Thursday, November 19, 2009
Electro-Politics: A Micro-Essay on NIN's 'Head Like a Hole'
Admitted, electronic dance music is largely barren of explicit political content. This, in as it largely devoid of lyrical content. But there is something to dancing itself, as a jubilatory practice, which contains a utopian element of release from conditions of slavery. We gonna stamp down Babylon and whatnot. It is a reclamation of mastery over the body.
The revolutionary aspect of dancing, be it even as "braindance", partially aside, then, the overtly revolutionary potential of lyrical electronic dance music needs also be assessed. Nine Inch Nail's Head Like a Hole will be the paradigmatic example taken in this respect.
I recall on first hearing it over the car radio with my parents a sense of most guilty association with its sedition. It was as if it was murdering my father for me through noise. My father was no doubt thinking of his father at the time as well.
But beyond family politics, Head Like a Hole gave me a brutally prescient framework for understanding the whole of society. It was as close as I had yet gotten to the Master-Slave dialectic or class relations. In my wider researches I have indeed yet to find another piece of noise which presents such a stark and "raving" insight into social relations on first approach.
Much could be added here on the essential human element of all "techno" or the essential technological element of all "acoustics", but I find that my point here has largely already been made. Blogs are precious insofar as they free one from arbitrary journalistic rubrics or measures. I err therefore on the side of a greater concision.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Erotic City
[Discipline to the text purely avaricious:]
Hellish goblin am I, stained with feces of Satan.
Pestilence embraces mine gibberish of the tortured.
Sheaves of filth crumble outwards.
Reheated swill
Of nothing eventful
Are my poems.
Unsleeping yet,
Having slept all day,
Unfocused boredom stains everything.
For a poetry of divine violence.
'...if the administration of society and all contact between people now depend on the intervention of ... "instant" communication, it is because this "communication" is essentially one-way; the concentration of the media thus amounts to the monopolization by the administrators of the existing system of the means to pursue their particular form of administration.' -G. Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Break wierdly with all influences
to preserve and respect them.
Hellish goblin am I, stained with feces of Satan.
Pestilence embraces mine gibberish of the tortured.
Sheaves of filth crumble outwards.
Reheated swill
Of nothing eventful
Are my poems.
Unsleeping yet,
Having slept all day,
Unfocused boredom stains everything.
For a poetry of divine violence.
'...if the administration of society and all contact between people now depend on the intervention of ... "instant" communication, it is because this "communication" is essentially one-way; the concentration of the media thus amounts to the monopolization by the administrators of the existing system of the means to pursue their particular form of administration.' -G. Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Break wierdly with all influences
to preserve and respect them.
pasos del Massif
Exclude the schizos
And next come the sane.
Tumescences of the world bursting with
Stark, raving prescience.
Diagonals shriek of Mammon-Shiva.
That is all.
What we share with animals
http://socialistworker.org/2009/11/18/what-we-share-with-animals
The above linked letter by Ryne Poelker to the Socialist Worker is the most learned, practical, and prescient contribution to the recent "animal controversy" yet made available. While, in the grey world of theory, all polemics are interminable, this letter provides something approaching a sound closure to the issue for me. Also note that, as a schizophrenic, I am liable to be (have been) stripped of all my "rights", the very "rights of man", over and over again by the state. Thus am I "like" an animal. In end, and in truth, I warn this list that all are liable to be so excepted from the rule of law. We all may "become-animal", if not biologically (of course), then legally. Giorgio Agamben has written well on this I believe. I just finished his beautiful 'State of Exception'. Nothing better has yet been written on the intimate, intricate relations between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt.
The very best,
Max Clark
p.s. also just picked up Quentin Meillassoux's 'After Finitude'. anyone else have any thoughts to share on this title? anything on "arche-fossils", "ancestrality", and whatnot?
The above linked letter by Ryne Poelker to the Socialist Worker is the most learned, practical, and prescient contribution to the recent "animal controversy" yet made available. While, in the grey world of theory, all polemics are interminable, this letter provides something approaching a sound closure to the issue for me. Also note that, as a schizophrenic, I am liable to be (have been) stripped of all my "rights", the very "rights of man", over and over again by the state. Thus am I "like" an animal. In end, and in truth, I warn this list that all are liable to be so excepted from the rule of law. We all may "become-animal", if not biologically (of course), then legally. Giorgio Agamben has written well on this I believe. I just finished his beautiful 'State of Exception'. Nothing better has yet been written on the intimate, intricate relations between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt.
The very best,
Max Clark
p.s. also just picked up Quentin Meillassoux's 'After Finitude'. anyone else have any thoughts to share on this title? anything on "arche-fossils", "ancestrality", and whatnot?
Thursday, November 12, 2009
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