Thomas Hirschhorn

http://www.renaissancesociety.org/show/hirschhorn/index.html

Michelangelo Pistoletto

http://www.gnam.arti.beniculturali.it/pistoletto.htm

http://www.galerietanit.com/bios/pistoletto/pistoletto.htm

http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/~hstockha/neu/html/pistoletto.htm

Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation

It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition.

Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different everything is not the same. Everything is not the same as the time when of the composition and the time in the composition is different. The composition is different, that is certain.

The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing. Nothing else is different, of that almost any one can be certain. The time when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of that composition of that perhaps every one can be certain.

Distinction between "composition" and "form". Composition is an activity, perhaps even a performance…Form indicates formal properties, something must have these properties…generally a "thing" if not a unified whole then something which can be referred to as distinct…a composition can include many forms…but it's harder to think of a form including many compositions…the distinction may not be important but…as formalism has specific (disciplinary) histories and tends to become or have become mired in doctrine I have the urge to separate them. On the other hand to polarize composition as performative/open/liberatory and form as limitation would be false and not my intention.

Modernism as a period of cultural production with its roots at the turn of the century, tended to look for radically new forms. The avant garde gestures indicated that older forms of expression were no longer adequate for the new social historical moment. With modern artists such as Picasso, Stein, Joyce and Schoenberg one has the feeling that the pieces of the "code" (language music etc.) have been taken apart and reorganized or reinvented. As Michael Witt states in relation to Godard's avant-gardism "Godard's view of the cinematograph is entirely in keeping here with his polemics of the past five decades generally, where priority is always accorded representations in any art form born of a quest for expression outside the regulatory constraints of accumulated aesthetic formulae. In other words, Godard is ultimately interested in Art, and the cinematograph is a singularly fresh art form. as Jean Epstein insisted long before, the impactof radical formal novelty far outweights questions of localized narratives or representations: every meter of film serves to reveal and inform, to directly communicate a savage reality 'before names and before the law of words." (Witt, 43).

Brian O'Connor, in his introduction to The Adorno Reader, explains that for Adorno the formal qualities of a work of modern art should provoke "the experience of contradiction without naming society directly." The work must express the experience of modern society—its real truth—is that of contradiction, and art must somehow express this….Adorno finds something uniquely apt about the dissonant, atonal qualities of the music of Arnold Schoenberg in a society which, contrary to appearance, is dissonant. As Richard Wolin puts it: 'the fragmentariness of the de-aestheticized works of art originated in opposition to the concept of totality and the false reconciliation that concept implies.'" (O'Conner, 17)

These quotes from Clement Greenberg's influential: "Modernist Painting" 1960 will help inform our discussion of what is at stake in a modernist sense of "formal" innovation.

I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant. Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive of Kant as, the first real Modernist.
The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. Kant used logic to establish the limits of logic, and while he withdrew much from its old jurisdiction, logic was left all the more secure in what there remained to it.

As the modernist project waned, with the advent of pop art and conceptualism and minimalism in visual art (precursors to postmodernism) and post serial music, etc. in the era of post structuralism in which Derridian ideas of "writing" were to dominate/influence, and as semiotic "reading" of work, at least in visual art became the metaphor for a way of looking at art, discussions of form or materiality (beyond language structures, i.e. their replication in cinematic structure as articulated by Christian Metz) lacked an organizing principle or sense of urgency.

One enduring idea of formal importance has come from Marxist /materialist thinkers whose ideas necessarily articulate some sense of homology, reflection or resemblance between artistic and economic/material/social/ideological structures. Simplistic articulations of "reflection" theory have been critiqued yet our sense of art as replicating the "logic" of the historical period (Jameson) or even being premonitory (Attali) remains persuasive.

The idea however that changing the cultural codes, composition etc. will change the social structures which underlie it is rarely claimed. However, it would seem that artists who see themselves as critically engaged but not "message" makers must hold out for some possibility that activity in the cultural sphere can at least "represent" aspects of thought which the dominant culture suppresses or undervalues.

