Despite my absence from the poster, I’m going to be speaking at CONCEPT‘s one-day conference on politics and art next Thursday (this absence is not CONCEPT’s fault, I should add). I’ll be talking about Joseph Beuys, Johannes Stüttgen and Karl Fastabend’s Organization for direct democracy through plebiscite, social sculpture and Benjamin Buchloch’s criticism of Beuys’ ‘simple-minded utopian drivel’. I’ve not read – but have heard good things about – Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things; Lyman Tower Sargent has forgotten more about utopia than I’ll ever know; and Chris’ does some great stuff on political posters, so it should be good…
And I’m not speaking at, but will be attending this, the following day…
My review of Uri Gordon’sAnarchy Alive (which, in short, I highly recommend) is in the latest issue of Capital and Class (Feb 2012). And it’s also beneath the picture below, or downloadable here. Not sure I share its optimism any longer, but I’d still encourage anyone interested in anarchism and contemporary social movements to read it (not sure about the cover mind):
Book review: Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory, by Uri Gordon
Capital & Class 2012 36: 189
In 2004, David Graeber (2004: 2) noted that although ‘anarchism is veritably exploding right now’, academia has failed to keep up, offering little other than caricatured understandings of a complex movement. Whilst he was perhaps overstating his case a little, even then, Uri Gordon’s Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory shows that a thoughtful, nuanced understanding of contemporary anarchism is not an impossibility in the university. Developed from his Ph.D. thesis (written at Oxford University, no less) it offers a compelling vision of an ideological movement whose relevance now is even stronger than it was in 2004.
The subtitle of Gordon’s work talks of a move ‘from practice to theory’, inverting the more standard approach of books which proclaim the relevance of a particular political ideology. Yet Gordon’s book actually goes further, undermining the dichotomy between practice and theory: it is perhaps best thought of as a work of praxis, in which theory and practice are irreducibly bound together in a mutually reinforcing relationship. It is a work which puts ‘organisation, action and lifestyle on the same footing with ideas and theories’ (p. 27), and what results is that each of these facets of anarchism asks awkward questions of the others such that a precise definition of ‘anarchism’ can never be established. Any initial fears that encoding key issues in anarchist practice into a work of theory might bring about an ossification of the movement are thus unfounded, and despite a cautiously optimistic tone throughout, Anarchy Alive! is bookended with assertions that its purpose is to ask ‘relevant questions’ (p. 7), and that ‘there are more questions than answers’ (p. 164). Indeed, the book’s refusal to fix the meaning of anarchism once and for all – and the liveliness of the debates it draws on – perhaps offers an answer to the questions Sartre posed in Critique of Dialectical Reason, where he wondered how it was possible for revolutionary politics to avoid ossification into bureaucratic forms of organisation, killing its vitality (Sartre, 2004).
It may seem odd, then, that Gordon considers anarchism an ‘ideology’ – a concept often seen by many anarchists as the site of precisely such ossification (see McQuinn, 2011; Landstreicher, 2001). Yet drawing on the work of his Oxford supervisor Michael Freeden, Gordon instead argues that ‘ideologies are not irrational dogmas or forms of “false consciousness”’ but rather are ‘paradigms that people use … to handle ideas that are essentially contested in political language’ (p. 20). This view of ideology poses no threat to Rudy Rocker’s understanding of anarchism (which Gordon quotes approvingly) as offering ‘no patent solution for human problems … It does not believe in any absolute truth, or in definite final goals for human development’ (p. 43).
It is to the current framing of the paradigms central to anarchism that Gordon turns in Chapter 2, where – as throughout the book – he draws predominantly on his experiences in anarchist struggles across Europe and the Middle East, and on the literature developed from these struggles: webzines, photocopied pamphlets, Indymedia postings and diy documentary films. From this, he argues that the three core concepts for the ideology of anarchism are domination, prefiguration and diversity/open-endedness, but that the meanings and relationships of these ‘are constantly reframed and recoded in response to world events, political alliances and trends in direct-action culture, evolving through intense flows of communication and discussion, and through innumerable experiences and experiments’ (p. 28).
Gordon’s familiarity with the multifarious debates of contemporary anarchism means that his work is imbued with an intrinsic understanding of the subtleties of anarchism that is lost in the caricatures of which Graeber speaks sorrowfully. In Chapter 3, ‘Power and Anarchy’, for example, he notes that ‘anarchists are hardly “against power”’ (p. 49), and continues to explain how anarchism seeks to maximise the individual’s ‘power-to’ by developing the communal ‘power-with’ (p. 50, 54-5). The complexities of this process are then examined with reference to anarchist practice of groups including Food not Bombs (p. 58) and Reclaim the Streets (p. 72-3), where factors not traditionally considered in works of ‘political philosophy’ must be considered: sparse finances, the self-confidence of activists, a lack of equipment and so on. Equally nuanced is Gordon’s argument that anarchism must not be seen as the logical conclusion of democracy, since it is philosophy that lacks the ability to force decisions upon others (p. 68-9); although, whilst he makes a compelling case here, it is one of the rare occasions on which his reflections are grounded in abstract theorising rather than in the movement itself. I am sympathetic to his claims, but would argue that it is for the movement to decide whether the term ‘democracy’ should be dispensed with or not – perhaps it is a concept that can be remade, rather than rejected.
The second half of the book sees Gordon apply his approach to a number of key issues of debate in contemporary radical politics and features chapters on the role of violence, technology, and the politics of Israel/Palestine. This section of the book, I wish to suggest, is particularly fruitful, both for those involved in the movement and those seeking an understanding of how it operates. The former can take inspiration for Gordon’s call for a ‘diversity of tactics’ (p. 78) and the unstinting tolerance for a diversity of opinions which is a frequent marker of this book. For the latter, it helps to flesh out how the machinations of anarchism play out on a ‘day-to-day basis’ far more effectively than any work grounded solely in theory ever could. I do not always agree with Gordon’s pronouncements (I think he is too pessimistic about the radical potential of technology, for example); others I found persuasive (his claim that no form of politics can escape violence, and that anarchism needs to bear this in mind when debating when violent struggle is ethically acceptable): but to take debate at length with these in this review would miss what makes this book so vital, for Gordon is not limiting anarchist theory to his beliefs on these issues, but rather showing how anarchism is ‘a dialogue’, which discusses real people’s ideas and practices with them: which ‘speak[s] – not from above, but from within’ (p. 9). These chapters should rather be read as invitations to reflect on and engage with Gordon’s claims from within the movement, using the same generosity of spirit Gordon shows in developing his arguments.
That is not to say that this book is beyond reproach, and I have concerns that the vision of the anarchist ‘movement’ Gordon offers (unintentionally) sets up a dichotomy between the ‘inside’ of that movement and the ‘outside’: with the inside appearing somewhat intimidating to penetrate. ‘Our archetypal anarchist’, we are told, ‘could pull up genetically modified crops before dawn, report on action through emails and independent media websites in the morning, take a nap, and then do a bit of allotment gardening in the afternoon and work part-time as a programmer in the evening’ (p. 109). Inspiring stuff, undoubtedly, but due to issues such as childcare, timidity, depression, disability, imprisonment or financial woes – not to mention a whole host of other late-capitalist anxieties – not an approach that is open to all. I worry that setting up such an intense body of activity as ‘anarchism’ risks alienating people who cannot offer that much to the movement. It might, perhaps, be more productive to think of anarchism as a culture which, at times, we all embody – the approach taken by Colin Ward (1982) (and which Gordon himself acknowledges: 41). Yet this is not perfect either, and runs the risk of depoliticising anarchism, reducing it to a series of generous gestures and leading to a situation in which ‘your archetypal anarchist helps an old lady across the street in the morning, illegally downloads some music all afternoon and then dumpster dives with his mates in the evening’. To avoid potential activists succumbing to this rather individualised fate, the anarchist movement must display not only the internally generous spirit exemplified by Gordon’s book, but also appear outwardly attractive to those who have much to offer the movement.
