Audio/ Visual: Multimedia Versus Intermediality?

As someone whose academic and artistic work tends to revolve around various critical concepts of intermediality, with a general and passionate fixation on the blurring of mediums and boundaries between disciplines, I have a somewhat awkward confession to make.

Honestly, there are times when pop-culture's (and particularly consumer-culture's) emphasis on the "multi-media" weirds me the hell out.

I feel like a bit of a hypocrite saying this, back-pedalling, trying to explain how what I'm referring to is somehow different from what "I" do, as I research the role of music in Literature or vice-versa, or stress the importance of videos I make for a more thorough understanding of my musical-output that they accompany... (I know. How very un-post-modern [or un-post-post-modern/ un-"reconstructionist"] of me to try to distance my own work from pop-culture. This is an observation, not a theory, so I offer no direct apology). It is what it is.

I first jotted some of these thoughts down in a notebook a few years ago, while I was searching for a gift for a family-member. I was looking for an electronic-device that performed a single task in a simple, easy-to-use manner. I had owned a similar device years prior, so I knew that the technology existed... and honestly, as a musician who's a bit of a gear-nerd, I knew of quite a few ways to accomplish the task in question. Problem was, at the time, there were plenty of devices on the market that could handle this simple audio task.... in addition to a plethora of other far more complicated tasks that wouldn't be used and would render the device far too uselessly complex for the person it was intended for. Poking around in the stereo-equipment section, I was invariably directed to the "home theatre" section, to which I groaned. "Oh, we have plenty of things that do that... as a side-effect of all this neat video-stuff that they can also do!" Another groan. "No, those features will not be used." I wanted a device that accomplished a strictly-audio task simply and efficiently. There was nothing on the market at the time that did what I wanted it to (outboard, without needing to be plugged into a computer) that didn't also have a visual-component.

For some reason, these frustrations led me to think of how distasteful I found the "Bohemian Rhapsody" sequence of "Wayne's World" the first time I saw it. The Queen song had long-conjured its own set of mental images for me. The aesthetics associated with that song in the film, Garth and Wayne headbanging, provided such a harsh juxtaposition with my own imaginative constructs for the song. Afterward, it irked  me irrationally and uncontrollably to no end that, among kids my age, whenever that song came on, the point-of-reference was inevitably "Wayne's World," rather than the dense operatic aesthetic landscape I'd constructed in my mind. {for the record, this no longer bothers me in the least. I was pretty young when that movie came out, and "A Night at the Opera" was the first record I ever purchased, so childhood feelings about this subject were rather biased and passionate.}

{contrast audio-associated aesthetic imagery and perceive intermedial dischord.}

{On a somewhat unrelated note, I'm developing an ever-more-detailed theory about how much you can tell about a person based on their opinion of Queen. I'm only partially kidding.}

Similarly, around the same time, I heard an article on NPR about how Disney's "Fantasia" shaped the way that entire generations qualified classical music with aesthetic imagery. (I think it was this article.) Although I found this story/ review fascinating, it also made me feel somewhat dirty. There's something deeply strange about how this classical content, works by Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Stravinsky, etc, was reshuffled, repurposed, re-imagined, and re-aestheticized forever in the collective consciousness.... by a cartoon. 

As Lloyd Schwartz says in his NPR review of the Fantasia rerelease,  "for kids, it's a delightful introduction to classical music. But both Fantasia films reveal how difficult it is to arrive at convincing images. Visual artists have to be deeply sensitive to music not to oversimplify, or betray, what's so deeply in the music." Maybe that's part of my discomfort, and the distinction I can't help but draw in my mind- pop-culture's use of "multi-media" tends to super-impose and interpret between mediums, whereas "intermediality" perceives and utilizes multiple mediums as components of an over-arching whole, multiple ways of understanding the same content, an ability for aspects of one medium to say things unable to be expressed with another, rather than a botched-translation from one format to another as if the vocabularies were entirely and seamlessly congruent? (See Deleuze and Guattari on mimicry versus Becoming?)

