Such Truths certainly involve a basic decision - the choice whether or not to go down that road - but once you make the basic decision to follow that path, to try to make some unattainable idea true in musical practice, it's no longer a question of mere random preference, but it becomes a question of logic - of a new, unforeseeable logic that you unfold by working on it. Preference is simply too weak a word, too suggestive of whim, for what it means to make decisions of that order. Again using Badiou's terminology, if you admit some such Truth, you are 'faithful' to it - which is for Badiou exactly the only way to achieve subjectivity! (his notion of subjectivity is a little more abstract than most folks' - a subject is not a person, but is a process of fidelity to a truth that persons can subscribe to; a subject is something you partake in, not something that you are; if you're not engaged in some such truth, you're basically living some sort of animal life, just prolonging your existence while working, watching tv and paying off your mortgage etc.)
So sez Samuel Vriezen in a comment to a post by Kyle Gann on John Cage. If you remove that "decision" claptrap from the beginning, you're left with something rather familiar, n'est-ce pas?
Elsewhere on Gann's blog: sweet ink, man.
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