Martin E. Rosenberg
Now retired, Martin received his Ph.D. from the Department of English, University of Michigan, in 1990. He does research on Science, Technology and Culture: Theories of Time; Complexity Theory in physics and cognitive science, Art, Music, Literature, Philosophy and Politics: Poincare and Bergson, Duchamp and the emergence of emergence; Duchamp and Dada; the History of Jazz; Jazz and cognition; Embodiment and Distributed Cognition; Chess and Go; the scientific epistemological foundations of fascism; Thomas Pynchon; Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, John Cage, Sam Shepard; Kiki Smith, Arakawa and Gins, Pilobolus, The Pulsa Group, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari; Henri Atlan & Ilya Prigogine, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Jean Petitot, and Edwin Hutchins.
Martin has had a sideline in Hypermedia, HCI and Interaction-Design. You can see a list of these publications at:
http://www.interaction-design.org/references/authors/martin_e__rosenberg.html
two of which have been translated (Spanish: https://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero8/landowte.htm
and Portuguese: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001297/129707por.pdf
With Jondi Keane of Griffith University, Brisbane AU, Martin co-directed the first completely digital global academic conference:
AG3-Online: The Third International Arakawa and Gins: Architecture and Philosophy Conference,
which ran from March 12-26, 2010 with concluding celebrations at Barnard College April 30, and at The Solomon Guggenheim Museum, May 1, where Martin gave the inaugural keynote.
See the conference website:
http://archive.is/6AFZ
Martin has given a number of invited lectures and conference plenaries internationally, including: Universidade de Sao Paolo (1999 and 2000); University of Bergen, Norway (1998); University of Brussels--Flemish (2000); Trent University Ontario CA, (2005); University of Cologne, Germany (2009); University of Warwick, GB (1994); The Sense Lab, Concordia University, Montreal (2010); University of London (2019); National Academy of Sciences, Prague CZ (2019). And, in the US, at Harvard University (1999); Art Institute of Chicago: E. Kac's Biology and Art Seminar (1999); Texas Tech University (2X) (1998 and 2001); Center for Nano-Technology and Society and the NSF, ASU (2006); Arlington Arts Center DC (2010); Slought Foundation, U. Pennsylvania (2008); and many other places.
He was invited recently to join the editorial board of _The Journal of Music and Meaning_, (http://www.musicandmeaning.net/issues/editorial.php?artID=6.1), the mission of which will be expanded in the coming months.
Originally trained at the Berklee College of Music (1974-6) in composition, arranging and guitar performance, Martin has recently returned to performing and composing jazz in the Pittsburgh area, to complement his current scholarship on jazz and emergence.
Supervisors: William R. Paulson and Stuart Y. MacDougal
Phone: 412-737-2627
Address: 601 Robinwood Drive
Pittsburgh, PA 15216
Martin has had a sideline in Hypermedia, HCI and Interaction-Design. You can see a list of these publications at:
http://www.interaction-design.org/references/authors/martin_e__rosenberg.html
two of which have been translated (Spanish: https://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero8/landowte.htm
and Portuguese: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001297/129707por.pdf
With Jondi Keane of Griffith University, Brisbane AU, Martin co-directed the first completely digital global academic conference:
AG3-Online: The Third International Arakawa and Gins: Architecture and Philosophy Conference,
which ran from March 12-26, 2010 with concluding celebrations at Barnard College April 30, and at The Solomon Guggenheim Museum, May 1, where Martin gave the inaugural keynote.
See the conference website:
http://archive.is/6AFZ
Martin has given a number of invited lectures and conference plenaries internationally, including: Universidade de Sao Paolo (1999 and 2000); University of Bergen, Norway (1998); University of Brussels--Flemish (2000); Trent University Ontario CA, (2005); University of Cologne, Germany (2009); University of Warwick, GB (1994); The Sense Lab, Concordia University, Montreal (2010); University of London (2019); National Academy of Sciences, Prague CZ (2019). And, in the US, at Harvard University (1999); Art Institute of Chicago: E. Kac's Biology and Art Seminar (1999); Texas Tech University (2X) (1998 and 2001); Center for Nano-Technology and Society and the NSF, ASU (2006); Arlington Arts Center DC (2010); Slought Foundation, U. Pennsylvania (2008); and many other places.
He was invited recently to join the editorial board of _The Journal of Music and Meaning_, (http://www.musicandmeaning.net/issues/editorial.php?artID=6.1), the mission of which will be expanded in the coming months.
Originally trained at the Berklee College of Music (1974-6) in composition, arranging and guitar performance, Martin has recently returned to performing and composing jazz in the Pittsburgh area, to complement his current scholarship on jazz and emergence.
Supervisors: William R. Paulson and Stuart Y. MacDougal
Phone: 412-737-2627
Address: 601 Robinwood Drive
Pittsburgh, PA 15216
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Published Articles, Drafts and Software by Martin E. Rosenberg
This thought experiment addresses how the complex processes that govern jazz improvisation enact behaviors that resemble the logic of gift exchange first described by Marcel Mauss (1968). It is possible to bring to bear structural, sociological, political economical, deconstructive or even ethical approaches to what constitutes gift exchange during the performance of jazz. Yet, I would like to shift the focus from grounding this analysis of jazz improvisation with reference to the language of music as symbolic action (which all of these approaches require), to grounding jazz improvisation in embodied and distributed cognition, the performance of which begins with a ritual gift of silence. For jazz musicians, embodied silence becomes the initial condition for processes of cognitive bifurcation. For it is bifurcation that attracts us to jazz in the first place. Jazz can thus be reconceived as a subversive antidote for processes of determination identified with what some have diagnosed in a new sub-discipline of cultural studies called “cognitive capitalism.” I would therefore like to emphasize understanding the role of silence as gift exchange in jazz performance from an anthropological perspective, which conceives of jazz performance as a ritualized resistance to many forms of top-down cognitive control that are coextensive with social and digital networks. I wish to privilege the ritual enactment that is jazz improvisation in order to point towards an aesthetics of bifurcation that is simultaneously an aesthetics, and micro-politics, of neuro-resistance, an enactment that must begin with silence. But what I propose insists on the empirical rather than mystical grounds to this gift of silence. Recourse to silence is not just an ethical surrender of space to an Other, an ethical logic of reciprocity for performers who wish to exchange “riffs.” Silence constitutes an initial condition that performing jazz musicians must experience in their bodies, and thus it becomes necessary to ground embodied cognition in a collective field of cultural production that, while containing melodic, harmonic and rhythmic elements, exists behind these elements. This cognitive field emerges from each embodied individual, and yet also pervades the distributed ensemble in ways reminiscent of feedback loops in complex systems, and it is by recourse to recent research into the cognitive neuroscience of music generally, and jazz improvisation in particular, that the empirical grounds for an anthropology of neuro-resistance become visible.
A penultimate draft of the English version published in _Play and Democracy: Philosophical Implications_ by Routledge UP 12/21can be found on my Research Gate site: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355208012_The_gift_of_silence_Towards_an_anthropology_of_jazz_improvisation_as_neuro-resistance
http://www.epa.uz.ua/03700/03787/00031/pdf/EPA03787_ex_symposion_2019_102_051-060.pdf
A final draft of this essay may be found as a chapter in _Play and Democracy: Philosophical Perspectives_ (Routledge, 2022), a penultimate draft available on my Research Gate website:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355208012_The_gift_of_silence_Towards_an_anthropology_of_jazz_improvisation_as_neuro-resistance.
