"Fredric Jameson, among others, has articulated a notion of what might be called the “technological sublime.” If the concept of the sublime had previously been used to articulate the inadequacy that the human subject felt upon trying to represent Nature, the postmodern condition—in which Nature itself has been effaced—has produced a sense of the sublime in which humans find themselves up against their own creations, and find themselves wanting (34–35)".
Dale Chapman uses this postmodern conception of the technological sublime to come to terms with the relationships he sees between paranoia and the technological sublime in the genre of "DRUM & BASS" music. Eschewing the more Durkheimian style of analysis which has characteristically considered the role of electronic music in generating episodic forms of collective effervescence in response to local conditions, Chapman reaches for the utopian affect he believes prefigures possibilities outside of contexts of immediate consumption, paralleling, as they apparently do, the contingencies of an ascendant, global "trauma" culture.
In my view, there are strong parallels here with a recent tome, The Lacanian Left, insofar as the focus on utopian hope may have to do with which Lacanian approach one chooses to adopt. One can invest The Real with positive, even contestatory impulses, or choose rather to follow Laclau's more sobering, even pessimistic, assessment of the possibility of articulating a realistic counter-hegemonic moment from the atomised fragments of "society" (without necessarily evoking Lacan per se, this stance basically correlates with the more negative strand of Lacan's thinking). It was, afterall, a difference on this very issue that led to the falling out between Zizek and Laclau.
There is much to consider in this piece, but my only criticism is how the organisation of the argument tends to mimic the torsional movement of the breakbeats and so forth it describes. For example, a passing reference is made to Williams' conception of "structures of feeling", while no attempt is made to capture the "tragic", "emergent" structure of feeling that would have helped flesh out the argument in relation to cultural studies style forms of musicology. One can see this problem replicated in the latest issue as well, which foregrounds "public sphere" as its organising metaphor, and then does nothing to situate Habermas' text. This seems strange and disappointing as Habermas was addressing issues of communication, and indeed counter public spheres, which have much to do with the experience of contingency that Chapman et al refer to. Indeed, it is only because of the "emptiness" at the heart of the social constituted by communication, that one can even speak of the existence of forms of contingency that are not strictly disciplined by neoliberal commodification. I am not convinced that the positing of a "trauma" counter public sphere is either necessary or capable of capturing the utopian, contestatory impulses of the public sphere as indicated by either Williams, Habermas, or even Lefort. Chapman's focus places him much closer to Mark Seltzer's new historicist formulation of a pathological public sphere, which, perhaps not coincidentally, arose in opposition to the Williams school of cultural materialism.
Having said that, there is still much to savour in Chapman's efforts to offer a more expansive account of the mediation of ritual by not only symbols, but as an embodied, material, technological practice. And so here is a preview of his reading of the "technological sublime":
In this light, it becomes all the more important that we understand the ethical implications of a music that is largely disembodied in its execution and yet deeply embodied in the dancers that respond to it. The dancer—whose role it is to embody the intricate rhythms pounding forth from the speakers—has to attempt to take up a kinesthetics of the superhuman, has to bring his or her body up to the threshold of realizing the bodily implications of these radically disembodied rhythms. This, otherwise stated, comprises the sublime: the fractal-like complexity of the rhythms that the producer conceives of in the abstract have to be met by the imagination of the dancer, “imagination” in this context consisting of the dancer’s fundamentally embodied “envisioning” of the music. Insofar as rhythmic patterns form analogies of manipulating the body in time, the mechanistic virtuosity of the sequenced rhythms of drum and bass frequently results in a situation where the body is at a loss to respond to all of the music’s intricacies. In this moment of failure, the dancer’s body becomes enraptured through the ways that it has extended its capacities, and yet much of this rapture derives from the terror that it experiences in not being able to live up to the metaphors that the computer is generating.
It is important to note that there is a racial dimension to this notion of an embodied sublime. One of N. Katherine Hayles’s principal concerns in How We Became Posthuman is the question of “how information lost its body,” the complex process through which the Cartesian mind/body split has become radically reinforced in discourses about information technology and cyberculture (2). In doing so, she sets up a dichotomy between the contemporary posthuman and an earlier notion of the “human” that is based upon the hegemonic liberal humanist conception of subjecthood. However, Alexander Weheliye has taken Hayles to task for her failure to confront the specific ways in which subject positions outside of this Westernized humanism might complicate her historical narrative. For Weheliye, black subjectivity has always stood in problematic relation to that of liberal humanism, owing to the particular historical profile of a people that has often been systematically reduced to bodies, each one denied the status of personhood (21–6).
