ANTI-SELF: EXPERIENCE-LESS NOISE

[GegenSichKollektiv]

ANTI-SELF: EXPERIENCE-LESS NOISE, by GegensichKollektiv
This text will be published in late 2011 by Continuum in the book, Reverberations: The Aesthetics, Affect and Politics of Noise, edited by Michael Goddard and Benjamin Halligan.

Anti-Self: Experience-less Noise
By GegenSichKollektiv

Noise exacerbates the rift between knowing and feeling by splitting experience, forcing conception against sensation. Some recent philosophers have evinced an interest in subjectless experiences; I am rather more interested in experience-less subjects. Another name for this would be ‘nemocentrism’ (a term coined by neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger): the objectification of experience would generate self-less subjects that understand themselves to be no-one and no-where. This casts an interesting new light on the possibility of a ‘communist’ subjectivity.i

There is a growing emphasis in contemporary capitalism on individual experiences in production and consumption. In a given context, when we experience our living labour being realised, the potential of our subjectivity, of our intellectual and affective capacity, we feel empowered, we feel that we can be and that we are, a constituent part of the context that we are in. We don’t have an overview from outside, we are inside. This feeling of self-empowerment is used by capitalism in its creation of a framework where a valorisation of whatever activity that occurs within can be realised a different points and moments. While we gain unique experiences, momentarily feeling happy about ourselves, a capitalist logic expands deeper and deeper into our subjectivity. In his text, ‘Genre is Obsolete’, Ray Brassier points out that the commodification of experience now takes place not only at the ideological level but at the neurophysiological level.

If we take the term literally, noise should not work smoothly at the level of either aesthetics or experience, in fact its qualities radically challenge both of these notions. Rather than trying to reconcile knowing and feeling, noise can help us to dissociate the commensurability of experience and subjectivity in a sense that exceeds the logic of framing, by either being too much, too complex, too dense and difficult to decode or too chaotic to be measured. One cannot have mastery over it. It is a kind of useless general intellect that suspends values of judgement such as good or bad or right or wrong. To think of it in moral or ethical terms seems ridiculous. Noise with its epistemic violence, counters the division between activity and passivity. By making us aware of our impossibility to decipher it, noise alienates us. We all are no-one in front of it. We cannot find reaffirmation of our accepted positions (either as audience or performer).

Unfortunately in practice, noise has become just another musical genre and many people can predict what a noise concert might be. In noise concerts the performer/audience division is reproduced as it is elsewhere and players rarely deal with it. Rather than trying to perpetuate noise as musical genre, I would like to think through how noise, as it carries qualities such as chaos, density, saturation, precision, intelligibility… can be executed in order to dismantle the frameworks that so often shape the way we behave and how we relate to each other. Noise routes both expression through the impersonal and indulges in a catastrophe of generic gestures. The anti-self destroys its own position by nullifying the attributes of accumulation that shape our subjectivity today, such as confidence, contacts, recognition, and attention. Being no one, being nowhere, being nobody, definitely not an artist, certainly not an audience, producing nothing that separates us from our objective conditions, having nothing to exchange because there is nothing to count that someone else can frame.

But how does a subject that isn’t come to be at all? In the development of machinery in large-scale industry in the 19th Century Karl Marx apprehended a dynamic and contradiction which has become manifold in the 21st not only in the factory but across all work.

[…] the machine does not free the worker from work but rather deprives the work itself of all content.ii

