splintering bone ashes

The Autophagic University

2010-05-04T13:47:00.008+01:00

The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University is worth more dead than alive. As this FAQ makes clear:

"if as many believe, the incoming government delays the next research exercise by 2 years, to 2015, Middlesex will continue to receive RAE money for Philosophy for six more years, until August 2016, whether it employs any philosophers or not. The total sum is likely to be close to £1 million."

Hence the management has decided to begin a highly profitable autophagic feast. As a mental disorder, Autophagia is a compulsion to inflict pain upon oneself by devouring portions of one's own body. It is sometimes caused by severe sexual anxiety, schizophrenia or psychosis. Please sign the petition, join the group and attend...

Pitch-black ecology

2010-02-03T22:24:00.012Z

The new Collapse is proving a provocative read, and I will come to Reza Negarestani and Manav Guha’s pieces in due course, but already I find myself in somewhat of a bind. For Timothy Morton’s piece, “Thinking Ecology: the Mesh, the Strange Stranger, and the Beautiful Soul”, whilst attacking some of the right enemies (Heideggerean mystical-holism and the conservative ecology of the “just-over-there”) ends up positing its own deeper and more obfuscatory mysticism. He begins, simply enough, with a basic thesis: interdependence in any region of reality (although he appears to be concerned with biological, and to a limited extent linguistic realities) can be minimally defined by two axioms, (1) any given thing is defined by its not being another thing, negatively differentiated and (2) all things derive from other, prior things.

From these minimal axioms of potential interdependence, Morton derives a sequence of propositions, which themselves eventually undermine the logic of the initial axioms. Chief amongst these is the impossibility of disentangling elements within ecosystems (at multiple levels: distinguishing absolutely between species, distinguishing living from dead, pulling apart environment and animal as lifeforms both reconfigure their environment and actually constitute such an environment for other such entities, all targets constantly in motion etc). This entanglement is embodied in the idea of “the mesh”, a term chosen to avoid both overly vitalist nomenclatures as a “web” and overly technological ones such as “network”. Humans, like every other form of life are ensnared within this mesh, bleed into it and into each other in slippery reflexive continua, our boundaries confused in a relation of intimate complicity which vitiates against any position of transcendent relation. Many of Morton’s scientific reference points are fascinating, particularly his account of the pre-living life of the crystalline 'RNA world', and the sinister creep of life (to use a Naught Thoughtism) at the sub-cellular level. And indeed, the majority of his thesis on interdependent intimacy (no transcendence for man within the ecological schema, no “leaving be” in a Heideggerean mould, no “nature”) I am in complete agreement with.

But in deriving his notion of interdependence from Derridean linguistic deconstructive thought, Morton lays himself open to a vitalist-correlationism, or a twisted ecosophical absolute idealism in the guise of a high-tech Po-Mo materialism. I am reminded of the deep irony in critical animal studies taking up object oriented philosophy: deposing the tyranny of Homo Sapiens by theoretical coup d’état only to install in the void it leaves behind the dictatorship of the animal (which someone like Larval Subjects is wise enough to immediately bound over, to enter the more interesting if not unproblematic territory of his own universal politics of objects). For though it is correct that it is difficult, perhaps even intractably so, to distinguish between living and non-living things (as in the example Morton quotes of the minimal functional difference between RNA viroids and computer viruses), this difficult continuum or grey-zone between the two does not mean that there is nothing outside the vital. It is correct that whilst ‘life’-systems are enmeshed within one another, there remains a realm, a region of time-space which pre-exists ‘life’ and which will be again, after ‘life’ has been extinguished. It is this challenge to thought, to life, which is countenanced and forms the speculative motor in the works variously of Meillassoux, Brassier, and Negarestani, though with very different conclusions.

As Reza Negarestani himself put it to me:

“Interiorisation as Urtrauma (originary splitting) does not result in […] the assimilation of the exteriority (extinction, ancestrality, etc.) by the principles of the interiorised horizon but rather it leads to a redistribution or retwisting of the exteriority’s non-belonging and the unilateral negativity (the nonnegotiable power) inherent to it. Rather than assimilating the exteriority and turning it into itself, the interiorised horizon is forced to reassign its extensive and intensive vectors to the unilateral negativity harboured by the index of exteriority, remobilising it as a subtractive form of dynamism for binding exteriority from within and from without.”

In other words the originary trauma of the emergence of life from non-living matter (in Reza’s terminology, the construction of an interior realm) does not result in the formation of an absolute immanence, but of a more complex topology of imbrications and corruption. The problem of Morton’s continua and intimacy-infection is that if extinction is assimilated by life, then the whole moral/ethical dimension of the project is damaged (ie- the references to ecological catastrophe which frame this work). The piece begins with gestures towards a “politicised intimacy” with other beings, rather than nihilism, and yet once Extinction/Ancestrality is taken seriously, the legitimacy of a non-nihilistic ecology becomes strictly moot. Not only must we divest ourselves of any inkling of transcendent ecology of “nature” and the beautiful soul who “lets it be”, but of hyper-relationist ecology which seeks the sublation of the ancestral dimension beneath a pan-vitalist rubric. Perversely, only a rigorous nihilism can vouchsafe the threat of the great outside. More than simply a melancholy understanding of complicity and inescapable ensnarement within permeable systems leading to a kind of responsibility, (and why responsibility and the weak ethical turn rather than irresponsibility?) instead we need to think a deeper and more disturbing complicity between living and non-living (which does not subsume one within the other but maintains the tension and complex topological relation between the two) an intimate embrace contorting life nested with non-life, life formed from the twisted planes and surfaces of the inorganic. The “butchery” of the outside (outside thought, outside life, the great outdoors in all its objective monstrosity), which is already within, already the very stuff of the inside. An intimate nihilism. The catastrophe, which ecology abjures, has already occurred.

Matters geophilosophical

2010-02-01T00:41:00.005Z

The latest volume of Collapse, the pre-eminent journal of experimental and cunningly thematised philosophy has now been released. If proof be needed that the journal will not shrink to a narrow horizon of scientism, as some have predicted, then this Geophilosophical issue is it. If past excursions are anything to go by, this ought to be a head-crushing and paradigm shifting experience... get it here.

On negative solidarity and post-fordist plasticity

2010-01-31T22:53:00.021Z

From the tube strikes to the postal strikes, to the upcoming round of public service cuts, and festering in every political blog’s foetid comments box and every wretched rancid letters page of the right-wing London free-sheets, a striking psycho-cultural phenomena emerges: negative solidarity. More than mere indifference to worker agitations, negative solidarity is an aggressively enraged sense of injustice, committed to the idea that, because I must endure increasingly austere working conditions (wage freezes, loss of benefits, declining pension pot, erasure of job security and increasing precarity) then everyone else must too. Negative solidarity can be seen as a close relation to the kind of ‘lottery thinking’ the underpins the most pernicious variants of the American Dream. In lottery thinking we get a kind of inverted Rawlsian anti-justice- rather than considering the likelihood of achieving material success in an unequal society highly unlikely and therefore preferring a more equal one, instead the psychology of the million-to-one shot prevails. Since I will inevitably be wealthy in the future, this line of thinking runs, I will ensure that the conditions when I become wealthy will be as advantageous to me as possible, even though on a balance of realistic probabilities this course of action will in fact be likely to be entirely against my own interests. More than lottery thinking, which is inherently (if misguidedly) aspirational in nature, negative solidarity is actively and aggressively anti-aspirational, utterly negative in the most childish fashion, and drives a blatant “race-to-the bottom”. Negative solidarity operates under the invisible, though clearly contradictory and self-refuting, assumption of reflexive impotence. I will endeavour to campaign for the lowering of working standards since I must suffer the same lowered standards, because there is only one direction in which the thermodynamic system of socio-economics can run: towards the abject exploitation of sump-end post-Fordist (faux-free market) Neoliberalism. When the Tories talk of social solidarity in the face of the consequences of the financial crisis, it is clearly negative solidarity they have in mind.

The problem that negative solidarity indexes is twofold. Firstly, and on a smaller scale, it demonstrates the extent to which any activity by labour movements will be met with implacable public hostility. This can perhaps be resolved by a smarter presentation of the underlying issues, difficult though that may seem given the current media ecology. All too often mindless inefficiency and blatantly exploitative management practices are smuggled in under the discursive rubric of “modernisation” and it is clearly around terms such as these that the short term struggles must be based. Any labour actions must be explicitly battles for modernity, against a form of managerialist paradigm which is inadequate and actually antediluvian in nature. However, one of the chief stumbling blocks to achieving this links into the second and far more serious problem which is gestured towards in negative solidarity: the widescale collapse of organised labour under post-Fordism in the west. This has been achieved as the result of a deliberate and carefully coordinated (though experimental) political programme, Neoliberalism. What remains of labour movements in the UK are partly in hoc to the dreadful failure of a New Labour administration, and those that are seriously militant are generally connected to key levers on capitalist production: transport, infrastructure, communications. The control of the narrative of what “modernisation” might mean has been hijacked by sclerotic and centralising centres of accumulation (of capital, power, information). Between the forcible shattering of the labour movements in the 1980s and thirty years of post-Fordisation of the workforce, widescale labour militancy would seem to be unlikely. The old form of workerist solidarity is inadequate, only partially available, and utterly weakened.

Unpicking negative solidarity, which is clearly an internalisation of the conditions of flexibility and atomised ‘homo economicus’ individualism necessary for the embedding of Neoliberal post-Fordism, requires the constructing of a new form of solidarity, a form of solidarity adequately configured to effectively oppose the chief machines of Neoliberal praxis: finance. This new form of solidarity must be capable of fluidity and rapid response, able to exploit weaknesses within systems and structures opportunistically and with a global purview, one which crucially can mirror the rapidity and fluidity of international finance. This is solidarity as plasticity, rather than the static brick-like form of Fordist labour solidarity, capable of flowing and shifting, yes, but also of fixing into position and assuming a hardened form where necessary. This form of solidarity must be inclusive of the new protest and occupation movements which have emerged in recent years, which although they have been largely ineffectual to date, have certainly led to new and interesting configurations of interest groups. What has been lacking however are the necessary cybernetic coordination systems to effectively enable these disparate and fragmentary groups to achieve the status of a counter-hegemonic power, a “class” power in the broadest sense of the term, one which is capable of counter-balancing effectively the rapacious if discredited centres of neoliberalism. Indeed it is this which must be formulated as the political conclusion of theories of post-Fordisation, rather than any kind of fantastical and strictly imaginary political subject such as the multitude. Only when there is an effective counterbalancing power can new theoretical socio-economic post-capitalist forms be properly disseminated, and successfully gain purchase.

Vindicatrix’s liminal songcraft

2010-01-31T15:53:00.024Z

Kudos to K-Punk in last month’s Wire magazine for bringing a little-remarked upon album which sneaked out in the latter days of 2009 to my attention. Vindicatrix sits in an almost entirely unexplored region of musical terra incognita, perhaps only previously visited by late-era Scott Walker, and even he never quite travelled so far-out into such unfamiliar spaces. Vindicatrix’s earlier releases on the Mordant Music label were largely club-oriented pieces of gloom-techno or glum-post-dubstep, garnished with his Scott-at-the-bottom-of-a-reverb-pit style vocals, and were intriguing but somewhat limited in scope. With Die Alten Bösen Lieder, Vindicatrix extends this style into a series of bizarrely broken assemblages, a parade of semi-functioning aesthetic machines: neurotoxic Weimar Republic house, serialist ethno-dubstep, dada-nightmare isolationist ambient, and a beautiful middle sequence of unearthly liminal ballads. A friend of mine described the album as sounding “like you're sitting in a room adjoining a performance of Wozzeck and a Shackleton gig” and this certainly captures something of the flavour of the earlier tracks, combining dissonant circling choral harmonies with rickety bleached-bone drum patterns and dolorous vocal ruminations.

But really the core of the album is the expanse of three alien-art-ballads beginning with “Lack of Correspondence”. Shifting away from the subtly dubstep and techno inflected percussive textures of the earlier tracks, these songs, rather than operating on principles of postmodern combination of pre-existing generic forms, instead home in on and magnify the most alien-sublime elements of Scott Walker’s late works. Vindicatrix takes late-Walker at his most lushly orchestral, those immense pieces of extraterrestrial lieder like “Sleepwalkers Woman” and “Patriot (a single)”, sketching vast landscapes of unknown emotions, then drifts even further out into an ever more unknown oneiric psychological hinterland. “Lack of Correspondence” begins with a kind of drolly humorous narrative of religiously inspired love before folding into cut-up vocal fragments and teeming swarms of rapidly edited white noise shards. “Rubbing Pages Out” merges backmasked noise with vast banks of shimmering strings to create a glowing mass of iridescent sound, akin to the final glorious chord of a romantic symphony captured and transformed into a continuous plateaux, topped with occasional interventions by a conciliatory tuba. On “Insulinde”, at almost ten minutes the longest and most singular piece on the album, we enter a strange territory of distantly tolling metals, subliminal bass drones, oddly harmonised vocals, chimingly sinister bells, a recurrent motif of five metallic thumps, sampled operatic wailing. A rising tumult of strings: “Behind closed doors. There is. Violence. In. Outer chambers. Violence.” An unnameable ritual. All this material accumulates, disperses, reforms, dreamlike in the sense of being unplaceable, yet naggingly familiar, the relations between these sound-objects intuitively understandable yet forming a strange sort of sense, in a liminal grammar like a sequence of words caught in the instant before sleep, a memory which can be recalled but cannot be placed, sitting between the sinister and the gloriously beautiful.

The album concludes with the inhuman bleak expanse of “A Long Straight Road in a Cold City”, a continual sub-bass filched from some 2006 dubstep track, but shorn of its percussive-clothing, left to prowl through the remnants of a Ligeti choir, whilst acoustic drums and screams burst in momentarily to assassinate the calm with the unintelligible violence promised elsewhere on the album. In an era when experimentation with song form seems locked into past paradigms, this is an enormously welcome and necessary collection, acutely aware of contemporary sonic mores but able to spin them into new and unsettling forms, capable of rendering the beautiful strange and the strange beautiful, rather than simply ungainly.

The Paradoxes of Militant Dysphoria

2009-10-02T10:46:00.013+01:00

Many thanks to Mark Fisher for organising Wednesday's Militant Dysphoria event at Goldsmiths, in conjunction with the release of Dominic Fox's excellent new book Cold World. The quality of other papers was such that I hope they are made available online, but for the meantime here is Nick Srnicek's on Dysphoria, Actor Network Theory, and slow motion revolution. My own paper, which is fairly inconclusive unfortunately, is below:

Dysphoria & Unworlding

Firstly let us consider the particular political-theoretical ecology from which the need for “the cold world” of militant dysphoria appears to arise. Most obviously, there is the collapse of the familiar paradigms of leftist politics, be they democratic parliamentarian, or street-protest based. Though neo-liberalism as reality principle might well appear to have imploded following the economic crisis of 2008, in the West we have pointedly not seen a serious renaissance of the left. The impasse of the contemporary political moment is never better dramatised than in this Spring’s G20 protests in London. Here the limits of a certain form of praxis were plain, where protest seemed little more than a kind of feel-good feel-bad activity, a pious but clearly inevitable defeat. Thirty years of triumphant post-Fordist neoliberalism seem to have critically weakened the usual avenues for left politics, to have driven those who keep faith with the truths of Marxism or Socialism to either an in-denial fervour for the theatrical acting-out of a party in the street, or a kind of numb remove, an immisrated state. So the left is trapped in a sort of depression, in a dysphoric state itself. Here “militant dysphoria” means the dysphoria of the militant. The hope arises that it is through a radicalisation of this very negative state that a future emancipatory politics might be born. A radicalisation in what sense though?

For perhaps what the cold world of militant dysphoria threatens is a similar utopian twist to a dystopian analysis as the Italian post-Marxist Autonomist’s notion of the Multitude. For the Autonomists, most notably of course Hardt and Negri, there exists on the one hand an ever deeper encroachment and subsumption of the human lifeworld by post-Fordist capital, and the destruction of workerist subjectivity. But on the other there is an expansion in the power of living labour (as fixed capital becomes ever more composed of cognitive and affective-communicational components), and the formation of a new kind of subject, the Multitude. Somehow what appears to be an absolute dystopia nurtures the very conditions from which utopia might emerge, and from the state of utmost despair arises ultimate salvation. We might agree with the negative dimension of their analysis, delineating the fundamental shift from Fordist to post-Fordist modes of production, and the concomitant erasure of a certain form of political subject, without accepting their thesis of what will replace it. Can the notion of a militant Dysphoria escape such a fate, a pseudo-Hegelian teleological fantasy of determinate negation?

In terms of theory, we have seen a parallel swing from euphoria to dysphoria, from affirmation to negation. As Ben Noys has diagnosed, this shift is most firmly marked by a swing in the balance of power from affirmationists, or accelerationists, paradigmatically Deleuze and Guattari, to a qualified return to the negative (or at least, the subtractive) in the form of Badiou. Affirmationist politics proceeds from a primary positivity- be that difference-in-itself, Desire, Life – and from there towards an acceleration of the innate processes which Capital utilises but which must always limit in order to maintain its consistency, in other words to undo capitalism from within by accentuating its deepest tendencies. Against this, Badiou stands markedly more opposed to the logics of capital, seeking to think a subject divorced from the determinations of the situation, working to construct truths which are subtracted from the democratic materialism of bodies and languages. Though continuing to root the political closely to the ontological, the political here is not an acceleration of the fundamental tendencies of a world, but rather a subtraction from it, and a torsion upon it.

