[Dancecult-l] Neil Huthnance serial music part 2

[Nibelungentreue at aol.com]

Hi Tobias,
I thank you for your thoughtful response and general characterisation of industrial culture, many aspects of which I find myself in substantial agreement. In particular, I was taken by the critical acuity of your remarks about the “wasteland of industrial capital”. By means of a rejoinder, partly for the sake of manageability, given the fact that I don’t have all of my sources here with me as I write this (i.e. I’m not home in Sydney town at the moment), I will attempt to respond in a way that can only begin to explore some of the territory that I sketched out in my posting on the dancecultures listserv. 

If there are differences then in our respective approaches to this material, I wonder they may prove to be more of degree than of kind (?). When I write of a “new conformism” with reference to one wing of modernism, and by extension, industrial music culture and the isolationist genre following in its wake, I am contextualizing my argument in respect to the object of critique. i.e. artists such as Throbbing Gristle, were, as you say, responding, in no small part, to the Thatcherist restructuring of the United Kingdom. As I understand it, this was a period in which the “organized” nature of “modern” Britain, with its central characteristic of a social contract predicated upon a planned economy/lifelong [male] employment, protected by a unionized workforce and safety welfare net, was beginning to fracture.   Nation building functions of the state were being handed over to private industry. Yet at the same time the state was becoming increasingly centralized and authoritarian, in the eyes of the disenfranchised, in the manner in which it sought to implement this radical program, by force as was deemed necessary, through police agencies and the judicial system. 

In combination with this centralized governmental authoritarianism, critics of Thatcherism came to increasingly focus on the complicity of mass culture as a propaganda tool designed to foster the illusions of a monoculture promoting social consensus and moral certainty. Thus, “countercultural” workers came to, by and large, critically deploy “alienation” as a distancing device from large scale bureaucracy. 

Working at the same time, Williams came to view this strategy as an over adaptation. What I might say about industrial music culture as embodying a “new conformism” therefore runs interestingly parallel to Williams’s critique of his fellow cultural studies traveler, Stuart Hall, who wrote an influential piece on the authoritarian populism of Thatcherism, “the toad in the garden”. Williams asks, “Will there be no end to petit bourgeois intellectuals making long term adjustments to short term situations?”   In this way Williams demonstrably anticipated the recuperation of the artistic critique of bureaucratic capitalism that is explicitly foregrounded in the culture of industrial music. Likewise, in their compelling study The New Spirit of Capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello present the (anti) systematic features of contemporary capitalism in terms of a regime of flexible accumulation able to absorb critique and hence attain higher degrees of “network complexity”. According to these authors, this is accomplished by recuperating the critiques of the preceeding era. Whereas the critique of exploitation is traditionally associated with the worker’s movement, a more “artistic critique” came to prominence with the mass cultural education provided by state universities. Concentrating then on the major social groups in France following the turmoil of May 1968, Boltanski and Chiapello demonstrate how the labour force became beneficiaries of hitherto unseen economic gains, while at the same time production was gradually reorganized so that it would take place outside union control and state regulation. Meanwhile, an aspiring managerial class proved receptive to the artistic critique, which had targeted large-scale organized systems for producing alienation
. 
Williams had also in some ways anticipated these developments by noting the recuperation of much of the culture of modernism by the advertising industry. He therefore regarded postmodernists as reifying one element of a complex formation through their emphasis on alienation. But it would seem that Boltanski and Chiapello are going much further in this regard than Williams. For their point rather appears to be that alienation, or “fragmentation” in postmodern terms, is no longer reified as a dominant “structure of feeling”, once the new flexible organization of work blurs with the experience of leisure activities. Fluidity, mobility, reflexivity, absence of direct supervision and control: Boltanski and Chiapello suggest that these imperatives are more subtly coercive than their opposite predecessors, because they strive to transform work from a mode of alienation into a creative activity, as the worker learns to self-manage. But rather than proving that Williams somehow completely missed the mark, his concept of a “selective tradition” could be used to demonstrate instead how the recuperation of the aesthetic critique of alienation aided the culture of the networked enterprise, by legitimating exclusion of the workers’ movement and the destruction of many social programs.

In the example you provide, Test Dept, I wonder if it needs to be established how representative were their activities, if it can be assumed that they continued to hold onto the critique of exploitation, thereby not reifying the more artistic critique of alienation? Before going on to discuss the ambient genre of “isolationism” itself though, I wonder if in relation to Test Dept. some comparable critical questions might still be asked. Might it be legitimate to speak of “isolationism” in the sense, not so much with reference to a failure to achieve any grass roots coalition building in the manner you so convincingly describe, but rather in the manner of a failure to develop an even wider populist strategy in relation to a (one dimensional) reading of “mass culture”? This seems to be the perennial problem faced by avant garde formations: if popular culture was believed to be so important in maintaining a false consensus, then why choose such extreme Brechtian techniques of artistic expression with little chance of attaining popularity/widespread airplay to disseminate the message? It was not only an electronica act such as Heaven 17, for example, who had an intuitive foothold on this potential problem [which they then attempted to overcome], with their smash hit, “We Don’t Need This Fascist Groove Thang”, but also the collective “Red Wedge”, featuring Billy Bragg et al, who united through the common bond of their pop music in their effort to have the   Labour Party reelected. By extension, did more cinema goers learn about the depredations of capitalism by sitting through the works of Jean Luc Godard, or by reading between the lines in other films that mobilised popular genres, such as science fiction ,say, Blade Runner or Alien, for instance?

