[-empyre-] relational objects

[nick knouf]

Julian Oliver wrote:
> Here's a good text outlining Serres' Quasi-Object, which seems to be close to
> the 'relational object' you are describing. Here he refers to the 'furet' (the
> object in a French children's game where a ring of players hide the object from
> one of the players. That player must deduce who in the ring has the object).

Thanks Julian for making reference to Serres with regards to the
quasi-object.  I've found his concept quite useful in thinking about
these strange objects that we seem to be regularly encountering that
upset the oppositions between subject/object, Nature/Society,
real/virtual, analog/digital, and so on.  I'm drawing here also from
Bruno Latour's extension of Serres' concept in _We Have Never Been
Modern_ (http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LATWEH.html), a really
wonderful text that argues, quite forcefully, that we live not in a
"post-modern" age, but rather one that is "pre-modern" or "amodern" in
its constitution---meaning that we are beginning to realize that we can
not so easily separate Nature from Society as had been hoped for by the
so-called modernists.  Rather, we have to accept the the impossibility
of that task, and move on to dealing with the quasi-objects themselves
without trying to place them on one side or the other of an impenetrable
divide.  This would, as Norah suggests, involve "not [to] try to
recreate the experience of the live performance but instead trace the
principles, events, ideas, and possibilities inside the event and
re-present these principles with the intent not of documenting but of
sharing".

This is something that I am quite interested in because of my own
background in music.  While music has often tried to notate performance
exactly in order for exact reproduction in the future, there is an
impossibility embedded in this task.  (And dance, as far as I am
informed my limited knowledge in this area, has had many attempts to
create a stable notation system that is not entirely idiosyncratic, each
time running into insurmountable difficulties that (Western art) music
has only recently begun to come to terms with.)  As musical performance
has expanded to include all manner of electrical equipment, as well as
extended analog techniques, we have witnessed a breakdown in the ability
for notation to keep up and retain the belief that is possible to create
a stable, reproducible representation of reality (recall here Latour's
argument).  (And if any of you have ever looked at the score for
Stockhausen's _Kontakte_ you know what I am talking about;
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~grace/220c/Kontakte_1.jpg )  Simon Yuill
argues that the expanded notion of notation (and collaborative processes
of writing and performing) developed by people like Cornelius Cardew and
the Scratch Orchestra, contemporary live coders, Sun Ra, and others
offers one way of thinking about novel types of social relationships
that both counter staid ideas of artistic creation, as well as suggest
alternatives that cannot be so easily recuperated by capital.  At the
same time Yuill cautions against valorizing collaboration and "noise" as
ends themselves, given their usefulness to capital; rather, he suggests
that since we are all being forced to follow scripts and notations that
we additionally have to improvise from, we "must make the notations of
production constantly problematic" and, I would add, make the process of
making notation itself problematic.  (Yuill's text is available both
from in the FLOSS+Art book I referenced in my original e-mail as well as
on Mute:
http://www.metamute.org/en/All-Problems-of-Notation-Will-be-Solved-by-the-Masses
).

nick