The dominance of western music
Karlheinz Stockhausen, RIP
December 13, 2007 40 comments
Fans of Oliver Kamm ((Would fans of Oliver Kamm, if such people exist, be likely also to read unspeak.net? I accept this is improbable.)) will be familiar with his charming habit of denouncing the recently dead in tones of stentorian conservatism. So it goes with his CiF post about Stockhausen, the newly late German composer. Unfortunately, Kamm is rather out of his depth on the topic of music, as can be deduced from the following hilarious passage:
The dominance of western music reflects its ability to combine melody and harmony, and thereby produce a discourse. A musical composition is above all an argument that appeals to the emotions. The work of Stockhausen is not like that.
The dominance of western music, eh? Where is it dominating? Is it that it is dominant in the west? Well, one might suppose that to be true by definition, as far as it goes.
Sadly, it goes nowhere. Because Kamm can’t really mean “western music” when he says “western music”. After all, Stockhausen was a European, and so quite western, composer. And the feature that Kamm supposes to be unique to “western music” — “its ability to combine melody and harmony” — is, of course, a feature of lots of other musics, from around the African continent, or India, or China, or Japan, and so on ad pretty much infinitum.
But let us give Kamm the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps what he is really thinking of is not “western music” but specifically a current in what is loosely termed “classical music”, viz., the contrapuntal tradition that issued in the great Renaissance polyphonists. In such music, harmony is created through the movement of independent voices, which is perhaps what Kamm really means by “its ability to combine melody and harmony, and thereby produce a discourse”.
Sadly for this generous interpretation, Stockhausen’s music, particularly his choral writing, contains many examples of counterpoint too.
What about the claim that “A musical composition is above all an argument that appeals to the emotions”? I once wrote a long review of Roger Scruton’s very interesting The Aesthetics of Music, in which the author rightly points out that such a childish view of music is untenable. (Even though Scruton himself nods at times, as when he somehow intuits that the opening bars of a Beethoven sonata “express a tranquil gratitude”.) Plainly it is fatuous to say that a musical composition is an “argument”, never mind an “argument that appeals to the emotions”; unless Kamm is able to précis for us the argument of Mozart’s 40th or Claire de Lune.
(Update: I somewhat misremembered Scruton’s analysis, which is that music can indeed “express” meaning, though not in the way Kamm implies: music is not, Scruton says, a “language”. In comments Mr Kamm offers a sentence from Scruton’s 2007 book Culture Counts, in which Scruton does argue that a piece of tonal music can have, though not be, an “argument”. It is rather illuminating, actually, to compare Scruton’s sentence with Kamm’s. Emphases have been added:
Scruton:
It is tonality, however, with its unique potential to synthesize the melodic and harmonic dimensions, that makes counterpoint and voice-leading intelligible to the ordinary musical ear, and so makes it possible for people not otherwise versed in musical theory to follow the argument of a symphony or a string quartet, and to understand the message addressed through tones to their emotions.
Kamm:
The dominance of western music reflects its ability to combine melody and harmony, and thereby produce a discourse. A musical composition is above all an argument that appeals to the emotions.
It is surely just coincidence that Kamm’s passage is so similar to Scruton’s. Kamm does not cite Scruton by name in his blog post, and so cannot have had this sentence in front of him when he wrote it. It would, of course, be absurd simply to substitute Scruton’s “tonality” with Kamm’s “western music”, since the two are not at all the same thing. Much Chinese music is just as tonal as Beethoven; and much western music is not tonal in the traditional sense.)
Reluctantly, then, I approach the conclusion that, on the subject of music, Kamm is cloth-eared and ignorant. Still, his blog post itself is, in a way, an “argument that appeals to the emotions”. You don’t really need to have listened to any Stockhausen to read it; nor, perhaps, to write it. All you have to do is swell with a vague emotional attachment to old-fashioned “western music” (not including Germans), and — evidently the real source of Kamm’s doltish animus against the composer — an emotional reaction against anyone who could have said that 9/11 was “the greatest work of art ever”.
