Marlene Vigil's Profile

ixed music into a single melodic line with fixed pitches and simple timbres

we’re not selling music — we’re selling a representation of a song someone has heard”

estern classical music appearing on early ringtones is eminently representable and abstractable music

such music — and this would include virtually all public domain music that would appear as default ringtones — stems from an era in which sheet music or musical scores were the primary vehicles for composing, understanding, interpreting, and commodifying music in the West

a ringtone essentially functions as a means of abstraction not dissimilar to a musical scor

rovides a means of abstraction is its formal focus on important melodic themes, tunes, or motives, which are highlighted for the listener as being particularly important within the long–range flow of the music.

melodic fragments that one can easily recall, a feature that can be easily marshaled for use in a ringtone and other forms of advertising generally

it determines the coordination of harmony with melody, metre with phrasing, and texture with register, thus encompassing — within its historical domain — the whole of music.” [86]

tonal music includes various forms of redundancy that allow the listener to comprehend quite complex musical forms and styles

epresent — the whole of the musical structure without actually including all of its components.

Thus, one might see both the production of uploadable monophonic ringtones based on popular songs and the appearance of higher–quality polyphonic and sound–file ringtones as attempts to distance mobile music from its classical, score–based roots and embrace a timbre–based popular music.

attempting to push Israeli society beyond the politically dangerous reification of the Holocaust

rchestral musicians including composers of new orchestral works and innovative conductors have attempted to integrate cell phones and ringtone melodies into their compositions, either as bids to make their work more current and socially relevant or to ironically distance themselves from contemporary social phenomena

n most of these cases, ringtones are mostly novelty effects, often directly poking fun at audience members whose ringtones have interrupted concerts on other occasions.

attempt to naturalize the handsets and the sounds they produce

Many of these new works are to some degree built on a principle of interactivity, in which audience members’ activities help in real ways to constitute or construct the work itself.

ense of agency

ndividual’s contribution to these works is anything but perfunctory or superficial, perhaps creating a false sense of agency on the part of attendee

whose efforts merely serve to glorify the creator of the work in question

reduced to the status of children at a high–tech jungle–gym

The fact that every person’s phone is pre–registered in a database, with many but not all phones being reprogrammed with new ringtones, paints an image of a society constantly under surveillance, with each individual citizen’s strings being pulled at will by a hegemonic force.

The sound file ringtone, on the other hand, merely relegates the sonic aspect of the cell phone to the same bin as other portable sound–file playing devices like the iPod or even Discman.

The trajectory of the cell phone, a fundamentally auditory device, seems to be drifting into the realm of the visual.

The social meanings of the ringtone are always positioned between its function as a signal and its cultural — distinction and aesthetic — value.

The legality of such devices is questionable, given that the airwaves (as sound transmitters) are public property, a

t if rudeness is the paradigm under which the cell phone is frequently viewed, it doesn’t seem to entirely capture the nature of the social transformations engendered by mobile telephony.

enabled by the security of near–instant contact and constant communication

he ringtone transforms the cellphone into a device that combines aspects of two crucial sound–reproduction devices of the 1980s: the boom box (or “ghetto blaster”), which launched a sonic assault on the public sphere, and the walkman, which facilitated a retreat from the public sphere into a private musical world.

mediating link between public and private for the user, demanding to be heard and silenced at once

irst,

Second

Third,

two parallel sets of time scales devoted to cultural production — in his case, literature — and politics–economics — the two of which are interwoven together, with the economic taking greater priority as the latter time–scale broadens.

n turn, the ringtone as a high–tech fad, the ringtone as a conflict between larger and smaller forms of capital, and the ringtone as indicative of a long–term shift in productive capacity from the United States to East Asia.

But the thrill of the new and the irritation of the newly old are central to the logic of fashion, which demands the perpetual reinvention of the old.

