Close (vision) is (how we) here

Abstract

What has not yet been imagined in thought is: how to remain together while still being two, how to be and become subjectively two, how to discover a way of coexisting as two beings … a way of living and thinking and loving as two beings without one being reduced to the other? … [t]hanks to the respect that I feel for the other as other, to articulate both attraction and restraint with respect to him. I go out from and return to myself in order to respect his alterity, and this respect for the other becomes respect for myself, my life and my growth. So there is no longer fusion or submission, but the existence of a two which is irreducible to one or to the simple opposition between one (male) and the other (female), a reduction which makes them simply two poles of the one.

Luce Irigaray, Democracy Begins Between Two 112–13

Notes

1. There are two blind breakdown curves in “Clapping Music.” The first is when the players stumble and hence destroy the trajectory of the action. This lets laughter and sadness out. The second will be noted later, and it lets loose other possibles, including “texture” and futurality. Deleuze reminds us to pay attention to and even work with what is enabled when things break down, crack up. Although “Clapping Music” as musical composition involves the simplest of materials and techniques, it has limit points all over it into which the players fall. Sometimes composers use the most complex materials and techniques in order also to lay up a store of such limits, and from these limits, to derive new ground for further possibles. In one of Paul's compositions, “Deep Mountain,” he used a computer-based composition program as his initial generative principle, throwing information at the computer at a rate beyond the computer's capacity to process that input. This caused the program to function along its breakdown curve, to emit a maximum number of “workable” errors, which then became the texture upon which the final piece was written. It is thus neither simplicity nor complexity, purity nor avant-gardism of approach which is crucial here, but the ways in which habitual expectations and goals attached to these can be interrupted in the doing of a process, and hence generate new material which simply could not have been “invented” by the ear or the formal conceits of the mind, “in advance” of that doing. To release possibilities requires some form of breakdown, which is, according to Paul, both its dangerousness and its necessary difficulty. Says Murail, of his own evolution:

• … the initial goal was the desire to develop the capacity to control the finest possible degree of change. Having achieved this, however, we began to feel that the music had perhaps become too directional and predictable; we then had to find a way to re-introduce surprise, contrast and rupture … triggering “catastrophic” changes … in these works there is clearly more than … continuous evolutions. (Murail 7)

2. “… [t]he ‘what does not pass’ or ‘what does not happen’ of time defined on the basis of the now, as limit, as the point of the instant. ‘Some of it has been and is not, some of it is to be, and is not yet.’ From these both infinite time and time in its incessant return are composed” (Derrida 1997, 140). Compositionally, the cellular unit on which Reich's piece is based employs, on the micro level, movement from and to a point. The event groups that define the rhythmic cell are three, two, and one beat long (separated by a rest of one beat), followed by a return in groups of one, two, and three events. This contraction and relaxation creation is a palindrome, or non-retrogradable rhythm. But, due to the rotations of the cell in player two's part, the overall macro structure of the work can also be seen as palindromic. The two-ness of relations on other levels of the work now expands to include the cell and the work as a whole, an expanding breathing apparatus of ins and outs. Within the cyclical restratification and renewal of the relationship between parts, the music deploys a contradictory non-retrogradable process. As time passes only in a forward direction, the compositional technique of retrogradation affords the opportunity to imply (artificially) reversal – a reversal and retracing back through the same material, yet in the forward passage of time. Contiguous with the temporal progression of the numbers one, two, three, four, and five, is the material progression three, two, one, two, three, implying reversal and directional change. Retrogradation, therefore, is a concept, or sensation, ultimately an artificial distortion of time. The adjacent issue of palindromes is integral to exploring aspects of the creative process and its re-creation in time-based works of art. Experiential time is released, becomes bendable, folded back over itself as the material reverses backward (yet forward) to the beginning. In typical compositional style, musical material (notes, timbre) is considered outside of time, then placed, in the manuscript, back into it, and performed with reference to time, in time. By contrast, with any example of forward movement and reversal, the focal point becomes not the start or end point but always ever the location upon which the reversal is centered: the new now. Presenting material forward and then backward creates a central fulcrum of energy around which material is outwardly, but not exteriorly, distributed. Movement is made from the beginning toward the center point (without knowledge of its location or existence), followed by the journey away – tracing unrealistically backward through the material while time moves forward (a 12321 statement of material against time's alleged 123456789 momentum). The mercurial conflict between forward and implied backward motion is like two flints being rubbed together, their friction both complex and inflammatory, centripetal and centrifugal at once.