Much of my early work on the avant-garde demonstrates how Deleuze and Guattari ground the concepts of nomadology and micro-political aesthetics to a great extent in the discourses of complex systems in physics and cognitive science, as those discourses have evolved throughout this century, but especially since the 1960’s. Since the late 1980’s, I have argued, along with Manuel Delanda, that many other concepts such as the refrain, multiplicities, territorialization and de-territorialization, difference and repetition—recently discussed by Deleuzean scholars with reference to music--also share these grounds. We need to justify this venture into the careful forging of alliances among scientific disciplines, the philosophy of science and contemporary aesthetic philosophy, in order to reflect on the following five main lines of inquiry (or what Deleuze and Guattari would call “lines of [conceptual] flight”) traversing the realms of science, philosophy and jazz aesthetics:
How do assumptions about duration or time shape the very different creative processes in classical and jazz music? I refer specifically to the western tendency to spatialize time since the 17th Century when both calculus, and standard music notation with even temperament and bars and time signatures, emerged.
How dependent are John Cage’s compositions, by foregrounding the interdependence of music and noise, upon a carefully considered deconstruction (in the Derridean sense) of the calculus of music notation dominant since those 17th Century innovations in contrapuntal composition. We will then notice how he adopts models of music notation that look uncannily similar to phase space diagrams of such complex irreversible processes as attractor states in thermodynamics.
How did the Be-Bop composing practices of Charlie Parker and others engage directly in the calculated yet spontaneous deconstruction of spatialized time, in order for new, hybrid processes of musical expression to emerge? Reminiscent of Bergson’s stages of “creative evolution,” these processes, enable song structures, as the vehicles for improvisation, as well as the conceptual/linguistic musical content (harmony, melody and rhythm) of those songs, to evolve into increasingly subtle and abstract forms at breath-taking speed.
How may we identify processes of de-territorialization and re-territorialization, and the iterative, emergent or self-organizing nature of the refrain (and of harmonic rhythm generally), as central to an understanding of the micro-political motivations of an aesthetic? We will also see how a shift from the model of calculus to the model of phase space in conceptualizing the nature of duration enables us to theorize, and visualize, the crucial role of systemic bifurcations: in both complex processes from physics (and cognitive science in Part Two), and in jazz.
How one might define Ornette Coleman's theorization of “Free Jazz,” in terms of a distributed form of musical expression (called "Harmelodics"), as an evolutionary extension of the line of conceptual flight opened up by Be-Bop composing practices. Other artists also embraced the distributed nature of jazz performances, involving the maximum freedom in juxtaposing independent and sometimes contrasting melodic, harmonic and rhythmic materials, to reach for a full realization of performative freedom."
Note: the published version of this article in _Pynchon Notes_ from 1994 with graphics is also available on my academia page.
https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/superconversations-day-50-martin-e-rosenberg-responds-to-franco-bifo-berardi-the-message-of-francis/2076
For Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, as well as for Deleuze and Guattari, it seems that the condition of contingency, which characterizes processes of self-organization, is always-already becoming in a non-dialectical relationship with those superimpositions. The exertions of that part of the Body Without Organs responsible for striated spaces, in turn, bear resemblance to the ways in which the unified, autonomous global construct frames and constrains contingency from within as well as from without - within the individual mind as well as in cultural machinery. In other words, the Body Without Organs constitutes a virtual realm undergoing a kind of mental warfare between competing cognitive styles - a realm which offers us a new way to discuss aesthetics as well as politics, and the politics of gender as well as that of ethnicity.
This temporary alliance between philosophy and cognitive science may be extended further to artistic expression. Through Deleuze's own work on Francis Bacon, I would like to apply these distinctions to Kiki Smith's elaborate, technically brilliant constructions often involving viscera and fetuses dangling from paper or wax human forms. Kiki Smith's juxtaposition of elegantly wrought human bodies out of technically difficult materials such as wax over armature, or handmade paper and paper-maché with the horrific representations of flowing menstrual blood, dangling fetuses, placenta, and viscera, deliberately engages contradictory mental processes: the calm disinterest of aesthetic judgment involving standards of harmony, balance, proportion, as well as an appreciation of complexity and skill; the literally visceral response often felt not by the head but by the stomach and intestines experiencing an involuntary response to a horror, a threat.
The descriptions of human consciousness in
Freud and in Deleuze and Guattari are problematic precisely in their inverse, mirrored opposition, and we may discover the "ground" for that opposition by examining the role played by tropes from the discipline of physics in these theorists' representations of subjectivity. We will need to notice the historical differences in the ideological use of these tropes. Yet, even contemporary theories of tropes have had recourse to the discipline of physics in order to model how tropes work. Drawing on Ilya Prigogine's confrontation with the rhetoricity governing a "clash of doctrines" between time-reversible (dynamic) and time-irreversible (thermodynamic) assumptions underlying investigations in the physical sciences, we will examine first the role of oppositional tropes from physics in theories of tropes. Second, we will observe the role that these tropes play in representing the subject: in Freud's "The Dreamwork," in Laplanche and Pontalis' account of Freud's subject-systems, and in Stallybrass and White's account of the unconscious as the site of the carnivalesque.
We will then show how Deleuze and Guattari's representations of the subject in terms of the nomad and the rhizome, simply invert Freud's valorizing of the dynamic laws controlling thermodynamic processes, arguing instead for the celebration of the contingent and the indeterminate. In a telling passage on chess and Go as game theories of war in which chess becomes the discourse of %physis%, while Go becomes the discourse of %nomos%, Deleuze and Guattari seek to hide their own claims for a time-irreversible model of cultural resistance "grounded" in natural laws of a different sort than those justifying the rules of domination governing subjectivity and society since the Industrial Revolution. --MER
This issue may be accessed here: https://www.pomoculture.org/2013/09/25/dynamic-and-thermodynamic-tropes-of-the-subject-in-freud-and-in-deleuze-and-guattari/
A good analysis of my essay, in relationship to the other essays in this Johns Hopkins UP publication edited by George Landow, was written by Ken Paradis in the _Semiotic Book Review_, which can be found here:
https://semioticon.com/semiotics/srb/hypertext.html
1. Jazzwriting--a non-linear and recursive environment for generating and then exfoliating ideas in response to an automated or self-initiated prompt. Designed with the composing practices of BeBop jazz musicians in mind (improvisation/composition/improvisation), it offered recursive access to strategies for the improvisation of thoughts, and guided students to explore their more formal elaboration according to the rules of rhetoric, which was then linked to another "stack called:
2. Brainstorming--a non-linear, yet also sequential cluster of rhetorical heuristics: "Narrative," "Description," "Definition," "Comparison/Contrast," "Argument,"--each of which consitituted a "stack" which contained a sequence of prompts (often based on challenging heuristics such as Kenneth Burke's Pentad, for Narrative) to help expand the range of implications of ideas generated spontaneously in Jazzwriting. It was also possible to "jump" randomly or deliberately from one to the other of these heuristics, so that five separate threads of thought might be developed from the initial Jazzwriting responses. All five of these stacks then were projected into the next stack:
3. Arguprompt--which guided students through a series of prompts that would generate positions, assumptions, arguments and evidence, objections and replies to those objections, in such a way that each prompt generated a paragraph in sequence. At any point in the process of "inventing" and "arranging" an argument, the user could highlight and then export a particular assertion into another "stack" called:
4. Enthymemes--which would, through the use of dialog boxes, center that assertion into the form of an Enthymeme, which would then prompt the student to respond to a few questions. Answering these additional questions would then trigger the hypertext program to translate the Enthymeme into a formal syllogism; and then offer the opportunity to translate that socratic syllogism into a Toulmin unit of logic, with assumptions and grounds for those assumptions. Furthermore, from Arguprompt, the students could access another stack called:
5. Style--which would offer students exercises to work on semantics, grammar and syntax.
As the student progressed through the sequence of four distinct environments, or worked exclusively with just one of them, the student could export generated text to a word processing program for further engagement with the processes of invention, arrangement and style.
