that made me gravitate towards it in the first place.

That's interesting. I've made the opposite journey. I used to believe in the pure aesthetic nature of music but gradually come to the conclusion that that idea doesn't really say anything. Sure, there's physiological and psychological reasons why we would discern consonance from dissonance, smoothness from roughness, but it tells us nothing about why we choose one over the other. You'd think the discomfort of dissonance would mean we'd stay safely in the harmonic series but that would be boring.

It's like with food: sweet tastes suggest sugar therefore energy source therefore survival; bitter suggests poison. But people muck it all up by letting stuff go off on purpose and consuming that.

Because you're assuming the way of being different proper to groups of people is what necessitates different forms of beauty, rather than the way in which different forms of beauty are different in themselves. In this view, there has to be a first order of necessary differences which determines things and a second order of contingent differences which ultimately express the first. Or else that the first order is the only 'true' difference and can subsume the second, which is only a mirror or echo of it rather than a representation of something inhuman or nonhuman.

But surely, 'different forms of beauty' is just another subjective concept, which is also culturally bound.

You can have syntactic or grammatical structure or form, or simple signs, without having semantic content. These forms can exist independently of whether they can be said to have a particular meaning or a definite logical structure. For example a lot of concrete poetry and dadaist work appears to have grammar, syntax, meaning, etc. but it only really has "sense" in the loosest possible way we can use that.

In aesthetics something can operate as if it expresses a certain meaning without expressing any meaning at all, or perhaps more commonly a meaningless or nonsensical statement can fit in with meaningful ones in a way makes it indiscernible unless you interrogate it.

One way of describing aesthetic uses of language like the parodies of concrete poetry Veloso (I think it was him or Gil if I'm wrong) wrote for the Os Mutantes, is that they are inherently meaningless structures of language that provoke us to act as if they were meaningful, and in doing so create meaning. So aesthetic forms and meaningful structures interact, but they're not continuous to each other.

But what you're describing is a system of meaning. The dadaists were expressing ideas about the nature of language and perception.

Have you read the part of Philosophical Investigations where Wittgenstein asks the reader to read some illegible script aloud as if it were a meaningful sentence?

I hadn't but I'm afraid I can't make sense of the bit you quoted. Something about the characters making us think of particular sounds and therefore meanings?

edit:
Trenter's example of the pareidolia of a wall socket works too. Is the socket influencing me to see a face, or am I seeing the face in the wall socket?  The form that "enables" the meaning that my mind "constructs" for it pre-exists the meaning-making activites that it influences me to do, and it doesn't need human faces to exist as real objects in the world to have a face-like form.

I don't buy the socket thing at all. Of course our pattern recognition software makes us see information that isn't really there, although in Japan, there is widespread recognition that it's a thing and car manufacturers try to make sure that their cars don't frown. That's some advanced aesthetics, isn't it?

By itself, it's just a socket, though. Maybe if Trenter  had put a little hat on it, it would have expressed something about the nature of pareidolia.

[Sebastian Cobb]

As regard *nix shells, it's less relevant what the shell is than the ecosystem of tools you can call from it, I'd guess.

Most scripts tend to be written for bash in my experience, which shouldn't matter if you're calling it from zsh provided it has the correct shebang.

However it may mean you will struggle to use bash functions. For instance I've got a small function that provides an interactive cli-menu for switching aws profiles by reading the aws config file; it might work out the box with zsh, it doesn't with fish.

[kalowski]

4) The chalk one with the big cock.

Best episode of Friends that they made.

[Icehaven]

Also I've mentioned this way too much already but Myers-Briggs. Really, no-one cares what your little corporate zodiac sign is and these things are so vague they're meaningless (and I wish my employer would stop paying for MBTI workshops). Horoscopes are at least good for a bit of a giggle.



Should all just read GRAVE.

Maybe I'm just flaky and inconsistent but my issue with any personality test is that another day, or even later the same day, I'd give totally different answers to a lot of the questions. I know a lot of them have scales like 1-5 so you can answer somewhere in the middle if you're not strongly either way but surely then that just means you're not any particular "type"?

