Je Est Un Autre

For Lawson is the type of explanation common to mainstream economics is what he terms the formalistic-deductive framework. He zeroes in on economics laws which state that ‘whenever event x then event y’, an event regularity, deterministically defined. Such statements can develop into laws, or predictions of outcomes, or allow us to deduce outcomes. So, increasing the minimum wage (x) will cause unemployment in the poorest elements of society (y). Naturally, x and y are not restricted to two events or two variables, and can be any number of x’s causing y’s, what matters here is the structure x then y and the relationship of causality between then, it is irrelevant whether this is an empirical study, or begins with a set of principles simply imagined. This methodology, translated into the language of mathematics forms the basis of the mathematical modelling which is the whole mainstream project – other approaches are prima facie dismissed.

Such a method, like all methods, has certain ontological commitments, commitments regarding the nature, structure and raw stuff of reality. Yet, ‘the ontological presuppositions of the methods of mathematical modelling used by economists are rarely questioned or even acknowledged’. It is never questioned whether these ontological presuppositions fit with the social reality under investigation. It is Lawson’s claim that these presuppositions “appear not to arise very often in the social realm” and hence are wholly inappropriate for understanding economic reality. This deductive model presupposes that “event regularities prevail in the social realm” – they do not. Lawson is fond of quoting Marx: ‘In the analysis of economic forms…neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use’ - “the nature of the subject matter in question is such that the noted tools are not appropriate to its investigation”. In order to maintain this form of deductive x then y reasoning that is necessary to create mathematical models, economists are required to make two ontological commitments, which create the closed system necessary for prediction, two commitments which the post-autistics and other have noted are wholly inappropriate given even the obvious features of social reality. Lawson names these intrinsic and extrinsic closure. Here we find the root of the two axioms of economics many have found so problematic: atomistic conceptions of agents and bodies (intrinsic closure) and almost complete isolation and lack of intersubjectivity of these agents (extrinsic closure).

Intrinsic Closure

First, intrinsic closure. Say we have the situation, a standard deductive-formalistic one, where stimulus q is applied to x in order for y to happen. I am an economist (perhaps one working in econometrics and this is largely statistical), and I do an experiment in the field, giving a bar of chocolate to one of my friends, Rob. Rob loves the bar of chocolate. If I model this I can assume that giving x (a human person), q (a bar of chocolate) results in y - if x and q then y. You say I gave David (x) a gift of chocolate (q), using my model I would assume he enjoyed it (y) - again if x and q then y. What must we assume for our deductive model to be correct? Firstly we must assume that every x is the same, I must assume that all x’s, that is human beings, all are constant, that they are always the same – I must assume intrinsic consistency, that one can be substituted for the another. Yet in social reality this is not at all the case. David is allergic to chocolate and is hospitalised for six months.

Secondly I must also assume that all x’s respond to the stimulus q in the same manner, that is, y – in Lawson’s words, that only one outcome is possible, only one exit – the situation must be reducible. Yet in the situation I am this is not the case. I gave Rob another bar of chocolate (q) usually loves chocolate so would normally react with pleasure (y) but he is feeling ill today, so he doesn’t want some chocolate, human beings are not intrinsically reducible, they do not respond in the same way to the same stimulus across time or space - “the manner in which a given person may answer a specific question, conduct himself or herself in the market place, or perform some other specified act, is likely to depend upon whether he or she is alert or sleepy, optimistic or pessimistic, starving or well fed…”. Yet, to create a closed system which allows one to predict matters, or create laws, economics must assume the system is intrinsically closed. They must therefore assume the agents in the system are like atoms that can be substituted for one another and that respond in the same way given a stimulus, that the agents involved (be they chocolate bars – I could buy a different brand, of course - or people) are intrinsically consistent. This also allows them to aggregate the results, I send out a hundred chocolate bars and I get a hundred happy people would be my prediction – all the effects can easily be added together because I am assuming every thing is the same. Yet in the real world some people would not like chocolate, or be ill that day – they would not be the same and not respond passively like atoms.

Extrinsic Closure

Perhaps more significant is extrinsic closure. Economic activities must be therefore considered in isolation from any external influences, where the economic transfers and the actors involved is considered in something akin to a vacuum – methodological individualism, non-embedded in the real world. Given our exciting chocolate example, ( if x and q then y) I am unaware that Rob has been told by Andrew that he is fat and that he shouldn’t eat a bar of chocolate. This throws a spanner in the works, instead of if x and q (and I am able to predict y), I have x and q and a (Andrew). To keep my economic law working I need to assume that x and q will never encounter some unknown factor coming in madly from outside. The system must therefore be extrinsically closed against such things for it to stand.

