Vulgarization and Enchantment: Adorno vs. music industry

October 8th, 2009 researchTags: inanimata, indexicality, modernity, music

Texts: Theodor Adorno, On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening

“Vulgarization and enchantment, hostile sisters, dwell together in the arrangements which have colonized large areas of music”.

Adorno deftly analyses Marx to argue that our contemporary experience of music is irrevocably degraded by the fact that we consume music as a thing whose “exchange value” – the market hype that brands something as desirable or not – becomes fetishized to the point of obscuring its “use value”. And here Adorno’s dialectic use of “use-value” as the value that something possesses before comodification, as the thing’s intrinsic social good, becomes problematic. “Exchange value” constitutes a paradoxical kind of worth because it has no substance (built upon an entrenched system of cultural hearsay / advertisement that consumers buy into in order to be “in the loop”), but we are left with the question of what kind of  “substantial” worth can be attributed to the pre-comodified social good.  

In the case of music, Adorno claims that its mass production has destroyed the “promise of happiness” it once held, the possibility of true enjoyment that can only happen when the experience is unique / individualized (“The liquidation of the individual is the real signature of the new musical situation”).The shallow immediacy of the consumer’s enjoyment of his fetishized object (his record, a song on the radio, the idea of “classical music”) cannot compare to this lost form of deep joy experienced by the 19^th century music-listener during a one-time concert by Schubert or Beethoven. And although there is little doubt that the fetishization of cultural goods is a kind of behavior only properly defined by industrialized capitalist society, Attali’s argument in Noise justly points out that music (like any other cultural product) has always been inextricably indexed to and defined by the hierarchies and ideologies that reinforce and articulate a society’s economic organization at any given time – the type of “higher” enjoyment that Adorno speaks of is the product of specifically bourgeois and Enlightenment modes of experiencing art, a distinct behavior already being hyped up (if not yet properly “branded”) as the apogee of all aspirations towards gentrification and refinement ( i.e. social ascension).

Adorno’s distinction between past and present cultural attitudes towards music, if not a completely successful denunciation of consumption in its totality, does, however, usefully put the notion of enjoyment as the forefront of our investigation of sound. Enjoyment is a kind of behavior/experience that is both culturally conditioned and highly individual, generating meaning that is both unique to the enjoyer and communicable and understandable by her peers. To inquire into different modalities of enjoyment is simultaneously to carry on a critique of the material conditions of social life (means of production, distribution networks, technological contexts) and to map out a phenomenology of sound.

How can we elaborate on Adorno’s dissection of musical consumption as fetishization of a musical object? How have we diverted ourselves from that moment and what new species of enjoyment are being invented/discovered today?

immigration, race, gender, the phonograph, the telephone, Tin Pan Alley, factory of dreams, jazz and Halloween: is catchy a crime? it all comes to the fore in this famous Fleischer cartoon for Cab Calloway’s ear-popping “Minnie the Moocher”.

Las Hurdes / Land Without Bread: better to destroy a museum than to build a cultural center

July 13th, 2009 researchTags: archive, detournement, indexicality, modernity, photopia, play, visceral

Bunuel, in his autobiography, writes that he finds the thought of destroying a museum more appealing than the idea of building a cultural center. The exercise of building entails casting things in stone all over again, issuing precepts, binding cultural forms according to a discipline of  structural soundness and reliability. A cultural center is a didactic institution – it hands down knowledge, it propagates and reproduces. By extension, an exercise in destruction (in the form of an exuberant attempt, a gesture ) feels like a motion of freedom – from various architectures of thought, from institutionally invested representations. The ideology of cultural destruction is the hope of the decimation of ideological frameworks.

Land Without Bread‘s ambiguously sarcastic voice-over upends not only the idea of the possibility of sober and objective representation (in the tradition of Rosen’s historical Chronicler and the modernist project for a scientific treatment of actuality) but destabilizes, decades before the practice of digital manipulation, the photograph’s indexical relationship to the real. In las Hurdes what we see is not what we see: a donkey falling to its death from a cliff (as we are told) is a setup _ the “real” meaning of the image (what actually happened) is completely obscured, irrelevant. In effect the idea of “real” meaning, of a grounded indexical relationship between the image and the way we read it is dismantled. This methodical decimation of sense is pursued in the sequencing of “events” that we are told occur before the camera: a child is “sick”, a shivering man is “sick”, a child lies down, “dies”.