{I'm using this particular example not because it's the best-known and most narratively-accessible sequence from the film, but because the source-material for the musical-composition is literary [Goethe], which provides an additional layer of multi-media/ intermedial complication.}

I'll be the first to admit that, in all of these examples, the role of capitalism in our cultural reception of art is a large aspect of what I find off-putting... "You NEED more features... Why WOULDN'T we want our stuff to do more stuff??"... classic works of art repackaged and resold in more digestible forms to cater to a larger swath of the consumer population, scarring the new image-associations simultaneously to the parts of our brains receptive to the music, blocking our cognitive ability to let the music speak its own language... etcetera... {Breathe.}

Are these the only distinctions, though? As always, the line between audio (or any other medium) as product and audio as art is really blurry. I'm constantly trying to figure out where that line is, and how to most effectively discern and distinguish the force-fed "multi-media" that makes me feel like a dirty manipulated consumer from the uses of intermediality and the blurrings of boundaries between disciplines and distinctions that I find so vital and mentally-invigorating... Yet at the same time I'm entirely unsure as to why this line needs to be drawn or clarified at all. 

In the meantime, exploring observational knee-jerks is always something I find important. 

{Now, to cleanse your pallet, a bit of multi-media mind-candy I stumbled on while writing.}

Ealain Ar Son Ealaine (anachronistic credos to reconstruct the creative "now")

(For a variety of confusing, conflicted, and convoluted reasons that I'll spare you from here, several of my recent research endeavors have been bringing this poem that I wrote a couple of years ago to my mind a lot lately. I thought that I had posted it somewhere shortly after it was written, but a cursory search of google says that I'm mistaken. This piece was one of a pair (drastically different from each other) that I wrote for anonymous submission to an academic poetry journal that I was working for at the time. In keeping with my initial guess, this one was rejected in favor of the other, which was said to be more realistic, grounded, and relatable... which provided further proof of the point that I was trying to make with this one in an appropriately ironic way... which I was obviously greatly amused by.)


The breeze blows in
The experimental surreal
The swirl of my pipe-smoke
The mingling, crumbling,
Crushing of crumpled, living
Leaves, to sway and swing in
Non-notes, artificial harmonics,
To add texture to the silence.

None of this is more real or
Pertinent than the
Dream that I had last
Night... something about
Espionage, switched ID's
In the restaurant where I
Work, in big-backed
Red-vinyl booths with
Pernod bottles on the
Shelves, "Anisette," a smaller,
Softer version, a more
"Truthful" femininity,
Something far more "real,"
If "reality" and "truth"
Could be given more
False "faith." But from that
Draught they've drank enough.

When your footing fails,
And your senses are seen to be
No more than merely what
You sense, "Construction" and
"Conceptualism" render
"Content" entirely inconsequent.

Activity falls to the
Dagger of intellect;
All disciplines would quake and
Cower if they realized that
The ones that prove their
Umbrella could make their
"Important" findings obsolete.

Empirical studies suggest,
Based on what we understand,
The best of the research-
Methods that I have no
More than anyone else,
Or less, the plinking,
Plopping, fizzing, bubbling,
Test-tubes of all the
Chemical concoctions we can
Understand (which are none),
Besides what happens in
Our own heads, concludes,
That this is all that matters.

A false construction
In a dead language,
Of a nineteenth-century
Slogan, fitted around a
"Real life" growling version
Of a giant plaster lion
At the front of an emerald
Building in a city
Built for the construction
Of fabricated grime
Demonstrates this well.

When the activist "realities"
That Gautier and Poe spoke
Out against are demonstrated
By our daily lives to
Not exist, their credos adopt
More fervent strength and meaning.

Anachronistically, of course.
I am well aware of my
Ironies and contradictions,
And these themselves will prove my point.

Mirrors and Voices, Part 4: Reconstructing the Fabricated

(...continued...)

