Experiencing the Real

We offer this simple definition: a medium is that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real. A medium in our culture can never operate in isolation, be- cause it must enter into relationships of respect and rivalry with other media. There may be or may have been cultures in which a single form of representation (perhaps painting or song) exists with little or no reference to other media. Such isolation does not seem possible for us to- day, when we cannot even recognize the representational power of a medium except with reference to other media. If someone were to in- vent a new device for visual representation, its inventors, users, and economic backers would inevitably try to position this device over against film, television, and the various forms of digital graphics. They would inevitably claim that it was better in some way at achieving the real or the authentic, and their claim would involve a redefinition of the real or authentic that favors the new device. (Pg: 65)

Whenever we focus on one aspect of a medium (and its relation- ships of remediation with other media), we must remember to include its other aspects in our discourse. In the case of film, for example, when we look at what happens on the screen (in a darkened theatre), we can see how film refashions the definitions of immediacy that were offered by stage drama, photography, and painting. However, when the film ends, the lights come on, and we stroll back into the lobby of, say, a suburban mall theatre, we recognize that the process of remediation is not over. We are confronted with all sorts of images (posters, computer games, and videoscreens), as well as social and economic artefacts (the choice of films offered and the pricing strategy for tickets and refreshments). We must be able to recognize the hybrid character of film without claiming that any one aspect is more important than the others. This is the claim implicit in most cultural studies analyses of popular media: that film and television embody or carry economic and cultural ideologies and that we should study media principally in order to uncover and learn to resist their ideologies. Although it is true that the formal qualities of the medium reflect their social and economic significance, it is equally tNe that the social and economic aspects reflect the formal or technical qualities (Kellner 1995). (Pg: 66)

In turn, actors and directors of television dramas want their work to be accorded the status of dramatic film. On stage, in film, or on television, the mark of being a true author or actor is "moving" the audience: offering an experience that the audience finds authentic. Film and television actors and directors could also lay claim to improving on stage drama, in the sense that their newer media handle popular subjects in accessible ways and appeal to a public that twentieth-century stage drama could no longer attract. (Pg: 69)

The two logics of remediation have a social dimension for the viewers as well as the practitioners. We have so far used the term immediacy in two senses: one epistemological, the other psychological. In the epistemological sense, immediacy is transparency: the absence of mediation or representation. It is the notion that a medium could erase itself and leave the viewer in the presence of the objects represented, so that he could know the objects directly. In its psychological sense, immediacy names the viewer's feeling that the medium has disappeared and the objects are present to him, a feeling that his experience is therefore authentic. Hypermediacy also has two corresponding senses. In its epistemological sense, hypermediacy is opacity the knowledge of the world comes to us through media. The viewer acknowledges that she is in the presence of a medium and learns through acts of mediation or indeed learns about mediation itself. The psychological sense hypermediacy is the experience that she has in and of the presence of media; it is the insistence that the experience of the medium is itself an experience of the real. The appeal to authenticity of experiences what brings the logics of immediacy and hypermediacy together.
This appeal is socially constructed, for it is clear that not only individuals, but also various social groups can vary in their definitions of the authentic. What seems immediate to one group is highly mediated to another. (Pg: 70)

Remediation is the replication or mechanical reproduction; however, we cannot discuss social and political dimensions without pausing to reflect on Walter Benjamin's influential essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1969). Benjamin's argument is that mechanical reproduction produces a fundamental change in the nature of art, a change that destroys the artwork's "aura" by removing it from the context ritual and tradition in which art had been historically embedded. (Pg: 73)