Attali goes further, he suggests that Music is the place to experiment with new harmonies or dissonances of the organization of society and perhaps consciousness: "Music is prophetic. Why? If we consider music to be a kind of code, we can see that there are many different ways of organizing that code: different melodies, different rhythms, different genres. Moreover, we can explore these different forms of organization much more easily, much more rapidly, than we can explore different ways of organizing reality." (From Attali's talk in 2001)
(in class Matt played a few minutes from a selection of "free jazz" compositions…to the degree that each sounded like a complete, "sensible" but very different sonic/being organization it was a believable contention.)

"Beneveniste himself notes that even with a linguistic event of the sort described by him the speaking subject is not really in control of his or her own subjectivity. To begin with, the subject's discourse is constrained by the rules of language; it can only speak by means of a pre-existing linguistic system. Moreover, "language" must here be understood in the broadest possible sense, as encompassing not only the operations of denotation, but those of connotation. In other words, every utterance must be conceived as having various levels of signification, and issuing from multiple voices. It is spoken not only by the palpable voice of a concrete speaker, writer, or cluster of mechanical apparatuses, but the anonymous voices of cultural codes which invade it in the form of connotation. As Barthes remarks in S/Z, "Alongside of each utterance, one might say that off-stage voices can be heard: they are the codes: in their interweaving, these voices (whose origin is 'lost' in the vast perspective of the already-written) de-originate the utterance…" These "off-stage" voices belong to earlier discourses; they repeat what has already been said, written or filmed, and to a very large degree determine what can now be said, written or filmed."

(p. 50 Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics).

This sense of a soundtrack in complex relation with the "image" or even "instruments" of its production continues as Silverman begins to discuss the further attenuation of the autonomy of the subject which is, "further qualified by the inclusion of the unconscious within the semiotic argument…Benveniste suggests that a discourse unfolds simultaneously along more than one axis, and that it has its origins in a split subject; he proposes that is, that a discourse contains a latent as well as a manifest level, and that it issues from an unconscious as well as a conscious speaking subject. The latent discourse can only be discovered through the manifest one, just as the unconscious subject can only be reached through the conscious one. Both projects require a student who has been schooled in psychoanalytic interpretation, and who is as attentive to the gaps in the discourse as to its manifest content…

Benveniste suggests in this passage that those moments of seeming silence within and around discursive events—those moments when language would appear to cease, and with it subjectivity—are not really silent at all. They are filled with the inaudible sounds of a second discourse, a discourse of which the subject remains oblivious. " (51)

Michele Chion, Audio Vision, Sound on Screen, 1990

Michele Chion's articulation of the category of the "acousmatic" (sounds who's source we don't see) and his insistence that the soundtrack has no frame, and in a way no coherence (independent of the image) is provocative in relation to the ideas (above) of "off stage" voices of the father, ideology, socially dominant…as well as making me wonder where this metaphor breaks down. That is, in the "real" world….where is the off stage space? The one designated by Barthes in the quote above the "off stage" is the always already present "context" for my utterance. The of stage metaphor reminds us that we only control or construct our meanings to a degree…perhaps even as much through our performance as our literal utterance…but this image of a kind of "controlling" or contesting or otherwise more originary voice which doesn't come from me but which forces me to speak the ideologically dominant. [quote from Kaja woman speaking dominant discourse] seems to replicate a more simplistic construction of ideological hierarchy which is deconstructed by Foucault/Judith Butler etc. al who postulate that the entanglement with power (like that of the symbolic order) is a precondition of becoming a Subject. so these whispering voices who fill in silences and statements alike are neither mine, nor not mine, but ours. Of course the affiliation of the nondiegetic/acousmatic "voice of god" voice over in documentary film (for instance) with the voice of the father/cultural authority has been well explored by Silverman and other theorists of the cinematic soundtrack. However, This possibility of sharing (vocal?) acoustic emanation even as a metaphor (for it seems more possible to imagine a sound coming from "no where" which we all produce…like a harmonic…than an image…can we picture an image whose source is not present or an image we 'create together'…) the importance is in the real and metaphoric possibilities for "understanding" and thinking differently which sound may offer. In fact even Chion, who speaks in phenomenological, rather than philosophical terms about sound, reminds us that like our tendency to identify power as localizable in a "source" the idea of a sounds "source" is also somewhat of a fiction. "For sound and cause, though quite distinct, are almost always confused. But surely this confusion is inscribed also t the very heart of our experience itself, like and unsettling knot of problems.