If the anarchist movement can find a way to solve this conundrum and move forwards with the clarity, honesty and enthusiasm that Gordon’s book displays then I would be tempted to share the optimism with which it closes and agree that many of the questions anarchists must now face are indeed ‘new questions … questions about winning’ (p. 164).
References
Graeber D (2004) Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Ceros Press.
Landstreicher W (2001) How then do we go wild? Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed 52.
May M (1994) The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism. Pennsylvania State University Press.
McQuinn J (2011) Post-left anarchy: Leaving the left behind. Online at http://www.theanarchistlibrary. org, accessed 14 June 2011.
Sartre J-P (2004) Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Smith A. London: Verso.
Ward C (1982) Anarchy in Action. London: Freedom Press.
A couple of months back I produced a pamphlet (and gave a talk) for the Psykick Dancehall and Jon Marshall curated exhibition Thinking Ourselves into Existence at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (full text below). The exhibition explored the social and political relevance of improvised and experimental music and featured works by Psykick Dancehall; curated readings and listenings; and pamphlets by Psykick Dancehall and Jon Marshall, Adam Harper, Ben Watson, Marie Thompson and Paul Hegarty. My pamphlet was entitled Playing the Future: Improvisation and Nomadic Utopia, and can be downloaded here, read below, or bought here. One can only speculate what Watson would make of its use of Deleuzean nomadic thought to read improvisation (and perhaps of improvisation to read Deleuzean nomadic thought)…
My thoughts have developed a little since I wrote this – I think I’d be even more cautious about improvisation’s utopianism now (I like Foucault’s idea of ‘hyper-pessimistic activism’), though I still think the key arguments are relevant. Paul Hegarty’s pamphlet (which you can buy here) perhaps offers a slightly more cautious counterpoint to my own piece. Anyway, you can read the piece below the picture…
“When I close my eyes and I am just playing with other people in a free situation, where we can all do what we want, I am in a utopian space. And I have been very lucky to spend a huge amount of my life in that utopian space.” Evan Parker, in an interview given to Stewart Lee, 2010
The fundamental argument of this essay is that the practice of collectively improvising music creates utopian space. But this is by no means a self-evident truth: it cannot simply be said that the space of improvising music is a utopia which solves problems of social and political organisation once and for all, for improvisation is an inherently muddy phenomena, frequently constituted by frustrations and failure. Though the adjective ‘utopian’ has been used to describe the practice of collectively improvising music, (1) an investigation into exactly how its utopianism operates and what its utopia might look like is necessary before the claim can be taken seriously; and even then there are limits to improvisation’s utopianism. Nonetheless, I believe that the claim can be taken seriously and that these limits need not prove fatal. There is a utopianism inherent to improvisation.
Before this argument can be developed further, it needs to be established precisely what is meant by the term ‘collectively improvising music’. I use the phrase to refer to the activity of creating music in a group of people without reference to any ideal/limitation determining how the music created can, or should, sound; or which determines the relation- ships between musicians. (2) An infinite number of possibilities should be open to each musician at all times during the creation of music. (3) Ideals/limitations and hierarchies may be formally predetermined before the music is created or they may emerge during the performance itself, and they may be recognised or unrecognised by the performers. Fol- lowing a score or agreeing before the performance to play in 7/8 time would be recognised factors, whilst the impact of music the performers
had listened to at any time in their lives prior to improvising might be recognised (“let’s do something that sounds like Can”) but would, without a doubt, place parameters on the performance that went unrecognised – as would the emotional state of the musicians, the temperature in the room, the musician’s life histories and innumerable other affective inputs. Playing in a certain time signature, scale or key may also emerge during the performance and may not be consciously recognised by the musicians if this is the case. In terms of relationships, meanwhile, improvisation is built on non-hierarchical relationships between musicians – there are no leaders in an improvising collective.
Making music free of these ideals/limitations is, of course, impossible in its pure state (just as it would be impossible to create ‘fully composed’ music that gave performers absolutely no freedom of choice regarding how to play, at least so long as the performers were human). This means that improvised music should not, therefore, be seen as exist- ing in a binary opposition with ‘composed’ music. (4) Rather, all human musical performance operates on a spectrum running from these two inaccessible poles: music is improvised to the extent that performers are free to explore the infinite for its entire duration and it is composed to the extent that they run up against ideals/limitations which prevent that exploration.
Like improvisation, utopia is a muddy concept: it too is littered with frustration and failure. I argue that there are two poles of utopia: the ‘nomadic utopia’ and the ‘State Utopia’. Like improvisation and com- position, they form the opposite ends of a spectrum rather than existing in binary opposition, and cannot be realised in their pure states. A good starting point for exploring these poles is the etymological double entendre of Thomas More’s term: utopia is caught between ‘euto- pia’ (good place) and ‘outopia’ (no place): ‘the good place that is no place’.
The only thing clear here is that utopia is a place. In arguing that the practice of improvising music creates a utopia (more accurately, it creates a nomadic utopia) it is necessary, therefore, to consider how it is possible to speak of musical production as a place. Here, I draw on the definition offered by the geographer Doreen Massey, who argues that ‘place’ is “constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular lo- cus” (2004: 69). There is a danger of circularity in this definition as ‘locus’ is Latin for place, and to avoid this, I understand the term in the mathematical sense, where it refers to a collection of points which share a property. The ‘points’ here would be the musicians; the shared property their desire to create music together – either in a particular style or through a particular process. In this sense, then, it is possible to think about a group of musicians working together as constituting a ‘place’, with the ‘locus’ being the music they create.
In order to understand this place of musical production as a utopia it is necessary to consider it as a ‘good place’ and a ‘no place’. Here, two rival definitions of the ‘good’ come into play. The State Utopia (which conforms to colloquial understandings of the term as a per- fect place separated from the present by time or space) is constituted by the ‘moral good’, in which that which is good conforms to univer- sal laws and speaks to a vision of perfection. It sees itself as “divine, transcendent, superior to life” (Delueze, 1986: 122), judging and orienting action from a location beyond the material present. This location is the State Utopia, a place in which all actions conform to this particular moral vision. Hierarchy is necessary to enforce this conformity and deny difference, meaning that the only form of free- dom is a negative freedom; in the words of the utopian scholar J.C. Davis, Utopia provides “freedom from disorder and moral chaos, freedom from moral choice altogether” (1981: 384).
This, clearly, is antithetical to the social organisation of improvising collectives. Indeed, it seems to offer a description of the orchestra, in which individual players are generally given no freedom to explore or pursue their own interests, and in which a strict hierarchy – flowing from conductor down through soloists, the first violinist, section leaders, and so on – enforces the strict moral ordering of the composer, whose score functions as an object of ‘perfection’. Like those living in a State Utopia, the orchestral musician has “accepted a discipline which is totalitarian in its scope and denial of human individuality” (Davis, 1981: 54). (5)
Whilst Davis is an advocate of (State) Utopia, he shares with its detractors a belief that it is ‘totalitarian’ in scope, denying the in- dividual the capacity to act on their own desires, or create their own conditions for life. For many (myself included), this would be a fundamentally dystopian state of affairs where the totality utterly dominates the individual. Marylou Speaker – a violinist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra – notes that “the more successful we are as instrumentalists, the more we have to sublimate our individuality…. to the tyranny of the conductor… players in an orchestra have to submit, instant by instant, to the dictates of a single individual… every movement you make, in the music that is the substance of your being, is dictated to you by others” (quoted in Fischer, 1994: 28).
