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!  ¶ 6:53 AM 1 comments

  Speedup and the middle class professional [reading Paul Virilio, The Original Accident] I should point out that here as often elsewhere in this blog I am not claiming to present new knowledge but trying to answer my own questions, which is a different and not a lesser pursuit. The former, the academic or scientific approach, assumes the theories and discoveries of the past and seeks to supplement, verify, revise or overturn them, whereas I am turning questions over in my often troubled mind, perhaps of no relevance to “new knowledge”. For instance, the story below of the creation of the factory worker has often been told, I am simply updating the (Marxist) theme of the white collar middle class (my class, however wayward I may have been) becoming increasingly proletarianized and pauperized, only with far more illusions than the earlier industrial working class had. Why would the educated elite in particular be so much more unable or unwilling to grasp what is happening to them (speedup, increased work load, pressures and hours, reduced real wages, etc.), compared to their social inferiors of the working class who protested vigorously and briefly threatened revolution. Questions like this intrigue me, and as neither academic nor journalist nor aiming to influence others I merely indulge myself in pursuing them.

I’m interested in the kind of shifts over the last fifty years or so in what it takes for people to be content with what they are in relation to what they do. What I mean by this would be expressed today as the kind of job they tend to have, which earlier would have been considered a vocation or profession. I am referring to the kind of contentment in an earlier age that meant accepting unconsciously, without question, one’s lifelong identity as a librarian, a mechanic, a physician, a mailman, farmer, etc. after a period of apprenticeship. There was even resistance to moving up the ladder, from being, say, a teacher to being an administrator (expressed in the phrase, “kicked upstairs”). Today of course there would still be many who would resist such promotion, but I would guess that the resistance is less. Certainly it would be interesting to explore this statistically. But my general point would probably hold, that today one is looked down upon for being content with one’s vocational identity as if limiting one’s options and showing lack of ambition. To stay at the same level is considered stagnation. In my own profession, that of musician, unless one is moving ahead in cd sales, fees for performance, recognition (visibility), one is disrespected.

To finally link this to Virilio, there has been a shift from substance to movement and acceleration. The new substance, what makes people feel they are real, purposeful, and connected with the world, or at least expect to be connected adequately to the world, is movement. Significantly, career is not confined to the upward path from, say, instructor to full professor but encompasses previously questionable spin-offs--scientists become entrepreneurs, hawking and profiting from their discoveries; sociologists and philosophers become talking heads and media stars; historians go on book tours as part of their career. It is not enough to be one thing and do it well; one must have an entire life of entrepreneurship in order to sit back by one’s private pool with a gin and tonic and feel content. Of course this is only the image of success, the expectation, since of course there is no way to feel actual content when speed has taken over one’s life. So surely there is discontent, as there was in the fifties with the business career, but without analysis, public expression (The Organization Man) or target of criticism. There is no target out there, as “the system” (for the sixties’ activists) or the exploited enraged at the exploiters in the earlier version. In this case the appropriate target is within one’s own most positive, hopeful energies. These cannot be touched without risking the collapse of one’s entire system of life accommodations—family, the trajectory of expected fulfillment, consumption patterns, indeed everything that has come to replace the moral and religious standards by which one can stand apart from and judge one’s life.

This shift is seen as an advance over the old, antiquated system, which is indeed rooted in ancient society. The librarian who got paid poorly because she loved books and desired the social good of literacy was the secular equivalent of the medieval monk, who was socially esteemed so long as he was selfless and sacrificing. He or she has been replaced by an employee who is paid according to accomplishment, perhaps initiating a literacy program and getting it funded, to the applause of all, and is competing with all enterprising others. The goal is that of the state, of the statistician, to increase the number of those who can read, not to communicate a love of reading, of thought, of reflection. To be motivated like the selfless librarian is indeed a handicap to advancement. I am not asking the question of whether this is a better system or not, because our judgment of what better would mean would then have to be asked first. I am asking only how did it come about, and to say this happened because it was an improvement, or even inevitable begs the question.

