Social Dissonance
book with Preface by Ray Brassier Urbanomic (Falmouth)
PDF
We are not what we think we are. Our self-image as natural individuated subjects is determined behind our backs—historically by political forces, cognitively by the language we use, and neurologically by sub-personal mechanisms, as revealed by scientific and philosophical analyses.
Under contemporary capitalism, as the gap between self-image and reality becomes an ever greater source of social and mental distress, these theoretical insights are potential dynamite. Shifting his explorations from the sonic to the social, amplifying alienation and playing with psychic noise, artist and performer Mattin finally lights the fuse.
In what is a handbook for practical transformation as much as a theoretical treatise, Mattin sets out the thinking behind his score Social Dissonance, in which the audience is the instrument.
The noise is here to stay. Alienation is a constitutive part of subjectivity and an enabling condition for exploring social dissonance—the territory upon which we already find ourselves, the condition we inhabit today.
Lectures on Social Dissonance:
Cécile Malaspina ”Noise As A Spiritual Excersise: Mattin in Conversation with Hadot via Foucault”
As part of @jaradul exhibition "Live Lecture Streaming Podium", ICA Winnipeg, 20th February 2024
Podcasts, Presentations and Interviews:
Entretien avec le philosophe et artiste Mattin
Par réalisé par Cécile Malaspina
« Noise » Leçons d’un empirisme sonore déchaîné, Rue Decartes (Paris)
Social Dissonance, interview with Mattin - Pierre d'Alancaisez (London)
Interview with Colin Morgan for Radio Veneno (São Paulo)
Social Dissonance: Mattin, Elena Biserna and Tobi Maier in conversation with Anabelle Lacroix, Disclaimer (Melbourne)
Inteview with Diffractions Colective (Prague)
Mattin & Miguel Prado: Conclusions from Social Dissonance, Aesthetic of Noise Series organised by Cécile Malaspina
leeways #2 Mattin – “Social Dissonance” | exploratorium berlin
Mattin | Deciphering Social Dissonance: Ideology, Noise, and Subjectivity. Session 1, Foreign Objekt
Mattin | Deciphering Social Dissonance: Ideology, Noise, and Subjectivity. Session 2, Foreign Objekt
Soziale Dissonanz – Wir sind nicht, was wir glauben zu sein, Heimo Lattner mit Mattin, Kultur Mitte (Berlin)
Berria, Iñigo Astiz, 2022ko abuztuak 28 - Getxo
«Askatasun falta esploratzen dute nire partiturek»
Sakon ezagutu ditu inprobisazioaren eta zarataren alorrak Mattinek, eta 'Social dissonance' liburuan bildu ditu orain hainbat hamarkadatan ondutako gogoetak. Soinuaren alorretik alor sozialera aldatu du enfasia.
«Soinuaren alorretik alor sozialera aldatu behar da enfasia, zatiketa hori fikziozkoa delako, soinuaren pertzepzioa bera jadanik soziala den neurrian». Zarataren bihotza bera gurutzatua du Martin Artiach Mattin-ek bere ibilbide artistikoan (Getxo, Bizkaia, 1977), eta haren osteko espaziotik mintzo da orain. Izen ezaguna da harena mundu osoko soinu artearen, zarataren eta inprobisazioaren alorretan: 70 disko baino gehiago ditu argitaratuak, ehunka diskotan aritu da ekoizle, bizi izan da Londresen, bizi izan da New Yorken, eta Berlinen dago egun; Abject Music estudioa darama bertan. Inprobisaziotik, alor kontzeptualera heldu zen lehenik, eta ildo horretan sakonduz eman du orain argitara Social Dissonance izeneko liburua (Urbanomic), hamarkadako ikerketa artistiko eta intelektualaren ondoren bildutako gogoetekin.
Politikaren, ekonomiaren eta abangoardia artistikoren bidegurutzean bertan dabil haren jarduna. Euskal Herrian ere izan da udan hura aurkezten, eta hala egin du zita BERRIArekin. Elkarrizketa argitaratzeko baldintza bat jarri du, eta elkarrizketa bera eraldatzeko proposamen bat ere egin du. Edukia izan dadila erabilera librekoa, batetik, eta, bestetik, lehen paragrafoko letra tipoak izan dezala, ez ohi duen 9,6ko letra tamaina, baizik eta azken inflazio datuaren araberakoa: %10,7koa, alegia, Hego Euskal Herrian.
Sorkuntzan beharrezkoa duzu deserosotasun puntu bat?
Kontzertu inprobisatuak egiten nituenean, baziren musikari batzuk emanaldiaren ondoren beren buruarekin oso pozik sentitzen zirenak. «Oso ongi egin dugu». Inprobisazioaren aurka zihoan hori, nire ustez, zeren inprobisazioak zeure burua zalantzan jartzera eraman behar zaitu. Nartzisismoa da bestea. Egun bizi dugun egoeran, zeure buruarekin pozik sentiaraziko zaituen zerbait egiten baduzu, egungo gizarte honetan bizitzeak esan nahi dituen gainerako gauza guztiekiko ere poza adierazten ari zara. Gizarte honen arazo eta kontraesanak aztertu behar dira, eta ez poztu.
Liburuan badago bizitza osoan erabat zure izan duzun soinuaren eta inprobisazioaren eszena horri buruzko esaldi bereziki gogor bat. «Bere buruaren parodia bilakatu zen».
