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Theory As Poetry: Italo Calvino’s “Six Memos for the Next Millennium” (2016)
A meticulous effort to match the written to the not-written, to the sum of the sayable and the not-sayable. These are two distinct drives toward exactitude. In trying to account for the density and continuity of the world around us, language is exposed as lacunose, fragmentary: it always says something less than the sum of… Continue reading
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On Performance
When I think about the word performance I often think about musicians, actors, dancers, even teachers putting on some kind of show. There’s a spectacle aspect to most performances though: they involve some degree of put on, some level of acting, some amount of fakeness. I say this even though I myself perform as a… Continue reading
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Theory As Poetry: Paul Gilroy’s “Darker Than Blue” (2011)
Ethical losses resulted from marginalizing the intersubjective, antiphonal equilibrium that had been practiced in ritual real-time collaboration between performers and crowds. Centering music creation on computer screens compounded these difficulties. The resulting music has sometimes celebrated the expulsion of any trace of fallible and funky humanity. The sinuous warmth of real-time bass and drum was often… Continue reading
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Theory As Poetry: David Sudnow’s “Talk’s Body” (1979)
A biology of action (19): You could say that experiences are deceiving, but you cannot say this if the goal of your description is the characterization of experiences and nothing else (22). A method for studying something always discovers only those possibilities that spring from a world the method creates. The perspective defines the phenomenon from the… Continue reading
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Theory As Poetry: C. Wright Mills’ “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” (1959)
Thinking is a struggle for order and at the same time for comprehensiveness. Thinking of the opposite of that with which you are directly concerned. Orient [yourself] to the central and continuing task of understanding the structure and the drift, the shape and the meanings, of your own period. Do not allow public issues as… Continue reading
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Theory As Poetry: Dick Hebdige’s “Subculture”
We are interested in subculture— in the expressive forms and rituals of those subordinate groups who are alternately dismissed, denounced and canonized we are intrigued by the most mundane objects which take on a symbolic dimension we must seek to recreate the dialectic between action and reaction which renders these objects meaningful (2). Subculture… Continue reading
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