Acid Museum
The Spectre of a World Which Could Be Free
The exorcising of the “spectre of a world which could be free” was a cultural
as well as a narrowly political question. For this spectre, and the possibility of a world beyond toil, was raised most potently in culture — even, or perhaps especially, in culture which didn’t necessarily think of itself as politically-orientated.
Marcuse explains why this is the case, and the declining influence of his work in recent years tells its own story. One-Dimensional Man , a book which emphasises the gloomier side of his work, has remained a reference point, but Eros and Civilisation , like many of his other works, has long been out of print. His critique of capitalism’s total administration of life and subjectivity continued to resonate; whereas the claims Marcuse’s conviction that art constituted a “Great Refusal, the protest against that which is” came to seem like outmoded Romanticism, quaintly irrelevant in the age of capitalist realism. Yet Marcuse had already forestalled such criticisms, and the critique in One-Dimensional Man has traction because it comes from a second space, an “aesthetic dimension” radically incompatible with everyday life under capitalism. Marcuse argued that, in actuality, the “traditional images of artistic alienation” associated with Romanticism do not belong to the past. Instead, he said, in… formulation, they “recall and preserve in memory belongs to the future: images of a gratification that would destroy the society that suppresses it.”
The Great Refusal rejected, not only capitalist realism, but “realism” as such. There is, he wrote, an “inherent conflict between art and political realism”. Art was a positive alienation, a “rational negation” of the existing order of things. His Frankfurt School predecessor, Theodor Adorno, had placed a similar value on the intrinsic alterity of experimental art. In Adorno’s work, however, we are invited to endlessly examine the wounds of a damaged life under capital; the idea of a world beyond capital is dispatched into a utopian beyond. Art only marks our distance from this utopia. By contrast, Marcuse vividly evokes, as an immediate prospect, a world totally transformed. It was no doubt this quality of his work that meant Marcuse was taken up so enthusiastically by elements of the Sixties counterculture. He had anticipated the counterculture’s challenge to a world dominated by meaningless labour. The most politically significant figures in literature, he argued in One-Dimensional Man , were “those who don’t earn a living, at least not in an ordinary and normal way”. 6 Such characters, and the forms of life with which they were associated, would come to the fore in the counterculture.
My favorite text Mark Fisher has ever written is his unfinished introduction to Acid Communism. That also makes it one of the most frustrating in his catalogue, in the sense that it is just one unfinished endeavor with a tragic conclusion (not in the writing, but in continued life). I think it showcases the somewhat paradoxical sources of energy art can give into life. So I want to dive a bit deeper.
A few texts ago, I mentioned how Fisher’s use of the term Psychedelic Fascism bothered me somewhat, for pointing to the moralizing streak that is some of my least favorite aspects of his voice. As pointed out by people like Alex Williams in the negative (“contained in Mark’s assessment is some notion that creative processes, whilst socially and economically conditioned, retain a degree of individual freedom- and hence it is a moral failing on the part of this generation to not have produced innovations comparable with their forefathers”), Xenogothic in a more positive light (“I’d argue, then, that Mark was very much aware of hauntology’s flaws, but it was precisely those flaws that interested him.”) and in a nuanced middle ground by Rhett (“Digging through the papers of the beatification of Saint Mark we can retrieve a fecond bundle of neuroses and the silhouette of a conceptually dysfunctional man in a desertified cultural landscape — the shadow of the only true characteristics which we fully share with him unambiguously.”). It has been pointed out to me, however, how my assessment of that term is unfair in the face of his use of the word Acid Communism, which is part of what i want to remedy in this text, because i do believe that expression (along with Popular Modernism, present in a few of his older essays like the wonderful Going Overground) to be very important to my endeavors.
Soren Kierkegaard, in Either/Or, claims that the “The unhappy person is he who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, his real nature in some way or other outside of himself. The unhappy man is always absent from himself, never present to himself”. On the same chapter, he says of the “remembering individual”: “If he finds himself in the past, strictly he is not unhappy; but if he cannot do that but remains constantly absent of himself in a past, then we have a form of the unhappy”. Much like how Fisher claims that a portion of Marcuse’s works falling into a decline of popularity for their illuminating power of the new, i’d like to make a similar claim to Kierkegaard’s interest going beyond the strictly theological dimension, and in fact may provide a lot of power in ways that may not have been the intended objective of his work, or, to steal Steven Shaviro’s bold statement: “We need to reverse the direction of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, and move from the ethical to the aesthetic” (both Kierkegaard quotes come from the first half of Either/Or written by the Aesthetic “A”).
