commodity alienation

Is the confusion within DJ culture between consumption and production simply an extension of commodity alienation in a Marxist sense, or is it a herald of a new set of commodity relations to come? The amount of installation work within the visual arts that involves the arrangement of consumer goods (or services) into patterns might be another symptom of this phenomenon.

event of appropriation

The mystery of the Heideggerian “Gestel” is the nature of this relationship of challenge and provocation between man and being as necessary prelude to the ‘event of appropriation.’
Perhaps this becomes more comprehensible when viewed as an extension and distillation of the Nietzsche of “Gay Science,” or perhaps not.

jitterbugs

Adorno’s comments on the insectoid-robotic “jitterbugs” of the 1920s was not so much exaggeration as a dim intimation of dance-floors to come.

parametric intensity

To say that the durations of kinesthetic responses are proportional to parametric intensity takes on added significance when thinking about electronic dance music where parametric change is quantized to the sample level, tens of thousands of units per second with almost absolute precision. Here the embodied modulation of affect becomes entrained to purely machinic unfoldings.

kinesthetic response-process

“Groove” involves a “kinesthetic response-process” that breaks with linear temporality and provokes a subjectivity elastic in time over micro-intervals. It is this temporal elasticity and not just repetition itself that opens the possibility of ek-stasis (ecstasy).

affective figuration

If Wagner’s music can be read in terms of Hegelian sublation it is as the final accomplishment of ‘musica ficta,’ bringing to a close the period of Western music as affective figuration.

epistomelogical specificity

For any study of the ‘neutral level,’ the trace of a work of art, to have epistomelogical specificity, it must be divorced as much as possible from poietic and esthesic contextualization.

metaphorical enterprise

But to examine structure is always already to be engaged in a metaphorical enterprise, at least outside of mathematics (and perhaps even there).

semiomorphic resonance

What is important in semiology looked at from the point of view of ‘semiomorphic resonance’ is the study of the structure of reference: how symbolic forms function in series and towards limits.

The Wagner event

The Wagner event was an anti-Hegelian moment where the art of the 19th century swerves to miss its appointment with (sublation?).

reduced listening

Schaeffer’s ‘reduced listening’ is a method towards the systematic creation and maintenance of what James Tenney would call a ‘threshold of formal concern.’ This listening style brings the ‘sound object’ into being by describing its phenomenological boundaries.
To say that Schaeffer’s ‘sound object’ is a special case of what Tenney calls a ‘temporal gestalt unit’ is to bring the temporal aspect of its objectivity to the foreground.

Antony Gormley

In the work of sculptor Antony Gormley, it is the space generated by the placement of figures in a field of vision that is the artistic matter, not the representation of the human form in the figures themselves. Our architectural experience of the engendered space provides the experience of movement in the work. The previous tradition of attempting to represent movement in the static figure that culminates in Rodin’s superimposition of muscular micro-movements in not touched on here. Gormley’s humanoid forms represent bodily movement barely at all…just enough to summon a haptic response from the viewer…just enough to set the viewer into resonance with the figured space.

A more subtle theme in Gormley’s work is oscillation and patterning in material processes and how spatial reorganization re-contextualizes them (consider his reorganized trees). When Gormley turns to working with the figure there is already a complex interplay of time, space, place, and affect.

privileged discipline

While we still as a species have a tendency towards haptic empathy while viewing other human bodies, dance will remain a privileged discipline in which to examine questions of spatial and morphic resonance. And as architecture gets increasingly dancerly in its exploration of space and dance gets increasingly architectonic, the intersection of these forms will become even more fruitful for thinking these resonances.

morphic resonance

To attend to the resonance of forms, to morphic resonance, is to attend to the production of space by and between bodies. It is also to question the spatiality of the temporal.
The commonplace expression that architecture is frozen music needs to be re-examined from this point of view. Do we mean by this that a building is like a piece of music made immobile so we can investigate the details of its symmetries outside of time, or do we mean that a building is like a musical moment suspended in time, music put on pause so to speak. Or is it the intersection of these two temporalities, one transversal to the other that is significant. Perhaps it is the counterpoint of these two temporal unfoldings as a possible phenomenological experience of architecture that brings the musical to mind.

