Brace and embrace: Masochism in noise performance
For well over 30 years now, there have been variations on avant-garde music that have been identified as somehow ‘noise’. Today, there are multiple genres aspiring to be part of noise music, with varying degrees of noisiness. But to think of noise as just loudness, distortedness or avant-gardist is not enough. Noise must be heard in relation to not-noise: to harmony, stuctured music, meaning, language, discourse, to sounds recognized and appreciated rather than shunned or found unpleasant. This means that noise is historical and social, and that what is noise at a given moment will not necessarily always be noise. This is why noise is a negativity, to use terminology familiar from phenomenology: it exists in definition to something else it is not. Music too is a negativity in this conception, but there is a further noise which is in the relation between noise and music. Noise is also negatively defined in its historical capacity, making it doubly Hegelian, as part of a developmental alteration in what people hear as noise. One simple way this happens today is that in the case of noise music, it stops being noise for a specialist group of people, whilst remaining noise for most. This enables a paradoxical recovery of noise: even as this taste elite dismisses one type of organized sounds as no longer noisy, it holds out the hope for a new noise yet to come, or yet to be identified. But noise is nothing if not in opposition, in relation, so to forget the ‘negative’ angle is to dismiss noise as a type of potential, and to be fooled into thinking some types of sound or music are inherently and autonomously noisy.
Noise can be found in a series of historical negations, and can easily be talked about as a sequence of avant-garde moves: John Cage, Arnold Schoenberg, Edgard Varèse, Luigi Russolo, punk, hardcores, dub, Japanese noise, industrial, environmental soundscapes, atonal improvisations, stuff-shuffling, etc. – if all we wish to do is track what people imagined as noise and how this moved toward music (often while ostensibly refusing it). But any one of those stages represents a set of practices, and the noise, if noise there is, rests in those strategies, how they are perceived and how they attempt to renew and/or destroy existing practices. Here, I want to look at a particular type of noise music, from Japan, that uses mostly electronics, analogue devices, feedback, distortion, effects, as its prime material, and I am going to look at this noise music as practice, as physical, located practice.
This music began to emerge as early as the 1970s, and its principal performers – Masami Akita (Merzbow), Masonna, Keiji Haino, MSBR, Incapacitants, Hijokaidan, Otomo Yoshihide, Boredoms, all shape their noise approach in the 1980s, with it reaching fruition in terms of blisteringly harsh work in the 1990s, with an accompanying recognition that a new, sprawling, messy, multi-genre avant-gardism was taking shape in Japan. For a certain listenership, noise music is now well-defined in its connections to free jazz, rock, improvisation, psychedelia, contemporary composition. Elsewhere, the origins might have been differently focused, as in the United States, where the 1990s regrowth of noise music sprang from a combination of west coast hippie experimentalism along with no wave and post-punk. In Europe there is a clear continuum with industrial musics of the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, and, it is this continuum that I think is being increasingly sidelined, despite also being in the background of any globally situated noise music. From Simon Reynolds to Steve Goodman, and over a period of 20 years, the taste public of the avant-garde has squirmed at recognizing the drive of music that aspires to confront,1 and that believes firmly in content and form going together, hence its unshakeable interest in apparently timeless transgressive behaviours and beliefs. This rejection of industrial music, of the noise inspired by this and that of 1990s Japan and elsewhere has only served to confirm the equally superior attitude taken by the would-be transgressors that, largely, the avant-garde public is a bunch of empty formalists. This would account for the emergence of ‘harsh noise wall’, epitomized in the solid noise chunks put out by Vomir, and perhaps the resurgence in the last decade of Whitehouse, Sutcliffe Jugend and Skullflower. This ‘debate’, with purists and politicos on all sides, is of no interest here, other than to serve as a backdrop for a complexification of just what transgressiveness might mean when not taken literally by proponents and detractors alike. This too is all by way of introducing the relevance of Gilles Deleuze’s idea of masochism as a way of understanding the practice of harsh noise performance However, this will not be in a way that dwells on the literal aspects of the usual understandings of masochsim, but one that instead conveys the paradoxes that arise from wanting to surprise, shock and even alarm an audience while putting on a concert that at some level, at least, this audience enjoys and often pays for.