Finally we might see the cold world as sitting intriguingly at the juncture between two emerging trends within contemporary post-continental philosophy, between Speculative Realism, and a less well defined but equally powerful strand which might be termed “subjectivationism”. Speculative Realism, though it consists of a series of distinct elements marks a shift away from a correlationist conception of philosophy, a breaking of the necessary co-implication of human subject and world. In so doing it has been accused of jettisoning concerns for the political altogether, although this is perhaps a premature judgment. The second school of thought is probably even more loose, and aims instead towards a rethinking of the conditions for radical political subjectivity. The notion of the cold world and militant dysphoria serves as a meeting point between the two, for whilst on the one hand it seeks to uncover the subjective conditions for new forms of politics through the gesture of scission in a post-Badiouian fashion, the removal of the subject from the world, it also opens the door to the beginnings for the beginnings of a post-speculative realist politics.

One interpretation of a militant dysphoria would hold that dysphoria acts to separate the subject from their world, and that then once suitably energised by this negative relation, they might act to change it. In this sense of “militant dysphoria” dysphoria is a necessary stage of subjective transformation, a making strange of the everyday world of life and the vital, a subtraction apart from its quotidian ensnarement and the first step on the path towards its transformation. Here then, militant dysphoria breaks down into first dysphoria, then militancy, in that order. We might even conceive this in Latourian terms- to change the world from a “closed black box” which is simply taken as a given, effectively invisible, to an opened black box revealing its components and working parts, coming newly into focus as the dysphoric subject finds themselves freshly alienated from its processes. The primary difficulty here is to think the transition from the moment of refusal, of separation, of scission, and the conversion of this negative energy into action, the shift from rejection and dejection to engagement. Here we would certainly need the supplement of a form or vessel into which this negative energy might be poured, a structure, a party, a battle group, some degree of institutionalisation of negativity which would serve to give form to the otherwise potentially solipsistic tendencies of the dysphoric.

Moreover the politics of this form of militant dysphoria is deeply paradoxical, and seemingly always in danger of either sliding back into the logic of the vital or its dark inverted doppelganger, a reification of dysphoria itself. There is always something approaching a paradox in the disavowal of the vital. Take for example the writings of the ontological horror writer Thomas Ligotti. At the level of content there is a radical denial of the vital, and yet this very disavowal enables the works to pulse with certain inhuman vitality. Within the libidinal economy of the depressive mind, whilst life itself is refused, the life of the depressive economy, of the inverted libido, becomes omnipresent, becomes a new kind of life. Ligotti, for example, whilst claiming an absolute anhedonia, a freezing up of the machinery of desire and enjoyment into a crystallised, timeless, ice-like tableaux, at the level of productivity remains motivated. Fundamentally of course, Ligotti still writes. Instead of a refusal of the vital, of enjoyment, the dysphoric libidinal economy seemingly learns to enjoy displeasure, to metabolise disenchantment itself as a new kind of alternative energy source. Again this leads us back either to the vital, back to the world which seemingly the dysphoric appears to be escaping, but are in fact simply reconfiguring their internal relation to. Or, alternatively, towards a genuine absence of energy, which would preclude any political activity whatsoever. Problematically, if the dark libidinal economy takes hold, it serves only to perpetuate itself, and therefore will never rise to risk the elimination of the very things which enable its perpetuation. In a political context the refusal to enjoy, to take the apparent fruits of consumerist late capital and receive pleasure from them, comes to take on its own negative enjoyment, to become an inverted pleasure all of its own. At best a malign energy distinguishes the militant dysphoric from the merely dysphoric.

In his book Dominic singles out a line from one of Gerard Manley Hopkins “Terrible Sonnets”, which runs “no worst, there is none”. This indicates something of the paradox of the dark libidinal economy. That there is no worst means that there is no halting point to the process of disenchantment of which dysphoria is the primary affect, and that a radicalised dysphoria’s only aim is towards its own self-expansion. To think politically, the amassing of negativity within a social-economic system at the affective and economic levels might trigger the calling into question of the coherency of such a system, and the emergence of the truth of it, a new world born from its ashes. But if there is no worst, that we can advance ever worstward ho without limiting point, the necessary dialectical grip or friction for a conventionally oppositional change is absent. The very point of sublation which might imply the alteration of the world of life from which the militant dysphoric has fled is absent, and instead a non-dialectical form of negativity rages without end.

But what I would clarify as the necessarily militant moment is perhaps the point of subjective decision, to, ironically, affirm this withdrawal, or perhaps, to identify with it. If the distinction between the merely dysphoric and the militantly dysphoric can be drawn, it is at precisely this moment. Discontent can always be cathected, or indeed stored and then released. But might there be another interpretation of the term, rather than the sadness of the defeated militant at the end of the end of history, or the dysphoria which leads somehow towards militant engagement? Rather perhaps a dysphoria which is itself militant. If the paradox of militant dysphoria is its tendency towards inertia without some kind of vessel into which it might be employed, then perhaps one way through this impasse is via dysphoria itself, not to escape, to employ this negative affect to remake the existing world, but rather to see in it a new world altogether.

What is most fascinating about the militant of the cold world is precisely what Dominic has located in the field of Black Metal, in the ability of the genre to present aestheticised dysphoria as a kind of telepathy with the dead, an ability of the subject to reach a point of anti-subjectivation, to commune with that which is not a subject, to become possessed by the inhuman. What is most radical about this notion is, for all its influence by Badiou, it is an inversion of its master’s doctrines, a generic mis-anthropy or generic inhumanity rather than a generic humanity. Here then dysphoria acts as a path not towards militant engagement with the world, but rather a making strange of the human-world relation, to the extent that the human subject identifies no longer with their own ostensible interests, but instead with those outside of itself. In other circumstances a similar kind of politicisation might occur so that the self-interested individual takes on a willingness to live and perhaps die for an idea or a cause. But here rather than an identification with humanity as a generic concept, or even the vital as such (as in perhaps communism or radical environmentalism, with a willingness to make ones own interests subservient to those of the greater cause) here the abjuring of the vital indicates instead a form of communion with sub-vital or non-vital processes.

To systematise briefly: a world protects its consistency by rendering itself a black box, invincible and invisible, taken for granted. The human world is one determined by vitalistic principles, and it is these which are undone in dysphoria, hence undoing the world which they construct. If capital has subsumed the world of life, has exploited and manipulated its processes to such an extent that it becomes synonymous with life, and indeed a form of life itself, then perhaps the way of death, of non-life, of the freezing over of the vital offers a way out of its particular strictures. It is certainly true to say that capitalism as it stands now requires a degree of acquiescence with the “big other”- to at least pay lip service to the affirmationist common sense. This means that at the level of microeconomics, we must “enjoy” or at least pretend to do so, and at the level of macroeconomics that the dogma of growth of gross domestic product as strictly equivalent to the common good and the elevation of the general standard of living of humanity must be maintained. So in identifying with the state of dysphoria itself and hence to subtract from this world, the militant dysphoric effectively abandons a world already made cold by capital’s alien life, and then perhaps, undoes it. Perhaps.

But there are clearly uneasy isomorphisms between the self-expanding activities of capital and the accumulative logic of dysphoria itself. Unlinked from the necessary dialectical purchase to transform the world of life in the name of life, the libido of the terrorist or Black Metallist, can think of no greater horror than the ending of horror itself, no greater misfortune than the ceasing of the cold world, of being drawn back into the rhythms of the vital, to, as Dominic puts it most succinctly, love and to work. As such the dysphoric libidinal economy appears to depend upon the very thing which induces it, leading this reified, fetishised dysphoria to appear to be intimately imbricated with contemporary Capitalism. A truly militant dysphoria is analogous to capital-as-cancer or as-virus, (ie- without dialectical purchase or friction, a slippery self expanding negativity) but this itself must be grasped and pushed to an aggravated conclusion, since as with Nick Land’s phantasmic re-imagining of neoliberalism, we can clearly risk overestimating the dissolutory forces involved, and to ignore the ever-present conservatism of the form. For Capital this is the need to preserve its own consistency through restraint upon production, and for dysphoria it is its unwillingness to dissolve itself or the grounds for itself. In this sense the militant dysphoric asserts both the unending dissolution of worlds, and the construction of a singularly new world consisting of such endless dissolutions, the world defiled and the world of the process of such defilements.

For the greatest betrayal.

2009-06-11T01:41:00.006+01:00

If only there were a misanthropy pure enough to become divested of its human shell. That it cannot be so, that is itself the quandary, the attempt at resolution via a limitropic reduction, an asymptote descending upon zero... poised between elimination, the betrayal of every prior world, and desertification... but where the desert itself, the absolute plane… is absent, though the process… continues… the desert is a mirage, but the dust… the dust is real. The effect however is of a tensor sign: between the drive towards unpeeling unto an impossible zero, and the contamination of the flesh- eliminativism as paradoxical, an endless ungrounding, tunnels and wormholes, insides and their insiders—at every layer a new conspiracy-- and yet... this paradox itself generates some kind of energy, an entropic energy, built upon a tensor sign- a generator of eddies of negentropy even within essentially utterly entropic abstract decay paths...

It is the impossibility of this zero=the real=that which both drives and confounds the process (the inhuman, OR the inside which is also the outside). But the process must continue - an accelerationism forever worstward, the worst the better, without any remorse or flip or dialectical reversal… (Negri is the same but with the negative switched to the positive, of course). A tensor sign between the purifying drive towards nullification at absolute zero and its eternal contamination by- flesh=the inadequacy of every subsequent conceptual regime- Hegel without absolute knowing, the pathway of doubt without redemption… where it is this inadequacy itself which perversely enables the mobilisation of non-dialectical negativity for subversive ends. It is the impossibility of the ultimate militant process (capitalistic abstraction/subsumption processes or technoscientific destruction of an endless regress of manifest images) which both will please the regressive Marxists amongst us (the limit cannot be breached) and yet which drives onwards… The ultimate betrayal is the impossibility of ever reaching the (non)-ground, the process is for nought, and yet it can never reach nought. The Human cannot slough off its skin, the physicist cannot find their Grand Unified Theory (or absolute univocal ontological component). The impossibility of the militant operation (desire to cleanse) lends it its metaterroristic function, a fury without end. Lies… all the way down.

Why I will never be clean again...

2009-06-09T14:02:00.005+01:00

In the “I hate…” series, perhaps we should take a philosophical turn, since all musical options have been taken…

With a heavy heart, and with very little jouissance…

“I hate Badiou”.

Or perhaps I should qualify this, somewhat- I find the post-evental world that Badiou delineates (and perhaps more than that, everything beyond his basic, seductive, ontology) to be simply absurd. This is an unhappy conclusion to reach, for me at least, since it was Badiou who brought me to philosophy in the very beginning, his works that I read first of all, in that first flush of enthusiasm, who I chose to study and write about, to calmly explain to non-believers (let’s not kid ourselves here…) the careful meaning of “event” “subject” et al (in his exceptionalist conceptual bestiary).

It would probably be unfair to say that I hate any philosopher, strictly speaking, since I view them as technology which can be drawn upon (not religions or football teams to be supported fanatically or denounced in no uncertain terms). But in the proper tradition of the “I hate ______” of Jonny Rotten’s “I hate Pink Floyd” t-shirt, that rancour which can only accumulate from a prior love, that disappointment, that disgust that only builds from a platform of adoration, of having the scales stripped from your eyes… I find myself increasingly frustrated by Badiou’s silly, stiff, useless philosophy. The core reason must lie with the lure which initially prompted my enthusiasm for his work in the first place: that against a backdrop of the terminal beach of history, the death of everything new, the possibility of the new in fact, here was a theorist who dared to claim to think the new as such, to formalise its emergence, its progress, the evils which may befall it etc. This was precisely what I had been looking for, motivated in a political sense not by a desire to prevent the suffering of the poor, but to unblock the lock on the new, this impassable impasse, THAT was to be the imperative of thought. But it is with Speculative Realist thought, and most particularly that of Brassier, Negarestani, and Nick Srnicek, that has threatened this simply held belief. If, as has been widely discussed, the new (and most especially the revolutionary new, the fruit of ruptures) cannot be held to be intrinsically good, and is only possible via a surreptitiously inserted humanism at the level of an illegitimately posited ontological set-up, then the libidinal lure of Badiou’s work slowly crumbles apart. Badiou’s philosophical Modernism Après Le Lettre now appears grotesque, but not for the reasons that are mostly touted, his continuing support of Maoism, dismissal of the philosophies of difference, or his antipathy to human rights and the suffering of the pathetic human animal…

Whilst his ontological position has a certain minimalist elegance about it, everything he builds atop it is little more than a ridiculous hyper-structure of nonsense piled upon nonsense, an unsteady philosophical folly whose absurd (yet po-faced) architecture has only been exacerbated by (what I have read thus far of) Logics of Worlds. Whilst I admire Badiou's style (an admittedly masterful mixture of crisply cumulative argument, mathematical abstraction, and poetic/polemic turn of phrase, indeed the style above all of the master, the father, the priest… in the best and worst senses) Increasingly I find his work unbearable... The whole notion of the relational body of a truth is ridiculously simplistic, and fails to resolve the chief spectre haunting Badiou (i.e.- Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason). His absolutism, exceptionalism, his rejection of management- well I think politics must always, in the end, return to that question, the issue of organisation, the issue of management… of relation- it is the political question. The question of relation sat uncomfortably over Being & Event – and it is with his relational supplement that Badiou is revealed as a pathological system-builder, but to what end- to what avail does he build his awkward tower? These fragments he shores against his ruins, a ziggurat of ruins, the ruin of a thought… (my thought, I think perhaps, rather than his own…).

The question remains: what can we do with Badiou?

If philosophy, for Badiou, operates only under conditioning from disciplines outside of itself (which even if we are not to be strict Badiouians, seems a not entirely unreasonable premise) in order that it might think the compossibility of its times, then what does Badiou himself offer to our current conditions? His thought seems ideal to grasp the passage of high modernist art or militant communist praxis, but gives little grasp on ecological collapse, on non-linear decomposition of abstract decay which appears to be the primary aesthetic (at least in music, but also, intriguingly, in politics). The temporality of the truth procedure, the subjectivity of the militant, gripped by the fervour of the event and the unfolding of possibilities presented by the consequences of that event in a motion of scission and torsion, cutting and twisting and folding back (as Bruno Bosteels as hypothesised)- this is indeed adequate, after the fact, as a way of thinking the sequences of action which most marked the pre-68 twentieth century history- but it remains inadequate as a way of conceptualising our times, and as such, can be identified as a philosophy under condition only of the past (how often, after all, does Badiou supply us with examples or figures from our own times- of course, perhaps it is “too soon to tell”). A philosophy which has arrived too late, an after-shock, a slap-back echo reverb spectre of modernism (but a modernism that admits to itself the plurality of narrative breakdown upon which post-modernity itself hinges). The very problem is that we have arrived at a situation where this absolutism, exceptionalism, has become itself the problem, above all for what remains of the left, as demonstrated in Badiou’s patronising lecture at the 2009 Communism Conference at Birkbeck.

K-punk has recently proclaimed, audaciously, that we are in “a new year zero” a “reverse 79”- which is partially correct. Indeed it appears that we have passed through some kind of threshold in 2009- things are not as they have been, politically, economically, aesthetically, philosophically. But this is not a clean slate, a fresh start, a cleansed palette, a blue sky, a new dawn, a new day… it is the impossibility of cleaning the slate which is presented by the challenge of a world of insides, of immanence, which must be marked by conspiracy and corruption- the impossibility of ever "getting clean" finding some zone outside from which to moralise... perhaps via the dysphoria which (via Dominic Fox/Poetix) K-Punk points towards… or the kind of negativity which Benjamin Noys has been focusing his energies upon… we may be exhorted to “hold our ground”- but what ground precisely, what grip? Better to continue the process… all the way down. It is precisely, contra Fisher and Fox, corruption, pestilence and terror that must be investigated as the political ecosystem of our times, instead of seeking to flee to a purified realm, somewhere apart from the rot of the flesh... somewhere intact from the force of abstract decay… somewhere safe with the reassuring word of the father, the master, the priest (Badiou or Zizek, no doubt, depending on taste), where there will always be a clean year zero, a subject free of contamination etc... a subject, moreover who can be redeemed (even baptised at his co-terminous birth within truth). There is something prissy here, pathological in the desire to remove all stains from the hands... Understandable, perhaps, I used to think precisely the same, but impossible. What must be delineated is a kind of schizoanalysis, as Reid Kotlas of Planemonology has recently written, but one divested of crypto-morality, of positivity, reintegrated as a kind of metaterrorism of conspiratorial management, infection, contagion, and pestilence, a weaponised non-dialectical negativity wielded in the name of the highest value our times will admit to: Betrayal.

Beyond the call of wonky...

2009-06-02T23:00:00.003+01:00

A lengthy and rather extraordinary musicological account of wonky is available over at Rouge's Foam, who also has some extremely detailed musings on David Stubbs' recent book Fear of Music.

Speculative Reports.

