amusia

Facebook: the structure that took to the streets

2012-01-15T08:59:00.000-08:00

‘In a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies’. Mark Zuckerberg.

The news that Facebook has a population greater than the US and the EU put together (BBC2 04.12.11) reminds us that the company’s aspirations tend towards a proximate ‘statehood’ than simply profit. As such, its ‘revolutionary’ potential is not neutral. The question therefore concerns what kind of social bond or social contract it instantiates. A very good indication is outlined at the beginning of David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect (2010), the authorized history of the company. He tells the story of a campaign against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) which again reminds us that Facebook’s political utility is perfectly equivocal such that it can just as easily become a tool for counter-revolution, for popular revolt in support of a weakened and ineffective state.

“Oscar Morales was fed up,” begins the book, because the Columbian’s holiday period, like much of the country apparently, was being disturbed by “the suffering of a little boy named Emmanuel” who was being held hostage along with his mother Clara Rojas and others including the politician Ingrid Betancourt by FARC. Expectation was high that at least little Emmanuel, if not all the hostages, would be released by Christmas 2007 as a result of negotiations between the guerrillas and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. By the New Year the boy still hadn’t been released, but to everyone’s surprise in early January the Colombian President Alvaro Uribe announced that Emmanuel was no longer in the hands of the FARC, but in foster care. For Morales and many others, this was the last straw. “People were happy because the kid was safe, but we were so fucking angry [...] we felt assaulted by the FARC. How could they dare negotiate for the life of a kid they didn’t even have? People felt this was too much. How much longer was the FARC going to play with us and lie to us?”.

Morales set up a Facebook Group called Un Millon Voces Contra Las FARC (A Million Voices Against FARC). Information about the Group and its plea was rapidly distributed through Facebook’s ‘social graph’, and in a few weeks the Group had thousands of members, and a large demonstration was organised. The demonstration attracted the attention of the Press as indeed did the novel means of its organization and the campaign spread further – in the process expanding the number of Facebook users since it was new to Columbia and associated only with ‘kids’ (4). The very visibility of the numbers of the Group emboldened the campaigners –“Facebook gave Columbia’s young people an easy, digital way to feel comfort in numbers to declare their disgust” – and the site itself provided a key point of organization and liaison. “Facebook was our headquarters ... It was the newspaper ... the central command ... the laboratory” (Morales quoted by Kirkpatrick, 5). President Uribe eventually succeeded in negotiating the release of the hostages but the Facebook campaign and the demonstration were credited with applying pressure on the FARC. Oscar Morales’s “group and the subsequent demonstration made him into a national and international celebrity” (6).

The anecdote illustrates nicely how Facebook establishes a social bond though the production of ‘faces’: the new technology of the social networking site enables Oscar Morales to become the face of the protest against FARC, and ultimately achieve ‘celebrity’. In Seminar XVII Lacan famously organizes the social bond across four terms:

agent other
truth production

It is clearly Facebook and the Group it enables (Un Millon Voces Contra Las FARC) that is the ‘agent’ here, addressed to the ‘other’ whose reference is FARC. The authority and ‘truth’ of the Facebook Group is grounded in the number of members of the Group galvanized in relation to the guerrillas. Although they were in the thousands rather than millions (there not being enough Facebook users in Columbia at the time), millions of people did demonstrate in cities across Columbia, inspired by the Group. In contradistinction to the inhuman facelessness of FARC, then, Facebook produces Oscar Morales as the (human) face of a Group actually made up of thousands of other faces like so many pixels or the digital code into which the face dissolves in the original Facebook logo.

The four main forms of the social bond for Lacan are the discourses of the Master, the Hysteric, the University and the Analyst. It seems to me that Facebook, appropriately given that it was developed at Harvard, is an example of University discourse in which knowledge (S2), supported by the signifier of the master (S1), is in the position of agent which, through its address to the lack constitutive of desire (objet petit a), produces the subject ($).

A certain modification is necessary however in order to discuss Facebook as a form of social bond with regard to this structure. Facebook is certainly a product of the University, but does not so much represent the ‘knowledge’ of the University as its ‘information’; it is not the agent of operative knowledge, but operative information. As such the structure can organize all the rankable degrees of University life on the same plane from social grooming to academic and professional achievement.

Famously, Facebook was developed at Harvard in a kind of perversion of its bureaucratic procedures. All Universities, colleges and fraternities had a ‘facebook’ of passport-style photographs that are held along with other information as a record of its staff and students. Zuckerberg and his colleagues, initially through Facemash leading to theFacebook used these procedures as a means for student enjoyment: self-promotion, narcissism, dating, voyeurism and so on. From the very beginning there was something ‘superegoic’ in the way in which its ‘obscene’ content (the inspired by the initial idea of comparing female students’ faces to farm animals for example) was conveyed by the apparent neutrality of bureaucratic form. Accordingly, the signifier (S1) that is the governing support of Facebook (S2) is not the name of a Master or a governing Idea of the University (Truth, Culture, Excellence), but a number (1) that stands for numbers generally, metrics, statistics, quantification and so on. The ‘knowledge’, then, if there is any, is statistical information that is operative through the manipulation of computerized data through the use of algorithms. With the Oscar Morales story, number (Un Millon Voces) provides the hyperbolic, even performative command that brings the Group into being as a mass, and its authority as a number provides its ‘comfort’ and security.

As everyone knows there is something uncanny about passport photographs and their inability to deliver a satisfyingly narcissistic image of one’s face (enabling them to be compared to farm animals, for instance). I don’t recognize this image; it’s not me! It is as if the photo booth steals some aspect of the face essential to its enjoyment as a mirror image. The digital face-making, or prosopopeia of Facebook, is predicated upon a generalized prosopagnosia (or prosop – a – gnosia) where the a stands for the lost enjoyment stolen by the bureaucratic passport photograph. However, the theft of enjoyment in the Oscar Morales story concerns the fact that he and his countrymen were cheated by the FARC of the collective joy that would have been brought by the sight of the face of Emmanuel, his suffering relieved by his release on Christmas day. The fact that he was quietly released by the hostages into a foster home without fuss or announcement seems to have produced an irrational rage in the Columbians, strange given the possible alternative: “People were happy because the kid was safe, but we were so fucking angry” (Kirkpatrick, 1). It is therefore into this gap, marked in its absence by the suffering or joyful face of Emmanuel in the field of mediatized visibility, that Facebook pours its information, a million faces combining to producing Oscar Morales as Columbia’s first Facebook star, making him “a national and international celebrity” (6). As such, however, he inevitably loses something, loses his offline, off camera ordinariness, becoming vulnerable to the harsh light of media attention and expectation as a hero of political and moral virtue.

Lacan presented his theory of the four discourses in the context of the events of May 1968, most notably in a rowdy exchange with students at Vincennes. Memorably, Lacan claimed that “the aspiration to revolution has but one conceivable issue, always, the discourse of the master”. At the same time, as Matthew Sharpe notes, Lacan also made the claim that university discourse “is increasingly becoming the dominant form structure of social relations”. While Lacan initially had in mind “the societies of the now-former Soviet bloc”, Sharpe shows that new forms of advertising in their ‘superegoic’ appeal to transgressive (as opposed to officially sanctioned) enjoyment are organized according to the same structure, since advertising “faces, and educates, a more or less unformed, ignorant individual” which it compels to consider, “from a quasi-superegoic position of neutral self-observation ... what we really are and really want, beneath whatever social masks and roles we may from time to time have taken up”.

Since about 2008, Facebook’s core business, its means of making money, has been advertising, but it is claimed that this is purely a means rather than an aim, and in any case “the word advertising is really no longer the right word for what is going on at Facebook” (Kirkpatrick, 263). Rather, Kirkpatrick argues that Facebook provides a space in which producers and consumers interact to the point of becoming indistinct as mutual users of the site. From the beginning “Thefacebook had no content of its own. It was merely a piece of software – a platform for content created by its users” (31) in which marketers can now pay for visibility for their products but “can no longer control the conversation” about them (263). For Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook ‘monetization’ merely generates the revenue necessary for a much more profound social project. The company is “founded on a radical social premise – that an enveloping transparency will overtake modern life”, and this premise is the foundation of Facebook’s utopian promise. As the story of Oscar Morales relates, Facebook can be an effective tool working for popular causes in the aid of the state – no doubt in other states it can work against them. As such, however, Facebook is not a neutral ‘tool’ for the political expression of popular reason. It is a form that is itself transformative of other political structures, ushering in a new kind of governmentality. “In a lot of ways”, Zuckerberg argues, “Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies”. While particular technology companies are always vulnerable to the rapid exploitation of new technological innovations and a certain boredom threshold concerning their formats, Facebook has it seems made a decisive breakthrough in its reformatting of the social bond. In its infinite streams of commentary, ‘likes’ and followers of Groups and interests, Facebook has transformed the meaning of ‘Friendship’ and opened it up so that a transparent – or ‘transparental’ – love has become the principle of a new technology of neoliberal governance. Whatever the fate of Facebook, for this model to become truly revolutionary would require a further turn clockwise towards the discourse of the Master in which love for the face of the ‘transparental’ One, the index of the multiple, supports the total operationalization of social reality without remainder other than the facelessness that is produced as its surplus and condition.

From Scott Wilson, ‘Prosopopeia to Prosopagnosia: Dante on Facebook’ in Glossator 5 (2011): 19-56.

Musca amusica and the sound of Ba’al Zebûb’s ascension

2011-11-14T10:04:00.000-08:00

Halo of Flies Over My Head
I am decaying Satan's Wrath
The one to walk planet earth alone
Spreading disease, death and war ... Impaled Nazarene, ‘Halo of Flies’ All That You Fear (2004)

Attractive to the flies ... I am their mephitic trough ... a buzzing which engulfs all ...
Through compound eyes / I envision eternity
Lugubrum, ‘Attractive to Flies’, De Vette Cueken (2004)

Flies are a frequent trope in both black and death metal. For the latter, buzzing flies pullulating over a rotting corpse lyrically figures death metal’s pulverizing a-subjective affections of the body; for the former, flies are related to a metaphysical problem bound up not so much to the paradoxical notion of the death of God but the death and deification of Satan.

While there are numerous reference to flies in the various genres of metal (perhaps since Iron Maiden) the ultimate reference is to Satan or Beelzebub as ‘Lord of the Flies’, or as Malkuth put it, ‘Great Black Goat God (Lord of the Flies)’ (1994). A Hebrew insult at the followers of the God Baal, ‘dung flies’, ‘ba’al’ ‘zebub’ emerges in the Christian tradition, sometimes as another name for Satan himself, but more interestingly as an angel who successfully stages his own infernal rebellion, displacing Satan to second spot just above Euronymous, according to Weyer’s demonology. Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, then, is also a figure for the overthrow or overcoming of Satan and the ascension of some other order, the order of dung flies.

The reference is picked up in metal (from Iron Maiden, across numerous genres) where there are also gestures towards Golding’s famous novel in which Satan is already a rotting animal’s head: the sacrificial offering to the Beast misperceived as the Beast itself. Or rather become the beast through the hideous teeming acephalic noise of the flies that swarm about its decapitated head. The process of self-identification and self-transcendence that hold the God-Satan-Man triad together is transformed through consumption. Flies, not Man, maketh the Beast, but first through turning the flesh into ‘a mephitic trough’, a Styx of digestive liquid’ (Lugubrum) in which ‘Transformed man [is] dethroned’, Nominon, ‘Hordes of Flies’ (2005). For Nominon, then, the process of complete post-parasitical transformation – ‘Innate insects part of me /Parasite inside eating me / Host of flies born inside – sees the Satanic ‘Beast’ (the satanic multiple) resurrected from the swarming darkness of base matter where death has no dominion: ‘Absence of life I am the lord of flies’. Companion species, no doubt, since the migration of homo sapiens from Africa, musca domestica have lodged in the margins of human civilization, incubating and pupating in its shit and garbage, feeding on wounds and rotting flesh, defecating and vomiting waste matter teeming in deadly bacteria and viruses: typhoid, cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis. In black metal’s buzzing, musca domestica musica, flies are both the locus of amusical ex-sistence and figure of Satan’s divine inexistence and return. ‘Through compound eyes / I envision eternity’.
My abstract for PEST, Black Metal Theory Symposium Date: Sunday 20 November 2011, 14.00-Close
Location: The Pint Bar, Eden Quay, Dublin, Ireland

Rhythm, a-rhythmia and the Revolutionary Drive

2011-09-19T07:50:00.000-07:00

‘Brains are foretelling devices and their predictive powers emerge from the various rhythms they perpetually generate. At the same time, brain activity can be tuned to become an ideal observer of the environment, due to an organized system of rhythms’. György Buzsáki, Rhythms of the Brain.

‘Humans are the only species to spontaneously synchronize to the beat of music’.
A.N. Patel, Music and Language

‘[There is no] assimilation of the drive to a biological function, which always has a rhythm. The first thing Freud says about the drive is, if I may put it this way, that it has no day or night, no spring or autumn, no rise and fall. It is a constant force. All the same, one must take account of the texts and of experience.
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI.

‘Rock and roll as well as jazz was what they called “imperialist music”… [Guevara] hated artists, so how is it possible that artists still today support the image of Che Guevara?”
Paquito D’Rivera.

If the problem of whether ‘time and space are situated in our minds only or whether they in fact exist independently’ is intractable (Buzsáki, 8), it is rhythm, according to neuroscientist György Buzsáki, that provides the means for the brain to shape its own sense of reality in its negotiation with its environment. Rhythm produces a sense of time, allowing for anticipation, and the imagination of exterior space. For A.N. Patel, the ability to perceive a regular beat is, similarly, ‘anticipatory rather than reactive ...’ and is fundamental, not a byproduct of [other more clearly adaptive] cognitive mechanisms’ (402). Beat perception appears to be an event in the evolutionary history of human beings, the always already cultural yet universal means of establishing a collective. ‘In every culture, there is some form of music with a regular beat, a periodic pulse that affords temporal coordination between performers and elicits a synchronized motor response from listeners’ (Patel, 402). It seems that groups, tribes, nations have always been one under a groove.

It was Jacques Attali who first related music, as a particular organization of noise, to social order, and this paper looks at rhythm as a means of establishing a social bond in a way that is heterogeneous to language. Using various examples, including the arrhythmia of Che Guevara (neither he nor Eva Peron could dance, and both hated the tango), the paper also introduces a quasi-psychoanalytic concept of a-rhythmia in which rhythm is equivalent to the drive’s Vorstellung, thereby becoming the locus of cultural dissatisfaction and discontent. It looks at how the a-rhythmic drive is a revolutionary force in the sense that it revolves around an impossible (extimate) object that holds the place of another conception of social reality, that is to say some Other (groove) Thing (or Thang).

Abstract for the Rhythm and Event Symposium
10am-7.30pm 29 October 2011
King’s Anatomy Theatre & Museum, 6th Floor, King’s Building
King’s College London, Strand Campus, London, WC2R 2LS

Capsule presents ... Home of Metal Conference, 1-4 September 2011

2011-07-12T08:07:00.000-07:00

University of Wolverhampton and Lighthouse

Science and Truth

2011-06-02T04:34:00.000-07:00

(On an unconscious that isn’t one, but something of the one)

The apparent contradiction in the UK government’s decision to cut all funding to Arts, Humanities and Social Science subjects at University in order to open them to market forces while protecting Maths, Engineering and Science betrays something more interesting than the limits of pure competition theory or ultimate market failure. This decision shows that neoliberalism is an art of government, of course, as much as a mechanism of economic growth (as Foucault anticipated in the late 1970s), but perhaps more profoundly, it shows that in the UK at least, science is now the official bearer of truth. The decision concurs with Steven Hawking’s view that science is all we need to answer the big questions of philosophy, and the latter can fight for its survival among the other idols of the marketplace. Science has even superseded literature, Darwin having displaced Shakespeare as the touchstone of National Genius.

Scientific truth is not, of course, an effect of individual genius, but is grounded in scientific method and in the production of a number of (mathematical) correspondences that appear to cohere with certain regularities generated by nature or the real. Science does not speak the truth since these regularities are not found in language but in numbers or formulae. What or where is a truth that no longer speaks – not even of itself in the guise of a metalanguage? Is it a truth that counts, or is counted, or that counts itself (as truth)? For science to tell the truth, numbers would have to speak, a goal that the psychotic mathematician John F Nash Jr. set for himself (Nasar, 2001: 336), the same Nash whose famous ‘equilibrium’ is supposed to justify both the economic efficiency and the social benefits of neoliberalism. Naturally, the Browne Reports’ prioritisation of Science and Technology is not just recognition of the burden of truth and destiny that these subjects now seem to bear, but about generating another set of numbers that will reproduce and sustain the current system of social and economic relations.

For those of us brought up under the shadow of Matthew Arnold in the tradition of literary and cultural studies this decision shows that the governing class in the UK has finally given up on the idea that liberal culture has an essential ‘social mission’ or ideological function, as Althusserians used to say. Of course this has been evident for a long time. Even as some of us were busy deconstructing the ‘Shakespeare Myth’ back in the 1980s the governing idea of the University was already moving away from Culture to Excellence, an essentially vacuous term under which the University was transformed from a pedagogical institution to a mechanism for the exchange of information whose governing structure, if not metaphor, is the networked computer. Disciplines became stripped down to a set of equivalent ‘key skills’ to be cashed into the service economy. As we all know, the ability to savour poetic ambiguity, where it occurs, is a fringe benefit relative to a student’s aptitude for ppt presentations.

The neoliberal experiment in government has sought to construct a very different kind of subject to the subject of liberal culture, leaving the latter to withdraw to centres of privilege and heritage sites. As with other state institutions, the ‘privatization’ of Universities has been steadily achieved through the introduction of internal markets and mechanisms such as KPIs and PRP that formally assume a subject of pure self-interest that needs to be governed by the imposition of goals and targets that are continually assessed in the running commentary of internal audit, the latter having no external rationale or reference other than the economic efficiency or ‘value for money’ that is calculated on the basis of the same imaginary interests. This process reinforces and locks-in competition as a formal principle. The ultimate biopolitical aim, or effect, is to produce (economic) life according to mathematizable models. In this way governance manufactures the kind of data-producing subjects it wants even as it justifies itself scientifically in the name of economic reason.

Alongside the credence given to Hawking’s and others view that science has rendered philosophy pointless, another symptom of the belief that science bears the burden of truth is the rise of quasi-scientific approaches to the Humanities. And here I do not just mean sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and so on, but the work of a new generation of academics producing varieties of, for example, ‘cognitive literary criticism’ and ‘evolutionary literary theory’ which look ‘to the cognitive neurosciences for finer-grained descriptions of the workings of language, consciousness and subject-formation than those supplied by influential but inadequate post-structuralist theories’ (Richardson, 2007: 553).

But if the idea is to save the Humanities by imitating scientific methods, it is doomed from the start because its object, the manifest image of the conscious, language-defined human being, is itself unscientific. Ever since the post-linguistic turn of the 1980s and the rapid development of cognitive neuroscience, scientists have become increasingly sceptical about the utility and even ‘reality’ of ‘top-down concepts, such as thinking, consciousness, motivation, emotion, and similar terms’, doubting that they ‘can be mapped onto corresponding brain mechanisms with similar boundaries as in our language’ (Buzáki, 2006: 19). The once notorious eliminative materialism of Paul and Patricia Churchland that famously denounced and rejected the ‘folk psychological’ mysticism of conventional concepts ‘such as belief, desire, pain, pleasure, love, hate, joy, fear, suspicion, memory, recognition, anger, sympathy, intention and so forth’ (Churchland, 1998: 3), has become standard. Everything that goes on in the Arts and Humanities is essentially delusional, a tissue of semblance.

At their most provocative, the Churchlands claim not only that the folk psychology model that informs Humanities and Social Science is empirically false, but it is also damaging, chronically defective (12). Cognitive neuroscience knows very well that brains are not simply hard-wired, but need to develop. They must become subject to processes of learning in order to function appropriately and efficiently. Trillions of new synaptic connections need to be made between neurons ‘so that incoming sensory vectors are automatically and almost instantaneously transformed into appropriate “prototype” vectors at the higher populations of cortical neurons’ (14). This is ‘learning’. What learning is not, however, is ‘assembling a vast mass of sentences’ because the ‘basic unit of occurrent cognition is not language-based, but rather the high-dimensional neuronal activation vector (that is, a pattern of excitation levels across a large population of neurons)’. And ‘the basic unit of cognitive processing is apparently not the inference from sentence to sentence, but rather the synapse-induced transformation of large activation vectors into other such vectors’ (10). Since human languages are pre-eminently the accumulated archive of ancient folk psychologies, superstitions, misconceptions, misperceptions, myth, narratives reproducing basic cognitive errors, they are hopeless vehicles for learning, incapable of producing appropriate neuronal activation vectors and need to be eliminated. Folk psychology is simply bad theory that results in the bad human behaviour we see all around us and should be replaced by a theory based in the grey matter of the brain, an eliminative materialist ‘successor theory’ (35). The excitement of the Churchlands concerns their promise of a ‘superior social practice’ that will come with the displacement of FP by a theory based in a properly scientific account of ‘human cognition and mental activity’ (35). The disappointment is always that their social imagining falls back on a kind of liberal pragmatism expressing a pious hope that ‘a deeper understanding of the springs of human behaviour may thus permit a deeper level of cognitive interaction, moral insight, and mutual care’ (35), without explaining why the former should imply the latter. As Freud might have noted, one could just as well recoil in horror.

It is not, I would think, in the direction of moral pragmatism that the utopia promised by the faith in science lies. Far from diverting the techno-scientific drive, the financial crisis of 2008 has of course further entrenched the attempt by the forces of neoliberal governance to account for and speculate upon the economic effects of human cognitive processes both individual and collective. The hope is that the market mechanism can be enhanced through the elimination of irrational human impulses (greed, fear, panic etc.) that are based on the manifest image of human motives and behaviour based in language. Rather, through being reconstituted within the conceptual framework of completed neuroscience, economic theories can become much more powerful and more substantially integrated within physical science generally. The promise appeals to the demand for increased economic performance, as brains directly interact with each other via screens and scanners for the satisfaction of the numbers.

Given that consciousness is now regarded as too ‘top-down’ a concept to be scientifically operative and too inefficient in matters of optimal performance (as sports people know, the ‘zombie’ brain is the key to high achievement, Ramachandran, 2005: 83), there would not seem much potential for an unconscious, political or otherwise. For psychoanalysis, of course, the unconscious is the seat of truth, at least insofar as it articulates the truth that the subject doesn’t know that it knows. ‘“I, truth, speak ...”’, wrote Lacan, evoking ‘the unnameable thing that, by virtue of its ability to pronounce these words, would go right to the being of language – if we are to hear them as they are to be pronounced: in horror’ (Lacan, 2006: 736). The unconscious can no longer be defined simply against the (self) consciousness of speaking beings, but also the functional nonconsciousness calculated by numbers. ‘I, truth, speak’, but the prosopopeia now addresses a prosopagnosia that can no longer perceive in a face anything other than an abstract form correlated to the oscillations of neuronal assemblies that might be mapped onto ever-shifting profiles, markers of nodal points of data predicated on an empty mediating space for the exchange of biometric and economic information. Truth shimmers in every upgrade of Facebook ...

While the stream of numbers slide over the real, or the ‘noumenon that, for as long as pure reason can remember, has always kept its mouth shut’ (Lacan, 737), those speaking beings still on the language side of things might ask: what numberless horror is produced or encountered in the slippage, the something of the one (1+) that foams in excess of formulae? Fortunately, it seems, while the noumenon does not speak, it bites, or at least according to some, even as its fangs hook into the ‘technocosm’.

The Browne Report’s indifference to the fate of Arts and Humanities relative to the economic imperative demanded of Science and Technology is something I assume that Nick Land and his acolytes are gleefully cheering in technoecstasy. ‘We no longer judge such technical developments from without, we no longer judge at all, we function: machined/ machining in eccentric orbits about the technocosm. Humanity recedes like a loathsome dream’. (Land, 1992: 223). LOL.

References
György Buzáki (2006), Rhythms of the Brain OUP.
Patricia & Paul Churchland (1998), On the Contrary, MIT.
Jacques Lacan (2006), Écrits, Norton.
Nick Land (1992), ‘Circuitries’, PLI, 217-235.
Sylvia Nasar (2001), A Beautiful Mind, Touchstone.
V.S. Ramachandran (2005), Phantoms in the Brain. Harper Collins.
Alan Richardson (2007), Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, OUP.

Heavy Metal and the Other Side of Culture

2011-05-14T05:46:00.000-07:00

Abstract for The Home of Metal Conference, 1st-4th September 2011.

‘Technology's progression, over man machines reign
Enslaved without compassion, new masters of (the) earth we dwell
Human life is worthless, in this automated living hell’.
Bolt Thrower, ‘Profane Creation’ War Master 1991.
‘We no longer judge such technical developments from without, we no longer judge at all, we function: machined/ machining in eccentric orbits about the technocosm. Humanity recedes like a loathsome dream’.
Nick Land, ‘Circuitries’, (1992).

This talk looks at two moments in the history of the non-relation between metal and academia that find coincidentally their location in Birmingham and the Midlands: heavy metal and cultural studies; Grindcore/death metal and the Warwick philosophy group associated with Nick Land in the early 1990s.

It is well known that both heavy metal and Cultural Studies emerged in the Midlands in the 1960s. But if they were born in the same town, the movements associated with Stuart Hall and Ozzy Osbourne have had little to do with one another, perhaps because Cultural Studies academics saw, in heavy metal, only a monocultural (predominantly white, male) form unsuitable as a vehicle for political transformation. Ironically, Cultural Studies’ development into the study of identities established in consumable differences stands accused of preparing the ground for a different kind of political transformation that has resulted in the full marketization of the Humanities. Metal, meanwhile, over the same period, has become the name under which multiple styles, scenes and festivals have articulated the pleasures, desires, discontents and demands of numerous people across Europe and the rest of the world. As I have suggested elsewhere, metal could be regarded (in the language of Cultural Studies) as the popular cultural, counter-hegemonic form par excellence in so far as national and regional varieties of DM, BM, Viking, folk, doom, ambient and so on have become the positive reverse of the absence of any political alternative to the ‘globalatinization’ represented by institutions like the EU, on the one hand, and neoliberal consumer culture on the other.

Metal as an explicitly political form derives from the legacy of Grindcore, particularly Napalm Death, who in some ways provide a point of punk-inspired cross-over into Cultural Studies-style political investment in popular culture, but from a position of deep ambivalence towards humanity, if not a profound anti-humanism. At the same time in Warwick’s philosophy department, in the circle around Nick Land, the writings of Nietzsche and Bataille were re-animated to inform an extreme, nihilist version of Deleuze and Guattari that celebrated the destructive forces of global capitalism as the most radical form of ‘machinic desire’. Death metal bands like Coventry’s Bolt Thrower, meanwhile, echoed Land’s contention that ‘war in its intensive state is desire itself, convulsive recurrence, unilateral zero’. Exulting in the destruction of liberal culture and the universal humanities, Land’s acolytes breathlessly embraced the promise of techno-science, particularly digitalization, as represented in cyberpunk, Blade Runner and The Terminator movies. As dated as some of it seems now, this imagination provided the impetus for developing a ‘para-academic’ space on the network that provided some of the most interesting and innovative models for the survival of thought in the ruins of the university, in virtual spaces where much of the new academic interest in metal currently resides. Contemporary academic interest in metal follows this logic and is the effect of a generation of graduates, metallectuals on the margins of the Academy, for whom metal’s ‘unemployed negativity’ provides the most appropriate vehicle with which to articulate not just their discontent and contestation of the violence of neoliberal subjectification in state institutions, but also and as such to forge a different form of intellectual life on the other side of culture.

Popular Culture and World Politics IV

2011-05-09T02:23:00.000-07:00

23-25 November 2011 at University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Lapland, Finland
Plenary Speakers:
Tiziana Terranova, Napoli, Italy
Scott Wilson, Kingston, UK

If you are interested in attending this conference please visit our
website at http://www.ulapland.fi/?deptid=20727
The deadline for abstract submissions is June 30th.

We study popular culture to understand the representational practices through which power relations are constructed worldwide, and grasp the aesthetic practices through which the intolerability of power relations are given political expression, and out of which new political subjectivities and peoples are brought into being. Deconstructing the former is integral to the processes of struggle by which we can contribute to the composition of the latter.

The Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Lapland, is pleased to invite you to continue this effort at the Popular Culture and World Politics Conference (PCWP 4) to be held in Rovaniemi, Finland, 23-25 November 2011. The conference is the fourth in a groundbreaking series of annual events that began in the University of Bristol in 2008. Since then the series has developed into an exciting annual event which attracts scholars, practitioners and artists from throughout the world and across the disciplines and fields to debate and discuss the world politics of popular culture.

This year, the conference will be held on the ultra-northern verges of Europe, in Lapland, which occupies liminal space in-between popular imaginaries of Western modernity and Arctic wilderness.

The three-day conference will attract papers and presentations from thinkers whose work is inspiring contemporary forays into the relations between politics and culture across the humanities, social sciences and the arts. Invited keynote speakers include Tiziana Terranova (Napoli, Italy) and Scott Wilson (Kingston, UK).

With this Call for Papers we invite participation in all possible forms. In addition to panels and individual papers, we welcome proposals for art exhibitions, screenings, performances or other modes of expression. In so doing we hope to build the event into a rich experience which involves not only talking about popular culture but also experiencing, sensing, feeling, producing and, in most cases, enjoying it.

Suggested themes for panels, papers and other presentations include
(but are not limited to):

- Challenging the theory/practice divide
- Aesthetics and the constitution of new subjectivities
- Decolonizing methodologies
- Popular culture and climate change
- The politics of Santa Claus
- Representation and race
- Senses, sensibilities and the redistribution of the sensible order
- Art and political activism
- Popularization of indigenous cultures
- Imaginaries of hope in contemporary politics
- Aesthetics of security
- War and media
- The politics of cinema
- Digital aesthetics
- The biopolitics of popular culture

All other themes will be entertained too.

If you are interested in attending this conference please visit our website at http://www.ulapland.fi/?deptid=20727 and submit a brief abstract of your paper, panel proposal (including the names and titles of each presentation) or artistic contribution (max. 450 words). We will inform you about the outcome of your abstract submission by the end of August 2011.

Welcome!

Prof. Julian Reid and Dr. Laura Junka-Aikio
University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland

Rhythm and Event

2011-04-11T04:30:00.001-07:00

Abstracts by 31 July to E.Ikoniadou@Kingston.ac.uk and S.Wilson@Kingston.ac.uk

I Only Want To Be With You (Songs from the Tarantinian Ethics)

2011-03-27T10:45:00.000-07:00

True romance leads beyond narcissism. ... In True Romance the point at which one sees oneself from the position of the other is also the point of death and disappearance. Death intervenes to demonstrate the imbalance of romantic fantasy, even as the other’s pain and suffering prove that fantasy with a vengeance. Death is thus the limit and fulfilment of romantic desire, introducing an absence that allows the fantasy to thrive, unimpeded by reality: ‘What they need is not one another’s presence, but one another’s absence’ (1993: 42). Indeed, for Lacan, ‘between the object as it is structured by the narcissistic relation and das Ding, there is a difference ...’ (Lacan, 1992: 98). The difference is crucial. If death is on the agenda for Mickey and Mallory only in so far as it is the death of others, or the living death of a lobotomy, then absence and obstacles are crucial to sustaining their passion. True love blossoms and burns most after they have been imprisoned, the screenplay suggests, in Mickey’s letters and Mallory’s songs that are addressed to the silence that is the support of their fantasy. The other’s absence seems to have little bearing on their passion, while the bars of the prison only serve to affirm it.

We stare at McClusky and Scanetti for a second. Then, like a bull, we charge/dolly straight at them. Mallory screams out of shot. We smash head first into the bars. Mallory’s POV flings up, looking at the ceiling, then falls backward.

SCAGNETTI

Jesus Christ!

McCLUSKY

Don’t worry about it. She does that all the time. (Tarantino, 1995b: 15-16)

‘For what is love other than banging one’s head against a wall’, comments Lacan, ‘since there is no sexual relation?’ (1982: 170). For Lacan, the imagined, absolute and ideal union driving love’s fantasy remains impossible because it is an effect of signification: it is the Other, the locus of desire and object of demand, that is addressed in love, not a real person. For Lacan, using courtly poetry as his example,

the being to whom it is addressed is nothing other than being as signifier. The inhuman character of the object of courtly love is plainly visible. This love that led some people to acts close to madness was addressed at living beings, peoples with names, but who were not present in their fleshly and historical reality . . . they were there in any case in their being as reason, as signifier. (Lacan, 1992: 214-5)

The address to the other thus moves beyond the other towards the Other, demanding of the Other recognition and love for the totality of the subject’s being. But as it remains the locus of difference and desire, the Other cannot reply other than by signifiers, the very marks of separation. The absence of any reply to the subject’s exorbitant demand leaves only signifiers as the obstacles to true union, obstacles that exacerbate desire. Courtly love, for Lacan, exemplifies the detours provoked by this absence of relation: ‘it is an altogether refined way of making up for the absence of sexual relation by pretending that it is we who put an obstacle to it’ (1982: 141). The barriers thus work to preserve the illusion that, beyond them, beyond words, beyond life itself, an idealised union is possible.

But the bars of signification also open a gap between self and other, introducing a cause that belongs to neither one nor the other. The difference between the amorous couple is temporal. Writing on Tristan and Isolde, Maurice Blanchot discusses the nostalgic anticipation of the continually delayed arrival of love’s impossible presence:

the fulfillment of all veritable love which would consist in realizing itself exclusively according to the mode of loss, that is to say realizing itself by losing not what has belonged to you but what one has never had, for the ‘I’ and the ‘other’ do not live in the same time, are never together (synchronously), can therefore not be contemporary, but separated (even when together) by a ‘not yet’ which goes hand in hand with an ‘already no longer’. (Blanchot, 1988: 42)

For Lacan, it is also a matter of the dislocation of the lovers’ spatial relation: ‘when in love I solicit a look, what is always profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that – You never look at me from the place which I see you’ (1977b: 103). The fantasy is never complete, difference ultimately eludes love’s capture. Love opens beyond the other, the imagined object of love; it ‘can be posited only in that beyond where, at first, it renounces its object’ (1977b: 276). That is, love moves from the other to the Other, the locus of speech and signification, and manifests a gap between the real being and the subject of signification. For Denis de Rougemont, lovers are prisoners, possessed by a power they neither know nor control: ‘They are prisoners of “exquisite anguish” owing to something which neither controls – some alien power independent of their capacities, or at any rate of their conscious wishes, and of their being in so far as they are aware of being’ (39-40). Perhaps this accounts for Mickey’s extraordinary self-possession in the State Penitentiary. Since he is already imprisoned in love, there is no such thing as prison, it is already an environment familiar to him, a familiarity that abolishes the locks and the steel bars. Indeed, the presence of the real prison supports his self-possession since it realises the shackles of love’s ‘alien power’ in concrete form, thereby rendering it, too, familiar. With Mickey the prison only serves to replace, as banal obstacle, the sense of the ‘alien power’ of love that, for Blanchot, is an undefinable strangeness that haunts and thwarts shared love as it:

excludes mutuality as well as unity where the Other would blend with the Same. And this brings us back to the foreboding that passion eludes possibility, eluding, for those caught by it, their own powers, their own decision and even their ‘desire’, in that it is strangeness itself, having consideration neither for what they can do nor for what they want, but luring them into strangeness where they become estranged from themselves, into an intimacy which also estranges them from each other. (Blanchot, 1988: 43)

The strange, alien, uncanny power emerges, however, in writing, in the epistolary romance Mickey narrates to Mallory but cannot send.

For Mallory, this alien power also comes from the signifier, from the words of the songs she sings: ‘She starts moving her body to music only she can hear, then begins to sing the song “Groove Me” in a slow a cappella, using the cell as her stage and a man who isn’t there as her audience’ (1995a: 24). The songs express her pain, suffering and separation: ‘Love is a hurtin’ thang’; ‘Long Time Woman’. Another song she is reported to sing is ‘I Only Want to Be with You’.

The title and hook-line, ‘I Only Want to Be with You’, inscribes desire within love. The total, singular and exclusive desire of love is bound up with being, or rather, as the title suggests, with the lack in being, the ‘want-to-be’, or want of being. Thus, the absence of the other and the absence of being remain at the centre of love’s expression and the song’s performance of total desire. Punctuated throughout the song, various declamatory statements lay out the co-ordinates of love’s desire: the unconditional, ‘It doesn’t matter where you go or what you do’; the ever vigilant, ‘I want to be beside you everywhere’; the fateful, that is, accidental and inevitable, ‘I fell into your open arms/ And I didn’t stand a chance’; mutual possession, ‘I only know I never want to let you go’, ‘That ever since we met you’ve had a hold on me’; the acknowledgement that love takes the singer beyond knowledge and possibility, ‘I never knew I could be in love like this’; and beyond care, ‘As long as we’re together, honey, I don’t care’; and finally beyond reason to truth ‘It’s crazy, but it’s true/ I only want to be with you’ (Mike Hawker/Ivor Raymonde. Springfield Music Ltd.). The song also calls up that alien power beyond immediate, specular visibility, ‘Cos you started something, oh can’t you see’, and begins by speaking of that object inaccessible to knowledge, the some thing in you more than you that impels love, ‘I Don’t know what it is that makes me love you so’, an object which opens the address to the Other who is beyond reply though who is determinedly, if perhaps unsuccessfully, buttonholed, ‘Now listen, honey’.