Kamm is also fond of accusing various writers of disgraceful scholarship when they cite things while eliding context. In the interest of enabling unspeak.net readers to assess the level of disgrace that ought to attach to Kamm’s “scholarship”, I end this post by reproducing what Stockhausen said about 9/11 in full:
Well, what happened there is, of course — now all of you must adjust your brains — the biggest work of art there has ever been. The fact that spirits achieve with one act something which we in music could never dream of, that people practise ten years madly, fanatically for a concert. And then die. And that is the greatest work of art that exists for the whole Cosmos. Just imagine what happened there. There are people who are so concentrated on this single performance, and then five thousand people are driven to Resurrection. In one moment. I couldn’t achieve that. Compared to that, we are nothing, as composers. […] It is a crime because the people did not agree to it. They did not come to the “concert”. That is obvious. And nobody had told them, they could be killed. ((Source (pdf); translation: Wikipedia.))
Rather deliciously, the plainly fatuous characterisation that “a musical composition is above all an argument that appeals to the emotions”, dismissed as childish and untenable by Roger Scruton, is the view of … Roger Scruton.
“It is tonality, however, with its unique potential to synthesize the melodic and harmonic dimensions, that makes counterpoint and voice-leading intelligible to the ordinary musical ear, and so makes it possible for people not otherwise versed in musical theory to follow the argument of a symphony or a string quartet, and addressed through tones to their emotions. ” (Culture Counts, 2007, p. 92)
I have some recollection that on another subject (the Pacific War) you once produced a citation that you claimed, pace me, was well known and definitive, and I had great difficulty making you see that – owing to its being an exercise in mindreading – it had been immediately dismissed by historians on publication and thus featured almost literally nowhere in the scholarly literature. I hope we won’t have, this time, the equivalent but opposite problem of ill-temperedly dismissing as inauthentic what is plainly Scruton’s considered, well reasoned and entirely convincing judgement.
What a commenter wrote at CiF applies here as well: “Excellent pos[t] after a startlingly dumb article.”
Mr Kamm: we’re laughing at you, not with you.
this: “A musical composition is above all an argument that appeals to the emotions”
does not in fact follow from this: “It is tonality… that makes counterpoint and voice-leading intelligible to the ordinary musical ear, and so makes it possible for people not otherwise versed in musical theory to follow the argument of a symphony or a string quartet, and addressed through tones to their emotions”
unless you’re also arguing — as kamm might i suppose be but scruton is most certainly not — that a musical work is above all what people “not otherwise versed in musical theory” make of it
(Update: see comments 13 & 14 below. Now that we have the full version of the quote that got mysteriously changed in your version of it, Oliver, we can see clearly that Scruton’s claim is not at all the same as yours, for quite interesting reasons. I leave the main text of this comment as it originally appeared, with updates in parentheses.)
Ah, hello Oliver. You’re right: I had misremembered Scruton’s view. Rereading my review of The Aesthetics of Music of 10 years ago, I am reminded that though he says music is not a language, he does think it can be heard as a kind of expression, and does in fact use the term “musical argument”, without ever defining it. (Update: my bad: Scruton plainly means “argument” to mean the music’s structure: “A theory of musical expression must show how the organization of a work of music serves to articulate the emotional content. It must show how an emotional demand can be resolved by a musical argument.” TAoM, pp156-7.) My main criticism of the book, indeed, was that it seems quite impossible to know reliably what music, particularly instrumental music, is supposed to express.
It is also hard to see how Scruton thinks a composition can be an argument when he insists that music is not a language, and so I continue to consider the view contained in your more recent quotation to be fatuous. (Update: see comment 14 again: in fact, Scruton doesn’t say a piece of music is an argument, as you fatuously do, but that it has one. As the quotation from TAoM above makes clear, the “argument” or organization of a work of music is not all it is.)
Still, at least Scruton knows what he is talking about on the subject of music, unlike you. So he is able to say that he is talking specifically about voice-leading and counterpoint, whereas you flounder around comically with your bizarre conception of “western music” and the supposed reasons for its “dominance”.
As for the Pacific war, I have satisfied myself, as can anyone who cares to look up recent historiographical reviews, that your periodic pronouncements on the state of its scholarship are bogus.
