shakey ground
Saturday, May 16, 2009
  Paul Virilio and improvised music
[reading Steve Redhead, Paul Virilio--Theorist for an Accelerated Culture, 2004] Virilio calls himself a dromologist, dromos means "race" in Greek. He is focused on the speed and acceleration of culture, has been called “the high priest of speed”. His starting point is WWII and military technology; for him that war was never finished, from the point of view of technological development. Speed has continued to accelerate until it has reached the speed of light (internet, cybernetics)--instantaneous, making events and time itself global and no longer local. The human as a local phenomenon, first of all the body, disappears as a cultural given. His concept of the accident is related, since speed as the essence of technological advance brings with it the accident, which is no longer "accidental", i.e. contingent. We have now the "integral accident", that is a necessary part of technological advance, and points to the coming accident which will integrate many disasters through chain reactions. Progress has then reached its finite limit. Accelerated modernity, especially after the end of the Cold War and the impossibility of checking nuclear proliferation, has become dangerous modernity (the terms are Steve Redhead's).

The question for me is in what ways free improvisation draws from current cultural trends, and which trends. Reflecting on Virilio’s categories I am reminded how it is the most contingent music, lacking the substance, the necessity of what is considered significant art. It occurs in real time, instantaneous for players and listeners, then disappears. At whatever speed it goes, no matter how slow or fast, it is still instantaneous, and cannot be criticized with the tools that have been used to analyze art as object. It cannot correct itself and is not responsible for itself any more than Cage's traffic sound outside his window; it is only replaced by the next improvisation, valued in turn for itself. Recording is a futile attempt to capture it and turn it into substance, for it always escapes to the next moment. In this way it is very much a part of our accelerated culture and would not have been conceived of at an earlier age, a post-war phenomenon. Then begins the attraction to what I'm starting to call "absolute" improvisation, which burst the bonds of free jazz in the sixties. Absolute improvisation cannot actually exist but there is the desire to approach a music without givens, as if purified of human hands, non-idiomatic right down to the idiom of each player, a kind of randomizing machine under human control. Cage deplored free improvisation because he said musicians were too steeped in habit to equal pure randomness, such as his coin toss; there would always be the human limitation. But improvisers ignore his strictures, seeking freedom from their limitations of habit.

The accelerated culture is an extension of the myth of progress, which sees the present as necessarily superior to the past. Logically, this should mean that the present is inferior to the future, which is full of promise, as was believed in the Victorian era and has continued in some force in the hopes for specific technologies, such as medical. Yet accelerated culture has broken with the progress myth significantly since, from the time of nuclear competition the future is seen not as glorious and problem-solving but as threatening. The “grand narrative” has collapsed along with the faith that Man will prevail. Celebration of the present, such as the self-congratulation of neo-liberal capitalism after the collapse of Western Communism, has a hollow ring, one with the short reverberation of this month’s advertising slogan. If we were to see the future as having recognized our present shortcomings then we would not celebrate the present as a kind of “last generation”, to be followed by the deluge. It is hard to find any faith, as opposed to hope against hope, that humans will be able to use its wits to overcome the various accelerating calamities multiplying around us. Similarly, the accelerated culture encourages us to avoid looking at what we do from a future perspective, that is critically.

In relation to music, there is a celebration of the present free of criticism, free of the thought that we might some day look back on what we do now and find it wanting, or conversely look at what we did in the past and find it superior. Western artists generally proceeded through a process of criticizing their work, finding problems with it and inventing solutions on their own terms. In my experience this approach is lacking among improvisers; the next improvisation wipes away the last. This is of course not just due to the celebration of the present moment but also to ubiquitous market culture (of which Virilio says little), in which the musical entrepreneur never admits doubts about his or her work. Also the Anglo-American celebration of the hidden artist in every man and woman fits nicely in this uncritical artform. If boosting your self-image and overcoming a sense of inadequacy is part of the picture then you are hardly going to look negatively at your work.

