Sean Cubitt (1998), Digital Aesthetics, London: Sage.

The work is more critical than theoretical in as much as it is a work in itself. (??)

[add to section on formalism and/or nothing]

In 'Reading the Interface' (1998), Sean Cubitt explains that there is a disjunction between the world and the text in as much as writers do not actually write books but they are manufactured by other workers and machines. The text, this text and his text, cannot be divorced from the materials and institutions that produce and disseminate it. Otherwise the text is 'idealised' and privileged over the cultural form of the book, separating it from the reality of its production: 'The text is the immaterial presence which re-presents the absent material' (1998: 21). In a sense, the computer assists in the dematerialisation of the text and at the same time marks the materiality of the production and dissemination of the text, its presence and absence.  

The story goes that John Cage, on visiting the anechoic chambers of Harvard University, heard two distinct sounds that turned out to be the sound of his blood and the central nervous system. He discovered that even when trying to artificially make silence, it was impossible task and one that indicates something of the silencing of works of art. Cubitt draws a parallel to the debates around the autonomy of the work of art such as in the work of Clement Greenberg (1992), and the relative silence in which aesthetic contemplation is encountered. Although on the one hand Greenberg contributed to an understanding of the medium, at the same time he contributed to a silencing of the artwork (Cubitt, 1998: 93). Cage's 4'33" is the clearest example of trying to explore the absented sound object. Cage sought to remove compositional control through the use of chance with a set of strict rules informed by his interest in the I Ching. What remains is a durational composition with no content. These ideas are further developed in his composition 0'00" in which the control of duration would also be removed. These examples paradoxically function as spectacle, making the compositions of silence:
'not the unmediated sounds of the world, nor the liberation of music from its own autonomy, but a commodification of sound as music in the up-to-date form of the commodity without use-value, a pure display of taste.' (Cubitt, 1998: 97) 
It fails to engage with its apparatus sufficiently in other words - it is 'quietist'. It simply commodifies noise and strips it of its social character, making noise into music and erasing it simultaneously: 'producing a certain mode of subjectivity rather than an interpretation of hearer and heard' (Cubitt, 1998: 97). Perhaps this is something the Frank Zappa version attends to, as a recording registering the production and dissemination of the work (1993).