A genuine noise music (as opppsed to the musicalization of noise) comes out of industrial music. It uses non-musical instruments, awkward and sometimes outmoded machinery, extreme volume, and very often carries ‘extreme’ content, seemingly in a railing against the limits of the non-noise world, a world of taboos, controls, limits, normalized behaviours and so on. If one thing serves to differentiate noise in the context of music from music, it might be its search for breakdown, its willingness to work inside failure rather than look for achievable goals. So we might imagine a world of gigs that are like performance art – and just like in that realm, there is certainly a place for the literal in noise music. Industrial music was very closely linked to very physical performance art (e.g. COUM Transmissions), taking its lead both from the painfully serious Austrian Actionists, the humorous dissections of Fluxus and the earlier Japanese Ongaku artists, and as part of the burgeoning genre of body art. Performances of industrial music sought to address the question of embodiment through an exploration of its border conditions, creating abject bodies adrift in liquids, lost in objects and held in stress positions. It would also make the process of music-making dramatically physical, working through human/machine/nature relations through the literal exponent of bashing things,breaking others, chopping, sawing, exploding … Lyrical and image content plumbed depths of the illegal, the uncommon and the unpleasant as the 1980s dirtily blossomed. It is quite common to see bondage imagery in the visual side of Japanese noise, especially earlier, in the 1980s (and this has returned in much of harsh noise wall – although not with Vomir). Merzbow would often use bondage pornography to decorate his early releases, and explicitly refers to bondage in his Music for Bondage Performance CDs or the picture disc of bound women on the ‘Electroknots’ single. All of this is to say that experimental music from the late 1970s on was heavily interested in pushing taste, sometimes to offend, sometimes to joke, but often to present an unconventional set of practices (as in Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV or Merzbow). I personally believe that, while an experienced listening public might be a bit tired of all this, or regard it as posturing, many have not yet encountered either the content or form of the transgressive in experimental musical terms, and, I think we should question anyone who imagines that transgression itself is somehow over, only for them to suggest some new type of music or commercial practice as a way of saving the world.
In any case, the real transgressiveness of industrial music or of Japanese noise music, which for me represents a much less dogmatic or monolithic take on similar material and ideas of embodiment is only signalled by its more explicit elements – what it transgresses is the assumptions of musicality, of performance as the satisfying outcome of sequences of correct actions. In other words, the things that are most unacceptable are not things like bodily fluids and violent imagery, but incompetence (real or assumed), use of non-musical sound, absence of recognisable structure, open-endedness, privileging of volume, effects, sound itself, as opposed to musical content. But – of course there is good and bad noise; there are ways of performing that have only displaced skill, under the banner of refusing it. The audience too acquires the understanding of ‘how noise works’. The perennial problem of the avant-garde is made flesh in noise: how can you continue to be ‘noise’? Are we supposed to enjoy it or hate it? Arguably the best audience cannot hear noise as being in the place of music, but hear only noise. How to stay transgressive? This is to misunderstand (not in a good way) what is being played out in noise: it is only ever fleeting – this is part of its failure as formless success, as signalled by philosopher and pornographer Georges Bataille, without the comfort of failing again, failing better. Transgression, argued Michel Foucault apropos of Bataille, is only firstly about shock and rule-breaking. It is the meaning of these, and the way they flow in and out of taboo that is the real transgression: ‘[Transgression] does not negate the taboo, but surpasses and completes it’ (Foucault 1977: 63). This makes it ‘the measure beyond measure of the distance that opens at the heart of the limit, and traces the flashing line that brings it into being’ (ibid.: 35). Noise flickers in and out of existence, even in the course of a single performance. Transgression itself is shown, signposted by ‘transgressive’ content, so that transgression can be thought of as structural – about the crossing of lines, and in so doing establishing those very lines. In a move that hints at the epistemological schemas of Foucault or Baudrillard, Douglas Kahn identifies the line as a defining structure in music, or more precisely how sounds are structured into meaningful ensembles. First, the line is the vibration of the cosmos, and music aspires, as does mathematics, to return home to this line, to resonate harmonically with it. It then deviates into the ‘score’, and is a rational tool into which music is put and from which it can be derived. Latterly, the line becomes a border – precisely, in the twentieth century, when music, sound and noise are brought together as separate yet connected elements in hearing and/or performance (see Kahn 2001: 72–100) This line is made in its own undoing, and so instead of being just a line, it is the place of highest creation (‘the line exists as a reservoir and not a residue’ [ibid.: 72]), its tension the location of all that is heard as the previously unheard.