Reconstructing the Fabricated

The concept of Samuel Beckett’s Nohow On begins at a juncture where the author already takes for granted that conventional literary forms have been torn down and rendered unnecessary. He is writing from a post-modern platform that is post-character, post-plot, and post-setting. Even when these elements can not be (or are not needed to be) completely removed, they are relied on as tools rather than as story-building focal-points themselves, as they would have necessarily been in literary moments prior to the one in which Beckett writes. He writes with the confidence that the efforts to tear down these problematic paradigms of the past has already been completed (by both critics and artists such as Borges), making it now his responsibility with this work to reconstruct just as admittedly fallible paradigms in the places where the old ones have been removed. The intention of the three “stories” in Nohow On, therefore, seem to be the construction of an elaborate simulacrum of both “literary form” and “reality” at the same time in the absence that the removal of prior forms of each have left. If it is understood from the point at which Beckett stands at the beginning of the work that “realities” are constructs of representations such as “literary form,” and these representative tools are also themselves constructs, and any prior assumptions of “truths” imbedded in either sides of these representative paradigms are therefore inconsequential, then Nohow On situates itself as a work that constructs new structures where the old ones have been stripped away, with the assumed understanding that the new forms are no more “real” than the ones that they replace.

The first “story” in the work, “Company,” presents an interesting corollary metaphor for the way that Beckett’s reconstruction in the entire work operates. Without giving the reader any more than elusive and extremely slight fragments of plot and setting, and only one extremely undeveloped shell of a character that we are told, in the last line of the work, has been the entire time “alone,” Beckett creates a story-telling format that operates with different necessary elements than these, while at the same time, by way of tools of language that rely on very different constructs, builds hypothetical “tangibles” by using the same sort of elusive and unsecured language. Within this tale, these tangibles are referred to as “company,” characters that are mere figures of language to keep the protagonist from being alone. These creations are built by way of language itself, which, by continually altering viewpoints, constructs a cacophony of voices, members of the “company,” that are no less yet definitely not more closely aligned to traditional “characters” than the one that we are told is alone.

Rather than utilize metafiction as merely an element of the storytelling convention, in “Company” metafiction is among the primary premises of the work, and in this way the piece is allegorical for Beckett’s reconstructionist ideology with Nohow On as a whole. The single “character” is, through language, “devising it all for company” (44). In order to not be alone, he creates, by way of narrative position and tense alterations, multiple voices that create one another. When he creates one, that one will spin off and change the position from which it speaks, thus constructing “yet another still devising it all for company” (44). The voices are the representation of characters; these representations create other representations. Thus, as the need for originals of characters to be represented becomes stripped away, we find that all are merely representations of representations, which, according to conventional story-telling guidelines, would render them to be nothing at all. Beckett, however, demonstrates actively how they are created, and therefore demonstrates that, because we are taking for granted now that conventional characterization is also merely representations of representations and therefore subjective or inconsequential, that the constructs themselves, built on nothing besides their nature as constructs, are the goal of the narration, and by their very constructed nature are viable entities, or at least as viable (or as nonviable) as any other representation. In this way, Beckett demonstrates how he will construct viability for all three of the stories in Nohow On, and demonstrates the point of the work to be the reconstruction of artificial representations that are as close to being as unhindered by “truthful” representations as the author can muster. Just as the “character” in “Company” lays on his minimalist bed and constructs a room full of voices, so Beckett stands on the blank slate of the post-modern critical understanding and constructs, with newly reutilized linguistic tools, his own form of representative story-telling.

Thus, as Borges demonstrates with his mirrors, and countless critics such as Baudrillard demonstrate with their theories of the postmodern, that all concepts of “reality” are representations that have little or no secure foundation, Beckett stands on this footing, in the chasm where the constructs have been torn down and takes the next step. He creates, just as the lone “character” in “Company” creates with language the voices of others to share the room with him, a new fallible reality to fill the gap that has been recently vacated, using as few as possible of the old tools, to rather start a new, and reconstruct false objects for the sake of the objects and their fallacy themselves.

Mirrors and Voice, Part 3: Reconciling the Absence

(...continued...)

Reconciling the Absence

The frequent question to be asked from this point, of course, is, if all representations are faulty because the represented itself and the act of representation are inherently faulty, where do we go from there? How can questions be answered if both the answer and the questions asked are inherently irrelevant? Many critics seem to have either wanted to stop here, as Derrida, or continue from a different juncture within the old structures entirely, like Jameson. If the same thought-process were to be maintained, however, the necessary next step from the point of tearing down prior “truths” would entail the reconstruction of new Art-based structures within the new-found understanding. Where critics seem to have been rare in asserting the necessity of this step and advocating for it, Artists themselves have taken up the pursuit, and constructed representational worlds based on assumptions that have become understood in the time since Borges’ work on the subject. The later work of Samuel Beckett provides a near-perfect example of the sort of reconstruction required to complete the postmodern project in relation to the problem of representation.

