John Mark Sherlock

sherlock – utopiansimBeautyTry to understand that every work of his is hopeless. Stainless, salvage/wrecking, utopianism have nothing to do with being music – it is just a coincidence. Think more about how they all fail in themselves, how they fail to become the beauty they so effortlessly suggest. The performer(s), presented with successive impossibilities, engage the process of becoming this art, of choosing themselves, for themselves, in order to lose themselves of themselves. They must not succeed in what is given; the music should never resemble its conditions. In other words, the music must fail to be “music”; it must forget its “self” as found and become what it never can be – utopia.The effect of failure is not regrettable; in fact, it’s a boon. It relieves Beauty of having to coincide with its terms, terms freighted with so much irrelevant import that they obscure the conditions on which this music might be interesting. Of course one is free to seek Beauty in these events. Clearly there is manifest a tendency towards something that reminds us of Beauty; however, not according to anachronisms like “balance, “proportion” and “harmony” but something more remote, something like the pure aesthetic disposition Kant imputes to the “concept-less” cosmological by-product of “Nature” (“This one’s a real Ideas lacker”¦”). Yet, because Kant requires that the Beautiful emerge as a judgment grounded upon the pleasurable agreement of the Imagination’s faculty of intuition with that of the Understanding’s faculty of concepts, Sherlock’s music, by this measure, cannot rightly called Beautiful. But works such as these, though they fail to comport with Kant’s (obnoxious) rationalist notion of the Beautiful and offer only the distribution of salvaged affects as their aesthetic expression, bring the event they provoke into the domain of an empiricism advanced by such thinkers as William James, John Dewey, and Gilles Deleuze. In the empirical sense espoused by these theorists the matter of art is less as a discourse of representation (the Beautiful) and more a functional modality of experiential flow.Up close the music is harmless. Look at the curiously listless vertices. They are unstrung and chasing their own tail. Sedimentation. I suppose there is no choice really. The instruments are libelous in their associations. They, like Beauty, carry the burden of history. Yet as with “harmony” et al, their cargo is irrelevant. Well, that’s not entirely true. We are always listening through tradition, and tradition, if you will, is an implement that bequeaths context, be it the instrumental timbre, ornamentation, corporeal deportment, or the sociality of the proscenium. However, because the sounding of these instruments lacks the attendant histrionics of their traditional expression, history is scuttled by the failure of its own discursive tactics. What we have to deal with then are a kind of sonic flotsam that refuses to go anywhere.The music sounds the way it does for the reason that its Beloved is no-where. The Beloved we know as the addressee or object of the lyric poem’s subject is also the virtuality proper to this music’s becoming. The Beloved’s virtuality is what guides the music’s advent or coming-to-be-in-the world, but never comes forth itself, in itself.It’s in the refusal to be beautiful that the Beloved of Sherlock’s music shepherds its emergence. Yet, despite this refusal, the music insinuates Beauty. Keep in mind that these works are not Beautiful; they never have the property of beauty. Beauty belongs to “Music” and to “Art,” such, it serves the interests of a leisure that can afford its own disinterest. In short, Beauty is less the “what happens” than the talk of it. Rather than Beautiful, these works show the lineaments of a beauty-yet-to-come. “The Beautiful,” which is reason’s task to evince, is in this case irrelevant so far as the music is indifferent to its circumstance. Here the Beautiful serves as a conceptual pivot for deeds of irreverent soundings. But what deeds! Deeds that “drift” and seek out reasons for movement other than those for which an environment was designed” (Sadie Plant). To empty itself of all topographies so that an “im-beauty” will seep into its recess. But how does that matter for a committed procession of failings? Perhaps because all beauty founders on its own terms””proportion, harmony, accord, pleasure (as so many second terms)””it requires a third name: the Beloved.What stands in for Beauty (even though it is hopeless, and precisely what this effort affords) is “no where.”Properly speaking, the Beloved belongs to the lyric poem; it is the poet’s world or persona to whom speaker in the poem addresses. Though I speak of a Beloved that does not make of this music poetry. But consider this: A lyric poem imagines both a speaker and a world addressed. From here it is simple to take the position that the world is the Beloved. The Beloved, as Allen Grossman has noted in his Summa Lyrica, is what “modulates the relationship of the poem’s subject and object, and the distance it creates is filled with ontological questions.” Poetry’s question, its theory””it’s “theatre” even””is ontology. Poetry interrogates being. In that music is also a denizen of imagination, it too fantasizes a relationship of sorts and differs from poetry in that its object of address, its “Beloved,” does not modulate the relationship of subject to object by a propositional form. Propositional form is a semantic encoding that “ha[s] in common with identified facts only a logical [and therefore dimensionless] structure. Music on the other hand “hallucinates” a gesticulatory form, a signifying structure “related to the entirety of emotional, affective and motivational states and processes.” Gesture