Marcuse, to Fisher seems to provide this flight towards (or coming from) the aesthetic. Against Adorno’s constant appeals to an ethic, Fisher values (throughout his career) the power of taking back the narrative as it were, of breaking out of the melancholia of left inneffectism. A communist beyond good and evil of sorts, an emotion that can be seen in an essay such as the older Pomophobia (written along with Robin McKaye). He claims that leftism has taken a certain pride in its own unpopularity, and it is time to revert the dilemma. Take this section, from the very beginning of Going Overground:
“Owen Jones is correct about the need for a left-wing populism. As I argued in the wake of Thatcher’s death last year, reactively firefighting an agenda set by the right will keep us on the backfoot forever. Having the best arguments is only part of the battle; what the right — even this degenerate, incompetent, barely functional right — understands is the incantatory power of repeating a simple message ad nauseam: politics as neurolinguistic programming.
However, if the explosion of experimental popular culture in the second half of the 20th century taught us anything, it’s that it’s possible to be popular without being populist. Conversely, it’s possible to be populist without being popular. Isn’t this, in fact, the formula for capitalist realist culture since Blairism? Blair wins election after election, but by the end he is widely detested — especially among those who have reluctantly voted for him. Exploitative reality TV continues to command large — if now waning — audiences, but many of the people who loathe the programmes are also those who avidly watch them. Similarly, many of those who protest the arrival of Tesco in their town also end up shopping in the stores when they arrive. To call this hypocrisy is to miss the eminently dialectical ambivalence of these entanglements. In watching the X Factor or shopping in Tesco, there is often some lingering desire for mass mediated technological modernity to be better than it is, whereas those who have retired into private space with their DVD box sets and ethically sourced goods have given up on this possibility, if they ever cared about it.”
Sprinkled all through Acid Communism, though he does not use the term “popular” very often, are these references to a tight knit society that is not necessarily a niche, but that effectively makes itself known in its difference and potentiality. For example, he says :
“Marcuse worried about the popularisation of the avant-garde, not out of elitist anxieties that the democratisation of culture would corrupt the purity of art, but because the absorption of art into the administered spaces of capitalist commerce would gloss over its incompatibility with capitalist culture. He had already seen capitalist culture convert the gangster, the beatnik and the vamp from “images another way of life” into “freaks or types of the same life”. The same would happen to the counterculture, many of whom, poignantly, preferred to call themselves freaks.”
I think this is part of why Fisher and many other thinkers of his style placed a huge weight into the role of dance music as a revolutionary power. Unlike the fear mongering of Adorno, who referred to Jitterbug dancers of the late 30s as genuinely “turning into insects”, Fisher in referring to his project as Acid Communism, not only brings to mind the LSD that fueled so much of 60s and 70s music, a music that had not yet become afraid to dance, like the ironic portrayal of people dancing to Smashing Pumpkins in the Simpsons episode Homerpalooza (“Getting teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel”). To my mind it also brings to mind the rise of Acid techno, in the late 80s, and further, the entire field of electronic music (which Fisher had nothing but praise for, especially in the UK side of Jungle and Hardcore).
In a purely historical fashion, Acid Techno is one of the most beautiful scene uprisings in music history : Chicago and Detroit youth coming into contact with the TB 303 and the TR 808 in second hand stores, instruments considered financial failures in many respects due to how odd they sound and how difficult they were to operate, suddenly creating a whole new genre out of the use and the abuse of them. People modified that equipment, haphazardly stuck them together with pedals and created insane masterpieces of musical under-composition that focused on, for lack of a better word, “vibes”. It was all about the textures, the robotic rhythms and the dancefloor.
That is the quintessential context that is usually praised in the rise of garage rock or punk rock, and it is happening way after any hope in those styles was pretty much dead : The hippie generation was a failure, soon to be out of touch parents themselves, while punk had been dethroned by post-punk which, though in many respects took its messages to stranger further places, in many ways, intensified an arbitrary and unnecessary divide in its audience.
Acid Tracks
That is a point I’d like to linger for a bit. I may sound like a broken record, but it is paramount for the art world (specifically the music world) to start dealing with the legacy of Disco Demolition Night. It is interesting that Fisher draws the line of his project around the 60s and 70s, as opposed to the post-punk of the 80s or the jungle music of the 90s that he praised so often, because of the significance Disco has in my eyes. Tyler The Creator said in one of his interviews with Narduwar that the 70s seemed like the last time where there wasn’t hate between races, and people of all backgrounds came together to make great music together. That may seem like a simplification of sorts, but i think taking this statement to its ends can reveal a lot. Disco Demolition Night took place in 1979, two years after The Sex Pistol’s Never Mind The Bollocks, the same year that saw the release of London Calling by The Clash (a record that encompassed the ancient shape of proto-punk, the current energy of the punk movement and the possibilities of a new wave future) and Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures (with Ian Curtis’ dark, despondant and deffectuous voice which would define generations of depressed men to come). Among the three bands mentioned, you have Johnny Rotten and his infamous “I Hate Pink Floyd’’ shirt (which, in an interview in 2010, he would say that he actually thought were pretty good), Joe Strummer’s embarrassing rants during the Cut The Crap era writing off the weak and feeble pop music, or Ian Curtis’ tortured genius legacy who hid the boys club attitude that was (and in many respects, still is) the punk world. In the words of his ex-wife Deborah,
“I think the fact I didn’t stand out was an attraction for him,” she admits. “I think he thought I would be easy to mould, to control. He liked to have an input on what I was reading and what music I listened to.” Though Deborah herself was writing poetry at the time, Ian was very much the focus of the relationship. “I don’t remember him ever asking to see what I was writing. That’s partly my own fault — I stopped writing after we got married. But I think he was so powerful that our lives were sort of centred around his art, and what he was going to do.”