[Johnny Yesno]

I didn't realise I was saying otherwise. I'm actually all about aesthetics when it comes to music: I care what the music sounds like, not what it means.

Apologies, I meant to say they are meanings. They are the same to me, hence my slip.

Now, it appears you're arguing that 'what it sounds like' and 'what it means' are often the same thing, which might have some truth, although on a level which makes the entire discussion somewhat moot.

Yes, though while it's probably annoyingly vague, I don't think it's moot.

FSOL anecdote

Heh! That's why I don't pay too much attention to track titles.

Much of the history of electronic music is characterised by the struggle to get it recognised as valid at all. You're not in any way the only person to want to detach the sound from the source. It's the basis of acousmatic music. If using music to illustrate that sound doesn't have to be perceived as coming from a known source isn't the communication of an idea (i.e. meaning), then I don't know what is.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

That's interesting. I've made the opposite journey. I used to believe in the pure aesthetic nature of music but gradually come to the conclusion that that idea doesn't really say anything. Sure, there's physiological and psychological reasons why we would discern consonance from dissonance, smoothness from roughness, but it tells us nothing about why we choose one over the other. You'd think the discomfort of dissonance would mean we'd stay safely in the harmonic series but that would be boring.

It's like with food: sweet tastes suggest sugar therefore energy source therefore survival; bitter suggests poison. But people muck it all up by letting stuff go off on purpose and consuming that.

I see the danger in reducing things to a pseudo-scientific justification like evolutionary psychology, but the claim that things are universal or transcultural/transhistorical is not necessarily a claim about faculties universal to human subjectivity or that concepts are already latent in the subjects that they 'appear for' - I definitely don't think beauty is something we're innately programmed to recognise (like faces or hands) or a property of the natural world, just waiting out there for humans to discover or reflect in our artistic endeavours.

One of my big worries is how easy it is to take all the reasons that one normally rejects universalism for relativism: such as social darwinism, essentialism, the pseudoscientific parts of ev psych, reductionism, reduction of human experience to a play of evolutionary forces or struggles; and merely transposes all those biases into the social or cultural sphere without interrogating or submitting them to any kind of rational exposition or critique.

I think in a sense this is a problem of where we locate univocity of a concept in our subjective encounters with something that appears to embody or exemplify that concept. For example, to be crude about it, someone might say that Toshiro Mifune and Pam Grier are equally 'beautiful' as people. So to understand how this beauty is understood by a global, or universal or transcultural, audience we can either say - beauty is univocal, it means the same no matter who is beautiful, that beauty designates specific qualities that cannot be equivocated about. Or we can say that the way in which a person is beautiful is what is univocal even if we have to equivocate as to which individual qualities make up a beautiful face or a beautiful body language or speaking voice.

To my mind the former view is where culturally relativist and anti-universalist views lead. Because it reduces beauty to a play of social forces, it has the same effect as if we were to reduce beauty to evolutionary forces. It removes equivocation in the final instance or appearance, and specifies beyond doubt the characteristics and attributes that one associates with "beauty" because beauty is immanent entirely to a certain set of specific social relations and forces and has no being seperate to this power of specification.

The latter, however, is universal because one can never know in advance what particular aspects might be beautiful in the instance of beauty itself, because they might incidentally arrive because of social or cultural specification or forces, but in their final instance they have escaped it. Beauty is therefore a universal quality because it describes a generic way that certain qualities might be composed together, rather than telling us exactly what those qualities are before we see them. It happens all the time you see a person with physical features or personality traits that are beautiful, but you'd never have thought of those traits or features as being connected with beauty until you see the person in which they're beautiful. If beauty was culturally specific, then we could make lists of qualities that were and weren't beautiful, and (unless you're Sam Harris or someone like that) there is no reason to believe that we can do this. These qualities can come together in different ways, and still be 'beautiful' in the conceptual (rather than meaningful) sense.

