Re: [microsound] being 'political' in non-verbal music

[Bill Ashline <ashline@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 6/23/05, jeff gburek <tsazmaniac@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> this paraphrase from lyotard has something that i do
> find interesting but i don't read the historicization
> of the "distinction" to be so distant and proscribed
> by discourse on art or linguistics. the act of
> interpretation upon seeing the cave painting is rather
> instantaneous.

The point from Lyotard is that you have phenomena but the categories
for organizing the phenomena are part of human knowledge, part of
culture, if you will.  We often assume these categories in advance
without realizing that phenomena are what they are first of all and
then a use-value for human understanding later.  In Nietzsche's terms,
we made up the category and then we forgot that we made it up.  Then,
we forgot that we forgot.  Then it became culture.  We assumed that
the meaning of sound had always accompanied its occurence, but we
simply hadn't remembered far back enough.  We forgot our own
invention--the rhetoric that gave meaning to the sonic sign.  So an
inscription is an inscription first of all and a message after a
certain framework of understanding is invented.  the same for sound. 
Which applies to your example of the bus.  The only way you get the
hell out of the way when a bus sounds its horn is because you've been
programmed to read that sound as a warning and an alert.  That's
culture, of course, but without that, it's just another sound.  So
back to the original question, can you create a sound that contains an
inherent politics outside of a discursive form that identifies it as
such?  I have yet to see one solitary example that demonstrates such a
possibility.

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