¶ For example, the sound of a shoe's heel striking the floor of a reverberant room has a very particular source. But as sound, as an agglomerate of many reflections on different surfaces, it can fill as big a volume as the room in which it resonates. In fact, no matter how precisely a sound's source can be identified, the sound in itself is by definition a phenomenon that tends to spread out, like a gas, into what available space there is.

¶ In the case of ambient sounds, which are often the product of multiple specific and local sources (a brook, bird songs), what is important is the space inhabited and defined by the sound, more than its multisource origin…" Chion states that the more reverberant a sound is the more it refers to its space of audition and the more acoustically dead it is it refers to its source.
characterizations of the relation between sound and image and on and off-screen space.

characterizations of the relation between sound and image and on and off-screen space.

Is there an auditory scene?
"The Image"=The Frame [the frame is the constant container of 'the image' which is less real]

There is No auditory Container for Sounds
there is no frame for sound "If we can speak of an audiovisual scene, it is because the scenic space has boundaries, it is structured by the edges of the visual frame. Film sound is that which is contained or not contained in an image ; there is no place of the sounds, no auditory scene already preexisting in the soundtrack—and therefore, properly speaking, there is no soundtrack." 68

The Acousmatic [sounds one hears without seeing their cause]
"Pierre Schaeffer, describes "sounds one hears without seeing their originating cause." Radio, phonograph, and telephone, all which transmit sounds without showing their emitter, are acousmatic media by definition."72 There is also mention of acousmatic music which is made for recorded medium. One would imagine that computer music is, to a degree acousmatic…or rather that it troubles this category as the "source" may not be a phenomenological event but a digital "event" and therefore not witnessable as "source."

Chion designated "visualized" sound as the opposite of acousmatic. Here you see the source.

The Question of Off-screen Space:
Onscreen, Off-screen, Nondiegetic

Onscreen is "visualized" sound, offscreen is acousmatic, and "to designate sound whose supposed source is not only absent from the image but is also external to the story world, I shall use the term nondiegetic. This is the widespread case of voiceover commentary and narration and, of course, musical underscoring." (73)

Do Exceptions Disprove the Rule : [Chion complicates his former three-part diagram with new categories]

A topological and Spatial Perspective [talks about a sense of "topology" that is a kind of topographic/spatialized map]

Ambient Sound(Territory-sound)
"envelops a scene and inhabits its space, without raising the question of the identification or visual embodiment of its source: birds singing, church bells ringing. We might also call them territory sounds, because they serve to identify a particular locale through their pervasive and continuous presence." (75)

Internal Sound
"although situated in the present action, corresponds to the physical and mental interior of a character…breathing, moans heartbeats …objective-internal sounds….mental voices, memories…subjective-internal sounds…"

"On-the Air" Sound
"…sounds in a scene that are supposedly transmitted electronically as on-the-air—transmitted by radio, telephone, amplification, and so on—sounds that consequently are not subject to 'natural' mechanical laws of sound propagation…On-the-air sounds, usually situated in the scene's real time, enjoy the freedom of crossing boundaries [space and time] of cinematic space." These therefore are also profoundly "indexical" sounds (in Peircian terms) because they bring together two or more absent states…or they point in that way…that is a person listening to a prerecorded voice…the voice points to the absent individual but also through its acoustic specifics (i.e. its timbre, various bg sounds etc.) a mode of recording (i.e. an inadvertently recorded sound on a video recording of a childs party at the zoo) and another location…as well as the present of the listening…the acoustics of the room the voice is listened in must also be taken into account in its reproduction.

Perhaps this is a moment to temporarily abandon conceptualizing the compositional field/arena/atmosphere/what one operates in or with and return to Jameson who gives a historical or "periodizing' description of the difficulty of conceptualizing the field of action/effect/context in what he calls "late capitalism".