Aipatu ditudanak bezalako momentuek eraman ninduten horra. Ohartzen joan nintzen, printzipioz araurik gabekoak diruditen eta esperimentazioak gidatuta omen dauden esparru horietan ere, haiek kontrakoa esan arren, jendeak ez zuela benetan ezagutzen denaren mugara joateko asmorik. Benetan mugan bazaude ez duzulako gertatzen ari dena identifikatzeko tresnarik, eta ezin duzulako ulertu. Balio sistema zalantzan jartzen duten esploratu gabeko gune horietara heldu ezean, niretzat, hori ez da inprobisazioa. Zeure burua zalantzan jartzen du inprobisazioak, zeure ingurukoekin eta, are, baita gizartearekin duzun harremana ere; momentu horretan, umiltasuna behar da onartzeko ez duzula egoera hori epaitzeko erremintarik. Gain egiten dizula. Inprobisazioarekin eta zaratarekin musika genero oso identifikagarriak sortu direla iruditzen zait, eta etengabe autosaboteatzen egon ahal izateak erakarri ninduen ni esparru horretara, egiten duzuna ezin kutxatila bakar batera murriztu ahal izateak eta identifikazioei izkin egin ahal izateak.
Disko dendetako kategorizazio hori saihestea, alegia: Rocka, popa, zarata...
Zarata gisa ere identifikatzeko zaila den baina etengabe hor dagoen zarata hori interesatu zait beti.
Eta hortik iritsi zara liburuaren lehen orrialdeetan datorren esaldi horretara: «Soinuaren alorretik alor sozialera aldatu behar da enfasia».
Esperientziari egindako kritika batetik dator hori. Mota horretako inprobisazio edo zarata horrek fetitxizatu egiten du soinu esperientzia batean murgiltzea, eta niri iruditzen zait halakoetan esperientzia pertsonala nabarmentzen dela, esperientzia pertsonala zer den zalantzan jarri beharrik gabe. Baina esperientzia ere gure gaitasun kognitiboek filtratzen dute.
Liburuan diozuna da ezin dela ahaztu esperientzia hori ere momentu historiko batean, gizarte konkretu batean gertatzen dela.
Hori da, eta nik hori azaltzeko John Cage jartzen dut abiapuntu modura. [Soinu guztiak neutralizatzeko diseinatutako] Areto anekoiko batean sartu zen momentuan, Cagek deskubritu zuen isiltasunik ez zegoela. [Areto barruan ere zarata altu bat eta zarata grabe bat entzuten zituen Cagek. Bere nerbio sistemari zegokion lehena, eta bere odol jarioari bigarrena]. Une horretatik aurrera, isiltasunik ez zegoela konturatu zenez, berak erabaki zuen soinu guztiak hartzea beren kasa ziren bezala, eta objektu estetiko sonoro modura landuko zituela. Isolamendu estetiko horrek, ordea, lotura zuzena du bere interes politiko pertsonalekin, hau da, anarkismoaren adarrik indibidualistenarekin. Eta, beraz, horren arabera, Cageren pentsamenduak aurresuposatzen du zuk baduzula autonomia maila bat indibiduoa zaren neurrian. Eta ideia hori da kritikatu nahi izan dudana. Gaur egun bizi dugun gizartean, soinuak beren kasa isola daitezkeen objektu estetikotzat hartzen dituen ideia hori bezala, ezinezkoa delako bere kasa askatasuna baliatzeko gaitasuna duen indibiduoaren ideia hori ere. Liberalismoaren bertsio azeleratu bat besterik ez da anarkismoaren ikuspegi hori.
Artistaren ustezko askatasunaren eta gizartean nagusi den askatasun faltaren arteko talka da zure liburuaren sakonean dagoen gaia.
Disonantzia kognitibo bat da hori. Leon Festinger-ek proposatu zuen kontzeptu hori, eta deskribatzen du esaten duenaren eta egiten duenaren arteko aurkakotasunean bizi den pertsonak bizi duena. Eta gizarte liberal honi begirada orokorra eskainiz gero, ohartuko gara egiturazko disonantzia kognitibo ikaragarria dagoela gizarteak aldarrikatzen dituen askatasun indibidualaren, berdintasunaren eta demokraziaren balioen eta, praktikan, egunero ezberdinkeria eta zapalkuntza sustatzen dituen sistemaren artean. Horri deitzen diot disonantzia soziala.
Eta zer ahalmen du sortzaile batek horri aurre egiteko?
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2017ko Dokumentan hasi nintzen gai hauek lantzen, eta nire ametsa zen Fluxux mugimenduak proposatzen zituen instrukzio moduko partiturak hartu eta horri izaera politiko eta iraultzailea ematea. Baina gehiegizkoa zen. Eta, azkenean, partitura haiekin askatasun falta esploratzea erabaki nuen.
Horraino hel daiteke, beraz, Joseba Sarrionandiak aipatzen zuen poesiaren giltza ttipia?
Bizi dugun ingurua eta askatasun falta hori zenbat eta sakonago ezagutu, agian, orduan eta egingarriago izango da hortik zerbait eraikitzen hasi ahal izatea. Ze uste dut baietz, eraiki daitekeela zerbait, eta sortu daitezkeela aliantzak, sentsazioa dudalako jendea gero eta kezkatuago egongo dela, baldintzak gero eta zailagoak izango direla... Eta, nire ustez, elkartasuna eraiki daiteke disonantzia sozialak eragiten duen frustraziotik abiatuta. Oso-oso mugatuta gaude, eta, agian, oso umilak izan beharko dugu.
2000ko hamarkadan esfortzu handia egin zenuen mundu osoko soinu artisten, inprobisatzaileen eta zarataren alorreko sortzaileen sare moduko bat osatzeko. Nola hartu ditu sare horrek zuk egindako kritikak?
Oso era organikoan gertatu zen saretze hori. Interneti esker gertatu zen. Jende gutxi ginen, leku zehatzetan, baina sekulako hartu-emana zegoen. Oso giro ona zegoen. Nire bizitzako urterik onenak izan ziren. Asko ikasi nuen han, eta, soinu aldetik ere, orduan sentitu nintzen, azkenik, etxean. Gero, behin barruan zaudenean, hasten zara baina batzuk ikusten. Oso abangoardista zen. Etengabe zenbiltzan mugek noraino eman zezaketen kuestionatzen. Era berean, oso eszena gizonkoia ere bazen.
Ausartentzako eszena bat.