As capital develops automation, labour-power, the very source of value, is thrown out of the process. On a qualitative level capital simplifies and standardises all tasks making it possible for a machine to do them. On a quantitative level, by raising the productivity of labour, it requires less and less workers and more and more machines. Capital has a vested interest in reproducing human subjects as workers but also, over time, eroding the meaning of their work. Instead of employing ever larger numbers in growing factories the opposite becomes true. In his own lifetime Karl Marx experienced, with surprise, this situation producing the massive expansion of a servant class as industrial production grew. We experience the later stages of the same contradiction as the production of surplus populations – a global growing population which cannot be absorbed into productive labour (both a flexible service class in the North and a landless unemployed proletariat in the South). Other facets of question of the content of work, understood in part as de-skilling, come increasingly to the fore. These can be characterised on the one hand by a growing disidentification with work by workers, or even disenchantment of work as the substantial content of human life. On the other hand desperate attempts to identify with work which has less and less substance. This desperate attempt to identify with work, or more precisely with value, becomes obvious when we measure all of our activities in terms of gains and losses. We build up an image of ourselves knowing what we can get from it, as if we were embodying value itself. Increasingly our activities are directed towards either personal pleasure or self-valorisation by representing ourselves through, for example, social networks. We work towards the production of our own subjectivity having internalised the values of contemporary capitalism which praises attention, reputation, confidence, innovation and creativity, as ways of producing value out of nothing.

Human Companies: Spectral Objectivity

The openness of Noise allows me to explore my creativity in unimaginable ways. Noise is the ultimate act of freedom. Only while making Noise [do] I feel myself.iii

Notions of freedom, self-expression and creativity are the hallmarks of a desperate attempt to produce value out of the unproductive forces in capitalism. Value seems now to have more to do with speculation, confidence and belief than with socially necessary labour time. An example of this is how artists and musicians ‘work’ without getting paid, but in their total identification with what they are doing are ready to sell themselves for nothing but their own self image. Within the experimental music scene this self-image is reinforced through the prising open of subjective experience, an anthropocentric perspective in which one sees oneself as the central and most significant entity in the universe:

[…] it would be naïve to think of the subject and the object as two separately subsisting entities whose relation is only subsequently addressed to them. On the contrary, the relation is in some sense primary: the world is only world insofar as it appears to me as world, and the self is only self insofar as it is face to face with the world, that for whom the world discloses itself.iv

This phenomenological approach described above fits perfectly well within an individualistic logic which avoids political implications. As if one is able to access reality through sound in an act of unmediated experience, in a moment of freedom from the determinations of the forces of production, just as it appears to us (as phenomena). It is not uncommon to then hear people making noise or improvising talk about notions of form, structure, quality… basically aesthetic choices determined by subjective notions of taste. These personal choices feed into a notion of individual freedom, but this is a notion of freedom that is completely entwined with the development of capitalism. As Karl Marx notes, it was not until we were equal before the eyes of the law that the logic of exchange could be developed universally. He explains that in order for the worker to be able to sell their labour power as a commodity two requirements must be met: ‘In order that its possessor may sell it [his or her own labour power] as a commodity, he must have it at his disposal, he must the proprietor of his own labour-capacity, hence of his person.’v And secondly he should also be free from any access to the means of production or substantive property. The worker is free to be, to have this equality as her content but only as far as she is a worker and thus material for capital to exploit.

It’s not only outside of the wage relation that we are nothing but outside of the contradiction of the wage relation, which changes everything, and by which everything can change.vi

We can see how the conceptualisation of experience emerges at same time as the development of the bourgeoisie; at the same time as we are ‘equal before the eyes of the law’ (as opposed to the formal inequality of serfdom or feudalism). A constructed notion of the individual becomes naturalised through the notion of experience. One aspect of this is the way that aesthetic judgement affirms a universal society of equals – Immanuel Kant’s sensus communis. Another aspect is that aesthetics reinforces this individuality by, for example, producing the concept of authorship and the division of labour under the audience/artist or performer distinction.

Today artists and musicians outside the mainstream have insufficient means to produce any effectual change because their productivity is not directly involved to the production process. Therefore we consider ourselves both as property and as the means of production. In order to sell our property and potential (production of aesthetics) we have internalised a managerial logic that is engraved in the latest developments of capitalism, one that sees human capital as its currency. By managerial logic we simply mean how we frame our dubious creativity and innovation in such a way as to be able to market oneself. Money may not be the primary currency in the noise scene, instead the key currency might be thought of as self-promotion. Young subcultures, have learned this very quickly. In a YouTube video about the history of jerkin (street dance from L.A.) one of the teenage musicians explained how what they really wanted was to get hits on MySpace and on YouTube. This will give them credit and respect among their peers. This specific reputation is something one cannot buy with money. In this regard we can see how musicians and artists are paradigmatic subjects within contemporary capitalism; they give all for developing and marketing their ‘own’ individual skills so the audience/consumer can have experiences that they cannot get elsewhere. This is another example of how commodification takes place at the level of experience, as musicians know there is a market for such experiences and they work towards it.

