Just in time for everyone to run out and see the new Star Trek movie (which you should do super soon...it's awesome), here is a link to my Star Trek essay.
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfw523gg_2f8d6p77p
This whole project began with a frantic note I scribbled in my copy of Silverman's Acoustic Mirror: "Pg 54: 'inside' filmic space=female; 'outside' = male. ---> what about the computer in Star Trek? ---> both 'inside' and disembodied." From there, I had an excellent excuse (like I needed one) to sit around and watch Star Trek for about a week straight until I began thinking about the "sexy voice" episode ("Tomorrow Is Yesterday"). And really, the rest just sort of fell together. Now I just need to take it someplace. To be perfectly honest, I'd most like to take it to the Trek convention in Vegas. But, since that neither counts for my career, nor would I likely be able to find anyone who cares enough about the Oedipal or Latency Stages to read it, I found a couple of "real" conferences I could send an abstract to.
1. San Fransisco State University's Cinema Studies GSA conference titled "Breaking Barriers: Borders and Beyond Liminality in Cinematic Media." According to the description, they're looking for papers that discuss the ways in which things break outside of the norms in mediated fiction. Since a lot of my paper talks about the episode in which the norms of the Latency Master Narrative of Star Trek is breached, I think it would be perfect.
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=168437&keyword=science&keyword=fiction
2. Pacific University's interdisciplinary conference on Gender, Sexuality, and Power. My paper is, essentially, about gendered voices, the power of said voices, and the ways in which male sexuality and subjectivity may or may not be threatened in relationship to such voice, so I think it would fit perfectly at this conference!
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=167596&keyword=gender&keyword=media
Other than conferences, I had a few other ideas for ways to expand the paper into publishable length. First, I think it would be interesting to compare Star Trek's Enterprise to 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL 9000. The former is female and coldly mechanical, while the latter is male and soothing. Of course, the outcomes and media are entirely different, so it would make for a fascinating study, I think. Another possibility is to just expand my discussion of the Enterprise voice into the spin-off shows. Majel Barret did the voice for every single Star Trek computer (including the new movie, just before she died), so it's really interesting to see her evolution over the years, despite the fact that the ship essentially serves the same maternal function throughout. There are also tons of venues for such papers, include Cinema Journal, The Journal of Popular Culture, etc. etc. etc. And even if I never do get around to writing these things, at least the next time a friend says to me, "Really, Liz, you're watching Star Trek again!?" I'll be able to respond, "Dude, it's research!"
Friday, May 8, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Enterprise Doc-ing Bay 1 (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
In case you'd prefer the googled version of my abstract, here's the link.
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfw523gg_1hggjrdd2
It's the exact same thing as what's posted below, but for the sake of techno-joy, I thought I'd googledoc it anyway.
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfw523gg_1hggjrdd2
It's the exact same thing as what's posted below, but for the sake of techno-joy, I thought I'd googledoc it anyway.
Friday, April 17, 2009
"Computing, Dear": The Female Voice-Over as Disruptor of Male Subjectivity in Star Trek: The Original Series (ABSTRACT)
In Star Trek: The Original Series, the computer aboard the Starship Enterprise (voiced by Gene Roddenberry's then-wife Majel Barret) serves multiple functions. Within the narrative, she performs whatever computations the crew verbally asks of her, then she reports aloud her computations.
On a psychoanalytic level, the computer's female voice also, quite evidently, serves as a maternal voice, reenacting a womb-like situation for the ship's crew. The computer speaks to them from a disembodied, though omnipresent, position—she is the ship, inside which the crew is enclosed, much like a mother whose child is enclosed in her womb. Furthermore, the crew treats the ship as a beloved woman, describing her as “she,” and often saying how beautiful she is. In particular, both Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and the ship's chief engineer, Montgomery “Scotty” Scott (James Doohan), all but worship her as as a thing of beloved beauty. In one episode, Scotty goes so far as to start a fight with a crew of Klingons because they “insulted the Enterprise.”
Thus, the computer serves for them both linguistically and emotionally as a maternal figure; however, this primarily auditory role of the computer disrupts the typical alignment of speech with male subjectivity, as Kaja Silverman describes it in The Acoustic Mirror. According to her, “Male subjectivity is...defined in relation to that seemingly transcendental auditory position, and so aligned with the apparatus” (57). Silverman applies this solely to classic cinema, though I argue that it is equally applicable to television. The computer is aligned with the apparatus—she serves simultaneously within the narrative as the literal apparatus that enables the voyage of the crew and externally to the narrative through the mechanism of literal voice-over in order to suture over the indicators of production. Yet the fact that the computer is gendered as a maternal woman disrupts male subjectivity by re-inscribing auditory characteristics typically gendered as male through cinematic voice-overs. Furthermore, I posit that this tension between the female-gendered computer voice and the male subjectivity of the crew is most evident when the lines between maternal voice and sexualized female voice combine, as is evident in the episode “Yesterday is Tomorrow,” when the computer has been reprogrammed to address the Captain as “Dear.” By analyzing this episode, I will show the ways in which the disembodied female voice not only threatens and disrupts male subjectivity, but also is seen in media situations other than classic cinema, thereby revealing the ubiquitousness of the tension between male and female subjectivity.
On a psychoanalytic level, the computer's female voice also, quite evidently, serves as a maternal voice, reenacting a womb-like situation for the ship's crew. The computer speaks to them from a disembodied, though omnipresent, position—she is the ship, inside which the crew is enclosed, much like a mother whose child is enclosed in her womb. Furthermore, the crew treats the ship as a beloved woman, describing her as “she,” and often saying how beautiful she is. In particular, both Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and the ship's chief engineer, Montgomery “Scotty” Scott (James Doohan), all but worship her as as a thing of beloved beauty. In one episode, Scotty goes so far as to start a fight with a crew of Klingons because they “insulted the Enterprise.”
Thus, the computer serves for them both linguistically and emotionally as a maternal figure; however, this primarily auditory role of the computer disrupts the typical alignment of speech with male subjectivity, as Kaja Silverman describes it in The Acoustic Mirror. According to her, “Male subjectivity is...defined in relation to that seemingly transcendental auditory position, and so aligned with the apparatus” (57). Silverman applies this solely to classic cinema, though I argue that it is equally applicable to television. The computer is aligned with the apparatus—she serves simultaneously within the narrative as the literal apparatus that enables the voyage of the crew and externally to the narrative through the mechanism of literal voice-over in order to suture over the indicators of production. Yet the fact that the computer is gendered as a maternal woman disrupts male subjectivity by re-inscribing auditory characteristics typically gendered as male through cinematic voice-overs. Furthermore, I posit that this tension between the female-gendered computer voice and the male subjectivity of the crew is most evident when the lines between maternal voice and sexualized female voice combine, as is evident in the episode “Yesterday is Tomorrow,” when the computer has been reprogrammed to address the Captain as “Dear.” By analyzing this episode, I will show the ways in which the disembodied female voice not only threatens and disrupts male subjectivity, but also is seen in media situations other than classic cinema, thereby revealing the ubiquitousness of the tension between male and female subjectivity.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Ammendment to the Following Blog
I realized this morning that I forgot to mention what software Martina and I used for our soundscape. It's really not 100% relevant to my discussion, but I figured for the sake of sciencey type accuracy, I should at least note it.
When the files were recorded with my phone (a crappy Nokia thing that does little more than let me communicate with the planet), they were saved in AMR format. So after I uploaded the files to my PC (I have a data link cord thing) I downloaded a freeware program called FormatFactory to convert all my files quickly to MP3s. I then used a Blaze Audio program called Rip Edit Burn (something I've had since high school when I was doing a lot of powerpoint projects that needed music mixed to the correct times. It was well worth the $20 I spent way back then and has become even more useful now for creating my own ringtones) to cut out the individual line I wanted to use from each file, then mix them back into one big poem.
Since we did our parts individually, I have no clue what Martina's got. See her blog for more on that.
When the files were recorded with my phone (a crappy Nokia thing that does little more than let me communicate with the planet), they were saved in AMR format. So after I uploaded the files to my PC (I have a data link cord thing) I downloaded a freeware program called FormatFactory to convert all my files quickly to MP3s. I then used a Blaze Audio program called Rip Edit Burn (something I've had since high school when I was doing a lot of powerpoint projects that needed music mixed to the correct times. It was well worth the $20 I spent way back then and has become even more useful now for creating my own ringtones) to cut out the individual line I wanted to use from each file, then mix them back into one big poem.
Since we did our parts individually, I have no clue what Martina's got. See her blog for more on that.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
The Real Shakespeare is Studying English at WVU
Part 1: The Creation
For our soundscape, Martina and I used my cell phone to record some of our students (who were provided two extra credit points) and several GTAs (who were coaxed unabashedly by us) reading two of Shakespeare's more famous sonnets—“Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day” and “My Mistress's Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun.” For each person we recorded, we asked him/her to read the sonnet directly from a piece of paper in his/her “best” British accent. Strangely enough, quite a few of our students had difficulty calling to mind exactly what a British accent sounds like, but since they were being rewarded with extra credit, they were more than willing to give it a shot. The GTAs, on the other hand, had no trouble understanding what the accent “should” sound like, yet they were all reluctant to try it when being recorded.
