Re: [microsound] the tool has become the message

[David Powers <cyborgk@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2/14/07, Kyle Klipowicz <kyleklip@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I agree, that often people are more interested with 'the sound' of
> their music than basic, down-to-earth songwriting and composition. You
> can add all the bells and whistles that you'd like, but without a
> solid framework, it's just a bunch of fluff.
>
> ~Kyle

However: this sounds a lot like a modernist position, attempting to
oppose postmodernism, but you don't give any justification as to why
"fluff" is a BAD THING. It is precisely the characteristic of
postmodernism artistic production to be ALL surface, all "fluff" ...
all "effect" with no substance behind it. I would propose that the
current DSP/remix culture is a perfect example of postmodern culture
as pure simulacra and hyperreality.

This line of thought reminded me of the Postmodernism book by Frederic
Jameson, which I haven't read in years. Apparently my memory of the
essay was rather more interesting than the essay itself, but I did try
to find a couple of appropriate quotes online, that allude to this
postmodern schizo-experience of living on a surface that has no depth
and is all fluff. The following is from
http://homepage.newschool.edu/~quigleyt/vcs/jameson/jameson.html :

'Indeed, there is a kind of return of the repressed in Diamond Dust
Shoes, a strange, compensatory, decorative exhilaration, explicitly
designated by the title itself, which is, of course, the glitter of
gold dust, the spangling of gilt sand that seals the surface of the
painting and yet continues to glint at us.'
.....
'Nor is this depthlessness merely metaphorical: it can be experienced
physically and "literally" by anyone who, mounting what used to be
Raymond Chandler's Bunker Hill from the great Chicano markets on
Broadway and Fourth Street in downtown Los Angeles, suddenly confronts
the great free-standing wall of Wells Fargo Court (Skidmore, Owings
and Merrill) -- a surface which seems to be unsupported by any volume,
or whose putative volume (rectangular? trapezoidal?) is ocularly quite
undecidable. This great sheet of windows, with its gravity-defying
two-dimensionality, momentarily transforms the solid ground on which
we stand into the contents of a stereopticon, pasteboard shapes
profiling themselves here and there around us. The visual effect is
the same from all sides: as fateful as the great monolith in Stanley
Kubrick's 2001 which confronts its viewers like an enigmatic destiny,
a call to evolutionary mutation.'
....
'If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the
sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and
future of our own biographical experience or psychic life. With the
breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, the schizophrenic is
reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other
words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time. We will want
to ask questions about the aesthetic or cultural results of such a
situation in a moment; let us first see what it feels like:

     "I remember very well the day it happened. We were staying in
the country and I had gone for a walk alone as I did now and then.
Suddenly, as I was passing the school, I heard a German song; the
children were having a singing lesson. I stopped to listen, and at
that instant a strange feeling came over me, a feeling hard to analyze
but akin to something I was to know too well later -- a disturbing
sense of unreality. It seemed to me that I no longer recognized the
school, it had become as large as a barracks; the singing children
were prisoners, compelled to sing. It was as though the school and the
children's song were set apart from the rest of the world. At the same
time my eye encountered a field of wheat whose limits I could not see.
The yellow vastness, dazzling in the sun, bound up with the song of
the children imprisoned in the smooth stone school-barracks, filled me
with such anxiety that I broke into sobs. I ran home to our garden and
began to play "to make things seem as they usually were," that is, to
return to reality. It was the first appearance of those elements which
were always present in later sensations of unreality: illimitable
vastness, brilliant light, and the gloss and smoothness of material
things."'

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