Watching yourself later and over years past is not only like viewing yourself as another person, it is encountering yourself as a doppelganger, a completely distant other. An act, nearly complete. I wasn’t into this interview. It was formal and weird; and so was I. Which made it all the more weird. The point being, how can you film an aural exhibit? And so being-weird in the exhibit was the only answer.

Thanks to Renaud Kasma for capturing, editing & uploading this 2007 interview, shot in SAT’s now obliterated SAT_GALERIE, for the espaceSONO exhibit.

mnemotechnics interphase

This is a machine of mnemotechnics. Memory erased unto itself. The mystic writing pad looped in magnetic filament. A machine that spins tape back unto itself in a loop, eating itself, devouring itself, an interface of mechanical time, capable of repeating, reiterating, a sound, over & over, and sending it into space & echo. The Roland RE-201 Space Echo is such a machine. I have desired one for years. It is the basis of King Tubby and Lee Scratch Perry. It is a channel into the technics of space and time… it is a time travel device, a memory palimpsest on rewind. It is beauty.

Too bad I don’t have a PhD expense account. I couldn’t finish writing about the tape loop echo until I simply had one. Indeed, the most valid research expense yet, save for the thousands spent in books thanks to lack of VPN library access from McGill.

Frostbitten fingers not included—Paul Miller's The Book of Ice

In my hands now is Paul D. Miller’s latest project, the Book of Ice, a collage-work of manifestos, stories, photographs and texts on the southernmost point of this planet, that ice-bound and all-but uninhabited pole, Antarctica. This is something of an artist’s book, a kind of anti-book that collects exappropriated objects from elsewhere. In this context, by exappropriated I mean an act that samples without stealing, that takes part without taking away from the whole. So, like all of DJ Spooky’s work, images of Amundsen and Scott’s voyages are sampled much the same way that Spooky remixed D.W. Griffith’s founding racist myth of US history in Rebirth of a Nation. Though details of Antarctica’s history, discovery and exploration are provided, this beautifully designed and illustrated hardcover from Mark Batty Publishers is much more a meditation on ice through the sampling of Antarctica’s recorded history alongside Spooky’s exploration of design imagery in the melting/consumption of Antarctica.

The Book of Ice includes ”Osmotic Strategy Machine—The (Flawed) Unfolding of Afrofuturism,” an interview I conducted with Paul for my forthcoming edited volume on Afrofuturism (Wayne State UP). The version presented here is somewhat staccato, but to the point through its brevity (the volume will include a remixed exchange and sampladelic text). This interview presents insightful reading, as it is one of the few times in which Paul has openly reflected upon his involvement with the 1990s email list and website Afrofuturism.net, as well as situating his interpretation of Afrofuturism within historical, political and aesthetic contexts. I believe Paul includes this interview as part of the ethos explored elsewhere in the Book of Ice, where he talks about “thawing-out” the cold muthafucka’ aspects of black ice, as well as warming up the ice-cold brittleness of stark whiteness. Paul continues to forge a global aesthetic of remix culture that melts the divisions of colour, and in this respect, Paul remains an exemplary Afrofuturist—whatever he might say otherwise. Paul Miller is remarkable for creating bridges between disparate cultures, and in The Book of Ice Paul puts into perspective the greater forces at work in the melting of Antarctic ice, reminding us that the collapse of our polar regions also calls for the thawing of cold hearts and cultural antagonisms. We are like penguins caught in the flow of the impending great melt, and to move outwards, upward to the stars, we need to begin with swimming together through the thaw….

Osmotic Interview Strategies

In 2008, Paul Miller spent four weeks in Antarctica, conducting sound recordings for his compositional work Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica. It is unfortunate that this book does not include a DVD of the multimedia work (understandably, it was probably not cost feasible for a book already colour printed on quality stock). Miller’s first book for MIT Press, Rhythm Science, included a CD mix which reflected his ideas through his DJ mix—I wrote a lengthy treatise on that book over on EBR. In any case, as Terra Nova is a full-fledged multimedia work that interrelates many of the cold concepts explored in The Book of Ice, here’s an insight:

What I like about The Book of Ice is how it rethinks what this cold space could be otherwise—a place, perhaps, of unclaimed exodus. What then, when it melts? When its resources will undoubtedly become exploited by competing interests, corporate and nation-state? Miller explores the dream of a “People’s Republic of Antarctica” through a series of campaign posters that alternate between early 20th century revolutionary modernism and monochromatic symbolism awash in blue penguins. The print posters call for a manifesto of Antarctica in different languages and national iconographies, from the Arabic half moon to the Chinese Communist red star.

Manifestos of a people's icepublic

The compositional method of Terra Nova is also explored here with a visualization of the score. Miller turns the elements of traditional sheet music into bubbles of chaos complexity, with the notation juxtaposed and carved into circular objects, as if spattered with the geometric shapes of water droplets from Antarctica’s melting ice caps.

Sheet music for snow & ice

Questions of climate change arise throughout the text, as Miller explores the economic, emotional and data landscapes of Antarctica through cartographic mappings of ice flows to dataflows. Aspects of this territorial mapping are reminiscent of Situationist détournement. Along this line, the visual icons of sell-by capitalism are explored in the juxtaposition of consumer-packaging barcodes and the increasingly ubiquitous QR squares with various linguistic scripts. Implicit among these image mixes is Miller’s interrogation of “hyperconsumerism:” is Antarctica for sale? If it can be mapped, can it be scanned and sold?

Antarctica 4 Sale

Ice maps and Antarctic cartographies

The closing section of the book is filled with full-bleed, full-colour images from expeditions mapping the great unknown ice, with double-page spreads of mountains and icebergs, explorers in ice-encrusted parkas and numerous penguins. Black-and-white imagery is contrasted with the subtle blues and grays of monochromatic colour. Night photography of modern research stations revels in the similitude between the neon-lit lighting of science and the southern aurora borealis.

Ice routes abound...