This rendering formal of the idea of transgression is not to dodge content. There might still be room for offensive content, combined with new variations on musical approach. But the widescale dissemination of oddness, ‘unacceptable’ viewpoints, avowed misanthropy, sex, violence and filth and its acceptance as valid artistic expression means it is no longer possible to count as transgression. Some have realized this, and use violent sexual imagery as stylistic choice, others rail against this, and use similar ideas to fuel their take on avant-garde aggression. Whitehouse often managed both, and on the cover of Cruise (2001), first rail against those who have to stand apart from ‘extremes’: ‘The Artworld allows for such safe distancing. Just like treadmill fetishists need’, then complain about the cynical or pathetic use of harsh material: ‘grubbing job-hunting artists and art aficionados who prefer art that “raises questions” are certainly as disgusting as those rubbered dilettantes who recognise that the answers are what you masturbate over’. In the end, they want us looking where they want to look, and just get on with it (so transgression as a category is deftly removed, reinvigorating the repressed), or ‘just shut your fucking mouth’.
Noise contains aggression, it harnesses and targets it – it is there as an element (quiet noise might still work as noise in terms of confounding expectations, and this would be its forcefulness). So, as Goodman notes, ‘usually noise, or disorganized sound, is conceived as a weapon, a code bomb launched by those practitioner-theorists angry at the complacency of a certain hierarchical stratification of audiosocial matter’ (Goodman 2010: 7). Despite Goodman’s immediate dismissal of this idea for many types of music, it is a valid point to identify as a moment of critical trouble for ‘noise artists’, because on the one hand, the assertive ‘weapon-user’ must not care for the recipients of the weapon, while often preaching to the converted.2
This is both simpler and more interestingly paradoxical when viewed through the lens of masochism. Deleuze argues firstly that we need to dispose of the term ‘sadomasochism’ which unites two superficially connected ideas into one misleading term (Deleuze 1989b: 14). The two terms are entirely different economies. Principally this is about consent – sadism is specifically about the absence of consent, whereas masochism, in the sense of the search for physical pain and/or humiliation, is all about a contract. Both parties in consenting, physically painful, erotic activity are involved in masochism, says Deleuze (ibid.: 41–2), and this gives us an initial model for understanding the noise performance – both performer and audience have agreed to be present, knowing that there might be risk. The performer is not merely the ‘top’, the dominant player, as he or she also tries to put themselves in the masochist position of receiving noise – the performer tries to lose their status as ‘top’, and to become the audience for a noise that exceeds them. This perspective allows us to remove the idea that the performer is a sadist, as the audience is not being coerced against their will.3
Performers in many modes, situations and genres have tried to engage audiences in direct participatory interaction – i.e. noise is hardly the only genre to attempt to corral the audience into what is going on – but the best model of the sadistic demand for interaction is in a coldly rational exploitative concert situation like the arena or stadium event. So, if noise is some sort of weapon, it is not there for one part to oppress the other. The weaponly nature of noise is undermined from the start, constrained into a space where permission is given as to the extent of unexpected violence. But even here, the violence or the appreciation of violence is secondary to other factors such as waiting, expectation, deferred gratification, submission to the other at an imaginative level, such that ‘pain should be regarded as an effect only’ as opposed to being the cause (Deleuze 1989b: 121). Masochism is not about suffering but about dis-organizing and re-organizing the world through physical activity:
Of course the masochist must use his body and his soul to write this story, but there is nevertheless a formal masochism which preexists physical, sensual or material masochism, just as there is a dramatic masochism before any moral or sentimental masochism. (ibid.: 101)4
The masochist controls time through letting go, like Nietzsche stepping into the river of the eternal return forever, and manipulates space through his or her body as recipient of spatial interaction. Hence masochism oscillates between sensory deprivation and sensory overload. And this is where the bodily dynamic of the performer comes in. This relies on the presence of others, and the negotiation of this link is what emerges in the actions firstly of the performers, and then, further on, in the figure of the listener or hearer of noise.