The strangeness of the amorous relation as it is broached by the song is inscribed in the very terms of address, in the function of the shifter ‘you’. Between the impersonated object of love and the demand for love from the Other, gaps appear. This is because, as Lacan observes, ‘the you in its verbalized form does not at all coincide with the pole we have been calling big O’ (1992: 270). The I-you structure of address, moreover, discloses ‘a distance that’s not symmetrical, a relationship that isn’t reciprocal’ (1992: 274). Nonetheless, the structure manifests the effects of signification on the subject, effects that evoke a superegoic function: ‘it’s the you that says you in us, this you that always makes itself more or less discreetly heard, this you that speaks alone ...’ (Lacan, 1992: 275), that is, the discourse of the Other. ‘Present as a foreign body’, the you manifests ‘something completely uncertain and problematic in this fundamental communication’ in which ‘the I is essentially fleeting in nature and never entirely sustains the thou’ (1992: 287). Similarly, the you remains ‘unsecured in the substratum of discourse’ and depends on the effects of metaphor to provide a temporary quilting point to sense and meaning: ‘the you is the hooking of the other in the waters of meaning’ (1992: 299). ‘Now listen, honey ...’ Thus in love’s communication, like ‘I only want to be with you’, the you and the I, one and other, remain at some distance: ‘this you presupposes an other who, in short, is beyond him’ (1992: 300). It is a distance, a gap that lies not only between inside and outside, but one that remains internal to love’s discourse, implicated in its signification to the extent that both I and you, subject and other, are separately rendered uncertain, subjected to the shifting course of signification that, ruffled by love, never runs smooth.

From Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, The Tarantinian Ethics, Sage, 2001

Songs from the Tarantinian Ethics: Oral Pleasure and ‘Son of a Preacher Man’

2011-03-05T08:03:00.000-08:00

Tarantino’s movies are concerned both with consumption and critical discourse. The most seductive element of his movies is often considered to be his dialogue. Speech is privileged to an unusual degree, and his screenplays are not surprisingly highly valued by actors for the opportunities they allow ... in chapter one, speech is associated with law and transgression. Antwan Rockamorra’s castrating encounter with paternal law, in the shape of an outraged Marsellus Wallace, is manifested in the shape of a ‘speech impediment’ caused by a lacerating fall through a greenhouse. The object immediately referred to as lost at the beginning of Pulp Fiction, is the voice, a voice lost in the silent intimacy of Antwan’s gift of a foot massage to Mia Wallace. Antwan’s lost voice underscores the importance of speech generally, which is offered, in Pulp Fiction and in Reservoir Dogs where Blonde removes the ear of the captured cop, as key to the ethical relation, the privileged mode of exchange with the Other. Consequently, many scenes in Pulp Fiction are dominated by an often disembodied voice that, in one way or another, lays down the law. ...

... The most highly developed and significant scene, however, in which a voice frames, interrogates, directs and deploys a body within its power occurs when Vincent goes to call on Mia Wallace. ... in the scene it is no longer the content of Mia’s speech that becomes important, but the positioning and eroticisation of her voice. Mia is removed from the place of the unattainable ding of the courtly relation to become the voice of a new, feminised superego while her gaze is located at the empty heart of a panopticon. She is still situated, imaginarily, in the position of the phallus, but not in the form of a definite image or object. Rather than an object, Mia is now the unseen origin of an imagined gaze that speaks. Mia surveys Vincent through a bank of security monitors while addressing him through an intercom. When she is perceived, she appears as a metaphor in the shape of a disembodied, obscene mouth giving oral pleasure to a microphone. At this point also, it becomes clear that the soundtrack is now directly addressing the eroticised relationship between speech and moral law.

It is Hurley and Wilkin’s ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ sung by Dusty Springfield: ‘the only one who could ever reach me / was the son of a preacher man / The only boy who could ever teach me / was the son of a preacherman’. The oddly un-courtly aspect of Mia is that she is neither silent, iconic nor inscrutable. On her date with Vincent, she doesn’t engage him in the coded, seductive play of courtship; indeed she doesn’t tempt him into doing anything; on the contrary, in the up-front forthright manner for which American women are rightly celebrated, she tells him to do everything.

Perfectly at home in Jack Rabbit Slim’s, Mia instructs Vincent on the law of desire, ‘it’s more exciting when you don’t have permission’, even as she gives him permission, becoming the law herself (61). Which is to say that she does not merely permit but positively orders him, in the face of his resistance, to dance publicly with her; she is the trophy she instructs Vincent to win for herself: ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I do believe Marsellus, my husband, your boss, told you to take me out and do whatever I wanted. Now, I want to dance. I want to win. I want that trophy’ (65). They dance to the answer to the question of who to prefer out of Elvis and The Beatles – Chuck Berry – and they win. It is Mia who impales the father on his own law, using his own commands as the means to his cuckoldry, turning transgression into an imperative.

It is the link between speech, desire, orality and the pleasure-imperative that, if anything, links Mia with the other female characters, Fabienne and Esmarelda Villalobos. It is of course ‘oral pleasure’ that Fabienne demands of Butch, a request with which he complies on condition that she ‘kiss it’ in return (101). This exchange establishes a certain mutuality to their relationship, but further, in the context of Tarantino’s scirpts thus far, it frames that mutuality within a clearly defined ethic of romantic sexual conduct.

This ethic is more fully elaborated in the second scene [excised from the Tony Scott film] of True Romance where the importance of providing the woman with oral service is forcefully debated, along with its history and its implications for race. Appropriately enough, the question is discussed by three pimps. Drexl, the white wannabe black man, and Big D are explaining the law to Floyd.

BIG D

Shit, any nigger say he don’t eat pussy is lyin’ his ass off.

DREXL

I heard that.

FLOYD

Hold on a second, Big D. You sayin’ you eat pussy?

BIG D

Nigger, I eat everything. I eat the pussy. I eat the butt. I eat every motherfuckin’ thang.

DREXL

Preach on, Big D. (Tarantino, 1995b: 8)

For Floyd, the very idea is humiliating, shameful, and, moreover, an indication of the moral degeneration inflicted on black men by the dominant white, pussy-eating ideology of America, bringing oppression into every sphere. Floyd continues,

There used to be a time when sisters didn’t know shit about gettin’ their pussy licked. Then the sixties came an’ they started fuckin’ around with white boys. And white boys are freaks for that shit ... Then, after a while sisters get used to gettin’ their little pussy eat. And because you white boys had to make pigs of yourselves, you fucked it up for every nigger in the world everywhere ... Now if a nigger wants to get his dick sucked he’s got to do a bunch of fucked-up shit. (1995b: 8-9)

Given Drexl’s evangelical acclamation – ‘preach on’ – to Big D, and Floyd’s gloss on the racial history of pussy consumption, it is possible to give a Tarantinian interpretation of ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ that makes sense of its emphasis on orality and erotic moral instruction. It is clearly the song, conveyed by the sixties’ premier white soul singer, of a young black woman’s initiation, by a white boy, into the delights of oral pleasure: ‘The only one who could ever reach me / was the son of a preacherman / The only boy who could ever teach me /was a sweet lovin’, / sweet talkin’ / son of a preacherman’. While the endless consumption of dicks in ‘Like a Virgin’ testifies to the jouissance demanded by the Other-as-great-fucker (‘Big D’), the oral adoration given to what Jules in Pulp Fiction calls ‘the holiest of holies’ (Tarantino, 1994b: 20), while it confirms the castrating power of the father, sacralises the law of the Other as female, subjecting the father to the general imperative of consumption.

It is a law that has, moreover, become internalised as the quintessentially American superegoic, moral imperative to consume and enjoy for the Other at the expense of one’s own pleasure or that of one’s partner. The law is of course the same for oral consumption in general. While it is Fabienne who, with her breakfast order of ‘a big plate of blueberry pancakes with maple syrup, eggs over easy and five sausages ... a tall glass of orange and a black cup of coffee ... [and] a slice of blueberry pie to go with the pancakes. And on top, a thin slice of melted cheese’ sets the incredible standard demanded by the Other (1994b: 108-9), edible consumer products are frequently cited and – with Jules’s objection to pork excepted – universally and unreservedly affirmed: ‘Uuummmm, that’s a tasty burger’ (26), ‘Uuuuummmm, hits the spot!’ (27), ‘Goddamn! That’s a pretty fuckin’ good milkshake’ (58), ‘Goddamn Jimmie, this is some serious gourmet shit’ (146). Repeated utterances such as these underscore the importance of giving and affirming the oral pleasure of American ideology.

From Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, The Tarantinian Ethics (Sage, 2001).

Songs from The Tarantinian Ethics: Madonna's pain and the ear of the Other

2011-02-24T03:02:00.000-08:00

Pain, the other’s pain, underlines the simultaneously human and inhuman relation between White and Orange: it culminates in a tragically human and inescapably ethical sacrifice of life for the other. Through pain one reaches the limit, the Thing, that articulates ethics and desire:

In brief, Kant is of the same opinion as Sade. For in order to reach das Ding absolutely, to open the flood gates of desire, what does Sade show us on the horizon? In essence, pain. The other’s pain as well as the pain of the subject himself, for on occasions they are simply one and the same thing. To the degree that it involves forcing an access to the Thing, the outer extremity of pleasure is unbearable to us. (Lacan, 1992: 80)

It is pain that guarantees the human relationship. For White, pain proves the authenticity of Orange: ‘that kid in there is dying from a fuckin’ bullet that I saw him take. So don’t be calling him a rat’ (Tarantino, 1994a: 28). Pain draws the subject to the point of death and thereby draws out the truth, just as it does when White’s sacrifice places him in an identical position to Orange.

The ethical question of the other’s pain is raised at the beginning of the film by Mr Brown in his infamous ‘Madonna speech’. His interpretation highlights the function of metaphor by suggesting, emphatically, that ‘the whole song is a metaphor for big dicks’. In so doing, his reading of ‘Like a Virgin’ squarely refutes the version offered by Mr Blonde who proposes, romantically, that ‘it’s about a girl who is very vulnerable and she’s been fucked over a few times. Then she meets some guy who’s really sensitive…’(3). Dismissing this, Brown underscores the crucial experience of pain:

Now she’s gettin’ this serious dick action, she’s feelin’ something she ain’t felt since forever. Pain ... It hurts like the first time. The pain is reminding a fuck machine what it was like to be a virgin. Hence, ‘Like a Virgin’. (4-5)

The pain differentiates machine from human, innocent from habitue, recalling something that has been lost. At its crudest, the reading of ‘Like a Virgin’ affirms phallic law in its most brutal, literal rendering of a subjection. But the loss of an innocent, virginal state as a result of this encounter metaphorically signifies, for the position of the interpreter, a different traumatic, castrating encounter with phallic law. What is raised in the interpretation is the spectre of lack, of subjection to law. For the woman, the experience of pain broaches the Thing at the extremity of pleasure, a pleasure enjoyed, not by the interpreter, Mr Brown, but by another, the Other:

The real father, Freud tells us, is a castrating father. In what way? Through his presence as real father who effectively occupies that person with whom the child is in a state of rivalry, namely, the mother. Whether or not that is the case in experience, in theory there is no doubt about it: the real father is elevated to the rank of Great Fucker – though not, believe me, in the face of the Eternal, which isn’t even around to count the number of times. Yet doesn’t this real and mythical father fade at the moment of the decline of the oedipus complex into the one whom the child may easily have already discovered at the relatively advanced age of five years old, namely, the imaginary father, the father who has fucked the kid up. (Lacan, 1992: 307-8)

‘Like a Virgin’ is about the ‘Great Fucker’: ‘it’s about some cooze who’s a regular fuck machine. I mean all the time, morning, day, night, afternoon, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick’ (Tarantino, 1994a: 4). As ‘fuck machine’ the woman testifies to the jouissance demanded by the Other, the great fucker and castrating father. The myth of the phallus as embodiment of the Other’s jouissance is thus promoted in this reading of ‘Like a Virgin’. It is a reading endorsed by the director who, as actor, performs the speech: ‘I have no doubt in my mind she [Madonna] is going to come to me and say: “Quentin, you’re a hundred per cent right, that’s exactly what the song’s about. And I was laughing my ass off when all these fourteen-year-old girls were singing it.”’ The certainty, however, even as it anticipates authorisation, was deluded: Madonna inscribed a copy of her album Erotica ‘To Quentin – it’s about love, not dick’ (Bernard, 1995: 193). The interpretation, countermanded by an inscription of authority, discovers itself to be fantastical. [NOTE]

But what the interpretation discloses, significantly, is the realm of fantasy determined by the Thing: ‘Freud placed in the forefront of ethical enquiry the simple relationship between man and woman. Strangely enough, things haven’t been able to move beyond that point’ (Lacan, 1992: 87). For Lacan, the relation between the sexes is a nonrelation, a relation only to the objet a which is, precisely, not one, but ‘something of the One’ (1982: 139). Indeed, the nonrelation between Madonna’s and Tarantino’s versions of the song charts an insurmountable difference between male and female fantasy: the myth of the phallus embodied or literalised, is opposed to the myth of romantic union, the phallus idealised. It is a point that, strangely, cannot be surmounted since it figures the gap between the sexes as Thing. Sexual difference is the point on which symbolic castration turns, the point of lack, the very gap, the site of loss and separation marked by the objet a. The differentiating effects of the castrating father thus enjoin the male subject to, and bar him from, the jouissance of the Other.

Since Dogs is framed by the elevation of the great fucker at the beginning of the film and the Other’s explosive assertion of power at its end, in the shape of the LAPD, the position of Joe appears tenuous. Throughout the film, he assumes the role of paternal metaphor: the one who lays down the law, who knows the robbers ‘as men’, who knows their real names, and who is invoked as the one that will take care of things. But his plan is ruined by one Thing: his blindness to Orange. His authority is questioned, his rules broken, his law collapses, the supposed father killed. What Orange introduces and the film dramatises is this collapse, its implosion. The fragmentation, the repetitions and regressions circulate around the central absence that Joe’s law cannot fill. For Lacan, it is ‘the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father in the place of the Other’ and ‘the failure of the paternal metaphor’ that defines psychosis:

We will take Verwerfung, then, to be foreclosure of the signifier. To the point at which the Name-of-the-Father is called – we shall see how – may correspond to the Other, then, a mere hole, which, by the inadequacy of the metaphoric effect will provoke a corresponding hole at the place of the phallic signification. (Lacan, 1977a: 201)

It is precisely around such a hole that Reservoir Dogs turns.

Scene here

But there is one figure for whom there are no holes: Mr Blonde. ‘I guarantee we’ve got a rat in the house’, says Pink. ‘What would ever make you think that?’ replies Blonde. Supremely indifferent to their predicament and unconcerned about his part in it, he replies to the accusations about his trigger-happy response to the alarm sounding with a statement of fact: ‘I told ‘em not to touch the alarm. They touched it. I blew ‘em full of holes. If they hadn’t done what I told ‘em not, they’d still be alive today’ (Tarantino, 1994a: 59). Callously indifferent, ‘a fucking psycho’, he has one thing in his favour, as Pink observes: ‘Right now, Mr Blonde is the only one I completely trust. He’s too fuckin’ homicidal to be workin’ with the cops’ (44). Pink’s vote of confidence is subsequently underscored by the flashback entitled ‘Mr Blonde’. With an almost filial relation to Joe and a fraternal relation to Eddie, the loyalty of Blonde is beyond question: ‘... you don’t lie to a man who’s just done four years in the slammer for ya’, Joe comments to Eddie (50). Unimpeachable in the eyes of the Other, Joe and Pink, Blonde is distinguished as psychotic: he has foreclosed any relation to the Other, ‘his shooting spree in the store’ defining him as a subject of pure expenditure. Without reference to a reality or any law, his actions situate him beyond reason, subject only to his own sovereign pleasure. ‘First off, I don’t have a boss,’ he informs the captured cop. He then goes on:

Now I’m not gonna bullshit you. I don’t really care about what you know or don’t know. I’m gonna torture you for a while regardless. Not to get information, but because torturing a cop amuses me. There’s nothing you can say, I’ve heard it all before. There’s nothing you can do. Except pray for a quick death, which you ain’t gonna get. (1994a: 61)

Without point, use or purpose beyond the value of amusement, the torture scene presents psychosis as that which is detached from any reference to law, usefulness or meaning. Hence the importance of the organ he severs from the body of the captured cop. The ear is what connects the subject to the voice of the Other: in Reservoir Dogs it is presented as an ethical, human organ, the one that, in the absence of visual orientation, connects others to the screaming voice of Orange’s pain. Moreover, the ear is what connects subjects in the film to the Other, the world outside the drama which intrudes from the airwaves in the form of K-Billy’s voice. Blonde switches on the radio, before opening his razor: ‘Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right. Here I am, stuck in the middle with you’ (63), he mouths, assuming the place, the words of the Other. These words signify, for the psychotic, the redundancy of the Other: there is no law, no paternal metaphor, only jokers and clowns. Blonde, moreover, is deaf to the cop’s pleading. Without compassion, he has no relation to the other or the Other and, by severing the other’s ear situates the cop in an identical position, cut off from all law or protection. ‘Mr Blonde just stares into the cop’s / our face, singing along with the seventies hit. Then he reaches out and cuts off the cop’s / our ear’ (63). The script includes the audience in this scene of utter subjection to irrational, tyrannical and ruthless violence. However, in the film, the camera pans away, separating the cop from ‘us’ as ‘we’ effectively turn away from the amputation in an act that may produce relief in not seeing, having no mirror to see an unbearable infliction of pain.

But the moment is heard. It is an ethical moment, opening morality to its own desire. ‘Was that as good for you as it was for me?’ Blonde asks the cop off screen, but it is to ‘us’ that the disembodied voice is really addressed, as we-the-camera stare into the vacant space at the back of the warehouse. Well was it? Yes, clearly, but in a different way. For the audience the (missed) spectacle of the ear amputation is a moral moment that calls up and frustrates moral desire, activating a prurience in withdrawal and disappointment; it is ethical in the way it opens a gap in the moral gaze, leaving an imaginary residue and a sound when it is the real thing that is wanted, the point of abhorrence that is also the place of absolute moral enjoyment and execration.

Tarantino explains just how deliberate, and deliberately moral, was his seduction and thwarting of the audience during this scene. It appears to have been designed precisely to produce this sort of disturbance between desire, morality and the law. As he says in the interview featured on the video of Reservoir Dogs.

In the infamous ‘torture’ scene the use of the song ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ – which is a kind of bouncy, kinda cool song – not only does it not lighten up the scene, it makes the scene even harder to watch. You’re sitting there and you’re watching it, then all of a sudden this tune comes on and you’re tapping your toes, it’s real catchy and everything, Michael Madsen starts doing his little dance, and then ... BOOM! The hard stuff starts. You’re sitting there watching this [hard] stuff, but it’s already too late, you’re already a co-conspirator. You enjoyed the song, you enjoyed his dance, now you’ve got to take the hard stuff. And that’s what makes it so disturbing.

The ‘hard stuff’ introduces the kernel, the hard core, of subjective existence, that which remains least avowable to subject, the objet a. The scene is so traumatic because its use of the song calls up an unconscious self-reproach in the audience that invites an aggressive response, a response, furthermore, that takes its support in a disappointed prurience. Perhaps that is why this scene has become so notorious, has been so singled out with so much moral outrage and so many calls for censorship: and yet it is all directed towards an act that is missing, that has already been censored.

Aesthetic violence, then, becomes ethical if it opens a gap within representation which questions the complicity of desire and law. Aesthetic violence and the violence of aesthetics manifests both a hole in the real and a corresponding rupture in the fabric of the symbolic, the locus of law. In the encounter with the hole all (paternal) metaphors appear inadequate as, in the figure of Blonde, all reason fails and all meaning falters in the face of an absolute negativity that goes beyond, even as it constitutes, the possibility of ethics. The negativity that comes to the fore in Reservoir Dogs pertains to desire that is moral in so far as it appears useless and ineffective: ‘the desire of the Other is apprehended by the subject in that which does not work, in the lacks of the discourse of the Other ...’ (Lacan, 1977b: 214). Desire surpasses the position of the one supposed to be master, Joe, as his own self-reproach acknowledges. For Pink, the desire for the money prevents him walking away from the job. Desire exceeds the Other, it seems, as it raises the problem of the Good alongside that of goods; desire serves no purpose, accedes to no law other than that of desire, attenuating another economy beyond that of meaning and regulated exchange.

This other economy is one of pure expenditure, the explosive expenditure on which the movie climaxes. In Blonde’s irrational, amoral, purposeless violence, it mimics the consumption of commodified culture; it is ‘a shooting spree in the store’, the absolute expenditure, without return, of the consumer’s shopping spree. Excessive expenditure leaves the subject of desire wanting only to the extent that it wants for nothing or, in Felix Guattari’s words, wants only the absolute Other, the ‘diamond of unnameable desire’ (1984: 8), the point of its own extravagant consumption and non-return. The exorbitance of the subject’s desire charts a trajectory that is heterogeneous: toward a sacred point and enmired in utter profanity, a locus of shit and the sacred. Indeed, if Reservoir Dogs has any reference it is, perhaps, to the condition of sovereignty and abjection, to what, in a restricted economy of use and exchange, is held in reserve, the surplus, the profit and the value that serves no useful function, unemployable and unworkable, the dogs, the remains, leftovers of another world of desire, the thieving rabble, the detritus and utter waste of expenditure.

[NOTE]The authority of Mr Brown’s reading is countermanded in the text by Joe in his guise as real father. Mr Brown’s reading is continually being interrupted by Joe as he flicks through an old address book that seems to consist entirely of a list of women’s names, his old flames perhaps. ‘Toby’ … ‘Toby Chew’ … and so on. Just at the point where Mr Brown offers up his conclusion in triumph, Joe declares the reading ‘Wong’. Mr Brown immediately reacts ‘Fuck you, I’m right!’ (Tarantino, 1994a: 5). This demonstrates that the real father of the unconscious knows, even though it doesn’t know it knows. (Hager Weslati)

from Fred Botting & Scott Wilson, The Tarantinian Ethics, London: Sage, 2001

Quentin Tarantino and Cinema's Other Enjoyment

2011-02-19T05:01:00.000-08:00

The London Graduate School and the London Society for the New Lacanian School present a Symposium on Quentin Tarantino and psychoanalysis beyond the paternal principle.1-6pm 4th April, Institute for Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London

Register here

‘Daddy’s dead. Noooo!’ (Tarantino, From Dusk Till Dawn) Tarantino’s movies frequently turn on the abjection of a paternal figure (Marcellus Wallace, Jacob Fuller, Bill, Stuntman Mike), who loses his place and authority to become a redundant figure of consumption and expenditure. Tarantino’s movies themselves, in their restless play of reflexive images and references, are always seeking to produce the maximum in cinematic affect irrespective of the aesthetic unities of generic form, symbolic consistency, realism. This symposium explores the suggestion that Tarantino’s movies best symptomatise a tendency in Hollywood generally where cinema is no longer a vehicle of (anti)Oedipal desire, but a febrile, speculative generator of thrills, pleasures and anxieties swarming along an accelerating death drive which is itself death proof. In Tarantino’s film of the same name, for example, the impotence of itinerant ex-stuntman Mike is the condition of a romance between two iconic automobiles, vehicles not of male potency but an altogether Other jouissance.

INTRODUCTION,
Véronique Voruz, the London Society of the New Lacanian School

TOUGH LOVE,
Marie-Hélène Brousse, practising psychoanalyst in Paris, a member of the École de la Cause freudienne and of the World Association of Psychoanalysis.

TARANTINO’s GIRLS,
Gérard Wajcman, writer, psychoanalyst, curator and art critic. He teaches at the Department of Psychoanalysis of Paris 8 University and is a member of the École de la Cause Freudienne and the World Association of Psychoanalysis.

POST-PHALLIC LIBIDINAL ECONOMIES,
Hager Weslati, London Graduate School, Kingston University.

SCREEN, DRIVE, ROMANCE,
Fred Botting, London Graduate School, Kingston University, co- author of the Tarantinian Ethics (Sage, 2001)

PSYCHE, THAT INGLOURIOUS BASTERD,
Scott Wilson, London Graduate School, Kingston University, co- author of the Tarantinian Ethics (Sage, 2001)

BROUSSE, Marie-Hélène,
Marie-Hélène Brousse is a practising psychoanalyst in Paris, a member of the École de la Cause freudienne and of the World Association of Psychoanalysis. She is an associate professor at the Department of Psychoanalysis of Paris 8 University. She has contributed numerous articles to Lacanian studies, among others in Reading Seminars I and II (SUNY Press: 1996), Reading Seminar XI (SUNY Press: 1995), The Later Lacan (SUNY Press: 2007), and is a regular keynote speaker in the Freudian Field and in universities in Spain, Italy, South America and Australia.

WAJCMAN, Gérard
Gérard Wajcman is a writer, psychoanalyst, curator and art critic. He teaches at the Department of Psychoanalysis of Paris 8 University and is a member of the École de la Cause Freudienne and the World Association of Psychoanalysis. He also directs the Research Centre on the History and Theory of the Gaze. Recent publications include: L’œil absolu (Paris: Denoël, 2010), L’objet du siècle (Verdier, 1998), Collection (Nous: 1999), Fenêtre, chroniques du regard et de l’intime (Verdier: 2004), Les animaux nous traitent mal, photographies de Tania Mouraud (Gallimard, 2008).

BOTTING, Fred
Fred Botting is Professor in the School of Humanities, Kingston University, London. His two most recent books are Limits of Horror (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008) and Gothic Romanced (London: Routledge, 2008). He is co-editor (with Scott Wilson) of Bataille: A Critical Reader (London: Blackwell, 1998). His research interests include cultural and critical theory (psycho- and schiz-analysis); Bataille and general economy; romanticism and postmodernism; techno-poiesis; uncanny media (gothic technologies; cybergothic; neuromanticism); smoking, sublimity, consumption and horror.

WILSON, Scott
Scott Wilson is Professor in the School of Humanities, Kingston University, London. His two most recent books are: The Order of Joy: Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment (SUNY Press, 2008) and Great Satan’s rage: American negativity and rap / metal in the age of supercapitalism (Manchester University Press, 2008). He is co-editor (with Michael Dillon) of the Journal for Cultural Research (Taylor & Francis) and co-editor (with Fred Botting) of The Bataille Reader (Blackwell). His research interests include cultural & critical theory, particularly psychoanalysis and the legacy of Georges Bataille. He is currently working on a book on the audio unconscious.

WESLATI, Hager
Hager Weslati is lecturer in Critical Theory and American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University, London. Her teaching is at the interface of philosophy/ literature; and media/culture. Her research interests are focused on interpretations of Hegelian philosophy and on the critical theories of space with particular interest in nomadology, heterotopias and mobility. Her book chapters include “Travel in Disguise: On Travel Writing and Cultural Governance” in Not So Innocent Abroad: the Politics of Travel and Travel Writing (CSP, 2009); “Deserts in Literary and Religious Fundamentalism” in Literary Encounters of Fundamentalism (Heidelberg UP, 2008); “Aporias of the As If: Derrida’s Kant and the Question of Experience” in Derrida After Kant (Clinamen, 2003). Articles include: “La pensée du désert: the Paradox of Theory and the Narrative of Boom and Bust in Cultural Studies” Tropismes (October, 2010); articles on Lacanian psychoanalysis, philosophy and transference in Journal for Cultural Research ( January, 2007) and Anamorphosis. A Journal of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis and the San Francisco Society for Lacanian Studies. Her translations include articles by Jean Joseph Goux, (in Cultural Values, 1997) and Georges Bataille (in Parallax, 2001). Her current book project is titled “Absolute Error: The Kojevean Century and the Idea of Europe”.

Black Metal Theory @ Kaleidoscope

2011-02-13T12:43:00.000-08:00

Francesco Tenaglia interviews me about Black Metal Theory Symposium II: Melancology here

Neroplatonism 14.01.11

2011-01-16T07:28:00.000-08:00

Text for the paper given at Speculative Medievalisms, Anatomy Theatre, 14 January 2011.

‘Perception is purely a matter of phantoms. Only now and then does this situation break down and lead to two real objects indirectly affecting one another by means of a third. And this is one form of what I call “allure”’. Graham Harman, ‘Offshore Drilling Rig’, Circus Philosophicus.

I Preamble: Bataille and AJ Ayer

I should begin with an apology that I am neither a medievalist nor a speculative realist; I have no authority here. I was invited to participate by Nicola Masciandaro on the basis of my interest in Georges Bataille (who was indeed a medievalist), and whom Nicola suggested might have something to contribute in this area.

But at the same time it is important to note that Bataille is also taken to represent the worst excesses of correlationism not least because of a now notorious conversation with AJ Ayer, in which were also present Merleau Ponty and the physicist (and co-author of The Accursed Share) Giorgio Ambrosini. This conversation, which went on until 3am, involved a (no doubt increasingly drunken) argument as to whether or not you could say that the ‘sun existed before man’. This conversation is cited for example by Simon Critchley in his review in the TLS of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude, the founding text of Speculative Materialism.

The anecdote is recounted by Bataille himself in a short lecture called ‘The Consequences of Nonknowledge’. The reason for the anecdote is not, however, to ridicule Ayer or English philosophy, but on the contrary to disclose the limits of Hegel and Absolute Knowledge. While, on the one hand, there is no question that the statement ‘the sun existed before man’ ‘indicates the perfect non-sense that a reasonable proposition can assume’ since there cannot be an object without a subject, on the other hand this very non-sense makes us uneasy. We should also note what the sun means for Bataille in relation to ‘man’. ‘Man’ has worshiped the sun, bathed in it, sacrificed for it, organized all its ‘heliocentric’ philosophical metaphors around it, turned it into the Apollonian symbol of order, reason, form, illumination, enlightenment and so on; ‘Man’ is inconceivable without the sun and vice versa.

Bataille writes, ‘Honestly, it seems to me that insofar as we remain within discursive considerations, we might indefinitely say that there could not have been a sun before man; however, this also might make us uneasy: a proposition that isn’t logically doubtful, but that makes the mind uneasy, induces in us an imbalance: an object independent of any subject’ (Syst. Nonkn). It is this latter idea of an object independent of any subject that fascinates Bataille, as indeed it does Graham Harman, of course. The failure of language to convey that which isn’t logically doubtful in a form that is both perfect and yet non-sense opens up an abyss not just between French and English philosophy but between himself and the world: ‘I myself am in a world I recognise as profoundly inaccessible to me’.

[BTW. It is perfectly possible to posit that language itself pre-exists both man and the sun, logically, scientifically and speculatively in the sense that 1) language produces the very categories of subject and object, man and sun, that makes such differentiations possible, 2) in the sense that modern humans are an evolutionary product of the invention of language and other systems of signification and symbolization and that 3) there may well have been and currently may be very many cosmic languages out there.]

However, as we know, for Meillassoux the cosmos is ultimately only accessible through mathematics (the meaningless formulae through which God speaks to us in his own language, as Lacan would say). Only mathematics, perhaps, can grasp the laws and forms of the cosmos that are inaccessible to discourse (narrowly conceived) and pre-exist both ‘man’ and the sun. Since we must therefore also say that mathematics pre-exists man, what of that sonic form of maths known as music? Certainly, I would suggest, if we regard music as an open system with the minimal yet quite conventional definition of ‘organized sound’ where, of course, the principle of organization – form – does not originate in human culture. Again this idea is far from unknown; figures as diverse as Stockhausen and Steven Spielberg have speculated that aliens communicate through music.

II Base Idealism
The point I wish to make in this paper, speculatively and playfully titled ‘Neroplatonism’, is that it is the heteronomy of form itself that produces the ‘unease’ through which we do not not know the heterogeneity of objects and the world(s) they inhabit.

And here, for the purposes of this paper, I part company with Bataille even as I draw your attention to two short pieces by him. The first one, ‘Base Materialism and Gnosticism’, points to Bataille’s affinities with the Gnostics, close rivals with the Neoplatonists, but hostile, it is assumed, in part because the former regard base matter as an ‘active principle having its own eternal autonomous existence as darkness', a conception that perhaps could be said to currently have cosmic correlates in the mathematical intuition of dark matter and dark energy etc.

In contrast, it is often suggested that for the Neoplatonists matter is quite different and merely a passive receptacle or a question of simple privation. But on closer inspection this is not always the case. Plotinus states quite clearly that to call matter a receptacle or simply privation would be to define it, and matter is [under erasure] pure indeterminacy, formlessness; it is absolutely alien, other, a darkness within all perceptible darkness; matter lies beyond even the apprehension of shapelessness, colourlessness, sizelessness and so on. It is the Void, but the Void as a manner of being [under erasure] that is absolute difference as relationality.

Thus also for Bataille, the 20thC Gnostic taking up arms against latter day Platonists, base matter is bound up with formlessness: ‘All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.’ (Georges Bataille, ‘Formless’).

An easy objection can be made to this, of course, whether or not one wears a mathematical frock coat. To say that the universe is something like a spider or spit is precisely to give it a form, the form of a spider or spit, of course. But here Bataille is ironically moving from the Gnostic tautology of ‘base matter’ to the more Neoplationic (or at least Petrarchan) realm of affect that can only be conveyed in oxymoron. Spit and spiders are formless forms in the sense that they are phobic objects whose powers of horror reduce many people to a state of abjection beyond all rational control or determination. This is the formlessness of the universe for Bataille, a formlessness that arises as an effect of a form that it is impossible to grasp, an impossibility precisely missed through mathematical formularization. A spider or a gob of spit is not its mathematical form even though it does indeed have a form and this form, beyond the threshold of sense, reduces us (or some of us) to formlessness.

Oxymoron, as the Petrarchan conceit par excellence, is a striking hyperbolic comparison in which, for example, the beloved’s black eyes are the formless forms of delightful agony; incomparably compared to the sun, the icy fire of the ‘bel nero’ of Laura’s eyes are the unfathomable source of the Petrarachan conception of love – a Neoplatonism that as such is always also a Neroplatonism: a Platonism that finds its truth in the black eyes of its beloved.

Neroplatonic love involves, to quote Rime 37 of Petrarch’s Canzionere, that ‘Strange pleasure that in human minds is often found, to love whatever strange thing brings the thickest cloud of sighs!’
[Novo piacer che ne gli ingegni / Spesse volte si trova, / D’amar qual cosa nova / Più folta schiera di sospiri accoglia!] Francesco Petrarch, Rime 37,

Now, as I understand it, speculative realism requires that one’s speculations be grounded in scientific realism, however elaborate they may become, such that, for example, allowing the realist contention that God does not exist does not preclude the possibility that he may come to be in the future. Following suit, then, and drawing on the medieval and renaissance convention of the ‘elaborate conceit’ that allows one to toy with the devices of science, I am going to suggest that Petrarchan Neroplatonism shows that love is not just a form of madness or folly (this is after all highly conventional), not just an affliction caused by an external nonhuman force (again this is a totally conventional idea), but that it is a neurological (or perhaps better, a ‘nerological’) condition that allows us to explore the heteronomy between form and perception. In this sense nerological love is a form of agnosia like amusia or prosopagnosia. These afflictions can be placed under the sign of oxymoron because the former denotes musical noise while the latter concerns faceless faces.

Amusia never concerns simply a case of tone deafness or indifference to music; it does not describe a world of silence so much as the perception of often agonizing noise where there is music. For Vladimir Nabokov, for example, listening to a string quartet felt like being ‘flayed alive’. While the experience is one of formlessness, what produces the experience is a specific form. It is not the nonperception of music, but the perception of music as painful noise. The notion of amusia also therefore presupposes that music can disclose a fissure in the brain’s model of external reality that frames phenomenal experience, hinting at a reality outside that model: the unknown impulse that generates painful ‘amusic’. The ‘malfunction’ of the system of perception and aural object recognition, the disjunction between the brain and its reality, is betrayed by the a-musical repetition of noise, then. Similarly, for prosopagnosia, the non-recognition of faces remains predicated upon an abstract model of the face. Confusion, distress, meaninglessness is predicated upon the perception of an abstract face-shape.

In its positing of a highly generic face comprised of a blazon of conventional features (golden hair, black eyes, ruby lips etc.), there could be said to be something prosopagnosic about the poetry of courtly love even though the praise of the beloved’s face is both the condition and the means of the production of poetic subjectivity. Further, it closely delineates love as an effect of a relation between form and perception, enhanced to a large degree by the influence of Neoplatonism that corresponds to the process whereby ‘object recognition is accomplished by repeatedly transforming the retinal imput into stimulus representations with increasingly greater abstraction’ (3). To quote Petrarchan scholar Isabella Bertoletti, ‘Petrarch relies on the enumeration of a limited number of formularized discrete physical attributes that he re-iterates hypnotically, attributes which never come together as a portrait’ (Bertoletti, ‘Mourning Laura’) This is exactly how people with prosopagnosia seek to recognise people in the absence of an ability to perceive the face as a whole.

In Neroplatonic love, then, we have the experience of agony, distress, catastrophe predicated not just on the general, abstract form of a beautiful face, but in particular, the piercing ‘bel nero’ of its gaze, to which the lover returns hypnotically. These eyes, the paradoxical light of the Ideal that emerges from impenetrable blackness only to reduce its object to formless agony, are both the cause and effect of the prosopagnosia of neroplatonic love.

Both amusia and prosopagnosia are examples of associative agnosia ‘in which perception seems adequate to allow recognition, and yet recognition cannot take place’ (Farah). In Tauber’s phrase, it involves ‘a normal percept stripped of its meaning’. Agnosias like amusia are useful for neuroscience in ascertaining the contingent and modular (evolutionary) nature of perceptual apparatuses and neural ‘knowledge’ systems that abstract and pattern the object-‘stuff’ of perception. At the limit, the loss of certain phenomenal ‘qualities’ may imply the emergence of new forms, and indeed new forms of knowledge (Metzinger).

Neuroscience, then, in its general discussion of the agnosias (and there are many different kinds) seems to be operating with quasi- if not neo-platonic categories that involve a clear distinction between form and matter or, in their words, between neuro-computational forms that give shape to the base ‘stuff’ of perception that lacks form. To quote Farah,

Early vision has been characterised as representing ‘stuff’ rather than ‘things’, meaning that the visual system initially extracts information about local visual properties before computing the larger scale structure of the image. In many ways, visual form agnosia can be described as preserved stuff vision in the absence of thing vision. What is striking about visual form agnosia is the complex nature of the stuff that can be represented in the absence of things. The perception of depth, velocity, acuity, and especially color (as opposed to wavelength), which are at least roughly intact in many visual form agnostics, requires considerable cortical computation. These computations yield a kind of rich but formless (my emphasis) goo, which requires some additional and separately lesionable grouping process to represent objects. (Farah, Visual Agnosia).

