Spread the Virus: Affective prophecy in industrial music
Don’t the necessary weapons reside precisely within the creative and prophetic power of the multitude? (Hardt and Negri 2001: 65)
Someone told us after watching us work in the studio that it was like the ‘street’ amplified through some strange tribal process. (Kirk, cited in Vale and Juno 1983: 47)
Considering music in the light of affect theory suggests the freeing of music from subjectivity, thinking music (and musically thinking) in terms of the pre-individual, the virtual and the inhuman. Music exceeds the subject. Further, insisting upon music’s a-subjective mutability and radical creativity ex nihilo (if not in nihilo) means refusing its recuperation into a historical canon. As Attali (1985) suggests, music, when it embraces noise, possesses powers of prophecy, outpacing society’s political and economic institution.
Noise is untimely and we should approach perpetrators of noise not as precursors but rather as ‘traitor prophets’, those who turn away from and betray the dominant in order to open up a route into a new reality (O’Sullivan 2006: 148–50; Hegarty 2007: 11). Music’s prophetic power lies in its attunement to asignifying, code-disrupting events of affective disturbance which threaten to set regimes of power and structuration trembling. ‘Underground’ music, in particular, treacherously abets power’s jeopardy by giving the lie to dominant codes, images and narratives, flying off without any destination known ahead of time. Music, when it is noisy, rescues life from programme and preserves the potential of untimely affect.
Attali’s reflections on the prophetic power of music, originally published in 1977, culminated in his announcement that intimations of a new audio-social order, which he called ‘composition’, were becoming apparent: ‘Composition can only emerge from the destruction of the preceding codes. Its beginnings can only be seen today, incoherent and fragile, subversive and threatened’ (1985: 136).1
What follows suggests that British ‘post-punk’ music, a phenomenon emergent at the time of Attali’s writing, manifested these beginnings of composition. Post-punk was, I contend, a cartography of hitherto imperceptible affective disturbance in the 1970s and 1980s. My specific focus is the ‘industrial’ music of Sheffield group, Cabaret Voltaire. I take the group as an example of an experimental ‘street’ attitude to sound which reflexively appropriated elements of both popular and avant-garde techniques and styles in imagining, and rendering audible, a new world. It was a kind of clairaudience constituted by a contagious encounter, the capture and mapping of affective flows of the late twentieth-century mediascape. A noise music such as industrial is neither plagiaristic nor precursive, but rather an immanent space in media res, sandwiched between actual identities, a space in which the ‘outside’ is prophetically folded into the world. In Cabaret Voltaire’s music a map of the future was sounded which was attuned to incipient metamorphosis, vital stirrings in the world.
Attali’s hope was the institution of an audio-social order of composition, which swept away the capitalist order of, in his terms, ‘repetition’. A ‘new noise’ is, perhaps, ‘the essential element in a strategy for the emergence of a truly new society’ (1985: 133). However, the year of Attali’s prophecy, 1977, was also, according to Berardi, a year of prophecy of a different kind, a premonition of catastrophe: ‘Today, at the end of the first decade of the new century, we are in a way witnessing the realization of that year’s bad dream, the dystopian imagination coming true’ (2011: 48). Cabaret Voltaire’s music sought to deform and subvert preceding codes, but at the same time sprang on its audience nightmares of the possibility of catastrophe. As I shall conclude, the catastrophe now confronting us in the twenty-first century is precisely power’s capture of the mechanism of prophecy itself.
Audible mutations
Cabaret Voltaire’s early explorations in cut-up and rhythm unfolded, crystallized and rendered perceptible a diffuse mood; how it felt, essentially, to live in the mediascape. They also picked up an echo of the forces assembling the future. We can frame these explorations in terms of an exposition of Attali’s discussion of the emergence of order from audio-social noise and his anticipation of an imminent shift from repetition to composition. It is precisely at this hinge, this breakpoint, that Cabaret Voltaire’s music is situated.
