To make a better crease

January 26, 2013 sPur

Hyperstition, that word to left of this entry and just a little ways beneath the excessively stylized header, stands as a key term for this blog because each of us shares the belief in the power of belief, or more specifically, the power of the false, the not-necessarily-true, and lies, to govern coincidence in a way that makes fabula effective and real. In other words, we’re hyperstitious because it’s apparent that reality is capable of being changed in conformity with the will.

The term, however, is not ours. Nick Land is largely responsible for its coinage and for its common conceptualization as an inhuman, apocalyptic power from the future. In some sense, hyperstition is Land’s radicalization of Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of capitalism which regards certain of the latter’s productive tendencies as evidence of an agency belonging to the system rather than those who are subject to it. Yet whereas Deleuze and Guattari are content to let the anomalous powers of capitalism remain ontologically indeterminate, Land interprets them in very literal ways to give his writings their distinctive fantastical and horrific flare. (See for example: “Meltdown.”) Basically, Land’s hyperstition is a methodological term that describes a form of “concept engineering” or idea wangling to account for the way things that are not necessarily true seem to have an effect on things in a way that perpetrates or conditions their own realization. In Land’s model reality is not a fixed object but a fluctuating environment of signs, affects, percepts, and behaviours that is continuously being designed, effected, and, more importantly, fought over. Something is therefore “hyperstitional” when causal links are made between a fiction’s semiotic field (which includes the special case of “art”) and the real’s effective terrain. This “fiction making itself real” can be understood as a form of classic occult causation, or, if you want to invoke Land’s terms, a case of cybernetic action wherein “reality” and “fiction” are both elements of a closed signaling loop that feeds change back into a system to regulate its constraints, potentials, and tolerances. (For Land, the “system” is no more than the productive pressure which matter’s self-differentiation produces in excess. Matter (material) is the process of individuation and synthesis, and thoughts (concept) are its effects, effects stripped of their transcendence.)

In this respect, hyperstition appears to be a type of formal or plexive causality that refers to the way effects implicate themselves within events to decline them away from expressing authorized—transcendentally coordinated—versions of reality. Things become hyperstitious when counterfactual propositions fold semiotic patterns and intensive regularities into a semblance of the real that is, while effectively virtual, indistinguishable from what it simulates. The consequences of this “verity swerve” are several, the least of which is that hyperstition confounds the categories of true/false, real/unreal. Perhaps what’s most interesting about the collapse of the distinction between the real/unreal is that postmodernism’s knee-jerk ontological skepticism is now the authorized response to hyperstition. Simulation is fact. The Real is fiction. But hyperstitions confound this formula because they don’t occasion a dispute—the absolute immanence of all transcendentals is prima facie. For the hyperstitious, the terms of debate have shifted to from substantiating the constructedness of the real to waging war over its invention. What this means is that hyperstitions leverage the “efficacy of the virtual” to re-version the real. Reality is not only plastic through and through, but everything about it folds into its expression, its process of self-differentiation. Writing, speaking, dancing, being bored, hesitating, forgetting, symbolizing, withdrawing, dying. Each of these acts executes a tendency that engineers what Land calls “zones of plexivity”—( ), (( ))), ((( )))))))))—where versions of the real compete to make a better crease.

Although every “thing” has an active function in the perplex of the real, only some things are sanctioned as operative. It all depends upon the tolerances of the current cultural Speculative Regime (ccSR)—the controlling system that commands the conjectural remit of any given version of reality. However, just because something is not sanctioned does not mean that it has no influence or lacks a measure of affect. For example, while the therapeutic efficacy of certain herbs that resemble the parts of the body (the “doctrine of signatures”) do not possess the overt correspondence between effects and signatures that would validate the reality of the doctrine, the mnemonic system that herbal signatures and discernable remedial effects produce cannot be denied. The curative signature of herbs has, then, an effect that produces changes in the real—the doctrine is a memory machine. But these effects are occulted, they are dissembled and rendered merely expressive of a “mnemonic device” for attributing which medical action corresponds with what herbs. The doctrine of signatures is a gateway through which modes of health may become real, and in this respect it is not a superstition but a hyperstition. It is a fiction whose speculations envisage a salubrious reality yet to come.

