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CLASS MEETING AT FOX AND FIDDLE ON BLOOR

On Tuesday, 3 March, we'll be meeting at the Fox and the Fiddle at 10.00a rather than in the Drama Centre. I will pay for coffee or tea for everyone as you like.

On Cage, Attali, and the dimensions of Noise

Steven Conway

DRA1003H1S

Prof. T. Nikki Cesare-Schotzko

Response #8

27 February 2015

Attali’s argument is seductive, ridiculous, awesome, at times a leap of faith, at times undeniably true. I want to dissect it and discuss it at every turn, but perhaps I should reign myself in to the book’s title, and the relationship between the two constructs that form its core dialectic: noise and music.

Though Attali’s project is intended to apply to the history of human kind, it is made possible and legible due to the particular musical moment in which he wrote, of which John Cage is one of the most prophetic and influential philosophers. Like Cage before him, Attali is attempting to re-define how we understand what we hear, and what music’s relationship is to the world around it. For Cage, all music is the “organization of sound” (Cage 3). Within his philosophy, a person is able to go out into the street and, metaphorically, hear an orchestra. Consequently, that person can compose a work using only sounds from the street that can be played by musicians in an orchestral context (assuming that the context is defined by the setting and ensemble rather than the use of “traditional” orchestral instruments, which, by the mid-20th century, was becoming a more realistic prospect due to the technological innovations that prefigured parallel changes in politics and art, re: Attali). The context serves to categorize sound as either “music” (an aesthetic product created from human intent) or “noise” (anything outside the realm of the music), but does nothing to affect the quality of the sound itself, only how it is apprehended. The implication of this is that one can hear “music” anywhere and everywhere, and that all it takes to “create” it is the agency of the listener (which can be guided and influenced by social, political, and aesthetic norms).

Cage’s theories prefigured the broadening of aesthetic boundaries in popular music through the advancement of various technologies (most notably, recording technologies), which allowed people to hear sounds in a musical context that were previously considered un-musical. However, the Cage-ian performative mode of listening (ie. hearing an orchestra in the street) is not a dominant one, and people generally still make a distinction between “noise” and “music” in what they hear. It is nevertheless important to recognize that the moment in history in which Cage wrote allowed for the potentiality imbued in his philosophies to be aesthetically viable. This potentiality means that noise is more accurately understood as a social code rather than a sonic attribute, constituted by an aberration from norms, often described (both in music and the language of social life) as dischord or dissonance from harmony. It is critical to acknowledge this aesthetic precedent (ie. that all sound is potentially either noise or music) in order to recognize Attali’s treatment of noise as the basis for his theoretical model and understanding of/“through” music.

For Attali, music is not as rigidly defined as the organization of sound, but rather thought of as “noise” in the abstract given a form (Attali 10). Throughout the chapter, Attali variously characterizes noise as both sonic and social, both audible and metaphorical. There is background noise, political noise, social noise, harsh noise, white noise, industrial noise, visual noise, spatial noise, among a seemingly infinite number of classifications. Noise is no longer specifically an aberration from norms; it is the material from which norms are created and destroyed. Within Attali’s (explicitly theoretical and un-quantifiable) project, all human history is a chaotic mass of noise, and it is through its organization into music that we are able to understand it, herald it, and potentially even affect it. Attali seems less abstract in how he characterizes music, acknowledging it as an art form and sonic medium, albeit one that has exploded in its aesthetic potentiality at the time he is writing to include all of the sounds of daily life. If the organization of society (or lack thereof) is manifested (literally and metaphorically) in its sounds, then understanding it necessitates a specific mode of listening that, as with Cage, distinguishes music from noise by the determination of the listener. However, if noise can be made into this all-encompassing and relativistic construct, then is the idea of noise as a sonic property obsolete? Assuming that noise is still understood as a sonic attribute in some sense (if even colloquially), how can we make noise in 2015?

Works Cited

Attali, Jacques. “Listening.” Noise: the political economy of music. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 3-20. Print.

Cage, John. “The Future of Music: Credo.” Silence: 50th anniversary edition. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. 3-6. Print.