Noise performers vacillate between stasis and more visceral performances. Both are designed to heighten the transmission or growth of affective response. When we look at the movement of Masonna, or the extravagant stillness of MSBR or Merzbow, we could imagine that this distinction between restless activity and still focusedness applies across popular music, but we cannot dissociate the actions of noise performers from the noise that these movements are involved in – noise is the specific content of the form of bodily activity. Noise aims to assault the senses and also the sense of music, or organization (and requires this sense of order against which to be noise), and the form is in some way mirroring this. As well as attacking the ears, noise tries to make the listener aware that the ear is only part of what is doing the listening. Deleuze writes that in both Sade and Masoch, ‘language reaches its full significance when it acts directly on the senses’ (Deleuze 1989b: 17). This is not us perceiving and understanding it, it is the supplanting of perceptual control – noise parallels masochistic writing in that it is our senses in the plural that are addressed, and most of all the proper processing organ is displaced – the eye for reading is supplanted by erotic response; the processing ear, how we understand sound, is disturbed and becomes the means to the end of a sensory experience that is more hearing than listening. The noise performer is in the same position, and, as Bataille observed, art can break through to the erotic, to death, to the hidden excess of the universe when it operates through contagion, ‘using non-discursive sensation’ (1988: 13), and this sensation is a weakening of control, not a sadistic infliction: ‘the weakness of the dramatic method is that it forces one to always go beyond what is naturally felt. But the weakness is less that of the method than it is ours’ (ibid.: 14).5
The music of Masonna (Maso Yamazaki) consists of feedback, distortions, sequences of effects overloading either singly or as a series. In the live setting this is mostly done through a combination of vocals and bodily exertion. The pedals that are making the majority of the final sound are usually scattered around a space in which Yamazaki hurls himself around. Sound and sounds can disappear just as easily as they load into harsh noise, and in the space of the concert itself, his body thumps around, hitting pedals, nearby drumsets (a favourite second ‘instrument’), making unamplified as well as electrically processed sound. Technology is both prosthesis and obstacle, and its responsiveness means the machines act as unreliable extrusions of the Masonna-body. The audience is blasted with unpredictably occurring and altering sound blasts, along with the uncertainty of the Masonna-projectile. When Masonna throws himself around, he seems to be taking Bataille’s injunction very literally, becoming all body, all noise. Control seems to be withheld, and the body rather than mind acts as noise-maker. Despite the temptation to imagine it this way, the mind and body do not live separate lives; so here, what we have is a stilling of the rational mind, a removal of the thought of the mind/body separation, a shutting down of structuring musicality in the form of a more unconscious expression (but not of anything specific). As a musical body, Masonna’s is also suspended: this is a vocal performance, but the capacity of the voice to express something either personal or human becomes merely human: here is an animal that is human (and also caught in a series of machines). The voice becomes secondary to the bodily movement; the voice and movement alike are subject to electronic processing. The closer we look the less there is – so this excessive performance is about lowering, lessening. The masochistic system applies to the listening and performing part alike – the attack on the senses is the ‘desexualization’ Deleuze sees in masochism (Deleuze 1989b: 120) – i.e. eroticism diverted from its apparently inevitable concentration on the genital areas.