* * *

If contemporary culture is no longer superstitious because it believes in the certainty of its own programming, then as it gains awareness of its mediated constitution it is now becoming actively hyperstitious. The social construction of reality is beginning to look less like a theoretical gambit and more like an ontological model. Perhaps where superstition functions as a technique used to seduce specific results from a reality believed to be unruly and, paradoxically, “already written,” hyperstition is a practice for, as Ccru puts it, “propagating escape routes” and “charting a flight from destiny” (LTW). As a technique, superstition, despite its occult causality, continues to endorse the claims of the ccSR because all that it evokes are possibilities, pre-established future paths that short circuits any attempt to escape the ccSR. But hyperstition has no truck with the ccSR. Results for the hyperstitious are not something to be endorsed, they are something to be achieved or accomplished, regardless of their ontological status. To be hyperstitious is, then, to believe in the reality of the impossible and to execute the invention of the unfathomable. Land invokes Lovecraft’s “Old Ones” to depict the degree of hypsersition’s relevant unfathomability. As an absolute exteriority whose nature is so alien and ancient, so outlandish and inexplicable, the Old Ones represent the conjectural limits of the ccSR and thereby escape, at least symbolically (which is not nothing), the latter’s powers of domestication. The point is that one cannot plot or reason one’s way out of the ccSR, for plot and reason, even so deviant a strain as Land’s, belong to its remit. The outcomes of tactical subversion, logically composed nonsense, or even some form of auto-extinction, are fated to reiterate the concerns of the ccSR. The only way out is to lie, to make the counterfactual effective.

Well…I’m not entirely certain about any of the above. I think, however, what matters is for hyperstition to be understood as the production of sense that Deleuze identifies as the boundary or surface between propositions and things, a metaphysical surface from which the various modes of relationality find their power to differentiate and thereby organize into realities. As sense, hyperstition is not peculiar, but where sense runs amok, where surfaces multiply exponentially as we’ve been taught has already happened, then the efficacy of the virtual is something that is being constantly leveraged to engineer all manner of realities, from the grand designs of “global terror” that mobilize affections such as dread to manage the expectations of large populations, to the unassuming busker who hopes for a moment to capture a single listener long enough to sympathize and attune his/her temporary local reality. Additionally, multiples of sense create time anomalies and future memories, for the surface which “turns one side toward things, and another side toward propositions” (Deleuze) describes a spiral of coincidences that bring distant surfaces into effective proximity. Lies, then, are not false so much as they are exemplars of hyper-sense. Lies make sense, and the sense they make cleaves fact and fiction to the same expression. But the latter (expression) is itself just the surface of another series of sense that manners its own relay of signs, affects, percepts, and behaviours into a potentially functional reality.

For The Occulture, hyperstitions locate senses that stick, or show the promise of sticking, of becoming realities that will have been versioned. Perhaps you could say that because The Occulture is interested in hyperstition, it’s in the business of making sense.

– eldritch Priest

Cecchetto, Uncategorized

Listening as sympathy

January 18, 2013 David Cecchetto

First off, I want to preface my (relatively brief) post by saying that this space, for me, is a chance to hash out ideas as much as anything else. As such, I hope it goes without saying that many of the things I write about are as much a product of conversations I’m having and books that I’m reading as they are indicative of any ‘original’ thinking. To be clear, I don’t mean this as an apology and certainly don’t mean to suggest that my formal (scholarly) writing is somehow the product of a single author, but I want to make the point nonetheless because (while I’ll make every effort to cite appropriately) the great affordance of this space, for me, is to be able to ‘simply write’ (if not, alas, to be able to write simply).