The quotation from Scruton that Kamm has typed in seems ungrammatical; what is “and addressed through tones to their emotions” supposed to be conjoined with?
Incidentally I would expect to find Scruton’s considered judgments about music in his 520-page book specificially about music published with OUP, not in his 120-page book about Western Culture published with Encounter. I haven’t read either book so I don’t know what either says, but if there’s a tension between things he says in the two books I’d expect The Aesthetics of Music to be more definitive.
Oh, I hadn’t seen Steven’s comment when I posted, so mine is redundant. Personally, I don’t think that it’s wrong to see that music often appeals to the emotions and is so intended to do so, but the problem with Kamm’s view of Stockhausen is that because music precisely isn’t a language, it’s not necessary to rely on principles of melody and harmony to appeal to the emotions. Music doesn’t require interpretation through principles of meaning the way language does.
If Stimmung (or Xenakis’s Bohor, or Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire) doesn’t appeal to your emotions, then the fault lies in you, not in the music.
So we have confirmation, at least, that one open and enthusiastic fan of Oliver Kamm does indeed read this site.
If we’re going to start “recollecting” the inauthenticity of citations on other subjects then readers might want to consider Kamm’s efforts on behalf of his ongoing anti-Chomsky campaign. Faced with multiple allegations of dishonest handling of source material he has simply refused to offer a response. On the subject of scholarly accuracy, he’s a hypocrite.
In fact, I’d go along with the Aaronovitch Watch commenter who yesterday called him a “cargo-cult academic”.
Funnily enough, the earlier exchange here to which Kamm alludes came after this post, demonstrating the state of his scholarship on a matter regarding Chomsky!
Hell, if we’re going to focus on the accuracy of citations, there’s Kamm’s hilarious citation of Cardew. For those who don’t know, Cardew wrote “Stockhausen serves imperialism” during his batshit Maoist phase (that’s batshit even for a Maoist, btw). He actually broke away from Stockhausen six years before writing this work (becoming a follower of John Cage), btw, forming the improv Scratch Orchestra and AMM (neither known for their adherence to western tonality).
This work, described by the risible Kamm as “stirring”, makes the argument that Stockhausen represents the final chapter in the history of bourgeoise music, rather than a daring break. The problem with Stockhausen’s mysticism is that “”Mysticism says ‘everything that lives is holy’, so don’t walk on the grass and above all don’t harm a hair on the head of an imperialist.” Got that, the problem is that Stockhausen’s music will stop “the people” from killing imperialists. Well its an argument, but probably not one that Kamm concurs with. So here we have it, pretty definitive proof that Kamm hasn’t actually read the work he cites.
Bracketing the validity of the Scruton quote for a moment, his sole point is that the naive listener can follow (and presumably enjoy) a work of tonal music. I seriously doubt, however, that Scruton would argue that this is the highest form of appreciation, or that familiarity with music theory will enhance one’s pleasure and understanding of the music. Clearly then this is not an argument that to be good, worthwhile, etc – that music must appeal to the emotions, or that music that cannot be appreciated without some understanding of music theory is “bad”.
adorno’s criticism of the stockhausen piece, whichever it is, and the piece’s failure to dramatise or even compellingly reveal the process of its own creation, is NOT an argument for sticking with 19th-century tonal conventions, but rather an argument that the young avant-gardist has not yet achieved a language of expression and articulation which allows outsiders in — by which adorno would never have meant scruton’s “people not otherwise versed in musical theory”, since adorno actually cared about and valued vanguard music AND its theory, but rather any potential “theorists of the future” (or some such) who could read the unfolding process of the new language (his problem is basically that HE is shut out; in other words, that this particular piece (whichever it is) shuts out one of the pioneer theorists of the 12-tone project and musical avant-gardism, which adorno as a result considered a bit of jejeune fuck-you-grandad outflanking by a snot-nosed kid…
Given Kamm is reading this, I thought I’d just finish giving him a good kicking. He says at the end:
Given this presumption, I fear that Cardew’s accusation was mistaken. Stockhausen’s most notable intervention in the public sphere was instead a peculiarly fatuous description of the 9/11 bombings as “the greatest work of art ever”. (Stockhausen claimed, not convincingly, to have been misquoted
Given that other journalists present at the press conference backed up Stockhausen’s statement, and that the statement he claimed to have made is consistent with things he’s said elsewhere, what is not convincing about his claim to be misquoted? Do you have any actual evidence to profer, or does it just not feel right?
but there is no dispute that he likened the murder of thousands of civilians by theocratic fanatics to an intense aesthetic experience.)