This is clearly a long way from the experience of improvising musicians, so how might it be possible to use the term ‘utopia’ to describe the spaces they create? To do so requires a different understanding of the concept of ‘the good’. Unlike State Utopianism’s moral good, the nomadic utopia orients itself around an ‘ethical good’. Drawing on the work of Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze, this can be under- stood as that which unfolds immanently and increases the capacity of those present in a space to act. This should not be understood simply as a reversal of the domination of the collective over the individual found in State Utopianism, however. Rather, it collapses the binary opposition between the individual and the collective: the ability of one to act from their position of difference increases the ability of the collective to act: an increase in the power of one increases the power of all, meaning power is distributed and produced non-hierarchically (and indeed, the imposition or emergence of hierarchy is damaging to such power). (6) As such, the concept of the ‘individual’ is replaced by the ‘dividual’, someone who – in the words of Lewis Hyde – is “con- stituted by the complexity of the world around him [sic]”. To be a dividual is to know that “we are always simultaneously individuals and sunk in our communities” (Hyde and Wallace, 2010: online at http:// bombsite.powweb.com). An increase in the power of the individual results in an increase in the power of the collective, and vice versa.
The nomadic utopia is made (and remade) by these productive operations of power, meaning it exists in a state of becoming. It is like Heraclitus’ river “which is not the same and is” (2003: 51), or Deleuze and Guattari’s “schizophrenic object” which can- not be understood without reference to the forces that produce it (2004: 6). It is a residue of materialist utopianism and not the telos of idealist Utopianism; a prefigurative space in the im- manent here-and-now that is open to becoming; not a perfect- ed space in a transcendent future which is closed to becoming.
I believe that the place of musical improvisation is a nomadic utopia. In it, dividual musicians assert their difference through their playing, yet this asserted difference does not deny the dif- ference of fellow improvisers. Rather, each player responds to the difference of the other players and adapts their own out- put accordingly. This is often described as ‘nobody solos, ev- erybody solos’, although I prefer George Lewis’ term ‘multi-dominance’ (2000): a nonhierarchical arrangement in which the ex- pression of power is not dependent on others occupying a position of powerlessness. (7)
This nonhierarchical multidominance unfolds immanently, mean- ing that the music created cannot be known in advance – nor can the specific form the social relations between the players will take. This is the essence of the nomadic utopia which, as noted above, results from – rather than creates – utopianism. In the liner notes to Change of the Century, Ornette Coleman notes that “[w]hen our group plays, before we start out to play, we do not have any idea what the end result will be. Each player is free to contribute what he feels in the music at any given moment. We do not begin with a precon- ceived notion as to what kind of effect we will achieve” (2006: 253).
It is important, however, not to forget the ‘no’ in utopia’s ety- mology. As I noted above, it is impossible to create music that is purely improvised, and the nomadic utopia cannot be actualised in its pure state. Even if no hierarchy or ideal/limitation is placed upon musicians before they begin to play, they will emerge as a performance progresses. A key or rhythm may be settled upon, or multidominance may give way to dominance by a single play- er or a section of the collective. These moments may be among the most powerful in improvisation – the feeling that a band has really hit its ‘groove’ and synced around a spontaneously created order – and they may well be necessary, moments of recupera- tion, of taking stock of gains achieved. (8) Heraclitus’ river is not a site of pure becoming, remember – it is “not the same and is” – and such synchronisations are perhaps necessary to give a sense of cohesion, identity and continuity to the nomadic utopia; they enable it to have a name, to be more than undifferentiated chaos.
Yet they are also moments which lessen the extent to which the music is improvised, and as the mode of musical creation moves along the spectrum away from the pole of improvisation and to- wards the pole of composition, the musical place moves along the utopian spectrum away from the pole of nomadic utopia towards the pole of State Utopia. Tyrannies of habit may emerge – informal hierarchies which show that it is not enough to simply overthrow formal hierarchies and declare the end of history . In Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed an anarchist (nomadic) utopia, in which there are no formal hierarchies, slides towards State Utopia/ dystopia as habit becomes ossified into moral order, with those who question this order alienated from the society. Change becomes something to be resisted; the society begins to close itself off to the future. Tom Moylan cautions against such an occurrence, and his words could equally apply to improvising musicians ‘in sync’:
Remember to be historically vigilant, do not lock in the utopi- an achievement, do not remove the social utopia from the pro- cesses of time. Don’t cut a deal with the false utopian devil of your own collective imagination as it dreams of the end of his- tory; and don’t cover up the deal by changing the [utopia] from that of a place-in-process to one of eternal delight…[do] not let the processes of learning and change end (2000: 15).
The ‘no’ in utopia’s etymology, therefore, should serve to remind the improvising collective that they must not settle permanently on any given order; that they must always look to keep the musical space open to the unknowable future. Improvisation creates utopia, and it must do so continuously.
What, then, can improvisation do on a larger scale? What sort of role might it play in a more ‘macro level’ nomadic utopianism? A small one, of course: improvisation is not going to save the world, and it would be a mistake to simply extrapolate from the specific micropolitics of improvisation to tackle the messy dystopia of neoliberal capital. Yet I do believe that improvisation can play a role, no matter how small. It can teach people the joys of nonhierarchy, and help us understand that there is not a necessary war between the interests of the collective and the interests of the individual. Similarly, the techniques used by improvisers to overcome problems of hierarchy and lack of ideas may suggest techniques applicable to those involved in nonhierarchical forms of social organisation and political action (and vice versa).
And of course there are problems relating to exclusivity which must be addressed before improvisation can truly be hailed as even the smallest part of political movement. Whilst my focus in this essay has been on improvisation as a practice rather than a genre (or an umbrella term encompassing a number of sub-genres in the jazz and improv traditions), serious questions need to be asked about why improvisation is so dominated by men; why there are still racial divides; and why queer and many other minority issues are so absent from the discourses and practises of improvisation (including this discourse, I should add). A nomadic utopia needs difference; it thrives on difference: it cannot be an exclusive, privileged sphere. Discussions must therefore take place around the practice of col- lective improvisation to ensure that it becomes a space in which all those who want to take part can do so (not everyone, of course, wants to make music – and some may simply prefer to play com- posed pieces: that is fine, and I would not suggest this means they are likely to have ‘bad’ politics). (10)
Improvisation is indeed a muddy, contested practice. But so is utopia - and by getting our hands dirty and engaging, we might just be able to move towards a freer, fairer, more exciting world for all. In the utopian community he founded at New Lanark (just thirty miles south-east from this gallery) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Robert Owen established a number of musical groups – choirs, orchestras and brass bands – believing they ‘had the capacity to break down barriers and offer the opportunities for collective activities that would foster friendship and cooperation’ (Davison, 2010: 234). Whilst there were disconcertingly hierarchical aspects to Owen’s use of music (it could, he asserted, create “obedience and order in the most imperceptible and pleasant manner” [quoted in Davison, 2010: 238]), the use of music to help create community is inspiring. We can only imagine the joys that a nomadic utopia which replaced the brass bands with free improvisation collectives might obtain as they played the future into existence.
Notes
1 See, for example, Cox and Warner (2002: 251-252), Fred Van Hove (online at http://enotes.com) and Evan Parker (2010: online at http://guardian.co.uk).
2 I write this term as such because an ideal necessarily imposes a limitation on possi- bility – if you are a cellist performing Elgar’s Cello Concerto it is not possible (or at least not permitted) to start using the body of the cello as a percussive body, for example. It should also be noted that improvising collectives might involve non-human actors: computers, animals, cyborgs, the acoustics of the room – although I do not consider these in this essay.
3 Initially, it may seem that this commitment to infinity would require each impro- viser to have infinite musical talent and a continuously tuned and instantly responsive instrument capable of synthesising all possible sounds. This fails to understand that there are near infinite potentials within discrete parameters, however, not least when notions of playing an instrument ‘properly’ are abandoned, and when there is more than one person involved in the production of music.
4 Indeed, I have been tempted to reject the term ‘improvisation’ in favour of ‘in- stant composition’. This would draw on Adam Harper’s insight that “technically, the word ‘composer’ suggests anyone at all who might create music. In this sense, the term overlaps with the word ‘performer’. Composers may also come in groups that collaborate on the creation of music” (2010: 7). As the term improvisation is more clearly recognised, however, I am inclined to stick with it.