"It is a peculiarity of cultural production, which inhabits a sphere irreducible to the immediate socioeconomic world of its emergence, that we cannot “read off” its characteristics from a sober analysis of that world. Put another way, South Africa under Apartheid, though it had antinomians who created some incredible music, was not the source of the most fucked-up, primitive, apeshit, irate, no-holds-barred punk rock. Perhaps it should have been in some record collectors’ dreams, but things just don’t always work that way. Derry in the 1970s produced the Undertones, a brilliant band but not one whose sound is predicted by the extreme conditions in which they lived, except perhaps as mirror-like inversion. Relatively calm, even boring, social-democratic Sweden, on the other hand, was the source of Anti-Cimex, Crudity, DTAL, Shitlickers, SOD, etc. Off-the-charts rage captured for posterity on vinyl. Tacka gud."

an additional recommended reading for WEEK 8 -- courtesy of Steven Conway

WEEK EIGHT Silence Sound Noise

Readings

Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, “Interview with John Cage,” TDR10, 2 (1965): 50–72. (online)

Fred Moten, “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream,” in In the Break

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1–24.

Jacques Attali, “Listening,” in Noise (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 3–20.

Performance

John Cage, 4’33” (1952)

Amiri Baraka, Somebody Blew Up America (2001)

Stephanie Zidel on Elswit's "So You Think You Can Dance Does Dance Studies"

The Unfortunate Politics of Dancing Bodies A Response to Elswit’s “So You Think You Can Dance Does Dance Studies”

I will admit, before we begin, that as a young woman and dancer I was a dedicated follower of the Fox program So You Think You Can Dance. I was one of those viewers who cried at Tyce Diorio’s choreography to “This Woman’s Work”, danced by Ade Obayomi and Melissa Sandvig, which was later affectionately nicknamed “The Cancer Dance”. At the time that choreography first aired, I was very much invested in the program and its contestants; I was overtaken by the “affective spectatorship” that Elswit pins on So You Think You Can Dance. Elswit asserts that Obayomi and Sandvig were appropriate vessels for Diorio’s choreography: “In the introductory clips, neither Sandvig nor Obayomi declare any personal associations to cancer survivors, but this lack of a personal story allows them to take on the roles Diorio has ‘written’ for them.” (8) Here, the choreographer’s explicit emotional involvement with the subject matter eclipses the dancers’ personal connection to the dance. Regardless, there are many other factors contributing to how the audience sees Obayomi and Sandvig in the dance. For instance, their bodies both stand in contrast to the young, white majority on the show. Obayomi, a black man, and Sandvig, the oldest contestant on the show, carry significant “difference” in their bodies.

Diorio’s choreography and concept highlight physical struggle. The theme of the piece does that outright, being about a struggle within the body against breast cancer. Additionally, there is the actual physical demand of the dance. “This Woman’s Work” makes the viewer conscious of Obayomi’s body, in particular. The dance is particularly demanding for the male partner, whose most notable task is to lift Sandvig many times throughout the short piece. As one judge called him, Obayomi was regarded as the show’s, “strong black ‘gentle giant’.” (10) Why must we call him a gentle giant? His body is gendered and racialized by the program’s judges. The term “gentle giant” plays against some black stereotypes and reinforces others. It says that while he is a physically powerful man, he is gentle, not a threat; in other words, despite what the colour of his skin and the size of his body might suggest, Obayomi is not a thug.

To have Obayomi’s powerful (yet gentle, as we are told) body as a focal point of the dance changes how we see both the dance and his body. Firstly, we see Obayomi as the physical protector of his dance partner. We see him as a means of support, which challenges the popular narrative surrounding black male bodies. His blackness does not necessarily make the dance about race, although it might if we were not explicitly told in the piece’s televised preamble that the piece is about breast cancer. Because of how it is set up within the show’s context, “This Woman’s Work” cannot be about anything other than breast cancer awareness. While Obayomi’s blackness is acknowledged elsewhere in the program’s season, in the context of this piece, there is no room for it. Instead, this dance is about a woman battling her own body, whose strong partner is there to support her when she is not strong enough to support herself.

Being supposedly about the weak female body (which is a problem for another response), the piece has to make room for Sandvig. As Elswit describes, “The healthy body of the pale, crying, ballet-trained dancer...accords with the illness narrative of the choreographer’s invisible friend”. (8) We know that, at 29 years old, Sandvig was the oldest contestant on that season of So You Think You Can Dance. Perhaps her age can in some ways account for her “imperfect technique” because as we age our bodies do things differently. Compared to the twenty-year-olds she was competing against, Sandvig’s body was unavoidably different, but this fit neatly into the dance’s narrative, wherein a woman is confronted with her changing body in opposition to her.

