A.M.A.

Review essay Van der Tuin: New feminist materialisms

2011-06-24T01:35:00.000-07:00

(via @juspar ):
"A nice review article by Iris van der Tuin in Women's Studies International Forum 34 (2011) 271–277 on New Materialist Feminisms."

The article reviews the following publications:

Material feminisms, Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Eds.), Indiana University Press, 2008,
The material of knowledge: Feminist disclosures, Susan Hekman, Indiana University Press, 2010,
New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Eds.), Duke University Press, 2010,
Carnal knowledge: Towards a “new materialism” through the arts, Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (Eds.), I.B.Tauris, (forthcoming)

Shifting titles, and a new challenge: "One, two... Soup!"

2011-06-24T00:36:00.000-07:00

Behind the stage of paper writing: how the paper title has shifted while writing over the last weeks (I recovered these from my drafts between June 6 - 13)

Shifting musicologies, or the transversal capacities of New Materialism live as an explosive fuel to performance studies.

Shifting musicologies and the new materialist generation: methodology, ontology and time for change.

Or, productive alliances and not-a-new methodology

New materialism live! Transversal methodology, shifting musicologies, and time for a radical politics of affirmation

Or: affirming (my) new materialist music(ologi)cal experience as performance and transversal methodology

Or: Hippies or Butches? Soft affirmation as alternative to feminist criticism

New materialism live! Transversal methodology, posthuman subjectivies and shifting musicologies

It reveals some of the more articulate and less subtle stages of the process, I think.. what do you think? (the penultimate one remains my favorite..)

p.s. yes, I've finally finished. As you may have noticed, there is a point where I couldnt keep up with the live stream. Probably, there's a time of opening up, and one of closing down. Necessary to get things done.
This morning I realize that all the more, as I just started the next paper challenge, and immediatly felt the desire to share some thought again..

and of course, no new project goes without a funky working title. For today:

"One, two… Soup! On the limits of politeness/othering, perception, and pluri-modal ontology"

This paper will focus on the Speculative Turn, and I'm taking some earlier posts on that book (on the authenticity of imitation, for instance) as the starting point.. I need a shorter hashtag for this one, do you have suggestions? #12soup doesnt look good, I think..

Think becoming and watch this

2011-06-10T23:56:00.000-07:00

Think 'becoming' and watch this.
Think 'first there is movement' and 'unity is what we make of it as its product'
Think 'oppositional terms are themselves part of one and the same movement'

Remember that neither the one, nor the multiple is privileged in pluri-modal ontology. That there are different modes does not mean that you can be 'both at once... compossibility works in a quite different way from simple accumulation. .. the difference lies in good and bad ways of protecting the multiplicity from the dangers of both inity and dispersal.' (Latour on Eitienne Souriau in The Speculative Turn, p. 332 (full details posted earlier))

and perhaps most of all
Realize that constant becoming, flux, movement is FAR FROM CHAOS.

[with thanks to F for bringing this to my attention]

Art is life

2011-06-10T06:52:00.000-07:00

So cool, so cool..

The 'is life' campagin does indeed resonate already in other fields. (Read this earlier post if you don't understand what I mean)

check it out!! http://www.artislifemovie.com/
'it's there.. it follows you... it breaks borders... its always there.. it touches everything... it brings people together'

Sally Macarthur, Gilbert Simondon and more

2011-06-08T13:05:00.000-07:00

So here's my "my-life-is-too-short-but-these-articles-I'd-otherwise-read-right-now" list of today.
Included: short notes on why these, and full-text pdf links

Have you read it? Will you read it (for me)? Share your thought in 100 words, or even less .. so that we can use the time of our too short lives together more productively.

0.(that is, this before and most of all)

Sally Macarthur

I still haven't had time to properly read her work. But she's clearly a partner in new materialist crime. Or in feminist-deleuzian musicology, as she would probably call it. Her 2010 book is expensive. I'll talk to my librarian. Meanwhile, we'll have to do it with this:

Macarthur, Sally. "A thousand dissonances" in Australian Feminist Studies 2009.

