John Law first tells us to acknowledge the messiness of knowing. Ok – so I’ve accepted the fact that Bach didn’t really tell me how to play these pieces, and teachers and books have told me I can do what I want with them. But, this makes me question my role as a performer. Am I to be the link between the music and the composer, which would make the written music simply a vehicle for this transmission of ideas? Or, am I to interpret the music as I feel fit, not considering how the composer may have wanted it played?

With regards to the Actor-Network Theory (ANT), this manuscript is a perfect example of how the material affects the social. Law explains heterogeneous networks as ways of suggesting that society, organizations, agents and machines are all effects generated in patterned networks of diverse (not simply human) materials (Law 1992, 380). So, if our interactions within different networks are mediated through human or nonhuman objects, this book of printed music plays an important role in how one acts and behaves within the network. In this case, since Bach died in 1770 and I want to play his music today, in 2013, it is a network of both humans and objects that provides communication between a violinist today and Bach.

Iron Gall Ink

It all began with iron gall ink on large manuscript around 1720 (the same ink used by da Vinci, Van Gogh, and to write the US Constitution), to its first publication in 1843, and finally to the modern editions that can be found on the internet today. Within those objects are countless people who made decisions in the early editions: whether to change or add things, what size paper to print on, the overall look of the music, and then there are the performers who affect personal taste preferences in more modern editions. Perhaps an editor really loves one violinist’s version of Bach, and subsequently prints all of their fingerings, bowings and dynamics into their edition. Is it biased? Yes. But, are other editions also biased? Yes. Are the “original” manuscripts that were found in Saint Petersburg sixty-five years after Bach’s death biased? Perhaps. It is unknown if they are even originals, or if his wife may have made copies. From ink on a manuscript, through various forms of printing presses, to being able to find the sheet music through Google today, one can access countless formats of what machines and humans have contributed to the heterogenic patterning of the social. This has quickly turned into a huge network! What a mess.

Modern version and hand-written “original” manuscript

Now, things just continue to get messier the more I think about the lack of clarity in my probe object. In his article Thick Description, Clifford Geertz states that “the more deeply [your research] goes, the less complete it is.” This is a scary statement to come to terms with, especially since each of us is about to live with our research topic for at least the next several years. When we finally finish our dissertations, we are likely not going to feel a sense of completeness from what we just accomplished. I am sure we will all have questions and unknowns at the end of the process. The areas we have chosen to research are all messy in their own ways, and Law reassures (me, at least) that vague research is not necessarily “bad” research.

Towards the end of his article, Law describes how “some materials are more durable than others” (1992, 387), eventually saying that by performing these relations and materials, they may last longer. Printed music is meant to be embodied – no two violinists will approach the compositions in the same way (Affelder), and therefore the network and actors are continually changing and evolving over time, just as knowledge is as he explains in Making a Mess with Method.

As an example, let’s take a live recording of Gidon Kremer: Gidon Kremer – Bach. This is the third movement from the last partita of the set of six works. We don’t know whether Kremer is performing only one of the six works, or if he is in the process of playing them as a set, as scholars believe Bach intended them to be performed (Fulkerson). Judging by the sweat on Kremer’s face, it looks as if he’s been playing for awhile, which leads me to believe he has just played the five other sonatas and partitas that precede this one (which would take about two hours).

What objects and people make up this social network? There are many actors, such as the choice of edition from which Kremer learned the music, the teacher who once coached him through learning the music years prior, the audience watching this particular performance, or the tempo at which he has chosen to play the piece. But, connected to each of those actors are other networks as well. Each audience member comes in with different expectations of what they’re about to hear. Some of them will have listened to multiple versions and know their preferences, while others will be hearing it for the first time. Does Kremer take into consideration for whom he is playing? Would he perform the piece differently if he knew a particular person was in the audience? All of these factors contribute to the social network at that particular time. As a complete contrast, here’s another example of the same piece played by Gil Shaham – Bach - notice how different the tempo, volume and overall approach is compared to the first clip.

Law describes ANT as a claim that “people are who they are because they are a patterned network of heterogeneous materials” (Law 1992, 383). He goes on to explain that actors are also networks, for example, Law uses as an analogy, a machine that has various parts and roles within it. Back to my example: this would make the printed music an actor as well as a network, and if it is a network acting as one unit, it can disguise itself as a black box of sorts. One can look closely into the networks that are hidden from view (for example, the processes of transformation from hand-written manuscript to computer-processed sheet music), or they could choose to view the object as a single actor as part of a larger network.

Just like the YouTube videos: one could see it strictly as a performance playing an actor role in a social network, or one could dig deeper into the networks that make up and surround the actual performance.

This is still all very messy.

