File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_1998/nietzsche.9808, message 57


Date: Tue, 4 Aug 1998 21:58:49 -0400 (EDT)
From: malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: Cage and Nietzsche -- autism


LC wrote:

> We are not sure what exactly you meant by the edge (ie when did it pop
> up?  We cursorily looked back to the texts to see if there was some
> décalage - maybe there was but we did not locate it)- but effectively it
> becomes absurd to disagree when we let go of any notion of the
> importance of an audience (even from a pedagogical viewpoint) in the
> description of the artistic experience.  

Sorry, what I meant was this.  When you first mentioned autism, you wrote:
"(maybe the source of art is autism...)".  Now it seems to me that you would
not have offered this so tentatively, and perhaps would not have used
the rather provocative word "autism", if what you meant was the 
absurd-to-disagree-with thing that I capitulated to.  Note also, that we have
_not_ really let go of the audience -- we simply said that from the point of 
view of the experience of the performer, the audience, the pedagogy, etc., 
only matter to the extent to which they form (or do not form) a part of 
this experience.  See what I mean?  It all borders on tautology.  While, 
on the other hand, to talk about "the autism of art" does not seem to thusly 
border.  

Yet, perhaps this talk of "tautology" misses the point.  Because 
the point, I am beginning to see, is that when one talks about art one must
always stick to talking about _actual experience_.  It might be the
experience of the performer, the composer, the director, the spectator,
the person who tells the epic tale, the person who hears to the epic tale
-- but it must always be on the level of actual lived experience of
_someone_; otherwise one is talking incorrectly.  Otherwise, one rushes
to drown in a self-created swamp of pseudo-thoughts like "art is the 
language for the communication of values" and "art imitates nature". 
Dewey says this over and over and over again, but somehow it can never be 
said enough; too sweet the song of the swamp. 

> in a situation one creates the space and the duration 
> (we are tempted to say something that
> would raise D&G's hair straight up on end: in a 'situation' one
> constitutes the territory by setting up an assemblage: the assemblage
> produces the territory), whereas in a drift one only modulates any
> (pre-existing) spaces by the speed of traversal, by the duration
> experimentally chosen (again we are tempted to say, in a drift, the
> deterritorialization of the movement over a territory produces the
> assemblage, or fails to).

LC, could you, for my edification, talk a bit about why this usage would 
raise D&G's hair?

> We do not doubt that Cage's compositions are
> experimental anti-art, nor even that the emotional disturbance they
> provoke has a politics of decoding our listening to sounds; but does it
> succeed in deterritorializing the performer and the (separate) listener
> - say, as a situation or a drift was intended to do?  

No, but here we hit on another essential difference: I don't think that
deterritorialization is Cage's purpose.  So, for example, in his short
talk on Cunningham, "In This Day...", he says:

"The novelty of our work derives therefore from our having moved away
from simply private human concerns towards the world of nature and 
society of which all of us are a part.  Our intention is to affirm
this life, not to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements
in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is
so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of the way
and lets it act of its own accord."

Am I right in thinking that this is not along the lines of deterritorialization?

I don't want to elaborate on this vs the SI too hastily -- the obvious doesn't
need to be stated and the unobvious, on my part, needs some time to cook.
But if your unobvious cooks faster, it would be the cat's meow if one of
the sauces you served it in was this: 

> Maybe the question
> of the politics and its difference goes back to whether the 'artistic
> production' manages to reach the pure line of a 'submolecular and
> unformed Matter'?


-m


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