The connection between eroticism and noise is not metaphorical, as noise is fully part of how Bataille sees eroticism as all that challenges the separation of humans, through a threatening, fleeting community that comes from lack of control or the letting go of control: ‘through that which we call incompletion, animal nudity, wound, diverse separate beings communicate, take life by losing themselves in communication, one with another’ (Bataille 2011: 22). This paradoxical desexualization, or un-bodying, is precisely a heightening of the corporeal through an attack on it and ultimately in a redistribution of tasks on and in the noise body. Like transgression, eroticism and masochism here are forms that exceed their most literal components: Masonna opens up a set of flows where he has ‘contracted’ with the audience to perform, they to listen. In the midst of this is a literalist type of masochistic auto-erotic will to break free of the self. Yamazaki does not literally contract with himself, but he does separate himself into two functions that trade off one another to produce the controlling/ecstatic subject. This is conducted in the presence of an audience which is also controlling (he performs for it) and losing itself (in uncertainty, loud volume, unpredictable proximity of the performer). These flows, both internal and relational, should create an ecstatic shared situation, where we do not all merge as one, but in a process of negativity (i.e. mutual loss of self through proximity to the other). Such an inhabiting of the noise situation takes us far from the idea of the ‘masochistic’ use of the body as a means to some other end (as O’Dell does, most blatantly with regard to Gina Pane [O’Dell 1998: 45–50]). But the noise performer, in the passing form of Masonna, is not a tool-user, is not firmly ensconced in a realm where mind uses body to signify, with all these things (subject, object, tool, meaning) in their place.
If Masonna does elude easy characterization as a secure user of the body as tool, in this space of emptying established in the time of the performance, he seems to act as a channel, possessed by noise, becoming an unconscious savant bringing the word to the audience. This is where the continual risk of failure is important, and the choice of machinery, his actions, even the type of sound he is making, all conspire to undermine any messianic tendency. The uncertainty of whether he is to be shamanic or sacrificial heightens in recent ultra-short performances, which have now become a norm, with concerts barely reaching a minute long on many occasions. On the one hand, this seems like an exciting dismissal of concert conventions – an irruption into the thoughts of all present (Yamazaki included), with there being no time to process the event while it occurs. You cannot dwell in such short periods, cannot settle cosily into Bergsonian duration.6 On the other hand, the 1-minute performance could be seen as a return to the weapon-ness of noise, a pure refusal to pander to the audience, but thanks to contemporary media, many present at such an event will be all too aware of the now standard procedure. But, to sum up, the unpredictable amount of time or activity that occurs in a Masonna concert tends to favour an authenticist role for performer, who is there to bring as much noise as necessary, dictated from somewhere otherwise unattainable.
What then of the ascetic, stationary performers, who seem to be giving themselves over in a form of self-denial? Often the loudest, noisiest noise music is produced by people standing still and fiddling with knobs, stuff, effects or even a laptop. The static Merzbow or MSBR seem more obviously to enact the masochistic ‘disavowal of sensuality’ (Deleuze 1989b: 52), a kind of control over the body even as it seems to submit to forces greater than it can take. It is as if noise demands the ‘maximum of effacement […] as opposed to comical romanticism’ as Bataille saw it in his meditative inner experience (Bataille 1988: 26). It is a stoic heroism, at first glance, a refusal that allows the listeners to have the experience of noise, as the performer manipulates sound. It defies the more literalist expectations of what a noise performance might be, so offers an internal (generic) noise ascetics as well as the more general asceticism. It also suggests a high degree of control – and this is far from the case, once we go beyond the technical work and think about what it is the performer is trying to locate him or her self in – a noise that comes from the overdriven machinery, a noise that seems to emerge in resistance to form, in favour of a formless in which to be lost. The stasis becomes a kind of helplessness, even if in most ways a willed helplessness, a knowing febrility, a conscious submission. Bataille’s idea of meditation, and the practice of the motionless noise performer, is just such an experience of loss that must travel through the body, not a refusal, but a suspension of both physical and logical processes, while still being embodied, still. This is not supposed to be a calming journey where catharsis comes from surmounting or embracing the nothingness of being, the meaninglessness of music, the emptiness of noise. Instead, the noise meditator has his or her ears and eyes open, and is ‘frozen like an animal’ (Bataille 1988: 13) or has established a situation of repetition, ‘characterized by the frozen quality and the suspense’ (Deleuze 1989b: 34). The Bataillean noisemaker, apparently in cold control, is trying to lose the sense of the body as tool, of the person as means rather than end, by excessively being those things, ‘in order to be broken’ (Bataille 1988: 57).
