Dark Carnival
by Paul D. Miller a.k.a Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
"Manhattan is the Rosetta Stone of the 20th Century"
~ Rem Koolhaas
Consider the following mosaic:
Possible performances. Impossible narratives. Ruptured flow. Binary Dissonance.
Questions of omission. The voice divorced from the body that gave it life,
the face ruptured and ripped from the skull. Electro-modernity: a spatio-dynamic,
disembodied, simultaneous, play of death. Morphing. Identity in continuous
upheaval, in the multipying mirror of memory. Reproduction. Replication:
Asymmetric. Telekinetic. Dialectic. Flow. The body as a site of textual
malleability. The mind as a locale of total recall. Total displacement.
Who's there? Erogenous, decoded amnesia. Biopsychic paradoxes. Eclipse
of the self. Prosethetic. Synthetic. Memetic. Technophilia...
Back in 1875, ten years after the Civil War that had demolished half of
the USA, and 25 years before the turn of the century, during the period
in American history that brought us such issues as American self identity,
reconstruction and "the role of the Negro", the "woman" question, the
"Irish" question, the "Jewish" question, the "Indian" question, taxation,
civilization and its emerging discontents, and so on, the American poet
and theorist, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an essay that prefigures much
of the discourse around "originality" in late 20th century culture. His
essay was entitled "Of Quotation and Originality" and in it, Emerson was
trying to come to grips with a kind of cultural inertia that he saw in
the literature of his day. The central premise of his essay was that peoples
minds were too burdened with the weight of previous creative work, they
only took elements from the past and reconfigured them to their own taste
in their present day. But Emerson, being the creative individual that
he was, tried to look beneath the surface that this kind of cultural saturation
fostered. He wrote: "Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation
is so massive , our protest so rare and insignificant - and this commonly
on the ground of other reading or hearing - that in large sense, one would
say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the
warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist
of these two strands(170)..."
Through love, I have reached a place/where no trace of Love remains,/Where
I' and we' and the painting of existence/have all been forgotten and left
behind/Now who can know where I am,/here where no knowledge, no opinion
can be found./Here even Love is bewildered/and the intellect is crazy,
talking nonsense./Totally impoverished, I have no wealth,/no identity
of self/Free from faithfulness and faithlessness/a stranger to myself
and all acquaintances./Yet only for this can I still be blamed/that a
cry comes from me/Out of grief for Nurbakhsh I say/"You have gone. How
is it that I know not where?"
Dr. Javid Nurbakhsh, "In the Paradise of the Sufi's" (whatever can be expressed in words is not sufism)
Two years later, December 6, 1877, to be exact, in a similar region of
the world, Thomas Edison invented the first prototype of the phonograph,
the "talking machine," also called "the memory machine" by recording the
human voice onto a tinfoil roll. The first recording was of a friend of
Edison's singing "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and was the embodiment of Edison's
search for a simpler, more easily controlled method of creating music
that was in his zone of experience. Edison, under the influence of one
of the first scientists to critique sound from the viewpoint of physics,
Herman von Helholtz (Helmholtz's book, Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen
als physiologische fur die Theorie der Musik (Sensations of Tone As a
Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music) , advanced a notion of a
"science of the beautiful" based on tone structure and its replication
in music. This idea was a massive influence on Edison) felt that the turntable
was a better mechanical way to, in his words, "establish music on a scientific
basis." "You know music in oneway,", Edison would say to his friends,
"and I in another - I know nothing about musical notation and have never
tried to learn. I am glad that I don't know. I try to form my own opinions."
"So what if I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes."
Walt Whitman, "Leaves of Grass"
The linkage between Emerson and Edison is more than just a serrendipitous
fact. Edison always viewed Emerson as his life long mentor. In his biography
about the inventors life entitled "Edison: Inventing the 20th Century",
Neil Baldwin wrote about their relationship as being a kind of rough and
tumble trade-off between the pragmatic, take no shorts inventor, and the
lofty poet. For Baldwin, Edison's initial discoveries and deployments
of his mechanical and electric devices led him in time to invent things
that were a way of trying to deal with America's expansionist urges. Edison
viewed his invention of the phonograph as a method of having access to
the past - something that would make it more than just a phantasm of collective
memory. He liked to compare himself to the turntables he invented. "I
am" he would jokingly say when he would boast about his technical effiency,
"like a phonograph." But the prosthetic relationship between voice, memory,
and the devices we use to recall them to our "pre-sent" selves is not
a new issue. It has haunted the notion of human identity for millenia.