Once we had the recordings, Martina mixed “Shall I Compare Thee,” and I mixed “My Mistress's Eyes.” In the mixing process, we took individual lines from the poems out of the recordings and put them together so that a different person was reading a different line throughout. Then I sent my mixed poem to Martina, who put the two together into one file. The results can be found on Martina's blog: http://bloggershewrote.blogspot.com/.
Part 2: The “Readings”
There were several questions we set out to answer with our soundscape, and in truth, we didn't really answer any of them. When we started, I wanted to do something with a multi-vocal poem, Martina wanted to do something with British accents, and we both wanted to do something that would make a statement about authenticity. In the end, as the following discussion shows, we really came up with more questions than definitive answers. For this reason, I'd like to narrow my close listening down to just two problems: authenticity and ownership.
The biggest question we both wanted to answer was that of authenticity. What exactly is an “authentic” Shakespearean reading? (In actuality, we didn't set out to answer this question. We just picked Shakespeare's sonnets because they're easily recognizable and definable as British. Even so, this is where the soundscape led us.) Several of the scholars we've read (though none more so than Maria Damon in her defense of slam poetry) seem to want to argue that authenticity stems from authorship; in other words, for a reading to be authentic, the author has to read it in his/her authorial voice. Well, Shakespeare's dead, and sound recording was invented well after his life, so there's no possible way to have an “authentic” recording of his sonnets. So what exactly would be authentic here? As I mentioned above, one of the major concerns for the people we recorded was getting the British accent “right.” And as you'll notice in our soundscape, a lot of people failed miserably. But even if we went to England and found people who had been living there their entire lives to read for us, would it still be authentically Shakespearean? Probably not. In fact, it's entirely likely that the only “correct” sounding Shakespearean reading would likely have to come from a classically trained Shakespearean actor—one who's accent has been carefully tweaked to sound most British. (In my head, this sounds like a blend of the guy from Masterpiece Theatre, a BBC newscaster, and John Lovitz's “Aaacting” skit from SNL.)
Clearly, though, no one we asked to read for us is a classically trained Shakespearean actor. So what have we got? There are several readers who sound more British than others, particularly in the lines with soft “r”s. Take, for example, the first two lines in the soundscape. “Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day” sounds nasally, and the pronunciation of “Summer's day” sounds like “Summah's Day.” These are, arguably, the most recognizable characteristics of British accents. The second, though, is not only read by a male, instead of a female, but the reader also doesn't capture the soft “r” as clearly as the first. If we just take into consideration these differences in pronunciation, we might say the first is more authentic than the second. However, the female voice is gendered differently from what we'd expect William Shakespeare—as a man—to sound like. So how authentic can a woman reading Shakespeare be?
Let's take a male voice, then. The line “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see” was read by one of my students. He doesn't use the characteristic soft “r,” but the deep timbre of his voice can automatically be read as male, and as soon as I hear it, I think, “That's Jeffrey,” because it sounds exactly how Jeffrey does when he reads in class. So would it be less authentically Jeffrey if he were speaking in a British accent? Or would it just be more authentically Shakespearean? Is one preferable over the other?
This brings me, then, to the question of the work itself in terms of ownership and authenticity. What happens to a creative piece when multiple people, none of whom are the authors, appropriate the piece through a recorded reading? Shakespeare's works are now entirely free access; weirdly enough, though, we're still drawn as a culture to cite him as the author. Because of this, if Martina and I had billed our soundscape as “Two original poems written by us and read by various people we know,” the whole class would've gone nuts, someone would've turned us in for plagiarism, and our lives as scholars would be over. So who owns our soundscape? Again, Shakespeare's dead, so he can't really own anything. But I own the phone that recorded it; Martina and I own the software that mixed it; the people who read for us own the voices they used to deliver the poems; and the recording itself is posted on Martina's blog, which is accessible for free to anyone who wants it. I also own at least 5 different books with those two poems printed in them, although for the actual recording, we used a piece of paper Martina had created by copying and pasting the poems from a website she'd found into a Word document. But none of us owns the poems themselves. We merely took it and made it our own, though I'd argue not quite in Lethem's “second use” way. Yes, we recontextualized it, but we also tried to make it as “authentic” as possible.
So where does this leave the poems themselves? Have we taken two of the most beautiful poems ever written in the English language and horribly, disgustingly, defaced them by composing a mixed recording? In other words, we've come to the “vs.” part of any authenticity discussion: “good vs. bad,” “accurate vs. inaccurate,” “authentic vs. inauthentic.” In a technical sense, the poems are accurate, since every word written is accordingly spoken. And I, personally, think the soundscape is good—bordering on awesome—simply because I recognize all the voices, some of which make me laugh, and I had a good time putting it together. As for whether it's authentic, I argue yes, though not in the same way other people would. It's authentic in that it really is a collection of voices we took from people and mixed together to make two poems, right down to the clatter I purposefully left in during the line “Music hath a far more pleasing sound.” (Get it? Sound? Clatter?) On the other hand, if I were Shakespeare, I'd probably be shocked and horrified at what two reckless graduate students had done to my work. There's no regular emotion, nor even real emotion, unless you count the frantic student reaction, “I need extra credit so I don't fail my English class!!” Instead, there's a trace of identifiable voices, some of whom are better at faking a British accent than others. So I'm left with one last unanswerable question: does this trace count for authenticity if you can't trace it back to the author, and if the trace does lead us to the author, as he exists in the minds of the readers, what other form of authenticity could possibly exist?
For our soundscape, Martina and I used my cell phone to record some of our students (who were provided two extra credit points) and several GTAs (who were coaxed unabashedly by us) reading two of Shakespeare's more famous sonnets—“Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day” and “My Mistress's Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun.” For each person we recorded, we asked him/her to read the sonnet directly from a piece of paper in his/her “best” British accent. Strangely enough, quite a few of our students had difficulty calling to mind exactly what a British accent sounds like, but since they were being rewarded with extra credit, they were more than willing to give it a shot. The GTAs, on the other hand, had no trouble understanding what the accent “should” sound like, yet they were all reluctant to try it when being recorded.
Once we had the recordings, Martina mixed “Shall I Compare Thee,” and I mixed “My Mistress's Eyes.” In the mixing process, we took individual lines from the poems out of the recordings and put them together so that a different person was reading a different line throughout. Then I sent my mixed poem to Martina, who put the two together into one file. The results can be found on Martina's blog: http://bloggershewrote.blogspot.com/.
Part 2: The “Readings”
There were several questions we set out to answer with our soundscape, and in truth, we didn't really answer any of them. When we started, I wanted to do something with a multi-vocal poem, Martina wanted to do something with British accents, and we both wanted to do something that would make a statement about authenticity. In the end, as the following discussion shows, we really came up with more questions than definitive answers. For this reason, I'd like to narrow my close listening down to just two problems: authenticity and ownership.
The biggest question we both wanted to answer was that of authenticity. What exactly is an “authentic” Shakespearean reading? (In actuality, we didn't set out to answer this question. We just picked Shakespeare's sonnets because they're easily recognizable and definable as British. Even so, this is where the soundscape led us.) Several of the scholars we've read (though none more so than Maria Damon in her defense of slam poetry) seem to want to argue that authenticity stems from authorship; in other words, for a reading to be authentic, the author has to read it in his/her authorial voice. Well, Shakespeare's dead, and sound recording was invented well after his life, so there's no possible way to have an “authentic” recording of his sonnets. So what exactly would be authentic here? As I mentioned above, one of the major concerns for the people we recorded was getting the British accent “right.” And as you'll notice in our soundscape, a lot of people failed miserably. But even if we went to England and found people who had been living there their entire lives to read for us, would it still be authentically Shakespearean? Probably not. In fact, it's entirely likely that the only “correct” sounding Shakespearean reading would likely have to come from a classically trained Shakespearean actor—one who's accent has been carefully tweaked to sound most British. (In my head, this sounds like a blend of the guy from Masterpiece Theatre, a BBC newscaster, and John Lovitz's “Aaacting” skit from SNL.)
Clearly, though, no one we asked to read for us is a classically trained Shakespearean actor. So what have we got? There are several readers who sound more British than others, particularly in the lines with soft “r”s. Take, for example, the first two lines in the soundscape. “Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day” sounds nasally, and the pronunciation of “Summer's day” sounds like “Summah's Day.” These are, arguably, the most recognizable characteristics of British accents. The second, though, is not only read by a male, instead of a female, but the reader also doesn't capture the soft “r” as clearly as the first. If we just take into consideration these differences in pronunciation, we might say the first is more authentic than the second. However, the female voice is gendered differently from what we'd expect William Shakespeare—as a man—to sound like. So how authentic can a woman reading Shakespeare be?
Let's take a male voice, then. The line “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see” was read by one of my students. He doesn't use the characteristic soft “r,” but the deep timbre of his voice can automatically be read as male, and as soon as I hear it, I think, “That's Jeffrey,” because it sounds exactly how Jeffrey does when he reads in class. So would it be less authentically Jeffrey if he were speaking in a British accent? Or would it just be more authentically Shakespearean? Is one preferable over the other?