It is this other neural grouping, or faculty of the mind, rather than perception per se, that has the facility of apprehending the form of things supposed to shape the base matter of perception. The question, therefore, concerns the formal relation between inside and outside. While apprehension of the order of things seems to be primarily a process of intellection, it would not be scientifically realist to presume that form is solely an effect or trick of the mind in contradistinction to the formless gooey stuff perceptible by our senses out there in the great outdoors. The dark matter of perceptible reality requires considerable computational power even before it can be rendered into the ‘formless goo’ out of which the faculty of the mind is able to perceive or apprehend or intuit the ‘platonic’ or mathematizable ideas that inhabit it, no doubt as an effect of evolutionary adaptation.
In this new neoplatonic neuroscience, then, reality is only perceptible as an Idea recognized by certain neural groupings in the brain out of the goo of spurious perceptions computed by other areas of the brain crunched from the mass of data introduced by the senses. The brain can only reconstruct or represent the Idea out of a mass of spurious computations of matter. Ironically, this structure is similar to the way Plotinus suggests we can intuit the existence of matter itself divest of any Idea or heterogeneous to any particular form.

In Plotinus’s account matter escapes all rational apprehension and can only be intuited, as Plato himself suggests, through ‘spurious reasoning’. In his account he relies on the metaphor of darkness:

The eye is aware of darkness as a base capable of receiving any colour not yet seen against it: so the Mind, putting aside all attributes perceptible to sense – all that corresponds to light – comes upon a residuum which it cannot bring under determination: it is thus the state of the eye which, when directed towards darkness, has in some way become identical with the object of its spurious vision (Plotinus, Enneads).

For matter to be intuited, therefore, both the eye and the Mind have to construct a (spurious) vision of darkness (or formless goo, let’s say) in order to sense something within it, the ‘darker’ darkness of matter itself. ‘With what is perceptible to it’, that is, the eye/mind, says Plotinus, ‘there is presented something else: what it can directly apprehend it sets on one side as its own; but the something else which Reason rejects, this, the dim, it knows dimly, this, the dark, it knows darkly, this it knows in a sort of non-knowing’ (Plotinus: 100).
What is interesting, then, about this new neoplatonic science with regard to agnosias like amusia and prosopagnosia is that it is the very form itself that produces the effect of formlessness or radical indetermination. Indetermination is determined, somehow, on the very basis of form; a deeper formlessness is determined by the very indetermination immanent to form: that is, impossibly, form is formlessness, music is noise, a face is a faceless void, and sovereign beauty the terror of indeterminate chaos.

III The Specious Vision of Death
At this point, if there were time, I would conclude with a commentary on Petrarch’s Rime 323 in the above terms. This is one of the most beautiful poems in the sequence, a Visions of Ruin poem that re-iterates Ovidian themes and images from Rime 23 but also laments the trauma of love in a fuller development of the lines from Rime 37 I quoted earlier where love’s strange pleasure is ‘to love whatever strange thing brings the thickest cloud of sighs!’ It is a poem, like all of them ultimately, about death and writing, [note Petrarch’s anticipation of Blanchot], it suggests, I could propose somewhat anachronistically, that poetry’s creation of a new or strange thing (cosa nova), that is to say new and strange thoughts and feelings in the formation of new neural circuits, arises as an effect of love’s trauma; the mental disorder or catastrophe that is love, and the death that it pre-figures and anticipates.

In Rime 323 the strange/new pleasure is elaborated in six emblematic visions of ruin and mourning traditionally associated with the death of Laura from the plague on 6 April 1348, the same date as his innamoramento, his falling in love, as he writes in Rime 211 (see also 336). [Note The convergence between the dates is also noted in 30, 50, 62, 79, 101, 107, 1 18, 122, 145, 212, 221, 266, 271, 278, 364, ranging from 1334 to 1358]. Six visions of ruinous beauty and the beauty of ruin offer complex forms of always reversible allegory. The hind, the ship, the laurel tree, the fountain, the phoenix and the Bella Donna are ‘all emblems for Laura [that] at sometime or other also stands for the lover, and vice versa’ (During). If Laura is the laurel, the lover turns into a laurel; if she is the beautiful deer he is hunting, he is an Acteaon (and, again, in 323 she is torn apart by dogs); if he becomes a fountain of tears, she is a fountain of inspiration (but is it Narcissus’ pool?) ... the myths are constantly being transformed’ (During). Narcissus is certainly referenced in the final emblem. While the snake bite of course recalls Eurydice, she falls bowed like a flower when plucked.

It has often been noted that the myth of Narcissus, from Ovid to Freud, provides the classical pattern for the psychic structure of love and love poetry. As it is indeed also the structure of Neoplatonism assuming we recognise the Neoplatonic universe as the Empire of the One. Speaking of which, I am fond of Lacan’s wry remark on the Platonism of scientific reason when he affirms that yes, of course, ‘we proceed on the basis of the One ... The One engenders science’, but not, he quickly adds, in the sense of measurement, that is not what is important. Rather, ‘what distinguishes modern science … is precisely the function of the One, the One in so far as it is only there, we can assume, to represent solitude – the fact that the One doesn’t truly knot itself with anything that resembles the sexual Other’ (1999: 128). The insistence of the Other which, as we know from Lacan, does not exist, is an effect of the ‘One-missing’ (1999: 129). It is for this very reason that the One can be said to be both transcendent and immanent to the many, the worlds of objects which exist but with which there is no relation. Or rather, there are only indirect relations by means of a third, the principle of the many (see also Lacan on Tao The Ching], the obscure form(s), both alluring and dissonant, that articulates the two and denotes the impossibility of their complementarity, harmony or synthesis.

‘Perception is purely a matter of [alluring] phantoms’ writes Graham Harman, by means of which two real objects indirectly affect one another in the absence of any direct relation or recognition (see also Harman, 51): a face, for example, and some water. Less often noted than its function as the paradigm of romance, the myth of Narcissus is the first recorded instance of prosopagnosia. Narcissisus’s love for his own reflection must be predicated on the fact that he fails to recognise the face as his own. And this is indeed how the myth is sometimes translated. Dryden for example writes,

For as his own bright image he survey'd,
He fell in love with the fantastick shade;
And o'er the fair resemblance hung unmov'd,
Nor knew, fond youth! it was himself he lov'd.
Ovid, Metamorphoses (trans. Garth, Dryden et al)

But after all, what kind of sublime idiot would pine away at an image if he knew it to be his own? At the heart of the myth of Narcissus, hidden it seems from view, is the tale of a profound alienation predicated upon a disjunction, a radical heteronomy between perception and form, eye and brain, subject and object. Yet Narcissisus looks upon himself as something strange and new, someone or something utterly not himself that he cannot not love even though it brings the thickest cloud of sighs (not least from the amusiac song of Echo’s echo of Narcissus’s amorous dissonance). Each of Petrarch’s reversible emblems in rime 323 take this Narcissistic structure but disclose the radical heteronomy at the heart of the myth.

The key to this is perhaps the emblem of the phoenix which, here, does not rise again from the ashes of death. Classical symbol of re-birth and resurrection, the phoenix is described in explicitly Neoplatonic form as the celestial immortality of Form itself, the Idea that breathes new life into dead matter. But here it commits suicide, destroys itself in the face of the preceding visions of ruin. ‘All things’, it seems, ‘fly towards their end’ even the Ideas that animate them. There is a darker principle that determines the fate even of form, the indeterminacy that is represented by the Idea of death. Death is only ever an Idea, of course (see Weslati); it is not something that we can actually experience. Death is the essential Idea through which we speaking beings console ourselves that this doesn't go on for ever. Death doesn’t mean anything to science; it is just the transformation of matter. The Idea of death is a spurious vision, but through it one ‘comes across a residuum which it cannot bring under determination’. Looking deep into the beautiful black, ‘bel nero’, eyes of death one becomes ‘somehow identical with the strange new thing [cose nove] behind it, the force of absolute exteriority that transforms the psyche: the indeterminate determination of all indeterminacy. ...

Given this radical indetermination, even death is not the end, as Petrarch writes in the final lines of Rime 328, in which the dead black eyes of Laura address his own eyes and speak to him, ‘Her beautiful eyes ... with chaste, strange shining said to my eyes: ‘Peace be with You, dear friends; never again here, no, but we shall see each other again elsewhere’
[Li occhi belli ... Dicean lor con faville oneste et nove: / “Rimanetevi in pace, o cari amici: Qui mai più, no, rivedremne altrove’ (328: 9, 12-14.)]

IV Coda
All kinds of speculative possibilities of the new and the strange glint in the bel nero eyes of death’s spurious vision, even eyes that speak, though whether they are speaking only of madness in grief, mourning and melancholy is another question. Throughout its history, of course, from the Troubadours to Andre Breton’s Amor fou, love has been regarded as a mental disturbance, madness, folly. One of the symptoms of love’s psychosis can be a numerological obsession with dates and numbers. April 6, the date of Petrarch’s innamoramento and Laura’s death from the plague in 1348, lies at the heart of the Canzoniere’s elaborate numerological system based around the number 6. For example in Rime 323, the six emblematic visions of Laura’s death are conveyed in 12 lines each (3+3x2); the whole sequence itself comprises of 366 poems, that’s 6x60+6. As my metal chums will know, that’s the Sign of the Beast. Appropriately, then, I shall round off my talk with a song, from Black Metal band 1349, named after the date the plague which killed Laura de Noves reached Norway, and which ‘welcomes the darkness that fills my soul / and is blessed by the madness of the Chaos star’ (1349, ‘Manifest’).

Neroplatonism

2010-12-11T13:26:00.000-08:00

‘The One engenders science. Not in the sense of the one as measurement. It is not what is measured in science that is important. ... What distinguishes modern science from the science of antiquity ... is precisely the function of the One, the One insofar as it is only there, we can assume, to represent solitude’. Jacques Lacan, XX.

Ma l’ora e ‘l giorno ch’ io le luci apersi
Nel bel nero
Francesco Petrarch, Rime Sparse 29.

‘All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.’ Georges Bataille, ‘Formless’.

Novo piacer che ne gli ingegni
Spesse volte si trova,
D’amar qual cosa nova
Più folta schiera di sospiri accoglia
Petrarch, Rime 37.

'What is striking about visual form agnosia is the complex nature of the stuff that can be represented in the absence of things. The perception of depth, velocity, acuity, and especially color (as opposed to wavelength), which are at least roughly intact in many visual form agnostics, requires considerable cortical computation. These computations yield a kind of rich but formlessgoo, which requires some additional and separately lesionable grouping process to represent objects.'
Farah, Visual Agnosia.

With what is perceptible to [the eye/mind] there is presented something else: what it can directly apprehend it sets on one side as its own; but the something else which Reason rejects, this, the dim, it knows dimly, this, the dark, it knows darkly, this it knows in a sort of non-knowing’.
Plotinus: Enneads, 100).

For I have seen beyond the stars
I have felt the strength of chaos
I have reached the point of sanity
And was married by the Chaos star
I welcomed the darkness that filled my soul
I was blessed by the madness of the Chaos star
1349, ‘Manifest’

Melancology: Black Metal Theory Symposium II

2010-11-28T03:49:00.000-08:00

‘Earthly thought embraces perishability (i.e. cosmic contingency) as its immanent core …. such perishability … grasps the openness of Earth towards the cosmic exteriority not in terms of concomitantly vitalistic / necrocratic correlations (as the Earth’s relationship with the Sun) but alternative ways of dying and loosening into the cosmic abyss … The only true terrestrial ecology is the one founded on the unilateral nature of cosmic contingency against which there is no chance of resistance – there are only opportunities for drawing schemes of complicity ... Hence, the Cartesian dilemma, “What course in life shall I follow?” should be bastardized as “Which way out shall I take?”’ -- Reza Negarestani, ‘Solar Infernal and the earthbound Abyss’

Black metal irrupts from a place already divested of nature, a site of extinction, ‘a place empty of life / Only dead trees …’ (Mayhem, ‘Funeral Fog’, 1992); ‘Our skies are forever black / Here is no signs of life at all’ (Deathspell Omega, ‘From Unknown Lands of Desolation’, 2005). As such black metal could be described as a negative form of environmental writing; the least Apollonian of genres, it is terrestrial – indeed subterranean and infernal – inhabiting a dead forest that is at once both mythic and real unfolding along an atheological horizon that marks the limit of absolute evil where there are no goods or resources to distribute and therefore no means of power and domination, a mastery of nothing.

A new word is required that conjoins ‘black’ and ‘ecology’: melancology, a word in which can be heard the melancholy affect appropriate to the conjunction. A new word implies a new concept and we know from Deleuze and Guattari that concepts have to fulfil three criteria. Accordingly, the plane of immanence of melancology is extinction and non-being. All things are destined for extinction; immanent to all being is the irreducible fact of its total negation without reserve or remainder. The development of the characteristics of melancology is to be addressed at the Symposium, of course, but there are already a number of apophasic determinations: it is not ecology, it is anorganic; it is not political economy, it is anti-instrumental; it is not love of nature, environmentalism, Gaia, geophilosophy … But it implies an ethos and a style that delineates the third aspect of the concept, its embodiment in a conceptual personae: the black metal kvltist whose ethos runs across the spectrum of melancholy from bile and rage to sorrow, depression and the delectation of evil all the better to affirm the desolation s/he contemplates in the sonorous audibility of black metal’s sovereign dissonance.

This environment of absolute evil is exactly the same as the absolute good of black metal itself: the expenditure of a sonic drive that propels a blackened self-consciousness, a melancological consciousness without object that is the necessary prior condition to any speculation on or intervention in the environment.

The Black Metal Theory Symposium thus invites speculation and interventions on the blackening of the earth, landscapes of extinction, starless aeon, sempiternal nightmares, black horizons, malign essences, Qliphothic forces from beyond … in a general re-conceptualization of black ecology.
Details and registration HERE.

Scott Wilson, ‘Introduction to Melancology’.
Amelia Ishmael, ‘Metal’s Formless Presence in Contemporary Art’.
Elliot A. Jarbe, ‘Beyond Melancology: Hüzüncology and the Thymotic ’.
Drew Daniel, ‘Towards the Re-Occultation of Black Blood’.
Liviu Mantescu, ‘Suddenly, life lost new meaning: Melancology as another new age
metaphor for transcendental encounters’.
Dominik Irtenkauf, ‘To The Mountains or: rocking against melancholy. The implications of black metal's geophilosophy’.
Steven Shakespeare, ‘A Machine for Breaking Gods: Unity, Nature and Ritual in US Black Metal’.
Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Wormsign’.
Aspasia Stephanou, ‘Black Sun-Blank Metal Perversion’.
Eugene Thacker, 'Sound of the Abyss'
Ben Woodard, ‘Irreversible Sludge: Troubled Energetics, Eco-purification and Self-Inhumanization’.
Hager Weslati, ‘Going to Hell in Northern Deserts’.
Evan Calder Williams, ‘The hot wet breath of extinction’.
Reza Negarestani, ‘ ‘.
Mark Patrick Oughton, ‘Visions of Kali: Attack Sustain Release’ (Video installation)
Niall Scott, ‘Blackening the Green'.
Concluding remarks and Introduction to Abgott

Abgott (Live performance)

David Lynch in Theory edited by Francois-Xavier Gleyzon

2010-11-18T11:59:00.000-08:00

"This stunning collection of twelve essays and an interview with Michel Chion can be likened to as many shock waves cutting through David Lynch's cinema and photography. Each and every one informed by critical methods up to speed with the work, the essays become, in the strong sense of the term, events. Some touch on electric attraction and breakage, others on the ghost-like nature of the cinema, others on creative abjection and fetishism. Written by experts, filmmakers and artists, all discern, as Chion notes in the final pages, the strong degree to which Lynch is a commanding auteur of our time. Francois- Xavier Gleyzon is to be congratulated for having engineered an explosive work that opens Lynch and film theory onto unforeseen lines of inquiry."--Tom Conley, Harvard University

"Francois-Xavier Gleyzon has brought together a brilliant set of critical essays on the iconic hero of lost forms, David Lynch. Probing, fearless and scrupulous, the volume stays close to the pained exactitude of an unrelenting oeuvre, strongly supporting its troubled and abjected areas, the glacial vocabularies and spectral prods that have made Lynch unbypassable, necessary and enduring."--Avital Ronell, New York University

"David Lynch in Theory takes us deeper into the heart of Lynch's art than the artist himself ever could, because it registers not only the seismic shudders and wild eclecticism of his studio practices, but traces the effects of his work on the sensoria of a brilliantly selected array of critical perspectives. This marvelous collection will be required reading for any further study of Lynch's art."--W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago

"Francois-Xavier Gleyzon's new collection of essays on David Lynch makes a compelling case for the urgency of Lynch's work, today more than ever. These lucid interrogations of Lynch's unfolding oeuvre, including essays by some of the very best psychoanalytic and philosophical film critics, stitch together the pieces of a fantasy in which Eraserhead feels as contemporary as Inland Empire. Essential reading for scholars and students working in film and theory, and those of us whose waking dreams are haunted by snatches of sound and light from Lynch's singular art."--Kenneth Reinhard, UCLA

CONTENTS

FRANCOIS-XAVIER GLEYZON
INTRODUCTION: DAVID LYNCH’S SEISMOGRAPH 1

TODD MCGOWAN
THE MATERIALITY OF FANTASY: THE ENCOUNTER
WITH SOMETHING IN INLAND EMPIRE 8

GREG HAINGE
RED VELVET: LYNCH’S CINEMAT(OGRAPH)IC ONTOLOGY 24

GARY BETTINSON
ERASERHEAD: COMPREHENSION, COMPLEXITY,
& THE MIDNIGHT MOVIE 40

DOMINIQUE DE COURCELLES
“WAKING DREAMS ARE THE ONES THAT ARE IMPORTANT”
NOT BELONGING TO EITHER, SOUND & IMAGE, & TIME 58

SCOTT WILSON
NEURACINEMA 70

ALANNA THAIN
RABBIT EARS: LOCOMOTION IN LYNCH’S INLAND EMPIRE 86

JASON T. CLEMENCE
“BABY WANTS BLUE VELVET”: LYNCH & MATERNAL NEGATION 101

JOSHUA D. GONSALVES
“I’M A WHORE”: “ON THE OTHER SIDE” OF INLAND EMPIRE 117

REBECCA ANNE BARR
THE GOTHIC IN DAVID LYNCH: PHANTASMAGORIA & ABJECTION 132

LOUIS ARMAND
THE MEDIUM IS THE FETISH 147

ERIC G. WILSON
SICKNESS UNTO DEATH: DAVID LYNCH & SACRED IRONY 157

FRANCOIS-XAVIER GLEYZON
LYNCH, BACON & THE FORMLESS 166

GARY BETTINSON & FRANCOIS-XAVIER GLEYZON
DAVID LYNCH & THE CINEMA D’AUTEUR: A CONVERSATION
WITH MICHEL CHION 182

FILMOGRAPHY 188

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

The Leader of the Pack (Freud and The Shangri-las)

2010-10-30T07:45:00.000-07:00

Produced by the legendary Shadow Morton, ‘Leader of the Pack’ locates Charles Darwin's dominant male in the midst of the Blackboard Jungle of an American High School in the early 1960. As Ellie Greenwich, one of the writers recalls, it is about ‘that bad guy that every girl wanted to go out with ... then there was the motorbike. Back in the sixties, when you started making money, you’d buy a motorcycle’. Just as, on the lawless plains of Africa according to Darwin, it is the biggest, baddest primate who hoards all the females, so it is the meanest, coolest guy on the fastest motorbike who ‘every girl’ wants to go out with, particularly in popular post-war High School myth. In ‘Totem and Taboo’, Freud does not argue with Darwin's evolutionary reasoning about sexual selection in The Descent of Man, but does note that human societies have always involved prohibitions, notably on murder and incest. Freud speculates that these prohibitions arose out of the violent sacrifice of the tyrannical leader, his authority becoming internalized, through shared guilt, as moral law. Freud's lesson to modernity, then, is that the death of God leads not to a liberation of enjoyment, but to a redoubling of its prohibition.

The Shangri-las reject this model. For Freud, a mythical originary act of rebellion and murder retroactively grounds law in a guilty parricide. The Shangri-las rewrite this this myth for the post-war baby boom generation, its romantic rebellion introducing a new law of consumption in place of prohibition. The Shangri-las’ myth discloses that modernity has moved into a new phase: they sing from a different position to the murderous sons and brothers, and without the strange remorse that derives, Freud speculates, from a disappointment at discovering that no man can individually occupy the dominant place, consequently prohibiting it. Their anti-oedipal tale is told from the point of view of the women, a position neglected by Freud. But not by Lacan, who suggests, in Seminar XVII, that the women would have had other ideas.

The Shangri-las' version of ‘Totem and Taboo’ is, fittingly, not a macho tale of male rivalry, violence and tragedy, but a romance in which death and melodrama are, of course, key elements. Named after an imaginary earthly paradise -- the hidden valley in J. Hilton’s Lost Horizon -- resonating with an all-too conventional promise of some feminine verdant cleft, the Shangri-las foreground the kind of utopian bliss, or Nirvana, that Freud associated with the death-drive. Though, on first hearing, 'The Leader of the Pack' seems to describe a tale of male rivalry and prohibition: the tyrannical nature of paternal law is negatively affirmed and atoned for by the sacrifice of the young biker who assumes a symbolic place in death. 'Is that Jimmie's ring you're wearing?' Jimmie reminds us of Jimmie Dean, crash dead by the time this song was a hit, and already the symbolic leader of a new rebellious generation of baby boomers. The function of the Ego-Ideal is transferred, via the crash, to the signifier in whose name rebellion is authorised, and an unspeakable jouissance promised.

But this would be to misread the song. For a start, it is clear that the romance between Betty and Jimmie has not been forbidden absolutely. In order for the paternal function to shift smoothly from father to surrogate son, the father would have had to have uttered the classic paternal prohibition: 'you will go out with that bad lad over my dead body!' Jimmie's sacrifice then guarantees the transfer of paternal authority on the father's terms. However, this is not what happens at all. While Betty's folks complain about Jimmie, are always 'putting him down', and are apparently unhappy about his background, they do not stop her riding with him on a regular basis and having a great time. All the other High School girls are jealous. She's even wearing his ring. Then, 'one day', she decides to find someone new. Her father's law is invoked, but as a law that demands novelty rather than moral judgement. He is not reported as saying 'find someone better', in a moral sense, but merely 'find someone new'. The suspicion remains, then, that Betty's invocation of paternal law is simply an alibi. While her father, no doubt slumped in front of the tube watching re-runs of 'I Love Lucy', remains vaguely disgruntled, it is Betty herself who has decided she needs a new boyfriend. As her friends say 'What do you mean when you say you better go find somebody new?' The Leader of the Pack is nonplussed: 'He stood there and asked me why?' Che vuoi?’ Poor Jimmie pathetically inquires after the desire of the Other, but is met with silence: 'All I could do was cry'. Clearly, Betty is bored and is looking for someone with a better, faster bike. At least, this is how Jimmie interprets her tears as he accelerates off in a vain and fatal attempt to go faster, to keep up the demanding pace. The song is of course about amorous rejection. Betty knows that the Leader of the Pack is no mean, bad lad: he's just a bit sad, the cause of regret and a few tears, but no great loss and easily upgradable.

The Shangri-las' 'Leader of the Pack' re-writes Freud's originary myth according to a more arbitrary and technological law of novelty, consumption and performance. 'I met him in the Candy Store'. The initial scene of the romance is set in a conventional place of conspicuous adolescent and pre-adolescent consumption of pure luxury items: the Candy Store points towards the sumptuous spectacle of the shopping mall and an abundance of choice, an excess of sweet tempting options. The relationship is no different: Betty, wearing his ring, appears as the choicest sweetmeat of the saccharine horde that he is supposed to lord over. But it is Betty who sets the standard of performance for the male subject, Jimmie, who is precisely subject to the law of the commodity himself. Ultimately, he is no better than, and as replaceable as, his technological prosthesis, his bike. And it is of course the bike, purring and growling at significant points throughout the record that is its real star and selling point. The Leader of the Pack, a potential Ego-ideal like Jimmie Dean, is dependent upon the technological processes that endlessly reproduce his image, to supplement and replace it with a host of Elvises, Marlons, Marilyns or whoever.

The motorbike is pre-eminently, in postwar America, the signifier of transgression, crossing thresholds and barriers. The result of technological innovation and a human desire for speed and thrills, the motorbike ideologically embodies the pioneering spirit of the lone rider of the West, the vehicle of the urban cowboy's 'rebellious' phallic narcissism. But the Shangri-las' 'Leader of the Pack' suggests that this narcissism is staged for the gaze of the Other who always demands more: be more daring, make it bigger, harder, faster: paternal law is secondary to the demand or imperative that seems to drive technological innovation for its own sake: keep up with the pace of the machine that is always just that bit faster, adapt to its always new horizons ... or die in the process. By becoming the very locus of material existence, by marking its threshold, technology functions as the Other: the reservoir of an Other knowledge and, at the limit of that knowledge, an Other jouissance that exceeds the phallic imaginings of the subject. This would therefore be the meaning of the crash for the subject who crashes in this epoch of the incorporated crash: that there is no relation to the crashing machine.

From Fred Botting and Scott Wilson ‘Venus in Foam’ New Formations 46 (2002): 64-84.

‘Hamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow)’: Songs from the Botting & Wilson archive (occasional series)

2010-10-22T03:10:00.000-07:00

POW POW POW

Grinding wire, rumbling skin, taut metal slice, blood drawn strings.
Voice retching down a well of misery, spelling it out.

aytch … chayh … yemmh … mhell …

…yyeaeuuURrrGHh

POW!!

‘Hamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow)’. The Birthday Party plays a Hamlet of Bataillean proportions. Nick Cave sings Bataille now in a performance that sketches in, allusively, various philosophical incarnations of Shakespeare’s most perverse character.

Hamlet got a gun, now,
he wears a crucifix

Priestly, prophetic, sovereign in his visionary expenditure, the German Romantic Hamlet appears in all his doomed, artistic individualism: heroically, vainly, struggling against the overwhelming torrent of historical destiny. Hegel’s Hamlet, for example, moving beyond ‘the rightful sense of vengeance’ and a forced violation of morality, is a figure whose ‘real collision’ turns on the ‘particular personality’, on the ‘inner life’ ‘whose noble soul is not steeled to this type of energetic activity’. Similarly, for Goethe, time is out of joint because a pure, noble and moral nature is not up to the performance of the great action for which events call, sinking, instead, under a burden it cannot bear. The noble soul of Goethe and Hegel is unable to meet the demands of destiny, a human destiny that, for Schlegel, becomes enmired in the ‘dark complexity’ of world events. For Tieck, the dark passions are those of the melancholic soul cursed with the gift of an unbearable interiority, an accursed hole, ‘these beautiful contradictions from which nearly every gifted individual suffers’. But

don’t let ‘em steal your heart away
he went and stole my heart POW!

Hamlet’s heart is gone. Yet still Hamlet refuses to give up on his desire. ‘Is this love?’ Hamlet also appears as an amorous, anguished individual animated by an uncanny object of adoration and animosity: ‘I believe our man’s in love’, ‘some kinda love’. Some kind of love: for Charles Lamb it is a ‘supererogatory love’, ‘love awkwardly counterfeiting hate’. Hence the confrontation between Hamlet and Romeo.

WHEREFORE ART THOU BABY-FACE?

‘Hamlet got a gun’, he’s a vengeful pursuer seeking out his Romantic double; he is loverman, master of love-hate drawn out to the extreme limit of Romantic subjectivity and

he likes the look of that CADILLAC
POW POW POW POW

The gangster of love’s on a death drive.

Hamlet’s fishin’ in the grave
thru’ the custard bones
he ain’t got no friends in there

The melancholic subject seeks the impossible: a lost object in the hole in the real, the very point of nonknowledge, according to Lacan, around which the symbolic cannot close, the hole that pulls the symbolic out of joint. As Lacan insisted, ‘we do not know what happened [to Antigone] in the sepulchre any more than we know what goes on when Hamlet goes down into the sepulchre’. This rupture is also characterized by Lacan as the limit where the possibility of metamorphosis is located. When, for example, Antigone goes fishing in the grave to re-cover the corpse of her brother she begins to moan like a bird that has lost its young. Hamlet, however, becomes Ophelia, his own lost object:

Hamlet moves so beautiful
walking thru’ the flowers …

Down in the hole, Hamlet follows the logic of the signifier outlined by Lacan in ‘Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet’, but with a difference. The young Dane assumes the identity of Ophelia, and then, with a gun and a crucifix, he rises from the grave as phallus. But Hamlet rises as phallus but only to raze it to the ground. Already continuous with his lost object of love, Hamlet’s identity further splits as he goes in vengeful pursuit of the ghost whose place he has taken:

now he’s movin down my street
and he’s coming to my house
crawling up my stairs

Hamlet shadows the ghost of his father, the deadly, fantasmatic double whose visored gaze demands action and revenge. Beyond morality, Hamlet turns his gun on the law in a moment of homicidal expenditure: POW POW POW

* * *

POW POW POW

'Is this love?’ In love, Hamlet encounters the movement of extreme states which, for Bataille, mean he is torn from ‘isolate being’ and opened to ‘what’s beyond itself, to what is beyond the couple even – monstrous excess’. It charts a movement from a desire for union and decision to a lacerating, catastrophic leap. POW POW POW With laughter that ‘opens me up infinitely’, there is a laceration in which being ‘slips into indecisiveness, turns into interference, splits apart’; Hamlet’s indecisiveness becomes a mortal wound: ‘there’s an infinite gaping in laughter, something mortally wounded – this is nature, violently suspending itself’.

Laughter remains an erotic experience and as such it ‘waits upon chance’. Eroticism, Bataille states, ‘always entails a breaking down of established patterns, the patterns … of the regulated social order basic to our discontinuous mode of existence as defined and separate individuals’. Eroticism fucks with communication even as it remains at its base:

For those who understand communication as laceration, communication is sin or evil. It’s a breaking of the established order. Laughter, orgasm, sacrifice (so many failures harrowing the heart) all manifest anguish; in them, a person is anguished, seized and held tight, possessed by anguish. (Bataille)

But the negativity of sovereignty, the eroticism which veers uncontrollably towards death, expends the individuated being beyond the anguish of death, towards the me that is not me, to a real that is not real, impossible … ‘to be or not to be is a question that can never be seriously (logically) raised’. HA-HA-Hamlet.

Sovereign man dies like an animal in the act of living sovereignly, freed from the anguish of death. The sovereign resists individual consciousness, his ‘playful impulse’ ‘proves stronger in him that the considerations that govern work’ … This impulse demands transgression; it enjoins rebellion, provoking the desire to move beyond usefulness, slavish work and the negation that death introduces into the domain of servile existence. … Sovereign play finds its ‘greatest affirmation’ in the killing of the king for it displays a king who cannot die, for whom ‘death is nothing’: ‘it is that which his presence denies, that which his presence annihilates even in death, that which his death itself annihilates’.

Crawlin’ up my stairs
WHEREFORE ART THOU BABY-FACE?
Where-for-art-thou?
POW POW POW POW

POW POW POW POW

Hamlet’s act means he becomes phallus, no longer subordinated to it. Through his moment of sovereign expenditure Hamlet becomes king and dies, sacrificed to the signifier of deathlessness that erases and exhumes him, turning substance into energy, returning him to the ghostly, fatal power that has moved him throughout his performance and beyond it.

Sovereign negativity, as it sacrifices individual identity, as it transgresses all limits, does not become frozen before the mirror, the double of the signifier. Hamlet, spitting bullets in the face of death, discharges signifiers in the grave of the double; Hamlet, fishing in the hole that remains in him more than him, rends life’s fabric and its symbolic death. POW POW POW. Absolute expenditure.

It unleashes a movement beyond the human wager, beyond the risk that restores an uneasy equilibrium between the two deaths in that, risking one, the combatant achieves the recognition of the Other. For Lacan, Hamlet is torn between a real and a symbolic death; and it is only in being so torn, having been given his death wound by Laertes, that he can unleash his revenge. But it is an indifferent revenge. Beyond the risk there is only sovereignty. While Lacan’s Hamlet ends with the rise of the phallus and the return of some kind of symbolic order in the shape of Fortinbras and Hamlet’s request to Horatio ‘To tell my story’ (V.ii.341), Cave’s Hamlet expires in the POW POW POW. The rest is silence.

Absolute in its uselessness, complete only in its utter evacuation of subjectivity, the discharge of sovereign negativity wrenches time out of joint.

...

A Bataillean response, then, to the so-called postmodern, posthistorical period heralded or exemplified by the symbolic death of Marxism is not to resurrect the Kantian moral imperative in the ghostly shape of Marx’s spectre or spirit, it is to follow and act in the negative determinations of the irreversible death, destruction and sacrifice forming the blind spot around which meaning circulates, to act in a Marxism that does not give up on its desire, a Marxism that exists in the sovereign space disclosed by its symbolic death, a Marxism without reserve. POW POW POW

From Fred Botting & Scott Wilson (2001), ‘Pow, Pow, Pow’, Bataille, Palgrave: 127-45

Mark Featherstone, 'Death-Drive America': review of Order of Joy and Great Satan's rage

2010-10-01T13:33:00.000-07:00

Death-Drive America: On Scott Wilson’s Vision of the Cultural Politics of American Nihilism in the Age of Supercapitalism

Mark Featherstone

I

Against the Bipolar Culture of Americanism

Despite the explosion of academic study of American political theology in recent times, I hold the view that the best single work on the fundamentalist turn in American politics under Bush II is Arthur Kroker’s (2006) short book Born Again Ideology. However, this view has recently been challenged by the appearance of two books on contemporary America by the British cultural theorist Scott Wilson. What makes Wilson’s books on American supercapitalism, which should really be labeled volumes one and two of a single study of contemporary American political culture, extremely important is that they provide a coherent philosophical and cultural exposition of contemporary America that historicizes the fundamentalist turn under Bush II and presents the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld neoconservative regime as less the driving force behind the turn to fundamentalism and more the political-cultural representation of a tendency in American history that has always been present. Kroker’s book is essential for the same reason. There are, of course, other studies which cover the same ground, including James Morone’s (2003) excellent Hellfire Nation, but none of these offer the same level of philosophical sophistication as the Kroker or Wilson books.

Where Wilson differs from Kroker is in his sustained use of psychoanalysis and cultural theory to explicate the structures of contemporary American society that enables the reader to situate the Bush II regime in a philosophical context comparable to those that exist for the great modern utopias-dystopias of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union (Arendt 1973). In other words, where Kroker’s book delivers the story of American quantum culture and vampyric techno-theology through a close reading of American culture itself, Wilson provides the interpretation of the deep structure of this strange cultural form through a close reading of the poststructuralist tradition in French thought. Although some realist readers may complain that both Kroker and Wilson are hyperbolic in their interpretations of America, I would suggest that it is precisely the surrealistic tone of both writers that makes their books essential, because it is this super-realistic vision that enables them to reveal the madness of contemporary American culture and overcome the tendency to normalization that is present in every society, never mind those where the exception has become the rule. It is for this reason, which often means that those books that are most necessary are paradoxically completely underexposed to commentary and discussion, that what I offer in this paper is a critical analysis of Wilson’s essential theory of American political culture under Bush II.

The first point to note is that Wilson’s books are particularly timely in that they offer us an image of the America of Bush II in its last days. As I read Wilson’s texts America was already consumed with Obama’s utopian talk of change, and it was easy to think that the cruel landscape of what we might call death drive America was about to be swept away forever by at best Obama’s utopian politics, which would apparently see the world united behind a new tolerant brand of Americanism, or at worst McCain’s Bush-lite, which would never be able to hit the highs or lows of the Bush II regime because of the failure or, as Wilson’s books explain, the success of the latter in its black policy drives. But simply because Obama came out of top, and America entered a new utopian phase of thinking about itself as liberator of others through rule of law rather than iron fist, does not mean that Wilson’s books on the cultural politics of the America of Bush II represent irrelevant historical documents. Although it is clear that America has now entered a liberal phase, which as Kroker (2006) explains is the less violent other side of American quantum culture, it is not clear that the social, culture, and psychological complex of Americanism that endlessly propels the land of the free through the bipolar cycle of religious ultra-conservatism and secular liberalism has been completely or even partially recognized.

As Kroker’s (2006) shows, the central reason why it is difficult for America to reflect upon its cultural psychopathology is that the connection between religion and reason runs right through to the core of American identity itself to the extent that even the two-party political system is a reflection of its psychopathological bipolarity. This is why it will not be enough for Obama to simply turn away from what Wilson shows to be the Bataillean politics of Bush II. If Obama’s own utopianism, which is colored by nods towards social justice rather than Bush II’s focus on advancing the law of nature, is no more than the latest in a long line of more or less centrist versions of American liberalism, then the bipolarity of American culture will remain unchallenged. This is what Kroker and the subject of this paper Wilson show. The real change America needs will require a radical re-evaluation of its national, cultural, psyche on top of a turn away from the surrealistic political economy of Bush II. That this will only be possible by interrogating the deep structures of Americanism is what makes Wilson’s books important beyond the Bush II period, into the Obama presidency, and most probably long into the future.

What Wilson’s books offer is precisely this psychological analysis of the deep structures of Americanism that is necessary to not only critically engage with the totalitarian or, to use Paul Virilio’s (Virilio in Armitage 2001) term, globalitarian aspects of the American psyche, but also excavate the progressive or utopian element of the thought of the inhabitants of the land of the free. As I have shown in my own work, Tocqueville’s Virus (2007), this utopian impulse which runs through Americanism, and can be traced back to the original settlers, read out of the works of Hobbes and Locke, and detected in the politics of Wilson, FDR, and Obama, is the other side of the death dealing, sacrificial, psychological temper Wilson associates with the Freudian (2003) notion of thanatos.

