From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net
Date: Thu, 06 Aug 1998 00:24:38 -0500
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.  

The provocation was intended as an attempt to think art as a production
inseparable from its consumption (autism as its source), or totally
independent from its separate consumption (spectacle for an audience). 
We did let go of the audience to the extent that it is irrelevant to
artistic production when the latter is seized as a process.  Of course,
as you point out, an audience may enter (or _not_) in composition with
that process, but it remains per se an unessential element of the
process or experience of artistic production.  Since self-pedagogy is or
can be autistic, even the pedagogy of an experience does not require an
audience - nor of necessity that it can be retold.  Is that such an
obviously-absurd-to-disagree-thing?  Did you not raise your desire to
perform for an audience as perhaps distinctive from other arts, in that
an audience was necessary for the art of performance?  Could the art of
performance have autism as its source?  Where should we put the tactile
borders of what _here_ (in the common texts) verges on tautology?

>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. 

We whole-heartedly agreed - and that is why one should also consider the
catatonia and sensory-motor scheme of the spectator, as expectation of
art that can be separated from the living.

>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. 

Yes!  Yes!  The moralism of these aesthetic conceptions (socializing,
naturalizing, geometrizing, etc) has done more harm to creativity than
all social repressions put together.  

>> 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?

Very difficult question, for several reasons - beginning with the fact
that just as the Champlibristes made a point of only mentioning D&G with
one insult and a pile of blank pages, so did D&G, together and
separately, carefully avoid any comment, positive or negative, on the
SI/Debord/etc (incidentally, this was not so in person with Felix).  We
can only guess what their reaction would be to hear one _deviate_ the
concrete rules of abstract machines to describe the difference between
'situation' and 'drift', and pose the question of 'territory' and
'assemblage' such that in one case (ie in a 'situation') the assemblage
extracts the territory by decoding the milieus ("the territoriality of
the assemblage originates in a certain decoding of milieus") and "the
territory makes the assemblage" (territoriality being the envelope of
the assemblage, "home"), but in the second (ie in a line of drift) it is
not the assemblage that extracts the territory nor the territory that
makes the assemblage, but the deterritorialization index of the movement
on a pre-existing territory (homelessness) that succeeds or fails to
constitute an assemblage if it succeeds or fails to coordinate to its
deterritorializing action an absolute decoding of the pre-existing
territory.  The first concrete rule of abstract machines posits that
every assemblage always deploys a territoriality - simply the
territoriality of drift ("le terrain passionnel objectif" said to belong
to the pre-existing territory) appears to result from the line of
deterritorialization ("on peut dériver seul, mais tout indique...",
Debord) and not from an operation of extraction by an assemblage, as if
territoriality now resided _only_ (strange territoriality) on its
extension into lines of deterritorialization or drift.  

Of course one could object that a drift decodes precisely existing
milieus, but the fact is that the drift may or may not succeed in
effectively carrying out this decoding, and yet it still
deterritorializes those that go through it, even when the assemblage
that results is not consistent.  Just wondering then: if a smooth space
is a space where "the absolute is local, precisely because place is not
delimited", is a territoriality _of milieus_ always necessary to an
assemblage?  A situation and a drift may both originate in the autism of
the experience, but can a situation - unlike a drift - ever limit itself
to the autism of an experience?  It is as if in a drift the experience
of a social and natural terrain autistically sufficed itself, but a
situation demanded some measure of 'conviviality' - not a theatre on a
stage, but a theatre in a meadow.  In all likelihood, this does not get
a flow to run between the two - and the cooking is raw, not to say
uneatable.  Hence, they might well be turning in their graves - and only
cutting our heads off could give them satisfaction, despite all of our
pleas for clemency.

>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?

We think so - which is why we emphasized in Cage's writings the
acceptance of the continuum that is, rather than any explicit search for
a line of continuity.  But in the contact ("...simply to wake up to the
very life we're living...") he seeks - there is already implicit an
active and continuous line of escape, just as a line of
deterritorialization or pure drift (to agree with you) permeates his
music - a becoming deterritorialized of musical sound:

"It is certainly not a systematized music, a musical form, that
interests Kafka (...) It isn't a composed and semiotically shaped music
that interests Kafka, but rather a pure sonorous material.  If one
counts the main scenes of sonorous intrusions, one arrives approximately
at the following list: the John Cage-like concert in _Description of a
Struggle_ where the supplicant (1) wants to play the piano because he is
feeling happy; (2) doesn't know how to play; (3) doesn't play at all
("At that moment two gentlemen seized the bench and, whistling a song
and rocking me to and fro, carried me far away from the piano to the
dining table"); and (4) is congratulated for having played so well"
(D&G, "Kafka").  

Lambda C

"Assemblages are already different from strata.  They are produced in
the strata, but operate in zones where milieus become decoded: they
begin by extracting a territory from the milieus.  Every assemblage is
basically territorial.  The first concrete rule for assemblages is to
discover what territoriality they envelop, for there always is one: in
their trash can or on their bench, Beckett's characters stake out a
territory.  Discover the territorial assemblages of someone, human or
animal: "home".  The territory is made of decoded fragments of all
kinds, which are borrowed from the milieus but then assume the value of
"properties": even rhythms take on a new meaning (refrains).  The
territory makes the assemblage.  The territory is more than the organism
and the milieu, and the relation between the two; that is why the
assemblage goes beyond mere "behavior" (hence the importance of the
relative distinction between territorial animals and milieu animals).
(...) The territoriality of the assemblage originates in a certain
decoding of milieus, and is just as necessarily extended by lines of
deterritorialization." (ATP, p. 503-505)


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