By Achim Szepanski
Translated by Jan Heintz
With the modification of a Baudrillard quote regarding the infinitely choosing chooser one could write: The culture industry irrigates and energizes the excited and at the same time exhausted nervous system, lets people hear until they themselves want to hear more and more often, and they would actually like to hear much more. This does not mean that they have a taste or believe in the meaning of music — on the contrary, it expresses a bulimic desire for hearing: the music system is devoured and digested in a voracious and excremental way. One gets rid of it by an excess (not by rejection, but by a digestion disorder) — the whole system is transformed into a huge white music belly.
This also means that the retro mode in music has finally become ubiquitous. Although there have been retro tendencies in Pop based on fashion from the beginning, but for a time, until the 1990s, according to Fisher, it was possible to distinguish “retro” from so-called contemporary music, which captures the moods of a period. Today, all retro styles are sold as contemporary precisely because there are no truly contemporary alternatives. That is, according to Fisher, truly eerie. The retro mode has thus become the standard, i.e. styles, fashions and objects that are retro are sold as contemporary products, precisely because the real innovation no longer takes place in the present. If everything is retro, on the one hand it is pointless to call certain phenomena retro, on the other hand nothing is retro anymore. Time would be white.
Ultimately, however, the insistence on the contemporary always takes place, whereby the present appears to be eternally extended or stretches like cheese that never melts. The contemporary coagulates into a time that occupies the present, the past and the future. Over time it becomes like all transit places — shopping centres, airports, museums and sports arenas: It has become completely replaceable in all its dimensions (past – present – future), no matter what year we are in. Because it is replaceable, the contemporary is also standardized. “Being up to date” was already an insult to Nietzsche, who proudly proclaims at the beginning of his essay On the Use and Abuse of History for Life the untimeliness of thinking, “i.e. acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come” (Untimely Meditations, p. 60). This insult continues.
Mark Fisher more or less sums up what Frederic Jameson described long before him. Jameson registers in post-Fordist culture an equivalence between the accelerated circulation of differences at all levels of social activity, the design of use values, symbols, habitus, etc., and at the same time their unprecedented standardization and functionalization — Jameson writes: “What then dawns is the realization that no society has ever been so standardized as this one, and that the stream of human, social and historical temporality has never flowed quite so homogeneously” (p. 59). Homogeneous time crawls ahead, not by means of the crude “naked repetition”, which always repeats the same thing, but precisely by means of the “clothed repetition” of differences often mentioned by Deleuze, which in the course of the repetition of variation interiorizes the condition of its own repetition; i. e. “clothed repetition” is the interiority of value as Difference-in-itself. It is dominated by a strangely stratifying force — a Time apparently filled with colorful contents, but which remains subject to capitalization. The appearance of radical novelty constantly circulates, while in reality one preserves.
One would now have to speak of something like a versity (equalization), an inversion and mutation of diversity. It does not mean the elimination of Difference or socio-cultural differentiation; on the contrary, versity uses difference as its real substrate to generate certain standardized organizational systems. New ordering systems and power technologies are constantly being generated that absorb or modulate differences. (The activities of the mutual influences of the respective net nodes can be described with diffusion-reaction-equations and this leads to the recognizability of patterns and cluster formations, e.g. of disease foci and -courses. It is also easy to understand that graph theory can be used to map or illustrate certain parameters such as density, relation and relata of economic variables in the context of monetary transactions on the financial markets. The algorithmic infrastructures create certain conditions for the normalization and standardization of the respective communications and transactions. Biopolitical methods of control are used preventively qua “Big Data”, e.g. by evaluating the data on Twitter and Google, in order to build up epistemological networks that can serve governmental biopolitics in the global context for the early detection of riots and epidemics of all kinds.)
Of course, Adorno would immediately be on the spot when he writes about the culture industry: “Thus, the expression ‘industry’ is not to be taken too literally. It refers to the standardization of the thing itself – such as that of the Western, familiar to every movie-goer – and to the rationalization of distribution techniques, but not strictly to the production process” (p. 100). For Adorno, the rationalization of artistic process techniques, such as the well-tempered piano, is successively accompanied by the transformation of artworks, of objects enveloped in an aura, into standardized goods. According to Adorno, a certain technical treatment of the artistic material leads to the serial production of standard goods that, depending on the medium, have shrunk to a manageable ensemble of signals. Adorno summarizes: Culture today beats everything with similarity. Film, radio, magazines make up a system. Although the statement is reminiscent of a mere economy, Adorno does not want this to be understood as a crude power of determination; rather, for him culture is a system, insofar as the economy is realized in culture as its opposite. (For Eshun, distribution techniques are the nervous systems of the 21st century and, unlike Adorno, he sees them positively — in raves, in clubs and at parties. As matrices of the futurhythmic discontinuity, however, today they are more adequate to the modes of finance.)
Such a critique of the standardized cultural industry and its goods must always deal with the accusation that it is only morally outrageous that capital has provided a product with a price and thus standardized it even before the use value qua design is standardized. The naive objection to such a reality, which is usually called a commodity society, is presented as if it were somehow precisely this standardized reality that should forbid turning use value into a commodity. Bored by such a reality, and precisely because of this totally in agreement with it, critics have forgotten that it is not at all important to accuse the contemporary of not possessing any taste, but of challenging the power of the untimely, which can only be a force of thought. Or let us take the taste. This is what the artist-subject likes to refer to; as Adorno says, in his idiosyncrasy he lets taste guide him. But taste, too, has long since been turned around by capital’s remixing and sampling machines; it is over-capitalized, over-aestheticized, over-medicated, inundated with brands and art, it becomes white (this has nothing to do with the thread of the Tao) — or, alternatively, it is reduced to a one-euro taste in the course of inhibited austerity programs. What if the capital itself takes over the remixing and treats sonic and financial objects in multiple dimensions?