And yet the intellectual suspicion of the image that the snarky narrator communicates is not enough snuff our quasi automatic emotional allegiance to the image. We are hammered with tales of woe and poverty while village scenes unfold and in spite of rational uncertainty we are already half-way towards believing the story: we have to rein in or check spontaneous movements of shock, sympathy, horror within us. We remove our faith from the idea of the interpretational authority of the filmmaker only to assume a form of authority from ourselves: the power to be critical but also, in the end, to feel affect, to feel involved. The metaphor that unfolds in the final moments of the film, when the scene of a poor family lying down to sleep is repeatedly cut with the image of an old woman crying out the announcement of a death through the streets of the village delivers a punch that no longer owes anything to the indexical relationship between the image and actuality. The specter of death that weighs over the inhabitants is a concretely felt reality or hypereality that emerges from the visual text. Have we then left the realm of documentary to enter a fiction? I am reminded of Rosen’s reiteration of Baudrillard’s claim the cinematic can not (or can no longer) reproduce reality, it can only produce more / other reality. And yet, seeing Las Hurdes or any documentary representation that rings a bell of recognition, of understanding (one dare not say truth) I retain the suspicion that metaphor, if not indexicality can still constitute grounds for a certain form of worldly evidence…

Man with a Movie Camera: utopia arrives!

July 9th, 2009 references, researchTags: archive, body, city, contingency, Dziga Vertov, experimental circus, immersion, kinetic, machine, modernity, music, play, punctum, space, time, utopia, visceral

This film opens up a world, another level of “reality” that is more than the sum of its parts. Emerging out of a vision of other time – time mechanized, measured, dislocated, arrested, superimposed – is the vision of a other way of life, a life energized by the fullness of the juxtaposed moment, a society aligned with Vertov’s and the communist project’s ideal of a union of the activity of communal / industrial daily life and the vital élan, the joyful exercise of each individual’s humanity. The world invented / discovered by Vertov’s camera erases the division between labor and “one’s own time”, between citizens and the city, between the producers and the technological means of production, between products and their consumers. Every element that is captured by the apparatus meshes with a multiplicity of analogous moments or rather analogous vectors, snippets of temporal trajectories in which the world and all its inhabitants seem to freely throw themselves into each others’ paths.

Brecht-like, Vertov pulls down the wall between the screen and the audience, allowing the subjects-spectators possession of their photographed selves, assigning the camera (and the filmmaker) to be as much a participant in the buzz as its privileged observer. This move is incredibly satisfying and startling at the same time: I do not feel I am presented with an object, a result, a work out of or beyond actuality for me to consume but that the windows of actuality have been blasted open all around me and that I find myself almost on the same ontological plane as the (human, technological) population of the film. Rather than bringing the world to me, it brings me into the world – as a spectator I feel simultaneously transformed into an actor, an agent, part and parcel of the aliveness of the kino-eye. It’s the first time I’ve seen “Man with a Movie Camera” . I cannot remember having ever been so engaged (as opposed to engulfed, enchanted, immersed) by a work of art.

How is “Man with a Movie Camera” a documentary? Grierson’s “the creative treatment of actuality” seems too indeterminate a definition to characterize Vertov’s utopian project. Actuality here is certainly treated, openly, visibly mediated by a community of agents : by the apparatus (which eerily and comically becomes an animate character of its own)_ by the camera operator, the camera’s appendage or transport device whose main task seems to be to enable the camera’s heroic phenomenological agency_by the editor, who, in a sequence showing shots of frames on a film strip followed by shots of the same frames projected at their proper speed, finalizes the machine’s God-like powers to set time in motion. This candid mediation takes the sting out of “creative treatment of actuality”: we are informed as to the “how” and encouraged to jump into the project ourselves.

The filmmaker does cease to be a conjuror and becomes an epistemologist – rather than doling out a spectacle (even a spectacle structured by an argumentative, informative or ideological purpose, on the non-fiction side like Grierson or on the fiction side like Eisenstein) the kino-glaz (a gaze that is simultaneously the filmmaker’s, the spectator’s and the camera’s) inscribes a map of actuality, in fact writing by the exercise of looking / scoping /projecting.

Argumentation becomes problematic at such a level of investigation into the actual, not least because we are placed in a realm beyond language or discourse into something that is purely cinematic – if we are mobilized politically it is on a poetic level, where social issues cannot be divorced from their embededness in an entirety of human meaning.

Another epistemologist – phenomenological camera in Chris Marker’s “Sans Soleil”. “Sans Soleil” also takes actuality as its material, but is it a documentary? When does not the poetic treatment of actuality but the poetic purposes of the filmmaker diverge from a “documentarian” purpose. “Sans Soleil” is about actuality, although a highly subjective one. Does it count? Or must a documentary necessarily address some form of consensus reality – must it necessarily inform in addition to express?

Ghost in the Machine: the life and time of spirit photography

July 1st, 2009 researchTags: contingency, haunted space, indexicality, machine, modernity, noise, photopia, play, punctum, shock, uncanny, visceral

Playing with the idea of a haunted portrait _ the ghost appears like the absconded presence of the camera, staring out from the double mirror of the photograph. The idea of the dead coyly sitting in on the poised, posed family pictures of the living – unheimlich at it’s most potent, what is buried won’t stay buried but leaves secondary evidence, leaves tangible traces of doubt.

The inappropriate sneaks up behind your back, the camera becomes the eye in the back of your head: new weapon against the uncanny or projector of hidden horrors?