That this ‘commodification’ has nothing to do with a wage suggests two trajectories: that capital may now be drawing upon ‘free inputs’ of (gently) coerced labour-power as in so-called primitive (or primary) accumulation and, perhaps more controversially, that capital itself has reached a point at which it is struggling to absorb labour and this self-activity is either above or beneath capitalisation. The struggle to capture this subterranean activity as intellectual property has comprehensively failed. Our anonymous hordes may seek recognition, but this is providing less and less of the substance capital craves. Either the social relations of capitalism no longer necessarily pass through the labouring subject or the formerly labouring subject no longer recognises the necessity of deforming themselves through work. Yet, this ‘going through the motions’, this preening and constant work on the self passes at least for work-readiness in the absence of any real appearance of the conditions for work to be done. The value objectivity in noise production today is even more spectral than in the type of production typically based on wage labour:

The ’substance of value’ as a figure of speech has frequently been understood in a quasi-physical, ’substantialist’ manner: the worker has expended a specific quantity of abstract labor and this quantity exists within the individual commodity and turns the isolated article into an object of value. That things are not so simple should already be made apparent by the fact that Marx describes the value-objectivity as a ’spectral objectivity’ (’gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit’, Capital, vol. I, p.128, corrected translation), in the revision manuscript for the first edition (’Ergänzungen und Veränderungen zum ersten Band des “Kapital”’) he even speaks of a ‘purely fantastic objectivity’ (’rein phantastische Gegenständlichkeit’).vii

What is this spectral objectivity if not the fetish character of the commodity? Marx understood fetishism as the inversion by which humans are dominated by the results of their own activity. When a thing becomes a commodity it is changed into something that transcends its sensuousness and ordinariness becoming something ‘mysterious’ or, to be precise in its translation, a sensuous super-sensuous thing (sinnlich-übersinnlich). The production of ourselves as commodities can only but produce schizophrenia as we are trying simultaneously to feel our subjectivity and to sell it at as thing. The production of experiences tries to emphasise the sensuousness aspect in order to supersede the ordinary but still reproducing this mysterious thing called the self.

Value is a relation between persons – expressed as a relation between things.viii

An experience-less subject, a person as a thing, is exactly what the value-form produces as sociality, people regard each other as tools and commodities, as accretions of value. Experience today expands this spectral objectivity in our subjectivity producing a sense of individuality, that appears to transcend the logic of value and the wage relation. In this process we become sensuous super-sensuous things with a human face. Yet, to take this and identify with it, to identify with non-identity would put this abstract purposeless purpose to work not in the augmentation of value but in the augmentation of human capacities, sense-perception expanded.

Capitalism now produces subject positions; it has caused many variants of human beings to come into existence (via identity practices, and niche markets) which feel completely at home within the boundaries capitalism has drawn onto them-from the perspective of its subject positions, capitalism replaces nature. It has become, or it was always, almost impossible to consciously reject the values developed by capitalist organisation because consciousness itself is derived from the movement of its value – the refusal of capital is laterally the refusal of reality.ix

The refusal of reality, understood from the perspective of a subject position, would still mean today the reproduction of a subjectivity produced by capitalism. The question is whether there a reality outside a subject position?