In this way, the "phonograph", the talking machine that gives us a "phonetics
of graphology," is as old as the human voice and perhaps, is implicit
as a phenomenon, in the bulk of human communication.
Recording the voice proposes an ontological risk: the recorded utterance
is the stolen sound that returns to the self as the schizophonic, hallucinatory,
presence of another. But today, the voice you speak with, may not necessairly
be your own. The mechanization of war, the electronization of information,
the hypercommidification of culture, the exponential growth of mass media
- all of these point to a machinic/semiotic hierarchy of representation,
a locale in which the human mind, consciousness "itself" acts as a distributed
network: a place where consciousness becomes an object of "material memory."
The spread of global networks of all sort (information distribution systems,
mail systems, satellite direct broadcasting etc.) have created a sense
of telephony unprecedented in human history as well: the complete integration
of and simultaneous representation of the human world as a single conscious
entity based on the implosion of geographic distance or cartographic failure.
The mesh of sound, symbol and sentiment that electronic music represents,
is another way of speaking, another fusion of techne with logos (one must
not forget that the word logos, is Greek for "word"), order imposed upon
skill and the ability to deploy them both in the socio-graphic space of
one's environment, that electro-modernity has brought us. It is not so
much a new language, as a new way of pronouncing the ancient syntaxes
that history and evolution have given us, a new way of enunciating the
basic primal languages which slip through the fabric of rational thought
and infect our psyche at another, deeper level. Could this be the way
of healing? Taking elements of our own alienated consciouness, and recombining
them to create new languages from old, and in doing so to reflect the
chaotic turbulent reality we all call home, just might be a way of seeking
to reconcile the damage rapid technological advances have wrought on our
collective consciousness. Who knows? It might not. As Glenn Gould writes
in his groundbreaking essay on recording, identity, and textual continuity
"The Prospects of Recording": "The most hopeful thing about this process
- about the inevitable disregard for the identity factor in the creative
situation - is that it will permit a climate in which biological data
and chronological assumption can no longer be the cornerstone for judements
about art as it relates to environment. In fact, this whole situation
of individuality in the creative situation - the process through which
the creative act results from, absorbs, and re-forms individual opinion
- will be subjected to a radical reconsideration."
For Emerson, as with Edison, the notion of recreating and reproducing
text wasn't a mechanical issue, it was a psychological realm riddled with
the paradoxes that always seem to follow culture wherever it goes. Today
we operate under a recombinant aesthetic that even one hundred years ago
was beginning to take shape. The only thing that differentiates today
from yesterday, is the scale and scope of the paradigm. When in 1875 Emerson
could write: "the originals are not original. There is imitation, model,
suggestion, to the very archangels, if we knew their history. The first
book, tyrannizes over the second(172)..." Today we have an entire youth
culture based on the premise of replication (the word "replication" is
derived from "reply"), a milieu in which much of what is heard, seen,
and thought, is basically a refraction of the electronicized world that
we have built around ourselves. Emerson's critique of how people absorb
text closely parallels one of the first recorded copyright disputes in
Western History. In 6th Century Ireland, St Columba made a copy for himself
of a manuscript of the Latin Psalter, and the original "owner" (one must
remember that in Ireland Christianity was an import, and almost all of
the manuscripts were copies), Finnian of Druim Finn, protested. The king
at that time ruled "As the calf belongs to the cow, so the copy belongs
to its book." The two disputing parties went to war, and the "copyright
violator" won, and of course, held on to the book (Scientific American,
July 1996). But the sense of how people control and distribute culture
in both Emerson and the St. Columba tale, holds true in a sense today
as well.
