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.

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?

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.

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

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?