Wednesday, April 15, 2009



Perhaps I thought of David Tutor mostly because of the image of the composition at the top of the Rhizome essay, but if I have some grasp of the rhizome, I think Tudor's music might apply. I think of Cage's comment about abstract expressionism, that he found it interesting because it de-emphasized the center of the canvas as the point of reference for composition, and that his (and perhaps Tudor's) musical compositions were like this also. My understanding of the rhizome is that it does not operate within traditional binaries, dualities, dichotomies, etc; but attempts to instead understand something in light of it's endless complexity, which seems to lie beyond our everyday perceptual experience of the thing (for example, a book, a mind, or a history). The essay seems to suggest that binaries are imposed from without and are a form of unequal power distribution, much like assertions of sociocultural normativity (for example, a professor of mine liked to designate american normativity as "White-Protistant-Hetero-Patriarchal-Capitalism".)

While I feel like I understand this on some level (it reminds me of discussions of quantum mechanics vs. Newtonian gravitation), I don't totally understand the essay's negation of subjectivity. Sure, one can say that a subject is more complex than we experience it to be, such as eastern mystics who will point out that if you begin to "watch" yourself thinking, you will realize that your thoughts are happening whether you are in control of them or not. Still, I don't know if I agree with the extent to which they are subverting subjectivity and objectivity. On some level, I would think (much like mutual gravitation, which still tells us where planets are located with a degree of accuracy) that subjectivity more or less accurately describes the way we experience the world, and is therefore valid, at least as a model.

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