As in the case of computer music, and Chion suggests all sound (at least in reproduction but it would seem also in presentation) there is a confusion of "source". The difficulty of locating where, for instance, power/voice of authority emanates from, is a political as well as a cultural problem.

From Fredric Jameson, "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (1991)

Jameson finds the computer as a machine "of reproduction rather than production" (37) an element of our "hysterical sublime" in which the object of the sublime is no longer nature or the divine (as in Burke or Kant) but some kind of complex late capitalism/technological other, to be one reflection/manifestation of this troubling of source. The sublime as Jameson reminds us is a representational or aesthetic problem "the sublime becomes not only a matter of sheer power and of the physical incommensurability of the human organism with Nature but also of the limits of figuration and the incapacity of the human mind to give representation to such enormous forces." (34) Our new technology does not (Jameson asserts) "possess the same capacity for representation [as that of the modern era] : not the turbine…not the baroque elaboration of pipes and conveyor belts, nor even the streamlined profile of the railroad train—all vehicles of speed still concentrated at rest—but rather the computer, whose outer shell has no emblematic or visual power, or even the casings of the various media themselves, as with that home appliance called television which articulates nothing but rather implodes, carrying its flattened image surface within itself." (37)
These new machines of reproduction "make very different demands on our capacity for aesthetic representation than did the relatively mimetic idolatry of the older machinery of the futurist movement…"(37) For Jameson it's not about showing the technology, i.e. pictures of cameras and films with movie cameras in them but representing what they stand for, or embody. Thus he does find that in some postmodernist text and particularly architecture a representation or an aesthetic of the new machines of reproduction and simulation (who surely trouble the idea of "source") emerges. These representations and their limits are not however about technology per se, rather Jameson claims they are an attempt to come to terms with the big other of our moment, not nature or the divine but labyrinth of late capitalism. "I want to suggest that our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely the whole world system of a present-day multinational capitalism. The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult fore our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself." (38)
Although Jameson does not discuss sound or music, it seems to me that much contemporary computer music and digital art which attempts to translate the data/code available through computers and the internet, this "immense communicational and computer network", works such as Mark Brady's recent piece which translated the data flows from music software downloading in real time, to sounds. Or an older work by Nancy Patterson which tied the computation of the stock exchange to a skirt whose hem rose and fell with the strength or weakness of the markets.
How do these problems of "source" relate to questions of composition? Well again I would say that we have to think of ways to compose which somehow "include" or don’t' preclude all that is "extra diegetic" or "on-the-air" sound. Sounds and voices in the broadest sense.
Now, Jameson also discusses space and time. He constructs an argument about the domination of space in relation to time (somewhat opposed, but not entirely to Virilio's conception of Speed as our organizing principle). I think what Jameson means is that we privilege space (real estate, surface, etc.) over historical time. Thus we don't conceptualize different futures. And even in our understanding of space, our spatial logics are confused…we go in the "back door" and loose ourselves in mirrored and phantasmagoric spaces (The hotel Bonaventure is his example).
This emphasis on space (and remember space self destruction) in Marxists sense, retains an ability to give continuity that allows for a collective reimagining, is fractured, flattened by t and time are surely part of a field or matrix of composition) is in part, due to what Jameson calls a "crisis of historicity" "a new and original historical situation is which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach." (25) That is, for Jameson the sense of history which, although perhaps not teleological (heading to the capitalist systems inevitable self destruction) was/is a way to comprehend a collective state of being, its causes and possible changes, ("to organize its past and future into coherent experience" (25) this is fractured by the simulacrum. "The new spatial logic of the simulacrum can now be expected to have a momentous effect on what used to be historical time. The past is thereby itself modified: what was once, in the historical novel as Lukács defines it, the organic genealogy of the bourgeois collective project—what is still…the retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of our collective future—has meanwhile itself become a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum…the past as "referent" finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts." (18)
These are "texts" in a post structuralist Derridian sense, that is endless deferrals without the real referent (of history) to anchor them.) This lack of genuine historicity also makes it impossible to map our current experience "Yet this mesmerizing new aesthetic mode [nostalgia, pastiche] emerged as an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way. It cannot therefore be said to produce this strange occultation of the present by its own formal power, but rather merely to demonstrate, through these inner contradictions, the enormity of a situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience." (21)

If there is a crisis in historicity what is the "time" of the composition what does the time of the composition mean. Its past present and future…The relations of past present and future which it constructs? This is something which we will bring up with Godard.