Well no, an intense aesthetic experience that he described as grotesque. There’s no reason why the murder of thousands of people shouldn’t be an aesthetic experience. It doesn’t make the murder better or worse, or have any bearing on the morality of the situation. It just is. Though I find it interesting that you imply that because the murderers were “theocratic fanatics”, the murder was somehow worse, or that this is worthy of comment when making a moral denunciation.
Actually, it’s quite interesting to make a direct comparison of the Scruton citation Kamm helpfully provides in comment #1 with what he wrote in his blog post. I have been able to correct Kamm’s version of the quote, since as he no doubt knows, the book is available on Amazon’s “Search Inside” facility.
Scruton:
Kamm:
If I didn’t know better, I might almost suppose that Kamm took Scruton’s sentence and decided to try to disguise its provenance by substituting terms, without really understanding their meaning! (And also, as belle points out, traducing Scruton by casually inserting an “above all”!) That hypothesis, improbable as it is, would at least clear up the question of what Kamm means by “western music”: that it is synonymous with “tonality”!
Furthermore, the full version of Scruton’s Culture Counts quotation makes it clear that it is not the music’s argument that appeals directly to the emotions, which is what Kamm’s fatuous sentence claims, but its message. By “argument” Scruton means the music’s structure: what Scruton calls “the argument of a symphony or string quartet” is a feature of it, along with other features such as its “message”. Scruton does not claim, as Kamm fatuously does, that a piece of music just is an argument and that this is what appeals to the emotions. So he is really not saying the same thing as Kamm at all. (Nor, by the way, is he saying exactly the same thing as he said 10 years previously, in TAoM.)
It is no doubt just a coincidence or the result of an unfortunate computer gremlin that Kamm’s garbled version of the quote missed out just those words that introduced the idea of the music’s message as something distinguishable from its argument. Here is the version of the sentence Kamm gave at comment #1, with the part he accidentally forgot to include in bold:
It is no doubt just a coincidence or the result of an unfortunate computer gremlin that Kamm’s garbled version of the quote missed out just those words that introduced the idea of the music’s message as something distinguishable from its argument.
Now be fair Steven; surely the most likely explanation for the garbled sentence is, non-sarcastically, that Kamm skipped a few words while typing from the book. If he’d wanted to be deceptive he’d’ve omitted the “and” too, so the sentence wasn’t obviously garbled.
That is a very fair point.
I remember a remark by Stockhausen (I think it’s in his “Conversations” with Jonathan Cott) about Adorno. Adorno gave a lecture at Darmstadt, trying to impose his own aesthetic theories onto the young composers present. Stockhausen got up and said he was like someone trying to see a chicken in an abstract painting…
Kamm doesn’t seem to have listened to very much of Stockhausen’s music. And, frankly, this annoys me. You wouldn’t review a book you hadn’t read, so why’s he allowed to review the life’s work of a major composer when he knows almost none of it?
It’s depressingly similar to the Derrida pieces, where people who knew at best a tiny portion of the man’s writing were criticizing it…
For an antidote to Kamm’s nasty little display of ignorance: the Guardian‘s Tom Service has a lovely collection of reminiscences of Stockhausen by people who met him.
“The dominance of western music reflects its ability to combine melody and harmony” – Oliver Kamm
I presume Mr Kamm is not quite up on the latest teminology? It’s Country and Western.
No, no no! Mr Kamm doesn’t mean “country and western music”, he means “western music” ie the soundtrack to a genre of film called “westerns”. That always has a very clear message such as “Look, Red Indians on the skyline” or “Look, the stagecoach wheel is falling off”.