Perspektibarekin begiratuta, horrek arazo batzuk sortzen zituen, bai, baina bazegoen integritate bat eta esplorazio asmo intentsu bat. Denborarekin, ohartu naizena da hartu-eman biziko une horiek erabat lotuta daudela ekonomiaren oparoaldiarekin. 2008ko krisialdiaren ostean, Japoniako musikariek, esaterako, Europara etortzeari utzi zioten, eta apaltzen hasi zen hartu-eman hura. Jaialdiak ere beherantz hasi ziren. Ni barruan nengoen, baina artea eta artearen teoria ikasi ahala eskuratutako tresna kontzeptualekin pixka bat deseroso sentitzen hasi nintzen mugimendu hartan ikusten nuen formalismoarekin. Nik alor kontzeptualera eraman nuen hori, eta alor sozialagora eraman dut hortik.
«Publikoa instrumentu bilakatzea». Esaldi horrek laburbiltzen du zure azken aldiko jarduna.
Esperientziaren bidez jakintza sortzeko moduak bilatzen ditut. Potentzial handia dute une horiek, eta asko dibertitzen naute. Hitz joko moduko bat ere bada, ezta? Pandoraren kutxa bat zabaltzearen pareko da musika instrumentuak kendu, eta publikoa instrumentu modura erabiltzea, zertarako, eta, hain justu, nola instrumentalizatuta gauden ikusteko. Disonantzia sozialak eragiten duen zarata beti dago hor, eta hori da niri gehien interesatzen zaidana.
Liburu amaieran zerrenda luze bat dator emanaldietan ikus-entzuleen erosotasuna eta segurtasun sentsazioa zartatzeko balia daitezkeen ekintzekin: entzuleari belarri bat miazkatzea, denen artean saioarekin jarraitu ala ez jarraitu bozkatzea, ikus-entzuleen arteko sare sozialetan zabaltzen duten profilak denen artean eztabaidatzea...
Aldaketa handi xamarra egon da hor. Bost urte joan dira zerrenda hori osatu nuenetik. Oso gogor aritzen ginen orduan, nahikoa inozoak ere baginen, eta asko ikasi dugu geroztik. Zuzenean egindako trolleatze ariketak ziren horiek. Oraindik ez genuen bestelako erreminta landuegirik, eta horregatik ere gertatzen ziren halakoak. Gaur egun orduan baino askoz okerrago ikusten dut jendea, pandemiaren ondoren eta, eta kontu askoz ere handiagoz aritu behar garelakoan nago. Jendea mugan dago, eta ez dago hatza zaurian sartzeko beharrik, zauria zabalik dagoelako.
Goxoago ari zara orain, beraz?
Kontu handiagoz nabil. Bestelako begirada bat behar da orain, bestelakoa delako bizi dugun unea. Gizarteak jadanik trolleatzen gaitu nahikoa, gu ere elkar trolleatzen hasteko. Konfort eta laguntza estrategia gehiago behar dira orain.
Erabat mediatizatuta dago gizartea egun. Aldi berean bizi gara plano digitalean eta analogikoan, esaterako. Egoera horretan zer lor dezake aurrez aurreko performance batek?
Jendearekin denbora pasatze hutsa, elkarrekin zerbaiti arreta jartzea eta egoera pixka bat arraroa konpartitzea izan daiteke bizi duguna partekatzeko modu bat. Elkarrizketaren letra tamaina aldatzea bezala. Hitz problematikoa da zintzotasuna, baina emanaldiek zintzotasunezko egoerak sortzen lagun dezakete, non jendeak bere ezinegonak, ezerosotasunak eta estualdiak parteka ditzakeen. Eraman egiten zaitu denak, bestela; eta oso emankorra izan daiteke geratu ahal izatea eta gaur egun garena mahai gainean jartzea. Merezi du, ze ez dugu denborarik izaten halako gogoetak egiteko. Egunerokoak jan egiten gaitu, eta denak izan behar du funtzionala. Funtzionatu egin behar duzu beti, baina nork funtziona dezake?
Reviews:
Radical Philosophy, RP 2.12 (Spring 2022, London)
Estranging capitalist estrangement
Review of Mattin, Social Dissonance
Mario Aguiriano
Both a reconstruction of the notion of alienation and a partisan reflection on the relationship between experimental art and a social world, Social Dissonance could be considered the first work of ‘Brassierian Marxism’. If the study of Wilfrid Sellars led Ray Brassier to a profound engagement with Marx’s revolutionary contribution to thought, Mattin builds on his work, along with Thomas Metzinger’s, to enrich traditional Marxian theories of alienation, complementing the ‘alienation from above’ instituted by the ‘spectral objectivity’ of value with a highly original rendering of the ‘alienation from below’ that constitutes the self as a sort of necessary appearance.
Much ink has been spilled discussing the proper role of the concept of alienation in Marx’s work. Soldered, according to some, to a metaphysical notion of ‘human essence’ soon abandoned; crucial, according to others, as a reminder of Marx’s deep humanist commitments. The entwinement of the debate with practical political problems has often served to occlude what was theoretically at stake in the first place.
What is perhaps most valuable about Mattin’s contribution is his ability to vindicate both the cogency and enduring importance of the concept of alienation whilst circumventing most of the problems traditionally associated with Marxist humanism, be it its troubling nostalgia for a pre-alienated wholeness or its various appeals to an unhistorical ‘essence’ that contradicts Marx’s own flattening of the latter into the ‘ensemble of social relations’. Although he draws on Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, Mattin avoids some of that text’s most flagrant flaws, such as the invocation of the ‘soul of the proletariat’ as an unmediated source of resistance against generalised reification. He instead resorts to Brassier’s rendering of ‘essence’ as self-relating negativity. This interpretation salvages the notion whilst shattering any articulation of the latter as a substantial identity.
