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.

Return of the repressed religion?

(A post in homage to Friedrich Nietzsche, born this day, 1844.)

Jean-Luc Marion wrote, in one of the earliest of his theological texts:

“The most hideous man killed God because God, who saw him with an eye that sees all, killed him with a glance. To return that glance, to see the God as such, is to kill him. For one then sees nothing but an idol. Or rather, what one sees gives rise in turn to this suspicion: ‘and what if God were not truth and it were precisely this which is proved? If he were vanity, the lust for power, the impatience, the terror, the enraptured and fearful illusion of men?’ (Daybreak, I, § 93.) In seeing God one immediately discovers his nature, his revocation, in a word, the quotation marks that, from this point on, must frame him in our text – ‘God.’ For illusion must be understood precisely as an idol seen too close. The madman, and therefore Zarathustra, has one eye too many, provisionally. … Thus Nietzsche does not only name ‘God’: he points out his idolatrous status through the addition of an intermediary: some concept or other. Because ‘God is a conjecture’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, ‘On the Afterworldly’) he can be approached, that is, attacked and sunk, only as a ‘concept of God.’ Man rejects only what he attains. … It is evident that the ‘critique of the Christian concept of God’ (Antichrist, § 16) maintains its pertinence only in being exerted on ‘God,’ the idol that it sees….”

Marion, “The Collapse of the Idols and Confrontation with the Divine: Nietzsche,” in The Idol and Distance, 30.

This maneuver – redirecting Nietzsche’s declaration away from God and toward the idol of God closest to God, “God” – has become infamous. It is the very foundation of Marion’s more famous subsequent theological work, God Without Being. The God that can be killed is the concept of God, an idolatrous double. God must be elevated out of the realm of ontic existence (where claims and predications concerning God can be made) and brought into the morphological beyond-Being of which, for instance, Lévinas will not cease speaking. In addition to supporting the later theological works, however, this central claim buttresses the much more controversial “theological turn” in phenomenology that was the subject of some debate in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The charges against Marion (and conspirators Michel Henry, Lévinas, Ricoeur, and so on) were that the latter had covertly or overtly reintroduced the divine into die Fröhliche Wissenschaft. Dominique Janicaud was the most vociferous of critics on this end, authoring the pamphlet-essay we now know him for, in addition to a rejoinder issued just before his death, called Phenomenology ‘Wide Open’, which reiterates the central complaints of the former pamphlet and updates them in accordance with recent developments. Janicaud has a bone to pick for good reason: Marion et al. and Janicaud himself consider themselves, at least to some extent, Heideggerians. This entire scene can be understood as dramatically unfolding the tension within Heidegger’s own body of thought: the expressly theological sources (and destinies) of central concepts in Heidegger’s earliest works (too many to enumerate) create a strange friction when juxtaposed with his Nietzscheanism, his persistent claims that Being is not God and that God has no place in philosophy (recall from the 1926 lecture course, a claim to the effect that “Philosophy is necessarily atheistic,” “Christian philosophy” is a squared circle), and so on. Janicaud effectively takes up the latter end of this conflict while his theist colleagues suit up in the black and white to defend the “theiologism” of the former strand.

That obscure object of idolatry, “God” (God-objectified), then, is the subject of the proclamation “God is dead.” The God that can die is not the true God, and so we ought to celebrate Nietzsche for the favor he has done Judeo-Christian philosophy. Janicaud’s polemic inspired several conferences and many papers on the topic, and what this entire paradigm means for the future of philosophy. Janicaud was not able to neutralize the threat from above, as it were, and in fact only ended up drawing more attention to the intra-phenomenological phenomenon. I think this is partially because of the alternative he’d offered: the problem with Janicaud’s position (as laid out in Phenomenology ‘Wide Open’), in my view, is that it retains Heidegger’s spirituality, thus obliquely granting the theologico-phenomenologists quite a bit of credence, as if the matter were one of doxa, simple difference of opinion with plausible arguments on either side. Janicaud argues for a reinvigoration of the late Heidegger’s phenomenology of the inapparent, with strong emphasis on Gelassenheit (the letting-be of things in their truth) as a methodological principle. The latter was food more for theological thought than for philosophical thought in its own prime, and has only become more mystical, more otherworldly in its inertia (or legacy). Moreover, Janicaud inherits the philosophico-theological concept of finitude from Heidegger, a concept he does not seem to notice he shares with Henry, Marion, and so on.

God and the gods remain a force to be reckoned with in Heidegger’s thought. Famously, “only a god can save us.” The gods have passed over and left our world disenchanted in the Beiträge, and we await their return. This is the meaning of finitude: we require salvation, re-enchantment. Janicaud’s polemic fails in the end because of a commitment to this position; once we uncover this stake at the heart of Janicaud’s own work, we realize his true place in the entire debate – he, too, is a theologian.

Let us turn to a more satisfying approach.

“I take the formula ‘God is dead’ literally. It has happened. Or, as Rimbaud said, it has passed. God is finished. And religion is finished, too. As Jean-Luc Nancy has strongly stated, there is something irreversible here. What is ultimately important in this is to figure out the subjective mechanism explaining how people can so easily believe that it is nothing of the sort and that religion prospers; or even, as it is so often said at this time, that religion returns. Admittedly, nothing returns, and we do not have to believe in specters. The Deceased drifts away solitary and forgotten in His anonymous, stateless tomb.”

Badiou, “God is Dead,” in Briefings on Existence, 23.

We would do well, first, to note that this “short treatise on ontology” has been translated into German as Gott ist Tot. As Badiou notes in this introductory essay, it sets the tone for the whole work, everything following it, as he puts it, operating in its clearing.

We shall put Badiou face to face with Marion. Both try to answer the question: what remains after the death of God? We’ve seen what remains for Marion: God. For Badiou, what remains is the drama of the decomposition, the theatre of the Dead God. This “ultimately bloody drama” is really an inertia, history catching up with the event. The dead God is not the God of metaphysics, or of poetry, but precisely Marion’s God, the God of religion.

Against our phenomenologists of religion, then, Badiou claims that the God of religion is the Dead God, and that the death of the God of metaphysics does not necessarily follow from this. This God is Man, the autonomous Man of secular humanisms here and abroad. This God has been deconstructed, reconstructed, and shown to have died with, alongside of, God. Against both Gods, Badiou evokes a god or divine principle more in line with Heidegger’s god or godhead, the god which alone can “save us.” This is the god of the poets, and it is not dead (but nor is it alive). This is the god of flight, the god that has taken flight and left the world in inertia, in a disenchanted state. This god offers the poet and, through the poet, us, the possibility of re-enchantment. This god of the poem – in truth, gods of the poem – must be, according to Badiou, snuffed out. These gods are the only remaining support for the philosophies of finitude, against which Badiou ceaselessly rails. Finitude as a philosophical construct operates to keep the divine door open, “the trace of an afterlife in the movement that entrusts the overcoming of the religion-God and the metaphysics-God to the poem-God” (“God is Dead,” 29). It is fitting that poetry’s task is that of putting its own God to death. Philosophy will work in a parallel manner on the concept of finitude. One is undoubtedly correct in seeing in this “mission” a military-religious charge. It is the final crusade: “troubl[ing] the real when being silent,” to pluck a line from “Here,” a poem by Guennadi Aigui that Badiou cites.

It thus appears that Nietzsche’s task has been taken up in no uncertain terms by Badiou, despite his previous claims to find in Nietzsche less of an ally that might be expected.