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

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

dear Dagmar,

Thanks again for your points. You draw out difficult questions. I fear that
I will have to be reductive, so as to avoid a neverending discussion of
certain points, and at that, to avoid filling everyone's inboxes ;)

As I mention in the other email on this thread, I think where our words have
touched have sparked a few areas to begin thinking about what is at question
here, but I am worried about carrying on an argument that would attempt to
totalise its sides to truth. Thus I will attempt to make clear a few points,
then perhaps we can move on to other things entirely.

1. I like the way you talk of the wave. Believe it or not, I spent a good
part of my childhood in Maui, and I am also an avid (free)skier, so I can
well understand what you mean--or, what one feels. I'll get back to this in
a second.

2. I tend to be suspicious of the Frankfurt school's rationalization of
fascism, especially as a "clever manipulation." Perhaps because of the
necessity to consider the entire telos of a dialectic, of what is implied in
this critique, of manipulation, of an ideology.

3. I'm not sure if one can bracket the "ego" (which would be a process of
phenomenological reduction), if one can say to have an "ego,"
phenomenological, Freudian, or colloquial. Thus I am not sure if there is a
"willing loss of control" (as if we ever had "control"--which you bring up).
Perhaps a pragmatic approach of a threshold; there is something other that
occurs when one dances with sound. Inscriptions of sonic memory in the body.

4. Oedipus. I am referring to hierarchical structure here by the name of
Oedipal structure, perhaps phallogocentric structure, and that rave culture
came to embrace such a structure through PLUR, which is to say that through
the culture's attempt to codify its openness it reinforced and delimited its
boundaries and established a static territory and a system of hierarchical
positions.

5. Masochism is meant here in the Deleuzian fashion: an open, affirmative
reading of Sacher-Masoch. Masochism, as you point out, as the attempt to
make oneself a body without organs. Yet masochism--again as you point
out--risks the hollowed body. (I'd also like to add: masochism perhaps risks
the slave; this is to extend and perhaps engage Deleuze on this point). I
think you describe this quite accurately in the fish-eyed ravers. Perhaps
here we can pose this extraordinary thought, at least for me, I think it
opens up a way, here:

Is dancing not close to surfing?

Ocean and sound.

Becoming-curve of the wave; becoming-ear of the body.

Yet: so different. 

Dancing, together, in a group--there is something other, in the formation of
a sonic social, than the relations formed between surfer and water.
Microfascism can form anywhere, but the formation of it in the motion of
surfing is difficult to believe (perhaps in the structures of patriarchy and
onshore violence--but this is another discussion). The surfer, as you
mention, would get tossed into the wall and drubbed across coral if s/he
attempted to fight a wave. Yet is there not also the wave that one should
not have dropped? The unexpected wave, the ocean rearing its head as if it
was out to revenge itself? And finally, the tsunami?

Dancing, in the moment of the dance itself, insofar as it is a moment
itself--we've already heard about its imminent network of bodies--holds a
potential for abolition when conjoined with an entire structuration of an
event that turns from open, temporal, and temporaneous to codified, even in
its *resistance* to the "mainstream" codifications (thus revolutions can be
fascist). I don't think this can be attributed to drugs, as if drugs were
the essence or catalyst of this danger. As D&G say, "so many things can be
drugs." Drugs are as double-edged as any other thing (or as any word). The
BwO that burns itself out (like Artaud, like all those "writers" with their
ailments--and Deleuze too, don't forget!) is not necessarily "negative;" it
is just that so much caution is necessary for making oneself a BwO. And that
caution was not a patiently considered quality of apocalyptic, anarchically
oriented, hedonistic and masochistic rave culture, in the participation of
its events; yet in other ways, caution was necessary for the event planning
(Angela Roberts has a great paper noting the incredible organisational
skills that rave promoters have: is this not an organisation of space and
time to allow and open this space of the sonic? A pragmatic preparation:
scouting warehouses, neighbours, police patrols; double-infolines,
checkpoints; cryptic flyers and directions; cutting locks, jacking power;
the distribution of techno vinyl; the event; its aftermath). This is what I
will say for now, rather polemically, except to note that I have spent some
years thinking and experimenting with this situation. It is difficult to
think of. It will take some time.

Again, thanks for your thoughts. I think I have fairly exhausted myself on
the topic, especially given the "testing ground" nature of these posts, and
will take a few minutes to grab a drink and move on to a few other things ..

best,

tobias

> Hm...............
> 
> Maybe I should emphasize that I was not talking about mega-raves.  I've been
> to the
> Love-Parade once (as it was already BIG) and it was nicer than I expected
> although
> already quite commercial. It still had its good moments.  But that's not the
> platform of experience I was talking about.
> 
> "tobias c. van Veen" wrote:
> 
>> 
> 
> I wrote
> 
>>> Fascism would be:  a group structure stronger than the indivduals, dictated
>>> by
>>> one guy.
> 
> You wrote:
> 
>> 
>> --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).
> 
> Maybe I should add again the sentence I wrote afterwards: "But here every
> individual was responsible for the groove to develop..."  There is a willing
> loss of
> control but at the same time -- at least for some people -- the feeling of
> being
> responsible for the wave to develop.  And that means you don't completely
> forget
> yourself, you put parts of your ego in brackets, forget about it for some
> time, but
> other parts of oneself are all the more active.
> 
> I tend to the concept of fascism as explained by the Frankfurt school, as an
> outcome
> of the dialectics of enlightenment.  In a culture that has emphasized reason
> and
> rationality to such an extent as to exclude everything irrational as
> potentially
> insane, a certain sensual and emotional starvation takes place.  And that
> starvation
> was exploited by fascism, which gave people something to identify with
> emotionally
> as a mass movement.  A clever manipulation.  But that doesn't mean that every
> phenomenon which is non-rational and based on a unit larger than an individual
> is
> fascist.
> 
>> 
>> 
>> 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).
> 
> I am not sure I know what you are referring to.  Could you explain where
> 'Oedipus'
> comes in here?
> 
> 
> 
>> 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.
>> 
>>  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.
> 
> In what sense is 'giving over the body to sound' masochistic?  Couldn't it be
> that
> our culture is so much organized around the notion of being in control that
> instances of giving oneself over to less control is wrongly associated with
> masochism?  In what sense do people suffer when they form the wave?  (By the
> way,
> there is control but on a different level; when a surfer rides on the wave
> (the real
> one, I mean here, the one made out of water), he doesn't give up control; on
> the
> contrary, he has to be quite active with every muscle to stay on the board,
> but on
> the other hand, he is aware that it won't do to ride the wave without
> cooperating
> with it, negotiating with it; his body, the board and the wave form something
> which
> D/G call an agencement.  If 'being in control' means, a surfer tells the wave
> what
> to do, then of course, he's lost).  There is a sense of expenditure, yes, of
> spending oneself -- but it doesn't amount to abolishing oneself, because it is
> a
> temporary experience, framed within a situation and a time set.  If there is a
> drive
> towards body without organs in the negative sense -- D/G talk about the
> drugged
> body, the burned out and hollow body -- that is not due to the dancing and the
> wave
> but due to the drug addiction which also took place (and eventually ruined the
> whole
> techno thing for me, too many burned out people, kiddies with fish eyes).  But
> that
> happens because of the drug situation, not because of the music or the
> dancing.
> 
>> 
>> 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?
> 
> Of course, no problem.
> 
> Dagmar
> 
>> 
>> 
>> tobias c. van Veen -----------
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> 

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