2009-05-01T01:01:00.004+01:00

Intrepid reporters on the Second Speculative Realism/Materialism conference at UWE on 24 April 2009: Ben at Speculative Heresy, more notes at Total Assault on Culture, and pictures at Infinite Thought. Thoughts to follow, particularly on Alberto Toscano's paper which placed Meillassoux in a very interesting context, if one which bares further analysis.

Invention or Discovery- or, when is a genre not a genre?

2009-04-30T21:21:00.009+01:00

This is my paper presented yesterday at the Hardcore Continuum Event at UEL. Big thanks to Jeremy Gilbert and Steve Goodman for inviting me, to the other panelists, and to the audience who generally asked decent questions...

The most contentious claim Simon Reynolds makes regarding the Hardcore Continuum is that it is not simply a theory, a model, but rather that it is real. On Reynolds’ account the Continuum was not invented by him but rather he discovered it as an already existing thing, and merely gave it a name and described the kind of processes of which it consists. The reason why Reynolds is drawn towards defining the continuum as a discrete object is fairly obvious, since to do so is to make it cohere across time in the same way as hip hop or jazz or rock, and in so doing claim a similar space of significance for it. This certainly accords with Reynolds’ talk about a kind of musical patriotism: for him, the continuum is the greatest popular music invention to emerge from the UK, and a coherent name allows its mercurial processes, its constantly shifting genre structure (from Hardcore to jungle to 2-step garage to grime to dubstep) to be conceived as a single evolving art-form. In this sense it is hoped that its canonical and culturally significant role can be firmly asserted. Whilst few would dispute that there is certainly a high degree of interconnectedness between these scenes, the issue of the continuum as real-in-itself presents something of a conundrum. Reynolds’ claims that the continuum is an “empirically verifiable (and abundantly verified) thing-in-the-world” is usually backed up by vague accounts of demographics and technology, although both of these have changed significantly across the course of the purported continuum. A more rigorous musicological analysis has so far been absent, but might seek to demonstrate the connections between sub-genres on the basis of their percussive forms, rhythmical patterns, chordal and melodic devices, the particular textures used (with attention being paid to precise methods of generation, the envelopes, filters and tone generators used to create the sounds). This data could presumably be mathematised and statistically plotted, to be able to chart at the material level of the music itself any coherent patterns. But short of such genuinely realist empirical verification, we are left with a theory which is too open-ended and insufficiently tight in terms of what it includes and excludes. This leaves it liable to being used in a prescriptive fashion, since if there are no hard and fast rules as to what is in or out, and no attempts to demonstrate empirically how we might judge this, the temptation towards personal prejudice (to claim for example that “Grime isn’t in, its too aggressive”, or “Dubstep isn’t in, its too languorous”) remains significant. Whilst this is a problem with most genres too, it becomes particularly egregious when projected onto the scale of the continuum. It also leaves open why we ought to begin with Hardcore, when if we want to talk about Grime, Dubstep, Bassline, Funky, and Wonky it is much more coherent to talk about them in relation to their immediate predecessor sound, UK Garage.

There is a temptation at this point to throw our arms up in despair, and point towards the apparent failure of the Hardcore Continuum to be anything more than a convenient shorthand as a demonstration of the inappropriateness of any and all theorisation of Music or pop culture. I think this is a mistake. Whilst there is certainly a need for a realist theory of dance music, which would be able to precisely map mathematisable musical qualities, there is also another role for theory entirely- one which was described by the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit as ‘hyperstitional’- a form of fiction which engenders its own realities, or which can intensify our experience of the real. Another way of thinking about this is through what has been termed ‘immaterial labour’ - types of work which produce value which are not directly related to production as we might traditionally conceive it. In the case of dance music, of course there are the producers and DJs who deal directly with the creation and dissemination of the music, but there are also the dancers, the consumers, the theorists and the journalists, each of whom has a significant role in creating the context in which certain musical forms are selected over others. As has been well noted, in the case of the dancer-consumer, it is only with their positive or negative feedback relationship to the DJs and producers that enables certain percussive or affective tropes to emerge as dominant. But the context in which the DJ-Producer-Dancer relationship is forged is one which, to some extent, created by promoters, by music journalists, and by theorists. And it is only when you put together these three sides of the equation- producers, consumers, and media that the processes of dance music can be properly thought about. Because from the perspective of immaterial labour, each of these three groups is in a certain sense actually a producer, though some produce in a less tangible or immediately obvious way than others. Each is creative, and it is not really the case that we can separate out DJs or the actual creators of the music of as a special category to be given priority over the others, since their production is meaningless outside of the broader context, and it is indeed the context itself which the media, in this case music journalists and theorists, produce. Moreover I do not think that it is possible to get away from theorising- we can do so in a more or less academic fashion, certainly, but contra-Mark Fisher, I think we must consider that even the simplest of reviews contain theoretical positions, of a sort. Even the notion that this debate which we are having now is a kind of over-abstraction and that we should all head down to Forward and actually get raving, is itself a theoretical position!

The Hardcore Continuum is real, but only as a theory. In other words the theory exists and has certain effects- how it influences other forms of production, how it adds to our own experiences of music. It is certainly related to a reality external to itself (a set of musics, clubs, people) but its role is not passive, but active. The act of naming is not a naturalistic or scientific act of description, but a creative act itself, an invention, not a discovery. It puts the set of musics it collects under its name into a particular configuration, and if we buy into the theory, alters our way of perceiving them. We can indeed still take umbrage at what the Hardcore Continuum does, since though it acclaims innovation on the one hand, perversely its canonisation of the past may well act to inhibit future developments. By codifying the history of these musics and attempting to think them within a grandiose system which now stretches back at least 15 years, there is a kind of drag-effect upon the abilities of future artists (and theorists no doubt) to continue the very arrow of futurism it claims to represent. If the Continuum theory has an effect, it might not be entirely positive! But naming, whether it is of the Hardcore Continuum, of a genre or of a single track, certainly creates a powerful context which shifts the nature of the thing being described.

We might consider that in the formative stage of generic development in dance music, DJs play records in relation to a certain defined body of dancers to select certain tropes over others, largely to please (but sometimes to challenge) the particular tastes of the crowd. In the early days of hip hop, for example, before the genre existed in a pre-defined way, DJs would select music from a variety of genres, playing the tastiest breaks from rock and roll, soul, funk, disco, and even Kraftwerk. This serves to project a kind of constellation of points, between which a genre coalesces. Later dedicated producers come to write music to specifically occupy this defined space, to join the dots between the early cross-genre records. What naming does in all this is to crystallise this loose constellation of sounds, to literally define and enact the genre, to mark the point when it becomes something more than merely an assemblage of pre-existing sounds. In some ways, naming is a gamble or a wager, a bet on the fact that this rough configuration will come to be a genre. And not all genre name’s stick (if we remember the early days of what came to be called ‘Grime’, we might have equally ended up with the somewhat less evocative ‘sub-low’). Naming itself is thematised in a track like Wiley’s “Wot U Call it?”, and the moment when a body of music seemingly demands a defined descriptive label can be thought of as the “Wot U Call It” moment. It is also no coincidence that the time shortly before and after the “Wot u call it moment” is often the one which produces the most fascinating and original music within the genre.

I now want to talk about Wonky, as a paradigmatic example of naming as a creative process of intervention. It was named by Martin Clark aka Blackdown in his April 2008 Pitchfork column, and like Funky, is an adjective appropriated to serve something close to the role of a noun. In his original piece Martin defines wonky as… “A theme not a genre” and a “crossing”. In these senses Wonky is postulated as something more than an adjective, a feel, a vague descriptor, but (unlike funky) something looser than a solid or coherently demarcated genre-noun. This description is both tentative and audacious, necessarily tentative since it lashes together a seemingly disparate group of artists through the notion of a kind of common “spirit” of wonkification operating in all of them, but equally audacious since it refuses the easy option of a singular, fixed generic label. Wonky is not a box, but rather some kind of aesthetic which operates between boxes.

The key word in Martin Clark’s initial definition is very much “crossing”- and though often crossing between genres seems to give rise to a kind of bland eclecticism, a postmodern homogenisation, in this instance the nature of “crossing” seems to have a markedly different quality. Wonky is a kind of process, rather than a fixed endpoint, a liquidation rather than a fusion, a process which occurs to pre-existing genres rather than being a genre itself. It is for this reason that I like to consider how wonky operates through use of the idea of the “transversal”. A transversal is a line of connection operating between otherwise disconnected regions, transforming them and breaking down pre-existing structures, a kind of trans-generic mutational agent. I think this can be reasonably applied to wonky at present, since what it opens up is lines of contact between genres as disparate as Dubstep, post-Dilla Hip hop, Crunk, Grime, Rave, Electro, and IDM. More than simply a new passageway for musical ideas to pass through, wonky-as-process seems to be able to translate ideas, like a sort of synaesthesic wormhole, afflicting any element of a track- sometimes textural, sometimes percussive, sometimes pitch, a fluid shifting of the idea of wonky between these different elements and registers. For example, the “wonkiness” of Flying Lotus comes predominantly through use of non-quantised drum patterns, whereas for Joker it is expressed in maniacally pitch bent and modulated synths. And beyond its lurid synthetics and lopsided mutant free-funk, Wonky is intriguing as perhaps the first sound to properly embody, in a very literal sense, the kind of media-scape which has been wrought by the permutations of internet culture. The lines of communication which the term represents are genuinely transnational, and if Reynolds’ thesis encounters trouble once we reach Grime (in the cult of the MC) or Dubstep (the torpor of the percussion) then it reaches total crisis point with Wonky. Not only is it no longer a “London ‘thing”, its not even a “UK ‘thing” anymore, and yet it clearly originates at least in part within what Simon would want to call the Continuum.

The question must be raised however, as to whether wonky itself is “real”? Is it not simply a journalistic fabrication? What I would argue is that it is not so much real in the sense of a pre-existing scene which demanded a descriptive name to be given to it, but as a kind of trans-generic zeitgeist aesthetic which was crystallised in Martin Clark’s intervention. To reverse Reynolds’ formulation, this is inventive rather than simply a discovery, since though a name must have something concrete to latch onto, its reality is effectuated in what happens to that reality after it has been named, which is never a neutral process. In the case of wonky, new lines of communication have been opened up between a fairly diverse set of producers, who have now begun to remix each other’s work. Equally, promoters have a theme upon which to construct nights around, meaning that increasingly we might find wonky DJs, sometimes operating out of very different traditions on the same bills (Flying Lotus and Zomby for example). By naming wonky as a transversal form (as a line of connection transversal to genre) it is as flexible as possible, allowing the maximum potential for the unexpected and for the non-genre to be a fertile ground for new music to emerge from. If the most fecund period for a genre is often that immediately preceding and following the “Wot U Call it” moment, it is because producers are still working out the kinds of conventions which will come to define the genre, and dancers are trying to work out how to move their bodies to the new sounds and rhythms, and journalists and theorists are scratching their heads trying to come up with original ways to think this new form. Dubstep became mired in a certain set of characteristics (turgid half-step drums, unimaginative wobble bass and dodgy plastic Rasta samples) because it became too rapidly codified, in spite of the seemingly highly open-ended nature of the form (138bpm with heavy bass) and the strong awareness of the need to avoid the vertiginous collapse which afflicted Jungle in 1997. And of course there remains a danger that wonky may well solidify into “just another genre”. It is still eminently possible that a later generation of producers will emerge who treat artists like Flylo, Rustie, and Joker as a pre-generic constellation of points, and construct a static genre in the space between them, a tired collection of dried-up genre signifiers. Seen in this context, the naming of Wonky as a non-genre, as a process of disruption and liquidation, can be identified as an attempt to disturb the usual processes of genre sedimentation so as to maintain the “Wot U Call It” moment of maximum confusion and creativity even whilst simultaneously producing a term with which to describe it.

Note: Martin Clark and I were talking after the event about who coined the phrase "the wot u call it moment"-- glancing at Dissensus, it originates with Nomos AKA Paul Autonomic of Deeptime.

Darwin: The Greatest Humiliation.

2009-04-09T19:06:00.005+01:00

Saturday 25 April 2009 12:00-16:00pm.
Urbanomic Studio, The Old Lemonade Factory, Off Windsor Terrace, Falmouth TR113EX Cornwall, UK.

Freud located Darwin's theory of evolution, which "destroyed man's supposedly privileged place in creation" within a modern history of humiliation that dealt repeated blows to the "naive self-love of men." What is the nature of the Darwinian humiliation, and how can the human negotiate its nihilistic consequences? Philosophers Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay speak on evolution and nihilism. Followed by audience discussion.

Narcomaterialist fallacies.

2009-03-17T12:21:00.004Z

Simon Reynolds on Wonky and Ketamine in the Guardian. It is clear from the change in tone and content between Reynolds’ initial responses to Wonky and this piece that he cannot quite fit it into a pre-exiting pro-forma schema. The latest piece posits a speculative association between the psychedelic disassociative anaesthetic and the emerging transversal non-genre, one which lies firmly within what must be termed the narcomaterialist tradition of music writing, one recently lambasted heavily by DJ Rupture here. The narcomaterialist perspective is one which will be familiar to any avid reader of the UK music press (particularly the rock press), and it commonly reduces entire genres, albums, artists, to their particular associated narcotic intake- Bowie’s Station to Station, for example, will be talked about as a “cocaine album”, with little attention paid to the specificities of its production beyond that. Whilst drug-use inevitably has some role to play with certain artists (indeed of course Bowie was consuming an inhuman quantity of the stimulant in the mid-1970s) and certainly was an element within the assemblage-network in the earlier years of dance music, narcomaterialism is all too often greatly overstated, without significant empirical verification, and operates as a way to conceptualise and write about abstract shifts in musical production and consumption patterns in an overly-intuitive fashion. Often writers from an English Lit background, with little grasp of how to describe music itself, reach towards narcotic-metaphor to enable an easy indexing of the qualities of a piece of music (for example the description of Villalobos-style mnml technohouse as “Ketamine house” used the drug as a metaphor which conveys a certain linearity, an anaesthetic lostness of extreme repetition and track/set length combined with a psychedelic pulsating textural edge). But the pop-nowness of wonky seems out of step with the descriptions of Ketamine experiences (frequently involving in its deeper “k-hole” stages a total disconnect from reality and abstract mind-tunnel transport).

Reynolds, unlike many of his fellow music journalists, has always been able to describe music in exquisite synaesthesic detail, and hence his falling back upon a narcomaterialist analysis is not due to laziness or an inability to engage with sonic materiality. I suspect its temptations come for him because of the way in which his speculative (nay fictitious) wonky-K relation enables him to return to the mythic era of rave where a direct drug-dancer-music interaction was more explicitly apparent. It is true that a sonic-theory-fiction or hyperstitional narrative need not be immediately empirically accurate in order to have a certain currency, a productive power perhaps, but what is clear here is that Reynolds’ speculations act simply to slot the new (wonky as non-genre) into a pre-existing paradigm. Of course we ought not to necessarily take the words of the producers and DJs at face value (who often seek to undermine the role of agency of the dancefloor in favour of their own auteurship by denying any link to drug use). Indeed in earlier times the link between cerebral Apollonian producer/DJs (for example in the first wave of Detroit Techno) and drug-guzzling Dionysian dancers played an absolutely key role in the evolution of the music. However there have been significant changes in patterns of drug consumption and drug-pop culture interaction, with the singular veneration of one substance (Ecstasy predominantly in the formative years of electronic dance music culture) shifting to a more orgiastic poly-drug consumption- where the effects and affects of a specific drug are erased in favour of a combinatorial fug- alcohol, MDMA, amphetamines, cocaine, ketamine, along with various legals and experimental chemicals, some deployed together, some deployed individually but in a heterogeneous fashion across the makeup of the dancefloor. This crucially undermines any direct and obvious synergies which might develop, since each has markedly distinct consequences. Drug use has clearly shifted from a kind of Eucharist-like specificity towards a generic intoxication, perhaps concomitant with a broader consumerisation of underground dance music.

Eliminativist Soul.

2009-03-02T17:23:00.013Z

Tom Allan writes via email:

"Not sure though about your point re: a move away from the Latin mnml of Luciano and Ricky V, and towards the Ostgut sound. That's where some of the critical interest is going, I guess, but the main shift has been towards the dreaded post-mnml quasi- deep house of Oslo, Cecille, Mountain People, Drumpoet, Sascha Dive etc. Which was ok for a release or two but now sounds boring as fuck. But that's undoubtedly where 'the scene' (dj's, producers, labels, punters) has mostly gone. Ostgut/Berghain have existed in parallel to mnml for years, and are now I guess attracting more critical interest than previously, partly because of the Shed LP [...] Most of the Berghain residents (including Dettman and Klock) were involved in Tresor, and the sound is very much a part of that Berlin 'nuum, obviously tying in with Basic Channel/Hardwax/Chain Reaction too. I'm not sure how much it owes to mnml, to be honest... So re: house/techno shifting in parallel with socio-economic changes, that's borne out by the rising popularity of Ostgut (and the Hardwax-affiliated labels like Equalized, MDR and Klockworks, also the suddenly massive popularity of e.g. Sandwell District), but not really by all the neo-deep house stuff, which is supposedly about reinvigorating mnml by introducing 'warmth' and 'soul'... "

I'm certainly with Tom when it comes to a deep suspicion bordering on contempt for the kind of ‘warmth’ and ‘soul’ proffered by the neo-deep house contingent, but I think that this kind of bifurcation (both of which operate via a retracing of steps to a certain extent, though Ostgut Ton clearly manage to extract a greater amount of value than the pseudo-deep set) is not entirely divorceable from the socio-economic, especially given the fact that Berghain/Ostgut had evolved since the early 00s in parallel to the then-dominant mnml sounds. Why the turn to these genres now? In part of course this is due to internal reasons within the mnml scene, a perceived total exhaustion of its potentials resulting in a lot of generic tracks being produced, along with a disdain for the rapid mainstreaming of what had once been an underground sound. But this kind of polarisation in the descendant sounds seems to imply a degree of relation to the spirit of the times more generally: some sounds drifting towards the cold/dark/inhuman, others to warmth, soul etc.

