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.

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.

Dancecult: mixing theory @ the speed of sound

:: Fiends I am proud to present the first edition of ::

DANCECULT – JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC CULTURE

Including a piece of my own that recaps 10 years of MUTEK:

Convergence & Soniculture: 10 Years of MUTEK

| — > PDF < — | — > HTML < — |

&
.
Dancecult 1.1 2009 Contents:
http://dj.dancecult.net

:: Featured Articles ::

IDM as a “Minor” Literature: The Treatment of Cultural and Musical Norms by “Intelligent Dance Music” – Ramzy Alwakeel

Decline of the Rave Culture Inspired Clubculture in China: State Suppression, Clubber Adaptations, and Socio-cultural Transformations – Matthew M Chew

Neotrance and the Psychedelic Festival – Graham St John

Too Young to Drink, Too Old to Dance: The Influences of Age and Gender on
(Non) Rave Participation – Julie Gregory

DJ Culture in the Commercial Sydney Dance Music Scene – Ed Montano

:: From the Floor ::

Convergence & Soniculture: 10 Years of MUTEK – tobias c. van Veen

The Hardcore Continuum? – Jeremy Gilbert

The Abstract Reality of the “Hardcore Continuum” – Mark Fisher

12 Noon, Black Rock City – Graham St John

The Inverted Sublimity of the Dark Psytrance Dance Floor – Botond Vitos

:: Reviews ::

We Call It Techno! A Documentary About Germany’s Early Techno Scene (Sextro and Wick) – Hillegonda C Rietveld

Lost and Sound: Berlin, Techno, und der Easyjetset (Rapp) – Sean Nye

Chromatic Variation in Ethnographic Research: A Review of Psychedelic White:

Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race (Saldanha) – Anthony D’Andrea

Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures in Ibiza and Goa (D’Andrea) – Charles de Ledesma

Breakcore: Identity and Interaction on Peer-to-Peer (Whelan) – Emily Ferrigno

The High Life: Club Kids, Harm and Drug Policy (Perrone) – Lucy Gibson

in the shadows of the urban (I)_ MTL. photo: tV

Henri Lefebvre’s last work, published posthumously, and intriguing as it is something of a skeletal meditation, is entitled Rhythmanalysis. In it Lefebvre advances two hypotheses, each unique, urgent, and radical in scope. The first, following from The Urban Revolution, is that the engine of history, so to speak, is no longer the economic base, by which Lefebvre upends the Marxian hypothesis that the means of production drive the social production of history and class. Lefebvre instead posits the urban: the urban, in itself, constitutes a breakdown between city and country, between the means of production and the superstructure. The urban is a new, epochal and thus world historical condition – a virtual set of possibilities – encompassing the ‘urban revolution’, which for Lefebvre retains its open, virtual – and thus ateleological – futurity. This thesis, nascent in Lefebvre’s work of the early ’60s (and with the SI), comes into its own in Rhythmanalysis, wherein a second hypothesis takes shape: that the urban can be read, can be analysed, by a kind of phenomenology of rhythm, a phenomenology or psychoanalysis of the urban condition.

Unlike the sociological interpretation of Lefebvre – in which the ‘urban’ is seen as an architectural phenomena of the city’s expanse, of the suburb, and in which Lefebvre’s work is thus dated to the level of a (now dated) sociological fact – I am intrigued by the broader philosophical purchase of Lefebvre’s thought on the urban and rhythmanalysis.

What is particular of this analysis is that it follows from Derrida’s deconstruction of phenomenology (in Speech and Phenomena), insofar as phenomenology cannot effectively bracket the sign by way of its transcendental reduction (the bracketing of the world in the attempt to encounter the consciousness of the phenomena present-to consciousness, aka intentionality). Derrida’s deconstruction does not discredit Husserlian phenomenology. On the contrary, it opens phenomenology to several fruitful themes, not the least the apprehension of the sign (writing-in-general), a more complex understanding of time consciousness, the substrate of technics (np. Bernard Stiegler), and what Lefebvre calls ‘rhythm’, in all of its differentiated phenomena. (In a similar vein, one can read Derrida’s deconstruction of several of the concepts of psychoanalysis — memory, repetition, time, repression, the return, the symbol — as also opening psychoanalysis to these broader themes, in a more radical sense than Freud’s application in texts such as Civilization and its Discontents).