Although thanatos may be essential, because as Deleuze (1991) shows in his work on the psychology of sadism, the dystopic rhythms of the death drive are always prior to the secondary impulse of eros, the life drive that prevents humans simply destroying themselves in the name of a return to Mom. I think there is a sense in which America needs to confront its own death drive in order that it may better engage its progressive, utopian, impulse. In the age of globalization and global capitalism, I think this is now more urgent than ever before because the reach of the death drive America is more or less total, as evidenced by dystopic notions such as full spectrum dominance, and the original utopians, the European heirs to Plato and More, who for so many centuries sought the realization of an imaginary social and political ideal, have long since seen their idealism collapse into cynical realpolitik under the unbearable weight of the memories of Auschwitz and the Gulag Archipelago. This is why we need to take Wilson’s books deadly seriously. They offer a dark dystopic image of America that may be enough to cause us to think about the ways in which America can return to its progressive, utopian, tradition under conditions of globalization that make confronting profound philosophical, psychoanalytic, questions of utopia, dystopia, life, and death more pressing than ever before.

II

The Mystical Order of Joy and the Supercapitalist Death Drive

On the face of it is difficult to see how what I take to be the first volume of Wilson’s study of Americanism, The Order of Joy (2008a), delivers the form of cultural re-evaluation that will be necessary for America to recognize, and consequently master, its own unique brand of quantum culture. The book seems to be a standard philosophical document working through connections between various French structuralisms and poststructuralisms, and it is hard to see what it could say about America, beyond a passing similarity between some aspects of French thought and American culture. However, the relation between French thinking and American culture the book establishes is much deeper and much more convincing than first impressions suggest. The deep meaning of the book, and the psychological complex which roots the exploration of American culture to come in both texts, resides in the equation of pleasure, death, and joy made early in the book. This connection, which it would be easy to miss because it appears on the first page of the book, relates back to Wilson’s earlier work on Georges Bataille, with the important development that Bataille’s link between pleasure and death is augmented through reference to Deleuze’s concept of joy that describes the sensation of perfect mechanization (Wilson 2008a).

Given the addition of the notion of joy, Wilson’s thesis is not simply that a kind of sensuous violence pervades contemporary American culture, and that this is paradoxically the product of a repressive Puritan society, but rather that the fusion of religion and technology in America creates a limit situation defined by perfect mechanization that recalls the mythic state of joyess rapture where the chosen people leave their fleshy earthbound bodies behind and ascend towards the heavens to become one with God. It is through reference to this thesis, which recalls Achille Mbembe’s (2003) work on necropolitics, that Wilson shows how America has evolved a mystical culture of negation, where technological death and destruction is necessary for the elevation of particular humans to a joyess new state. What is more is that this runs parallel to the Islamic fundamentalists’ apocalyptic cult of death of the suicide bomber, which transforms the ghoulish spectacle of the exploding body into a cause for celebration. That is to say that in much the same way that the Islamic fundamentalist body explodes when it reaches the joyess state of maximum intensity represented by the condition of martyrdom before God, the American techno body pushes towards the limit condition of organic death through a culture of techno-theology that aspires to reach the mystical state of oneness with the divine through a state of perfect mechanization that would render the fleshy body obsolete and signal the emergence of posthuman cybernetic man.

Given that this psychocultural apocalyptic structure has, as Kroker (2006) shows, been central to American thought from the very beginning illustrates why it will not be enough for Obama to simply turn back to multilateral politics and away from the empire talk of Bush II. In Kroker’s theory of American postmodern ideology, what happened under Bush II is that the ancient Old Testament Puritanism of the original settlers came back to enchant the postmodern techno-politics of post-Berlin Wall America that was already gripped by the messianic language of the end of history. Thus, the thinkers who inform Kroker’s vision of the America of Bush II are Einstein and Weber who illustrate the possibility of a quantum culture where religion and techno-reason fuse to form an apocalyptic complex that is endlessly thrown back to the future in search of salvation. It is this image of techno-Puritan America that Wilson (2008a; 2008b) extends in his books through French theory, with the added value that the psychoanalytic basis of his work may provide some way out of the psychological complex of quantum culture through the recognition of the way the compulsion of repeat sustains the bipolarity of Americanism. In other words, through recognition it may be possible to work through and eventually overcome the condition of bipolarity that currently means that the conservative-paranoid line through Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush II will never end. This is, essentially, the therapeutic model that sustains the Freudian-Lacanian theory that Wilson employs in his books to explain the structure of the order of joy that he believes organizes American culture.

In order to extend this psychoanalytic model to an analysis of American cultural politics Wilson makes use of Lacan’s three registers of the imaginary, which usually refers to the subject’s imagined self, the symbolic order, which relates to the systems of language and culture that structure human reality, and the real, which Lacan employs to explain the hard core of organic existence that can never be represented by either the imaginary or the symbolic order and persists on the outer edge of human perception. Wilson employs this triadic structure of the imaginary, the symbolic order, and the real to refer to the body of global capitalism, the state, and the general economy of war and expenditure. In his Lacanian complex, then, the imaginary is represented by the totality of global capitalism, the symbolic order is reflected in the state that provides significance and codes the image of the global economy, and the real is embodied by the practices of war, violence, and expenditure understood in the widest sense. Regarding the fusions between the three registers, Wilson explains that economy and war meet in the explosion of joyful immanence linked to destruction and consumption, war and state collide in the production of the mode of anorganic joy related to perfected mechanization, and the state and economy meet in the event of the symbolization of empire.

The nightmarish picture of neo-liberal America that emerges over the course of the first chapter of The Order of Joy (2008a) is, therefore, one of a state set on the total domination of global space-time through the endless expansion of a martial economic model that is based on that mechanistic consumption of organic matter and is for this reason totally impervious to human reason. While Kroker (2006) paints a similarly bleak picture of American empire in his outstanding companion piece to Born Again Ideology , The Will to Technology (2003), through the use of Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Wilson fast forwards through Kroker’s essential texts Capital (1990), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2003a), and The Question Concerning Technology (1977), until he reaches Deleuze and Guattari’s (1972; 1984) books on capitalism and schizophrenia, which become the core texts for his work on contemporary Americanism. In respect of the use of Deleuze and Guattari to conceptualize the rise of empire there is nothing particularly new in Wilson’s work, because Hardt and Negri (2000) and to a lesser extent Retort (2005) make use of the core thesis of Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1984) to understand processes of globalization. But I think that what sets Wilson’s treatment apart from these texts is the depth of the textual relation he establishes between the works of the French schizoanalysts and the condition of Americanism.

Similar to the thesis explained by Kroker in The Will to Technology (2003) and Born Again Ideology (2006), The Order of the Joy (2008a) shows how the American war machine expands in order to colonize global space-time on the basis of a ballistic version of Puritanism that we can trace back to the original settlers, but also the core political theorists of America, such as Thomas Hobbes (1982) and John Locke (2003). We know Hobbes employed the new physics of Galileo to conceive of the early modern economy in abstract terms of competing forces, trajectories, and lines of flight that needed minimal regulation in order to ensure that collisions between the human embodiments of those forces continued to be objectified in economic terms and did not break through the thin crust of civilization to restart the natural war of all against all (Spragens 1973). The next step took place when Locke located Hobbes’s abstract model of economy in America, the tabula rasa of the new world which was perfectly suited to carrying a metaphysical theory of economy, and began the long history of the mechanization, or technologization, of man through his theory of property that extended to the idea of the estranged possessive individual who owns his own body as an objective source of labor power to be gainfully employed in the world (Macpherson 1962). Given the theoretical model that the English political philosophers left America, which enabled the understanding of men as abstract economic quantums best understood through reference to the new physics of movement that conceived of reality as a smooth space characterized by competing quantums of matter in motion, and money that stands in for some other object and only finds value in relation to other values, it is clear how the possessive individual could be conceived of in terms of a piece of hard metal that was endlessly on the move and was meaningless beyond its relation to the environment that would simply either allow or disallow future movement. Although my view is that the political philosophies of Hobbes and Locke may be seen to inform the development of Americanism on a deep philosophical level, Wilson skips the English masters and leaps straight to Deleuze and Guattari and in particular their idea of the war machine to illuminate the condition of postmodern America. In his view the purpose of the war machine, which represents the fusion of economy, state, and war in American empire, is to brand reality, where the practice of branding simultaneously refers to the ancient process of marking property and the postmodern practice of image manipulation in order to stimulate consumer desire, and code the flows of capital as they pass through space-time in order to continually construct and reconstruct the endlessly deconstructing economic imaginary.

This is where war enters Wilson’s system. The practice of war paves the way for flows of fast capital by deconstructing traditional territorial structures in order that new capitalist structures may be constructed in the image of the globalized capitalist body without organs and the state may oversee the construction of the correct essential infrastructure to establish connections between the new virgin territory and the wider imperial network. Hardt and Negri (2000) make the same point in their Empire, suggesting that the key role of the American military machine is to develop smooth space for capitalism to flow through, and Retort (2005) employ the concept of military neo-liberalism to show how the American military machine is led by the principle of economic need in order to first open up and second protect new markets essential for the maintenance of the heated up global consumer credit society. That this heated up consumer model crashed while I was reading Wilson’s books illustrates his point that the reason global space-time has become a battleground of competing economic interests is that the traditional master signifier of international relations, the balance of power, which had held since the end of World War II in the form of nuclear deterrence, collapsed with the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union leaving the globalizing technologies of finance, telecommunications, and the American military machine free to colonize global space-time without human reason or reflexivity.

It is now clear that the essential result of the total unreflexive expansion of these globalizing technologies under the tutelage of the American state over the course of the last twenty years has been the more or less apocalyptic crash of the global economy which was never governed by value rationality, but rather operated on the basis of mindless principles of economic struggle, such as competitive advantage. However, to imagine this crash somehow signals the end of Americanism and that Obama will be presented with a clean slate on which to build a more socialistic America is, I think, a mistake since the standard view of the Chicago School economic thinkers would be to regard the current economic chaos in posthuman terms by suggesting that what has happened over the course of the last year or so is best represented by the image of the personal computer re-booting itself after receiving the essential software update that the credit bubble was over-inflated and needed to burst in order for the economy to start to expand in future. The idea that we should tamper with the economy on the basis of the essential re-boot, and think in humanistic terms about the effects of the re-start on the world’s human population, would be lost on a thinker such as Milton Friedman (2002), who would assert the need to let the economy work itself out of the downturn, simply because he was possessed by the apocalyptic spirit of technology that has become normal in the Americanized world. Unfortunately for the human population of the planet, the modern / postmodern age has been, and continues to be, defined by the dominance of the spirit of technology in ways that stretch far beyond the economic theories of Friedman and the Chicago School thinkers and are perhaps better illustrated by Heidegger’s (1977) theory of completed nihilism that describes a world totally possessed by instrumental reason.

Despite the dire warnings of the prophets of technological dystopia such as Heidegger we remain unable to really conceive of the value of organic life vis-à-vis the vitality of technology because we are infused by the spirit of the machine that has no purpose beyond the endless reproduction of its most basic function to work. As Kroker (2003) illustrates in his The Will to Technology, the prophets of the technological future, such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, understood that the machine, which is transformed into Deleuze and Guattari’s war machine in Wilson’s work, has no thought, philosophy, or reason. It simply works for the sake of working and ensuring that it continues to works in the future. In Kroker’s view this image of what Deleuze and Guattari call the mecanosphere was predicted by Marx, who advanced the notion of circulation, Nietzsche, who made the idea of the will central to this thought, and Heidegger, who linked Marx to Nietzsche in his theory of completed technological nihilism that simply wills the will that wills itself and so on. However, we know that this is not the end of the story. Akin to Kroker (2006), who shows that the closed circle of completed nihilism produces a mythical resurrection effect that pushes a primitive God who hires and fires and sort winners from losers centre stage, Wilson explains that the total expansion of the supercapitalist war machine through the various scalings of global space-time produces a utopian moment of convulsive pleasure comparable to the mystical union with an omniscient tech-no God for a post-Nietzschean nihilistic universe.

This is a truly apocalyptic event in Wilson’s view because the sensation of anorganic mechanistic joy is the product of the realization of a ghoulish utopia-dystopia of total control or over-determination which sees the supercapitalist machine start to threaten the elimination of organic life itself in favor of a new brand of post-organic cybernetic life that does not suffer from any of the imperfections or malfunctions of its organic predecessor. In this situation the war function and the state function of supercapitalism are merged in the form of a violent control mechanism set on over-determining organic life by transforming it into code that can easily flow through the imaginary body of the globalized communications network in quantums that are equivalent to both basic financial and telecommunications data. Under these conditions, where organic life itself is under threat from the spirit of technology, we have entered the realm of Agamben’s (1998) state of exception where there is no rule of law, but that made by those in executive power who manage the endless unfolding of the supercapitalist machine.

For Wilson (2008a), we are currently living in the Americanized supercapitalist state of technological second nature where we are totally exposed to the coding mechanisms of state power. In Agamben’s work this means that the liberal individual is completely open to construction through discourse and that they can, therefore, easily be reduced to a state of bare life by stripping away their legal identity. However, Wilson’s postmodern, surrealistic, take on the significance of the new coding technologies of the supercapitalist state takes this Foucauldian theory a step further. In his view, the contemporary supercapitalist empire, which is in the process of reducing everything and everybody to the status of code, deconstructs and reconstructs the individual as either normal or pathological on the basis of their sociological and biological identity that flows through the globalized communication network as streamed data. At this point the individual, who has already been reduced to the status of a quantum of economic power by the Hobbesian / Lockean logic of the supercapitalist system, is totally surveilled by the normalizing power structures implicit in the Americanized global communication network.

In many respects this vision of a total system that covers every conceivable scaling on the planet, reaching from the global level of networked communications to the micro-biological level of individual genetic code, represents Foucauldian (2008) biopower in its ultimate form. What the contemporary American supercapitalist war machine achieves through the reduction of the individual to digital data is the complete immersion of humanity into a technological coding system that simply works by endlessly circulating information. The difference between this Americanized biopolitical machine and what Roberto Esposito (2008) calls the archetypal biocracy of modernity, Nazism, is that the Nazi machine was never able to globalize its model of normality and pathology because its central mechanism for reducing humanity to the status of bare life, the camp, remained at an experimental level that required the relatively primitive industrial production of corpses, rather than the system we live with today which creates postindustrial postmodern Muslims or muselmänner through the reduction of humanity to the status of code. In this respect Nazism was nowhere near as effective in achieving the normalization of humanity as the contemporary American supercapitalist machine because its mechanism for creating robotic men relied on brutal violence and the systematic humiliation of the embodied human.

We know that the American system sometimes slips back into the same logic, because we have all seen the images from Abu Ghraib, but these kind of events represent a primitive or, in Wilson’s Lacanian language, real form of punishment that the supercapitalist war machine would prefer to avoid where possible, simply because it understands that surveillance and normalization through data is a far more effective means of ensuring that humanity is perfectly streamed through the channels of technological mecanosphere than ritual humiliation ever could. However, the supercapitalist machine is not a static system that simply turns over endlessly because the effect of the closure of mechanical circuit is the production of a new mythological subject that functions to make the process of total robotization bearable. What this means is that somewhere in the realization of the total technological system, where the global scale is the micro scale of data that streams across the smooth spaces of the world communication network, we encounter the real end of history in the emergence of a kind of metaphysical temporal loop, which connects the contemporary supercapitalist machine to ancient cosmological notions of the micro-macrocosm that showed how man was intimately related to the universe, and, as a consequence, the violent closure of the circuit of history running from ancient Greece to postmodern America, with the result that humanity is thrown back into prehistory and mythology.

This is what Kroker (2006) means by quantum culture because what it illustrates is the way in which the surrealistic looping of history creates a new space of techno-mysticism based on notions of the kind of apocalyptic rapture popular in contemporary America (Pfohl 2006). But in the new American techno-apocalypse it is not simply that the chosen few vanish into the mystical body of Christ, because this pulp version of the story is far too close to traditional Old Testament thought, but rather that the totally immersed, totally coded, body of the normalized individual is overcome by the fantasy of the bioengineered new man who never wears out and never passes away. In this sci-fi fantasy, which is, in my view, the hard core or real of contemporary supercapitalist ideology, the new man, a kind of bioengineered Nietzschean übermensch, resides in a strange techno-utopia, a new Heaven on Earth characterized by immortality and a culture of endless life, where everybody and everything simply works.

Consider the sci-fi fantasy where everything works. This imaginary, which trades off the construction of cinematic imaginary and star-status in Hollywood, current obsessions with cosmetic surgery and body transfiguration, and the proliferation of hard-core pornography on the primary site of globalization, the Internet, where super-human, hyper-sexed, bodies provide surrealistic images of hard fucking machines working at maximum intensity in idolization of the supercapitalist machine, not to mention the very real evolving science of bioengineering, sustains the masses’ belief in technology. That this fantastic vision seems more real in some places in the world, such as California, than others, which are known for other reasons related to death and destruction, legitimates its ideological function in the minds of the masses who worship those super-human pumped up bodies working and playing at maximum intensity. But the problem with this work hard-play hard ideology of endless life is that it creates a culture of mystical enjoyment based on perfect mechanical motion to screen out what Wilson (2008a) suggests is the truth of the contemporary supercapitalist system, which is death, destruction, and the transformation of humanity into pure malleable data to be bought, sold, and disciplined over the media-scapes of the global communications network.

In this condition, which Wilson expresses through the idea of the death drive of capitalism, humanity is reduced to the status of pure commodity and the veneer of civilization is stripped back to leave the world in what may appear to be a state of nature, but is in reality a condition of manufactured technological brutality. Supported by the ideological fantasy of the post-human body, there is no end to death drive supercapitalism. In the state of manufactured natural brutality one would imagine that the brand of mysticism that Heidegger (1993) employed to suggest a different mode of technology, which would be poetic rather than calculative in its approach to evolution, should be unsustainable. The same should be the case for the fantasy of the utopia of the bioengineered man, simply because in the face of a thanatological system that transforms everybody and everything into an object for exchange, and in a globalized society where the amoralism of evolutionary biology dominates economic thought in the shape of bioeconomics, one would imagine that there would be no room for such a technological fantasy. However, it seems to be that far from undermining the legitimacy of the techno-utopia of the bioengineered superman, the evolution of the contemporary supercapitalist thanatological dystopia that we might call the new Hobbesian ecosystem has in fact led humanity to cling to the fantasy of the technological superhuman more desperately than ever before, perhaps because we collectively realize that there is no way we can stop technology in its tracks and that our only hope of salvation from the impending techno-apocalypse resides in some future utopian technological innovation.

Unfortunately, in Wilson’s (2008a) view, the flat line American supercapitalism is likely to produce is not some timeless anorganic utopian future where everybody lives out perfect lives, but rather an endless posthistorical present characterized by death, destruction, and the consumption of organic life. This relates to his key criticism of contemporary bioeconomic thought which is that it remains wedded to 19th century notions of sustainable economics and balanced production and consumption and fails to recognize that the supercapitalist machine is not about creating a sustainable economy, but rather consuming and laying waste to everything that crosses its radar in thanatological pursuit of flat line burn out. In this respect Wilson reads contemporary supercapitalism through the lens of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (2003) that explains how humanity is set on a suicidal path straight back to the state of security first experienced by the unborn in the peaceful nothingness of life in utero and that the only reason we continue to live and do not simply cut our own throats is that we are conflicted creatures who also possess a deep will to live. Fatally caught between the extremes of Dad who tells us to live a little and Mom who wants to keep us close, we live lives characterized by risk and consumption taken in the widest sense of the term in order to establish some kind of compromise formation between living forever and dying as soon as we are born.

Wilson makes the case that Mother Nature has the same problem herself. She realizes she has to let her children live a little or she would have to cancel their existence outright before they had even had chance to let out their primal birth cry. All the same she cannot stand to see them stray too far for fear that they will leave her behind. For Wilson, this is why eating, sex, and death exist in nature. These practices simultaneously prolong life, but also ensure that death will eventually catch up with complex organisms that eat and copulate. In other words, eating and sex have no reason of their own, but exist to ensure that death persists. Thus, Wilson explains that there is no need for creatures to eat each other or starve searching for food because making their own food through photosynthesis would be more effective in terms of sustaining life. Similarly, he tells us that there is no need for creatures to work through the problems of sexual reproduction because simple asexual reproduction or splitting is a more efficient way of ensuring the continuation of life without the combative struggle to reproduce or the essential problem of complex organic life, death. But if this is the case, we are left with the fundamental problematic of waste. Why waste? Following Bataille (1991), Wilson’s basic answer to this most basic but profound question is that the universal truth of existence is expenditure. There is no more. We live to waste.

In Wilson’s (2008a) view it is this basic truth that animates American supercapitalism. This is why it should be understood as a manufactured technological mode of brutality modeled on the state of nature that is totally ignorant of the value of culture and civilization. His theory of contemporary American supercapitalism shows how the growth of human economy through the stages of industrialism and postindustrialism until the current globalized economic system has resulted in the emergence of an informational ecosystem that treats everybody and everything as economic data to be circulated through the channels of the network in order to enable the production of more value in the form of profit. Although we have seen that this system can generate surplus value ex nihilo in the form of complex economic machines called futures, the hitch is, of course, that somewhere in the process the supercapitalist system needs to consume fresh raw materials. Herein we encounter the martial element of contemporary American supercapitalism, which we may explain through Marx’s (1993) theory of primitive accumulation or Retort’s (2005) update notion of military neo-liberalism, that Wilson suggests is essential to feed the machine by opening up new territory for exploitation. Given that it is this machine that causes so much poverty, misery, death, and destruction across the world to the extent that today we wonder whether the biosphere will soon become inhospitable for human life, it is difficult not to wonder why we do not simply pull back from the brink now.

Beyond the mystical belief in technology, perhaps the answer to this question is, as Wilson suggests, that we are fated to self-destruct and turn the planet into a black hole that cannot sustain organic life. Despite this thesis, which seems more persuasive every day, I think that we must hope that the power of human reason will save us from ourselves. But even this hope is complicated by the effects of supercapitalism on culture understood in its most basic sense as human meaning symbolized. As Wilson (2008b) shows the problem of culture under conditions of American supercapitalism is that it loses its deep capacity to carry human meaning and instead becomes more data trash in the commodity ecosystem. This is problematic because if we are to even begin to critique the techno-nihilism of supercapitalism we will have to turn to culture to first create some sense of the significance of organic life in the world and second help us to think through the problems of the thanatological personality of America. But what is even worse is that beyond the Frankfurt School problematic of culture as commodity lay the issue of the ways the commodity form infects cultural content (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997). This results in, for example, the inscription of the suicidal culture of performance in the Nike slogan, Just Do It! What, then, are our prospects of saving ourselves from death-drive America through cultural criticism? This is the subject of the second of Wilson’s (2008b) two books on contemporary American supercapitalism, Great Satan’s Rage.

III

Rage Against The Satanic Supercapitalist Machine

Great Satan’s Rage (2008b) turns off the theoretical model developed in The Order of Joy (2008a) to explore the popular cultural effects of the emergence of the nihilistic supercapitalist machine. In this text Wilson’s central thesis is that beyond the production of the mystical techno fantasy of the bioengineered man, which is translated for everyday use by movie-porn-sports stars who enjoy life to the max through perfect bodies, the meaningless supercapitalist system has seen the development of a popular culture of negativity that is peculiarly American in nature. The basic emotion streamed through the culture of negativity is what Heidegger (1993) called the malice of rage, but the sense of nihilism of American supercapitalism similarly expresses itself in cultures of despair, hopelessness, apathy, boredom, sadness, misery, anxiety, and paranoia. Although it is possible to read the production of these cultures of negativity in terms of a process of psychological reaction-formation, which is designed to simultaneously work through and critique the nihilistic technological form of contemporary America, Wilson shows that the relation of the popular culture of negativity to the supercapitalist machine is more complex than first appearances may suggest.

The title of the book itself, Great Satan’s Rage, begins to suggest the complexity of the relation between the popular culture of negativity and the wider supercapitalist system for the reader of The Order of Joy, because it works off the idea that it is not simply American popular culture that is possessed by a deep sense of rage, but also the Great Satan, the American state itself, that rages against the world around it. Centrally, it is this bind between the negativity of American supercapitalism and its popular cultural expressions that are simultaneously utterly conservative, because they express the violent negativity and murderous rage that is America, and entirely radical, because this cultural negativity and rage is often directed towards America itself, which holds Great Satan’s Rage together and drives the text forward through to its undecided conclusion, in much the same way that violent negativity and murderous rage propel the America supercapitalist system endlessly into the future.

Given the centrality of the idea of conflict to the book, the position of Milton’s figure of Satan in the text is particularly important. Milton’s Satan is, of course, the rebellious antihero par excellence of Paradise Lost (1993) who struggles with a tyrannical God, only to be cast out of Heaven and forced to live in Hell. Satan’s rage emerges from his hatred of his creator and his deluded belief that Dad wants to stop him leading his own life. Although Milton ultimately presents Satan as at best a sulky teen, who simply cannot stand the fact that he is God’s creature, and at worst a paranoid conspiracy theorist, who is possessed by psychopathological feelings of hatred for Dad, the equation between the fallen angel and rebellion and revolution has stuck. It is this vision of Satan, the raging rebel without a real cause, that Wilson uses to symbolize America under conditions of supercapitalism. Akin to contemporary America, which was born of rebellion and revolution first when the Puritans fled England and second when the settlers threw their colonial masters out of the new world, Milton’s Satan is a born rebel who lives for revolt and revolution but is not, in the end, entirely sure what it is he wants to put in place of the old regime.

Despite his claim that ‘it is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven’ (1993:9), it seems that what Satan does know is that he wants to get out of Hell in order to get back in Dad’s face. God’s two-state solution is clearly no good for Satan because he heads off to the new world as soon as he can in order to cause problems for God’s other more recent creation, man. I think it is clear that the reason Satan wants to mess with man, and lead him out of the Garden of Eden where the rules of utopia apply and throw him into the dystopic world of time driven by desire, sin, and the law, is that he wants to provoke Dad who really should have known better than to abandon him to Hell. We know that life in Hell is no life for Satan because his rage against God is marked by deep ambivalence. He hates God because He is creator, everything Satan wants to be, but loves him for the same reason. The problem is that God cannot help his status as creator. He cannot make his creature independent. Satan has to revolt on his own terms. This is exactly what happens in Paradise Lost, but the problem is that rebellion is never enough because Dad is still Dad and Satan’s place is not Heaven. This is why the revolution never ends.

In the end Satan’s revolution is purely negative, purely nihilistic, since it is based in the rage of the creature who wants to be his own creator. For Wilson the same is true of America. He tells us that Satan’s motto ‘non serviam’ (I will not serve) perfectly describes the American attitude to life, even in the era of supercapitalism when the land of the free is the only super-power on the planet. In Wilson’s view, then, the truth of America is that the Puritan revolution never really ended. The sulky states cannot help but see oppression everywhere, because it is still consumed by resentment towards the old world. Similar to Milton’s Satan, who really wants to get back to Dad to live out a flat line life in Heaven, but can only express this through hurt fuelled rage, America is driven by a primal desire to reach the oceanic state of the old world that simply exists, which it can only articulate through violent rage against examples of oppression that appear to repeat its own colonial past. That all of this is repressed deep into America’s cultural unconscious explains why the discourses of freedom, democracy, and individual self-realization, which condition the ideology of progress scratched onto the nihilistic supercapitalist machine and continue to inform the Californian mysticism of the bioengineered man and his organic friend, the movie-porn-sports star, are expressed with complete naivety and total lack of reflexivity, despite the glaring presence of evidence to the contrary, which suggests that America is more often than not engaged in cynical realpolitik. It is this delusional situation, which has evolved through massive military spending set on ensuring that the revolution never ends and the emergence of a politics which is always conditioned by ideas of freedom and more centrally liberation, that has led America to become a world leader that still thinks of itself as an oppressed power.

That America has no sense of itself is, I think, perfectly captured by the reversal of Milton’s revolutionary Satan, who Wilson correctly interprets as the romantic antihero of the west, into the Great Satan of the Iranian Revolution that still persists today in the Islamic world. In this view the American Satan is simultaneously John Wayne with horns civilizing the West and an evil imperialist set on the violent exploitation of every available human and environmental resource. Although America seems to be completely unaware of the bipolarity of the figure of Satan, it may be that the schizophrenia of the Devil is perfectly illustrative of the condition of American supercapitalism and its front men, such as George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, who wanted to present themselves as revolutionaries on the side of freedom, democracy, and human rights, but came off looking like evil colonialists looking to slash and burn what they could not loot.

Wilson knows that the Devil has all the best tunes. As such, he explains that it is possible to find a similar bipolarity in the nihilistic popular culture of supercapitalist America. The bands who soundtrack postmodern America, such as NWA, Ice-T, Nirvana, Korn, and Slipknot, express sincere rage, apathy, and disgust at the world around them, but similarly fail to offer any kind of constructive solution to the dystopic conditions they hate so much. Instead what they offer is images of sensuous violence and complete apathy. In this respect they are totally in tune with the nihilism of American supercapitalism because what they have to offer, rage against the machine, is in no way revolutionary in an extra-systemic sense. Consider one of Wilson’s (2008b) key examples, gangsta rap. Gangsta rap evolved in Los Angeles in the early 1980s in response to the rise of Reaganomics and the ruination of the black inner city. Abandoned by policy makers to the ultra-violent state of nature Loic Wacquant (2007) calls the hyper-ghetto, and living in a completely segregated world characterised by the narcotics economy, NWA and Ice-T rapped about the violence of gangsta life. As Wilson explains, their records where characterized by what Chuck D, front man of Public Enemy, called niggativity. For Wilson, Chuck D’s point was that the problem with NWA, Ice-T, and later NWA member Ice-Cube, was not only that they produced records that where wholly negative in their representation of the state of hyper-ghetto, because they could surely be forgiven for not producing utopian solutions to the withdrawal of the state from the inner city, but that they also created urban imaginaries that glamorized the ultra-violent world of the dark economy of drugs, gangs, and prostitution.

The term niggativity refers to the way black popular culture plugged into the nihilism of American neo-liberalism and began to glamorize the violence of its central principle, economic competition, through rapped tales of the drug wars that played out supercapitalism in the black community. All of this in order to make a fast buck. But what a fast buck! Now the vicious circle of the nihilist economy was complete: supercapitalism destroys the black community that responds by selling the hyped-up version of that destroyed community to make money in the supercapitalist economy where violence is necessary to produce profit. As the supercapitalist machine heated up over the course of the 1990s, the niggativity of gangsta rap became more extreme. Snoop Doggy Dogg, who had always employed the pimp aesthetic, branched out into hard core pornography, and 50 Cent, produced perhaps the archetypal gangsta hymn to ultra-violent supercapitalism, Get Rich or Die Tryin. In Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent the niggativity of NWA and Ice-T was completed. In completed niggativity there is no longer any trace of criticism of American apartheid, such as that advanced by Chuck D and Public Enemy, because adjustment to the violence of the inner city is complete and the narco-economics of the hyper-ghetto have become an accepted part of American life.

At this point the misery of the hyper-ghetto expressed by sociologists such as Wacquant (2007) is totally overcoded by expressions of the sexualized enjoyment of violence that recalls the key works of Wilson’s master thinker Georges Bataille, and the gangsta imaginary is transformed into a fantastical universe of violence, sex, and money, where the normal rules of society no longer apply. It is this cartoon world of fantasy transgression, most clearly illustrated by the New York group Wu-Tang Clan whose 1999 record Enter the Wu-Tang mixed samples from cult martial arts movies, Bushido philosophy, and ultra-violent tales of the hyper-ghetto to create a surrealistic landscape caught somewhere between medieval Japan and postmodern America, which sells to middle-class white kids on the basis of the parental advisory sticker, the sign that one is about to enter the fantasy world of the gangsta. Regarding this warning sign, I do not think that the importance of the parental advisory sticker can be underestimated because what this symbol, which was developed by the ultra-conservative Parental Music Resource Centre (PMRC) in the 1980s, really signifies is the kind of Satanic rebellion Milton wrote about in Paradise Lost expressed through violent language that tunes kids into the core values of the nihilistic culture of supercapitalist America, cut throat competition, sadistic enjoyment of violence, complete lack of sympathy for others, hedonistic consumption based on immediate gratification, and total lack of reflexivity, which can never find voice in official discourse because they remain the obscene, unconscious, dystopic truth of Americanism.

Unfortunately, the other popular cultural form Wilson examines, white punk / nu-metal, has not really exposed the problem of Americanism in an overtly political sense either. Instead, the new wave of punk has simply repeated the constructs of gangsta rap for a different sub-cultural audience. Accounting for the emergence of the new form of punk / metal, Wilson suggests that as the niggativity of gangsta became more popular with white kids in the late 1980s, a new fusion of punk-metal emerged on the independent music scene. The new creation, grunge, soon became the music of choice for the hyper-nihilistic, disenfranchised, white kids of generation X. A seemingly endless series of grunge bands exploded from the Seattle Sub-Pop label in the late 1980s / early 1990s, but the key exponents of the form, Nirvana, remained central to the movement even though they ‘sold out’ to a major record label, Geffen, and produced a number one album, Nevermind, simply because they captured the nihilistic culture of American supercapitalism for white kids so perfectly. Apart from the ironic naming of the band, ‘Nirvana’, which was simultaneously a sincere recognition of the need for some utopic state of peace and a sarcastic swipe at the impossibility of such a condition, that might be seen to be comparable to Thomas More’s (2003) gesture of naming his perfect world Utopia to indicate the impossibility of the place he was describing, the title of the group’s most popular record, Nevermind, exemplified the apathy of generation X, who had resigned themselves to lives characterized by misery and boredom before they had even reached adulthood.

In explaining the synthesis of boredom, apathy, and teen angst under the master sign of grunge, rage, Wilson (2008b) provides a contemporary pop cultural example of the condition of the malice of rage that Heidegger (1993) linked to the rise of technology and the emergence of the condition of completed nihilism. Akin to Milton’s sulky teen hero, Satan, who was expelled from perfect state of Heaven, the kids of generation X were the cast offs, where the idea of the cast-off refers to the creation of an accursed share or excremental remainder, of a perfectly functioning technological system that has no time for the philosophizing of the young. Since the supercapitalist machine has no time for the eternal question of the young, why? -- and is completely closed to the real experience of wonder before the new -- simply because it is completely cynical in its industrial production of saleable novelty, the original kids of American neo-liberalism were born nihilists or, in the words of Kurt Cobain, negative creeps. That the nihilism of Generation X was in many respects the product of supercapitalism and its reduction of cultural significance to the level of financial calculation is reinforced by the cover art of Nevermind.

As Wilson explains, Nirvana’s baby is caught up in the supercapitalist machine and the pursuit of money from the moment it is born. Although the cover star of Nevermind is no new born, his immersion in water recalls the condition of the foetus in the womb, with the implication that the nihilistic logic of the new economy conditions life, not only before the toddler has learnt to speak and entered the symbolic order, but before he has even emerged into the world. Herein resides the reflection of supercapitalist nihilism in Nirvana’s outlook on life. If supercapitalism is mother long before it is father, then the thanatological pursuit of peace, nirvana, through a suicidal return to the womb will offer no escape from the torment of a life conditioned by the need to find some kind of meaning in a human world reduced to the meaninglessness of the natural world that simply exists. That Nirvana could never escape this bind is clear. Consider their third and final album that mixed critique of the culture industry, the track Radio Friendly Unit Shifter, with suicidal tendencies, the original title of the record was I Hate Myself and Want to Die, and the metaphor of the womb, the final album title was In Utero. Here, the thanatological strategy of the pursuit of the return to the peace of the womb through self-destruction was played out on vinyl. But even though Cobain took the thanatological route, shooting himself in the head in 1994, he could not save himself from supercapitalism. Suicide is big business, especially in pop music, because it helps to sell records to kids who feel similarly suicidal about their hopeless situation in the supercapitalist machine.

It is likely that death has always been a key theme of popular music, and popular culture more generally, because this form of culture has always been connected to the capitalist culture industry that is endlessly set on reducing human meaning to the calculation of the bottom line. But Wilson (2008b) shows how this condition radicalizes under conditions of supercapitalism, so that it is no longer simply suicide that captures the nihilistic imagination of the teen critique of consumer capitalism, but rather the active cultivation of death and destruction through war and combat. In Great Satan’s Rage (2008b) this turn from rage conditioned by apathy and suicide to rage characterized by aggression and violence is captured in the shift from the grunge scene of Nirvana to the nu-metal sub-culture of Korn that reflects the shift from Bush I to Bush II and the transformation of war from a cynical political strategy to an existential condition. In this transformation from Bush I through Clinton to Bush II, which represents the movement towards the complete realization of the supercapitalist machine, the rage of bands such as Slipknot and Drowning Pool can be seen as a critical reflection of the violent nihilism of contemporary America that is characterized by anger, aggression, and conformity to the belief in the existential significance of war. That nu-metal is the soundtrack to Bataillean man fighting his way through the war zone of the contemporary supercapitalist eco-system screaming ‘I myself am war’ (1985:239) is evidenced by Wilson who notes that American troops in Iraq made Drowning Pool’s Bodies their number one theme to the war on terror. In Wilson’s view the screamed mantra of Bodies, ‘let the bodies hit the floor’, perfectly captures the ghoulish supercapitalist utopia-dystopia that has taken root in the neo-colonial spaces of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The lyrics of Bodies juxtapose the line ‘nothing wrong with me’ to the mantra ‘let the bodies hit the floor’ in order to suggest that the American war machine is in some way pathological. But contrary to Drowning Pool’s equation of the violence of the war on terror with insanity, war and violence are far from pathological in western thought. Consider the key works of Hobbes (1982), Nietzsche (2003b), Marx (1993), Heidegger (1991a; 1991b), Jünger (2004), Marinetti (2008), Bataille (1991), and Deleuze and Guattari (1972; 1984). Milton’s Satan, the Puritan Devil of resistance, rebellion, and revolution, is in each of these thinkers. He possesses them, manifesting himself in the commitment to negativity and overcoming, which has been more or less completely realized in supercapitalist America. This is why Wilson’s use of the Nietzschean tradition of French thought is perfectly appropriate to the study of contemporary America and there is nothing arbitrary about his use of Bataille and Deleuze and Guattari to understand the system he calls supercapitalism. As Kroker (2006) explains in his study of technology, it is not only that the Nietzschean tradition sheds light on contemporary globalization, but rather that contemporary globalization is in many respect the realization of the current of nihilism and negativity running through western thought. To call the violent hot spots of the contemporary world, such as New Orleans, Mexico City, Juarez, Caracas, Gaza City, Baghdad, and Mogadishu, Bataillean spaces is, therefore, in no way simply descriptive, because these urban war zones are realizations of the prophetic insights of the French thinker and his fellow Nietzscheans who saw supercapitalism coming long before Bush II was pushed center stage.