possibilities

Although the trajectories of art music and vernacular music have diverged so dramatically over the last century and can never be brought together again as a totality, they must be thought together to make sense of where we are today and what possibilities there may yet be for sound as art.

politically innocent art

There is no politically innocent art, and this is doubly true of entertainment.

onto-theological presence

The rejection of atonality is aligned with the belief in an a-historical symbolic matrix of onto-theological presence. Consider ‘German’ music from Bach to Wagner for traditionalists, or ‘pure’ tuning systems for various neo-Pythagorians.

emotional effects of music

If, as the neuro-scientists tell us, different parts of the brain are involved with the emotional effects of music and the appreciation of structure, perhaps the mono-structure of the popular song form has something to do with the emotional investment of the listener.

productive mis-hearings

This does not mean however that there is a listening ‘adequate’ to particular musics able to unpack completely the meaning latent somewhere in the sounding. Meanings only arise between the material event of sound and listening subjects as temporal and highly contingent processes. All listenings are in this way productive mis-hearings.

materials of music

Listening is always situated in a historical and cultural context. As the materials of music are virtual, they can only be discerned with clarity through the lens of embodied temporal-spatial specificity.

modulation of point of view

From the very beginning of cinema it was apparent to some that the movement of the camera was as significant as the movement ‘captured’ by the camera. That is, the modulation of point of view was as significant as the dimensional flattening that cinema shared with painting and still photography. Futurists did not discover this…if anything the optical outlook of futurism lay implicit in cinema from the beginning waiting to be noticed.

the Schoenberg event

The violence with which the Schoenberg event is still ghettoized is the surest sign that something that remains to be thought still resonates there.

symbolic representation

Now that the primacy of the trace of the musical work in the written score is almost forgotten, maybe we can begin to think the relationship between sonic realization and symbolic representation over the past several centuries.

critique of music in music

Arrangement in the romantic era becomes what the ‘art of the remix’ could be in our time: the critique of music in music. But for this to happen the musical descendents of DJ culture will have to become more reflective, and above all begin to sort out their confusion of production, reproduction and reception.

style is substance

The assertion that ‘style is substance’ is always just a brief prelude to the assertion that there is no substance. This is not just a cynical stance, but becomes a significant challenge in a situation where the actual becomes ever more dependant on the virtual.

shut up and dance

The antagonism promoted between reflective thought and bodily expression, the enjoinment everywhere to ‘shut up and dance,’ disciplines our alienation from an unmediated experience of either mind or body.

purity of tone

Romanticism elevated the diffuseness of the sonic to an ideal. The purity of tone that had guided the evolution of instruments in the west over the preceding centuries found its end in the requirement that even the largest orchestral forces speak with a voice that is everywhere, yet one.

The optical

The particulate nature of light makes it imperceptible to us except by the objects it illuminates (or of course from the luminous source). Conversely the wave transmission of sonic energy is perceived surrounding us as a field. The optical always confirms our belief in the solidity of the boundaries of the objective while the sonic calls them into question.

Cameras

Within the west for many centuries, political mobalization has always involved group song. Can we say that this would be the case now? Can we imagine the breaking into song of the mass? And is this loss of possibility just a symptom of a change of musical culture, or does the change of musical culture present a symptom of the loss of the possibility of mass political mobilization? If not song, what can we find instead at every political manifestation? Cameras.

material reality of subjectivity

Speech, before any of what is said, is the experience of the seeming material reality of subjectivity. It is the assertion of the possibility of there being ‘some-body’ there to say some-thing. And in this way is the assertion of the material reality of the object as well. In the guttural attack of a consonant, or even the slight clearing of the throat before is not always the question: is any-body there?

