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

[jeff gburek <tsazmaniac@xxxxxxxxx>]

The politics comes later.
> > Paraphrasing Lyotard:  a cave dweller inscribes a
> figure on the wall
> > inside a cave.  Is it art?  Is it language?  It is
> neither.  The
> > distinction will come later.
> >

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 interpretations will depend on
whether or not the immediate phenomenon means
something for me personally. one never questions a
bus's horn as it goes off, you just look fast and get
the fuck out of the way. if i come from planet
xenon265 where there are no such things as buses, i
might get creamed. but the ability to interpret signs
depends on the fact we are familiar with the reality
of communication and that we percieve an intention.
humanity has long percieved propriety in terms of a
model of what "nature" does until it evolved to only
look for the "laws" of nature. once you have begun to
look in this direction, the cultural becomes
percievable as a kind of collapsed hierarchy with the
natural universe. better, let's call it a horizontal
hierarchy, no more significant than any other layers
in the terrestrial sedimental compaction. we can
percieve all sounds as potentially communicative but
we may sometimes be wrong about the nature of the
transmission.  throughgout our lives we become
familiar with more and more languages or
langauage-like systems. that we inteptret a sound as
music is an immediate assessment of the sound's
meaning or the intention of the one who makes the
sound. the political act comes when we organize and
inject priorities into the sound or music. these
priorities are "preset" systems, if you will. these
indeed do come later to be imposed on the phenomenon
as we judge what is "more meaningful" to us and the
problems start to occur when one assumes the "presets"
are of the order of nature--which is how all the
unexplainable arbitrariness of culture is presented to
children: this is just the way it is. but this is not
the truth.   

--- aleks vasic <bvasic@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Who's distinction?  Yours, mine, we/ours?  We have
> no point of 
> reference.  Only the creator of the image has it. 
> We can only percieve 
> to know what distinction/purpose it really had.  But
> in the end that 
> only further supports your rationale on the whole
> subject.
> 
> 
> aLEKs
> 
> >  
> >
> 
> 
>
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