Re: [microsound] "Everybody wants to be a fascist": Trolling for Flame Wars + afew neat links

["The pHarmanaut" <pharmanaut@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tobias et al:

A few top-of-the-cranium reactions before digging into the brain tissue.
I've been immersed in an amazingly synchronous field of late--lamenting not
having Burroughs's "Break Through in Grey Room" CD with me at the outset of
class session, only to see one of my students holding his own copy of the
CD; students discussing their phobias of bees, not knowing that I was
planning to show them a few snippets of David Blair's "WAX"; and now this
article. References to aura, the spectacle and cyborgs reconstruct the
shorter portions of the last few weeks of my "Critical Approaches to Digital
Media" syllabus: Benjamin's "Work of Art" essay, Debord's spectacle theses,
and Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" have all been recent topics of discussion.
Throw in some references to the media extensions of McLuhan and Kittler on
the gramophone and I'll invite you in as a streaming guest lecturer in an
upcoming class session (not a bad idea, actually ... let's pursue this).

And there's one more piece: by the third-to-last paragraph, I was thinking
Fussible (which I was listening to on the drive home after class last night)
and Nortec Collective. Anyway, lest this become a post better for offline
discussion than on, I just wanted to acknowledge that my reactions come out
of this intense, somewhat overloaded mesh of associations.

Friedrich Kittler's _Gramophone, Film, Typewriter_ could inform this
discussion in several valuable ways. In part, Kittler associates his media
triad with the Lacanian triad of Real, Imaginary, Symbolic respectively. The
Edisonian phonograph, which both records on and plays back from wax
cylinders, operates for Kittler as the death of poetry (a death he
celebrates) because of its association with unfiltered noise; that is, the
phonograph potentially records the entirety of its environment, without
censorship, while the Romantic poets preceding Edison (Goethe is Kittler's
main foil) rely upon the hallucinatory properties of reading to construct
the illusory soul. Literally reading between the lines in order to conjure a
hallucinatory imaginary world, writing/reading is a technology/media through
which we've been trained to deny its materiality. That is, the book's
success depends on how well we can ignore the process of reading (again,
this applies to pre-modern Romantic poetry, Kittler argues, and I'm sure
there are exceptions, such as William Blake).

An emphasis on the material object of the phonograph leads Kittler to obsess
on the materiality of the corpse (highlighted by stories by Rilke on a man
who dreams of playing the cranial sutures on skullcaps with a phonograph
needle and another story about a scientist who reconstructs Goethe's larynx
in order to create new speeches by Goethe); and while he fairly clinically
unfolds the history of media technology in terms of innovations in military
technology, he holds up before the reader the material promise of such
bodily sound-art as the anti-art war tactics of Burroughs (tape cut-ups and
_The Electronic Revolution_); the scratch-art work of Moholy-Nagy; and the
new class of musician-technicians that were first to take advantage of
declassified wartime technology (The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Hendrix all
mentioned). These artist-technicians achieve their most valuable effects due
to their engagement with the material of production and sound reproduction;
in the most extreme cases of 1960s rock musicians, there "abuse of army
equipment" constitutes a "positive feedback loop" that can cut against the
grain of the engineers' negative feedback, or control, which Pynchon
explained was the key to power in this century in _Gravity's Rainbow_.

Rock songs like "Electric Ladyland," "Yellow Submarine," and "Sympathy for
the Devil" all "sing of the very media power which sustains them", which to
me suggests some connections to the dance-floor experimentations that you,
Tobias, describe in "Discourse DJing". Just as Kittler rejects qualitative
or moralizing distinctions between military/civilian technologies, he does
not rest his case on distinctions between pop music practice and that of the
avant-garde. He implies such a distinction is irrelevant in the face of
non-discriminating media/technologies, such as the stereo headphones which
likely care less whether they're being used to determine bombing positions
during the blitzkrieg or to simulate the lovemaking of the gods for a
Hendrix track. At the same time, he allows for what I see as principally
BODILY methods of engagement with sound production as the key to the
politics of power and the development of culturally-immersed bodies.

Tobias: "And this shouldn't be a return to "pure" or "essential" elements of
techno... it's a continued sonic exploration of not only the experimental-I
don't want to sound like I am dissing the far reaches, for I'm not and I
appreciate the boundary seekers-but of the body, in sound, and through
sound."

I'm not familiar with Mike Shannon's work, so I'll try to bring this back to
your article by way of Nortec Collective and Fussible, in particular. A
piece like Fussible's "Odysseo" is all about the dancefloor (and the
subgenre-tinged flavas of each remix on the album suggest applicability to a
number of different dancefloors), and as it brings to the dancefloor its
mixture of tambora, norteno and electronica, it suggests not a discourse on,
but an embodiment of, borders, border-crossings, boundary limits and
cultural hybridization ... through sound. I'm left and leaving here with
fragments. The materiality of the music as body-movement. Mixed forms and
the power of cultural noise.

Tobias: "As Kim Cascone says, "a lack of gestural theatre." Cascone sees
this lack as deficient only by simulacra and in false comparison to
inauthentic pop spectacle. But this lack is perhaps not a lack of "aura"
brought on by the false spectral demands of the spectacle insofar as this
very discourse operates as a lack that negates political positivity.
Contrast to the former role of the Disc Jockey as the sonic narrator of the
body & memory selector...."

I've been very interested, Tobias, in your ongoing challenge to the
affiliation of the so-called avant-garde electronic music with the tropes of
microsound (as discoursed, in this article, by Mille Plateaux). I would like
to hear more from you regarding the ambiguous phrase, "Cascone sees this
lack as deficient only by simulacra"; I do think that I get your drift with
suspicious comparisons to "inauthentic pop spectacle", which has lead to the
negative politics of abstract microsound as performative mathematics, and an
attempt to reconstruct the age of artistic "aura" in the guise of an
unaffiliated academia. Not that you have to be associated with the academy
to produce useful theory or meaningful practice.

But your readings of Cascone and Mille Plateaux suggest that their approach
has made a series of mistakes worth closer analysis:

1) a closing off of artistic thought/production within the blast-shield of
the aura (which Benjamin had already dismissed in favor of emphasizing
engagement with the materials of production and the situation of profane
illuminations within shared cultural environments);

2) defining territory in a way that fosters an almost religious mystique,
and that positions performance/event/concert in the form of a meditative
pose of sound-minister and quiescent audience worshippers that succombs to
the most debilitating aspects of electronic media (McLuhan: "By putting our
physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems by means of electric
media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere
extensions of hands and feet and teeth and bodily controls-all such
extensions of our bodies, including cities-will be translated into
information systems. Electromagnetic technology requires utter human
docility and quiescence of meditation such as now befits and organism that
wears its brains outside its head and its nerves outside its skin.");

3) limiting participation in the production of the live/living, perpetually
remixed history otherwise known as "the present". To cite McLuhan's
_Understanding Media_ one more time, this seems a squandering of an
opportunity to take advantage of extended electric/digital media's provision
of "total social involvement instead of the bourgeois spirit of individual
separateness or points of view".

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The living organism has neither meaning nor existence when considered in
isolation from its extensions, from the space that it reaches and produces.
Every such organism is reflected and refracted in the changes that it wreaks
in its "milieu" or "environment"-in other words, in its space.

-- Henri Lefebvre, _The Production of Space_ [1974]

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Best regards,
-=Trace

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