But it seems there is more going on here than just that- in a sense there is a kind of battle between two notions of "soul"- as falsely-naturalised humanising warmth or as coldly inhuman dislocated "ghost in the machine", between a certain banal soul-boy conception (with a concomitant reductive and naive relation to black music) and blank-eyed techno futurism (with a far more complex and productive set of transversal relations to the music of the Black Atlantic). As I wrote before there are a number of subterranean connections between Ostgut Ton and certain strands of UK Bass Music, not merely in some of the percussive tropes but also in the deployment of regular plumes of irradiated diva-vox, (see “Goodly Sin” “OK” and “Gold Rush” from Ben Klock’s One) squirming into the bleak drum matrixes, rendering the inhuman backdrops all the more alien. Whilst there were certain moves within late-mnml to incorporate the more singular dubstep sounds (for example Villalobos' dropping Skream's "Midnight Request Line" and various Skull Disco tracks), this was piecemeal and whilst indicative of a degree of respect developing between the two scenes, never really impacted on the kinds of productions being produced. Ostgut Ton on the other hand refine this and achieve a more fluid articulation between the two cultures (indicative of who is the real inheritor of the space opened up by mnml). As Simon Reynolds noted in his recent talk on the Hardcore Continuum in Liverpool, the point where diva vocals (or the machinically reconstituted remnants of them at least) were erased from a given genre is usually exactly the juncture when its international appeal is really established- that it ensures no-one is confused as to whether this is pop music or R’n’B or other “girly” (sic) genres more firmly associated with a preponderance of female vocals. OT appear to radically mess with this conception, often seeming like a strange quirk in the Hardcore Continuum itself, a weird after-echo, temporally and spatially displaced. It is this (in both the vocal matter-remainder and swinging slicing 2-step-via-Burial drum patterns), along with an ineffable “atmosphere” reminiscent of a particular kind of cold-energy which shifts OT away from being simply an outright nostalgic sound.

Two (interlinked) kinds of ‘soul’: As human-essence or as black musical expression. Ostgut Ton’s take on the latter (absorbed via post-HCC musics) enables a more sophisticated, bleaker interrogation of the former. In this sense Ben Klock’s recent productions almost operate as eliminativist soul music, where the human as such interrupts only as remainder, as locked-groove epiphenomenon. Whilst this has some connections to hauntology, this differs greatly from already-implemented hauntological musical forms. Rather than an act of mourning this particular intimation of human quasi-presence speaks of a system where the pathic as such has been evacuated, a cold system, subjectively forsaken, mere meat-brain mass mediated via assemblage-network... ain’t no happiness, ain’t no sadness…

Dark energy, cold vitalism: Ostgut Ton.

2009-02-28T05:32:00.022Z

It is interesting to examine the recent shifts in Germanic post-minimal techno-house, which can only be conceptualised as a kind of battle within minimalism itself, since if anything the Berghain/Ostgut Ton sound is every bit as minimal as the Kompakt art Techno of the last 8 or so years. However what is reasserted is muscularity, harshness, inhumanity, but without necessarily returning to the relentless (and relentlessly boring and energy sapping) hard loop techno of the mid to late 90s. What producers like Ben Klock and Marcel Dettmann maintain from the minimal era are its fetishisation of pure sonic texture for its own sake, and an obsessive approach to filtering elements in order to rinse every last scintilla of variation from synths and outlying percussion. The textures of Klock's debut album (One) and accompanying EP (the logically entitled Before One) are stark and burnished, but we have moved from the metaphorical tasteful minimalist flat (see k-punk’s amusing review of 2562's Aerial last year in FACT) to an industrial kitchen of steel surfaces, exquisitely sharpened blades of scything hi hats, lifestyle music for butchers of obscene humanoid meats perhaps… Detroit iciness, Sähkö reductive brutalism, Basic Channel shimmering archefossilised dub glisten, Burial’s discarded shell case percussion… a resurrection of the goosepimpling shivering dread-flesh of the future, a sort of late 00s Martyn Hannett Techno… music to watch cities in motion to, to watch economies die to…

That such dark music evades dubstep’s dope-fugged torpor is revealing, and not merely by regular deployment of four to the floor basskicks. Instead the atmosphere is lucid, rather than druggy-languid, alien… powerful without becoming thuggish, bleak whilst pulsating with a mechanically efficient, seductive energy…The post Burial jerky hi-hat scissor slicings of Klock’s remix of Kerri Chandler’s “Pong” from 2008 is indicative of the curious relationship between Ostgut Ton and dubstep (one which evades the bland-out fears k-punk outlined before, imbuing the tropes it acquires with a cold-hearted vigour and chiselled assassin attack). The crystalline rhythmical post-2 step track "Gold Rush" on One could almost have been lifted straight from Burial's first record, juddering with a jagged metallic percussive bump-and-grind, spurting forth distant gushes of aqueous sonics (though if anything Klock pushes the sound further into oneiric minimalism with fantastic sound design). There are two vocal tracks on One, an interesting choice for such an ostensibly inhumanoid musical form. The most intelligible lyric appears on “OK” running “ain’t no happiness, ain’t no sadness…” endlessly filtered, backmasked through reverbs, swirling through the chunky snare-clunk, a call-and-response of zero-affectivity, anthemic in its endtimes resoluteness, cycling forever without resolve, a dislocated clarion call. “Napoleon Hill” from the EP swaggers into view on dusty shaker patterns, a shivering synth riff repeating like electrical charges through its neuro-percussive infrastructure. Likewise the first and lengthiest piece from One, "Coney Island", has an insistent synth riff which flickers with inhuman relentlessness, unsettling and ruthless, yet infectiously danceable, its minimalism never pedantic or pretentious. However the album is not content with dancefloor functionalism, the art-ambient house piece "Init Two" resisting a kick drum (riding on the regular chop of a satisfyingly physical hi hat) but again convulses with sound-energy- tiny tinkling glassy bell patterns and undulating shuddering audio-shimmers actually managing to make the often tired ambient form sound refreshing.

Equally of interest is the MDR04 EP from last year by Klock’s slightly better known fellow Berghain resident Marcel Dettmann (on his own MDR label). This is of a piece with Klock’s cold muscular future-art-tech, but traffics in more striated rasping textures, "Lattice" regularly being rent apart by surging blasts of static white noise. Largely eschewing synth sounds for pure percussion and noise, tracks like "Shatter Proof" have an implied musicality, hints of fucked-up swing jazz emerging from the scree of pitched industrial drum sounds. Dettmann's own remixes from the last year or so are equally extraordinary, especially his treatment of dubstep artist Scuba's "From Within", which evades bass-heavy lethargy for a different kind of darkness, a cold sensuality or metallic sexiness. Shed’s album on Ostgut Ton from 2008 (Shedding the Past) is worthy of mention, although it slips the aesthetic slightly by being less forward looking, less texturally rigorous, and warmer. Intriguingly however he continues the crossover with dubstep or two step, with "ITHAW" directly referencing the sound. Even when the tracks seem superficially more obviously techno inspired, often the basskick action is weirdly non-4x4, with odd stuttering patterns and strangely quantised galloping snare/tom work.

What is intriguing is why this sound has become so massive at this particular juncture in time (Berghain/Panoramabar being noted by Resident Advisor as the new centres of global techno). Whilst Simon Reynolds has been keen to disabuse those amongst us who might fancy a naive interrelation between the economy and musical creativity (see his recent FACT piece here) there is certainly something in the marked shift in tone- away from the exuberant teeming Latin-mnml of Villalobos or Luciano, away from the dramatic synth-pop influenced Ellen Allien, away from the ornate mnml trance of Gui Boratto or Stephan Bodzin, towards a bleaker, harder, sound, operating beyond the pleasure principle. The only recent precursor in Germanic minimal techno would be someone like the great and deeply underrated Matias Aguayo, whose Are You Really Lost and Night at the Tilehouse combine a similar chunkiness of percussive texture with a bleak sexuality. But Aguayo’s work has a sleaziness to it which is absent from the Ostgut sound, which frequently opts for heavier harsher sonics and a greater degree of reductionism. Whilst the Ostgut Ton artists are clearly working in a consolidatory fashion rather than a revolutionary leap (integrating past sounds and atmospheres within the space opened up by mnml, just as mnml itself did with microhouse) there is much here which chimes eerily with the spirit of our times. Whilst it would false to claim any kind of political impact from this kind of work (and really asking the wrong kind of questions I think) it is interesting to note the “bellwether” like status of contemporary techno, wired into the zeitgeist in a way which other genres seem to avoid.

Anodyne Heavy: Vitalism avec Speculative Realism

2009-02-28T03:34:00.007Z

Anodynelite on SR and vitalism, and their possible marriage via science...

"It seems to me that the pathway into such a reconciliation, rather unsurprisingly, involves science- the most direct object-oriented praxis that we have at our disposal. It also seems that both Deleuzo-Guattarian vitalists and speculative realists gesture in precisely this direction, with similar ideological aims but with different perceived ideological results. For both Deleuze/Guattari and Meillassoux, what is at stake are the gains of materialism made by the Enlightenment thinkers. Is there really no way that we can retain D&G’s and Latour’s mindfulness of the burden of desire (and its effects on even our best attempts at a pure metaphysics) as it weighs upon our efforts to enact the Copernican counter-revolution? Couldn’t a deeper foray into the ontic draw upon the radically depoliticized Deleuzo-Guattarian metaphysical vocabulary as a means of avoiding the twin traps of absolutism and correlationism?"

Elimination Zone.

2009-02-28T02:16:00.011Z

I think Graham Harman is right on the money with this post sketching possible future outcomes for Speculative Realism, (the latest issue of Collapse colliding with the brain like a series of brutalising punches, in the best possible way). Really it comes down to a simple issue (I think), of whether emergence between scales of structures is an actual ontological property or not, and the relation or articulation between the ontic and the ontological, between beings (of all different kinds, non-human and human) and being itself (and how far we can push such a distinction before it loses intelligibility). To what extent is emergence an epistemological constraint (we see a structure, formed from a subsidiary structure, the micro-level obeying certain laws, the macro certain other laws, and whilst one is certainly the result of the other, it appears to emerge in a dynamic manner, multiplicative rather than merely additive, but this is simply because our grasp of scientific modelisation is theoretically inadequate...)- or is it an actual ontological property (as Levi and Latour hold). Is this the final gasp of correlationist anthropism (freedom in a scientistic guise?) Can we have an ontic principle of irreduction alongside an essentially eliminativist ontological monism?

As regards Graham's response to my comment regarding object-based ontologies as anthropic biases, I probably should have been a little clearer. My comment on Larval subjects ran that:

"...isn’t there the danger of absolutising the object as realist ontological unit? I’m uncertain that, say, Brassier would want to limit himself in such a way for example, especially given recent critiques of metaphysical schema which rely upon objects as their basic structural component (I’m thinking particularly of Ladyman’s “Who’s Afraid of Scientism” in the latest Collapse). Indeed whilst it makes perfect sense to talk on a folk-metaphysical level about giving objects their proper attention (as you and Graham Harman do), to think at least as much about the interactions between inanimate non-human actants as human ones, does this not remain overly wedded to the very level of correlated folk-knowledge any realist must attempt to escape from? If the crucial component of science for realist philosophies lies in its anti-intuitive findings, leading to a continual disenchantment of the manifest image, why ought we to continue to think in terms divorced from these findings (i.e.- to remain at the level of “objects all the way down…”). Ladyman’s “Ontic Structural Realism” for example strikes up a radically eliminativist approach to objects tout court, in contrast OOP seems to remain overly in hoc to the visualisable structure of the objectal."

To clarify, I am not accusing Graham of being a kind of intentionality obsessed phenomenologist! But there is something in Ladyman's critique of analytic object-based metaphysics which struck me as requiring some degree of response, on the specific issue of objects as ontological paradigm, with the suspicion, or perhaps speculative posit, that this could be an example of notions inherited from human sensual biology continuing to surreptitiously infect our conceptual attempts to evade such determinations. Even given the weird (vicarious) nature of causation between Graham's objects, that distinguishes them from the kind of folk metaphysical mechanics ("tiny objects and microbangings") Ladyman is actually attacking, as Dominic Fox has noted there remains a distinct possibility that our notion of "objects" breaks down at a certain point (extreme macro multiverse or extreme micro-physics, potentially). We don't necessarily have to be eliminativist about this, since OOP is endangered once it encounters a non-objectal form (something which perhaps in Graham's terms really is simply pure relationality, or pure quality perhaps). I don't know enough about Ladyman's Ontic Structural Realism to be able to properly comment on how his "structure, all the way down" approach actually works, or how it evades the pretty obvious objections, but will definitely look forward to Graham's ultimate response to the latest Collapse.

The battle continues...

2009-02-27T23:44:00.007Z

The Hardcore Continuum? A discussion.
Presented by the Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London
In association with The Wire.
UEL Docklands Campus (Cyprus DLR)
April 29th 2009 2:00pm-6:00pm

Simon Reynolds' commentary on the "hardcore continuum" - the mutating sequence of dancefloor music to have emerged from the breakbeat hardcore matrix of the early 1990s - has recently generated intense debate in the musical blogosphere. What is the value of this concept? Does it still usefully describe the context from which dynamic new beat musics emerge? Can the conditions of creativity in the 1990s be replicated in the era of web 2.0? Should we even want them to be?

Speakers: Mark Fisher (K-Punk), Alex Williams (Splintering Bone Ashes), Steve Goodman (Kode 9), Lisa Blanning (The Wire), Dan Hancox (Guardian, New Statesman), Kodwo Eshun (Author of More Brilliant than the Sun), Joe Muggs (Mixmag, The Wire), Jeremy Gilbert (Co-author of Discographies)

Attendance is free but pre-registration is recommended. For info or to register contact J.Gilbert@uel.ac.uk

Rupturing as foundation.

2009-02-20T16:51:00.010Z

Now of course what we are not suggesting is that there is a clear cut off point or line in the sand between Capitalism’s halcyon era of cultural productivity and its deceleratory endpoint. To extend the diagrammatical metaphor with petroleum once more, all we can say of resources stripped at a rate higher than their generation is that a certain point will arrive when it becomes more and more marginally expensive to extract value from them- rather than reaching an absolute limit. Moreover this is extremely hard to predict, and even more so if we extend the diagram to human culture. Further its deceleration is non-linear, non-absolute and “patchy” in distribution- certain sectors or subgenera falling into rote repetitions quicker than others, dependant on the contingent social, aesthetic, technological etc components of which these assemblages consist, so there is no clean demarcation point. In terms of Bass Music, perhaps some will call this as being the transition from Jungle to D'n’B, others 2-Step to Grime/Dubstep etc... We might look to other generic sectors to observe similar patterns, for example rock music seems to have used up the stable set of attractors much earlier than electronic music, and is now locked into extreme minimal marginal utility surplus value extraction techniques: underground transgeneric cross breeding and mainstream retro-necro reiterations. Electronic music, Hip Hop, and Metal certainly aren’t in as dire conditions yet, but are headed towards similar thermo-dynamic destinations. Exactly how long it takes them to get there depends on an almost unimaginable array of contingent empirical phenomena, but I don’t think this alone is enough to safeguard an absolute ex nihilo productive freedom for the human. In general humans are productive, but with material constraints, chiefly the total set of currently extant aesthetic information (both as end points and generative strategies), when set against the rate at which these components are accessed, disseminated, and conjugated with each other. We can run counterfactuals as to how precisely these energies are worked out, distributed, what forms they give rise to etc, but given capitalism (itself contingent of course) and its processes, resource crisis based deceleration seems highly likely, providing we ignore the possibility of absolute techno-cultural acceleration as identified in Kurzweil's Singularity concept.

