Kodwo Eshun, excerpt of interview from July 2000:
I was really pleased to find an old essay by Sylvere Lothringer which
explained how they wanted people to use Semiotexte books for speculative
acceleration. Instead, people started using these texts to prove their moral
superiority, saying "You are wrong, you have misunderstood Foucault." They
used theory for prestige, to block speculation. That is why so many artists
used to resent theory. You would get these lame pieces, somebody trying to
apply Heidegger to Parliament-Funkadelic because they had seen the word
"ontology" on a cover, instead of taking Parliament to read Heidegger. They
always did it the other way round. Theory wasn't being used to pluralize, to
see that there was theory everywhere you looked, and everywhere you
listened.
When painters paint, they are theorizing immanently in the field of paint.
Sonically, when you compose, you are theorizing tonally. That was a key
breakthrough. When I wrote my book it did not have to be historical. It
could be a sonology of history, it did not have to be contextualization of
sound. It could be an audio-social analysis of particular vectors. Sound
could become the generative principle, could be cosmo-genetic, generate its
own life forms, its own worldview, its own world audition. That's still the
key break between my book and most cultural studies analyses. They still
have not understood that sonology is generative in and of itself. Like every
field is. Every material force can generate its own form.
I was really inspired by the Futurists and Marinetti. For ten years I only
read critiques of the Futurists, saying they were fascists. In fact, they
were the first media theorists of the twentieth century. They were amazed by
X-rays, by artificial light and lamps, out in the street, by new camera's
and photography. They just wanted to explore how new technologies broke up
the solidity of the organism and involved lines of force. Futurism,
supremacism and constructivism were the science-fiction of the first machine
age. The fantastic adventures of the early modernists, from Tatlin to
Malevich. Machines, media and art thinking were one and the same. Some
artists are just extremely good theorists. Still hard to find, this
material. Go and look for the essays of El Lissitsky. The same counts for
the speculative writings of the photographers Robert Smithson and Gordon
Matta-Clark. I realized that Barthes never had an academic degree. And why
McLuhan used to structure his ideas with number or the alphabet, not be
bored to death by the academic obligation to seriousness.
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Kodwo Eshun, excerpt of interview from July 2000:
I was really pleased to find an old essay by Sylvere Lothringer which explained how they wanted people to use Semiotexte books for speculative acceleration. Instead, people started using these texts to prove their moral superiority, saying "You are wrong, you have misunderstood Foucault." They used theory for prestige, to block speculation. That is why so many artists used to resent theory. You would get these lame pieces, somebody trying to apply Heidegger to Parliament-Funkadelic because they had seen the word "ontology" on a cover, instead of taking Parliament to read Heidegger. They always did it the other way round. Theory wasn't being used to pluralize, to see that there was theory everywhere you looked, and everywhere you listened.
When painters paint, they are theorizing immanently in the field of paint. Sonically, when you compose, you are theorizing tonally. That was a key breakthrough. When I wrote my book it did not have to be historical. It could be a sonology of history, it did not have to be contextualization of sound. It could be an audio-social analysis of particular vectors. Sound could become the generative principle, could be cosmo-genetic, generate its own life forms, its own worldview, its own world audition. That's still the key break between my book and most cultural studies analyses. They still have not understood that sonology is generative in and of itself. Like every field is. Every material force can generate its own form.
I was really inspired by the Futurists and Marinetti. For ten years I only read critiques of the Futurists, saying they were fascists. In fact, they were the first media theorists of the twentieth century. They were amazed by X-rays, by artificial light and lamps, out in the street, by new camera's and photography. They just wanted to explore how new technologies broke up the solidity of the organism and involved lines of force. Futurism, supremacism and constructivism were the science-fiction of the first machine age. The fantastic adventures of the early modernists, from Tatlin to Malevich. Machines, media and art thinking were one and the same. Some artists are just extremely good theorists. Still hard to find, this material. Go and look for the essays of El Lissitsky. The same counts for the speculative writings of the photographers Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark. I realized that Barthes never had an academic degree. And why McLuhan used to structure his ideas with number or the alphabet, not be bored to death by the academic obligation to seriousness.
- tom moody 8-31-2005 7:06 pm