To try and sum up the mess and vagueness, I will discuss knowledge and the various forms in which it can be found. When I hold this book of music in my hand, I know what an important body of musical work it is. The weight and number of pages inside is daunting, but it gets worse when you open it up. One has the choice to either read from the edited version of the “original” manuscript, or to try and read off of the shrunken version of the “original” manuscript. There is a great deal of collaborative knowledge that went into the printing of this edition, which I now know makes things even messier because Law explains that collaborative research is messy because you never fully know what your collaborator(s) know. If I choose to read the edited version, I am consciously playing it the way that the editor (in this case, Galamian), wants me to play. But, I am unaware of what his knowledge was at the time of putting his ideas onto the music. I believe that Galamian’s way of dealing with the messiness of the situation was to include Bach’s manuscripts at the back of the book. It still appears that there is a precise system to it, but one is able to see into the messiness if they so desire. I haven’t even gotten into the argument of performance practice and whether or not Bach’s music should be played on modern instruments, or violins from the period from which the music was composed. That is another pile of mess altogether.

Music is truly a moving target. There will be future editions, and people will continue to learn from past editions. All of these are affected by live performance and recordings, which change along with the trends and what the style at the time of editing is. This shape-shifting reality, as Law puts it, makes it extremely difficult to study and document since it is so heterogeneous and widespread.

On grant applications, I will do my best to present a precise and clear description of my research, but for now and at least for the next few years, I will continue to struggle with the vague and imprecise nature of social sciences research.

Works Cited

Bach, Johann Sebastian. “6 Sonatas and Partitas for Violin Solo.” Edited by Ivan Galamian, foreword by Paul Affelder. New York: International Music Company.

Fulkerson, Gergory. “Unaccompanied Sonatas and Partitas 
of Johann Sebastian Bach.” Sheila’s Corner, 2000. Accessed 11 September, 2013. http://www.sheilascorner.com/bach.html

Geertz, Clifford. “Thick Description.” The Interpretation of cultures; selected essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Law, John. “Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity,” Lancaster: The Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, 1999. Revised 2003. http://www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law1992NotesOnTheTheoryOfTheActor-Network.pdf

__. “Making a Mess with Method.” Lancaster: The Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, 2003. http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Law-Making-a-mess-with-Method.pdf

Vittes, Laurence. “Titans Talk about the Bach Solo Violin Works.” All Things Strings, January 2007. http://www.allthingsstrings.com/News/Interviews-Profiles/Titans-Talk-about-the-Bach-Solo-Violin-Works/

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Mess is inevitable: it is in our thought-process, our social interactions, our work, our mistakes and accomplishments, but most importantly it is also there in the creative process. When looking for supercuts on the internet, this website leads you to an archive of supercuts, which provides a definition for them:

Supercut: noun \ˈsü-pər-kət\ — A fast-paced montage of short video clips that obsessively isolates a single element from its source, usually a word, phrase, or cliché from film and TV. Supercut.org collects every known example of the video remix meme.

This ‘obsession’ creates a framework, a sort of viewer’s critique that highlights how this single element is repeated (and thus circulates) throughout a variety of different circumstances, events, or sources. For example, by isolating a sentence from the Wizard of Oz movie the following supercut shows how a single element can spread and circulate in a series of different contexts (networks) to ultimately become a popular culture reference:

Supercut of a Line from the Wizard of Oz

Simon Owens who writes about the impact of supercuts in the shape of nostalgia gives numbers to the general amount of editing in one single supercut, mentioning that in “2011, Baio analyzed a database of over 146 supercut videos and found that ‘the average supercut is composed of about 82 cuts, with more than 100 clips in about 25 percent of the videos’” (Owens). The extensive editorial effort provided by the creators of supercuts points to the difficulty of finding ways to order what must first appears to be a messy pile of data.

As an aspiring scholar myself, I found their creative—and yet—rigorous method intriguing enough to dig a little deeper. Could supercuts make visible the network patterns that John Law describes as running “wide and deep – that they are much more generally performed than others” (Law 385), thus illustrating how “network patterns that are widely performed are often those that can be punctualized…because they are network packages – routines – that can, if precariously, be more or less taken for granted in the process of heterogeneous engineering” (Law 385, his emphasis). Considering how supercuts create “a kind of ‘Aha!’ moment when a Hollywood cliché that you perhaps never fully internalized is laid out for you” (Owens), I would argue that they are disrupting force—perhaps even (when shared and spread) a resistance—to the sort of formulaic engineering of inserting certain overused tropes (or references) within the content of a film or series. Why would the phrase from the Wizard of Oz be used so many times? The actor-network theory might explain it in part. By alluding to the Wizard of Oz, the writers are making a reference to something that is familiar to a vast number of people, and thus this phrase becomes an actor in a grander scope of networks (viewers). This phrase has the power to connect the writers’ content to a complex spectrum of effects spreading from nostalgia to comedy.

Since supercuts isolate elements that could have been lost in a sea of content (massive amounts of unseen and/or unrelated movies and/ or television shows), could supercuts also be, in way, a punctualization? While the digitalisation of television and cinematographic content aids the phenomenon of supercuts, “these forms can be traced back to pre-digital technologies of the 1970s (in the case of Penley’s Star Trek fan videos) or the pre-YouTube and Web 2.0 participatory sharing (in the case of Cover’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan videos, distributed through newslists, email and private website)” (Cover). By now being able to ‘binge-watch’ a whole series (which can sometimes amount to eight or nine seasons of twenty plus episodes) due to the digitalisation of content, viewers of such content appear to have new ready tools to engage with, share, and modify massive amounts of data.