In short, in order for my chocolate model to work I have had to make non-trivial socio-ontological axiomatic claims. It would have made no difference if I hadn’t done the experiment and simply (as is very common in economics) imagined my model from the get go. It is a feature of the deductive style that is incompatible with reality:

it is these tacit requirements of the deductivist mode of explanation, rather than
substantive [reality observing] considerations, which lead to economic models
predicated in terms of atomistic individuals acting in relative isolation

Without using my chocolate technique, Lawson concludes this is the problem with econometric and theoretical economics. In my chocolate model, the event regularity I modelled I took a regularity from the real world, made a model and then used it to predict the outcome – which I got entirely incorrect – because my predictive model assumed closure, because is a necessary feature of deductivism when applied to social
situations. Fullbrook again: “Deductivism ‘presupposes a ubiquity of social closures, while in the event, social closures of an interesting kind appear to be extremely rare’”. Whatever model I might define from the data dissipates on contact with reality, because reality is not a closed system: “Identifying stable econometric relationships requires that the system under investigation be closed off from extraneous effects (the extrinsic closure condition) and from changes in the internal states of those under analysis (the intrinsic closure condition)”. I must therefore assume that individuals can be cordoned off in such a way that behaviours are not interdependent and that they never change, that they are atoms. Yet in reality neither things are possible.

Contrary to popular belief it is then much mainstream economics itself that is assuming away the laws of (sociological) gravity.

Discuss your ideas, theories and general views on what might happen to conclude in tonight’s closer. Before the BBC implodes under it’s own reflexive advertising-as-news paradigm.

One of the more finished chapters was , The Muddle of the Middle, a lecture he gave in March 1980 to the Monday Club, a Conservative Party caucus in London. [...] “when thirty-six years ago I inscribed The Road to Serfdom ‘To the Socialists of All Parties,’ I am afraid this was not least aimed at an influential wing of the Conservative Party.” He always opposed a ‘middle way’ between socialism and capitalism, and thought that this would lead eventually to full-fledged socialism: “One cannot create harmony out of conflicting principles, and socialism is not half right but all wrong. It must be resisted in principle if one is not to be dragged step by step into a system which is both totalitarian and ineffective. I am afraid in this the Conservative Party has failed, failed because it refused to be bound by principles, but has abandoned principles in the service of expediency.” At the same time: “I have, of course, always stressed that there was, in a wealthy country, a strong case for government providing outside the market a minimum for those poorest victims of acts of God or the King’s enemies who were unable to provide for themselves.” He ended this talk saying that “the battle for Britain’s survival as a wealthy and important nation was being fought inside the Conservative Party, and that Britain’s continued prominence would depend on eliminating trade unions’ privileges, controlling inflation, and rejecting the notion of ’social justice.’

Ebenstein, Alan. Hayek’s Journey : The Mind of Friedrich Hayek. Gordonsville, VA, USA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. p 220.

Wrapped in black paper, Collapse IV - Concept Horror arrived on the spine of a raven, freed at last from the thickets of spines and writhing slime tentacles that characterise its inception in Robin Mackay’s blasted neuro-alchemical hatchery. I don’t think I have any choice other than to read it through a mask of soot and smeared corpse paint whilst listening to Xasthur, Burzum and Wolves in the Throne Room.

Frosty. Grim.

Rather than consider his most obvious works upon the subject of political economy - the Nature of the Gothic in the second volume of The Stones of Venice, A Joy Forever (also know as The Political Economy of Art) Unto This Last¸ Munera Pulveris, Tide and Time, The Crown of Wild Olive, Sesame and Lilies and his collected letters to the workmen of Britain Fors Clavigera - for the roots of Ruskin’s economic thought one must begin as early as his first significant writings, Modern Painters. Though it is now viewed as an element of a particularly Victorian and romantic conception of aesthetics, rooted – much like the works of Wordsworth - in the concepts of nature and the sublime, for its time it was radical and met with an almost universally hostile reaction.

In this work Ruskin defends the modern painters, for example Turner (most significantly), Prout and Fielding, against the ‘ancient masters’. His reasons for this are in part their ability to reflect the beauty and abundance found in nature, though never completely – the creation is the ultimate artwork, which in turn reflects its creator – “it is the task of the painter to translate God’s work of art into one which makes visible to ordinary human beings the divine signature that marks every natural phenomenon”. Ruskin delineates two conceptions of beauty:  typical beauty and vital beauty. Typical beauty is the “symbolizing of Divine attributes in matter”. This beauty has six attributes or modes, which map onto aspects of the divine, of God, the most important of these being Unity.