Macarthur, Sally. "A Becoming-Infinite-Cycle in Anne Boyd’s Music: A Feminist-Deleuzian Exploration" in Radical Musicology 3(2008). http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk/2008/Macarthur.htm

See also the full list of publications on her site.

1.

THE POSITION OF THE PROBLEM OF ONTOGENESIS
Gilbert Simondon, translated by Gregory Flanders
2.
TECHNICAL MENTALITY
Gilbert Simondon, translated by Arne De Boever

Why Simondon? They told me at school that Deleuze took the notion of "individuation" of Simondon. Hence he must be a smart guy.

3.
TOWARD AN ETHICO-POLITICS OF THE POSTHUMAN: FOUCAULT AND MERLEAU-PONTY
Rosalyn Diprose

why? Because it was the first female author turning up after pages and pages of all-male contributors to Parrhesia: a journal of critical philosophy. so that must be something exciting then huh. no also because its ethics, and posthuman. and foucault and our good old phenomenology hero (who I still need to get to know better to be armed in debates with those who love him (many music performance scholars))
4.

HUMANISM AFTER ALL? DAFT PUNK’S EXISTENTIALIST CRITIQUE OF TRANSHUMANISM
Chad Parkhill
5.

VULNERABILITY AND THE PASSING OF CHILDHOOD IN BILL HENSON: INNOCENCE IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION
Joanne Faulkner

Anahid Kassabian

2011-06-07T23:52:00.000-07:00

http://blahfeme.typepad.com/blahfeme/2007/01/when_the_music_.html

Anahid Kassabian's work on haptic and ubiquitous listening

(Recommended by in a discussion on "it's her factory" blog)

New layout

2011-06-07T15:14:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Nate, another one of my great artist friends. Check her amazing work here.

The header image is a fragment of the one below. To me it looks like a radically open brain with many schizoid alliances.

Life project equals insight of the day, in less then a twitter update

2011-06-07T11:27:00.000-07:00

The tricky thing with bodies is the moment you try to define one, you find yourself always already involved in producing another.

This is, in short, my view on the relation between bodies and the subject.

In contrast to objects, bodies never fully detach, let alone do they stand in a binary opposition to the subject. Hence, my understanding of the subject is in no way a pure (Cartesian) mind. Embodied it is. Yet, I do not first pose the subject and thereafter the body. To posit the subject as embodied is not to say that embodied subjectivity is the only position from which expression, experience and consciousness take place.

My understanding of the body, namely, on the other hand, is radically post-human. There is a bodily consciousness that exceeds the subject. Or perhaps it is better to say, the body has an entirely different ontological mode, a different mode of being. (I was inspired by reading Latour on pluri-modal ontology today[1]). Think of a string quartet: this supra-individual body has the capacity to express as an organic unity, even though individual bodies are at once also expressed.

The I that creates a cartography of a body is itself part of that very body in its subsequent actualizations (very simply: you read my view of a body hence you look ‘through my eyes’ at that body, so you read ‘me-seeing-a-body’) .

I want to explore the idea of different modes of bodies as different ontological modes. That is: of ‘a bodily reality’, distinct to the singularity of each encounter.

Is it helpful to imagine a radically immanent/contingent multimodal plane of continuously shifting ontologies? No, not al the time. But sometimes.

[1] Latour, Bruno. “Reflections on Etienne Souriau’s Les différants modes d’existence” (translated by Stephen Muecke) in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds.). Open access (full text): http://www.re-press.org/content/view/64/38/

Brian Massumi, another great crafty generator of life

2011-06-05T10:09:00.000-07:00

Semblance and Event - The MIT Press

also on the list: his Parables for the Virtual

Reading Marcus Boon's In Praise of Copying

2011-06-05T09:59:00.000-07:00

Found some interesting stuff via Thomas Brett's blog, to be read at a later point:
Marcus Boon's In Praise of Copying (online availlable)
See Brett's blog for a short review.

It resonates with my 'authenticity of imitation' line of thought.

Did someone read it and/or has something to say about it?

Career bitch or ordinary pleasure? The conference report draft 1.0

2011-06-04T08:23:00.000-07:00

My experience with male co-worlders if it comes to games or sport usually confirms to me the idea that they, boys, are more competitive.

