Re: [microsound] Re: xenakis quote source

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

[snip] 

> any way, the quote by Tobias is much better than the one by Xenakis,
> which sounds so pretentious.

Xenakis is not that pretentious, just a rationalist, and a dominant, master
thinker of Western art music. The Dusted piece IS pretentious, in the sense
that it is "Making or marked by an extravagant outward show" -- this being
the exact mode of: 

"Sound is intelligence's bitch."

It's a soundbyte. What is interesting is that quite a few people tend to
actually *like* this idea.

To spell out the intraweaving of the Dusted piece, the point is:

1. I don't like the fact that some would wish to stand behind such a
statement as a justification for a criterion that attempts to establish
"intelligence" as the rule for sonic judgement.

2. Why? Because it is the old master/slave game: Man Dominates Through Brute
Force .. and what is Dominated Is Man's Domain .. the old Xtian teleology ..
the Earth is our domain to name, control and rape and all that .. Remix that
to say: Xenakis utilises the same criterion of judgement found in Hegel for
the aesthetic, although he seems to lack all the understanding of the
master/slave relationship which even Hegel possessed. Basically: that the
slave learns what the master can only control through abstraction. Thus the
slave overthrows the master in the endless dialectical progression towards
the Good, i.e., the State of God.

(Whoever noticed that "intelligence" should be displaced like "beauty" hit
the head on the nail. "Intelligence" is simply another deferral in the
power-game to establish control over "art," in this case, "sound." It could
be shown that the apparent hierarchical difference supposed by Xenakis
between "intelligence" and "beauty" is one that is purely constructed for a
tautological justificatory schema and that the terms are as interchangeable
as the files we drop into an Impulse generator.)

3. The funny unwinding of all this is that intelligence is *nothing but
sound,* the ephemerality of speech, the spoken winds--I was tempted to say
"hot air" of "man"--that float into the flagging history like dust. Dust
particles and theories. And the difference and deferral of writing is no
less nor more than speech. We could reprogram our soundbyte to say:

"Sound is sound's bitch."

Which is rather senseless, i.e., "unintelligent."

4. When I say "Sound is intelligence's bitch," I am both spitting and
laughing.

5. Nietzsche was a soundbyte.

tV

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