As certain as Chopin sounds about what he is trying to say, his essay (manifesto?) is pretty contradictory. He is complaining about the Word, yet he is using words to do so. He is advocating a poetry free from the bounds of words (or Words?), but in those, he will not be able to convey his message the way he does in this essay. But: does he want to convey a message? "[I]t is not useful that anyone should understand me," he claims, and I'm not sure whether he is talking about poetry or life in general. At least he sees the value of the Word for lentil-buying endeavours.
Seriously, though: I somehow found myself enjoying he over-the-top, generalizing manifesto. No, I won't start making random noises instead of speaking, but I doubt that's what Chopin would want me to do after all, he is also against ordering people around, right?). I do think he makes a valid point about us living in a cult of meaning and understanding, where anything which is meaningless is automatically devalued. Meaning and understanding, in the sense of there being one one true, universal meaning to something, is certainly something worth questioning and critiquing.
I don't know if it is just me, but to me his whole essay in its form was also a critique of language. He argues that the Word gives orders, and in a way, that's what his essay sounds like. He might be demonstrating the insufficiency of the Word to truly say what he wants us to "understand" - now more in the sense of feeling, "getting it." He seems to imply that meaning can still exist, but not as a prescribed, rigid thing, but as a flowing, canging, subjective thing.
Or he could simply contradicting himself by writing the essay. But really, what other options does he (and do we all) have?
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McCaffery's essay mentions Phonography, which he says attempts "to investigate the possibilities that there are for a relationship between sound and picture, [...] between audible and visual rhythms. This made me think of.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2H5w8MsPps
Can this, then, be classified as a sound poem, since it is sound transformed into a picture? And is the end result, or the video the poem? Would the video of the painting being created be a (visual) poem, even with the sound off? Would the relation of the soundless video to the piano be parallel to the relation of a the printed words of a poem to its live performance? Yes, the colors of the paint are arbitrarily chosen, but then so are written representations of sounds. So many questions....
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Hi Layla.
ReplyDeleteYou point to the performative problem in Chopin's essay. Certainly we can contain it by saying that he's critiquing a usage of language from a position that employs a wider notion of language. But that doesn't seem to be what he says. Another possibility is that he adopts contradiction, that he expects his own text to be voided and collapse by its own logic. Does the fact that he can make his critique point to his being right or does it nullify his critique? As to the questions you pose about the video, the answer is: yes.