In another light, both Emerson and St. Columba, parallel the thoughts
and observations of one of the original "structuralist" thinkers, Giambattista
Vico, whose notion of "poetic wisdom" informed much of his thoughts while
he was writing his book "The New Science" a folio that acted, as Donald
Philip Verene puts it, "a theater of memory." Verene writes of the role
of sound in Vico's work as a kind of zone of aberation, a place where
many of the cultural motifs that "the ancients" used were able to be passed
down through time in a process of continuous cultural combat between the
elements of the new and old. For Verene, the New Science is a "place within
which the universal structures of the human world are brought together
with its particulars by the bonding of philosophical and philological
thought into a single form of mentality. These two kinds of truth are
held together in such a way that one cannot be grasped without the other...
the reader confronts an order of contents wherein the logic of what is
to be discussed is not evident. Instead there is a collage of topics such
as wisdom, giants, sacrifices, poetic logic, monsters, metamorphoses,
money, rhythm, song, children, poetic economy, natural law, duels, legal
metaphysics, barbaric history. One encounters the scenery of the human
world."(Veverene, p106) In Vico's own words, excerpted from "The New Science",
there is the preliminary exploration of what Vico calls "the physics of
man," a place where human value structures continuosly evolve and change
in repsonse to the underlying myths that hold together the fabric of their
cultures: "philosophers and philologists should be concerned in the first
place with poetic metaphysics; that is, the science that looks for proof
not in the external world, but in the very modifications of the mind that
meditates on it. Since the world of nations is made by men, it is inside
their minds that its principles should be sought." (Principles of a New
Science, 1759). Vico always refers to myths as the underlying forces driving
the unconscious impulses of culture. Earlier in his explorations of cultural
transformation and his "physics of man" he posits "contests of song" as
a way of transferring the values of society from generation to generation:
"the civil institutions in use under such kingdoms," he writes of "the
ancients," are in a way always mediated by the way they engage the culture
that generated their "auspices". He continues: "[the civil institutions]
are narrated for us by poetic history in the numerous fables that deal
with contests of song... and consequently refer to the heroic contests
over the auspices...Thus the satyr Marsyas...when overcome by Apollo in
a contest of song, is flayed alive by the god... the sirens, who lull
sailors to sleep with their song and then cut their throats; the Sphinx,
who puts riddles to travellers and slays them on their failure to find
a solution... all these portray the politics of the heroic cities. The
sailors, travelers, and wanderers of these fables are the aliens..." (The
New Science, p244)
"The receiver gave out a buzz of a kind that K. had never before heard
on a telephone. It was like the hum of countless childrens voices - but
yet not a hum, the echo rather of voices singing in an infinite distance
- blended by sheer impossibility into one high but resonant sound that
vibrated on the ear as if it were trying to penetrate beyond mere hearing..."
~
Franz Kafka, The Castle
Emerson, like Vico before him, develops his argument for a kind of respectful
synthesis at the core of how culture evolves and changes. Mid-way through
his essay we find him quoting Goethe, who as far as we know, was probably
quoting someone else: "Our country, our customs, laws, our ambitions,
and our notions of fit and fair - all these we never made, we found them
ready made; we but quote them. Goethe frankly said, What would remain
to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius? Every one
of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons,
a thousand things: wise and foolish have brought me, without suspecting
it, the offering of their thoughts, faculties and experience. My work
is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature. It bears the
name of Goethe.(p190)." Todays notion of creativity and originality are
configured by a postmodern discourse characterized, one might say, by
velocity: it is a blur, a constellation of styles, a knowledge and pleasure
in the play of surfaces, a rejection of history as objective force in
favor of subjective interpretations of its residue, a relish for copies
and repetition, and so on. We inhabit a cultural zone informed by what
Deleuze liked to call a "logic of the particular", a place where the subjective,
multiple, interpretations of information lead us to take the real as a
kind of consensual, manufactured situation. Where does this ebb and flow
that both Emerson and Columba seem to be arguing for, fit in? Today's
cultural discourse, without doubt, is configured by, and in a strange
way, echoes, much if the early characteristics of the Frankfurt school:
until the 1980's its influence on academic circles had become the ground
from which almost all critical discourse seemed to reflect off of: Antonio
Gramsci's "ideological hegemony", T.W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer's "culture
industry", Hans Enzensbergerger's "consciousness industry," Jameson's
"use value overcoming exchange value" Friedrich Schiller's "mind managers,"
Micheal Real's "mass mediated culture" and, of course, Herbert Marcuse's
"systematic moronization" and "repressive tolerance." Their intellectual
descendants: Tod Gitlin, Andrew Ross, Tricia Rose, Stuart Hall, Raymond
Williams, Ariel Dorfman, John Fiske, Neil Postman, still hold many of
the tenets advanced by the early pioneers of cultural criticism.