Yet why this obsession with Antarctica? As Miller writes, ever playing the trickster, ice resonates with black culture. As Paul puts it,

Black culture loves ice. We name ourselves after it: Ice-berg Slim, Ice-T, Ice Cube. . . . So, yeah, there’s a long history in black culture of being a “cold muthafucka.” It’s about being a “frigid” person: the ice grill, bling bling, bounce off the light of diamonds in your teeth. Yeah, that’s ice (Book of Ice 10).

If urban black culture tends toward ice, then DJ Spooky aims to thaw it out with sinfonic soundwaves capable of collapsing cultural ice into global flows. If climate change is melting Antarctica, then the melting of ice presents an intersection between the geosphere and the sonosphere, between the axes of black and white ice, cityscape and icescape. Two compositional tools guided Spooky’s process in creating the Terra Nova sinfonia: repetition, on the one channel, and R. Murray Schaefer’s soundscape, on the other.

My concern here is how do we make music out of it, how do we thaw the process, thaw people out, and see the paradox of hyperconsumerism that this kind of stuff celebrates, while at the same time tying the conceptual issues of sound and contemporary art. It’s a Sisphyean task, but considering there’s not much more going on this planet than the ecosystem, I thought it was a worthwhile one. Hip-hop is always considered the soundtrack of the city’s geometric landscape. The grid of most American cities carries what I like to call an “orthogonal” logic. I wanted to take the “urban” concept of repetition and apply it to a different landscape, and see what would pop out of the collision. After all, music is patterns. And so is landscape. The common denominator here is pattern recognition.

And that’s what brings me to Antarctica (Book of Ice 10).

Explorers on ice/

For many moons now I have been toiling away on Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture as the incoming Managing Editor. Lo, this is volunteer labour, and a hearty dose it has been, from taking over the reins of our Open Access publishing platform, OJS—which is a cranky beast indeed—to completely upending the Dancecult StyleGuide (DSG) so that it conforms—well, almost conforms—to the Chicago Manual of Style 16th ed.. The kind of labour I perform is exemplary of the overeducated precariat: technical server administration; web production; design and layout production and direction; editing and copyediting; technical manual writing and production; human resources; workflow management; all-around tinkering & troubleshooting.

Here’s a slice into a typical Dancecult session—begin with double-espresso and/or late-night wine. Chat with Operations Assistant Neal Thomas as I edit PHP, tinker with TPL, use root SSH to get all CHMOD, manage a CPanel reinstall and transfer, setup MySQL databases and fix CSS, and do all manner of technical support for the Journal as we try to figure out how to upgrade this stubborn beast. At the same time, I am engaged in an email storm with Executive Editor Graham St John and the Copyeditors as we overhaul the DSG, where I act as a a senior copyeditor and the last pair of eyes for every single piece of text you see published. As my mind approaches meltdown, I run next door and meet with Art Director Cato Pulleyblank. We are transferring over the existing workflow to Adobe InDesign, redesigning the entire publication layout, from fonts to margins, styles to protocols, in the process. Cato redesigns Dancecult’s logo with Graham and I’s input, drawing up visual conventions for web promotions and style protocols, throwing down hours of pro bono in the process. And that is still not all. To get this beast underway, I check in with the Production Team, which has been assembled from a call for precarious labour. I check in on Director Gary Botts Powell to see how our new Production Assistants (Luis-Manuel Garcia, Ed Montano and Botond Vitos) are doing with the HTML conversions. From their feedback I improve the HTML production guide which I have writ to explain the rather complex process involved in converting Word’s garble to appropriate XHTML (Transitional, of course). Meanwhile I carry out all of the Journal’s InDesign layout for PDF production, and draw up a Guide for that too—though I doubt anyone else will be touching it for awhile, due to the complexity and attention to detail involved. As the midnight hour flips over into morning, I edit and fix all HTML returned from the newly-minted production crew. Eventually, after a few weeks of such routines, I publish it all on OJS and fix all the broken things. Graham and I celebrate over Skype. It is early afternoon for him, and a late night for me. We virtually clink the beers.

Now that would sound like a lot of self-aggrandizing hype if it wasn’t for the fact that all of us involved do all this unpaid and yet—damn straight—produce an extraordinarily professional Journal. Meanwhile, I watch other academic funding agencies throw down bloatware cash to pay the poorly-trained to pump out some pitiful excuse for a research platform. I’m not sure what my point is here, though I am looking forward to seeing some capitalist renumeration for such a plethora of skillz. Bring on the meritocracy, I say.

* * *

DANCECULT | Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture
==================
Volume 2 • Number 1 • 2011
==================
http://dj.dancecult.net/

Dancecult returns with two themes: the dystopian and remix aesthetics of Detroit and a special section on the Love Parade.

While you read, take a look around. Dancecult has taken a new step forward in the visualization of the Journal, with a complete redesign of our PDF publications and logo. It is also our first edition featuring the volunteer efforts of our Production and Copyediting Teams. Congratulations to all for their efforts.

Graham St John
Executive Editor

tobias c. van Veen
Managing Editor

## Feature Articles ##

Disco’s Revenge: House Music’s Nomadic Memory
– Hillegonda C. Rietveld

Hooked on an Affect: Detroit Techno and Dystopian Digital Culture
– Richard Pope

Maintaining “Synk” in Detroit: Two Case Studies in the Remix Aesthetic
– Carleton S. Gholz

Festival Fever and International DJs: The Changing Shape of DJ Culture in Sydney’s Commercial Electronic Dance Music Scene
– Ed Montano

## From the Floor ##

Nomads in Sound vol. 1
– Anna Gavanas

# Special Section on the Love Parade #

Where is Duisburg? An LP Postscript HTML
– Sean Nye, Ronald Hitzler

Party, Love and Profit: The Rhythms of the Love Parade (Interview with Wolfgang Sterneck)
– Graham St John

Pathological Crowds: Affect and Danger in Responses to the Love Parade Disaster at Duisburg
– Luis-Manuel Garcia

## Reviews ##

Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification (Anthony Kwame Harrison) PDF
– Rebecca Bodenheimer

The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance (Graham St John)
– Rupert Till

Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Tara Rodgers)
– Anna Gavanas

Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures (Graham St John)
– Philip Ronald Kirby

Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Steve Goodman)
– tobias c. van Veen

Music World: Donk (Dir. Andy Capper)
– Philip Ronald Kirby

Speaking in Code (Dir. Amy Grill)
– tobias c. van Veen

===========
DANCECULT 2 (1)
http://dj.dancecult.net
===========

What is it with hip-hop and the arm wave? Why wave arms side-to-side in the air? Is this a gesture of unity? Like crowds of the mid 20th century, the arms aligned in position, all are become one, in the movement of movements….