This brings me, then, to the question of the work itself in terms of ownership and authenticity. What happens to a creative piece when multiple people, none of whom are the authors, appropriate the piece through a recorded reading? Shakespeare's works are now entirely free access; weirdly enough, though, we're still drawn as a culture to cite him as the author. Because of this, if Martina and I had billed our soundscape as “Two original poems written by us and read by various people we know,” the whole class would've gone nuts, someone would've turned us in for plagiarism, and our lives as scholars would be over. So who owns our soundscape? Again, Shakespeare's dead, so he can't really own anything. But I own the phone that recorded it; Martina and I own the software that mixed it; the people who read for us own the voices they used to deliver the poems; and the recording itself is posted on Martina's blog, which is accessible for free to anyone who wants it. I also own at least 5 different books with those two poems printed in them, although for the actual recording, we used a piece of paper Martina had created by copying and pasting the poems from a website she'd found into a Word document. But none of us owns the poems themselves. We merely took it and made it our own, though I'd argue not quite in Lethem's “second use” way. Yes, we recontextualized it, but we also tried to make it as “authentic” as possible.
So where does this leave the poems themselves? Have we taken two of the most beautiful poems ever written in the English language and horribly, disgustingly, defaced them by composing a mixed recording? In other words, we've come to the “vs.” part of any authenticity discussion: “good vs. bad,” “accurate vs. inaccurate,” “authentic vs. inauthentic.” In a technical sense, the poems are accurate, since every word written is accordingly spoken. And I, personally, think the soundscape is good—bordering on awesome—simply because I recognize all the voices, some of which make me laugh, and I had a good time putting it together. As for whether it's authentic, I argue yes, though not in the same way other people would. It's authentic in that it really is a collection of voices we took from people and mixed together to make two poems, right down to the clatter I purposefully left in during the line “Music hath a far more pleasing sound.” (Get it? Sound? Clatter?) On the other hand, if I were Shakespeare, I'd probably be shocked and horrified at what two reckless graduate students had done to my work. There's no regular emotion, nor even real emotion, unless you count the frantic student reaction, “I need extra credit so I don't fail my English class!!” Instead, there's a trace of identifiable voices, some of whom are better at faking a British accent than others. So I'm left with one last unanswerable question: does this trace count for authenticity if you can't trace it back to the author, and if the trace does lead us to the author, as he exists in the minds of the readers, what other form of authenticity could possibly exist?
Monday, March 30, 2009
Am I being objectified or thingified by using this medium?
Question 1: A dominant theme among the writers in Sound Unbound seems to be the emphasis of taking something everyday and making it new or recontextualizing it. I think this is all fabulous and necessary for us to avoid slipping so far into familiarity and product hyper-recognition that we're suddenly living out 1984 (which, oddly enough, was essentially a reworking of Zamyaten's book We). But Dick Hebdige brought up the fact that we're returning to the necessity of the "unimaginable," particularly in this post-9/11 time. So my question is: just how "revolutionary" or "avante-garde" or, in fact, NEW can anything really be? Lethem spends his entire essay talking about how nothing's really new, but it can have what he calls a "second use." Isn't the experimental, then, just a perpetuation of the cycle of capitalism? When we get overprogrammed, we suddenly need to reprogram ourselves. In turn, that reprogramming becomes the "second use" overprogramming until someone else comes along and tries to reprogram us. It's the Kurt Cobain Dychotomy: how can you be counter-culture and make an impact when your ideas have grown to the point of being culture itself?
I have no answer to that one. In fact, I'm not even sure there is an answer to that one.
Question 2: Why are sampling, public commons, P2P, etc., considered so "bad"? A number of the writers in this book have various answers, but most of them seem to want to boil it down to the evils of big business. I just don't see how it can be that easy, though. It seems to me that a big part of the "bad"ness behind sampling and "plagiarism" is the modern anxiety of uselessness and inadequacy. Anthony Giddens talks a lot about this in his book Modernity and Self-Identity in relationship to shame. Apparently, we develop shame in response to feelings of social inadequacy (65). Because of this, we're driven to "make something of ourselves" or "leave our mark on the world." We want to be original and important and, most of all, USEFUL. Lethem inadvertently points this out when he quotes Thomas Jefferson's writing of copyright law: "The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors but 'to promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts.' To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work" (42). Notice, though, the word USEFUL in that quote. No matter what, art has to have a use value, whether it's commodified in the capitalist way or some other way. The trouble is that we live in a consumer culture where literally everything is bound up with commodification. Lethem talks about various "values" that can't be commodified. But the word used to describe them is "value." So they have worth. And we wouldn't believe in those values as a mediated culture if it weren't for the fact that all of our pop culture media establishes and reinforces those values. But the media isn't a gift; it's a commodity. So in order to maintain our "free" values, we two things: 1. the media that reinforces the values; and 2. the feelings of inadequacy in relationship to these values that drive us to maintain them in our everyday lives. Now, at this point, it sounds like I'm saying that the media is ruining us. But I"m not. I like pop culture and mass media. A lot. What I'm saying is that tearing down the corporate consumer culture we live in isn't going to help the fear of file sharing. We're still going to feel the need to be useful, something which Thomas Jefferson apparently thought the arts needed, even before arts were as technology-driven as they are now. What would have to change, then, in order for sampling and such to stop being "bad" is the entire way we perceive usefulness. Sure, art could be useful to just one person, who happened to have received said art as a "gift," and in turn, that one person could put that art to a "second use," but if that were to happen, how would art be able to develop in the first place? I'm getting unorganized and sketchy now as this whole thing breaks down, but I think I'm right back where I started in question 1: if we don't commodify things, how will things ever become objects in order to become things again?
I have no answer to that one. In fact, I'm not even sure there is an answer to that one.
Question 2: Why are sampling, public commons, P2P, etc., considered so "bad"? A number of the writers in this book have various answers, but most of them seem to want to boil it down to the evils of big business. I just don't see how it can be that easy, though. It seems to me that a big part of the "bad"ness behind sampling and "plagiarism" is the modern anxiety of uselessness and inadequacy. Anthony Giddens talks a lot about this in his book Modernity and Self-Identity in relationship to shame. Apparently, we develop shame in response to feelings of social inadequacy (65). Because of this, we're driven to "make something of ourselves" or "leave our mark on the world." We want to be original and important and, most of all, USEFUL. Lethem inadvertently points this out when he quotes Thomas Jefferson's writing of copyright law: "The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors but 'to promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts.' To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work" (42). Notice, though, the word USEFUL in that quote. No matter what, art has to have a use value, whether it's commodified in the capitalist way or some other way. The trouble is that we live in a consumer culture where literally everything is bound up with commodification. Lethem talks about various "values" that can't be commodified. But the word used to describe them is "value." So they have worth. And we wouldn't believe in those values as a mediated culture if it weren't for the fact that all of our pop culture media establishes and reinforces those values. But the media isn't a gift; it's a commodity. So in order to maintain our "free" values, we two things: 1. the media that reinforces the values; and 2. the feelings of inadequacy in relationship to these values that drive us to maintain them in our everyday lives. Now, at this point, it sounds like I'm saying that the media is ruining us. But I"m not. I like pop culture and mass media. A lot. What I'm saying is that tearing down the corporate consumer culture we live in isn't going to help the fear of file sharing. We're still going to feel the need to be useful, something which Thomas Jefferson apparently thought the arts needed, even before arts were as technology-driven as they are now. What would have to change, then, in order for sampling and such to stop being "bad" is the entire way we perceive usefulness. Sure, art could be useful to just one person, who happened to have received said art as a "gift," and in turn, that one person could put that art to a "second use," but if that were to happen, how would art be able to develop in the first place? I'm getting unorganized and sketchy now as this whole thing breaks down, but I think I'm right back where I started in question 1: if we don't commodify things, how will things ever become objects in order to become things again?
Monday, March 23, 2009
Come up and analyze me some time.
Question 1: Silverman writes, "The 'talking cure' films also deprivilege the female psyche by denying to woman any possibility of arriving at self-knowledge except through the intervening agency of a doctor or analyst" (65). So doesn't this use of a male "medium" (i.e. doctor or analyst) mirror the medium of film & the use of the filmic apparatus to distance the male viewer from conscious knowing/facing his lack? I think Silverman would definitely say yes, since she talks a lot about how men are portrayed as striving to be "exterior" to the cinematic space, while women are portrayed as "exterior" to it. However, part of Silverman's larger point seems to be that classic cinema establishes gender boundaries through the voice. Yet if the use a male medium for women to tell their tales--constructing them in the interior of the film--mirrors the cinematic apparatus, rather than deprivileging women, wouldn't this actually break down the boundary between genders? In other words, if we ALL experience lack, and therefore interiorized through castration, but men can become exteriorized in classic cinema through identification with the cinematic apparatus (i.e. bodiless voice-over, etc.), isn't then the image of a woman telling her story to a male medium really just an extra layer of "othering" for the same process that men go through? I guess you could say that by portraying only women in the role of "lacking and in need of apparatus," then yes, gender boundaries are being forced onto women by associating them with lacking individuals and men without lack. However, there are plenty of men in films (though I can unfortunately only think of television episodes right now) who go to see an analyst or doctor. Thus, what's really going on with this type of scene is a rupture in the cinematic suture that covers over the fact that we need an apparatus to get at what we lack, which in turn is a never-ending, unfulfilling process.