5 In line with my earlier comment that it is impossible to have music in which per- formers always have an infinite number of options open to them, it is impossible to perform music which leaves no space for individuality on behalf of the perform- ers. However, the degree of freedom an orchestral musician is given is likely to be miniscule, with soloists, or those at the very top of the orchestral hierarchy the only musicians truly permitted to stamp their individuality on a piece (the conductor, of course, has relative autonomy in deciding how a composer’s instructions are to be interpreted). It should be noted that this has not always been the case, however, and many baroque compositions left significant space for musicians to improvise within a given set of parameters.
6 In his Ethics, Spinoza calls this understanding of power potentia, and distinguishes it from postesas, which is power as domination (2000).
7 For Lewis, the concept of multidominance is Afrological, and is central to a great deal of art (both visual and sonic) from the African diaspora. Though he notes this is “historically emergent rather than ethnically essential” (2002: 217), for a fuller ac- count of improvisation’s utopianism the way in which social histories have informed its development would need to be taken into account.
8 A process of pure flux would be overwhelming; chaos without the potential for self-ordering. Angela Carter’s novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is set in a society in total flux, and its narrator – Desidero – is so overwhelmed by the constant play of difference that he “only has one desire: that everything stop” (2011: 2), an experience that many who have played (or listened to) improvised music may well be able to relate to.
9 The writings of the ‘postanarchist’ Saul Newman are of relevance here. See, in particular, p.47-51 of From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power.
10 I would suggest that these discussions take the form of popular education work- shops. Popular education – a form of radically inclusive learning largely developed in Latin America – is, I argue, another nomadic practice which has a number of striking similarities with the practice of free improvisation (see Bell, 2010: online at http:// ceasefiremagazine.co.uk)
Works Cited
Bell, David (2010) ‘The Shape of Education to Come’, online at http://cease- firemagazine.co.uk/deserters-songs-5/ (accessed 31/1/12)
Carter, Angela (2011) The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, London: Penguin Coleman, Ornette (2006) ‘Change of the Century’ in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (eds.), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, London: Continuum, pp. 253-254
Cox, Christoph and Warner, Daniel (2006) ‘Improvised Musics: Introduction’ in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (eds.), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, London: Continuum, pp. 251-252
Davis, J.C. (1981) Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516- 1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Davison, Lorna (2010) ‘A Quest for Harmony: The Role of Music in Robert Owen’s New Lanark Community’, Utopian Studies, 21(2), pp. 232-251
Deleuze, Gilles (1986) Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson, London: Continuum
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix (2004) Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane, London: Continuum
Fischer, Marilyn (1994) ‘The Orchestral Workplace’ in Journal of Social Philosophy, 25 (3), pp. 26-39
Harper, Adam (2010) Infinite Music, Winchester: Zero Books
Heraclitus (2003) Fragments, trans. Brooks Haxton, New York: Penguin
Le Guin, Ursula K. (2006) The Dispossesed: An Ambiguous Utopia, London: Gollancz
Lewis, George (2002) ‘Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives’ in Black Music Research Journal, volume 22, supplement, pp. 215-246
Lewis, George (2000) ‘Too many notes: computers, complexity and culture in voy-ager’, in Leonardo Music Journal 10, pp.33-39
Massey, Doreen (2004) ‘A Global Sense of Place’ in Tim Creswell, eds. Place: A Short Introduction, Malden: Blackwell, pp.63-74
Moylan, Tom (2000) Scraps of the Untainted Sky: science fiction, utopia, dystopia, Boulder: Westview Press
Newman, Saul (2007) From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power, Lanham: Lexington Books
Spinoza, Baruch (2000) Ethics, trans. George Parkinson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
A follow-up to my earlier post on the riots has just been published over at Bullets and Ballots. In it I advocate popular education as one way in which the energies unleashed in the riots might find a more utopian manner of expression.
Yet despite my belief that popular education must play a key role in social change, there are some difficult issues around hierarchy, domination, power and authority that need to be thought through. These, I think, apply regardless of the situation in which popular education takes place, but are particularly pressing if it is to be successful in Britain’s most deprived areas, where mistrust of authority is likely to be at its highest.
Given that most of those who advocate popular education are of an open/heterodox/humanist Marxist or anarchist persuasion (and I’m speaking from the latter), ‘power’, ‘hierarchy’ and ‘authority’ are generally regarded with suspicion, and ‘domination’ is rejected outright. Popular education appeals precisely because it reverses the vanguardism of Marxist-Leninism: encouraging people to be active in the making of their own futures rather than following pre-determined paths to emancipation. ‘We make the road by walking’- as the title of a book-length exchange between Myles Horton and Paulo Freire has it.
Yet despite the active role that everyone plays in creating their futures in popular education, a number of teacher/theorists argue that it does not completely dispense with the authority of the educator. Here is Freire on this issue in the aformentioned discussion with Horton:
‘I also discovered another thing that was very important to me afterward, that I had authority but I was not authoritarian. I remember that not even one of the students ever left the classroom without telling me or asking me in a very respectful, polite way every time. I began to understand at a very young age that on one hand the teacher as a teacher is not the student. The student as the student is not the teacher. I began to perceive that they are different but not necessarily antagonistic.
The difference is precisely that the teacher has to teach, to experience, to demonstrate authority and the student has to experience freedom in relation to the teacher’s authority. I began to see that the authority of the teacher is absolutely necessary for the development of the freedom of the students , but if the authority of the teacher goes beyond the limits authority has to have in relation to the students’ freedom, then we no longer have authority. We no longer have a freedom. We have authoritarianism’.
From an anarchist perspective this is troubling: ‘authority’ is usually considered something to be avoided, even by those (and I’d include myself here) who draw inspiration from Foucault and argue that anarchism is not about overcoming power, but about overcoming domination and hierarchy (more on this in a minute).
To me, it seems nonsense to expect a student to ask permission from the educator to leave a popular education class. Depending on the circumstances, it might be polite to ask permission of the whole class, or whoever’s speaking- but there could be perfectly legitimate reasons for leaving the class without asking permission from anyone- even without saying anything at all. Expecting a student to defer to the authority of the educator seems a pointless nod to what Max Weber would call ‘rational-legal authority’: the authority that comes with the position of being an educator: an authority, in other words, which comes from a formalised hierarchy. It could also be seen as deferential to what Weber would call ‘traditional authority’- it’s always been the case that you ask permisison of the teacher to leave the room, that’s just ‘how things are done’ (what I would call an ‘ossified hierarchy’). Anarchism is also opposed to such hierarchies; deferring to tradition is almost always a counter-revolutionary action.
The claim that the student has to ‘experience freedom in relation to the teacher’s authority’ is also an odd one. I may be mis-reading Freire here, but this seems to be playing to the liberal myth that freedom is necessarily relational (the freedom of a impinges on the freedom of b) and furthermore, that this is a hierarchical relationship (the freedom of those further down the hierarchy limits the freedom of those at the top). Here, I would argue that these only hold up when there is a hierarchical relationship: as you move towards nonhierarchicy, freedom becomes a social concept: a‘s freedom is no longer in opposition with b‘s; they co-exist and mutually reinforce each other: freedom becomes bound up with power-with, which I discuss below.
In both instances, ‘authority’ presents itself as a legitimate exercise of power-over, or domination. For anarchists, no form of power-over is legitimate (I’m speaking broadly here, of course) and so such authority is unacceptable.
Yet I think that we need to think carefully about the role that ‘charismatic authority’ (Weber’s third kind of authority) can- must- play in popular education. There is no doubt that charisma can be dangerous: when mixed with other forms of authority or power it can facilitate hierarchy and domination of the most destructive kind. But without it, popular education will not get off the ground.
I cannot stress how important this is. Most disaffeted youths would laugh in the face of a popular educator and see the ‘lack of hierarchy in the classroom’ as an excuse to dick about. They would not be able to distinguish between the popular educator and the well-meaning social worker, schoolteacher or police officer who- however polite they might be- will always be ‘on the other side’; will always be ‘the enemy’. The popular educator does not come in the name of hierarchical authority, but that won’t be immediately apparent (and if the popular education is taking place within a coercive setting- a school or young offenders institution, for example, there will be an inescapable element of power-over involved).
