#senseless common sense averse head

[riusugoi]

Ray Brassier - Genre is obsolete

‘Noise’ has become the expedient moniker for a motley array of sonic practices – academic, artistic, counter-cultural – with little in common besides their perceived recalcitrance with respect to the conventions governing classical and popular musics. ‘Noise’ not only designates the no-man’s-land between electro-acoustic investigation, free improvisation, avant-garde experiment, and sound art; more interestingly, it refers to anomalous zones of interference between genres: between post-punk and free jazz; between musique concrète and folk; between stochastic composition and art brut. Yet in being used to categorise all forms of sonic experimentation that ostensibly defy musicological classification – be they para-musical, anti-musical, or post-musical – ‘noise’ has become a generic label for anything deemed to subvert established genre. It is at once a specific sub-genre of musical vanguardism and a name for what refuses to be subsumed by genre. As a result, the functioning of the term ‘noise’ oscillates between that of a proper name and that of a concept; it equivocates between nominal anomaly and conceptual interference. Far from being stymied by such paradox, the more adventurous practitioners of this pseudo-genre have harnessed and transformed this indeterminacy into an enabling condition for work which effectively realises ‘noise’s’ subversive pretensions by ruthlessly identifying and pulverising those generic tropes and gestures through which confrontation so quickly atrophies into convention. Two groups are exemplary in this regard: To Live and Shave in L.A., led by assiduous American iconoclast Tom Smith, whose dictum ‘genre is obsolete’ provides the modus operandi for a body of work characterised by its fastidious dementia; and Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, headed by the enigmatic Swiss deviant and ‘evil Kung-Fu troll’[1] Rudolf Eb.er, whose hallucinatory audiovisual concoctions amplify the long dimmed psychotic potencies of actionism. Significantly, both men disavow the label ‘noise’ as a description of their work – explicitly in Smith’s case, implicitly in Eb.er’s.[2] This is not coincidental; each recognises the debilitating stereotypy engendered by the failure to recognise the paradoxes attendant upon the existence of a genre predicated upon the negation of genre. Like the ‘industrial’ subculture of the late 1970s which spawned it, the emergence of ‘noise’ as a recognisable genre during the 1980s entailed a rapid accumulation of stock gestures, slackening the criteria for discriminating between innovation and cliché to the point where experiment threatened to become indistinguishable from platitude.[ Fastening onto this intellectual slackness, avant-garde aesthetes who advertised their disdain for the perceived vulgarity of the industrial genre voiced a similar aversion toward the formulaic tendencies of its noisy progeny. But in flaunting its artistic credentials, experimental aestheticism ends up resorting to the self-conscious strategies of reflexive distancing which have long since become automatisms of conceptual art practice – the knee-jerk reflexivity which academic commentary has consecrated as the privileged guarantor of sophistication. This is the art that ‘raises questions’ and ‘interrogates’ while reinforcing the norms of critical consumption. In this regard, noise’s lucid anti-aestheticism and its affinity with rock’s knowing unselfconsciousness are among its most invigorating aspects. Embracing the analeptic fury of noise’s post-punk roots but refusing its coalescence into a catalogue of stock mannerisms, Smith and Eb.er have produced work that marries conceptual stringency and anti-aestheticist bile while rejecting sub-academic cliché as vehemently as hackneyed expressions of alienation. Each implicates delirious lucidity within libidinal derangement – ‘intellect and libido simultaneously tweaked’ – allowing analysis and indulgence to interpenetrate. Where orthodox noise compresses information, obliterating detail in a torrential deluge, Shave construct songs around an overwhelming plethora of sonic data, counterweighing noise’s formdestroying entropy through a negentropic overload that destroys noise-as-genre and challenges the listener to engage with a surfeit of information. There is always too much rather than too little to hear at once; an excess which invites repeated listens. Typically cross-splicing scenarios from obscure 1970s pornography with Augustan rhetoric, Smith’s ravings resist decipherment through a surplus rather than deficit of sense. And just as Shave’s sound usurps formlessness by incorporating an unformalizable surplus of sonic material, Smith’s words embody a semantic hypertrophy which can only be transmitted by a vocal that mimes the senseless eructations of glossolalia. Refusing to yield to interpretation, his declamation cannot be separated from the sound within which it is nested. Yet it would be a mistake to confuse Shave’s refusal to signify and their methodical subtractions from genre for a concession to postmodern polysemia and eclecticism. Far from the agreeable pastiche of a John Barth or an Alfred Schnittke, the proper analogue would be the total materialization of linguistic form exemplified in the ‘written matter’ of Pierre Guyotat or Iannis Xenakis’ stochastic syntheses of musical structure and substance. Indeed, the only banner which Smith is willing to affix to Shave’s work is that of what he calls the ‘PRE’ aesthetic. PRE is ‘a negation of the errant supposition that spiffed-up or newly hatched movements supplant others fit for retirement […] PRE? As in: all possibilities extant, even the disastrous ones.’[7] PRE could be understood as Smith’s response to a quandary concerning musical innovation. The imperative to innovate engenders an antinomy for any given genre. Either one keeps repeating the form of innovation; in which case it becomes formulaic and retroactively negates its own novelty. Or one seeks constantly new types of innovation; in which case the challenge consists in identifying novel forms which will not merely reiterate the old. The imperative to actualise incompossibles leads not to eclecticism but to an ascesis of perpetual invention which strives to ward off pastiche by forging previously unimaginable links between currently inexistent genres. It is the injunction to produce the conditions for the actualisation of incompossibles that staves off regression into generic repetition. n. In The Wigmaker in 18th Century Williamsburg (Menlo Park, 2001), this imperative to actualisation results in a music of unparalleled structural complexity, where each song indexes a sound-world whose density defies abbreviation. Here at last dub, glam-rock, musique concrète and electro-acoustic composition are conjoined in a monstrous but exhilarating hybrid. Interestingly enough, recent years have seen the emergence of sub-categories within the ‘noise’ genre: ‘harsh’; ‘quiet’; ‘free’; ‘ambient’, etc. Noise seems to be in the process of subdividing much as metal did in the 1980s and 1990s (‘thrash’; ‘speed’; ‘black’; ‘glam’, ‘power’; ‘doom’, etc). Nevertheless, the proliferation of qualifying adjectives within an existing genre is not quite the same as the actualisation of previously inexistent genres. Whether these sub-categories will yield anything truly startling remains to be seen.