Mattin’s appeal to the externalisation of alienation combines a farewell to any illusion of an estranged immediacy, either predating capitalism or coming after its demise, with a call for the supersession of its specifically capitalist forms. Communism, in short, is not a ‘reappropriation’ of any kind, but the estrangement of capitalist estrangement. Moreover, his rigorous – and equally Brassierian – deployment of the dialectic of immediacy and mediation circumvents a further contentious point of Lukács’s work: his tendency to depict praxis as an essentially free activity lurking behind the reified immediacy of capitalist social forms. This interpretation fatally severs the link between social practice and social forms as the necessary mode of existence of the former. Unlike Lukács, Mattin correctly asserts that alienation, properly understood, is not a mere mystification but the truth of our social being under capitalism.
However, a third complication haunts Lukács’s critique of reification, one which Mattin’s work does not avoid entirely. It concerns the proper role of labour in a theory of alienation. The latter point is crucial because for Marx, and even for the young Marx, alienation is first and foremost the alienation of labour. This is what makes his theory both socially critical and historically specific. Alienation does not stem from our ‘thrownness’, the pervasiveness of the ‘they’ or the role of the signifier: it is socially grounded in a dynamic of expropriation and accumulation, wherein our social powers (the productive powers of humanity) take a quasi-objective existence in the form of commodities, money and capital. Crucially, those collective powers are not something inherent in ‘human sociality’ or any other mystified abstraction: they are a product of capital, yet could point beyond its rule. Thus, the overcoming of alienation is not, for Marx, a re-encounter with a lost immediacy, but the collective appropriation, through the revolutionary action of the working class, of the social powers alienated in the forms of the commodity, capital and the state.
In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács operated under an inversion whereby the alienation of labour appeared as a by-product of a generalised and all-encompassing reifying trend arising out of the commodity-form, a Weberian body in Marxian clothes that necessarily leads to a mystified conception of politics. In truth, however, the products of labour only take the commodity-form as a consequence of the former’s alienation, which creates a society built around the double split between (1) classes and (2) private and independent units of production. Mattin rightly asserts that alienation is ‘a process founded on the fundamental asymmetry between workers who lack the means to convert their material energy into social wealth and a production process that converts this potential material wealth into the actuality of wealth: capital’. However, his quick move to the general ramifications of this original alienation obscure one important political point: how workers’ struggle ‘in-and-against’ the wage-relation and the concomitant dictatorship of the capitalist in the working place is already a struggle against alienation. Capitalist alienation is the mode of existence of a contradiction, a reality internally split by struggle. When the struggle for the wage develops into a struggle against the wage-form, class struggle – the mode of existence of capitalism – takes a revolutionary shape. And insofar as the former is grounded in the daily experiences and collective practices of the working class, the wage-form might well constitute the weakest link of fetishism. As Mattin repeatedly points out, seeing through its mystified appearance requires a theoretical effort, but this effort is fuelled by the impositions made by the valorisation process on the working class.
This latter point should not be mistaken for a call for a workerist politics (a demand of ‘fair redistribution’ confined to represent the interests of the working class as variable capital): it is just an attempt to highlight the identity of the self-abolition of the proletariat and the abolition of the wage-relation as the central determination of a communist politics. Only the fusion of theory and struggle in a revolutionary organisation could demystify capitalist mediations, pointing to their immanent overcoming.
After analysing the ‘spectral objectivity’ of value and its mediations, Mattin moves to the ‘phantom subjectivity’ (re)produced by capitalist relations, where the private individual confined within the self confronts the social world as something purely external. In the best Marxian fashion, he demonstrates how the critique of political economy is not an analysis of an inert objectivity somehow lying ‘out there’, but an immanent unfolding of the form-determinations of both objectivity and subjectivity. Social practice mediates between the two, producing a reified objectivity and the private ‘abstractly free’ consciousness of the commodity-producer as two sides of the same alienated coin. This rigorous materialist standpoint allows Mattin to denounce Reza Negarestani´s one-sided identification of social praxis with conceptual practice for remaining idealist, trumping its emancipatory intentions.
Mattin’s audacious innovation, however, lies in showing that there is a deeper layer of alienation that has not been thematised in the Marxist tradition, yet is by no means incompatible with it. It concerns the production of selfhood in a neurobiological sense, a topic he explores through the works of Thomas Metzinger. According to the latter, ‘biological systems produce self-models in order to cope with the exorbitant costs of processing information in their environment’. Selfhood is a product, yet it appears as something given. As an immediate appearance that conceals the (neurobiological) mediations that give rise to it, the logic underlying the production of selfhood is closely linked to Marx’s concept of fetishism.
Mattin pushes Metzinger’s contribution towards Marxism because the actuality of selfhood cannot be detached from the social forms that mediate it. Selfhood as a neurological phenomenon intersects with the capitalist (re)production of the private individual (grounded in the indirectly social nature of commodity production and sanctioned by the state). The exaltation of experience as self-possession dovetails with the logic of ownership. It reifies experience as a form of immediacy, perpetuating the (liberal) myth of the sovereign subject.
The explicitly political dimension of Brassier and Mattin’s attempt to disentangle selfhood – i.e., phenomenological immediacy – and subjectivity – i.e., rule-governed agency – derives from this entwinement. Experience is neither transparent to itself nor self-validating, but socially (Marx) and conceptually (Sellars) mediated through and through. Although ‘phantom subjectivity’ has neurobiological foundations, it is ultimately instituted by the ‘social actuality of abstraction’. Thus, the creation of a communist subjectivity would have to pass through the destitution of the self in a process whereby capitalist real abstractions are abolished and the relationship between the social recogniser and the recognised individual takes a radically different shape.
Mattin’s analysis of the unity-in-difference of subjective and objective alienation from the perspective of its potential overcoming furnishes his vindication of an aesthetic of noise. Noise is a peculiar phenomenon that seems to elude both cognitive apprehension (conceptual mediation) and commodification (social validation). It is disturbing, baffling, alienating. However, positing noise as the other of mediation would turn it into another form of immediacy. Mattin’s project goes in the opposite direction: a radical aesthetic of noise, he asserts, ought to inscribe the latter (which is precisely that which cannot be smoothly inscribed, i.e., represented) within our social and conceptual practices, using its estranging powers to explore social dissonance, the estrangement of our social being. By estranging us from ourselves and our environment, noise sheds light on the estranged nature of our selves and our social world, both on the subjective and objective sides of alienation.
