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Boring Formless Nonsense (or, On The Aesthetics of Failure in Recent Experimental Composition) by eldritch Michael Priest A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Cultural Mediations Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario ©2011 eldritch Priest Library and Archives Bibliotheque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaONK1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-81589-2 Our file Notre r6terence ISBN: 978-0-494-81589-2 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. 1+1 Canada Abstract Failure has been an implicit theme in the arts since at least the beginnings of the modernist era. More recently, cultural practices have made failure an explicit and positive theme whose expressions pivot on the contestation of both modernism's Utopian bid for a master aesthetics and post-modernism's optimistic investment in difference. Yet failure, like so many avant-garde artistic strategies of the twentieth century, has become blunted by its own satisfaction, its critical edge dulled by a belief that the transgression of expectations is sufficiently productive. In a sense, failure has failed. Failure in art is expected and so short-circuits its ways to success, leaving the irregular elements of experience that it stands for to go to weed. What then can be made of this "weed garden" that failure remainders? Or, how might one imagine an aesthetics of failure wherein hesitation, lack of concentration, duplicity and other markers of insufficiency are not simply recuperated as a kind of inverted success but are permitted to breed and proliferate in the slow creep of their own boring formless nonsense? In this dissertation I try to answer that question by looking at failure through contemporary experimental composition that takes its cues from preoccupations other than those characterized by the normative avant-garde gesture of (selfjreproach. Drawing on theoretical approaches to contemporary culture including Sianne Ngai's concept of the aesthetic "stuplime," Rei Terada's theory of "phenomenophilia," and Gilles Deleuze's theory of sense, I suggest that an aesthetics of failure resonates with a broader set of cultural logics that revolve around the mechanics of depression, distraction, and prevarication. I conclude that recent experimental compositions engage with failure not as a celebratory phenomenon but as a strategy for coping with the apparent horizonless vista of contemporary culture. ii Acknowledgements I am extremely grateful to my advisor, Geraldine Finn, whose support and counsel as well as her commitment to the adventure of thought helped make the morass of my own thinking, if not entirely clear (to me), then at least (partially) interesting. 1 am also thankful to my other readers, Jill Carrick and Jesse Stewart, who have been generous in their time and their words. I would also like to thank the composers who spoke with me, and were kind enough to provide me with scores and recordings of their work as these, for the most part, are not commercially available. Thank you to Timothy Murray and The Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and to Brian Massumi for allowing me to crash his course during my stay in Ithaca. Numerous friends and colleagues have supported this work, some by their camaraderie, including Rory Magill, Lindsey Wellman, David Brosco, and others through their interest in my study such as Michael Urbanski and David Cecchetto. But special thanks must be made to Marc Couroux for encouraging this dare and being part of its strange feedback loop, and John Mark Sherlock for his moments of therapeutic lucidity and staunch refusal to say "simulacrum" properly. My parents, of course, must be acknowledged, if not only for their boundless supply of emotional and financial support, then for having the courage to not completely understand what I've been up to all these years, yet love and encourage me anyways. Thank you also to Penelope whose wish is my command and unbridled success is my wish. And lastly, my immense gratitude to Claudette Lauzon who I shower with love and illimitable thanks for helping me edit and prepare this document, but most of all for the immeasurable gift of patience and love that I know I will spend my life failing to match. This work is dedicated to Aaron Granville-Martin and David Foster Wallace. iii Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Table of contents iv Introduction 1 One: Boring Introduction 42 A boring history 55 Cage, Fluxus and Extendedness in the 1960s and 70s 67 The Aesthetics of Boredom and the Art of Waiting 83 The Premises/Promises of Aesthetic Boredom 91 A Less Promising Boredom 93 Uglier Feelings of the Stuplime 101 Post... Death... 115 Afterthought... 119 Two: Formless Pretext 124 (Informe) 130 How to read this chapter 136 Story 137 Becoming Formless 148 Music Noise 156 Recording Distraction 162 —Multitasking 17] Capture and Escape 174 Lull))))))))) 182 Listening to SoS#16's Lull))))) 188 (((((Listening Away))))) 190 Muzak's Way of Dreaming Ubiquitously )))) 194 —Notes on Muzak 194 —Quantum Modulation 194 We don't (((listen))) anymore 197 The (((Sound))) of Habits 200 Sound-Effects 203 ))))) Charm and Dissatisfaction 208 Last))))) 219 Another Again 223 Three: Nonsense (Voodoo 224 ((Metareferentiality, Metamusic and Hypermusic 233 (((Grupat and Pseudonymity 238 ((((Symptoms, Syndromes and Hyperfiction 250 (((((In a Sedimental Mood 255 ((((((Hyperstition, Magick and Nonsense 258 (((((((Becoming Karen et al, a Real-Time Hyperstition as of March 30, 2007 By Karen Eliot 266 ((((((((OfLies 275 ((((((([(What does music feel like? (or, 'on the refrain of pain and imagining'): Discursive Remainders from glossolalia (stress positions) by Engram Knots 282 ((((((((((glossolalia (stress positions) 288 (((((((((((Occult dualism 296 ((((((((((((Illustrative Interlude: Practicing 299 (((((((((((((The sleep side of music and dream-work))))))))))))) 302 Inconclusion/This chapter is false 310 ("Disclaimer") 318 Confabulation 319 Bibliography 326 Introduction Gamble This dissertation theorizes an aesthetics of failure in post-Cagean experimental composition. Failure here is approached as an ambivalent event—an approach that skews its more familiar reception in contemporary art as a form of resistance to, or critique of, aesthetic and social norms. In this study I suggest that failure is sounded out by recent compositions in their resonance with a set of affects and effects that characterize contemporary culture's efforts to cope with its own inconsistencies and contradictions. Failure, of course, has been an implicit theme of the avant-garde since at least the beginnings of the modernist era. More recently, cultural practices have made failure an explicit theme whose expressions pivot on creative practices and artworks that contest modernism's Utopian bid for a master aesthetics and complicate post-modernism's optimistic investment in difference. Yet failure, like so many avant-garde artistic strategies of the past century, has become blunted by its own satisfaction, its critical edge dulled by a belief that transgression of expectations is sufficiently productive. In a sense, failure has failed. Failure in art is expected and so short-circuits its way to success, leaving the irregular elements of experience that it stands for to go to weed. What then can be made of this "weed garden" that failure remainders? Or, how can one imagine an aesthetics of failure wherein hesitation, lack of concentration, and duplicity are not simply recuperated as a kind of inverted success but are permitted to breed and proliferate in the slow creep of their own boring formless nonsense? In this dissertation I try to answer that question by looking at failure through contemporary experimental 1 2 composition that takes its cues from preoccupations other than those characterized by the normative avant-garde gesture of (selfjreproach. As such, the sense of failure that I draw from this music is one whose weave is slack and uneven as it touches upon several areas of contemporary culture's current expressions of disease including depression, distraction and, disinformation. I conclude that contemporary experimental composition points to failure not in its forms of error or insufficiency, but in its expression as a risk, or wager, a pure potentiality. But right off I will reveal that there won't be any fussing over the way failure and success spiral around each other.