Eb.er squarely situates Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock under the aegis of actionism. Their performances are not concerts but rather ‘psycho-physical tests and training’, where both the testing and the training are directed toward the performer as much as the audience. The rationale is not shock and confrontation but rather discipline and concentration, yoked to an unswerving will to perplex.  

But the extraordinary lengths to which Eb.er is prepared to go in conceiving and executing these ‘stunts’, not to mention the inordinate difficulties he often generates for himself in doing so, immediately contradict the accusation of facileness

What is being ridiculed here is the facile mysticism of those who would sanctify musical experience – more specifically, the experience of listening to ‘experimental music’, whether composed or improvised – as a pure end in itself: this is the specious mystique of aesthetic experience as ethico-political edification.

Are these contrived and consequently inauthentic tokens of derangement? Or genuinely psychotic but therefore stereotypical symptoms? Over-familiarity has rendered the iconography of Viennese actionism banal: blood, gore, and sexual transgression are now tawdry staples of entertainment. Ironically, even art brut looks formulaic to us now.

In this regard, Eb.er’s approach is the symptom of a tactical rather than psychiatric dilemma: How to produce art that confronts without sham; art that is unequivocal in its refusal to placate or appease? ‘We do not care about any behaviours, standards or civilisation. I don’t want new ones. Just none. Bye bye.

But perhaps a psychotic who is lucid about the degree to which his estrangement is socially manufactured is a more dangerous political animal than any engaged artist or authentic lunatic?

In this regard, the ‘noise’ genre is undoubtedly a cultural commodity, albeit of a particularly rarefied sort. But so is its theorization. And the familiar gestures that vitiate the radicality of the former are paralleled by the reactionary tropes which sap the critical potency of the latter.

Much contemporary critical theory of a vaguely marxisant bent is compromised by conceptual anachronisms whose untruth in the current social context is every bit as politically debilitating as that of the reactionary cultural forms it purports to unmask.

Just as ‘noise’ is neither more nor less inherently subversive than any other commodifiable musical genre, so the categories invoked in order to decipher its political potency cannot be construed as inherently ‘critical’ while they remain fatally freighted with neo-romantic clichés about the transformative power of aesthetic experience.

. The invocation of somatic and psychological factors in accounts of the (supposedly) viscerally liberating properties of ‘noise’ reiterates the privileging of subjective (or inter-subjective) experience in attempts to justify the edificatory virtues of making and listening to experimental music. But neither playing nor listening can continue to be privileged in this way as loci of political subjectivation. The myth of ‘experience’, whether subjectively or inter-subjectively construed, whether individual or collective, was consecrated by the culture of early bourgeois modernity and continues to loom large in cultural theory.

The commodification of experience is not a metaphor played out at the level of ideology and combatable with ideological means, but a concrete neurophysiological reality which can only be confronted with neurobiological resources

Although still ensconced at the cultural rather than neurobiological level, the dissolution of genre prefigures the dissolution of the forms and structure of social existence. If the substantialization of ‘experience’ is an anachronistic gesture with as little contemporary critical salience as its ‘aesthetic’ complement, why not jettison it along with the latter and find other ways of articulating whatever critical and political potency music might retain?

To eradicate experience would be to begin to intervene in the sociological determination of neurobiology as well as in the neurobiological determination of culture.

Where noise orthodoxy substantialises its putative negation of genre into an easily digestible sonic stereotype, which simply furnishes a novel experience – the hapless but nevertheless entertaining roar of feedback – Shave and Runzelstirn construct the sound of generic anomaly – a hiatus in what is recognizable as experience – by fusing hitherto incommensurable sonic categories in a way that draws attention to the synthetic character of all experience: dub cut-up, free-glam, and electro-acoustic punk for Shave; cartoon musique concrète and slapstick art brut for Runzelstirn. Both groups deploy an analytical delirium which steadfastly refuses the inane clichés of subcultural ‘transgression’ on one hand, while obviating the stilted mannerisms of academic conceptualism on the other. 

Neither sounds like ‘noise’; yet it is their refusal to substantialise the negation of musical genre that has led them to produce music which sounds like nothing else before it.

The abstract negation of genre issues in the sterile orthodoxies of ‘noise’ as pseudonym for experimental vanguardism, and the result is either the stifling preciousness of officially sanctioned art music or (worse) the dreary machinations of a ‘sound art’ which merely accentuates and hypostatizes ‘listening experience’. But by forcefully short-circuiting incommensurable genres, Shave and Runzelstirn engender the noise of generic anomaly. It is the noise that is not ‘noise’, the noise of the sui generis, that actualises the disorientating potencies long claimed for ‘noise’.