The fake spirits accusing the photographer of fraud – first betrayal of the photographed image’s promise to reproduce reality. William Mumler in the 1860s already destroying the metaphysically automatic/newly automated line between reality and metaphor, conjecture, phantasie. The sought for and unwelcome guests usher these bourgeois families into modernity.

Don’t these apparitions look TRAPPED? Their imprint gelled, their first effort at substantiation caught in the middle.  Nothing left to do but appear, put on an appearance without the evidential accoutrement of an indexical relationship…ontologically exiled, phenomenologically virulent. First clue that the photographic apparatus is a creative as well as a reproductive machine: “documentary is the creative treatment of actuality”, according to Grierson and these spirits are products of an indexicality machine, they document the ghostliness of the apparatus, they rise out of the machine, immanent smoke that manufactures a referant for the new photographic sign…

More recent iterations on the theme in the audio department:

Derive and Detournement: call back to situationism

June 4th, 2009 referencesTags: ambiance, city, cyborg, derive, detournement, experimental circus, flaneur, haptic, modernity, nomad, play, situationism, space, utopia

These texts and clips had me thinking about the relationship between the modernist concern with contingency (starting with the ubiquitous presence of photographic arts from the early 20th century onwards) and the movement of situationism as it flourished in the late 50s and 60s – I see another line or relationship between the flaneur, the nomad, the cyborg and the situationist as precursors of immersive arts/installations practitioners…immersion is basically the design of playful space.

Debord advised drifters to allow themselves to be guided by those features of the street neglected by most pedestrians, like “the sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters” and the “path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the contour of the ground)”. the determinants of drift, apparently, were alternations in emotional and ambient intensity; “the appealing or repelling characters of certain places”; and the drifter’s tendency to “drain” along relatively unresistant paths, “the fissures in the urban network”. The Lettrist International even “envisaged a pinball machine arranged in such a way that the play of the lights and the more or less predictable trajectories of the balls” would represent the “thermal sensations and desires of people passing by the gates of the Cluny Museum around an hour after sunset in November,” as though drifters were like ball bearings, propelled through the city’s channels by the energized “pins” of the unities of ambiance.

Simon Sadler, The Situationist City

CINEMA: Haunted Time

April 7th, 2009 researchTags: amnesia, archive, cinema, contingency, flaneur, machine, modernity, shock, time

Texts:

Mary Anne Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive

Mark Shiel, Cinema and the City in History and Theory in Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, edited by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice.

Mary Anne Doane and Mark Shiel make arguments for opposing conceptions of cinema as escape valve for modernity’s alienation from “lived time” and as a postmodern transformation of simulacra into “lived space”.

According to Doane, “the technique of metropolitan life” implies the development of a consciousness regularly leached of meaningful experience by the systematic “shock” of paradoxically both the excessive presence of the present in the form of a barrage of urban stimuli and the alienation of subjectivity from its own present by the logic of capitalist labor. Doane’s essentially psychological (Freudian?) argument is that this constant condition of collective trauma is the origin of a schism in our conception of time – between a time characterized by “the most punctual integration of all activities and natural relations into a stable and impersonal schedule” (the time created by railroad logistics, punch-cards and wrist-watches) and the time that takes shape in the experience of cinema, which offers “the technological promise…of immortality, the denial of the radical finitude of the human body, access to other temporalities” and, contra the traumatized time of daily modern life, can be archived, re-captured, indexed, “rematerialized”. Cinema in this case become a collective prosthetic imitation of memory, a mechanized algorithm for the production of the lived time that has been lost in the business of a modernist logic that “spends” time instead of holding onto it.

This new or other cinematic time is constructed around a double absence: the phenomenological gap resulting from the fact that cinema is a juxtaposition of still frames, and therefore fails to reproduce (according to Bergson) true time/movement, and the diegetic gap constituted by editing, which dislocates the linear flow of time. This phantom, uncanny time, resurrected/ “relived”, “haunted” by its own fabricated past, becomes a site for experiments in fresh meaning-making, for the presentation and representation of the kind of life that “results from immanence and embodiment”. Out of perversity or driven by a utopian desire for the impossible, Doane argues that photography/cinema, or at least their proponents, seek to transform the contingent, the arbitrary (the non-contextualized moment, “that which is beyond or resistant to meaning”) into that which is most authentically (because instantaneously) meaningful. From a classicist point of view, this reconfiguration of time into a present of memory (and nostalgic memory of the present) is equivalent to attempting to achieve a sort of alchemy – in spatial terms, to conflate surface and depth.

This argument that cinema exists in a time of its own is curiously echoed (or produced in a postmodernist reverse/mirror effect) in Mark Shiel’s argument for the understanding of cinema as its own “spatial system”, a space that is present/constitutes a present rather than merely a “textual system”, a system of representation. Using the city as a metaphor for cinema as well as the site of (Hollywood) cinema’s very concrete expansionist/imperialist practices, Shiel points out that film has long ceased to be a factor amongst many in the progression of globalization, but constitutes its basic engine – that in a sense globalization is about the colonization of ‘real’ urban space by the space of cinema, by the imaginary of the cinematic presence / present.