antagonist

Luke Vibert and the Klang-zum-Tode

I'm not a big Luke Vibert listener. Even his critically acclaimed work as Wagon Christ or Plug never did get me going so to speak. The only album that created enough discomfort to keep me listening is his collaboration with Jeremy Simmonds 'Weirs'. Weirs was the final accumulation of a particular sound and ambience which to me started with Dick Raaijmakers’ ‘Electronic Music’ (1981), made almost mainstream by Richard D. James, epitomized by Mike Paradinas, especially on his debut album, and finally laid to rest by Vibert & Simmonds (Wisp is just an anomaly). This is the sound of machine melancholy, the austere aestheticism contained in the weird wiring together of machines and human emotion through frequency modulation and scruffy beats.

Vibert & Simmonds Path T'Zoar (Weirs)

The track listed here is not the best track on the album but it’s certainly the one that captures the particular sound I’ve referred to best. The track builds around a simple sine-wave in an almost pure form representing the steady pulse of a heartbeat sounding through an EKG machine. In aural culture we’ve come accustomed to this particular sound escalating into the flatline, the electrocardiogram that signals death. It has become something to be expected. As the anticipation of death, the pulse is a mnemo-perceptive effect as philosopher Jean François Augoyard classified it. Entranced by the precision of its military timing, we pre-hear death itself. 

The flatline is a test tone. What it tests, is the existence, or rather the presence, of vital signs. The lack thereof creates the monotonous, electronic, disaffected tonality of death. In other words, the test tone is a sonological rendering of being onto death, it is a Klang-zum-tode. 

Here it slows down, opening a dysphoric contemplative sphere of claustrophobic intensity. Locked inside, circled by a high pitched, almost eerie, wavelike sound of solidified serenity, backed by a testosteron fuelled beat, the listener finds something like solace. There’s comfort in the realization that machines and emotions can be grafted onto each other, that there is beauty in and beyond the ‘machinic’.

Zombyland

Zombies, memories made of decaying flesh. Their hauntic presence a material realism. Sarah Lauro writes a Zombie Manifesto in which “The zombie exists somewhere between the ontic and the hauntic”. She describes an evolution of the undead in terms of the living, Hence an ‘evolution from the Haitian zombi to the Hollywood zombie. 

She proposes the zombii: a conflation of David Chalmer’s p-zed with a Benjamian/Derridian zombie. An über-zombie. Zombii: ‘a zombie that does not yet exist’. 

From this we learn that zombies do in fact exist. She identifies some for us: we have capitalist zombies (Dawn of the Dead), communist zombies (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), viral zombies (28 Days)  and we might add vampiric zombies (I am Legend) or more recently auto-zombified legends of pop (MJ, as per Ian Penman).

The zombii Lauro proposes will canabalize the future. This Über-Zombie, a u-zed, is a spectral post-human swarm organism. Its lack of consciousness is what instills horror. Its Achilles heal is its brain, the cognitive center of our humanity and the zombii’s un- or a-humanity. 

The zombii, neither living nor dead, neither subject nor object, is an in-between creature of negativity. It is suspended in a negative dialectical tension without the possibility of release. The zombii cannot be sublimated, it is the undead aporetic appearance of horror in human form.

But we can take Lauro’s evolution one step further. A zomby is the material realization of the perpetual postponement of humanity. Its not post-human like Lauro’s zombii modeled after Haraway’s cyborg. It has no use for humanity except for nourishment. It’s neither conscious nor unconscious, it has no need for consciousness. It is a thing among things. To some that's the most horrifying prospect possible.

Kafka's Burrow and the Sonorous Body

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.  John Cage

She is in an unspeakable mood. I try to circumvent her, but her foulness is everywhere. When she moves, space reorients itself around her. I get a sense of vertigo when this happens. I feel sick.

She sighs and some air escapes the pressure between us. She sips her tea, her downcast eyes protecting me unwillingly from what will remain unuttered between us.

I am unable to speak, but still, words wring themselves from me. The silence she returns resounds of me, echoing inside me. It leaves me breathless. Hollow.

It’s not a matter of when a person listens but of where he listens. He listens to the resounding of something within himself caused by something outside himself. Some exteriority is inscribed in his interiority.

Nancy writes that his is a ‘sonorous body’, a body which is ‘always at once the body that resounds and [a] body as a listener where that resounds, or that resounds with it’ (8, my emphasis) . 

We're both listening then, at the same time, but more importantly in the same shared place or rather our listening creates our co-presence in sound. I've never listened this intently to her silence before. I must have never listened to hear before. Something crucial is approaching. Some secret is at stake.

Nancy is in search of an ontological tonality and asks: What does it mean for a being to be immersed entirely in listening, formed by listening or in listening , listening with all his being? (4)

What does it mean indeed? I don’t know, but I know this. I am hollow, her silent exteriority reverberates my interiority, the outside is enveloped by the inside. She is Echo, but I am no Narcissus. 

