Absolute disjunctive syntheses: contemporary music, part one

In this post, I’d like to highlight one of a number of identifiable absolute, or inclusive, disjunctive syntheses in contemporary art. In the grand scheme of things, highlighting these phenomena of the new poem may point toward a kairotic moment opening an evental site, to use the language of Badiou & Derrida: Politics, Events, and Their Time author Antonio Calcagno.[*see addendum] In that sense, my conceptual matrix for this project is heavily dependent upon Badiou’s work. However, Badiou largely provides me with only formal guidance in the overall determination of this project’s direction. When I do use his concepts as tools in analysis, moreover, I will undoubtedly run up against obstacles that require extensions of these tools beyond their breaking points and have to look to other theorists, other artifacts, and conceptual invention to capture the affects generated by these disjuncts. I think my approach is more in line with Deleuze’s method than Badiou’s, for that matter.

Broadly speaking, I understand absolute or inclusive disjunctive syntheses as propulsions into a structural impasse, direct confrontations with terminal points built into the edifice of a field of praxis or discourse. Moreover, these encounters, which thus bear upon the impossible, must be conceived as productive, edifying (heightening of power), potentially transformative operations. Foreign elements with no necessary or prescribed relation come together to break apart a sedimented, totalized-totalizing scheme of behavior. And yet, any one instance is never the necessary precursor, however dark, to an opening of lines of communication between divergent series. An amorphous, vertiginous cloud accumulates differential elements (elements with no intrinsic properties whose relations are therefore wholly exterior) and relations which do not interact and determine themselves through negation, but rather do so through affirmative, symbiotic amplification or resonance. If no resonance forms between such series, which are nevertheless synthesized or brought under a sort of vinculum in the synthesis at hand, nothing (substantial) in the structure changes and the series might dissociate (de-synthesize, dissolve) or remain non-resonantly, non-communicatively, non-productively coupled, acquiring new elements (and concomitant relations) for synthesis in future encounters. An absolute or inclusive disjunctive synthesis is thus one potential “effect” of a de/reterritorialization or erasure and reinscription of relations of exteriority pertaining to some set of differential elements. As such, finer prediction is guesswork.

I would like to take the work of Einstürzende Neubauten, a group of German pioneers of sonic metallurgy, as a muse in this and follow-up posts on contemporary music. This work is marked by a series of profound reversals, foldings-back (and foldings-forth, foldings-diagonal, etc.), and errant, unpredictable reorientations over the course of several decades. This is evidenced not only in changes in raw materials (ranging from traditional musical instruments and electronic components to specially-crafted or found objects and, importantly, found phrases) and methods of composition, but also in forms of arrangement. The latter have taken traditional or “conservative” schemes, but less frequently than they have been cast in the shape of the “revolutionary” – and we shall see that this conservative-revolutionary thematic is important for understanding Neubauten’s impact on contemporary music’s structure of behavior in itself. Neubauten has, in some counter-cultural circles, become famous for the silence-noise circuits, the conservative-revolutionary zone of indistinction, and the amplifications or swellings of singularities constituting the body of work. These, for us, highlight the shifting of the virtual landscape and the rise toward crisis points of self-enveloping quanta, which promise to reshape the actual, constituted patterns of behavior in contemporary music.

Kollaps is a natural starting point for any discussion of Neubauten’s body of work, being the first official full-length work. This post discusses, however incompletely, only this project. Few subsequent projects will have the consistency of this first; or, perhaps, we might say that this first project suffers from a lack of complexity that properly embodies Neubauten’s profound inconsistency. In either case, the sonic assault that is Kollaps has, in Zizek’s language, its space curved according to a principle of pure noise. Percussion dominates on a material level; of this there is no question. As pure, concrete noise (concrete here in the sense of musique concrete, sound as material, sound disconnected from any means of production and metonymically substituted for both its process of production and itself), however, it must not be confused with destruction. As the introductory cut (“Tanz Debil”) demonstrates, it is a dance of the mad, a “body devoted to its zenith” (Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, 59). It desires to rely on no criterion outside itself to determine its movement; it wills its movement alone as itself. However, a certain ambivalence remains inscribed at the heart of the work of this period. The mad dance knows, as if proprioceptively, that it is nothing but amor fati, creation of its own immanent fate, yet expresses itself as a logic of the No. This is the meaning of the title of the cut “Negative Nein”: Kollaps thinks itself as negative-no, “three times No,” but engages with itself, materially functions as affirmation of amplification.