To continue with Jameson and space in the era of compromised time/history. Spatial logic takes over from time/history and the syntagmatic. The syntagmatic is the signifying chain, this chain implies a kind of causality (source?) for each new term in the "utterance". Jameson creates a parallel between this breakdown of historicity/sytagmatic logic to Lacan's idea of schizophrenia.

"Lacan describes schizophrenia as a breakdown in the signifying chain, that is, the interlocking syntagmatic series of signifiers which constitutes an utterance or a meaning….when the links of the signifying chain snap, then we have schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers….the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time." (26, 27)

This "breakdown" might be reflected in a composition by the absence of unifying formal aims or method, the absence of "development" (as in teleological dramas, climactic symphonies, the progressive logic of modernist painting) in favour of effect, pastiche, quotation, discontinuity…etc. But it might also, and perhaps more significantly be homologous to a conception (which is debased and therefore discarded?) of composition as "spatial"…(or must the spatial and the idea of history time be in opposition?) by which I mean that only idea of "organization" remains. A placing of "things" on a plane. But why does Jameson's idea of "space" preclude what Saussure would call both the diachronic and the synchronic…these aspects of at-onceness and development over time that allow for the kind of 'harmonies' or recombinations which Attali sees as important 'testing' ground for new ideas? Jameson's space (at least in this chapter) does seem to be very visual, that is knowing where one is is based on locating the body through a kind of vision. He states "In a classic work, The Image of the city, Kevin Lunch taught us that the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves….Disalienation in the traditional city, then involves the practical reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory and which the individual subject can map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories." (51)

(I can't help but read in this quote a reference to the map, that 2D schemata which is not unlike the traditional musical score or a drawing or other traditional notions of a "composition." Although Jameson recognizes it and counters it by calling this map a "cognitive map" that is a map of cognition, thought, coming to thought. So he insists this is not a simple mimetic representation. "The cognitive map is not exactly mimetic in that older sense: indeed, the theoretical issues it poses allow us to renew the analysis of representation on a higher and much more complex level." (51)(Again, is it film and sound which break this "maps" logic to some extent?)

This puts me in mind of the saying that "The map is not the territory" and I would certainly extend it to "the score is not the composition" that is the composition is not a plan or model…or at least not only…somewhere the composition is the dialectical relation (or what other relation?) of the plan or model to its realization…

So the "trouble" with the spatial logic which Jameson sees as dominating is not that it is spatial…but that it is only spatial…and the spatial really can't be separated from the historical/temporal and still make sense…that is the perpetual present (find where J discusses this).

This brief history and conceptualization of mapping and cartography is something Jameson then wants to "transcode" onto a social relation to the geographic/global/late capitalist present. "…the global space of the postmodernist or multinational moment." (Where one feels themselves to be "post industrial" while others are "developing" …where different "historical" moments take place in different geographical spaces at the same time)…

Jameson's last paragraph may be worth quoting in full. Imagine it as a call for a kind of "composition." It is explicitly a description of an aesthetic.

"An aesthetic of cognitive mapping—a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system—will necessarily have to respect this now enormously complex representational dialectic and invent radically new forms in order to do it justice. This is not then, clearly, a call for a return to…some older and more transparent national space, or some more traditional and reassuring perspectival or mimetic enclave: the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say to its fundamental object—the world space of multinational capital—at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale." (54)

So Jameson clearly outlines here a political and social dimension to the production and projection of space as individual and geopolitical positioning and time as history in art.

