Dave, did you ever read my recombinant dub piece?

[koganbot]

Dave (and anyone else), did you ever happen to run across the recombinant dub piece I did for the Voice back in '02? "Recombinant dub" isn't entirely what the piece is about, it's just the name for one of the concepts in it, one of the poles of attraction in a multi-poles-of-attraction environment. Also, I actually discuss no dub music in the piece

Comments

[skyecaptain]

Hm, a lot to think about here -- I'm rereading the recombinant dub piece now.

I think one thing I'd maybe shift in the metaphor is that I'm not sure I'd get rid of the actors, with the pieces standing in previously as background for the foreground now without that foreground. Rather, the scope widens to the point that the fore isn't as fore as it once was. We see the three actors, and perhaps recognize them as "the actors," but we might see that elm tree much more prominently, or those other actors, or whatever else.

And to swim back and forth between literal and metaphor, this is to some extent what happens to film in the postclassical period (starting in roughly the 1950s) -- the influence of art house aesthetics starts to create a cinematic language that is not as centered on the actor, but rather creates a general picture that the actor happens to inhabit. We follow the actor (perhaps) because we know he's the actor, but not because he's necessarily been centralized by the surrounding imagery.

But to go back to the metaphor, the "pulling out" of scope actually starts to denature our understanding of how central the actor is in the first place. In postclassical cinema, there's no question that a given star is the star (even if it's an unprofessional actor), regardless of how prominent the elm tree is. Whereas when every shot radically de-centers the actors, we can only follow them if we choose to. So I imagine that you have some people -- many people -- who continue to do so, but you also have a lot of people who pay more attention to the trees, or to the city architecture, or the other people in the shot (the "new" actors), perhaps at the expense of those three formerly central actors.

"Let's say this is our world, without the main characters: where do we take it, but without necessarily having to fill in a foreground in the way we had a foreground before (though that might be what we do, find a new foreground, but we don't have to)?"

Raul Ruiz has a lot of interesting ideas about the "secret plan" of a given film, which is just this -- finding a network of possibilities that essentially remove the foreground (the plot, the characters) to imagine something else; while we're watching the foreground, the "real" story is happening in a subterranean way we don't actively notice (and have to create ourselves). The thing is, I don't see how you get around the problem of filling in a foreground at all, you merely change what you want the foreground to look like while recognizing you have less control over other people also seeing your chosen foreground, since you can't center it for them and thus they need to find it for themselves. And the way they'll find it, most likely, is by observing socially that you are watching it.

Which is maybe a way of saying that you can always decrease the size and meaningfulness of a center but you can't destroy the center; if you want to focus on the elm tree, you focus on the elm tree (and perhaps become part of an experimental film and media subculture, and make films in which the tree is the main character, etc., "this is a film about how fog lifts slowly from a landscape, and the stars are fog and a tree and a horse" might be the plot synopsis of Fog Line, which many people worship as dutifully, in their own way, as mainstream critics do Citizen Kane).

[koganbot]

If every shot radically decenters the actors, then "decentering the actors" becomes the center of the film.

Hmmm. My complaint about rock criticism and musicwrite is that the critics don't know how or aren't willing to sustain an intellectual conversation - and this seems to be a problem of concentration: a refusal to communicate, a refusal to understand, and a refusal to follow through. But this isn't because in today's de-centered world people are too pulled this way and that to concentrate on the same subject matter (though it is difficult to gather people together to all talk about the same thing). Rather, the problem is that when person B says to person A, "You said X but I did not understand you, and you said Y but you seemed to contradict yourself," and A never gets back to B with a response, or A gives a response that just repeats X and Y in slightly re-worded form, this isn't because in today's culture A has so many interesting things to think about, in a wide variety all over the place, that he just never really got around to thinking about B's comments (though of course the culture does provide quite a variety for anyone who wants it). It's more that noticing problems and possibilities in his own ideas just isn't something that A finds fun, or that A even knows how to do.

And the reason the health care debate is so distorted isn't because, e.g., people are distracted by what's happening with Conan and Jay or whoever else happens to jump in front of their radar and if people hadn't been distracted they'd have taken the time to find out what's actually in the health bill, and if the media would only report what's in the health bill people would then know it. My guess is that under no circumstances would people take the time to find out what's in the health bill. (Confession: I don't know what's in the health bill.)

(Not sure how well the last two paragraphs hook up with the issue I was raising in my post. Over on Tom's Tumblr, in response to his linking Hornby's horrendous review of Kid A, I made a couple of points on the supposed "time" issue, which I recast as an issue of when and whether people are willing to put effort into what they do with their leisure time. The reason I didn't repost here on my lj, as I would normally do when I post something so substantial, was that I hadn't said anything new; really all I was doing was subtextually repeating my gripe about how hard it is to get people to play with me. But if I were to repost, I'd have add the frame, "How do we model reflective thinking and intellectual interchange as something that people might potentially view as fun? And also, how do we engage the problem of incompetence? People spend a lot of effort and emotion online arguing poorly. Is there a way that arguing well can seem more rewarding than arguing poorly?" [Speaking of de-centering, I've now wandered far away form my original topic.]