What reaches me, what extends from me to her and thus vice versa, what travels in res between us, is an echo, a renvoi, something that returns to itself, in itself, by itself. We are rebounding/resounding of each other. When we are ready to return to ourselves we have departed already, again, over and over.

At this point I recall Kafka's Burrow, a parable on the exteriority of the interiority or the interiority as exteriority, a tale of folding/unfolding, of invagination. The burrower obsesses with silence, his burrow must be silent. (There’s a thread in here of the relation between silence, safety and topology)

He is continuously haunted by the omnipresence of rhythmic sounds punctuated by a noise-like hissing which seem to be always arriving in an ever-increasing crescendo without ever reaching its destination.

As he sets out to investigate he is acutely aware of the burrow as a listening body but fails to identify himself as such a sonorous body. His burrow has become an anechoic chamber. He is reverberating with himself.

(What happens to his plan to transform his beloved Castle’s Keep into a hollow separating it from the walls surrounding it, creating an island within his burrow which is already an island?)

He longs to be in his Keep with nothing but the rushing of silence to accompany him. Poor thing. He fails to realize he is not listening i.e. ‘straining toward a possible meaning’ (6) at all. ‘Sense opens up in silence’, writes Nancy, our task, and the burrower’s, is to listen to the ‘silence of meaning’ (26).

‘Silence is an arrangement of resonance’, it is ‘exactly as when in a perfect condition of silence your own body resonate[s], your own breath, your heart and all its resounding cave’ (21).  

The animal deep inside its burrow is experiencing the absolute non-phenomenality of sound, its lack of intentionality. His fear of alterity and exteriority is evoked from his interiority. This animal's haunto-topological predicament consists of ‘acoustic oto-emissions’ (16).

Her silence mingles with these auto-produced sounds of my inner ear. What starts as an itch, excavates me while it burrows deeper into me. It sits in my stomach now, a dense mass of emptiness stretching me from the outside in. 

(Numbers refer to Listening by Jean-Luc Nancy (2007))

Little Creatures Moving in the Distance

Kafka is terminally ill. He is in constant pain, he is plagued by horrible spells. He stays in bed and reads Either/Or. A couple of days before he pens down the final entry in his diary, which we'll soon read, he copies a passage from The Pilgrim Kamanita, a Buddhist tale by the Dane Gjellerup, a tale of reaching nirvana:

Such a one, so long as he dwells in the body, is seen by men and gods; but after his body is fallen to dust, neither men nor gods see him no more. And even nature, the all-seeing, sees him no more: he has blinded the eye of nature, he has vanished from the sight of the wicked.

If it is not nirvana Kafka is interested in, what then? The vanishing act of man in nature Gjellerup describes, reminds me of the opening of Nietzsche's Über Wahrheit und Lüge im Außermoralischen Sinn or Houellebecq's exasperation with man's insignificance in The Possibility of an Island:

Look at the little creatures moving in the distance, look. They are humans.

But there's a significant difference as well. While Nietzsche and Houellebecq emphasize man's nullity and nullability, Kafka might have been interested in man's invisibility in nature after death. Once the dust has settled man disappears. His final being is to be amongst the things, invisibly. Nietzsche also reminded us, 'antespectively', of man's complete disappearance from the earth: after nature has drawn a few breaths all men, however smart they are, must die.

Death is inevitable: it happens whether you like it or not (K, Diaries). Shortly after the Kamanita passage, Kafka writes his own 'eulogy':

It is incorrect to say of anyone: Things were easy for him, he suffered little; more correct: His nature was such that nothing could happen to him; most correct: He has suffered everything, but all in a single all-embracing moment. (K, Diaries 1910-1923)

He's in bed, he's reading Either/Or. The final leap is only a couple of months away. Is it surprising that Kafka's last entry conjures up a spirit? Kafka's writing, which has accompanied him many nights, finally turns on its author:

More and more fearful as I write. It is understandable. Every word, twisted in the hands of the spirits - this twist of the hand is their characteristic gesture - becomes a spear turned against the speaker. Most especially a remark like this. And so ad infinitium. The only consolation would be: it happens whether you like it or not. And what you like is of infinitesimally little help. More than consolation is: You too have weapons. (K, Diaries).

After this, Kafka will write no more.

An Endless Space of Presence in Absence

Mirrors

When we touch a mirror’s surface and look closely we note the impassability from reflection to reflected. We are witnessing a sublime, unbridgeable rift, an aporia. Our touch never touches but asymptotically. Our reflection never reflects but hauntologically. Our bodies are there but not there, we are what Derrida calls ‘becoming-body’.

A reflection is a reflection of form; a mirror forms a reflection of us, but not us. Before a reflection can form, it is formless. This formlessness, this Bataillian l’informe regenerates forms infinitely, tirelessly, without exhaustion, without exhausting us (but supplementing us). The mirror is an endless space of presence in absence.