(...to be continued...)

Mirrors and Voices: Part 2, Reflecting the Fabricated

(...continued from yesterday...)

Reflecting the Fabricated

In Brian McHale’s essay “From Modernist to Postmodernist Fiction: Change of Dominant,” we are told that “the referent of ‘postmodernism,’ the thing to which the term claims to refer, does not exist. (4) Thus, the term is a construct, by the nature of its existence as a linguistic symbol with which to categorize or create, at the same time that the movement, style, or body of work (depending on which context the word is used in) that it is constructed in order to describe, its “referent,” as McHale calls it, is a construct as well. The term is a reflection of the ideas that it is created to describe, but neither the reflection or the source are any more “real” than the other. The categorical term can thus be seen as a mirror, where the representative reflection is limited and altered by the angle from which it is looked into and the confines of its frame. Therefore, since both the room that the mirror reflects and the mirror itself and the descriptive reflection are fabrications (as the mirror reflects things that are not themselves “real”) it is irrelevant to be concerned with the bias or credibility of the reflection, or its nature that lacks credibility as (or by the way of being) “merely” a reflection.

This image of representational reflection operates on several levels in dialogue about postmodernism. As McHale suggests, it applies to the movement’s nomenclature, with “postmodernism” the word serving as a mirror to reflect the room of “postmodernism” the thing. This image also applies to, more generally, the project of postmodernism in relation to conceptions of reality and representation. The mirror in this case is the text, art-form, or chosen form of representation in general, while the room is the world or setting being described, the “reality” being called into question. In this regard, McHale’s essay is in and of itself a postmodern text, merely using the linguistic representation of the movement itself as an example of the way that the postmodern conception of “reality” operates, most specifically its relative representational nature and eventual inevitable irrelevance.

Viewing postmodern representation as a mirror with reflection and subject, the subject itself being a reflection, provides an interesting correlation to Plato’s classic principle of Ideas versus Forms. The mirror provides the “Forms,” the representations, descriptions, and approximations, while the room that is reflected serves as the “Ideas” that, to Plato, are the “real” versions that the mirror reflects. Obviously, the wrench that postmodernism throws into Plato’s philosophy is that, when the ideas themselves are observed to be just as representational as the representations of them reflected in the mirror, the idea that the forms are subordinate to a more relevant set of ideas is torn down, leveling the playing-field and making the allegory of the cave appear more like a hall of mirrors with no definable source for the image, but rather a potentially endless series of reflections.

It is therefore no surprise that the mirror is a common symbol in postmodern works by authors such as Jorge Luis Borges. In Borges’ fiction, the mirror is most often placed in a room with fabricated “realistic” parameters. The room is constructed in such a way that it shares enough commonality with the “realities” understood by the readership that it serves as one layer of reflection, while the mirror is placed in order to reflect this reflection, to draw our attention to the limitless number of layers of possible potential-“realities” that can be caused by representing alternate representations, which, to the postmodernist, is the task that all artists are engaged in. The room is a representation, intentionally altered (or perhaps merely biased by the chosen angle of perception), of the “reality” that Borges understands, which is, in itself, a representation in several regards (perception, perspective, linguistic, etcetera), and the mirror provides a third layer of representation, which can be altered by the angle that it is perceived from, the angle that the light is received by it from, the limiting confines (bias) of the boundaries of its frame, etcetera. By way of the inclusion of this third layer of reflection, we are reminded of the representational biases and alterations of all other layers of reflection that led to this version of the image. The third visible layer of reflection directs the reader’s eye to the idea that the images’ sources are ambiguous, and possibly non-existent. Because it is understood that neither the reflection in the mirror or the image of the room that it reflects are “real,” neither the reflection nor the image are more or less relevant than the other, and biases, limitations, and angles of perception no longer have any effect on the readers’ perception of the “truthfulness” or “credibility.” By the same reasoning, therefore, as all layers of what we perceive as “reality” are subjective representations, Borges is using the mirror to demonstrate how the worlds that he creates in his stories are no less relevant or “real” than the ones that he or his reader lives in; Uqbar is no less relevant than Europe, Bioy is no less relevant than the reader, the author’s speculation about the room that the reader sits in no less relevant than the room that the reader himself perceives from his own sensory biases.