Film for Benjamin is a medium that demonstrates the inseparability of technology and reality. He emphasizes the complicated apparatus surrounding the production of film, as a result of which &ere is no unity or wholeness in the surrounding scene. It requires elaborate camera work, editing, and other forms of reproduction to make film appear seamless, to make its mediation disappear. Ironically, although filmmakers work hard to conceal the signs of material and technological mediation, their final product calls attention (through the rapid succession of images) to its aesthetic, temporal, and formal mediation in a way that traditional painting does not. For Benjamin, the painter and the cameraman practice very different crafts. In a period such as ours today, in which media and the process of mediation are more frankly acknowledged and appreciated, the aesthetic goal and its political consequences seem to be different. The work of art today seems to offer "an aspect of reality which cannot be freed from mediation or remediation," at the same time that new media seek to present us precisely with "an aspect of reality which is free from all mediation:' Thus remediation does not destroy the work of art;instead it always refashions that aura in another media form. (Pg: 75)

It may well be that film and other technologies of transparent immediacy enact a gendered form of looking. On the other hand, visual media can pursue other router to immediacy than perfect transparency. Television's claim to immediacy depends not only on its transparency (conventional television is not as visually precise as film), but also on its ability to present events 'live." @ p. 187. The immediacy of such new media as computer games and the World Wide Web is supposed
come through interactivity-the fact that these media can change their point of view in response to the viewer or user. Indeed, interactivity even forms part of virtual reality's claim to immediacy. Finally, there is the immediacy that comes through hyper-immediacy an immediacy that grows out of the frank acknowledgment of the medium and is not based on the perfect visual re-creation of the world. In such cases, we do not look through the medium in linear perspective; rather, we look at the medium or at a multiplicity of media that may appear in windows on a computer screen or in the fragmented elements of a collage or a photomontage. We do not gaze; rather, we glance here and there at the various manifestations of the media. (Pg: 81).

Source:-

Bolter, J. David, Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding new media (mit Press, 2000). 

The purity of form

Media theorist Erkki Huhtamo (1995) points out that acknowledgment is characteristic of our culture's attitude to digital technology in general: "Technology is gradually becoming a second nature, a territory both external and internalised, and an object of desire. There is no need to make it transparent any longer, simply because it is not felt to be in contradiction to the 'authenticity' of the experience" (171). And Huhtamo is right to insist that hypermediacy can also provide an "authentic" experience,at least for our current culture. (Pg: 42)

On the opening page of Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuhan remarked that "the 'content' of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph (23-24). As his problematic examples suggest, McLuhan was not thinking of simple repurposing, but perhaps of a more complex kind of borrowing in which one medium is itself incorporated or represented in another medium. (Pg: 45)

 In fact, all of our examples of hypermediacy are characterised by this kind of borrowing, as is also ancient and modern ekphraris, the literary description of works of visual art, which W. J. T. Mitchell (1994) defines as "the verbal representation of visual representation" (151-152). Again, we call the representation of one medium in another remediation, and we will argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media. What might seem at first to be an esoteric practice is so widespread that we can identify a spectrum of different ways in which digital media remediate their predecessors, a spectrum depending on the degree of perceived competition or rivalry between the new media and the old. (Pg: 45)

Media theorist Steven Holtzman (1997) argues that repurposing has played a role in the early development of new media but will he left behind when new media find their authentic aesthetic:
In the end, no matter how interesting, enjoyable, comfortable, or well accepted they are, they are, these approaches [repurposing] borrow from existing paradigms. They weren't conceived with digital media in mind, and as a result they don't exploit the special qualities that are unique to digital worlds. Yet it's those unique qualities that will ultimately define entirely new languages of expression. And it's those languages that will tap the potential of digital media as new vehicles of expression. (Pg: 50).

Hypermedia and transparent media are opposite manifestations of the same desire: the desire to get past the limits of representation and to achieve the real. They are not striving for the real in any metaphysical sense. Instead, the real is defined in terms of
the viewer's experience;it is that which would evoke an immediate (and therefore authentic) emotional response. Transparent digital applications seek to get to the real by bravely denying the fact of mediation; digital hypermedia seek the real by multiplying mediation so as to create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience, which can be taken as reality. Both of these moves are strategies of remediation.' There are two paradoxes at work here. One is that hypermedia could ever be thought of as achieving the unmediated (Pg: 51).
(The logic of remediation we describe here is similar to Derrida's (1981) account of mimesis, where mimesis is defined not ontologically or objectively in terms of the resemblance of a representation to its object bur rather intersubjectively in terms of the reproduction of the feeling of imitation or resemblance in the perceiving subject. '"Mimesis here is nor the representation of one thing by another, the relation of re- semblance or identification between

two beings, the reproduction of a product of nature by a product of art. It is not the relation of two products but of two productions.")

