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?
Monday, March 30, 2009
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?
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