Observing the almost infinite variety one finds in nature, Ruskin concludes that this must be an element of beauty. Ruskin mentions that “There is not one leaf in the world which has the same colour over its whole surface”, in a “state of perpetual variation”. Yet, variety is only truly beautiful when it placed within a greater unity, a sense of background and complementarity that draws out the best qualities, where when left alone it may be pedestrian. Thus a great painting, like those of Turner, might when considered in one sense appear disordered, but considered as a whole are intensely beautiful: colours, lines and shades working in harmony with one another as in nature. Ruskin uses the analogy of music, of notes struck together to form a beautiful chord, complementary yet independent of one another, where the removal of one note causes the chord to be entirely broken. Of unity, Ruskin writes that “the appearance of separation or isolation, and of self independence, is an appearance of imperfection; but all appearance of connection and brotherhood are pleasant and right, both as significant of perfection of things united, and as typical of that Unity which we attribute to God”. Variety is beautiful because of its unity and harmony, a variety which like nature may almost be infinite, yet like nature is contained within an overarching unity. Herein one can find already the outworking of his notion of society. In volume five of Modern Painters, writing in a section entitled The Law of Help, Ruskin asks his readers to “dwell a little on the word help”. Inanimate objects, like clouds, Ruskin says, may cohere, but they do not help each other, removing one part does not effect the whole cloud, just as removing one marble from a bag of marbles, does not effect the other marbles. Yet, with a plant, the removal of one part does hurt the rest, because all the parts are interconnected, they all ‘help’ one another. Ruskin then widens the scope of this observation:

The power which causes the several portions of the plant to help each other, we call life. Much more is this so in an animal. We may take away the branch of a tree without much harm to it; but not the animal’s limb. Thus, intensity of life is also intensity of helpfulness—completeness of depending of each part on all the rest. The ceasing of this help is what we call corruption; and in proportion to the perfectness of the help, is the dreadfulness of the loss. The more intense the life has been, the more terrible is its corruption.

He continues:

When matter is either consistent, or living, we call it pure, or clean ; when inconsistent, or corrupting (unhelpful), we call it impure, or unclean. The greatest uncleanliness being that which is essentially most opposite to life.

Finally, he turns to the widest issue:

A pure or holy state of anything, therefore, is that in which all its parts are helpful or consistent. They may or may not be homogeneous. The highest or organic purities are composed of many elements in an entirely helpful state. The highest and first law of the universe—and the other name of life, is, therefore, ” help.” The other name of death is ” separation.” Government and co-operation are in all things and eternally the laws of life. Anarchy and competition, eternally, and in all things, the laws of death. […] in true composition, everything not only helps everything else a little, but helps with its utmost power. Every atom is in full energy; and all that energy is kind.

Herein is Ruskin’s understanding of society – society is to be considered not a competitive system of parts independent and antagonistic, as in the self-interested utility maximising methodological individualism of the political economists, but as a harmonious whole, which each element interdependent and cooperative, one part being hurt is to cause the whole to be hurt, to damage the beauty of the chords chiming together. The inter-subjective and quasi-ecological nature of Ruskin’s ethical economics is plain, and as serious as his modern heterodox companions. It is also directly in opposition to the understanding of economics and the best moral ordering of society in his day. Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, or Private Vice and Publick Benefits, concludes that “Vice is beneficial found”. Private self interest, and individualism leads to the harmony found in the bee hive. Likewise, in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations dis-harmony comes to benefit the whole. Ruskin is opposed to both these conceptions. Indeed he reminds them as being the principles of his Political Economy in Unto This Last. This basic interrelation can be traced also to Storm Cloud of The Nineteeth Century, where nature, the morality of humanity and God are placed in relation. Brian Jay notes:

what we do to the atmosphere (”Blanched Sun”) affects the earth (”blighted grass”), which, in turn, affects humankind (”blinded man”). As a statement of troubled ecological morality, it argues that nature acts as an index of human misdeeds: “Of states in such moral gloom every seer of old predicted the physical gloom.” As a statement of Ruskin’s tripartite ecology, it reminds the reader that beyond the two terrestrial economies lies a divine economy (as the uppercase S in “Sun” attests), suggesting that humankind is doubly blinded, unable to see either nature or God, whose image is now clouded or “[b]lanched.”

What is it, then, specifically that unites the various streams of heterodox economics?