Given that the Nietzscheans’ central lesson of supercapitalism is that struggle is an existential condition, the difference between war and peace in the supercapitalist world is relatively unimportant. Whether we choose to focus on Detroit, Mexico City, or Kabul the war is always on. War is everywhere in the supercapitalist world. In sports, which represent the most popular escape route from the hyper-ghetto, conflict, suffering, and pain are considered necessary to success. Even in education, the space of culture, civilization, and learning, there is no escape from warfare. As Wilson (2008b) explains, Columbine and the Virginia Tech shootings illustrate that the core principles of supercapitalism (compete, consume, produce) form the hidden curriculum of contemporary education. War is, in Wilson’s language, the hidden excess-essence or x-essence of the contemporary Americanized world. From the drug wars that rage across the hyper-ghettos of Los Angeles, Mexico City, Juarez, and Sao Paulo, to the violent response to criminality of the supercapitalist warfare state, there is no end to spiral of violence because in Wilson’s view struggle is what the Americanized world is all about. This is the negative utopia of America, the negative utopia of first freedom, where we are free to fight for our right to survive, second democracy, because we know everybody is part of the fight to survive, and third individualism, because we understand that we are on our own, that everybody else is either predator or prey, and that the role of the state is to ensure that the basic Hobbesian rules of engagement hold and no more.

Possessed by the malice of rage that comes from living in a technological world that is completely devoid of human tolerance, the spirit of Milton’s Satan possesses every Americanized one of us. Possessed individuals, the rebel nation orders us to resist. You will not serve, unless you are working the counter of McDonalds or Wal-Mart, in which case you must fall in line with the hyper-rational machine of supercapitalism that embodies the principle of resistance. Refusal to obey the negative program to not serve will paradoxically be interpreted in offensive terms and result in massive resistance on the part of the Satanic machine. War, the normal modus operandi of the supercapitalist machine, will be the end result. This is why war in no way opposes the supercapitalist machine and the radical Islamists are misguided if they think that their actions will have any impact upon American neo-colonial policy. As Wilson (2008a) suggests, the exploding body of the suicide bomber is a secret joy to the supercapitalist war machine because what it signifies is the passing of humanity and the emergence of the completed nihilism of the posthuman machine that simply works.

Contrary to war, which simply plays into the hands of the war machine, what we require to oppose supercapitalism is cultural resistance and cultural change. This is what makes Wilson’s books, which may strike some readers as totally over the top, so important. They offer resistance to the contemporary American-led capitalist war machine on the basis of their hyperbolic critique of state violence that escapes the hegemonic symbolic order of the culture industry through its surrealistic refusal of the mass man who wants to be told what he already knows to be true. Unfortunately, what mass man knows to be true is the symbolic structure that we must recognise, resist, and overcome if we are to ever work through the problem of not only contemporary post-modern capitalism, but also more fundamentally the dystopic strain of Americanism understood in its widest sense. Thus, Wilson’s books are true edge works in that they that seek to engage the reader who refuses engagement in order to question his total adjustment to the normal madness of contemporary capitalism. In this respect they are impossible texts in that they are critical cultural studies working in the fundamentalist Americanized world where there is no place for critique or culture that does not conform to the norm set out by the culture industry that sells to the normal man on the street. It is here, in their very impossibility, that Wilson’s books retain the kind of weak messianic power, which he finds in contemporary popular culture, and is essential for the kind of cultural critique we find in true American utopians such as C Wright Mills, that we must urgently re-discover in the era of completed supercapitalist nihilism or what I call death drive America.

References
Adorno, T. and M. Horkheimer. 1997. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso.

Agamben, G. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Palo Alto, CA:

Stanford University Press.

Arendt, H. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harvest Books.

Bataille, G. 1985. ‘The Practice of Joy Before Death.’ Pp. 235-240 in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

------. 1991. The Accursed Share: Volume I. New York: Zone Books.

Deleuze, G. 1991. Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty and Venus in Furs. New York: Zone Books.

Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1972. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Volume I. London: Athlone.

------. 1984. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Volume II. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Esposito, R. 2008. Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Featherstone, M. 2007. Tocqueville’s Virus: Utopia and Dystopia in Western Social and Political Thought. London: Routledge.

Foucault, M. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France, 1978-1979. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Freud, S. 2003. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. London: Penguin.

Friedman, M. 2002. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hardt, M. and A. Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Heidegger, M. 1977.‘The Question Concerning Technology.’ Pp. 3-36 in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row.

------. 1991a. Nietzsche: Volumes I and II. San Francisco: Harper

------. 1991b. Nietzsche: Volumes III and IV. San Francisco: Harper.

------. 1993. ‘Letter on Humanism.’ Pp. 213-267 in Basic Writings. San Francisco. Harper.

Hobbes, T. 1982. Leviathan. London: Penguin.

Jünger, E. 2004. Storm of Steel. London: Penguin.

Kroker, A. 2003. The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism: Heidegger, Nihilism, Marx. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

------. 2006. Born Again Ideology: Religion, Technology, and Terrorism. Victoria: Ctheory Books.

Locke, J. 2003. Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Macpherson, C. B. 1962. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Marinetti, F. 2008. ‘War, Sole Cleanser of the World.’ Pp. 53-55 in his Critical Writings. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Marx, K. 1993. Capital: Critique of Political Economy: Volume I. London: Penguin.

Mbembe, A. 2003. ‘Necropolitics.’ Public Culture 15(1):11-40.

Milton, J. 1993. Paradise Lost. London: Penguin.

More, T. 2003. Utopia. London: Penguin.

Morone, J. 2003. Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Nietzsche, F. 2003a. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. London: Penguin.

------. 2003b. The Birth of Tragedy. London: Penguin.

Pfohl, S. 2006. Left Behind: Religion, Technology, and the Flight from the Flesh. Victoria: Ctheory Books.

Retort. 2005. Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in the New Age of War. London: Verso.

Spragens, T. 1973. The Politics of Motion: The World of Thomas Hobbes. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

Virilio, P. 2001. ‘From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond: An Interview with Paul Virilio.’ Pp. 25-57 in Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond, edited by J. Armitage. London: Sage.

Wacquant, L. 2007. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge: Polity.

Wilson, S. 2008a. The Order of Joy. Albany: SUNY Press.

------. 2008b. Great Satan’s Rage: American Negativity and Rap/Metal in the Age of Supercapitalism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

FAST CAPITALISM 7.1
http://www.fastcapitalism.com

ON THE LOVE OF COMMENTARY (IN LOVE AND ONLINE)

2010-09-05T06:54:00.000-07:00

ON THE LOVE OF COMMENTARY (IN LOVE AND ONLINE)
Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary (Fall 2011)
Volume Editors: Nicola Masciandaro & Scott Wilson
glossator.org

Love must be reinvented …, but also quite simply defended.
—Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy

Every person is free to pursue thought and experiences, however sublime and exquisite, that are his by special insight, on the meaning of the Bridegroom’s ointments.
—Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs

What it is thus the Other’s job [the locus of speech] to provide – and, indeed, it is what he does not have, since he too lacks being – is what is called love, but it is also hate and ignorance.
—Jacques Lacan, Écrits

Taste and see (Psalm 34:8). Taste refers to the affectus of love; see refers to the intellect’s cogitation and mediation. Therefore one ought first to surge up in the movement of love before intellectually pondering . . . For this is the general rule in mystical theology: one ought to have practice before theory.
—Hugh of Balma, The Roads to Zion Mourn

What is there to say, except that we have invented the reality of a virtual space that will allow us to interact long-distance and no matter what the distance from our neighbour? Will we, in the near future, have to love our non-neighbour as ourselves?
—Paul Virilio, Open Sky

[A]ll the causes that engender and increase friendship have joined together in this friendship, from which we must conclude that not simply love but most perfect love is what I ought to have, and do have, for it. . . . This commentary shall be that bread made with barley by which thousands shall be satiated, and my baskets shall be full to overflowing with it.
—Dante, Convivio

I-love-you has no usages. Like a child’s word, it enters into no social constraint; it can be a sublime, solemn, trivial word, it can be an erotic, pornographic word. It is a socially irresponsible word.
—Roland Barthes, Lover’s Discourse
O marvel! A garden amidst fires, i.e. manifold sciences which, strange to say, are not consumed by the flames of love in his breast. The reason is, that these sciences are produced by the fires of seeking and longing, and therefore, like the salamander, are not destroyed by them.
—Ibn Arabi, Tarjuman al-ashwaq [The Interpreter of Desires]

As these citations attest, there are significant points of contact between commentary and love, particularly according to the premodern commentary traditions that acknowledged and practiced commentary as a form of contemplative love. But unlike the opening kiss of the Song of Songs, these points of contact have received little direct attention or acknowledgement, neither theoretically, with respect to the study of commentary (or love), nor practically, with respect to how the production of commentary is generally approached and valued. The work of writing commentary may be a ‘labor of love’, but the inflection of this commonplace (on labor) often betrays a lack of eros, or at least its displacement into private/privative regions elsewhere than commentary itself. Commentary—as obsession, compulsion, veneration, disclosure, interpretation, appropriation, contemplation, devotion, critique—has a way of attesting to love in a manner that displaces love from itself, sapping it of immanence. As a genre, commentary is not sexy. Its seductions seem to lead elsewhere than direct pleasure in or exercise of the love that drives it. This elided eros of commentary, generally visible across the medieval/modern divide as “the loss of commentary and the gloss as creative forms” (Agamben), becomes newly significant in the context of the present multiform return to commentary, diagnosed by Gumbrecht as an inevitable result of the “vision of the empty chip . . . a veritable horror vacui.”

Commentary has never been cooler, not because of its authoritative reincarnations in contemporary theory (however important these are as indices of commentary’s ongoing seductive inventional potentiality), but because of the accelerating technical horizons for its practice, hitherto always supplementary, in relation to discourse (political, juridical, academic, critical and so on) that forms the modern basis of the social bond. Commentary is not the same as discourse, rather the former is a continual elaboration and un-working of the latter. As the invitation to participate in the beta version of openmargin, an application for the iPad eReader, puts it: “Connect thoughtfully: When you read a book, the words can inspire new, original thoughts in your mind. These thoughts are never heard, because they have no place to go. But from now on, the blank space around the text is public domain. When you write thoughts in this openmargin, they become real traces in the book, left for other readers to find. Together with these like-minds, you can start a dialogue. Exchange ideas, challenge the status quo and maybe start a small revolution. The margin has always been the place where change started from. So start reading and speak up.” Yet whatever the dreams currently being offloaded onto commentary’s ever-widening gyres, the expanding archipelagic mega-glosses of networked ‘global’ cultures—dreams at once of touching the void and changing the world—the loves and desires of commentary itself remain undisclosed, even stifled in its very proliferation, like the safely cordoned off comment-box itself. Whence this themed volume of Glossator, which aims to ‘put the love back’ into commentary, one way or another, practically and theoretically. For it the editors invite the following kinds of contributions:

1) commentaries on the subject of love, on texts and other objects concerning love

2) loving commentaries, commentaries that are in love

3) articles and essays addressing the relations between love and commentary, theorizing one as the other, etc.

4) commentaries on the triangular relation between love, discourse (the social bond) and commentary

5) hybrids of the above

Please send abstracts of 300-400 words to the editors (glossatori@gmail.com) by October 1st. Deadline schedule:

15 June 2011: Submissions due to the editors
15 July 2011: Submissions returned to authors with comments
15 August 2011: Revised submissions due to editors
September 2011: Publication, online and print.

Prosopoeia to prosopagnosia: love and commentary’s ‘inhuman partner’.

2010-08-26T04:10:00.000-07:00

‘I couldn't recognise my reflection as me until my 20s but I always saw CLEARLY. Nothing was a blur. But the face meant nothing, it seemed like a stranger, but I did get used to 'her' and that she was always in the mirror.’
1210Donna

‘At the club I saw someone strange staring at me, and I asked the steward who it was. You’ll laugh at me. I’d been looking at myself in a mirror’
Prosopagnosic patient, (cited in Martha J. Farah, Visual Agnosia, 2004)

For as his own bright image he survey'd,
He fell in love with the fantastick shade;
And o'er the fair resemblance hung unmov'd,
Nor knew, fond youth! it was himself he lov'd.
Ovid, Metamorphoses (trans. Garth, Dryden et al)

‘By means of a form of sublimation specific to art, poetic creation consists in positing an object I can only describe as terrifying, an inhuman partner’.
(Lacan, Seminar VII)

Like Astrophil and Stella or Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, the central conceit of this essay is the formal impossibility of the amorous relation and the interminable commentary that it generates. Here is a romance between two allegorical figures: Prosopoeia, the personifier, the maker and perceiver of faces and personae everywhere, and Prosopagnosia, s/he who is unable to recognise individual faces, even or especially her own. While Prosopagnosia can perceive all the elements that make up a face, indeed can recognise a shape as a generic face, the elements fail to signify a specific person or personality, instead the image perpetually poses a question, ‘who?’

This essay will be in two parts that will run side-by-side, separated by a barrier. In the first, I look at how the face, always already repeatedly photographed, is no longer primarily an object of demand, desire or recognition; it is no longer a phantasmatic screen of imaginary projection, but an ever-shifting marker of nodal points of data, an empty mediating space for the exchange of biometric and economic information. As such, I am going to suggest, the relation to one’s face becomes affected by a generalized psychic agnosia in which one's face begins to lose meaning, becoming unrecognisable, even imperceptible, in relation to the profile-images that continually displace it. In the second I return to the courtly tradition of western epideictic poetry, from the Troubadours, Dante and Petrarch, where the luminous face of the beloved Other is the highly generic inspiration which provides the impetus to forge the poetic personae that set, it is often claimed, the pattern for the emergence of the self-reflecting, self-making modern individual.

It is easy to see how the general 21stC imperative to have a face, or to make one, or to make a persona, an identity or profile is linked to a general disquiet about faces, ravaged by age and cosmetic surgery. Michael Jackson is perhaps the most symptomatic of our age. While the Classical Narcissus fell in love with a face he failed to realise was his own, Jackson’s serial attempt to construct a face he could love was apparently predicated upon an initial loathing of a face in which he recognised only his father. Common distaste for one’s passport photograph (‘that’s not me!’) that, in digital form, has become ubiquitous as a marker of personal identity throughout the (online) world of techno-bureaucracy is no doubt linked to the criminal mug shots that heralded the introduction of universal policing and surveillance from the 19thC. Supremely, Facebook provides a forum for contemporary prosopoeia, on the basis of the pure form of an empty template, for face-making. It is a machine for endless commentary and self-narrativization through which we negotiate our (self)love, online romances, filial and friendly relations, increasingly becoming our main means of self-promotion, the way we establish our market value.

Prosopagnosia is of course a figure from modern neuroscience, describing an inability to recognise faces. Martha J. Farah writes, ‘most prosopagnosics complain of an alteration in the appearance of faces. Although they have no difficulty perceiving that a face is a face (and do not generally mistake wives for hats), they often speak of seeing the parts individually and losing the whole or gestalt’ (Farah). Agnosias are important for cognitive neuroscience in determining, among other things, whether cognition is the effect of an over-arching ‘functional architecture’ or a more modular system comprised of contingent features that have arisen due to specific evolutionary problems. Prosopagnosia, suggesting as it does that faces are ‘special’ objects of cognition, implies the latter.

In its positing of a highly generic face comprised of a blazon of highly conventional features (golden hair, black eyes, ruby lips etc.), there could be said to be something prosopagnosic about the poetry of courtly love even though the praise of the beloved’s face is both the condition and the means of the production of poetic subjectivity. Further, it closely delineates love as an effect of a relation between form and perception, enhanced to a large degree by the influence of Neoplatonism that corresponds to the process whereby ‘object recognition is accomplished by repeatedly transforming the retinal imput into stimulus representations with increasingly greater abstraction’; the process that transforms the raw ‘stuff’ of perception into the pattern of ‘things’, thereby producing the template necessary for face recognition.

This essay returns to the courtly tradition of Dante and Petrarch to look again at the literary process of amorous prosoproduction in the light of these distinctions not in order to speculate on the neural pathology of love, but to excavate the architecture of a psychic (narcissistic) prosopagnosia of amorous relations that owes its origins to that tradition. The essay thereby explores the contrast between this tradition and contemporary amorous commentary where the face and its multiple profiles take on a different function in the context of an unconscious that has become increasingly modular.

Abstract for On the Love of Commentary (in Love)

amusia, noise and the drive

2010-08-21T12:09:00.000-07:00

The neurological condition of amusia is a form of agnosia, which is the disappearance, pathology or deviation of a highly selective aspect of one’s phenomenal model of reality (Metzinger). Amusia never concerns simply a case of tone deafness or indifference to music; it does not describe a world of silence so much as the perception of often agonizing noise where there is music. It is not the nonperception of music, but the perception of music as noise. The notion of amusia also therefore presupposes that music can disclose a fissure in the brain’s model of external reality that frames phenomenal experience, hinting at a reality outside that model: the unknown impulse that generates painful ‘amusic’. The ‘malfunction’ of the system of perception and aural object recognition, the disjunction between the brain and its reality, is betrayed by the a-musical repetition of noise. This essay appropriates this neurological notion for psychoanalytic, that is, nonbiological purposes. While science finds its consistency in repetition, a psychoanalytical notion of amusia concerns the irreducible specificity of this ‘malfunction’, of how music is experienced as a profound dissonance for some one that nevertheless discloses the limited nature of the (imaginary/symbolic) system that gives the phenomenal experience of music a semblance of meaning in so far as it is pleasurable.

Amusia is an example of associative agnosia ‘in which perception seems adequate to allow recognition, and yet recognition cannot take place’ (Farah). In Tauber’s phrase, it involves ‘a normal percept stripped of its meaning’. Agnosias like amusia are useful for neuroscience in ascertaining the contingent and modular (evolutionary) nature of perceptual apparatuses and neural ‘knowledge’ systems that abstract and pattern the object-‘stuff’ of perception. At the limit, the loss of certain phenomenal ‘qualities’ may imply the emergence of new forms, and indeed new forms of knowledge (Metzinger). A speculative psychoanalytic mode of amusianalysis would seek to trace the auto-emergence of a ‘sinthomic’ amusic that takes as its condition the incurable real of the amusical symptom that the negativity of musical form renders both singular and common. With reference to contemporary cultural examples, this essay considers the relationship between noise and the drive in the articulation of a specifically audio unconscious. It will argue that the move from oral to invocatory drive introduced by Lacan cannot be seen as purely an effect of language or of the alienation of demand in speech. Rather, it is an effect of binding with the locus of sound itself, a particulate system heterogeneous to the locus of the signifier that forms an audio unconscious equally heterogeneous to the one supposed to be structured like a language; it is this that turns the invocatory drive into a death drive that offers alternative amusical ways out of current models of symbolized reality in a movement that potentially – but only ever retrospectively – has aesthetic and political implications.

Abstract for Politics, Philosophy & Aesthetics of Noise edited by Michael Goddard and Benjamin Halligan

Black Metal Theory Symposium II: Melancology

2010-06-26T09:14:00.000-07:00

MELANCOLOGY

Black Metal Theory Symposium II

13 January 2011
The Fighting Cocks
Old London Road
Kingston-upon-Thames, London
1-11pm

Another gathering dedicated to the mutual blackening of metal and theory

Live Act

Abgott

Plenary speaker

Reza Negarestani

‘Earthly thought embraces perishability (i.e. cosmic contingency) as its immanent core .... such perishability ... grasps the openness of Earth towards the cosmic exteriority not in terms of concomitantly vitalistic / necrocratic correlations (as the Earth’s relationship with the Sun) but alternative ways of dying and loosening into the cosmic abyss ... The only true terrestrial ecology is the one founded on the unilateral nature of cosmic contingency against which there is no chance of resistance – there are only opportunities for drawing schemes of complicity.’ ...

‘Hence, the Cartesian dilemma, “What course in life shall I follow?” should be bastardized as “Which way out shall I take?”’

Reza Negarestani, ‘Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss’

MELANCOLOGY

Black metal irrupts from a place already divested of nature, a site of extinction, ‘a place empty of life / Only dead trees ...’ (Mayhem, ‘Funeral Fog’, 1992); ‘Our skies are forever black / Here is no signs of life at all’ (Deathspell Omega, ‘From Unknown Lands of Desolation’, 2005). As such black metal could be described as a negative form of environmental writing; the least Apollonian of genres, it is terrestrial – indeed subterranean and infernal – inhabiting a dead forest that is at once both mythic and real unfolding along an atheological horizon that marks the limit of absolute evil where there are no goods or resources to distribute and therefore no means of power and domination, a mastery of nothing.

A new word is required that conjoins ‘black’ and ‘ecology’: melancology, a word in which can be heard the melancholy affect appropriate to the conjunction. A new word implies a new concept and we know from Deleuze and Guattari that concepts have to fulfil three criteria. Accordingly, the plane of immanence of melancology is extinction and non-being. All things are destined for extinction; immanent to all being is the irreducible fact of its total negation without reserve or remainder. The development of the characteristics of melancology is to be addressed at the Symposium, of course, but there are already a number of apophasic determinations: it is not ecology, it is anorganic; it is not political economy, it is anti-instrumental; it is not love of nature, environmentalism, Gaia, geophilosophy ... But it implies an ethos and a style that delineates the third aspect of the concept, its embodiment in a conceptual personae: the black metal kvltist whose ethos runs across the spectrum of melancholy from bile and rage to sorrow, depression and the delectation of evil all the better to affirm the desolation s/he contemplates in the sonorous audibility of black metal’s sovereign dissonance. This environment of absolute evil is exactly the same as the absolute good of black metal itself: the expenditure of a sonic drive that propels a blackened self-consciousness, a melancological consciousness without object that is the necessary prior condition to any speculation on or intervention in the environment.

The Black Metal Theory Symposium thus invites speculation and interventions on the blackening of the earth, landscapes of extinction, starless aeon, sempiternal nightmares, black horizons, malign essences, Qliphothic forces from beyond ... in a general re-conceptualization of black ecology.

Inquiries & abstracts to Niall Scott & Scott Wilson
NWRScott@uclan.ac.uk
S.Wilson@kingston.ac.uk

Boredom’s joy: the music of the vuvuzelas

2010-06-15T03:36:00.000-07:00

Football is one of the world’s most boring sports, for the fan the boredom being attenuated by constant gnawing tension that is enlivened by anger, rage, moments of euphoria, incredulity and despair. Or at least that’s my experience living in England. For amusia, however, the current world cup is a constant joy because of the general annoyance caused to the world’s broadcasting networks and much of its global audience by the mass buzzing of the vuvuzelas, major networks having lobbied FIFA to get the Thing banned. Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s President has refused, however, letting his German unconscious do the talking when he avers, liberally, that ‘I have always said that Africa has a different rhythm, a different sound’. Remarkably unifying the extraordinarily diverse and geographically remote nations and cultures of Africa, the sound of the vuvuzela nevertheless becomes the universal sound of ‘Africa’s’ specific mode of enjoyment, the rest of the world’s noisy neighbours. For Blatter, it seems, the Africans should be allowed their exotic mode of enjoyment for our enjoyment. People are annoyed, but at the same time annoyed with themselves for being annoyed, the only recourse being to point a liberal finger in the annoying mirror of annoyance. The vuvuzela is ‘only annoying to the annoying’ says a caller to BBC Radio 5, annoyed by white middle-English intolerance.

The vuvuzela is the South African name (apparently derived from a Zulu word) for a stadium horn that has been around for years – in Brazil it is apparently known as cometa. In this world cup, however, it has indeed taken on a new dimension. It is not simply that the vuvuzela is South Africa’s ‘12th Man’ in the tournament as this report suggests. One is tempted to sound all D&G and speak of a plane of intensity or a human-horn assemblage becoming elephant becoming hive etc. etc, the crowd producing a sonic war machine that transforms the site and sound, the whole milieu, of world cup football. The music of the vuvuzelas drowns out applause, cheers, singing, conventional means of support; on the field, players exhausted through lack of sleep having been kept awake by all night vuvuzela parties, cannot hear each other above the din produced in the stadium, described as a massive beehive.

But for the neutral South African supporter, what is watching a boring football match between England and the USA, say, and blowing on a vuvuzela in unison with thousands of others? The buzzing of vuvuzelas is only a mode of ‘African’ enjoyment where it becomes the (phallic) signifier of all the lost enjoyment of TV viewers, especially in the West. But I’m not sure there is anything specifically African or even South African about the stadium horns. An effect of spaces real and spectral, actual and remote, these thousands of thin plastic phalloi vibrate spreading viruses and tele-techno annoyance around the stadium and around the world: they are the pipes of boredom’s joy. Jamie Carragher on TV last night says his kids have demanded that he bring a bunch of them home. Better than the world cup.

The London Graduate School

2010-06-10T12:57:00.000-07:00

No doubt you will have followed the campaign to save Middlesex philosophy, which has galvanised an international community of scholars and thinkers. With yesterday's announcement of the transfer of Middlesex's Centre of Research in Modern European Philosophy to Kingston University, the struggle to preserve a future for critical thought in London (something all of us have been engaged in, in different ways), and indeed beyond, now enters a new phase. The imminent launch of a London Graduate School, devoted to renewing the intellectual project of the University, fostering a new spirit of the public sphere, and inspiring new forms of intellectual and cultural practice, is to be accompanied by an inaugural lecture given by Gayatri Spivak in the Large Common Room at 6-8pm 21st June at Goodenough College, London. This will provide the opportunity, we hope, to bring together or at least make possible something like an Estates General in London.

As co-directors of this new initiative, Martin McQuillan and Simon Morgan Wortham would like to invite you to this event. All welcome.

John F Nash’s B Theory (from Bach to The Beatles)

2010-05-23T06:20:00.000-07:00

At Princeton as an undergraduate, ‘Nash soon acquired a reputation for being both brilliant and odd. In the quadrangle, he rode a bicycle in figure-eights, over and over, and paced the hallways obsessively whistling Bach’s Little Fugue’ (Samels, 2002).

Bach’s Little Fugue was John F. Nash’s signature refrain, his calling-card; it is the thing that most people remember about him, according to his biography and most other accounts of his life, providing the point either of sympathy or more often annoyance in his relations with others. At Princeton, ‘the ten or so first year students were a cocky bunch, but Nash was even cockier. He loved sparring in the common room. He avoided classes. He was rarely seen cracking a book. Pacing endlessly, whistling Bach, he worked inside his own head’. Associated indelibly with his thought, his arrogance and his annoying presence, Nash’s whistling produced a number of complaints. Nasar reports that the mathematics secretaries at Princeton complained about him to his tutors and superiors (Nasar 2001). The whistling was annoying no doubt because of its monotony, but perhaps also because it established a relation of (dis)connectedness with people. It heralded his presence but also his absence, his indifference to those around him, being lost in thought. But there is evidence that Nash was also very aware of this effect, that the refrain had a representative function. It seems to have been in some ways analogous to speech, a statement not to anyone in particular, but concerning his existence: ‘I am thinking’ or ‘genius at work’.

John Nash’s paranoid schizophrenia became apparent at the age of 30 when he suffered a psychotic break triggered, among other things, by the prospect of fatherhood, a common trigger since it exposes the subject to the gap or void where the paternal signifier should be. Devoid of a paternal metaphor, there is no anchoring point for the psychotic, no ‘permanent monologue’, just ‘some kind of music for several voices’ (Lacan). With Nash music became the model both for repetition, the refrain that provides a point of stability, and the dissonant voices that constituted the major hallucinatory part of delusional activity. With Nash it could also be said to take on metaphorical significance to the degree that Bach’s Little Fugue functioned as his ‘signifier’. On one occasion, ‘knowing that his whistling irritated one particular music-loving mathematician, who frequently asked him to stop ... [Nash] once left behind a recording of his whistling on the man’s Dictaphone’ (Nasar, 2001). It is not just, here, that Bach’s Little Fugue comes to signify Nash or his thought, but that it can do so in his absence and in the absence of his interlocutor, and moreover through the vehicle of a dictaphone. It is a joke in which Nash’s own whistling substitutes for the other’s voice through the mechanism of the machine whose functioning betrays the presence and symbolic mediation of the Other in so far as the latter can be regarded as designated by music as an ambivalent form of social bond.

On a later occasion when Nash was teaching at Princeton and managed to solve a particularly intractable and coveted problem posed to him by colleague and rival Warren Ambrose, ‘Is it possible to embed any Riemannian manifold in a Euclidian space?’, Ambrose was generous and ‘took to telling his musical friends that Nash’s whistling was the purest, most beautiful tone he had ever heard’. Nash’s whistling, therefore, as both irritating noise and beautiful tone, is the point of amusia by which Nash is established in an extimate relation with the Other, qua bearer of the symbolic pattern, something that, as a psychotic, he would be unable to achieve in language.

Bach's Little Fugue in G Minor is more than just a simple refrain, as recognizable as it is to lovers of Classical music. It has a characteristically precise and mathematical structure in which initially two and then four ‘voices’ or tunes are counterpointed. No doubt the mathematical precision appealed to Nash, Bach along with Mozart was his favorite composer. Bach's Little Fugue has a precipitous momentum, starting relatively simply and sedately and then increasing its tempo, voices imitating and cutting across and undercutting each other. It could be easily imagined that these voices offer a model, even a metaphor, for schizophrenic subjectivity, described by Lacan as ‘some kind of music for several voices’; except, of course, that the four voices are held in exquisite aesthetic tension by Bach’s ‘math-musical’ structure.

In 1968, deep in the heart of his lost years of mental illness, Nash came up with his own metaphor for his subjectivity, ‘a metaphor that he couched in his first language, the language of mathematics’ (Nasar). On a postcard, Nash wrote of himself: B squared + RTF = 0. This ‘very personal’ equation represents, according to his biographer, ‘a three-dimensional hyperspace, which has a singularity at the origin, in four-dimensional space. Nash is the singularity, the special point, and the other variables are people who affected him – in this instance, men with whom he had relationships’ (Naser). They were the high-point of a narcissism that was noted by one of Alicia Larde’s confidantes who recalled that he was far from being infatuated with his wife, ‘he was infatuated with himself’. This self-infatuation became the basis for increasingly intense but brief relationships with young men like himself that culminated in his arrest – he was the victim of entrapment by a police officer at Muscle Beach, a location notorious for homosexual liaisons – and no doubt in reaction, marriage, fatherhood and breakdown in 1959.

The libidinal intensity of his narcissism is revealed in a letter he wrote to his sister. As Sylvia Nasar writes

After John Nash lost everything – family, car, the ability to think about mathematics – he confided in a letter to his sister Martha that only three individuals in his life had ever brought him any real happiness: three ‘special sorts of individuals’ with whom he had formed ‘special friendships’. Had Martha seen the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night? ‘They seem very colorful and amusing’, he wrote. ‘Of course, they are much younger like the sort of person I've mentioned ... I feel often as if I were similar to the girls that love the Beatles so wildly since they seem so attractive and amusing to me’.

The four young men that he loved at MIT, the ‘RTF’ that culminates in the ‘B’ (for Jack Bricker, his greatest love of all the young men) are squared by The Beatles, four voices singing in counterpoint and in harmony, like Bach’s Little Fugue. At the other side of the equation is Nash at the 0 point of a singularity, screaming like the thousands of Beatles’ fans featured in A Hard Day’s Night, at Kennedy airport, at Shea Stadium, Nash’s Beatlemania opening up a fourth dimension. This structure can easily be mapped onto Lacan’s Schema L which features in Seminar III.

In this figure eight: 0 = Nash as singularity / void; o-o1 = Nash’s objects RTF, the sum of which is B for Bricker; B2 = the audio unconscious from Bach to The Beatles.

The 0 of the subject devoid of a signifier nevertheless locates the egoic image of its self-love in its objects, the young men designated by RTF that find their ideal image in the ‘B’ for Bricker. This is squared by The Beatles and Bach’s Little Fugue that provides the ‘speech’ of the subject in Nash’s whistling. However, the Other is a locus not here of signification but of music, the canon of music from Bach to The Beatles that runs from the fugue to the screams of Beatlemania that issue from the infinity of the singular point ‘0’ that opens up the fourth dimension.

As Nash’s delusions of persecution grew to cosmic scale, informed by theories that were ‘astronomical, game theoretical, geopolitical, and religious’. The dominant theory remained B theory, the math-musical theory that reached ‘sinthomic’ proportions: ‘I’ve discovered a B theory of Saturn’ he wrote in one of his many ‘Joycean monologues [that were] written in a private language of his own invention ... All the while he was working through his theories, B theory provided the organizing pattern, the theory of theories, as he would for days pace ‘round and round the apartment, his long fingers curled around one of [his mother's] delicate Japanese teacups ... sipping Formosa oolong, whistling Bach’.

DG 003580 NS

2010-05-07T13:50:00.000-07:00

IN SACRIFICE, beauty’s perfection points to death’s full brutality. Double-take. At first glance, it is as if the veiled woman is warding off the camera, the hennaed hands not so much a blessing as a curse. But it is the backs of her hands that are visible, of course, splayed out and thrust towards the camera lens in pride and supplication, the tattoos perhaps signifying a forthcoming marriage. But then again, these hands are so much in the foreground that they are positioned in the picture almost as if they were ‘our’ hands – or indeed the photographer’s hands that should be taking the photo. It is as if we have suddenly dropped our camera in order to hold back some sinister apparition looming up from behind the glass. The blurring of the picture gives this sense of double movement, pushing back and forward, thrusting and repelling. A woman beautified, ceremonially painted-up, adorned, veiled for someone’s delight, looks ominous. ‘We’, similarly adorned, hold back, with our hennaed hands and our slender pointed nails, our double, our darkened image. The composition of the picture sets up this equivalence, this Iranian stand-off, conveying our gaze directly into the eye-line of the woman framed in the blackness of the veil. One eye, obscured behind the reflected flash of light, the other – the evil one, no doubt – looks directly at ‘us’, at me, behind thick eyeliner. ‘As we are about to take the final step, we are beside ourselves with desire, paralyzed, in the clutch of a force that demands our disintegration’ (Bataille). Hands are held up against the translucent barrier and the dark figure behind it. What denotes the glass barrier, if it is glass, is the reflected light and, in the top left-hand corner, where the left index finger points, some painted writing. Whatever it is, writing signifies that there is Law somewhere, and here, as ever, it marks the point of separation, all points of separation, between light and dark, subject and viewer, beauty and its profanation, woman and woman. Because I must remember that the woman does not look at an ‘us’. These hands at the foreground of the picture address another woman – the photographer – as if in challenge and complicity, each woman looking the other in the eye. What do they see – each other’s life, love and beauty, or death? In her place, looking enacts sacrifice. S

DG 003510 NS

2010-05-03T01:54:00.000-07:00

Sequined sea of space-time / the multiple / an apparition of forms. Immersed, neither inside nor out, how can I tell that this doesn't go on forever? Undulating, an iridescent mirage that discloses nothing but desert without end or horizon reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, extending to remotest space, countless particles multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, feathers upon birds, scales on fish, drops of water in the mighty ocean, atoms in the vast expanse of the air ... How much do I love thee? Let me count the ways ... Love is of course the immeasurable and the unaccountable. It's not the sequins that she wears, it's not her baby-fine blond hair, it's more the desert in her stare (Iggy Pop). The truth of desire discloses itself as nothing but semblance. But what is this auto-disclosure? Desire of course transcends the object, directed by the semblance of being immanent to it. Desire is always directed towards another desire which, without mediation or regulation, replicates itself endlessly in sequences so that desire is desire of desire of desire of desire of desire of desire ... Not signifiers but sequins: no longer zecchino, medium of exchange, but pure metonymy, pure sequentiality without order of priority or narrative, flickering in the full nothingness of evacuated exchange-value, the empty plenitude of digitality. Who could make a metaphor of it? Who would turn this multiple into the likeness of One? She puts on a universe comprised entirely of sequins strings, patterns emerge – life seems to glisten in semblants of being – in folds and clusters, in degrees of intensity, in the fabric of space/time, to arouse the desire of God, who names her the Universe, the One. But she is la belle noiseuse, querulous beauty (Serres), flashing eyes and glinting hatred: noisily not (not) one she ex-sists in the domain of the infinite with which she is continuous. Glistening jouissance, pure surface – not of the repetitive circuit of the drive (the brickwork, the crumbling walls, the undead historical process that goes nowhere) but in the en-corps (Lacan) which insists in the body beyond its sexual being (Seminar XX). 'It is in the traces of jouissance inscribed in this en-corps that we can, perhaps, discern something of the poesis—the something coming from nothing—that Lacan links to the contingency of being and, ultimately, to the path of love' (Suzanne Bernard). S

DG – 003506SE

2010-05-03T01:51:00.000-07:00

‘In the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am’ (Foucault). A photographer, is this the photographer? At first sight, naively, it looks like a photograph of a woman, the street behind her, taking a photo of some desirable object in a shop window. But it could be a reflection, yes, the glass is angled relative to the picture plane; the photographer is the ‘desirable object’ looking at herself in the ‘shop window’. Even if it is not a reflection, this is the ruse of the double, setting up the desire to photograph the photographer looking at herself looking at herself. And here I am like her – like anyone – in the place where she discovers her absence, looking at herself looking at herself. The place of the shopper and the commodity is the same. Her left eye, not the camera lens, seems to look into that space from which she is now absent and from which I am looking, being drawn into this play of glances, this exchange of narcissisms. It is a look of intimacy, but it is not intimate. A smile plays on the photographer’s lips as she glances at herself and through herself into the virtual point, the empty space not of symbolic mediation but economic exchange, from which I look back at her. I notice the fractures in the glass hinting at the disunity of the body that is normally veiled by the specular image but is here disclosed. I fragment in turn. This commentary is too facile, don’t you think? I see a hurried yet studied impersonation of feminine desire. On impulse, she pulls back the thick curtain, as heavy as death, unwinds her veil, takes a quick snap of something that catches her eye (herself). Transgressive feminine jouissance is on display even as it takes place out of the sight of the King and his police (Purloined Letter, again). It is not an image of female narcissism, but an advertising of feminine desire and jouissance that appeals to the narcissism of the viewer, his idiotic cleverness. This is desire pimping itself in the form of its own semblance all the better to remain hidden. Abject, I don’t know how long I can go on playing the role of the (Lacanian) punter. It is time to unwind that veil, but what is behind it? Nothing but another semblance of an imitation of a semblance ... S

DG – 003505 DS

2010-05-01T05:59:00.000-07:00

A trunk and a package of junk, tied with string. Let’s go. They do not move. ‘S’ is the letter that denotes me in this glossing game. And here is ‘my’ letter stencilled on a cardboard box flattened to provide some loose casing for – what – wrought iron gates, a fence? This picture, which falls to me by the law of numerical series and sequencing that allots my place, has ‘my’ letter on it prominently placed and underlined. But of course this picture has absolutely nothing to do with me. I have never seen this alley, street or those objects. Then again, what does the letter ‘S’ have to do with me? Arbitrarily, according to the rules of the game, I am put into the picture as the letter ‘S’, a letter as alien to me as this picture. Has someone arrived or are they about to travel? Has someone died? (1) ‘S’ is visible but at the expense of ‘me’ who am absent, like the owner of these objects. ‘The signifier, whose first purpose is to bar the subject, has brought into him the meaning of death. (The letter kills, but we learn this from the letter itself’) (Lacan). The letter marks the point of division wherein one locates one’s place as an effect of the chain, SAEND, arranged in couples at four corners, ‘in a form homologous to a pyramid’, a tomb. It is this form of fatal couplings that determines the destiny, if not the destination, of ‘my’ desire in the context of this game. Appropriately the image seems to comprise, again, of a series of dualities: a dark alley, an opening, where all the lines tend, into the light. Propped up against the wall, the objects look set to travel, but just sit there. This could simply be a pile of rubbish. I see a couple, although there are many more than two objects: the sealed trunk, smug, inscrutable, sphinx-like; the other(s) ragged, dishevelled, letting it all (nearly) hang out. A game of even and odd couples: Oscar and Felix, Jacques and Jacques, Félix and Gilles, Didi and Gogo. Didigogo? No, he did not move. Yet desire is movement even in stasis; it is anticipation, imaginary flight, fantasy; La lettre volée, while the objects remain. (2) I see a trunk and a wrought iron-cardboard-string machine bearing a letter that has arrived by chance, as always, at its destination. S

(1) When I first saw this image I was reminded of Freud’s tattered hat and coat that hangs above a weather-beaten monogrammed suitcase in the Freud Museum in Vienna. These signs of imminent departure are virtually all that is left of Freud in the house from which he fled from the Nazis. Almost everything in that house is now in Hampstead. But these objects did not leave, they were abandoned.
(2)‘By The Time I Get to Phoenix’ is a song of imaginary flight. It is another repetition in a series of failed departures – ‘I’ve left that girl so many times before’. His anticipation is always displaced by nostalgia, the (love) sickness for home. ‘By the time I get to Phoenix, she’ll be ...’ but he never gets to Phoenix.

dESIRE gloss: DG – 003501 SA

2010-05-01T05:44:00.000-07:00

[These brief commentaries are part of a five-sided, pyramidal gloss on a series of photographs (for other examples see The Whim). It is forbidden to reproduce them here; they must be imagined.]

