Saturday, December 4, 2010
Final Part II: Where next?
The more culture fragments into ever-smaller niches and changes at an ever-increasing pace due to increased global connections, and the more global economic and political power structures become larger and more complex, the more difficult it becomes to identify what constitutes noise, subversion, and transgression. Francisco Lopez makes clear how subjective the existence of music (and by proxy, noise) is; while noise music is already an uneasy collection of sub-genres and scenes, one could imagine it splintering even further into highly localized, fleeting spurts of activity that register as noise for only a few. Without an easily identifiable norm, what is there to subvert? Noise may come to be an even more relative concept than it is now: faced with a plethora of niche musics, only the individual subject will be able to analyze any given example as noise or not-noise. While the progression toward total cultural fragmentation is asymptotic, I anticipate that the culturally noisy will become more and more difficult to identify.
What will actually constitutes noise in a cultural sense and what artists who identify as part of the noise genre will choose to produce in the future seem like two different questions. As noise-the-genre reifies, it itself becomes a code, a norm, perhaps even a power structure. The noisiest artworks may, in the future, come from outside noise-the-genre. To offer some specific potential directions: as technology increasingly rules our lives and enters our bodies, I can imagine biomedical artworks that test the boundaries between the biological and technological in ever more invasive ways: performances that involve aestheticized, amplified surgical procedures; the use of biomedical technology to sonify (and perhaps simultaneously manipulate) human brain activity.
Final Part I: Four Quotations
1) From Jacques Attali's "Noise and Politics"(AC p. 7): "Listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political...with music is born power and its opposite: subversion." I agree with this statement, but only in a qualified way, thus I'm counting it as a disagree.
Throughout much of history, I think Attali's assertion that social mores and power structures coalesce in music has been accurate. The idea of organizing sound into something recognized and accepted as music is an apt metaphor for organizing people into something recognized and accepted as a functional society (though what this acceptable thing actually looks like is of course immensely mutable depending on context) and we can probably pretty accurately read ways in which sound organizers reflect either the status quo of their society or some form of subversion of that status quo (and if we can't, a lot of musicologists are out of a job.) However, in our increasingly globalized, post-Berlin-wall world, what constitutes power and subversion becomes ever blurrier. The social codes reflected in a music may not accurately represent its place in cultural, political, or economic power structures. Some of these paradoxes are relatively transparent and superficial - wealthy stars rapping about life in the projects; "indie" bands whose labels are in fact subsidiaries of global media conglomerates - but in our increasingly fragmented cultural landscape, the identity crises and ambiguities of cultural position that affect most instances of artistic production are more complex and less easy to identify. So while music remains intensely bound up with power and subversion, those are so far from being discrete, oppositional categories that Attali's statement seems impossibly binary. At this moment in time identifying any given music as representative of either of those categories is intensely difficult; most likely any given music represents both to some degree, and depending on the observer, might represent one or the other for the same reason.
2) From Francisco Lopez: "I strongly believe that any sound can be music, but not that it is music. The essential difference, what converts a sound into music, is a human, subjective, intentional, non-universal, not necessarily permanent, aesthetic, decision...a way of perceiving certain sounds in a certain time by a certain person."
Amen, brother. This goes in my agree column and is one of the most eloquent and forceful statements of cultural relativity I've encountered; it goes second because it reinforces my point above regarding Attali. By highlighting the relativity and subjectivity of music and its reliance on human agency for existence, Lopez by extension highlights the same things about noise. He makes the existence of music and noise seem intensely personal - these categories (much like power and subversion) are endlessly redefined by each individual subject, who in turn may redefine them endlessly as they move through space and time.
3) From NM p. 125: "Noise is on the side of revolt rather than revolution (not that this can be said of all experimental music), as revolution implies a new order, and noise cannot be a message-bearer (other than of itself as message)."
I appreciate the distinction this quotation makes because it helps explain how noise can be allied with subversion. However, this is going in my disagree column because its conclusion - that noise cannot be a message-bearer - while accurate as part of Hegarty's definition of noise, is perhaps the thing that makes me most uncomfortable with noise as a genre. The sounds of the genre don't bother me at all; I enjoy listening to a lot of the music we've encountered in this class. Moreover, I certainly don't think music should be reducible to simple verbal messages, or that it should be asked to serve political or societal functions. However, the suspicion that some of this music may intentionally not have anything to say, and thus may in fact be intentionally disrespecting or devaluing meaning and earnestness, or the search for meaning in art, feels really uncomfortable to me - it hits at the heart of the seriousness and sense of responsibility with which I approach my own work.