I cannot emphasise the above point enough: I’ve been the teacher (in a mainstream setting) who thinks that by being nice they’ll automatically get students on their side, and I had a rude awakening; classes were way out of my control and routinely took advantage of my kindness. Now I ethically object to trying to impose either traditional or legal-rational authority to work my way out of this situation (and it would have proved useless: I looked about 16 and a ‘cover supervisor’ doesn’t have much ‘legal-rational’ authority), so the only way out was to try and assert some ‘charismatic authority’.
So I threw caution to the wind and decided to be myself. And it worked, for the most part. Students warmed to me and it got to the point where serious bad behaviour in my classes was rare. “Don’t dick about, Mr. Bell’s sound”.
The point here is that I’d earned the respect of the students. It’s a sad world where this has to be the case, but we shouldn’t necessarily blame the students for this: they are routinely subject to domination and automatically distrust anyone in a position of authority which- as I’ve noted- is exactly where they’d see the popular educator. So- if I can use an analogy which runs the risk of alienating all right-thinking people- the popular educator almost has to act like a salesman. Quite rightly, everyone’s default position is to despise the salesman, so they’ve got to use charisma to overcome the initial prejudice they encounter, and then convert this personal goodwill into a belief in the product that’s being sold.
There is no single way to have be charismatic: some people do it through the sheer force of their niceness; others are funny; some are just odd. You have to be yourself, believe in yourself and hope that you have something the students can buy into. And once they’ve bought into you, they might buy into the project. If done self-consciously this is a troubling move, which comes extremely close to exercising power-over without the subjects of that power even realising it (the most worrying kind of power, as Steven Lukes has argued). But it strikes me that it’s legitimate for four reasons:
Charisma is inescapable. Even in an anarchist utopia in which all formal hierarchies had been done away with, some people would be charismatic and others would not (though there would be structures to allow those who were less charismatic to influence political organisation).
We do not yet live in an anarchist utopia. Whilst anarchism is a prefigurative political philosophy- one which seeks to enact itself through its praxis rather than wait until a radical break- anarchists must also be prepared to be pragmatic and engage tactically with the norms of the contemporary society in order to challenge them. Writing an article for The Guardian on anarchism might be an example of this. Popular education helps make power (of all forms) visible, so the one-time exercising of a power which may go unrecognised is an acceptable trade-off in the long run.
Whilst the salesman or the dictator seeks to use their charisma to achieve power-over; the popular educator is using it to achieve power-with (more on this below).
Anarchism’s prefiguration is inwardly focussed. That is to say that anarchists deal with each other in the manner that they would in an anarchist society: it is in the social relations between anarchists that the ‘new world in the shell of the old’ is to be found. When engaging outside the anarchist community, however, this does not apply to such an extent. The attitudes of resenting authority in the manner I’ve discussed above would not exist in an anarchist society, because formalised hierarchies would have been done away with.
I think three is the strongest of these points. The educator’s charisma should properly be seen as a form of power-with, as defined by Starhawk. It is ‘the power of a strong individual in a group of equals, the power not to command, but to suggest and be listened to, and see it happen’ (I take this Sparhawk quote from Uri Gordon‘s Anarchy Alive, which I can’t recommend enough for its discussion of power in anarchism). It is a power that- like Spinoza’s conatus- self-maximises but never dominates, spreading throughout the group so that each individual feels empowered within the collective, and feels that they can change the world for the better. It might even enable each individual to maximise their own charisma.
A few years ago I worked as a ‘cover supervisor’ in a secondary school in Nottingham (an unqualified and cheap supply teacher, essentially). For the most part, I loved my time in the classroom. But on a small handful of occasions things went wrong. Completely, hideously wrong. Students with whom I enjoyed good rapport would suddenly flip- embarking on a spell of hugely destructive behaviour: bins were thrown, equipment was smashed and- on rare occasions- I and other students were threatened with violence. Despite my reputation as an understanding member of staff and the fact that I never lost my temper (nor threatened sanctions), there was invariably little I could do but ensure the safety of other students and wait for the student in question to calm down.
These students were not subhuman. They were not scum. They were not chavs. They were not pikeys. They were people, like everyone else. Some of them were could be unpleasant, many of them were often very pleasant: just like any sample of secondary school students, in other words.
From my position of power the cause of these outbursts would be nigh on inexpicable. If any immediate trigger was obvious it would invariably be something as minor as a pen running out, a question proving too hard, me asking them to do something/not to do something.
Frustrated, all I knew was that these were horrible situations: scary for all concerned, and sad too. Witnessing such self-destructive behaviour is not easy.
Such actions aren’t just born in the heat of the moment, though. Nor can they be explained away by mechanistic psychology (“that child has ADHD/something wrong in the head”). The popularity of energy drinks at break-time might be a contributing factor (I’m serious here), but ultimately what appeared ‘inexplicable’ to me was often a symptom of a socialised condition of hopelesness, springing from a sub/semi-conscious understanding that there is no future.
Perhaps this is not even self-destruction: there is no longer a sense of self to destruct. Liberal rhetoric about knuckling down and working hard and making something of life is seen as the patronising, implausible bullshit it is; traditional hierarchies that kept people ‘in their place’ have been eroded by capitalism; collective action to change the situation simply isn’t seen as possibility. There is nothing to do but howl helplessly. I often thought that if this was a struggle for recognition it was a struggle for self-recognition; an act of proving to oneself that you are still capable of doing something.
So when I first read Henry Giroux I felt he was clearly right to say that whilst much classroom ‘rebellion’ has no obvious political content, it does have a political origin.
* * * *
It’s pretty obvious why I’m thinking about this tonight. What we are seeing across London is the hopeless howl of a generation with no future. No, these people aren’t ‘protesters’. No, their actions aren’t self-consciously political (on the whole, at least). But these people are not scum. They are not chavs. They are not pikeys. They are humans, like everybody else.
Triggered by yet more police violence (which I’m not discussing here, but is certainly relevant), I would suggest that we are seeing the simultaneous performance of two roles (which intertwine, and are not exhaustive):
1. That of the consumer who is told they can have it all.
Hence the looting and pillaging of luxury items. People feel a sense of entitlement. They have been promised so much; so much is dangled in front of them and yet remains (through the debt they have to get into to afford it) a form of social control. WELL FUCK THAT, they are saying. WE WILL JUST HAVE IT. “BECAUSE WE ARE WORTH IT”.
(There are almost certainly people looting things they need and can’t afford too).
2. That of the no-future generation.
Like the student smashing a classroom, the rioters and looters have abandoned a future which has abandoned them. When there’s nothing to fight for, there’s nothing to lose. Those whose sense of self has been taken from them are revelling in the freedom that loss brings.
* * * *
On this second point I think Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s essay ‘Civil War’ merits consideration. First published in 1994, its central message is that the term ‘civil war’ is a misnomer which disguises the fact we exist in a continuum of violence. That is to say, violence always exists beneath the radar and it’s only when it erupts through rioting or military/militial conflict that we pay attention. This much should be self-evident to anyone with more than a passing knowledge of neoliberalism’s march to ‘a free market and a strong state’; or to anyone who’s been paying attention to gun and knife crime in some of Britain’s most alienated, abandoned communities. And, of course, to anyone who’s seen what the Metropolitan police has been getting away with for decades.
Now I do not endorse many of Enzensberger’s arguments- not least his all-too-ready dismissal of structural/economic causes (it’s not clear how much weight he attaches to the second last point quoted below- he certainly doesn’t see it as a foundational cause of violence), but the following extracts will, I think, strike a chord with those who can’t understand why inequality seems to be fostering violence directed inwards at people’s own communities and not outwards at political elites who create/perpetuate inequality.