it seems is a type of dynamic sign that signifies an object by virtue of its homologous or indexical character to that object, actual or not. Music, in a manner of speaking, has its own kind of Beloved, a Beloved symbolized by the gestural semblances of sound that actualize its virtue in affect. Music’s Beloved is the affective representation of change per se, or to use Henri Bergson’s term, dureé. Music lives duration.The Beloved of Sherlock’s address, what transposes our hearing into a listening, lingers as so many shards of harmony and takes “no where” as its object of desire. Thus, a failure is installed at the very core of Sherlock’s expression. Hailing a Beloved whose desire is “no where” will yield a mute response. The (non)reply that comes from the “no where” within one’s own address is the unbearable light of being to which Kundera refers. Yet because this is music and not poetry, the theatre is one of becoming and not of being. As becoming the Beloved is not so much silent as “out of range” or rather out-of-joint. The Beloved of “no where” is infinitely truant and so demands a certain reserve to enable its efferent desire to mobilize an afferent form.The failure that hollows out what is possible in art, so that Beauty might become the truant Beloved, effects a cosmetic withdrawal that reveals the relationship of the artist to his “world” as modulated by multiple being””that is to say, by the event, or what ruptures the multiplicity of being (Badiou). Like night then, which encourages the distribution of sound over sight, this withdrawal, although not itself sensible, is the condition of unveiling that makes one sensitive to the plenary absence of the Beloved.Why is this music is so sad? Because its melancholy proceeds from the fundamental task of showing itself to be bereft of Beauty, of signifying the eternal departure of the Beloved whose anterior withdrawal is the only thing that it can tell me. How then does one listen to a music whose entire purpose is already a future past?You don’t, at least not in any meaningful sense. What is there to listen to? “Form,” “development,” “proportion,” “precision?” These are all figures of the past maintained by the resilience of historical narrative. “Harmony,” et al. haunt rather than complement present-tense beauty. They (mis)donate (me-donner) aesthetic value by convention rather than by merit such that anything that now resembles art (never mind doing art) has no chance to be other than Beautiful, or one of its representative marshals. Of course because Beauty as a name (Beloved?) has its origin in the Enlightenment it is afflicted with those typical problems of modernity (ideology, class, gender, etc); however, the diaphaneity or robustness of Beauty, if you will recall, is not a feature I attribute to Sherlock’s music. As a conceptual lever, the Beautiful manoeuvres Sherlock out of its purview. But like the relationship of a lie to the truth, the Beautiful keeps its “other” in sight. If the Beautiful is relevant to Sherlock’s music, it is with the singular purpose to avoid being it. And in order to succeed at this, failure must be the Beloved’s sobriquet.All art addresses a Beloved, be it a persona, a world, or extinction.Failure1.0 Keep in mind that I am not saying these works are beautiful; rather, they promote a future beauty. “The Beautiful,” which is not what I am saying , is in this case a hinge.1.1 That which tends towards Beauty: It is almost nothing, mostly nothing in fact. It gives way to change. Indeed, this tendency is utterly dependent upon its giving way, for the charm is precisely its alibi.1.1.1 It might go without saying that Beauty changes with time; its meaning a measure of the socio-historical currency of the of the sign. If we take Adorno’s position that aesthetic experience is a negative experience (the anti-form of history), then how does the negative articulate the aesthetic experience of beauty?1.2 Lingering might be a better term to describe the way these sounds endure and do the work of excavation.1.2.1 Rather than integrate and harmonize the detritus of history, Sherlock prefers to distribute it, but in a localized manner that does more to allay the whimpering of an-art than service the politics of re-”Art.”1.2.2 It could also be said that there is no working upon history here. The remainders, gathered into congeries of pastness, exhibit expressive forms – “culture” – which, in order to satisfy “Art” require only the mere shuffling of crumbs, whereas, art desires creation. The former case concerns technique and representation -geometry – while the latter tasks contemplation and resemblance. In other words “Art” confuses fabrication for creation. What is peculiar here is how the crumbs are not given to fabrication that exemplifies pretends to a trajectory of sense. Instead the crumbs are operationalizes as crumbs. The dirt and garbage you pass over or around have a life whose vitality, despite its irrelevance to you, vibrates nonetheless.1.3 Sherlock often describes himself as floating among the flotsam of life. Everything you might have hold of then””in art, in thought””is the jetsam of history.1.3.1 Like Sherlock, if this is our contemporary predicament, we are all of us lost at sea. How you keep yourself afloat and whether you believe such an effort will buoy you up and carry you to shore orients an attitude towards the future. On Sherlock’s part I would suggest his effort lacks this struggle. He neither gropes nor scrambles to salvage meaning. In the wreckage of “Art” while hope floats Sherlock drifts.2.0 Before I become too immersed in thinking about the fragility and/or robustness of Beauty I should remind you that a “hinge” is what works to freight the significance of experiential remainders. A hinge then does not