They are more fanatic,
they enter the survival/fighting mode,
and they are more devoted to win.

I saw the nature of my opposing gender confirmed in the fact that I- and other female friends, significantly care less about the game and about winning it.

At a recent conference , where I was present to present a paper - for the first time in my life - and where I was ~~looking forward to make myself known~~ to a scholarly community and to the Great Professor, I came to realize that I do have a strong drive for competition. However to concede this appears somehow morally undesirable in the leftish environment of philosophers and artists who implicitly attain to the ‘higher value’ of good knowledge production, since they surely can’t be doing it for the money. Openly showing too ambitious, too much goal-oriented simply doesn’t fit the academic environment and it’s social codes.

But here, now, I did, and I wish to point it out.

No matter how impropriate.

Extreme intensity,
flow,
rush, as well as
casual, ordinary pleasure

is what followed and increased my dedication to the game.

In fact, the unwritten code that made me try to appear a casual as possible (i.e. not-to-ambitious, no matter how blatantly obvious the actual performance) only added an exciting extra layer of intensity to the game (‘take the jackpot without making the ambition too obvious!’).

But what does this actually mean?

What does it say about my deeper inner me, my drive, my oedipal unconscious?

Of course, I act not entirely without a goal: I am fully aware of strategic opportunities and also of the potential benefits of winning the game. But honestly, that doesn’t mean it was all carefully planned and intended like that from the start. My deeper nature, if it would exist, surely doesn’t equal a stereotype career hunter, a selfish ambition driven narcist in the run for fame and money.

The narcism rather must be understood in a more direct sense: short-term, ordinary pleasure, desire for challenge and excitement. Or, what boys call their nature: hunting instinct or sex-drive.

What do you think?

Cutting intermezzos

2011-06-03T03:33:00.000-07:00

Cutted during my work of rewriting paradigms and disciplinary history of the new materialist generation..

----intermezzo

A few basic rules, or, what we can learn from successful revolutions of the facebook generation

Facebook only has a like button; an ultimate example of the affirmative mode. [1]

Existing online is a strong step towards ontological existence. Materialization is further secured by appearance in the established Western media (online, tv and print), helping it leak through at dinner-table talks and in classrooms. Realities on Facebook or YouTube have the capacity to intervene realities of hegemonic state media.

Active participation needed! Transversal mobilizing may go faster than ever before, forgetting and demobilization join easily after. One-day-flies don’t make sustainable difference. Therefore, constant reinforcement and active participation is needed. A high number of likes and visits in a short time is crucial to get feet on the ground, but keeping attention and ongoing engagement is the only way towards materializing sustainable difference.

---

[1] I am deliberately not delimiting the movement to ‘Arabic’ revolutions as it resonates as well outside the Middle East with varying effects, f.e. China and more recently Spain.

--intermezzo 2:

A few consequences and implications of reshuffling hierarchies and structures in the new materialist generation.

‘Promise of the youth’ gets a whole new significance when taken on as leading for legitimacy. That is, you don’t have to be established before your arguments may be cited by others.

And, New materialist citation policies 2.0.

Livestream paperwriting. Shifting musicologies ..

2011-06-03T02:35:00.000-07:00

Today: a new experiment, after longterm frustration about paperwriting and the evil facebook distraction that notoriously stands in the way of efficient writing.

Now let's see if postindividualist thoughtstream may actually enhance the product.

Follow the livestream on twitter and join with the hashtag #shiftingmusicologies. This is an invitation to join, help, laugh at, challenge, and criticize the process. And remember, your contrinbutions will be acknowledged, in line with the recently proposed new materialist citation politics.*

Mimesis - CFP

2011-05-30T11:37:00.000-07:00

Interesting call for papers, especially for someone concerned with the authenticity of imitation.
deadline 15oct2011

Karen Barad, Myra Hird and Elizabeth Wilson Visit Warwick

2011-05-28T13:50:00.000-07:00

Anyone close to Warwick / Manchester on June 13, don't miss this chance to meet these new materialist heroins! (Barad introduced the terms 'intra-action', 'material-discursive', etcetera)

Boundary crossing images I

2011-05-28T12:40:00.000-07:00

Time for a little visual input on this platform.
A big part of the works displayed here are stored in my living room, I am staring at them all day long.