Indeed it is the very affectivity of acceleration which has set our expectations of future changes. On the one hand this is quite a simple claim: Humans are pattern-recognizing animals, with neurological systems which are sensitive to change, rather than stasis. Hence a steady state of acceleration quickly becomes felt as if it were the norm, and hence the perception of a relative deceleration. The dyschronia of Capital is not a voodoo ideological bewitchment or some kind of Philip K Dick-esque rupture of time itself, it is an entirely intelligible psycho-cultural response to environmental shifts. This response results in a de-historicizing perspective on the contingent nature of the emergence of Capitalism itself, and its status as rupture- it falsely naturalises it, and hence in a certain sense the totally immersive character of our sociologically mediated user-illusion “covers-over” the suturing points, the scars, the scabrous matter in the joins… But this has further implications, that there is no necessary reason that music for example should change at such rates, that there is no intrinsic moral worth in “the new” per se in the slightest. Pop music is entirely a creature made possible by capitalism. For many thousands of years folk and Art musics likewise changed only very slowly, but since the economic systems built around them (localist minstrels or music for ritual, or the institutional support of wealthy patrons) did not demand endless novelty this was entirely unproblematic. This is a point upon which I believe we might wish to take Badiou to task, (and perhaps modernism as a whole). The valorisation of the new seems to be an artifact of a certain kind of capitalistic subjectivation, and as Nick Srnicek of Accursed Share pointed out here, why change at all? Why not slow emergence instead of rapid revolutionary change? Why not absolute stasis? Why valorise the new? Capitalism’s endless turn-over of products and services serves an obvious purpose within its own terms, but the claim towards inherent worth (whether capitalistic or modernist) is on shaky ground (i.e.- is a massively under-theorized discursive a priori). Affirming a kind of Speculative Nihilist Realism, I am unable to safeguard the claim that Capitalism in this regard is either "good" or "bad", but the presumption of one or the other, or indeed the ignoring of its status as a rupture with the past forms of production and accumulation are clearly delusions we must divest ourselves of in the ongoing disenchantment of the real, the continuing critique of the manifest image.

Wonky 3: Abstract decay processes.

2009-02-20T02:11:00.023Z

Simon Reyonlds responds to the HCC imbroglio. I would assert very definitely that my claim towards the materiality of culture (which is never precisely merely a physicalism of course) is not at all metaphorical. Whilst the issue is clearly less simple than petroleum resources, the diagram of both situations: (essentially certain energies are accumulated over very long timeframes, then via integrated globalised capitalism rapidly exploited) bares certain isomorphy. To put it another way the “shock of the new”, the impact of a new cultural idea (in this case some kind of sonic gesture) once absorbed into a different musical tradition, is initially great, then tapers off as the possible forms this encounter is able to generate become rapidly exhausted.

As regards Wonky, Simon’s first claim, that “it does all seem a bit like a poncy way of saying ‘eclectronica’” is clearly inaccurate. Wonky is not a genre, hence its “eclecticism” is not a matter of mashing together disparate sonic fragments into uneasy PoMo assemblages- functionally it seems to operate in a more disparate fashion, transversal to other pre-existing genres. Wonky is a process, not a static endpoint (at least not yet…) and indeed within each artists’ oeuvre there is a consistency which remains firmly anti-eclectic. Simon’s other point, that it seems close in some respects to post-IDM artists in the late ‘90s taking on dance music genres (Squarepusher with jungle being the most infamous example) is a bit closer to what is going on here—and which touches upon some of Mark K-Punk’s musings on “rude energy”. In one sense the IDM-ification of club-based dance music might be seen as a gentrification, in another as a kind of reductio ad absurdum, a parodic (though sometimes loving) acceleration of certain ticks and features to the point where all dance-functionality breaks down (i.e.- the extreme end of breakcore/drill’n’bass). Things are slightly more complicated with Wonky, since its detournement of pre-existing genre templates does not act to necessarily destroy their club potential, it is not so much a bearded sonic terrorism/tiresome juvenile technology abuse/avant-garde translation of the hip new thing, as the finding of a new groove altogether. It is clearly not an accelerationist aesthetic by any means, rather as I have sketched before it is based upon decay (though without any of the gothic/romantic/Black Metal associations the term usually carries- decay as entirely abstract process). Moreover, sociologically many of the players in this umbrella formation, this non-scene, are clearly not outsiders or disinterested observers to the genres which they act upon, Joker, for example, seemingly beginning as any teenage Grime producer might.

Wonky applies, in its woozy textures, liquefying day-glow synthetics and dilating anti-quantised beats something surprisingly akin to the process My Bloody Valentine exercised upon indie rock guitar music- from within the tradition itself (not from the cynical perspective of the outsider) a method by which surplus aesthetic value can be extracted from deadened forms, by applying abtract-decay processes of liquefaction, breaking down the rigid sonic matter (be it the hard bone matter of drum patterns or the softer flesh of synth textures or the fibrous masses of bass pressure). In this sense perhaps it intimates a kind of sonic anti-affirmatory dark vitalism, at the level of process, since perversely its immediate affect is bright, crisp, colourful, rather than the dank encrustations we would traditionally associate with decay. This is unlike certain Hauntological artists (The Caretaker, Burial, William Basinski), who foreground the materiality of decaying sound recording media through crackle, in order to intimate and explore the processes of human memory and history, (and hence are spectral in nature, haunted). Hence it is not so much as K-Punk asserts that whereas Hauntology interrogates "the failure of the future; Wonky exemplifies it..." rather that both serve (in very different ways) as non-conventional trans-generic strategies for the extraction of dormant energies within inert sonic forms, though admitedly one is very much more candid in foregrounding its activities than the other. For with Wonky abstract-decay gives rise to new and perverse vitality, a vivid hyper-“now” sound...

Wonky 2: Kinaesthetic analysis.

2009-02-18T01:37:00.009Z

A sketch of an even more specific theory of dance music might want to focus in greater detail upon the former part of the term, the “dance” element itself. In a recent thread on the Dissensus message board on Juke music, what was most fascinating was the embedded youtube videos of the dancing itself. One way out of, or complication between perhaps, tyrannical GUT theorising and dull empirical micro-trend spotting would be to think dance music as primarily a kind of programming system, a machine itself, operating upon the bodies of the dancers, and engaged in a kind of dialectical feedback relationality with the music. In speculative realist terms the “object” in question is no longer merely the music, (which as we know is merely a part, an important part but a part nonetheless, of the whole) but its interactions with specific kinaesthetic bodily motion and forms. Some of the best of Simon Reynolds writing has certainly touched upon this approach in the past (thinking of his UK Garage piece with its descriptions of alarming hurky/jerky dance moves). Dance music sets up a series of potentials (within the rhythmic matrix it presents) for dancers to lock into or ignore- which via the DJ as mediator (between producers and dancers) achieves a kind of fluidity of feedback- which tunes excite the dancefloor the most? The true innovation then might be seen to be the range or vocabulary of new moves (in a sense forms of kinetic subjectivation) made possible by the beat structures and textures of the particular music. I’ve yet to attend any wonky raves (sure to bring down the ire of the empiricist branches of the anti HCC contingent no doubt) though I attended many in Dubstep’s golden era- where a lot of the initial excitement was working out how precisely to move to this new music… lock in at 69bpm with a slow head bob shifting from foot to fit in a low skanking motion, or fit into the hi-hat patterns at 138bpm, limbs flailing? Wonky as dancefloor experience intrigues because the more club-bound aspects of the sound seem to be fitting in at a dubstep-like tempo (and hence can be legitimately deemed to be in some senses post-dubstep). Do the de-quantised drums and lurid synthetic lead lines inculcate a new vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of bodily motion?

Wonky as transversal rave.

2009-02-18T01:15:00.025Z

One point of contention arising from the recent “Hardcore Continuum: Still Relevant?” brouhaha relates to the notion of the applicability of theory to the domain of dance music. As Word The Cat wrote a while ago: “music is music, everything is everything (reductive yes, but liberating in its absolute reduction). we don’t need to map our own binaries onto music (screwface/smiley face — masculine/feminine — skunk/MDMA). music takes you past that.” Whilst I absolutely agree that some of the reductive dualisms in HCC theorising are oversimplifications (and easy anthropomorphisations of the alien actualities of the music in question- especially as regards masculine/feminine codings: why ought bass-pressure to be thought of as masculine at all, its pummelling aggression is matched by a concomitant womb-like embrace, a violent amniosis…) I would maintain that theory is not to be jettisoned full stop, and indeed cannot be. Even in the absence of overt grand-narrative theorizing, low level “folk-theoretical” devices will take their place. In the writings of the critics of the HCC for example there remain certain theoretical tropes (genre, analysis of specific emergent sonic identifying points etc). The question then is not “whether theory?” but “which theory?” and further “what are the limitations of this theory, and how might it enrich our understanding of the object?”

This is certainly of key interest, above and beyond merely the HCC debate, since this is one of the central concerns of a possible speculative realist aesthetics: Whether we can ever evade the subsumption of the object beneath the organon of theory we use to interpret it. This point has been made very clearly by Schoolboyerrors here, exquisitely accurate on the over determination of art objects by their Deleuzean readings. I believe we have all read similar pieces on the internet, especially Lacanian film readings which tell you little more than how Lacanian theory itself operates (useful, true, but often with little regard to the actual object at hand). In a certain sense what the HCC critics get absolutely right is the dangerously slippery slope of theorizing, that in the end the very tool used to grasp a hold of the objective reality might alienate us from it, overdetermine it, and achieve a tyrannical grip. This in itself is a deeply Laruellian point, that in the construction of a philosophy the world is split into a world-theory dyad, the former containing the philosophical re-presentation of the world, the latter the transcendent theory sitting above the world it has created judging it like some kind of God, defeating any claims to radical immanence (as John Mullarkey accurately diagnoses in his book, Post-Continental Philosophy). It is certainly the case that it has become increasingly apparent that the single Grand Unified Theory approach to philosophy (and associated areas such as theoretical criticism) is deeply flawed. As has already been well drawn out in various discussions in the theory blogosphere, the past tendency within recent continental thought to politicise ontology is overly convenient and strictly unbelievable. In a later post I want to discuss how GUT thinking is damaging not just to pre-speculative realist thought, but equally appears to be infecting speculative realism itself, especially in its object-oriented sub-genre. This is especially clear having read the most recent issue of Collapse and Ladyman’s critique of the “small objects and micro-bangings” of analytic metaphysics.

I have admittedly yet to get a full grip on how a non-aesthetics in the Laruellian mould might operate, so I must for now limit my discussion of Wonky to more general terms, rejecting the tendency towards immobile GUTs in favour of a half-way measure, a theory sensitive to the object at hand. What is most interesting about Wonky thus far is its trans-generic nature, its relative looseness and inclusiveness to a proper diversity of disparate aesthetics: stretching between Rave, Dubstep, G-Funk, Instrumental Hip Hop, Crunk, Pop, UK Garage, IDM/Electronica, Techno… etc. Moreover it operates in a number of different tempos, (chiefly dubstep’s 138 bpm and hip hop’s slower 90-110bpm) with producers scattered between different continents, and different regimes of consumption (club and home listening). Even further, the very notion of “wonky” itself is a deeply slippery idea. Sometimes it indicates de-quantised drums (as in Flying Lotus, Lukid, and other post Dilla beat-artisans) sometimes pitch-bent synth and bass work (Joker, Starkey, Rustie), sometimes a maddening rush of 8 Bit arpeggios (Zomby, Ikonika, Rustie again). Wonky is not so much a genre unto itself. Instead it operates as a kind of trans-generic mutational agent, spreading seamlessly between bpm species, liquidating textures, distending rhythmical consistency like so much manipulable sonic sticky toffee: All that is solid melts into a new electronic psychedelia, as fluid and mellifluous as the globalised capitalism which spreads it. Wonky in the sense of off-key, out of place, misshapen, breaking through an electronic music environment increasingly characterised by myopic microgenre developments and parodic stylistic affectations, as a set of strategies to be applied to a pre-existing template. In a sense then Wonky detournes pre-existing genres (instrumental hip hop, grime, rave, dubstep etc) corroding the arid grid-like bass kick / snare matrix into something closer to the handmade asymmetrical anti-rhythms of Burial, pushing the shuffled culminating and accelerating sensual textural play towards a surrealist fair ground of Dali-esque percussive affect. However, unlike Burial it would be difficult to conceive of less hauntological artists operating today than Starkey or Rustie, their lurid neon-surreal synthetic post-dubstep negotiating everything that’s still (barely) alive within electronic dance music. Hence I would resist K-Punk’s embryonic attempts to slot certain aspects of Wonky into a hauntological conceptual schema, as the utilisation of 8-bit electronics is distinct from Ghostbox’s deployment of library music and Radiophonic-tronica in at least two respects: firstly in seeking direct dancefloor engagement, and secondly in not dealing explicitly with manipulations or foregroundings of the past (or the processes of memory). Wonky is far from nostalgic, I believe, in spite of Zomby’s Hardcore tribute record (which isn’t in fact Wonky at all).

What is clear from all this is that the Hardcore Continuum is indeed totally inadequate to describe the realities of this music (though perhaps still appropriate to some extent for Bassline, Dubstep and possibly even Funky—although the latter’s incorporation and communication with a broader range of afro-house musics and soca complicates the issue). The shifts in technology, lines of communication and influence, and geographical centres indicate a major development from prior formations: No longer a “London Thing” (or even particularly a UK thing for that matter) nor indeed quite a “scene”. To hazard a theoretical attempt to describe what might be going on here (ultimately, to my ears, consolidatory in terms of actual music, but absolutely fascinating in its anti-localism, its trans-generic scope, and the avoidance of being merely an incoherent grab bag of postmodern influences) we might turn to Félix Guattari’s concept of transversality. Taken in part from mathematics and Sartre’s Transcendence of the Ego, like Wonky transversality operates in a mercurial and allusive fashion within Guattari’s work: beginning as a way of conceptualising lines of unconscious force/desire within institutional structures, it later becomes the cornerstone of a complex ontology binding material, psychological, linguistic and imaginary components together. We might think of Wonky as operating as a vector transversal to genre, a transversal analysis in-itself operating beyond merely a postmodern genre-game. Rather than a pick and mix approach to generic materials, wonky is strategically applied to pre-existent genres, not as an adhesive but as a liquefying agent... [cf perhaps Negarestani's rotting objects?]... a making strange... not in the sense of hauntology's unheimlich-home, but in the deliquescent informational fluidity and interoperability of late capital, the strangeness of a blooming irridescant corpse, (not a spectre) a sonic embodiement of its distributive ground.

The vicissitudes of the hardcore continuum and the great deceleration.

2009-02-13T17:39:00.018Z

An extremely interesting debate has been occurring of late as regards the status of Simon Reynolds’ concept of the “hardcore continuum”. Here it would appear there are two chief claims being made by the defenders of the continuum: that the new bass-music (dubstep, funky, wonky, bassline) fits broadly within the remit of the continuum, and that it is demonstrably less innovative than before. The counter claims from those in the generation below run that the model itself is overdetermining their response to the new, and that as such the argument is incoherent (running both that “funky, wonky, dubstep, bassline, etc… can all be safely fitted into the HCC model” AND “but they don’t fit the model, and HENCE are indicative of a generational decline”).

Putting the model to one side, I would want to focus on the most interesting claim made by Simon Reynolds and Mark K-Punk, that of the declining innovatory potentials of UK bass music, one which the younger generation fail to fully address. For whilst I agree in part with those such as Dan Hancox who argue that too little attention is being paid to the ways in which these new forms draw strength precisely from that which escapes the limitations of the continuum, be that G-Funk for Joker or Afro-House for funky, I also firmly contend that the rate and depth of innovations in this field (and indeed every field of musical cultural production) has slowed down. The reasoning for this is historical and material, and in part serves to evade the intergenerational backbiting which forms the libidinal matrix at the core of this particular dispute. For contained in Mark’s assessment is some notion that creative processes, whilst socially and economically conditioned, retain a degree of individual freedom- and hence it is a moral failing on the part of this generation to not have produced innovations comparable with their forefathers. I believe we have good reason to reject this argument, and to take a historical and material view on the processes which have informed the creation of British urban dance music over the last 18 or so years. In part it is the very capitalist realist processes which Mark so often rails against which condition the thinking that what has been always will be so (or could be so, perhaps).

In considering precisely why it is that late capital seems to endlessly reproduce in the cultural field an entropic retrospection and reiterative nostalgia would it be absurd to deem cultural resources as operating in an entirely dissimilar way to energy resources? Oil and natural gas are the products of millions of years of lifeforms absorbing energy from our sun and the actions of the earth’s geology, and hence are strictly finite. In much of the discourse surrounding energy crisis it is a commonplace to consider the thesis that the twentieth century was an absolute rupture or aberration, powered almost entirely by the global tapping of hydrocarbon energy resources to enable an unparalleled technological expansionism. That capitalist ‘realism’ always covers over its intrinsically radical status blinds us to the fact that recent history is borne entirely upon the back of a brief window of opportunity created by an utterly contingent and ultimately meagre resource. I would want to argue that in a similar sense the unbearable necrotic grip of the postmodern exists partly in response to the approach of another looming impasse within the field of cultural resources. In a similar fashion perhaps, the total output of the world’s cultures to date might be considered to equally have a material limit. For much of the history of the world these resources were accumulated, but in a manner which prevented immediate exploitation, either geographically isolated from each other or lost to the passing of history. The twentieth century might indeed be read in cultural terms as an unparalleled exploitation of previously geographically (and chronologically) inaccessible resources. In an oversimplifying model we might consider there to be three kinds of resources which enable rapid development in the cultural field:

1. Geographically remote resources- cf gamelan – made available by ever expanding globalised capitalism;

2. Historically previously forgotten/under-exploited resources- cf: dance punk – made available by ever increasing technologically assisted access to previously out-of print or difficult to obtain back catalogue;

3. Technological developments- cf: timestretching in early 90s Jungle… and which obviously exists in some kind of dynamic relation to (1) and (2).