Rob Cover argues that despite this blossoming of digital methods and tools, “there has emerged a methodological gap requiring new frameworks for researching and analysing the remix text as a text, and within the context of its interactivity, intertextuality, layering and the ways in which these together reconfigure existing narratives and produce new narrative” (Cover). The way supercuts organize and order their content could be an example of how massive amounts of content could be framed in order to highlight the interactivity and intertextuality of their content.

The ‘methodological gap’ to research and analyze the remixes (and/or supercuts) that Cover points out is not unlike the one that fostered Law’s interest “in rehabilitating parts of the mess” (Law 4). Hence by trying to find frameworks in order to include (and assign meaning) viewers’ and/or fan-based’ works, we are simultaneously trying to imagine new ways to include messy bits into our methodology. The inclusion of those types of media in research is particularly relevant to Lawrence Lessig, who argues that text “is today’s Latin,” since it is “through text that we elites communicate…For the masses, however, most information is gathered through other forms of media: TV, film, music, and music video. These forms of ‘writing’ are the vernacular of today,” and ultimately adds that for “anyone who has lived in our era, a mix of images and sounds makes its point far more powerfully than any eight- hundred- word essay in the New York Times could” (Lessig 68-69). To illustrate the potential repercussions of combining arguments with media, follow through this experiment: would this clip demonstrating how a character manipulates individuals with pop culture references to create a ‘community’ reinforce Law’s argument that “our communication with one another is mediated by a network of objects – the computer, the paper, the printing press….that these various networks participate in the social. They shape it” (Law 382)?

Short Clip from Pilot Episode of the TV Show Community

Also, could this type media thus be used not only to shape our social networks and interactions, but also to “overcome your reluctance to read [Law’s] text” by reinforcing “the social relationship between author and reader” (Law 382)? Could then supercuts be considered as the product of a distant reading, and if they are, could they represent a different media (other than writing) to reveal patterns and networks between non-obvious elements? Most importantly for my case, would considering this media as a potential way to enlarge or enrich our methodology enable us to tackle down more complex and messier concepts?

Consider the complexities that arise in an episode from the TV show Community entitled “Remedial Chaos Theory” in which the interactions between the characters diverge and/or converge when a person must leave the room to go get pizza.

They roll a die to determine who gets to leave the room, and this sequence is repeated to show each of the seven plausible (and very different) storylines contained in this episode. A supercut would make a montage of the repetitive sequences, namely the rolling of the die, and discard the variants. However, take a look at another type of fan-based/viewers clips that was created, and reminisce Law’s leading question, “‘would something less messy make a mess of describing [mess]’” (Law 4):

Juxtaposition of Content rather than a Supercut

This clip—and other similar ones–cannot be called supercuts since they did not in fact isolate repetition. They created instead a patchwork that allows the viewers to notice all the repetitions while viewing all its parallel differences. These clips could also represent the compilation of data before the massive editing (such as in supercuts or essays): before discarding the bits that do not fit to seek a pure pattern, a seemingly complete repetition. These clips are messy, noisy, heterogeneous, and relevant, “because that is the way the largest part of the world is” (Law 4). The reluctance to order something that is already complex, the surviving mess in those clips points to Law’s argument that “Clarity doesn’t help. Disciplined lack of clarity, that may be what we need” (Law 4). By not adhering to a massive edits (but instead minor ones, to juxtapose the storylines), these clips thus show a much more complex and richer patchwork of parallels, repetitions and variants.

These clips “broaden method” (Law 4), by not ‘obsessing’ with “clarity, with specificity, and with the definite” (Law 4). These clips can be used as a parallel for the moment when someone conducting research is facing a multiplicity of data converging and diverging in places, noisy and messy at times but also repetitive and similar at others. Should we then attempt to ‘Other’ “Everything that doesn’t fit the standard package of common-sense realism…Everything that is not independent, prior, definite and singular” (Law 8)? Or should we attempt to use this mess as the creators of those clips did, to better understand its source? How can we understand the complexities of mess if we can only use methods that ultimately order—and thus alter—it?

Works Cited

Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin, 2008. Web.

Law, John. “Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity.” Lancaster: The Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, 1999. Revised 2003. http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Law-Notes-on-ANT.pdf

–. “Making a Mess with Method.” Lancaster: The Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, 2003.
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Law-Making-a-Mess-with-Method.pdf

Owens, Simon. “How the Supercut Changed the Shape of Nostalgia.” DailyDot. 23 August 2013. 12 September 2013.Web.
http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/supercut-nostalgia-history-slacktory/

Cover, Rob. “Reading the Remix: Methods for Researching and Analysing the Interactive Textuality of Remix.” M/C Journal 16.4 (Aug. 2013). 12 Sepember 2013. Web.
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/686

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