For Attali, listening involves a concrete, immanent sensory orientation, which he contrasts with the abstract, calculative prejudice of Western visual culture. Music can be understood as a form of perception, as a kind of thinking, and a tool for reinvigorating theoretical inquiry. Crucially, to listen to music is to eavesdrop on not-yet fully manifest transformations of the social order: ‘Music makes mutations audible’ (Attali 1985: 4). Music’s function has to be understood in relation to social codification, taken to be an ordering of a primordial noisy chaos: ‘Listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political’ (ibid.: 5). Drawing on the anthropological hypothesis that the ritual sacrifice of a scapegoat assuages an original state of violence and stabilizes a community, Attali posits that music’s first function – its first politics – is as a simulacrum of sacrifice. Music sublimates the noise of difference, encodes it by giving it symbolic form as ‘ritualized murder’ (ibid.: 25–6). If noise inspires fear, if it presents itself as a potential weapon, then power’s capture of noise is crucial to its bid for legitimacy. Music’s efficacy is in channelling chaos, prophylactically preventing a contagion of noise. Music shrouds noise with forgetfulness, constituting ‘an affirmation that society is possible […] Its order simulates the social order and its dissonances express marginalities’ (ibid.: 29). However, as sacred access point to noise’s excess, its ecstatic and transgressive charge, music can afford a quicksilver expression and dramatization of the forces, flows and intensities at work in its context; it outpaces reality. Music clairaudiently diagrams and plays out propensities of, and transformations ensuing from, the fraught clash of forces jeopardizing the codified world.
[Music] explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future. (ibid.: 11)
In other words, music plays a reflexive ‘double game’ and stands both within and without actual concrete production (ibid.: 12). It constitutes an immanent transcendence, an encounter with the virtual ‘outside’ of a given social order. Music is our most reliable advance warning system for the noisy decoding of the old order and its recoding in an emergent order.
Arguing that music, ‘like cartography, records the simultaneity of conflicting orders, from which a fluid structure arises, never resolved, never pure’ (ibid.: 45), Attali is in accord with Deleuze’s contention that ‘we think too much in terms of history, whether personal or universal. Becomings belong to geography, they are orientations, directions, entries and exits’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 2). If the first ‘zone’ in Attali’s cartography of audio-social orders is comprised by the simulacrum of murder, the second involves the ‘unmooring’ of music from everyday life (Attali 1985: 36). In early modern societies of sovereign power and primitive capitalism, music’s ritual function is supplanted by an autonomous existence, comprising a ‘monologue’ delivered by musicians standing apart from an audience (ibid.: 46–7). The musician, having earlier entered into the service of a lord, composing to his glorification, gradually enters the ‘game of competition’, bourgeois consumption, and is valorized on the basis of the representation of a score through live performance (ibid.: 51). Music now makes people ‘believe’, becoming associated with harmonious exchange in a ‘consensual representation of the world’ (ibid.: 46). Measured and fixed in a differential vibrational system, tonal music constitutes an important aspect of rational representation: ‘The two harmonies, the divine and the scientific, combine in the image of a universe governed by a law both mathematical and musical’ (ibid.: 61). In the zone of representation, musicians have been extracted from the common run of things and elevated as purveyors of a ‘combinatorics’ of ‘authorized sounds’ (ibid.: 64). However, order in excess eventually gives rise to a statistical noise which disrupts representational harmony. In the midst of the closed system of auditory combinatorics, an aleatory propensity is nurtured that undermines the code from which it sprang. In what must be considered a ‘rearrangement of power’, rather than fully fledged revolution (ibid.: 83), Attali describes the emergence of the code of cybernetic repetition based on probabilistic control. Just as music as ritual murder was displaced by the representational spectacle, now representation ‘disappears beneath an acceptance of nonsense and a search for a new code’ (ibid.: 83).
In the zone of repetition, which roughly corresponds with twentieth-century capitalism and a bureaucratic disciplinary society, power’s imperative is to instil a general ‘silence’. This transformation is, in part, the unintended consequence of recording technology – the ‘triumph of the copy’ and the ensuing individualization of music consumption (ibid.: 89). Meant to facilitate the preservation of representation, recording leads to ‘stockpileable sign production’ (ibid.: 88) and the explosion of music as industry. This is an industry of promotion, compelled above all to produce consumers. Music is mortified and moulded into ‘abstract perfection’ (ibid.: 106). The differences upon which value hitherto depended are erased in the new society of moulds and minor modifications and, at the same time, the means of restoring value are instituted in the form of the hit parade, locus of the ‘pseudoevent, in a repetitive world in which nothing happens anymore’ (ibid.: 108). ‘Pop life’ confirms the individual’s impotence: ‘One consumes in order to resemble and no longer, as in representation, to distinguish oneself’ (ibid.: 110). Music under conditions of repetition fosters an ideology of nonsense in the subjects of the moulded and conformist mass audience: ‘Music is meaningless, liquidating, the prelude to a cold social silence’ (ibid.: 122). Avant-garde music is not immune. In improvisatory pieces by Phillip Glass, John Cage and others, the musician constitutes merely ‘an aleatory element in a statistical law’ (ibid.: 115). This is music rendered as a kind of algorithmic enslavement. Chillingly, Attali insists that repetition strips the individual down to bare life, heralding ‘the threat of the return of the essential violence’ instead of the affirmation of society’s possibility (ibid.: 120).