In other words, it may be easier to admire, rather than actually like, the works produced in accordance with the more avant garde position. Not having read a manifesto by Test Dept., I cannot say if their avant garde credentials extended to a desire to assume the vanguard (leadership) role in a socialist movement. If it did, it would be interesting to ascertain whether this extended to a modeling of cooperatives compatible in any sense with the fluidity described by Bolatanski and Chiapello, or was it more hierarchical by design? This latter point leads me to consideration of how the abandonment long ago of the model of the Leninist vanguard as the template for intellectual politics had opened a power vacuum, which could be filled by an avant-garde, “leadership by experimental example”. This has meant more though than reacting to the dominant class within which these avant-gardes are formed and against which they rebel, (thereby prefiguring developments within this class), to the extent that it also entails emulating aesthetic avant-gardes at the level of intellectual content. The important distinction in comparison with Williams’s position, is how often this insight has been used in the avant-garde sense of keeping ahead of the popular, [more often described as “the mass”], usage of contested signifiers. Williams therefore preferred to speak of “multiple serial production” rather than “mass production” or “the mass media”, on the basis that the latter terms are unable to distinguish between the meaning of large numbers, (“within certain assumed social relationships”), “rather than any physical or social aggregate”. Moreover, Williams notes how the very term “mass communication” evokes the public listening groups that were organized by fascist regimes, rather than the specificity of “broadcasting” – where it is more appropriate to describe many people receiving communications by means of individual sets, or listening to recorded music at home. However, if one prefers to retain a more nominalist position, it becomes difficult to not only distinguish between the particular and the general, but also between bourgeois propaganda and a bourgeois public sphere.

Perhaps the conflation of these categories into a notion of a dominant bourgeois explains the avant garde failure to develop a populist strategy. Hence one finds, here referencing the web document called “a pre-history of industrial music”, the failure of Genessis Porridge post Throbbing Gristle to move beyond the contradictions of the collective he was involved in, the so-called Temple of Psychic Youth. While in the United States, on the even more extreme avant garde fringe, Boyd Rice’s Abraxia Foundation (hope I’ve got the name right, I’m relying on memory here), to this day organizes itself, without any apparent irony, around the principles of the occult, social Darwinism and National Socialism. How easily it seems “leadership by experimental example” can become twisted into meaning the defence of a minority culture against the barbarism of the “masses” [sic]. Of course, this need not imply “isolationism” in the sense of an insularity from the fan network of zines etc that you reference. On the contrary, once you have become fluent in the roundabout speech and deep reading required by gatekeepers to gain admittance, this sense of being an insider can be wielded as a form of symbolic power to police the actions of others, both inside and outside of the group. Sadly, it seems that the recuperation of the artistic critique, into small groupings, can also in the context of fan cultures easily translate into niche marketing, indeed, perhaps more than it does to coalition building outside of the primary group.

When I speak then of isolationism with references to developments post classic industrial music, I am thinking of artists such as Lustmord, Thomas Koner, Biosphere etc, who are oftentimes also tagged with labels such as minimalist techno, dark ambient etc. Whilst the leadership principles of the avant garde can prove themselves to be ideological wildcards (they may be “ambivalent” as you put it), I read this more recent genre of music as pushing beyond the transcendental ambitions of [some] of its predecessors, in that it appears to abandon the pathos industrialism acknowledged by its foregrounding the social relationship between meaning producing listeners i.e. composers, interpreters, listeners were all creatively involved in that music should mediate feeling and thinking about human existence. By contrast, the machines talking to each other, in combination with the natural sound environments explored in isolationism, prominently featuring caves, abandoned buildings etc, what is more humanly spatially inaccessible, lead me to wonder about the aptness of Ferrara’s remarks:

“That is, the society which once found its ultimate frame of reference in the religious ideal of an orderly life devoted to the carrying out of one’s calling is now split into the two opposing camps of the “specialists without spirit,” devoted to work only as a means for securing consumption, and the “sensualists without heart,” who dedicate their lives to aesthetic cultivation but remain insensitive to all sense of duty or communal purpose. The choice of this vantagepoint reveals its infecundity when the theorists of postmodernity combine it with Weber’s dichotomy of asceticism and mysticism. When these two notions are superimposed over the distinction of specialists and sensualists we obtain, as a result, the gist of the neoconservative interpretation of modernity. Asceticism, which in a broader sense stands for vita activa, for a sense of moral purpose, for taking interest in the external world….for believing in progress, for the desire to grow more in control of our collective destiny, and for the desire to free ourselves from all man made yet unintentional constraints, is seen as losing ground. Mysticism, which is associated with vita contemplativa, with intellectualism without ethical commitment, with immobility and self-inspired stagnation, with withdrawal from the world and therefore with losing control over it, is seen as gaining the favor of the “sensualists without heart” and as threatening to become the dominant outlook”.    

