En dekonstruktion i ljud : J.O. Mallanders Extended Play

Sammanfattning:

J.O. Mallander’s Extended Play (1968) is a sound recording, a readymade, of the counting of votes in two presidential elections in Finland, during 1962 and 1968. A voice repeats monotonously: “Kekkonen, Kekkonen, Kekkonen, Kekkonen, Kekkonen…” Although the Finnish president Urho Kekkonen represents, almost personifies, the politics of the post World War II period in Finland, Extended Play does not explicitly address the political. Rather, as this essay argues, it engages in the discourses of power and politics by providing a temporalization of its fixedness, or what Jacques Derrida terms the proper.

Extended Play is, in parallel with Derrida’s critique of western metaphysics, a deconstruction in sound that challenges the state ideologies conveyed in the process of the counting of votes, where the presuppositions of the presence of the voice characterizes the ambiguities of power that Kekkonen’s politics of neutrality represent.

Mallander’s readymade emerges as a double of the game theory strategies of the Cold War, a mimetic surplus of the administrative control mechanisms of sound recording. Through overturning the dialectics of the original and the copy, where repetition of sound also temporalizes the representation of the proper, it does not unequivocally reproduce its content. As an aural document, repeated and mass-produced as a record, it devalues, therefore, presumptions of origin. Derrida’s idea of “sous rature” initiates, in the discussion of Extended Play as a specific form of conceptual sound art, the notion of sound under erasure, which is not reducible to an auditory or medium-specific practice.