In his 2005 essay The nature of heterodox economics Tony Lawson attempts to locate an answer, and begins by noting that heterodox economics is doubly diverse. There is diversity of traditions which could be considered heterodox, be they post-autistic, neo-ricardian, Marxist, post-Keynesian, institutional, feminist, social, Austrian or ecological, to name but a few. Within these traditions themselves there is also considerable diversity rather than any particular agreement on basic principles, policy recommendations or methodologies. What they are defined by within a tradition is not by a core set of concrete principles or universally recognised common ground, but rather by their opposition to neo-classical, orthodox economics, and a set of key texts from which they might draw (for example, post-Keynesians draw from Keynes), a fact that the independent traditions tend only to admit “begrudgingly”.  Given the fact that these traditions call themselves heterodox, this should come as little surprise. If heterodox economists are untied, at the very least, in their rejection of the orthodoxy of neo-classical, mainstream approaches, what is it specifically about these approaches that they reject, and is there something that unites their objections under a common theme? And do they even understand what mainstream economics means, or neoclassical economists for that matter? Can the two terms be used interchangeably? A common criticism of heterodox approaches is to state that the mainstream in fact far more diverse than they allow and that their criticisms may reflect a previous held positions on such matters, but the consensus has since shifted to methodologies which avoid the major points of their analysis; Heterodox economists shoot at a moving target and miss.

Such a response is exemplified by David Colander’s The Death of Neoclassical Economics. Yes, says Colander, defining a set of factors that define neoclassical economics, such a think called neoclassical economics did exist certainly, and some of the approaches derived from it are still common currency yet the mainstream “is much more eclectic” and “there is significant flexibility, especially at the cutting edge”. For example, methodological individualism and the assumption of “far-sighted rationality” (the idea that economic agents have very good awareness of the future and past) are being challenged from with the mainstream by the work done in experimental economics, behavioural economics and with approaches utilising complexity mathematics and evolutionary game theory. Mainstream economists can therefore evade criticism.

In his essay Lawson rejects two common definitions of orthodoxy, in order to evade the criticism that the assaults on heterodox economics are misplaced. Firstly, mainstream economics as maintaining the current economic situation, as ideology for the status quo. Secondly, mainstream economics as being united by the axiomatic statements of commitment to individualism of economic subject who acts in a rational, utility optimising, self-interested manner in a market that tends towards equilibrium. Indeed, in the case of many analyses of equilibrium, even those of advanced behavioural economics, equilibrium is methodologically assumed: the procedure is not to ask “Will rational agents behave accordingly to the theory’s equilibrium prediction?” as would be the question of any proper psychology, but rather to assume axiomatically that they will and ask “If rational agents are behaving according to the theory’s equilibrium prediction, will they have cause to stop doing so?” – agents can only tend towards equilibrium, or be frustrated from doing so. In short, the drive toward equilibrium models the behaviour of the agent.

In the first instance, the mainstream economic tradition can be defined as an ideology that upholds the current workings of the economic sphere. This is the approach of Mainstream economics is “rigged”, by using its individualistic perspective, maximising rationality and belief in equilibrium, to show that lassiez faire economic policy, that is non-interference in the market system and the opening of this system into all areas, produces “optimal outcomes”.  As previously stated, the use of the general equilibrium model would provide the standard proof that only in an unregulated market is one in which fair distribution of goods occur. Yet were this the case, Lawson argues, mainstream economists would, on the whole, support the thesis  that equilibrium exists – however, in the case of Hahn and other, despite their rational-individualist assumptions do not believe equilibrium ever comes about – “Equilibrium economics…is easily convertible into an apologia for existing economic arrangements”. Indeed, rational-choice Marxists use the same rational-individualist criteria to demonstrate weaknesses in capitalism, and economists work on such piecemeal and tiny elements of the economy that the idea that they are providing an apologia whole the whole seems rash. If the axiomatics of economics all naturally lead to conclusions which supported the status quo, one might be inclined to believe that it is an ideology. Lawson admits that some may use it to justify capitalism, but the exceptions show it does not lead immediately to this conclusion.

In the second instance, Lawson concurs with the mainstream critics of his and others projects that it is not the case that mainstream economics is committed to a model of the human which involved optimising individual behaviour. Certain perspective of game theory assume no rationality at all on the case of either parties, evolutionary game theory also does not. Economics is capable with working with concepts such as ecology which do not embrace this style. It is also beginning to consider how large groups make economic decisions. It appears that this common characterisation is also misplaced.