But why the arms? Why are emcees so concerned with aligned arms? Why should we not care about it, or rather, why are emcees telling us not to care about it?

Hands in the air, the transcendance of care.

Watching Kool Keith I would expect Dr. Octagon to ask us to wave anything but arms in the air. Or, if waving arms, to signal with inventive and improvised semaphore the coordinates of the next landing, infrasonic investigation of orifices, or otherwise booty call for the Black Elvis.

But he too (and all his selves) are concerned with the unity of an arm wave set to regulation appeal.

In 1998, in San Francisco, Black Elvis does not call upon an audience to wave. The audience waves itself (according to footage).

In 2007, Kool Keith unmasked in hoodie, still holding spit but seemingly no longer split into conscious costume (or is he?), requires ultramagnetic inflection to wave arms at his behest, of an audience now almost exclusively white.

Heads down bop up, beatdown backpacks on – arms up, salute? Wave like you just don’t care?

If hip-hop cared or if it would die, would it resurrect a founding moment when emcees used arms and hands to signal black power? Black arms waving, a movement salute from the fingers, what was the black armed wave of the 1970s? Was it a counter-Travolta, counterdisco movement of the body, sleezy and wheezy, ready to punch drunk, where disco was tight and controlled?

The origins of the arm wave, mysterious, from the fingers to the hands, spit out the mouth. Lips.

RAMM:ELL:ZEE (RIP) armed the letters, took them off the wall, the letters had to race. What would it take to arm the arms waving? Arm them with what? An arm armed is an arm too many, an army formed under arms a wavin’. An arm doubled becomes armed. But at the end of the arm, is there not the hand?

Of course this could all be an overheard misunderstanding.

Wave your hands in the air. Throw your hands up. The hand to the extension of the arm. Fingers become scratch weapons. DJs talk with their hands.

Unlike the care of being in which the hand partakes, known as being-at-hand, or handiness from Heidegger (Zuhandenheit), in the density of hip-hop you throw it away. Throw your hands in the air. And wave them as if you just don’t care.

As if…?

(But really, one does. Care.)

Show up the hand, throw it down, throw it around. The display of the hand on the arm demonstrates readiness for arms. Is the hand thrown, throwness, not once again philosophy remixed in the gesture of sound?

I am born into the being of this world (In-der-Welt-sein) as a thrown hand, connected to an arm, heads up. Beat down. Projection of care through hands in the air.

What does it mean, then, to come from the projects?

Dasein is a “thrown” “projection,” projecting itself onto the possibilities that lie before it or may be hidden, and interpreting and understanding the world in terms of possibilities. Such projecting has nothing to do with comporting oneself toward a plan that has been thought out. It is not a plan, since Dasein has, as Dasein, already projected itself. Dasein always understands itself in terms of possibilities. As projecting, the understanding of Dasein is its possibilities as possibilities. One can take up the possibilities of “The They” self and merely follow along or make some more authentic understanding. (Wikipedia sample/ see Hubert Dreyfus’ book -Being-in-the-World-)

Hands together, now.

interstellar tones transport Sun Ra offworld

But in reality, it is the inherent failure of representation, both in the visual and the political sense, that continually leads activist-artists to abandon their works and their familiar skills, and to dissolve once again into the intersubjective processes of society’s self-transformation.

This moment of dissolution is where one could locate exodus, not as a concept, but as a power or a myth of resistance. On the one hand, exodus is a pragmatic response to the society of control, in which any widespread political opposition becomes an object of exacting analysis for those who can afford to invest major resources in the identification, segmentation and manipulation of what we naively call the public. In the face of these strategies, exodus is a power of willful metamorphosis: the capacity for a movement to appear, to intervene and to disappear again, before changing names and recommencing the same struggle in a different way. (Brian Holmes, Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering @ 185)

Exodus is a movement — defection from the State, exit from the state of things, toward the formation of a “new republic” (as Paolo Virno puts it). While Virno and other Italian-based theorists of the Autonomia/Operaismo movement have traced exodus as a response to the factory regime of Fordist labour that saw its dismantling in the ’70s and ’80s, Brian Holmes has placed exodus within the artistic lineage of interventions and occupations, in which the fluidity of art, and of art as an occupation or role offers an exit strategy from institutionalized engagement. Holmes’ historical references are those of the alterglobalization movement, notably the public sonic occupations of Reclaim the Streets and the deployment of carnivale tactics in general, but also in specific art projects such as Nikeground. Here, art (and the artist) move through an interzone of activism and art, a zone in which intervention and representation are no longer distinct sides or sites of the work.

Significantly, Holmes writes how the passage toward exodus opens in the breakdown of representation. One can think such representation in (at least) two ways: the representative politics of the democratic order and the politics of representation of the object and identity, or rather the ordering of representation in which art is supposed to traffic (albeit at a distance). When representation fails, or rather proves itself inadequate through its persistent failure (some might say its planned obsolescence), then strategies of exodus come into play.

And quite literally — exodus as a myth of resistance is also a time of play, a site in which the play of representation can be remixed, through exit from its confines, into a new scenario. For the artist, exodus from an institutionalized art world changes the play of what it means to respond to a Call — no longer a competitive call for new works, but now a Call for collective action, in which art becomes the performative habitus for an alternative republic, a “non-state public sphere” (Virno).