Maybe it explains the general schizoid state.

Maybe it inspires.

Take a look at the close-ups on his website.
The wooden panels have a presence and affect me in an unmediated way.
I can't really explain, but prediscursive wouldn't be right here, as I'm sure it resonates with excessive theorizing.

Leonardo is a genius.

You recon' this isn't musicology? It's a musicologist's life.

First encounter with The Artistic Turn

2011-05-24T12:58:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note after reading a few pages of The Artistic Turn (the chapter on deterritorialization and a fragment of Artist’s examples). I emphasize, I have read only a few pages. This is not a review after proper reading! These are investigation in research-in-the-making, glimpses of the first encounter between scholar and text.

Feminist upbringing immediately makes me try out replacing ‘artist’ with ‘women’, to see how the ontological and the nature/nurture or determinist/social-constructivist views work on the category as such.

In that respect it is crucial to question constantly the self-world opposition, since the ‘self’ or subject itself is not attainable for its life/living in the same manner. That is, the unregistered, the stateless, the insane, the prisoner, they are no subjects in the first place.

Why is it crucial? Because next we take Cage, Gould or Bach as prototype ‘artists’. Now how come we grant these living individuals not only the status of ‘true’ or authentic artists, but even as exemplary cases that grow rather than diminish as they move towards knowledge production/research.

Take myself, for example; having moved to musicology I figured that I didn’t fully deserve the identity ‘pianist’ anymore, let alone ‘artist’ or ‘performer’.

For the rest, of course I am content with a turn to artist-experience and creations-in-the world. But what about musicologist-experience, could that be generative and creative too? And could the specific singularity of the contingent decentered subjectivity that I am myself could be equally relevant?

It seems that personal or subjective experience can always only be justified as of greater relevance if first social consensus is reached on whether that specific shared experience is worth the status of subject.

An artist’s consciousness, an artist’s experience.

Finally, the whole question of psychoanalysis comes in: do we actually have access to our own experience? Or do the social symbolic order(s) already determine what we take for real, before it reaches consciousness? If so, then can we take still as neutral that specific individuals (Bach, Gould, Bernstein) happen to be male individuals?

The chapter on deterritorialization opens with the little girl, an often used image by Deleuze. I wrote a longer paper titled ‘What a little girl’s body can do’ that I have just uploaded and can be found under this link.

Of course these where merely critical notes, overall it seems promising. Generating new categories of subjects (artist-researcher, etcetera) certainly fits in expanding reality, in expanding what counts as life and lived experience, in the project that Butler called making gender trouble.

This is creative thinking in practice. This is intuitive response, not carefully constructed argumentation. It is vulnarable, please read it as such.

An unfinished reading/listening/worlding guide for new materialist newbies

2011-05-24T08:35:00.000-07:00

[under construction (like everything in life)]

1. Musicologists who certainly can be included in the new materialist generation are:

The most explicit and as far as I know only case of fieldwork-new materialist-musicology is Milla Tiainen's "Corporeal Voices, Sexual Differentiations: New Materialist Perspectives on Music, Singing and Subjectivity" (2007). (Abstract here, if you don't have full-text access through your library contact me).

Looking back in time, we see that the famous 94 essays on mind/body and on lesbian musicology of Suzanne Cusick are groundbreaking new materialisms at full force.

A crafty musicologist practitioner is Björn Schmelzer and his sound-assemblage Graindelavoix. It mixes early music in modern assemblage. Yet more then merely experimental or anything goes. Historically informed performance practice, or h.i.p. does not r.i.p. In fact, it's mostly alive when you consider the material factual encounter as the reactualization of history. history-in-pratice is the only reality of life. He does away with the cleanish English chant tradition early music singing style, and replaces it with real voice, personal, affective voice.(Listen to examples here and here)

2. From the wider feminist/theory/life-sphere these could be of interest

Claire Colebrook at the symposium 'What is the matter with materialism' spoke of the hyper-hypo affecftive disorder, and it fascinates me. The lecture is online, watch it here. Another one of her on Deleuze and cultural theory can be found here.