Question 2: Silverman also writes, "The third of the operations through which Hollywood reinscribes the opposition between diegetic interiority and exteriority into the narrative itself is by depositing the female body into the female voice in the guise of accent, speech impediment, timbre, or 'gran.' This vocal corporealization is to be distinguished from that which gives the sounds emitted by Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, or Lauren Bacall their distinctive quality, since in each of these last instances it is a 'male' rather than a 'female' body which is deposited into the voice. Otherwise stated, the lowness and huskiness of each of these three voice connote masculinity rather than feminity, so that the voice seems to exceed the gender of the body from which is proceeds. That excess confers upon it a privileged status vis-a-vis both language and sexuality" (61).
Okay, I get the first part of that--the "depositing the female body into the female voice..." part--but my question is about the sexualization of Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, and Lauren Bacall. It's unquestionable that these three women were super sexy in their respective days. But what's unclear is how their "male" type voices, in combination with their overt desirability and sexiness, link to castration anxiety and the oedipus complex in the men who are drooling over them.
Question 2: Silverman also writes, "The third of the operations through which Hollywood reinscribes the opposition between diegetic interiority and exteriority into the narrative itself is by depositing the female body into the female voice in the guise of accent, speech impediment, timbre, or 'gran.' This vocal corporealization is to be distinguished from that which gives the sounds emitted by Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, or Lauren Bacall their distinctive quality, since in each of these last instances it is a 'male' rather than a 'female' body which is deposited into the voice. Otherwise stated, the lowness and huskiness of each of these three voice connote masculinity rather than feminity, so that the voice seems to exceed the gender of the body from which is proceeds. That excess confers upon it a privileged status vis-a-vis both language and sexuality" (61).
Okay, I get the first part of that--the "depositing the female body into the female voice..." part--but my question is about the sexualization of Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, and Lauren Bacall. It's unquestionable that these three women were super sexy in their respective days. But what's unclear is how their "male" type voices, in combination with their overt desirability and sexiness, link to castration anxiety and the oedipus complex in the men who are drooling over them.
Monday, March 9, 2009
I can't actually use a microwave, but I can make one hell of a coffee pot stew.
Miller's (or Spooky's?) Rhythm Science was intensely winding and contradictory for me, so I think this week, I'd like to try my best to keep it simple. I'm not 100% sure I'm about to achieve that, and I'm definitely positive that I'm not going to be able to answer much in the way of difinitive answers to either of my questions. But here we go.
Question 1: At the very beginning, he writes of sound, "This is a world where all meaning has been untethered from the ground of its origins and all signposts point to a road that you make up as you travel through the text" (005). So sound is pure abstraction. Okay, I can deal with that. But how can this reconcile with his later ideas about the digitization of literature (017), or that creativity consists of recontextualization (033)? If we're listening to his work in order to draw new meanings from old texts that have been recontextualized, how is this at all a sound that "has been untethered from the ground of its origins"? Isn't this just taking the same signpost and putting it on a different road? Can these two things function simultaneously? I'm sure they can, but not within the same person. Either you get the reference/sample in a mix or you don't. And whether or not you're moved by it is equally contingent on whether you get the reference/sample and whether you associate the reference with something positive or negative. For example, the song on the C-Side CD, "Biological Closure" by Scanner & Freeform vs. Michael Mayer (the second part of the 7th track) was nifty to me because it blends a beat that I associate with various good memories with sound poetry, which I also find to be nifty. But if I had no associations with these things, would I still be moved by it? And isn't this a reason for the continuation of the pop culture homogeny Miller/Spooky condemns? If we have no cultural references as a basis, how can anything move us? And how can we live as a community if not through our common cultural experiences, as with pop culture?
Which leads me to my next question....
Question 2: Miller/Spooky argues that Djing for him was taking the passive relationships with have with the objects around us and making them active (45). I presume this to mean that he wants more than just a mindless, taken-for-granted experience; rather, he wants both a tactile and intellectual experience. But how does this reconcile with his earlier claim that "Future generations won't have a 'dependence' on technology. They will have technology as a core aspect of their existence--as much as the languages we speak, the air we breathe, and the food that eat are all aspects of technology.... The dependence is basically part of the process of being human" (016)? How can we actively participate in something that is a part of our essence as humans? We don't generally actively engage ourselves in breathing, so how can we actively engage in soundmaking technologies that are as ingrained as the need for air?
Question 1: At the very beginning, he writes of sound, "This is a world where all meaning has been untethered from the ground of its origins and all signposts point to a road that you make up as you travel through the text" (005). So sound is pure abstraction. Okay, I can deal with that. But how can this reconcile with his later ideas about the digitization of literature (017), or that creativity consists of recontextualization (033)? If we're listening to his work in order to draw new meanings from old texts that have been recontextualized, how is this at all a sound that "has been untethered from the ground of its origins"? Isn't this just taking the same signpost and putting it on a different road? Can these two things function simultaneously? I'm sure they can, but not within the same person. Either you get the reference/sample in a mix or you don't. And whether or not you're moved by it is equally contingent on whether you get the reference/sample and whether you associate the reference with something positive or negative. For example, the song on the C-Side CD, "Biological Closure" by Scanner & Freeform vs. Michael Mayer (the second part of the 7th track) was nifty to me because it blends a beat that I associate with various good memories with sound poetry, which I also find to be nifty. But if I had no associations with these things, would I still be moved by it? And isn't this a reason for the continuation of the pop culture homogeny Miller/Spooky condemns? If we have no cultural references as a basis, how can anything move us? And how can we live as a community if not through our common cultural experiences, as with pop culture?
Which leads me to my next question....
Question 2: Miller/Spooky argues that Djing for him was taking the passive relationships with have with the objects around us and making them active (45). I presume this to mean that he wants more than just a mindless, taken-for-granted experience; rather, he wants both a tactile and intellectual experience. But how does this reconcile with his earlier claim that "Future generations won't have a 'dependence' on technology. They will have technology as a core aspect of their existence--as much as the languages we speak, the air we breathe, and the food that eat are all aspects of technology.... The dependence is basically part of the process of being human" (016)? How can we actively participate in something that is a part of our essence as humans? We don't generally actively engage ourselves in breathing, so how can we actively engage in soundmaking technologies that are as ingrained as the need for air?
Monday, February 23, 2009
I feel the need to preface this blog by saying that William S. Burroughs drives me nuts. Just when I think I get him, I realize I have no clue what on earth he's talking about. This week, of course, was no different, so here are my two burning Burroughs questions.
Question 1: What exactly is Burroughs's goal with "The Electronic Revolution" (aside from being radical)?
At one point, I thought maybe he just wanted us to wake up and think critically about the mass media. He writes, "Remember that when the human nervous system unscrambles a scrambed message this will seem to the subject like his very own ideas which just occurred to him, which indeed it did. Take a card, any card. In most cases he will not suspect its extraneous origin. that [sic] is the run of the mill newspaper reader who receives the scrambled message uncritically and assumes that it reflects his own opinions independently arrived at" (16). So in short, he doesn't like people who approach things "uncritically." Okay, that makes sense. Take everything with a grain of salt.
At another point, though, he seems also to be doing nothing more than reiterating Foucault's ideas about the Panoptic society. First, when discussing the 3 tape recorders, he describes the function of playback in creating fear: "If sexual recordings and film are widespread, tolerated and publicaly [sic] shown tape recorder 3 losses ist [sic] power" (8). Then later, he describes the RM as "a built-in electronic police force armed with hideous threats. You don't want to be a cute little wolf cub? All right, cattle to the slaughter house meat on a hook" (31). Both of these issues are (unintentional?) restatements of Foucault's Panoptic society in which a figure of power (tape recorder 3, God, etc.) uses power to retain control of members of society. This also ties neatly back to the first point I mentioned--that we need to think critically. Maybe if we were thinking critically, we wouldn't get caught in this web of fear and shame that comes from the threat of playback publication of our "private" lives. (As a side note, I've got a million more things to say about the issues of public vs. private in Burroughs's essay, but I think I'm straying too far from my original question at the moment.)
But at the end of the essay, Burroughs says that he wants to rid the English language of "Is of Identity," "THE," and "Either/Or" (33-34). This in and of itself seems to contradict what I thought was Burroughs's point--that we need to be more individualistic and stop being swayed by the powers that be. If we cease to be "THE," and become "A" instead, aren't we just being lumped into another category, of which we can only be recognized as "A" part of a collection? In short, doesn't the restriction of using "THE" make us a part of a mass anyway?
So I repeat: What is Burroughs's goal with this essay? How can we be both individualistic AND relatively nondescript?
This leads me (sort of, ish) to my next question.