Exodus is thus a spacetime of energies; a site of withdrawal in the gathering of force. Nor is this performed alone. Play takes at least a few, if not the many. Exodus is a collective gathering of experience:

…exodus seems to designate an existential reserve, that psychic space where fragments of artistic, poetic and musical refrains are inseparable from the wellsprings of action, but expressible only as a kind of myth. To touch this intangible space is the ultimate intervention on social material — something no individual can do, because it is only achieved through a collective experience, by a multiplicity that has no authority, no signature. (Holmes, Unleashing @ 186)

At times, Holmes risks representing exodus as a near mythical or “intangible” sign — which is perhaps due to a received idea of engagement or rather perspective upon the appearance of engagement that remains within either declarative art (despite its activism) or activism (despite its  aesthetics). This is surprising given that exodus, as a withdrawal or disappearance, would seem to call into question the appearance of things, and consequently of of activistism and art as being the only hybridity that registers exodus’ passing. In some forthcoming work for Dancecult: Journal for Electronic Dance Music Culture, I have set out to think rave culture as an embodied, collective exodus that performs all the ambiguities of its play, from its sonic interventions to its interruptions of politics, within the broader schema of a worldwide alternative network of soniculture.

In short, exodus needs to be thought beyond or rather before the realm of myth. Exodus happens. It occurs; it is a strategy of the cultural unconscious manifest in collective and energetic desire. It organises and disorganises vast collective actions in tandem.

In this respect Holmes is entirely correct: exodus can only be experienced through collective passage. But to say this collectivity has no authority nor signature leaves many questions concerning its manifold of structures, signs and play. The multitude that is rave culture has its many signatures, even its signature of a soniculture, qua rave culture; and it too has its authors and its authorities. In this respect, exodus as the pure flight from authority or signature remains a myth – but as such a myth, it loses much of its efficacity. I am more intrigued by the taking-place of exodus on the ground, so to speak (and I might add, like Holmes, who spends much of his excellent book detailing “activist aesthetics” and delineating the heritage of the 20thC avant garde).

And so Holmes leaves us with:

Exodus is an expression of process politics. It points beyond the distorting mediations and structural inequalities of capitalism toward a strange sort of promised land for the profane, which is the immediacy of the everyday, the direct experience of cooperation with others. The carnival that sometimes breaks out in the midst of concerted political action is a way to celebrate the occasional reality of this powerful and persistent myth. (Holmes, Unleashing @ 186)

I would like to reverse the proposition: it is protest that breaks out in the midst of carnival, it is political action in the realm of appearance that interrupts the exodus toward disappearance, it is the coming into the light of Reclaim the Streets that was the anomaly to rave culture’s occupations by night. Exodus has more to do with the collective unconscious of the everynight than the everyday — it has more to do with creating the alternative habitus of a place to sleep and to dream without fear, then to awake and, with a shit-eating grin, make that which is desired take place — regardless.

This reversal stakes out a different terrain. Exodus, or the exit strategy in general, is a priori to (as its qualifier phoneme suggests) representation. Exodus does not take its place after the fact; it is the escape which something has come to capture. In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari were correct; even if the State is a priori (arising always), exodus is that which the State arises against.

Secondly, it reinforces my intuition that exodus, like Virno’s contentious theorisation of multitude (and much to Negri’s discontent), is without content. Exodus is the state of most States. Most “people of the State” are in a state of exodus; they do not vote, they do not participate. Rather, they flee to various safehouses and wait it out. Unfortunately, this form of exodus – properly, perhaps this is not exodus as liberty but as confinement – is not collective but individual, even as it is the dominant form of being-together of so many. The political apathy of overdeveloped nation states of the 21C is an expression of this collective exodus. So is the collective experience of consumption. However this exodus is not energetically collective; it is collective without connection, a disconnected exodus, a passive escape from exodus itself. Various traces of its potential are found here and there in technological infonetworks, particularly with data piracy (music, film, software, intellectual property). However few P2P downloaders have connected their bits & bytes to a connection with their peers in the flesh, or with an organised attempt at its force (such as open source, hacking, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or the Pirate Bay – all of which signal the new republics of data and property).

In this respect, we might consider “downloadable data piracy” the capitalist answer to the challenge that remixing/sampling and rave culture provided to infotainment as a containment apparatus. By this I mean that data piracy, even with all the publicized hype surrounding its damage and its prosecution, is a contained strategy, or rather an attempt to contain what could express itself in a global cultural form and network of the likes we have not seen since the rave/alterglobalization convergence of the 1990s. (Music industry executives and the defenders of intellectual property will of course disagree with this premise, pointing out that infopiracy is truly a threat to IP; however in this respect capitalism itself is far ahead of them. Capitalism always cannibalizes its own.)

Third, exodus is a cultural strategy that has already shaped the 20thC. Though Italian Autonomist theorists such as Virno, Marazzi, Negri and others theorised exodus as a response to Fordism, I believe that its force was already well underway as a cultural strategy of transformation thanks to Afrofuturism.

Afrofuturism as cultural exodus

Holmes mentions several key concepts in relation to exodus: myth, collectivity, transformation, metamorphosis, and the blend of direct action and art. Perhaps we should look no further than the mythical corpus of Afrofuturism.

Afrofuturism plays out an abundance of interstellar exits from planet earth: alternative alien origin myths, the power of sound to transport us beyond prejudice and conflict (if not space and time itself), transforming the forced exile of the Middle Passage into an interplanetary and cosmic exodus.

Afrofuturism demonstrates that all humans are in some way or other fundamentally alien. What Marx thought through labour (like the Autonomists) Afrofuturist artists, musicians, poets, writers, sci-fi writers and prophets have lived through the exploitation and cultural memory of  of (post)slave labour. We are all alien in this alien nation. This is an accurate myth, precisely attenuated to the truth of a reality constructed upon the myths of racial origin and supremacy.