Informed by the specific practices of jazz musicians and composers, the behavior of bifurcating systems in non-equilibrium thermodynamics described by Ilya Prigogine, as well as the non-linear models from philosophy exemplified by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and their concept of the rhizome, the project was an application of the theories explored in my theoretical dissertation: _Being and Becoming: Physics, Hegemony, Art and the Nomad in the Works of Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, John Cage and Thomas Pynchon_ (1989). This project was followed by an online real-time text-based virtual reality classroom of multiple rooms with functional tools at the Media Lab MOO called _MER's Fungal Palace_ (1996), with which I taught several graduate seminars linked to seminars at other universities (1996-8); and _Chess RHIZOME_, an exploratory hypermedia database to explore the contradictory epistemological implications of the metaphor of chess across all disciplinary formations (1998).
This thought experiment addresses how the complex processes that govern jazz improvisation enact behaviors that resemble the logic of gift exchange first described by Marcel Mauss (1968). It is possible to bring to bear structural, sociological, political economical, deconstructive or even ethical approaches to what constitutes gift exchange during the performance of jazz. Yet, I would like to shift the focus from grounding this analysis of jazz improvisation with reference to the language of music as symbolic action (which all of these approaches require), to grounding jazz improvisation in embodied and distributed cognition, the performance of which begins with a ritual gift of silence. For jazz musicians, embodied silence becomes the initial condition for processes of cognitive bifurcation. For it is bifurcation that attracts us to jazz in the first place. Jazz can thus be reconceived as a subversive antidote for processes of determination identified with what some have diagnosed in a new sub-discipline of cultural studies called “cognitive capitalism.” I would therefore like to emphasize understanding the role of silence as gift exchange in jazz performance from an anthropological perspective, which conceives of jazz performance as a ritualized resistance to many forms of top-down cognitive control that are coextensive with social and digital networks. I wish to privilege the ritual enactment that is jazz improvisation in order to point towards an aesthetics of bifurcation that is simultaneously an aesthetics, and micro-politics, of neuro-resistance, an enactment that must begin with silence. But what I propose insists on the empirical rather than mystical grounds to this gift of silence. Recourse to silence is not just an ethical surrender of space to an Other, an ethical logic of reciprocity for performers who wish to exchange “riffs.” Silence constitutes an initial condition that performing jazz musicians must experience in their bodies, and thus it becomes necessary to ground embodied cognition in a collective field of cultural production that, while containing melodic, harmonic and rhythmic elements, exists behind these elements. This cognitive field emerges from each embodied individual, and yet also pervades the distributed ensemble in ways reminiscent of feedback loops in complex systems, and it is by recourse to recent research into the cognitive neuroscience of music generally, and jazz improvisation in particular, that the empirical grounds for an anthropology of neuro-resistance become visible.
A penultimate draft of the English version published in _Play and Democracy: Philosophical Implications_ by Routledge UP 12/21can be found on my Research Gate site: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355208012_The_gift_of_silence_Towards_an_anthropology_of_jazz_improvisation_as_neuro-resistance
http://www.epa.uz.ua/03700/03787/00031/pdf/EPA03787_ex_symposion_2019_102_051-060.pdf
A final draft of this essay may be found as a chapter in _Play and Democracy: Philosophical Perspectives_ (Routledge, 2022), a penultimate draft available on my Research Gate website:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355208012_The_gift_of_silence_Towards_an_anthropology_of_jazz_improvisation_as_neuro-resistance.
Much of my early work on the avant-garde demonstrates how Deleuze and Guattari ground the concepts of nomadology and micro-political aesthetics to a great extent in the discourses of complex systems in physics and cognitive science, as those discourses have evolved throughout this century, but especially since the 1960’s. Since the late 1980’s, I have argued, along with Manuel Delanda, that many other concepts such as the refrain, multiplicities, territorialization and de-territorialization, difference and repetition—recently discussed by Deleuzean scholars with reference to music--also share these grounds. We need to justify this venture into the careful forging of alliances among scientific disciplines, the philosophy of science and contemporary aesthetic philosophy, in order to reflect on the following five main lines of inquiry (or what Deleuze and Guattari would call “lines of [conceptual] flight”) traversing the realms of science, philosophy and jazz aesthetics:
How do assumptions about duration or time shape the very different creative processes in classical and jazz music? I refer specifically to the western tendency to spatialize time since the 17th Century when both calculus, and standard music notation with even temperament and bars and time signatures, emerged.
How dependent are John Cage’s compositions, by foregrounding the interdependence of music and noise, upon a carefully considered deconstruction (in the Derridean sense) of the calculus of music notation dominant since those 17th Century innovations in contrapuntal composition. We will then notice how he adopts models of music notation that look uncannily similar to phase space diagrams of such complex irreversible processes as attractor states in thermodynamics.
How did the Be-Bop composing practices of Charlie Parker and others engage directly in the calculated yet spontaneous deconstruction of spatialized time, in order for new, hybrid processes of musical expression to emerge? Reminiscent of Bergson’s stages of “creative evolution,” these processes, enable song structures, as the vehicles for improvisation, as well as the conceptual/linguistic musical content (harmony, melody and rhythm) of those songs, to evolve into increasingly subtle and abstract forms at breath-taking speed.
How may we identify processes of de-territorialization and re-territorialization, and the iterative, emergent or self-organizing nature of the refrain (and of harmonic rhythm generally), as central to an understanding of the micro-political motivations of an aesthetic? We will also see how a shift from the model of calculus to the model of phase space in conceptualizing the nature of duration enables us to theorize, and visualize, the crucial role of systemic bifurcations: in both complex processes from physics (and cognitive science in Part Two), and in jazz.
How one might define Ornette Coleman's theorization of “Free Jazz,” in terms of a distributed form of musical expression (called "Harmelodics"), as an evolutionary extension of the line of conceptual flight opened up by Be-Bop composing practices. Other artists also embraced the distributed nature of jazz performances, involving the maximum freedom in juxtaposing independent and sometimes contrasting melodic, harmonic and rhythmic materials, to reach for a full realization of performative freedom."
Note: the published version of this article in _Pynchon Notes_ from 1994 with graphics is also available on my academia page.
https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/superconversations-day-50-martin-e-rosenberg-responds-to-franco-bifo-berardi-the-message-of-francis/2076
For Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, as well as for Deleuze and Guattari, it seems that the condition of contingency, which characterizes processes of self-organization, is always-already becoming in a non-dialectical relationship with those superimpositions. The exertions of that part of the Body Without Organs responsible for striated spaces, in turn, bear resemblance to the ways in which the unified, autonomous global construct frames and constrains contingency from within as well as from without - within the individual mind as well as in cultural machinery. In other words, the Body Without Organs constitutes a virtual realm undergoing a kind of mental warfare between competing cognitive styles - a realm which offers us a new way to discuss aesthetics as well as politics, and the politics of gender as well as that of ethnicity.
This temporary alliance between philosophy and cognitive science may be extended further to artistic expression. Through Deleuze's own work on Francis Bacon, I would like to apply these distinctions to Kiki Smith's elaborate, technically brilliant constructions often involving viscera and fetuses dangling from paper or wax human forms. Kiki Smith's juxtaposition of elegantly wrought human bodies out of technically difficult materials such as wax over armature, or handmade paper and paper-maché with the horrific representations of flowing menstrual blood, dangling fetuses, placenta, and viscera, deliberately engages contradictory mental processes: the calm disinterest of aesthetic judgment involving standards of harmony, balance, proportion, as well as an appreciation of complexity and skill; the literally visceral response often felt not by the head but by the stomach and intestines experiencing an involuntary response to a horror, a threat.
The descriptions of human consciousness in
Freud and in Deleuze and Guattari are problematic precisely in their inverse, mirrored opposition, and we may discover the "ground" for that opposition by examining the role played by tropes from the discipline of physics in these theorists' representations of subjectivity. We will need to notice the historical differences in the ideological use of these tropes. Yet, even contemporary theories of tropes have had recourse to the discipline of physics in order to model how tropes work. Drawing on Ilya Prigogine's confrontation with the rhetoricity governing a "clash of doctrines" between time-reversible (dynamic) and time-irreversible (thermodynamic) assumptions underlying investigations in the physical sciences, we will examine first the role of oppositional tropes from physics in theories of tropes. Second, we will observe the role that these tropes play in representing the subject: in Freud's "The Dreamwork," in Laplanche and Pontalis' account of Freud's subject-systems, and in Stallybrass and White's account of the unconscious as the site of the carnivalesque.