It is frequently observed that Attali’s outline of a new audio-social order emerging from the age of repetition is somewhat vague. The rising order of composition he proposes on the basis of a ‘scanty clue’ (ibid.: 133) – a reactive formation insisting on the ‘right to be different’, to ‘compose one’s own life’ (ibid.: 132) – will be a matter of ‘doing solely for the sake of doing’ (ibid.: 134). Musical practice will forego any teleological orientation, finding its end only in itself, ‘inventing new codes, inventing the message at the same time as the language’ (ibid.: 134). Everybody will compose. This will be a music of amateurs, non-specialists dedicated to the carnivalesque conquest of the potentialities of their own bodies in a participative improvisatory practice: ‘rhythms and sounds are the supreme mode of relation between bodies […] music emerges as a relation to the body and as transcendence’ (ibid.: 143). What is entailed is ongoing collective invention; collective responsibility for a violent decomposition of old codes and practices. However, liquidation of the old must be accompanied by a reconnection of music with life, with a production of the new. Attali wagers that, in this collective endeavour of participative composition, a ‘social coherence is possible’, albeit one that will never be anything other than risky, unstable, endlessly revolutionary (ibid.: 145).
Your agent men
For Attali, it is what music does, not what it means, that is crucial. Music is asignifying; it is not language, not a matter of meaning. Rather, ‘the “meaning” of the musical message is expressed in a global fashion, in its operationality, and not in the juxtaposed signification of each sound element’ (1985: 25). Implicitly, without using the terminology of affect, Attali credits music with affective powers. However, as Steve Goodman has argued, Attali does not pursue this. His claims for composition notwithstanding, Attali fixates on the efficacy of noise-transgression without offering very much by way of how the new is to be produced. Attali’s cartography of audio-social zones rests upon destruction, yet the focus would be better placed on the contagious ‘emergence of rhythm from noise, the power of a vibrational encounter to affectively mobilize’ (Goodman 2010: 8).
The production of contagious rhythm from noise is a good way to characterize the work of Cabaret Voltaire. The group (originally comprising Richard H. Kirk, Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson) gave sonic expression to the feeling of life, the collective mood, of Britain in the 1970s. Reflecting this mood, they also pre-audited its monstrous potential. The juxtapositions their music offered bore witness to the strangeness of the times. It comprised a sonic science fiction, a critical, paranoid fabulation of the near future as a world in technological lockstep, a future of seductive commands and controlled rhythm. Industrial music, ‘both symptomatic and productive’, mapped and generated affective futures (Shaviro 2010a: 2).2 Affect organizes the mood-pulse of thought and feeling, both our bodies and minds ‘obey a pulse or wave train which organizes them together’ (Condon, cited in Gibbs 2010: 198). It worlds us, atmospherically shaping what Massumi refers to as our ‘bare activity’, our finding ourselves just ‘going on’ in the middle of doing (Massumi 2011: 1). Resistance, in this context, might be framed in terms of a politics of immanent ‘counter-moods’ (Heidegger, cited in Flatley 2008: 23). Resistance occurs through challenging dominant affects that condition bare activity. It suggests living the dynamic of virtuality, opening mood up to difference. Music can critically map our affective worlding. Such a map would track mutations, resonate with them and make them audible, and also put us into an open and experimental relation to them. Such a map could be conceived as a ‘machine of self-estrangement’ (ibid.: 80), enabling us to have one foot outside of the prevailing mood, securing, through ‘simultaneous rupture and connection’, a critical distance (ibid.: 84).