Rejecting these common positions, Lawson locates the definition of mainstream economics not in its specific set of fundamental axioms, but in its orientation toward methodology. Mainstream economics is hopelessly committed to a formalistic-deductive mathematical framework, the usefulness and realism of which largely goes undebated, or when it is subject to summary dismissals. For example, despite this commitment to the progressive elements of the mainstream in other areas, Hahn states that any view that questions the use of mathematics in economics is “a view surely not worth discussing“.  The commitment to mathematics results in the detachment of economics from the real world, which, in the words of Milton Friedmann, hardly the most radical critic of economics states “economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems”. Mathematical models build upon other mathematical models each stepping further and further into idealism rather than having grounding in real world analysis. Even the most cutting edge elements of mainstream economics – be it the uses of game theory, computer simulation, evolutionary economics, or the real nitty gritty of controlled experiments – all continue to be constructed around mathematical models – if it doesn’t contain a model, says the mainstream, it is not economics. While passing economic fads might differ from the atomistic model, or question the standard policy recommendations, they never stray from the understanding that the basis for proper economics is mathematical modeling and deductive analysis. Heterodox economics is therefore defined as a rejection of this orthodoxy – “the rejection of the view that formalistic methods are everywhere and always appropriate.”. Note here that this does not imply that is might not be sometimes appropriate, yet that it is not always the case. For Lawson, this unites the various traditions of heterodox economics internally and externally.

Particularly in the case of Lawson’s first objection to common definitions of heterodox economics, is Lawson being far too generous? At the level of policy, or otherwise, at the level of historical genesis of the mainstream approach? Is this definition so absolutely thin that it in fact is useless for anything more than a cursory uniting of hugely diverse approaches?

Noise* is a fairly regular night which celebrates either a particular genre, label or period in the history of music. Each time, as well as being able to listen to a DJed retrospective of the music, there are also free CDs and a brief history given to anyone who attends. Previous retrospectives have included  New York No Wave, Italo Disco, Krautrock, Detroit Techno and Stones Throw Records - future ones may include Dubstep, Black Metal or Free Jazz.

The guys from Noise* were kind enough to let me joint curate their exploration of Minimalism a few months ago, where I both wrote the brief history (concentrating mainly on the contemporary classical side of things rather than the techno side of things) and played a few tracks. It was an enjoyable night, and well attended - the mixing of Shackleton’s Blood On My Hands with Reich’s Piano Phase was particularly affecting. Without any further ado, here is the short history I wrote for i, designed to be printed on two sides of A4 and wrapped around the double CD I put together - sufficently persuasive comments might encourage me to upload it somewhere so you can all have a listen. This post was inspired because I saw Reich’s Four Organs performed last night to spectacular effect.

Noise* presents Minimalism

First emerging in the late 1950s, minimalism as contemporary classical music focuses on a steady rhythmic pulse or drone, repetition of phrases, motifs or groups of notes and (sometime very) slow development and harmonies that often rely of psycho-acoustic effects. Minimalism is in origin a broadly American cultural artifact. One can trace the origins of minimalism well by understanding the mutual influence of a series of American composers upon one another: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Phillip Glass. Although other minimalist composers were important for the genre’s origin and development, these composers produced both the most critical turns in it, its best examples, and arguably its greatest works.

Minimalist technique arose in part as a reaction against the orthodoxes prominent in the academy during the 1950s and 60s. One one hand, minimalism was a negative reaction against the complex and atonal compositional techniques of serialism, first codified by Arnold Schönberg. All of the prominent minimalist composers had learnt serialist technique during their college years, but all had eventually come to reject it as unnecessarily complicated and overly cerebral. Minimalism, by contrast, was perceived by many in the academy as simple music for equally simple minds, leading to a severe lack of coverage for its early experiments. On the other hand one had the aletorical experiments of John Cage and his contemporaries, that emphasised chance as an element in composition: Cage’s (in)famous 4.33 leaving everything to open chance. Minimalism sought a middle way between the two avant-garde forms: to be open to the interpretation by the performers (as in Riley’s In C) yet written along specific simple rules and patterns of notes, a move that can be seen only natural after a period of introspective and often austere complexity.

Early minimalists also sought more positive influence from what is badly termed ‘world music’ and  jazz, as well the French impressionists (such as Claude Debussey and Olivier Messiaen), early electronic composers like Edgard Varèse and repetitious works of the orthodox classical canon such as those of J.S. Bach. Young was influenced by Indian classical music. Both he and Riley studied with Hindu classical singer Pandit Pran Nath. All have spoke of there love for gamelan and african drums. It is interesting to note that all these musical forms come from specifically ritual and spiritual contexts. They are an intensely human form of music, that it was felt needed to be recovered, in contrast to the serialists and modernists. In these non-European musics, constant repetition is intended to induce a state of trance in the listener. All were also influenced by the burgeoning modal jazz scene and in particular John Coltrane.

The first recognisably minimalist piece was a series by Young in 1962 entitled Compositions 1960. Composition #7 in particular instructed to play B and F# ‘for a long time’, to create an effect that caused time to be disorientated. In Young established The Theater of Eternal Music with John Cale, Terry Riley and Tony Conrad future to realise his project of creating music that ran, for 24 hours, or potentially, forever - his Dream House. Each member went on to pursue their own minimalist directions.