The excess of media becomes an authentic experience, not in the sense that it corresponds to an external reality, but rather precisely because it is does not feel compelled to refer to anything beyond itself. As with MTV, the viewer experiences such hypermedia not through an extended and unified gaze, but through directing her attention here and there in brief moments. The experience is one of the glance rather than the gaze, a distinction that Bryson (1983) has drawn in order to understand the semiotics of Western painting (cf. Bryson 1981). (Pg: 53)

In his work on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson (1991)has traced out the connection between the "linguistic turn"and what he calls"mediatization:' Jameson describes the spatialisation of postmodern culture as "the process whereby the traditional line arts are mediatized: that is, they now come t o consciousness of them- selves as various media within a mediatic system in which their own internal production also constitutes a symbolic message and the taking of a position on the status of the medium in question" (162). Jameson's mediatization of the traditional fine arts is a process of remediation, in which media (especially new media) become systematically dependent on each other and on prior media for their cultural significance. What Jameson describes as mediatization may be true not only of postmodern new media but also of prior visual media as well. What he identifies as new and truly postmodern in fact reflects an attitude toward mediation that, while dominant today, has expressed itself repeatedly in the genealogy of Western representation.

Jameson himself seems to recognise this genealogy (Pg: 56)

he most powerful form of this "critical and disruptive challenge" is video, whose "total flow" threatens the physical and temporal differences that constitute linguistic meaning- even as the "available conceptualities for analysing" media like video "have become almost exclusively linguistic in orientation:" Proclaimed by Jameson the dominant medium of our postmodern age, video simultaneously depends on and disrupts literary and linguistic theory. For Jameson, literary theory, and by extension the traditional humanist enterprise, is redefined by popular visual culture. In fact, television, film, and now computer graphics threaten to remediate verbal text both in print and on the computer screen-indeed, to remediate text so aggressively that it may lose much of its historical significance.'


In We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Bruno Latour takes us further in understanding the role of postmodern theory in out media-saturated, technological culture. For Latour, as for Jameson, contemporary theory gives a special status to language and interpretation: "Whether they are called 'semiotics,' 'semiology' or 'linguistic turns,' the object of all these philosophies is to make discourse not a transparent intermediary that would put the human subject in contact with the natural world, but a mediator independent of nature and society alike" (62).Contemporary theory thus makes it difficult to believe in language as a neutral, invisible conveyor of fully present meaning either between speaker writer and listener reader or between subjects and objects, people and the world. Instead, language is regarded as an active and visible mediator that fills up the space between signifying subjects and nature. But language is not the only mediator; it operates just as visual media operate in their tasks of remediation. Postmodern theory errs in trying to isolate language as a cultural force, for it Fails to appreciate how language interacts with other media, other technologies, and other cultural artifacts. For Latour, the phenomena of contemporary technoscience consist of intersections or "hybrids" of the human subject, language, and the external world of things, and these hybrids ate as teal as their constituents-in fact, in some sense they are mote real because no constituent (subject, language, object) ever appear in its pure form, segregated from the other constituent. The events of our mediated culture are constituted by combinations of subject, media, and objects, which do not exist in their segregated forms. Thus, there is nothing prior to or outside the act of mediation. (Pg: 57). 

   

Source:-

Bolter, J. David, Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding new media (mit Press, 2000). 