In Mattin’s account, the practice of noise is neither a puerile exaltation of senselessness nor an abstract expression of discontent, but a radical and theoretically grounded exploration of negativity. Noise is negativity-in-act, and its practice aims to expose the negativity of our social world. By disrupting immediacy, it breaks its semblance of givenness, exposing the latter as the product of a complex net of mediations. It estranges us from the reality of our estrangement.
Despite the cogency and indubitable appeal of Mattin’s argument, a few objections come to mind. First, the estranging powers of noise are arguably more ambiguous than Mattin suggests. It might well be that encountering noise when harmony was expected would simply end up fuelling feelings of anger and aggressivity. Second, and most importantly, the senselessness of noise could reinforce the feeling of powerlessness among the oppressed rather than, as Adorno would put it, ‘break the spell’ of alienation. Thus, despite Mattin’s insightful criticism of the entwinement of avant-garde art and certain romantic tropes, his aesthetic of noise is not entirely alien to one of the most troubling problems of the former in its relation to emancipatory politics: elitism.
More generally, in the absence of a link between the practice of noise and a broader, more explicitly political struggle against alienation, the disentanglement of the latter from the insidious noise that is part of the fabric of our everyday life (a profoundly disempowering exposure to an endless stream of information, stimuli, etc., streaming from opaque social mediations) might prove a Herculean task.
These problematic issues notwithstanding, Social Dissonance more than meets the most important requisite of any contribution to Marxian theory: reminding us that there is much to think, and much to be done, whilst providing some precious tools to face this challenge.
The Wire, May 2022, Issue 456 (London)
White Fungus (Taichung, 2023)
Alienation as Art Form
By Colin Morgan
Mattin’s Social Dissonance monograph is an extensive description of his “Social Dissonance” score. As a music cataloger, I wish all scores had book-length contextualizations of their musical ideas. I would catalog them in the 382 MARC field for the medium of performance. The instrument has to be more than just a “trumpet” or “cello”.
“Social Dissonance” dispenses with conventional musical instruments. It instructs the performer to make the audience their instrument, externalizing the conditions of instrumentality. Performed at the documenta 14 art festival in 2017, it explores the broad sense of instrumentalization, consisting of sounds and silences, de-naturalizing what constitutes the instrument.
I’d catalog Social Dissonance as an instrument. I wouldn’t use the 655 field for genre or form. And I certainly would not use the 650 field for a subject no longer used by music catalogers following the work of librarian and author Jean Harden. Although looking closely at these facets, they blur.
Mattin suggests methods to cut on the bias or carve at the joints of biases. To listen to the elements of self-experience, the task of the “Social Dissonance” performance is to make explicit how explanatory coherence, in degrees of imperceptibility, affects the horizon of the musician-listener ensemble. This is not based on empathy or imitation but on the coherence of a relation or grouping through asymmetries.
Social dissonance reveals an impossible object. As with dissonance, a suspension of harmonic conventions, it reveals a discrepancy in interpretation. It allows a critique of covert biases regarding more or less authenticity.
Mattin traces the dissonance at the foundation of social dissonance to the early twentieth century. Noise suspends the rules of tonality established over the previous 900 years. In the rise and fall of the theory of consonance, the preference for thirds, fourths, and fifths is merely a convention. Increasing use of distance and closeness in tones led to the discovery of “atonal music.”
If overtones are too close or too far away, there is a perception of dissonance. However, no atonal principles of music composition were developed, only the arbitrary game of the twelve-tone system: play each tone before repeating. The emancipation of dissonance, de-biasing from the system of harmonic progression, remained bound to another system, the thematic unity of the work.
Dissonance was meant to overcome figural representation but remained bound to the idea of consciousness of the instrumental relation. The twelve-tone technique, and its general extension in the serialist technique, followed a dialectic of absorbing and negating the listener in a thematic unity of timbral changes. The binary of tonal and atonal did not dissolve fixations on tonality. It maintained a belief in the unity of micro-timbral syntax and macro musical structure.
The use of dissonance led to conceptual or performance art practices, in which sound works are held together by the bare minimum of being recognized as works. While serialists separate out a series of sounds and conceptually integrate them, some mid-twentieth century artists attempted to randomize the sounds and integrate them into an indeterminate structure. While denying talk of wholeness, this also reified it, naturalizing the unintended as a given, and conflating the lived experience of work and the sonic environment.
Although there was no longer an assumption of harmonic resolution, there remained an assumption of the convergence of the individual listener. Further, indeterminacy abstracted this individual from their historical embedding (Lewis, 1996). If sounds-heard are interpreted in one tone and then another, in such a way as the prior tone influences the latter, it might also be considered that there is a field of modifiability, a shared origin of both potential and actual.
I know of no examples of artists who convincingly obviate the role of memory. If anything heard is considered to be potentially music, how does the listener sense something as something heard? If all sound is music, how to explain differences in cultural listening practices? The attempted revolution against serialist techniques maintained a binary of the use and uselessness, nor did it offer anything to further the analysis of the material, energy, and information, as levels of description, of music.
Both dissonant music and indeterminate music have covert values of unity. Instead of correlating sounds heard to the generative structuring of changes at the level of the individual, a spiritual mutation might be achieved through modality, in both senses, of degrees of possibility and ascending and descending intervallic relations.
Mattin focuses on the political implications of an anarchistic sense of self-reliance in conceptual performance sound art. The presupposition of individual agency as the determination of surroundings in ideas about positioning intentional and unintentional, just like the idea in atonality of thematic coherence, reifies freedom and necessity. Biological metaphors of growth and development, that individual wholeness is made up of mechanisms reflecting that imagined whole, abound (Born, 1995).
