This, Not That

(or Editing as a Creative Act): A Provocation

“Play anything. Then simply take out the bits you don’t like.”

-Harold Budd (attributed by Brian Eno)

Creation is always an act of negation. This, not that. The frame is rendered. Within it, the work. Without, the world. The frame may be in motion during this negotiation but the impulse is ever present, working in the background.

The edit is an act of desecration, of desperation. It draws blood. It injures but also sutures, and inures. The edit both reveals and conceals, creating fresh chasms through which new infinities flow, tributaries of cause and effect. Something must be willed into being to be fouled by the edit.

The sculptor awaits the infinitudes of deep time for the figure to appear and be brought forth from the stone in the performance of the ultimate editorial art. Time and gravity have stood vigil previously.

We artists, we filter, we restrict, the egg omits millions from the ovum.

We seed the ground surrounding the frame, where yet more fruits may ultimately flourish and fall, healthier ones even, beyond the quickening.

We compost, we recombine, the tree plus chance selects the fruit that falls, holding back others, and

what is evolution but a filtering, an endless this-not-that-ing.

Some makers compartmentalize; this is our additive phase, this our subtractive. Yet the editorial impulse is with us always: this, not that, that color not this one, the choosing of materials itself an editing, an agency, an affront to determinism.

We this-not-that, we include, we omit, in a never-ending neg(oti)ation.

The editorial knife is merely the last in a long line of blades, the knife of choice, of decision, of this-not-that-ing.

We are all of us slicing our fruits from the start.

Every edit is an omission, an untruth, a misdirection, a lie, a circumnavigation of the authentic. Each brush stroke builds upon or covers what may or may not have been a mistake (does it matter?), lie upon lie upon lie. A film lies at 24 frames per second (and is made three times, in writing, shooting, editing). What of the electronic music maker, the hip hop producer, whose use of samples pile edit upon edit, lie upon lie, elision upon revision?

The illusion great works present is of a springing forth fully-formed, inevitable, devoid of the messiness of this-not-that-ing. Unfinished works appear somehow different, yet in certain ways similar; pure, unaltered, primal, fundamental, brutal, prior to the edit. They pose versions of the same question; are they form without void, absent the negotiation of this-ing and that-ing? Were they never dipped into the muck?

Musician and audience frequently overvalue the documentary aspect of music-making. A recording must capture the authentic. And so Miles Davis is skewered for the edits of Teo Macero. Glenn Gould is lambasted for the edit’s subversion of the primacy of the score. Bach rolls in his grave…

…or does he?

The Well-Tempered Clavier was written for an instrument that now barely exists, this-not-that-ed into the white-walled context evaporating / reconstituting vacuum of the museum. Each performer interprets a work within the dictates of the score; the spectator inevitably finds recourse to their preferences. Indeed, the edit is itself a preference-picking, a curation, a this-not-that-ing, a decision-making, and tens, hundreds, thousands of decisions made in the course of bringing forth a work are all to some extent editorial this-not-thats. What to add, what to subtract? What to include, what to omit?

Is there dishonesty here? Subterfuge? Perhaps, but we are fabulists, we deliver lies in the guise of the authentic; we elide, we blur, we smudge, we dissemble, we obfuscate, we create, we destroy, we are all of us Cucumatzes and Shivas, we list and list and I’ve additive-d and subtractive-d, elided, edited, scalpel-ed and squeezed this piece from the beginning and still I stand with blade in hand.

Each edit is an atomic repositioning, a tributary into a subset of possible worlds, of potential outcomes, a realignment. Each edit is an affront to the gods, a getting in the way of the vehicle of fate, a crossing or blocking of current.

We are not fatalists, not determinists. To edit is to exercise choice, free will, endless trolley problems of this-not-that-ing. The edit is an act of violence, yes, but also an affirmation, a this rather than that-ing leading inexorably to a hinge point where the dictates of the work assert their primacy. Across this threshold alas a kind of predestination lies. We can no longer exert our will over the work. We are prone, submissive to its dictates, it commits violence against us, the editorial scalpel turned, cutting the opposite way.

It is this choice, the edit, the exercise of will, that is a true affront to the gods and some scientists and psychologists as well, for they have situated predestination and determinism and behaviorism and endless atomic positionings (where all futures have been written and if only we had perfect information we would know the past and future in equal measure) before us and erased our sense of self in an attempt to erase

the will

the choice

the edit.