Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.1002261854050.10688@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Doing music among the digital, philosophy in real-time
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:54:32 -0500 (EST)
Doing music among the digital, philosophy in real-time ========================================================================== so beginning, a list of topics (re)created almost in a dream or trance state: ========================================================================== 1. presence of flesh. Investing in playing a physical instrument of the traditional type involves thinking through the presence of flesh. Playing string instruments for example results in constant manicuring: nails, skin, and muscle are shaped, exercised, and controlled, as much as possible, using operations that seem efficacious. Work-arounds, kludges, are also cultivated so that, for example, if a nail splits or muscles cramp, other means of continuing play are available. One is never far from the flesh, which asserts itself during production. (The production perhaps is also the production of flesh, of a certain inscribing of flesh.) ========================================================================== 2. what the flesh can do. The flesh inheres between interior and exterior, mind and sounding objects in the world. The flesh is both subject and object; the player intends through tending. The flesh of the mind and body is of the fabric of time, inheres within a phenomenology of human time- consciousness that absorbs and renders a body within musical production. The body is continually rendered during production, both present and forgotten, autonomic and abject-inert. (Human time-consciousness: think organism time-consciousness as well: what constitutes flesh, then; what constitutes sounding objects?) ========================================================================== 3. recoil of the body. The body recoils from forgetting, stating its limits which are the limits of production in the world. The recoil is that of death: beyond this speed or stretch, for example, one cannot go. This is usually taken for granted, set-aside, just as the sounds of flute or saxophone keys, or cello bow reversal, are set aside, but it - this barrier - is integral to musical production. Let me also place, then, under the aegis of recoil, all those sounds, necessary and often consid- ered parasitic, accompanying what one is intending; I also assert that it is these sounds, subtextual, almost subterranean, that constitute the true-real of music, that assert world and worlding among a displaced purity - which, however, already harbors the digital at its core. (I assert? one asserts... is asserted...) ========================================================================== 4. tending the real. As with the tending of flesh for playing, there is also the tending of the real: what one plays is tended-to, placed with a potential potential well, keeping an instrument safe and ready for production. As with everything else, instruments tend to decay; if this isn't checked, the music itself falls apart, and tending the real moves from the autonomic to control of anomaly in production - for example, taking into consideration finger-board warping, pad leaking, or small cracks that might develop in chromatic harmonicas. (Of course this also reinscribes the music, which is now of these anomalies as well, part and parcel of production.) ========================================================================== 5. irreducibility. Because of parasitism, the history of an instrument, the tendencies of the flesh and the real, the very moment of sonic produc- tion is irreducible; technique only goes so far, even on an electronic keyboard. To the extent that production occurs in real-time, unless one is using a digital recording device (and perhaps even then, outside of keyboard), what one is doing possesses a fundamental surplus or Benjaminic aura that differentiates one session from another, one musician from another, as if there were unique events in real-space, real-time. This is basic to rock-thought, punk-thought, and musical romanticism; it is also fundamental to music itself. Even one replay of a digital recording (cd for example) is different from another, as habitus and environment subtle- ly change. The industrial revolution resulted in equivalent instruments (for example the Boehm flute or saxophone), but their presence is always of separation and a unity that speaks of communality, as in horn sections of big bands or orchestras. (Or think, for example, of violins-in-unison: clearly differentiable!) ========================================================================== 6. inhabiting in real-time. Instrument and player inhabit real-time; so often in improvisation, for example, what occurs, occurs in an expanded present that appears horizonless, if it appears at all. Rather, there is the continuous doing and undoing of structure, remembrance of things past and subconscious projection of things future, which may or may not appear, as the dialog between instrument and player may take one elsewhere than what one has 'thought,' if such projections are of thought (and not, for example, of a pauseological nature) at all. (Pauseological: subterranean structure not yet 'filled' or fulfilled, a basic concept in enunciation.) ========================================================================== 7. 