Mattin is suggesting more than a synoptic vision of top-down alienation and bottom-up alienation. Rather, through a deep reading of Sellarsian philosophy, Mattin renders transparent the externalization of technical reason and technical sensibility in a performance, preparing the audience-as-instrument. This is not about social triggering or tension. “Social Dissonance” reveals the awareness of sensing something as something.
To listen to the basic elements of self-experience, making explicit how explanatory coherence, in degrees of imperceptibility, affects the horizon of the ensemble. It is hard to listen to the distribution of weight in a collective (Beckwith, 2015). This is something Mattin has done well since his earlier “dissonant” punk band Billy Bao. The punk milieu of the 2000s used noisiness to reject the social mediatization of listening, the conditioning of value through predictive algorithms, and the increased web accessibility of historical recordings and recording technologies (Wang, 2021).
Social dissonance makes explicit the musical contributions of Dead Luke, Catatonic Youth, Watery Love, Fag Cop, FNU Ronnies, Homostupids, Shit and Shine, Loose Grip, Francis Harold, and the Holograms, Sex/Vid, Tyvek, Slicing Grandpa, Swimsuitrights, Sic Alps, Times New Viking, Home Blitz, Blank Realm, Wonderfuls, Mountain Cult, Teenage Panzerkorps, Catholic Boys, Sparkle Girl, Shop Fronts, Beat Jams, Les Clubs de Chats, Varghkoghargasmal, Wooden Shjips, Hearts of Animals, Little Claw, Them Themselves Or They, Starving Weirdos, Mad Nanna, Sky Needle, Muura, and Drunk Elk.
Conventional classification by instrument tells more about the classifiers than the musicians because instruments are timbral ranges that are meaningful in their use, in locations, and in bodies (Wong, 2004). The question of cataloging timbre, considering timbre as a social category, a positioning or enacting of race and gender, is both about “what is this?” and “who am I?” (Eidsheim, 2015). The acousmatic question as a critical practice, as sonic differentiation, that when described is the describer’s, is a significant feature of Mattin’s social dissonance analytic.
A creative practice of cataloging music might improve music description by changing the relation of form and instrument in information retrieval through further consideration of socialization, by changing the interface of the catalog (into literature or VR), and by dispensing with the categorization by form (there are no whole works). Mattin provides the exemplar of music as a social practice that coheres to its own justification. It is an exemplar of music description that is not about cataloging authoritatively but consent-based cataloging.
Works Cited
Naomi Beckwith (ed.) The Freedom Principle. The University of Chicago. 2015.
Georgina Born. Rationalizing Culture. The University of California. 1995
Nina Sun Eidsheim. Sensing Sound. Duke University. 2015.
Jean Harden. Music Description and Access. Music Library Association. 2018
George Lewis. “Improvised Music After 1950.” Black Music Research Journal. 1996
Mattin. Social Dissonance. Urbanomic. 2022.
Jing Wang. Half Sound, Half Philosophy. Bloomsbury. 2021.
Deborah Wong. Speak It Louder. Routledge. 2004.
Art Monthly, March 2023 (London)
MINIMALISMORE
Jesús Rodríguez Lenin 16/05/2022
Urbanomic publishes Mattin’s essay on his performance “Social Dissonance”.
Social Dissonance was, first of all, the title of the artistic/musical project with which the Spanish artist and composer Mattin (Guetxo, Vizcaya, 1977) participated in 2017 in documenta 14, the fourteenth edition of the artistic event held every five years (initially every four), since 1955, in the German city of Kassel and which on this last occasion was held, for the first time, simultaneously in two cities, the aforementioned Kassel and Athens. Mattin, author of a very extensive discography situated, sonically, in the sphere of noise and improvised music, and, socially, in anti-capitalism and anti-fascism, intervened in the documenta with an extensive “concert” (in reality it was something more conceptual and more in line with what we understand by performance or happening, since the four performers used the public as “instruments”) that took place in both cities over the 163 days that the event was held: 8 April to 16 July in Athens; 10 June to 17 September in Kassel. From 10 June to 16 July, the four instrumentalists were divided into pairs, two in each city.
Social Dissonance is now also the title of a long essay written by Mattin and published by the English publisher Urbanomic, which explains in over a hundred pages the concept behind Social Dissonance, and which can be summarised, in a very crude way, as the impossibility of maintaining the novel spirit of noise and free improvisation.
To better explain what Mattin intends, he begins the book with an example: “On 14 September 2011, the music improvisers Moe Kamura, Taku Unami, and Jarrod Fowler were invited for a concert at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. For their contribution, Unami and Fowler decided to hide from each other in the bushes outside the performance venue. The organiser Jack Callahan was looking for them for a long time and it was only at 11pm, after all of the audience had left the venue, that he managed to find them. The musicians explained that hiding was their contribution to the concert. Callahan did not understand this ‘contribution’ and became extremely angry. If it seems unclear as to where the sonic element comes from, one only has to think of what Kamura, Unami, or Fowler, or the audience in the venue, might have been hearing while the concert was supposed to be happening. Their contribution radically questioned its own framing and the function of improvisation and music within a specific context. To this day an event organiser might have problems accepting this as a concert, but it is precisely in this sense that this gesture pushed the boundaries and produced thinking.”
Mattin, who has spent several lustra developing a musical career in the fields of noise and free improvisation, explains that at one point he realised that “noise had become a genre of music with specific tropes —loud volume, aggressive frequencies, total movement or total stasis, etc.— and that it was gradually turning into a parody of itself”.
He then became interested in a different approach to noise: silences full of expectation, in which one could not know what might happen next. “These silences –he explains– created effects that seemed to go beyond the purely sonic and bleed into the social situation of performance itself.” […]. “I began to understand improvisation not as an interaction between musicians and their instruments, but as a collective social interaction happening in a given space where there is no neutral position (no audience, no spectators). Assuming, after John Cage’s 4’33”, that there is no such thing as silence in any given social situation, and that it may well be the audience who produce the sounds, I then began to incorporate a Marxist perspective into my work, trying to understand and expose how social relations are produced in a given space and context”.