Afrofuturism has engineerd various exits (not the least of which is an exit from philo sophia – but this will have to wait for a future post). At the very least, we can speak of the Afrodiasporic exappropriation of technology and mutation of the cultural viruses of sound and rhythm that engendered jazz, hip-hop, techno, electro, disco and house – not as musical genres but as cultural interventions that changed the dynamics of race, gender, sexuality, autonomy, carnival, and liberation — up to and including the cyborg heteronymy of the human form itself, from becoming-alien (Sun Ra) to becoming-machinic (Model 500).

One can think the vastness of these interventions: within property (sampling, riffing, remixing, improvisation), white culture (the dance Twist, the disco fix, the funk phenomenon), politics (what is Afrofuturism other than the mythus to black power?). All the Greek conceptual categorizations (polis, mythus, tekhne) are remixed through Afrofuturism. In this respect Afrofuturism plays out an exodus from the default culture (whose colours until recently have been Imperial White). Afrofuturism is not constrained by soniculture, however. It has its articulation (Kodwo Eshun, Paul D. Miller, Alondra Nelson), its literature (Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler — only to name a few), its science fictions and phonofictions.

Significantly, Afrofuturism was an alterglobalization network before activist-artists, high on a rave culture directly engendered from black gay disco, Chicago acid house and Detroit techno, decided to bring electronic soniculture and carnivale into the light and name it as such in the 1990s.

Afrofuturism is a network from Jamaican dub to British ska-punk, New York hip-hop to disco, Chicago house to Detroit techno, dancehall to Dogon and Ngome ritual. And, of course — jazz and rock n’ roll, Chubby Checker and Little Richard, the blues and Dixieland. That said, it traces its historical appearance far beyond its  postslave / postcolonial cultures and the advent of recording technologies that echoed and intensified its force (in a manner which needs further explanation, technology is essential to Afrofuturism). Ron Eglash’s research into African fractals suggests that there is more Africa in the computer than Brian Eno thinks. Afrofuturism is the cultural evolution of black secret technology that underlies algorithms of computing technology. It arises at the same time as the invention of the computer as an exit from what Heidegger identified as technology’s apparent containment of being within en-framing. If the computer is the machinic materialization of African fractal thought, then Afrofuturism is the cultural anticipation of its machinic overcoding. Think on this. This is an entirely other and radical justification of sampling, remixing, open use, piracy, sharing networks, and otherwise collective exappropriation of technology. And not only a justification before the Law, but a rethinking of its basis.

Exodus, then, is vast, trans-epochal, interstellar. In its lineages it sustains both apathy and energy. Reconnecting or hooking-up apathetic exodus to its energizing variant – without burning out, as rave culture did – is a question of sustained and urgent consideration.

Beside itself: alterglobalization as alternative power

The parallel polis —

does not compete for power. Its aim is not to replace the power of another kind, but rather under this power – or beside it – to create a structure that represents other laws and in which the voice of the ruling power is heard only as an insignificant echo from a world that is organised in an entirely different way. (Václav Benda, quoted in Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering @ 180).

The alternative power grows within existing structures; like a weed it cracks the cement walls and foundations. But what has come of the strategy? Is it at all a possibility in the 21C, and what is its efficacity?

Perhaps, again, the question and its problem should be reversed. Not only is the parallelism of alterglobalization possible, it operates as the basis of existing distributions of power today. That there is no unification to power, no centralization of its control (and thus no conspiracy of the few over the many) is the secret hiding in plain sight — the purloined letter of alterglobalization. Alternative globalizations exist as the means by which attempts at militarized and economic centralization take place. In this sense, the strategy of the parallel polis has been well incorporated within military strategy; but this also only acknowledges that the terrain of its passage remains open.

./..

WANTED — soulphiction collective — libidinal let-loose lounge — counternorm committee — black-tie dinner & mud wrestling.

cut it up & start again

Hi there — you nose down in your gizmo — status updated — you & your busyness ontology — sorry to hear — about your  bits & bytes of existential banality — interconnected — your life.

Hi there — oh don’t phone back — without a doubt — you’ve discovered utopia — in the praise of the same.

Good riddance. The number encountered of recent inquisitive travelers I can count on one hand (for which I do not need any kind of prefix-laden device to assess, speak to, touch).

The general expansion of writing as communication technology has debilitated the encounter. What models of extraordinary violence await us — to rip apart the map.

What era? The era where sages are turned away as outcasts — is the era in which humanity has always cast itself. No sage is ever turned away, now. Do you tweet your sage offerings?

The new altar — constructed in code — where sacrifices of thought are made to the great winds of search — where no audiences come to hear you — where mediocrity has blown the great horn, and all come to sniff the smells of their own excrement. (Or another meditation on the provisions of approved & funded culture.)

Speak in tongues, but do not give any — tongue, that is. A licking or a lashing. Nobody gets much tongue any more — nobody ever chews on anything — spits it out — or sucks it up.

WANTED — incommunicados — specs — provisios.

Must be Unfiltered & Unrepentant.

Voilà.! Some 5 years in the making, Circulation & the City.

With appropriate fanfare & deep bows, Will Straw & Alexandra Boutro’s edited volume entitled Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture (McGill Queen’s UP, 2010) now graces the shelves. This book has been quite a few years in the works. The earliest drafts I have of work for the volume date back to 2005, and by the time we went to press, the final chapter I submitted on Henri Lefebre, rhythm, and revolution in the city had been transformed entirely from the words originally writ on rave culture and rhythm (funny thing: the new article I am finishing for Dancecult picks up on these earlier themes  – sometimes work must encounter different sets of theoretical concepts, and years of reflection, for the excavation of the intellect to yield its bounty). The book forms the third in a trilogy of publications from the Culture of Cities Project, a multi-university research endeavour that sought to unearth “the mix of universal and local influences in the everyday life of cities,” with research concentrated in Toronto, Berlin, Dublin and Montréal, and with researchers across Canada and the Continent. So, with the intent of lurking y’all into picking this up (or perhaps unwittingly scaring you off), I offer the introduction to my chapter “Cities of Rhythm & Revolution.”

