Author Archives: naimamazic

naimamazic

Not only are “prediction products” what “Zuboff sees as the true basis of the surveillance industry”, “which anticipate what users will do now, soon, and later”, but our behaviors are being shaped by technology firms, for us (Netizens or by media newly constructed subjects) to become even more predictable. (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2019-10-10/new-masters-universe) How do these predicted and even created actions connect to the “digito- analogic hybrid forms” and processes of today? (Critical Art Ensemble, Recombinant Theatre and the Digital Resistance, MIT Press 2016, p.153) I got to the point of asking: What is improvisation today within the time of technology and how are we being choreographed? Fred Moten says that music is the improvisation of organization. We can consider improvisation as the nexus of the digital (order from order) and the analog (chaos from order, order from chaos). Inventing the term “Monk’s Law” Fred Moten asks: “Is genious that which gives or that which breaks the rule?” and answers it by saying that giving and breaking are bound up with one another. (So maybe rather a Musizen than a Musician- considering the contingent element of improvisation – as an “encounter between a statement and situations or movements“). The “mode of deterritorialization” and “the unknown outcome” of the experimental Recombinant theatre carries the unpredictability within order as improvisation, and can therefore be put in conversation with Mark Poster’s Internet “containing the potential of new practices”, that “de- and reterritorialzes exchanges” and is interdisciplinary: “any point may establish exchanges with any other point or points, a configuration that makes the Internet very difficult, if not impossible, to control by the nation-state.” (p. 78/79 Mark Poster Information Please) Brian T.Edwards in his article Trump from Reality TV to Twitter, or the Selfie Determination of Nations, quoting Bill Pruitt talking about Trump on p.26: “You never knew what was going to happen exactly. It was like the greatest, grandest improvised theater with all the stakes woven into it.” I see Trump’s constant unpredictability as an important part and tactic of his political spectacle of power.

How do multiple fleshless bodies improvise with each other? It is true that “Social Media creates communities (…)” (p.38, Brian T. Edwards) and that “the internet contains the potential of new practices” (p.78 Mark Poster). Nevertheless, I believe that as artists, we share a common interest on understanding performing arts as a way to create places for gathering. “(…) the body is still the key building block of theatre” (p.163, CAE) and virtual communities through virtual theatre create a disembodiment that will prevent important and necessary social gatherings of flesh and bodies, of spec-actors from the contingent qualities of improvising together in the digital age- FLESHNETS.

Naïma Mazic

A political spectacle is based on making Belief through make believe (inspired by Richard Schechner, “Make Believe and Make Belief”). There is a clear guideline given to that in The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli. “How a prince must act to win honour” is the title of chapter 21, in which Machiavelli writes: “(…) a prince must endavour to win the reputation of being a great man of outstanding ability.” The crucially concluding question that Charles M. Blow poses in his New York Times article Trumpism exolts its folk hero is the following: “How does one fight a fiction, a fantasy?“. This question overwhelms me. I cannot think of possible answers. Fiction mixed with the important tool of the sovereign -unpredictability-, our fighting seems to become futile. Machiavelli, p.81: “I hold strongly to this: that it is better to be impetuous than circumspect; because fortune is a woman and if she is to be submissive it is necessary to beat and coerce her.“ Elizabeth Kolbert, the New Yorker-  “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds”, explains what became known as confirmation bias: “(…) the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them” and includes Jack Gorman and Sara Gorman: “(…)cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs.” We constantly create fantasies. We are making ourselves believe and are made to Belief. A fantasy. How can WE fight the arrival point of creation of fictions?  (if “we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins”? Sloman and Fernbach in Elizabeth Kolbert, the New Yorker-  “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds”)

Naïma Mazic

I wanted to see how the readings of this week address the gaze of the victim and wondered- Does the victim ever get to look back? This question became important to me, as in my own research I am interested in the representation of femininity (through the figure of the Madonna specifically in the middle-age, and beginning of renaissance), especially in how male painters saw the ideal of a woman and represented it. I am therefore focusing on their bodies that are curved, twisted, forming diagonals. Their eyes are diagonal- down, in a form of submission, or on the contrary up to the sky begging for guidance. But almost never frontal- directly looking at us.

In her text Percepticide, Diana Taylor writes on page 128: “Sight is gendered or, perhaps more accurately, visual access is gendered. As in rituals, only the initiates have the right to see the hidden source of power. And in the all-male theatre of the Argentine horror show, women are not the see-ers but the objects to be seen.” On page 120 you see the Photo by Jorge Aguirre where an image of “a beautiful model” is to be seen- the model not looking directly at us, but down, into the emptiness. “The beautiful model is the object of the girl’s look, but of course she doesn’t return the look.” (p.121)

When wondering why the play of Griselda Gambaro, Information for Foreigners is so threatening, even though no actual violence is being shown, Taylor writes: “(…)because the victim looks back at us, returns and challenges our gaze-just as the victims who were abducted, yelling and screaming, during the Dirty War. ” (p.133) (…) We are in the same room. This naked body does not, as in cinema, exist in the realm of the imaginary, pure celluloid; it is materially present. The victim returns our look.” (p.135) As a spectator,  it is definitely easier to distance oneself through the lack of being directly looked at.