Desire and the drive: A Persian tale baked upon an arch made of brick. Que vuoi? I don’t know anything about photography. I don’t know anything about the photographer except that she is American and has an Iranian partner. What does that have to do with anything? Are all these photographs taken in Iran? I don’t know anything about Iran, couldn’t identify a monument, square, rock. We think you know a lot about desire. This is the last, terrifying sentence on the email from N, inviting me to participate in this project. Who are we? And what do they suppose about my knowledge of desire? I’ve written on Lacan. But the page mock-up, determining the length of each gloss, consists entirely of repeated denunciations of psychoanalysis in favour of Deleuze and Guattari! Already my looking has been pre-directed by an imagined dichotomy I reject. This picture, the first one allotted to me, I cannot see now as anything but a staging of the question of desire, in a picture structured by a series of dualities, too many. But mainly: two planes and surfaces, ceramic tiles and whitewashed brick. I am struck by the awkwardness of the framing that truncates the images glazed on the tiles and makes the nature of the building difficult to read. (Already visual desire is provoked through a brutal act of photographic ‘castration’!) Modern (Western) consumer desire finds its origin and definition in eighteenth-century Orientalism in a fantasy of despotism and Other jouissance: The Arabian Knights but also Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721). Scheherazade’s 1001 glosses, wagering life on the desire of the Other, for ‘desire is interpretation itself’ (Lacan). Who is he, horseman of desire with his train of followers, is he laying siege or coming home to the golden citadel I imagine in the top corner, the point towards which all the lines tend? Visual desire is related to the scopic drive that is all the more deadly and machinic for being photographic, click after click, picture after picture, arching around a vacuole in brick-like, stolid satisfaction. But the desire that this drive supports, I wager (but we will see), is not to picture, objectify or possess Iran or Iranian objects, but to ‘operate on a sacrificial plane’ and arouse Iranian desire itself, ‘for what makes the value of the icon is that the god it represents is also looking at it’ (Lacan). S

1. Which illustrates interestingly how the East and the West – the Orient and the Americas – could, in the 18thC, be related in a triangular structure that connected virtue with erotic and economic value.

A brief economic history of romance and equilibrium’s Verwerfung

2010-04-22T07:38:00.000-07:00

In the film A Beautiful Mind (2001) directed by Ron Howard, John F. Nash Jr, played by Russell Crowe, is shown struggling to come up with the original idea that might form the basis of his PhD and future reputation. In 1950 Nash was awarded his PhD for a thesis he submitted called ‘Non-cooperative Games’ that offered a formula that held that an optimum solution always exists in a situation where competitors not only seek their self-interests, but calculate their best outcome on the basis of the others’ similar interests. The formula, now known as the ‘Nash equilibrium’, became throughout the 1980s ‘the analytical structure for studying all situations of conflict and cooperation from labor-management bargaining to international trade agreements’ (Kuhn and Nasar). ‘By the late 1970s, game theory had become one of the foundations of modern economics. And at the center was the Nash equilibrium’ (Samels, 2002).

The practical example Nash used to formulate his equilibrium in his PhD thesis was poker, but in A Beautiful Mind, the example is more interesting, strangely cinematic and anti-cinematic at the same time. Having been advised by his imaginary roommate to leave the confines of his student lodgings at Princeton and seek inspiration ‘out there’, Nash moves his desk and papers into what is presumably the bar in the basement of the Nassau Inn, popular with the Princeton mathematics department. This is not something that Nash ever did of course, or could have done, but nevertheless he moves his desk as a means of seeking inspiration in real life. In the scene, Nash is joined by male colleagues who draw his attention to the presence of a number of young women, in particular a tall blonde woman with whom the audience has seen him have a previous encounter. The woman, who immediately becomes the focus of attention for all the young men, instantly suggests, in the way she is dressed and styled and fills the screen, the blonde sex symbols of the 1950s (Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Mamie Van Doren) though in a more restrained and appropriately preppy way. Nash and his colleagues begin to speculate on their chances of seduction, voices cutting across each other in competitive rivalry, ‘what shall we say, gentlemen, pistols at dawn?’ But this anachronistic, almost chivalric suggestion of an aristocratic duel is immediately rejected by a more modern and enlightened suggestion. Characteristically, given these are young mathematicians and economists, the example of Adam Smith is invoked, ‘in a competition, individual ambition serves the common good’, says one, ‘everyman for himself, gentlemen’, says another, ‘those who strike out are stuck with their friends’. For Nash, sitting silently at the centre of the throng, it is a ‘Eureka!’ moment. ‘Adam Smith needs revision’, he murmurs, and with growing excitement begins to outline what will become his equilibrium theory:

If we all go for the blonde, we’ll block each other. Not a single one of us is going to get her. So then we go for her friends. But they’ll all give us the cold shoulder because nobody likes to be second choice. But what if no-one goes for the blonde? We don't get in each other’s way, and we don't insult the other girls. That’s the only way we win. That’s the only way we all get laid. ... Governing dynamics, gentlemen; Adam Smith was wrong.

Leaving his colleagues to act on his suggestion, Nash does not bother to wait for empirical confirmation of his theory, but rushes off to express it mathematically. We don’t get to see whether his colleagues give up on their desire for the blonde, but it is enough that the principle has been explained in a way conducive to popular cinema. The example is instructive, however, not just because it illustrates Nash’s idea nicely, but because it lays out very clearly the condition of Nash’s equilibrium: the foreclosure of desire. Desire, and its signifier, has no place here other than to be by-passed. In the Hollywood cinema of the 1950s that is powerfully referenced in this scene in the form of the bar, the pool table and the Wurlitzer jukebox playing popular jazz music, the signifier of the Other’s desire is supremely that of the blonde bombshell. The iconic blonde is not just a desirable woman, her hair is a signifier of the sovereign good of America; her full figure embodies das ding around which its symbolic order circulates, the site of the erection of America’s phallus. In the film she has no such significance for Nash. While he is minimally aware of her desirability relative to the other women, such desirability is simply an obstacle, something to be compromised in order to achieve the main goal which is to get laid, the satisfaction of the drives.

Nash’s inability to understand the conventions of romance has, in the film, already been established in an earlier scene in a previous encounter with the same woman. The scene prepares the ground for the grand entrance of the blonde, but it also serves to establish Nash’s eccentricity given that he was a man of striking good looks in his youth. Sat at the edge of the bar, the woman gives Nash the eye and he is encouraged to approach her. At her side, Nash is unable or unwilling to speak, however. The woman suggests that he might like to buy her a drink, and aware that this is his cue to begin his courtship, Nash remains silent for a few moments and then makes the following short statement:

I don’t exactly know what I am required to say in order for you to have intercourse with me. But can we assume that I have said all that? I mean essentially we’re talking about fluid exchange, right? So could we just go straight to the sex?

Unsurprisingly the woman calls him an asshole and slaps his face to general laughter in the room. But Nash wasn’t playing to the gallery; it wasn’t a performance. It was an acknowledgment of the impossibility of performance, a speech that disavows the possibility of speech before the Other, represented in sexualized form, by the desirable woman. ‘In psychosis’, says Lacan, ‘the Other, where being is realized through the avowal of speech, is excluded’ (Lacan, 1993). Nash cannot locate himself through speech in the set of conventions that mediate sexual relations. He cannot engage in amorous courtship, banter, flattery, seduction and so on. ‘There is no properly human desire at all in psychosis. Where the structure of desire is missing, desire too is missing’ (Fink, 1999).

After the slap, the blonde woman walks off, and Nash’s English roommate, played by Paul Bettany, comments on his failure, expressing disapproval at the vulgarity of the ‘fluid exchange’ reference. This character, the audience later realizes, is only ever seen by Nash. He is a hallucination, an effect of Nash’s schizophrenia. A Beautiful Mind is not, of course, just the story of a mathematics genius, it is the story of a genius cut short by a devastating descent into paranoid schizophrenia and his heroic management of his condition later in life. Indeed, retrospectively, and given the improbability of Nash setting up his office in a bar, the whole of this scene is no doubt meant to be delusional. The voices of his young male colleagues, expressing their sexual rivalry in terms of the history of economic competition, are perhaps just voices in his head, the equilibrium idea an effect of imaginary revenge at the original rebuff.

While neither scene in the Nassau Inn, actual or delusional, occurred in Nash’s life according to Sylvia Nasar’s biography that provided the basis for the film, it is nevertheless highly pertinent and instructive in the way that it not only makes the conception of Nash’s Equilibrium an effect of his psychosis, but also in the way that it shows how the grounding of ‘modern economics’ in the mathematics of game theory marks a profound break in economic history and indeed capitalism. In this scene objects are stripped of all symbolic value as if the drive had no Vorstellung other than numbers and was subject purely to a calculus of efficient satisfactions. But this apparently was indeed the assumption of Nash and many of his peers. According to his biographer, Sylvia Nasar, even before his psychotic break, Nash was

Compulsively rational, he wished to turn life’s decisions – whether to take an elevator or wait for the next one, where to bank his money, what job to accept, whether to marry – into calculations of advantage and disadvantage, algorithms or mathematical rules divorced from emotion, convention, and tradition. Even the small act of saying an automatic hello to Nash in a hallway could elicit a furious ‘Why are you saying hello to me?’ (Nasar, 2001)

Nash’s compulsion to quantify everything was entirely consistent with many of his colleagues, particularly at the RAND Corporation where mathematicians were reducing not just political and military matters, including nuclear war, to abstract formulae, but also the matters of everyday life. ‘RAND scientists tried to tell their wives that the decision whether to buy or not to buy a washing machine was an “optimization problem”’ (Nasar, 2001). It is also, of course, entirely consistent with the American neoliberal attempt to extend the rationality of the market into every domain.

From ‘Making Numbers Speak: John F Nash and the Madness of Neoliberalism’. Work in Progress.

Superfly

2010-04-17T10:07:00.001-07:00

Buzz Factory

2010-04-17T07:58:00.000-07:00

Given the ubiquity of musca domestica, flies have been a wonderful example of this neighbourly economy of jouissance from King Lear to the Cramps, Kurt Neumann and Cronenberg to Wire. Not ‘hurting a fly’ is the acme of Christian pity and Buddhist piety, being ‘a fly in the ointment’ is the desire of anyone hoping to subvert a repressive system, and so on. No doubt since the migration of homo sapiens from Africa, musca domestica have been the constant companions and noisy neighbours of human beings, lodging in the margins of human civilization, incubating and pupating in its shit and garbage, feeding on wounds and rotting flesh, defecating and vomiting waste matter teeming in deadly bacteria and viruses: typhoid, cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis. The House Fly is, therefore, a perfect object of ecological desire, named after the oikos, dweller in our house and environment, living off the waste products that define and embroil every culture: s/he is my constant companion, a neighbor with whom I share my home, but who does not treat it like one; a partner with whom I identify, but who is also other to me; an in-human double who’s annoying buzzing presence indicates that she enjoys herself too much at my expense, and whose body I can in turn enjoy in compensation by squishing her; a creature that I cannot help both love and torture for making me suffer.

Damien Hirst’s artwork A Thousand Years (1993) continues this tradition: a large steel and glass display case is divided in two by an interior pane with four holes cut into it. Inside, on one side, a rotting cow’s head infested with maggots sits beneath an ‘insect-o-cutor’; in the other is a white MDF box. As the maggots pupate into flies the chances of their generally limited average life span of around 7 days is curtailed. Most would die on their maiden voyage. Some, however, will make it through the holes into the relative safety of the adjoining case containing the white box. In the corners of both cases are dishes of sugar and water. It is a machine for killing flies, while offering the chance of a number of flies living out their lives, mating, reproducing and so on. Certainly enough survived to sustain the process. As a work of art, it invites identification as it offers the art lover the opportunity to view the whole lifespan of a creature from birth to death in a way that, even under confined conditions, owes much to chance and individual ‘choice’. As Timothy Morton writes of Blake’s poem, The Fly, Hirst’s work sets up a dual process of identification with ‘the “evil” (the “thoughtless”, “blind” mechanical operation [of the insect-o-cutor] and with the insect’ (Morton: 202).

Evil is certainly evoked in the title of Hirst’s piece, A Thousand Years, recalling the ‘thousand year Reich’ promised by the National Socialists in Germany. Given this, it is impossible not also to see in Hirst’s piece a reference to Auschwitz. But this is not just an extermination machine, this is also a breeding factory and a sustainable environment. Hirst thus brings out continuities between art, fascism and the ecology management of animals. The piece evokes Auschwitz, but also the increasingly industrialized ways in which animals are bred in captivity for slaughter; and not just bred, but by extension these days artificially inseminated, genetically manipulated and produced. The correlation between this and Auschwitz invites the contemplation of greater horrors: imagine, ‘for example, instead of throwing people into ovens or gas chambers (let’s say Nazi) doctors and geneticists had decided to organize the overproduction and overgeneration of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals by means of artificial insemination, so that, being more numerous and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing numbers for the same hell, that of the genetic experimentation or extermination by gas or fire’ (Derrida, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’). This is, perhaps, the darkly satirical element to the work. But precisely as such, ecological desire is provoked and affronted by the way in which the work relies on the equally dark correlation between flies and human beings made for example by deep ecologist Arne Naess when he asserts that ‘I will never say I have a higher right to life than a mosquito’, mosquitoes of course having been ‘responsible’ over the years for millions of human deaths -- deaths that are no doubt essential if the balance of life on earth is to be maintained in the face of human over-population. Poised between the solar death of the insect-o-cutor and the nuturing corpse of the earth, the fly-humans live out their brief allegorical lives in a utopian-dystopian sustainable environment as an art work.

While there is no need to speculate about authorial intention, one is tempted to ask, following Schopenhauer, what exquisite sensitivity must Hirst possess to require the audacious buzzing of flies to be compensated by the music of its eternal annihilation. Buzzzzzap! Sizzle; the soft fall to the floor of the fly-corpse. Hirst’s fly amusia balances his suffering against the extermination of both humans and flies (imagined or real) on the plane of aesthetic enjoyment. What Hirst has nevertheless produced is a mean machine for both realizing ecological desire and satisfying its death drive. The machine produces happy flies pupating in an ideal environment (the rotting carcass), feeding on sugar, flies that one might identify with and love as people, flies endowed with human ‘choice’ and a singular destiny as to the time and manner in which they live and die. They can fly through the hole to safety or they can fly too close to the insect-o-cutor and be zapped. The fact that many do the latter maintains the fantasy of ecological balance. Imagine the congestion without it. Furthermore, perhaps, future adaptation will result in evolved avoidance of insect-o-cutors etc... This is to say that the ecological art lover can contemplate in satisfaction the management of his noisy neighbour’s jouissance even as the death drive is sustained through the sound of perpetual buzzing annihilation.

CULTURE/CLINIC – CALL FOR PAPERS

2010-03-24T04:00:00.000-07:00

C/C is an English-speaking international journal of Lacanian psychoanalysis designed to bridge the gap between cultural and clinical elaborations by generating a dialogue between practitioners and the University.

Jacques-Alain Miller and Maire Jaanus, joint editors-in-chief for Culture/Clinic have decided on the two first themes for the launch of C/C in 2011 by Minnesota UP:

1) "All Mad"

In his last teaching Lacan reaches the conclusion that we are all delusional. So we are all mad. In his own teaching Miller suggested the expression 'a universal clinic of delusion'. At the time of the desperate search for mental health as key both to happiness and social order, psychoanalysis rather sees madness as the distinctive sign of speaking beings. It is thus inscribed more in the humanist lineage of Erasmus than in the classification in boxes of the DSM V. Yet the psychoanalytic clinic recognises the import of clinical categories and has made advances in generating models for these categories.

2) "Governing by numbers"

Governing is an impossible profession, said Freud. So is psychoanalysis. But it does not prevent us from either analyzing or governing, quite the contrary. This issue will broach the question through the clinic of discourses developed by Lacan from Seminar XVII onwards. The question of the development of the incidences of science on the discourse of the Master has transformed politics and practices of government. Is the Empire of the number taking over from that of the signifier? In which ways? And with what effects?

The Editors of C/C invite you to send your contributions on either one of these themes by July 15 2010. We are aware of the short time allowed for these first contributions but we would like to get the Journal off the ground as rapidly as we can. Texts should be between 5000 and 8 000 words, preferably in English (but can be sent in French too) at the following email address: cultureclinic@gmail.com

Please circulate this call for papers to anyone you think would be interested in contributing, or relevant mailing lists.
Suggestions or inquiries can be addressed to
veronique.voruz@le.ac.uk

Marie-Hélène Brousse, Managing Editor, C/C
Véronique Voruz, Coordinating Editor, C/C

Buzzing 2: Ecological Love and the jouissance of the fly

2010-03-15T09:26:00.001-07:00

Man is ... a funny sort of animal, is he not? Where in the animal kingdom is the discourse of the master? Where in the animal kingdom is there a master? . . . if there were no language there would be no master ... because language exists you obey. Jacques Lacan, ‘Milan Discourse’ (1972).

Jouissance of the Other ... of the body of the Other who symbolizes the Other, is not a sign of love’. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX (1972)

In Ecology without Nature (2007) Timothy Morton mounts an impressive attack on the ‘eco-mimesis’ that characterizes much environmental art and criticism which, in the wake of Romanticism, constructs a fantasy of immersion in the natural world that is indistinguishable from the contemplative state of the ‘beautiful soul’ whose pleasure precludes acknowledgement of participation in the environment and consequently ethical responsibility for it. In contrast, Morton wants to abolish the dream of nature and replace it with an ecology that recognises the creatures of the world as independent subjects with whom we should interact as such. Morton concludes his book by suggesting that the ‘best way to have ecological awareness is to love the world as a person’ (201). Furthermore, he writes, ‘the best way to love a person is to love what is most intimate to them, the “thing” embedded in their make up’(201). His specific example is provided by William Blake’s poem ‘The Fly’: ‘Am not I / A fly like thee? / And art not thou / A man like me?’ (see above)

What Morton means by ‘thing’ is not exactly clear, but given the prominence of Jacques Lacan in his readings (pp. 198, 202-3) I am assuming that it is a reference to the centrality of ‘das ding’ to Seminar VII. What, then, is das ding of the fly? It is a strange question because das ding is an effect of language; for Lacan, only speaking beings relate to a Thing around which the (death) drive, articulated by the whole Vorstellung of the subject, its means of self-representation, circulates. I am not sure that flies speak, although certainly they buzz. Can this buzzing represent the fly for the buzzing of all the other flies or for other speaking, musical, noise-making beings so that it might be loved as a person? What (ecological) system would need to be in place for this to be possible, and for such 'love' to become structurally mutual?

For Lacan, the very structure of the signifying chain implies some Thing outside it upon which the chain uncertainly grounds and articulates itself. The order of intimacy imagined for the world of nature, particularly animal nature, is often associated with the jouissance that has to be sacrificed in the name of human civilization. It is towards this jouissance that the drive aims, thereby becoming a death drive because it is located beyond the pleasure principle that marks the limit of civilized comforts that are always of course more or less comfortable for some. Projected in the void, the Thing is identified as both the absolute Good beyond the symbolic order and the absolute Evil of suffering implied through its deprivation by the Other. This Other, moreover, is always represented by another person, one’s neighbour, whom Christ commands that one love as oneself. Lacan notes that Freud ‘stops in horror’ at the Christian commandment to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ since it summons-up the unfathomable hostility that inhabits the neighbour that one recognises on the basis of one’s own hostility. ‘And what is closer to myself than that kernel of jouissance in myself to which I dare not approach?’. At the interior limit of the Thing (on the basis of which Morton suggests we must love another creature as a person), equivalence is established between jouissance and suffering: ‘he’ always enjoys at my expense and vice versa.

Animals are located squarely in this economy when Jeremy Bentham makes what is probably the founding ecological statement relative to ‘man’ and his animal neighbours: ‘The question is not can they reason, can they talk, but can they suffer?’ Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1823). If animals can suffer, they can also enjoy, and it is certain that man sees that everywhere he looks. Moreover, it is on this essentially economic and imaginary basis (calculating the jouissance of the other) that ecology seeks to intervene in the world. This economic relation is also central to Blake’s poem, where, in the first stanza, it is precisely the jouissance of the little fly’s ‘summer’s play’ that provokes the violence of the poet’s ‘thoughtless hand’ (his unconscious wille or death drive, no doubt). Accordingly, this thoughtlessness immediately provokes the thought of equivalence between man and fly because the poet’s own jouissance (dancing, drinking, singing) will at some point be brushed aside by some other ‘blind hand’. The fourth stanza begins with a typical Blakean conditional: ‘If thought is life ... And the want / Of thought is death’, ‘Then am I / A happy fly, / If I live, Or if I die.’ While the ambiguity of this last stanza, based as it is on a conditional, can mean so many different things, Morton reads the poem as a ‘Cartesian meditation’ so that even though the mutable pleasures of the body are perceived to be as ephemeral as a fly, subject to the ‘blind’ vicissitudes of life and death, they provide the essential locus of happiness. At the same time, thought is able to maintain a sovereign distance through identifying with both. ‘Instead of bemoaning the fate of living beings ... the poem identifies with the “evil” (the “thoughtless,” “blind” mechanical operation) and with the insect’ (202). For Morton the poem has the doubleness of a Cartesian-Utilitarianism. Perhaps this can provide the rationale for an ecological, machinic ‘thought’ to manage the problem of the other's jouissance through a regime of happiness in which humans and animals (even flies) are equivalent and have equal rights? ‘Social mediation’, Morton writes, ‘is required to aid the creature’, a mediation based on what society imagines and ‘thinks’, which is to say calculates, about the creature’s ‘thing’, its jouissance (Morton, 2007: 202).

It is here that the ‘Cartesian-Utilitarian’ ecology seems to take on the same structure as contemporary capitalism where the master signifier is concerned with accounting for the right to jouissance. In his Milan Discourse (1972), Lacan provides an algorithm for capitalist discourse by adjusting slightly the Discourse of the Master. Capitalist Discourse is produced when the subject ($) displaces the signifier of the master from the position of agent to that of (repressed) truth below the bar (see above).

In ecological terms, we could say that Man-the-master (Man who masters nature precisely as an effect of naming it) is displaced by the animal-subject ($) who is liberated through its right to jouissance/happiness (a) which bears on it from the position of production. The signifier that marks the difference between ‘man’ and the ‘animal’ is displaced and they enjoy an imaginary equivalence in which an animal can be loved as a person even as humans are understood purely in terms of their drives and interests, calculated statistically, and understood through ‘swarm’ behaviour as part of ‘hive minds’ that ‘buzz’ in the network biosphere. It is of course this system of ‘bionomic’ ecological capitalism (S2) ‘socially mediates’ to produce the conditions that enable the animal-subjects ($) to enjoy and be happy. (S1) represents the laws of governance that command and regulate capitalism (S2) and its institutions to produce the surplus jouissance (a) that enables the animal-subjects to enjoy more or less equally in bovine contentment. Following the arrows, it can be seen that the discourse works in a continuous loop like a machine. In his Milan address, Lacan commented that ‘it is the cleverest discourse that we have made. It is no less headed for a blowout. This is because it is untenable . . . it suffices so that it goes on casters (ça marche comme sur des roulettes), indeed that cannot go better, but that goes too fast, that consumes itself, that consumes itself so that it is consumed (ça se consomme, ça se consomme si bien que ça se consume)’ (11). The animal-subjects consume themselves in the all-consuming machine, but they do it more or less painlessly; jouissance is regulated, distributed through the excess commanded by the ‘blind hand’ of the bioeconomic machinery of joy – or at least until the blow out.

Buzzing (1) Schopenhauer, amusia and the fly

2010-02-21T07:38:00.000-08:00

Music is as direct an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself … Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity these Ideas are. This is why the effect of music is much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing itself. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea trans. Haldane & Kemp, 1964 (I, III: 333)

It is the same will which objectifies itself both in the Ideas and in music, though in quite different ways (333).

According to all this we may regard the phenomenal world, or nature, and music as two different expressions of the same thing — Music never expresses the phenomenon, but only the inner nature, the in-itself of all phenomena, the will itself (338).

We might just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will (340).

The fly ought to be used as the symbol of impertinence and audacity; for whilst all other animals shun man more than anything else, and run away even before he comes near them, the fly lights upon his very nose. Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism (137).

Unlike his Romantic contemporaries … Schopenhauer views this abstract Wille as impersonal, blind, and indifferent to our wants and desires. There is no nature-for-us, much less any being-on-the-side of nature. Furthermore, the wille is, in itself, ‘nothing’, a gulf at the heart of the world as Vorstellung. Eugene Thacker, ‘Three Questions on Demonology’ in Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium I edited by Nicola Masciandaro, Open Access, 2010.

Neither will nor Idea, music occupies a strange position in Schopenhauer’s philosophical system as the world’s uncanny double. The will is that mythical, noumenal (quasi-)force that is the in-itself of all things from physical forces like electricity and gravity to human desires and affects all of which are imperfect copies of Platonic Ideas. The latter are pure objectifications of the will, but they are not the will itself; the will is essentially in-different to Ideas just as it is indifferent to both humans and nature, that is to say both different from and indifferent to these things even as the will is objectified in them. The will as such is the in-human force of human striving, human ‘will’: ‘the nature of man consists in this, that his will strives, is satisfied and strives anew, and so on for ever’ in an interminable process that condemns human beings to continual dissatisfaction, suffering and ultimately death – the will wills its own death in human form in its own way. The will becomes a force in humanity and nature through becoming objectified (that is, objectifying itself) in Vorstellung: chains of ideas, concepts, presentations and representations, of which the ‘human’ is one among others. The world consists purely in ideas and representations that circulate, as Eugene Thacker suggests, a void, an effect of the will’s own self-negation, a ‘“nothing”, a gulf at the heart of the world as Vorstellung’ (HG: 188).

Music is heterogeneous to all of this, even as it repeats it, with a difference. Music is not Vorstellung; it is not an Idea, a concept or representation. It is, however, some form of objectification of the will, a copy of the will, but a copy that is so close it is able to express not phenomena or nature, but ‘only the inner nature, the in-itself of all phenomena, the will itself’ (338). Since this is exactly what the will does, vis-à-vis phenomena, music is an exact copy of the will. It is the double of the will and the same. As Schopenhauer also shows, music acts on the human subject in the same way as the will, exerting powerful effects directly ‘on the inmost nature of man’ in a way inaccessible to the other arts, reason and even mathematics which are bound up in the Vorstellung of ideas and concepts (329, 336). Music bears on, indeed articulates an unconscious knowledge of the ‘inner nature of the world’ which is beyond rational comprehension and verbal expression but may be expressed in musical composition: ‘the composer reveals the inner nature of the world and expresses the deepest wisdom in a language which his reason does not understand; as a person under the influence of mesmerism tells of things which he has no conception when he wakes’ (336). Notwithstanding all these ‘figures of speech’, language has no place here: knowledge of the inner nature of the world consists in wordless articulations of sound beyond even mathematical formulation – and Schopenhauer is adamant about this, music is not merely exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi [an exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting]. Music is thus not an aesthetic object whose formal consistency is guaranteed by mathematics, although Schopenhauer elsewhere hesitates about this, since it would be if music were to be regarded as a closed system. As a closed numerical system, music would not be able to ‘free itself from numbers without entirely ceasing to be music’ (331). This seems to be why Schopenhauer must regard music as an open system continuous with all the music of the world, all its buzzing and twittering, its sound and fury, from the birds and the bees to thunder and lightning: ‘we might just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will’ (340).

Music therefore for Schopenhauer offers a different relation to the world, to the ‘inner nature of the world’, than to the world as Vorstellung. This is because music is always double; it is both mimetic and anti-mimetic at the same time. On the one hand, since it is a copy of nothing but the will it is heterogeneous to all Vorstellung; it lies beyond all chains of signification, beyond all aesthetic and mathematical systems, and therefore beyond any possible discursive knowledge of the world. On the other, as a copying of the will in articulated sound, music sublimates and negates the will thereby producing and presenting the void within itself, the structural ex-nihilo out of which sprang the will in the first place, into which the will dissolves in its self-negation. It therefore establishes a position for itself outside of the will. How is this position exterior to both will and Vorstelling ‘known’ or experienced? Unconscious knowledge of this position is signalled by the experience of amusia relative to the world as ‘embodied music’ (340). The ‘void’ is signalled when the world as embodied music is experienced as a violent dissonance.

Appropriately, Schopenhauer does not discuss this in any other way than through recourse to his own experience. Helen Zimmern writing in 1876, 16 years after his death, comments on Schopenhauer’s acute sensitivity to the music of the world and its propensity to produce a degree of discordant agony that cuts him off from all ideas and representations. Describing his thought processes in terms of a hunt for ideas, Schopenhauer says,

Those ideas which I capture after many fruitless chases are generally the best. But if I am interrupted in one of these pursuits, especially if it be by the cry of an animal, which pierces between my thoughts, severing head from body, as by a headsman's axe, then I experience one of those pains to which we made ourselves liable when we descended into the same world as dogs, donkeys, and ducks.

The cry of an animal – Schopenhauer evokes, in the barking of dogs, the braying of donkeys and the quacking of ducks, the bucolic music of the countryside – literally severs his head from his body, placing him at the very limit of being in acephalic agony at complete variance with the world even as he enjoys the suffering of animals as his own. This radical disconnection, then, is also a profound connection with the ‘otherness’ of the animal in the inner experience of dissonant amusia.

In a famous comment in The World as Will and Idea on the higher capacity of suffering in complex beings relative to apparently simpler life forms, Schopenhauer notes that every time a man swats a fly, he implicitly ‘acknowledges that the fly suffers less from being killed than he suffers from being annoyed by it’ (see also Anders, Evolution of Evil : 195). Here, we see that the relation between man and animal is organized by an economy of suffering /jouissance, articulated by the locus of sound, in which the fly’s buzzing signifies a sovereign indifference that is ‘enjoyed’ at the expense of the philosopher. In Studies in Pessimism, Schopenhauer writes, ‘The fly ought to be used as the symbol of impertinence and audacity; for whilst all other animals shun man more than anything else, and run away even before he comes near them, the fly lights upon his very nose’ (137). The killing of the fly acknowledges that it represents a good that is inaccessible to him. The satisfaction gained from killing it is supposed to compensate for the suffering brought by the fly’s buzzing presence. It is another way in which man’s suffering /jouissance is located in the earth and violently extracted from it in a struggle over goods and satisfactions. This economy is at the same time also an ecology; they are, at root, almost the same words (oikos + nomos or logos). While ecology may or may not condemn killing flies, it is itself nothing other than a promise to redistribute the world’s goods based on knowledge of the world as Vorstellung of good and bad goods, an allocation of resources in which scientific-ecological knowledge assumes the force of law.

But killing the fly fails to compensate for anything. On the contrary, the gap opened up between man and fly is incommensurable even as it pitches on the philosopher’s nose, thereby presenting an idea of audacious freedom and impertinent autonomy relative to human knowledge. In Schopenhauer’s amusia there is an unconscious apprehension of a profound dissonance, resonating long after the death of the fly, that resounds from a place heterogeneous to any possible economy or ecology of suffering. There is no possible compensation. Accordingly, it is only from such a position of ‘audacious’ freedom and ‘impertinent’ autonomy, recognised in the dissonant music of the fly, that speaking beings can begin to address the problem of their relation to the world.

The Enoic Sublime (or 77 Million Reasons to Hate Brian Eno)

2010-01-23T12:01:00.000-08:00

‘When I look at this I see things that I didn’t predict because I can’t possibly have seen 77 million combinations, and I probably never will do.’ Brian Eno.

Probably? Let your undead unconscious do the talking, Brian. On the Brian Eno-athon festival on BBC 4 last Friday that repeated the hagiographic documentary on Roxy Music, Phil Manzanera (or was it Mackay?) disclosed the fine critical faculties of Sid Vicious by recalling the latter comment that he ‘really likes Roxy Music, but that Brian Ferry is a cunt’. While it’s difficult not to concur with this appraisal, it is impossible not to sympathize with Ferry nevertheless in the face of the monstrous ego of Brian Eno. Ferry of course won the Brian wars and kicked Eno out of the band unceremoniously. It is just surprising that it took him 2 albums. Centrepiece of BBC 4's evening was a long Arena documentary on Eno himself (theme tune by Eno) that culminated in the great man’s recent stuff on generative systems in music, art and animation (portfolio: Spore, the Bloom app. for iphones, animatronic popstars U2 and Coldplay ...). It also reminded me of Eno’s return to Art with his project of a couple of years ago that raised narcissism to the point of sublimity.

Eno’s multiscreen sound and light installation, Constellation (77 Million Paintings) (2007) is generated by a computer that is programmed to create 77 million unrepeatable aural and audio experiences. Reporting on the installation, Rachel Campbell-Johnston wrote, ‘appearing on a pattern of screens, the images transmute to the accompaniment of an entrancing electronic tune. The sounds cluster and recluster in strange unearthly songs (Campbell-Johnston, 2007). She quotes Eno gazing at one of his images and saying, ‘What absolutely intrigues me ... is that I've never seen this before and I'm never going to see it again. Each image is unique ... and each moment in the music is unique’. Even at the fastest speed available to the software, it would apparently take 9,000 years to view the entire show. So – probably – Eno won’t be able to enjoy the full extent of his generative genius.

Eno’s art and music is not, I would wager, the art of the future, even if it is programmed to exist and continually create in a time and society further away than any futurologist could imagine. Eno’s art and music is, however, an interesting sign of contemporary cultural production and its ambient joy of subjective erasure in the depths of the abyss. Even though it escapes the grasp of discursive knowledge, music can legitimately be regarded as a sign. In a Lacanian sense, music can be regarded a sinthome in so far as it is the effect of the know-how of a practice in which is embedded the jouissance that is specific to it. Music can be regarded as something like a sinthome because it can give a singular consistency to the knotting of real-Symbolic-Imaginary in the savoir-faire and jouissance of the composer or musician (see Lacan, Seminar XXIII).