TRACES OF PRESENCE; Culture's dESIRE FOR IMMEDIACY 

The practices of contemporary media constitute a lens through which we can view the history of remediation. What we wish to highlight from the past is what resonates with the twin preoccupations of contemporary media: the transparent presentation of the real and the enjoyment of the opacity of media themselves. (Pg: 21)

In order to create a sense of presence, virtual reality should come as close as possible to our daily visual experience. Its graphic space should be continuous and full of objects and should fill the viewer's field of vision without rupture. But today's technology still contains many ruptures: slow frame rates, jagged graphics, bright colors, bland lighting, and system crashes. (Pg: 22)

These earlier media sought immediacy through the interplay of the aesthetic value of transparency with techniques of linear perspective, erasure, and automaticity. all of which are strategies also at work in digital technology. As Albrecht Diirer noted, and as Panofsky (1991) reminded us in Perspective as Symbolic Form (27), perspective means a "seeing through," and, like the interface designers of today, students of linear perspective promised immediacy through transparency. They trusted in linear perspective to achieve transparency because by mathematizing space, it used the "right" technique to measure the world. Martin Jay and others have argued for a close connection between Albertian perspective and Descartes's spatial mathematics. For Jay (1988), "Cartesian perspectivalism" constituted a peculiar way of seeing that dominated Western culture from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth by allowing the Cartesian subject to control space from a single vantage point. (Pg: 24)

Contemporary literary and cultural theorists would deny that linear-perspective painting, photography, film, television, or computer graphics could ever achieve unmediated presentation.' For such theorists, the desire for immediacy through visual representation has become a somewhat embarrassing (because under-theorized traditions). Outside the circles of theory, however, the discourse of the immediate has been and remains culturally compelling. Even within the academic community, among art historians and perceptual psychologists, linear perspective is still regarded as having some claim to being natural. (See, for example, Gombrich 1982; Hagen 1980, 1986.) Meanwhile, computer graphics experts, computer users, and the vast audiences for popular film and television continue to assume that unmediated presentation is the ultimate goal of visual representation and to believe that technological progress toward that goal is being made. When interactivity is combined with automaticity and the five-hundred-year-old perspective method, the result is one account of mediation that millions of viewers today find compelling.

It is important to note that the logic of transparent immediacy does not necessarily commit the viewer to an utterly naive or magical conviction that the representation is the same thing as what it represents. Immediacy is our name for a family of beliefs and practices that express themselves differently at various times among various groups, and our quick survey cannot do justice to this variety. (Pg: 30)

One reason that this style has not been exhausted is that it functions as a cultural counterbalance to the desire for immediacy in digital technology. As a counterbalance hypermediacy is more complicated and various. In digital technology, as often in the earlier history of Western representation, hypermediacy expresses itself as multiplicity. If the logic of immediacy leads one either to erase or to render automatic the act of representation, the logic of hypermediacy acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible. Where immediacy suggests a unified visual space, contemporary hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous space, in which representation is conceived of not asa window on to the world, but rather as "windowed" itself-with windows that open on to other representations or other media. (Pg: 33)

According to Clement Greenberg's influential formulation, it was not until modernism that the cultural dominance of the paradigm of transparency was effectively challenged.' In modernist art, the logic of hypermediacy could express itself both as a fracturing of the space of the picture and as a hyperconscious recognition or acknowledgment of the medium. Collage and photomontage in particular provide evidence of the modernist fascination with the reality of media. (Pg: 38) 

Although this quote is directly referring to modern visual art works, we can see here how there is a certain desire for exposure or say, transparency -- like in simulcasts of opera and mass sporting events, the audience will desire more than just the 'art'... or just the 'performance' but rather the apparatus needs to be constructed in front of us (I'm thinking about the backstage cast and crew interviews, the setting of the stage during intermission and also the various outreach programmes that the institutions offer).

The logic of hypermediacy expresses the tension between regarding a visual space as mediated and as a "rear space that lies beyond mediation. Lanham (1993) calls this the tension between looking at and looking through. (Pg: 41)

Source:-

Bolter, J. David, Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding new media (mit Press, 2000). 