“Civil war has long since moved into the metropolis. Its mutations are part of everyday life in our cities, not just in Lima and in Johannesburg, in Bombay and in Rio, but in Paris and Berlin, in Detroit and Birmingham, in Milan and Hamburg. The combatants are no longer just terrorists and secret police, Mafiosi and skinheads, drug dealers and death squads, neo-Nazis and cowboy security guards. Even ordinary members of the public are transformed overnight into hooligans, arsonists, rioters and serial killers. And as in the African wars, the combatants are becoming younger by the day.”
“The perpetrators [display an] inability to distinguish between destruction and self-destruction. In today’s civil wars there is no longer any need to legitimize your actions. Violence has freed itself from ideology.”
“The molecular civil wars in our cities are similarly lacking in reason. Gang warfare in the North American ghettos has nothing to do with the historical class struggle. Not even the theory of black versus white provides a satisffactory rationale, for victims of muggings, robberies and murders are blacks more often than not. It wasn’t the homes of the rich that were the target of the riots in Los Angeles; the perpetrators set fire to buildings in their own community, including the oldest surviving bookshop in America, owned by blacks, and the office of the most militant local politician in the neighbourhood. In gang wars everywhere, it is a case of the have-nots shooting at each other.”
“Howls of protest at the loss of jobs are accompanied by pogroms which make it obvious to any thinking capitalist that it would be senseless to invest in a place where people go in fear of their lives. The most idiotic Serbian president knows as well as the most idiotirc Rambo that his vicil war will turn his contry into an economic wasteland. The only conclusion one can draw is that this collective self-mutilation is not simply a side-effect of the conflict, a risk the protagonists are prepared to run, it is what they are actually fighting to achieve.”
“If you imagine a map of the world that shows the geographical distribution of the ‘superflous’ masses- on the one side regions of underdevelopment in their varying degrees and, on the other, zones of underemployment in the metropolitan centres- and compare these with the sites of the many civil wars, you will notice a correlation.”
“In the collective running amok, the concept of ‘future’ disappears. Only the present matters. Consequences do not exist. The instinct for self-preservation, with the restraining influence it brings to bear, is knocked out of action.”
* * * *
The task, then, must be to take the energies released in the riots and offer to them a future.
This does not mean the lie of ‘social mobility’.
This does not mean the false promises of representative democracy.
This does not mean the vanguardist solutions of intellectual elites.
This means a future coming from within the communities.
It must be the future as possibility, not the future as readymade solution. A future created by communities talking to one another; by people learning together. A future created by communities sharing their knowledges and their experiences. A future shaped by the knowledge that communities are’t just local but exist across networks of solidarity, identity and experience globally- and that we are each in a number of such communities.
What is happening is ugly. But a beauty can be born from this. A beauty which shows communities that they are powerful. More powerful, in fact, than they had ever dreamed. The repressive arm of the state cannot cope with them. Assigned roles do not have to be reproduced.
This must be the catharsis which enables us to begin again. The fight must no longer be for self-mutilation but for self-organisation.
A while back I wrote a lengthy post on hypnaogic pop, cyberpunk and utopia (I noted in the ‘get out clauses’ at the bottom that I’d rather shamefully failed to work Records on Ribs into my discussion, and reading it back now it seems strangely pessimistic- coloured by a more paternal Marxist bent than I would generally subscribe to, powerful though such arguments are). Anyway, I’m reminded of this because Rick Poynor’s post on Adam Curtis’ latest BBC documentary, ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’ (which is named after the poem below- image from Poynor- and which I’ve shamefully not yet seen) joined up the dots for me between cyberpunk and the prefigurative utopianism of Records on Ribs which I discussed in today’s earlier blog post.
Text of poem is at the bottom of the post.
Of particular note in Poynor’s dissemination of Curtis’ documentary is the idea that the cybernetic dream of utopia- of a ‘cybernetic ecology’ is over. This seems to run contrary to the claims I made in yesterday’s post about seeing Records on Ribs as a prefigurative utopian space, but I think we have to acknowledge that the web- whilst it might provide the model- does not provide all the means. Building a society beyond capitalism will mean far more than sharing stuff online: the basic substances of existence- food, shelter, clothing- cannot be downloaded, no matter how fast your modem. We cannot pretend that Records on Ribs constitutes an adequate offering to the struggle. It is relatively easy to create communist spaces online; far less so in the physical world.
But we do not believe that we should abandon decentralised, nonhierarchical, self-organising modes of being. Whilst there is a similarity with much neoliberal thought (Hayek’s concept of catallaxy, for example, or even ‘The Big Society’), and whilst neoliberalism has co-opted this rhetoric, the world we live in fails to deliver on the promise of anarchistic cyberneticism because it is a system which is founded upon- and which perpetuates- inequality. Where there is inequality there is also hierarchy and where there is hierarchy there cannot be immanent self-organisation. Money buys access and control, and forms which threaten neoliberalism’s total domination are destroyed or co-opted. Where there is hegemony and police brutality there is not genuine, immanent, self-organisation. The system does everything it can to head off change. It might be internally dynamic (though even this is questionable), but it refuses to go beyond itself.
It’s time to wrestle back nonhierarchy and self-organisation from capitalism and to liberate it in the name of communism; in the name of commonly owned property. It’s not time to retreat from the utopian dream that networks and nonhierarchical organisation promise us.
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
by Richard Brautigan
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pins and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
Cross post with Records on Ribs (the creative commons label I co-founded and run with Alex)…
The issue of distributing music for free rarely goes away, and it’s all kicked off in Wire magazine following UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith’s Epiphany in last month’s issue in which he stated that as a result of filesharing ‘just like you I stopped buying music’. This month’s edition contains a strongly worded response by ReR boss Chris Cutler, which argues that the ‘all music should be free’ movement is an ‘idiot wave’. As a record label that gives away its music for free these are issues we’re naturally interested in. We’d like to think we’re not part of an idiot wave, but are aware of the complex ethical position we’re in. Hopefully this post will clarify our position a little more.
A New World in the Shell of the Old
Despite our manifesto claim that we are ‘not against anything’, Records on Ribs exists at least partly to protest capitalist modes of production and the monetary theories of value and the system of copyright that accompany and support capitalism. But negative critique contains- at least implicitly- a positive vision of how the world should be otherwise, and for us that positive vision is writ large in everything we do. We see Records on Ribs as a prefigurative utopia: a space of commonly owned property which points to how the world might otherwise be. It is ‘a new world in the shell of the old‘, as Aaron Peters puts it. It is communism, decentralised: here and now.
Pop Will Eat Itself
Kenneth Goldsmith’s file-sharing inspired Epiphany is something quite different. I don’t know much about what his politics are, but the views he expresses are not in any sense anti-capitalist. Rather, they embody the eternally disatisfied greed of capitalism’s dream consumer. ‘The minute I get something’, he writes ‘I just crave more’. This is what capitalism demands of us: each purchase promising something it can’t possibly deliver and setting in chain a feeling of dispondancy and failure, which drives us on to consume more and more, even as we boast about what we do have (‘It’s all about quantity…I’m drowning in my riches. I’ve got more music on my drives than I’ll ever be able to listen to in the next ten lifetimes’). Goldsmith argues that this ‘is an inversion of consumption…in which we’ve come to prefer the acts of acquisition over that which we are acquiring’, but there’s not really much inverting going on-for many decades capitalism has been about the thrill of the chase rather than the catch itself. After all, if we’re satisfied with the objects of our consumption we’ll cease to consume. Goldsmith sitting in his study feverishly downloading rarities from across the globe is experiencing the same thrill as Carrie, Samantha and co as they trawl the malls of Dubai for dresses they’ll probably forget they own. t’s an alienating existence marked by addiction to the chase rather than any enjoyment.
What’s interesting about Goldsmith’s column (and I should make it clear that I have no interest in passing judgement on him) is that his views represent the point at which the logics of capitalism overtake themselves. Promised the world, consumers suddenly realise that through the internet they can take it for free, and help themselves to whatever they can. Having for so long been told that greed is good, the subject of consumerism seizes that greed and uses it to bring down the system that helped to create them.
Where’s the free plumbers?