The essay develops this ongoing project, which has been reworked over a decade, by addressing the relationship between cognitive and aesthetic expectations of the concert situation and the social totality. The book consists of two parts: the first part theoretically traces the concept of alienation in different ways and develops the concept of ‘social dissonance’, while the second part presents and discusses social dissonance, an instructive score that explores these conceptual issues in practice, as developed in Kassel and Athens, where musicians used the audience as instruments. Following the example of Cage and his notion of the ‘prepared piano’, in which objects are placed inside the piano to generate different forms of sonority, in Social Dissonance, the work on show in documenta 14, the performers did not ‘prepare’ the audience with objects, but with concepts, questions and gestures, to set the situation in motion. In an analogy between his technique and that used by John Cage in 4’33”, instead of listening to an ostensibly silent concert hall, Mattin’s audience experiences their own alienation when placed in disconcerting social situations or in instances where they themselves become the spectacle.
Parts of this essay have already been presented by Mattin as lectures on several occasions, for example at the Department of Art History of the American University of Beirut, at the Goethe Institute in Los Angeles or at the Continuous Verb festival at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul.
Urbanomic publica el ensayo de Mattin sobre su obra performativa «Social Dissonance».
Social Dissonance fue, en primer lugar, el título del proyecto artístico/musical con el que el artista vasco Mattin Artiach (Guecho, Vizcaya, 1977) participó en 2017 en la documenta 14, la decimocuarta edición del certamen artístico que se celebra cada cinco años (inicialmente cada cuatro), desde 1955, en la ciudad alemana de Kassel y que en esa última ocasión se celebró, por primera vez, simultáneamente en dos ciudades, la citada Kassel y Atenas. Mattin, autor de una discografía extensísima situada, en lo sonoro, en el ámbito de la música ruidista e improvisada, y, en lo social, en el anticapitalismo y el antifascismo, intervino en la documenta con un extenso «concierto» (en realidad era algo más conceptual y se adecuaba más a lo que entendemos por performance o happening, ya que los cuatro intérpretes utilizaban al público como «instrumentos») que se desarrolló en ambas ciudades a lo largo de 163 días en que se celebró el certamen: del 8 de abril al 16 de julio en Atenas; del 10 de junio al 17 de septiembre en Kassel. Del 10 de junio al 16 de julio, los cuatro instrumentistas se dividieron por parejas, dos en cada ciudad.
Social Dissonance es ahora, también, el título de un extenso ensayo escrito por Mattin y publicado por la editorial inglesa Urbanomic, que explica a lo largo de cerca del centenar de páginas el concepto subyacente a Social Dissonance, y que puede resumirse, de una forma muy burda, eso sí, como la imposibilidad de mantener el espíritu novedoso del ruido y la improvisación libre.
Para explicar mejor lo que Mattin pretende, éste comienza el libro con un ejemplo: el 14 de septiembre de 2011, los improvisadores musicales Moe Kamura, Taku Unami y Jarrod Fowler fueron invitados a ofrecer un concierto en el Hampshire College de Massachusetts. Unami y Fowler decidieron esconderse en los arbustos del exterior del lugar de la actuación. El organizador, Jack Callahan, los buscó durante mucho tiempo y sólo a las 11 de la noche, cuando todo el público había abandonado el recinto, consiguió encontrarlos. Los músicos le explicaron que esconderse era su contribución al concierto. Callahan no entendió esta «contribución» y se enfadó mucho. Si parece poco claro de dónde viene el elemento sonoro, sólo hay que pensar en lo que Kamura, Unami o Fowler, o el público del recinto, podrían haber estado escuchando mientras se suponía que el concierto estaba teniendo lugar. Su contribución cuestionaba radicalmente su propio marco y la función de la improvisación y la música dentro de un contexto específico. A día de hoy, un organizador de eventos podría tener problemas para aceptar esto como un concierto, pero es precisamente en este sentido que este gesto empujó los límites y produjo pensamiento.
Mattin, que ha desarrollado durante varios lustros una carrera musical en los ámbitos del ruidismo y la improvisación libre, explica que en un momento dado se dio cuenta de que «el ruido se había convertido en un género musical con tropos específicos -volumen alto, frecuencias agresivas, etc.- y que poco a poco se estaba convirtiendo en una parodia de sí mismo». Entonces se interesó por un enfoque diferente del ruido: silencios llenos de expectación, en los que uno no podía saber que podía ocurrir a continuación. «Estos silencios –explica– creaban efectos que parecían ir más allá de lo puramente sonoro y que se extendían a la situación social de la propia actuación […]. Empecé a entender la improvisación no como una interacción entre los músicos y sus instrumentos, sino como una interacción social colectiva que se produce en un espacio determinado en el que no hay una posición neutral (sin público, sin espectadores). Asumiendo, después de 4’33» de John Cage, que no existe el silencio en una situación social determinada, y que bien puede ser el público el que produzca los sonidos, comencé entonces a incorporar una perspectiva marxista en mi trabajo, tratando de entender y exponer cómo se producen las relaciones sociales en un espacio y contexto determinados».
El ensayo desarrolla ese proyecto en curso, que se ha ido reelaborando a lo largo de una década, abordando la relación entre las expectativas cognitivas y estéticas de la situación del concierto y la totalidad social. El libro consta de dos partes: en la primera se rastrea teóricamente el concepto de alienación de diferentes maneras y se desarrolla el concepto de «disonancia social», mientras que en la segunda parte presenta y discute la disonancia social, una partitura instructiva que explora estas cuestiones conceptuales en la práctica, tal y como se desarrolló en Kassel y Atenas, en donde los músicos utilizaron al público como instrumentos. Con el ejemplo de Cage y su noción de «piano preparado», en la que se colocan objetos dentro del piano para generar diferentes formas de sonoridad, en Social Dissonance, la obra expuesta en documenta 14, los intérpretes no «preparaban» al público con objetos, sino con conceptos, preguntas y gestos, para poner en marcha la situación. En una analogía entre su técnica y la utilizada por John Cage en 4’33”, en lugar de escuchar una sala de conciertos ostensiblemente silenciosa, el público de Mattin experimenta su propia alienación cuando se le coloca en situaciones sociales desconcertantes o en instancias en las que él mismo se convierte en el espectáculo.