One of my personal favorites is Moira Gatens. In Imaginary Bodies (1996) she combines Spinoza, ethics, to create new imaginaries, feminist crafty generation of bodies.
Her lecture on 'Truth in Fiction' can be watched online lecture right here

Donna Haraway
Watch her lecture on natureculture's, multispecies worldings and the cat's cradle metaphor right here

The following is on dogs, companion-specicism, etc. (go to 8:22 for a quick impression of the funny dog-worlding) "The meeting of the American Association of Lap Dogs", lovely.

Very productive would also be to read of Haraway's first chapter of When species meet, and her 1988 essay "Situated Knowledges" (full pdf version). It introduces the 'material-semiotic' and says lots of very important stuff on limits of bodies, body-machine-apparatuses, and the redefinition of knowledge production.

(More online video lectures of the Utrecht University's Centre of the Humanities can be found on the video archive at www.uu.nl/cfh . Especially recommended are Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Noam Chomsky)

The authenticity of imitation

2011-05-24T03:57:00.000-07:00

(or: demystifying freedom and spontaneity with speculative virtualism)

A few insights from this morning’s reading encounter.

“As much as possible” needs to be speculatively revised.

When I stressed earlier the non-opposition of composition and improvisation, insisting on the constraints within the myths of “free acting” or “spontenous response”, it was precisely related to this.

There is a limitation in the idea of all possibles, and Meillassoux's chapter presented it to me perfectly with the image of the dice, this morning: it has a finite amount of sides and doesn’t allow different sizes its sides or addition of extra sides. This is the different between chance and contingency, and as I will argue, it helps to undo many myths, not only that of the musical genius, the transcendental image of the child prodigy, but also that of life as a miracle itself.

It starts from the ontology of the causal connection. Hume has never solved it, but nevertheless science has continued to build upon it. Indeed, “our belief in induction derives from habit and not from consequent reasoning”.

The mistake was as follows: they stayed with laws and formulating new laws, because they believed them to be stable. If they would be inconstant, after all, then “why do they not change at each and every instant”?

That is what I meant when I questioned Taruskin’s* assumption of sponaneity in audience behavior as it was based only on the observation of actually seeing it change in relation to what was before. And likewise with assuming free improvisation only if it actually differs from directed performance.

Shortly put, stability ≠ necessity.

“We begin by giving ourselves a set of possible cases, each one representing a conceivable world having as much chance as the other of being chosen in the end, and conclude from this that it is infinitely improbable that our own universe should constantly be drawn by chance from such a set, unless a hidden necessity presided secretly over the result.”

And that is how we start to believe in God.

What we must do however is accepting that the dice may change itself, its shape, its numbers, the weight, seize and actual number of sides, in the process of our throwing of it. TIME is the important factor here, the ontological motor of becoming that blurs the picture. Q in his speculative version speaks of ‘maintaining positively the contingency of laws.’

“An entirely chaotic world – submitting every law to the power of time – could thus in principle be phenomenally indiscernible from a world subject to necessary laws, since a world capable of everything must also be able not to effect all that it is capable of.”

You see? It’s the improvisation myth.

And the speculative version is really cool and much better: ‘ it proceeds from the conviction that one can think the contingency of constants compatibly with their manifest stability.’ The authenticity of imitation, as we call it.

Once again, and that will be it for now. To sum up, the two mistakes were these (and they relate directly to the way vitality is linked to inert matter): On the one hand the idea that it was already somehow contained within it (assuming that all matter is alive to some degree), and other the other, that it did not, which would imply a transcendental intervention of some higher degree, the ‘irruption ex nihilo’.

This is demystifying geniosity and freedom.

*naming the persona or abstract machine helps AMA grow in extramarital affair with the google body-machine.

The quotes of today: Quentin Meillassoux, “Potentiality/Virtuality” in The Speculative Turn (Full details here & open access link here )

[revised on June 15, 2011]

II

2011-05-24T01:28:00.000-07:00

Crafty musicology matters, vitally;

developing focuses from people who are about*. (Not around, this is not a circus.)

developing focuses for people who are about.

developing focuses with people who are about.