What is called progress here is actually the same process as that which eliminated the skilled mechanic in favor of the factory worker, who was created largely out of another skilled sector of the population, peasantry and small independent farmers, who were forced off the land, i.e. into poverty, by market competition. The knowledge and skill of trained mechanics as well as farmers, knowledge acquired through a lifetime, was irrelevant to the industrial labor required. Unlike the professions, industrial workers had no or little chance for advancement, but what I’m looking at is their relation to work. Industrial workers, beginning in the 18th century, identified not with their skills, whether or not they were satisfied with a piece of work they had done, but with their location within a process. This process yielded objects and a wage based on following instructions from those who were in control of the knowledge and process. The struggle between craft unions (the AFL) and industrial unions (the CIO) ended in the victory of the latter. It was a victory of mass democracy over the small-producer Jacksonian democracy that de Toqueville had witnessed, dominated by independent skilled workers and professionals.

What has happened to librarians, teachers, doctors, engineers and all the professions of yesteryear is that they have been “liberated” from their dependence on privately acquired knowledge and individualist pride of accomplishment, the ability to make things or perform services according to a certain standards in which they were trained and for which they were respected. They have been industrialized, their knowledge computerized, and they are no longer in control of their work life. This has happened in a way that makes it very difficult for them to sense that they have lost anything of value, and so there is little complaint that gets to the heart of the matter.

For each profession we would have to ask how this occurred, what combination of attraction and necessity brought it about. For doctors, it seems like an advance to become an entrepreneur rather than a professional when the latter is expected to maintain a skill level that is increasingly expanding. The entrepreneur deals with changing situations, utilizing what is available and selling what people are interested in; the professional is easily cast as an elitist and is pushed aside in favor of the one who “meets people’s needs” as the client and not medical knowledge defines them. There is at least a tug of war between the two, as the patient seeks empowerment just as every other customer does. You could say that necessity, the threatened loss of patients for some “traditional” doctors, joins with the attraction of entrepreneurship for others, those for instance who have scanned the potential income stats for the various specializations while in med school and have chosen accordingly. Since the eighties, the increased social status of entrepreneurs in all fields influences this shift. The traditional medical establishment, the journals and respected specialists, struggle to maintain the integrity of the profession in the face of this shift.

The marketplace doctor has not replaced the professional standards doctor but this seems to be the trend. The shift that can be seen as a decline, but why associate it with the creation of the industrial working class in the 19th-20th centuries? Doctors have not been pauperized; in fact they have been thriving financially. The marketplace is the new factory in another sense, that it is the place where what is valued is what others want and not what the professional’s judgment tells him or her to impose. It is where the object of useful knowledge is not, or not exclusively, the body and the tools and skills needed to repair it but the manipulation of patients’ fears and desires for medical procedures to greatest pecuniary advantage. In the name of democratic advance, the patient is the new boss, who can be fooled and stampeded but must ultimately be reckoned with if one wants to develop a practice, just as the old factory boss had a bottom line of production quota and efficient operation. And of course the insurance companies, competing with each other for subscribers’ dollars and the lowest payouts possible, overrule professional standards. The doctors used to have the authority to tell the insurance companies what to pay and what to pay for, now the companies are telling the doctors who is boss. The increasing technologizing of their business also reduces doctors to being a factor in production rather than like the bosses, in charge of the process. The emphasis, as any patient knows, is eliminating the personal relation of doctor and patient in the interest of efficiency and turnover (output). So with their large technical knowledge and training doctors may not be assembly line workers, but they certainly do not live up to their self-image of "independent professionals".

And for musicians, “liberated” from the union and the club owners increasingly since the sixties, are they their own boss now or is the anonymous marketplace? Do they determine what music they will do or, if they wish to be respected and paid a decent amount, do they bow to the market?  ¶ 9:57 AM 0 comments