He also makes clear that his is not a "vulgar Marxist" version of reflection theory where the relation of culture to the "economic base" is one reflection, or even mimetic representation. Rather in Jameson's more elaborate articulation but rather art works, cultural products play the role of "cognitive maps" which relate the individual to the abstract and both to the questions of code or symbolic order by which they are represented.

It seems no coincidence that Jameson writes the introduction to Jacques Attali's "Noise" (1977) from which we read the chapter "Composition." On the subject of the relation of cultural works to their social-political context Jameson states in the introduction:

"The originality of Jacques Attali's book then becomes clear: he is the first to have drawn the other possible logical consequence of the "reciprocal interaction" model—namely, the possibility of a superstructure to anticipate historical developments, to foreshadow new social formations in a prophetic and annunciatory way….and that the music of today stands both as a promise of a new, liberating mode of production, and as the menace of a dystopian possibility which is that mode of production's baleful mirror image. " (xi)

So Attali, although always retaining, in Jameson's words, a "tough minded insistence on ambiguity" suggests that music can be prophetic of social change, and perhaps, even more than prophetic—composition can be a way of "testing' new social organizations. A couple of quotes to illustrate these points:

On the "prophetic" nature of music

"Music is prophetic. Why? If we consider music to be a kind of code, we can see that there are many different ways of organizing that code: different melodies, different rhythms, different genres. Moreover, we can explore these different forms of organization much more easily, much more rapidly, than we can explore different ways of organizing reality." (From Attali's talk in 2001)

"...Music, like cartography, records the simultaneity of conflicting orders, from which a fluid structure arises, never resolved never pure. " (Noise, 45)

Attali on Music and Violence the market economy and the organization of difference:

No organized society can exists without structuring differences at its core. No market economy can develop without erasing those differences in mass production. The self-destruction of capitalism lies in this contradiction, in the fact that music leads a deafening life; an instrument of differentiation, it has become a locus of repetition. In itself becomes undifferentiated, goes anonymous in the commodity, and hides behind the masks of stardom.. It make audible what is essential in the contradictions of the developed societies: an anxiety-ridden quest for lost difference, following a logic from which difference is banished. " (Noise, 5)

violence

But now I want to connect to some of Jameson's questions and introduce some new ones through a look at Godard and Deleuze.

One question to keep in mind is, I believe the special case of film, and particularly the "complexities" of on and off screen, context and the dominant culture's "whispering voices" that the sound track makes possible…Film and post filmic technologies (video and DVD etc) seem to have at least the possibilities of presenting these complex "cognitive maps" which must go beyond the 2D (Remember Chion insists his diagram would be better as a "topology" or 3D model). To quote Jameson again: "Surely this is exactly what the cognitive map is called upon to do in the narrower framework of daily life in the physical city: to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society's structures as a whole."(51) Godard also imagines, not film but "cinema" or the "cinematograph" as a technology for new representations. Not explicitly Jameson's locating cognitive map, but a more open idea of "montage" which we will recall in a moment. (Later connect Jameson's cognitive map to Deleuze's "Rhizome"…illustrate with? Thomas Hirschorn or even Kabakov's "palace of projects" or a new media "score")

Further, I want to look at the brief allusions in our readings, and this is an ongoing articulation of Godard's, that the cinema creates a present and a past and a future. If as Jameson asserts there is a crisis in historicity what is the "time" of the composition, what does the time of the composition mean. In an interview printed in the NY Times Nov. 21, 2004
Godard states: "Yes, in the movies you have one image, then another, then another and then another and finally there's a past, present and future. "

I question the "history" in compositions how do they indicate time/history/past present future. Also to what degree does the composition create a totality or relate "parts" to "wholes". Is this similar to Jameson's discussion of the compass and connecting the individual to the abstract totality of the map. And further how does the composition investigate/remake its own code. In relation to history Attali states that:

"Composition thus leads to a staggering conception of history, a history that is open, unstable, in which labor no longer advances accumulation, in which the object is no longer a stockpiling of lack, in which music effects a reappropriation of time and space. Time no longer flows in a linear fashion; sometimes it crystallizes in stable codes in which everyone's composition is compatible, sometimes in a multifaceted time in which rhythms, styles and codes diverge, interdependencies become more burdensome, and rules dissolve." (147)

"Any noise, when two people decide to invest their imaginary and their desire in it, becomes a potential relationship, future order."

