Sunday, October 28, 2007

Miscellaneous styles

A few months ago I read Everything is Miscellaneous by a Harvard philosopher and it makes the argument that we can slice and dice things to fit any categories we find convenient at the moment. He is making the point that information processing has opened the door to breaking down the old Aristotelian hierarchy of categories that has been the basis of our understanding of the world for the past 2000 years. The argument is that our brains are no longer constrained to organize in categories and hierarchies of categories (because our memories are limited and we need to abstract and create bins that we call concepts) but that information processing has allowed us to keep knowledge organized at whatever level of granularity we would want without those (artificial) structural constructs. Thus everything is miscellaneous. So this kind of pleases me, since it is liberating. I can have my cake and eat it too musically. The categorization of a song as blues or ska or whatever is a side-effect of this cultural mode of thinking, and if we break it down, we can say that songs can be blues or ska but that it depends on when we listen to them and on who listens to them and that ultimately these categories are ways to sort records rather than truths. So I may want a song to belong to multiple bins and I can do that through hyperlinks. Ultimately I want to know what people think my songs would sound like and what tags they put to them, but I don't want to plan it.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home