We will then show how Deleuze and Guattari's representations of the subject in terms of the nomad and the rhizome, simply invert Freud's valorizing of the dynamic laws controlling thermodynamic processes, arguing instead for the celebration of the contingent and the indeterminate. In a telling passage on chess and Go as game theories of war in which chess becomes the discourse of %physis%, while Go becomes the discourse of %nomos%, Deleuze and Guattari seek to hide their own claims for a time-irreversible model of cultural resistance "grounded" in natural laws of a different sort than those justifying the rules of domination governing subjectivity and society since the Industrial Revolution. --MER
This issue may be accessed here: https://www.pomoculture.org/2013/09/25/dynamic-and-thermodynamic-tropes-of-the-subject-in-freud-and-in-deleuze-and-guattari/
A good analysis of my essay, in relationship to the other essays in this Johns Hopkins UP publication edited by George Landow, was written by Ken Paradis in the _Semiotic Book Review_, which can be found here:
https://semioticon.com/semiotics/srb/hypertext.html
1. Jazzwriting--a non-linear and recursive environment for generating and then exfoliating ideas in response to an automated or self-initiated prompt. Designed with the composing practices of BeBop jazz musicians in mind (improvisation/composition/improvisation), it offered recursive access to strategies for the improvisation of thoughts, and guided students to explore their more formal elaboration according to the rules of rhetoric, which was then linked to another "stack called:
2. Brainstorming--a non-linear, yet also sequential cluster of rhetorical heuristics: "Narrative," "Description," "Definition," "Comparison/Contrast," "Argument,"--each of which consitituted a "stack" which contained a sequence of prompts (often based on challenging heuristics such as Kenneth Burke's Pentad, for Narrative) to help expand the range of implications of ideas generated spontaneously in Jazzwriting. It was also possible to "jump" randomly or deliberately from one to the other of these heuristics, so that five separate threads of thought might be developed from the initial Jazzwriting responses. All five of these stacks then were projected into the next stack:
3. Arguprompt--which guided students through a series of prompts that would generate positions, assumptions, arguments and evidence, objections and replies to those objections, in such a way that each prompt generated a paragraph in sequence. At any point in the process of "inventing" and "arranging" an argument, the user could highlight and then export a particular assertion into another "stack" called:
4. Enthymemes--which would, through the use of dialog boxes, center that assertion into the form of an Enthymeme, which would then prompt the student to respond to a few questions. Answering these additional questions would then trigger the hypertext program to translate the Enthymeme into a formal syllogism; and then offer the opportunity to translate that socratic syllogism into a Toulmin unit of logic, with assumptions and grounds for those assumptions. Furthermore, from Arguprompt, the students could access another stack called:
5. Style--which would offer students exercises to work on semantics, grammar and syntax.
As the student progressed through the sequence of four distinct environments, or worked exclusively with just one of them, the student could export generated text to a word processing program for further engagement with the processes of invention, arrangement and style.
Informed by the specific practices of jazz musicians and composers, the behavior of bifurcating systems in non-equilibrium thermodynamics described by Ilya Prigogine, as well as the non-linear models from philosophy exemplified by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and their concept of the rhizome, the project was an application of the theories explored in my theoretical dissertation: _Being and Becoming: Physics, Hegemony, Art and the Nomad in the Works of Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, John Cage and Thomas Pynchon_ (1989). This project was followed by an online real-time text-based virtual reality classroom of multiple rooms with functional tools at the Media Lab MOO called _MER's Fungal Palace_ (1996), with which I taught several graduate seminars linked to seminars at other universities (1996-8); and _Chess RHIZOME_, an exploratory hypermedia database to explore the contradictory epistemological implications of the metaphor of chess across all disciplinary formations (1998).
Intersections: Human and Non-Human Relations
November 21, 2024.
In recent work, I refer to a famous quotation by pianist Bill Evans, who, when asked to define jazz, says: “Jazz is not a what. It is a how.” I would like to unpack this statement with respect to understanding how the question of time impinges on the ways we look at different schools addressing philosophy of mind. Here I would like to situate the materialist phenomenology of Manuel DeLanda, with the approaches to panpsychism in the works of David Chalmers, Phillip Goff, Galen Strawson, Hedda Hassel Mørch, and others from the Analytic tradition. I will, in 10 pages (!), explore jazz improvisation as a thought-experiment to play out both the differences and commonalities of these distinct “schools” embracing profoundly different assumptions. To the point, both materialist phenomenology and panpsychism address the problem of emergence: for DeLanda’s account of visual cognition, emergence involves a transformation from material to phenomenal processes involving heirarchies of agents and selves; many panpsychisms require a form of monism by which the phenomenal remains embedded with the material at all levels of existence, leading to an ongoing debate as to how the emergence of consciousness happens, with respect to the “combination problem.” Interestingly, both materialist phenomenology and several panpsychisms propose that these implied hierarchies of self-organization are reversible with respect to causality in the production of consciousness: there are top-down and bottom-up characteristics presented by both “schools.” In other words, by foregrounding “emergence,” I am signaling that I am more interested, referencing Miles Davis, in So How, rather than So What.
Now, originally, I hoped to sketch this part of my research project on jazz and cognition. But instead, I will focus here on the initial conditions, by addressing the musical note as an object with both material and phenomenal characteristics. While the physics of sound has been quite well quantified, one could conceive of a note as having variable phenomenal existences as something both consumed and produced. I am only half-joking by saying that one could locate embodied, embedded, enactive and extended characteristics in the way that a musical note behaves. A famous incident involving Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis and “the wrong note” during a performance of "So What?" will suffice to illustrate. I will then address the distinct processes of musical cognition (The HOW) that I have identified specific to jazz improvisation, involving top-down (Projective Apprehension) and bottom-up (Proprio-Sentience) during performance. One could bring to bear either DeLanda’s model or those from panpsychists to understand the difference between the intentional superimposition of musical notes onto an existing musical song form involving slow cognition [PA]; and the visceral reactive responses of musicians to each other at very fast cognitive speeds beneath the threshold of conscious awareness (in ways reminiscent of debates within the philosophy of mind over “the zombie problem”) [PS]. I have argued that these forms of cognition coexist in contingent non-linear relationships, within The NOW, which complicates our understanding of intentionality, and renders the Zombie problem moot.
In their architectural theories, Arakawa and Gins describe an “architectural body” moving through an “architectural surround,” and the tentative ways in which body and world meld together during this process have larger implications for them. For Arakawa and Gins, the immediate data of sensory experience, called a “Perceptual Landing Site” (requiring fast cognitive processes), becomes juxtaposed with the cognitive schema, arising in memory, called an “Imaging Landing Site” (requiring much slower cognitive processes), by means of a default cognitive screen called a “Dimensionalizing Landing Site” which attempts to integrate these fast and slow forms of cognition. These distinct forms of cognition become projected, contingently, as “approximative rigorous abstractions” onto “architectural surrounds.” These projections enable an architectural body to move, as they form, dissolve and reform from one instant to the next, although they are also capable of dysfunction. The name for these contingent projections is “biotopology.” I have written about how Arakawa and Gins’ account of biotopology seems to obey the rules governing phase space diagrams of complex physical and cognitive processes. Biotopology, as a phase space for competing embodied cognitive schemas proposed by Arakawa and Gins, becomes especially visible in its dysfunction. I suggest that phase space diagrams also model Arakawa and Gins’ zen-like accounts of “forming blank” in The Mechanism of Meaning, as well as with Arakawa’s earlier engagements with “blankness” in his Neo-dadaist paintings, while actualizing Duchamp’s insistence, in the context of DADA, that “you are not as blank as you think you are.” This vocabulary for describing an architectural body moving through an architectural surround, blankness, phase space, competing landing sites (and their dysfunctions), and biotopology, can be easily mapped onto the models of embodied and enactive cognition exemplified by the work of cognitive scientist Francisco Varela, with micropolitical as well as aesthetic implications.