After a falling under the spell of Young at the University of California, Berkeley and being a vocalist in the Theater, Terry Riley began experimented with tape loops in his parent’s garage. Leaving the US after university to play piano in US military bars in France, he became more exposed to techniques used in radio production such as the use of feedback loops. On his return to the US, Riley began working at the San Francisco Tape Music Centre. It is here in November 1964 that the first all Riley programme was performed which included a number of tape pieces including Music for the Gifts, using a looped piece of trumpet solo, but at its conclusion the seminal piece for 13 musicians In C - considered by some to be the most significant piece of classical music since Stravinsky’s Right Of Spring. Each musician played at their discretion a series of 56 extremely short musical “loops”, all in C, with a (‘played by a pretty girl’ instruct the score - the influence of Young’s often bizarre musical direction is certainly felt) piano keeping time. The technique Riley used in this piece and has continued to use with variations throughout his career represents the blueprint for minimalist music.

Steve Reich (among other minimalists like Jon Gibson and Pauline Oliveros) was present at this performance and had been at the centre to escape the stuffiness of New York academia since 1963. He and Riley had become friends since Riley had stormed out of a performance of Reich’s group who unsuccessfully attempted to combine serialism and jazz. On returning to New York in 1965, Reich, inspired, began developing his own techniques, also using tape loops. The technique for his first recognisably minimalist piece, 1965’s It’s Gonna Rain, was discovered quite by accident. Reich had been dubbing a recording of Brother Walter, an apocalyptic preacher, and had accidently played two records of the same loop at slightly different speeds. Rather than correcting the mistake, Reich was intrigued by the interaction between the two recordings and their phasing, and the new and different sounds made by combining the same sound with very slight difference. Reich also enjoyed using an essentially inhuman process, tape playing, to bring out the subtities in the preacher’s voice and intonations - hence the phrase ‘process music’. After using a similar method for his civil rights piece, Come Out (as sampled by MF Doom and Madlib in the introduction to their Madvillainy track America’s Most Blunted)  Reich moved to use the same ideas on live musicians, in pieces such Piano Phase and Violin Phase where one instrument remains static, playing a series of notes and the other instruments (or recordings of those instruments) play the same series of notes at different speeds, faster or slower, creating a marked phasing effect. Reich’s 1972 piece Clapping Music demonstrates this technique at its most simple, requiring only two performers and their hands to work. His piece Four Organs, featuring the titular electric organs and a two maracas keeping time, explores all the contours of a dominant eleven chord (D E F# G# A B with an E in the bass) by having the performers slowly augment the chord, increasing its duration, in something that in spirit recalls Young’s earliest experiments (and is directly influenced by the church music of Pérotin that so influences the sacred minimalists below).

After a 1971 trip to Ghana to study African drums and to Seattle to study gamelan, Reich produced the pieces that are seminal in his career and for the what most people would recognise at the minimalist sound: Drumming (1971) and Music For Eighteen Musicians (1974-6). At this point, inspired by jazz instrumentalists and his inability to get his pieces played inside the academy, Reich established his own ensemble. Moving away from his early process orientated work, these pieces utilised large ensembles of percussionists, vocalists and flutists to create more complex pieces that were based around slow moving additions and subtractions from the music, with many cyclical loops. Reich’s later career is marked by a combination of these techniques and a deepening of subject matter and sound sources. For example, 1988’s Different Trains is a highly personal peace concerning his own Jewish identity and its relation to the holocaust. It uses loops of interviews of his family and holocaust survivors, where the instruments anticipate or repeat the intonation of the phrases, to incredibly emotional effect.

Returning from a trip to France where he studied classical composition and indian music in 1967, Phillip Glass watched Reich’s performances at the Park Price Gallery. While it is a point on contention as to how much he was there inspired, Glass began developing similarly cyclic, rhymical pieces, for example Music In Twelve Parts. His work tended towards the larger canvas than the others had, his Portrait Trilogy of operas, Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and Akhnaten painted with broader brush-stroke, while maintaining a vital minimalist insistence on repetition. His collected Glass Works contains some on the most breath-takingly simple meditations for piano ever created and his work continues to be used for film, most notably in the soundtrack for The Hours. His masterpiece in this regard is his contribution to the ethical-political-ecological Qatsi film trilogy, where a thunderous minimalist soundtrack is married to complex, often time lapsed images speeding up and slowing down with regard to the score - a technique recently revisited in an advertisement for the computer game Grand Theft Auto IV.

