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

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

dear Dominic,

You've caught me with the largest of all questions ;) Nice work.

I think that all experience that claims to prioritize the unknowable as that
which should be exonerated--whether called "mystical" or "religious"--bears
a structuration of hierarchy, of systems of oppression. I think Nietzsche
has got this critique down pat. Of course the problem with Nietzsche becomes
his own violence, his own hierarchy, for he only effected a simple reversal:
which is why the answer and the very framing of your question is extremely
difficult.

For you propose that there is a "thing" to be referred to, whereas the
"unknowable" cannot be seen as "same" or "thing"--it can only be that which
is neither and yet that which is possibly also both, insofar as we could not
recognise the two in their simultaneity.

The same problematic underlies the following question; is the unknowable
inherently chaotic? If the unknowable is unknowable, then it is
fundamentally unknowable. For we claim to know chaos.

But this may be only a claim. Can we say, now, here, that we understand,
that we know, "chaos"?

I think your last question jumps a few registers to the normative, and
overall I would tend to agree with the gist of what is said here, at this
point: that humans tend to desire a mastery and a control over chaos, and to
perform this mastery and control with a discourse of the mystificatory, and
that this discourse is essential to what we have come to name as "fascism,"
which is something altogether different from a simple authoritarianism, but
includes, or showcases, a deep desire for self-abolition, for apocalypse,
for the limit as that which is death.

Thus--if we return to planet earth for a second and to music ;)--the
question as to metered vs. non-metered, or "basic" vs. "complex" rhythmic
patterning, should not be held in a system of oppositions, as if one was
inherently privileged over the other, as if one held a privileged relation
to that which, as we have seen here, is entirely problematic in its
self-assertion as being privileged, however we chose to undermine or analyse
that which is being signified as the privilege ("religious" experience,
"mystical" experience, the "unknowable," etc).

Our attentions should not be focused in finding an *essential* relation
between a patterning of sound and that which is privileged--for there is
none--but in tracing the historical conditions of discourses that pattern
sound into hierarchies of privilege, that condition sound into becoming
systems of sonic oppression. Every sound, every sonic patterning, holds the
potential, in its structuration, of being used to territorialise or
deterritorialise (that "dream box" you spoke of v. the wide open plane of
that which exceeds our knowledge). If we can understand the interplay
between the constrained and the limitless, we can begin to understand the
way desire and power traverses the politics of sound in certain singular
conditions. 

Which is to say that I agree with you that certain patterns of sound, in
their discursive structure--which also extends to their economic
structuration, their hierarchies of admission, social rank, etc, such as at
a large UK club--are nothing more than dream boxes, but boxes that are
nonetheless always leaky and always open to the possibility of the sonic
echoing forth from the box and exploding its walls through a perverse dream,
a nightmare perhaps, an unexpected dream: as if that box was then
transmutated to perching on the edge of an abyss, an unknowable plain, that
is not in reverence to a more authentic experience (for it is also the
possibility of violence and the reterritorialisation of an even worse
hierarchy), but simply has its limits moved to the horizon. And in a sense,
we are always in some dream-box or another: these boxes are necessary to
maintain the conditions of life we live in today, and perhaps, what we would
call our "sanity." The trick is to constantly be on the move, and moreover,
to recognise and flee the most dangerous boxes--to not get "boxed in." And
of which there are many today, quite obvious ones in fact. But the way these
boxes touch each other, where points of each box touch every other point of
every other box, is another discussion. It is enough to say here that the
flight from one box becomes a very important task.

This answer is highly informed and drawn from Deleuze. There are other ways
to think this.

Thanks for your perfect questions. There is much more to discuss here, as
always, but you've hit upon all the difficult points.

best,

tobias

> 
> Tobias,
> good and interesting response!
> do you think that a "religious experience" and a "mystical experience"
> refer to the same thing?
> also, were you saying that "the mystical, the unknowable" is inherently
> chaotic, or that humans perceive it that way and then try to order it with
> religious meaning?
> just curious.
> 
> ~Dominic
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> Subject: Re: [microsound] the black, the white, and the Mutek @ Stylus
>> 
>> dear Nicolas,
>> 
>> I have a question as to your argument. You begin by arguing that
> repetitive
>> music can lead to a kind of "mind control," a "dream in a box." Later on
> you
>> tie this into the possibility of reinforcing an anthropocentricism, in
> fact,
>> to a desire for setting "rules," and thus, linked to various modes of
>> fascism and authoritarianism.
>> 
>> You oppose this to experimental music, which has a "complex rhythmical
>> organisation." The effect of this complexity is that "you can only feel
> it,"
>> and by this "it" you mean "an order that includes you but that you cannot
> be
>> aware." You then tie this "order" into "god," "religious experience."
>> 
>> Is not that which defies explanation--the mystical, the unknowable, of the
>> chaos that nonetheless contains meaning--the very *basis* of religious
>> hierarchy, and ultimately, the self-destruction of the order to chaos that
>> is fascism?
>> 
>> The mysticism of the Nuremburg rallies; the magical uses of uniform and
>> symbology--the sense that, in the case of National Socialism, its very
>> essence was a part of a large, unknowable destiny of the Fatherland that
>> simply could not be explained. And that this must be *mastered*, but only
>> from the unknowable (again, Pynchon's description of the double-helix
>> mineshafts, of the Schwarzkommando all come to mind here). Thus, from the
>> chaos of the unknowable, comes the mastery and control that drives the
>> magical experience of fascism, thus:
>> 
>>> Experimental music is a way to push the limits of the thinkable, to look
>>> deeper into chaos and give it a meaning.
>> 
>> I would tend to believe that one of the most highly anthropromorphic and
>> humanist constructions is the entire power structure of mysticism, i.e.
>> "god" itself--at least in the manner of which you describe, of giving
>> meaning to chaos; that one of the most powerful marks of an
>> anthroprocentrism is the drive to give meaning to that which is chaos--to
>> that which *is* unknowable, to that which is wholly other, and yet always
>> translated.
>> 
>> What if I were to say: let chaos be chaos, and let us dance to the
>> asignifying rhythms between milieus?
>> 
>> One of the mistakes that Deleuze and Guattari identify in their chapter on
>> Rhythm is that of associating rhythm with meter. I would argue that both
>> experimental music and rhythmic-based music offer the potential for sonic
>> deterritorialization, just as both contain the underlying conditions for a
>> closed line of flight, a fascist experience, a stratification into
> hierarchy
>> and oppression, and that what is perhaps most frightening is the (perhaps
>> unwittingly) dangerous argument here: that one exceeds the other in that
> it
>> is in touch with the creative power of the mastery over chaos, and that
> the
>> other is somehow reductive and *essentially* dangerous, and thus, must be
>> excluded and denigrated, to bow to the higher, mystical order of the
>> unknowable rhythm. This is a basis for extreme violence.
>> 
>> best,
>> 
>> 
>> tobias
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> 
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> 
> 
> 
> --- Dominic Lanzone
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tobias c. van Veen -----------
http://www.quadrantcrossing.org
http://www.thisistheonlyart.com
------------- tobias@xxxxxxxxx

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