Make Believe: On the Power of Pretentiousness

SPEAKER_1 (0:08)

Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and JF Martel. For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weirdstudies.com.

J. F. Martel (0:44)

Welcome to Weird Studies, this is JF.

When you co-host a podcast with the tagline Art and Philosophy at the limits of the thinkable, you probably shouldn't be surprised when someone calls you pretentious.

Fortunately, I'd built up some immunity to that particular complaint long before Phil and I launched Weird Studies. It was in the 10th grade that the P word was first hurled at me. It hurt because it was true. Today, however, when I read a review describing our show as somewhat pretentious, it doesn't hurt at all, again, because it's true. I guess I've come to understand that nothing new happens in culture without a modicum of pretension, by which I mean that the emergence of good creative work necessarily hinges on someone, somewhere, deciding to become what they aren't, deciding to pretend, in hopes of transplanting something from the realm of the merely possible to that of the actual, with no guarantee, of course, that it will survive the procedure.

Take, for instance, Pierre-Yves Martel's latest musical project, Ephemera, a 10-hour-long, quote, experiment in sonic immersion and long-form music, combining field and archival recordings with modular synthesis and acoustic instruments. This episode features an excerpt from the ninth piece in Pierre-Yves' series, a rendition of a Bach-Serra band played on the harmonium. Now, how's that for pretentious?

As you may know, Pierre-Yves is our resident composer and performer. He writes all the original music you hear on Weird Studies. As his older brother, I can assure you that he's the most unpretentious person I've ever met. When leveled at his work, the charge of pretentiousness is no more deserved than if you lobbed it at a murmuration of starlings. But check out his Bandcamp site, link in the show notes, and have a listen. At times you'll wonder if this is even music. But what is music?

What was music before the first tune was sung? What is music when any song ends in that silence of infinite possibility? Once again, Gilles Deleuze may have said it best. What expert judgment in art, he wrote, can ever bear on the work to come? Brian Eno long ago decided that he'd take any accusation of pretentiousness as a compliment rather than an insult. And thank God he did. As for us, well, we're just doing our thing. If you don't like it, there are millions of other podcasts out there. If you do like it, then listen on. Roll your eyes when the need arises. And please consider supporting us on Patreon. By joining our top tier for the low price of nine American dollars a month, you can even come to our monthly Zoom meetups and be somewhat pretentious with us. We won't judge. We promise.

SPEAKER_1 (3:42)

Promise.

Phil Ford (4:07)

So I'm going to start off reading a passage from Brian Eno's published diary, A Year with Swollen Appendices, the title of which alludes to the fact that it's a year of his diaries, plus rather substantial appendices that include various pieces of short writing he's done over the years. And one of them is a little one-page squib on pretentiousness. It's titled Pretension.

And it's worth reading in full.

J. F. Martel (4:38)

Pretension is a pretentious way of saying pretentiousness.

Phil Ford (4:43)

Okay, so I'm just gonna pretend I didn't hear you say that.

Pretension is the dismissive name given to people's attempts to be something other than what they quote unquote really are. It is vilified in England in particular because we are so suspicious of people trying to quote, rise above their station. In the arts, the word pretentious has a special meaning. The attempt at something that the critic thinks you have no right even to try. I'm very happy to have added my little offering to the glowing mountain of things described as pretentious. I'm happy to have made claims on things that I didn't have any right to, and I'm happy to have tried being someone else to see what it felt like. I decided to turn the word pretentious into a compliment. The common assumption is that there are real people and there are others who are pretending to be something they're not. There is also an assumption that there's something morally wrong with pretending. My assumptions about culture is a place where you can take psychological risks without incurring physical penalties, make me think that pretending is the most important thing we do. It's the way we make our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise. Robert Wyatt once said that we were always in the condition of children, faced with things we couldn't understand and thus with the need to guess and improvise. Pretending is what kids do all the time. That's how they learn. What makes anyone think you should sometime give it up?