Fragmented Culture

 Memory and temporal structure are the new spaces of art to me. Deleuze and Guattari arrive at a similar point in their critique of late capital and schizophrenia with the rhizome structure, a decentered and nonhierarchical form that perfectly illustrates their metaphor for counter culture. A fixation on multiplicity gives their expressions all the more immediacy because of its fragmented nature.  pg. 354

Autonomous zones are interstitial, they inhabit the in-between of socially significant constellations, they are where bodies in the world but between identities go: liminal sites of syncretic unorthodoxy... Autonomous zones my be though of, in temporal terms, as shreds of futurity. Like "outside", "future" is only an approximation: there are any number of potential futures in the cracks of the present order, but only a few will actually unfold. Think of autonomous zones in terms of time, but tenseless: time out of joint, in an immanent outside (Nietzsche's untimely).

-Brian Masumi, A Users Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia

In the Electronic milieu that we all move in today, the DJ is a custodian of aural history. In the mix, creator and remixer are woven together in at the syncretic space the text of samples and other sonic material to create a seamless fabric of sound that in a strange way mirrors the modern macrocosm of cyberspace, where different voices and visions constantly collide and cross-fertilize one another. pg. 351

Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music Edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner

Text from: Algorithms: Erasures and the Art of Memory by Paul D. Miller

The text is about DJ music and mixing/appropriating sound. I'm drawn more to it for its use of language positioning the recorded/remixed sound as having an erased/lost origin. And the new combinations of sound becoming a new space or 'Autonomous zone'. These hybrid or in-between forms contain potent energy of change and tension. Additionally, the idea that these new spaces are rhizomatic, decentered and nonhierarchical seems like a perfect analogy for current lived experiences. The last paragraph of this text really states the urgency of our current state- created by technology. 

All I can say is that in this era of hypermodernity, the current message has been deleted. Any sound can be you. It is through the mix and all that it entails the re-configuration of ethnic, national, and sexual identity--that humanity will, hopefully, move into another era of social evolution. I can only hope that the world can shift into this new matrix without too much disruption. The other options--genocide, internecine ethnic strife and warfare, the complete destruction of the environment, and the creation of a permanent underclass that doesn't have access to technology--are what the future holds if humanity can't come to grips with these new and explosive forces technology has released in us all. pg 354