This is an effort to trace a constellation of ideas that, for me, have added up to an idea that I term [[dissonance]].
I make [[performances]], where I [[talk about ideas]] in a manner that is similar to way I will talk about them here. Perhaps I take more liberties when I am calling it a performance.
But this is about the ideas around dissonance, it is an attempt to treat ideas like [[anecdotes]]. Parts that move around a larger idea. A [[constellation]].
<iframe width="840" height="472" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_OZucS0oMfE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Is something ([[art]]) that is in the work of understanding these ideas, but is not necessarily the particular point of this articulation and the [[constellation]] of ideas it is trying to map.
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/134835433" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/134835433">[expanding feeling]</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user32825293">J F Dunlop</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
Is something ([[art]]) that is in the work of understanding these ideas, but is not necessarily the particular point of this articulation and the [[constellation]] of ideas it is trying to map.
Dissonance is how I am trying to think through the intersection of experiences – affectively & [[emotion]]ally – of relation.
Particularly, at the moment, through internet communication practices and the functions, and malfunctions in particular, of digital technologies.
I also make things about this, which I am not really going to talk about as such. But still, [[art]] is another way of moving through ideas.
What I trying to do is to treat ideas like anecdotes.
I am trying to tell a series of stories that for me find coherence and connection through [[my particular understanding of dissonance]].
And my hope is that perhaps that coherence and connection – the shape of this particular [[constellation]] – is also evident to someone else.
And so, this is an attempt to define dissonance by re-performing how I came to that idea.
Dissonance as a mode of relation, a way of defining the affective and emotional experience of relation when it is characterised by a together that is also an apart.
And this is all relation, arguably.
But for me, right now, is most interesting insofar as I want to start talking about the imbrication of [[emotion]] and technological modes of communication.
& I am going to conflate affect and emotion here because I think that we should.
But quickly and inadequately:
Affect is the experiential part of feeling, prior to meaning. It is kind of like an impact.
Emotion is cultural situated and generated modes of making sense of feelings. Emotion when and how our feelings are understood in relation to world.
But I take them together & what I mean when I say emotion and affect is the way we experience and make sense collectively of how we feel the impact of the world and of our together.
So the things I think about (& the things I make) centre around ideas of [[generosity]] and [[my particular understanding of dissonance]]. And I am mostly going to talk about dissonance today. And what the [[constellation]] is that I have built around it.
But generosity is important. Because the two are super imbricated in each other, in my thinking. Generosity, now, as a part of the conceptual agenda of my work, is about how we define the process and experience of relation. And it is, for me, a way of signing an intention to disrupt models of exchange are based solely in financial terms.
Generosity as a kind of care, a modality of relation that also implies a political or ethical dimension. Generosity is word that comes from my collaborations with an artist called Mira Loew.
& she and I work together a lot, and collaborations are a particular kind of intimate relationship.
Generosity was a way of understanding our collaboration, of understanding the particular back and forth of working with another person & then extrapolating from that a kind of thought about [[being in the world]].
And this constellation is, for me in this moment, made up of [[friction]] and [[nervousness]], [[alongsidedness]] and [[noise]] and [[theatricality]]. All the moments of [[failure and near failure]].
It is through navigating and positioning all of these different points that I think [[my particular understanding of dissonance]] appears. In all its [[different]], similar and repeating ways.
And so it is the mess and tangle of their interconnections that I move off of, [[forward from]].
And so friction might be the best word for what I am talking about, in terms of near-failure in functional systems. In terms of the impact and affect of different modes as they encounter one another.
[[The closest to dissonance insofar as it is a kind of tactile version of the impact of disjuncture that dissonance might mean.]]
Gertrude Stein’s formulation of nervousness & emotional syncopation is one place where I would start.
In an essay called ‘Plays’ from Lectures in America, Gertrude Stein talks about her [[experience of the theatre]].
there is a bit of Michel Serres’ The Parasite that Alexander Galloway translates as an example of alongsidedness.
& it is [[too perfect to paraphrase]].
So dissonance is the [[friction]], the [[nervousness]] of syncopation, the [[glitch]]ing and [[noise]] of being in relation to someone else. [[The feedback in the technology of emotions.]]
Theatricality is when we become aware of theatre’s condition of presenting imaginary events while also being an actual event. [[Aware of the pretending it is working at.]]
And all of these different approaches to tension, near-failure, imperfect in relation are – I believe – [[sticky]].
Generosity is a mode of relation, a quality of exchange, that perhaps disturbs or disregards the imperatives of accumulation and person gain. Is one thought.