Nevertheless, Kollaps also enacts an unrelenting critique of capitalism, perhaps to be located on a continuum somewhere between a classical Marxist / dialectical materialist approach and a Deleuzo-Guattarian (radical trans-Marxist?) political-libidinal economic approach. That is, capitalism and its overcodifications, its microfascist-engendering chains of displacement grounded upon its floating metric (capital), are subjected to a line of interrogation calculated to extract the affective kernel: namely, greed. Greed is indissolubly linked with death, a principle and practice, a culture, of death (as the opening line of “Tanz Debil” attests: stell dich tot!). Greed and death color the entirety of Kollaps, and the fascination with these themes probably played a part in its self-conception as “negative-no,” progression according to negation and self-externalization. Greed and death culminate, in Kollaps, in the conclusion that Draussen ist feindlich, outside is hostile: go and hide with me, retreat into interiority, close off all lines of flight. Such is the subjective structure produced in a capitalist social formation (microfascism, desire’s desire of its own repression, outside is hostile: synonyms); such is the object of Kollaps, however inadequately reached it might be.

The use of found objects in art is often aligned with such a (latent or manifest) critique of capitalism. The very artifacts capitalism secretes – especially in disused or abused condition – are taken up and mobilized against its operation. Hence, in Kollaps, unidentifiable metals, plates or shards of glass, hand tools, heavy springs, and running water, among other instruments, are put to use on the body of capital, tearing away at its hard surface. Capital, as we already hinted above with our brief comments on the motif of greed, is weighty, hard, insofar as it is inextricably bound up with the spirit of gravity, is this very spirit at its core. Subjects of capitalism – all of us – “tr[y] convulsively to fly from the earth, but at the following level [we] actually rise[] above it…powered by centrifugal forces that triumph over gravity” (Paul Klee, On Modern Art, 43; quoted in Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 312). The lightness of the dance of the mad gracefully – though frenetically – strives to reshape the body of the earth, make it rotate upon an axis other than that of capital, the spirit of gravity. Yet, perhaps despite Klee’s optimism, the subject of / to capitalism is always in a sense the tarantula (Nietzsche’s figure of gravity in Thus Spoke Zarathustra), the ideologue. Trying convulsively to flee the earth of capital and succeeding in flight requires composition with the infinite forces of the outside, those centrifugal forces to which Klee alludes; however, the subject of / to capitalism is structured according to the maxim outside is hostile, and so incipit homo, commence reactive-man. The active figure of praxis is today often thought in Nietzsche’s terms as the Übermensch, the form of life that is a zone of indistinction between life and itself, that is, between life itself and its own immanent power. “The forces within man enter into a relation with forces from the outside, those of silicon which supersedes carbon, or genetic components which supersede the organism, or agrammaticalities which supersede the signifier. … What is the [Übermensch]? It is the formal compound of the forces within man and these new forces” (Deleuze, Foucault, 131-132). Agrammaticalities superseding the signifier! If this deadlock of the regime of signs (legitimizer of the signifier) yet sounds foreign to us – how can an asignifying particle, an agrammaticality, present itself as anything other than nothing? – we remain as tarantulas, tattooed with the triangle and black symbol of capital on our backs.

Segue to the next post on contemporary music: Kollaps does not, in itself, articulate a vehement, serious critical treatment of capitalism. It lacks the anarchitectural efficacy of, e.g., Haus der Lüge, with its free-zones and perplications, that Neubauten has deployed and shown to be necessary for any sustained treatment of capitalism. That is to say, Kollaps receives its truth in subsequent projects. How Kollaps plays into the synthetic act of absolute disjunction cannot be made clearer until other works have been explored.

*Addendum: You’ll note that I merely use his language; the kairological moment, for Calcagno, is the temporality of the intervention.