 Erasing the traces of presence 

In digital technology, as often in the earlier history of Western representation, hypermediacy expresses itself as multiplicity. If the logic of immediacy leads one either to erase or to render automatic the act of representation, the logic of hypermediacy acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible. Where immediacy suggests a unified visual space, contemporary hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous space, in which representation is conceived of not asa window on to the world, but rather as "windowed" itself-with windows that open on to other representations or other media (Pg: 34) 

It is a visual style that, in the words of William J. Mitchell(1994), "privileges frag- mentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity and... emphasises process or performance rather than the finished art object" (8). Interactive applications are often grouped under the rubric of '"hypermedia,"and hypermedia's "combination of random access with multiple media (Pg: 31)

Vast audiences for popular film and television continue to assume that unmediated presentation is the ultimate goal of visual representation and to believe that technological progress toward that goal is being made. When interactivity is combined with automaticity and the five-hundred-year-old perspective method, the result is one account of mediation that millions of viewers today find compelling. (Pg:30)

Although effacement is by no means universal in Western painting, even before the nineteenth century, it was one important technique for making the space of the picture continuous with the viewer's space. This continuity between depicted and "real" space was particularly apparent in trompe (Pg: 25)

To achieve transparency, however, linear perspective was regarded as necessary but not sufficient,for the artist must also work the surface to erase his brush strokes. (Pg:25)

"Cartesian perspectivalism" constituted a peculiar way of seeing that dominated Western culture from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth by allowing the Cartesian subject to control space from a single vantage point. (Pg: 24)

As Albrecht Diirer noted, and as Panofsky (1991) reminded us in Perspective as SymbolicForm (27), perspective means a "seeing through," and, like the interface designers of today, students of linear perspective promised immediacy through transparency. (Pg: 24)

These earlier media sought immediacy through the interplay of the aesthetic value of transparency with techniques of linear perspective, erasure, and automaticity. all of which are strategies also at work in digital technology. (Pg: 24)

 All of these enthusiasts promise us transparent, perceptual immediacy, experience without mediation, for they expect virtual reality to diminish and ultimately to deny the mediating presence of the computer and its interface. (Pg: 23)

In order to create a sense of presence, virtual reality should come as close as possible to our daily visual experience. Its graphic space should be continuous and full of objects and should fill the viewer's field of vision without rupture. But today's technology still contains many ruptures: slow frame rates, jagged graphics, bright colours, bland lighting, and system crashes. (Pg: 22)

Virtual reality is literally "in the viewer's face." The viewer is given a first- person point of view, as she gazes on a graphic world from a station point that is always the visual center of that world. As computer scientists themselves put it, the goal of virtual reality is to foster in the viewer a sense of presence: the viewer should forget that she is in fact wearing a computer interface and accept the graphic image that it offers as her own visual world (Hodges et al. 1994). (Pg: 22)

The practices of contemporary media constitute a lens through which we can view the history of remediation. What we wish to highlight from the past is what resonates with the twin preoccupations of contemporary media: the transparent presentation of the real and the enjoyment of the opacity of media themselves. (Pg: 21)

We do not claim that immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation are universal aesthetic truths; rather, we regard them as practices of specific groups in specific times.' Although the logic of immediacy has manifested itself from the Renaissance to the present day, each manifestation in each age may be significantly different, and immediacy may mean one thing to theorists, another to practicing artists or designers, and a third to viewers. The diversity is even greater for hypermediacy, which seems always to offer a number of different reactions to the contemporary logic of immediacy. Remediation always operates under the current cultural assumptions about immediacy and hypermediacy. (Pg: 21)

Source:-
Bolter, J. David, Richard Grusin, and Richard A. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding new media. mit Press, 2000. 

MEDIA + COMMUNICATION

The introductory chapters of Paddy Scannell’s “Media and Communications” centre on an analysis of ‘The Masses’ -- combining research into media and cultural studies alongside the formative development of critical social theory.

