this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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chapotraphouse
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"It's supposed to be shit" is and will almost always be a bullshit excuse in my eyes. It's on par with "it's just a prank, bro" and "it's a social experiment." Performance art is brilliant and fantastic and doing something badly isn't that, it's just lazy.
You're not deconstructing anything by doing it badly, you're just doing it badly. If all your "deconstruction" is doing is asking "what is [concept] really?"
Then you're a boring person asking boring questions. Or at least 9 times outta 10 it's boring, because I do love the ship of Theseus.
I think that “it’s supposed to be shit” can be good when it comes from an artist that has the ability to do it well. No idea if this is the case for Raygun, but it’d be interesting to me if she had proven her chops elsewhere then decided to put on a horrible act.
This is not what she is arguing lol
In 2019, I bought a cheap guitar at a pawn shop. Over the course of the following year, I swapped out the neck, the tuners, the pickups, the controls, the jack, and the bridge. Is it still the same guitar?
You can't play the same guitar twice
If my guitar went through the Star Trek transporter beam and had all its molecules disassembled into energy and was reassembled via the inverse process from different energy strings, is it still that guitar or is it a duplicate?
If you cover your eyes and the guitar disappears and then you uncover them and it reappears, is it the same guitar?
Depends on if I have slotting files or a Dremel nearby. It's kind of an Idle Hands situation over here.
Thats not the same as the Star Trek thing though, right? The guitar never stops existing, whereas with the star trek thing there is either a moment where it does not exist or a moment where it exists in two places at once.
It's a joke about lacking object permanence the way babies do
good joke
Oh damn, whoops
I always have an issue with the use of the words "the same" because it kinda ruins it for me, because like it objectively isn't "the same" it's the guitar with some things changed about it.
Is it the guitar you picked up at a pawn shop though? Yeah it is. It is still the guitar
Is it still that guitar if I swap out the body for a new one? What if that also requires a pickguard swap? What if the tremolo cavity plate no longer fits and I need to swap that out, too?
It's conceptually the same guitar if you think it is
It's the same idea of "what is a chair"? You are the one who perceives an arrangement of wood in a particular way as being a chair. Heck, you're the one who conceptualizes a certain arrangement of organic molecules to be "wood" in the first place
Yeah, I think so. You're the one who makes it that guitar, so as long as it is that guitar to you, then it is. Repairs and replacements are part of the life you live with it, the travels you have together. I would say it wasn't "that guitar" if you swapped it out wholesale. How do you feel about it?
The answer gets more tricky if we say you're a famous musician and when you die, society decides to keep your guitar, because then who is it that makes the guitar the guitar, and what if they disagree?
Or that we say it breaks in two and you repair the two halves into two seperate guitars (personally I'd say the guitar wasn't no more and you'd used it to fix up two other guitars).
I wrote out a bunch of the hypotheticals not too long ago, I'll see if I can find them, if you want
This is the joke. The body and a couple of plastic bits are all that remain from the original pawn shop find because I kept finding shit that was either broken, unusable, or in need of so much rework that it made more sense to just get new parts, resulting in an almost entirely different instrument from what I initially bought. I almost have enough bits to rebuild the original guitar and dump it off on some other sap with poor impulse control, but it probably has more use value as (carcinogenic) firewood.
No i understand that, but what I mean by "swapped out" is that you replace all the parts of the guitar at once.
Last question: do you think this line of questioning will work on my spouse?
Yes and you should definitely do it
brb
Edit: Holy shit, it worked! Thanks, comrades!
I hope it was a nice conversation that let you appreciate how they perceive the world or something like that