Except it doesn’t really threaten to bring down the system. The immediate result of thousands of people downloading music, films and television is that the people who make it suffer. We couldn’t give a flying fuck about Lily Allen or Warner Brothers or 20th Century Fox, but we do care about our many friends who make brilliant music and struggle to make ends meet from day to day because hardly anyone pays them for their music, whilst capitalism carries on as usual in other spheres.
There are two answers to this. The first is to encourage people to pay for the music they listen to- by calmly stating the damage that downloading music can do (as Cutler does) and by making the physical object worth spending money on, restoring the fetish for the object which Goldsmith says he has lost. The second is more long-term (although as a prefigurative movement it is also immediatist) and calls for a system of exchange beyond capitalism: gift economies, common ownership and mutual aid (and to be fair to Goldsmith, he touches on these issues here). Free music here works as a prefigurative movement heralding a complete shift in our relations. As Cutler notes, plumbers do not work for free. But capitalism is not the end of history and perhaps one day plumbers will work for free. Perhaps, perhaps by giving away our music for free we can play our part (a tiny part) in showing what can be done when we abandon capitalism’s modes of exchange.
A Cautious Revolution
It’s clear that these two strategies are almost mutually exclusive- and this clash between short term survival and long term radical change is a problem that those trying to go beyond capitalism often encounter. Discussing the plight of workers at car manufacturing plants in Oxford in the 90s, David Harvey noted that the short term aims of securing their jobs hampered many longer-term goals- better working conditions, higher pay and a cleaner local environment. And many sympathetic to the plight of workers would probably also crave a world without so many cars and their destructive impact on our health and our environment, which clearly wouldn’t do their job prospects much good.
There is, then, clearly a tricky balance to strike and in my own musical consumption I try and navigate both paths. On one hand I offer music for free through Records on Ribs, recognising that doing so is not just a way of ‘getting the music out there, man’, but a political act; a utopian act. And I download music for free too. On the other hand I spend as much as I can on music released by labels who care about their artists and support a whole microindustry of professionals and creatives- designers, lathe cutters, etc. These are all skills/trades we’d want to survive beyond the revolution so we must be cautious not to trample them in our greedy haste for a new world. And hey, Records On Ribs isn’t above accepting donations too.
It’s a tricky debate, and I think we should welcome both the honesty of Goldsmith and the clairty of Cutler. But as we think through what it means to acquire music, we should also think how we might be able to live beyond this shitty system that causes so much suffering and unhappiness.
All music should be free, but so should all plumbing.
If hauntological music is rekindling (or hankering after) a utopian vision drawn from certain facets of English culture c.1950-1980, then what’s the utopian vision of its brash US cousin, hypnagogic pop?
David Keenan (who coined the term) and Simon Reynolds both argue that hypnagogic pop takes its aesthetic cues from 80s pop and soft-rock (Don Henley, Fleetwood Mac- even Chris de Burgh) and New Age spirituality (Wyndham Hill Records, tie dye tshirts- even Enya), and they’re clearly onto something. But I reckon there’s another utopia/dystopia buried in the liminal zones of hypnagogia: cyberpunk. This is a hypnagogic vision a lot darker than that of Dolphins Into the Future, but perhaps also a whole lot more political…
There’s reasonable hypothetical grounds to assume a link between cyberpunk and hypnagogic pop. If those making this music are- as Keenan claims- half-remembering the New Ageisms of their childhood, perhaps they’re also half-remembering cyberpunk from the same time. And perhaps they’re subconsciously aware of the links between New Agey ambience and cyberpunk futurism. Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack, or this Steve Roach video (which actually predates cyberpunk by a couple of years), for example…
This link between cyberpunk and hypnagogic pop has been hovering in the liminal spaces of my own brain recently but it made itself explicit when I recently watched the 1990 documentary film Cyberpunk (which you can watch too!).Its once cutting edge CGI immediately reminded me of Daniel Lopatin’s reappropriation of 80s computer imagery as sunsetcorp (Lopatin is better known as chief hypnagogue Oneohtrix Point Never).
Many William Gibsons: a still from 'Cyberpunk'.
Many Timothy Learys
The resonances are more than aesthetic, though. Both cyberpunk and the kind of hypnagogic pop I’m interested in here deal with a dissolution of the self into the networked collective (un)conscious, operating in that much spoken about ‘liminal zone’ where dreams and reality merge. Speaking to David Keenan, James Ferraro- one of hypnagogic pop’s key figures- says ’I’ve always viewed my music as just sort of plugging into a matrix of human-alien culture…plugging into a world broadcast of media entities that jump out of the screen and merge with life via people internalising them as soundtracks for life temples’.
Life Temples? A Still from 'Cyberpunk'
It’s this dissolution of the self into the network that’s central to cyberpunk. In Neuromancer, cyberspace is described as ‘a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators…A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system’. As we plug into this, our sense of self is lost, and all kinds of wondrous new horizons open up. ‘The internet is a self-atomising machine’, as Oneohtrix Point Never’s digitised voice tells us on Returnal‘s title track (the picture accompanying this video was chosen by the YouTube uploader, I should note).
So what’s the utopianism in all this? Where’s the politics? At The Guardian’s music blog Ben Beaumont-Thomas expressed dismay at the lack of political content in hypnagogic pop (which he problematically abstracts into a larger category of ‘blog rock’), suggesting that- at best- ‘with Ferraro’s nostalgia comes an implicit, bitter rejection of the now’. But like hauntology, there’s something more than nostalgia going on here (though as I’ve argued elsewhere, this doesn’t mean it’s necessarily superior to nostalgia). It’s possible to see Ferraro and his likeminded travellers not as people who bitterly reject the present, but who chastise it for failing to deliver the utopia cyberpunk seemed to promise. They want to realise the radical potential offered by the hackers interviewed in Cyberpunk (one of whom- Michael Synergy- claims he’ll be more powerful than a government agency within a few years), by Case in Neuromancer and bythose on the titular enclaves in Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net.
Michael Synergy in 'Cyberpunk'
This is the utopia of the cyborg- a union of man and machine, of self and network. Here, it is suggested, we can imagine a radical politics which is not constructed on an essential view of the human. It’s information, not the human, that wants to be free.
It’s this that’s been celebrated in cyberpunk by a couple of interesting thinkers hovering at the ‘postmodern’ end of anarchism: Hakim Bey/Peter Lamborn Wilson and Lewis Call. Bey (who edited a 1989 Semiotext(e) anthology of cyberpunk) speaks of his enthusiasm for cyberpunk’s view of ‘the web’ in his essay ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’. ‘Like Gibson and Sterling’, he writes ‘I am assuming that the official Net will never succeed in shutting down the Web or the counter-Net; that data-piracy, unauthorized transmissions and the free flow of information can never be frozen‘. (Interestingly, there’s a musical version of this essay- made with Bill Laswell- which isn’t a million miles away from James Ferraro’s Monopoly Child Star Searchers’ album Bamboo for Two.)
The Semiotext(e) SF anthology edited by Peter Lamborn Wilson (AKA Hakim Bey)
Lewis Call, meanwhile, uses cyberpunk to help the reader visualise his postmodern anarchism: the highly praised final chapter of his book Postmodern Anarchism is dedicated to the form. For him:
[Postmodern anarchism's] deconstruction of Enlightenment subjectivity is no mere theory in the pages of cyberpunk science fiction; it is an established epistemological condition. Characters in these books routinely experience sensory perceptions which “belong” to someone else. Cases of postmodern schizophrenia and multiple electronic identity are common. A character might upload a simulation model of her mind to the net; it is not unheard of for the network itself to attain consciousness.’
This might be terrifying to some, but it aint an easy ride being a Nietzschean revolutionary, and cyberpunk:
‘tell[s] us what it is like to live in a universe where the comfortable certainties of the modern world have vanished…[and] what it means to be revolutionary in such a universe…They describe an anarchist politics for our time…The barricades of the next revolution will be raised on post-Cartesian virtual space, and this revolution will be carried out by the cyborgs who reject an outmoded bourgeois subjectivity’
This is the world of Baudrillard’s simulacra which, on Call’s reading, presents us with radical possibilities to change the way things are. We should not seek a return to the ‘real’ world and a truth which will set us free. Rather we must embrace the logic of simulation- use the power of The Matrix to construct new ways of living, new forms of consciousness.