Scannell addresses the formation of an inter-textual culture and draws comparisons between the understandings of the production process and the final product (primarily investigating the work of Lazarsfeld, Adorno and Merton).

In the early days of researching the masses, there was a burgeoning reliance on practical realisation and manifestations between media and its actuality. Little research was conducted into mediated communication as psychological and sociological perspectives took centre stage (pg: 10). However, in Colombia University momentum began to pick up research began to surface considering the ‘new media of mass consumption’ (‘new’, of course at the time).

Lazarsfeld framed sociology as an empirical social science to re-interpret data, revealing social and commercial information. Thus ignited the practice of using ethnographic statistical observation and to measure sociological input.

Feeling that administrative research was academic work in the service of external public or private agencies, Lazarsfeld set out collecting and analysing information on the attitudes and responses to mass media (radio, print and film). This was measured in composition by age, sex and income and their preferences (likes and dislikes) – giving a broad and detailed understanding on the types of consumers they were engaging with. This ultimately provided agencies with the tools (informational) to strategies their product production and marketing practices.

The Lazarsfeld-Stanton program analyzer was developed to discover how audiences responded to what they were listening on a micro (moment to moment) and macro (overall) response level. Their device (called ‘Little Annie’ at CBS) recorded and tabulated audience reactions. The machine could profile changing audience reactions and responses to particular content, this lucrative device provided the agencies with insightful information gathered by the measurement from the audience – directing them to adjust aspect of their content to comply with audience’s desires and expectations.

Lazarsfeld’s research is not about the mass media as a singular critical entity (economic motivation, political regulation, organisation or production means) the focus is entirely based on the audience. New cultural industries still prioritise the immediate relationship between performers, performance and audiences. However, a growing dependency on producers, product and consumers are evident in current mass media events (like simulcast opera): there is no direct immediate link between what were later to be called the moments of encoding (production) and decoding consumption (pg: 22).

Scannell’s second chapter voices the concerns of mass culture; he particularly focuses on issues pertaining to: authorship, production, the rationality and reification of cultural institutions and their socio-economic organisation. This chapter delves into how the advancement of critical social research has impacted on the masses. According to Horkheimer, the masses should not be considered as ‘one entity’ instead they should be considered in their socio-historic process in relation to social and economic mechanisms that produce and perpetuate the masses.

The technical efficiency of contemporary cultural institutions operates on economic and medial apparatus that are regulated and governed by public and privet funding bodies – institution’s (like the ROH) content still rely heavily on understanding their audience demography and catering to these needs whilst attempting to balance the output of their artistic integrity and educational incentives (each ‘Live’ season will see a diversified programme: new and old productions, ‘popular’ operas, new commissioned works and quite often an obscure or controversial work (something that distinguishes their programme). 

Screen shot of BP Big Screen of Don Giovanni

To be continued…

 Autonomous Audiences 

If one takes Kant's concept of aesthetic ideas seriously, especially in Gautier's version of that argument, and holds that the absence of firm, definite, and rational ideas and meanings is the nature of both the creative process and the perception of artistic beauty, then the elimination of all narratives and the disappearance of all kinds of representations appears as the necessary step. Art must stop representing something, must stop meaning something in order to be what it is (art). (pg 664)

When art ceases to be recognised (and definable) in its aesthetic properties, one needs a "theory" which would contextualise and explain something as art, and the "artworld" in which such objects can function as art. (pg 672)

Yves Klein's exhibition entitled "Le Vide" (void), opened in 1958 in the Iris Clert gallery in Paris, is the action that reduces art to emptiness in a paradigmatic way. Its visitors were presented with an empty gallery; emptiness or "nothing" (apart from freshly painted white walls of the gallery) was all that was exhibited. Art appears here as being liberated not only from mimesis, formal elements of visual art, material objects or the compelling presence of the artist; the "pure" and "real" nature of art appears as nothing, signifying the final stage of the vanishing acts. The absence, emptiness, and/ or nothingNess that are derived from Klein's project can probably be interpreted as disclosing the real nature of (autonomous) art, as the aesthetic argument aspired to establish it. "Nothing becomes the final stage and a complete self-realisation of art as an autonomous phenomenon. (pg 671)


Source Džalto, Davor. "Art: A Brief History of Absence." Filozofija i društvo 26 (2015).

 placing presence

You're Dead to Me...

