Convex Portrait in a Self-Mirror: Social Dissonance and Social Synthesis

Social dissonance is 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.