But to read Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings as an audio-visual sign, symptom or even sinthome necessarily involves considering Eno as part of an assemblage. Eno is not an artist so much as a creative consultant. He stands at the juncture where artist and worker are conjoined in a completely different creature of econopoietic management; he's a system and a brand. So while it is not the specific jouissance of the body that generates the music and the image, but a software programme, nevertheless, inherent to the programme and its particular organization of noise is a structure of desire related to an imaginary utopia of social order based on neoliberal biotechnology. Immanent to this assemblage is not jouissance but anorganic joy to which one can have no access and about which one can know nothing except that it distributes a variety of affects, most notably amusia.

Ever since Music for Airports (1977) Eno’s ambient music has not failed to evoke discontents provoked by the demands of new techno-bureaucratic imperatives. The audio symptomaticity of Eno’s music is most clearly heard in the intense irritation that greets so many every time The Microsoft Sound and its derivatives herald life at the screen. Eno’s sound intensely exacerbates, even as it is supposed to ameliorate, the anxieties surrounding contemporary existence. Eno’s music is the answer to anxieties concerning the erasure of the subject of culture and society: the death of the artist and worker and the econopoietic rise of me-me performativity.

Eno’s Constellation (77 Million Paintings) with its performance-presentation of the beauty of a turbulent art-nature of continual and indefinite change, mutability and expenditure is consistent with mainstream, econopoietic processes. Indeed, it is ‘homoeconopoietic’ because while the software programme allows a finite number of audio-visual elements to yield a practically unlimited diversity of combinations, each one is perfectly equivalent and exchangeable. The automata of the symbolic (algorithms, numerical systems, digital biology) erase the letter and overwrites the real in the sense of generating a fulminating ground in which nothing repeats but everything returns to the same place. Everything is unique, nothing is repeated, everything is in a constant churn of creation and destruction, life and death. But there is no life or death, no trauma that testifies to the irruption of the real. As such this art is the perfect sign of a techno-science that is divested not just of all meaning but all utility. Its scientific death drive has foreclosed the imaginary dimension in which death might become meaningful for a subject; it has divested function of all purpose. There is no subject, no musician, no artist, no listener or viewer, just an undead process of emergence and disappearance programmed to last 9,000 years. Not marble nor the guilded monument of princes shall outlive it. And yet it has Brian Eno’s brand signature.

If The Microsoft Sound gave 77 million reasons (or however many copies of Windows 95, 2000, or XP were sold) to hate Brian Eno, Constellation gives him 77 million reasons to love himself back. Even as the notion of the artist-as-producer is effaced in the generative process, the work promises to commemorate his name for ten millennia. The effacement of the artist, therefore, is predicated on a monstrous narcissism. This narcissism gives imaginary consistency to the piece as a joy-sign in its support of the symbolic that became more and more detached in the age of generalized psychosis promised by techno-neoliberalism. The narcissism of the work stops the symbolic becoming completely operational in its scientific (mathematic, algorithmic) reformatting of the real through its hyperbolic doubling of the order of simulation.

In the correlation that he makes between art and science, Eno likes to draw an important distinction. For Eno, the key difference between art and science is that art is safe (‘Gossip is Philosophy’). The role of art is to render safe the violence of the real and the effects of science -- its waste products, pollution, damage, mutation and death, ‘the symptom in the facts’ (Lacan, ‘Lituraterre’). The idea of a wholly aestheticized science is therefore to simulate the violence of the real, accommodating it within the order of production as a leisure activity, rendering it safe. But of course Eno’s project is thus consistent with the general goal of the techno-scientific, biopolitical order of total positivity from which all negativity is purged. Eno’s repetition and uncanny doubling of this project, that does nothing other than monumentalize his own idiotic egotism, resonates therefore with a profound dissonance, heralding its death. The desire to abolish death that is the most characteristic feature of the biopolitical order that seeks to govern in the name of life is doubled by the undead generation of art-life that can continue almost indefinitely in Eno’s brand name. But the presence of the name seals its meaning as the tomb of a dead man, a monumental folly testifying to the very traditional hubris of attempting to sustain one’s name in the name of the brand as if it constituted an aesthetic overcoming of death.

Happy Xmas (WAR IS FOREVER!)

2010-01-14T07:52:00.000-08:00

The most unbearable form of music is the Christmas song. Every year in Britain at least, for a whole month, over-familiar ditties from Bing Crosby to Cliff Richard, Nat King Cole to Slade, Johnny Mathis to George Michael torture the public. John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ entered this dubious canon of aural agony in 1971. In the general banality of its liberal sentiments, addressing itself to a world of old and young, rich and poor, weak and strong, black and white and so on, it is unremarkable and more or less equivalent to any other Christmas song. The difference lies with the parenthetical supplement, ‘War Is Over’. The Christmas song proffers a Christmas gift, the equivocal nature of which is signalled in its own bracketed condition ‘(If You Want It)’.

There is no question that John Lennon and Yoko Ono would have been highly aware of the ambivalent nature of the gift that is the Christmas song generally. The release of theirs was a deliberate part of the ‘WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It)’ billboard campaign, generally acknowledged as part of Yoko Ono’s oeuvre and a significant example of advertising art. Ono began her advertising art in 1965 with the IsReal Gallery project that advertised for sale a number of purely imaginary art works from an exhibition that did not take place in a non-existent gallery. Playful and paradoxical, Ono’s advertising events take up the imperative form of advertising in a way that is not simply subversive; they are also contemporary with the move advertising itself made in the 1960s into a form of conceptual thinking that had its end point, in the 1980s and 90s, in the marketing of pure concepts rather than products.

While Ono was a significant figure in the conceptual art of the 1960s, unlike Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, Hans Haacke and others her approach, while it similarly employed language, nonsense, participation and minimalism, did not undertake a critique (of art conventions). Rather, her works ‘posit the mirror as a primary form of the imaginary ... going beyond genres and categories to include all art and thought’ (Miyakawa Atsushi). Like the Freudian unconscious, they know no negation, but are affirmative events, ‘the closest word for [which] may be a “wish”’ ('To the Wesleyan People', 1966). They ‘in-struct’ as they construct imaginary and fictional yet incomplete spaces/events that assume ‘fiction as fiction, that is, as fabricated truth’ (‘The word of a fabricator’, 1962). This concept of ‘instructure’ informs both the Instruction Pieces and the Unfinished works that require the involvement of participants in order to be completed, although the ways in which the works and pieces can be completed can be as variable as the participants. As such, like the ambivalent space of the mirror itself, the event can be unpleasurable as much as pleasurable, distressing as much as reassuring, the fabrication disclosing hatred as much as love.

Much larger in scale, the ‘WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It)’ project involved a multimedia advertising campaign including billboards posted in different languages in twelve major cities around the world. Reputed to have cost $72, 000 the campaign constituted a huge and highly equivocal gift to the anti-war movement. One might even say it was a form of potlatch given the self-promotion necessarily implied in the gesture and the adverse publicity it generated. Though not a direct imperative like Coca-Cola’s ‘Enjoy’ with which it is directly contemporary, or Nike’s ‘Just Do It’ of the 1990s, ‘WAR IS OVER! (if you want it)’ operates in exactly the same way. It is a mot d'ordre, an order-word, in the phrase of Deleuze and Guattari, that instructs by ordering or commanding obedience. ‘We call order-words, not a particular category of explicit statements (for example, in the imperative), but the relation of every word or statement to implicit presuppositions, in other words, to speech acts that are, and can only be, accomplished in the statement’ (D&G). These statements through their clear link, direct or indirect, to presuppositions and assumed obligations not only compel the bodies that they address but transform and mobilize them.

A perfect example would be George W. Bush’s statement to the world’s press in 2001:‘you are either with us or with the terrorists’. In an instance, the citizens of the world were incorporeally transformed into quasi-Americans in relation to a spectral group with no national affiliation and mobilized into the War on Terror that it simultaneously inaugurated. As a response to Bush’s statement, ‘WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It)’ would have been even more pertinent than it was in 1970 since like Bush’s statement it requires no referent. In its global address, it does not refer to an actual war or actual combatants (not even the Vietnam War), but rather accomplishes in the statement itself an instantaneous transformation. ‘The incorporeal transformation is recognizable by its instantaneousness, its immediacy, by the simultaneity of the statement expressing the transformation and the effect the transformation produces; that is why order-words are precisely dated’ (D& G). Appropriately enough, ‘WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It)’ is precisely dated. It comes with a signature ‘Happy Christmas John and Yoko’. This Christmas gift presents the end of war – but only if you want it. How could anyone refuse? How could anyone not want war to be over? How can you reject a Christmas present? You are either with us, or you are with the ‘meanies’ (Ono).

There is an essential asymmetry, however, between the statements of John and Yoko and George W. Bush. They are not opposites facing each other, they are pointing in the same direction. Of course J&Y do not have the power to mobilize everyone into literal combatants of global war. But that is not what Bush’s statement means nor is it what it does. Rather, the statement formalizes the condition in which war is constant and knows no national boundaries. That is indeed the meaning of both statements. The incorporeal transformation of Bush’s statement does not concern a movement from peace to war, but of the transformation of the meaning of war as something that is no longer prosecuted between nation-states, but is immanent to all states. Similarly, J&Y’s message does not describe or promise a passage from war to peace, even if it may take the form of a wish for such a passage. Rather, it produces an experience and self-consciousness of war through the antagonism it generates. ‘WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It)’ actually means ‘WAR IS FOREVER! (And You Have No Choice)’. Happy Christmas John and Yoko. They say it every year: on every popular music radio channel, every retail outlet, every Christmas party, the conjunction between antagonism and commerce, war and advertising is announced, placing the festive cheer and universal love of Christmas on the path of ex-sistence.

In the same way that many people find Ono's famous instruction poems – 'Watch the sun until it becomes square' – as annoying as they do charming, 'WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It)’ cannot help but produce hostility precisely through demanding the impossible. A small collection of instruction poems is one thing. But an impossible demand, framed in the form of a Christmas present commanding world peace, screaming silently but insistently across the world in huge billboards and across the mass media, cannot fail to produce antagonism. For some, Ono’s events are examples of how she has ‘managed to use the simple concept of love as a universal social construction as the content for her own aesthetic and philosophical stance. This is not here, it is everywhere and eternal’ (David Ross). These references to love as both a ‘social construction’ and ‘everywhere and eternal’ once again clearly indicate that the discourse of love is marked by an essential delusion. In their conjunction of art, commerce and the gift, Ono’s marketing events employ this discourse informed by the delusion of love in the name of peace. What these events actualize and foreground, however, is quite the opposite. Through the formal effect of commercial repetition (irrespective of any profit-motive) these statements produce pure dissonance.

According to The Beatles’ biographer Bob Spitz, ‘Yoko’s appearance in the studio functioned as a declaration of war’. This seems excessive, but at the very end of her own authorized documentary of Lennon’s life and legacy, Imagine (Solt, 2005), Ono’s reflections on her relations with her dead husband are short, simple and revealing. She lists a series of roles apparently in an ascending order of significance.

He was my husband, he was my lover, he was my friend. He was my partner. And ... (pause) ... he was an old soldier that fought with me (brief smile).

Groundhog Love (audioligachaeta and the love song)

2010-01-02T05:42:00.000-08:00

In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray would probably have raped and killed Andie MacDowell quite a few times, really gone to town. I can see why they left that out of the movie. Bill Murray’s character’s real triumph is that he can still eventually fall in love with someone after he has spunked on her disembodied colon.
Frankie Boyle, My Shit Life So Far.

This is funny, perhaps (to me anyway), because it assumes that the blandness of Hollywood romance, represented by MacDowell, evokes a violence that is unconsciously recognised in laughter, but also because it contains a truth about love’s impossibility: that it seeks to imagine a form for formlessness.

The violence of Bill Murray’s character, Phil Connors, is not visited on MacDowell, but it is visited on himself (he attempts – and even succeeds – to commit suicide several times) throughout the movie and on the alarm radio that wakes him every day, that is of course the same day that threatens eternally to recur, to the tinny sounds of Sonny & Cher’s ‘I Got You Babe’. However, there is nothing Nietzschean about Groundhog Day, on the contrary. Indeed, one could argue that there is no love at all in the movie since Hollywood romance is merely the cynical premise for a Protestant parable about self-improvement and re-skilling (Collins learns French, the piano and ice sculpture in his efforts to impress MacDowell). In the process Murray’s bad, grumpy weatherman becomes a Good Person and a better worker. But let’s, for the moment, take Frankie Boyle’s reading and suppose that there actually is love at stake in the movie and that, moreover, its repetition motif is a metaphor for love that is conditioned, in Groundhog Day as everywhere else, by the popular love song.

A song of love, a famous duet, greets Connors at dawn, as 5.59 flicks over to 6am, every time Groundhog Day begins again. The love that according to Frankie Boyle will redeem Murray’s character (both are comical misanthropists, btw) is an accursed thing that heralds each new day as the same day, the same scene and situation, the same misery. Cue the smashing of the alarm radio as if it were Andie MacDowell, imagined source of his amorous frustration and self-loathing, as if it were love itself, some agonizing unbearable, whining noise, the very embodiment of evil’s banality: ‘so put your little hand in mine, there ain’t no hill or mountain we can’t climb’. Love is a ‘tormented circling’ (Agamben, see the Whim) that is figured, in Groundhog Day, by a musical ‘earworm’ that traps the amorous subject ‘in a sort of loop, a tight neural circuit from which it [can] not escape’ (Sacks). For Agamben this circling takes place around ‘an image painted or reflected in the deepest self’ – as if there were anything in this idea of profundity other than an infinite reflexivity.

Perhaps this is the difference between the music of love and its image. The latter assumes Narcissus as love’s primary scene, its model for all future loves and identifications, while the former evokes love’s pure contingency as an external force, blind cupid’s arrow that sounds even (or especially) in the night of howling winds. As Roland Barthes notes in Lover’s Discourse (1978), the first thing we love is a scene. ‘For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness ... the scene consecrates the object I am going to love’. The fact that the visual object is always an effect of a prior mise en scene that determines the field of visibility is noted by Oliver Sacks even as he contrasts this with the aural register (Musicophilia, 2007). While listening is no doubt a selective process, the form of what is heard is always ‘preserved with remarkable accuracy’. For Sacks, ‘it is this fidelity – this almost defenceless engraving of music on the brain – which plays a crucial part in predisposing us to certain excesses or pathologies ... even in relatively unmusical people’. Music comes unbidden, whether you like it or not, you cannot shut your ears, and it makes you mad. This amorous music is an affliction, a diabolical possession or madness, it enters and ‘subverts’ the brain, ‘forcing it to fire repetitively and autonomously (as may happen with a tic or seizure)’ (Sacks). The ‘audioligachaeta’ or earworm can fade, but once it has entered the brain, like love the heart, ‘a heightened sensitivity remains, so that a noise, an association, a reference’ can set it off again (Sacks). Their apparent universality unites the normal with the pathological, the every day and the eternal, sanity and madness, interiority and exteriority, banality and evil ...

Although Barthes does not in LD mention the popular song (nor indeed music at all as far as I can remember), the love song is in contemporary life one of the main vehicles of ‘love’s obscenity’ that Barthes insists ‘must be assumed by the amorous subject as a powerful transgression which leaves him alone and exposed’ in a reversal of values. The necessity to embrace abjection and humiliation – not as a form of ascesis proper to Courtly Love, but in accordance with the stupidity of a revolting sentimentality – raises love’s obscenity to an (almost Kantian) imperative where sublimation and perversion are indistinguishable and the ‘deepest self’ is plumbed in an indefinite process of imaginary degradation and discharged as waste. Here we can return to Frankie Boyle and the love that finds its image in a disembodied colon: the lover as the shitter become shit.

They say our love won't pay the rent
Before it's earned, our money's all been spent
I guess that's so, we don't have a pot
But at least I'm sure of all the things we got

The pop song pipes on, counting time on love and how it is measured in the familiar exchange of money for shit. Love, the gift of something one doesn’t have (Lacan): in its place a disposable piece of trash that is endlessly recycled, an irritating noise that goes round and round again. In so far as it is conditioned by the audioligachaeta of the love song, contemporary love is an effect of amusia in the sense that it is an everyday yet miraculous experience of the impossible in which noise and music are the same. The little refrain stakes out the territory, the scene, for love’s imagining, but only as a site of consumption, a different form of speculation in which the lover is an amorous slave put to work, dissipating itself on a hamster wheel of commercial activity. Oh rose thou art sick.

But Blake and the poets know that love has always been sick, capitalism merely speculates on the site of speculation already opened out by its malaise. Music ‘feed’s’ or provides the condition for love by transforming language into an alien form, a refrain stripped of meaning and purpose other than to provide a territory, a scene, for the speculative imagination. In the lyrical language that has been captured by music, ‘every term is irreplaceable and can only be repeated’ (Deleuze), yet repetition resonates in the dissonance of a singular passion that provides the difference necessary for speculation. This dissonance resonates, precisely, with music’s ‘dark secret’ that is the immanent noise experienced in love’s amusia. This is the noise of disaggregation with the universe, the formlessness that noisily compels love to the singular form of its destruction.

BPM: 5. Baphomet

2009-12-20T23:55:00.000-08:00

‘All the gods died of laughter to hear one among them proclaim himself unique!’ Pierre Klossowski, The Baphomet

The disembodied soul of Øysten Aarseth, exhaled in his last dying breath and born on the icy winter wind, howled through the window of an old house outside Oslo. Dead lay there, still dead, half of his head still pressed up against the wood panelling, his knife and shotgun by his side, the floor splattered with dried blood and brain matter. Suspended in time, Dead’s last exhaled breath picked off the remaining layers of blasted skull and scooped out the putrefying tissue to disclose another head made of gold. A metalhead.

Aarseth was returned to his final state, on the day of his fatal stabbing. As the new golden-headed Dead seemingly arose from the dead, Aarseth got down on his knees before the strange goatlike yet godly creature, ‘My saviour!’ he stammered. ‘Why do you call me saviour and kneel to me like a God’ said Dead, ‘I am not a creator who enslaves being to what he creates, what he creates to a single self, and this self to a single body. Øysten, the millions of selves that you oppress within yourself are dead and have resurrected millions of times in you, unbeknownst to your single self’.

‘Is it not myself that you have rescued from the knife of Vikernes?’
‘In the suspension of historical time, events echo throughout infinity and individuals eternally. But everything a breath has perpetrated through its body can remain without consequence once it has left its body, since we differ in no wise from the winter wind’.

At this point another chill entered the room as the already-dead breath of Varg Vikernes merged with the breath of his victim, finding himself much weaker than the latter as he quickly sought to separate. Greeted with no sense of moral atonement, Vikernes was struck by a violence of another order to the one he perpetrated: one of total indifference, the worst kind of violence, an indifference that left no trace.

Dead’s golden head glinted in the darkness as he explained that the Judgement of God had been infinitely suspended since He became consumed in flames. ‘Henceforth humankind has changed in substance: it can be no more damned than saved’. Divine Judgement has been overturned, indeed displaced. In this atemporal space memories of the past are revived as momentary states of intensity, a funeral fog of fallen souls which, without identity or propriety, are exchangeable from soul to soul. ‘Here is no peace made of human flesh’ said Dead and prepared himself to breeze through the leaves of the forest.

‘You’re leaving me? Stop’, Aarseth begged. ‘By what name may I invoke you?’
‘What does my name matter to you? In truth I tell you: the millions of brothers and sisters inside you, who have died for your high idea of yourself – Euronymous! – know my name well, and are reborn in it; no proper name exists for the hyperbolic breath that is my own, anymore than anyone’s high idea of himself can resist the vertigo of my great height; my forehead dominates the stars and my feet stir the abysses of the universe’.

‘Spell it for me, I beg you, so I will have invoked you but once!’
Dead began:
‘B-A...’
‘Ba ...? repeated Euronymous.
‘P-H-O ...’ continued Dead.
‘...pho...?’
‘M-E-T...’
‘... Met!...’

Baphomet, otherwise known as Prince of Modifications, opposed to the Christian principle that guarantees the identity of the soul and the unity of being. To quote Pierre Klossowski, ‘Basilieus philosophorum métallicorum: the sovereign of metallurgical philosophers, precursors of black metal theorists, that is, of the alchemical laboratories that were supposedly established in various chapters of the knights Templar’. ‘The Prince of Modifications overturns all identity and absorbs being into the principle of radical multiplicity, that is to say within the principle of blackness.

Dead’s death-rattle laughter clattered through the night and the antichrist scuttled out from behind his feet in the form of an anteater. Friedrich the anteater in a high-pitched German accent affirmed, 'When one god proclaimed himself unique, all the other gods died of laughter!' Reborn in the breath of this laughter the million godlike hands find themselves again with something holy to burn, as the black metal circle turns eternally in a clamour for being that unfolds a process of becoming as infinite non-self-identical multiplicity beyond all figures of unity or of the One. ‘Anything can happen’, said Dead, ‘in the infinite blackening of the universe’.

‘Be faithful to your oblivion!’

BPM 4: Metaloricum

2009-12-08T13:59:00.000-08:00

‘It's hard to imagine that Theory can bring much to Black Metal ... Blackened Theory -- destructive, chaotic evil, inhuman -- is imaginable. Theoried Blackness is harder to imagine. Can the tools of Theory be tools for Blackness?’ Raw, Obsolete

‘Although I have been involved in the BM scene for many years myself and listen mostly to BM today, I refuse to recognise any (substantial) intellectual achievements of this movement, because there aren't any’. Andreas Bauer

Certainly it is vain for theory to aspire to the condition of black metal, just as it would be for theory to aspire to the condition of any music at all even though, maybe, it achieves it all the time. Such an aspiration is familiar from Western philosophy generally, at least since Romanticism, wherein music is attributed with meaning and significance beyond language, an attribution precisely correlated to the degree to which music is also regarded as deficient, purely imaginary, devoid of theory, vehicle of base emotions ... etc. What devilish alchemy is this that turns base material into sonic gold only for it to turn to shit as the goat glances in the mirror? Oh black Narcissus, the exquisite horror of self-reflection! Black metal has no meaning, of course – but then neither does any music – even as it opens up, in the non-sense, the excess of meaning that it evokes; the domain of non-knowledge.

Black metal theory is forged through the process of its ‘tools’ being placed in the icy furnace of blackened affinities and affections, giving itself over to the power of modification to which BM is itself an effect, heterogeneous no doubt, but one that opens onto the same Night. Let us say that black metal theory cannot know – can never know – its object: the black metal that rings out in the impenetrable darkness of its so-called intellectual emptiness. Like an object sovereign in its exteriority, an object that is precisely not a thing – a thing for us – such an object would be God; that is to say the God that BM invokes in order to banish Him, the God that sits, perpetually exchanging places with Satan, at the mediating position between the possible and the impossible.

‘I myself am in a world I recognize as profoundly inaccessible to me’ (Bataille). ‘Faded am I, behind a wall of consciousness / Still feeling a different World / Surrounding Me’ (Darkthrone). Black metal, for some, for a few, provides the locus of this in-accessibility, provides the experience of non-knowledge that communicates ecstasy, that is to say places someone at the limit of being in a radical questioning of being itself. This questioning occurs in and as an inchoate experience that nevertheless provides the (groundless) ground of self-reflection in a speculation that reflects, interminably, on the im-possibility of indefinite and limitless being.

From the ground, frozen yet fulminating in the accursed seeds cast away by a thousand years of Christian frostiness, Northern Protestantism, the castrated hedonism dedicated to servicing the Goods, comes, in seven chapters, the
Kathaarian Life Code of Non-Knowledge (Darkthrone avec Bataille)

1. ‘The Triumph of chaos - Has Guided our Path / we Circle the holy Sinai’. Black metal blackening thought blackening metal blackening theory ... Like the circularity of the spectral drive that invokes God simply in order to exorcise Him from the vast nocturnal landscape that his death discloses. Black metal theory is circular; circular theory is the only plausible theory. ‘To be of one’s time is quite simply to be a stooge’ (Bat. SN: 107), the exploited dupe of slavish exigencies.
2. Circular theory must begin, which is to say continue, not from a proposition but from the blackness that precedes it, just as it culminates, which is to say begins, in the blackened knowledge that is non-knowledge. ‘A strong light – the only Night’.
3. Black metal glints in sparks mixed with Coyote eyes and resonates in shortened cycles which black metal theory can only describe, knowledge fired across the desertified landscape; instances of the nonknowledge of the moment.
4. ‘Face of the goat in the mirror’: the horror of self-reflexive nonrecognition discloses the black metal Baphomet, ‘Baphomet in steel’, the prince of modifications: ‘I entered the soul of the snake’, the one, no doubt, that consumed itself in a blaze of icy fire.
5. The dis-identification of Satan and the death of God, of the erotic and the laughable, the playful and the stupid, the poetic and the amusical, with the unknown is the key to all theoretical difficulties. Recognizing its worthlessness, its good-for-nothingness, theoretical knowledge returns with the dream of making its own God, a Paragon Belial, the sum and sublimation of all earthly insufficiencies. And yet ...
6. The substitution of absolute dissatisfaction, the invisible force of an abyssic hatred, for relative insufficiencies results in the passage from insubordination to sovereignty in a blasphemous cyclone of infernal in-difference, stirring in the metalorical furnace ...
7. The final nature of dissatisfaction is the truth of awakening:
For this Eternal Winter
A New God Ruled the Sky
The Million Hands Of Joy
Have something holy to Burn
A new God is invoked but only for the joy of again consuming Him in flames, for igniting the divine in-existence in a blaze in the Northern sky.

BPM 3: Philosophorum

2009-11-25T16:03:00.001-08:00

‘Know yourself’

‘I know but one thing, that I know nothing’.

What can I know? By the word knowledge I don’t just mean the knowledge produced through the work of philosophy or academic discourse, or discourse per se, that is, the locus of a social bond; nor do I refer simply to the esoteric knowledge located in arcane texts and objects; nor do I mean the savoir faire, the know-how, of the musicians, the in-competence that produces BM’s magnificent yet ‘hellish racket’. All of these are important, and one can see that in so far as BM is an effect of discourse, it is a discourse that exacerbates the problem of the social bond through refusing comprehensibility by excoriating to the point of laceration voice and language in sonic aggression. And yet it is precisely through such sonic ascesis that the social bond is sustained, if negatively. Music is nothing but social bond, establishing a community of listeners somewhere that can perceive, and as such become bound by, a particular organization of sound. Otherwise music is no different from the indifferent howling of the wind that BM seeks to evoke, but always for somebody, if only just for oneself, to place oneself at the very limit of oneself where one is dissolved to NOTHING. This is the amusic of black metal: ‘my feelings already enclose me as in a tomb and yet, above me, I imagine a song similar to the modulation of light, from cloud to cloud ... in the unbearable expanse of the skies ... How can I avoid the intimate, never-ending, horror of being? ... This heart crying a thousand tender joys, how can I fail to open it to the void?’

As such, the blackened knowledge that I wish to invoke is, as the title of this symposium suggests, a hideous gnosis. This gnosis, like any gnosis hideous or not, is starred in the bleakness of the sky by the truth that is revealed through the work of intuition or of an ‘instinctive’ knowledge; that is to say, a knowledge that doesn’t know how it knows or even that it knows.

‘My music does not come from a philosophy but from a pre-critical compulsion, an instinct which comes prior to the thought and does not depend on it ... The negativity of my sound is simply the representation of my most hidden emotions’ (Ovskum).

Given that this so-called instinct comes in the form of music, it should more accurately be called a drive. An instinct (alimentary or sexual, say) that does not have a direct relation to its object but is mediated or shaped by a symbolic form is called a drive. And a drive has an indirect relation to its object, which is to say that it circulates it. Which is another way of saying that it has no object, there being no object; its God is dead. In the case of music and song this is the invocatory drive, a designation of course particularly appropriate to BM which perhaps consists entirely as an invocation: calling on God in order to contemplate and exult in the torment of his extinction, or the invocation of Satan in the conjuring-up of evil, that which will not serve.

In so far as it was harnessed and articulated by language, ‘Freud considered the drive to be structured like a montage’ (Lacan). In BM, the invocatory drive is articulated by the music to form the martial/amorous lamella-armour of the warrior decked in metal plates, spikes and bullet belts that is darkly erotic in the sense of being jenseits (beyond, the other side of, the dark side of) the lustprinzips. The lamellar armour of the drive forms an intensive surface that extends the organism (the voice) ‘to its true limit, which goes further than the body’s limit’ (Lacan), establishing its territory in and as the sound that unfolds an abyssal darkness into which the voice qua voice fades away. The unanswerable invocation reveals the deadly meaning of the lamella in the sense that the only meaning is the meaning of death. The prosthetic armour may for a while offer a semblance of protection, of existence, but its presence signifies only the vulnerability and inevitable death of the organism that it brings into battle. It is of course the armour, the weapons, the metal not the organism that actually contests the battle. Sound, that always refers back to a prior dissonance, that is always the sound of the elemental war for existence, kills even at the moment that it heralds the coming of death and silence. ‘This is why every drive is virtually a death drive’ (Lacan).

Invocation requires ritual and in BM that ritual is sacrifice:

At long last, did one not have to sacrifice for once whatever is comforting, holy, healing; all hope, all faith in hidden harmony, in future blisses and justices? Didn’t one have to sacrifice God himself? (Nietzsche)

The sacrifice of the subject of knowledge, the sacrifice of the subjectifying power of knowledge, discourse, speech at the attenuated limits of an excoriated voice become mere gasping breath that is always the last breath expiring in the sovereign space between life and death. In the strange processional yet timeless history of metal it is important to remember that black metal displaces death metal in order to find its brief illumination in the light of the freezing moon. This is not simply because the imaginary violence of the former gives way to the more profound imagination of violation that characterizes the latter. Violated, the BM voice is silenced in the midst of its hellish racket as it becomes pure sonic death-drive, nothing but a corpse-painted lamella, an undead tessellated sound-surface, endlessly breathing its last-breath death rattle as the metal goes into battle.

Hideous gnosis, the in-competence of an amusical death drive, which loses itself, dissipates itself at the site of nonknowledge marked by the name of death in the crucible of metalorical transformations...

Notes towards etc. (see below)

BPM 2: Basileus

2009-11-25T05:49:00.000-08:00

‘When you play black metal you don’t play it like you were a human ... no no no, you play it like you’re a warrior’ Raffi (cit. Keith Kahn-Harris, Extreme Metal.

‘You play it like a warrior’, Legion, Marduk (ibid)

Mayhem, Emperor, Darkthrone, Beherit, Gorgoroth ... the names of some of BM’s most exalted bands would seem to bring together the sovereign anomie that Giorgio Agamben suggests characterizes the current state of affairs, ‘the state of exception’ that is turning Western democracies into totalitarian states (Agamben, 2005). But this is exactly what needs to be refused, just as certainly as the temptation to assign to BM the status of symptom: the exceptional symptom of the exception in which the fascism immanent to Western democracy enjoys itself in its pure negativity. Agamben cites Pseudo-Archytas's treaty On Law and Justice, in which the word Basileus is translated as ‘sovereign’ rather than ‘king’ because it ‘lays the foundations for a conception of sovereignty that is entirely unbound by laws and yet is itself the source of legitimacy’. This distinction is essential, but not for the reason Agamben finds in Pseudo-Archytas where ‘the distinction between the sovereign (basileus), who is the law, and the magistrate (arkhōn), who must only observe the law, is made the origin of twentieth-century Führerprinzip and of Carl Schmitt's theories on dictatorship. In the space opened by the severance of law and violence, a severance that implies a doubling of violence, Agamben fantasises about ‘a word that does not bind, that neither commands nor prohibits anything, but says only itself’, a word that would name a utopian state of unfettered ‘use and human praxis that the powers of law and myth had sought to capture in the state of exception’ (88). But there is no word that does not bind or prohibit or kill that which it names. Except, perhaps, the name of a loving God ...

Satanic laughter erupts from the depths of the forest. Agamben has no place there, even if the distinction first made by Pseudo-Archytas must remain: basileus should be translated as sovereign rather than king and legislator; and I name BM basileus in honour of its sovereign force. This force is not the force of a word, but of music (amusic) that can be felt only in warrior-like play. The warrior is a conceptual character that figures, fictionally, that ‘aspect that is opposed to the servile and the subordinate’, an aspect to which a beggar might be as close as any nobleman’ (Bataille, ASII).

‘When you play black metal you don’t play it like you were a human ... you play it like you’re a warrior’. The warrior is a metaphor, a character, you can’t BE a warrior, the warrior is not a figure of being any more than it is human. Nor is it in-human either, but completely other to the slavish being that takes itself for a form and a universal form at that. The warrior is a figure for the sovereign force of black metal, the closest related idea to which is clearly Bataille’s concept of sovereignty which designates exactly that which is heterogeneous to the sovereign function denoted by the sacralization of power (and of mastery), whether in the symbol or the body of the legislator-king. As Denis Hollier states,

Bataille’s concept of sovereignty corresponds to something that is much nearer … to the noncontractual liberty which is congenital with the warrior function. For the warrior has nothing to do with what one understands as a soldier or that Roman invention, ‘the military man’. Even when he is not the only one to be fighting, a warrior always fights alone: the solitary hero of single combats. And he fights for fighting’s sake, carried away by heroic fury. For the prestige of risk. Fundamentally undisciplined, he is the inspired warrior of the joust, the vates of the field of battle who, like Plato’s poet, can fight only as one possessed, transported.

And it is precisely in that poetic or musical movement of transportation that the sovereign aspect emerges as ‘the object dissolves into NOTHING’ (Bataille). Neither symbol nor living law but in the evanescent movement between sound and silence in the space-time between life and death, music is sovereign. As Derrida, following Bataille, affirms, ‘simultaneously more and less a lordship than lordship, sovereignty is totally other’. Hence, Darkthrone, Beherit, Gorgoroth, and all the other names for Lucifer and Satan that star the black metal firmament. And hence, perhaps above all, Mayhem. All are fictional names for the sovereign aspect that will serve no master and that refuses all forms of subordination. Neither force of law nor originary violence, the sovereign impulse is essential to any mode of rebellion, any breaching of closed systems, any process of transformation political or personal.

It is moreover only through actualizing this sovereign aspect that one might bring to bear the forces of black metal to the realization of one’s own powers. And this has absolutely nothing to do with individualism, mastery, subordination and so on. ‘Although I scorn the completely modern idea of “a self-made man”, as a Luciferist I solemnly hold up the view that man must reach as far as one can with his own powers’ (IC Rex). To where does one reach, what use are these powers? Such questions simply return us back to the ground on which we grovel ‘in the concatenation of useful activity’ (Bataille). Answers cannot be anticipated, future effects cannot be known since, as we do know very well, knowledge is always the result of work; ‘it is always a servile operation, indefinitely resumed, indefinitely repeated ... It is impossible for knowledge to be sovereign; it would have to occur in a moment. But the moment remains outside, short of or beyond, all knowledge’ (Bataille).

And yet, it is just such knowledge of the moment that is impossibly both inside and outside itself that is promised, paradoxically, in the black metal philosoPHOrum of hideous gnosis.

Notes towards a paper to be given at The Black Metal Theory Symposium, Public Assembly Rooms, Brooklyn, 12 December 2009.

BAsileus philosoPHOrum METaloricum 1: Blackened Symposium

2009-10-14T08:13:00.000-07:00

Seeking death ... I ride the longing winds of my blackened soul eternally.
Emperor, ‘Ye Entrancemperium’

It is in death that black metal finds its infinite resourcefulness; the approach of death – its sovereign gesture, its prominence within human memory – hollows out in the present and in existence the void toward which and from which black metal resounds.
Michel Foucault, ‘Language to Infinity’

Already, with the very notion of a symposium, there is the expectation that music and speech will conjoin and, moreover, conjoin ‘with drinking’ (sum-posion) [Note to Nicola]. Most famously of all, Plato’s Symposium records a somewhat drunken dialogue on love and beauty from the 4th Century BC. Given the misanthropy that characterizes black metal, we might suppose that the Black Metal Theory Symposium will be more concerned with hatred, but of course you do not get one without the other. For the love of black metal we side with ‘the great adversary’ (Nortt) of existence. It is indeed a question of love and hatred and precisely not of judgement, for there is no possibility of conjunction between black metal and academic discourse since the whole point of the latter is to take the former for its object and place it under the spotlight, illuminate the darkness, set up a beacon in the obscure heart of the forest and flash an investigative torch into its sallow face.

Black metal and academic discourse are no doubt heterogeneous and cannot be conjoined, but in bringing one into proximity with the other it is, I believe, our expectation that this clash should result less in the academic illumination of black metal than in the blackening of discourse itself wherein the forces of black metal restore some of the powers and dangers of discourse which the procedures of academic institutions seek to ward off and master by controlling and delimiting them. There is a long history of such procedures but currently they are more often than not justified with reference to ‘ethical’ judgements concerning representations and the ‘power relations’ they are supposed to reproduce and re-instantiate, judgements that do nothing other than draw a work into the University’s own nexus of power/knowledge by which, as a biopolitical function of the state, it seeks to manage and regulate culture in the name of health, life and utility.

Black metal can bring its forces to discourse by drawing it into the freezing orbit of its sonic density, so that, suspended between life and the death that opens it to infinity, academic speech (and writing) might become drawn out of itself, erase itself for the exclusive sovereignty of that which it wishes to say and which lies outside of words. Heterogeneous to language, music, of course, refers to nothing but itself in the universe of sound except, perhaps, voice. Speech enters into the music and becomes it (becomes song) even as it dies, disappearing as music, breathing its last endless rasping breath, that is linked via Le Baphomet (Pierre Klossowski) to a theory of breathing itself linked, by so many threads, to the whole of Western philosophy, and yet which emerges from it, rendering permeable the limits of discourse.