These days there seems to be some sort of confusion as to what is performance,
what is "live" what is valid. There are corralaries, axioms of previous
migrations of meaning that somehow never seem to reach the dense locale
of late 20th century youth culture, a place where many of the issues that
drive the discourse of both cultural criticism and philosophy tend to
be generated. We live in a time where the human body is circumscribed
by a dense locale of technological sophistry: a place where the line dividing
the organic and inorganic elements that form the core essence of human
life is blurring. Unravel the distortions of the present day: sampling
to me is like sending a fax to yourself from the sonic debris of a possible
future; the cultural permutations of tommorow, heard today, beyond the
corporeal limits of the imagination. Do you get my drift?
SHAPE CAN BE OFFENSIVE...THE SHADOW IS LARGER THAN THE TREE...SOON MAN
SHALL BE...MUST FREE...THE LOOK IS ALWAYS FIXED. IT MUST BE UNHOOKED...STOP
TIME! GAUGE THE PACE OF YOUR BREATH...TURN THE MOON AROUND. THEN REWIND
YOUR HEARTS... Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread Beat and Blood
Illocutionary acts of speech, language as a stream of performative sounds,
sounds as the end product of a series of gestures marked by ellipses of
silence, places of disappearance on the fabric of the body... the polyphonic,
hungry gaze of a culture of repetition, and so on and so on... [skip/fade/enter/delete]
Performativity as a source of discourse that cuts across the terrains
occupied traditionally by the history of medicine, film studies, art history,
philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and fiction. It attempts
to find an artisitic or cultural pretext for each of the expositions of
performance... The West first really encounters this notion of "imaginal
hypertext" through the auspices of three radically different theorists:
Giordano Bruno with his "memory palaces" that mirror previous thinkers
such as Augustine (in his Confessions, Augustine treats memory as a personal
space where "the Divine" acts as a receptacle for the personal memories
one has accrued in life), and his essay "On the Composition of Images,
Signs, and Ideas,"and much later on, Deleuze and Guattari (but Deleuze
and Guattari are so dense, that they would require an entire essay, so
that's a topic for later discussion). Bruno was burned at the stake by
the Papal Inquisition for heresy because he believed in the world and
the self as a kind of semiotic unity. For him, human existence was a holistic
all embracing search for identity in the signs of a transcedent culture
of heterodoxy.
Bruno's work, like the dj mixes I always allude my writing to, was to
be ranged over and through: much of his work like Vico, Walter Benjamin's
"Pasagen-Werk", and Ferdinand Saussure (founder, along with Charles S.
Pierce, of structural linguistics, and whose work comes to us only through
the fragments of his lectures that his students managed to save) was fragmented,
and involuted, and mainly a kind of exploration of textual slippage: his
style of writing was to be explored, traversed with the same sense of
physical movement that we achieve when we walk through the streets and
byways of the urban landscape: through verse, image and aphorism, he tried
always to synopsize memory as a space open to the world, completely generated
through the auspices of humanity's engagement with the environment it
finds itself in. Bruno's "hermetic" thinking refers to other medieval
and historic characters (a list too long to elucidate here), but his own
contribution is a an obsession with heterodoxy, of using the surface elements
of perception to search for the underlying unity of the world. Bruno wrote
in the "Dedicatory Epistle" of the De Imaginum...Compositione, about a
kind of unified field of perception - what contemporary thinkers like
Deleuze and Guattari would call a "morphogenetic field", or a place where
all is flux, and human expression rests on a kind of associative action,
rather than the rationalist notion of categorical thinking: "It is that
sort of eye which sees all things in itself, and is like wise in all things.
