Chamber music prefigures the structure of telematic society

Evidence

Chamber music can serve as a model of the telematic social structure. In itself, it precedes telematics, the apparatus, and automation. It is a preindustrial form of communication. And yet it is now possible to see in it (and perhaps in jazz, so strongly reminiscent of chamber music) many aspects of postindustrial communication. […] The basis for such music making is an original score, a program, a set of rules. But using recordings of recordings of recordings, this score will soon disappear behind the horizon of musicians who are improvising with continually reprogrammed memories. In chamber music, there is no director, no government. The one who sets the tempo is only temporarily directing things. And yet chamber music demands an exceptionally close adherence to rules. It is cybernetic. Chamber music is pure play, by and for the players, for whom listeners are superfluous and intrusive. It employs participation (strategy) rather than observation (theory). Precisely to play as though it were playing solo, each instrument plays as though it were an accompaniment. To play for himself, each player plays for all the others. Each improvises together with all the others, which is to say, each adheres to precise rules (consensus) to jointly change them in the course of the playing. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 529

Categorization

• DEFINE: Flusser’s chamber-music analogy is the chapter’s densest concrete model of polyphonic attention – rules improvised collectively, no fixed director, player as both soloist and accompaniment.
• SEED: Essay angle: using improvisational music (chamber, jazz) as the governing metaphor for what decentralized digital collaboration should look like, against both Taylorist concentration and pure chaos.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox at the core – ‘pure play by and for the players’ that yet ‘demands exceptionally close adherence to rules’ jointly altered in the playing – captures a genuine puzzle about how autonomous self-governing collectives stay legible. Rewards slow reading.
• XREF: connects to: Musical form’s temporal unfolding embodies a dialectic toward future plenitude — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 275; Communication technology shapes culture through interests, symbols, and community — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 622

Broader Connections

• Musical form’s temporal unfolding embodies a dialectic toward future plenitude #expands (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 275
• Communication technology shapes culture through interests, symbols, and community #expands (0.72) — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 622