In terms of the HCC the primary drivers have been (1) and (3), though perhaps of late it has been increasingly (2) (for example in the return to 2-step in the works of Burial, 2562, Martyn etc). Against this we might position a basic endogenous rate of change which is far less rapid, which has received in the last hundred years an unparalleled and ultimately artificial stimulus. From the current perspective it seems as if geographically remote resources are increasingly ‘dry’, the historical pockets of wealth, the exploitation of which have marked the last 20 or so years of pop culture, also looking ever more threadbare. Technology too appears to be in a state of consolidation rather than exponential growth, and hence the rate of change is reverting to a previously slower rate. That this has occurred within a economic and social system which has evolved against the backdrop of a far greater velocity means that even when resources are scarce, the economic and mass-psychological need (or perhaps we might say addiction) to a high velocity of innovation is maintained- leading, we might argue, towards the necrotic grip of retroism and aesthetic consolidation. In a sense capitalism has reached a point where geographical expansion is no longer possible, there is no outside left absorb. Given this, and the limitations of the endogenous cultural growth rate for the forms of capitalism which have evolved in this period, the deterritorialization of time itself is the symptom of an underlying resource poverty. The depressing conclusion of such a hypothesis being that once we have divested ourselves of the seamless dyschronia of capitalist-realist ideology our future appears to hold little but a protracted return to cultural and economic ice-age austerity.

Rather than thinking it is the postmodern issue of “clotted influences”-- a panoply of overly diverse and diffuse influential materials to draw upon leading to an incoherent output, as theorised by Reynolds—instead it is the very exhaustion of these materials which is at the core of cultural deceleration. For example, it is only possible for techno to absorb the hip-hop breakbeat ONCE, which initially gives rise to an immense new field of possible musical forms, but which over time become gradually worn out. So whilst I would defend funky and wonky as noteworthy innovations demanding serious attention (in the last year or so they have occupied 90% of my listening within the field of electronic music) it is indeed correct that if you played a wonky track to someone five years ago they would be unsurprised, whereas a ’97 techstep track to a raver from 1992 would seem like a radical step forward. Part of what Reynolds argues with the HCC was that a certain social, technological, and distributive network was able to synthesise influences in a way which led to emergent genres which were not immediately reducible to a mere additive process upon their influences. In contrast, he identifies much recent bass music from the UK as simply the sum total of their component parts, never reaching the point where something new emerges out of the chemical reaction between influences. But instead of this being a failure of modernist will (or desire for the new) as I detect in some of his and Mark’s arguments, the real problem is the sheer mass of history. This is operative not merely in the sense of a psychological pressure, which I think is insufficient to explain the current processes, but instead as a matter of generic “niches” within the cultural-ecosystem of dancers. I can't help thinking the real problem is percussion: after the hyper-on cut up funk of jungle and the sick alien-suave swing of UKG, there appears nowhere uptempo to go. The question is of how many uptempo stable "attractors" exist within such a limited set up. The hivemind or parallel processing capabilities of “scenius” (a complex meshwork system with certain key "sorting points") is certainly great, but not infinitely productive, especially given the eventual solidification or standardisation of previously fluid dynamics into institutional frameworks (which include the very theory of the continuum itself of course, although this perhaps has only a limited feedback potential back towards the producers/dancers etc). Hence the contemporary status of much UK bass music as being, if not actively retro-necro (which is unfair I think) perhaps simply consolidatory in nature. Whilst consolidation has always been an element of musical creativity, the exhaustion of stable attractors within a given consumption milieu (dancing, listening) means that it is left to simply additively utilise external influence-components, rather than achieving new emergent syntheses, characterised by the “shuffling of a deck” of possibilities already established elsewhere. This does not necessarily make for bad music, per se, and I am much more likely to listen to the latest Joker or Starkey tune than sit mournfully reminiscing over old Omni Trio 12”s. But the libindal investment in The Now, the addictive cultural expectation that what happens in this time is Important, (concurrent with the bad/misread Deleuzo-Guattarean notion of affirmation at all costs, and the injunction to “Enjoy!”) must not be allowed to blot out the all too real state of affairs. Ultimately it is a question of the mindset induced by capital’s de-temporalising hypnosis- in actuality what we have experienced is merely a blip, perhaps never to be again repeated, 150 or so years of extreme resource binging, the equivalent to an epic amphetamine session. What we are already experiencing is little more than the undoubtedly grim “comedown” of the great deceleration.

Speculative realism/speculative materialism - second annual report.

2009-02-04T12:36:00.016Z

Friday 24th April 2009 University of West England, Bristol, St Matthias Campus UK.

Ray Brassier
Iain Hamilton Grant
Graham Harman
Quentin Meillassoux

From Daily Humiliation. More information to follow no doubt, but interesting name change indicative perhaps (given some of Graham Harman's comments on the "umbrella term" that isn't a movement) of some clarifications of positions. Meillassoux himself of course seems happier with materialism rather than realism, in his case a materialism based upon the "meaningless symbols" of mathematics. Brassier and Harman we might consider to be definite realists (though the former definitively more eliminitavist than the latter).

Values as objects – A quick conjectural reply to Larval Subjects.

2009-01-27T02:38:00.008Z

Levi responds with an extremely well-thought out post on object-oriented philosophy and nihilism here. Whilst I am not fully signed up to the definition of objects-as-difference, it seems apparent that it is indeed the case that norms (and even fictions) exist as objects/actors etc. Levi continues by stating that norms or values must always be produced, rather than emerging from some transcendent operation (no God delivering stone tablets on mountains for example). The question then resolves to the production of these particular objects, and that as produced (by biological, linguistic, social and historical processes) the kinds of relations they enter into and the processes of change they engender (including the forms of subjectivity they might be capable of conferring). That fictions are adopted as objects (providing, for Levi at least, if they make a difference, have an effect, which appears to be a crucial distinction between his own position and that of Reid Kotlas of Planemonology’s or Graham Harman’s) can be squared with the CCRU concept of the hyperstitional narrative, and indeed Badiou’s under-theorised idea of “the powerful fiction of a completed truth” (that rests at the core of the tricky notion of forcing within the transformative truth procedure).

Not all belief-objects or norm-objects are the same in terms of their machinic effects or diagrammatical workings, but none is more fundamental than any other (no matter their relative truth values). In this category we can certainly place ideological-objects, (which as Zizek frequently jokes, work even if you don’t believe in them). However, I am uncertain that Levi has banished the threat of nihilism yet- for whilst the teeming network or assemblage universe is filled with all kinds of components or actors, amongst them norms and values, just as there are planets, nematode worms, jokes and computer operating systems, our only recourse in terms of a selection principle seems to be the contingent set of normative assemblages acting upon us, enunciating us. Descriptively this is certainly highly satisfactory, and a useful way to think sociology perhaps. But equally it dissolves everything to the level of a cold-vitalism, or an amoral machinism (or perhaps even an a-political politics) wherein even life itself or machinic efficiency cannot be preferred over inert death or stasis or sclerosis (because the very norm of life or efficiency has been reduced to the ontological status of merely another actor within the network). I would be perfectly happy to agree to this outcome, a purely descriptive naturalism bereft of prejudice. What is capable of domination predominates over that which is incapable, and it is neither good nor bad (or possibly it is either/both, dependant on the point of view invested in the judging subject as side-effect of pre-personalising norm-objects). Though effectiveness itself is not ‘good’ it will lead to predominance within a system, (though even the claim that to be is better than to not be is unsupportable) and one implication of this is that the very status of ‘fiction’ and ‘truth’ become dislodged from their usual significations- is there not also the considerable danger of a rampaging relativism here?

A short note on Harman and Hallward.

2009-01-27T00:03:00.007Z

In one of his many excellent posts Graham Harman (here) seemed to argue that Peter Hallward’s repeated calls for a more relational ontology were based upon the idea that it would be innately more leftist in orientation. I think that Hallward (in his recent reviews of Meillassoux’s After Finitude and Badiou’s Logics of Worlds) is pointing towards the more practical issues of praxis. It is not so much that Hallward identifies relational ontologies as necessarily being leftist in orientation, rather that his critique of Deleuze Meillassoux and Badiou rests upon the lack of concrete and strategic support their political ontologies offer for praxis. If we are thinking of Hallward’s recent criticisms of Badiou (and his pupil Meillassoux) it is above all paralysis and quietude, passivity in other words, that is his chief target. For Hallward relational ontology offers a better tool for a leftist politics to analyse problematical practical situations and derive new ways of actually acting within them. Badiou’s hyper anti-relational politics (if in doubt check out his thoughts on political organisation in Metapolitics- “the most unbound place of all” etc) offers little beyond its analysis of evental sites and marginality as the zone from which revolutionary activities spring from. Even in terms of the relational update Logiques des Mondes Badiou remains pretty primitive (cf: his analysis of Mao’s red army thought in terms of the adaptations of a body of a truth to various ‘points’ which confront it). However I am also aware that the kind of relational ontology Hallward has in mind is going to be far from a De Landian or Latourian form (in conversation Hallward has stated that De Landa’s A New Philosophy of Society is “slick” but ultimately with little concrete to offer a politics of emancipation). I myself think De Landa is quite a bit more worthy of comment, specifically in the way that his post Deleuzo-Guattarian account of assemblages is able to challenge the more traditional “folk-political” concept of the political field.

Moreover the prospective Hallwardian project (aka “Relational Reality”) will consist of a relational ontology combined with a kind of post-Sartrean (or neo-Sartrean) subject equipped with a political will, against the crucial backdrop of history. The latter entails some kind of resurrection of the “resources of the dialectic”, though so far Hallward has yet to reveal what form this might take. My own hunch might be a thoroughly re-equipped version of something resembling Sartre’s own Critique of Dialectical Reason, with a more thoroughly integrated relational component, a fascinating if dangerous approach!

On having your cake and eating it.

2009-01-26T16:53:00.008Z

The blogosphere is alive with talk of speculative realism and its sub-genre, object-oriented philosophy (as manfully elaborated by Graham Harman and Levi Bryant). The political stakes of this have also been interrogated, (see especially here) but I find a slight flaw in much of the discourse surrounding this issue, a weakspot or point of blindness.

The challenge to political (or politicised) ontologies is clear: illegitimately bringing the political into the ontological is an underhand philosophical manoeuvre (if being = cosmic difference = innately creative and revolutionary for example then already an overly convenient political orientation is present at the level of being) and hence somewhat unbelievable. If the challenge of a realist orientation in metaphysics is that being is radically flat, divested of hierarchy or morality (no layer higher or more significant, authentic, real etc than any other) then the grounding of normativity cannot be located within an ontological analysis. Of course, we already have a certain kind of normativity within the claim towards radical ontological egality, but one which is de-charged or a-signifying- it gives no clue as to preferential principle. In this regard flat ontologies are capable of overcoming the Deleuzean ethology or Nietzschean forces which incessantly moralise over that which ought to be a matter of descriptive naturalism. Whilst Badiou’s minimal ontology in some regards escapes this politicisation of being, his notion of event as trans-being and political truth procedures emerging via the momentary uncovering of the hidden being of being itself comes close to a similar structure to Deleuze or indeed Nietzsche: there is an aboriginal state to being, which is innately good, which is somehow perverted, manipulated, falls into a state of disarray, illusion, falsehood etc. The edenic structure of political ontologies is plain, and must be undermined at all costs because it leads metaphysics towards absurdity. For, to take the example of Nietzsche, if his force analysis is a kind of naturalism, then a force is what it does, and the play of such forces simply is- without guide towards preference. If the weak forces predominate over the strong we have no reason to think them weak at all.

However, I cannot but find the true implications of this for the political to have been safely “bracketed”, to have been separated so far from the political field as to be of little importance. It would seem that if Speculative Realism not only de-couples the world from the human but also necessarily and as a consequence removes all hierarchies between layers and scales, then politics as such is deeply problematised. The current blog discourse seems to hold that this new metaphysics might be deployed as a kind of analytical conceptual technology, in the service of political aims or projects. But this seems to have failed to learn the proper lesson- for surely such political praxes are themselves justified in terms of a system of norms, at the very least a theory of “the good”. It seems as if many writers would want to use the descriptive powers of flat ontologies or network/assemblage theories (of the kind proffered by De Landa and Latour) in the service of pre-existing political orientations. To do so would simply be to fall into a sort of double-think. For each political praxis is itself justified by a theory of what is good, each of which can be genealogically traced to a prior philosophical or religious system, each of which are crucially undermined by the very notion of an ontology without preference. If we are to think only pragmatically then we remain within the domain of the correlation—to remain neo-liberal democrats, Marxists, humanists etc. There is a clear issue of how the bare/indifferent/non-preferential ontological interacts with the human-ontic. Two options seem available. Firstly we think ‘pragmatically’, deploy flat ontological analyses as a mere technological appendage to serve pre-existing political vectors, but this seems to be somewhat paradoxical for it entails a hidden claim that the ontological has no baring upon the political—but this indicates the technological potentials of the philosophy are null and void. Alternatively we might think the other formulation: if being gives us no ability to prefer this over that, then we cannot do so (or seek some other form of validation). But to seek other validation is to inevitably rest upon some other problematic ground (all the different kinds of situated-chauvinism from racial-tribalism to humanism or vitalism). To take SR seriously is to hold to a radical nihilism, and it is in this respect that Ray Brassier comes closest to unravelling the full consequences (in spite of his own apparent gestures towards the continued validity of collective politics, perhaps another example of doublethink?). Either SR has no impact on politics, or destroys politics (and its reliance upon the situated-chauvinistic) altogether. It seems intrinsically a-political. In making of philosophy a science, we can no longer draw political claims from it, or rather perhaps, only a rigorous (though absolutely whimsical) anti-politics where it as good to eliminate the human race as to institute globalised communism. In this sense a kind of political hyperchaos might be thought, or perhaps an anti-phenomenological/inhuman ur-nihilistic existentialism.

Numerical materialism and the discursive shield.

2008-11-22T15:53:00.002Z

Continuing the recent debate surrounding Peter Hallward’s critique of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude, Larval Subjects points towards the principal issue at hand: the questionable legitimacy of ontological systems predicated on the primacy of the matheme and the supposed “purity” of mathematical discourse as the 'royal road' to an uncontaminated being. The real target here is of course Alain Badiou’s identification of the discourse of being (ie- ontology) with axiomatic set theory. However Badiou (unlike his pupil) is careful to maintain a distinction between ontology as discourse (that which can be said of being) and being itself. Set theory then enables a kind of purified discourse about being, without ever necessarily entailing access to being itself. This “purification” is the removal from ontological discourse of the ontic dimension, of all predicates and qualities that might be applied to something, to leave behind merely the most minimal descriptions of a being (that to say something “is” is the least that can be said in a process of reduction whilst still allowing it to “be”). As Badiou describes: “Strictly speaking mathematics presents nothing […] because not having anything to present, besides presentation itself – which is to say the multiple – and thereby never adopting the form of the ob-ject, such is a condition of all discourse on being qua being.” It is important to realise that this mathematised ontology does not mean that, for example, actual beings are ultimately composed of infinite multiplicities of number! As Badiou himself puts it: “The thesis that I support does not in any way declare that being is mathematical, which is to say composed of mathematical objectivities. It is not a thesis about the world but about discourse. It affirms that mathematics, throughout the entirety of its historical becoming, pronounces what is expressible of being qua being.” The reason for this is discernible in Badiou’s decision of the multiple over the one, since “what presents itself is essentially multiple; what presents itself is essentially one”- and hence to describe presentation outside of the “what” dimension (i.e.- the ontic) is a necessary step to holding the one at bay, a step achieved by handing over the business of ontology to set theory. As Larval Subjects correctly analyses, mathematics does not give us “all that can be said of being”, and it is not part of Badiou’s project (within Being and Event at least) to even attempt to do so… instead mathematics is positioned as the least which can be said of being, a modest minimalism…

There appear to be three issues here:

(1) That mathematical ontologies allow for the description of entities which do not exist in the corporeal world (ie- the problem of non-Euclidean geometry). For Meillassoux (as Hallward accurately diagnoses) this means that deductions vouchsafed within a realm of pure maths cannot legitimately be automatically shifted into the real world (ie- that of applied mathematics). This is certainly an issue for Meillassoux, but how serious is this for Badiou?

(2) That in terms of a broader notion of “being” mathematised ontologies such as Badiou’s set theoretical notion do not give an exhaustive description of every aspect of being. This is undoubtedly correct, but Badiou would not want to deny this, his interpretation of “being” being oriented towards a minimalistic definition of the least which one can say before being unable to describe any being at all. Set theoretical descriptions of situations are preferred by Badiou precisely because they enable the indiscriminate counting of things without any necessary ontical detailing of what the thing is, and hence an apparently universal discourse, (which can as easily describe humans in a class room as grains of sand on a beach etc). Hence being-qua-being is already a particular sub-genre or specific sense of being.

(3) That the claim towards a “materialism” appears to be restricted to the “matter” of number itself, (or as Meillassoux has stated “the meaningless symbols of mathematics”). If this “matter” produces forms which are only possible within thought and which fails (whether by design or not) to describe every aspect of being, indeed, to describe an aspect of being which is reducible from the ontic dimensions only in thought itself, how does this not collapse into a cunningly scientistic idealism?