in the shadows of the urban (II)_ MTL. photo: tV

Rhythm comes to the fore in Lefebvre (and in Derrida).  Rhythm, not as a motif or metaphor for the passing of time, nor of history, class, production or place, but as its occurence in-itself. As something of the stuff of things, the warp and woof of what comes to measure and differentiate. And yet something felt: the affect of differentiated repetition, the felt passing and upcoming, structured into the complex semiotics of ritual, calendar, measured time, music and dance. Rhythm: a way in which to grasp, for Lefebvre, the urban revolution, which is the invisible and silent rhythm, the standing-wave or superposition of obverse rhythms so that their overlay becomes imperceptible (a similar hypothesis is to be found in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (more on this later); rhythmanalysis opens an encounter, perhaps, between D&G and Derrida, for the analysis of the imperceptible suggests an aporia, which lends itself to a quasi-transcendental approach by way of a quasi-Kantian analysis of conditions of possibility).

(Note to self again: ‘revolution’ here is ambiguous, insofar as it loses its Marxian finalism, becomes a general condition, a rhythm which demands its own rhythmanalysis.)

The urban revolution constitutes the dominance of the urban, but in such a way that the urban cannot be distinguished as a rhythm unto itself, but rather as the apparent lack of rhythm onto which differentiated rhythms are perceived. The urban is not a phenomena to consciousness in this sense; it is the effect of superposition, in which their inverse relation produces phase cancellation.

Superposition on the right (phase cancellation).

As differences between the means of production and their architectures of habitation and circulation — city and country (and thus their classes, proletariat and bourgeoisie) — merge into a general condition, that of the urban condition, the analysis of rhythmic difference eclipses that of dialectical difference. (At least, this is how Lefebvre sees it; Derrida would argue that this eclipse is precisely what is at work in-general, though he too, I think, remains deeply ambivalent as to the historical status of différance, and even fundamentally so, insofar as différance must remain indecisive — this at least is how I read the meaning of ‘infinite différance is finite’ in Of Grammatology. In any case, it is this ambivalence that Stiegler exploits as he, unlike Derrida, decisively claims technics, qua the substrate, as the historical condition of the différance of différance.)

Rhythm can be analysed by way of an embodied meditation — a practice in-between phenomenology and psychoanalysis — and, according to Lefebvre, classified into three fundamental categories (arrhythmia, eurhythmia, isorhythmia), and through its analysis the specific characteristics of the urban in its architectural centripetality (the city) can be identified. This process is somewhat flawed, insofar as Lefebvre at times appears to categorize rhythm by way of a dialectic, and to claim that rhythm can identify what would be the essential characteristic — rhythm — of a particular urban locale (city). That rhythm could essentialize a locale, or determine its essential identity, would mean that it entails a dialectical finalism in itself — a hypothesis that strains against Lefebvre’s more radical assertion of the polyrhythmic, and not strictly dialectical, operations of the urban, and of the complexities inherent in the aporia of the urban as the rhythm invisible (obverse superposition: a standing-wave). In this respect too Lefebvre overemphasizes the significance of the city as the site of rhythm, as the privileged place of urban identity. But these are fruitful aporia, by way of a deconstruction, of Lefebvre’s bold meditation on rhythm as an embodied practice (in a way Bataille would appreciate). This embodied practice reveals a way to read a (rhythmic) shift in the technics of world historical conditions (the urban revolution). As any dancer or musician knows (as any body knows), rhythm is felt.

The particular rhythms of a place are observable by way of embodied perception, in the oscillation between stasis (the poses of still meditation, listening, focus) and movement (the dance, the flâneur, the dérive). Radical political practice has taken up the oscillation of rhythm. But this is not the only aspect of rhythmanalysis. Rhythmanalysis affords an opening between différance and embodied experiences of stasis/movement. It generates the context for theoretical dialogue, not the least to continue deconstruction by other means, by way of embodied practice.

Rhythmanalysis, here motivated as an opening to Afrofuturism, to rhythm as practice in which not only the (apparent) dialectic between city/country disintegrates to the general rhythm of the urban, but that between philosophy and practice itself.

in the shadows of the urban (III)_ MTL. photo: tV