Another thought comes from Rosalyn Diprose in her book Corporeal Generosity.
And Diprose discusses a lot of things, but importantly for me, in Corporeal Generosity, she conceptualizes ‘generosity’ as a fact of our experiences of one another. For Diprose, generosity is not only an affect but also affectivity is made possible by generosity.
Not only do we experience generosity, but also the experience of intersubjectivity at a corporeal level, the generosity of feeling for someone else while also feeling their difference, is what makes the affective operational.
Makes us susceptible to [[impact]].
And there are other, more autonomy confirming ways of defining generosity. But you can keep those.
Here, I am interested in generosity as mode of relation. A way of understanding the back and forth between people that includes and is defined by actions of acknowledging another.
So, I want generosity. As a mode of relation.
But generosity implies ease. Implies a good & positive experience of the relationships that we are in.
If generosity is a modality and experience of relation, so is dissonance.
Dissonance as the unease that attends practices of relations.
And so these are the ideas that it pivots on, the [[constellation]] that I am trying to understanding what I mean through.
Dissonance comes with generosity as a way of troubling the tendency to romanticise being together or feelings of care. Dissonance also is what brings digital philosophies that address disruption in technology to bear on the experiences of the relationships that they mediate.
So, what I want to trace here is how dissonance is like nervousness, like emotional glitching or friction or noise, it is perhaps technological theatricality & failure. Technological stickiness. Emotional alongsidedness. It is a tactical unification of these ideas. It is the harsh effects of being together. It is syncopation, the inevitability of emotional asynchrony.
It the sum that is larger than its parts.
And hopefully I will be able to build a sense of what I am trying to do by bringing these ideas together. Demostrate how they constitute or consolidate something with their [[constellation]].
Double-click this passage to edit it.
And what she says about it is, ‘this is the fact that your emotional time as an audience is not the same as the emotional time of the play is what makes one endlessly troubled about a play’
I have long been fascinated with the particular kind of relation that Stein describes, what she refers to as the ‘nervousness’ produced by this particularly syncopation.
Because it is very much based in the emotional experience of watching a performance.
That emotional experience is based on the affect of being out of time despite also being at the same time.
[[She writes]]
[[Nervousness consists in needing to go faster or go slower so as to get together. It is that that makes anybody nervous.]]
And notion of being out of time with the thing you are experiencing seems very useful to me as a way of explaining how internet communication frames our relations. & our emotional experience of those relations.
Our effort to get together when we can’t.
How it repositions time and also our connections to one another so that we can feel always together while also knowing we are [[apart]].
And also because watching a performance, the meaning of a performance is – like life – tied up in the effort to emphasize with another person and the [[inevitable malfunction]] of that exercise.
Nervousness, syncopation, dissonance, these are words for describing things that are ongoing and active. That operate in a present but also generate a feeling forward, because that is what happens with affects – with the sensory experiences of being in the world – and with the emotions that they are ultimately and inevitably imbricated in. [[They happen and then go in both directions.]]
And dissonance is, for me, a way of thinking about [[noise]], or [[glitch]] or [[friction]], thinking about how these things that describe a kind of technological function also have an affective and emotional experience associated them. Both in the sense of their impact and effects but also insofar as they are describing models of relation that people are inside.
And perhaps, as our relations are increasingly mediated then we need to think about the emotional [[friction]] and [[noise]] and [[alongsidedness]] that comes with that and the impacts of living it together. The ways we all have to live it differently.
So it is perhaps a [[constellation]] of ideas for the already ongoing operations of difference.
So it is the fails, the errors, the imperfections that make themselves known as they trip and are tripped over that is the point.
Glitches, things that catch.
A [[constellation]] made up of the results of things gone wrong.
[[Friction lends itself more readily to analysis of potential power dynamics at play.]]
Friction is in movement, which seems useful.
It occurs in process, as the result of a relation.
Friction is when two things rub together.
[[The interaction of substances in ‘mutual irritations’.]]
(Which is actually a definition for interface from McLuhan)
But if dissonance is about relation ([[generosity]]), about the discordant experiences that attend to our modes of being together, friction and the interface can be similar. [[Can be kept in proximity to each other.]]
And proximity asks a new set of questions, considerations.
It requires its own constellation of ideas, which is not the [[constellation]] currently at hand.
Those moments when the infrastructure of feelings become suddenly hyper-visible. Or, perhaps not hyper visible but when [[we bump against the sides of them.]]