The political moment in such commodities is thus best characterized by the dialectic of reification and utopia present in all forms of mass cultural production

however, they demonstrate a utopian quality that both helps to perpetuate their further consumption and yet points beyond the present social order

ingtone is,

ural quality (whether abstract or high–fidelity) and ease of accessibility of the ringtone in general.

These rentiers are then situated within a typical capitalist network of value producers and extractors.

Entertainment entrepreneurs are capitalists: workers in publishing and performers are productive workers. Composers are rentiers.

This makes ringtones a characteristic form of the “pay–per” society, in which cultural goods are “purchased on a transitory, rather than permanent, basis” [153] or rented.

For some companies, the ultimate aim would be to transfer content to mobile systems, devalue the Internet in the process, then buy up those online assets and eventually transform them into for–pay services.

forms of originally independent media like cable television were understood and used in a similar way to the present Internet and ultimately found themselves under the ownership of large media conglomerates

For what we have here is the simultaneous autonomization of consciousness inside a sonic bubble and the display of the autonomous self in the public, a strange dialectic present in a somewhat different form with the cell phone.

Raymond Williams described as “mobile privatization.” Characterized as a condition of “unprecedented mobility of [highly] restricted privacies,” Williams sees the concept embodied in the automobile.

The shell created by the Walkman or cell phone is not physical so much as affective, created by the learned ability to sink into the aural, visual, and tactile experience of the particular device and, in the case of the cell phone, its networks of communication.

f the measure of the global social impact of a particular culture, nation, or region would be the creation and spread of new cultural forms and practices beyond the geographic boundaries of their source, one might note the greater presence of Japan in the rest of the world after 1970

In bourgeois society
capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is
dependent and has no individuality.

National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and
more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom
of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production
and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.

“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice,
etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes
eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of
constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to
all past historical experience.”

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past
ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder,
then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity
and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general
ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance
of class antagonisms.

The sodomite was a recidivist, but the homosexual is now a species."

This view makes Foucault one of the first
constructivists" in this area, claiming that sexuality and sexual conduct
is not a natural category, having a foundation in reality.

What we now call homosexuality cannot exist
outside our specific cultural context. The same goes for all sexuality.

sexuality is analyzed as a
social construction

he leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois

established the world market

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie
was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class.

erving either the semi-feudal or the absolute
monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone
of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since
the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered
for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway.

It has resolved personal worth
into exchange value,

has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade.

It has converted the physician, the
lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

family relation to a mere money relation.

bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising
the instruments of production,

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases
the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere,
settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

from the numerous national and local literatures,
there arises a world literature.

creates a world after its
own image.

lumped together
into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national
class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff

nto their place stepped free competition,

The conditions of bourgeois
society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the
ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself

hese labourers,
who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article
of commerce

ost all individual character

But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to
its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness
of the work increases, the wage decreases

converted the little workshop of the patriarchal
master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist.

daily and hourly enslaved by the machine,
by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer
himself.

the more modern industry becomes developed, the
more is the labour of men superseded by that of women.

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With
its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest
is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory,
then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual
bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against
the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production
themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour,
they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to
restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.

t this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies,
but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the
landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois.

very victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.

This union is helped on by the
improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and
that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another.
It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local
struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between
classes.

he modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve
in a few years.

n all these battles, it sees itself
compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag
it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies
the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education,
in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting
the bourgeoisie.

urther, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class
are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or
are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply
the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went
over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over
to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists,
who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically
the historical movement as a whole.

he other classes
decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry;

If by chance,
they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer
into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future
interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that
of the proletariat.

Law, morality, religion, are
to him so many bourgeois prejudices,

hey have
nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy
all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

The proletarian movement is the self-conscious,
independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense
majority.

But in order to
oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it
can, at least, continue its slavish existence

He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops
more rapidly than population and wealth.

It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence
to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink
into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him.
Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its
existence is no longer compatible with society.

What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above
all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat
are equally inevitable.

“kung fu”

annotated bibliography