<nettime> Scatter(ed) Dynamics (text): audio.culture.theory

[tim jaeger <tejaeger@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is a text that I wrote for the SUBSOL  (http://subsol.c3.hu/) e-zine.
It wasn't published (I couldn't revise it in time), but it's here an riffs
on a variety of topics, going from Walter Benjamin, to new electroclash
bands, to new audio and modes of production...I think it picks up where some
of what Kodwo Eshun writes about in his book MORE BRILLIAN THAN THE SUN:
Adventure in Sonic Fiction  leaves open for investigation, both in audio
practice, theory, etc....  It's most likely of interest to
practitioners/writers of any audio arts, sound art, and new music media.

Anyway, it's divided up into two parts, here's the first..Enjoy, and if you
have any comments I'd love to hear them!

-Tim Jaeger
thelast100years.com (in progress)

SCATTER(ED) DYNAMICS

Our current predicament/scenario/moment/etc. is an utterly discontinuous
one.  It is both a culture on hyperalert for the New, and one where old
traditions/rituals die hard. The Modern and Postmodern have converged
seamlessly, without clean fissures or breaks to differentiate between a
drive towards enlightenment/essences and an appropriated play-time where
things collapse in upon themselves and signifiers lack meaning. Or, more
specifically, the (mutated) subjectivities that are produced and activated
throughout this time period.

Walter Benjamin views a period like the one we're in now as containing both
past resonance and future predictions, as he wrote about in his Arcades
Projects. While I disagree with Benjamin in that there is no ?true history?
that can be uncovered by unmasking a bourgeoisie experience of history and
lived life, I agree that there are all sorts of
anterior/exterior/Para-histories that can be synthesized. There are
histories, all constructed, that emerge and demonstrate nonsynchronous forms
of mutation and growth (Felix Guattari, a psychoanalyst, and Manuel De
Landa, a historian/philosopher, mention two, Guattari's "auto-enriching"
relationship to the world that he speaks of in Chaosophy and De Landa's
"meshwork" model from his Thousand Years of Non-Linear History).

BEAVERS AND FISH

If this non-synchronicity produces anything, one thing is a culture based on
a "metamodelisation" that takes into account the variety of modeling systems
that already exist. These numerous histories/models (and I'm using the term
liberally here...thinking of Kodwo Eshun's Sonic Fictions that he writes
about in More Brighter Than The Sun, the numerous histories of genetics/matter 
and cellular replication, or even Deleuze and Guattari?s endless series 
of ?becomings? or where life-patterns of humans come to resemble those of 
animals ) can be (re)-inserted into the present in a way where causes and 
subjectivities are traced back through them, and a more aware Trans-Modernity 
is one that acknowledges its past, and seeks to make the inserting action 
transparent (cut, pasted, open-sourced) as part of the blueprint or code in 
constant creation.

?Becoming? isn't just relegated to humans morphing into the sleep/work
patterns of fish or beavers and other animals that Deleuze and Guattari
mention numerous times throughout Capitalism and Schizophrenia, nor is it
virtual humans coalescing into F/X'd cartoons. ?Becoming? becomes humans
exfoliating entire histories into themselves, their lives, their activities.

ELECTROCLASH

The Electroclash movement (or the ?new new-wave?) is a good case in point
(Combining aspects of ?80s new wave and more recent gritty techno, as well
as a punk-rock take on 80s high-fashion) of this: Metamodelers like
Ladytron, a band of 21st-century electro-Maoists, acknowledge our condition
of permanent "newness" that never seems to cease. "We are now seeing so many
significant changes in our lifestyle, which would have killed someone from
the 1950s. As a result, new things will become less important to people,
simply because there are so many of them. We can't stop it" they note from a
?01 issue of *surface magazine (a design mag).

They fabricate a perpetually Darwinian self-regulating machine that balances
itself out with propagandistic images culled from the recent past, where
badly designed product not of a pedigree-clone variety is eclipsed by Modern
AlphaProduct, "pared down," which becomes consumable and ready for purchase.
Mind and body-space are at a premium, and they find it worthwhile to target
the most fertile territory and cultivate in the least amount of time possible. 
They invite people to "imagine a future where less is really more.
Where a single new product unifies sofa, shoes, and the art of the walls"
as new, all-encompassing totalizing products.   Electroclash unities all of
these different movements, cultures, fashions, musics under one moniker. It
is very much a meshwork, and ?auto-enriches? previous movements for a new
generation.

