[microsound] (no subject)

[Stephen Hastings-King]

thanks for this post, kim.

i have been thinking about this question since the initial post was made.  i
wasn't interested by the clip because it seemed to me more or less
traditional program music, the sort of thing that would have a score
including sequences for foley guys who would provide appropriate
clippety-cloppity sounds when the horses on which the fox hunters are riding
zip across the pastoral environment just before the basses and tympani start
a froth to announce a coming thunderstorm.  the problem with that, beyond
it's tedium, is that it presents a flatly representational surface at a
point where such surfaces are themselves politically (and cognitively) a
Problem.

i think it's particularly difficult to make direct political statements
through frameworks that see in representation, and the conceptual apparatus
that enables it, an ideological problem.  i thinks this generates problems
not only for bourgeois forms of representation (the conceptual apparatus
that you see made semi-material through television coverage of the world,
the tight focus on particular sequences of events, the erasure of context,
it's replacement with the voice-over which tells you what the sequence
you're watching "really means" in terms which are synched in their
arbitrariness to the arbitrariness of decontextualized
factoid-reality...whence the operative power of the discourse of "terror")
and its marxian inversion.  i think the idea of "what's really happening" is
a problem, one that opens onto ontological-register work---and newer forms
of sonic organization can be framed as performing such work in that the
enact alternative approaches to information and it's organization--but this
material (i suppose---i can't think of a better term at the moment, even as
i know this is not a good choice) doesn't operate itself as argument or
demonstration.  it requires the development of new analytic frames,built
along what amounts to an alternate ontology, that can operate alongside new
approaches to sound organization in a relation through which one type of
activity extends and informs the other.

and it seems to me that there is considerable distance to be traversed
before such projects link to more conventional forms of politics, of action,
if they do.
it might be that the furthest "we" can go is to enact and conceptualize
alternate ways of thinking and seeing----these may end up being
self-referential---they may not issue into a way of thinking politics that
we know about--or it might.  either way, it seems to me there's an
interesting set of adventures to be had, new modes of failure to be
explored.

i have trouble talking about gaza sometimes.
it seems to me a massive confirmation of the ways fanon described the
dynamics of colonialism as a process that corrodes occupier and occupied,
that issues into a kind of psychotic space structured by types of
pseudo-rationality.  perhaps one could count the 400 fewer children who are
alive in gaza after these past 3 weeks and arrange them as steps in a proof
that leads in this direction.

this seems to me to take you beyond folksongs that tell you earnestly that
situation in the world x really sucks.

stephen



On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 4:03 PM, john saylor <js0000 at gmail.com> wrote:

> hi
>
> so what are we talking about?
>
> [imagine droning sythesizers]
>
> ... gaza ... aesthetics ... marx ... compression ... failure ...
>
> [sythesizers off]
>
> it was all my mistake
>
>
> i said:
> >>> what is needed today is the effort to try and to look at things for
> >>> what they really are.
>
> which is easily misread, and i kinda knew better ... what i wanted to
> say is virtualy the same as you say here
>
> On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Kim Cascone <kim at anechoicmedia.com>
> wrote:
> > - to see things for what 'they really are' requires an open mind since it
> is
> > our hanging on to the consensus that makes us uncomfortable when
> presented
> > with outlying data
>
> and especailly in regard to being presented with data.
>
> --
> \js  [ http://or8.net/~johns/ <http://or8.net/%7Ejohns/> ]
>
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