What I propose to do here is to re-view the problematic “operational closure” of disciplinary formations through the lense of Gilles Deleuze's critique of analogy, representation, and the trap of genus/species formations in his masterwork Différence et repetition (1968). I will then read that same text to rehabilitate a paradigm of tropical performance which will answer Deleuze's call to forge “mobile relations” or what the cognitive scientists Maturana and Varela would call emerging “consensual domains” across rigid disciplinary boundaries, while at the same time avoiding the error of analogy that Deleuze links to an ontology of Being which undergirds genus/species formations, and which, in turn, re-inscribes that Being.
This first talk builds on earlier work which emerged from 1. my critique of the role of science metaphors from thermodynamics in Freud and Deleuze and Guattari; 2, my examination of the naïve or ironic cultural work of the metaphor “chess” across disciplinary boundaries in my hypermedia project Chess RHIZOME; 3. my deployment of Bruno Latour and Peter Galison's notion of the "agency" of tools, in enabling trans-disciplinary “Trading Zones” as an approach to understanding the cultural work of tropes; and 4. my examination of Arakawa and Gins’ concept “terminological junctions” in their manifestos, in terms of Deleuze’s “shocks to thought.”
Private Session
Saturday, June 24th
10 am Pacific Time
The Private session will be held to raise issues and answer questions about
these three papers on metaphor, science, and transdisciplinarity:
1. "Dynamic and Thermodynamic Tropes of the Subject in Freud and Deleuze and Guattari," in _Postmodern Culture_ from 1993. I only have a typescript for this since the journal is behind a paywall. If I can get a properly web-formatted copy, I will send it to you (PMC was perhaps the first quality online academic journal, now managed by Project Muse at Johns Hopkins).
2. "Chess RHIZOME and Phase Space: Mapping Metaphor Theory Onto Hypertext Theory" from _Intertexts_ from 1999. This is a theoretical article about my hypermedia project _Chess RHIZOME_ which explored the cultural work of the metaphor of chess across all disciplinary boundaries.
3. "Constructing Autopoeisis: The Architectural Body in Light of Contemporary Cognitive Science." _Interfaces_ 2003. This explores the ways in which metaphors of cognitive science get deployed by others, and contains an explicit critique of the school of Lakoff, Johnson and Turner.
What I propose to do here is to re-view the problematic “operational closure” of disciplinary formations through the lense of Gilles Deleuze's critique of analogy, representation, and the trap of genus/species formations in his masterwork Différence et repetition (1968). I will then read that same text to rehabilitate a paradigm of tropical performance which will answer Deleuze's call to forge “mobile relations” or what the cognitive scientists Maturana and Varela would call emerging “consensual domains” across rigid disciplinary boundaries, while at the same time avoiding the error of analogy that Deleuze links to an ontology of Being which undergirds genus/species formations, and which, in turn, re-inscribes that Being.
This talk builds on earlier work which emerged from 1. my critique of the role of science metaphors from thermodynamics in Freud and Deleuze and Guattari; 2, my examination of the naïve or ironic cultural work of the metaphor “chess” across disciplinary boundaries in my hypermedia project Chess RHIZOME; 3. my deployment of Bruno Latour and Peter Galison's notion of the "agency" of tools, in enabling trans-disciplinary “Trading Zones” as an approach to understanding the cultural work of tropes; and 4. my examination of Arakawa and Gins’ concept “terminological junctions” in their manifestos, in terms of Deleuze’s “shocks to thought.”
I first examine how Deleuze critiques the motive to deploy the tropical dimension of language to establish identity-relationships among concepts in disparate fields of inquiry. Then, I wish to replace this motive with one which deploys tropes and their extensions in models and diagrams transversally, to subvert the arboreal formation of disciplines, and to establish contingent, emergent alliances, for the specific purpose of generating events that are understood in terms of what Deleuze calls "shocks to thought." These events reveal intensive processes, indicating qualitative changes in the nature of knowledge-formation that reverberate cosmo-politically (from Isabelle Stengers) across all disciplines--processes of morphogenetic knowledge-formation that (as Francicso Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch demonstrate) can account for the emergence of historically significant innovations such as the hybrid discipline of cognitive science. I will discuss tropes derived from reversible and irreversible time, chess, entropy, bifurcation/individuation, and singularity, to unveil errors, and then model their recuperation.
The Multiplicity of Subjectivity, and Three Forms of Time Cognition as Intrinsic Manifestations of Emergence during Jazz Improvisation:
This chapter examines jazz improvisation in two ways. First, it addresses the problematic metaphor- “improvisation is story-telling.” Although jazz musicians must remain aware of the narrative frame or schema of the song form while improvising variations for their own “story,” they also must react instinctually in real time to the other musicians who are also creating variations. Thus, the improviser’s intention with respect to their own “story” may not be so simply defined.
Secondly, it then addresses how jazz improvisation happens, with respect to current neuroscience research. I will draw on Francisco Varela’s theoretical essay “The Specious Present” to demonstrate how improvisation requires the engagement of three coexisting forms of time cognition (Fast: 1/10; Slow 10; Integrating 1), and two distinct but competing forms of musical cognition: top-down "Projective Apprehension," while preparing for improvisation; and bottom-up "Proprio-Sentience," which enables interaction beneath the threshold of conscious awareness during performance. This model of improvisation becomes visible particularly in dysfunction, when jazz improvisers become "lost.” Also addressed: the role of instruments in mediating these processes, and the need to shift from a prosthetic to a structural coupling model of instrumental performance.
Third, it will investigate how one might conceive of the relationship between embodied and distributed cognition with reference to the properties of emergent processes: From the irreversibility of time, to cognitive bifurcation (both visible in music notation) to feedback loops both within the cognitive processes of a single improviser as well as amongst improvisers interacting as an ensemble (and increasingly visible through the research on the cognitive neuro-scientific correlates of improvising musicians), we need to confront the question of how emergent properties, largely associated with living systems, might apply to processes of thought.
1. How do assumptions about duration or time shape the very different creative processes in classical and jazz music? I refer specifically to the western tendency to spatialize time since the 17th Century when both calculus and standard music notation, with even temperament and bars and time signatures, emerged.
2. How dependent are John Cage’s compositions, by foregrounding the interdependence of music and noise, upon a carefully considered deconstruction (in the Derridean sense) of the calculus of music notation dominant since those 17th Century innovations in contrapuntal composition. We will then notice how he adopts models of music notation that look uncannily similar to phase space diagrams of such complex irreversible processes as attractor states in thermodynamics.
3. How did the Be-Bop composing practices of Charlie Parker and others engage directly in the calculated yet spontaneous deconstruction of spatialized time in order for new, hybrid processes of musical expression to emerge? Reminiscent of Bergson’s stages of “creative evolution,” these processes enable song structures, as the vehicles for improvisation, as well as the conceptual/linguistic musical content (melody, harmony, harmonic rhythm, and percussive rhythm) of those songs, to evolve into increasingly subtle and abstract forms at breath-taking speed.
4. How may we identify processes of de-territorialization and re-territorialization, and the iterative, emergent or self-organizing nature of the refrain (and of harmonic rhythm generally), as central to an understanding of the micro-political motivations of an aesthetic? We will also see how a shift from the model of calculus to the model of phase space in conceptualizing the nature of duration enables us to theorize and visualize, the crucial role of systemic bifurcations: in both complex processes from physics, and in jazz.