The challenge that black subjectivity poses for the posthuman manifests itself with particular intensity in the sphere of black popular music. Weheliye foregrounds the inescapable remainder of the body that resides in even the most radically synthetic forms of contemporary hip-hop and R&B, with technologies such as the vocoder or the digital sampler being used to smuggle the traces of embodied experience into the realm of the artificial (30–40). Against this backdrop, the context of the dancefloor in drum and bass magnifies this racialized dimension of an embodied posthuman in a powerful way. This music harnesses a specific tension between the suppleness of its appropriated Afrodiasporic stylistic gestures and the mechanistic coldness of its cyborg complexion. This tension carries an especially frightening expressive force, because the dance floor is a site that dramatizes the radical split between cerebral producer and embodied dancer.
The sense of anxiety that emerges from this approach to music-making—the exertion of absolute control coupled with its radical renunciation—comes to inform the aesthetic of the musical sounds. The intricacy of the breakbeats and the sense of anticipation that they create indicate one area where the cyborg collaboration of producer and sampler can create a situation of expanded consciousness reminiscent of the sublime. The ability of the musician to program patterns that would be beyond the capacities of a live drummer creates a situation where he or she has powerfully extended the body’s capacity. Moreover, the constantly shifting orientation of the beats—their seemingly inexhaustible variety—gestures towards one of the central themes of the movie π, that is, the mind’s effort to encompass conceptually the infinite randomness of the universe. However, in the cultural context of drum and bass, this gesture towards the sublime takes on a radical new significance: the potential meaningfulness of every gesture and every silence only serves to facilitate the paranoia of the listener, the sense that dark, nameless forces are constantly at work. Seen through this lens, the technological sublime loses its idyllic aura and takes on a more sinister aspect: the infinite capacity of technology to inflict damage. Technology loses its peripheral status and becomes the motor that drives societal norms, taking on a life of its own.
This more sinister face of drum and bass—its celebration of technology’s seeming alienation from the humans that create it—can be represented through numerous strategies, and it is important to take note of the particular strategy that is employed here. Parkes is a huge Japanophile; even though he admits to never having visited the country, he has developed a fascination with the sensibilities of certain aspects of traditional Japanese culture through his training in martial arts (Parkes).
One idea that seems to manifest itself extensively in Parkes work—particularly on this track—is his accentuation of space or silence as a palpable quality that resides between objects, gaining significance through the way those objects mark out space and time. In this instance, the discourse of Japanese aesthetic appropriation maps out against other discourses of the kind mentioned earlier: rupture, paranoia, and a suspicion of silence in a world view where the appearance of rest can never be wholly trusted.
In short, what “Ni-Ten-Ichi-Ryu” dramatizes is the capacity for drum and bass to powerfully evoke the terrifying specter of otherness. Here, as in other Photek tracks (“UFO,” “Hidden Camera”), or in darker compositions by Ed Rush, Panacea, or others, specific musical devices—rhythmic tension, silence, unsettling textures—are harnessed in the service of placing the listener in opposition to a nameless, terrifying presence located somewhere beyond the confines of the work.
Part of what we must do, then, to understand the cultural ramifications of drum and bass is to set the music within this larger context. Previous discussions of the music have concentrated upon its relevance to understanding urban postindustrial society against the backdrop of economic changes in 1990s Britain, or its role within Afrodiasporic conceptions of modernity (Reynolds; Gilbert and Pearson 79–80; Collin and Godfrey 243–66). However, the resonances of musical practices often exceed their immediate social context, and it is important to understand the ways in which the structures of feeling embodied in music can perhaps tell us things we might have initially thought beyond its purview.
The same productive excess that manifests itself in spectacles of destruction also gestures towards the utopian promise of technical innovation itself. As an aesthetic mobilization of this productive excess, the bleak wakeup call of drum and bass bears within itself the possibility of a more utopian world. In the expansion of the mind (and body) that derives from the experience of the sublime lies the potential for additional strength, for critical awareness. In its pairing of mechanistic rigor with neurotic, fragmentary rhythms, the works of this genre constitute their own self-critique. In the end, the hermeneutics of suspicion inspired by drum and bass might help to foster a conscious world-view in which we are ready for the contingencies to come.
Echo: A Music Centered Journal:
http://www.echo.ucla.edu/Volume5-Issue2/chapman/chapman4.html
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