Ah, now we are getting somewhere. I hear whips, a male-voice choir, and the twang of a guitar. Suddenly it all makes a kind of batshit sense.
I hear whips
but of course, always tonal whips.
yalls be familiar with ennio morricone’s apprenticeship in gruppo di improvvisazione nuova consonanza, naturally
Which brings us very neatly to “Gunfight at the OK corral”.
That is wonderfully neat. I wonder which character in this short film is closest to OK?
Oliver Kamm pontificating on a subject he knows very little or nothing? Well, what’s new?
I don’t know if Kamm’s absurd book reviews can still be found on Amazon’s website, but they’re informative and funny at the same time. Kamm dismisses Nobel Prize-winning economists for their inability to understand, er, economics (and this coming from a man whose day job is in the financial markets that are on the verge of causing a global recession, perhaps even a depression!). He foams at the mouth at Edward Said’s writings on culture. Hilariously, on his blog (on top of all the misrepresentations, distortions and outright mendacity) he once solicited opinion as to whether Chomsky really was any good at linguistics! Meanwhile, racists like David Horowitz receive high praise. As does John Lewis Gaddis, who once wrote that Kissinger is incapable of doing anything wrong because he’s a thoroughly nice sort of bloke. It doesn’t bear thinking about what Kamm makes of David Barenboim. By the Kamm definition, one of the world’s great pianists and conductors must be terrible.
Morale of the story: if you don’t share Kamm’s fantastic politics, you’ll be damned for alleged stupidity and heaven knows what else. If you’re a neoconservative psychopath, he’ll lavish praise until the recipient vomits and tries to call a halt to the guff.
Steven, have you noticed that Kamm has disappeared from the Times lately? Then check out Kamm’s website and the praise he bestows on his “friend” Daniel Finkelstein, who just so happens to be the opinion editor at…you guessed it…the Times. Could it be that even the Times has had enough of this neoconservative court jester?
You can read this excellent blog and still read the Kammsters blog too. Not sure I’d call myself a fan though. Pretty much the only views I have in common with the Kammster is that the sun rises in the morning and the war in Bosnia was a disgrace in which a lot of people died.
Oliver Kamm’s comical ignorance on the subject of music, which he nonetheless mysteriously insists on trying to write about, is evidenced anew. Attempting to correct a sceptical commenter, he offers the following delicious display of moronic pomposity at his blog:
Of course this is blundering nonsense because:
i) As anyone faintly familiar with contemporary music knows, “contemporary music” is not “usually taken as a synonym” for “experimental music”, but is rather a rough general term (not a term limited to “musicology”), used to encompass all varieties of modern “classical” (or post-classical) or “serious” or “art” music. John Cage’s particular definition of “experimental music” (in his 1957 lecture of that title) is, specifically, any music in which the composer gives up the ambition of having absolute control of the sounds that constitute the performance (using aleatory procedures, ambient factors, tape-splicing etc). (Other people have meant different things again by “experimental music”.) “Contemporary music” is usually taken to include “experimental music”, but is not limited to it. Thomas Adès is a contemporary composer, but not an experimental one, on Cage’s or any other definition: he writes traditionally notated scores.
ii) Neither “contemporary music” nor “experimental music” is synonymous with musique concrète, which is about constructing music through the arrangement of sounds that are “found” or electronically generated and subsequently manipulated — not, in the main, made by conventional instruments. Musique concrète is often considered to be a subset of “experimental music”, but not all “experimental music” is concrète.
iii) Whether Kamm has any idea what “neo-classicism” is, and whether he has even listened to The Rake’s Progress, I leave it for others to decide. (Of course, Stravinsky also employed serialism, which funnily enough falls under some people’s definitions of “experimental music”.)
One does, I fear, begin to wonder whether the blatantly false pose of expertise that Kamm strikes in these matters should inform one’s view of his writing on other topics.
That is embarassingly awful: the Kammster really doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about…
…no change there then.
whether the blatantly false pose of expertise that Kamm strikes in these matters should inform one’s view of his writing on other topics.
Some of us reached that conclusion long ago, but well done for finally seeing the light.
