As a follow up to a posting from last year on Andrew Murphie and Ross Harley's "Australian Electronica: A Brief History", here's a quick alert about an interview with Clinton Green who "spent three years excavating, researching and compiling the Shame File Music’s latest release, Artefacts of Australian Experimental Music: 1930 – 1973", an archival effort that has brought "an antipodean perspective to the documentation of early electronic music".
The photo above is of Jack Ellitt whose Journey #1 is included in the "Artefacts" collection
"An excerpt from Ellitt’s ‘Journey #1’ opens Artefacts—its breathtaking collision of cut-up sounds, including the portentous sound of a booing crowd, perfectly demonstrates the fierce exploratory overtones of the collection. “Jack Ellitt’s music has been a real startling find, he’s basically unknown to most people. Very few artists were doing anything like this in the 1930s; it’s quite a startling bit of history on an international scale. Ellitt recorded directly onto film stock, because tape was so rudimentary at that stage. Tape recorders were basically impossible to edit or do any sort of decent long length recording on. ‘Journey #1’ has an incredible amount of editing going on, there were a few other people who were doing a similar sound collage at that stage, but nothing as way out as this recording."
1. jack ellitt "journey #1" excerpt (early 1930s)
ellitt grew up in sydney in the early decades of the twentieth century, where he met the young new zealander len lye (who would later become an important avant-garde film maker and sculptor). ellitt later worked with lye on his films in london from the early 1930s, when ellitt began to create musique concrete compositions on tape. he wrote, somewhat prophetically of contemporary sound art practice, in 1935, "when good recording apparatus is easily acquired, many people will record simple everyday sounds which give them pleasure. the next step would be to mould these sound-snaps into formal continuity" ellitt worked in film for many years and on retiring returned to australia in the 1970s where he continued to work on his sound compositions in private, eschewing attempts from the likes of stockhausen to contact him.
This post is a kind of companion to "Becoming Animal". With an open acknowledgement of the source (Tobias's commentary on dancecult), the hypothesis follows: becoming-alien, its *play* on the alien allows us to infiltrate in-between, say, the identity operations of Marxist phenomenology that devalues and sees as "alien" the processes of commodity fetishism (and/also, as Lefebvre would put it, the technics of the machinic object as alienating production) and the AfroFuturist practices, rhythms, technologies, musics and (contra/sub)cultures that embrace, twist and play (with) the alien. There's a lot of bracketing in this last sentence as there's a LOT to think about here, namely quite a challenge to certain fundamentals of leftist politics *as well as* philosophies that rely upon the purity of the phenomenon (which is to say most of analytic philosophy, phenomenology, I guess what Derrida calls "metaphysics").
An interesting way into this for Derrida fanatics might be to consider Derrida's deconstruction of Marx's phenomenology in _Specters of Marx_ that not only shifts ontology to hauntology (from the phenomenology of presence/absence to hauntology of specters) but reveals a similar opening of the alien. The alien is no longer that which *negatively* alienates, distances us as pure subject from work or the pure object from its fetishistic character. The alien precedes the subject and the object, and its meaning is displaced from a negative process of "alienation" to one which is incorporated as part of the process of becoming. "Alien" here can be thought as an otherwise "other" though now displaced from Eurocentric discourses of the "other" which deconstruction is prone to.
To address the question of violence. Here, the alien is liberated through a certain *violence of reading* -- like any great philosopher's reading -- which deconstruction reveals as inherent to any kind of reading, but I think reading violence here means reading liberation -- though again, the idea is to think neither in positive/negative (good/evil) terms of morality, judgement, value, and so on. We are talking about FORCE. The unsettled question here is ethics. FORCE in the name of what. Ghandi exerted FORCE or violence upon his body (fasting). His "nonviolence"falls under a FORCE of inertia enacted upon the state (mass hunger fasts). "Nonviolent" protesters today chain themselves to things and go limp: a violence is enacted in their immobility. I would question, in a way, their adherence to "nonviolence" as a _pure ideology_, though I fully grasp its tactical or even strategic necessity, its value as a media discourse. But as for ethics, Derrida spent his later life working through exactly this problematic: how to read the affirmation of deconstruction as "ethical", ethical to what or whom, and in what meaning of ethos / ethics.
Now, at least in this context, inserting AfroFuturism into the mix allows the alien to take on a pragmatic role when answering the charge: "In the name of what does one perform such a reading, by claiming that that which alienates us is a part of us? For isn't there obviously alienated work and forces of appropriation?"
