Platforms like Youtube have kind of opened
the floodgates in recent years allowing more
people than ever before to engage in the criticism
and analysis of art.
And while I think that’s ultimately a very
good thing it has also meant that many old
conflicts about how you should or shouldn't
go about analysing art that have played out
behind the guarded gates of academia have
been dragged up to be refought on this platform
over countless response videos and epic takedowns.
One of the questions at the center of these
heated debates is who decides what a text
means.
For the purposes of this video when i say
a text I mean any work of art whether a book
or a movie or a video game, that work is the
text.
So, does the author have total dominion over
their creation, do they have the right to
decide what the correct interpretation of
a text is and dismiss other readings of their
work as “incorrect” or “not canon?”.
After all they wrote it, they know what they
meant to say.
Or does the audience decide what a text means.
Are they permitted to put their own emotions
and experiences into a text?
If somebody tells you they find a song sad
but the musician did not intend it to be,
is the listener wrong to be sad?
Is the listener subordinate to the will of
the songwriter or do they decide what the
piece means to them?
I would caution against viewing this as a
binary.
Both of these are lenses that you can analyse
a text with.
Lenses are not correct or incorrect they are
simply different.
You can discover different things in a work
by looking into the author, who they are,
what their intentions were, by applying an
authorial lens.
You can also untangle all sorts of ideas in
a text by applying other lenses, perhaps a
class lens or a feminist lens or a religious
lens of some kind, all of these can transform
the meaning of a text WHILE being looked at
through those lenses.
Now that doesn’t necessarily mean every
interpretation is just as well thought out,
well evidenced, and coherent as any other.
What it means is that you are not automatically
“right” or “wrong” for applying any
particular lens.
But I want to argue that the very application
of lenses takes place in a context.
I reject the binary decision of whether the
author or the audience have the ultimate say
over the meaning of a text because one does
not stand above the other, but rather they
are in conversation with each other.
So, does that conversation take place in a
vacuum?
To hear many people discuss the Intent Of
the Author you might be fooled into thinking
that’s the case,
There is a famous essay written by Roland
Barthes called The Death Of The Author.
For Barthes, the death of the author meant
a criticism that denied the author full authority
over their text, meaning that text was open
to influence from external contexts, whether
they came from the audience or the very conditions
that the text exists in
In his essay, Barthes writes “the text is
a tissue of citations, resulting from the
thousand sources of culture.”
Which is to say that the idea of the author
as an all knowing singular overseer of their
text falls apart when you begin to understand
the author as a person who exists within the
cultural and material conditions of their
time and place.
As an artist who is influenced by all that
came before them, the words they write are
not strictly their own, but are coloured by
their times and the entire historical context
leading up to their present.
Barthes ends his essay lamenting that in traditional
literary criticism “the reader is a man
without history, without biography, without
psychology; he is only that someone who holds
gathered into a single field all the paths
of which the text is constituted.”
In other words, the reader is considered to
exist in a vacuum, a featureless recipient
of the text, with no context or perspective
of their own influencing the work.
But if we accept that the writer is a person
and they exist in a time and place, influenced
by the cultural and material conditions of
that time and place, then we have to ask ourselves,
is the reader a person?
If the reader is a person then we have to
accept that they are also influenced by all
of those same things in their own time and
place.
And if cultural and material conditions, if
history can colour and dictate the creation
of a text, then surely they can effect the
interpretation of a text.
For example there has long been debate over
whether certain plays written by William Shakespeare
are tragedies or comedies.
How could two people watch the same play and
come out of it with such a different impression
of what they watched, unless their experiences,
their perception colours the text itself.
Try to think of pieces of art that have taken
on new meaning to you as time’s have changed.
The favourite song you share with a loved
one can become the saddest song ever written
if they pass away.
A movie about somebody losing their child
might have done nothing for you when you were
16, but could hit you like a truck when you
watched it again as a 30 year old parent.
But let’s go beyond individual experiences
and into wider material conditions to really
get to the heart of how the conditions that
a text is created in AND the conditions that
a text is experienced in can dictate the meaning
of that text beyond anything either the author
or the audience decide themselves.
I want to explore this idea in direct response
to an artist by the name of Robert Fripp.
Robert Fripp, guitarist, songwriter, and founder
of the band King Crimson is a musician whose
work I’m a very big fan of but he is a notoriously
brutal enforcer of copyright law.
Fripp goes to great lengths to keep his music
off of the internet, even going so far as
to take down images of the album art from
King Crimson records.
Fripp is determined to keep his music out
of the hands of anyone who didn’t buy the
album or pay to see them play live.
When justifying this aggressive copyright
enforcement Fripp doesn’t cite lost revenue
as his main motivation although it’s certainly
a factor.
He disagrees with people experiencing King
Crimson’s music in anything but the intended
experience, exactly as Fripp wants it to be.
He believes that there is a correct way for
the audience to experience his work and he
also believes that he can control and preserve
that correct way.
So, let’s get really specific.
I want to talk about a favourite song of mine
by King Crimson.
Here’s where I’d normally play a bit of
it for you but as we’ve established Fripp
and his legal team would be all over me.
And youtube is not known for handling copyright
issues particularly well.
So feel free to pause this video and go listen
to it yourself if you aren’t familiar.
The song is called 21st Century Schizoid Man,
We’ll call it Schizoid Man for short.
That’s him right there I’m pretty sure.
The schizoid man.
So we’ll call the song schizoid man and
this guy The schizoid man.
Not confusing at all right?
Good.
I don’t know about you but when I see this
guy all I can think is… same buddy.