Foucault mentions that during the spectacle of the scaffold, the head of the assasin will be covered with a black veil and quotes De Molène on page 13/14: “(…) the condemned man was no longer to be seen. Only the reading of the sentence on the scaffold announced the crime and that crime must be faceless. (The more monstrous a criminal was, the more he must be deprived of light: he must not see, or be seen.“

The eyes of women in most painting and photographs are shown, the difference is that they are never allowed a powerful frontal look and posture (linking desire to a visual lack?) This lets the spectator not only own them (as John Berger in Ways of Seeing mentions the Spectator-Owner), but I almost dare to see it as a torture- the fact that the victim is not allowed to look at us.

Wrested Rhythms of unpredictability

Look harder and longer. This simultaneity, up to a certain point, is only apparent: a surface, a spectacle. Go deeper, dig beneath the surface, listen attentively instead of simply looking, of reflecting the effects of a mirror. You thus perceive that each plant, each tree, has its rhythm, made up of several: the trees, the flowers, the seeds and fruits, each have their time. […] In place of a collection of fixed things, you will follow each being, each body, as having its own time above the whole. Each one therefore having its place, its rhythm, with its recent past, a foreseeable and a distant future.
Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 41

I am interested in escaping anticipation and control (of individual reactions) of political strategies, by finding ways of becoming less predictable. “There is an inextricable link between power and rhythm. What power imposes in the first place is a rhythm (rhythm of everything – life, time, thought, discourse)”, Roland Barthes wrote. I am suggesting to rather consider the link between power and meter and to look at how meter emerged as a transversal concept across the arts, poetics, philosophy, and social science. For me, the meter subjugates, not rhythm, and I see the notion of polymeters and polyrhythms as a way to abolish the hegemony of meter that is imposed upon us as constraint and for becoming more unpredictable through that. It is important to first shortly explain the three basic modes of temporal organization in music – pulse, meter and rhythm and I mostly refer here to the important book The rhythmic structure of music by Cooper. Pulse is one of a series of regularly recurring, precisely equivalent stimuli. Like the ticks of a metronome or a watch, pulses mark off equal unites in the temporal continuum. Meter is the measurement of the number of pulses between regularly recurring accents. Within meter pulses become beats; accented beats are strong, unaccented beats are weak. Rhythm is the way in which one or more unaccented beats are grouped in relation to an accented one. In most compositions, we find a hierarchy of metric organization and some rhythmic groupings are more difficult to realize within a given meter. Aspects of temporal organization which measure are metric. And Foucault writes: “The mechanisms introduced by biopolitics include forecasts, statistical estimates and overall measures.”  Crucial is, that pulse is necessary for the existence of meter, bur rhythm can exist without meter! Rhythm is independent of meter and theoretically even of pulse, it can happen in any type of metric organization. Henri Meschonnic proposes to get back to the ancient meaning of rhythm: Rhutmos (rhéin to flow and –(th)mόs a way, a manner) is the pattern of a fluid element (a letter, a peplos, a mood), an improvised, changeable form.