Virilio makes a point about speed creating an aesthetics of disappearance, as in, here this second (instantaneous), gone the next. This parallels the development of photography (I'm also reading Susan Sontag's 1977 book On Photography), which values the multitude of images easily shot by amateurs as highly as those of painstaking professionals (now digital photos and ubiquitous cellphone videos have pushed this even further). The stable object—painting, sculpture, composition—is replaced or at least competes with the unstable, such as cinema, which moves at 24 frames per second, installation art, and improvised music. The art object--the masterpiece (Artaud) and the aura (Benjamin)—disappears in the equal valuation of everything as art. This is all related to the democratizing of art, of which free improvisation is a good example. There is a fine piece in the current London Review of Books by Andrew O'Hagan ("Short Cuts") concerning U-tube, which he calls "the depot of international self-realisation". It links well with Virilio, pointing to the recent instantaneous global success of Susan Boyle's appearance on the UK's Britain's Got Talent. We think of free improvisation as on the other side of celebrity culture, but fifteen minutes (now seconds) of fame, the egalitarianism of everyone as potentially "special", parallels the valuing of every sound and moment, or at least the reluctance to devalue any moment of sound. Here the politics of anti-discrimination reinforces the cultural; every sound has a kind of soul that needs recognition in the light of day, not a dark spot left unexposed (take that, Nietzsche!) Not to mention the relative openness of improvisation to anyone, whether they’ve practiced five minutes or five years on their “sounds”, and the blurring of the amateur/professional distinction, which has something to do with the very nature of this music.

Improvisers have also been highly attracted to electronics (electro-acoustic improvisation, or eai), the core technology for the expansion of the media, providing its speed of response, the ubiquity of the internet, all of which are of significance for Virilio's categories. For traditional, acoustic music the invention of a new instrument has been rare, but with electronic instruments it takes only a year or two for a technology to be dated. This speed of turnover, and the specialized knowledge of what is the latest, is part of the attraction to electronics for many. Moreover, it takes much less time to learn to improvise passably on electronics than on an acoustic instrument. An acoustic player can spend years before being judged proficient, whereas the period for some electronics players is a few weeks before they're on stage and impressing people (I include myself here among those frequently impressed). Even extended techniques on acoustic instruments, which are favored by contemporary improvisers, are much more easily mastered than the elaborate finger and embouchure work of a John Coltrane. The greater popularity of electronics over acoustic instruments among improviser audiences demonstrates that technology speeds up a career just as it gets you from here to there a lot faster.

Virilio says that the now, global real time undivided by time zones, is replacing the local here; history, which is always located in a specific place, disappears into ubiquity. International humanitarianism, for instance, the rationale for American global intervention, recognizes no sovereign states. The instantaneousness of 24-7 engagement with the world through international television and the internet is not just the focus on the now but means that a local event occurs simultaneously everywhere. This is what the virtual means, a substitute for the real (and not, as for Baudrillard, a simulation.) The spectators of a sport event are eclipsed by the television viewers, who must collectively purchase products (implicit in commercial sponsoring) in order to see it. For art, that means not only that the masterpiece is obsolete because everything is art but because it is available around the globe without ever having to see the actual object. Originally this was seen as a great advance in bringing art to more people through books of photographed art (Andre Malraux, The Voices of Silence, 1953), but that was when art was still revered as inhabiting the realm of untouchable heroes. Artists marketing their work today seek to attract buyers by putting it online at a dot com; achieving fame the old-fashioned way is left to the increasingly popular "outsider artist".

By contrast, for the improvised music session, unrecorded or recorded only for participants, is very much here, occurring at one place and time; there is no virutality, no participation without the physical body being actually in the room. In this sense free improvisation escapes the ubiquity of mediated experience; our music is for us, players and listeners, and none other. I often joke, when there are only a couple of listeners, that each gets a larger share of the music than if there were more present. But it is no joke; small-scale and intimate is somehow as natural to this music as it once was to blues. But then I am not typical of improvisers; the stage, where musicians display their developed styles of playing to a hopefully growing audience, has trumped the session. Whether the session will be able to assert itself against the scene remains to be...seen.

I read this over, it sounds like a mish-mash, but, sorry, it's how my mind works on only a quarter cup of coffee. Imagine a half-cup!
 
Comments:
Like electronics when combined with acoustic instruments,and it is nice where you've gone in unforced fashion;some "radio" on "Deburring Tool";a disc I continue to spin in fascination.But there seems to be some "push" toward,"groundbreaking music",comprised of all electronics,that is devoid of "communication"...and don't like some effete critic telling me the disc is "great".I think this sort of improv goes off the cliff,and can't be legitimized;it's a splattered dead end...Thanks,Bill
 
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Someone once asked me, "How can you be so sure of yourself?" The kind of certainty that reaches the level of expression is only through active self-questioning, not the presentation of ideas that look convincing (the job of lawyers). Toleration and pluralism begins at home, far better than tolerating the fools we run into. In the home of the mind we let the fools in the door and have a good laugh-and-think time together.

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