proximity of social power

The arts (and perhaps especially the most experimental) have always unfolded in the proximity of social power. This must be kept in mind when considering any valorization of an aesthetic position as a platform for resistance.

musica ficta

With Wagner, music as the art of the representation of affect comes to an end. At this moment, just as Levi-Strauss had identified the bifurcation of myth into the forms of the novel and the fugue, the musical lineage of ‘musica ficta’ bifurcates into cinema and psycho-analysis.

de-territorialization of the ear

Several levels of representation stand between most musics and the material specificity of sound. The representation of “extra-musical” affects or events, yes, but also the representation of the virtual structures of particular musical languages: a note, a sruti, a power-chord. The emancipation of the sonic from representation is always at the same time a de-territorialization of the ear.

omega point

The developing eschatology is perhaps nothing more than the exact identification of nihilism with the accomplishment of the metaphysical quest. This is the singularity of Kurzweil, for instance…the omega point of the techno optimistic.

To listen

To listen is to become aware of a space or a time where space temporalizes and time spatializes. At the moment of the eclipse of the self we are literally ek-static, outside of time and space, in no time and in no-place…this is the siren song of the oblivion of being.

deep listening

In Heideggerian terms, in “deep listening” we come as close as possible to the phenomenological experience of the “clearing” that is Dasein. We catch a flash or a glimpse of the spatializing and temporalizing processes that unfold prior to time and space.

non-eventful minimalism

The non-eventful character of musical minimalism can be seen in the rapidity and vehemence of the retreat from the consequences of early minimalist activities by the principle characters. What was the insight they were recoiling from? What was the event waiting to be born there…waiting for the decision that did not arrive?

structured through resonance

For Badiou the subject is structured through resonance with the temporal unfolding of the event. But the initial entrainment or putting into resonance is the simple decision to recognize the event as event…But this decision is one with the possibility of error. And is not the error joining with a resonance rather than constituting a resonance by the decision?

synaesthetic impulse

What is the nature of the synaesthetic impulse within modernism? Is it the eruption of a new modality or is it a symptom of the breakdown of the optical regime of the last 500 years?

atonal pop

The majority of popular music today is atonal…a fact lost on those who universalize tonality and consider atonality an historical aberration of the west. Tonality involved (so we are told) a heightening of tension by delaying harmonic closure and this went some way in explaining the emotional investment in the temporal unfolding. In the dominant musics today, closure is known in advance to be laid out on the grid in binary fashion: 2 units, 4 units, 8 units, 16 units, etc. Harmonic movement has gone from the traditional 3-chord pattern, to the 2-chord alternation, to the 1-chord mono-harmony, often the implication of a modal scalar pattern of a few pitches. The recent flowering of complex accompanimental vocal harmonies is not a refutation of this as they are the product of predominantly machinic subjectivities and accord with traditional tonality only in the most tenuously mediated way. In fact it is possible that the tonal and the machinic are in some way deeply incompatible.

haptic empathy

As technological mediation in the performance of popular music becomes ever more the norm, haptic empathy with instrumental production of sound becomes ever more phantasmatic. The discourse of pedagogical interactivity arising at places like MIT meshes very nicely with the entertainment industry’s production of interactive quasi-musical activities to harness these phantasmatic longings and discipline the bodily experience of the sonic.

relations among intervals

If the triad remains a dominant fact of western music, its unity obscures the discursive struggle between intervals themselves; in the detuning of fifths to create “pure” thirds, for instance. In this context what does the dominance of the equal tempered system (whose hegemony has stabilized more in the last 20 years than the previous 200) mean for the relations among intervals?

synchronization of affect

The synchronization of affect through the media event is dependent on a resonance effect that gathers and organizes media outlets. The question of simulation can be re-thought as, does a “real” event create a resonance effect throughout the media that then generates the media event or is the media event simply a symptom of a resonance with the media whose causes are obscured to us?