Bojana Cvejic wrote a summary of our thoughts and discussions we had in her course at P.A.R.T.S., where I mentioned my ideas for the first time: “When rhythm is wrested from the established notion of measure in music, a perplexing diversity of terms, instruments and practices unfolds, situating it between a manner of flowing (ruthmos) and an order of movement, proportioned figure (metron), in “the gray gap between black beats” (Nabokov).” The consolidation of the bar line and therefore the introduction of the hegemonic meter seems to have become a part of music only during the 17th century. (Simultaneously with the emergence of capitalism especially in Holland and England?) For example, also the blues used to be an open form with the duration needed for the story a musician was about to tell and did not necessarily have the now common 12 bars. Composer Girard Grisey worked on the relationship between change, predictability, order and disorder. “One can also imagine an oscillating rhythm in which the meter itself would fluctuate constantly.” Link to Tempus ex Machina by Girard Grisey Grisey denies the periodic considered as an ideal point of reference, the basis of a hierarchy which is for him linked to “maximum predictability” and order. He refers to Abraham Moles that says “the notion of rhythm is linked to that of expectation (1966)” and I personally think that the fulfillment of the expectation is linked to metric control and metronomic pulse. (notes from a class with Bojana Cvejic). “Sunny Murray and Albert Ayler did not merely break through bar lines, they abolished them altogether.”,  John Litweiler. I had to think of Free Jazz and Swing while working on this paper. As written in the chapter 6 Innards of Time of the book “Flow, gesture, and spaces in free jazz : towards a theory of collaboration”: “The swing is one of those subcutaneous rebellions against the tyranny of the bar line.” To swing means to fluctuate between 2 and 3, to be in 2 and 3 at the same time. Breaking down all rhythmic elements into ‘twos and threes’ (8th notes, 16th notes and triplets) has its roots in nearly all folkloric traditions from Gnawa music of North Africa through the Balkan to Colombian Bata.  Drummer Milford Graves: “(…) but if you’re counting like a metronome and everything is like Bamp, Bamp, Bamp just like the second hand, that is extremely dangerous. That means your body is not responding. It must respond. You cannot walk across the street in military march, you know on the beat per second on a major highway where traffic is coming. (…) your tempo is going to change. That’s what the body expects. (…)“. I need to explain, that polymetrics, as I am using the term in this paper, allow not only for different simultaneous rhythms but for the possibility of shifting and changing time and restraints. I am not suggesting to get rid of meters as it is important for the possibility of communal organization and collectivity, but of its hegemony. We do not need one meter that keeps a measured amount of beats controlled, but to share a pulse that allows for interdependency through the possible plurality of polyrhythmic shared within polymetric space and time.* To this thought I want to add beautiful quotation of Osip Mandelstam (“Government and Rhythm” 1920): “Solidarity and rhythm are the quantity and quality of social energy. Only the collective can have rhythm. (…) Rhythm demands a synthesis, a synthesis of the spirit and the body, a synthesis of work and play.(…)” I wonder- how do we free ourselves from the prison of meter opposed on us in order to be more easily controlled through the therefore established possibility of expectancy? What would it mean to live in a polymetric society? On a society based on polymetrics and the resulting less predictable poly-dictability? How would it influence the power of dictator’s unpredictable acts upon us? Would it? “The dictator must never be predictable“, Sue Prideaux in Dictators: the great performers. We still are. But we can start forgiving.
I want to end this paper with another quotation of the book “Flow, gesture, and spaces in free jazz : towards a theory of collaboration” of page 52. Guerino B.Mazzola and Moreno Andreatta conclude the first part of chapter 6 with the following: “So the new thing about time was that it made the move from facticity to the level of making: time became a thing to be construed from scratch. No more tyrannic clocks, no more eternal lines, no lines at all. We make time, we are the new hands, and the clock, and the gestures, which mold time. Not surprisingly, such expressive making also changed the time’s stature: physics’ anorexic timeline was transmuted into a voluminous body of time as shaped by the powerful hands of working musicians.“

“These intimate and predatory forms of exploitation are introducing calculation through rhythms into new arenas of every day life. The question is therefore how to bridge—analytically and politically—the relationship between newer and older(re)configurations of rhythm, power, and everyday life.” Intersectional rhythmanalysis: Power, rhythm, and everyday life by Emily Reid-Musson.


*I very clearly make a differentiation between polymeters and polyrhythms, which in music is not always the case, and not in this way as I am doing it for this paper.

Swinging Max Roach

2 and 3 at the same time- swinging La Réunion!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOm3lqhvvRI

Archie Shepp – Free jazz                 

Ari Hoenig- Polymetrics / Polyrhythms

Conlon Nancarrow born in the US, lived most of his life in Mexico. He is one of the most important composers of our time and forerunner of contemporary music, but somehow strangely unknown. He mostly composed music for player piano. “One reason for working with the player piano was my interest in temporally dissonant relationships. Temporal dissonance is as hard to define as tonal dissonance.”

Rhythm Study No. 1 (1951) is a polyrhythmic composition with over 200 changes of meter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mKfQYzfduY

It was fascinating for me this week, to read Judith Butler and Hannah Arendt next to each other; to see the relations, shared – and differently developed ideas. I am interested in how the two authors bring time and rhythm into play. On p.75 Judith Butler poses the question: “How do we understand this acting together that opens up time and space outside and against the established architecture and temporality of the regime? (….)”
“This time of the interval is one in which the assembled bodies articulate a new time and space for the popular will (…) as an alliance of distinct and adjacent bodies whose action and whose inaction demand a different future.” What exactly is this new time, this opposing temporality that Butler is talking about?
Hannah Arendt (p.214): “Where the biological rhythm of labor unites the group of laborers to the point that each may feel that he is no longer an individual but actually one with all others, (…) this eases labor’s toil and trouble in much the same way as marching together ceases the effort of walking for each soldier.”
I think the established architecture of the regime could be seen as the notion of “meter” in music. Also Hannah Arendt might actually be talking about the facism of meter and not rhythm. The meter that is imposed on the biological rhyhtms (plural) of labour and frames the pulse. Judith Butler is talking about the interval, Hannah Arendt about the “Erscheinungsraum- the space of appearance (Nabokov about the grey gap between black beats). Maybe we do not need one meter that keeps a measured amount of beats controlled, but to share a pulse that allows for interdependency through the possible plurality of polyrhythmic shared space and time.

Maybe as for many others this week, the dancer and performance artist Erdem Gündüz was constantly in my mind while reading, mostly because of the exactly this “new” time and space he created, this unpredictable, out of meter temporality through the standing man. ( We met him just shortly after the protest when were in Istanbul with the conservatory for dance). I wanted to share these videos, even though unfortunately I could not find such good material online

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNONsBm-bv0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO8hkU4uK2g