Abstract
Social Dissonance is then, both a form of practice, an effect of that
practice- the furthering of the already present socially dissonant
effect/affect-, and a specific score, proposing possible kinds of
action to an audience to bring about the consciousness of their own
unfreedom- or, more radically, the consciousness of their
unconsciousness. But this program has two insufficiencies: 1. The
circuit through which the risen consciousness of an unfree state may
translate into forms of action is not provided. 2. Even if one
has successfully elicited the experience of unfreedom, the transmission
of that feeling of unfreedom within a localized social milieu- typically
enclosed within an art gallery, a concert hall, or a punk venue- to the
consciousness of the unfreedom of the social world at large is, in the
least, problematic. The first insufficiency relates to the problem of
the theoretical conditions of practice, or what kinds of
influence can a theoretically gained description have upon practice - a
very classical problem. The second insufficiency is more specific to
Mattin and one would say amounts to the influence one practice may have
upon other practices. But this last formulation is a superficial one,
being maybe more fruitfully described as the problem of the traction one
form of action may have upon the practical conditions of
conceptual representation- once we understand the dialectics
between action and conception that seems to be implicit in Mattin’s
account, and much of the present text will be dealing with exactly that.