So the imaginary and desire are (future) topics for this consideration of composition.

Montage and history and montage and history: From Michael Witt "Montage, My Beautiful Care, or Histories of the Cinematograph"

In one sense which is no less important because it is simple, composition and montage result from "combining" sounds, images etc. "Godard is, as he has often characterized himself, above all a 'combiner' who positions himself between disparate worlds and 'puts Raymond Chandler in contact with Fyodor Dostoevsky in a restaurant on a particular day with well-and lesser-known actors'. (34)

Witt concentrates on "Godard's understanding and use of 'montage' in the context of his discourse on cinema, history and cinema history."

Witt quotes Godard "…by montage I mean something much more vast….cinema was popular, it developed a technique, a style or a way of doing things, something that I believe was essentially montage. Which for me means seeing, seeing life. You take life, you take power, but in order to revise it, and see it and make a judgment. To see two things and choose between them in completely good faith." (35)

"Throughout HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA, cinema is positioned and read as modern painting, inheritor and extension of a representational tradition indicative of western art. 'montage' comes to designate the relationships internal to a given art form, as well as those established through art between the world and its inhabitants. In the domain of cinema, it comes to signify not merely a common formal idiom or singularly potent expressive tool, but the power and specificity of silent cinema as an historical force." (39)

"In a passage again strongly reminiscent of Malraux [I call art here the articulation of unknown yet suddenly convincing relationships between people, or between people and things."(40)] Godard conflates the successive 'montages' effected by the cinematograph (within the image, between images, between the viewer and the screen, between the subject and society, and between the individual and the world) as follows:

When people saw a film there was something that was at least double, and since someone was watching, it become triple. In other words, there was something, something else, which in its technical form became gradually known as montage. It was something that filmed not things, but the relationships between things. in other words, people saw relationships, and first of all they saw a relationship with themselves." (46)

Brian Massumi "A Users Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia"

on Deluze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus

To return to the discussion above about the relation of cultural products to their social context (reflection, premonition, cognitive map etc.) we can add what Brian Massumi describes as Deluzian and post structuralist critique of "representational thinking." Well, "add" may be too neutral a term…it would seem that this critique attempts to sever a semblance which a more traditionally Marxist analysis preserves between "base and superstructure" or between a subject, the subjects thoughts, and the faculty of judgment…

"State philosophy" is another name for the representational thinking that has dominated Western metaphysics since Plato, but has suffered an at least momentary setback during the last quarter century at the hands of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and poststructuralist theory generally. As described by Deleuze, State philosophy is grounded in a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subject, its concepts and the "eternal" objects to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identify. Representational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspondence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of judgment serves as the police force of analogy, assuring that each of the three terms is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought its end is truth, in action, justice. The weapons it wields in pursuit of these are limitative distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a term's self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, Man, God, or Gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: x=x=not y. Identity, resemblance, truth, justice and negation. The rational foundation for order(4)…"

"Deconstruction-influenced feminists such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigary have attacked State philosophy under the name "phallogocentrism"….Deleuze and Guattari describe it as the "arborescent" model of thought…"

"Nomad thought" does not lodge itself in the edifice of an ordered interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not repose on identity; it rides difference. It does not respect the artificial division between the three domains of representation, subject, concept and being; It replaces restrictive analogy with a conductivity that knows no bounds. The concepts it creates do not merely reflect the eternal form of a legislating subject…Rather than reflecting the world, they are immersed in the changing state of things…"What interests us are the circumstance." Because the concept in its unrestrained usage is a set of circumstances at a volatile juncture. It is a vector: the point of application of a force moving through a space at a given direction….
(future: continue the quote from p. 6…it reads almost like a score)

Deluze and Guattari, "Percept, Affect and Concept" from What is Philosophy

(page numbers from The Continental Aesthetics Reader, Clive Cazeaux)