But. It is clear that some degree of instrumental control is occurring, and equally that a wall of noise can be a warm bath where we are summoned to return to the amniotic fluid of sound before music gave us tasks, identity, rules and imposition. This failure to achieve the breakdown of self in noise is precisely how noise works: this failure will always occur, the listener and the performer learn, and this cycle of breaking out and coming back to order is where noise occurs. It is a mistake to say that here is music, there is noise: noise is in the crossing of those two apparently opposed terms. A necessary mistake, an inbuilt failure. The unmoving noise performer is the conduit not just for noise but all of that blossoming failure, each part of that loss of control, including even the loss of control.
The static and hurled body both attest to giving over control, to inviting noise as if it were truly beyond, as if it could be chanelled through denial. The ‘as if’ is what makes noise – and the masochistic restructuring of the universe as if it could be mastered and lost in one move, repeated over and over. This is why the noise performers’ movements are so important, as they ground the ungroundable, knowing this cannot happen, yet over and over, relentlessly, make it not happen. Masonna, Merzbow and MSBR look for the moment Bataille sought, where it is possible to say ‘I am acted upon’ (Bataille 1988: 60). Which says I am because I am acted upon, I also cease to exist because I am acted upon. Incapacitants bring both types of noise body together – both acting as channels, as the space and passing of time fills with noise. But at any one time they are also in suspension, always waiting, even as noise comes. The two performers (Toshiji Mikawa and Fumio Kosakai) stand behind their tabletops of electronics, bits of stuff with contact microphones and effects pedals, alternating between controlled exploration of those devices and frantic bodily expressions of ‘possession’ by noise. For the listener, there is often a serious disconnection between visible activity of noise performers and the noise itself – often the simplest (if loudest) parts are the ones matched by most physical activity (even leaving the equipment behind, as if once unleashed, it could now become the shamanic directing element). Looking at the video recording from an Oslo concert in 2007, the crowd is very much like any loud alternative rock or hardcore crowd – headbanging, moshing, crowdsurfing – and this seems to transmit back and forth between them and the band (just as with any good gig), and Fumio Kosakai ends the set by stagediving into the crowd to confirm that this transfer is what has been happening all along. The crowd too can often be static at noise performances, almost as if forced into silence – but increasingly, with the spread of festivals and the insistence on the performance element of harsher noise as opposed to sound fumblings, it seems as if sound art performances are the most oppressive – you will listen and you will be still, and you will hear reflexively, and this will become better listening. In sound art or improvised but non-jazz events, this spatial control, with its different type of drawn-out waiting that is less than anticipation is still a version of the masochistic structuring of space and time, but one that wishes the body into aetheriality, as opposed to loss in sensory heightening. The noise concert, in the shape of Incapacitants, does not just happen by itself, for all the performers’ attempts to perform in the possibility of that being the case. Instead it is precisely the negativity, the relationality of both stasis/movement, control/letting go that defines the situation as one of constant to and fro, of stroking/striking then waiting. This in turn alternates with relentless driving further into noise as the concert progresses – to use a literal example from sexual activity, perhaps something like the cumulative effect of near-asphyxiation in breath control.