This non-apology is particularly apt for this first post of mine because I’d like to think a little about modes of concentration, and I owe a lot of my thoughts in this area to eldritch Priest (who will also be posting here regularly, and who has a fantastic book called Boring, Formless, Nonsense: experimental music and the aesthetics of failure out with Continuum/Bloomsbury). To my mind, a corollary to McLuhan’s famous (and problematic) conception of technology as an ‘extension of man’ is that the senses are themselves technological, or perhaps medial. That is, we might understand (in the context of a distributed notion of cognition that we might call ‘affect’) technological extension to mean that to speak of hearing or seeing or touching et cetera is more to acknowledge a quality of attention than it is to define a discrete site of perception. This is why, for example, one can speak sensibly of seeing with one’s ears or hearing with one’s eyes: what is called forth is not so much a metaphor (though it is that, too) as it is set of affordances and constraints emphasizing certain distinctions over others. Or, put differently, each of what we think of as our five senses (or seven, if you include premonition and proprioception) is a kind of stand-in for a different way of articulating the ongoing system-environment difference that is embodiment. So, my aural body is different than my optical one (and, indeed, neither are properly ‘mine’), raising the question: in what does this difference consist? There are (of course) numerous answers to that question, but also (paradoxically) none that are categorically true precisely because sense-differentiation is operational rather than categorical, as I’ve just alluded to.

All of which doesn’t really matter, except in so far as this operational emphasis allows us to think about listening itself as a mode of concentration without erasing the material differences that obtain between sound and vision; that is, without adopting a necessarily anthropocentric perspective. There are any number of ways to pressure this operational difference (Marc highlighted eight in his post), but for the remainder of this post I’d like to focus on one: sympathy.

As Aden Evens points out in Sound Ideas, listening always involves attending to a differential play. Evens notes (as others have) that we don’t hear air pressure, but rather air pressure changing; to hear a ‘constant’ pitch is literally to hear something that is nothing but constant change. That is, despite sound waves travelling longitudinally (rather than transversely, as with a ripple on a pond), sound is resolutely not found in the particular air that impacts a resonant surface, but rather emerges from the pattern of the impact. Thus, we are always listening durationally in the doubled sense that to hear is: (1) to compose a succession of particular impacts into a pattern that is directed towards meaning; (2) and to exist outside of any fiction of a ‘pure present’ such that this direction towards meaning is always also a misdirection, since there is not even the fiction of a fixed referent.

This is actually a remarkably disturbing (in the best sense) observation—despite its simplicity—because it means that to ‘listen to’ is always to ‘feel with’ (to sympathize), to be attuned to the dynamics of a process that at once exceeds and composes oneself (composes because this process of attunement enacts a system-environment difference). Put differently, listening composes a form of relating that does not establish a subject/object distinction but rather an immediate (!) dynamism. In this, it is dramatically different from vision, which requires a minimal distance in order for light to be reflected.

(As an aside, I came across this podcast of a lecture by Daniel Black—who I don’t know at all—some time ago; he makes the crucial point that since nanotechnology is smaller than the wavelength of light it is constitutively invisible. As a result, visual nanotech interfaces are not so much magnifications—as we are invited to believe—as they are material translations that introduce qualititatively different parameters of potential manipulation…a point which is always true of magnification to an extent, but which is radicalized in that case. Thacker’s Global Genome similarly unpacks the radical material slippages that are collapsed into the concept of DNA.)

Moreover—and more politically—we might say that to listen is to draw proximate to the risks of entrainment. That is, in so far as listening entails a kind of primary relationality—i.e. a relation that logically precedes its relata—a position of critical distance is no longer possible (indeed, I have it in the recesses of my memory that the etymology of the word critical may in fact tie it to separation…). While this is perhaps simply another articulation of thinking politically after the transvaluation of value, it is nonetheless particularly pertinent today: as Hayles (and others) have argued, the ubiquity of technological networks compels us today to move beyond the psyche, the body, and even the social as the privileged sites of nonconscious activity. In short, Hayles’s project describes the myriad ways that we are persistently and relentlessly entrained by and through ubiquitous technologies, an entrainment that is typically unilateral because such networks are constitutively outside the realm of our conscious knowledge (she argues, for example, that 99% of all communicated language is machine to machine data that is unintelligible to humans). To listen, then, is to risk further immersion in precisely such networks.

