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List of works related to music and walking, or walking music.

Hammons from “Going Out” anthology book and the buddha quoted by Derek Jarman in his memoirs “Modern Nature”

Hammons recognised the diversity and flow of public space as creative inspiration, as creativity. “The less I do the more of an artist I am”. A simple manifesto that suggests much without filling the observer with long words, words encoded with the possesive nature of logistics.

I read three essays in “Going Out: Walking, Listening, Soundmaking”, an anthology of walking related practices. 150 pages. Reading is a kind of movement, a motion, so it would not be fair to ridicule the corporeal paradox of sitting and reading a book about walking which may not be a negative paradox. However the logistics of an anthology tries to gather patterns from a diverse array of creative practices, to categorise, and to assimilate these practices into a dominant language.

Another quote from Hammons: “The art audience is the worst audience in the world. It’s overly educated, it’s conservative, it’s put to criticism, not to understand and it never has any fun! Why should I spend my time playing to that audience? That’s like going into the lion’s den. So I refuse to deal with that audience. I will play with the street audience. That audience is much more human, and their opinion is from the heart. They don’t have any reason to play games, there is nothing gained or lost.”

Criticism: an assertion of bourgeious elitism? Fred Moten writes in “The Undercommons”: “Critical theory neglects the possibility of there being an outside, an untameable…” The relation beteen the critique and the outside. What is outside of the critique? How can we imagine outside as a sort of unframing, outside of logic? And walking as an evaporation of logic, of verbalism. Evaporation: context leaves through the pores, the self empties, the wind rattles through us. Wanting to feel in this way would be dangerous in a rotting landscape full of grief and violence. But then to smell the gorse on an empty stomach is beautiful and intense. Digestion: swallow some words, walk them out, test them in their relations to the thick spatial experience of an environment, stick them to the lands and leave them hanging on trees and motors, take a shit and the opened hollow will birth a new idea, not yours, but one made in space.

Notes now on “The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study” by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.

In moten and Harney’s framework of the colonial dynamic, the settler does not surround the exploited but is surrounded. The settler attacks outwardly, transforming heterogeneity into homogeneity and defines the commons. In this framework, why repair and why fight for visibility? Why fight for the commons? Rather then defend our commons, can we inhabit the outside, the space unframed by those categories and logics defined by the settler?

What is looming outside of every attempt to politicise?

There is resonance here between Moten and Harney’s commons and Hammon’s art world. They both desire to looks beyond the critique. The critique may be the tool of a rationalising order, to tame whatever’s left outside.

So how to inhabit the outside, close to chaos? This call may be beyond politics that may be already encapsulated by an order codified in hierarchy and domination. A call to bring life into intensity, to imagine chaose as a source of intensity.

Final notes on Brandon La Belle’s “Sonic Agency”.

La Belle’s last chapter of his book, titled “The Weak”.

La Belle is outlining a politics of vulnerability and weakness, a “passionate politics” (hooks) held in spaces where our deep longings and desires are shared as a process of building community. Relating to bell hook’s work on critical education, the classroom represents this potential space to carry and educate methods of collectivising. Rather than an imposition of determined knowledge, a classroom of “enagaged pedagogy” becomes a space enriched with “the commonality of feeling”, an embodied present reflecting the thickness of social tensions and connections of everyday life. Through feeling together, the subjectivity of knowledge is displayed through living bodies. hooks’ classroom is a space in continuous flux, shifting with the present moods and dynamics of the students and teachers. The engaged classroom reflects a politics free from the subtractive qualities of the “campaign”: instead as fluid as the “nonmovements of everyday life”.

Back to La Belle’s words, these places of learning can function as “shared spaces of (erotic) becoming, sites of desire and longing, bridges between private and public life.”

La Belle’s expanding view of agency goes beyond, or before politics. He echoes Herbert Marcuse’s call for an “emergence of a new historical subject”, calling for a political subjectivity beyond ideology, a transformation of the self that goes “against the prevailing technological reasoning of our times. It is this technological reasoning of ideology that La Belle claims to reduce “the creativity of our speech, to an overarching functionality, restricting the full dimensionality of discourse.” (pg 133).

This possibility of self-transformation opens an expanding view of political subjectivity, one that is “expressed not solely in gestures of speaking up, or in rational formations of energetic attunement, ecstatic togetherness, and affective intervention – vibrational formations in which the personal is deepy political and the political is something to be shared.”

La Belle is outlining a potential bridge between the fuzzy realms of the spiritual and the rationalism of politics, that to be together as a “vibrational formation”, connecting as much through non-verbal energetic becoming as speech and ideology, is a continued expression of our political subjectivity. In this framework, subjectivity does not start and end with a ‘campaign’, but is continously emerging from our embodied interactions as individuals or collectives. Connection, joy and togetherness are seen as powerful political actions against systems that rank, divide, and alienate individuals. Perhaps to avoid the rationalisation of these ecstatic human qualities of togetherness, La Belle makes a claim for this subjectivity to be “beyond the purely political”, and refers to Václav Havel’s term the “pre-politcal”, which he describes as the “fundamental responsibility of a life lived with others, that overrides party politics.”

“in being weak, one is in need of others.”

unlearning great

dislearning womp womp

dislearning, dis-connected to a knowing. unlearning not a return, recognising trapped energies.

there is a possibility of our dislearning, as our tools provide a constantly higher leaning away from the troublesome heart which coats the knowing. the painful heart throbs and now we can leap away in a constant flow of external spaces, virtual spaces, a stimulation peaking beyond the threshold of a sensory whole.

how to make a statement about the collective shifts from an individual perspective?

Further notes on Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennet. Bennet suggests ways of approaching our being in order to access, even slightly, the “vibrancy” of matter, this entanglement of things that surrounds and partakes us. In regards to the opposition of this enlightenment, what is the blinding string that gathers us into self? Perhaps it is our fear of death, becoming unwhole into the ground that moves beneath us, that keeps us desperately holding ourselves together. Perhaps the fear of death is not an intention but the intrinsic motive of the body. So life is a fleeting holding on, and the illusory idea of self motivates each step to eat, to love and to breathe!

It reminds me how the existential psychotherapists say that anxiety is inherent to the human condition, or how birds and squirrels look like they’re on amphetamines! Existential anxiety.

In it’s meta version, vibrant materialism is a gentleness, a gap of ease between the everyday harshness of survival.

I’d like to make a future installation that sounds our death. As a reminder that the only certainty in our future is our death. The Buddhas say it is a good thing to know our death. That’s when the shimmering beauty of life reveals itself.

Collapse is fatigue, depression, dysfunctional relationships, transport strikes, the malnourished fox. Collapse envisioned through micropolitical and microsocial events is more real than a story of “the end of the world”. Decay brings growth. Even a speck of algae bloom is a world of it’s own, and so the worlds continue to exist.

Sound to connect, not seperate. Listening for connection, to increase the enchantment of living; with eachother, with non-human beings and materials, with our interweaving environments.