At stake in Cabaret Voltaire’s acoustic mapping is a practice of listening and recording, for which the group took strong hints from certain movies and books. For example, in the group’s larval stage, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 psychological thriller, The Conversation, struck a chord.3 Its socially inept protagonist, Harry Caul, is an audile, his life given over to interpreting the interaction of noise and signal. A private surveillance operator, Harry records the conversation of a couple meeting in a bustling square. ‘I don’t know anything about human nature. I don’t know anything about curiosity’, he insists, but remixing the tapes in his workshop, transforming noise into voice, he thinks he hears something dreadful – an intimation of impending murder. This seems to be in some degree anticipative – ‘fore-hearing’ – on Harry’s part: ‘We may dread a sound, or we may be eager to hear it, but either way that sound seems to be heard without being actually emitted’ (Augoyard and Torgue 2005: 25–6). Or, as David Toop comments, ‘the close listener is like a medium who draws out substance from that which is not entirely there. Listening, after all, is always a form of eavesdropping’ (2010: xv). At one point the film draws our attention to the homophony of Harry’s surname with ‘call’, which can mean to predict, to expose, or to pass judgement, as well as referring to a vocational summons. Indeed, Harry cannot deny the responsibility and injunction that the prophetic, or mediumistic, element of listening entails.
The Conversation reflexively foregrounds the perspectival implications of listening. Harry Caul inhabits a marginal heterotopia in which the present can be processed, echoically reshaped and othered. This space, I suggest, is akin to the space of ‘underground’ music. In this regard, Brandon LaBelle suggests that going underground we find a ‘deeper image of what lies above’, a ‘mirror’ for ‘aboveground culture’ which can also be a ‘counter-sonic’ (2010: 32). ‘To catch a sound, to concentrate the ear, there within or against the dark tunnel below’, he remarks, ‘brings forward unsteady anticipation – sound in this regard might be the prescient announcement of what shall eventually come forward, into plain view, to spawn fear of the unknown or hope for the future’ (ibid.: 41). Such a listening can be considered untimely in Nietzsche’s sense, that is, as ‘acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come’ (Nietzsche, cited in Deleuze 2004a: xix). Harry not only mirrors but immerses himself in sound at a virtual, molecular level, and as a consequence is carried away into the auditory real, the sonic unconscious, to the point of personal breakdown.4 However, this molecular becoming, risking absorption in noise, is the precondition for making mutations audible.
‘I’m kind of a musician … a freelance musician’, Harry cagily concedes to a girlfriend he keeps in the dark about his affairs. It could be said, flipping this around, that Cabaret Voltaire were ‘kind of agent men … private surveillance operators’. Working intuitively, they conceived themselves as ‘modern primitives’ mediumistically channelling the sonic in order to counter the present (Stephen Mallinder, cited in Vale and Juno 1983: 46). Admirers of Dadaist anti-art shock tactics,5 and inspired by Brian Eno’s example of the non-musician exploring available audio technology, including tape recorders, synthesizers and custom-built equipment and effects, the group’s original impetus was sheer experimentation with a strong role for chance: ‘the initial idea was to be more of a sound group, just putting sounds together like jigsaw pieces. If the end result did sound like music then it was purely coincidental’ (Kirk, cited in Fish 2002: 204). Conceptualization, for Cabaret Voltaire, was typically post hoc, akin to Attali’s compositional ‘doing for the sake of doing’.
This sonic assemblage plugged into ‘extra-musical elements’ – literary as well as cinematic – key to the industrial music aesthetic (Savage, cited in Vale and Juno 1983: 5). The ‘cut-up’, discovered in the writing and tape recorder experiments of William S. Burroughs, was decisive: ‘Burroughs was really the main thing … cutting up bits of tape, making loops, just to see what happens’ (Kirk, cited in Reynolds 2009: 248). Emulating Burroughs’s procedures, which themselves harked back to Dada’s random poetry-generating techniques, Cabaret Voltaire folded fragments of voices and sounds ripped from mass media past and present into their singular funk in minatory fashion.