Question 2: Does playback create fear or does fear initiate playback? Burroughs seems to want to argue that playback has to occur in order for fear to be created. He writes, "I have said that the real scandal of Watergate is the use made of recordings. And what is this use? Having made the recordings as described what then do they do with them? ANSWER: THEY PLAY THEM BACK ON LOCATION.... PLAYBACK is the essential ingredient" (9). But then later, when he describes the scenario in which his recordings of the Moka Bar caused them to close from fear of exposure (11), the root of the problem seems to be that they're afraid and ashamed EVEN BEFORE PLAYBACK. So just the simple threat of public shaming is enough to cause private shamefulness. But THEN, Burroughs writes, "Tape recorder 3 is PLAYBACK. Adam eperiences shame when his DISCRACEFUL [sic] BEHAVIOR IS PLAYED BACK TO HIM BY tape recorder 3 which is God. By playing back my recordings to the Moka Bar when I want and with any changes I wish to make in the recordings, I become God for this local. I effect them. They cannot effect me" (11). So here, it's the playback itself (the act of it), rather than the threat of it (which would, in turn, create fear, which could, in turn, cause the act of playback or not) that's causing shamefulness.
Or is it the audience that really matters, rather than whether the fear and shame comes before or after the playback? Really, as Burroughs points out, "You may not experience shame during defecation and intercourse but you may well experience shame when these recordings are played back to a disapproving audience" (12). If the audience approved, there would be no shame, and so the fear comes from having a disapproving audience, not the act of playback itself. But there doesn't even need to be an audience in the first place, only the suggestion of one in order to create fear.
Question 1: What exactly is Burroughs's goal with "The Electronic Revolution" (aside from being radical)?
At one point, I thought maybe he just wanted us to wake up and think critically about the mass media. He writes, "Remember that when the human nervous system unscrambles a scrambed message this will seem to the subject like his very own ideas which just occurred to him, which indeed it did. Take a card, any card. In most cases he will not suspect its extraneous origin. that [sic] is the run of the mill newspaper reader who receives the scrambled message uncritically and assumes that it reflects his own opinions independently arrived at" (16). So in short, he doesn't like people who approach things "uncritically." Okay, that makes sense. Take everything with a grain of salt.
At another point, though, he seems also to be doing nothing more than reiterating Foucault's ideas about the Panoptic society. First, when discussing the 3 tape recorders, he describes the function of playback in creating fear: "If sexual recordings and film are widespread, tolerated and publicaly [sic] shown tape recorder 3 losses ist [sic] power" (8). Then later, he describes the RM as "a built-in electronic police force armed with hideous threats. You don't want to be a cute little wolf cub? All right, cattle to the slaughter house meat on a hook" (31). Both of these issues are (unintentional?) restatements of Foucault's Panoptic society in which a figure of power (tape recorder 3, God, etc.) uses power to retain control of members of society. This also ties neatly back to the first point I mentioned--that we need to think critically. Maybe if we were thinking critically, we wouldn't get caught in this web of fear and shame that comes from the threat of playback publication of our "private" lives. (As a side note, I've got a million more things to say about the issues of public vs. private in Burroughs's essay, but I think I'm straying too far from my original question at the moment.)
But at the end of the essay, Burroughs says that he wants to rid the English language of "Is of Identity," "THE," and "Either/Or" (33-34). This in and of itself seems to contradict what I thought was Burroughs's point--that we need to be more individualistic and stop being swayed by the powers that be. If we cease to be "THE," and become "A" instead, aren't we just being lumped into another category, of which we can only be recognized as "A" part of a collection? In short, doesn't the restriction of using "THE" make us a part of a mass anyway?
So I repeat: What is Burroughs's goal with this essay? How can we be both individualistic AND relatively nondescript?
This leads me (sort of, ish) to my next question.
Question 2: Does playback create fear or does fear initiate playback? Burroughs seems to want to argue that playback has to occur in order for fear to be created. He writes, "I have said that the real scandal of Watergate is the use made of recordings. And what is this use? Having made the recordings as described what then do they do with them? ANSWER: THEY PLAY THEM BACK ON LOCATION.... PLAYBACK is the essential ingredient" (9). But then later, when he describes the scenario in which his recordings of the Moka Bar caused them to close from fear of exposure (11), the root of the problem seems to be that they're afraid and ashamed EVEN BEFORE PLAYBACK. So just the simple threat of public shaming is enough to cause private shamefulness. But THEN, Burroughs writes, "Tape recorder 3 is PLAYBACK. Adam eperiences shame when his DISCRACEFUL [sic] BEHAVIOR IS PLAYED BACK TO HIM BY tape recorder 3 which is God. By playing back my recordings to the Moka Bar when I want and with any changes I wish to make in the recordings, I become God for this local. I effect them. They cannot effect me" (11). So here, it's the playback itself (the act of it), rather than the threat of it (which would, in turn, create fear, which could, in turn, cause the act of playback or not) that's causing shamefulness.
Or is it the audience that really matters, rather than whether the fear and shame comes before or after the playback? Really, as Burroughs points out, "You may not experience shame during defecation and intercourse but you may well experience shame when these recordings are played back to a disapproving audience" (12). If the audience approved, there would be no shame, and so the fear comes from having a disapproving audience, not the act of playback itself. But there doesn't even need to be an audience in the first place, only the suggestion of one in order to create fear.
Monday, February 16, 2009
This is my acoustic space. That's your acoustic space. Let's cha cha.
Question 1: Sterns spends a long time talking about the ability to mentally "filter out" external noise in order to construct an individual acoustic space. He writes, "The forgetting associated with technology was the forgetting that all learners do as they achieve mastery--technique moves from a conscious effort to a kind of second nature, a disposition, a feel for the game" (113). Later on, in his discussion of fidelity, he also discusses the fallacy of "perfect fidelity" (218). So I wonder, if we as an iPod-obsessed culture have been trained to mentally filter noise, does purposeful noise in recordings indicate that we've transcended the very concept of "perfect fidelity"? Take, for example, a recently recorded song that purposefully contains record-like static. (I'm ashamed to admit that the only concrete example of this I can think of is the song "Say You'll Be There" by the Spice Girls. The song starts out with record static, as though someone's just put the album on a turntable.) Evidently, we're meant to process that "noise" as more than noise--it's supposed to be a form of nostalgic interference. We're supposed to notice it. This seems to reveal that we as a culture have moved beyond the drive for perfect fidelity, whether it existed in the first place or not, though I hate to say we've regressed into something else. Instead, it seems that we're taking fewer noises for granted. What once was an annoying static on an LP that we could train ourselves to ignore has now become an artistic or even just nifty addition to a digital recording.
On top of this, I wonder how highly-mediated recordings like Kanye West's latest album, 808s and Heartbreak, in which he uses an electronic voice-modulator (ish type thing) called Auto-Tune to electronicize his voice, changes the concept of fidelity. To whom is this album being faithful? The computer that changed Kanye's voice? And Kanye's not the only person to ever use this technique--Cher and Daft Punk have also experimented with it (just to name a few). This again seems to indicate that we're transcending the marketable drive for perfect fidelity, and yet the electronic voice is problematic in and of itself. In this situation, the sound isn't just being transduced and spit back out in its original format. It's being changed into electronic signals, then digitized, then being transformed into something completely different, to the point where it hardly even seems to be a "recording" in the original sense of the word. So what is it? And how does it fit into our cultural conception of listening and privatized acoustic space?
(This is where I stopped having answers to my own questions. It's all downhill from here.)
Question 2: While talking about transducers, Sterne mentions that in science, sound had to be transduced into sight (45). So I began to wonder how this works mentally--how do we go from hearing something to being able to picture it in our heads? Specifically, I'm think of iconic sounds from film, like the Star Wars light saber noise. The sound itself is, obviously, not in reality connected to a light saber. Yet that's the image we conjure in our minds (or at least my fellow geeks and I do) when we hear that sound. Can we say that this is a form of mental transduction? And if so, why does it happen? How are sight and sound bound up together through this type of fictionalized atmosphere, such as in film?
And what about the notion of mentally filtering noise? How does this work with sound design in film? Obviously, when designing a soundscape for an imaginary world, there is no literal noise. Everything is inserted for a very specific reason, and sometimes for the sole purpose of having something there for the audience to filter out in an attempt to create a more realistic ambiance. But what does this indicate about the fact of filtering in the first place? Why construct sound to be filtered? Would we notice if we weren't filtering anything?
My second question here is something I've been thinking about for my final paper, so I'm going to leave it unanswered for now. But I would like to explore this connection between sound and mental imagery more, perhaps in relation to iconic sounds like those from Star Wars. Another idea along these same lines I had, too, was to look at the episode of M*A*S*H called "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet." It's about a war correspondent writing a book called "You Never Hear the Bullet," the premise of which is essentially that the movie moment when the audience hears a ricochet immediately before the hero is shot is a fallacy. That doesn't happen in war. But then this correspondent is shot in combat, and as it turns out, he heard the bullet. The interesting thing here is that we, the audience of M*A*S*H, never actually hear a bullet ricocheting in the whole episode, and yet we can easily follow the reference. I wonder how this type of sound-memory interaction works in relationship to iconic television and movie moments?