My paper will suggest various ways in which black metal permeates and ‘blackens’ academic discourse across four polarities: the subject, knowledge, non-knowledge and truth. In so doing it encourages a displacement of academic conventions so that there is a constant contamination of force and affinity between black metal and discourse rather than the hierarchy of primary text and the commentary which decodes, recodes and re-states it interminably. Only in this way might commentary hope to have some bearing on ‘the art to come’. By way of example, I here invoke (as I have been throughout) Michel Foucault, that great adversary of commentary, whose theories of power have been catastrophically deployed by the institutions of liberal governance to the very purposes they were designed to undermine.

At the very end of his life, in the guise of a masked philosopher, Foucault dreamt ‘about a kind of criticism that would not try to judge ... it would light fires, (like a blaze in the Northern sky), catch the sea-foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply, not judgements, but signs of existence in the freezing fog, make diabolic shapes float by out from the dark; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes – all the better. All the better. ... I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination [that] would bear the lightning of possible storms’.

This lightning, that gives ‘a dense and black intensity to the night it denies’, conjures an enlightenment that is at the same time a chaotic storm, ‘which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, and yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity: the flash loses itself in this space it marks with its sovereignty and becomes silent now that it has given a name to obscurity’ (Foucault).

But as the light goes out and the voices are stilled, the wind yet whispers beside the deep forest that gives its name to this obscurity in which ‘Darkness will show us the way ...’ (Mayhem, ‘De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas’).

Notes towards a paper to be given at 'Hideous Gnosis', Black Metal Theory Symposium, Brooklyn 12 December 2009

Joycign sinthomy of psoakoonaloose

2009-10-04T04:35:00.000-07:00

Can you not distinguish the sense, prain, from the sound, bray? You have homosexual catheis of empathy between narcissism of the expert and steatopygic invertedness. Get yourself psychoanolised!
O, begor, ... I can psoakoonaloose myself any time I want.
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

It is a commonplace to describe Finnegans Wake as a ‘word symphony’ because sound seems to be more evident than sense; comprised of multiple puns and varieties of paronomasia from a range of European languages, the text seems pregnant with meaning, but delivers less than a semblance, offering nothing but infinite resources for interpretative delusions. In an exchange from the book, frequently said to refer to an episode in Joyce’s life when he was offered a Jungian analysis, the inability to distinguish sense from sound is said to require psychoanalysis. The in-distinction of sense and sound generated and perceived in the production of paronomasia betrays, it is alleged, a structure in which the subject is poised between transference with the ‘narcissism of the expert’, a hystericized subject supposed to know, and ‘steatopygic invertedness’. Since ‘inversion’ is a sexological term for homosexuality, ‘steatopygic invertedness’ could be rephrased as a big-arsed desire (for a big arse, perhaps). Or perhaps it refers to an inverted arse, a big arse upturned to the sky. If there is a correlation implied in the conjunction of arse and expert, then clearly sense, the illusory effect of narcissistic criticism and analysis, is confounded by the sound of a great amusical fart. What is psychoanalysis supposed to make of that? Or indeed amusianalysis since Joyce seems to want to turn language into music and vice versa, producing a ‘reading/listening’ experience in which the one displaces the other as sound subverts sense only for sense to return, momentarily, in eruptions of laughter.

In conventional cases of amusia like those discussed by Oliver Sacks, it is tempting to characterize the suffering involved in the amusical perception of noise as a symptom, perhaps a symptom of hysteria. For Lacan, the symptom is not a call for interpretation but a pure jouissance addressed to no one. A symptom is a particular way in which the subject enjoys and suffers from the unconscious. If neurological amusia is a symptom then it is one that experiences music as a pure jouissance. While jouissance emerges in the default of speech, occupying the place vacated by the absence of meaning, with amusia suffering is related not just to absence but to a form. amusia establishes the subject in a negative relation to a form that it recognises through suffering, through an experience of painful noise. In amusia jouissance is correlated to a form – music – that communicates without saying anything. It is thus more like Lacan’s notion of the sinthome in which the jouissance specific to a subject may be embodied in an art that Lacan elaborated in relation to James Joyce. Like the sinthome, the amusical relation to music denotes a singularity, a singular jouissance or rather joy exterior to, or foreclosed from, the symbolic order and the metaphors and metonymies of a purely linguistic unconscious.

In his late seminar on Joyce, Le sinthome, Lacan argued that through producing a writing that was not primarily comprised of metaphors and metonymies but of puns and ‘equivoques’, Joyce managed to construct a ‘singularized’ name for himself through the destruction of the symbolic and the discourse of the Other, the unconscious supposed to be structured like a language. Drawing a distinction between singularity and the particular that supports the universal,Jack Stone writes, that ‘Lacan takes as an exemplary instance of this singularity, or individuality, the Sinthome of James Joyce, who through his writings, particularly Finnegans Wake, constituted and presented this Sinthome "au ciel ouvert," as Jean-Guy Godin puts it--or “arse under open sky”, as the Irish say’. For Lacan, Joyce’s sinthome involves the ‘littering’ of the letter, an inversion of the usual relation of excess and meaning in signification so that it is only a modicum of meaning that remains as the remnant of a general signifying excess. This remnant saves Joyce, or his text, from full blown psychosis, according to Lacan, establishing a relation to the Other (at least in the shape of a readership); laughter erupts when fleeting, imaginary remnants of (double) meaning are (mis)recognized in the rubble of the symbolic order.

But while Lacan is attentive to the affective, singular subversions of language through which the sinthome, as fourth term, hooks the symbolic on to the imaginary via the real, he is inattentive to the approximate yet equally affective relation of the text to music, to the idea that the sinthome is actually a sinthomy. No doubt this is because music is for Lacan pre-eminently just another form of the imaginary, reducible to the infant’s echolalias of the mother’s voice, a kind of ‘acoustic mirror’ that enframes language in lalanguage.

Just as it is a commonplace to emphasise the musicality of language in Joyce, so this emphasis should also be made in contradistinction to vision. A considerable tenor in his day, Joyce was of course also near blind and therefore the field of vision (and all the discursive metaphors it gives rise to: clarity, lucidity, transparency) is not supposed his favoured domain. Music therefore might be expected to compensate for this lack of vision through substituting music’s resources of imitation, counter-point, harmony and echo. As so it does, in the earlier work. But by Finnegans Wake music suffers as much as language as both forms are tortured in Joyce’s attempt to turn language into music and make music speak. It is a fantastic attempt to do the impossible, a great passionate revenge on music and language that demonstrates their incommensurability, even as it consigns both to the grave in a ‘wake’.

Out of his hainamoration of language and music, Joyce produces an amusical sinthomic writing comprised not so much of notes or signifiers but joycigns (Joycean joy-signs). These joycigns are not, like words, full with the promise of a jouissance that is endlessly deferred along with meaning down the signifying chain, the famous enjoy-meant produced by the conjugation of imaginary and symbolic; neither are they the fetish objects of an idiotic jouissance, nor are they the occasion of an Other jouissance, both of which are defined in their negative relation to knowledge in their support of the phallus and God, respectively. Rather, joycigns are full with a Joycean joy that broaches an experience of nonknowledge at the extreme limit of knowledge glimpsed in the very fragmentariness of meaning that is dissolved in laughter, and in which ‘nonsense is the outcome of every possible sense’ (Bataille).

In psoakoonaloose, psychoanalysis gives way to the non-productive expenditure of laughter, intoxication and waste matter. Joyce ‘escapes’ or exceeds psychoanalysis – as indeed he does in spite of Lacan’s last attempts to tie him in Borromean knots – not because he avoids it or rejects it but because, as Lacan avows, ‘he goes in it straight to the best one can expect from a psychoanalysis in the end’ (Lituraterre).

With Joyce, therapee involves a session – a long session – not on the couch but in the bar. Psychoanalysis turns into psoakoonaloose with an ‘eatupus complex and a drinkthedregs kink’, ending an evening of riotous expenditure appropriately enough in the gutter, its steatopygic arse in the air. With its nose in the trash, sniffing out the litter in the letter, as Lacan shows, psychoanalysis is led by Joyce to confront in base matter the traces of a geopsoakoonaloose adequate to the trauma that is civilization for the earth.

Molly Bloom’s Chamber Pot

2009-09-27T04:27:00.001-07:00

Since I wrote Sirens, I find it impossible to listen to music of any kind.
James Joyce, letter to Harriet Weaver

I finished the Sirens chapter during the last few days. A big job. I wrote this chapter with the technical resources of music. It is a fugue with all musical notations: piano, forte, rallentando and so on. A quintet occurs in it too, as in Die Meistersinger, my favourite Wagnerian opera ... Since exploring the resources and artifices of music and employing them in this chapter, I haven’t cared for music anymore. I, the great friend of music, can no longer listen to it. I see through all the tricks and can’t enjoy it anymore
James Joyce (Ellmann)

By the end of the Sirens chapter of Ulysses, Joyce has had enough of music. As with Luigi Russolo (Art of Noises, 1913) Joyce’s exhaustion, through literary simulation, of the tricks and techniques of Western music similarly culminates, in the chapter, in Leopold’s Bloom’s joyful discovery of noise-music. ‘Sea, wind, leaves, thunder, waters, cows lowing, the cattle market, cocks, hens don’t crow, snakes hissss. There’s music everywhere’. The hatred of music as a kind of discourse or locus of technique, knowledge or savoir-faire, gives way to a joyful revelation of ambient noise-music in which joy is always the joy of the Other.

‘That’s joyful I can feel. Never have written it. Why? My joy is other joy. But both are joys. Yes, joy it must be. Mere fact of music shows you are. Often thought she was in the dumps till she began to lilt. Then know’. (Joyce, Ulysses)

But who or what is the Other, here, that can’t be written, that is inaccessible to language and therefore no longer the locus of the signifier? On the one hand, it is the noise-music that reveals existence, ‘Mere fact of music shows you are’. One’s being, nothing but the pure facticity of music, is never actually there of course but resounds only in the fall of its continual disappearance, death and silence. There is no Other that might confer meaning or organization as with language, just the joyful immanence of a stream of consciousness that, for Bloom, can only be brought to self-consciousness in the apprehension of love and sexual difference that is disclosed in song. Molly’s lilt confers knowledge for Bloom, and the self-knowledge conditioned by desire.

Molly’s memory is jogged and eroticized by the sound of Blazes Boylan’s footsteps – ‘Jog jig jogged stopped. Dandy tan shoe of dandy Boylan socks skyblue clocks came light to earth’. This sound, intersecting with the faint sound of chamber music, sets off an erotic reverie articulated by a pun.

It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is. Tinkling. Empty vessels make most noise. Because the acoustics, the resonance changes according as the weight of the water is equal to the law of falling water. Like those rhapsodies of Liszt’s, Hungarian, gipseyed. Pearls. Drops. Rain. Diddle idle addle addle oodle oodle. Hiss. Now. Maybe now. Before. (Joyce, Ulysses)

Russolo’s six families of noises claim a degree of completeness, but he doesn’t mention the sound of a woman making music by making water into a chamber pot. But doesn’t the pun re-instate the pre-eminence of language in the form of metaphor thereby governing the relations of equivalence? No, on the contrary, the pun is the figure by which significance is subverted by sound into a relation of heterological non-equivalence or incommensurablility. The pun is the figure, the ‘fatal Cleopatra’ through which language loses the world, as Dr. Johnson said of Shakespeare. Liszt is piss and piss is Liszt. This (non)equivalence does not just turn the world upside down in a way familiar from Carnival, through it, language loses grip on the world in the process of becoming music. While equivalence is sought by Bloom nevertheless, this is by way of the science of acoustics and the laws of physics, the little numbers that always seem to pop up when the ways of music need to be justified to reason and its own grasp of the (secular) world.

But Joyce’s urinary eroticism (something which, along with his name, he shared with Freud), that is manifest in the description he gave to his favourite white wine – ‘the Archdeaconness’s urine’ – combines the sacred and the profane in a heterological musical flow, a rhythm in which presence tumbles after the always already before of repetition.

Molly’s chamber pot is pulled out again at the culmination of the novel in the ‘Penelope’ chapter. Molly takes another piss and sorts out her monthly menstruation that is ‘pouring out of me like the sea’. It is a literary critical commonplace to point, from Molly Bloom to Anna Livia Plurabelle, to Joyce’s association of the feminine with streams, rivers, ‘sea, wind, leaves, thunder, waters’, life, etc. etc. All that could be noted here is that in Molly’s chamber pot resides an alternative model of music and the world to rival the rival classical myths of Pindar, for whom the art of aulos resounds to the suffering (both human and suprahuman) or the sound of the turtle shell in which was discovered, in the form of a lyre, the sonic properties of the universe. In Molly's pot, music is neither subjective emotion nor Pythagorian acoustic design, but the resonant, erotic de-formation of form (human and non-human) in a ceaseless flow of expenditure, waste products, pissss.

Audio unconscious: upper level of the graph

2009-09-26T08:52:00.000-07:00

At the upper level of the graph, the vector that runs parallel to the locus of sound marks the place of the audio unconscious. The term ‘joy’ should replace Lacan’s term ‘jouissance’, however, just as ‘death’ replaces ‘castration’. Death does not here refer to the empirical end to someone’s life, but to the continuous death of someone or something that music denotes as the defining sound of a life. This does not just refer to the funeral song or desert island discs that one carries around in pleasurable anticipation of death and the celebration and commemoration of one’s life; it refers to the music that for better or worse in joy or agony marks the indeterminable, endless possibility of the death of someone or something. It refers to the music that reduces us to waste, to noise that is framed by the silence of death, which returns from the past in the form of repetition in the clamour for being. It is the music of an indeterminable joy before death.

For Lacan, 'the drive is what becomes of demand when the subject vanishes from it; that is to say, the subject of language, speech. The drive is pure, speechless demand, however, and as such it is usually characterized as silent. A mouth that eats, sucks and gnaws does not speak. Eroticism (of either the anal or genital kind) is also, as Georges Bataille maintains, speechless; like death it is supposedly a zone of profound silence. The place of the drive ($◊D) therefore is denoted by silence.

However, silence is impossible, no doubt in the same way that the experience of death is impossible. John Cage discovered when he was placed in an anechoic chamber that silence is precluded by the noise of the body that inhabits it. Consequently, when Cage staged a piece of music that consisted of a motionless pianist at a silent piano, music became whatever noise could be perceived in the 4.33 minutes that were allotted to the performance. In the withdrawal of music as organized sound noise-music emerged without any principle of organization other than the pre-determined space and time it was given. In this noise-music the noises of the bodies of the audience are conjoined with their ambient environment in the demand for music.

With this piece, then, Cage evoked the music of the drive, the hitherto accursed domain; for while a mouth that eats and sucks and gnaws may not speak, it is still noisy, as is the scene of a successful erotic encounter. In the absence of speech there is silence, but only for it to be filled with noise. A joyful clamour, therefore, tends towards the death that frames and determines it, the silence that is the space of its unfolding and disappearance. This noise is amusical, unlistenable, radically heterogeneous from the music of organized sound that seems to be filled with the promise of meaning. On the contrary, amusic is abject since it consists of the noises of eating, fucking, defecating, noises of the body. This is noise-music as waste, junk, detritus, noise as non-productive expenditure: the singular noise that I am without meaning. It is the noise of an in-different multiplicity that discloses not just that the Other is lacking but that there is no Other. In the place of (S(Ø)), the signifier of a lack in the Other, there is noise. There is nothing Other than the noise of joyful immanence in a clamour for being that is at the same time the clatter of unbinding and disintegration.

Flower of hatred: Yoko Ono and The Beatles

2009-09-12T07:41:00.000-07:00

You see many people hated me ... Well I used that hatred as a power, as an energy, and it’s a great power, my God.
Yoko Ono

In Britain over the past two weeks we have been bombarded through every form of media by a continuous barrage of Beatles copy to mark the re-issue of their complete digitally re-mastered oeuvre. It’s a nightmare. It makes you want to scream, primally. This obsession with The Beatles is as incapacitating to the British as their smug reverence for Shakespeare. The Beatles are, as someone once wrote of the second-rank Elizabethan dramatist, ‘an impassable horizon protecting the Anglo-American world from anything resembling culture’. amusia agrees with Paul Morley who suggested in last week’s Observer Music Magazine, that George Martin could probably have produced the same results with another bunch of random scallies dragged off the streets of Liverpool in the early 1960s, scrubbed-up by their manager; the time was right.

amusia would happily swap the whole of The Beatles oeuvre (digitally re-mastered or not) for Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band, and is delighted to see that she still has the power to disclose, uncannily, the barbarous limits, the acheronta movebo, of Anglo-American culture. In her essay on the use of music as a torture and battlefield weapon, Suzanne Cusick consults various online discussions and exchanges in order to assess the cultural resonance of such usage on the ‘home front’. One blogger wrote, concerning the US’s ‘war on terror’, that ‘You might as well stick panties on the head of everyone in the village. At least THAT would be more human than using Yoko Ono as a weapon of torture’. Another posted a parody of Article 13 from the Geneva Convention to prohibit the use of her music, while yet another wrote:

No dude ... we gotta have some limits ... I mean ... just damn. I mean ... pork fat, shredded Koran, menstrual fluids ... I see the usefulness there. But I gotta draw the line at Yoko. I mean, we’re not barbarians.

Yoko Ono’s appearance in the 1960s did not destroy The Beatles, she confirmed them as Britain’s sacred Thing through the hatred she generated. In interviews John Lennon said he was taken aback at the abuse his wife took and as the testimony of The Beatles’ biographer Bob Spitz demonstrates, it was clearly not just Ono’s foreign appearance, but above all her voice, grating ‘like fingernails on a chalkboard’ or ‘screeching like a wounded animal’ (Spitz, 2007), that provided the extimate point of excruciating dissonance defining British amusia. Even as The Beatles seemed to secure Britain’s imaginary place at the centre of the post-war baby-boomer pop-cultural consensus from the 60s to the present, Ono’s avant-gardism threatened to ‘steal’ it and destroy its iconic band, thereby disclosing the amusial symptom of Britain’s essential decline and discordance in the perception of the unbearable noise, tunelessness, and pain of its misogyny, racism and abjection.

In Yoko Ono’s album that takes the title of her conceptual band (comprised in this instance of Lennon on guitar, Ringo Starr on drums and Klaus Voormann on bass) Yoko adapts her previous vocal style and vocal improvisations from the Fluxus days into a new form. On Plastic Ono Band the sound palette is stretched and extended as it is pitched against amplified instruments, a driving drum and bass beat, echoing and fusing with Lennon's blistering guitar work. Ono takes the basic format of rock and roll into a new direction through changing the function and relationship of the voice and liberating it from the form and structure of the song.

The first two tracks on Plastic Ono Band, ‘Why’ and ‘Why Not?’ were developed in jam sessions during which ‘recording engineers routinely walked out’ (Munroe and Hendricks, 2000). Yet, for Andy Davis, the first track ‘Why seethes with a confrontational menace not heard again in Britain until 1976 punk, Ono’s voice matching Lennon’s ‘scratchy, razor-wire guitar’ which is ‘harder and more experimental than anything he ever managed for his own recordings’ (Clayson, 2004). ‘Why’ and ‘Why Not?’ pitch the question of desire on to an undulating plateau of varying intensities, voice and guitar distorting, extending and deterritorializing the so-called acoustic mirror beyond any point of identification, stability, sense or meaning on a line of continuous variation infused with a suffering and joy that is addressed to no one. The voice and guitar do not imitate each other; they do not construct a sonic envelope but rather engage in a process of constant sonic unfolding, an evacuation of meaning in an ascetic eroticization of the scream.

The solitary good review by Bill McAllister of Record Mirror that was included on the sleeve notes of later pressings of the album emphasises the point of moving beyond aesthetic boundaries, form, reflection and even the margin of excess that delimits and de-forms them. ‘Yoko takes music beyond its extremes, into the realm of non-music you might say ... Yoko breaks through more barriers with one scream than most musicians do in a lifetime’ (McAllister, December 19, 1971). In subsequent tracks the basic voice-guitar-drum-bass assemblage is thickened with tape fragments, sound effects and improv tapes that develop textured audio events that nevertheless exist on the same plane of intensity. For Edward M. Gomez, these tracks are like ‘evocative sound poems [that] blended train, bird, and dog-howl sounds into Ono’s chanting voices, which were multi-tracked in overlapping waves’ (Munroe and Hendricks, 2000). Beyond extremes, Ono generates a paradoxical sound music that is a modality of excess, neither conventional music nor noise, but a form of screaming that renders music completely strange, takes it into another dimension. As Deleuze and Guattari write, as if with Ono in mind: 'It should not be thought that music has forgotten how to sing in a now mechanical and atomized world; rather, an immense coefficient of variation is affecting and carrying away all of the phatic, aphatic, linguistic, poetic, instrumental, or musical parts of a single sound assemblage – "a simple scream suffusing all degrees"(Thomas Mann)'.

Pushing the Sonic Envelope: Freud, Eno and the origin of ambient

2009-09-09T06:27:00.001-07:00

What’s interesting about music is not the music, actually.
Brian Eno

In a short piece called ‘Ambient Music’, one of the appendices to his 1995 diary published as A Year with swollen appendices (1996), Brian Eno reflected on the emergence of the genre that he named on the release of his seminal album Music for Airports in 1977. Eno noticed that in the early 1970s, with the novelty of records and radio wearing off, he and his friends had begun listening to music in a different way. ‘My friends and I were making and exchanging long cassettes of music chosen for its stillness, homogeneity, lack of surprises and, most of all, lack of variety’. Eno and friends wanted music that would surround them and be continuous with, or constitute, ‘the ambience of our lives’. They began to make music in which they could become completely immersed: ‘Immersion was really the point: we were making music to swim in, to float in, to get lost inside’.

That music and environment could become continuous became clear, Eno recalls, in a defining experience in 1975 when he had been confined to his bed following a serious accident. He was given a recording of seventeenth-century harp music by a female friend who put the music on as she left. Alone and incapacitated, Eno

'realized that the hi-fi was much too quiet and one of the speakers had given up anyway. It was raining hard outside, and I could hardly hear the music above the rain – just the loudest notes, like little crystals, sonic icebergs rising out of the storm. I couldn’t get up and change it, so I just lay there waiting for my next visitor to come and sort it out, and gradually I was seduced by this listening experience. I realized that this was what I wanted music to be – a place, a feeling'. (Eno, 'Ambient Music')

What is interesting about this evocative description is the way in which an initially disagreeable situation transforms itself into a seductive and pleasurable one. Clearly in discomfort, unable to move after his accident, Eno is confined to his bed. He is in a passive situation that he is unlikely to have experienced since he was a small child. Dependent upon the comings and goings of nurses, friends and visitors, the female friend in the anecdote compensates for her departure by putting on the harp music at his request. In the anecdote the harp music substitutes for the woman’s absence functioning like the mechanical musical mobiles that were introduced in the mid-seventies, designed to amuse and lull a baby to sleep in the absence of the mother. Initially, the experience is unpleasant. The music is barely perceptible and obscured by the rain outside. The music merges with the rain, but even then the sonic environment remains chilly, even icy and tempestuous. Eno has no choice but to give in to his situation. ‘I couldn't get up and change it, so I just lay there’. Gradually, the storm abates and the ocean settles to produce a more seductive and pleasurable all-enveloping experience, one that changes his relation to music and his understanding of what it can do or be.

The idea that music offers fantasmatic experiences of absorption or immersion is of course not new, not even in 1977. Indeed the idea is picked up by Freud where, at the beginning of Civilisation and its Discontents, he considers it as one of the bases of religious feeling. For Freud the oceanic feeling is a relic of the baby’s sense of continuity with the mother. ‘An infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon him’. The ego develops its sense of unity and autonomy from the external world through a process of relative privation of maternal care that becomes signified by the cries and screams that mark its departure and summon its return. Further disengagement with the external world is precipitated by ‘the frequent, manifold and unavoidable sensations of pain and unpleasure the removal and avoidance of which is enjoined by the pleasure principle, in the exercise of its unrestricted domination’. Pleasure itself thus becomes a principle of separation and avoidance of pain, the ‘pleasure-ego’ enclosed by the pain that waits at the door of what Lacan would call the jouissance of the Other. Freud therefore traces back the oceanic feeling to the earlier phase of the ego prior to its sense of separation. If the oceanic feeling becomes the support for religion, then Freud can only suppose that this is because even as it seeks ‘the restoration of limitless narcissism’, in which the self is one with the world, this is the correlate of the ‘infantile helplessness’ that desires paternal presence. And Freud ‘cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection’.

There is no obvious reference to religion or fathers in Eno’s anecdote, rather there is the icy harp and rain music of the world. Neither the harmony of the spheres nor a scream passing through nature, but the noise-music of a father who does not know he is dead, the music of his harp-playing angels fading away, indistinct from the rain. Confined to his bed, following his own near-death experience, dependent on the presence and absence of friends and relations, Eno in his anecdote has clearly been returned to a state similar to Freud’s grandson whose famous game with the cotton reel seemed to suggest that the drive conformed to a principle that went beyond pleasure, an ‘instinct for mastery’ that overcomes pain and recovers pleasure via an identification with sounds. From an original position of maternal dependence and passivity, the child exerts itself actively and begins to distinguish and identify himself in relation to a signifier, an utterance, ‘fort!’ with which he can address an imaginary or real partner whom he makes disappear. The exertion of imaginary mastery therefore is a repetition that replaces passivity with activity and therefore compensates for the disappearance of the mother.

There is obviously a temptation to hear in Eno’s anecdote how the harp music, in substituting for the presence of his female friend, takes over the function of maternal presence in the form of a substitute voice, a lullaby perhaps. But there is nothing warm and comforting about it. It is chilly, icy. Following his accident, Eno has been reminded of his own mortality and this rain and harp music has more of the austerity of the symbolic order that is of course cemented by the name and law of the dead father. The music of the harp and rain music is no more an echo of the mother’s voice than the fort! and da! that is uttered by Freud’s grandson as his cries fill the empty space vacated by the mother. For Lacan these utterances are testimony to the violence of the symbol that ‘first manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire’.

For Eno, music is not in itself very interesting. Rather, he is more ‘interested in … what happens when music hits its culture, what it does to people, what new types of thought it allows’ (Eno, Presents). It is not, then, the formal qualities of music’s specific organization of sound that is important, nor the timbre, the quality of its ‘voice’. Rather, it is the way music makes a symbolic cut into culture, its impact on thought even more than feeling. In his own anecdote, Eno is describing the symbolic power of sound to change the world, to transform the world into ambient music. Music is no longer something that is composed, performed and listened to, it is all around us, a place, a feeling, that induces calm and ‘creates a space to think ... it must be ignorable as it is interesting’. The music is much less important, therefore, than the space it creates, the effect that requires naming.

The symbolic force of music is not without its sensuous compensations, and as the sounds become more seductive the thought that they solicit quickly turns to symbolization proper and the power of naming. As he struggles with the here-and-there of the notes of the harp coming in and out of hearing beneath the heavy rain, Eno masters the situation in his imagination by synthesising everything into the field of his own ‘pleasure-ego’. Eno’s mastery takes the symbolic form of a whole new function and genre of music. The musical seduction is essentially a self-seduction in which he becomes at one with his environment even as he masters it, imaginarily, wallowing in the oceanic joy of limitless narcissism that is secured by his act of naming: Eno has invented and named the world; it is ambient music.

Pop journalism and the passion for ignorance

2009-08-23T06:26:00.000-07:00

‘What sucks is when metal is co-opted by wannabe academic nerds’.
Chronic Youth

The hostility to academic commentary on popular culture that unites conservatives with pop journalists and bloggers everywhere surfaced again with knee-jerk predictability at the prospect of a Black Metal Theory symposium in Brooklyn this coming December. Both positions assume that either popular culture does not deserve critical inquiry or does not require it. Theory is either redundant or it misses the point which can only be grasped in authentic, inexpressible experience. See also here and here.

All this is jolly good fun and publicity for the event (so thanks again, guys) but I do feel professionally obliged to point out the irony that this hostility is precisely informed by (theoretical) assumptions that are themselves academic, though of a 19th-century Romantic variety. For example, Ben Jonson’s trenchant criticisms of his contemporary, Shakespeare, that he a) ‘knew small Latin and less Greek’ (hence his plays were one big Gothic mess), and b) ‘never blotted a line’ (and could therefore have done with some serious editing), were taken by the Romantics as evidence of Shakespeare’s Natural Genius. True artists must always be essentially unreflecting, intuitive, natural, and art always ‘beyond the last instance of criticism’ (Frank Kermode). All this does is to empower the Romantic critic who somehow knows (even better than the artist) without having to demonstrate or account for that knowledge, or indeed place it under scrutiny. I assume that this form of criticism is routinely trotted out by pop journo-jocks (often wannabee academic nerds themselves) because it is self-empowering and self-pleasuring. The discourse of the master: ‘I want to know nothing about it except that it gives me pleasure’.

Yes indeed it is about enjoyment and authority (and the enjoyment of authority) that is erected on the basis of the bizarre fear that academics might steal it. The fear is strangely paradoxical because, on the one hand, the cloistered ‘wannabee nerds’ can only press their noses up against the window of authentic experience, and on the other hand, there’s the threat that they might ‘co-opt’ it. The journalist must stick his fingers in his ears and shout it down, or present some caricature. This fear of the academic is completely imaginary and simply (re)produced in order to bolster the journalist’s authority and passion for ignorance: passion for the ignorance of the artist, for the incomprehensibility of the work, and the ineffable authenticity of his experience about which she wishes to know nothing except that she experiences it. But that’s cool, it’s important to be passionate about stuff.

Academics are fans too and can say just as many dumb things as anybody else, not necessarily because they are fans but usually because their discourse has become formulaic and predictable. As such academic discourse can be very boring indeed, especially if you compare it to the popular cultural objects that it talks about (although boredom is often, paradoxically, the interesting marker of a limit). Popular culture, which can also be incredibly boring, is informed (even or especially Black Metal) to varying degrees by academic discourse (art, literature, philosophy, religion etc. etc.), more or less interestingly. Whatever the use artists make of theory, academic discourse can only become interesting if it is modified and changed by its object in some way and is engaged by readers on its own (modified) terms.

This is what we are looking for: Black Metal fucks up academic discourse SHOCK! Now that would be a headline.

The Braindance of the Hikikomori (extract)

2009-08-17T10:02:00.000-07:00

There’s something magical about having all your equipment in the same room as your bed, and you just get out of bed and like do a track and go back to sleep and then get up and do some more and do tracks in your pants and stuff.
Richard D. James (Aphex Twin)

... While the bedrooms of most otaku chime and pulse to the sounds of anime pop and game electronica, the form of music that corresponds, in its mode of production, to the experience of the hikikomori is the ambient work of Richard D. James, also known as Aphex Twin. Works such as Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2 (1994) were produced from a bedroom-studio in a state of ‘semi-reverie’. This double CD of ‘chilly soundscapes’ evokes a world that knows no day or night, produced in the sleepy sleeplessness of perpetual bedroom existence known to adolescents and students the world over. Working live to tape, his studio equipment within arm’s reach, scattered around his bedroom, 'sleep deprivation and marijuana lent Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2 the quality of spectral music' (Prendergast). Speaking of SAWII, James recalls, 'that was all done lucid dreaming. This was me basically going asleep, dreaming up a track ... in an imaginary studio with imaginary equipment and then waking myself up and re-creating that track' (Prendergast).

Critics have noted however, that while SAW II’s use of 'enormously long reverberation' and 'forests of digital delay' produce a mood that is apparently calm and reflective, 'repeated listening reveals a fundamental instability: tones waver and wobble, recording levels nudge into the red of distortion, rhythmic traces never quite assert themselves' (Shaughnessy). The expression of an 'informatic whatever' that is materialized between an ensemble of electronics and a receptive yet semi-conscious brain, James’s ambient music is not fundamentally relaxed and reflective, it is tense and dissonant, even as that dissonance is echoed into infinity by the enormous delay and reverberation.

Richard D. James's notion of braindance implies a certain scientific materialism unusual in dance music. Conventional pop music appeals to ‘body and soul’ generally by-pass the brain, at least where it is understood conventionally as an organ of thought rather than feeling. The notion of braindance displaces that opposition, however, opening up the cranium to the pulse of electronica in the same way that the bedroom of the hikikomori is linked to the audio-visual virtual world of online entertainments. Braindance is consistent with the old house trope, borrowed from the cyberpunk of William Gibson of ‘jacking in’ to cyberspace. Braindance establishes, through multiple rhythms, tones and timbres, electronic continuity between neural circuits and circuits of digital information. There is, then, a different relation to a collective or an assemblage than strictly on the dance floor, one that is in common with the online world of work and play that takes place primarily though interaction with a screen or headset. Braindance music unravels, neuron by neuron, silcon chip by silicon chip, the audio unconscious of the drive towards complete interactivity within a human-machine system. It is the pulse and rhythm of neural electrical stimulation that promises to take emotion, feeling and the thought that follows in its wake, into the extrinsic networks of information. The dancing brain, neither inside nor out: 'welling up and rolling over in a perpetual ever-changing pulse. Amid motions that never start nor end, a sea-consciousness of crystalline clarity and fractal simplicity, without centre or horizon' (Fred Botting, Extimatrix).

In this context we cannot read the unconscious simply as an effect of language, but rather look at how a multiplicity of different forces produce effects of meaning and memory, that is of resistance and the dream. ‘Psychic life is neither the transparency of meaning nor the opacity of force, but the difference within the exertion of forces’ (Derrida). All that is left of humanity, perhaps, as it is neurocomputationally wired into the online universe is the dream that is produced by the difference within the exertion of forces, by the resistance that is implied in that difference and its return in the effraction of the trace. So as humanity dies and becomes post-humanity, as it shuffles off this mortal coil and de-evolves into multiple individualized units of fractal simplicity, what dreams may come? If it is no longer a human subject that dreams and desires, what kinematics of dream-cognition finds expression nevertheless in activation patterns across the populations of nodal points whose differential of force produces the psyche of the networked brain?

James has been accused of a kind of solipsism or creative hedonism with regard to his music as if it concerned no one but himself. Shaughnessy argues that the 'overriding point' of James’s work is that 'all of this music is about himself', citing the multiple anagrams of his own name, various aliases and personal associations that he uses for song titles, assuming that all the music must be made to refer back to himself. But if he is solely interested in himself, that notion of self is subject to same ‘sampladelic’ logic as techno: it is set free from any point of origin. Evident perhaps in the music but certainly in the artwork, graphics and especially the videos made with Chris Cunningham is a replicant form of self unleashed to 'mutate and spread virally across the musical landscape' (78). The anagrams do not therefore refer back to a single name or origin but are the linguistic equivalent of an endless fractal mutation. Language is subject to the same process of reproduction and mutation as the music and images. This is especially the case with the albums that followed Selected Ambient Works II: Donkey Rhubarb (1995), I Care Because You Do (1995), Come To Daddy and Windowlicker (1999). The cover of I Care Because You Do depicts a digitally modified image of James’s bearded face sporting his characteristic sinister grin, as if he were Richard Branson’s evil double and apotheosis. In the accompanying artwork and window displays this face is multiplied in various sizes while the cover of Donkey Rhubarb details the grin which is again repeated 30 times. Like these images the title of the album I Care Because You Do evokes the me-me structure in which the notion of ‘care’ is fractured to infinity in an endless series of self-reflecting interests: 'I care because you care that I care because you care that I care because you care ...'

The technique is again repeated to spectacular effect in the famous videos for ‘Come to Daddy’ and ‘Windowlicker’ by Chris Cunningham. In the former, a “horror-jungle piece”, James’s face is multiplied and morphed on to midget children, in the latter it becomes the ubiquitous face of US corporate dance music and sexual excess.

The video parodies a Miami-style rap video in which the uncompromising courtship of two young women by a pair of stereotypically foul-mouthed boys from the ‘hood is interrupted by James in the guise of a pimp multi-millionaire tycoon. Arriving in an apparently infinitely extendable limousine (38 windows long), wearing a white suit and wafting a white parasol bearing the morphed ‘AT’ of the ‘Aphex Twin’ corporate logo, James is immediately the focus of the young women’s avid attention. Consistent with music video male fantasy more bikini-clad women are discovered on the Miami seafront dancing to the master’s tune. But this masturbatory hip-hop reverie lasts only for a second as all the women are revealed to be James himself complete with sinister grin and straggly red beard. The finale, in which James’s head, with its digitally-enhanced ugliness and evil morphed onto the virtually naked bodies of glamour models, becomes as Garry Mullholland writes, 'genuinely terrifying, and by the end of the promo all notions of money, fame, physical attractiveness, sexual identity and American excess had been surgically exposed for the empty charade that they are' (Mullholland).

The braindance of the windowlicker, a term in colloquial English that denotes someone mentally handicapped or psychically disturbed, is conveyed through the amusical arhythmia of the machined beats. At the same time, the title’s reference is also presumed to be a translation of faire du lèche-vitrine, in a tribute to his French partner at the time, meaning ‘window shopper’. In a crude and no doubt offensive way, then, ‘Windowlicker’ conjoins psychosis and consumer capitalism. The correlation suggests that this is the fevered erotic dance of a brain ‘interacting’ with a screen, a ‘window’ on to a pornucopia of electronic sounds and images. The latter is of course evoked in Cunningham’s video where the ubiquity of James’s face suggests the reflection of the windowlicker in the screen that overlays the images of micro-bikini-clad models. It is the braindance of the porn-obsessed hikikomori, but also by extension of the whole bio-electrical erogenous zone that is online consumer capitalism.

But further, from a psychoanalytic perspective we can not only clearly see, in the foreclosure from a principle of prohibition (the name-of-the-father), the return of the spectre of père jouissance in the form of the brain-dancing master of the primal horde, but also that the primal horde is itself a series of clones of the father of enjoyment, that the father/phallic principle has become subject to bio-computational reproduction and gender mutation. As Aphex Twin’s electronic music splurges towards its machined climax and whimper, below slo-mo images of champagne ejaculation, we are presented with the ambivalent sound-image of the realization of scientific jouissance: the order of joy in all its monstrous poly-pluripotency.

Extract from a paper to be delivered at the 'Psychoanalysis and the Posthuman' conference, University of Nottingham, UK, 7-8th September 2009