In sum then: Given (1) mathematised ontologies invariably enable the description of entities which do not exist outside the mind and (2) denote a “pure” being, a kind of being which has no existence outside of the mind capable of conceptualising being divorced of its ontic dimensions then (3) this materialism seems to be simply an idealism. Or at least, as guarded against by Badiou’s discursive shield, an idealist discourse. Meillassoux seems to move beyond this protective layer towards a notion of mathematical information (as indexed by ancestral phenomena such as the archefossil) being present within phenomena themselves… If anything Hallward does not make a strong enough case here, given that it is to retain a correlation (to a mathematising consciousness) to ascribe to things-in-themselves any mathematical properties (i.e.- beyond Hallward’s argument as to dates requiring linguistic mediation contained in phrases like “6 billion years before the emergence of life”), perhaps… Is mathematics really in a superior position to language, (in its precision perhaps, as indicated by its ability to index primary qualities rather than merely secondary qualities) but does it really hold that it is truly a mind-independent property? If we are to pay close attention to Badiou’s sneaky but necessary discursive get-out-clause, then we might consider even a primary mathematisable quality within a thing to be merely a discursive representation of an irreducible and indifferent ontic being. Is it to travel too far into the correlationists' circle to contend even that mathematically indexable primary qualities are really present as anything other than an idealist discursive abstraction of the unreachable in-itself? Does mathematics really enable us, as Meillassoux contends, to access the "great outdoors" of thought (the thing-in-itself outside correlation, the pure object sundered from a subjective mediation)...? In a counterfactual situation where conscious life never emerges in the universe at all, (i.e.- a universe where correlation itself is impossible because of the inexistence of subjects) is it possible to think a mathematical property as being present within a given thing within this universe? If mathematics is simply a superior discourse, but a discourse none the less, how can we even ascribe primary qualities to objects in a universe devoid of conscious mediation? Is the real outside thought not the universe without even mathematical discourse? Or is mathematical discourse in the ontic sense merely a communicative way of expressing intrinsic relations between things which exist independently of any subjective mediation… is this the principle article of faith for a realist position, (the realist "kool aid" so to speak) to "buy into" the ability of mathematical information to be mind-independent? Is this the final correlationist trap or the pathway to the real outside?

Why Dawkins must read Guyotat...

2008-11-18T00:53:00.001Z

As if to add further emphasis to the various debates centring on Dawkins and his merry band of theistic-humanist "atheists" and their contemptible little advertising campaign... schoolboyerrors on the absolutely inhuman literature of Pierre Guyotat, with some interesting concluding remarks for the proper reception of evolutionary theory...

Some aims regarding Speculative Realism and Politics

2008-11-17T22:14:00.002Z

As Ben makes clear here it is very much the issue of agency which is most crucial. As I have hoped to distinguish, any vision of accelerationist capital which fails to delineate a clear role for agency (even if merely to push the system towards its maximum negatory potential, even if to undo agency itself) falls into a plain neo-liberal dogma. Further my aim, surely entirely unfulfilled so far, is to seek a grounding for a new mutant politics which is not subsumable beneath any kind of Marxist or leftist banner, but which simultaneously is neither the empty repetitions of contemporary liberal democratic-materialism nor a capitulation to the “invisible hand” of the market. The objective then is not to refound that which already exists, but instead to find through the detours of theory the basis for a praxis which is as yet inexistent, one which if appropriately shielded from crypto-humanisms will be capable of breaking through the wall of the end of history. Part of my frustrations with theory is that a great deal of abstract reasoning takes place to merely justify in a new fashion the same praxis or simply a variant of it, when such praxes appear tactically to have fallen totally into the realm of what Sartre would term ‘counter-finality’.

Hence whilst I have considerable sympathies with the kind of line which Peter Hallward takes (cf: his recent critique in Radical Philosophy of Meillassoux’s After Finitude and the refutation made available here, but which is common to his criticisms of Deleuze and Badiou also) it seems to remain overly encased in a priori assumptions. His critiques have a consistency, no matter whether the object of discussion is Badiou or Deleuze or Speculative Realism, his central concerns remain identical: that politics is primary, (which I actually agree with) and that only a hyper-relational ontology will give the necessary nuances to vouchsafe a practically useful revolutionary political praxis. Given that ultimately what he is interested in I suspect is precisely a new way not merely to model radical political activity but as a way into new tactical innovations, his inability to identify within Speculative Realism a set of tools which can fundamentally destabilize old assumptions when applied to the political field is disappointing. That Meillassoux himself gives little clue as to how we are to go about such an experimental splicing of the speculative genome into the body of radical politics (and his own insistence on theological or ethical developments) is simply an opportunity for those who come after him. Perhaps this is to radically misconstrue the proper theory-praxis relationship, to naively accord too strong a role to theoretical discourse in moulding real-world political activities, but I think that at the very least a hyper-anti-human or coldly inhuman political theory, whether devised by pushing Deleuzo-Guattarian or Badiouian thought beyond its vital/humanist limits or by constructing an implied politics from Speculative Realism is an avenue worth pursuing, precisely because of the perverse results which it will undoubtedly produce. To re-orient politics away from any notion of the human-as-suffering animal for example, would entail a genuine shift in both political aims and means…

Post-Land: The paradoxes of a speculative realist politics.

2008-10-26T23:41:00.004Z

To answer some of Mark K-Punk’s questions (original posts here and here):

1. Is this pure capital not a phantasmic projection? Yes, absolutely, one which does not exist at present but which, as the powerful fiction of a completed truth, (to horribly misuse Badiou) might be able to actualise its own reality.

2. The problem of Agency: A more difficult question undoubtedly, but one which I hope to answer in part below, though with certain problems.

3. How to evade a fall into neo-liberalism…

To distinguish left-Landianism from Land’s own (surely now firmly rightward in its orientation), we might make two points:

1. Capital in its present form is incapable of delivering anything but inertia, or at least that parallax between a interminable rush of change at the level of fashion and an eerie stasis in terms of innovative cultural or political forms it seems incapable of throwing up. Hence there is a need for a very real praxis upon it (and its articulation with institutional forms). Land's position is a shadowy obverse to that of the Multitude(s)/Autonomia group, that "we are already (almost) there". He forgets that capitalist relative deterritorializations are always usually accompanied by an immediate reterritorialization, as determined by the capitalist axiomatic. It is this that needs to be worked upon, the shifting of the balance of de/re-territorializations.

2. To evade the dark/banal fall into mere neo-liberalism, we must maintain a firm belief in the horrifying and utterly negative nature of capital. It is in this meaning of the term "left-Landian" then that we might position this accelerationist reading of capitalism- as a preservation of the critique of the left, and the praxis of the right, the preservation of capital's negative dimension, and its absolute valorisation for this very reason. For the form of politics this demarcates comes closest to what the literary buffoon Martin Amis termed "horrorism"- part of the nomenclature he used in his pitiful misreading of islamist terrorist activities. I certainly enjoyed the term, if not its application, for it conveyed something of what a less literal terroristic praxis might consist, in the sense of what a non-dialectical amassing of negativity might mean, a horror piled upon horror, a critical mass capable of pulling the subjectivity attached to the organic human substrate through to some nether-zone of dissolution, a Deleuzean becoming crucially without affirmation. Outside of a vitalist notion of an inhuman jouissance, (shared by the libidinal economists) the market delivers not a utopia of free-flowing desire but rather a perfect dystopia of the genuinely inhuman, a non-affective cold-machinism truly adequate to capital-in-itself. The irresistible inverse image of 9/11 presents itself: Instead of flying the planes into symbols of western capitalism, we plunge the financial-capitalistic contents of the towers into the human world itself, dissolving, sundering, shattering…

The question of what form the praxis necessary to destabilise the current state-capital bond has already been answered in part- a kind of meta-terrorism, operating on the plane of capital itself (ideally, in the conception which has obsessed me for some time, in the form of a capitalist surrealism, the exploitation of credit based financial systems for their primary destructive potential. This destruction is not merely to be thought on the ability to trigger vast crashes, which is readily apparent, but further their capacity to destabilise the consistency of value itself). That this consists in taking more seriously the claims of finance capital than even its own agents is the very point itself, and is in a sense an actualisation of Lyotard's gestures towards a 'nihilist theory of credit'. Further we might conceptualise the collective forms necessary to actualise this praxis as being very much in the mode of the kind of Maoist party delineated by Badiou in Théorie du Sujet, an institutional actor capable of allowing the ephemeral vanishing term of history (now surrealist avant-capital, rather than the proletariat of course) to cohere, for as long as required to enable it to achieve the absolute dissolution of all structuration, including itself.

There is a significant question which remains unanswered, one which was touched upon by Schoolboyerrors in the comments box of the previous post:

“To what end accelerationism? In order to provoke a crisis, as you say, in the system, but for what? For the future of humanity? Is this inhumanism, then, merely a deferral of pathos until such time as revolution has been achieved?”

Accelerationism more generally might be considered to take a number of forms, fitting into two kinds of category, broadly being “weak” accelerationism, and “strong” accelerationism:

1) Weak Accelerationism: By driving capitalism towards an accelerated position, the conditions for something resembling a communist revolution might be engendered. In this (limited) sense accelerationism is merely an anti-ameliorationism, which sets the conditions for revolution by undoing the improvements in living conditions which western capitalism (in part) produces, mainly through the state, in order to further its own continued existence within its homeostatic form. Whilst we would not want to fall into a total economic determinism here, it appears relatively obvious (as it did to Lenin in What is to be Done) that soft leftist activities (socialist parties, unions etc) far from being agents of genuine change merely arrest the situation as it stands, frequently operating as part of the axiomatic machinery ensuring the stability of the homeostatic form of capitalism. In this sense then accelerationism opposes ameliorative leftism by acting to foreground the structural privations of the capitalist system. Further the utilisation of capitalist institutions for their primary negatory character would work to undermine the consistency of capitalist ideology. We might think of the current financial crisis as perhaps giving us such an opportunity, though we have already noted our cynicism as to the lack of an effective political organisation to capitalise upon this.

2) Strong Accelerationism: Unlike the “weak” model of accelerationism, which maintains the thesis that capital shifted beyond its current homeostatic form entails a collapse or fundamental catastrophe, suitable for the inculcation of some kind of neo-Marxist revolutionary communism, the “strong” form of accelerationism entertains the notion that far from ushering in the downfall of capitalism, acceleration beyond a certain point radically alters the nature of the processes of capital itself. Here acceleration is not a means to a crisis in the system, but rather a radical mutation of the system itself, along with it the kinds of subjectivations made possible.

Certainly the revolution which the “strong” accelerationist model has in mind can be far from merely a humanist pathos postponed, an inhumanism in the service of the ultimate utopian destiny of the human, or of some kind of vitalist maximisation of what these particular (human) bodies can do. Instead we might think of it as the process necessary to erase the human altogether (as a form of subjectivation), to actualise something close to the dissolution of subjectivity (and the initiation of what might resemble a Guyotadian political economy).

But there is a more serious, and perhaps intractable question which underlies this: How might one ground a politics which aims towards an inhuman becoming (or perhaps we ought to say de-subjectivation) outside of a discourse of either alienation or alternately some kind of pseudo-biological vitalist ethology such as Deleuze’s appropriation of Spinoza’s conatus? This is really the problem which lies at the core of a speculative realist politics (and ethics and aesthetics also). In other words of how to apply a skilfully de-correlated philosophy to the always correlated domains of the subject, (even if our intent is to ground a politics whose aim is towards the erasure of the very dimension of the subject itself). For surely there seems to be a presumption of the continuation of the problem of alienation (or at least, that the incommensurable nature of the current form of subjectivation with capitalism is itself the reason for our need to close the gap). Part of what I am looking for is a way to ground the Deleuzo-Guattarian model of capitalism (which even their harshest critics such as Peter Hallward and Ray Brassier hold is the finest conception of capital since Marx) outside of a faulty affirmative vitalism. That capital operates via a (largely state-mediated) axiomatic, controlling relative de/reterritorializations of flows seems too useful a model even for Brassier himself to give up on (indeed he uses it unproblematically in the original article of ‘Nihil Unbound’ to call one of Badiou’s silent a prioris into question). But even if such a regrounding were to be possible (upon a speculative realist xenoeconomics, as I think will need to be the case) the aim of the exercise, to re-introduce this into the social field in order to enable a radically new form of politics to become thinkable, the fundamental problematic remains. Outside either a vitalist ethology of ‘natural’ auto-self-maximisation, or some kind of Marxist-Hegelian dialectical drive towards the elimination of contradiction in the same, how might we be able to ground the very need for an inhumanising desubjectivation at all? Though we might wish to create a system which has had done with judgement, to ground the praxis (and here we return to the “sticky” issue of agency) necessary to arrive at this state requires the illegitimate use of the very devices the praxis seeks to erase.

When nothing ever happens.

2008-10-20T23:50:00.001+01:00

As k-punk makes clear here, it seems that hauntology is positioned in such a way as to blur the line between symptom (an aggravation of postmodernity, the frame, the joins, the shadow of the strings of the puppets etc) and something which is to be actively worked towards. This is because in its recent usage hauntology has become adapted into an aesthetic description, if not a viable political strategy then perhaps a legitimate artistic one. That Postmodern capital has thrown us, like some aquatic animal gasping for air, onto the arid beaches at the end of history is, for me at least, unquestionably accurate. That hauntology might be used as a way of conceptualising the gaps in the seamless blur of PoMo retronecrotic hyper-fashion is also possible. But what I would wish to contend is that whilst hauntology is distinguishable from postmodernity to the extent that it acts as its critique via denaturalisation, this critique remains within the bounds of postmodernity itself, within its circular logics and traps, an auto-criticism which whilst rendering postmodernity self-aware achieves little as the condition itself is surely predicated upon a kind of hyper-self awareness already (though as previously noted hauntology proceeds by a process of aching mourning rather than ironic detachment). Hauntology is a symtomatology, yes, but it not a cure. As the cultural logic of late capital, PoMo thrives upon contradiction, upon the ultimately flimsy nature of its chameleon facades. That it proceeds through a state of mourning also appears highly problematic. Mark has argued in the past that hauntology acts as an exploration of the nostalgia mode, rather than being nostalgic in and of itself, and perhaps thinking of such explorations as being a new aesthetic territory, as using the condition of postmodernity as the ground in which to open up new territory to create within (i.e. to use the accumulated ghost-material of a culture devoted to a near infinite accumulation of self-documentation, recording etc) is a seductive solution to the aesthetic deadlock which appears to afflict popular culture. But it remains debateable firstly as to how far many hauntological works actually interrogate their temporo-cultural ground rather than merely sliding into outright nostalgia, and secondly as to how far even those which do so are operating as anything more than a holding pattern, or a more sophisticated version of the usual Postmodern shuffling of pre-existing possibilities.

To truly escape the ouroboric contours of late capital requires a different process of denaturalisation, which begins by attempting to think the processes of capital outside of its correlation (positively or negatively construed) to the human (or at least, as far as this is possible). That this might undergird an accelerationist position does not necessitate the naturalisation of capital, the very opposite in fact. What we are looking for in part is a point of structural weakness, a point wherein the logic of postmodernity not only fails to operate seamlessly (or where the seams themselves confirm the impossibility of change) but actually assists a radical political praxis. In a sense xenoeconomics might offer us a way to use Badiou’s notion of structural instability within regimes of presentation and representation, but in an extremely heterodox manner which he himself would surely abjure.

“Much as I with it weren't the case”, writes k-punk, “it isn't possible to bring back modernism by force of will alone.” But surely what we must consider, if not in-itself then at least in terms of how we might bring it about, is not the return of modernism but the arrival of a new (perhaps, or at the very least) a currently properly unthinkable temporo-cultural episteme. Or is it the case that "the new" itself is linked so strongly with modernism that only a return can perversely engender a forward-directed breakthrough? This remains unconvincing, if only because it remains enmeshed inside the late-capitalist logic, and seems to lead at best only to the deployment of another attractive facade. For indeed, 'modernism' is already able to return, and does so endlessly, but as yet another “face” of postmodernity… Further, the uncomfortable resonances between hauntology and the melancholic spectral remnants of the contemporary political left remain- if hauntology is the aesthetic wing, wither its political correlate? The paradoxes of a conservative necro-modernism hang unresolved.

Xenoeconomics and Capital Unbound.

2008-10-19T16:17:00.003+01:00

A question remains open as to the current state of play with the unfolding trans-global financial deleveraging and subsequent mass-governmental bank buyout: Is this a genuinely unprecedented situation or simply the latest facet of business-as-usual, a crisis in the system, or merely a crisis of the system? The pessimism of the intellect suggests the latter, another arresting of the genuinely alien development of the capital-virus, in favour of the maintaining of a stable form. The optimism of the will though suggests that there might be the basis in the opprobrium that finance capital is now attracting (low level intensity but extremely broad in terms of numbers) for some kind of new proletarian leftist movement. BUT, and crucially, it is difficult to identify either a new and energised ideological/political-philosophical position or any kind of institutional framework (party, movement, mass, guerrilla attack group etc) with which to focus this negativity. There are certainly some limited Socialist Worker/Stop the War associated protests, but these lack both scale and the energy of new ideas. All that is on offer there is warmed over leftism/anticapitalism, without the energy of anywhere but back to go (essentially a conservative-radicalism perhaps). In the bending of all history against that impassable perimeter of the Postmodern terminus even radical leftism is fundamentally a mere shuffling of a pre-existing deck of possibilities, hopeless, haunted, an echo, homeless, nostalgic. It must be feared that for as long as it is thus the left remains incapable of defeating the status quo, or achieving much beyond the establishment of briefly extant semi-autonomous zones, all-too rapidly snuffed out.