Forms coalitions in social life (musicological life).

About ≠ local or institutional. (community=cringe)

Crafty musicology is not concerned with hybrids or hybridity.

is not writing in, with, or for a genre. It is obsessed with genre and with genreing.

is more interested in register than rhythm or pitch or harmony.

Crafty musicology is audatious: better accounts and greater detail.

is analytical.

is pleased to encounter myths, bespeaking narratives for mythical beings (not dramatis personae; history is not a play).

is as much as possible, seeking better craft (technique) from craft’s craftiness and the craft of others.

is bored with prosaic imaginations.

is productive in procrastination (sometimes).

* = 'All over or around; in various directions; to and fro; (also referring to things scattered over a surface) up and down, here and there.'

Copyright and the facebook generation

2011-05-23T03:31:00.000-07:00

The beauty of new materialist generative practice is that satisfies and intensifies life in a non-metaphorical manner. We don’t need to speak of and against the past and the other that we leave behind and aside. Positioning ourselves in the affirmative mode shows cartographies of alliances, the specific unborderedness and the radical openness of life. It not moving away but joining in with movement, the radical untogetherness and flux of experience. It is saying My reality is life.

Craftiness, creation, generation.

Haraway speaks of ‘critters’ rather than creatures, mapping a boundary that emphasizes a movement away from monotheist creation narratives. But a lovely capacitity of the new materialist mode is that any notion can be reclaimed, reterritorialized. In fact, that is precisely the generative mode; performing a qualitative shift by continuously expanding what any concept may stand for.

Therefore, let us happily throw creation back into the assemblage if we intuitively enact a new encounter in which it may become productive.

Take being, placed aside or as second in Deleuzian thinking, as that which may now reenter, as we are already on the way in the onto-epistemology of new materialism. Generating, creating may then also be generation and creation, by which its stability and facticity can be affirmed. This is important in our time of facebook revolutions, never before having been so aware that the facts on revolution are actively produced in the battle over mediation and representation. In short, let us affirm the new materialist generation as the growing body of alliances, transnational, glocal, multispecies, multi media cartographies. Multispecies worlding is the appealing term that Haraway uses for this.

After all is not precisely the affirmative mode expressed in the power of ‘like’ and absence of a ‘dislike’-button on facebook?

Coming back to the generational element: we found ourselves in a recent encounter most clearly defined as the facebook-generation brought up in postmodern blindness, nothingness.

Take the problem of copyright and authorship. Our initial response to anxiety over such issues was that it marked the digital immigrant mindset of our predecessors. We favor throwing our thought-oids out in the public, but the warning does leave me worried, somehow. Self-preservation and protection, we are not sure what these entail if the boundaries of selfness shift so radically.

Would it indeed be crucial to ask patents and place names on any thought that we produce? But if citation practices as well shift radically to the here and now of encounters, the possession of ideas as objects becomes disputable. What are the risks of abuse, of unethical behavior in this realm.

Will the deterritorializing, dehumanizing, decentering movement be powerful enough to prevent the return of Ego? Is it safeguarded from egocentrism by posing it precisely as it’s greatest contradiction? Do ‘I’ risk to end up at the margin and should I somehow maintain a ‘survival-of-thefittest’ mentality? Further insights on this may be found in the writings of Elizatbeth Grosz, who joins Deleuze in moving explicitly away from the Darwinist mindset.

Crafty Musicology

2011-05-22T09:55:00.000-07:00

A crafty musicology

Is very interesting, since musicology is currently united in platitude, the anxiety of being first to interrupt with A declaration of ‘interest’. Once claimed, passivity is restored, the assertion normalizing presentation (however radical) with all other imagined presentations, different but never more sensual, dulled lenses that create shadows against the glow of the latest manifestation of blah blah blah.