Critique of the self: Objectivity Independent of Ourselves and Capitalism

Ultimately, subjective experience is a biological data format, a highly specific mode of presenting information about the world by letting it appear as if it were an Ego’s knowledge… But no such things as selves exist in the world. A biological organism, as such, is not a self. An Ego is not a self, either, but merely a form of representational content-namely, the content of a transparent self/model activated in the organism’s brain.x

Following recent scientific and philosophical developments, the notion of the self has become subject to serious questions. In poststructuralism and postmodernism the notion of the self might have been very much put into question but this remained solely from the perspective of identity (or ‘identity thinking’ as Theodor Adorno put it). Because of the different backgrounds and influences of identities, and the voices that one might have, it has been impossible to talk of an objective or absolute truth, one that would transcend our identity and the different struggles and power relations that we are embedded within. This lead to a relativism and political victimhood – a situation in which the sovereign increasingly poses themselves as victim in order to assert power over others (see Belusconi/Gaddafi/Blair etc.). However europhilosopher Thomas Metzinger suggests, that the self is an illusion, a coping mechanism constructed by our brain, which has to reduce the complexity of the information it receives from the world in order to function. To facilitate our survival, our brain unknowingly constructs a reality tunnel. This is what he calls ‘The Ego Tunnel’. There is an objective reality, but our senses would be never be able to perceive it. We apply unconscious filter mechanisms, through our sensory systems and the workings of our brains. Our biological architecture, inherited together with beliefs and assumptions builds an ‘I’ on on this foundation. The notion of experience is not only a myth in the ideological sense but also an illusion that our brain creates in order to to make a coherent understanding of the world and our relationship to it.

Taking into account different scientific discoveries, some philosophers such as Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier have pointed out that contemporary science is able to state facts about a reality existing independently of any subjective point of view. A fossil is that which indicates traces of life, but an arche-fossil is that which contains traces of matter before the emergence of life. Meillasoux argues that with the discovery of arche-fossils, science is able to talk about a time and a reality before the emergence of life and thought. This implies that there is a reality existing totally independently of thought. This calls into question what Meillassoux calls "correlationism": the view that the very idea of an absolutely mind-independent reality is meaningless. Now, only that whose non-existence is unthinkable is necessary. But a fact is something whose non-existence is always thinkable: a fact is something that could have been otherwise. Science records the existence of facts: arche-fossils are facts. But if everything that exists is a fact, and facts are contingent, then everything that exists is contingent, and there is no necessity whatsoever underlying existence. The only thing that is necessary is that nothing exists necessarily. This constitutes what Meillasoux calls 'a new absolute': an absolute of un-reason. Everything is necessarily contingent or 'without-reason'. There is absolutely no reason for our existence or that of anything else. All existence is contingent and hence strictly meaningless.

By ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from each other. We will henceforth call correlationism any current thought which maintains the unsurpassable character of the correlation so defined. Consequently, it becomes possible to say that every philosophy which disavows naïve realism has become a variant of correlationism.xi

A critical question emerges, how could we break out of the correlationist circle? Ray Brassier defends a radically anti-correlationist philosophy that claims Thought is conjoined not with Being, but with Non-Being. For him universality and our understanding of the absolute is inaccessible to experience in the way we understand it today connected with subjectivity. It could be possible to break the relation of between thought and being if, for example, we conceived the subject as an organon or automaton. The objectification of experience would mean that we would be able to develop mind independent concepts. Could the objectification of experience in the cognitive sense transcend the socio-economic register? What would this require?

For once we have put science and philosophy on an equal footing before the real it becomes necessary to insist that there is no possible compromise between the claims of correlationism and the ancestral claims of science: if correlationism is true, science’s ancestral claims are false; if the latter are true, correlationism is false.xii

It is the development of science that gives us the knowledge that puts into question ourselves and correlationism. By taking into account its developments without positing ourselves at the centre of its discoveries we could achieve a better understanding of our reality, and perhaps thanks to this change it. The subject as subject of scientific experimentation might help us to develop a redefinition of politics beyond the ‘free individual’ that reproduces the logic of the commodity form. With the use of Cybernetics we could also develop a radical conception of sex and gender relations finishing with the tyranny of the biological family (as claimed by the radical feminist Shlamith Fireston in her seminal book The Dialetics of Sex).