Deadness emerges out of what is for us an unhelpful and overvalued schism between

presence and absence that undergirds much literature on performance. Deadness speaks to the distended temporalities and spatialities of all performance, much the way all ontologies are really hauntologies, spurred into being through the portended traces of too many histories to name and too many futures to subsume in a stable, locatable present. As we will argue below,

the topologies of deadness—those never-ending emplacements within concatenations of dis- placements—are patterned and repatterned through specific arrangements of co-labor, or the interpenetrating, distributed effectivities of all entities that have effects. (Pg 20)

Situations where “capturing” a live performance is the fundamental goal, there are always lags, leaks, and perforations that are indicative of intricate spatial and temporal enfoldings and defoldings. In the period leading up to, and immediately after (Page 22)

We might say that at the base of the entire history of audio-visual recording—indeed, at the fundament of all electronic communication—is a culture of synchronization. Sync culture—that leakage effect caused by the awareness of temporal disjointedness—develops

precisely at the moment when non-synchronization becomes a technical hurdle. (Pg 25) 

Our charge is to tease out the contingent patterns of collaboration within the inter-mundane: the apportionment of resources, the conscription of value, the deployment of technologies of co-presence, and the emergence of effective agencies, not to mention the uneven claims to ownership and refigurations of the corporal body within the durative soundscapes of intermundanity. Intermundane collaborations enrol, enlist, and manage deadness, not from the grave itself, but from another dead space: the recording studio. (Pg 27)

Being Makes it So?

Logocentrism is Derrida's term for a philosophy of presence, that is to say, a world-view which understands being in terms of presence: the unmediated presence to consciousness of  the world, and the self-presence of consciousness. Logocentrism is a form of 'onto-theology', or religion of being; in other words it subordinates all difference to the plentitude of presence resumed in the logos. (Pg 48)

The trace expresses the absence of full, present meaning: in so far as meaning is differential, a matter of constant referral onwards from term to term, each of which has meaning only from its necessary difference from other signifiers, it is constituted by a network of traces. (Pg 50)

There is no pure unmediated presence free from temporalization the trace is usually concealed in philosophical discourse which has been concerned rather with the problematic of the sign. The sign implies that it is a sign of something which precedes it; the trace, on the contrary, in Derrida's account, is not a secondary mark of a prior origin, it means rather that there was no origin before the trace. Derrida uses the terms archi trace and trace originaire to convey this destruction of a notion of origin in the knowledge that the terms are of course self-contradictory. (Pg 51)

The Responsive Co-Labors of Deadness

Deadness produces the resonances and revenances that condition all modes of sonic performance. We engage deadness not as displacement, but as emplacement in layered, rhizophonic sites of enfolded temporalities and spatialities. Within these sites, laborers are corpaural, bodies are always sonic bodies.

In the context of intermundane collaborations, liveness is enabled by the productive capacities of deadness, the distributed and noncontinuous temporalities effected by the body’s translation and proliferation through recording technology.27 

What is called liveness is nothing more than a transitive effect of deadness, and deadness is nothing more than the promise of recombinatorial and revertible labor. In the particular circulation of effectivity that characterizes intermundanity, the living register the effective co-presence of the dead even as they draw and  obdurate an impossible separation between mundanities. Collaboration is thus a sympathetic consonance structured in inequality, and skirmishes over rights inevitably arise. (Pg 32) 

Sources: 

Stanyek, Jason, and Benjamin Piekut. "Deadness: Technologies of the intermundane." TDR/The Drama Review 54.1 (2010): 14-38.

Howells, Christina. Derrida: Deconstruction from phenomenology to ethics. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.