magical properties

The real and direct beneficiary of the discoverers of surrealist photography was advertising. Madison Avenue learned quickly the power of optimal reframing to set the magical properties of the commodity in relief against their use-value.

sound theorists

The emerging generation of sound theorists tend to privilege sound as the media most suited to reflecting what they see as the non-hierarchical, rhizomatic structures of 21st century net-culture, and in this way have wed the relevance of the sonic to the dominant techno-optimism of capitalist globalization.

creative appropriation

It does not help the cause of creative appropriation to blur the distinctions between inspiration, influence, reproduction, parody, gloss, trope, collage, and so on. Instead these distinctions need to be sharpened so that those on the side of opening creative possibilities can approach the issues involved with more clarity than the functionaries of the monopoly of the mental landscape.
To say for instance that the iconic image of mickey mouse can be appropriated freely because after all mickey mouse was inspired by the existence of real mice, quite frankly deserves the quick drubbing it will receive by the protectors of capital’s copyrights.

the inhuman within the human

That “art bears witness to the inhuman within the human” as Badiou has said partially explains the privileging of art for the understanding of the post-human developing within what remains of the human in that the post-human is by definition inhuman. We care about art, and that is part of our humanity. Art does not care about us, and helps to prepare us to give up our care, without pity.

Surrealist photograph

Surrealist photography discovered the magic that could be summoned by the simple act of unexpected framing of objects in the camera lens. Can we say that the sample as we think of it today is deliminated by an analogous process of framing displaced from the spectral to the temporal?

rhythmic uniformity

To blame the rhythmic uniformity of dance music on the restrictions of music software is to ignore the diagnosis that dates from early Adorno of what some today have called the recursive logic of the tyranny of the beat. Also it neglects to ask why our software has the restrictions it does. And it ignores that despite the normative orientations of popular music software, it could be used otherwise, against the expectation of the programmers.

’68

The most remarkable thing about ’68 as a political sequence was its non-linearity. Only the Situationists recognized ahead of the event its non-linear potential. This alone secures their continued claim to significance.

narrative investment

The era of the classic sonata form laid the esthesic groundwork for the narrative investments that informed musical sensibility of the later 19th century.

techno porn

The commonplace observation that pornography drives the adoption of new technologies from VHS tape to the internet is perhaps an alibi to obscure from ourselves the degree to which we are libidnally invested in the technological change itself.

Jerome Bel

In the work of Jerome Bel we see the near infinite reversibility of specular critique. No sublation is possible here. We must either endure or step out of the realm of the visually performative entirely.

Cartesian subject

The era of the Cartesian subject was first and foremost an optical regime. 200 years of projective perspective within the visual arts had laid the ground work for the cognitive experience of subjective centrality. That this optical regime was challenged from within mathematics before the arts speaks as much as anything to the shift in the balance between art and science in the intervening centuries.

becoming machine

The drama of becoming machine is always a response to the crisis of the privileging of human presence. Across many musical domains this drama played itself out quite visibly in the 70s from James Brown to Kraftwerk to Steve Reich. That the drama has gone out of our becoming machine, is a readout on the loss of this privileging. It is not that the post-human is no longer felt to be a threat, it is that the distinction deliminated by “post” is perhaps no longer available to us.

arts organizations

That many arts organizations seem to fit to a “t” the professed values of capitalist enterprises should not really come as a surprise, but then what is the source of their rejection from the field of capitalist legitimacy? Is it really just the inability to return a profit? Or is there some other threat lurking there? It should be remembered that the concept of the “non-profit” capitalist enterprise was as much as Che Guevara posters a product of the commodification of the spirit of ’68 and by the close of the “short century” in 1989 had largely imploded.

