Re: [microsound] the black, the white, and the Mutek @ Stylus

["tobias c. van Veen" <tobias@xxxxxxxxx>]

dear dagmar,

Thanks for your heartfelt response. I can agree with you as one (slightly
more exhausted than I used to be) dancer to another.

You brought up a few points that are worth thinking of.

The first is sonic fascism. There is an interview I have where I expound
about this--with Alexis Bhagat, which will be published in the book _Sound
Generation_ which will be out this summer. Unfortunately, until it's
published I don't think I can share passages from it (as it sums up a few
thoughts rather nicely). However, I would probably say that:

> Fascism would be:  a group structure stronger than the indivduals, dictated by
> one guy.

--is actually, technically (and I am being rigorous here)
"authoritarianism."

I tend to move toward Deleuze and Guattari's definition of fascism, which
amounts to: the passion for abolition (the passion for self-destruction, but
with that, the destruction of all). Even then this definition is given in a
general questioning of our ability to _still understand_ the phenomenon of
fascism. I'm dragging out my favourite thinkers again, but Derrida speaks of
this as well--can we speak of fascism? Can we know what it means? Which
risks meaning: would we know it if we saw it? Can we recognise it? It seems
so much easier to recognise now, historically, what with the uniforms and
panache of the early 20th Century. What is fascist today? A serious
question.

I think a sonic experience such as dancing, for all its overtones of sharing
and bodily transaction, can quickly _turn_ from a slightly more open-ended
deterritorialization of "family" to a "chamber of resonance:" the familial,
authoritarian structures of Oedipus that began to resonate within mid-90s
rave culture (idealist fantasies such as PLUR come to mind). Within this
milieu was also a reaction by the techno counter-culture, even the Detroit
Afro-Futurists, who reacted with a dark take on the happy-Oedipus (what
Szepanski calls "pleasure prisons") of rave culture: this was for me the
height of the Cult of Plastikman. And in these events, and the events of
<ST> on the west coast, there was an engagement with a very serious element
of this dark side: almost something fascist. I think this is what Adorno
saw, although he couched it in poorly analyzed, essentialist, and borderline
racist critiques of entire movements of sound.

If you have access to FUSE magazine (art magazine from Toronto--it's on news
stands), the February issue has an article by me that explores this a
little, in terms of the work of <ST>. Once it has been out for a month I can
post it here.

Fascism also has another relation, something that occurs before the passion
for abolition that, although it is on the same trajectory, can
deterritorialise its dangerous result: and this is a kind of masochism, of
the kind Deleuze speaks of. This is a good thing. When I talk of the
"becoming-ear of the body," I hear this as a kind of dancing masochism, a
giving over of the body to sound, to the bodily transactions between dancers
(a network) you describe, which operates on a register other to language
(yet always, I would say, translatable, always already a translation--bodily
experience always already mediated). Deleuze talks of this in terms of
Sacher-Masoch, of the almost cliched masochistic practices of women with
whips etc, but as a way to reduce the body to a certain threshhold so as to
experience a minimum level of the body, of control, of all these impulses
toward mastery. This is a way of making yourself a "body without organs"
(taken from Artaud). I think rave culture might offer us a few invaluable
lessons about doing this.

Which is why it take the issues of dancing, of DJs, etc so seriously at
events such as MUTEK... because there might be more at stake than we think,
or can know how to think.

thanks for your thoughts.

best,

tobias

p.s. May I quote from your email for future reference?

tobias c. van Veen -----------
http://www.quadrantcrossing.org
http://www.thisistheonlyart.com
------------- tobias@xxxxxxxxx

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