'purity' of structure. I am playing something and the doing and undoing of structure is of the purity of structure, undermined and presenced with and among the abject. The purity of structure is the purity of the world; in this sense the world is always (already) pure, just as wave equations and quantum fields are pure. We drift towards greater levels, macro-levels in the world, ignoring the fine-structure or seething granularity that constitutes the cosmos - ignoring (for it appears deeply unknowable and irrelevant) the generation of dynamic objects and information, from which or of which, we may be, along with those objects and information, only projections at a distance. So a purity of structure, seething structure always (already) under deconstruction, is the constitution of the cosmos within which we play, unknowingly, that constitution and its harmonic deconstruction. ========================================================================== 8. deconstruction of 'purity' of structure. This goes literally without saying, a deconstruction through the presencing of noise: look at the dialogic/dialectic: between noise and structure, abjection and purity, flesh and sounding, metaphor and explanation - all occurring within time, within the real-time of improvisation. So improvisation unravels what it ravels; in another century, this might have been called the pursuit of life itself. (And deconstruction of edge-phenomena: what occurs as diacritical or 'curlicue,' peripheral, as well.) ========================================================================== 9. philosophical emergence. On one hand the utterly trivial production of music, and on the other, emergence after the face, recuperation of critical thought. But critical thought emerges through trivial production; it is the interaction of flesh, consciousness, the autonomic, and structure, that creates a different discursive space. Every philosophy demands a writing which is simultaneously elsewhere than real time, inhabited and uninhabited. The room for thought is not the lived thought of musical production. Or is it? Is there a philosophy within the real- time of its production, a philosophy that perhaps dies or dies out after the production itself? ========================================================================== 10. tied into digital habitus. It is the digital that, beyond tissue, sickness, and death, inhabits us; it is the digital, unrecognized and seething, that we inhabit. Our production within the cosmos is also our distance from it, an inauthentic distance constructed from potential wells and the remnants of inscriptive processes designed to ward off just about everything: death, dream, menses, semen, feces, wounds and illnesses - anything (ignorantly? popularly? mythologically?) smelling of pollution, discomfort, breakdown of musical structure. This is of course old news; what is different is the substrate, violation or virtual fabric everywhere and nowhere at all. What does one do with the neutrino? proton? electron? quark? Higgs boson? knowledge of the K-meson? Inscription and naming? The habitus is the production of sound - or paint, dance, or body, rite, or ritual. If there is deity, it is the digital itself, that division among virtual + and - (and the rest of it), everything and nothing at all - which is also everything. All this (buzzing) confusion disappears in the care and caress of the flesh, tending of an instrument or lover, following one following through sound through and beyond conclusion. ========================================================================== 11. inhering within the digital. How to do this? From Plato on mud, the last sections of Being and Nothingness Duvignaud's Change at Shebika, Kristeva's Powers of Horror, Chatterton, Swinburne, Lingis, Gilman, any number of contemporary books and theses - one moves through the history, phenomenology, and habitus of the abject. When my fingers throb in and beyond the act of improvisation, the abject asserts itself. But what is this? The residue of inscribing, as well as inscription: the chalk-dust or debris of writing, the wearing-down or annihilation of inscription: the presence of inscription and philosophy as real-time phenomena - events, not occasions, processes, not states. (The aegis of the digital kernel, its processes, undermines the horizon.) Improvisation is living through, and recognizing, the simulacrum, the uncanny and imaginary habitus; it draws worlds under erasure. As organisms, we are among ourselves; as producers of sound, we vibrate woods and metals and skins and air and worlds, things in the process of unthinging. We slide against ourselves, absorb and project the analogic, retain a sense of continuity, forgo inescapable and alien truth. From music we know that we emerge from the virtual; the vacuum and its energy are in our bones. Philosophy enters, passes through, and disappears; philosophy grounds our unknowingness as organisms, tethers us for a moment: philosophy dreams the unaccountable, accountable; philosophy murmurs the habitus of essence and existence, purity and impurity, analogic and digital; philosophy creates inscription under the sign of erasure; philosophy is not; philosophy _becomes._ ========================================================================== 32,33c32,33 ered parasitic, accompanying what one is intending; I also assert that it is these sounds, subtextual, almost subterranean, that constitute the ered parastic, accompanying what one is intending; I also assert that it is these sounds, subtextual, almost suberranean, that constitute the 51c51 keyboard), what one is doing possesses a fundamental surplus or Benjaminic keyboard), what one is doing possesses a fundamental surplus or Benaminian 63c63 present that appears horizon-less, if it appears at all. Rather, there is present that appears horizonless, if it appears at all. Rather, there is 91c91 9. philosophical emergence. On one hand the utterly trivial production of 9. philosophical emergence. On one hand the utterly trival production of 107c107 everything: death, dream, menses, semen, feces, wounds and illnesses - everything: death, dream, menses, semen, faeces, wounds and illnesses - 154c154 its processes, undermines the horizon.) Improvisation is living through, its processes, udermines the horizon.) Improvisation is living through, ==========================================================================