Spectral Silence: Generic Gesture and impersonal Expression

As people who work with Noise we ask, what would be the most objective sound, the most independent of our subject position, the one that would counter the idea of self-expression that we have criticised before? What could be the sound that has no value at all? One could think that silence is the most generic and asubjective expression, the most uncreative, and available. Because of this it is perhaps the very ’sound’ which could critique or dismantle the logic of commodity as no value can be attributed to it. Silence proposes in its generic qualities the possibility of leaving behind notions of authorship. But here we will see how silence becomes reified in its different uses by being framed within the managerial logic that we are trying to criticise here. John Cage rightly pointed out that there was not such a thing as silence. Is there silence after the critique of correlationism? When humanity ends, would there be silence? Silence only has conceptual importance within our mental reality, both in the hypothesis of the extermination of humanity, or in the side of a mind-independent reality, silence as conceived would make no sense.

Having said that, with Cage we can see how the problem of an author’s authority can follow the form of value. The silence, is no longer silence but somebody’s property. Paul Hegarty in his book Noise/Music: a history, singled out the first performance of 4′33′’ as the first noise concert. Interestingly the noise is made by other people, not by Cage.

We can understand that silence is always specific and singular, that it works as a framework which allows things to happen. In recent years, we can see in noise, improvisation and contemporary composition, the use of silence is taken in some way as an aesthetic palette which is used as if it were a guarantee of a sound or event by which we obtain the desired responses from the public and the artist. This is the case of movements such as what has been called reductionism (minimal improvisation) or the group of composers Wandelweiser. The music is largely based on long passages of silence accompanied by minimal notes, subtle tones, or field recordings with minimum interference or processing from in its ‘natural’ recording.

These musicians found in the silence a way of looking at situations and the infinite riches of the circumstances of reality subtracted from the action of the music, evaluating critically the need to add something to that which already exists. While from Cage’s 4′33′’ noise could emerge, Waldenweiser and the reductionist improvisers tighten up their silences so the revolting, unwanted, or alienating character of what could be noise becomes formalised, feeding a very specific aesthetic taste. Noise cannot emerge from their use of silence, a silence that gets subjectified in their personal desires and their authorities as composers.

The artist has taken care to make sure that supra-personal events will be decisive in the analysis of her work, hereby ensuring through her subjectivity the value of their individual decisions. The phenomenological character of listening takes as real the subjectivity of the artist projected by our own consciousness. Therefore what may happen during a silence has a special meaning in relation to who has more power in the situation. If it is a concert, for the musician who took the decision not to play it is his decision, while the public’s decision not to move from his place is expected.

We will call spectral silence, this silence, which tames the situation and sets limits on access to the reality that is. Silence as an element bereft of any consideration other than aesthetics or decision emerging from the artist’s subjective process.

An object is created, ready to be experienced and tasted as if it were itself a sublime event to be enjoyed, savoured etc. A pleasure that derives from the hand of stillness, quietness. It is a phenomenon of representation of what we conceive as silence, and not just an understanding of silence as an absence of sound but also the conception of this set of sounds that the performer or artist does not control, not prescribed sounds. Spectral silence neutralises the insurgent nerve that can emerge in any improvisation by reinforcing the notion of subjective experience.

The musician’s intention to appropriate or ‘generate’ a silence does not leave the fact of recognizing the conceptual framework as their own, a product of their own subjectivity. It is an aesthetic tool that subjugates the opportunity to reflect on the reality of each sound in this context. The musicians are related to the silence in such a way only through individual expression, the encouragement of his ego and their aesthetic decisions. The obtained musical phenomena ends up determining the cognitive processes which take place at that time.

We all know that the state of silence does not physically exist. Despite this, the silence is likely to be objectified but in its spectral form (i.e. commodified and valorised). Spectral silence arises to prevent (both the public and the interpreter) the objective analysis of this situation, to really know the reality of this situation or art object.

Because an artist decides to use silence, these silences become part of somebody’s improvisation or composition, therefore it is a silence that does not reflect on the objectivity of the situation but on the subjective authority of the improviser composer, and his or her decision to use this silence.

These silences become subjectified their production of an aesthetic experience, which reinforces rather than questioning the division of labour between the musicians and the audience. This limits the access to the reality of the sound in itself. That reality is dependent on the correlation that we establish as cognisant subjects with the situation and what can be known of it. In this regard we can understand that spectral silence creates an effect similar to that created by correlationism; keeping incogniscible an area of reality. We are interested in both noise and in silence, seeking its radical potential as encoded object, which challenges the established concepts of knowledge; experimenting with the limits and liberties of a situation.