This risk, though, is also listening’s potential, its political gambit. That is, if listening collapses (in advance) the spatial distinction between subject and object, it also temporalizes the relation that it posits: listening is dynamic. Thus—to return to the question of attention—the great possibility that listening presents is that one might attend to sympathy itself, to the possibilities that emerge in relations that cannot be traced to their constituent parts. Thus, for example, to learn to play a drum roll is not a question of learning to play faster, but rather of bringing the resonant potentials of all of the relevant actors (the drum skin, the sticks, one’s hands, et cetera) into sympathy with one another. Importantly, the argentine shimmer that makes a roll a roll emerges as a qualitatively different vector than any intensities found in the individual parts: it’s not just a question of speed. And crucially, such sympathies gain intensity over time: the roll might swell or compress, but it does so precisely because its status as a roll continually accrues.

In broad strokes then, perhaps we can say that to look attentively is to attend to a world that will persist in precisely the same manner independent of our attention. Unless we are solipsistic, we assume that objects persist even when we look away. To listen attentively, though, is to attend to a world where resonances are continually established, maintained, and broken; paraphrasing McLuhan, the question of solipsism is not intelligible to the ear. In listening, then, what Hayles calls the ‘technological nonconscious’ is still not brought into the light of conscious thought, but perhaps conscious thought itself might learn how to entrain bilaterally, which is to say to act.

– Cecchetto

4786

Uncategorized

First post: towards an unsound occupation

January 5, 2013 xenopraxis

I’d like to kick off this blog by insisting on the oft occulted area of tactical implementation of theoretical speculations, as a prelude to the work we’ll be doing in the context of An Unsound Occupation. There are many reasons why these speculations prematurely abort before sedimenting into application – chief among them perhaps is the sinking feeling that any tactic which circulates in cybernetic capitalism has the potential to strengthen the latter, to become indistinguishable from a product of a research and development wing for the “creative class”. Recall Cazdyn and Szeman’s critique of new economy guru Richard Florida in After Globalization. Dixit Florida: “I define the highest order of creative work as producing new forms or designs that are readily transferable and widely useful – such as designing a product that can be widely made, sold and used.” And this: “We have evolved economic and social systems that tap human creativity and make use of it as never before. This in turn creates an unparalleled opportunity to raise our living standards, build a more humane and sustainable economy, and make our lives more complete.” This grotesque line of argumentation connects with the seemingly progressive project of the Italian Autonomist movement (especially Negri), in reappropriating Marx’s Fragment on Machines from the Grundrisse in which the notion of “general intellect” is introduced as a means to a liberation from exploitation—”tapped into” in order to donate means by which the multitude can auto-poietically constitute itself—but occulting the fact that late capitalism is first and foremost an information, communication economy which vampirizes on intellectual, emotional, affective strata, capturing the individual even more securely into the folds of cybernetic logic. (Not to mention that Autonomist thought a fortiori restricts its critique to the level of production and leaves untrammeled consumption and eternal accumulation unexamined.) (For the moment, I’m not dealing with the claim that immaterial labor is itself nothing new, and has in fact always been an integral part to the production of value within capitalism. Anarchist theorist David Graeber has written on this.) As sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato points out, the individual is now ensconced in “machinic enslavement” which “consists in mobilizing and modulating the pre-individual, pre-cognitive and pre-verbal components of subjectivity, causing affects, perceptions and sensations as yet unindividuated or unassigned to a subject, etc. to function like the cogs and components in a machine.” This connects very much with the notion of pre-individual capture (the future preempted in the present) as dealt with by Brian Massumi and Steve Goodman among others, which seems to constitute one of the primary territories of struggle nowadays. I’m summarizing here, but the main question which has haunted my activities as of late remains: To what ends can creativity be “tapped” without unwittingly serving the very system one wishes to interrupt and defunctionalize? Here, as in all too many instances where the question of “what to do?” comes up, and despite rigorous, careful analyses, a dearth of concrete, actionable mechanisms makes its void painfully felt. My goal is to discover, through dialogue, whether heretical strategies from the past can be reappropriated (somehow divested from capitalist entanglement – Tony Conrad talks about the “excesses” in works which, because they are somehow occluded by historical, cultural “distributions of the sensible” prevailing at the time of their enactment, are therefore available for future use, when the time is ripe to skim them off) or whether heretofore unsuspected methods are what is needed. So I’d like to dedicate each post to a particular theoretical perspective – present or past – the tenets of which might illuminate a current conundrum.