Worldwide, an intriguing phenomena is the creation of so-called ‘holy’ or ‘sacred’ minimalism (a misnomer in part due to the sacred contexts from the East that initially influenced the minimalists and has remained influential throughout, as well as the later development of many of the composers, including Reich, to consider religious themes), by Arvo Pärt an Estonian, the Polish Henryk Górecki and the English John Tavener. Here the simplicity and repetition of the American pioneers is combined with the also unobstructed (particularly sung) music of the churches of the East and overtly religious themes of Russian Orthodoxy (and in Górecki’s case Catholicism), not to mention (like Young) the mystics of this tradition. Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 is a terrifyingly subtle and evocative requiem for the love of mothers and their losses of war, mothers both cosmic and human. Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa moves at gorgeous, glacial pace, while his Te Deum waits in almost silence ruminating on space, time and God - a minimalist prayer. His Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten is an absolutely fitting tribute, as the composer says, like light passing through a prism.

John Adam’s in his opera’s Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer combines minimalism with a traditional libretto and a political theme. Phil Niblock takes Young’s challenge to a natural conclusion, spinning out single notes digitally to create hours of music via digital processing. Charlemagne Palestine turned definitively way from the commercialism he perceives in the work of the ‘big four’ with his. His Strumming Music is primitive, physically demanding and intense: two notes expanding out to full thick chords for 52 minutes, causing the piano itself to detune and the strings snap. Tony Conrad’s post-Theater work cannot be under-appreciated. Four Violins is 18 minutes of blissful ur-drone, his collaboration with Faust is a masterful combination of classical and popular avant-gardes. Glenn Branca and others similarly combined the poles of the avant-gardes in his “guitar symphonies”, his has been producing since the 1980s.

The influence of minimalism on genres outside contemporary classical music is large-scale, in particular upon electronic music and drone. Minimal techno, in particular that of the German Kompakt label can be seen as an excellent example. The recent acclaimed album by The Field operates on soundly minimalist principles, a single loop being allowed to gradually unwind through time. Both Brian Eno and Aphex Twin have spoken of their debt to the minimalists. The recent Battles and Panda Bear albums could not have occurred without the work of Reich. There is little doubt the influence on music will only continue to grow.

Track Listing

1. Tony Conrad - Four Violins
2. Terry Riley - In C
3. Steve Reich - Piano Phase
4. Phill Niblock - Didjeridoos and Don’ts
5. Richard Youngs - Part I
6. Arvo Pärt - Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten
7. Charlemagne Palestine - One + Two + Three Fifths in the Rhythm Three Against Two For Bösen

Many of the examples of the suffering which our saints responded to with compassion are still found here in this city and beyond.  And new injustices have arisen: some are complex and stem from the exploitation of the heart and manipulation of the mind; even our common habitat, the earth itself, groans under the weight of consumerist greed and irresponsible exploitation.  We must listen deeply.  We must respond with a renewed social action that stems from the universal love that knows no bounds.

Benedict XVI, Saint Joseph Seminary, Yonkers, New York, Saturday, 19 April 2008 [italics mine]
Interesting statement. Eclectic Criticism notes forthcoming, a conference that occured the day before this statement and almost certainly explored the contours of this in some ways.

Is there some unwritten code of Marxist discourse that, following Marx and Engel’s fondness for the word, one must use the word hitherto as much as is possible? This is especially the case when one is summarising one’s argument, for example, in an abstract. Is this very much like the way in which Pauline scholars insist on throwing “by no means!” into every chapter a few times, an irksome habit recalled from my undergraduate days?

Suggestions as to similar tropes in other discourses will be taken. However, those refering to those of postmodernism, particularly to those of high academic postmodernism, will be ignored and deleted - shooting fish in a barrel.

Urbanomic’s Collapse journal announced the final details of it’s fourth volume last week, entitled ‘Concept Horror’, that should be available in May.

Collapse is probably among the most exciting things happening in ‘academia’, and I use scare quotes here entirely with reason. While remaining incredibly rigourous in what it does, locating itself and it’s penetrating essays at the interstices of philosophy, art, science, theology and film with a thrilling disregard for institutional boundaries as well a geographical location, Collapse is a journal about ideas and their thrill, rather than the machinery and drudgery of day to day CV collation. As such they publish articles that would not normally pass in the sometimes conservative world of journal editorial boards, based around themes for their intrinsic interest rather than clusters of academic fashion or vague criteria of ‘relevance’. Aesthetically, Collapse is beautifully realised, like finding a forgotten pamphlet of the Acéphale: gorgeously typeset, richly illustrated and filled with esoteric detail. The care put into the volumes by Robin Mackay, their editor, is nothing short of staggering. You can read an interview with him at Urbanomic, as well as purchasing the journal up to Volume III. A four volume subscription is £30, with which one can get all the back issues and have Volume IV sent directly when it is completed. Get this while you can, because the volumes are now so large (400 odd pages!) that this subcription fee may be going up after this volume.