By this sublime method we could be like that sort of eye, if we could
discern our species substance so that our eye could perceive itself, our
mind enfold itself. Then it would be as possible to understand all as
it would be simple to do all. However, the nature of things in composition
and that possess the body does not permit this. For its substance abides
in movement and quantity, even if by itself it neither moves nor is moved..."
(Bruno, p XII). Bruno uses the common Medieval notion of the eye as mind
(this was common in Renaissance neo-Platonist philosophy). His intent
was to say that the mind does not analyze itself: that rationality ends
where it begins. So where from there? What textual jumps, what shock-cuts
in the text? Abstract linguistics, an architecture of the subconscious:
Performance. Competence. Diachronic. Synchronic. Attack. Sustain. Decay.
Release.
[skip/fade/enter/delete]...
"From this play of night, light and leather, can I let myself take identity?
Equipped with contradictory visions, an ugly hand caged in pretty metal,
I observe a new mechanics. I am the wild machinist, past detroyed, reconstructing
the present." Samuel Delaney, Dhalgren
There are other zones of expression that manifested in physical performance,
movements of the body as bearer of meaning, such as Marinetti's notion
of a "Synthetic Theater" where human action and gestures "destroy the
Solemn, the Sacred, the Serious, and the Sublime in art with a capital
A." His critique of art and identity mirrors that of two women: the African-American
conceptual artist and philosopher, Adrian Piper, and one of the first
multimedia performance artists: Valentine de Saint-Point. Saint-Point,
the author of a multimedia "kinetic theater" entitled "Manifesto of Lust,"
performed on December 20, 1913, a "kinaesthetic incantation" at the Comedie
des Champs-Elysees in Paris: Saint-Point professed words of love, fragmented
"poems of atmosphere," love poems, hate poems, while projections of calculus
equations and rotating colored lights bathed her disfigured shadow on
the fabric behind her. Saint-Point's work is only prefigured, in terms
of intensity and ability to commuincate with the audience, by films of
destruction, like the Lumiere Brothers "Demolition of a Wall" (1896) and
Edison's film of a time lapse recording of a bullet ripping a lightbulb
to shreds at the turn of the 20th century, or composers like Raymond Scott
and Carl Stalling, whose compositions for cartoons like Bugs Bunny are
etched, it seems, into the fabric of late 20th century culture like some
strand of DNA sequence coding our collective memory for future mutations.
On the other hand, in the field of philosophy, later in the same century,
Piper in her essay "Xenophobia and Rationalism", critiques much of what
Western society has viewed as "rational" through the agency of Kant and
several other "Rationalists", and his notion of the "sublime" as a starting
point for the recognition of both culture, perceptions, and what can be
considered art. Kant's statement in his seminal essay, "Critique of Pure
Reason" paves the way for much of what Piper herself critiques in Kant's
work: "the transcendental concept of reason is none other than that of
proceeding from a totality of conditions to a given condition. Now since
only the unconditioned makes the totality of conditions possible, and
conversely the totality of the conditions is itself always unconditioned;
so a pure concept of reason in general can be explained through the concept
of the unconditioned, so far as it contains a basis of the synthesis of
the condition (A 322/B379)... Concepts of pure reason... view all experiential
knowledge as determined through an absolute totality of conditions..."
What intrigues Piper so much about Kant's openess to "anomaly" is the
sense that the "total" groundwork of knowledge is always in search for
new aspects of information, her "remix" of Kant's idea of, as she puts
it, "xenophilia": "So Kant is saying that built into the canons of rationality
that structure our experience is an inherent disposition to seek out all
the phenomena that demand an inclusive explanation When applied specifically
to the transcendent idea of personhood, this disposition to welcome anomaly
as a means of extending our understanding amounts to a kind of xenophilia.
