[-empyre-] - noise of contagion

[Simon]

Dear <<empyreans>>,

I am enjoying the dissonance between Sonata and Solidarnosc--Mozart and 
Jean-Michel Jarre, together at last.

Annie Mcclanahan wrote:
> that solidarity requires that we see ourselves as intimately connected 
> to lots of people we don’t know

On 29/04/20 5:09 pm, Patricia Zimmermann wrote:
> We had one week to "migrate" our courses to "remote instruction."  
> Words from administrators and not from faculty.  COVID meant 
> shelter-in-place. No more F2F classes as they have come to be called.  
> F2F, a phantom, a phantasmatic, a fantasy in this COVID world of 
> invisible viruses, illness, death, and screens. Migration from the 
> embodied sensorium of the classroom to the emphemerality of screens. 
> From three dimensions to two. From a world of chiararscuro to flat.
>
> The great migration as some have called it came with a great work 
> speed up.  Many colleges, including my own, insisted on propagating 
> ideas about "student centered," a neoliberal construct of consumerism 
> and comfort displacing the messiness of ideas and debate.  A dangerous 
> shift from the collective to the individual, from the abstract to 
> feelings.

Of course there is recapitulation here.

I went back to Milan Kundera for his view on kitsch, about the cruelty 
sentimentality and mawkishness cover over, and recalled how Kundera 
listened to//Varèse and Xenakis, finding, especially in the latter, 
consolation. He asks himself why? Why, when he could be listening to 
Smetana? and recapitulating in its patriotism his nostalgia for homeland 
and for collective belonging.

He writes, equally brutally, perhaps, to the brutality he describes, and 
again, forgive me quoting at length:

"Despite Stravinsky's denial that music expresses feeling, the naive 
listener cannot see it any other way. That is music's curse, its 
mindless aspect. All it takes is a violinist playing the three long 
opening notes of a largo, and a sensitive listener will sigh, "Ah, how 
beautiful!" In those three notes that set off the emotional response, 
there is nothing, no invention, no creation, nothing at all: it's the 
most ridiculous "sentimentality hoax." But no one is proof against that 
perception of music, or against the foolish sigh it stirs.

"European music is founded on the artificial sound of a note and of a 
scale; in this it is the opposite of the /objective/ sound of the world. 
Since its beginnings, Western music is bound, by an insurmountable 
convention, to the need to express /subjectivity/. It stands against the 
harsh sound of the outside world just as the sensitive soul stands 
against the insensibility of the universe.

"But the moment could come (in the life of a man or of a civilization) 
when sentiment (previously considered a force that makes man more human 
and relieves the coldness of his reason) is abruptly revealed as the 
"superstructure of brutality," ever present in hatred, in vengeance, in 
the fervor of bloody victories. At that time I came to see music as the 
deafening noise of the emotions, whereas the world of noises in 
Xenakis's works became beauty; beauty washed clean of affective filth, 
stripped of sentimental barbarity."

...

As of Monday New Zealand has moved to what has been called for the 
simplification of collective imagining alert Level 3. This is nothing 
like the great migration to the digital Patricia Zimmerman names. But 
then, perhaps it is, since, on entering a cafe or going to a restaurant 
offering takeaway service (since entering Level 3 there has been a great 
rush to do so), although one is met by serving staff--at the appropriate 
distance--one cannot simply make a verbal request of them, point to and 
say, That piece of pie, or A latte, please. One must "click and collect."

The publicity for this programme speaks to its convenience--and it is 
not only applied to food and drink, but applies to hardware and clothing 
stores. Even in the absence of a delivery service, it is allegedly more 
convenient to text in a request--using the app--and to take oneself 
there, often with others, who might not be as observant of the rules as 
oneself, and make payment by a "swipe" or "paywave" (the latter 
encouraged, cash vehemently discouraged) of one's card.

Now this is getting to be an almost universal proposition, covering all 
transactions.

Of course it /can/ cover, with its convenience and ease well-attested 
to, the dropping of superfluous staff.

But what is discovered by it is of course its inconvenience and the 
disease of the migration of some basic behaviours to the digital--in 
what might be called a series of /small migrations/. Further, what is 
entailed in the migration of the small is a disproportionate increase in 
the number of/personal data points/ one is handing over, freely, that 
one is both encouraged to as well as /has to/.

And this having to as well as being encouraged to and sometimes cajoled 
to, by ads calling for Unity, and yes Solidarity, against the enemy, 
mirrors nicely the very softly very gently impositions of rules for 
self-isolation and social distancing covering over with voluntarily 
adopted rules the fact of their being enforceable laws. The noise of 
this contagion--the digital, at the outset of the pandemic, was readily 
identified, before being identified with information or instruction, 
with /dis/information, as the more contagious--is covered over with 
sweetness.

Best,

Simon

http://squarewhiteworld.com



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