The desire for a philosophical analysis of post and digimodern music started after a long participation of the author in the miracle of sonic adventures, starting with the passionate listener to the evolving artisan of computer-assisted music creation. Also, starting with the period before this research adequately begun, I have doubled the experience of musical practice with numerous readings in the specific field, in order to create a theoretical paradigm, both influenced by illustrious figures from the field of the philosophy of contemporary culture (Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Gilbert Simondon, Katherine Hayles, Brian Massumi ş.a.m.d.), as well as personal contributions and new ideas. The musical examples used throughout the thesis were selected after many auditions, in order to emphasize their relevant essence. With the pervasive presence of international bibliography, I tried to develop a future possible exploration platform in the Romanian academic literature on this field, accordingly to the significant Western perspectives on the philosophy of computer-assisted music, starting with the French post-structuralist and deconstructivism and ending with some resonant names in the field of philosophy of technology and digital media.
Based on these premises, we attribute to post and digimodern music the role of the main contributor in emphasizing the connections between ontos and logos, between ideal and possible, between real and hiper-real, between offline and online as manners of alternative authentification of existence in a matricial reflection, through rendering, reproduction and intensive colonization of the perceptive space.
Postmodernism functioned as an implementation of fragmentation and discontinuity in the consistency of the expressive plans, thus generating a need for the reevaluation of its ontic, phenomenological and aesthetic-axiological status in a completely new frame, supplemented by the technological devices and hailed as a cultural regime under the digital modernism paradigm or, as Alan Kirby named it, digimodernism. We will emphasize the idea that postmodernism, due to all its questioning of traditions and history, could serve as a basis for the experiment of difference in music creation, by deploying the processes of pseudonaturalization, virtualization or actualization.
According to the medical definition of the term, ‘spasticity’ presupposes hypertonic muscular activity, hyperattention and hyperactivity, creating in conjunction with what Deleuze and Guattari champion as schizophrenia, a radical fracture of being: for the schizospasmic there is no clear boundary between self and nature, creator and creation, inner side and outer side, appearance and essence.
Self-replying appears as an attempt to explain how the artificial, as a phenomenological extension which serves for the camouflage of the postmodern void, is a mediator between individuation and trans-individuation, in the transit area of dez-individuation, self-imposed by being as a metaphysical process of resistance to the pressure of a constantly changing world.
By instrumentalizing the copy as a simulacrum, diagramatic icon or a rhizome (Deleuze, 1988), the function of the artificial creates in the musical fields of post and digimodern world a seduction of the technological device which imposes, on a circular mode, a reverse seduction of the creator by the technology. According to Jean Baudrillard, this process becomes ontologically stabilized as hyper-reality.
How does postmodernism identify itself in the functional paradigm of digimodernism? The pre and post-iluminist capital culture is relevant as a postmodern resource of cannibalizing tradition (F. Jameson, 1991), from an eschatonic point of here and now.
Digimodernism originated from this assemblage which re-defines and recapitulates the configuration of the idea of reality, by merging it with the digital media and artificial intelligence. Consequently, creativity is redefined as well and its musical practices demand an adjusted analysis, according to the digital media functions: instrumentalization and determination, ontological differentiation, reverse axiological modelling, gnoseological conditioning, recreation and transliminal pioneering. The digimodern artist is by default created in this platform of technological dependency, resulting in the beforementioned process of transindividuation, when the creator is self-identified by an intentional infusion into the digital microsystem, where the battle between the iconic authorship and the diluted one, the post-individual has been won by the latter. This happens simultaneously with the hegemonic rise of the receiver, of the listener, in a celebration of the rating, as an axiological system facilitated by the contributive culture (Bernard Stiegler, 1998) and self-technologies culture (Michel Foucault, 1991: 44-48), destined to subjectively regulate the creative practices and strategies subscribed to the interactions between various kinds of media, between man and machine, between code and intelligent language, between individuation and trans-individuation.
All in all, if the postmodern artist perceived music as an art of “margins nearby a collapsed centre”(T. Mitchell, 1989:45), the digimodern musician is satisfied by their security and he even prefers them to the centre, sometimes aspiring to the rapid explosion of those “fifteen minutes of fame” (1), a metaphor for assuming banality and ephemeral condition as basic factors of the participatory culture (Jenkins, 2009) and contributive culture (Stiegler), which hail the receiver/listener as a master of narratives.
[1] A famous catchphrase coined by Andy Warhol, 1968: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fifteen-minutes-of-fame.html.