In a reductionist musical concert, the artist and the spectators understand (just as Kant did) that the cognitive experience of the cognisant subject is active, that in the act of knowing the cognisant subject adjusts the known reality. This correlationism gives us access to what is ‘in itself’ a concert of noise i.e., independent of the subjective relationship we build with this. We can only know what the concert is ‘for us’. Thus, what we perceive is conditioned by the conceptual decision of the artist, by, what means for us, that set of ideas processed through our supra-personal level, we pay attention to something specific, to encourage development of a meaning consistent with the authority of the artist, our tastes, reinforcing our acceptance or dissent from the context created by the conceptual idea, and ignore other aspects that can remain censored, but nevertheless these secondary issues might help us understand the reality of the situation. Also, cognition may be distorted by the aesthetic experience, we recognize the significance of each environmental sound that we perceive as a harmonious and artisan creation of nature and the subjectivity of the artist. We return to this in search of a shelter that guarantees the same sensory success as in past experiences. This passive recreation and contemplation in listening drives us deeper and deeper into the idea of a positivist order in our relationship with nature – a nature typically perceived as peaceful, cosy, and overwhelming (it is not surprising to see some of these composers such as Michael Pisaro using field recordings of nature as their material for compositions).

Towards Anti-Self: Nihilism and Truth

Nihilism is not, as Jacobi and so many other philosophers since have insisted, a pathological exacerbation of subjectivism, which annuls the world and reduces reality to a correlate of the absolute ego, but on the contrary is the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality, which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable. Nature is not our or anyone’s ‘home,’ nor a particularly beneficent progenitor.xiii

If we want to exploit these kinds of experimental practices (such as improvisation, composition or artistic interventions) as a material of emancipation, we must destroy the naturalistic approach of listening to the silence, stop looking at it as canvas full of pure, harmonious subtle imperfections, to release the full range of powers that reside there.

In contrast to the inertia of these musicians that leads them to build spectral silence, the idea of generating noise appears. We usually think of the liberating power of noise, its inherent connection with chaos and disorder, noise’s propensity to not fall into the trap of capitalism because it threatens the logic of generic classification as such, but noise, like any other sound can be realized as an aesthetic category (in fact we can see how noise has become a musical genre), as happens when spectral silence loses its intensity as abstract form, an intensity that it shares with silence.

Is it possible to carry out the use of silence or noise under the influence of nihilistic conception proposed by Brassier?

We think that it would be interesting to think about how sometimes in improvisation or composition that works with the silence, our relationship with ‘nature’ is somewhat confused. There is no clear relationship established by artists with this word, ‘nature’. We do not know if it is the ‘natural world’ or the structure of reality. This confusion, which leads artists to determine what is or is not natural for them, is very problematic. We understand that nature is transcendentally separate from thought. Scientific statements are capable of supplying reasons for believing in the possibilities of determining thought's tracking and missing nature.

We need to dismantle parameters such as ’sensitivity’ or ‘aesthetic values’ in favour of processes of objectification (or non-subjectivity) in noise making or improvising. How is this possible, considering that a Wandelweiser’s composer can blame the fact that the public is speaking on one of his concerts? They dare think perhaps that the sound of the crowd is less ‘natural’ than the sound of birds or the traffic in the distance? Obviously, it is no less natural, it is only less aesthetically desirable for their purposes.

If we assume that silence, as one of the more objective approaches to the reality of the situation (by its generality, which does not involve the artist’s hand), we have to analyse the problems of the cognition distorted by the aesthetic experience induced by the artist’s decision; The decision that established the conceptual framework.