The performer makes a worldview based on masochistic meditation. It doesn’t last long, it blinks quantum-like in and out of existence as focus is applied to what’s going on or withdrawn. It is neither there in the stasis (too rational) nor the cutting-free (too close to imagining a complete freedom), but in the flickering between – and the more flickers the better. It needs a frame, albeit one that alters shape and position even as the concert unfolds. For Bataille, apparent arch-irrationalist, ‘without the support of reason, we don’t reach “dark incandescence”’ (1988: 47). The suspension, the ‘state of waiting’ that characterizes explicitly erotic masochism and the eroticism of noise is only possible through technique, the body, musicality, institutions of listening (the concert, the recording). Or, it may be that all the things we feel help us against the terror of some sort of sublime, or even make the sublime happen as something ‘other’, are only by-products of a billowing noise, a primary static that only comes into being in hindsight, as if it were always already there, filling the cosmos, underpinning all.7
This returns us to the idea of noise as something to be channelled, just as the masochist apires to tap into something primordial about the relation of the human to the not-human (animal or cosmos) (Deleuze 1989b: 101–2). The explicitly overwhelming sonic force of the kinds of noise described here is designed to immerse all who are present into something bigger but also something that disappears as you try to understand it. Beyond the usual excited loss of self that lies potentially in any concert, the two physical strategies of these noise performers are designed to heighten the sense of loss of self, and listening’s giving way to hearing. The physically unsettling nature of such events is one thing, but masochism also gives us a useful way in to the core of ‘noise as performance’, as it insists on waiting, on suspension. It is true that constant surging noise can be soothing (hence the use of white noise generators specifically packaged to help infants sleep), no matter how loud it is, as our ears adjust. Even if the music is physically too loud, ears adjust readily to new levels of sound input. But when there is uncertainty, a shock beyond the literal, then the physical reactions consitute something much closer to the masochist’s journey to ecstasy through submission.
Lastly, we do not commune in noise. It is our separation amid flows that makes it work, that defines the masochistic ordering of the universe. As we get close to communing, it falls away – we can never become amorphous, and why would we? Instead we could look to disruption, in parallel to notions of constructedness, as ‘destructivity and productivity are by no means antithetical. On the contrary, the fact that new orders arise from overcoming, transforming, or even destroying the given seems to be a central characteristic of the performative’ (Lagaay and Lorber 2012: 15).8 Goodman complains about the political stasis of the genre of noise, and instead offers the idea of a ‘subpolitical power of music to attract and congeal populations […] tagged bass materialism […] enacted as the microrhythmic production and occupation of space-times by collectively engineered vibration’ (Goodman 2010: 172). There is nothing wrong with this aspiration, although I imagine it would apply to more types of music than Goodman is actually interested in, with their focus on the physicality of bass. Vibration, inspired by, among others, Deleuze and Guattari, will set up an imaginary (and physicality) of connectedness, and flows and waves replace solidities. I think that in addition to Goodman’s move to a contemporary Pythagoreanism (like vibrating strings, or particles coming in and out of existence, or the movement of forces), noise performance allows us to think about accretions of locality within those flows. In other words, bodies form and reform in something Bataille might have termed a permanent state of ‘formless’, and these larger bodies have structures based on rules different to those that happen at the micro-level, just as gravity persists in a quantum universe. In other words still – in the material world, material bodies are not going to disaggregate in a consensual music situation, they are not going to become minds that now think in terms of circuits and total atomistic movement, but they are going to act like jellyfish – colony creatures – with different reactions playing out in different regions and areas. In fact, as we are talking about mammals who have the capacity to hear, we are precisely talking about more mineral entities.9 Alternatively, we can take Manuel De Landa’s composite of flows and structure, where we see:
reality is a single matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds, with each new layer of accumulated “stuff” simply enriching the reservoir of nonlinear dynamics [as with Kahn’s line-reservoir] and nonlinear combinatorics available for the generation of novel structures and processes. (De Landa 1997: 21)
From this, it is clear that flows (conceptual, musical or physical) are not regular, smooth and without form. The formless of ‘reality’ is precisely one within which forms arise, and of great interest to the human listener is the meshing of mineral geology with pre-existing organic forms:
A new material for constructing living creatures emerged: bone. It is almost as if the mineral world that had served as substratum for the emergence of biological creatures was reasserting itself, confirming that geology, far from having been left behind as a primitive stage of the earth’s evolution, fully coexisted with the soft, gelatinous newcomers. (De Landa 1997: 26)
The body in masochism, in the Bataillean community (of loss), in noise performance is made to remember this – to recall its solidity amid flow. It is friction, brittleness and a location that is properly subject.