That is, amounts to a positive valuation of human difference as intrinsically
interesting..." Kant's notion of "the sublime" is extremely important
for any critique of late 20th century culture. What we are seeing here
with her critique of Kant's notions of "synthetic reason" and its relationship
to what Piper calls "xenophilia" is a sense of configuring the known -
recasting previous information - just as Emerson wrote of in his essay
"Of Quotation and Originality."
In a strange way the juxtaposition of all of this information resembles
the Roman poet and Epicurean philosopher, Lucretius, whose remix of Epicurus's
notion of a "swerve," or "clinamen" which he advanced in his poem "On
the Nature of the Universe" (written in 55 B.C.), holds humanity's perceptions
of the dance of the atoms that compose the universe, and human being's
memories (meaning the coporeal sense of the body remembered, recalled,
rewound, as a physical object in the universe), as the very fragments
that hold our sense of existence together. "Fragment clings to fragment"
Lucretius wrote, "thus the universe is born." Memory, the time of corporeal
passage, the body's interaction with the universe, the body as a unified
field of atomic interaction of focres regulating "mind and spirit"...
More could be said on these topics and their relationship to electro-modernity.
Other people have written books on stuff that for this essay alone, would
be one phrase, one sentence, one word, perhaps. The way Edison viewed
much of this kind of transmigration of memory patterns and their relationship
to sound can be seen through his relationship with Emerson's work. In
this regard, Edison subscribed to three figures for most of his "metaphysical"
beliefs: Liebniz, Swedenbourg, and Emerson. Much of Liebniz's work was
based on the belief that the universe was composed of an infinite number
of spiritual force or energy (monads, Greek for "units"), a kind of divine
plan of ratios made of fragments ranging in size and importance from God
to the hosts of angels that he used to guide his plans. In a description
that presages our notion of the algorithms that drive computers and samplers,
by several hundred years, he even went so far as to view music as an "unconscious
arithmetic" made of numerical ratios - a kind of uninterpreted syntax,
so to speak. Swedenbourg also borrowed heavily from Liebniz, with his
idea that every being in the universe had a kind of harmony or correspondence
with the "divine plan" or "heavenly sphere." Etc. Etc....
"The blues impulse transferred...containing a race, and its expression.
Primal (mixtures...transfers and intimations). Through its many changes,
it remained the exact replication of The Black Man In The West...But evolution
is not merely physical: yet if you understand what the physical alludes
to, is reflective of, then it will be understood that each process in
"life" is duplicated at all levels. The Blues (impulse) lyric (song) is
even descriptive of a plane of evolution, a direction...coming and going...through
whatever worlds. Environment as the social workers say...but Total Environment
(including at all levels, the spiritual). Identification is Sound Identification
is Sight Identification is Touch, Feeling, Smell, Movement...
~
Amiri Baraka,
Leroi Jones, The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music)
As to Edison's relationship to their writings, Baldwin posits: "...Thomas
Edison was equally at home exploring possibilities in metaphysical "realms
beyond" as he was in the absolutely grounded world of material phenomena....
It naturally followed that when he was in the last decade of his life,
Edison returned with deep preoccupation to existence after death. In so
doing he tapped once again into a long, speculative tradition, inaugurated
by Gottfried Wilhelm von Liebniz (1646-1716), the Leipzig-born philosopher,
mathematician, and statesman, and the foremost intellectual theologian
of the seventeenth century..." We must not forget here, that "Rational"
is derived from "ratio," and the notion of repetition is implaicit in
this worldview. Edison was fascinated with Emerson's essay "Representative
Men" (1850) in which Emerson expounded a system of thoughts based on the
idea that "every material thing has its celestial side, has its translation
through humanity, in the spiritual and necessary sphere where it plays
a part as indestructible as any other...." the inventor for Emerson, was
someone who "began [his/her] lessons in the shipyards and dissecting rooms"
and who could go from there, and derive notions that would move the inventor
into "the dim spirit-realm." In this place, Emerson felt that the inventor
would find that "nature is always self-similar repeating to herself in
successive planes" of perception built upon aggregate "units" and particles".
