A.M.A.: May 2011

Monday, May 30, 2011

Mimesis - CFP

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

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Karen Barad, Myra Hird and Elizabeth Wilson Visit Warwick

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

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.

First encounter with The Artistic Turn

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.

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

[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.

The authenticity of imitation

(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.

II

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.'

Monday, May 23, 2011

Copyright and the facebook generation

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.

Crafty Musicology

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.

Creating life: a beginning

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!

A.M.A.