While she acknowledges them, Elswit does not make room in her discussion of “This Woman’s Work” for how the dancers’ bodies might semiotically fit into the narrative of the show. For a show that seeks to find “America’s favourite dancer”, the attention on this piece strays remarkably far from the dancers in it. Instead, we focus on the story behind the choreography to the point where it obscures its own composition.

Shawna Blain on Samba: The Body Articulate

WEEK SEVEN Dance Dance Revolution

Readings

Barbara Browning, “Samba: The Body Articulate,” in Samba: Resistance in Motion

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 1–34.

André Lepecki, “Exhausting Dance—To Be Done with the Vanishing Point,” in Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics ofMovement (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 123–31.

Kate Elswit, “So You Think You Can Dance Does Dance Studies,” TDR 56, 1 (2012): 133–42. (online)

Performance

Matthew Bourne, Swan Lake (1996)

Melissa Sandvig and Ade Obayomi (choreographer, Tyce Diorio), This Woman’s Work (aka “Cancer Dance”),So You Think You Can Dance (2009)

Presented in conjunction with Gerard & Kelly's installation Kiss Solo on view in the museum galleries, Reusable Parts/Endless Love is a score-based, interactive performance for a rotating cast of four dancers, presented on a potentially infinite loop. The dancers transmit and transform the instructions for a kiss between a man and a woman into a machine-like production of unscripted representations of intimacy. Each manifestation of the work begins where the previous one left off, accumulating continuously over the course of these two days of performance.

"The Kiss," performed by two dancers at the Guggenheim and photographed on an iPhone.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/arts/design/01tino.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Julija Pesic on The Emancipated Spectator

Michael Fried's "Art and Objecthood": The problems of comparison in historical theory

Comparison is always a valuable and strengthening practice; it aids in comprehension, in broadening horizons, and when need be, in forming concrete definitions. In Michael Fried’s 1967 essay, “Art and Objecthood”, Fried joins the historic discourse involved in defining artistic movements through the practice of comparison. The central argument of the essay is predicated on the belief that when compared to modernist painting, the form of art known as minimal or literalist art is, as Fried suggests: “antithetical to art” (153). While this is a bold critique of any form of art, Fried proceeds with an argument that suggests that literal art is “alien”(153) simply because of its similarities to theatre, otherwise known as “the negation of art” (153). While upon a first read, Fried’s essay might prove emotionally difficult for any artist or theorist of the theatre, what follows will attempt to explore the heavy-handed values and perspectives espoused in Fried’s article, as well as turn the tables and explore the constructive ways that we might apply Fried’s theories about the spectator of literal art to the spectator of a theatrical performance.

To begin, I feel it is important to recognize the context of Fried’s essay. Published in 1967, “Art and Objecthood” is situated in the historical cross-roads of modernism and post-modernism. 1967 saw Derrida publish his three books that were instrumental in the development of post-structuralist thought: Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena, and Writing Difference. It was also in 1967 that Barthes, the confirmed structuralist, began to shift his philosophies to a post-structuralist framework and publish “The Death of the Author” the next year. Despite the irony of referencing “The Death of the Author” in an attempt to understand a piece of writing within its historical context, it is important to historicize this essay because it functions from such a different ideological framework from what we are accustomed to today.

Furthermore, it is crucial to remember that although Fried’s argument in “Art and Objecthood” certainly abducts the form of theatre, his attention is wholeheartedly directed to a criticism of literal art. Indeed, the theatre is simply a means of comparison. Furthermore, from Fried’s loyally structural and modernist perspective within the discourse of modern art, it is no surprise that theatre should be considered antithetical to art. Indeed, traditional modernism is predicated on the individual in every sense: the structurally sound individual sign, the individual artist, and the individual art form. Fried articulates this modernist fear of artistic intersection, artistic synthesis, and ‘low art’ in section seven of his essay.

As well as these distinctly limiting modernist perspectives, there are two aspects of the theatrical that I feel Fried fails to take into consideration. The first is in regard to the narrative. Fried criticizes theatre and literal art for a “preoccupation with time – more precisely, with the duration of the experience” (166-7). He places this understanding of time as “simultaneously approaching and receding” (167) in binary contrast with: “a continuous and perpetual present – that the other contemporary modernist arts, most notably poetry and music, aspire” (167). Since narrative is inherently dependant on the passing of time, this leads one to question what Fried might think of the modernist novel? Is any narrative necessarily antithetical to modernist sensibilities? What of the modernist stream-of-consciousness form that at once understands the world within the “simultaneous approaching and receding” of the “perpetual present”?