Today, we are informed by a kind of textuality of what I like to call
"the post-rational," or a milieu where the "text" of the natural has been
displaced by its human derived interpretations, a place where Lautremont's
description of beauty as "the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing
machine on a dissecting table" and Rimbaud's idea of poetry as a "systematic
derangement of the senses" hold sway. Perhaps when we view the contemporary
concept of text through the lens of a kind of camera obscura, we are shown
a place where even Roland Barthes definition of text in his infamous essay
"Text, Discourse, Ideology" as "the phenomenal surface of the literary
work; [it is] the fabric of the words which make up the work and which
are arranged in such a way as to impose a meaning which is stable and
as far as possible is unique," is under serious doubt. Later on in the
same essay, Barthes makes an argument that text is a kind of interplay
between "signifiance" and "jouissance," and that text reflects human expression
as a kind of transcendent engagement. "Text" he writes, "takes part of
the spiritual glory of the work, of which it is the prosaic but necessary
servant.Constitutively linked with writing (the text is what is written),
perhaps because the very graphics of the letter - although remaining linear
- suggest not speech, but the interweaving of a tissue (etymologically
speaking, text' means tissue)...the text is a weapon against time, oblivion
and the trickery of speech, which is so easily taken back..." This, of
course, reflects his infamous dictum in which he announced the end of
the text as a stable object for linear reference: "that is the pleasure
of the text: value shifted to the sumptuous rank of the signifier..."
in his essay "The Pleasure of the Text."
"I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travel. They
are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has
upon switchback - of a helpless head long motion! I felt the same horrible
anticipation, too, of an imminent smash...Then in the intermittent darkness,
I saw the moon spinning swiftly through, her quarters from new to full,
and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently as I went on,
still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one
continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid
luminous color like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak
of fire, a brilliant arch in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band;
and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle
flickering in the blue..."
~
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
In 1699 a tome entitled "Choreographie ou l'art de decrire la danse, par
caractres, figures et signes demonstratifs" (choreography, or the art
of describing dance with demonstrative characters, figures and signs -
"writing with chorus") appeared on the scene of the time. To choreograph
is, originally, to trace or to make models for dance. This is what Feuillet,
who invented the word, thought of when he created it in 1699-1700. Choreography,
for him, was a kind of glossary of rhythmic movements. It was the first
codified system of rules and regulations for human movement in Western
culture, and it became one of the standard methods of choreographing dance
movement. According to the collective of authors who published the book
"Traces of the Dance", this codification of signs and symbols describing
human movement migrated into other areas of culture: Liebniz, Rousseau
etc. According to Foucault in his history of the imagination of the 1700's,
this kind of movement is made into correspondences with the very "wheels
of the universe" of that time. Invented by a coutesan to King Louis XIV,
Raoul-Auger Feuillet, the drawings and glyphs that were its visual hallmark,
resemble what we call today, graffiti.They also bear a strange resemblance
to Jackson Pollocks action paintings. Better yet, Giocommi Balla's "kinetic
paintings." Or Joseph Beuy's notion of social sculpture...
Today, the notion of movement and choreogrpahy find themselves re-inscribed
into a zone of flux: dance, sound-texture, all find themselvves in a place
where James Snead's notion of "concealed repetition" underlies much of
dance movement.This aesthetic inherits much of the premises of what art
critic Lucy Lippard called "the dematerialized object." Gestures perpetuated
in the sociographic space of the mix... Boom, there it is. Sound and signification.
Sound as social text. Sound as bearer of social memory. Who's there?
The word: Flow. Say it.
Roll it on your tongue. Spit it out. Swim in it. Caress it.
"No philosophy transcends its age..."
Hegel
I begin my conclusion with an excerpt from Samuel Beckett's play, "Krapp's
Last Tape." The essay unwinds, the tape spool rolls, reality takes on
a shimmering tinge, a kind of fractal distortion at the edge of your perception.
The tape rolls, Krapp's image appears on your mindscreen, an invocation
of Nietzsche's elevation of the composer into "a preist, a kind of mouthpiece
of the "in-itself" of things, a telephone from the beyond... (Genealogy
of Morals, III, 5)." An existential scenario unfolds before your eyes,
a clash between the rational and "post-rational" object of desire, love
long lost, time frozen, the lost voice of the desired one unwinds before
your gaze. Boo...