Using people as an example is a bit crude, but otherwise I'd have to pick either poetry or painting or music and talk about different formal qualities and concepts, etc which would make this is a jumbled mess because I can't express ideas clearly on the fly.

But surely, 'different forms of beauty' is just another subjective concept, which is also culturally bound.

Strongly disagree. If this were true beautiful aesthetic objects and forms from other "cultural" domains would be unintelligible to people in other cultural situations, they were would be so subjectively specific that there would be a clear and obvious distinction between authentic forms and inauthentic forms.

But what you're describing is a system of meaning. The dadaists were expressing ideas about the nature of language and perception.

I'm not comfortable in reducing meaning to intention when it comes to poetry.

I'm also not really comfortable with "system of meaning" in the sense that any meaningful act must belong to a totality of reference points. Isolated and independent acts of meaning are things that happen.

I hadn't but I'm afraid I can't make sense of the bit you quoted. Something about the characters making us think of particular sounds and therefore meanings?

I don't buy the socket thing at all. Of course our pattern recognition software makes us see information that isn't really there, although in Japan, there is widespread recognition that it's a thing and car manufacturers try to make sure that their cars don't frown. That's some advanced aesthetics, isn't it?

It means that the identification of the face with the socket is neither exclusively cultural nor is it psychological or behaviourial - in Wittgenstein's example, he argues we can't say that the influence letters have over is "unconscious" or already latent within us. It is a matter of following rules, its like a game, it exists within the game like rules or other nonphysical objects of a game exist - like goals or points. Its a conceptual activity, and not reducible to "meaning" any sense that would make meaning interchangeable to "aesthetic" in either the sense of form or experience.

[imitationleather]

Also I've mentioned this way too much already but Myers-Briggs. Really, no-one cares what your little corporate zodiac sign is and these things are so vague they're meaningless (and I wish my employer would stop paying for MBTI workshops). Horoscopes are at least good for a bit of a giggle.



Should all just read GRAVE.

Top right there is a proper car crash collision of tattoos.

[Zetetic]

Maybe I'm just flaky and inconsistent but my issue with any personality test is that another day, or even later the same day, I'd give totally different answers to a lot of the questions.

Different personality tests have massively different "test-retest" reliability.

One of the notable features of MBTI is that it has terrible reliability and so probably isn't describing anything that we'd want to call "personality".

[Zetetic]

Most scripts tend to be written for bash in my experience, which shouldn't matter if you're calling it from zsh provided it has the correct shebang.

However it may mean you will struggle to use bash functions. For instance I've got a small function that provides an interactive cli-menu for switching aws profiles by reading the aws config file; it might work out the box with zsh, it doesn't with fish.

I meant actual tools to do something in whatever environment you're operating in, not just shell features.

(I tend to put any shell scripts I write through ShellCheck, so catch most bash-isms etc )

[SpiderChrist]

People who are relentlessly upbeat and positive.

[Blue Jam]

Top right there is a proper car crash collision of tattoos.

I can't tell if one of them is meant to be Darwin's Tree of Life or Kurt Vonnegut's illustration of an asshole.

[BeardFaceMan]

Adult Swim
Playing guitar and singing at the same time
Shitposting

[purlieu]

Heh! That's why I don't pay too much attention to track titles.

I'm less fussed these days, but as a kid exploring music for the first time, everything seemed potentially important.

If using music to illustrate that sound doesn't have to be perceived as coming from a known source isn't the communication of an idea (i.e. meaning), then I don't know what is.

This is certainly true of acousmatic music, but I wouldn't say it's the purpose of a lot of electronic music. There's plenty of stuff out there that is detached from its source without existing to illustrate that fact.

