[microsound] the framework of microsound conditions a certain expectation

[Charles Turner]

On Sat, 17 Jan 2009 10:29:53 -0800, Kim Cascone wrote:

> in context of microsound or glitch: what does 'failure' mean?
> mostly it is a lack of intersection between intent and expectation

I think its worth pointing out that this lack of intersection is not a 
binary, but a continuum: there are many shades of "failure" between 
almost complete reception of intent, and non-recognition that a 
communication is taking place. And these varying shades of failure can 
occur in different measures among the components of a single work.

> Godard (see: 'A Letter to Jane' on the Criterion 'Tout va Bien' DVD) 
> is a good example of a combined political statement and a  
> _fractured_  post-modern narrative

I think the nightly network TV news would also qualify. What justifies 
its characterization as "real?" Certainly not the same clustering of 
reality fragments that characterize J. L. David's "Oath of the 
Horatiae," or Soderberg's recent film about Che.

On Sun, 18 Jan 2009 11:57:37 -0500, Stephen Hastings-King wrote:

> i think it's particularly difficult to make direct... 
> statements through frameworks that see in representation, and the 
> conceptual apparatus that enables it, an ideological problem.

(I removed the word "political" from your comment above, I think your 
observation is more general)

As per the above, representation is always a problem. Some just 
construct a representation that suits the array of messages to be 
conveyed. One can always point out the problematics of communication, 
but isn't it something to get over, like the flu? Ideology isn't going 
to go away.

Jill Dolan recounts in one of her theater essays her attempt to direct 
Wendy Wasserstein's "Heidi Chronicles," and counter its conservative 
feminist politics. But she remarks on how difficult it was to direct a 
production that subverted Wasserstein's text, particularly the humorous 
bits.

Direct linguistic statements can be very powerful, in part because they 
are designed to overcome inadvertent (and willed) problematization.

> 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

The distance, to my mind, is only as far as we are from politics. 
Brecht, for example, made very different claims for his work during the 
three major "eras" of his life: directly associated with a 
revolutionary movement in Weimar, building support for an anti-Fascist 
war in his American exile, and finally as a tolerated artist in the 
post-war GDR. He was insightful and honest enough not to falsely 
preserve previous claims when his social situation wasn't supportive of 
them.

Art work is politically successful to the extent that it allies itself 
with an active political movement. As you point out, without that 
connection, it becomes self-referential: the default mode of 
contemporary bourgeois culture. Sadly, it doesn't help that in the U. 
S. there's very little institutionalized opposition that an artist can 
ally with.

Best, Charles