Re: [microsound] MAP Series Guest Lecture: Ian Andrews

[billashline@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

I haven't had a chance to sit down and look at Ian's article in detail 
yet, but I will soon.  I just wanted to respond to some of this.

dbuchwald wrote:

>  Could it be that it depends on the
>narrowness of the system what appears as "glitch" (in the sense of error or dirt in
>the system)?  Maybe if the system is too clean, the probability of 'errors'
>multiplies.  But they are errors only from the narrow perspective of the overclean
>system.  Would foregrounding of the glitch destabilize the overclean systems, expose
>their vulnerability?  Or is it the beginning of a broader perspective, of a less
>exclusive system?
>
I like this configuration of things because I want to theorize glitch 
aesthetics through the work of Georges Bataille.  I see glitch as part 
of the accursed share, of expenditure, of technological production and 
process.  That which technology refuses to accept and admit.  In 
essence, glitch is the waste product of technology.  Microsound 
musicians are playing with its feces, recuperating it from the sewer, 
not so much to privilege it, which would throw us back into the problem 
of representation, a profanation of the sacred, by simply reversing the 
order of the hierarchy, but to simply take it into account, to give it 
its due.  Glitch is aural abjection, which has left the realm of the 
abject as object and become the "informe" or formless.  By its very 
nature, it resists theorization.  But it's always there, always 
inserting itself unacceptably into the normative, always finding a space 
to emerge.  Glitch is the surplus of technological production, the 
expenditure that such production constantly refuses.

>
>
>Now of all the terms we used here I most distinctly dislike "avant-garde" because it
>still transports the idea of a progress or progression of history where you can be
>in front or in back.  
>
Aligned too much with Hegel, indeed.  The only place to go for an 
"avantgarde" that remains is outside the prevailing codes where it is 
still permitted.  the avantgarde is now a trope.  It's a style.  A 
category.  Which by definition it could never have become.  So the only 
place to go is in spaces like electroacoustic improv or perhaps sine 
wave experiments or other such areas in more of a compositional space. 
 In E/A improv you have a continuation of the inventiveness of improv 
but at the same time a complete abandonment of normative aesthetic 
production.  People play acoustic instruments in very unacceptable ways. 
 It's a music that admits a mimesis of glitch electronically and 
acoustically.  It recuperates something of the avantgarde, while 
undermining its avantgardeness by its refusal of the categories of "high 
modernist" musicianship.  But interestingly, the people who talk about 
it are completely wedded to the language of aesthetic romanticism, 
artist as ubermensch.  And they ceaselessly invoke the Kantian category 
of judgment--always evaluating but rarely ever analyzing, particularly 
in a cultural sense.

>
>In terms of musical development I am also very suspicious of ideas of historical
>progression; thus "avant-garde"?  Too much caught up in ideas of originality,
>Romantic conceptions of the artist as genius standing alone, too modern.
>
Agreed.  the avantgarde must be critiqued completely to get rid of this 
kind of bad aestheticism and evaluative reactivism.

>  
>

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