In Michael Pisaro’s composition A wave and waves (2007) we can see how Pisaro and Greg Stuart work to re-create the natural dynamics of waves (after coastal observation) in a soundscape piece to delight the listener with the grandeur of nature. What is the impetus for trying to mimic nature’s processes? This interpretation, with its strong emphasis on phenomenological character, does nothing but deliver to us the idea of an overwhelming nature; a lapse back into nature is more like a naïve conformity to nature and, in a way, is reason's own fatal submission to the dictates of nature. We can see through the reception of the work how music writers encourage escapism and the unconditional acceptance of the phenomenological immersion of the work. This process of identification with nature according to the transcendental perspective engenders a subjective identity belonging to different positions while forgetting that nature is completely indifferent to us.


In the praxis of an objectified silence/noise, the artist’s decision, which activates certain conceptual processes; must be turned. We should work in a constant sabotage of the self. We’ll not take conceptual decisions to invest in our own individuality, rather our praxis should be the result of generic gestures or impersonal expressions. Otherwise we are doomed to access only to the meanings of a ‘reality’ created through the filter of the artist’s subjectivity (as we seen in the example of Pisaro’s A wave and waves), and continue ignoring and censoring sounds and acts depending on how they comply or not with our subjectivity, and how we wish that this should be projected (e.g. the performance in Milan of Empty Words by John Cage where communist students began a strong protest).

A praxis not based on individuality, but one that questions individualism, that questions the self- in both in is ideological level (and what interests this serves) and the neurophysiological level (what are the limitations of our senses and how can we change them through the use of technology).

The failure to change the world may not be unrelated to the failure to understand it.xiv

Notes

1 Ray Brassier, ‘Against an Aesthetics of Noise’, Available here:
http://ny­web.be/transitzone/against­ae ... noise.html
2 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin, 1990, p. 548.
3 R. Holloway, of The Bloody Unicorns, Detroit. In personal conversation.
4 P. Huneman and E. Kulich, Introduction a la phenomenologie, Paris: Armand Colin, p. 22
5 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin, 1990, p. 271.
6 Theorie Communiste (2010) ‘The Present Moment’. Trans. Anon, http://libcom.org/library/present­momen ... communiste (accessed April, 2011).
7 Michael Heinrich, Critique of Political Economy: An Introduction to the three volumes of Marx’s ‘Capital’,
Tran. Alex Locascio, forthcoming.
8 I.I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, Trans. Miloš Samardžija & Freddy Perlman, Delhi: Aakar Press,
2008, p.34 (quoting Capital Vol.1 p.167).
9 Frére Dupont, Species being and other stories. San Francisco: Ardent Press, 2007, p.22.
10 Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel, New York: Basic Books, 2009, p.8.
11 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, London: Continuum, 2009, p.5.
12 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p.63.
13 Ray Brassier, Ibid., 2007.
14 Ray Brassier, ‘Concepts and Objects’ in The Speculative Turn, p. 54. re­press, Melbourne, 2011. Available here:
http://www.re­press.org/book­files/OA_V ... 668346.pdf

[schiksalgemeinschaft]

could somebody summarize this into a paragraph or so?

[jon abbey]

sure, here you go, I've cut out all the unnecessary words and combined the remaining ones into sentences for easier reading, in the same order in which they appear in the piece:

"Noise is happy. One cannot have mastery over it. It is kind of useless. Unfortunately, in practice, many people can predict what we would like to think through. Karl Marx simplifies and standardises all tasks. In his own lifetime Marx experienced, with surprise, a growing dis-identification. We work towards nothing. It is not uncommon to hear teenage musicians drawing upon the boundaries capitalism has drawn onto them. Adorno suggests that that there is no fundamental reason for us to achieve a better understanding of reality. Cage rightly pointed out that Waldenweiser is real. The musician’s intention does not physically exist. We are interested in the spectators ignoring us. Michael Pisaro is indifferent to Brassier. This is very problematic. How is this possible? Greg Stuart."

[undo]

@jon: HA.

careful, guys, the bottom is kinda dripping on this barf-bag full of cool theory slaw.

[surfer]

Hahahahaha, brilliant Jon, well done.

[undo]

i am actually pretty amazed at how consistently this piece finds the dodgiest possible interpretation of all its sources. the metzinger bits are particularly funny.