WHY AM I SO VIOLENT?

An artist like Achim Wollscheid also embodies this ?metamodelisation?
technique, especially with his remix of "all" the participants on the
MASCHINELLE STRATEGEM compilation that the sub-division of the Mille
Plateaux record label put out. (Ritornell). In this work, he takes sections
of each of the participant?s tracks, and mixes it all together.  The remix
is an appropriate enough model. Questions that might be asked when embarking
on this kind of strategy might be: What's been left out? What can we make
different? How about this version? What about that version? Your "essence"
becomes my source material.  Watch out, you've been mulched. In Ladytron's
case, the scheme just needs to be effective. Our bodies and minds are
already prescient enough to accept varied foreign hosts with great ease.
This "non-linear" history becomes a concretization of underlying
auto-enriching schisms, feedbacks, and rhythms, not a linkage between dates
and events.  From the violent schiz comes the organized, not the other way
around.

MY TICKET TO CULTURE

Everything from Sherrie Levine's photo-interpretations to Ladytron's staged
revolutions functions as maps of causality that demonstrate this rather than
functioning as "individual(ized)" efforts. Both utilize previous 
artist/intellectual labor as capital which speeds up the process of
invention/re-invention/the new fall identity revolt sponsored by Calvin
Klein, etc.  For Guattari, any type of invention is dependent on this?The
freedom to articulate and express anything is dependant on the "dead" labor
of others, and documentation becomes a refrain working off of capital
recuperation and labor.  And just as production is dependent upon capital,
so is its double: consumption.  As such, there is no labor that is not
dependent in some shape or form on labor that preceded it.  There's no free
ride on the culture-train. Weightlessness is an illusion. Sorry, your ticket
expired long ago, but you have the chance to renew it. Which "labor-refrains" 
from the past we purchase and which fluxes of product and process we refer to 
reflect our subjectivities, of how we live, of our prosthetic relations to the 
outside world, and the capital that allows us to transform dead 
artistic/intellectual labor into newly enriched possibilities of expression.

Take the Lettrist Isadore Isou, working throughout the ?50s, ?60s and into
the present. Going back to quanta levels, he began to view letters and
sounds themselves as cultural-artifacts/elemental forms with revolutionary
potential (both as a link between music and musical effects (onomatopoeia)
and poetry, collage, as well as almost every other social field (cinema and
architecture), so it's reduced to an almost elemental form.   Isou's desire
for these new formations emerge around the same time as journalism and
wide-spread publications have slang and jargon coming into contact with
higher-speech idioms and modes of speech. This, as well as the French
literary group the Oulipians' struggle for building linguistic labyrinth of
escapes, mirror the drive towards a practice that struggles for new and more
diverse ways of speaking, coining language, of avoiding becomes a "dead
tongue, or "dead cells". Isou and the Lettrists synthesize new letter-strands. 
Isou's condemnation of other avant-garde works is not focused at the individual 
enunciations themselves, but rather in their failure to create adequate meta-
models which create a "perpetually new" state of living (one that Debord tried 
to articulate). This is where life itself, and all the quanta it contains, 
catches up with art, becomes trans-modern. Isou tries to get at a perfect 
model, one that digs down into the bowels of language itself.

MY LEAKY BODY

Isou?s experiments turn ordinary language into something different, foreign,
almost like science fiction.  Due to this science-fictionalization of life,
and the impossibility for a comprehensive narrative taking into totality all
accounts, at once, the word "performance" becomes insufficient as a
descriptive agent for those working in these realms. Replacing it with
"trajectory" or, better yet, "transmission," suffices to categorize the
activities of those like Antonin Artaud whose events bypass the simple
art-historical terms. His Rodez transmissions hypothesize by mapping the
body, the intimate abject, by electronically "leaking" information across
disciplines and time periods and becoming a brutalized human shell.
Likewise, our "everyday" actions are already labor-refrains and performance-
transmissions that are more caricatures of the roles we already play, of the 
ways we move, and of how we have been affected by both historical, genetic, and 
environmental determinants.