With this question in mind, I delved into Tiqqun’s 2001 L’hypothèse cybernétique, which exists in a fair English translation. The first seven sections establish the coordinates of the cybernetic capitalist system we find ourselves in today, throughout flagging and dismantling most critiques of it as wittingly or unwittingly complicit in its continuing power, while the remaining 5 sections propose strategies for resisting and ultimately defeating this paradigm.

Briefly put, cybernetics, a wartime development tasked with the prediction of enemy action (and concomitant preemption) is quickly put to postwar use in manners defined by the annual Macy Conferences held in NYC, with the explicit aim of preventing any future social trauma and mass destruction by regulating i.e. controlling social behavior (the continuation of war by other, political means). (Lutz Dammbeck’s The Net fully exposes this history which involves figures such as mathematician Von Neumann, biophysicist Von Foerster, anthropologist Bateson, cybernetician Weiner, father of information theory Shannon, psychologist Lewin – an interdisciplinary crowd if ever there was one, and certainly a substantive bolster to anyone who is susceptible to conspiracy theories). However for all intents and purposes, the intentions of the Macy participants revolved around the establishment of a lasting social peace (without of course attempting to substantively deal with the real social antagonisms suppressing its appearance—gender, race, class, capitalism).

At the same time as this is happening, consumer culture is exploding and proliferating, partially due to the astute application of propaganda (now retitled “public relations” to distance it from Goebbels’ use of the term) techniques developed by Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays (see Adam Curtis’ The Century of the Self) geared towards the “manufacture of consent” and the emphasizing / capitalizing of desires over real needs, to ensure constant circulation and accumulation. Thanks to the roughly contemporaneous development and implementation of technologies of real-time communication and information, the feedback model of second-order cybernetics becomes the ideal template shepherding capitalism into its “late” stage. Cybernetics is the response to a desire for order, certitude – and what better way to tap into this than to preemptively stage the future in the present, to actively close off potential future disruptions to ensure an ever-smooth space for commodity circulation. (“For cybernetics it is no longer a question of predicting the future, but of reproducing the present.”)

Tiqqun reminds us that the word cybernetic derives from the Greek kubernesis, literally the act of “piloting a vessel” and refers us back to Foucault’s 1981-2 courses on self-regulation and governmentality as the emerging tenets of a new neoliberal order (astoundingly, Foucault is one of the first to deal with neoliberalism, naming it as such in his 1978-9 courses before almost anyone else, during which time Thatcher acceded to power in the UK and shortly before it was effectively put into practice in the US by Paul Volcker, then chief of the Federal Reserve, when he raised interest rates on October 6 1979 (during the Democratic Carter administration), provoking a recession and installing the new policies of austerity). Social scientist Karl Deutsch recommended abandoning the concept of “sovereign power”, to be replaced by a governance which would consist in “a rational coordination of the flows of information and decisions that circulate through the social body” – a submission of what Lyotard termed the “libidinal economy” of free-floating desires (in his “evil” book of the same name, which he himself later repudiated) to cybernetic control. Deutsch underlined three conditions which would need to be met to actualize this new form of decentralized power: “an ensemble of capturers would have to be installed so that no information originating from the “subjects” would be lost; information handling by correlation and association; and a proximity to every living community.” In this sense, a mastery of uncertainty would arise from the “continuous extortion of information” (now increasingly possible due to new instant-feedback technologies – just think of the Amazon recommendations based on your own purchasing history, memorized and represented back to you, or any type of barcode scan at the checkout counter, which is fed directly into the just-in-time models which overwhelmingly characterize late capitalism.)