Schizoid Man easily reads as an observation
of the political climate in which it was written,
in 1969, the height of the Vietnam war, the
song laments the impact of what was going
on in the world at that time and it prophecises,
it fears that as a result of these conditions
the people of the next century will be, well.
schizoid men.
Now schizoid personality disorder is a real
thing that real people have, characterised
by emotional detachment, apathy, and preoccupation
with fantasy..
Is this song suggesting we will all literally
develop SPD in the 21st century?
I don’t think so, and that would be kind
of absurd, and the way it uses the language
of SPD to describe something that is ultimately
different but definitely bad is pretty shit.
It stigmatizes the mentally ill and compares
a societal condition to a psychological one,
which is important because what is afflicting
the Schizoid Man is man made.
To understand this song we have to draw a
distinction between SPD and the condition
effecting the schizoid man.
I believe those symptoms are what Schizoid
Man is really trying to warn us about, that
the population will become detached, apathetic,
not because of a neurological condition, but
because of our material conditions.
The environment we exist in.
Schizoid Man is immersed in the horror of
the Vietnam War.
In the first verse we see allusions to the
neurological damage of war, the PTSD suffered
by countless american soldiers returning home
from the war, and lord knows how many Vietnamese
survivors.
The paranoia of the cold war that tore communities
apart, this is the first few lines of the
song.
This is the state of the American political
and social mentality already deteriorating
as a result of the political climate being
created during the cold war and US imperialism.
In the second verse we get even more specific,
the use of napalm, barbed wire, directly conjuring
images of atrocities committed in Vietnam.
This line especially gets to the meat of this
song, innocents raped with napalm fire.
Innocents is pronounced more or less the same
as innocence, it’s worth noting that the
line works both ways.
For a lot of people, vietnam changed things.
The image of America as The Good Guys who
helped beat the nazis was becoming impossible
to maintain outside of the most fanatical
circles.
The reality of imperialism was becoming unavoidable,
there was no more innocence, no more good
ol fashion values because the death and destruction
at the heart of our society was laid bare,
impossible to look away from.
And in the third and final verse we discuss
the people more directly.
The blind greed of the imperialists planting
seeds of death as the Vietnam war claims millions
of lives, most of them civilian.
Poets starve as culture and the arts are devalued
and pushed aside, anything too difficult to
commodify is drowned out by the capitalist
need to transform everything into a product
that can be sold back to us.
And to say Children Bleed almost feels like
an understatement when discussing mass death
on the scale of the vietnam war.
And that final line, the purest distillation
of who the Schizoid Man IS.
Nothing he’s got he really needs.
The post war economic boom caused the American
people and people throughout the west to some
extent to develop a culture of consumerism.
Nice cars, big houses,, new tv’s.
The aspirations of regular people were increasingly
being dominated by new forms of consumption.
Now this would be a powerful piece of music
to hear in 1969, echoing concerns that must
have been so present among those not swept
up by the sound of America’s jingoistic
war drums.
This was a powerful song of political protest,
of opposition to US imperialism, and a warning
of what was to come.
That is what Schizoid Man was in that time,
and that place.
But to listen to it more than 50 years later
in 2020.
It takes on an entirely different character.
Schizoid Man ceases to simply be a political
protest song, a warning against capitalism
and endless war.
It becomes a piece of horror.
It becomes the genuinely chilling experience
of sitting in the future and listening to
a voice from the past desperately pleading:
stop this, turn back or so many will die,
turn back or live in miserable apathy and
alienation from the world around you.
And you can do nothing but listen helplessly
to these warnings from the past, knowing they
were right.
Their worst fears and anxieties came to pass.
We live in the world of the schizoid man.
The US and other western forces carve up and
terrorise the planet in endless wars that
claim countless lives every single year, our
culture becomes so hostile to anything and
everything as the contradictions of class
society become impossible to ignore, mass
shootings, terrorism, genocide, and starvation
are so present in an endless stream of news
that we just can’t look away from until
we… we just feel nothing.
We dissociate, gliding out of our bodies as
the unimaginable suffering of our world that
we can broadcast directly into our homes 24/7
just washes over us.
No, we don’t all have SPD but the world
Schizoid Man fears would come to pass.
We live in it.
And that is one of the most fascinating, terrifying,
and beautiful things about art.
When art is created, the world still moves
around it, and the art does not stay static
in one place forever.
It changes too, it develops new meanings when
it enters into new contexts.
Which brings us back to Fripp and his obsession
with listeners only experiencing his work
As Was Intended.
Looking at how Schizoid Man has evolved, has
taken on new meaning, we start to see that
Fripp’s intended experience doesn’t exist.
The experience I get from listening to this
song simply could not have been the intention
when it was written in 1969, the events of
the past 50 years have CREATED this experience
every bit as much as the song itself has,
and every bit as much as my own perspective
has.
And indeed my own experiences and perspective
have coloured the song as well, what would
I have gotten out of this song if I thought
the Vietnam war was justified and US imperialism
was Hella Based?
It would be a different experience.
21st Century Schizoid Man is more than just
the song Fripp wrote in ‘69, it’s a text
in conversation with its audience and that
conversation does NOT take place in a vacuum,
it takes place at a given time, in a given
place, influenced by the context created by
the cultural and material conditions of that
time and place.
And if those conditions can transform the
meaning of a song, imagine what else could
be shaped by the conditions it exists in.
Science, philosophy, your entire worldview?
I mean, you and me both have ideas about what
is normal, what is good and bad.
But you didn’t come up with all those ideas
on your own did you?
I know I didn’t.
So… where’d they come from.
Fripp wasn’t concerned that we’d all become
alienated, apathetic consumers due to some
personal failing.
But because our environment would sculpt us
into those things right under our noses.
Well, it’s just a song.
Right?