Listening may be conceptual, a matter of processing, but hearing is something else, a contingent growth as gill arches turned to bone and began tapping, oscillating, resonating in ways that shuffled and shook more internal liquids.10 Noise is a return to these physical accretions that hide within hearing – a recall of contingent solidity amid perpetual change, and the contractual and physical part of noise proximity brings this into the open. We are not communing with the nature of the universe, but we are in a position to recall something like that as something lost, something traceable in bone. The masochistic noise performance and its contractual aggression, suspension, volume, stasis and/or excess movement, is an archeological tool for border conditions and the mixing of categories of objects, flows, processes, expectations. An operational composite.
Notes
1 See Reynolds (1990: 57–60). One typical statement is ‘the rhetoricians of noise actually destroy the power they strive to celebrate’ (ibid.: 58). This is not to say Reynolds is wrong, but to ask why writers have been so keen to close down the possibility of form and content being extreme at the same time, however fleetingly, however quickly this might either date or become canonical.
2 Throughout the book, Goodman questions ideas or practices ‘of’ noise that do not acknowledge the wider military and political values, objects and practices that use noise as a weapon. The favoured counter-weaponry can be built from the diasporic techrhythms and counter-institutional practices of communal music production.
3 This sort of dynamic has been identified by Kathy O’Dell as masochistic performance in bodily performances of the 1970s (O’Dell 1998: 8–10 and passim.), but she retains a sense of the performer engaging in masochism through pain, and only subseqeuently linking this to the contract.
4 Deleuze consistently refers to the masochist as ‘he’, with his controlling entity a woman, but his model does not exclude women from the more active masochistic role. For a neat summing-up of lesbian masochist visual imaginings see Jacobs (2002), and also see the essential reference point for queering sex with domination and violence: the oeuvre of Pat Califia.
5 For more on noise, weakness, Masonna and Vattimo, see Hegarty (2006).
6 See Bergson (2001) where a model of two opposing modes of time is outlined. The first is standard time, divided into units. The second and more authentic version is one of embodiment, one which recognizes the interaction between time and being, rather than having time as something apparently objective that being moves through.
7 See also Hillel Schwarz’s (2011) careful identification of such stories as the creation myths of noise – stretching from mythical ones to ‘scientific’ and modern Western philosophical versions.
8 Lagaay and Lorber also outline the prospect of a destructiveness that really will parallel notions of constructedness along lines suggested by Judith Butler, among others (Lagaay and Larber 2012: 8–11). Unfortunately, they back away from this, perhaps because so many of the contributors to their volume point to some sort of literal destruction as something productive and artistic.
9 Something of this crossover between physical materiality and the interactional quality of listening was suggested by Barthes in his ‘Écoute’ of 1976 (in Barthes 1982). The suspicion of loss of form, of breaking-free, in the context of philosophical listening, was also raised by Derrida, in his essay ‘Tympan’ (1982).
10 ‘The sound waves enter the ear and make the eardrum rattle. The eardrum is attached to three little bones, which shake along with it. One of these ear bones is attached to the snail-like shell structure by a kind of plunger. The shaking of the ear bone causes the plunger to go up and down. This causes some fluid inside the snail shell to move around’ (Shubin 2009: 158).