digital mediation

As digital mediation becomes the norm for all forms of music making, operating systems, editing environments, and user interfaces take on the feeling of transparency and the forms of mediation of the creative process become obscured. As an example, consider the contemporary classical composer of acoustic art music. Sitting at her terminal, her notation software notates quickly for her everything that comes quickly to thought. The sonic success of her choices is confirmed for her by the realization of her score by sampled instruments. That an oboe is above all else a conceptual category is lost on her, and the one thing she will never discover listening back to her oboe simulacrum is what new an oboe can do. In this way the assemblage of the conditional compositional technique with machinic subjectivities, misunderstood as transparent tools to facilitate this technique, contributes to the ossification of a cultural form.

subjectivizing move

The primal subjectivizing move is the infinite spherical radiation of possible action. Resistance from the world results in topological deformation before complete blockage, which is known to us as character, or personality.

Attali’s “noise”

If there is one theoretical insight of consequence to be drawn from Attali’s “noise” it is that music is “a way of perceiving the world.” In this sense it is fully in the mainstream of western thinking of music as a carrier of meaning. The age-old debate within this orientation is between the idea of music as a model of divine harmony vs. music as a model of information as such. A contemporary example of this divide could be La Monte Young on one side and John Oswald on the other.

sock hop

The idea of a generational divide has been used for several generations now to promote the idea that resistance to the dominant subjectivity is simply reactionary. For this reason the high school sock hop of the baby boomers maintains its position as a primal scene of late capitalist reification.

the theoretical subject

Arthur Kroker’s “theory as anamorphosis” and Slavoj Zizek’s “Parallax View” are perhaps not so far removed from Dali’s “paranoiac critical method” or W.S. Burroughs’s aleatoric magical workings. All are concerned primarily with the correct positioning of the theoretical subject.

Stockhausen and Ritter

What is the connection between Stockhausen and Ritter? I think the idea of the experimental sensorium of one’s own body. The electronic musician in his studio evokes his auditory perception in assemblage with his machines. In one respect the compositions are proofs of these phenomenological experiments. There is a collapse of subject and experimental object in an act of self vivisection. Can we make a connection to Nietzsche here (hear)? But also we see here how Stockhausen was ultimately a romantic artist. Is there a “good romanticism” that can be identified with becoming cosmic?

Zielinski’s Varientology

There are two very different approaches to writing history: telling stories about what happened to explain the present vs. uncovering possible but obscured trajectories for the future. Zielinski’s Varientology is oriented in general toward the second.

The Magic Flute

What is the trajectory that begins with “The Magic Flute,” Mozart’s last opera? It is one thing to think of opera’s Deaths a la Zizek, and another to think of its Births, its re-beginnings, its reinvention of itself just when it seems hopelessly stuck in convention.

post-traumatic subject

The problem, for me, of the post-traumatic subject is the question of how one makes a distinction between subjectivisation as a generally (?) traumatic process and as a proper traumatic event.

Musical pedagogy

Musical pedagogy, particularly within classical traditions, is embodiment. There is a bodily understanding of a musical tradition as a structure of feeling that is transmitted from one body to another. This is of course one reason why classical traditions are threatened with extinction, the inability to allow those embodied pedagogical processes to be properly mediated by technology. Perhaps the “rock-band” type video games are also examples of embodied pedagogical processes, but where the transmitting body is a cybernetic robotic one. One could imagine the apologetics of these games (if one still needed apologetics) that in them machines work to impart a feeling for music. But it is the opposite that is in fact the case, the music works to impart a feeling for the machine.

The embodiment of musicians is also a good subject to examine the relationship between consciousness and bodily action. The bodily movements of classical musicians are among the most subtle, most complex known to man, and by definition they are not under conscious control. Another term of resonance, perhaps, between the modulation of emotional affect and what it is that your body is doing. What does it mean as a performer to say that you must “feel the music,” it means you must experience in an emotional way what your body is doing on its own. It is this moment of mediation that technology looks to enter into.

escape time?