Theater directions: (abstract pain, frozen silence, torn ligaments embedded
with Digital Audio Tape Ribbon, scenes from Allain Robbe Grillet's nouveau
roman "Last Year at Marienbad" mixed with footage from LA riots in 1994,
and Islamic Fundamentalists protesting in Pakistan in 1997, are projected
on the walls of woven fabric behind the actor. The tape begins to play,
the curtains rise: (pause) He suddenly bends over machine, switches off,
wrenches off tape, throws it away, puts on the other, winds it forward
to the passage he wants, switches on, listens staring front.
TAPE: ...gooseberries, she said. I said again I thought it was hopeless
and no good going on, and she agreed, without opening her eyes. (Pause).
I asked her to look at me and after a few moments -(pause) after a few
moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent
over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low) Let me
in. (Pause) We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went
down, sighing, before the stem! (Pause) I lay down across her with my
face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But
under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to
side. Pause. Krapp's lips move. No sound.... Krapp motionless staring
before him. The tape runs on in silence...
Whether performance comes to you via the route of tribal ritual or Medieval
Passion plays, or the experimental spectacles Leonardo Da Vinci staged
in front of bemused spectators for his "river pageants", to more recent
things like the Futurists notion of a "Synthetic Theater" a place where
"synchronism" was the all pervading motif, to performance artists like
Q*Bert, Joan Jonas, Stelarc (whose body was controlled for performance
pieces by needles electronically connected to the World Wide Web), Robert
Morris, Yves Klein, Wu Tang Clan, KRS-1, and Robert Wilson, there is one
thing that you will probably notice immediately: there is a sense that
all of these things can be and usually are, expressions operating on many
levels, in many fashions. In a sense, the more recent development of "hypertext"
is probably the first literary form to take on the approximation of textual
inscription and reinscription as performance. But that's another essay.
I write to you from a milieu in which creativity, rests for the most part,
in how you recontextualize the previous expression of others, a place
where there is no such thing as "an immaculate perception." Sampling as
the digital equivalent of Feng Shui? Sampling as a kinesthetic theater
of memory? Sampling as the structural inheritor of Mikhail Bakhtin's "chronotopic"
literary explorations... In the ecology of narratives, recyling myths
is a very old game, a dance between presence and absence. Perhaps this
is what Claude Levi Strauss spoke of when he called the "primitive mindset"
that of a "bricoleur..." Sociographic expression - sound writing - mirrors
the sense of continuous inscription and re-inscription of text that occurs
when the needle, the focal point of sound, electricty, and the refractive
characteristics of crystalline structure (the diamond on the tip of the
needle), is put into action when you press "play" on the cassette deck
you use to make a mixed tape or ride the fader on the mixing board. Soniture.
Ecriture. A phonetics of graphology. Sound and the electric imagination
in youth culture as the manifestation of language as total text, or as
Toni Morrision puts it in her essay "Playing in the Dark:" "The imagination
that produces work which bears and invites rereadings, which motions to
future readings, as well as contemporary ones, implies a shareable world
and an endlesslessly flexible language." Replication as differentiated
from mere reproduction. Replication as it stands derived from "reply":
the copies transcend the originals, the original is nothing but a collection
of previous cultural movements. Flow... The turntable's needle in dj culture
acts as a kind of mediator between self and the fictions of the external
world. With the needle the dj weaves the sounds together. Do you get my drift?
No Footnotes
No Bibliography
No References
Just straight up text...
Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. Dj Spooky That Subliminal Kid
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Phillis Wheatley. |
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DJ Spooky has participated in two new book projects.
DJ Spooky also has participated in renowned photographer Lyle Owerko's new book "The Boombox Project" on the history of boomboxes. 
Copyright Criminals - a Documentary by Ben Frantzen and Kembrew Mcleod
ORDER NOW!!! 
OUT NOW! DJ Spooky's "Sound Unbound"
CREATION REBEL MIX CD on Trojan Records
DJ Spooky has produced material on the new Yoko Ono album.
RHYTHM SCIENCE:
