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Re: [microsound] [ot] Derrida



> I've also gotten a lot more out of the postcolonial side of
> contemporary theory as compared to the litcrit side (which is where I
> think it's gotten pretty dull), but I'd be interested in reading more
> about 'post-digital music in the context of globalization.'


Comin' right up...


 In a world
> where we can all become music producers, where complex instruments are
> relatively inexpensive because they're all on the computer, I'm curious
> what you mean by 'post-digital.'


When I say "post-digital" I am using (admittedly uncritically) Kim
Cascone's term for recent digital music/audio, which isn't post-digital in
the sense of not being made with digital technology (DT), but in the sense
of having a less utopian attitude towards the potential of DT. For
Cascone, "glitch" is post-digital because of its use of glitches and
errors which highlight the imperfections of the medium in which it's
presented.


We seem very much within the digital
> realm to me.  But the overwhelming variety of approaches keeps me (at
> least) from becoming 'intimately mired' in one particular approach.
> It's almost like we're approaching a sort of 19th century 'haus' music,
> where everybody played music in their own homes instead of the great
> public spectacles we got in the mid-20th century.


When I said "intimately mired", citing Spivak, I was more referring to the
social context of globalization which is an inescapable part of both
everyday life and the production of digital audio. I wasn't so much
referring to people becoming "intimately mired" in any particular
aesthetic approach. And even though a lot of production takes place in the
home, that alone doesn't sever it from an actually existing material
economic context which is global in its scope. There are always traces of
the global in the local...


> I also see a certain amount of globalization, but with the demise last
> year of some major distribution channels, it almost seems like our
> musical worlds are splintering.  It takes a real effort now to stay in
> touch with artists I care about, and even more difficult to find new
> ones that I like (one of the reasons I like playlists on email lists,
> especially ones that provide contact information for the artists).  I
> see music I like released in smaller and smaller editions -- for
> smaller and smaller audiences?  Now that we can all distribute our
> music on the web, presumably finding listeners across the globe, I'm
> still puzzled why this has contributed to enforced rarity rather than
> the easier access we were all promised.



Well, it's one of the paradoxes of globalization, which tends towards
particularization as much as towards universalization. Maybe a
universalization of particularization or something...

> On Jan 15, 2004, at 8:28 PM, philthom@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
>> There are lots
>> of things that can be done with deconstruction: Gayatri Spivak's and
>> Homi
>> Bhabha's take postcolonial theory is one example. In my view, they come
>> somewhat closer to the spirit of Derrida's project than the US lit-crit
>> folks; Spivak, for example, points out that "the only things one
>> deconstructs are the things in which one is intimately mired; it speaks
>> you; you speak it". This, for me, highlights both the constitutive
>> ambivalence of the deconstructive philosophical position, but also its
>> link to the social in the context of postmodernity/postcoloniality...
>> This
>> is certainly relevant to the practice of "post-digital" music in the
>> context of "globalization": it speaks us, we speak it...
> ---
> Caleb Deupree
> ctdeupree@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>
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