A hacker's disguised identity in 'Cyberpunk'.
An example of hyperreal consciousness is seen in Donna Haraway’s 1991 essay ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’. Haraway sees the cyborg not as the vision of man’s technological triumph over nature, but the end of such binary divisions. It is a utopian becoming one of (wo)man, nature and technology:
Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling. I like to imagine LAG, the Livermore Action Group, as a kind of cyborg society, dedicated to realistically converting the laboratories that most fiercely embody and spew out the tools of technological apocalypse, and committed to building a political form that actually manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state. Fission Impossible is the name of the affinity group in my town.
But perhaps the cyberpunk hypnagogues aren’t all trying to rekindle an 80s promise of utopia. Perhaps cyberpunk wasn’t a promise of utopia at all, but a dystopia: cyberspace as a postmodern Garden of Eden (the original ‘soft’ dystopia: all happiness, no freedom). The argument here is that we do not live in a world of ‘simulacra’ (which is ‘never that which conceals the truth- it is the truth which conceals that there is none’) but a world of simluation, designed to hide the real from us. On this reading the liminal zone is a collective nightmare blinding us to exploitative reality. Shouldn’t we be disturbed that our hypnagogic poppers are enthralled to Don Henley, 80s Fleetwood Mac, Chris de fucking Burgh? These people are the soundtrack to the end of history. Where’s the rainbow road headed in that sunsetcorp video? It’s stuck in an endless, pathetic loop. Repetition without difference. It’s a road to nowhere.
The Matrix (the film, that is) doesn’t see cyberspace as utopian. It might think it’s a Baudrillardian film but it’s nothing of the kind (as Baudrillard himself grumpily pointed out). In its world, the virtual hides the real: it is not one with the real. The Matrix is Plato’s cave, its inhabitants chained up and unaware that what they see is not real.
This is the warning Mark Fisher makes. Cyberspace can be counterproductive for politicization and radical politics; it leads to individualisation not networkisation and can help prop up the system it was supposed to herald the end of. Or we may become one with our computers, but only because they come to completely dominate us. Here, Cronenberg’s Videodrome and ExistenZ become touchpoints. How about this for some proto-hypnagogia?
The Sleeper Wakes
If hypnagogic cyberpunk is the dystopian sound of our collective nightmare then the 7″ reimagining of Oneohtrix Point Never’s Returnal (with vocals by Antony Hegarty) can be seen as a glimpse of light in the darkness. Shorn of the original’s digital bliss, it can be heard as a defiant statement of fragile (but beautiful) humanity struggling against the machinic atomisation of the self: a trend which might continue. And Lopatin (a man who’s used YouTube- the internet addict’s heaven- as an instrument) suggests his new work will move away from the simulacra of digital synthesis towards organic instruments. The hypnagogue awakes from his slumbers! The real returns as the realisation dawns that somewhere, behind/beyond/before the simulation it’s been lurking….it’s never left, it’s been here the whole time…
Although I quoted him above as a celebrant of cyberpunk utopianism, Hakim Bey’s always been wary of the tension between the inherently mediating nature of cyberspace and the immediatist culture he’s celebrating. And in the Preface to the Second Edition of T.A.Z. (a collection of his writings which includes the essay ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’) he radically revises the position quoted above, writing the following:
I think perhaps the least useful part of the book is its section on the Internet. I envisioned the NEt as an adjunct to the T.A.Z., a technology in service to the T.A.Z., a means of potentiating its emergence…Time magazine identified me as a cyber-guru and “explained” that the TAZ exists in cyberspace….by 1995 [the commercial/surveillance function of the Net] had succeeded in burying the anarchical potential of the Net (if it ever really existed) under a mass of advertizing and dot-com scams. What’s left of the Left now seems to inhabit a ghostworld where a few thousand “hits” pass for political action and the “virtual community” takes the place of human presence. The Web has become a perfect mirror of Global Capital: borderless, triumphalist, evanescent, aesthetically bankrupt, monocultural, violent- a force for atomization and isolation, for the disappearance of knowledge, of sexuality, and of all the senses.
(Let’s not forget that the cyberspatial megacorp in Islands in the Net is called RIZOME).
To realise its utopian potential, the TAZ must shun cyberspace for ‘geographical odorous tactile tasty physical space’. A hypnagogic pop gig, perhaps, with the bass pulsing through our inners; a shared community high on ecstasy or company or dancing; a space in which utopian social relations can be prefigured.
This spatial utopia might, perhaps, be found on the islands of Islands in the Net (which are, after all, physical space- even if they have a cyberspatial function too). Or maybe it’d be on Zion, the Rastafarian space station in Neuromancer. Maybe up there, orbitting the dystopian world of the Sprawl and the matrix and the simstims…maybe up there they’re listening to the hypnagogic dub of Sun Araw or Pocahaunted.
Make it real, people. Make it real.
Afterthoughts, get out clauses and P.S.’s…
1. The spectre of Ballard is hovering around many of these themes. Ballardian traces the links between Ballard and cyberpunk (with Hakim Bey/Peter Lamborn Wilson thrown in too: it’s where I got the Semiotext(e) SF anthology picture from), and Keenan’s original article on hypnagogic pop mentions Ballard as an influence on various hypnagogues.
2. Drugs. Drugs drugs drugs. You’ll notice Timothy Leary (of LSD fame) in a picture towards the top of the post. He’s a pretty big fan of Gibson, and drugs play a pretty important part in Neuromancer- at the same time crippling Case and allowing him to go beyond the present, to transcend his own being. Their role in utopian/dystopian fiction isn’t minimal, either- they’re used both to control (Soma in Brave New World) and expand the mind (mescaline in Island). And I’d take a reasoned guess that some of our beloved hypnagogues have had the odd flirtation along the way, too (is it me, or is talking about drugs now completely passé in music criticism?).
3. Gibson and Sterling are both regulars in Wired Magazine: the ultimate celebrant of neoliberal cyberspace. The former puts his name to $340 laptop bags and $550 coats.
4. The singularity. I guess that’s the ultimate utopia for the synthesis of mind and machine, and it seems to me to signal the end of becoming: a permanent state of blissful liminality… the hypnagogia of the entire universe. And hey, it has some synth music of its own!
5. Yeahyeahyeah. I’m reading too much into the music. “Dave, c’mon man- these dudes just wanna get stoned, jam with their friends and make some cool tunes, yeah? First of all Keenan comes along and calls their music ‘hypnagogic pop’. They’d just about stopped pissing themselves at that and you come along with this mental narrative about reality and truth and radical politics and….just listen to the tunes!” I KNOW I KNOW. But let me have my fun, eh? Let me bugger these songs; let me force a meaning out somehow…
6. Stellar Om Source isn’t from the US.
7. Wikileaks might be interesting to consider in all of this.
8. As might the identity politics. Cyberpunk is often criticised for being the product of privileged young white men, and Assange has some decidedly dodgy views on women (whether or not he’s guilty of rape). There are some powerful feminist critiques of Haraway too.
Some words from me on the (mis)representation of anarchism since Saturday’s protest over at Ballots & Bullets, the University of Nottingham’s School of Politics Blog, with a big attention grabbing headline (which seems to be working), and some gratuitously ugly self-promotion. It earned me a snarky tweet from John Rentoul, though I don’t think he’d actually read my piece- preferring instead to a riff on his ‘Questions to which the answer is no‘ theme. I politely pointed out that this anarchist manages to hold down three jobs whilst doing a PhD, but I don’t suppose he really cared.
I’ve committed, promised and furthermore resolved to blog more regularly from now on- both on here and over at the Eastside Island Utopia Project (which I’m slowly updating). And now I’ve gone public with that, so you can hold me to it.