Until August 2010, here be the 20% off code: enter BSTRAW10 at checkout through MQUP.

qork / o d d i ty | Vancouver 1998 |<ST> | photo: Tanya Goehring

Cities of Rhythm & Revolution

// tobias c. van Veen

The urban problematic, urbanism as ideology and institution, urbanization as a worldwide trend, are global facts. The urban revolution is a planetary phenomenon. – Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (2003, 113)

Like Seeds in a Sack: the State and Urban Revolution

A revolution happens somewhere: in a city, a springtime revolt, the unexpected uprising, the insurgency of the city against its occupiers, whether military or monetary – these are all the classic forms. In the violence, boredom and exhaustion of the 21C,[1] there are revolutions in product design, software, advertising and taste while the upheavals that remake the world are rarely granted the dubious privilege of ‘revolution’. Despite its broad application, or rather, the attempt to render its force banal by subsuming it to the language of consumption, ‘the revolution’ nonetheless maintains an exclusive meaning when it comes to the remaking of the world as such. And this remaking has had particular import by way of the City: it is the City that is the locus of the State.[2]

What is the City that it overwhelms the world with a concentrated force, that it, once expressed as ‘the urban’, a tendency of the city to globalize, becomes the engine of history? Such would be Lefebvre’s ‘urban revolution’, the city as the dominant global manifestation in which a new form of the social emerges: the “urban society” (Lefebvre 2003: 5). The urban supercedes the agrarian and overtakes not only the country but even the city itself – for once all is woven within the urban fabric, the city loses its particularity, its oppositional architecture to the country’s expanse: “The urban fabric grows, extends its borders, corrodes the residue of agrarian life. This expression, ‘urban fabric’, does not narrowly define the built world of cities but all manifestations of the dominance of the city over the country” (3-4). But what is the city? Society? The country? A dialectical comment by Deleuze and Guattari on the matter, writ around the same time as The Urban Revolution (1970, trans. 2003), teases out the ambiguity of Lefebvre’s hypothesis remarkably well:

It is not the country that progressively creates the town but the town that creates the country. It is not the State that presupposes a mode of production; quite the opposite, it is the State that makes production a ‘mode’. The last reasons for presuming a progressive development are invalidated. Like seeds in a sack: It all begins with a chance intermixing. The ‘state and urban revolution’ may be Paleolithic, not Neolithic…. (Deleuze and Guattari 429)

Deleuze and Guattari challenge the – traditional, Marxist, liberal, linear, etc. – narrative of humanity’s ‘progressive development’ (from nomads to cities, agrarian to urban) by arguing that the progressive timeline that would posit the emergence of the City-State at a specific moment in the ‘linear development of civilization’ falls prey to tautology in its quest for the origin and evolutionism of historical succession (427-428). Theses “on the origin of the State are always tautological” not only because they fall into tautology, but because the State is tautological. In fact, according to Lefebvre, it is because all “logics,” including that of the state and the law, commodities, the organization of space, the object, daily life, language, information and communication want “to be restrictive and complete, eliminating anything that is felt to be unsuitable, claiming to govern the remainder of the world,” that they become “an empty tautology” (2003: 35). This tautology, however, is not meaningless: its emptiness shares a common point in the accumulation of surplus value in the city. Thus Deleuze and Guattari “are always brought back to the idea of a State” – as an “apparatus of capture” – “that comes into the world fully formed and rises up in a single stroke, the unconditioned Urstaat,” to which we might add its dimensional aspects: centripetal, circular, enclosing, inscribed in the corridors and walls of the polis (427). The City-State emerges with the origin of History itself:

Economic evolutionism is an impossibility… An evolutionary ethnology is no better… Nor an ecological evolutionism… All we need to do is combine these abstract evolutions to make all of evolutionism crumble; for example, it is the city that creates agriculture, without going through small towns. To take another example, the nomads do not precede the sedentaries; rather, nomadism is a movement, a becoming that affects sedentaries, just as sedentarization is a stoppage that settles the nomads. (Deleuze and Guattari 430)

Let us make quick work of this moment – for the radically anti-evolutionary, nondevelopmental thesis of a “coexistence of becomings” (against which “history translates into a succession”) (ibid.), is also to be found in Lefebvre. It is found in the complex interplay of the ‘urban’, wherein the urban anticipates its own realization as the ‘virtual’ horizon of its own becoming.[3] Lefebvre is quite aware of Simondon’s theory of transduction (2003: 5) which will later be incorporated by Deleuze and Guattari when encountering this exact problem: the virtual.

The urban, like Deleuze and Guattari’s Urstaat, always seems to have coexisted in the tension between city and country, as the fabric of their antinomy, though one might argue – as Lefebvre will – that the urban has now become the Ur-apparatus of capture, the overwhelming of all other becomings wherein both city and country dissolve within the urban fabric. And it is certainly the case that Lefebvre’s insistence on the urban as the global revolution – if not as the production of globalization per se – derails the dialectical succession of history and empties it of its content, for the urban revolution swaps out history’s engine, the relations of production, for an ambiguous and virtual fabric, Ur-becoming, that is the urban itself. This is one tendency of Lefebvre, and one which I shall insist on, to draw out its heterodoxy, to amplify all that it has to say, and to emphasize its precedent to Lefebvre’s later technique of rhythmanalysis. Not surprisingly, then, the samizdat concept that is the urban upsets the orthodoxy of teleological history: the virtual-urban, the becoming-urban, in-forms the present material reality.

Can the transductive logic of the urban, even if thought as synchrony, function within a linear development of history? Lefebvre insists upon the diachrony of urban history – a dialectical progression of the urban – all the while arguing that the ‘impossible’ barriers to the urban realization, erected on the horizon of the virtual object, must be torn down (2003: 7; 17). The impossible is reduced to a possibility to be overcome. The tension between becoming and historical succession, diachrony and synchrony, transduction and economic evolutionism develop a kind of rhythm – unresolved, impossible, aporetic, even – that is taken up at length in the complex thought of The Urban Revolution – and later in the problematic of rhythm itself, in Rhythmanalysis.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 2000. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P.

Lefebvre, Henri. 2003. The Urban Revolution. Trans. Robert Boronno. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P.

