thanks for this post, kim.<br><br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>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.<br>
<br>i have trouble talking about gaza sometimes. <br>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.<br>
<br>this seems to me to take you beyond folksongs that tell you earnestly that situation in the world x really sucks.<br><br>stephen<br><br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 4:03 PM, john saylor <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:js0000@gmail.com">js0000@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">hi<br>
<br>
so what are we talking about?<br>
<br>
[imagine droning sythesizers]<br>
<br>
... gaza ... aesthetics ... marx ... compression ... failure ...<br>
<br>
[sythesizers off]<br>
<br>
it was all my mistake<br>
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
<br>
i said:<br>
>>> what is needed today is the effort to try and to look at things for<br>
>>> what they really are.<br>
<br>
</div>which is easily misread, and i kinda knew better ... what i wanted to<br>
say is virtualy the same as you say here<br>
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Kim Cascone <<a href="mailto:kim@anechoicmedia.com">kim@anechoicmedia.com</a>> wrote:<br>
> - to see things for what 'they really are' requires an open mind since it is<br>
> our hanging on to the consensus that makes us uncomfortable when presented<br>
> with outlying data<br>
<br>
</div>and especailly in regard to being presented with data.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
--<br>
\js [ <a href="http://or8.net/%7Ejohns/" target="_blank">http://or8.net/~johns/</a> ]<br>
</font><div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c"><br>
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