The response begins with: in the name of what has come already. In the name of AfroFuturism. Of course it might be the case that a scholar such as Adorno (whom otherwise I deeply respect) would critique AfroFuturism outright. This is one possible response, but one that is deeply troubled (let's sidestep such critique for a second). Let us say that if one doesn't wish to negate an existing culture outright, one then has to *deal* with it and *deal with* how it has *worked* for certain people, dammit. Just like hip-hop's the Game -- how it has created an economic empire, form of creative expression, political and social force, media empire, for the afro-disapora where there was little -- it can't simply be written off as "representing" or "furthering" mysogyny and violence.
And the question above can be thought in terms of technics or technology in general: that it comes not from outside to overtake the human and render us as slaves to the machine, but comes from us, is part of us to begin with. And unlike Hegel it will and never can be re-synthesized properly; nor does it merely belong to certain class interests (as if classes could contain the dissemination of "alienating technics" today!). Which does not mean either that passive acceptance of pro-technological discourse is the answer (i.e. the California Ideology, Web 2.0, utopian technocracy in all its forms and twists with late-capitalism), but rather, what is called for is an attentiveness to a slightly more complicated form of infiltration and intervention, a reappropriation of the technics -- ah, let us play or spin here on the play of the Technics 1200, exappropriated for readjusting the rhythms of music and moving bodies -- which is where one finds AfroFuturism.
Such an answer of 'what has already come to pass' is the subtle counterpoint to every enunciation that is more or less commonplace in deconstruction, "in the name of what is to-come [à la à-venir]..." -- in the name of the future, which of course is part of the gesture: for what monstrous creations AfroFuturism has birthed --!!-- and from which we know not what the future can bring. I take the cue here from Kodwo Eshun, in _More Brilliant Than The Sun_ -- really I am just riffing on his work some 10 years ago now -- who writes of Detroit Techno (as well as jungle and strands of hip-hop and black science fiction such as Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delaney) as AfroFuturist: that is, of the Alien dream, going Offworld, the sci-fi alien embodiment. Escape velocity from postslavery, not as "escapism" -- ie a fantasy -- but as effective escape hatch. Like hiphop's The Game, Black Wallstreet, going Alien is counterindustry. It's not a theoretical presupposition, but rather comes out of (Detroit) technoculture itself, notably in the members of Underground Resistance, from Drexicya (aquatic race of Afrofuturist ocean dwellers that are the 'black mermen', born from black slaves thrown overboard off the slave ships of the Atlantic -- halfway between Africa and Jamaica, one could say) to DJ T-1000 (the assembly line, the AfroFuturist black body as machinic, nameless, identity displaced into machinic repetition) -- or Jeff Mill's X-101 series ("rings of saturn"), the entire Axis label.
Eshun pushes Going Alien a bit over Getting Real, something of a polemic, though I think anyone far into hiphop knows that hiphop always gets Surreal at its most creative points -- think Outkast's 1996 album ATLiens, which opens with "Are you alien...?" on one track, or "Greetings, Earthlings....". Of course Dr. Octagon is key here, Kool Keith, but so is the uber_realism of NAS or Mobb Deep, a kind of displacement of the steet into counterimaginaries that become increasingly offworld (think NAS' track off album 2 where he rhymes from the point of view of an intentionally misfiring gun). And of course DJ Spooky wrought AfroFuturism not only by bringing dub into the hiphop equation, thus illbient, the tripped out sphere of the spook, but by remixing theory and sociopolitical realms, a kind of transversal spook flitting in-between the dancefloor and the lecture hall...
Going Alien is a way to move postracial, think postracial, post identity politics, for we can all go alien, as Sun Ra invites us to, as Underground Resistance calls out for us to join in "deprogramming the progammers" -- as RAMM:ELL:ZEE writes, if it's about race, then who's racing? RAMM:ELL:ZEE, one of the early graf writers and noted MCs (he's in the movie WildStyle), took graffiti burners, armed them, then took them off the wall, and animated them three-dimensional into letter racers [ check it -- http://gothicfuturism.net ].
Going Alien is everywhere... we're living it... it's the way to handle, one another tip, alienation... and everywhere an inverted twist to Marx's alienation, which becomes here the -- in Hegelian terms -- reappropriation of the alien not to synthesize identity (self-conscious through overcoming alienation, commodity fetishism, etc.) but rather, embracing alienation to become alien. We are inseparably machinic now, we cannot disassociate as Marx envisioned. In fact AfroFuturism points toward strategies interior to alienation: Alien Nation, which communicates along the levels that UR proposed... Nation 2 Nation, Galaxy 2 Galaxy, Universe 2 Universe...