4) From NM p. 111: "So successful transgression can only ever aspire to be "successful" - it is caught in a loop of alternating failures - in its mundane failure in not disposing of the taboo, its alternative failure in getting rid of it and thereby becoming the norm, and above (beneath) all, its failure to even fail properly, as it negotiates between various ways it does not come to be. Transgression is always potential, or always already lost, but this does not stop Bataille, or Throbbing Gristle, acting as if it were possible."
This quotation sort of ties everything together. Hegarty is wonderfully honest and specific about the limitations and nature of transgression via noise. Transgression is as relative and contingent as any other category, and the process of trying to achieve it sounds here like a serious quest for a kind of meaning. Elsewhere, Hegarty describes engaging with Throbbing Gristle's output as "always a work undoing itself" as the group would change their sound in order to keep their transgressive power vital. The sustained effort, over time, to maintain a position of imbalance with respect to one's audience is certainly something I can get behind; the idea of inherently eschewing message does not feel nearly as threatening to me when put in this context.
Throughout much of history, I think Attali's assertion that social mores and power structures coalesce in music has been accurate. The idea of organizing sound into something recognized and accepted as music is an apt metaphor for organizing people into something recognized and accepted as a functional society (though what this acceptable thing actually looks like is of course immensely mutable depending on context) and we can probably pretty accurately read ways in which sound organizers reflect either the status quo of their society or some form of subversion of that status quo (and if we can't, a lot of musicologists are out of a job.) However, in our increasingly globalized, post-Berlin-wall world, what constitutes power and subversion becomes ever blurrier. The social codes reflected in a music may not accurately represent its place in cultural, political, or economic power structures. Some of these paradoxes are relatively transparent and superficial - wealthy stars rapping about life in the projects; "indie" bands whose labels are in fact subsidiaries of global media conglomerates - but in our increasingly fragmented cultural landscape, the identity crises and ambiguities of cultural position that affect most instances of artistic production are more complex and less easy to identify. So while music remains intensely bound up with power and subversion, those are so far from being discrete, oppositional categories that Attali's statement seems impossibly binary. At this moment in time identifying any given music as representative of either of those categories is intensely difficult; most likely any given music represents both to some degree, and depending on the observer, might represent one or the other for the same reason.
2) From Francisco Lopez: "I strongly believe that any sound can be music, but not that it is music. The essential difference, what converts a sound into music, is a human, subjective, intentional, non-universal, not necessarily permanent, aesthetic, decision...a way of perceiving certain sounds in a certain time by a certain person."
Amen, brother. This goes in my agree column and is one of the most eloquent and forceful statements of cultural relativity I've encountered; it goes second because it reinforces my point above regarding Attali. By highlighting the relativity and subjectivity of music and its reliance on human agency for existence, Lopez by extension highlights the same things about noise. He makes the existence of music and noise seem intensely personal - these categories (much like power and subversion) are endlessly redefined by each individual subject, who in turn may redefine them endlessly as they move through space and time.
3) From NM p. 125: "Noise is on the side of revolt rather than revolution (not that this can be said of all experimental music), as revolution implies a new order, and noise cannot be a message-bearer (other than of itself as message)."
I appreciate the distinction this quotation makes because it helps explain how noise can be allied with subversion. However, this is going in my disagree column because its conclusion - that noise cannot be a message-bearer - while accurate as part of Hegarty's definition of noise, is perhaps the thing that makes me most uncomfortable with noise as a genre. The sounds of the genre don't bother me at all; I enjoy listening to a lot of the music we've encountered in this class. Moreover, I certainly don't think music should be reducible to simple verbal messages, or that it should be asked to serve political or societal functions. However, the suspicion that some of this music may intentionally not have anything to say, and thus may in fact be intentionally disrespecting or devaluing meaning and earnestness, or the search for meaning in art, feels really uncomfortable to me - it hits at the heart of the seriousness and sense of responsibility with which I approach my own work.
4) From NM p. 111: "So successful transgression can only ever aspire to be "successful" - it is caught in a loop of alternating failures - in its mundane failure in not disposing of the taboo, its alternative failure in getting rid of it and thereby becoming the norm, and above (beneath) all, its failure to even fail properly, as it negotiates between various ways it does not come to be. Transgression is always potential, or always already lost, but this does not stop Bataille, or Throbbing Gristle, acting as if it were possible."
This quotation sort of ties everything together. Hegarty is wonderfully honest and specific about the limitations and nature of transgression via noise. Transgression is as relative and contingent as any other category, and the process of trying to achieve it sounds here like a serious quest for a kind of meaning. Elsewhere, Hegarty describes engaging with Throbbing Gristle's output as "always a work undoing itself" as the group would change their sound in order to keep their transgressive power vital. The sustained effort, over time, to maintain a position of imbalance with respect to one's audience is certainly something I can get behind; the idea of inherently eschewing message does not feel nearly as threatening to me when put in this context.
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