[Johnny Yesno]

I see the danger in reducing things to a pseudo-scientific justification like evolutionary psychology, but the claim that things are universal or transcultural/transhistorical is not necessarily a claim about faculties universal to human subjectivity or that concepts are already latent in the subjects that they 'appear for' - I definitely don't think beauty is something we're innately programmed to recognise (like faces or hands) or a property of the natural world, just waiting out there for humans to discover or reflect in our artistic endeavours.

One of my big worries is how easy it is to take all the reasons that one normally rejects universalism for relativism: such as social darwinism, essentialism, the pseudoscientific parts of ev psych, reductionism, reduction of human experience to a play of evolutionary forces or struggles; and merely transposes all those biases into the social or cultural sphere without interrogating or submitting them to any kind of rational exposition or critique.

Just because an idea is easy to misuse an idea doesn't make it untrue. Evolution is a case in point. However, what I'm suggesting is that culture is more arbitrary than that (although I'd also argue that evolution is more arbitrary than the public discourse credits). People take whatever is to hand and mess around with it to express themselves and there are myriad ways of doing so.

I think in a sense this is a problem of where we locate univocity of a concept in our subjective encounters with something that appears to embody or exemplify that concept. For example, to be crude about it, someone might say that Toshiro Mifune and Pam Grier are equally 'beautiful' as people. So to understand how this beauty is understood by a global, or universal or transcultural, audience we can either say - beauty is univocal, it means the same no matter who is beautiful, that beauty designates specific qualities that cannot be equivocated about. Or we can say that the way in which a person is beautiful is what is univocal even if we have to equivocate as to which individual qualities make up a beautiful face or a beautiful body language or speaking voice.

To my mind the former view is where culturally relativist and anti-universalist views lead. Because it reduces beauty to a play of social forces, it has the same effect as if we were to reduce beauty to evolutionary forces. It removes equivocation in the final instance or appearance, and specifies beyond doubt the characteristics and attributes that one associates with "beauty" because beauty is immanent entirely to a certain set of specific social relations and forces and has no being seperate to this power of specification.

The latter, however, is universal because one can never know in advance what particular aspects might be beautiful in the instance of beauty itself, because they might incidentally arrive because of social or cultural specification or forces, but in their final instance they have escaped it. Beauty is therefore a universal quality because it describes a generic way that certain qualities might be composed together, rather than telling us exactly what those qualities are before we see them. It happens all the time you see a person with physical features or personality traits that are beautiful, but you'd never have thought of those traits or features as being connected with beauty until you see the person in which they're beautiful. If beauty was culturally specific, then we could make lists of qualities that were and weren't beautiful, and (unless you're Sam Harris or someone like that) there is no reason to believe that we can do this. These qualities can come together in different ways, and still be 'beautiful' in the conceptual (rather than meaningful) sense.

Using people as an example is a bit crude, but otherwise I'd have to pick either poetry or painting or music and talk about different formal qualities and concepts, etc which would make this is a jumbled mess because I can't express ideas clearly on the fly.

Using people as an example actually highlights the flaw in your argument. What constitutes a beautiful person not only varies wildly between peoples, it varies wildly within them. Hell, my own idea of what constitutes a beautiful person hasn't remained the same throughout my life.

Of course, the public discourse might tell you otherwise, but that's where the power relations come into it. Admitting that the beauty of people is mostly arbitrary isn't going to shift product.

Strongly disagree. If this were true beautiful aesthetic objects and forms from other "cultural" domains would be unintelligible to people in other cultural situations, they were would be so subjectively specific that there would be a clear and obvious distinction between authentic forms and inauthentic forms.

But beautiful aesthetic objects are frequently unintelligible to people in other cultural situations. The beauty of a Lamborghini means fuck all to people who don't give a toss about cars. That entirely blue canvas is largely unintelligible to people who aren't interested in art. I can't make any sense of opera. Or Shakespeare. Or ancient Egyptian artefacts.

It means that the identification of the face with the socket is neither exclusively cultural nor is it psychological or behaviourial - in Wittgenstein's example, he argues we can't say that the influence letters have over is "unconscious" or already latent within us. It is a matter of following rules, its like a game, it exists within the game like rules or other nonphysical objects of a game exist - like goals or points. Its a conceptual activity, and not reducible to "meaning" any sense that would make meaning interchangeable to "aesthetic" in either the sense of form or experience.