[undo]

for example, mentioning the arche-fossil argument does prove that you've maybe kinda-sorta read some meillassoux (or that someone read about him for you), but its inclusion here shows you clearly don't know what to do with it.

[undo]

i keep looking for the 'like' button by jon's post.

[undo]

'[C] Note: Anti-Copyright. Anybody can do whatever they want with any of this material.'

probably not going to be an issue.

[negative potential]

Wow, undo, four posts in a row within twenty minutes from you on this topic. This article has really gotten under your skin, huh?

[undo]

more 'amused' than 'under my skin.'

though deleuze is no longer cool amongst those who have embraced metzinger/brassier/etc., i think this still holds:

'teachers already know that errors or falsehoods are rarely found in homework... rather, what is more frequently found -- and worse -- are nonsensical sentences, remarks without interest or importance, banalities mistaken for profundities, ordinary 'points' confused with singular points, badly posed or distorted problems -- all heavy with dangers, yet the fate of us all. we doubt whether, when mathematicians engage in polemic, they criticize one another for being mistaken in their calculations. rather, they criticize one another for having produced an insignificant theorem or problem devoid of sense.' (d+r, 153)

[diederich]

yeah, there is a serious lack of like button here

[faster]

This has really piqued my curiosity about Waldenweiser.

[Dan Warburton]

[undo]

In Michael Pisaro’s composition, A wave and waves, we can see how Pisaro and Greg Stuart work to re-create the natural dynamics of waves (after coastal observation) in a soundscape piece to delight the listener, with the grandeur of nature. What is the impetus for trying to mimic nature’s processes? This interpretation, with its strong emphasis on the phenomenological character, does nothing but deliver to us the idea of placid nature, her inherent beauty, completely forgetting that a set of waves can also be a destructive tsunami, that there is nothing caring, nature is indifferent to us. This interpretation is clearly the product of Michael Pisaro´s individual self-expression when he chose the series of waves.

fucking L-O-L, guys.

look, if you want to talk to michael and greg about their philosophical investments, it's pretty easy. i do it all the time! they're super-friendly, and they love to talk about it! they're also very avid and very good readers, which is clearly more than i can say for you.

here's the problem: the things you cite are incredibly important and incredibly useful ideas, some of the most useful going around. and you make absolute mulch out of them. if you want to answer questions -- and for some odd reason, i imagine you don't -- that's cool. if you're afraid that some discussion will hinder your creation-of-concepts, that's too bad. i'd be glad to help build better concepts out of this stuff. but the ones you've got aren't going to limp far out of this thread, which i hope will mercifully sink into the archives sooner rather than later.

it's a real bummer to see these ideas reduced to a series of bad name-checks, like an arms race to stay one hip library book ahead of someone else. it usually gets embarrassing, too, when you discover that the guys you're trying to stay edgier than are actually way better at this than you are.

(it's also sad to see the word 'collective,' as found in the byline, come to mean 'too long and half-assed.')

[Jesse]

no response since the opening salvo, joe, =troll.

[GegenSichKollektiv]

no troll
why people are so upset reaffirming their dogmas?

[undo]

clearly. but trolls with a forthcoming publication through continuum, apparently. which boggles the mind. the copy-editing expense alone should have deterred them.

i would just like the record to show that disdain for this bullshit is not limited to anti-theory types. those of us that care deeply about these issues find this drivel insulting, and it's important to point out who is bluffing, bullshitting, or worse, so that we're not all lumped together.

[leroysghost]

why people are so upset reaffirming their dogmas?

because people are really care about the Waldenweiser Kollektiv? can you reaffirm a dogma without being upset?

[undo]

no troll
why people are so upset reaffirming their dogmas?

oh, please. see, you're doing it again -- mistaking banalities for profundities, etc.

the issue isn't my dogmas. actually, i have the same interest in challenging the dogmatic images of thought, music, etc.

but it's difficult, sober work. and simply throwing authors in a blender isn't helpful.

the issue is that something so muddled as this article has no chance of doing anything, except making the theory-minded look muddled. it's just a pile. you didn't even pick the most relevant parts of the texts you kinda-sorta referenced.