Well there’s this on economics:
http://groups.google.com/group.....0db488c845
that suggests probably not.
Ten years old, and he’s mellowed a little, but the pompous pseudo-academic style remains.
Ten years old
Is that all? He looks at least 12. :P
Dear Unspeak Community,
I’ve been saddened by your petty attacks on Oliver Kamm for some time now, and have avoided participating in your assault, simply because it is below me and below Oliver. At the risk of insulting you, you are rather like a gaggle of geese flapping behind Kamm, pecking at his heels and leaving nothing in your wake but the splatter of geese droppings.
Fortunately, today, he has printed a polemic, which puts an end to your carping. Obviously, you have nothing to say about it. In fact, I notice that “Steven Poole” hasn’t bothered to post one of his nitpicking critiques of it. As many of us have suspected, “Steven Poole” is himself probably a sock-puppet for a small, anaemic group of Guardian readers, not located in Paris, France, but in Islingdon or Croydon. They have finally admitted that they simply don’t understand the world in as sophisticated a way as Kamm. Kamm understands global politics and he understands diplomacy. Kamm understands “extraordinary rendition”.
Our Kamm cuts to the chase.
You unspeak panty-waisters get all weak-kneed when people are moved. What’s the big deal about being moved? And in any case, all that’s lacking is a formal extradition treaty, but it’s not like you get a formal extradition treaty when you go to the South of France for the holidays, is it? So why do you get your knickers in a twist about the whole thing?
But in case you have any issues with “extraordinary rendition”, Kamm comes in with a kicker, because he has something you don’t:
The man has principles. He has so many principles, he could strap you down and pour his principles down your nose until you feel like drowning. But because he has principles he would oppose doing such a thing. In principle at least.
Because if you are actually a Nazi, he might approve of doing such things. And who would argue with this logic?
As we’ve always said, if it’s good enough for the Nazis, it’s good enough for a shepherd in Afghanistan.
Now, I am a lawyer, and I know a good bit of legal reasoning when I see it. The specious legal reasoning I see on unspeak.net is always preceded by the appropriately scatalogical IANAL, identifying where you retrieve your legal knowledge from. This, however, is the stuff of genius:
Kamm recognises the “principled objection” because he is a man who has more principles than you. But he also has a blistering legal insight. Think about it: how can we have international treaties and obligations if there isn’t a sovereign authority that can “effectively” implement these laws? If the laws aren’t enforceable, they’re not real laws, and so they can’t be broken.
Plus, drippy “peace campaigners” think that judicial approaches bring justice, unaware of the justice packed in a daisy-cutter. If Osama Bin Laden had turned himself in, they wouldn’t have known what to do, except perhaps invite him to a sit-in.
At the end of the day, though, Kamm has something you Unspeak minions will never have.
He can travel through time! He knows that Osama Bin Laden was behind the atrocities of 9/11 and he wants to stop him from doing it. What you don’t understand is that even if there is partial or circumstantial evidence, which wouldn’t hold up in court, they very well might be guilty in the future. Kamm’s ability to move through time means that he knows they did it and they must be stopped – in the future! You just aren’t there now to see it – because you’re in the past – and, believe me, you’re lucky! Kamm has gone to the future and he told me what it’s like. We know what lay ahead, and, by God, you pussy-footing lot couldn’t stomach what we saw when we see it in the future. Which is odd. Because we saw Kamm writing about it in The Guardian, in the future, even though it hadn’t happened yet. So, you’re asking, why didn’t he stop Osama bin Laden before September 11th? Because the evidence was only partial and circumstantial, and you wouldn’t let him.
Finally, though, Kamm has the foresight to prevent any of the wrong people from being extraordinarily rendered, even though we know they are guilty and, quite possible, Nazis.
Okay, so the country doing the extraordinary rendition may be violating due process, but the country the person is being “moved” to must exercise due process. That’s a bit of a mind-fuck for people like me, who aren’t quite as clever as Kamm, but he has principles and so I trust him. Just like we only “move” people to trustworthy countries where they swear that they won’t violate
internationaltheir own local laws about torture. Plus, it is only people who are suspected of being directly involved and who are not extreme cases. You unspeak wafflers can’t handle this truth!I know that you were all studiously avoiding this piece like a bunch of hyperventilating peace campaigners, but I thought that I would commit my own little extraordinary rendition and bring the piece into Unspeak territory itself.