I post as well some surprisingly lucid commments from disinformation about Jodi Dean's work on the relation of the alien to conspiracy theory. If belief in alien abductions, (as per Tobias's riff on Afrofuturism), and especially the eco-friendly kind described by Harvard Professor John Mack, and featured in last night's documentary, Stefan Alex's "Experiences"), then should we really just take their adherents to task for failure to acknowledge realism? If it is something other than liberal humanism that fosters the solidarity of a critical posthumanism, than is there not something valuable in this as well? Mack may have helped confer some legitimacy on alien abduction experiences, but Dean points out how this occurs in tandem with the contingency of modern communication: a movement from consensus to virtual reality, in the sense that universal narratives become relativized (by gesturing in this postmodern direction, Dean predictably became exposed to accusations of postmodern relativism by academics, who must have been motivated, at least in part, by a desire to preserve their privileged authorial voice, which secured their tenureship; much like those journalists who attack bloggers). In other words, how is the belief in alien abduction qualitatively different to Christopher Priest's imagining of a world where identity has to be renegotiated in relation to migrant experiences? Unsurprisingly, Kodwo Eshun reappears in the clip from "Martians and Us", discussing Priest.
One final piece of synchronicity in tonight's posting session. Manuel DeLanda is renowned for "War in the Age of Intelligent Machines", and this lecture (only one part of which I have posted here) is useful in clarifying the meaning of Deleuze's "geology [sic] of morals". I say this in light of the possibilty that it may in principle be distinguished from some of the developments foregrounded in Laurie Anderson's work (to say nothing of the comments by Deleuze's contemporary, Derrida, that the insidious emergent forms of bioterror will one day almost make people nostalgic for the visibility of the style of attack adopted in 9/11).
It is interesting to consider whether an earlier understanding of biocultural implications in part motivated DeLanda's own switch from his early path as a "transgressive" filmmaker (Nick Zedd even mentions him in his book on the subject). What future for the spectacle when the real effects would be felt beneath the threshold of visual perception? I resisted posting the youtube clip from the documentary Snuff, even though its makers appear sincere in their motivations, in part because of the point I'm making here. Isn't it incumbent on the filmmakers to situate their investment in such material with reference to the ready availability of websites such as ogrish.com? What effect does this have on the taboo nature of their topic, even if they choose to ignore the future biocultural ramifications (which will tend to date their work that much quicker).
At the very least, DeLanda's talk, if not his personal biography, will help me revise my manuscript to some extent, which touches on "becoming animal", bioculture more generally, and violence.
Years before N.Katherine Hayles wrote "How We Became Posthuman", and closer to the period in which Haraway was working on her famous "Cyborg Manifesto", conceptual artist Laurie Anderson was already telegraphing the articulation of biotechnology with military and industrial research.She is almost unique among musicians in recognising the significance of these relationships. While obviously critical of how these developments had the potential to spill over into (techno) primitive wars of accumulation, (Norbert Wiener, a founding "father" of autopoiesis, also acknowledged this fact), Anderson has never surrendered to one-dimensional pessimism. Witness her rationale for observing the system from the inside, during her most recent stint as the first ever artist in residence at NASA.
Further frustration on youtube; no clips from Titicut Follies (ach!). Instead, I stumbled across a preview of a documentary on the great Polish social theorist Zygmunt Bauman. I archive it here as a reminder to myself not to forget to look out for it in the future.
Legendary post-punk musician, artist, biomorphic horror technician and theoretician Philip Brophy offers a very interesting podcast here on representations of technology in anime. I must later archive some of Brophy's earlier music on this blog as well. Unfortunately, youtube is not carrying his short film "Salt Saliva Sperm and Sweat", which would have made an incredible companion piece. Derridata and I saw it on video in about 1990, which seems incredible now, as I was able to get it at the local store, and since then it has become difficult to find. I will also monitor his contributions to the "Cinesonic" seminar series.
Another thought occurs to me; was Phil an influence on Thug and, even further back, how much of a contemporary was he with Jim Foetus????
Please no citation or reproduction of any original writings or images appearing on this blog without the permission of its authors.
"Defects of empirical knowledge have less to do with the ways we go wrong in philosophy than defects of character do; such as the simple inability to shut up; determination to be thought deep; hunger for power; fear, especially the fear of an indifferent universe" (David Stove The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies 1991: 188)