“Cybernetics transports the rationalization process common to bureaucracy and to capitalism up onto the plane of total templating (modeling).” Not only have we NOT been liberated by post-Fordist restructuring of labor, but even our so-called leisure time (if we’re not plugged into work all the time to begin with) is being intensely monitored and capitalized by perpetual communication. (Radical economist Gary Becker was one of the first to theorize this total capitalization of existence in “The Economic Approach to Human Behavior” in the mid 70s). The Big State, equally decried by both late 60s student revolutionaries AND emerging neo-liberalists, is replaced by “micro-mechanisms of control”, AKA devices, “nomadic forms of control” which continuously collect information about our needs, desires, opinions (Tiqqun insists on the necessity within cyber-capitalism of constant TRANSPARENCY). Capitalist accumulation can only survive in the wake of the dissolution of mass-production Fordism if the production-consumption cycle accelerates. Accordingly, as Deleuze pointed out in his prescient Postscript, nothing is ever finished in societies of control, following Kafka’s notion of “indefinite postponement”; there are infinitely untapped methods by which the individual can be mobilized as a consumer (because capitalism, however rabid its deterritorializing impulses cannot in the end do without humans, its effects radically RE-territorialized into affects and bodies).

This is a gross summary – and it brings me back to the initial question of how, in this context, a tactical approach might be still able to circumvent capitalization.

Throughout the speculative remainder of the text, Tiqqun outlines general properties of a “successful” resistance:

a) Active Experimentation: “Attacking the cybernetic hypothesis…doesn’t mean just critiquing it, and counterposing a concurrent vision of the social world; it means experimenting alongside it, actuating other protocols, redesigning them from scratch and enjoying them.” AND: “Experimentation, which does not consist in completed experiences but in the process of completing them, is located within fluctuation, in the heart of the noise, lying in wait for the bifurcation.” (The latter notion which they crib from Prigogine and Stengers’ chaos theory discovery of “thresholds from which a new system status is possible”).

b) Intervention/Insinuation from within the logic of commodity flows: Tiqqun believes that Marx and Bataille both erred in “situating the power to overturn the system from OUTSIDE of the system of commodity flows.” This recalls Cildo Meireles’ Intervention into Ideological Circuits, in which repurposed mass produced commodies (assisted ready-mades) were reinserted into the system, their disruptive logic stealthily metastasizing. They define INSINUATION, “the illapsus, according to medieval philosophy – a strategy consisting in following the twists and turns of thought, the wandering words that win me over while at the same time constituting the vague terrain where their reception will establish itself.” Insinuation (read: duplicity) is posited explicitly AGAINST the logic of transparency. This leads to the necessary correlate of…

c) Contagion: Pace Burroughs (in the Invisible Generation), “What’s at issue in any enunciation is not whether it’s received but whether it can become contagious.”

d) Noise: Tiqqun defines noise as that which “is non-enrolled into the valorization circuit”: “The overproduction of bad feedbacks that distort what they’re supposed to signal and amplify what they’re supposed to contain — such situations point the way to a pure reverberatory power.” (It remains to be seen whether noise still has this capacity, given its genrification and valorization – remembering that this text was written in 2001). At its core, noise is the non-trackable, a movement which oscillates indeterminately between 0 and 1 (off / on).

All this is vaguely poetic and somewhat under-determined.

I’d like us to think about the following points and their potential grafting onto sonic practices, given our area of tactical focus. For the moment, I’m going to refrain from critiquing them (I’m expecting and hoping critique will occur). Note that these 8 points are not outlined as such in the text, but have been isolated by me – as such there are overlaps. Also, one should read the following remembering it was written in 2001 (before Sept. 11, an event which apparently brought about the dissolution of the group.); as such, you may find that 12 years makes a big difference.