Sincerely,
Yours
To steer off the late Stockhausen here, of whom I can say nothing informed…
And what supporters of the war would have advised had, unaccountably, the military option failed to capture Osama bin Laden but instead left us in occupation of large tracts of Afghanistan happily has been put to the test.
It’s been almost seven years and I’m still interested – genuinely interested – to hear a supporter of US/British policy in Afghanistan explain how they imagine this thing is going to end.
Bloody unspeak.net – made me misspell “Islington” and took out my strike-through on “international”.
And as for you, “Alex Higgins” (aka “Steven Poole”), we’re talking about principles here, principles of diplomacy and responsibility and the necessity of stopping bin Laden before he strikes on 9/11/01.
For a moment I thought the person signing himself “sw” above might be a sockpuppet of Oliver Kamm’s, but then I realised the prose was too good. So I gave sw his strikethrough, in case he ever remembers in future what the html is.
The muddled drivel, or drivelly muddle, of the article to which sw alerts us has me, finally, suspecting that “Oliver Kamm” might be just another fictionsuit operated by the inventor of “Melanie Phillips”, though somewhat less sophisticated. Perhaps “his” writings are merely the outcome of a few lines of satirical javascript that execute cunning sets of google queries.
absolutist rejection of rendition is a delightful bit of unspeak, isn’t it? l’etat de rendition, c’est moi!
I’m most surprised, however, to find out that the Taliban are holding Lord Lucan. Perhaps he started the whole thing. Maybe he, bin Laden and Kamm are all bound up with the Comte de Ste. Germain in a time traveling conspiracy, and we just get to see the inexplicable fallout from their eternal war. Paging Dan Brown: your sequel is ready.
I feel like I should take advantage of any such confusion, even if merely ironic.
Don’t know what Steven makes of that…
But I’m comfortable with the rumour that I actually wrote ‘Unspeak’.
“One does, I fear, begin to wonder whether the blatantly false pose of expertise that Kamm strikes in these matters should inform one’s view of his writing on other topics.”
Another way of putting this is that we should feel grateful at such revealing displays of open ignorance. This reminds me of when Kamm’s friend and fellow neocon Stephen Pollard wrote a defiantly boorish and philistine piece putting the boot into the then just-deceased Ingmar Bergman, a piece that betrayed no evidence of Pollard’s having seen any of Bergman’s films and that got bogged down in a completely irrelevant attack on the Liverpudlian-born filmmaker Terence Davies. I vowed upon reading that never to read anything by Pollard again, and (aside from the odd masochistic perusal) I’ve never wasted any time doing so.
Your trashing of Kamm is highly deserved, given that Kamm devotes most of his own blog entries to lambasting writers with whom he disagrees as ‘ignoramuses’ and courageously polemicising with such worthwhile targets as ageing Maoists and internet conspiracy theorists. The linguistic focus of your critique is also choice given Kamm’s predilection for accusing his opponents of illiteracy and correcting their grammatical mistakes. Incidentally, Kamm lost what little credibility he ever had for me when he took exception to a journalist labelling him a ‘defender of neo-conservatism’. In protest, Kamm pointed to the subtitle of his book ‘Anti-totalitarianism’: ‘a left-wing case for a neo-conservative foreign policy’. So clearly not a defence of neo-conservatism at all. Is that unspeak or just outright self-contradiction?
Oliver does have a rather incompetent grasp of the meaning of words, which lends a comic tinge to the ongoing spectacle of his prose style failing to live up to the ambitions he cherishes for it. It also makes it hard to tell, though, whether any one of his gaffes arises from simple crass ignorance or a kind of cynical Humpty-Dumptyism. I note from Aaronovitch Watch, for example, that he takes the line that John McCain, his favourite US presidential candidate, is “not a conservative”, even though McCain describes himself as a conservative.