The consumer, as far as he is financially able to do so, today not only wants his need satisfied, but also his desire seduced, and he wants his self-model changed by consumption in the sense of producing a sur-plus (of consumption). The modern consumer is the producer of a reflexive consumption, he not only consumes consumption, as a service provider he also consumes work, as a citizen he is an undead consumer. The desire is satisfied less than it is permanently incited to attach itself to cerebral consumption, which either consumes consumption or attaches itself to commodities charged with visiotypes and narratives in such a way that they construct a phantom image. Products (even those of music) today are less things than phantom images. And so the question for the consumer is whether he drinks the taste of freedom with Coca-Cola or Pepsi Cola or how he pushes freedom with the consumption of Red Bull.
Branding involves the production of an emotional and cognitive surplus-enjoyment, which is bound to narratives such as freedom, order, adventure or lifestyle with the establishment of branded goods and is permanently stimulated. For this the commodity still needs a symbolic equivalent, that is the money, to circulate. Only when money is open to meaning it can function as an empty reference structure, as a so-called media transporter that allows the commodities and their signs and narratives to circulate incessantly. Baudrillard has tied his theory of virtuality to the circulation of signs that only refer to themselves in circulation and whose meaning or value is a pure simulation effect. However, Baudrillard’s thesis that meaning and reality implode in the sign cannot be accepted, because even the bits as signs must mean something, but what they mean is irrelevant.
“Future”
The present is so saturated with retro that we no longer perceive the pure past that is always there. It is this flattening of time that leads to the fact that we no longer have any idea of a future that could be different from our present. Finally, we remain in the present, which cuts off relations to other temporal dimensions and interconnects everything in the present. The present is founded as it disappears at the same moment, and it remains the mere continuity of the present, the infinite flow of actuality and the (digital) automatic of the present. In these orders of equivalence and indifference of time, the unique or singular, i.e. the untimely, is excluded. The corresponding space resembles the one-dimensionality of a white surface. What counts now is above all the position in a network. The present thus lashed together produces exhaustion and hyper-activity at the same time and is lived in transit spaces.
Kraftwerk is perhaps still the adequate, i.e. the transparent music for the transit places. Some black people still say to this day that the technology Kraftwerk brought to sound has taken the color out of the music and made it transparent. It is no coincidence that Eshun speaks here of White Synthesizer Soul (as genre), Kraftwerk of the ultra whiteness of an automatic, sequenced future (p. 100). And it was industrial folk music, as Kraftwerk themselves said, but the people are still missing today. One possibility of resistance would now be to further exaggerate and accelerate the automatic by allowing oneself to be synthesized by the technology itself, to expose oneself completely to alienation, for example to let the cold string sounds of Derrick May wander on one’s skin without indulging oneself in coolness. Yes, says Eshun, this futuristic music resists the ubiquity of the present, it comes entirely from the future. But in a way Eshun himself is still in the industrial age. Techno is therefore also the sound of the demise of the industrial city called Detroit.
Yes, say the theorists of the “post-contemporary” today, time today comes entirely from the future, or at least qua finance there is a kind of anticipatory deduction of the future that emanates from the present and has an effect on it. Capitalization qua Derivatives indeed discounts the future price of an asset in order to generate future returns in relation to current and future market prices. Derivatives thus permit the contraperformative time-binding design of the present and the future, whereby the specific shift of the present into the future qua derivative prevents the actuality of the present from being clearly separated from the inactivity of the future. Thus, the specific time-binding of Derivatives can be understood as a relation between a withdrawn present and a split future, both of which, however, must be actualised and at the same time remain unactualised (insofar as certain possibilities are not actualised). The derivative is anticipated as a price in the future, which of course still has to take place, by calculating the price or discounting it to current values, and it is precisely in this way that the contingent future is used to achieve returns in the Now. This type of economisation of the future has an effect on the present, which is now split itself, and no longer is the one from which one started the calculation. To calculate it down for the actors: their action now has to include the future as a condition of action, and thus the action itself is modified. Here, as Bahr rightly says, there is a virtually anticipated lack or the idea that, for example, one’s own company will simply disappear from the market in the future without innovation and its realization in production, with which one must already deal with now. Here, too, the speculative moment is already set. To put it briefly, the expected profit generates the means with which it is generated. The difference between the expected future and the future that occurs in real terms cannot be eliminated, it can only be managed. Time does not come in toto from the future, rather the real future remains closed. And for finance, it is not only a matter of forecasting the future, but also of disciplining the present.
References
Adorno, T. W. (2005). Culture Industry Reconsidered. The Culture Industry. Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London, New York: Routledge.
Bahr, H.-D. (1983). Über den Umgang mit Maschinen. Tübingen: Konkursbuch.
Eshun, K. (1998). More Brilliant Than The Sun. Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books.
Fisher, M. (2014). Ghosts Of My Life. Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester, Washington: Zer0 Books.
Jameson, F. (1998). The Antonomies of Postmodernity. In The Cultural Turn. Selected Writings on the Postmodern (pp. 50–73). London: Verso.
Nietzsche, F. (1997). Untimely Meditations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
From Ultrablack of Music (2020, Mille Plateaux / NON) edited by Achim Szepanski.
Achim Szepanski is the founder of the electronic music labels Force Inc. and Mille Plateaux. His research focuses lately primarily on Speculative Capital. His recent publications are Capitalisation 1 & 2, Non-Marxism, Capital and Power in the 21th Century, and Imperialism, State-Fascism and the War Machines of Capital. He is the Editor of NON.
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