Well, we clearly have a different idea of what meaning is. To my mind, if you are shaping things using rules and presenting them to someone else who you think has a grasp of those rules, you are expressing meaning.

That's how I understand music and that's what I think composers are doing. I'd like to hear what you think composers are doing if it isn't that.

[Johnny Yesno]

I'm less fussed these days, but as a kid exploring music for the first time, everything seemed potentially important.

It seems FSOL taught you something about meaning.

I had a similar experience with Locust (Mark van Hoen). The first couple of albums have nice inscrutable sleeves with pictures of what looks like the ground on them, album titles that tell you very little and equally vague song titles. Then he released Truth is Born of Arguments with a scowling pretty girl on the front and song titles like I Feel Cold Inside Because of the Things that You Say. The music itself is not that much different. He found another way of being abrasive. Despite that, it seems I do still think truth is born of arguments.

This is certainly true of acousmatic music, but I wouldn't say it's the purpose of a lot of electronic music. There's plenty of stuff out there that is detached from its source without existing to illustrate that fact.

There is but that is my point. Acousmatic music is just a formalisation of an idea that was already out there. Delia Derbyshire's work on the Doctor Who theme detached it from any recognisable sound source and gave it its alien aesthetic. It didn't really have the humanity stripped from it, though. That just manipulation of the feelings of the listener by the composer, i.e. the meaning.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Good stuff! Sorry for breaking up the post, I'll stop going off topic after this.

But beautiful aesthetic objects are frequently unintelligible to people in other cultural situations. The beauty of a Lamborghini means fuck all to people who don't give a toss about cars. That entirely blue canvas is largely unintelligible to people who aren't interested in art. I can't make any sense of opera. Or Shakespeare. Or ancient Egyptian artefacts.

It's not about personal appreciation. I dislike car culture but I can still recognise a Lamborghini as a beautiful aesthetic object and I can still make judgements of taste about which cars have more aesthetic value than others, even though to me personally they're all about the same and my judgements would be risable to someone more immersed than I am. I enjoy listening to car lovers talk about their tastes and ideas about classic cars because the ability to conceptualise and empathise goes beyond the limits of personal, concrete enjoyment and experience - I definitely get something out of listening to or reading people talk about watching sports even though I hate watching sports, etc.

If relativism of the kind you are arguing for was actually thing then seeing artifacts and acts that were absolutely unintelligible or illegible would be a common feature of our world due to the vast proliferation of differences between communities and cultures. But I can't think of a single example of an aesthetic object that is absolutely imparseable as such to the point where beyond context people can't even recognise it as something that held aesthetic value for someone else. There is no work of great european literature that isn't acessible to those outside of Europe, there's never been a book of aesthetic or literary writing that ceased to be so when it was translated. Those kind of things would be regular features of an utterly relativist world where culture and language determined everything, but they're just not. We don't live in that kind of a world.

There is also the point that if this were true, we'd see unquestionable delineation between the authentic and inauthentic where it comes to cultural practice in general. And we see the opposite of it, its almost impossible to tell authenticity from inauthenticity unless its in a widely rehearsed situation like white dreadlocks, fake champaign, etc.

Of course, the public discourse might tell you otherwise, but that's where the power relations come into it. Admitting that the beauty of people is mostly arbitrary isn't going to shift product.

Why is "power" so important here that lets it override judgement, cognition, recognition, ability to follow rules, etc.? I just don't see it penetrating that deeply. Why are differences in power potent enough to ascend to the top of a hierarchy of kinds of difference where differences in beauty, differences in ways of being beautiful, differences in form, etc. remain at the bottom?