require an ontological ground to function but needs only an idea of its transcendence to intend meaning. Of course this does not does yield an absolute knowledge of what we are interested in, but I never said that it would.2.0.1 Jankélévitch calls his hinge “Charm.”2.1 Using Beauty, let’s think about the Beloved as a functionary in a way that history does not. I could speak in formal terms about this or that but “that” would exclude the more interesting thisness (ecceity) of failure’s function in the pleasure of experiencing “no where.”2.1.1 As I was saying elsewhere, if the Beloved is what establishes our sense of distance to it by being alternately both the address and the addressed and so constitutes our subject position accordingly, then in this case, because the Beloved is “no where,” it measures degree zero.2.2 The “no where” that inheres in the music””the Beloved who is forever missed””frees you to endure its present absence in much the same way that the beholden world’s hidden half behind you has a visual presence to it that fails to directly command your attention.2.2.1 In this sense the Beloved is a whisper that hints the advent of music’s becoming.2.3 The Beloved that Sherlock shows you opens itself to having nothing say except for its own facticity. And by this I mean that it is a-rhetorical, which, curiously, in making itself be nothing but fact””a singularity even””multiples its valence so that you can say as much as you want but you will never say it all.3.0 The Beloved “no where” is always the object. Thus failure is always its aim.3.1 But don’t take this failure as regrettable. There should be no greater success than for the music to fail the terms of being Beautiful. When failure is imma/inent to the Beautiful it involuntarily makes of our attention a vital readjustment.3.2 Failure is that hesitation consciousness is given in experience; a divergent matter whose intention is to dehisce, to reticulate the arrival of experience itself.3.2.1 “Caught in the poetic momentum that will have been set in motion, the subordinate re-creator, fertilized, becoming a poet in turn, will someday reproduce””who knows?””the initial act, the original poetic condition where works of art improvise themselves into existence.”4.0 Failure places the address of the Beloved beyond hope, for hope admits a deferral that implicates a lack or deficiency to its eventuality.4.1 Thus, “no where” refuses hope. The most one can wish for is to dampen its own turbulence.4.2 “Music is a charm, made of nothing, insists upon nothing, and perhaps it is nothing…The Charm is labile and fragile, and our presentiments of its obsolescence lend poetic melancholia to the state of grace it has engendered.”————————Melancholy of timeMusic that reconfigures the imminence of passage, whose sounds are timbral evocations that harness the sensation of nostalgia, Affective rendering of the felt melancholy of time does not force sound to represent vanished sensation, such could only be a banal act of sentiment that demands repetition, a demand whose hail remains out of joint with the hailed. The sadness of life’s rich (pageant) does not suggest nor harkens the despondence of flight but renders actual the affect of departure and the intensity of grief, For this reason one cannot “read” the work, one can only join it in its dolorous flow, which is not to say that he “writes sadness,” its more personal than that. This “sadness” stands beside its “self” in the aesthetic function of actual-izing the virtual and “untimely” condition of the pending sorrow of extinction.———————–Strange continuity: Pivots and PastsAffective pivots that turn on themselves. Timbre, more than anything else, sets the tribological performance of the text in motion. History, what the text’s textuality amounts to informs and furrows listening by its accretion of pragmatic utility. But always history is a modulatory trope. It inflects those aspects of experiential continuity that comport with a particular genre of discourse (ie. Beauty, Art). History then is not departed; it is neither elsewhere, nor at rest but rather a function of experience. It is a co-ordinate term that configures the facets of experience made salient by the prevailing narrative model into an expression of relations as transgredient to the immediate experience. History then is no dead silence, but a continually supple process of refolding more or less of the past into the present fold of immediate experience. What is heard at any moment is the soft ruffle of cultural pleats piling over-against the singular past of the now.Then what are we listening to? If the event is never just what is happening, present in and to itself, then it seems that we have to admit to time’s dehiscence and duplicable character. Whatever is experienced as music is heard immediately as both past and present. In this context history can be given the name tradition, and particular to tradition is the way it constrains and shapes the affects of sonic environments. In other words, tradition tells us how to listen; the amusing part is that we all have different relations to tradition, this one or that one. So, tradition is, in a sense, a past that co-exists with the present. But in addition to the cultural past is the less remote vista of one’s present. All along you are hearing the dolorous tones, typically five (or so) harmonic pivots that parley their affects into a “composition” becoming the expanse of their own past. With each event, the duration of which expresses a host of other durations, the whole of the composition changes its quality, yet without ever negating or excluding the difference that constitutes the qualitative change. Suddenly the minor character of the work is a complexity of two jets of time: one, increasing in breadth, while