If time can in a sense be seen as the metaphysics of three-dimensional entities, can one say that the project of overcoming metaphysics is an attempt to escape time? The desire for the ultimate cataclysmic bifurcation of divine violence? Or will science undo this dimension of time before we can complete this thinking? For instance through the proof of and instrumental use of retro-causality.

supplemental dimension

To the degree that philosophy approaches the present from the vantage point of the future, philosophy acts to fold time in on itself. One could say that philosophical thought is a kind of supplemental dimension in which the folding of time can occur.

space to time

A key problem here is the relationship of arrangement in space to time. Is our “constrainedness” in time the unfolding in series of discrete spatial arrangements in space? Perhaps here we need to go back to Xeno.

Even if we were to conceive of time as simply another spatial dimension, but one in which we were constrained to move in only one direction, we would be left to wonder how we move without something like time. And what would be the force constraining our movement, the “wind blowing from Paradise,” the flow from the broken vessel of Gnosticism?

Pop music proper

Pop music proper does not begin until a stable commodity form of the proper scale and distribution potential, initially sheet music. Its classical form was the 45 single, and its form of crisis is the MP3 file.

Joplin’s ragtime represents the first encounter of ostensibly African-American sensibilities with the pop commodity form.

moment of Baroque music

The founding moment of Baroque music was the rejection of the legacy of the music of the church to build a new art music directly from the vernacular. In this is already the birth of music as a deterritorializing force for capital, although its first test was the production of post-national capitalist subjectivities.

Vernacular music

Vernacular music functions to inscribe a people within a particular culture. It sets a worldview into resonance, which helps both to create and sustain the boundaries of that worldview. “What” music is in the vernacular is predominantly the same from culture to culture: a single melody with a simple relationship to a fixed tonal center unfolding in cyclic metrical units.

The “pop song” has so far for the most part shared these qualities but functions as a force of deterritorialization for capital.Interestingly, as a deterritorializing force, it has the potential to deterritorialize itself. This can already almost be seen in some of today’s DJ music.

Developmental music

Baroque music is pre-developmental in the sense of what development came to mean post-Mozart. The music of DJ culture is post-developmental, as was minimalism proper in Western classical music. The traditional popular song is simply non-developmental. Developmental music unfolds in a dialectical relationship to its form, where in general pre and post developmental musics are fixed in length by something external to them, like a pre-existing fixed form, or the capacity of a 45 single, and have the capacity to otherwise go on forever. This is cyclic, mythic time.

musical philosophy

That “musical philosophy” or the philosophy of music has come to mean the thinking about predominantly western classical music within the analytic tradition from the past few decades shows just how low the status of music as an object of thought has fallen in the west. Perhaps a steady decline since the time of Pythagoras. Can we even say that Pythagoras is the initiator of the decline?

Involved in recognizing the steady pitches of Greek music’s relationship to simple integer ratios was a forgetting of the infinite sonic complexity of our world.

70s structuralist filmmaking

70s structuralist filmmaking brought film closest, as of yet, to the situation of music, if one discounts the specifically synesthetic-visual music and the like.

sinusoidal potential

The idea that any sound can be resolved through analysis into constituent sine waves should be thought of in terms of Manuel Delanda’s concept of “virtual structure.” There are no little sine wave generators to be found scattered throughout the actual metric world, but there is perhaps sinusoidal potential in the realm of the virtual topological, to be found at the heart of the sonic process.

In Delanda’s reading of Deleuze, virtual structures drive intensive processes whose end result is material forms. This is the process of actualization. “End result” is of course poor choice of language as this process of actualization is without end. Also it must be remembered that this process works both ways, or as a cycle. Virtual structure is in a constant state of becoming constrained by the actual state of matter and the space of possibilities these material structures allow. Think of this in terms of (re)sonance for a moment: energy is applied to a sounding object. The virtual structures that have something to do with the voice of the object change in response to the object becoming set into motion. In one sense resonance is the name for this change in state. An example might be: one characteristic of a superior violin is that less energy is required to accomplish this change of state, for the violin to “speak” and so one can play with greater subtlety of tone.