Now writing for music, now craftiness for music, blind luminosity electric flux. Imbalanced and coerced by distortion, the coercion itself fashions topics of which the (The) fashioning is desired. In crafty-music-writing the consumption of presentation is a prelude to the bespeaking which shapes flows of energy and matter for human purposes. The telling of accounts for techniques provides materials for metamorphosis, multiplicities for multiplicities. Crafty musicology does not enjoy the posing of questions, and responds ‘thank you for your question, yes I have a b bottle of brandy just here’ or ‘to you a firstyness of thirdness fucking, converging on lips, with my own foreign tongue’. I wear glasses not because I have a nose… not for clichéd lhooqing (was that joke ever amusing?)... but for focus, sharp lines, and more intense visions to mitigate against dull glows; Corubsier was right when he said that all freedoms belong to art save that of not being clear.

…crafty musicology is getting wet in fantasy’s rains…

Sharp focuses are necessary for detailed conversations, stuff, materials, lines, reading and lines, misreading and lines, and lines, speaking and lines for swifts flocking.

Flock:

‘of cloth torn to pieces by machinery, used for quilting garments, and stuffing beds, cushions, mattresses, etc’

Secondness flucking stuffing flock-papers of already dyed patterns. Dead musicology does not need to be resurrected when the second keynote has come.

‘The hack is breaking into the flows passing through the channels. Not blocking the flow [or flo/ucking (on) the b(l)ow, for that matter], nor choking the power, but instead drawing new lines, reconnecting the highways, redirecting inherent energies, liberating and intensifying flows.’ Do-it-yourself exhibitionism of fashion’s meshing knitting. (Thank GOD that G.D. didn’t cite TRTZ’s furry wank, or we’d be commending Gaga as the new Dada…)

is the training we need to be affected.

Creating life: a beginning

2011-05-21T18:57:00.001-07:00

21 May 2010, Aveiro, Portugal.

Judgement Day.

It is time for a change. The end of the World, perhaps, indeed. The end. And the beginning of something new.

Yet we begin with renouncing innovation, for all the artificial change it generates. To 'make difference' is to believe in final salvation or world peace. It is not a difference opposing what has been going on so far, but difference in itself.

We felt constrained by need to produce difference the innovative way: The expectation of exceptional performance, the burden of talent. We want to affirm instead the lives of those who do not excel, create, innovate: the poor, pathetic, piteous. Their lives too are essential to the production of difference. Without them we would never felt powerful to act in the first place!

Imagine a growing network of alliances. Growing more complex, but intensively and not expanding: as a crystalline, or a fractal. Imagine a politics of affirmation. Starting today with the foundation of the Anonymous Musicologists Association (A.M.A.).

AMA offers mental support to disoriented, disillusioned musicologists, m/v, all ages. A place where modernists and postmodernists can unite. For those who felt their subjectivity and the reality of their experience subordinated to History, Man, genius, talent, excellence, and most of all to the need to excel. The dogmatic need to make a difference. For those who feel to have lost direction. For new coherence, new lineages. For radically affirming life.

Its blatant and unreserved promotion will be launched as the ‘= Life’ campaign. An ever growing variety of lives, life forms, passions, Productive worldings can be claimed, reclaimed, affirmed. Music is life. Musicology is life. And the list will grow. [Indeed it did: check 'the Art is life' video post] Imagine a wiki-style platform, online and offline. Opensource, yet strategically affirming capitalist systems of power. Money, commerce, authority, populist rethorics; these are the material-discursive weapons for real-izing life.

We don’t strive at purity of position. Politcal affirmation means getting your hands dirty for the good cause. The revolutionary power of the facebook generation, that proves to us the reality of non-borders, the power of resonance, the transversal capacities of bodies. Empowerment of the becoming-east, becoming-other by strategic use of the Western systems of power. The ontological truth of non-coherence, deterritorialization.

Life before everything. Life before being. Life before human subject. That is not to say that human is excluded. The contrary, but what counts is the encounter between humanist and posthumanist expression, between the desire to sustain Ego-Man and its twin-opposite: the radical rejection, elimination.

Affirmative politics means all-inclusiveness and at the same time radical openness to multiplicity in itself. Movements of togetherness and ‘untogetherness’, to speak with Roche and Ledger. Open to contradiction. Critique from within. Disagreement affirming life.

FyMi