"Every Home Is Wired": 4 -- Towards a Strategic Progressive Rock Community

"Every Home Is Wired":
4 -- Towards a Strategic Progressive Rock Community

In the end, then, de Certeau's view that "the two ways of acting" -- strategies and tactics -- "can be distinguished according to whether they bet on place or on time" (39) may no longer be generally valid for individual actors; today, individuals and institutions can act strategically within their own limited but well-demarcated segment of culture, but must fall back on tactics outside, in the wider cultural and societal context. This is a possibility not considered by de Certeau, perhaps because it stems from the segmentation of Western culture in combination with and under the influence of new media like the Internet (with their infinite cyber-spaces) -- it should be seen as a sign of our (postmodern) times.	Bit 16
"Every position on postmodernism in culture ... is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today" (Jameson 55), and the possible effects of the changes described here on (Western) society at large should therefore finally also be considered. As Lull notes, "popular music today may be the perfect sound track for life at the end of the twentieth century -- a choreography of musical and cultural impermanence that matches the quickening pace and uncertainty of the times" (11) --, and the heterogeneous genre of Progressive Rock perhaps especially so. Generally, too, throughout human history changes in popular music and other tastes have also often been correlated with changes in society as such. Attali, in fact, even goes as far as stating that "music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organisation are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things" (11). This may be so especially today, since it has become increasingly simple and cheap to produce, manufacture, sell, and distribute music -- due in large part also to global electronic media.⁶	Bit 17

In the end, then, de Certeau's view that "the two ways of acting" -- strategies and tactics -- "can be distinguished according to whether they bet on place or on time" (39) may no longer be generally valid for individual actors; today, individuals and institutions can act strategically within their own limited but well-demarcated segment of culture, but must fall back on tactics outside, in the wider cultural and societal context. This is a possibility not considered by de Certeau, perhaps because it stems from the segmentation of Western culture in combination with and under the influence of new media like the Internet (with their infinite cyber-spaces) -- it should be seen as a sign of our (postmodern) times.

Bit 16

"Every position on postmodernism in culture ... is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today" (Jameson 55), and the possible effects of the changes described here on (Western) society at large should therefore finally also be considered. As Lull notes, "popular music today may be the perfect sound track for life at the end of the twentieth century -- a choreography of musical and cultural impermanence that matches the quickening pace and uncertainty of the times" (11) --, and the heterogeneous genre of Progressive Rock perhaps especially so. Generally, too, throughout human history changes in popular music and other tastes have also often been correlated with changes in society as such. Attali, in fact, even goes as far as stating that "music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organisation are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things" (11). This may be so especially today, since it has become increasingly simple and cheap to produce, manufacture, sell, and distribute music -- due in large part also to global electronic media.⁶

Bit 17

Section 4 -- Go on to Bite:

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18