    Recent performances act more as "caricatures," or events where elements
of the daily are hypered via media. What is being transmitted, however, is a
code, a map that allows users of our performance-interfaces to navigate more
carefully the rest of our daily existences. We transmit these maps/codes so
that our everyday performances immediately become traceable within the
confines of this map. Semiotics meeting electrons. Chemicals meeting
mechanics. And so on. So that, like the Surrealists, with Dali's attempts to
compile catalogs and lists of phantasmal objects that refer back to the
mechanics of the unconscious and the Situationists with their rapid
constructions of urban ambiences and experiences wanted, we somehow save the
everyday, somehow make it more worthwhile, or at least more navigable, and
make the code more transparent.  Whether the clarification comes in the form
of a hyper net.performance, or other forms, they are, like Debord says, ways
to "read" other information in our immediate field of influence, ways to
engineer a new improvisatory lexicon which posits itself as another
possibility, another force of combinations that adds to, yet acts to counter
the present spectacle.  So it?s a difficult terrain to be in.

Cultural schizophrenia is, ironically, both a cultural luxury and a
necessity.  Switching-identities through fashion, psychoanalysis,
subconscious dream-states that are in continuous fluctuation, etc. require
currency and capital to facilitate, yet it is also a natural semitropical
drive starting at the cellular level where the individual cell loses its
borders, and becomes more amorphous.   It?s chemistry in motion. Our new
21st century Schizophrenia is a product of the culture of the copy, the
culture of the cut. Like Sherrie Levine and Ladytron.  Cutting and pasting
constantly, endlessly, maddeningly.

SAMPLE MY PROCESS

Misunderstand Marx talking about this process leads me to this: "a ?cut-
which does not serve the purposes of labor is useless. In addition, the cut
falls prey to the destructive influence of natural forces. Labor in this
case acts as an all-consuming force which consumes other instruments, other
products of labor."

Just as a Powerbook is a processing-machine, and Max/MSP is audio software
with which users can program, code, and construct their own virtual
instruments, combined they become meta-samplers and schiz-machines. Max/MSP
consumes other instruments only to turn them into new, different instruments
for others to use and produce new instruments with. The same with
turntables, or small CASIO keyboards spitting out sampled rhythms from old
New Order records. Instruments beget instruments beget instruments beget
more instruments. Meta instruments. The dead labor of yesterday is the
source material of today.

VIRAL CITIES

The CUT then becomes a fragment-in-space, a fracture waiting to be adhered
artificially into a new point in time. The changes are memetic, as foreign
hosts/bodies are effortlessly coagulated with existing material.  Nostalgia
is obviated because the timescale that the operation takes place in is
instantaneous, and virtually untraceable... Literally as well as
figuratively, the CUT is in a new sort of space, a temporary space, and
programs like MAX/MSP provides the chance to make artificial cuts at the
most advanced level, to personalize your "cut" and make it available to
others. like surgeons perfecting techniques and then putting them onto the
mass-market for free.

Even in cities themselves, the metaphor of a Virus is prevalent now that the
streets have been fully planned/designed as areas of consumption, as
pathways to capital flow. The virus areas, the areas the Situationists were
trying to rekindle as abject to capitals' flows and promises, urban spaces
that haven't been necessarily colonized, or attempting to turn the ones that
have over into public spaces where outré images and ideas can 'flow': where
terms that aren't in use can prosper again.

We have to transcend these terms to find ways to highlight needs and desires
that aren't created/produced/synthesized by the capitalist machine: in other
words, we need new terms and inserted histories to counteract the barrage of
omni-present spectacle hype, where money morphs into image-flow and
(re)production. If we can't find spaces without, public-spaces, un-colonized
spaces, then we will re-frame spaces from within and act as a Brechtian
power-up to the otherwise rigid segmented spaces that constitute reality.

Tim Jaeger

(E-mail me for specifics on sources, books, records, texts described at
tejaeger@xxxxxxxxxxx if interested...)

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