re:: politics of parasites

["tobias c. van Veen" <tobias@xxxxxxxxx>]

kim said...

most glitch music somehow ends up critiquing the 'politics of digital audio=
'
whether it is intended or not...just as buying and reading a newspaper coul=
d
be construed as a political act...by drawing attention to the aura of
digital audio via a 'misuse' or failure or accident of technology (e.g. CD
skipping, etc) a statement is made concerning the intended economic and
political trajectory set up by the power structures that market and
commercialize digital audio...
this is only one reading of this and could just as easily be lost on someon=
e
who is not familiar with the power structures that make up the audio/music
industry

--<

I think Achim Szepanski's article in Parachute 107 needs to be read with
careful attention. I'm with him when he says that sound has no content. Tha=
t
means no aura. I'm also with Guattari when he says that telematics cannot
account for transactivity. Achim mentions this in the same article. And I'm
with Derrida when he reads telematics--"sender/receiver" theory--as a
Hegelian throwback to a structuration of the polis and the subject, for
example, in The Post Card. This leads me to say that the "politics of
digital audio" are stuck in a feedback loop of Hegelian sender/receiver
theory, and thus a classicist, humanist, and if not teleological view of
structuration, of history ("trajectory"), of subjectivity, and the entire
processing of sound by the body, as long as the entire sonography is
constituted using a telematics of aura. None of this is an argument that th=
e
"musicians themselves" are doing this or that. This is a claim of the
_theory_ of this apparent aura-based "politics." The musicians continue
regardless in the indeterminate black box. Reading political acts into
events is a wonderful hermeneutic trick of cultural studies, but of little
use here. Reading a newspaper might be all fine, but Kittler's analysis of
the printing press might be of more use. A shade of technological
determinism is, afterall, the underlying--or overriding--buffer question in
all of this. For it always seems to be about statements that counter power
through failture; this overriding history of "power structures" is
"resisted" by skipping cds, a whole history whose trajectory is suspiciousl=
y
teleological, if not at least defined by the Attalian "epoch." If the tool
is the message, are we not just singing the songs of the tools, as Tim
Hecker says in the same issue of Parachute, and thus, singing the tunes of
capital? If the politics of digital audio are at all resistant to capital,
they are a very contradictory politics indeed, as their entire structuratio=
n
is that of a humanist topology that results in the glorification of the
softwares of capitalization. So, nothing is lost, or gained. There is no
vanguard, no enlightenment. Pop philosophy, use it like a record. This is
what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they say there is no ideology, although
here it becomes constructed in the aura apparatus that claims a totalizing
hermeneutics of the musician's politics--regardless of a "consciousness" of
the subject, in itself, or at hand--that then delimits the possession and
loss of this proper and power(ful) knowledge.

Buying software does not lead to autonomy, and it is a poor definition of
the temporary. I'm with Brady Cranfield, again in P107, when he says that
the politics of noise don't lead to direct action, and that it would be
na=EFve to think so.

Stealing software, and making it--those are steps in a better direction. I'=
m
with the hackers on that one. The same goes for creating temporary and
autonomous spaces, and thus temporaneities, to en-gage the body with sound,
rather than signing up for the acousmatic chair club.

Chewing fat,

tobias=20

tobias c. van Veen -----------
http://www.quadrantcrossing.org
http://www.thisistheonlyart.com
------------- tobias@xxxxxxxxx

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