–. 2004. Rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life. Trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London: Continuum.

Endnotes

1. “21C” is here abbreviated to designate the binarization – or digital codification – of the historical timeline as the archives of humanity become accessibly only through complex technological systems. The soundbyte style of “21C” can be attributed to DJ Spooky’s defunct magazine of the same name (RIP).
2. “City,” as well as “State,” are here capitalized in accordance with the work of Lefebvre, where the signifiers attain a quasi-atemporal status, as if referring to a near a priori manifestation of human activity. Thus, at times, I refer to “cities” or a particular city in contrast to the City (a city’s ur-principle of centripetal control). Likewise for “the revolution,” which is marked by the near teleological destination of its pronoun, and later, Negri and Hardt’s deployment of “Empire” to demarcate an organisational command that exceeds the nation-state.
3. Lefebvre will write of the urban how “its complexity surpasses the tools of our understanding and the instruments of practical activity,” serving as a “constant reminder of the theory of complexification” (2003, 45). If our missive bows to such a theory, it is in part because any would-be Occam’s Razor would only prove that simplism empties itself out in reductionism. The law of parsimony (Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate) should read: Reductio non est ponenda sine necessitate.

Yet another bloodsucker dressing-up to play the Glamour game.

I think the motto of recent living for me could be DOWN WITH THE TROLLS & GREY VAMPIRES, BUT ABOVE ALL, DOWN WITH THE PSYCHODRAMA DEMONS. What’s these here Grey Vampires and Trolls? K-punk outlines the concepts:

Grey Vampires are creatures who disguise their moth-greyness in iridescent brightness, all the colours of attractive sociability. Like moths, they are drawn by the light of energetic commitment, but unable to themselves commit. Unlike the Toll, the Grey Vampire’s mode is not aggressive, at least not actively so; the Grey Vampire is a moth-like only on the inside. On the outside, they are bright, humorous, positive – everyone likes them. But they are possessed by a a deep, implacable sadness. They feed on the energy of those who are devoted, but they cannot devote themselves to anything. (K-Punk)

Psychodrama Demons are somewhere in-between a Grey Vampire and a Troll. A Grey Vampire appears somewhat romantic at times, caught in a melancholia, only able to live vicariously through others, even as their mode-of-being sucks away at the marrow of life, draining those around them. A Troll is more outright aggressive. As K-Punk writes, a Troll “above all wants to waste time, its libido involves a banal sadism, the dull malice of snatching people’s toys away from them” (K-Punk).

Grey Vampires don’t feed on energy directly, they feed on obstructing projects. The problem is that, often, they don’t know that they are doing this. (That’s one difference between them and a troll – trolls usually aren’t under any illusions about themselves, they just find spurious justifications for their activities.) [...] the Grey Vampire is also a subject position that (any)one can be lured into if you enter certain structures. (K-Punk)

Certain structures include academia for k-punk, and many postgraduate students are Trolls, refusing to take positions, offering instead a constant barrage of critique without ground (oh, I know). But one could begin a list almost neverending of such “certain structures”: non-profits, start-ups, volunteer organisations, and of course, most corporate environments. After some consideration of management languages and hierarchies, it would appear that there be a third subject position between hideous Trolls and Grey Vampires worth investigating: the Psychodrama Demon. While the Grey Vampire might not know of their energy-sucking existenz, and while the Troll knowingly ignites a disastrous civil war amongst inhabitants (usually behind the cover of anonymity, sneaking away under cover of darkness as the flames fan higher & higher), the Psychodrama Demon turns every point of difference into a contest of wills, a battle of personalities. Everything is at stake with a Psychodrama Demon. It’s not only that they cannot appreciate another’s opinion; the real issue is that Psychodrama Demons don’t even notice that there are others around them. A demon doesn’t recognise others. Those other meaningless bodies are tools for use, not fellow travelers in Hell but a slave force of the Damned just waiting to be set to work under their auspices. Which is why any point of difference immediately becomes Psychodrama; for a minion to respond to a Demon calls into question the self-evident (for them) Master/Slave relationship that is the basis of their self-worth and existence. This is also why we have Psychodrama: because any point of resistance calls into question their self-confidence as beings, given that all other beings around them are reduced, in a demonstratively Kantian way, to means for their own nefarious ends. In short, Psychodrama Demons act with more potent violence than Trolls, for they stake their very being in being able to manipulate and control others through such brute means that one would usually think that no one would fall for it. Unfortunately, usually there is no choice in the matter. Psychodrama Demons are often so-called captains of knowledge, academia and industry. If in a leadership position, they are bottlenecks. Everything must go through them. They act as if they took Edward Gordon Craig’s theories of acting as a philosophy-of-life: those around them must be pulled with strings, mere instruments, as if “Uber-marionettes.”

Whenever I have someone write to me with the conversation-killer “I have real concerns with XYZ you’ve writ/said…”, I know two things: (1) this person believes that their real concern is at all a concern of mine; (2) this person believes that they exert power over me, and now we have to deal with an exercise in their attempt to exert it, i.e. I have to sit down and deal with it as if it mattered to me as much as it does to them; and that thus (ergo sum) this person be a Psychodrama Demon.

Of course such assessment calls to mind the classic work of Adorno & Horkheimer in The Authoritarian Personality, to which Brian Holmes has gone one step further, and combined  the sociological analysis of power with the economics of precarity, naming something he calls (in Unleashing the Collective Phantoms) the “Flexitarian Personality.”  As Holmes writes:

To grasp the way this hegemony [flexible accumulation - the subordination of social life to economic globalization - tV] is experienced by individuals, I have proposed the notion of the flexible personality. It is an ambiguous notion, because it designates both the managerial culture that legitimates the globalized economy, and renders it tolerable or even attractive for those who are its privileged subjects, as well as the “flexible” nature of a workforce that is subject to increasingly individualized forms of exploitation. In other words, the flexible personality designates the lived experience of a relation of domination. (Brian Holmes, Unleashing 59)

What is devilish (indeed) about the Flexible Personality is its Manichean structure, by which I mean devilishly dualist: both Master and Slave are caught up in this flexitarian regime. The Flexible Personality is precisely the managerial culture in which Grey Vampires, Trolls and Psychodrama Demons thrive. They thrive because – and I think this remains important for a basic faith in human kind (and not mauvais foi, in Sartre’s sense) – such devilish personalities are seduced, as if by the power of the Glamour which vampiric TV shows such as True Blood exploit (and to such lovely results). We can even call such glamour the Glamour of Globalization; all those expansive, vast networks, available for the biting & sucking (if one be a Grey Vampire), for the destroying (a Troll) or the controlling (mais oui, the Psychodrama Demon).