Burroughs’s provocative idea was to disrupt continuities of word and image so that something unprecedented might happen in the fissures created. The essay ‘Electronic Revolution’ (originally published in 1971) mooted cut-up procedures which made use of tape recorders. Rumours of dissent could be spread virally, pre-recorded cut-up tapes ‘played back in the streets as a revolutionary weapon’, in order ‘to scramble and nullify associational lines put down by mass media’ (Burroughs 1979: 125–6). The cut-up aesthetic, an immanent critical tactic, sought to cultivate ‘a form that would deform itself and spread that deformation through contagion’ (Hegarty 2007: 114). Cabaret Voltaire excelled in constructing atmospheric collages of music and voice. Particular favourites were voices of authority, usually sourced from American media, including extremists such as survivalists, televangelists and cult leaders. In each case, what mattered was seizing upon language in service of the propagation of disciplinary order, oppressive speech aimed at securing unquestioning compliance. ‘Order-words’ (a phrase coined by Deleuze and Guattari) performatively subjectify, moulding people according to definite ‘semiotic coordinates’: ‘Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and waits’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 84). Neither living nor dead, the word, for Burroughs, is viral. The cut-up, in turn, is a virus pitched against the word’s viral compulsion of obedience. For Burroughs, ‘reality is understood to be composed of fictions – consistent semiotic terrains that condition perceptual, affective and behavioural responses’ (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit [CCRU] 2004: 275). The entire point of the cut-up project is to scramble these terrains, scramble the order-words, deterritorialize so as to listen for new intersections, new lines of flight. Cabaret Voltaire’s mediatic sonic atmospheres suggest a pursuance of the logic of the order-word in order to infiltrate and jeopardize, to debilitate its position of command. How better to realize Burroughs’s project for playing back cut-ups into the ‘street’ than through the infectious medium of music?
The cut-up is a technique by which we can experimentally open ourselves to unforeseen affective events, derailing habitual responses to connect with the wave of future becomings. Similarly, industrial music enacts a post-mortem of the industrial, an attempt to find a transit to some unknown future. Cut-ups anticipate future ‘intersection points’ (Burroughs and Gysin 1979: 133–7) at which they might be properly tuned into. This is the political significance of the method. An invitation is extended to anyone who can attune to its potential: ‘Cut-ups are for everyone’ (Burroughs and Gysin 1979: 31). The principal task of the cutter is to foster, by practical example, a contagious affect which might enlist fellow cutters, a community of agents. The injunction, heeded by Cabaret Voltaire and others, is to use and abuse new technology. Tape recorders permit the redirection of linguistically moulded and constrained reality. Clearly, the logic is terroristic: ‘fighting fire with fire’ (Harris 2004: 190). As Hegarty points out, industrial music’s bid to bring the virtuality of power to expression, to hitch a ride, as it were, with the intensities unleashed from where they were dammed up in order-words, was itself complicit with, fascinated by, power (2007: 119). Cabaret Voltaire’s decompositional cut-up procedures and compositional rhythm generation arise from a fascination with, and a mirroring of, the strategies of power. However, the saving grace is that cut-up procedures open up a gap in associational lines and affective resonances which affords a certain critical, ironic detachment from the dominant mood.
Reflective pulse
Cabaret Voltaire began performing live in the mid-1970s. Establishing a base at Western Works – tellingly, a Victorian industrial space refunctioned as studio and workshop – the group entered into a fruitful relationship with the label Rough Trade which lasted until 1982. Their early music hinged on rhythms emerging from the ‘percussive pulse’ produced by tape loops, augmented with drum machine and supplemented with processed guitars and clarinet (Fish 2002: 207). In developing this procedure, the group progressed to building collages of sound which ‘(juxtaposed) different forms of music, such as the avant-garde experimental tradition, with a parody of rock music’ (ibid.: 207), culminating in a characteristic ‘stalking hypno-groove’ (Reynolds 2005: 169). Vocals, way back in the mix, were rendered inhuman by their treatment: ‘reptilian, alien, or, at the extreme, like some kind of metallic or mineralized being’ (ibid.: 170).
A deal with Virgin Records from 1983–7, through the intermediary of Some Bizarre, entailed de-cluttering the sound and foregrounding Mallinder’s vocals to render them more clearly comprehensible and accessible for mainstream audiences. Some Bizarre’s motto, ‘Conform to Deform’, catchily encapsulated a conviction that opportunities offered by the music industry could be more fully exploited by underground artists. Abandoning tape for new sampling technologies and sequencers, Cabaret Voltaire’s mission was re-specified for the dancefloor, bearing fruit most sublimely with 12” mixes of songs such as ‘Sensoria’ and ‘I Want You’.