On top of this, I wonder how highly-mediated recordings like Kanye West's latest album, 808s and Heartbreak, in which he uses an electronic voice-modulator (ish type thing) called Auto-Tune to electronicize his voice, changes the concept of fidelity. To whom is this album being faithful? The computer that changed Kanye's voice? And Kanye's not the only person to ever use this technique--Cher and Daft Punk have also experimented with it (just to name a few). This again seems to indicate that we're transcending the marketable drive for perfect fidelity, and yet the electronic voice is problematic in and of itself. In this situation, the sound isn't just being transduced and spit back out in its original format. It's being changed into electronic signals, then digitized, then being transformed into something completely different, to the point where it hardly even seems to be a "recording" in the original sense of the word. So what is it? And how does it fit into our cultural conception of listening and privatized acoustic space?
(This is where I stopped having answers to my own questions. It's all downhill from here.)
Question 2: While talking about transducers, Sterne mentions that in science, sound had to be transduced into sight (45). So I began to wonder how this works mentally--how do we go from hearing something to being able to picture it in our heads? Specifically, I'm think of iconic sounds from film, like the Star Wars light saber noise. The sound itself is, obviously, not in reality connected to a light saber. Yet that's the image we conjure in our minds (or at least my fellow geeks and I do) when we hear that sound. Can we say that this is a form of mental transduction? And if so, why does it happen? How are sight and sound bound up together through this type of fictionalized atmosphere, such as in film?
And what about the notion of mentally filtering noise? How does this work with sound design in film? Obviously, when designing a soundscape for an imaginary world, there is no literal noise. Everything is inserted for a very specific reason, and sometimes for the sole purpose of having something there for the audience to filter out in an attempt to create a more realistic ambiance. But what does this indicate about the fact of filtering in the first place? Why construct sound to be filtered? Would we notice if we weren't filtering anything?
My second question here is something I've been thinking about for my final paper, so I'm going to leave it unanswered for now. But I would like to explore this connection between sound and mental imagery more, perhaps in relation to iconic sounds like those from Star Wars. Another idea along these same lines I had, too, was to look at the episode of M*A*S*H called "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet." It's about a war correspondent writing a book called "You Never Hear the Bullet," the premise of which is essentially that the movie moment when the audience hears a ricochet immediately before the hero is shot is a fallacy. That doesn't happen in war. But then this correspondent is shot in combat, and as it turns out, he heard the bullet. The interesting thing here is that we, the audience of M*A*S*H, never actually hear a bullet ricocheting in the whole episode, and yet we can easily follow the reference. I wonder how this type of sound-memory interaction works in relationship to iconic television and movie moments?
Monday, February 9, 2009
The good, the Bad, and the Tone Deaf
Question 1: In class, we keep coming back to the notion of aesthetics and "good" vs. "bad" work. In my first post, I talked about the poetic hierarchy and blamed its existence on everyone involved. Yet that didn't really get to the root question--why, exactly, do we fetishize or give critical prominence to certain literary forms, but not others. In Ong's and Tedlock's minds (and mine at the moment), this question comes down to the difference between writing and speaking. According to Ong, we live in a predominately literate or a "secondary oral culture" (11). Because of this, we think of even oral performances as something stemming from a text, which is rooted in the arbitrary symbols we have lurking around in our brains. Tedlock, though, blames capitalism when he refers to the "fetishization of the vertabim quotation" (187). I can't deny either of these things. We do associate sounds with typeface in our heads, even if we're not consciously "seeing" a stream of words go by in our minds as we listen to people talk. And for those of us who have had Standard English ingrained into our heads, we do tend to talk like we'd write, though with slight variations under the constraint of having to formulate sentences faster while talking than while writing. And, of course, for those of us in the scholarly field, or those of us who teach MLA, we know how vital it is to give credit where credit's due, and claim your own written ideas whenever possible.
I can't help but wonder, though, how much the actual writing process works its way into our cultural aggrandization of the written word. Yes, verbatim quotation is awesome, but what about the fact that, as Ong points out, some guy has sequestered himself in a room for a while in order to perfect that exact phrasing? Are we as a culture driven immediately to respect this laborious process even more than the agony of standing in front of a giant crowd of people while trying to blurt out coherent and fascinating speech? I think the answer is yes, but not just because of the process. I'd like to suggest that the tools we have to use during the process--pen, pencil, paper, computer, etc.--are awesome (in the original sense of the word) and are unconscious reminders of the historical process it took to get us to the written word in the first place. Furthermore, since a vast majority of us in literate culture are also computer-literate, we've come full circle back to Plato and his fear of the written word (Ong 78-80) in that writing can no longer be special (or marketable, for that matter) if everyone can do it equally well, according to our aesthetic standards. In short, our standards haven't changed, our technology has. We can't just fetishize the written word--we have to fetishize the words written in a particular way, according to a particular standard (scholarly or social). And to get back to my original statement about process, since we're all (more or less) on equal technological footing, we've begun to value the written words that take much more time, effort, thought, education (formal or experiential) to construct (i.e. have a more specialized, training-oriented process).
Question 2: Can we consider music to be a language, according to Ong's standards?
I've come up with a number of possibilities for answering this question in the positive, but simultaneously, I keep coming up with exceptions. For instance, music is something that can be "spoken" in a series of phonemes (just move your mouth around a bit while holding one note, or even go with "do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do). The written form of music came well after humans had the ability to create music, and music in general has a whole arbitrary system of signs and signifiers. The note "C#" represents a sound, and on a musical staff, it's written with a little dot. When you connect all the little dots on the staff in a variety of ways, you can "read" music. BUT where do all the instruments fit in? And what about the fact that music doesn't come naturally to many, many, many people? Everyone inherently gets at least one language in their dominant culture, but not everyone inherently gets music. Or do we? I can hum to you right now (completely out of tune, mind you), and I'm technically making music, but I'm not really making any sense with it. Along these same lines, what about the "meaning" of music? We get feelings from it, and it can certainly conjure powerful images, but not universal ones.
I can't help but wonder, though, how much the actual writing process works its way into our cultural aggrandization of the written word. Yes, verbatim quotation is awesome, but what about the fact that, as Ong points out, some guy has sequestered himself in a room for a while in order to perfect that exact phrasing? Are we as a culture driven immediately to respect this laborious process even more than the agony of standing in front of a giant crowd of people while trying to blurt out coherent and fascinating speech? I think the answer is yes, but not just because of the process. I'd like to suggest that the tools we have to use during the process--pen, pencil, paper, computer, etc.--are awesome (in the original sense of the word) and are unconscious reminders of the historical process it took to get us to the written word in the first place. Furthermore, since a vast majority of us in literate culture are also computer-literate, we've come full circle back to Plato and his fear of the written word (Ong 78-80) in that writing can no longer be special (or marketable, for that matter) if everyone can do it equally well, according to our aesthetic standards. In short, our standards haven't changed, our technology has. We can't just fetishize the written word--we have to fetishize the words written in a particular way, according to a particular standard (scholarly or social). And to get back to my original statement about process, since we're all (more or less) on equal technological footing, we've begun to value the written words that take much more time, effort, thought, education (formal or experiential) to construct (i.e. have a more specialized, training-oriented process).
Question 2: Can we consider music to be a language, according to Ong's standards?
I've come up with a number of possibilities for answering this question in the positive, but simultaneously, I keep coming up with exceptions. For instance, music is something that can be "spoken" in a series of phonemes (just move your mouth around a bit while holding one note, or even go with "do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do). The written form of music came well after humans had the ability to create music, and music in general has a whole arbitrary system of signs and signifiers. The note "C#" represents a sound, and on a musical staff, it's written with a little dot. When you connect all the little dots on the staff in a variety of ways, you can "read" music. BUT where do all the instruments fit in? And what about the fact that music doesn't come naturally to many, many, many people? Everyone inherently gets at least one language in their dominant culture, but not everyone inherently gets music. Or do we? I can hum to you right now (completely out of tune, mind you), and I'm technically making music, but I'm not really making any sense with it. Along these same lines, what about the "meaning" of music? We get feelings from it, and it can certainly conjure powerful images, but not universal ones.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Because staring at you for 4'33" seems like a bad way to instigate....
Just from glancing at a few other people's posts on Cage's book so far, I think it's pretty clear to all of us that Silence is chock full of contradictions. So that's what's I really want to focus on in my instigation. I don't entirely expect that we'll reconcile any of these (and I most certainly don't have much in the way of concrete answers here), because on a certain level, I think Cage was well aware of the problem. He even comes right out and admits that his own academic approach doesn't match up with his philosophy: “How can we possibly tell what contemporary music is, since now we're not listening to it, we're listening to a lecture about it. And that isn't it” (44).
So here we go.
Question 1: What's the difference between experimental, contemporary, and avant-garde music? Cage seems to use all three simultaneously.
I'd like for the sake of this post to assume that they're synonymous. This is, of course, entirely up for debate.