So the flexitarian system appears attractive, and to those that jump hell’s bells for it (the Sociopaths, to use the previous post’s language from Venkat), they are rewarded in kind, but only at the expense – and here our devilish theme continues – of their soul. The Glamour works upon those in the Slave position of this power relation, of course; in believing they might achieve such status, or in being the kind that likes being bitten & sucked off of their energies, those that do battle with Trolls, or attempt to stand-up to Psychodrama Demons… such positions engage in the game, this Hell which all are playing out, this fantasy land of mytho-economics that is the mechanic of servitude, ultimately, for all. Holmes’ great insight here is that the flexible aspect of the workforce is “subject to increasingly individualized forms of exploitation.” In short, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. You too can have your individualized relationship to the abstraction of capital; you too can find your own personal Hell.

The question is how to get out of it, which brings us to two points, both of them courtesy of Paolo Virno. The first is that our concepts deployed here are empty. Like multitude, they have no (ontological) content. By this I mean there is no essence to these devilish subjects. The multitude is not inherently revolutionary just as authoritarian leaders are not inherently Psychodrama Demons. That said, it be the intersection of the complex of desires that make up my being, the economic position I find myself perched within (precariously, it would appear), and the exit strategies I can see that make up what I become in this anthronomics of the subject/precariat. And exit strategies become increasingly important, which brings us to point two: exodus. How does one flee from this scenario? As Venkat writes, we are nearly in a no-option, No Exit scenario (Sartre would be happy):

While the thought of exodus as a strategy is appealing, we have to keep in mind one harsh fact. The real economy requires people to earn paychecks to pay the rent. A job isn’t a “nice to have” part of life like Facebook, but a “must have,” at least for now. And while I am among the most ardent champions of cloudworking and free-agenting, I am also pragmatic enough to recognize that the economy doesn’t really provide support for exodus as a strategy on any significant scale.

At least not yet. (Venkat)

As I writ in a comment to Venkat, which I will repost here as a comment to this post for posterity, exodus is already under way. There might not be an easy exit, and there is never a way to merely pick-up and exist “outside” of any system. But by outlining the contours in which we find our servitude, at least we can face up to the age-old problem Spinoza so aptly laid out for us, by marking out not only the “one man” we might be serving, but the “one man” – the Last Man – that hides within all of us, that Grey Vampire/Troll/Psychodrama Demon waiting to take hold, seductive and desperate, which is not an exit strategy, but a Personal Hell waiting for you, individualized, this salvation by servitude:

Granted, then, that the supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation, and count it no shame, but the highest honour, to spend their blood and their lives for the glorification of one man. (Spinoza, Preface to Theological-Political Treatise: 3)

over & out ./.

Hiding within Signs (Liu Bolin)

Disappearance as a strategy: to flee confinement by way of a slippage between sign and symbol. As enacted in space, through time. Rave culture enacts a level of disappearance, by slipping away from the usual concept of a counterculture’s visual opposition. The visual is switched for the sonic. The punk on the streetcorner for the raver in the warehouse. Rave culture switches day for night. It doesn’t disappear from the day as it was never there.

In the 21C, disappearance would mean to conduct something of a digital erasure of the archives. To disappear would mean to delete all traces of oneself. But such an absence only gestures toward its horizon: a hole where once there was the whole. Strategically, for disappearance to be effective — which is to say, unnoticeable — something of a blending operation must take place. A slippage between sign and symbol.

Bulldozed out of Vision (Liu Bolin)

Chinese artist Liu Bolin paints himself into the background. By statically inserting his body, he becomes integrated into his surroundings. He blends-in (and of course, plays all the stereotypes of Chinese conformity by doing so). Bolin’s strategy is not so much disappearance as it is the ineffective demonstration of camouflage coupled with the effective demonstration of symbolic disappearance. Camouflage has never been so ineffective as in the case of Bolin, where its illusion requires the precise placement of one’s body (without movement, viewed from one perspective only). Yet the failure of camouflage (even when its representation catches us by surprise as we search for his increasingly elusive body) foregrounds a greater strategy: the slippage between sign and symbol. The body as outline of the person is now clearly outlined as little more than it is, a surface of itself, a patina without depth, capable of reflecting its background, capable again of faking its own transparency. The body is not to be trusted; nor is the perspective of the viewer.

Disappearance as strategy, by way of slipping between sign and symbol, requires the unsettling of perspective while retaining its expected characteristics. If a generalized perspective, such as the map, cannot be trusted to represent the territory, than those items already on the map, many among the millions, might be discounted, along with so many others, as extraneous information. Data unlikely from which to proceed. “Hiding in plain sight” – Underground Resistance.

Choosing to truly hide within the perspective of the firing-range, to attempt to disappear by way of obfuscation, always results in disaster. Never choose obvious cover. Never hide (per se).

This post has been government funded (in part):

How Not To Be Seen (As Monty Python Sees It)

Edit — added:

One thing I did not mention (as it perhaps warrants another post) is that Bolin politically orients his work. According to Infoniac.com, his Beijing studio was shut down by the Government in 2005 which prompted his “Hiding in the City” series of photographs, all part of a shift from “dependence to revolting against the system” (Bolin’s words). Check it:

“I am standing, but there is a silent protest, the protest against the environment for the survival, the protest against the state. I wanted to photograph the reality of scenes of China’s development today.” – Liu Bolin