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?
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Hi Liz.
ReplyDeleteThinking of your first question: doesn't he continually repeat this double move of an untethered/floating text and a repetition/citational text? The paradox does not seem apparent to Spooky. Is he oblivious to it? (i.e. is he a shoddy writer, poor in his thinking, etc.). Or are these perhaps simultaneous directions of rhythm science? Both may be the case: this may be how rhythm science operates, even though Spooky may not have a handle on it. Is this not a movement of supplementation? The source is both a fixed and totalizing reference, and also always copied into the peripheries, constantly at play...
Second question. This is another version of the supplementary logic. Technology as both enabling/revealing of relations but also as generating those relations as it reveals. i.e. technology is a core of our being just as we gain control of it. Supplemental logic: the essence is copied and prosthetic from the first. He seems unaware of this turn or direction in his thinking, which points even more to how it relates to technicity in general.