Concerning PCP and particularly aesthetics, Kelly's claimed focus of
convenience for his theory was on enabling individuals to restructure their
past, so a reasonable use of PCP would be to help those with obviously bad
taste to change it. (Perhaps Devi might volunteer his love for Newcastle
United Football Club as a test bed for treatment. I'm sure he could be cured.)
If we look for a wider value of PCP, most theories of aesthetics, from Plato
onwards, are basically associationist, so in principle you can use PCP to
analyse the connections in my aesthetic constructs, finding perhaps that I
connect Van Gogh's use of perspective with the futility of life, or the
taste of red wine with rasberries. But this is superficial (providing no
explanations of why I make these associations) and purely verbal. I cannot
explain the impact on me of the slow movement of Brahms' Bb string quartet.
It relates to something pre-verbal and intangible.
Lacan (a post-Freudian theoriser) talks of signifier-signified chains, in
which words, of course, are socially based, and always signifiers of
something else. Thus, if I could speak of what the Brahms signified, then
that word itself would only be another signifier. At the end of the chain,
the signified is lost, or so knotted with the signifier that it cannot be
separately expressed. And discussing music in terms of this verbal chain
sends the question of its significance along a route of social meanings
which may not be helpful. This theory tells me nothing about my taste - but
at least it explains why all theories of taste are ultimately speculative.
I don't know if this helps. In principle I'm saying that I think PCP can
(and should) form a basis to examine the overt, tangible and verbal aspects
of wider issues such as aesthetics as they affect the individual, but it
can't address the more fundamental questions.
Charles Smith
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