horsemouth's friend ben is sitting in a room re-conducting alvin lucier's experiment with the resonant frequencies of rooms and repeated speech. what the repeated sound elucidates is the material properties (the resonant frequencies) of the physical space in which the speaker is. of course the recording is portable and so is (usually) listened to elsewhere (in another room). this is lucier's text that ben 'riffs' off.
'I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.'
but by smoothing out the irregularities of speech lucier/ ben renders it incomprehensible (it is the irregularities of pitch and rhythm that enable sound to carry language). in this it might be taken to be an example of destructive repetition but productive also, in that it reveals the resonant frequencies of the room.
in part, in ben's use of it, there is a complaint about the alienated conditions in which we now find ourselves working but conditions that reveal the material conditions in which we are working (but also the ideological conditions in which we are working). for the zoom/room/ the different room are the rooms in which we work. in the cartoon sisyphus works from home we see sisyphus on the sofa with his laptop and the rock.
the transition of work to zoom (from work(place) to room) reveals somethings about the educative process (for ben's work is teaching) and the process of work that we are seeing afresh.
it being ben there is more.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'the progressing explosion of the atom of 'obedience' (whose stability was allegedly eternal)'
such was the quote from heinrich boll that hannah arendt wove into her on violence. it has (of course) been doctored in the usual horsemouth fashion (with what was subversive placed in brackets).
horsemouth has to warn you up front that in on violence it is fair to say that hannah does not 'get' black power and, like adorno, she finds herself out of sympathy with the 60ies radicals. she despises their fetishisation of violence as a tactic, pointing out that it is at best for marx and engels a symptom, and at least a distraction in the marxist scheme. that it is an under theorised heresy of sartre, sorel and fanon.
'it is the function... of all action... to interrupt what otherwise would have proceeded automatically and therefore predictably'
labour here is the kind of work that keeps you fed, the kind of work you do in consumption, the reproductive work, a repetitive, cyclical reproduction; work here is the kind of production you do of objects that may outlast you; action arendt sees as politics (but to horsemouth is seems it could just as well be art). and these are in a kind of ascending order (would be horsemouth's limited reading).
arendt has a major bugbear with things proceeding automatically and predictably, she doesn't want human society to be a calculable machine, she resists its reduction to this.
just as she did with labour/ work / action in the human condition, she separates out power/ force / authority / violence and (as with labour/ work/ action) it is important that they are kept separate and do not collapse into each other. if power is just violence if it does just grow out of the barrel of a gun then what is the use of any politics,, but if politics is a separate realm then action in that realm can have an effect.
horsemouth is relying on runciman's reading here and may well have to get his own copy.
yesterday faced by the sheer house-brick bulk of the origins of totalitarianism (and not possessing a copy of the human condition) horsemouth took advantage of his down time from the internet to depart into the fields with hannah arendt's on violence (a slim volume). he's about half way through he will attempt to finish it off and make some notes on it (and then return to origins as it were).
today no work and tomorrow no work.
today the beginnings of the paris commune (to be declared tomorrow).
No comments:
Post a Comment