Perhaps what this crash offers however is a chink in the armour of late capital, a Badiouian event, evading the usual in-situational structural determinations. In a sense Badiou would not recognise (economic) it really does give an opportunity (as did the crash of 1929) to recalibrate both the state-market relation and the type of economic theory deployed by governments. But this will be merely to retrench, to stabilise, to maintain the present system, in a new form, by whatever means necessary and available. Politically it is less clear, for in order that the potential this event offers to be fully exploited, we need a politics capable of fully evading even the kind of generic humanism Badiou's politics (for example) proffers. For the impasse of the end of history can only be properly surmounted by a final nihilistic overcoming of humanism-- in a sense even Badiou fails this test, his minimal-communist humanism not going far enough. What perhaps this might entail is a rethinking of a revolutionary position, built on the basis of a rethinking of the very notion of value itself.

In Speculative Realist terms, what is necessary is to think the in-itself of capitalism outside of any correlation to the human. Ray Brassier has already hinted at this in his original “Nihil Unbound” article on Badiou, Deleuze & Guattari and Capitalism. For surely what all analyses of capitalism have presumed to date is the capitalist ‘for-us’ (construed in positive or negative terms), whereas capital is ultimately a machine which has almost no relation to humanity whatsoever, it intersects with us, it has us as moving parts, but it ultimately is not of or for-us. Capital properly thought is a vast inhuman form, a genuinely alien life form (in that it is entirely non-organic) of which we know all-too-little. A new investigation of this form must proceed precisely as an anti-anthropomorphic cartography, a study in alien finance, a Xenoeconomics. Brassier himself has shied away in the last few years from a detailed discussion of capitalism, but I believe that the most interesting applications of speculative realist philosophy may well arrive with precisely a re-reading of both Marx’s and Deleuze & Guattari’s models of capitalism. Marx’s labour theory of value fails to think the capitalist in-itself, the ability to create value ex nihilo (ie- credit, and all financial instruments constructed from variations on this theme). For Marx credit, ‘virtual capital’ and speculation built upon it is “the highest form of madness”. Instead we ought to think of credit-based ‘virtual’ capital as the highest form of capital. This is not a mere semantic shift, but rather a revolutionary inversion of the LTV, following Deleuze & Guattari in considering capitalism-as-process, conducted upon pre-existing social forms, disassembling and reassembling them to suit its own nefarious and presently obscure ends. As process rather than concrete ‘thing’ we must consider its true nature to be contained in its destination, rather than the primitive building blocks from which it originally constituted itself (ie- in the worlds of ‘virtual’ capital rather than the alienation of human labour, which is surely merely an initial staging post).

Part of what is at stake here is the thinking of capitalism outside of alienation. For if we are to follow Badiou’s stab at an unmitigated inhumanism, a total leap beyond the suffering animal model of godless democratic-materialist bio-linguistic humanism, as surely we must, then a theory of value cannot be predicated upon this original suffering, the voodoo process of soul-theft at the core of the alienation of labour in the commodity form. To build a model of capitalism from a new theory of value is necessary if we are to evade the traps of both democratic materialist commensically corrupt liberalism, and the post modern end of history. The “blind acephelous polymorph” that is capital must be embraced, but not from the point of view of some naïve enthusiasm or sentiment of hope that markets can deliver utopia. Instead, as the way out of the binaries of a leftism which is utterly and irretrievably moribund, and a neo-liberal economics which is ideologically bankrupt, we must bend both together in the face of an inhuman and indefatigable capitalism, to think how we might inculcate a new form of radically inhuman subjectivation. This entails the retrieval of the communist project for a new man, AND the liberation of the neo-liberal quest for a capitalism unbound, from both its subterranean dependence upon the state and the skeletal humanist discursive a priori which animates its ideological forms.

In thinking how to deliver this subjectivation, an unbinding towards the absolute, an absolute adequation of post-human subjectivity to capital, the crucial concept must be that of institutionalisation- agglomerative masses of power (including states, corporations, NGOs, religions, discrete humans) all of which need to be dissolved. In a sense this is a continuation and merging of both Marxist-Leninist Communism and Neo-liberal capitalism, but where there is no need to take over the state, but rather to utilise capitalism as an engine with which to obliterate nation states. However, to merely do this would be entirely insufficient, as the state function within capitalism would simply be taken over by institutional figures such as corporations, which must therefore also be dissolved. But this is merely to think at the scale of large institutional actors, we must also continue this drive towards dissolution, (to be powered by the pure force of a nihilistic capitalism-unbound) towards what Foucault termed, in a Nietzschean manner in The Order of Things, ‘man’ (clarified by Deleuze as the ‘man-form’ the kind of self-conception dependant upon the foldings of the analytic of finitude). The question also needs to be asked of how to recalibrate this alien lifeform towards forms of dissolution which do not immediately restructure with conservative/familial types of subjectivation. Our contention (following Deleuze) is that this is intrinsically bound up with the metabolic rate of capitalism, currently constrained by its symbiotic relationship to the state, which maintains the expansion of capital within a homeostatic formula sufficient to prevent its most destructive potentials from being actualised. What is necessary (breaking with Deleuze) is to utilise the stuctures of capitalism against the state, in an entirely terroristic fashion, so as to transform the very nature of the nightmarish Lovecraftian creature itself. Finally, we might consider that the maxim of the politics which results from such xenoeconomical analyses to run as follows: "capitalism against the human".

Against Hauntology (Giving Up The Ghost).

2008-07-20T00:56:00.000+01:00

A fashionable current in the territory where critical theory touches pop culture is a renewed, expanded, and re-oriented notion of the Hauntological. This philosophical concept originates in Derrida's Spectres Of Marx, but in its current formulation it is applied to a particular aesthetics of pop music, whilst carrying with it the echoes of its original political context. In a sense Hauntology's ghostly audio is seen as form of good postmodernism, as set against the bad PoMo of a rampaging retroism. Beached as it seems we are at the end of (cultural) history, it is certainly a seductive argument. By foregrounding the processes at the material level (sampling, versioning, deliberately invoking buried/false childhood memories etc) it is contended that such music comes to terms with the deadlock which we face, the inability to properly think the new as such, and makes of this condition something positive.

Set against this we might posit an explicitly nihilist aesthetics of pop music, which whilst in some senses would operate in a similar manner, would be crucially bereft of the quality of mourning. It is this regard that Hauntology links to a mood of melancholic defeatism in Western left wing politics. What is noticeable is that beyond merely foregrounding the processes of recording and thereby demonstrating the nature of our time, hauntological musical works are frequently acts of reverent mourning for some better time, for some golden age forever foreclosed to us (be it the Ghost Box label's pre-Thatcher era of socialist government from 1945-1979, or Burial's rave-necromancy). Some of the stronger pro-hauntology arguments have run along neo-Benjaminian lines, holding that it is not merely an act of mourning for a non-reclaimable past, but rather a way of redeeming time, of reaching across possible universes towards parallel utopias, thereby showing us the possible, rather than just the dead-end intractability of our present socio-cultural situation. If all pop music now is a process of mourning the past, (most commonly seen in the retro-necro indie scene, but clearly observable in dance music, hip hop and metal) then hauntology's emphasis on placing that process centre stage is the obvious logical move.

The problem for me at least, is that this is essentially a position of total defeat, absolutely of a piece with the comfortably melancholic disease which has afflicted the left since the 1990s at least. From this perspective, Hauntology is a cowardly move, lusting after utopias that never were, or which are now unreachable, a retreat into childhood/youth, just as trapped in the endless re-iterative mechanistics of the postmodern as the lowest form of retroism, merely in a hyper-self-aware form. In summary, haunology cedes too much ground to what it attempts to oppose, because of an a priori assumption: that there is nothing else, (at this moment in time at least) that nothing else is possible, and as such we are to make the best of this(and that the best we can do is to hint at the possible which remains forever out of reach- with all the pseudo-messianic dimensions this involves). I would position two strands of argument against this: Firstly (if we believe the hauntologists discursive a priori), as I have hinted at above, we might think a more nihilist aesthetic which seeks not merely to foreground the processes of postmodern audio-necromancy, but rather to accelerate the system to its ultimate demise, to speed up the rate of fashion-flux to a point of irredeemable collapse. Rather than an act of reverence, of mourning, of touching at impossible universes from a distance, this would be a deliberate and gleeful affirmation. Alternatively, we might consider Badiou's analysis of the emergence of the new, which would entail a more strategic examination of precisely where the pop-musical evental sites and historical situations exist within our current time: those regions which appear, from the in-situational point of view, to be marginal, and properly undecideable.

Theoretical Explosive Devices in an endless Asymmetrical War.

2008-07-16T17:27:00.003+01:00

This piece at Poetix reminded me of something highly intriguing which arose during my Philosophy Masters-- the issue of the misappropriation of (largely post-Marxist) theory by organisations and institutions entirely ideologically contraposed to it. One noteworthy example was the fondness of the Israeli Defence Force for tactics derived from concepts extracted from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, using their notion of smooth and striated space as inspiration for innovative battle stratagems leading their forces to advance through Palestinian walls rather than accept the pre-existing topology of sniper-laden backstreets (for more information see: http://info.interactivist.net/node/5324). More interesting is the incorporation of post-structuralist political theory into modern business/management schools. Even a philosopher as blatantly Marx-influenced as Antonio Negri is capable of utilisation, carefully stripped of revolutionary import and his ideas removed and redeployed in a modular fashion. Zizek touched upon this issue in his rather weak anti-Deleuzean book Organs Without Bodies, but although his point itself (that Deleuzean concepts often come uncomfortably close in certain lights to ideological vectors for capitalism, and that in many ways Deleuze is THE ideologue for late Capital) is not argued very strongly, as a provocation it potentially opens up new directions: Deleuze isn't really an ideologue for late capitalism, of course, but what if he was...?

What is necessary from my own perspective is a form of theory which is self-sabotaged from within- that already knows and anticipates incorporation and recuperation by late Capital, and in doing so gains part of its very efficacy as praxis via such incorporation. If the problem for Deleuze and Guattari or Antonio Negri was that for the former a tool-box of philosophy is liable to be de-systematised and used in perverse manners, and for the latter that a theory based around the politics of emotion slides too easily into a world of motivational speaking and team-building exercises (the end of Negri's Insurgencies is especially guilty of this, a hallmark card world of undeserved and dangerous optimism...) then a new approach to the problem of our contemporary socio-political times is required, shorn of faux-naive renunciations of responsibility. If "radical" theory is either ignored, constrained to discussion within academic departments, or grotesquely twisted/lifted out of context to be used by capitalism, then the solution must be to think the interaction between the political and the theoretical in a new articulation.

In a certain sense this theoretical paradigm would be entirely terroristic in nature, concepts as improvised explosive devices deployed in an endless asymmetrical conflict, wherein the border between theory and praxis is redefined. In a sense theory-as-weapon has no particular recourse to truth, or indeed to rational coherence, any more so than is required in order for it to become attractive enough to be reabsorbed by the engines of capitalism. If there is no outside left, if integrated globalised consumer-capitalism is as intractable as it appears, then the only position from which to act which remains is perhaps inevitably from the inside, acting on the same plane as Capital.

Falling out of love pt 1: Dubstep.

2008-07-11T18:26:00.003+01:00

Some interesting remarks over at The Impostume on the ineffable mediocrity of London Zoo, the latest album by post-dubstep avant-dancehall producer The Bug. I think Carl is right to dismiss the album as rather a disappointment, though the terms in which he phrases it seem to me to ring slightly false(authenticity). Of course he is correct to note the somewhat artificial nature of the interaction between performers and producer, and the way in which it has very definitely been produced with an eye on a third party audience of urban hipsters. Though many of the vocal performances on the record are half-hearted and lyrically unconvincing, I have come to suspect that the chief problem lies fundamentally with Dubstep itself. Of all the records I have heard in the last six months, I have noticed that highly acclaimed dubstep records have frequently begun to leave me cold, totally unengaged, where once I was rapt with excitement at every micro-twist and turn in the developing aesthetic of the genre. The problem with London Zoo is not the inauthenticity surrounding its conception, but rather the stolidly unimaginative nature of the contemporary dubstep demi-monde.

Two years ago or so I very much found myself in the position of a cheerleader for the scene, pointing to its unique centring on bodily affect within the club environment, the open ended nature of the generic category, the potentiality for fertile cross-fertilisations. Curiously, it is only now that certain kinds of genre miscegenation are occuring the genuine flaws in the entire edifice are made visible. Certainly in the crossover point between Germanic minimal techno and dubstep as evinced by the recent 2562 album, the sense of sheer joylessness is palpable, as if it were simply a matter of PoMo mechanistics that this particular combination of pre-existing generic territories ought to be conjugated together- the end result being some of the most numbingly duff music I have ever heard: too tight-arsed to be properly, infectiously danceable, texturally drab (unlike a lot of truly great minimal which has such finely burnished textural prettiness that makes what seems like a dry technique-for-technique's sake perfectionism actually work) and simply purposeless. Who, precisely, is this music for?

It is therefore curious to see K-Punk, the great dubstep-doubter for many years, finally coming around to the genre in a review for this album. K-Punk is correct to point towards the essential interpretation of dub-as-process rather than plastic rasta signifier, and to the primacy of the art of space-sculpting in any dub inspired music, but it is strange that he would choose a review of the 2562 record to make such a point- an album as flat and de-spacialized as any in recent memory. In his concluding remarks K-Punk points to the danger of minimal, like dubstep, becoming merely a connoisseur’s music, "tastefully uncluttered in the way that minimalist flats are". It is a great line, but what makes minimal techno of the 00s variety so great is precisely the manner in which it is exactly this, a matter of supremely refined taste, textures chosen like exquisite wood finishes or burnished steel, beautiful machines for living in, emblematic of an aesthetic of late-consumerist luxury, the distinction between a mediocre track and a great one being mainly an issue of these gorgeous surfaces. In the manner of high-end interior design (or an artfully chosen font indeed) this is not art which sets itself up in opposition to the current socio-economic situation- instead it delivers finely wrought pleasure within an ultimately limited format. The problem with dubstep is that whilst being similarly limited and similarly unchallenging to the status quo its pleasures are minatory in comparison.

Functional Brokenness: Post-metal, grime, and naming the unnameable.

2008-07-09T00:45:00.003+01:00

Kicking off this blog I would like to talk about the debut album by the Denton, Texas post-metal quartet Pyramids. This album certainly appears to have attracted an unnecessary (though perhaps understandable) degree of opprobrium. The first thing which needs to be said is that Pyramids approach the current metal fixation of breeding shoegazing sounds into the genre from a totally different angle from say Jesu or Nadja, the latter two bands taking a doom metal approach, Pyramids attacking the problem from what initially seems to be a black metal one. But then again that doesn't seem to tell the whole story either, as whilst there are indeed furiously pummelling (and yet characteristically puny) blast beats on the majority of tracks, it is also pretty readily apparent that Pyramids are not themselves from a straight up black metal background (the preponderance of decisively beautiful, indie-ish vocals puts firmly payed to that idea). What is most appealing about this album is that unlike Jesu or Nadja the components are never totally successfully integrated, each element (the blastbeats, the effeminately indie vocals, the skyscraping psychedelic guitar histrionics) standing slightly disjunct from the others (sometimes literally so as others have commented as drum machines appear to enter from a completely different song, tempo and all). In this way Pyramids totally reinvigorate the now somewhat shopworn concept of shoegaze metal, rendering it genuinely alien and surprising, foregrounding everything that is wrong about the concept in the first place. In so doing the album has an avant feel quite unlike anything else out there, and for all its obviously derivative parts, smacks gleefully of the new.

I have heard Pyramids described (in a pejorative sense) as "self-conscious metal". What is most interesting is that this is absolutely the case, not only that but it is self-doubting metal, which functions precisely by dint of its brokenness. In many ways this reminds me of listening to the first wave of Grime records- working in virgin territory still yet to be properly charted, the beats seemed to be falling apart in front of your eyes, snares striking up startling new positions far from the second and fourth beats of the bar, akin to the garage which bore it, and yet working to deconstruct the beat even further. A kind of cubism of the drum line was occurring, all the more thrilling for what it implied. And herein lies the chief issue with the avant-accidental, that it functions partly because the creators have yet to fix it. In certain respects this is a matter of technical facility and expertise, but I think a much more important factor is that the creators have yet to actually work out precisely what it is that they are heading towards. Hanging undecided, the music sits liminally in a position of pure potential. However as soon as the music is fixed, it loses its avant-materiality (the actual sound of the tracks shifts towards a genre conventionality) as well as the feel of potentiality (we now know what Grime is, it has been decisively fixed, and hence in some regards, ossified).

All this immediately brings the contemporary continental philosopher Alain Badiou to mind. Badiou attempts to think the emergence of the new and in so doing establish an ethics of truths, expressed as open ended generic procedures. For him the evil which might befall such procedures is threefold: slavishly reifying the event which initiated the sequence, (back to '88 hip hop being a paradigmatic example) betraying the event (the thermidorean moment where the entryist new pop of the early 80s shifts into the "adult", "tasteful" MOR of the Eurythmics and the event of punk is disowned) and forcing the naming the unnameable. It is the latter which appears most apposite here, the "unnameable" being to decide once and for all what the procedure was heading towards, which inevitably halts the process.