the other contracts a greater diversity of virtual facets into actual sensation. What I was just mentioning about tradition still applies””its constraining tendency maintains. However, all durations upon which tradition impinges alters its functional order. The novelty that emerges from the commingling of the past and present, what we might call the sensuous future, modulates the available meanings that govern the affective order of tradition. A composition can never be beautiful in actu for the simple reason that Beauty belongs to retrospection. Beauty can only report a judgment upon an irrecoverable “historical” experience. For while the works affects us we are in media res and “that” experience is just that, what William James calls pure experience: “of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not…the collective name for these sensible natures” none of which are universal elements of any particular experience.More radically, retrospection is itself subject to the nature of duration. Experience as a “fold” (the continuous implication of an expanding past contracted into an unfolding present) or a “function” makes the remembrance of things past, in a very real and peculiar sense, a continuation of that duration. This continuity is as real as the continuity established by the pauses between movements; however, instead of re-engaging experience from the point of view of its material arrangement, one that posits the multiplicity of gestures as a “performance” as an expression of that composition that is termed “physical,” the piece is reanimated as an experience that is given the name “memory.” Unlike the “concrete” experience whose system of relations assigns a fixed place to it that inflects a reality in the stubborn, coherent mode, the “mental” aspect, which is less systematic in the assignation of its associate relations, expresses a reality inflected in the “fluid” mode. According to radical empiricism, the relation between the two experiences, audition and recollection, is real and felt as such. The two are continuous, or conjunctive, in the sense that this manner of relation, like all relations, is merely a functional attribute that actualizes pure experience by “differing degrees of intimacy.” In this sense, to remember is to modulate the available attributes of experience so that the degree of intimacy expressed, be it “with,” “next,” “and,” “similarity,” “difference,” “disjunctive” or “conjunctive,” is merely a modal operation on the thatness. Conjoined then to the past via the shared “sense formation,” which itself is a virtual object, the present recollection is less the subjective fancy of a “thing” and more the modal continuation of it.The composition, existing “then” as a concrete experience exists “now” as a recollected one. Of course “then” the concrete experience also had its mental facet (“I can’t wait for this to end”) just as it “now” has a physical expression, (“walking down the street”). However, properly speaking, as Massumi points out, being precedes cognition, so that in the event the speakable identities that would be taken as either subjective-objective, physical/mental areinseparable from the immediacy of the relation. Their coming-together precedes their definition. And it is their definition that culminates the event: only after it has run its course can the situation be fully contextualized, accurately determined to have been a particular case of a general class of happening.The point: what constitutes the “composition” is not simply a matter fixed to the locative expression of the sounds. Financially speaking this might be true, for payment can only be collected at the performance hall, whereas recollection of the event is free of that charge. However, to understand that experience is expressed in terms of functions that manifest a series conjunctively or disjunctively (and all terms that denote forms of relation) related allows for a strange continuity by virtue of the modulation of its terms. “Before” or “after,” “subjective” or “objective” makes no difference to the flux of pure experience so much as it nominates an attribute of relation to a particular portion of it. With regard to the recollection of the event it is true that the “mental” mode is equally subject to the duplicable condition of time where the past swells in the present recollection’s advance.————————ListeningWe always fail to hear the moment in itself because each affect distributed at moment is required to configure itself anew with regard to the repetition of history’s suggestion as well as to its own more immediate past (what is now its own memory-image that impinges upon its own present).The immanent diagramme of each event represents time to its conscious function as inevitable and smooth. The term “smooth” denotes a confluence of event-order in a particular “story” that dissembles the frayed edges of coeval varieties of intensities, of speeds and slownesses, of rates of change both internal and external to the territory of time. History is the effected contour of smoothing out (forming “ideas” about) the multifarious caesura that connects meaningfully the disparate expressions of temporal reminiscence. Each particular expression of history is a representation of “time”, and appears to its architect and occupant as possessing a firm, but internally “syncopated” rhythm or measure. History symbolizes “discrepant temporalities” the shared or “broken stories” that structure existential relief between divergent series, and entangles representations of being to reveal a furrowed and striated time.