As well as this unwitting negation of narrative form, although his more nuanced reasons for comparing literal art and theatre (as I will discuss below) are genuine, he seems to forget some other central tenets of theatre. For example: in his opening discussion, he suggests that literalists disregard modernist painting for the following reasons: “the relational character of almost all painting, and the ubiquitousness…of pictorial illusion”(149). Indeed, with a different perspective, one could easily argue that the relation of shapes that Fried refers to can equally be understood as the relation of characters upon which much theatre forms it’s narrative. Similarly, although it is time-contingent, the proscenium stage in its bare or occupied form can certainly be considered a form of pictorial illusion.

Despite these faults, there is undoubtedly wisdom to be gleaned from applying these theories of literal art to the theatrical experience. Fried’s discussion of literal art does indeed resonate with the type of spectatorship practiced in the theatre. Specifically, Fried acknowledges the importance of “objecthood” (152), that on a stage or in a gallery, “must somehow confront the beholder” (154) ultimately making them self-aware of their relationship to the work of art. More on this Tuesday.....

Works Cited

Fried, Michael. "Art and Objecthood." Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1998. 148-72. Print.

David Harvey discusses capitalist contradictions, the loss of meaningful jobs and alternatives to the current system.

Walking Away From Paradigms

This weeks readings inspired me a lot. I started by reading Tobin Siebers’ “Disability Experience on Trial” and it reminded me of my shift in academia from Urban Planning to Social Sciences, especially the first year of my Master’s Degree when I continuously got blank faces while trying to express the physicality of public spheres. In the mindset of social sciences public sphere was a completely abstract sphere where people interacted which equaled Internet and streets. In urban planning though, definition of public sphere was intensely physical: parks, streets, squares, other urban open areas plus so many semi-public, semi-private areas of human interaction like public transportation to public libraries and hospitals. Though I think the more abstract/theoretical definition of public sphere in social sciences discipline is worthy of consideration it has no value when faced with George Lane’s experience of crawling up two floors to get to the courtroom. Ableism is such an important issue, which is insistently made invisible by the bias carved in the physical environment that “we” are all “able”. There are many cases even in new buildings where disabled-access is neglected. (But even if all new buildings starting from today is made to be accessible to all disabled people the cities themselves are not made for that.) I found Siebers’ article very interesting for another reason too: the concept of “architecture of sex” is very important and significant. It is not just the biases of doctors and society that keeps disabled people away from practicing sex, it is also again the physicality of the very nature of all the constructed spaces of the city. (Tobin Siebers’ article discusses the issue from quite a first world perspective though. It should be insistently noted that in many cultures disabled people are seen as a shame for their families and are not allowed to socialize at all.)

The most important point in Siebers’ article is the reality of identity, where in the disability experience the identity is not just a social fiction but clearly a normative understanding in society carved in the very physical nature of the human environment. (This may connect well to all the Eugenic discussions of early 20th century.)

José Esteban Muñoz’s article approached the identity politics in a more fluid nature, (not mentioning the physicality of ableist environmental paradigm), but defining the varieties of queer and colored experiences of various artists. Muñoz’s article is a great example to destabilize both orthodox and heterodox (counter) identities of the modern public sphere.

Muñoz’s article actually reminded me of a body of Ursula Le Guin’s literature from the short story of “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” to the novel “The Eye of the Heron”. Le Guin always advocates for potentials beyond the given, potentials beyond simplistic dichotomies and ego-centric stubbornness of defending positions for the positions’ sake. In “The Eye of the Heron” moving away is a solution, walking away from the “given” and “presented” choices. Here the theory constructed by Muñoz is actually a theory of “walking away”, disidentification is a position, which queers the center by not noticing it or misunderstanding it (on purposely or not). And I loved the definition of Muñoz’s queer: "One possible working definition of queer that we might consider is this: queers are people who have failed to turn around to the "Hey, you there!" interpellating call of heteronormativity." (Muñoz, 33) This is a great example (definition) of “walking away” from presented paradigms.

Works Cited

José Esteban Muñoz, “Performing Disidentifications,” in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 1– 36. 

Tobin Siebers, “Disability Experience on Trial,” in Material Feminisms, eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 291–307. 

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