5. How one might define Ornette Coleman's theorization of “Free Jazz,” in terms of a distributed form of musical expression (called "Harmelodics"), as an evolutionary extension of the line of conceptual flight opened up by Be-Bop composing practices. Other artists such as John Coltrane also embraced the distributed nature of jazz performances, involving the maximum freedom in juxtaposing independent and sometimes contrasting melodic, harmonic and rhythmic materials, to reach for a full realization of performative freedom. Thus, attention will shift from cognitive bifurcation to cognitive aggregation during improvisation.
Despite the slight differences in their classifications of post-human philosophizing, David Roden and Stefan Sorgner diverge when Sorgner seems to identify two grand narratives informing the role of technology in the shift from humanism to post/meta-humanism: from Being to Becoming; and from subject-object Dualism to Univocality, Hybridity or Disconnection. David Roden’s fictional speculations in Snuff Memories, on the other hand, envision a post-human future without either. Actually, one can conceive of permutations of these two narratives, such as imagining a disembodied machine intelligence or even a hybrid fusion of subjective bio- and objective machine-intelligence capable of Becoming, here meaning self-organization.
This talk creates a context for these two grand narratives by demonstrating how central they were to the avant-garde strain of high modernism in the works and writings of Henri Robert Marcel Duchamp. We can locate Duchamp’s sources for these narratives in the mathematics of Henri Poincaré, and the philosophy of Henri Bergson, both of whom he read carefully. These narratives should be situated in relationship to a debate within the philosophy of science over competing paradigms: deterministic time-reversible and contingent time-irreversible models of physical systems, played out in the context of the techne of the Industrial Revolution. This debate is addressed polemically in the work of (Bergson-inspired) Ilya Prigogine, alone (1980) and with Isabelle Stengers (1979; 1984) in the wake of Prigogine’s 1977 Nobel Prize; and more thoroughly addressed in Stengers’ masterwork Cosmopolitics I and II (2010; 2011). Stengers locates the grounds for this debate in the “factishes” of scientific invention, including both objects and models: from the problematic status of the neutrino; to the inherent bias of western mathematics towards the reversible model of time, a bias challenged by the Intuitionist School of Kronecker, Poincaré, Brouwer and others. These competing paradigms also seem to play a role in the shift from a disembodied, computational-deterministic model of cognition exemplified by John von Neumann, to a contingently emergent model of embodied and enactive cognition exemplified by the work of Francisco Varela and others.
I will begin with how Bergson’s work Creative Evolution (1907) informs Poincaré’s essay “On Mathematical Discovery” (1908), which in turn proves central to Duchamp’s pre-World War I writings (in Green Box Notes to Large Glass @1912-17) that eventually inform his posthumous masterwork Being Given: 1. The Waterfall; 2. The Illuminating Gas (1968). I will conclude by addressing how Duchamp defines art as “a creative act,” an event generated by a charged field “between artist and onlooker” involving the distinct cognitive processes of “delay” and “exposure,” and how Duchamp’s chess treatise on the endgame: Opposition and Sister Squares Reconciled (1932) can be read as an allegory of distributed aesthetic cognition as an augury of univocality, whether mediated by technology or no.
I am struck by Amy Ireland’s endorsement of Snuff Memories: “The posthuman cannot be known before it is produced—so to know it, we must produce it.” This statement points to the paradox of David’s novel, which seems strongly motivated by his analytic examination of the philosophical implications of the various “schools” of post-humanism that have emerged. And yet, that research makes clear that humans have no control over how post-humans may happen. So, we have a problem to begin with: how can you create through fiction something that represents the intention of a subjectivity which does not yet exist, and for which we have no prior model?
Before we read this novel to evaluate the philosophical coherence of what is happening in Snuff Memories we should wonder whether this novel might be about the impossibility of conceiving the post-human. First of all, SM is not an easy read, because it lies on the edge of our cognition. We do not recognize this world of strange creatures engaging in strange forms of eroticism in a strange landscape with events that do not easily fit into the sequentiality of a narrative flirting with our sense of a beginning, middle and end. SM is an experimental fiction, but not in the vein of John Barth, Thomas Pynchon or Italo Calvino (although we find hints of these experimenters and others), and it’s not clear whether the novel is a failure as a work of fiction, or a work of fiction that is about the failure of the project of envisioning a post-humanity. I proceed firmly committed to interpreting it as the second kind of failure, and assert that Snuff Memories is a triumph.
https://www.foreignobjekt.com/snuff-memories/martin-rosenberg
1996 Conference of the Society for Literature and Science
Atlanta, Georgia, October 10 - 13, 1996
The Cultural Work of Cognitive Science: Session 2F
Martin E. Rosenberg, Eastern Kentucky University
The influential claims of Lakoff, Johnson and Turner for an epistemological and moral. imagination grounded by the bodily basis for meaning deserve to be tested against the work of cognitive scientist Fransisco Varela and the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Fransisco Varela, in his The Embodied Mind (Co-authored with Eleanor Rosch and Evan Thompson), argues that consciousness involves two antithetical though perhaps complementary cognitive processes: bottom-up emergence, which is necessarily contingent and which involves the spontaneous confluence of heterogeneic lower-order processes into a global state; and top-down repression of those heterogeneic processes, often described as a superimposition of categories or schema onto complex sensory data in a way resonant with the epistemological legacy of Immanuel Kant. So, while the "global state" is indeed a fiction, it constitutes a fiction necessary to ensure the survival of the aggregate, which may refer to a computer or a human being, or even a bureaucratic system. This distinction becomes interesting from the perspectives of epistemology and social philosophy in the following way: for the first, the emphasis is placed on the total control of the trajectories of symbolic manipulation; any loss of control brings down the computational house. For the second, the emphasis is placed on the connections among elements of systems, the deliberate relinquishing of control of those elements, and the observance of the contingent emergence of new forms of order among the connected elements that might not necessarily be predicted. The top-down exertion of control, and the contingencies of bottomup emergence, represent epistemological and ideological stances toward cognitive functioning, and in the study of human cognition, there is no question that both processes go on simultaneously, and perhaps even at cross purposes. I would like to argue that Deleuze and Guattari, among all social philosophers, have played out the ideological implications of these two styles of cognitive functioning through their writings concerning the rhizome and, more important, the Body Without Organs (BWO), a term which refers to what might be called a preexisting condition of wholeness. In other words, the BWO is the Global State itself, a field of immanence from which emanate both bottom-up emergences and top-down constraints, the reductio ad absurdum of which is the schizophrenic dream of the rubber body suit without any openings for breathing, eating, defecating. Consistently described in terms of the spherical wholeness of the egg prior to the complete formation of the embryo, in terms of hierarchical strata and of planes of consistency through which rhizomes must propagate but only by avoiding detection, the BWO constitutes the regime through which the exertion of constraints on various becomings may occur. Philosophically represented by Spinoza's ethics, psychoanalytically represented by the analysts' intrusion in the imaginary and symbolic formations of the patient, by the betrayal of desire in the form of the hypochondriac body, the schizoid body, the drugged body, the masochist body, the BWO can be understood simply as the superimposition of constraints on the lower order cognitive processes emanating from the organs of the body or from the nervous, autonomic, circulatory and immune systems. This correlation between bottom-up and top-down cognitive and social processes may help to frame a discussion of why Lakoff, Johnson, and Turner's assumption of the bodily basis for meaning is finally unsatisfactory. We will begin by questioning the cognitive schema and metaphorical and moral extensions of the term "balance," made concrete through a critique of Mark Johnson's reference in The Body in the Mind to Michael Polanyi's discussion of the bicycle rider from Personal Knowledge as paradigmatic of their claims for the embodied origins of metaphoricity.
