Re: [microsound] State of Music

[Ian Andrews <i.andrews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have to agree with Tobias here. The medium ain't the message. Apart from
being an over quoted McLuhan soundbite, this statement has lost its
relevance. We live in a time of post-medium art. As Tobias correctly points
out, the medium was the message for high modernism, which privileged form
over content and specifity of the medium. post-medium art began with Dada
(Duchamp in particular) and, like it or not, determines the artistic milieu
in which we work today, a milieu which moves context into the centre of the
work. 

The Russian and Italian Futurists experimented with many of these tropes:
one word column poems, destruction of syntax, transrational language (Zaum).
wild typography, etc. mainly because they believed that new meanings could
be expressed by altering the form of language. This belief came from the
idea that language gets in the way of thought, that thought exists
independently of language, and that if language could be simply altered new
ways of thinking would emerge.
The theories of Saussure had a great impact on this way of thinking and
moved some of the Russian Futurists (Jakobson in particular) into a
different direction, out of which, via the Prague School of linguistics,
Structuralism eventually emerged. Language is seen in structuralism as a
network of differences. It is the relations between words and not the words
themselves that are important. But some thinkers were not satisfied with the
apparently easy solutions offered by Structuralism. Post-Structuralism
delved into the deeper problems of language and moved the analysis of these
problems more towards philosophy.
The only post-structuralist thinker to radically break with the academic
form of writing was Jacques Derrida. One of Derrida's main contentions is
that the totality of thinking cannot be expressed in one language alone,
that absolutely transparent translation between different languages is not
possible. Derrida's writing consists of word play, puns, and allusions,
words with double meanings/ double translations.  It is, in a sense, art, or
poetic language. But at the same time it adequately and exhaustively
describes what it does, in the moment of its performance, with great rigour.
Derrida's (and Derridean - deconstructive) writing, far from being obscure,
is often more concise and precise in its use of language and concepts.
For some, however, this writing falls short because it does not offer
conclusions, or, on the other hand it always offers the same conclusion.

After all that, texts are always written with a particular reader in mind.
Generally a Masters thesis which is expected to present a strong and unique
argument in view of a distinct problem, is written for a reader who's
reading of it will conform to standard academic (not to mention Anglo
Analytic tradition) practice.

The use of computer code in an essay could function in a number of ways: it
could be read by a reader who is totally unfamiliar with the script, in
which case it would function as an obscurantist mystification or fashionable
typographic designer ploy; it could be read by a fellow coder familiar with
the particular script who would judge it according to its "elegance," its
adequacy to its task and its economy; or it could be read by someone who
understands it for exactly what it is: a distillation of binary and formal
logic which has dominated Western thinking for thousands of years.

In short, a thesis is a place where meaning should not be ambiguous.
Strategies which resist signification and express a multiplicity of chaotic
streams of thought make marking such work extremely difficult (not to
mention irritating). I would bear this in mind.
 
best,

ian

tobias c. van Veenwrote:

> 
> dear G,
> 
> 
>> if the medium is truly the message, then we have to break out of standardized
>> academic writing. and if this means writing without capitals, writing one
>> word
>> sentences, writing some
>> of it computer code, in java script, then so be it.
> 
> Which, ironically or quite seriously, repeats the same form as the
> historical avant-garde: that different forms express different meanings, and
> that breaking with form forges or expresses new meaning. This is the key
> tenet of what some have pegged "modernism," which in its strict narrowness
> rarely questions the underlying form of expression (although avant-garde
> movements that prefigured "high modernism" _did_, such as DADA).
> 
> In any case, is the structure of your box-breaking a repetition or a
> resampling? A rather individuated experience of breaking boundary, common to
> all Master's students writing theses, perhaps? Which would render its
> language games less precious and more general than we suppose?
> 
>> i highly recommend 'more brilliant than the sun.' kodwo does this really
> well...
> 
> While remaining intelligible and writing with capitals, mind you, in an
> aphoristic fashion sampled not only from record labels but Deleuze and
> Nietzsche, Sun Ra and George Clinton, the whole of AfroFuturism, which he
> rewrites in the process.
> 
> New form or new sample?
>   What's the difference, chuck?
> 
> cheers,
> 
>   tobias
> 
> ps. Currently in the last rewrite myself.
> 
> 
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