Might isolationism as a genre indicate something of how one genre of music defines itself against the culture of industrial music, playing “ascetism” against the latter’s “vita active”? or might it be rather the logic culmination of the exhaustion of leadership by experimental example?   I agree with you that it can become an issue in “isolating” in such cases for whom, and why any particular group interprets the “non representational” typifies such tendencies. I might suggest that one possible indicator is for the artists themselves, if one is willing to consider the explicit Deleuzian references evident in their recording for the Mille Plateau label, replete with detailed theoretical sleeve notes (see for example the double set, “In Memorandum: Gilles Deleuze”). This appears (or is intended to) to encompass both the “non representational” affective charge of listening to these recordings, as well as evoking a much wider societal disorientation of the sensorium flowing from the disorganized creativity characterizing the form of capitalism which we are currently living under; a form of commodification more radical than envisaged in the emphasis on centralized control generally found in the industrial music that preceded it.

So, to answer your question I guess involves building a model for determining the feedback loops between producers/listeners. How specialized, or how much cultural capital does one require to partake in this process? By this means one might be able to develop a criterion for determining degrees of “isolationism”, from populist strategies/appeal, across fan bases etc. Returning to your emphasis on “non representational” musical characteristics, my guess is that context of artistic “discovery”, or creativity, remains an open question, although one can trace some of its conditions of emergence as being dependent upon the artist’s position in a wider network of likeminded individuals. What I would suggest at this stage though is that the size of this “bandwith” is one of the relevant factors   that leads me to identify a general (non critical) assumption that there is some sense of ‘knowledge’ that can be pursued in a way that doesn’t force us to raise these politico-legal questions, perhaps because the ‘real’ objects of art draw us to their essences (whatever….).   I believe that this presumption is an artefact of the alienation of epistemology/aesthetics from the rest of philosophy, especially the other normative disciplines like ethics, politics, and law. 

In light of all this, I would conclude that the turn to “the social” in aethetics should not be in the business of replacing one dogmatism (say, of Cartesian certainty) with another vulgar sociologism(say, of learned consensus) but revealing the conditions under which it is possible to pursue alternative forms of knowledge/musical/social practice.

I hope this clarifies my position, even if you find yourself disagreeing with me. I know there is still much work to be done in working up an appropriate direction to follow. I apologise for the somewhat cut & paste nature of this email, which admittedly included a selective dipping into my thesis (like I said though, I don’t have my usual sources at my disposal right now). I also don’t know when and if I will have a forum to present the results of any future research. Suffice it to add, it would be great to receive feedback from you again sometime. I would be most interested in hearing about your research interests. Are you teaching at a university? Can I find other written/recorded material you have produced?

Finally, I’ll concede that at least some of my prejudice (although it’s really more like, as you describe your own view, “a love hate” thing), against certain “industrial” artists has to do with my personal preference for the electro/synth pop which emerged at the same time (due to time and space constraints, in this email I have not even touched on pathbreaking developments from Germany from this same period), such as John Foxx, Gary Numan, The Human League et al. I’ve wondered if The Human League song   “Empire State Human” (from the “Reproduction” album) could almost be read in my terms as a critique of this group’s more avant garde electronic cousins, in the manner I’ve tried to describe in this email. Just for fun, I’ve reproduced the lyrics below as if written from the perspective of such an avant garde performer interested in leadership by experimental example.

Best wishes,



Neil


Since I was very young I realised
I never wanted to be human size
So I avoid the crowds and traffic jams
They just remind me of how small I am
Because of this longing in my heart
Im going to start the growing up
Im going to grow now and never stop
Think like a mountain, grow to the top

Tall, tall, tall, I want to be tall, tall, tall
As big as a wall, wall, wall, as big as a wall, wall, wall
And if Im not tall, tall, tall, then I will grow, grow, grow
Because Im not tall, tall, tall, tall, tall, tall, tall, tall
Tall, tall, tall, I want to be tall, tall, tall
As big as a wall, wall, wall, as big as a wall, wall, wall
And if Im not tall, tall, tall, then I will grow, grow, grow
Because Im not tall, tall, tall, tall, tall, tall, tall, tall

With concentration
My size increased
And now Im fourteen stories high
At least!!
Empire state human
Just a bored kid
Ill go to egypt to be
A pyramid

Tall, tall, tall, I want to be tall, tall, tall
As big as a wall, wall, wall, as big as a wall, wall, wall
And if Im not tall, tall, tall, then I will grow, grow, grow
Because Im not tall, tall, tall, tall, tall, tall, tall, tall
Tall, tall, tall, I want to be tall, tall, tall
As big as a wall, wall, wall, as big as a wall, wall, wall
And if Im not tall, tall, tall, then I will grow, grow, grow
Because Im not tall, tall, tall, tall, tall, tall, tall, tall

Brick by brick
Stone by stone
Growing till hes fully grown
Brick by brick
Stone by stone
Growing till hes fully grown

Fetch more water
Fetch more sand
Biggest person in the land
Fetch more water
Fetch more sand
Biggest person in the land