If there were concessions to 1980s entertainment imperatives, this was still a music steeped in an oppressive ambience. The use of sampled Ku Klux Klan order-words in ‘Sensoria’, in tandem with the group’s new ‘rhythmic certainty’, seemed to constitute ‘instructions to some impossibly dangerous dance’ (Hollings 2002: 30–2). Noise’s transgressive power is prone to recuperation, limiting its affective yield. In shifting emphasis from noise to rhythm, it is as if the group had anticipated Goodman’s suggestion that opening the floodgate to noisy chaos in the hope of ushering in the new must be displaced by a more concerted attempt to ‘pre-emptively engineer the circumstances’ in which this might occur, ‘toward the invention of new operating systems for affective collectivity’ (2009: 140). Ultimately, noise is only the clinamen, the disruptive swerve, from which new rhythmical vortices can build (ibid.: 139–40).
Given their change of tack in the 1980s, Cabaret Voltaire could be said to have intuited this imperative. However, the group were soon to be outpaced by a new breed of sonic engineers more closely attuned to the flows unleashed by media, economy and technology (Hollings 2002: 33). By the late 1990s, house music would complete the digital transition inaugurated by Cabaret Voltaire, influenced by but ameliorating the more nightmarish elements of the group’s counter-sonic: ‘In the world of house music, the future soothes as much as it shocks; Catchiness converges with confusion, immediacy feeds into extremism, and pop coincides with futurism in Möbius loops that obsolesce the inherited distinctions between over and under’ (Eshun 2000: 87).
The sense of a marginal space in which a counter-sonic might flourish begins here to collapse. If mutations of capital and information in the 1980s were characterized by flow, Cabaret Voltaire’s rhythm-production was still perhaps beholden to an earlier rock aesthetic ‘concerned primarily with the essential business of concentrating effort into motion’ (Hollings 2002: 33). House was effortless. It echoed Deleuze’s announcement, in the mid-1980s, that the nature of movement had undergone a change. No longer was it bound up with ‘an energetic conception […] where there’s a point of contact, or we are the source of movement’ (1995: 121). Rather, it was now a question of how to ‘get into something’ (ibid.: 121), how to ride the wave and be carried away in the flow, surfing or gliding. Similarly, in his notes on societies of control (conceived after Burroughs’s notion of ‘Control’), Deleuze refers to a continuous serpentine undulation rather than the ‘disciplinary’ production of ‘discrete amounts of energy’ (ibid.: 180).
House and other electronic forms of music seemed better placed than post-punk, in the 1980s and 1990s, to more fully realize Attali’s brave new sonic order of composition. Electronic music, as a ‘music of forces and flows, of mobile electronic particles contracted or dilated by filters and modulators’, is pre-eminently, it might seem, open to the virtual (Cox 2009: 508). However, this fails to reckon with the tendency of processes of modulation, seen through the prism of the Burroughsian–Deleuzian notion of ‘control’, to contain morphological potential (Deleuze 1995: 177–82). Compositional choice is much compromised by the formulaic, statistical nature of the digital, in which ‘listeners are not interested in music as sound but as index’, and music has become a ‘trigger, setting off preprogrammed feelings’ (Evens 2005: 119). The emergent form of worlding brought to audibility in industrial music’s affective mapping does not ultimately appear to constitute the open-ended metamorphosis heralded in Attali’s work. The cutting up of code, the breakdown of rigid command lines, disciplinary moulds of the age of repetition, gives way to an order of modulation. The society of control lets loose pre-individual flows dammed up by the order-word, permits a spontaneity of pulses, building from germinal noise, but at once initiates a sorting, a management of loosed flows, channelling and blocking, algorithmically tethering. From today’s perspective, Cabaret Voltaire’s ironic detachment from the fascination of the words and rhythms of power remains only as a ghost of resistance.
Rhythm control
The particular moment that spawned movements such as industrial music was characterized by a cross-contamination of experimental, avant-garde aesthetics and popular culture. Arguably, however, the intervening period has seen a wholesale collapse of art into life. If avant-gardism has hinged on installing art at the heart of life, bringing it into closer proximity, at the present conjuncture, in the early twenty-first century, art and life have quite simply ‘come too close together’ (Elsaesser 2008: 14). Life has become thoroughly aestheticized, routinely designed and styled. The digitalized world means the disappearance of art and medium, the transparency of the interface and the rise of a generalized technological nonconscious in which life is surreptitiously programmed by invisible machines. No longer do we immerse ourselves, intact, into discrete media forms; it is now rather a case of the media’s ‘eversion’, the media becoming world (Novak, cited in Elsaesser 2008: 17).