————————Facets: (un)facetedEveryone else is concerned to multiply the facets of their expression. Sherlock on the other hand enjoys a peculiar reversal of this tendency. Imagine if you will, a die. Its six sides are its six facets. The finitude and limited power of perception prevents us from seeing all six facets at once. Perhaps with the assistance of strategically placed mirrors or the more finessed application of video cameras we could represent all the sides at once. Think of those early Cubists and their efforts to fold three dimensions into two. But this is only part of it. By rotating the die you are given a progressive experience of all its facets. You are still deprived of an actual totality of the die’s surface attributes; however, virtually speaking, in time you have the whole. Again this is only a part of what I am trying to say. If each facet represents a particular expression of the die then these coordinate features, taken at once or separately, constitute the topography of the object. Now, translate this into a musical setting (l’entourage) and imagine the composition is the die. You will have an analogous experience except for the fact that music does not have a surface that obturates or an edge that leads, per se. It is more like the example of a rotating die, only without the die, leaving the force of rotation and the sense of form it donates. If we again shift figures and consider the composition to be exhibiting “expressions” rather than “sides” we can posit the musical work as mapping a topography of expression. But here’s where it gets a little odd. Each feature (facet) of experience is a contraction of a pure experience. Listening to music is a ritual event that focusses, refines, and gives a particular sonorous definition to the confluent sensations that constitute experience per se (how it does this is belongs to another story). The typical piece of music (in which I include the appurtenant and pertinent rituals) that strives to elaborate this contraction of processes into expressive multiples will yield a many sided or variegated expression. However, describing the experience of music in this way effects an inversion upon Sherlock’s work: despite the framing conventions that circumscribe the experience of his work as “musical” to approach his music of lessness is to limn a negative facet that de-tracts rather than contracts expression. Picture the die again, only this time imagine it inside out. Where previously the expressive object “presents its systematic variations” that “define it in terms of the law of its variation,” (each aspect gives itself as a limit of the system – it is only ever one of six), the eversible die derogates the integrity of a covariant law such that its topography marks the ubiquity of fuzzy horizons. Cognitively speaking, the phenomena that describe music as contractions of experience will yield an expressive topography; however, music like Sherlock’s, phenomena that de-tract or wear away (deterere) the edges of expression, will describe something more like an in-expressive topology, a space of expressive properties and relations unaffected by the continuous change of contour or duration of the phenomena.(See Pivots and Pasts)————————Salvaging-driftingThe instruments serve as analogue to the work. Sherlock not only recovers instruments of history, he also salvages the components that impose other vectors of the past upon the implement. It seems that I’m suggesting Sherlock considers the past rife for aesthetic arrogation. But it is more personal than that. History is not made to serve the aesthetic prospects of “Music;” history can stay where it is. For Sherlock, recovery of the past is a brute act. “Fifty dollars for a cracked console and an assemblage of pipes!” The remains of music’s broken and shattered organs are offered another life. From the dross of culture Sherlock offers the wreckage as a possibility to be beautiful otherwise.————————”Here Now”And “here now” is the ultimate failure. For if by making all acts, all parameters and textualities work to express the ubiquitous schema of “no where,” the concept will be emptied of all meaning, for to make “no where” everywhere is to eliminate what it is set off against. In other words, by designating all instances of its in-expression as “no where,” or by making utopia the whole of its content, the work will have the equivalent of no content and will disable its ability to denote “no where” as “here now.” What then are you left with? You might suggest that this failure is just its own success””but up a notch: “Emptying itself of itself for itself is the final act of accomplishing “nothing” of spreading “no where” everywhere. But this would be an error; succeeding to fail would not be success so much as it would be to walk in circles. Sure enough, to the one who walks in circles “no where” appears to go on forever. But this is to mistake a circle for infinity…The beauty-that-is-yet-to-come can only be a beauty that “will have been.” The fullness of the present does not permit to beauty as beauty can only be accomplished in retrospection. The “real” that we endure is what casts its image behind itself into the indefinite “was.” The past of our present is what finds that it has always been possible; however, it is only at this moment¬””where we are now “”that the past begins to have always been possible. So the Beloved always speaks from the past event though it is of the present. The beauty of the Beloved then is only a memory, a memory ever more so the more often it calls us to remember it, until finally, when it’s features fasten our thought of it and present its variations in terms of the law of its variation, we kill it. But is this not Beauty’s desire: to fix its reflection and ground its conditional élan””to remove itself from life and make of it a corpse? Forever it may be, but no longer living, no longer affective is its call. But do we mistake death for immortality?eldritch PriestMarch 2007