1. “Fabricating the real instead of responding to it.” (Deleuze) This involves an experimental actualization of heretofore unsuspected “forms of struggle” and the transformation of the “interplay of lifestyles/forms-of-life into information.” It’s an “extended line of flight that seems to spread outwards from me”, which spreads a form of informational sabotage (or disinformation, or “hyperstition”), which could also be understood as a contagious spread of alternative models. It is important to have a consistent multitude of discrepant actions so as to produce an illegible overall effect (no clear mandate) and “produce invisibility in the eyes of the enemy”.

2. This fabrication and consequent dissemination of sabotage must be accompanied by a counter-movement, a folding back, a retreat from oppressive feedback circuits which would “attempt to encircle me/figure me out; like Bartleby, I’d “prefer not to””.”The resistance of lifestyles/forms-of-life to being made into information. Deleuze: “The important thing is maybe to create vacuoles of non-communication, interrupters who escape control.” “Extending the background interference that imposes itself when the feedback loops are triggered, and which makes the recording of behavioral discrepancies by the ensemble of cybernetic apparatuses costly”.

3. Consequently, ZONES OF OPACITY need to be established “where people can circulate and experiment freely without bringing in the Empire’s information flows”. Emphasis on the production of “anonymous singularities, recreating the conditions for a possible experience, an experience which will not be immediately flattened out by a binary machine assigning a meaning/direction to it, a dense experience that can transform desires and the moments where they manifest themselves into something beyond desire, into a narrative, into a filled-out body.”

4. In order that offensive opacity zones can form and be reinforced, there need to be planes of consistency, which connect deviations together, which work like a lever and fulcrum to overturn fear. “In order that behavioral fluctuations become contagious, it is necessary that they first attain a “critical mass,” which pace Prigogine/Stengers is “thus determined by a competition between the (cybernetic) system’s ‘power of integration’ and the chemical mechanisms that amplify the fluctuation within the fluctuating subregion.”

5. SLOWNESS is to be privileged over speed (given capital’s mobility and will-to-efficiency, cf. Taylor’s Time and Motion studies). “Slowness is also necessary to putting lifestyles/forms-of-life that are irreducible to simple information exchanges into relation with each other. It expresses resistance of relations to interaction.” ” Speed upholds institutions. Slowness cuts off flows.” So one must (somehow) fight against a temporality of urgency.

6. The POLITICS OF RHYTHM. On the one hand, the politics of rhythm is “the search for a reverberation, another state, comparable to trance on the part of the social body, through the ramification of each body.” (Cf. Canetti Crowds and Power) Shades of Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis and Eshun’s invocations from More Brilliant than the Sun: “political kinetics can be better understood as the politics of rhythm.” (Recall Goodman’s accounts in Sonic Warfare about transindividual vibrational encounters).

7. At the same time, the “binary techno-rhythm imposed by cybernetics must be OPPOSED by other rhythms” which would be “profoundly dis-integrating, rather than merely noisy…rhythms of disconnection.” They stipulate that “the collective conquest of this accurate dissonant tempo must come from a prior abandon to improvisation.” (see 6.)

8. “HAZE disrupts all the typical coordinates of perception. It makes it indiscernible what is visible and what is invisible, what is information and what is an event.” “To say that revolt must become foglike means that it should be dissemination and dissimulation at the same time.” Contra myths of transparency which the cyberworld is predicated on (“direct democracy”).

I’ll leave it there in order to think further about how sound might help actualize some of the above, especially given how sonic metaphors are already employed throughout.

I’ve posted some links to some of the texts above on the Asounder website here, and here.

Couroux

summary reading list (see aaaaarg if not linked):

Edward Bernays – Propaganda

William S. Burroughs – The Invisible Generation

Elias Canetti – Crowds and Power

Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman – After Globalization

Tony Conrad – Is this Penny Ante or a High Stakes Game?

Adam Curtis – The Century of the Self

Lutz Dammbeck – The Net – The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet

Gilles Deleuze – Postscript on Societies of Control

Michel Foucault – The Hermeneutics of the Subject (1981-2 lectures)