We touch it again and look closely, again.

Now we note the impassable is ‘pantaporos aporos'. A sublime multitude of bridges, a network of networks and routes, a pantaporia. Everything touches everything, but no shores, no ‘rims of the abyss to be crossed’ (Lyotard) are laid bare to discover. We are suspended over the abyss. Indefinitely.

(Aporos: unable to bridge, no route. Pantaporos, many ways to go through, to bridge, many routes. The phrase comes from Sophocles' Antigone.)

A Non-Review of Fumiyo Ikeda In Pieces Performance

A short review of Fumiyo Ikeda’s and Tim Etchells' dance performance “In Pieces” mentions that there was little joy in this piece, that is was boring. Utopia Parkway writes that the work quickly wears thin. I saw the piece this weekend and yes, there is certainly an element of boredom I had to overcome before I could take in Ikeda’s solo performance. But boredom is not what remains for me after having watched this fine performance. What remains is a sense of what happens between boredom and memory, between repetition and future things past and present. Let me explain.  

 First an impression of what I saw/what I took from it: Ikeda’s/Etchells' work titled ‘In Pieces’ starts with the voicing of a count. One. The count continues, stops, restarts again, repeats. The count is joined to a phrase. It can be embodied phrase, as in dance. It can be textual phrase, as in speech or it can be gesture, or a facial expression. Vocal phrases are conjoined and repeated, constantly shifting contextually (the body, movement, position on stage/the use of space). Ikeda masterly varies what is repeated.Conjoined phrases are sequences. Sequences are repeated. (The boredom of following a count up to one hundred something is stunningly effective to focus one’s attention on structure.) But there are more sequences. In the use of space between Ikeda and the wall, the only prop, besides a chair, a sense of repetition is constantly present. I got the sense that Ikeda painted the stage with movements in a geometric way. A pattern emerged. (The chair moved from left to front, then from the front, back to the wall but now to the right. It did not return to its original locus.) The count is not linear. Towards the end of the piece Ikeda switches to using the periodic table of elements to continue the count. But there is always the One. Always returning. The most powerful and risky part of the piece to me was when Ikeda explicitly joined the count to phrases consisting of memories: ‘something I like’, ‘something I forgot’, ‘the smell of Paris’, ‘the smell of London’. 

 Cultural analyst and philosopher Mieke Bal writes somewhere -echoing Derrida's work on iterativity and performativity - that ‘memory as mediator between performance and performativity operates on a mixture of temporalities’. Thinking about Ikeda’s performance that resonates exceptionally true. Memory and repetition figure prominently in this piece not unlike how it is at work in minimalist music. In the soundscapes of for instance Reich, the Eternal Return of the Same is ever present. Reich’s music has no beginning, no end, all is repeated, all is the same, what constitutes the music then is not what is played but what psychoacoustically is generated in the in-between of attaque and decay. That is where memory is carried over. To some this allows for the experience of eternity (Kurzawa, Repetition und Vergesssen). The instant, the moment is simultaneously actual and virtual, here and there, coming and going. These sounds are a ‘revenant’, a ghost which returns to us from the future to haunt our past in the present. Ikeda’s and Etchells' work might be the first time this theme of memory and repetition has so effectively been put to work on stage using voice, dance and mime in a solo performance. To Mieke Bal what happens when memory is mediated, operating on temporalities is what she calls the ‘staging of subjectivity’. And yes, some sort of subjectivity is staged be it as a a failure to subjectivate. Ikeda’s voice sometimes turns into a demand, a command: “Go away!’. But nobody leaves. A successful staging of failure. Wonderful. 

(Tim Etchells in his own words on In Pieces and Ikeda:)

Reassembling The Mirror of Production

Baudrillard, in The Mirror of Production, syncopated to Rousseau's beat, writes ‘everywhere man has learned to reflect on himself’. Like Narcissus in the pond, we are shackled by our own image. The shackles are the "scheme of production which is assigned to [man] as the ultimate dimension of value and meaning". He then conjures up Lacan's mirror. While man reflects himself in the mirror he comes to consciousness - this is emphasized by Baudrillard again and again - in the imaginary, which is to say that man's struggle for recognition of himself is constituted by production, labor and (use) value. The mirror, Baudrillard continues, is an operational mirror. It works, it labors to produce a ‘productivist ego’. In the mirror the organic body is recasted, thrown back into the world, reflected as an image- body, a screen-body, easily and eagerly replicated across the globe at breakneck speeds. What I like about the mirroring at work in the communicational sublime as I understand is that it retains this Lacanian/Baudrillardian notion of the mirror, its captivating and productive power. But, instead of the mirror of production being shattered as Baudrillard implores us to do, this mirror remains and when we look past the mirror, over our shoulders,we find the echos of objects and the simple further observation that we if we ‘irreduce’ them a sense of melancholy takes over.