#music
#non
#philosophy
#psychology
#sociology
#art
#minimalism
#afrofuturism
#public
#marxism
On 14 September 2011 the music improvisers Moe Kamura, Taku Unami, and Jarrod Fowler were invited for a concert at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. For their contribution, Unami and Fowler decided to hide from each other in the bushes outside the performance venue. The organiser Jack Callahan was looking for them for a long time and it was only at 11pm, after all of the audience had left the venue, that he managed to find them. The musicians explained that hiding was their contribution to the concert. Callahan did not understand this ‘contribution’ and became extremely angry. If it seems unclear as to where the sonic element comes from, one only has to think of what Kamura, Unami, or Fowler, or the audience in the venue, might have been hearing while the concert was supposed to be happening. Their contribution radically questioned its own framing and the function of improvisation and music within a specific context. To this day an event organiser might have problems accepting this as a concert, but it is precisely in this sense that this gesture pushed the boundaries and produced thinking.
In another performative work that blurred the lines between art, life, and the social, as part of her residency at Iaspis (Stockholm) in 2010, under the title What if, if I take your place?, Lebanese artist Lina Issa placed ads in various places around the city asking people to let her take their place at work, at home, or elsewhere for an hour, a day, or a month. There were a number of responses to the ads, and Issa was able to take the place of people who wanted a break from their everyday life—either at their jobs or at home and in their relationships.
[According to t]he understanding of subjectivity which prevailed in the last two centuries […] [t]he social obligation of every individual was to become an ideal economic subject, social egoist or self-loving subject of private interest, capable of mastering and overcoming alienation in the social sphere. From the viewpoint of this presumably authentic and fundamental but actually fictitious image of subjectivity, alienation appears like a sign of the individual’s failure to live up to the ‘natural condition of man’ as propagated by the liberal and neoliberal economic doctrines. Individuals are obliged to pull themselves out of the state of alienation, the latter being considered as their personal problem.3
Far from […] a mere object of perception, […] noise is also what un-conditions the capacity to discern and evaluate the object of perception. Not just a state of confusion and indecision, noise is also amplified by the panicked attempt to redraw the boundaries of the sense of self. To regain the sense of self as first object of cognition thereby becomes the precondition to reasserting its relation with other objects of cognition. At stake, in other words, are not the noises we perceive, but the noise of cognition constituting itself, against the always looming crisis of its dissolution.5
[T]he changes of external stimuli over time and the changes of internal disposition over time conjointly modulate the experience of ‘the mental state of noise’, potentially progressing from confusion and anxiety to […] the ‘catastrophic reaction’.7
The fear of disintegration of the sense of self is thus also a consequence of the inability to impose a critical limit. Loss of confidence furthermore implies the threat of losing a reliable sense of self.8
In short I am proposing that dissonance, that is, the existence of non-fitting relations among cognitions, is a motivating factor in its own right. By the term [cognition] I mean any knowledge, option, or belief about the environment, about oneself, or about one’s behaviour. Cognitive dissonance can be seen as the antecedent condition which leads to activity oriented towards dissonance reduction just as hunger leads to activity oriented toward hunger reduction.10
[t]his situation calls for a prognosis different to that of psycho-analysis whose goal is to adjust the individual to society. Instead, since ‘society’, the social order, cannot, ‘unlike biochemical processes, escape human influences’, since it is the human itself that ‘brings society into being’ (the social order never preexists our collective behaviours and creative activities), the prognosis is one of overall social transformation. As such, the ‘cure’ is ‘in the hands of those who are willing to get rid of the worm-eaten roots of the structure’.14
It was after I got to Boston that I went into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. Anybody who knows me knows this story. I am constantly telling it. Anyway, in that silent room, I heard two sounds, one high and one low. Afterward I asked the engineer in charge why, if the room was so silent, I had heard two sounds. He said, ‘Describe them.’ I did. He said, ‘The high one was your nervous system in operation. The low one was your blood in circulation.’15
[The anechoic chamber] absorbed sounds and isolated two of Cage’s usually inaudible internal bodily sounds, but in the process there was a third internal sound isolated, the one saying, ‘Hmmm, wonder what the low-pitched sound is? What’s that high-pitched sound?’ Such quasi-sounds were, of course, antithetical to Cagean listening by being in competition with sounds in themselves, yet here he was able to listen and at the same time allow discursive-ness to intrude in the experience because such sounds would be absorbed by clinical and scientific discourse, if not by the materials of the chamber itself, which historically had been allowed to intrude on musical listening.17
Society, not being a process a king sets in motion, becomes an impersonal place understood and made useful so that no matter what each individual does his actions enliven the total picture. Anarchy in a place that works. Society’s individualised.18
[t]he overlap between Landian theory and the Valley’s political agenda is not coincidental. ‘The Dark Enlightenment,’ which the NRx takes as its foundational text, is basically Land infusing theoretical jargon into Yarvin/Moldbug’s blog ‘Unqualified Reservations’. Yarvin’s Tlon (a corporate vehicle for Urbit, his open-source computing platform) is backed by PayPal founder and Trump advisor Peter Thiel, who is known for his antidemocratic activism. Cyberlibertarian views and Land’s brand of transhumanism are pervasive throughout the tech industry.20
a music which subverts the gap separating the figure from the background. When one truly listens to Satie, one ‘hears the back-ground’. This is egalitarian communism in music: a music which shifts the listener’s attention from the great Theme to its inaudible background, in the same way that communist theory and politics refocus our attention away from heroic individuals to the immense work and suffering of the invisible ordinary people.24