Why can't I say that what constitutes power and what constitutes a relation, is widely subjective and varies by discursive context yet beauty remains beauty? What's power got over beauty in this case? I know, I know, power is a non-concept which has no exterior and is already latent in the relationality required to make knowledge statements... I don't buy any of this any more. It seems like this is some very normative, even conservative, thinking coming in through the backdoor by claiming anything but itself can be historicised.

Its my view that relativistic or constructivist views are only maintained if one posits a concept or system of thinking ("power relation", "social hierarchy", etc) as extra-historical and transcultural, which can describe how things are bound to context without being bound to context itself. This is where the alarm bells should start going off.

Well, we clearly have a different idea of what meaning is. To my mind, if you are shaping things using rules and presenting them to someone else who you think has a grasp of those rules, you are expressing meaning.

When I write about art and aesthetic I try used language based on form and concept to describe this, because you're talking about shaping things (eidetic and formal qualities) and establishing rules (something related to play, grammar and conceptuality). This is all prior or anterior to contextual or interpretative questions and (with apologies to any Americans reading) sensation and affectivity.

I use "meaning" either for minor cases (semantic statements or values) or major cases (overarching interpretative claims or importance) - depending on how relevant it is talk about meaning as seperate from the sense of something.

[Johnny Yesno]

I wish I understood any of that but I'm not an academic.

How about answering my question about what you think it is instrumental composers are doing if it isn't communicating meaning?

[Video Game Fan 2000]

I wish I understood any of that but I'm not an academic.

How about answering my question about what you think it is instrumental composers are doing if it isn't communicating meaning?

I think the triple meaning of play - as in a sport where one agrees to constrain one's behaviour to arbitrary rules, childhood acting out of imaginative situations and taking a role of another persona in a piece of theatre - is a bigger 'clue' to what composers of music and makers of art doing than anything like the expression of a particular meaning. In German 'spiel' has the old sense of dancing and capering too which captures the physicality or materiality in a way thats a bit harder in English.

The similarity between artistic/aesthetic/poetic acts and forms of communication is a big red herring. I don't think there's much communication involved in art especially instrumental music.

[Johnny Yesno]

I think the triple meaning of play - as in a sport where one agrees to constrain one's behaviour to arbitrary rules, childhood acting out of imaginative situations and taking a role of another persona in a piece of theatre - is a bigger 'clue' to what composers of music and makers of art doing than anything like the expression of a particular meaning. In German 'spiel' has the old sense of dancing and capering too which captures the physicality or materiality in a way thats a bit harder in English.

The similarity between artistic/aesthetic/poetic acts and forms of communication is a big red herring. I don't think there's much communication involved in art especially instrumental music.

Blimey! That's a leap. We use the same word therefore they are the same.

What motivation do the listeners have to observe these players of meaningless games?

[Video Game Fan 2000]

What motivation do the listeners have to observe these players of meaningless games?

Zero.

In French scholars of interpretation often use the word "pari" (bet/wager) to describe what happens in involvement with art or text because you don't have a motivation, its not transactional in that sense - you're actually risking something by getting involved, even if the only thing you're risking is your time, because no meaning/sensation is promised in advance.

For example, if I pick up a book of avant garde literature that has no communicative meaning or immediate "sense", I'm wagering that it'll be worth doing so - I'm not only wagering my time, but I risk my opinions or even sense of self if it has a big enough impact on me, this could be positive or negative. I don't know until I try, but its a risk even if its a small one.

Its not a product where I get X experience or Y meaning in exchange for my money.

[pigamus]

Is there a Dummies book for this thread

[Captain Z]

Wow look at all these words nobody is going to read.

[JaDanketies]

I mean, I guess I do kinda get cocaine - what's not to get? - but I don't know why anyone who has any likelihood of worrying about money in the immediate future would do it. Unless they're addicted. You get a bigger bang for your buck with pretty much anything else.

[ProvanFan]

I've definitely had some art with pips, but I've definitely had some without.

[purlieu]

It seems FSOL taught you something about meaning.

Indeed: that I'm happier when actively avoiding it.