Algunas partes de este ensayo ya habían sido presentadas por Mattin como conferencias en varias ocasiones, por ejemplo, en el Departamento de Historia del Arte de la Universidad Americana de Beirut, en el Instituto Goethe de Los Ángeles o en el festival Continuous Verb del Museo Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Seúl.
Otra parte, (27 de Octubre 2022, Buenos Aires)
La disonancia social de Mattin
Rodolfo Sousa Ortega
A mediados de este año, la editorial inglesa Urbanomics publicó Social Dissonance, del artista vasco Mattin. El libro es, al mismo tiempo, un tratado sobre la alienación y un manual de transformación práctica. En este aspecto, Mattin parece insertarse dentro de una línea de artistas que producen a la par de la teoría política, para causar un extrañamiento estético y social en su obra y en su escritura. Esto lo acercaría a una genealogía que parece comenzar a principios de siglo XX con el surrealismo y sus vínculos con el anarquismo, e incluso antes, con el realismo francés, cuya estética buscaba la disolución de los cánones del arte clásico y al mismo tiempo ser un programa estético de la Comuna de París. Estas filiaciones continúan con el formalismo ruso, el teatro de Bertolt Brecht, el situacionismo y el activismo del músico Cornelius Cardew.
En su partitura, Mattin no sólo sigue el legado de estos exploradores de la disonancia tanto estética como social, también continúa con sus propias investigaciones en torno al noise, y en especial, retoma el recurso que comenzó con su trabajo de largo aliento con la improvisación y la búsqueda de momentos de fragilidad despojando a los músicos de sus instrumentos. En este caso se redobla la apuesta, peligrando hacia un acto de sadismo, ya que el público es el instrumento de los ejecutantes. La audiencia debe seguir las instrucciones dispuestas en la partitura, seleccionadas por los ejecutantes, que procuran la tensión entre los participantes desde que ingresan a la sala. Entre estas operaciones para amplificar la tensión, destacan el sampler humano que repite frases dichas por algún incauto en algún momento de distracción, glitchear la voz para hacer incomprensible el discurso, conjugar la impotencia de las convenciones sociales en la performance con la impotencia de cambiar la realidad en un sentido general (realismo antisocial) y compartir momentos de fragilidad.
Social Dissonance debe, pues, ser comprendido como el proyecto que consolida a Mattin como un artista que produce situaciones artísticas desde la teoría y viceversa. Comenzó investigando el noise como género, evitando a toda costa el parentesco con propuestas dentro del arte experimental cuyas operaciones han sido absorbidas por la industria musical. Después de sus actividades y escritos sobre el noise, se dirigió al ruido como un fenómeno epistemológico y cultural. Así, su libro es una densa investigación teórica en la que se analizan y entrecruzan la alienación, el sujeto contemporáneo y las mediaciones de la experiencia estética.
Distintas ramas del pensamiento contemporáneo parecen encontrar en el ruido la posibilidad de imbricar teoría y práctica para alcanzar un cambio radical. La propuesta de Mattin es producir una disonancia social antagónica a la subjetividad y a la alienación. El autor comprende tres estadios del sujeto: el fenómeno neurobiológico, la experiencia de la sapiencia (en la que las experiencias cognitivas de representación se imbrican con reglas y conceptos), y la subjetividad como una autoconciencia social, en la que las reglas y creencias se ponen en juego en su total contradicción.
Si la desfamiliarización se ha convertido en familiar, se requiere pues una nueva desfamiliarización que suspenda las posiciones fijas en las que el extrañamiento puede ser experimentado. Un extrañamiento basado en la incomprensión de la situación concreta diseñada por el artista y puesta en marcha por sus agentes.
Social Dissonance se presentó durante la documenta XIV, un evento marcado por la descentralización, que se llevó a cabo en Kassel y en Atenas. Cinco años más tarde, las performances se pueden ver como una antesala a las situaciones de tensión y fragilidad que enfrentó la documenta XV.
La edición de documenta de este año fue curada por Ruangrupa, un colectivo de artistas de Yakarta, Indonesia, que decidió reorganizar la estructura de invitaciones y convocatorias y hacer un llamado a distintos colectivos fuera del Norte hegemónico y los circuitos globales habituales. El resultado ha dejado un sabor agridulce. Por un lado, uno de los eventos más importantes de la institución artística contemporánea quedó desprovisto de los centros comunes y se permitió una libertad de expresión y la incorporación de agentes fuera de los circuitos establecidos, pertenecientes a países que no hace mucho dejaron de ser colonias o que aún pasan por procesos políticos violentos. Por otro lado, es interesante y angustiante observar cómo la documenta, punta de lanza en el sistema artístico contemporáneo, pasó de las ya acostumbradas políticas de visibilización y representación de los últimos años a ceder el control a agentes no centrales. Al existir una explícita pérdida del control por parte de la institución central, la disonancia social entra en marcha y se pone al descubierto la xenofobia de los medios de comunicación y de un sector conservador de la opinión pública que instrumentalizó el antisemitismo para cancelar la participación de varios artistas críticos procedentes de comunidades afectadas por las políticas contemporáneas de los Estados-nación hegemónicos.
Así, el proyecto de Mattin parece un vaticinio, y su libro no sólo es un documento de su proyecto en la documenta pasada, sino que aparece en el momento correcto, como un recordatorio de la construcción del sujeto neoliberal a partir de la alienación, que produce discursos, identidades y juicios que posteriormente se ponen en circulación por políticas neoliberales. ¿Cuáles son entonces las posibilidades de la disonancia para desmantelar estos discursos?
A2 (Prague, March 2023)
ROČNÍK XIX
mattin.org