Question 2: This is kind of a side point and is partially based in the fact that I didn't enjoy the book, but I think it really gets to the heart of the issue to begin with. How can we spend a class session analyzing John Cage's philosophy and music, when the act of analyzing itself turns his work into art, the very thing it purports to break down? Cage says, “When we separate music from life what we get is art (a compendium of masterpieces). With contemporary music, when it is actually contemporary, we have no time to make that separation (which protects us from living), and so contemporary music is not so much art as it is life and any one making it no sooner finishes one of it than he begins making another just as people keep on washing dishes, brushing their teeth, getting sleepy, and so on” (44). In other words, contemporary music, as Cage defines it, simply cannot be analyzed and academized (to completely invent a word) because it moves at the speed of life until it reaches the point of ritual. So really, contemporary music is moving too fast to be cannonized
BUT, he then goes on to say, “Very frequently no one knows that contemporary music is or could be art” (44). And later, when discussing the difference between American and European avant-garde music, he mentions that “such a continuum...[of audience experience during American avant-garde performance] dissolves the difference between 'art' and 'life.' (53). So, contemporary/avante-garde music works against both art and life...but contemporary music IS life...but it occasionally IS art. When is it one or the other? When is it all three?
Furthermore, what does the fact that we ARE, in fact, spending a class session discussing and analyzing Cage's work say about its standing as “art” or “life”? Is Cage's philosophy past its prime? And can we truly have music that IS life when it lives in the realm of avant-garde or experimental, while most of us now live in the realm of pop/mass mediated culture?
And now for some purposeless videos.
John Cage performs "Water Walk" on a 1960 television show (the audience's and host's reactions to Cage seem appropriate for my discussion here, and the performance is interesting)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=SSulycqZH-U
This second one is James Tenney playing a portion of Cage's "Sonatas and Interludes." The really awesome part is right at the beginning, when you can clearly see what exactly makes a "prepared piano" so prepared.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=1ve-M4Wbs0c
So here we go.
Question 1: What's the difference between experimental, contemporary, and avant-garde music? Cage seems to use all three simultaneously.
I'd like for the sake of this post to assume that they're synonymous. This is, of course, entirely up for debate.
Question 2: This is kind of a side point and is partially based in the fact that I didn't enjoy the book, but I think it really gets to the heart of the issue to begin with. How can we spend a class session analyzing John Cage's philosophy and music, when the act of analyzing itself turns his work into art, the very thing it purports to break down? Cage says, “When we separate music from life what we get is art (a compendium of masterpieces). With contemporary music, when it is actually contemporary, we have no time to make that separation (which protects us from living), and so contemporary music is not so much art as it is life and any one making it no sooner finishes one of it than he begins making another just as people keep on washing dishes, brushing their teeth, getting sleepy, and so on” (44). In other words, contemporary music, as Cage defines it, simply cannot be analyzed and academized (to completely invent a word) because it moves at the speed of life until it reaches the point of ritual. So really, contemporary music is moving too fast to be cannonized
BUT, he then goes on to say, “Very frequently no one knows that contemporary music is or could be art” (44). And later, when discussing the difference between American and European avant-garde music, he mentions that “such a continuum...[of audience experience during American avant-garde performance] dissolves the difference between 'art' and 'life.' (53). So, contemporary/avante-garde music works against both art and life...but contemporary music IS life...but it occasionally IS art. When is it one or the other? When is it all three?
Furthermore, what does the fact that we ARE, in fact, spending a class session discussing and analyzing Cage's work say about its standing as “art” or “life”? Is Cage's philosophy past its prime? And can we truly have music that IS life when it lives in the realm of avant-garde or experimental, while most of us now live in the realm of pop/mass mediated culture?
And now for some purposeless videos.
John Cage performs "Water Walk" on a 1960 television show (the audience's and host's reactions to Cage seem appropriate for my discussion here, and the performance is interesting)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=SSulycqZH-U
This second one is James Tenney playing a portion of Cage's "Sonatas and Interludes." The really awesome part is right at the beginning, when you can clearly see what exactly makes a "prepared piano" so prepared.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=1ve-M4Wbs0c
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Really, Bob Cobbing, what do you want from us?
Question 1: In the Bob Cobbing interview, Cobbing argues against verbal criticism, but seems fine with audience judgement. So what's the difference? Cobbing seems to suggest that criticism is a kind of in-your-face analysis (peer review meets catfight, I suppose), saying, "The point about criticism is that it is frequently wrong." Instead of the audience reacting "from their own point of view without any regard for where the poems are coming from," he suggests that readers/performers can intuit whether the audience likes the work, then make changes accordingly (Sutherland 3). But if we take into consideration Cobbing's own philosophy about the ways poetry should move its audience throughout their entire bodies (Cobbing 3), how is it possible for an audience to take in a poem from the author's point of view? Isn't the body and its sensations a personal thing, experienced from one's own point of view? Or is the real idea here that the audience should be bodily moved by experiencing the author's point of view, and when that's not possible, the reaction will be negative, thus spurring necessary changes on the author's part?
And to make things more complicated, what about publication? Cobbing suggests that "it's best to get stuff out and that way it can be discussed and evaluated, rather than judging it before hand" (Sutherland 4). This draws a huge line (pun totally intended) between live poetry and recorded or published poetry. So, what Cobbing really seems to be saying is that criticism is okay, as long as it's either not in the presence of the author or from anyone's point of view except the author's. And I suppose it makes sense in regards to his philosophy of feeling the ritual of the poem, in that the author is also called upon to feel the audience feeling his work.
Question 2: Speaking of Bob Cobbing and sensing or feeling his poetry, what's the difference between Cobbing's visual poetry and assymetries? Cobbing calls visual poetry "an image which had a sound associated with it" (Sutherland 6), while the assymetries are "nonstanzaic chance-generated poems of which the printed formats are notations for solo or group performances" (Young Turtle Assymetries 1). So with a visual poem, the audience can hear the sound by looking/reading the text, and with assymetries, the audience can hear the sound when it's performed from the page. So is the only difference that the performers act as mediators? And what about when we hear the sound that visual poetry is representing in our heads? That sound has to have been generated from some memory of hearing that sound in the past, so is that memory acting as the mediator? And if that's true, then does noise while hearing that sound in our heads impact the experience in the same way that noise impacts the performance of an assymetry?
And to make things more complicated, what about publication? Cobbing suggests that "it's best to get stuff out and that way it can be discussed and evaluated, rather than judging it before hand" (Sutherland 4). This draws a huge line (pun totally intended) between live poetry and recorded or published poetry. So, what Cobbing really seems to be saying is that criticism is okay, as long as it's either not in the presence of the author or from anyone's point of view except the author's. And I suppose it makes sense in regards to his philosophy of feeling the ritual of the poem, in that the author is also called upon to feel the audience feeling his work.
Question 2: Speaking of Bob Cobbing and sensing or feeling his poetry, what's the difference between Cobbing's visual poetry and assymetries? Cobbing calls visual poetry "an image which had a sound associated with it" (Sutherland 6), while the assymetries are "nonstanzaic chance-generated poems of which the printed formats are notations for solo or group performances" (Young Turtle Assymetries 1). So with a visual poem, the audience can hear the sound by looking/reading the text, and with assymetries, the audience can hear the sound when it's performed from the page. So is the only difference that the performers act as mediators? And what about when we hear the sound that visual poetry is representing in our heads? That sound has to have been generated from some memory of hearing that sound in the past, so is that memory acting as the mediator? And if that's true, then does noise while hearing that sound in our heads impact the experience in the same way that noise impacts the performance of an assymetry?
Monday, January 19, 2009
A Not-So-Authoritative, But Nevertheless Authentic Word on Performance
I'm working under the assumption right now that, since I signed up to instigate on 1/26, and we're now talking about the reading from 1/19 on 1/26, that I'm instigating. So here we go.
Question 1: What's the difference between a “reading” and a “performance”? (The answer to this seems simple, but the more I read, the more I realize that some theorists use the terms interchangeably, while others—like Maria Damon—seem to differentiate. Either way, I'd like to leave this one open-ended.)
Question 2: According to Jerome Rotthenberg in “How We Came into Performance,” one of the “paradigms” of poetry performance in the 1960s and 1970s was to debunk hierarchies. He writes, “[T]here is no hierarchy of media in the visual arts, no hierarchy of instrumentation in music, and that qualitative distinctions between high and low genres and mode (opera and vaudeville, high rhetoric and slang) are no longer operational...” (10). Can we still say this is true, particularly in consideration of Maria Damon's defense of poetry slams? Furthermore, how can we reconcile both popular and academic (mis)conceptions about the difference between poetry as “art” (avante-garde, experimental, socially-driven) and poetry as “entertainment” (mass-produced, pop-culture-driven, scantily engaged by academic criticism)? The answer to this is, I think, extremely complicated.
First of all, some of Rothenberg's other “paradigms” seem to skirt the problem with number 3—no masterpieces—number 4—art for the sake of use, rather than just art—and number 5—process takes importance over produced work (11). Each of these opens up the possibility of a whole slew of variations on a given text, and yet, none of them breaks down what Dennis Tedlock calls the “fetishization of verbatim quotation” (187). Even my quoting Tedlock here is participating in that process of over-aggrandizing the written word, as it “belongs” to a writer.