In Power Chess, we find aspects not addressed by those 20th century artists deploying chess in various ways: in this work, we have the shift from actual artists as objects engaged (such as Marcel Duchamp and John Cage playing a game which, by wiring the pieces and the board, contingently triggering tape recordings of contemporary compositions written according to principles of chance), to AI robots given synthetic subjectivity to play autonomously, yet which are witnessed by art observers, who are therefore seem initially to be subjects observing an art object possessing synthetic subjectivity. We also find that the AI robots have been programmed to delay decision-making so that the moves are made at human tempo, so to speak. Allowed to function optimally, one could imagine a game as complicated as one between Boris Spaasky and Bobby Fisher finished by these AI robots in under 10 minutes. Furthermore, we find that these robots have been programmed to simulate emotions between moves, so to further the mimesis of human subjectivity for those observing subjects, who are, after all, objects of a scientific study of Human Computer Interface. And, the robots have been programmed alternatively to be able to play the game according to eccentric logics or rules, which change the behaviors of the pieces involved.
But there are certain characteristics of chess that do NOT change, from the concerns of the earlier thinkers across disciplines, and avant-garde artists. There is an assumption of timeless transcendence between moves, which is coextensive with the underlying geometry of the chessboard itself, as with calculus, quantum mechanics and General Relativity. The behavior of the chess pieces, as the robots move them, reflects a hierarchical semiosis, which in turn reveals the nature of thought as precise, logically sequential, and action as dynamical, deterministic, and reflecting asymmetries of power.
To the point, changing the rules of the game does not change the underlying epistemology of the game. For example, to have stalemated pawns on both sides conspire to take out the royalty, so to speak, as one recent meme discovered on Facebook quipped, is not the same as playing all pieces as anonymous entities functioning according to the rules of GO, where movement is not dynamical, deterministic, but involving contingent flows through time. In Gravity’s Rainbow, there are characters willing to challenge the rules, such as the black girl, “a genius of metasolutions”: “knocking over the chessboard, shooting the referee” (GR102); or Pokler who, in confronting Weissmann the SS Man: “cornered him in his office…..the speech climaxing as he threw the chessboard and pieces all into Weissmann’s arrogantly blinking face” (GR 417-18). Here, I am already hinting at the scientific epistemological baggage carried by the game or chess as a metaphor, and its cultural and political as well as aesthetic reverberations, as that metaphor shifts from one disciplinary domain to another. Let’s now address this directly.
TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF JAZZ IMPROVISATION AS NEURO-RESISTANCE
MARTIN E. ROSENBERG, UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH, THE UNITED STATES
This essay addresses how the complex processes that govern jazz improvisation enact behaviors thatresemble the logic of gift exchange first described by Marcel Mauss (1968). It is possible to bring to bear structural, sociological, political economical, deconstructive or even ethical approaches to what constitutes gift exchange during the performance of jazz.. Yet, I would like to shift the focus from grounding this analysis of
jazz improvisation with reference to the language of music as symbolic action (which all of these approaches require), to grounding jazz improvisation in embodied and distributed cognition, the performance of which begins with a ritual gift of silence. Silence constitutes an initial condition that performing jazz musicians must experience in their bodies, and thus it becomes necessary to ground embodied cognition in a collective field of cultural production that, while containing melodic, harmonic and rhythmic elements, exists behind these elements. This cognitive field emerges from each embodied individual, and yet also pervades the distributed ensemble in ways reminiscent of feedback loops in complex systems, and it is by recourse to recent research into the cognitive neuroscience of music generally, and jazz improvisation, that the empirical grounds for an anthropology of neuro-resistance become visible. This talk extends earlier work by presenting more evidence for how jazz improvisation deliberately cultivates processes of bifurcation, melodically, harmonically, rhythmically, and how these processes of bifurcation function as neuroresistance to processes of cognitive suppression diagnosed by research into the psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism.
In the architectural theories of Arakawa and Gins, they describe an “architectural body” moving through an “architectural surround.” For Arakawa and Gins, the immediate data of sensory experience, called “Perceptual Landing Sites” (requiring fast cognitive processes), would be juxtaposed with the cognitive schema, arising in memory, called “Imaging Landing Sites” (requiring much slower cognitive processes), by a default cognitive screen called “Dimensionalizing Landing Sites.” I illustrated how precarious this balance is by resorting to a personal experience when I broke my nose. The model proposed by Arakawa and Gins becomes visible in its dysfunction, and we had discussed their sources in various phenomenological philosophers, but especially Francisco Varela’s essay “The Specious Present.”
This model of cognitive emergence (fast time), and top-down cognitive control (slow time), is also central to understanding of how cognition happens during jazz improvisation. “Conscious” and “unconscious” processes involved in the performance of jazz can contend in unproductive ways during performance, and yet are capable of achieving synchrony in ways that enhance both individual performance and the interactivity of the jazz ensemble. Yet, it is when cognitive processes during improvisation demonstrate dysfunction that will make visible the model I propose. I refer to the disconcerting experience that jazz musicians report: getting lost. Through illustrations of how competing forms of time cognition seek synchrony in architecture and in jazz, I propose a direct connection between aesthetics and micro-politics.
The Winslow talk addressed how the cognitive multiplicity within the individual embodied jazz musician might be able to forge links with the cognitive processes of the other musicians in a jazz ensemble in real time. Moving from still earlier work on the extrinsic manifestations of cognitive bifurcation--one of the properties of “emergence” or “self-organization” in physical and cognitive systems—that is visible even in music notation (2010)--I devoted that talk to examining inside what I call the intrinsic “black box” of bifurcation which seems to exemplify creativity in human cognition generally. I presented a model for how improvisation happens within the embodied individual, by which a jazz musician tells his “story,” and yet remains, at the same time, very much engaged with and responsive to the improvisational “stories” of other embodied performers. I argue that this is not simply enabled by a shared musical “language.” The purpose of this line of inquiry, then, is to ask: Is it possible to explain how both the inner intentional and visceral reactive forms of musical cognition of jazz performers coexist; is it possible for human beings to be, functionally, both embodied and distributed at the same time?
First, I would like to introduce some concepts that I have developed for this model to distinguish between cognitive processes involved in preparing for improvisation, and those that will ensure successful performance with other musicians in real time. The first is “Projective Apprehension,” brought to bear while practicing the range of possible pathways explored to resolve a problem in improvisation, yet often remaining engaged, with mixed results, during performance. The second, I call “Proprio-Sentience,” which describes the immediacy of contingent embodied cognitive processes while reacting to the other musicans performing.
Then, I would like to examine how current neuroscience research seems to support this distinction. But I would also like to contextualize this inquiry in terms of how an account of multiple forms of time cognition fits into this model of jazz improvisation, which in turn is grounded in a specific paradigm of contemporary cognitive science.
I will mention a few recent empirical studies in particular that help delineate this distinction, but suggest that these studies need to be viewed initially through the paradigm of embodied cognition articulated in 1991 by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. This paradigm has become prominent since I began writing about it in the early 1990’s, and many here may be familiar with it, but I would like to highlight especially that part of their paradigm that distinguishes between top-down and bottom-up processes of cognition.
Importantly, Varela, Thompson and Rosch suggest that this distinction does not simply reflect the historical shift from the computational model of John Von Neumann and others dating from the 1940’s, to the embodied paradigm that this 1991 manifesto delineates--the “godfather” of which these authors nod to Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Significantly, through this distinction between top-down and bottom up processes, Varela, Thompson and Rosch then generalize about how these processes coexist and sometimes contend within the embodied mind. In other words, they imply that the paradigms themselves reflect biases inherent in human cognition.
I will suggest that this neuro-Freudian model of cognitive emergence and control at the heart of this embodied mind paradigm becomes necessary in order to understand how cognition actually happens during jazz improvisation. “Conscious” and “unconscious” processes involved in the performance of jazz can contend in unproductive ways for what I call (self-consciously) the “screen” of the improviser’s awareness during performance, and yet are capable of achieving synchrony in ways that enhance not only the jazz improviser’s performance, but the interactivity of the jazz ensemble as well.