Sensation and Composition

"Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. They could be said to exist in the absence of man, because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas or by words is himself a compouind of percpets and affects. The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else; it exists in itself. " (465)

"We paint, sculpt, compose and write with sensations. We paint, sculpt, compose and write sensations As percepts, sensations are not perceptions referring to an object (reference): if they resemble something it is with a resemblance produced with their own methods; and the smile on the canvas is made soley with colors, lines, shadow and light. If resemblance haunts the work of art, it is because sensatio nrefers only to its material; it is the percept or affect of the material itself, the smile of il, the gesture of fired clay, the thrust of metal, the crouch of Romanesque stone, and the ascent of Gothic stone(466)…And yet, in preinciple at least, sensation is not the same thing as the material. What is preserved by right is not the mterial, which constitutes only the de facto condition, but…it is the percept or affect that is preserved in itself…(467)

By means of the material, the aim of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiveing subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another: to extract a block of sensations, a bure being of sensations. A method is needed and this varies with every artist and forms part of the work…" (467)

"Composition, composition is the sole definition of art. Composition is aesthetic, and what is not composed is not a work of art. However, technical composition, the work of the material that often calls on science (mathematics, physics, chemistry, anatomy), is not to be confused with aesthetic composition, which is the work of sensation. Only the latter fully deserves the name composition, and a work of art is never produced by or for the sake of technique. (480)

"sensation" (made of percepts and affects) comes in compounds, including "the vibration" "the embrace or the clinch" "withdrawal, division, distension" (468)

"Vibrating sensation—coupling sensation–opening or splitting, hollowing out sensation. These types are displayed almost in their pure state in scultpture, with its sensations of stone, marble, or metal, which vibrate according to the order of strong and weak beats, projections and hollows, its powerful clinches that intertwine them, its development of large space between groups or within a single group where we no longer know whether it is the light or the air that sculpts or is sculpted." (468)

"The composite sensation, made up of percepts and affects, deterritorializes the system of opinion that brought together dominant perceptions and affections within a natural, historical, and social milieu. But the composite sensation is reterritorialized on the plane of composition, because it erects its houses there, because it appears there within interlocked frames or joined sections that surround its components; landscapes that have become pure percepts, and characters that become pure affects. At the same time the plane of composition involves sensation in a higher deterritorialization, making it pass through a sort of deframing which opens it up and breaks it open onto an infinite cosmos…" (483)

"What defines thought in its three great forms—art, science, and philosophy—is always confronting chaos, laying out a plane, throwing a plane over chaos. But philosophy wants to save the infinite by giving it consistency; it lays out a plane of immanence that, through the action of conceptual personae, takes events or consistent concepts to infinity. Science, on the other hand, relinquishes the infinite in order to gain reference: it lays out a plane of simply undefined coordinates that each time, through the action of partial observers, defines states of affairs, functions, or referential propositions. Art wants to create the finite that restores the infinite: it lays out a plane of composition that, in turn, through the action of aesthetic figures, bears monuments or composite sensations…" (483)

"The three thoughts intersect and intertwine but without synthesis or identification. with its concepts, philosophy brings forth events. Art erects monuments with its sensations. Science constructs states of affairs with its functions….Each created element on a plane calls on other heterogeneous elements, which are still to be created on other planes: thought as heterogenesis. It is true that these culminating points contain two extreme dangers: either leading us back to the opinion from which we wanted to esxcape or precipitating us into the chaos that we wanted to confront. " (484)

heterogenesis: Definition:

\Het`er*o*gen"e*sis\, n. [Hetero- + genesis.]
1. (Biol.) Spontaneous generation, so called.
2. (Biol.) That method of reproduction in which the
successive generations differ from each other, the parent
organism producing offspring different in habit and
structure from itself, the original form, however,
reappearing after one or more generations; -- opposed to
{homogenesis}, or {gamogenesis}.

the creation of heterogeneity , which is having unlike qualities or parts throughout, the theory that things have unlike qualities or parts in them no matter how similar they seem.