The mirror is thrust in the reader’s face on the very first page of Borges’ short-story collection, “Labyrinths.” The first tale in the book, “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” begins with a description of how a mirror (or, more specifically, a conversation about the conceptual value of the reflective properties of a mirror, in some ways much like this one) aids in the discovery of a fictitious world. The number of levels of “fictive” representation referenced by this symbol are nearly limitless, and staggering. Conceptually, this number is allowed to be so astoundingly infinite by the reflective nature of the mirror itself. The mirror’s ability to reflect (and an assumption that what it creates is “real,” as the heresiarch of Uqbar tells us that “mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men” [Borges 3]) is contemplated in an encyclopedia entry (a reflection/ representation) about a fictitious place (another reflection) created by fictitious characters as a sort of an experiment with the nature of representation (reflection), which is discovered by another set of fictional characters, who reside in the principle “reality” of the piece, which is a reflection of the “reality” that Borges assumes for his readers, which is a reflection of his own “reality,” which only he can represent with whatever sort of biases or angles that he chooses and is the product of the representation of his sensory, linguistic, and cultural perceptions, among other things (all of which are reflections or subjective representations). The mirror offers no way of identifying the source of the reflections, demonstrating the truth of the comment by the “fictitious” heresiarch of Uqbar that the men reflected in the mirror are just as “real” as the men that they reflect, thus suggesting that the heresiarch, although separated by at least four layers of reflection, is no less “real” or “credible” of a relater of information or “truth” than Borges himself is. By this mirror, therefore, Borges demonstrates the postmodern project (and the meaning of the term and artistic movement itself) that he seems to agree with McHale on, that “the referent… the thing to which the term claims to refer, does not exist.” Contrary to the beliefs of Plato, postmodernism asserts that there is no difference between Ideas and Forms, the reflection is not less “real” than the reflected.

a bit of a break... Mirrors and Voices.

I have taken a bit of a break from my online postings lately, due to the time-constraints imposed by the grad-school application process. I apologize.

To my avid and disapointed readers (*cough*), I apologize.

To tide you over in the meantime, this evening I will begin to post segments of a piece of essay-work that I am currently working on retyping and reformatting for a professor.

This is the first installment in a series, and thus a cliff-hanger; so keep posted.


Mirrors and Voices;
Borges’ and Beckett’s Collective Postmodern Project of Tearing Down and Rebuilding Representations.


Refining the Scope of the Project


To encapsulate a major theme of the Postmodern project, it has been the job of both artists and critics to tear down all that had existed before, particularly as it relates to the idea of representation, and rebuild admittedly false but just-as-plausible representational constructs in the place where structures that were held as “truth” in the modernist and pre-modern eras had been removed. In this regard, critically, far more work has been done in the earlier phase of this project; that of the removing of past assumptions of representational “truth,” than in the latter stage, the process of rebuilding where the first stage leaves enormous opportunity for new Art-for-Art’s-sake initiatives. In terms of the works of Art that participate in the project, however, effort has definitely been made on all sides of the task. In this regard, Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett represent opposite ends of this spectrum that compliment each other nicely in view of the combined project of the movement. Borges can be seen to represent the beginning of the postmodern process in this regard, the early process of tearing down, by way of the works of art themselves, the constructs of the previously assumed “truths.” Correspondingly, Beckett represents the end goal of the project, the reconstruction, by way of Art itself, of new constructs based on the assumption that the old ones, by this point, are understood to be irrelevant (these new constructs would, therefore, also be irrelevant in any regard but to the advancement of the Art of representation itself). The two authors, therefore, if taken collectively, represent, in many ways, the fulfillment of the postmodern task. Deconstruction is inconsequential if some form of Reconstruction doesn’t follow, and true artistic construction cannot take place without the tabula rasa that early post-modern truth-destruction (both critical and artistic) provides. Borges and Beckett allow us to view how the two can most successfully function together to achieve a coherent artistic (and inherently Art-focused) statement.

...to be continued...