& there is a line in Off the Network where Mejias asks for the shift ‘from trying to solve the problem of communicating in the presence of noise to one that sees noise as [[communicating presence]]’.
Noise as communicating presence makes sense, here, to me. Noise as a product and a by-product of exercises of relation. As the moments when communication sticks & [[it becomes abundantly clear to me that you do not know what I mean]].
It is like a [[theatricality]] of technologies.
Theatricality is an engagement with conventions, with the ways in which a performance typically does the work of performing.
As well as impossibility of making invisible the conventions that frame the performance, the work of making the performance perform.
So, for theatricality there is necessarily those performing and those that watch and see that work.
[[And maybe what I am talking about is a kind of theatricality.]]
Theatricality is a particular kind of inevitable failure.
That is important insofar as it demonstrates the work of knowing conventions, enacting them, at the same moment that there is an impossibility to that.
The theatre is theatrical because is real, really happening, and not real, relying on our ability to collectively know how it will fail and be impressed or interested in that.
Theatricality returns the [[constellation]] of ideas human exchanges, to the strange ways we frame them and the stranger ways we get them wrong.
“Systems work because they don’t work. Non-functionality remains essential for functionality. This can be formalized: pretend there are two stations exchanging messages through a channel. If the exchange succeeds – if it is perfect, optimal, immediate – then the relation erases itself. But if the relation remains there, if it exists, it’s because the exchange has failed. It is nothing but mediation. [[The relation is a non-relation]].”
I like the idea of this relation that fails to erase itself. Of the imperfect message, the the exchange that is failing to complete itself.
Which is perhaps to move slightly to the side of what is described here: not the exchange that fails but one that is failing and, in failing, that [[continues the relation (the exchange) it frames]].
And so, what of the people being frustrated by the exchange that is failing.
Who are still in relation to one another, a relation that is also somehow thwarting their ability to communicate.
What does it feel like to be there? Temporarily or permanently.
Dissonance deals with a moment, an occasion.
All of these ideas do.
But also there is a question about where this [[constellation]] might lead, what thinking its thinking might make or unmake.
The failure I am interested in here, though, is the functional failure of certain systems:
This is what charms me about [[friction]], [[glitch]]es, [[alongsidedness]] and [[noise]].
Is that they all, to me, sound very much like [[theatricality]] and the particular kind of [[near-failure]] that one finds in theatre and performance.
Malfunction more than failure.
Because I really am against the romance of failure.
So [[malfunction]].
Which is at the heart of the representation conundrum that characterises theatre and, by association in my opinion haunts performance: the fact of attempting to representing real life and failing to do so while also actually being real life.
[[And therefore being entirely successful in being life-like.]]
Which is, I think, the syncopation that Stein talks about. That makes her nervous.
And is maybe super obvious.
But, for me, is super fascinating insofar as it is part of the muddle and the mess that we do our thinking in.
Part of this particularly [[constellation]].
Sticky is the affective quality of certain signs, that makes things stick together or makes us stick to certain modes of understanding.
Sticky is a word that Sara Ahmed uses in [[the Cultural Politics of Emotion]] to talk about the ways meaning accrues to affects, the connotations accrue to our feelings]:
‘Rather than using stickiness to describe an object’s surface, we can think of stickiness as an effect of surfacing, as an effect of the histories of contact between bodies, objects, and signs. To relate stickiness with historicity is not to say that some things and objects are not ‘sticky’ in the present. Rather, it is to say that stickiness is an effect. That is, stickiness depends on histories of contact that have already impressed upon the surface of the object.’
[[Stickiness.]]
[[And so all of the ideas that are set beside each other here are about,]]
Are in some way about what the points of contact between people feel like.
What they feel like as they become embroiled that facts of communication technologies.
[[And in the facts of our emotional and affective experiences of being together.]]
Dissonance is also a way of accounting for the ways in which that together [[is inevitable not generous]].
Is inevitably a product of histories of contact that stick to [[the impact of our contact with each other]].
And make those instances, their frictions, [[easier and hard to bear]].
Dissonance is because I wanted a way to talk not about how technologies structured emotion or emotion was a technology but about how all of that was already ongoing. And difference, distance, [[glitch]]ing and [[friction]] and [[failure and near failure]] are all potentially beautiful and productive and fascinating.
While also being very much not, very much yet another opportunity to build inequities and ignorance.
So this is [[constellation]] is perhaps supposed to be, for me, a way of addressing the muddles and the tangles of being in relation. In which we are generously coming together at the same moment that our proximity is dramatically confirming our distance and our difference.
***
[[All of these ideas as anecdotes.]]