Now, others have addressed both the embodied paradigm, and multiple time-scales that are involved in jazz improvisation, and I would like to mention in particular the work of Vijay Iyer and his invented concept “micro-timing” that has appeared in several articles. But I would like to argue that how these time-scales function gain far more explanatory power if one deliberately applies Varela, Thompson and Rosch’s account of the tensions between bottom-up emergence and top-down control central to that paradigm. And, it is in the moment when cognitive processes during improvisation demonstrate disfunction that will demonstrate the power of the model I propose. I am referring to the often disconcerting but sometimes rewarding experience that all jazz musicians report: getting lost.
http://www.soundmusicresearch.org/em/Program_EM.pdf
Study Leader: Flavio Chamis
• 3 Classes: May 9 – May 23 Class ID: 1459
• Monday, 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
• Mellon Institute, Auditorium
The sessions will focus on different aspects of music, starting
with Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story and how he
used motivic structures in order to produce this beloved
and revolutionary musical. The second session will cover
“What’s in an Interpretation?” When we browse a record
store, we find several versions of the same piece. Besides
the commercial interests, what is behind such multiplicity
of interpretations? This lecture will provide a comparative
study of several different approaches to the exact
same musical text, and how different artists insert their
creative insights into the relatively strict framework provided
by the composer. The final session will feature guest
speaker Martin E. Rosenberg, who will discuss classical
music, jazz, and the experience of time under the prism of
modern neuroscience research.
Flavio Chamis, a native of Sao Paulo, Brazil, trained in conducting
and composition at Tel Aviv University and in Detmold, Germany,
at the Nordwestdeutsche Musikakademie. He served in
Vienna as music director of the Villa Lobos Ensemble. While in
Europe, he recorded with the Radio Sinfonieorchester Berlin
and the Nouvelle Phlharmonique de Radio France. Among his
European engagements were performances at the Musikverein
in Vienna, the Wiener Festwochen, and the Royal Festival Hall
in London. In 1985, he became conducting assistant to Leonard
Bernstein, leading the Israeli Philharmonic in preparation for
tours of Europe, Japan, and the United States; in 1986 conducting
rehearsals for the world premiere of Bernstein's Jubilee
Games (later renamed Concerto for Orchestra), and assisting Maestro
Bernstein on the European tour of the London Symphony
Orchestra. In 1987 he became the music director of the Porto
Alegre Symphony Orchestra in Brazil. In Brazil, he conducted all
the major orchestras and performed on Brazilian radio and television.
He serves as guest conductor throughout Europe and
Latin America. He is a composer of a wide range of styles, from
solo, chamber, and symphonic pieces to jazz and Brazilian music.
He has also written the text for many of his vocal compositions.
He lectures on both Brazilian and classical music and since 2008
has been a permanent member of the Screening Committee of
the Latin Grammy. He has lived in Pittsburgh since 1994. He and
his wife, Tatjana, associate principal violist of the Pittsburgh
Symphony, have three children.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNpkojJuabE#t=77
Fretboard Cognition, Embodiment, Collective Intelligence
Kellen Auditorium, Parsons The New School for Design
66 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
Monday, December 2, 2013 7.00pm until 10.00pm
Free and Open to the Public
Seating is limited: Please register on Eventbrite
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/9125818569/efbevent
Dr. Martin E. Rosenberg
Ratzo Harris–Bass Dom Minasi–Guitar
Ed Keller, Director, CTM—Respondent
This talk seeks to use as a point of departure the question of ergonomics in guitar design, or, how the body couples with an instrument, to reflect on the neuroscience of musical performance during improvisation. By shifting attention away from the instrument to the player, we can reflect on how processes within the brain and body enable the performance of music on the guitar. I wish to focus on jazz improvisation, because the specific training in spontaneous composition required for it, which can be applicable to other musical genres, places the greatest demands upon the player.
Contemporary research in cognitive science, and more specifically in the neuroscience of musical listening and performance, give us new ways to think about fretboard cognition as both top-down and bottom-up cognitive performance. Paradoxically, practicing and performing jazz requires both unerring precision and maximum flexibility. During preparation, it requires meticulous visual mapping of pathways onto the fretboard, which, through diligent practice, form internal schema and proprioceptive memories involving fretting and plucking strings, to instigate performance. During performance, it requires precipitous decisions beneath the threshold of awareness by which one of any number of internal schema and corresponding proprioceptive actions might be enacted from one instant to the next. I call these two stages top-down “Projective Apprehension” and bottom-up “Proprio-Sentience.”
Finally, while examining the emergent neuronal behavior within the individual during the performance of jazz, we must also confront how the feedback loops between the individual and the ensemble during performance can alter the individual’s choices as well as the ensemble’s musical trajectory. This reciprocity mimics emergent neuronal behavior at a larger scale. The guitar fretboard, and its cognition, becomes the circumstance by which we may inquire into an embodied form of collective intelligence at work.
With the help of guitarist Dom Minasi and bassist Ratzo Harris, we will demonstrate both “projective apprehension” and “proprio-sentience,” and offer “conventional” and “free” jazz performances that will, through a concluding panel discussion, enable us to muse on the relationship between embodiment and collective intelligence that begins with the cognition of pathways onto the fretboard of a guitar cradled in the arms of a player.
More info and bios: http://ctm.parsons.edu/what-is-at-stake-with-ergonomics-in-guitar-design/
For Ratzo Harris' review of this event, follow this link:
http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/culture-the-end/
Much of my early work on the avant-garde demonstrates how Deleuze and Guattari ground the concepts of nomadology and micro-political aesthetics to a great extent in the discourses of complex systems in physics and cognitive science, as those discourses have evolved throughout this century, but especially since the 1960’s. Since the late 1980’s, I have argued, along with Manuel Delanda, that many other concepts such as the refrain, multiplicities, territorialization and de-territorialization, difference and repetition—recently discussed by Deleuzean scholars with reference to music--also share these grounds. We need to justify this venture into the careful forging of alliances among scientific disciplines, the philosophy of science and contemporary aesthetic philosophy, in order to reflect on the following five main lines of inquiry (or what Deleuze and Guattari would call “lines of [conceptual] flight”) traversing the realms of science, philosophy and jazz aesthetics:
How do assumptions about duration or time shape the very different creative processes in classical and jazz music? I refer specifically to the western tendency to spatialize time since the 17th Century when both calculus, and standard music notation with even temperament and bars and time signatures, emerged.
How dependent are John Cage’s compositions, by foregrounding the interdependence of music and noise, upon a carefully considered deconstruction (in the Derridean sense) of the calculus of music notation dominant since those 17th Century innovations in contrapuntal composition. We will then notice how he adopts models of music notation that look uncannily similar to phase space diagrams of such complex irreversible processes as attractor states in thermodynamics.
How did the Be-Bop composing practices of Charlie Parker and others engage directly in the calculated yet spontaneous deconstruction of spatialized time, in order for new, hybrid processes of musical expression to emerge? Reminiscent of Bergson’s stages of “creative evolution,” these processes, enable song structures, as the vehicles for improvisation, as well as the conceptual/linguistic musical content (harmony, melody and rhythm) of those songs, to evolve into increasingly subtle and abstract forms at breath-taking speed.
How may we identify processes of de-territorialization and re-territorialization, and the iterative, emergent or self-organizing nature of the refrain (and of harmonic rhythm generally), as central to an understanding of the micro-political motivations of an aesthetic? We will also see how a shift from the model of calculus to the model of phase space in conceptualizing the nature of duration enables us to theorize, and visualize, the crucial role of systemic bifurcations: in both complex processes from physics (and cognitive science in Part Two), and in jazz.
How one might define Ornette Coleman's theorization of “Free Jazz,” in terms of a distributed form of musical expression (called "Harmelodics"), as an evolutionary extension of the line of conceptual flight opened up by Be-Bop composing practices. Other artists also embraced the distributed nature of jazz performances, involving the maximum freedom in juxtaposing independent and sometimes contrasting melodic, harmonic and rhythmic materials, to reach for a full realization of performative freedom."