Collapse Volume IV: ‘Concept Horror’ is an investigation into the philosophical, existential, aesthetic, religious and political dimensions of horror. Its task is not to promote theories of horror, but to uncover the horrors that may lie in wait for those who pursue rational thought beyond the bounds of the reasonable.

The volume brings to fruition Collapse’s vision of a miscegenated text in which contributions interact and produce a series of interzones or objectively-collaborative spaces. Throughout the volume many different styles of philosophical texts and graphic works intermingle, creating unanticipated connections and adding new dimensions to one another.

George Sieg’s Infinite Regress into Self-Referential Horror demonstrates the simultaneously cognitive, existential and political nature of Horror, through a conceptual investigation of victimhood.

In The Shadow of a Puppet-Dance, James Trafford tracks weird fiction writer Thomas Ligotti’s anticipation of the radical thesis of neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger’s book Being No-One: namely, that ‘there has never been such a thing as a self’.

In Thomas Ligotti’s own contribution to the volume, he takes up the work of obscure Norwegian philosopher Peter Zapffe, among others, to take an unflinching journey into the depths of nihilism…

…As a counterpoint to Ligotti’s deflation of human hubris, Ukrainian Oleg Kulik, a prominent contemporary artist known for his disturbing investigations into the borders between life and death, human and animal, contributes his photographic series ‘Dead Monkeys’.

Eugene Thacker’s Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror gives a detailed and penetrating account of the ‘teratological noosphere’, discussing the ontologies of horror from Aristotle to Lovecraft.

Novelist Michel Houellebecq is well-known for his ability to evoke the horror that dwells within the banalities of contemporary life. His poems, of which a selection are translated into English here for the first time, distil his powerful vision into translucid moments of dread.

Jake Chapman, half of the notorious Brothers Grim of the British artworld, who unveil their infernal new work Fucking Hell in London next month, contributes a set of etchings created exclusively for Collapse in response to the other contributions in the volume.

Quentin Meillassoux’s work is familiar to our readers. In the third of a ‘trilogy’ of essays published in Collapse, Spectral Dilemma, Meillassoux reveals some of the ethical consequences of his deduction of the ‘necessity of contingency’, through an examination of the problem of ‘infinite mourning’ for the dead.

Kristen Alvanson’s photographs, at once repellent and fascinating, of preserved specimens of deformed and mutated animals and humans, are accompanied by a text which discusses Paré’s sixteenth-century treatise which makes of taxonomy itself something monstrous.

German artist Todosch (Thorsten Schlopsnies) meticulous sketches seem to depict varieties of heterogenous slime in the process either of disintegration or coagulation…

…A perfect companion to Iain Hamilton Grant’s Being and Slime. This untimely excavation of the naturephilosophische work of Lorenz Oken - according to whom the generation of the universe from a ‘primal zero’ corresponds to its coagulation from a ‘primaeval mucus’ - puts an entirely new slant on Badiou’s notion of ‘founding on the void’.

Benjamin Noys meditates on Lovecraft and the real, revealing that the most abyssal of Horrors is Horror Temporis.

In Thinking with Nigredo, Reza Negarestani shows how Aristotle and Plotinus both unlock and dissimulate the ontological mechanism expressed by an unspeakable form of Etruscan torture.

A rising star, Canadian artist Steven Shearer, contributes a new series of his Poems - striking graphical pieces created through a manipulation of the nihilistic and extreme titles and lyrics of death-metal bands.

China Miéville, better known for his bestselling weird fiction novels, writes on M.R.James and the Quantum Vampire, introducing us to a new fearsome creature from his arsenal, the Skulltopus!

Czech art collective Rafani present their cycle Czech Forest, an adaptation of folk-tale imagery which presents a very modern tale of warcrime and revenge from the end of WWII.

Graham Harman returns to Collapse with On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl. In a polemical defence of ‘weird realism’, Harman demonstrates that philosophical thought has more in common with weird and horror fiction than it might like to admit…

…Singular Agitations and a Common Vertigo, Keith Tilford’s series of images, deftly disintegrated objects with more than a hint of ‘pulp’, anticipate and shadow Harman’s invocation of the weird inner life of objects.

Collapse Volume IV // Ed. R. Mackay // May 2008 // 400pp[TBC] // ISBN 978-0-9553087-3-4 // £9.99