Lazzarato has argued that regimes of power, instead of creating and moulding subjects, as Foucault contended was the case in modern disciplinary societies, are now dedicated to the creation of ‘the world within which the subject exists’ (2004: 188). Capital’s business is world-production, worlding (to borrow a Heideggerian term) – ‘from Capital-Labor to Capital-Life’, as Lazzarato has it. Further, ‘the expression and effectuation of the world and subjectivities in there … precedes economic production.’ We live in a time of ‘“aesthetic” war’ (ibid.: 188).
Life has become programmable, worlded algorithmically and statistically; this is the present predicament for resistance. Life’s capacity for mutation and metamorphosis is pre-empted by capital. Following Elsaesser, we might say that capital has learned the productivity of the accident, the value-creating potential of the glitch. The concept Elsaesser draws from engineering to refer to this phenomenon is ‘constructive instability’ (2008). Capital paradoxically structures its activities around contingency, factoring instability into its formulae. Failure has a crucial place, built into self-organizing systems, when capital acknowledges the potential for extracting value from life’s emergent processes, its visceral and affective mutability.6
What were frightening possibilities in the post-punk period, giving rise to widespread paranoia have, in large, been realized. The ‘science fictional enemies’ of that period – forces of the future fought by self-styled ‘agents’ of resistance such as Burroughs and industrial groups – are now the imperceptible in-built contingencies by which contemporary power is increasingly sustained (Berardi 2011: 50). Order-words have migrated inside life, becoming paralyzing automatisms (ibid.: 56–7). It is now not a matter of creating obedience, but rather operationalizing initiative and experimentality, mobilizing affects (ibid.: 66–7).
Capital-Life is also, referring back to Attali’s revolutionary audio-social order, Capital-Composition. If Attali commended a reconnection of music and life in search of new rhythms, new bodies, we now find power has already seized upon bare activity, inserted itself into the lived event. Composition itself emerges precisely as the nightmare of control. The rhythmic composition of mood can be manipulated by a composition-machine geared to engineer affect. Bogard (2010) imagines a device – the ‘Motivator’ – which encapsulates this development. It is a machine that works precisely through constructive instability, through glitches and breakdowns, through the licensing of new and temporary counter-rhythms. If control was complete, according to Burroughs it would be entirely self-defeating. It would leave no time or space in which to exert itself. Thus, control thrives upon its incompleteness (Burroughs 1985: 116). As Bogard has it, the Motivator ‘responds to the affective deviations it itself creates’ (2010). Therefore, ‘resistance is integral to the function of control. Control is the modulation of resistance’ (Bogard 2010). In other words, capital has come to capture – and itself generate in order to contain – the prophetic counter-rhythms of resistance.
Capital-Composition, in its constructive instability, cannot but thrive by taking control to its limits. Composition is effectively weaponized and value is extracted from the engineering of the rhythms of our bare activity. Capital-Composition deliberately jeopardizes itself in its enclosure of rhythm and counter-rhythm. What, then, of the music of resistance? Control society, as it has come to exist, must always regenerate productive instability. Its rhythm machine cultivates dysfunctional moments. In this, there must always remain an opportunity to find anew a germinal audio-social noise, to build counter-rhythms and hope that they may find some way to escape and that from them a movement can accrue. This perhaps hinges on re-opening the gap between art and life, or at least, as Elsaesser comments, ‘repositioning’ them (2008: 14), but quite how this might be done remains to be heard (or not). Control, the dominant force of the new world first made audible by industrial groups, has effectively effaced a crucial avenue of attack for those who wish to oppose it. In formulating new weapons we need critical reminders from the past, the ghostly injunction of traitor prophets such as Cabaret Voltaire, to interrupt the present and fertilize new forms of dissonance and dissent.
Notes
1 The phrase ‘audio-social order’ is employed by Goodman (2010).
2 Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect (2010b) and Flatley’s Affective Mapping (2008) are my central points of reference for the aesthetic of affective mapping discussed in this chapter.
3 Mallinder cited the film as a key influence during a talk at the University of Lincoln’s School of Media on 6 February 2012.
4 Cox (2011) refers to the auditory real as the inarticulate, asignifying noise which is the virtual, Dionysian condition of possibility of articulate, meaningful sound.
5 Of course, the group’s name is itself borrowed from the Cabaret Voltaire founded in Zurich in 1916 by Dadaist, Hugo Ball.
6 In a similar formulation, Parikka has referred to ‘viral capitalism’ (2007: 96–100; see also Coley and Lockwood 2012)