And so, by way of a “second of all,” I'd also like to posit that BOTH academics and the general populous are partially at fault for perpetuating the hierarchical system of poetics. Take, for example, the fact that Amiri Baraka is mentioned in nearly every essay we read this week. I won't deny that his poetry is incredibly moving, and that he is an important African American poet. However, when I tried to look up more information about him, I stumbled upon www.afropoets.net, a site that lists several famous and important black poets. Among them, as you can guess, is Baraka, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, etc. etc. What I definitely didn't expect to find was twofold: first, Tupac Shakur, along with 11 of his poems that were released posthumously on his poetry album in 2000, is listed right along with more “traditional” poets; and second, aside from Shakur's entry, there is a noticeable lack of any listing of a poet who participates in anything other than “traditional” poetry circles (i.e. publication of books, poetry awards won, etc.), including famous black slam poets such as Saul Williams (For an awesome performance by Williams on Def Poetry Jam, check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzY2-GRDiPM. I also plan to compare Williams's performance here with one of Shakur's poems in class in an attempt to figure out the difference in "quality."). Clearly, then, Shakur serves here as a sort of token mass-mediated poet, while the rest of the focus is on more canonical poetry. In short, the canon's still there for literary aficionados, even if the rest of us are more likely to spend an evening watching a freestyle rap competition than perusing an anthology of New American Poetry. And for those of us outside of literary poetry circles, we nevertheless continue to place more widely known and critically acclaimed poets on pedestals.
Where, then, is the line drawn? And why is there still a line in the first place? If poetry is, as both Rothenberg and Tedlock claim, supposed to serve a social function and contain some form of use value outside of pure aesthetics, can the hierarchy of art over entertainment really be broken down? Is a work more valuable, simply because it moves a certain group of people to do a certain thing? And where does that leave poetry that simply moves us to enjoyment, as with something as campy as the poetry in a film like So I Married an Axe Murderer? Peter Quartermain seems to think so, as he points out that canonical publishing and author recordings attempt to create one authentic and “good” version of a poem (223). In short, majority seems to rule here when establishing quality, authority, and value.
This leads me to my 3rd question (Yeah, I realize we only needed two, but I was really inspired this week, and I'm lucky I managed to narrow it down to just 3.): How do audience interpretations and associations while listening/watching a performance impact the performance itself? Essentially, I wonder how the fact that when I listen to “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and immediately associate it with the scene in the end of the 1958 film The Fly ("Heeeeeelp meeeeee!") changes the artistic status of the poem itself. Something I plan to do in my instigation is have the class listen to Hugo Ball's “Gadji beri bimba” and write down all the associations they have when listening. According to Susan Stewart's discussion of this poem, the non-words Ball uses are more self-referential through the simple phonemes (31-32), and yet for me, none of my associations have to do with anything that is considered academic, linguistic, or high art in general.
And what about the question of authenticity? If the audience's ability to connect with the poem/performance in question, as Maria Damon suggests in her example of the “codependency” prayer/poem (329-330), can we say that each audience member's interpretation and associative chain is, in and of itself, a textual variation? In other words, if the performance is both a never-ending process (Tedlock 183) and reliant on a participating audience (Rothenberg 11), does each listener have a part in creating a separate variation of the poem itself? Damon's same prayer/poem example indicates that authenticity is valued above all else, regardless of its canonical status.
But how can we reconcile authenticity, authority, and textual variation? How can one author-performed work, even if it's an avante-garde performance such as “Gadji beri bimba” or a slam poem by a girl in Minneapolis, be interpreted in so many ways and still be authoritative? Does majority rule again here? And if so, does that negate the importance of works performed in a cafe's open-mic night or even something more widely know, but nevertheless unpopular, such as Derek Walcott's collaborative musical “The Capeman”?
Question 1: What's the difference between a “reading” and a “performance”? (The answer to this seems simple, but the more I read, the more I realize that some theorists use the terms interchangeably, while others—like Maria Damon—seem to differentiate. Either way, I'd like to leave this one open-ended.)
Question 2: According to Jerome Rotthenberg in “How We Came into Performance,” one of the “paradigms” of poetry performance in the 1960s and 1970s was to debunk hierarchies. He writes, “[T]here is no hierarchy of media in the visual arts, no hierarchy of instrumentation in music, and that qualitative distinctions between high and low genres and mode (opera and vaudeville, high rhetoric and slang) are no longer operational...” (10). Can we still say this is true, particularly in consideration of Maria Damon's defense of poetry slams? Furthermore, how can we reconcile both popular and academic (mis)conceptions about the difference between poetry as “art” (avante-garde, experimental, socially-driven) and poetry as “entertainment” (mass-produced, pop-culture-driven, scantily engaged by academic criticism)? The answer to this is, I think, extremely complicated.
First of all, some of Rothenberg's other “paradigms” seem to skirt the problem with number 3—no masterpieces—number 4—art for the sake of use, rather than just art—and number 5—process takes importance over produced work (11). Each of these opens up the possibility of a whole slew of variations on a given text, and yet, none of them breaks down what Dennis Tedlock calls the “fetishization of verbatim quotation” (187). Even my quoting Tedlock here is participating in that process of over-aggrandizing the written word, as it “belongs” to a writer.
And so, by way of a “second of all,” I'd also like to posit that BOTH academics and the general populous are partially at fault for perpetuating the hierarchical system of poetics. Take, for example, the fact that Amiri Baraka is mentioned in nearly every essay we read this week. I won't deny that his poetry is incredibly moving, and that he is an important African American poet. However, when I tried to look up more information about him, I stumbled upon www.afropoets.net, a site that lists several famous and important black poets. Among them, as you can guess, is Baraka, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, etc. etc. What I definitely didn't expect to find was twofold: first, Tupac Shakur, along with 11 of his poems that were released posthumously on his poetry album in 2000, is listed right along with more “traditional” poets; and second, aside from Shakur's entry, there is a noticeable lack of any listing of a poet who participates in anything other than “traditional” poetry circles (i.e. publication of books, poetry awards won, etc.), including famous black slam poets such as Saul Williams (For an awesome performance by Williams on Def Poetry Jam, check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzY2-GRDiPM. I also plan to compare Williams's performance here with one of Shakur's poems in class in an attempt to figure out the difference in "quality."). Clearly, then, Shakur serves here as a sort of token mass-mediated poet, while the rest of the focus is on more canonical poetry. In short, the canon's still there for literary aficionados, even if the rest of us are more likely to spend an evening watching a freestyle rap competition than perusing an anthology of New American Poetry. And for those of us outside of literary poetry circles, we nevertheless continue to place more widely known and critically acclaimed poets on pedestals.
Where, then, is the line drawn? And why is there still a line in the first place? If poetry is, as both Rothenberg and Tedlock claim, supposed to serve a social function and contain some form of use value outside of pure aesthetics, can the hierarchy of art over entertainment really be broken down? Is a work more valuable, simply because it moves a certain group of people to do a certain thing? And where does that leave poetry that simply moves us to enjoyment, as with something as campy as the poetry in a film like So I Married an Axe Murderer? Peter Quartermain seems to think so, as he points out that canonical publishing and author recordings attempt to create one authentic and “good” version of a poem (223). In short, majority seems to rule here when establishing quality, authority, and value.
This leads me to my 3rd question (Yeah, I realize we only needed two, but I was really inspired this week, and I'm lucky I managed to narrow it down to just 3.): How do audience interpretations and associations while listening/watching a performance impact the performance itself? Essentially, I wonder how the fact that when I listen to “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and immediately associate it with the scene in the end of the 1958 film The Fly ("Heeeeeelp meeeeee!") changes the artistic status of the poem itself. Something I plan to do in my instigation is have the class listen to Hugo Ball's “Gadji beri bimba” and write down all the associations they have when listening. According to Susan Stewart's discussion of this poem, the non-words Ball uses are more self-referential through the simple phonemes (31-32), and yet for me, none of my associations have to do with anything that is considered academic, linguistic, or high art in general.
And what about the question of authenticity? If the audience's ability to connect with the poem/performance in question, as Maria Damon suggests in her example of the “codependency” prayer/poem (329-330), can we say that each audience member's interpretation and associative chain is, in and of itself, a textual variation? In other words, if the performance is both a never-ending process (Tedlock 183) and reliant on a participating audience (Rothenberg 11), does each listener have a part in creating a separate variation of the poem itself? Damon's same prayer/poem example indicates that authenticity is valued above all else, regardless of its canonical status.
But how can we reconcile authenticity, authority, and textual variation? How can one author-performed work, even if it's an avante-garde performance such as “Gadji beri bimba” or a slam poem by a girl in Minneapolis, be interpreted in so many ways and still be authoritative? Does majority rule again here? And if so, does that negate the importance of works performed in a cafe's open-mic night or even something more widely know, but nevertheless unpopular, such as Derek Walcott's collaborative musical “The Capeman”?
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