(Fisher actually has a section on Joy Division in Ghosts of My Life and i do praise him for at least addressing how “There was an odd universality available to Joy Division’s devotees, provided you were male, of course…”)
So here we have the rise of a totally new and revolutionary style of music who constantly takes in the aesthetics of hate and aggression into their style, at the same time as Disco, a genre coming from funk and r&b in which the black body reaches towards the fantastical, the inhuman, pure pleasure, is getting torn down for being too fruity, fake and, worst of all, “popular”. I believe that created a cultural environment which we have not recovered from (at least, not totally). House music and techno were the refuges for the disco spirit, but they were a very specific niche of black and queer music, who stayed hidden (would you be comfortable raising the flag of Chic in a world which praises the intellect of a song like Panic by The Smiths?), until they could be thoroughly sanitized for common, unfreak-consumption (Techno’s sprawling, 10 minute long timbral excursions would be a no go. As for the house’s uncontrollable sample-work? Well, only if you pay up the copyright fees, like Daft Punk did for all the music they sampled). Then, in the 90s, white musicians like Jamiroquai or Daft Punk would get praise over reminding the world how great disco was, after the whole intellectual contrarian rocker shtick reached its tragic conclusion with the death of Kurt Cobain or the fall of Oasis.
Much like Tyler’s statement, thats a highly specific narrative i’ve constructed of course, but a few critiques can be rationalized : You still had George Clinton, Michael Jackson Prince or Rick James having hit after hit during the 80s, for example but it should be noted that Synth Funk was a very different development from disco. Also that Michael Jackson’s disco masterpiece Off The Wall came out in 1979 and it failed to get the attention of the Grammys that Jackson felt the album deserved (it only gained the Male R&B category), which inspired him for the undertaking of Thriller, a very sonically different record. You could point to the rise of Hip Hop and its samplework, but that presents a few problems in its own right, especially as it relates to sexism and homophobia (which is a can of worms for another day, but do note how white musicians were allowed to express themselves as androgynous during the whole eighties, meanwhile it took pretty much until now for queer rappers to have any sort of status in the hip hop world). The narrative I’ve drawn is one specific that matches Fisher’s description of the slow degradation of “a world that could be free”.
The importance of the “Utopia of popularity” (as Agnes Gayraud puts it in her book Dialectic Of Pop) is that it is a field in which very different sounds, philosophies and ideas can be passed around and knitted together. My claim is that this worked, in the 1970s, to bring together (in a limited way, for we cannot forget that it was still the 70s) perceived binaries to their mutual destruction. The integration of the popular “snob” which punk embodied so perfectly in many respects, may have just been another way in which capitalist realism repressed and deluded.
(I would like to point out that my denunciation is only partial — i am a huge fan of punk music, and of all of the artists i’ve mentioned. If the project is to have any effectivity, i’d like to keep my aesthetic appreciation to a higher level than my ethical judgement of the cultural reaction to those aesthetics)
Shaviro, in a recent post, has this phenomenal insight on the concept of transgression:
“Transgression, like so many other things, has largely been commodified and corporatized in the 21st century. What used to seem subversive is now no longer so. There is no sexual kink so extreme that you cannot find an internet community devoted to it. Of course, transgression always had different political valencies. If anarchism, extreme sex, and psychedelic drugs were transgressive, so were the eruptions of violence and destruction that the Italian Futurists loved, and that culminated in fascism. There’s always been a large degree of uneven development (to borrow and detourn a Marxist term) involved. For instance, I am second to no one in my admiration of Georges Bataille’s deeply transgressive critique of bourgeois capitalism (including of how it prepared the ground for, and then accomodated, fascism). My first book was half about Bataille. But what can be more stupid, boring, and old-fashioned to read today than Bataille’s pornographic fiction, with its extreme (and all too typical of male intellectuals of Bataille’s generation) gynophobia? — as in his ludicrous description of the female genitalia as “hairy and pink, just as full of life as some loathsome squid… that running, teeming wound.”
Even more seriously, perhaps, transgression today is largely a phenomenon of the ultra-right. Bari Weiss urges us to embrace the daring of the “intellectual dark web,” where people express such “dangerous” and “taboo” ideas as white supremacy, normative heterosexuality, male superiority, and the attribution of all differences among human beings in social power and wealth to the inexorable effects of genetics. This is what happens when large corporations, in order to maintain their sales, pay hypocritical lip service to “diversity” and “multiculturalism.” Yesterday’s mainstream ideology, which still has widespread support throughout society despite polite surface disavowals, is now packaged as a rebellious and transgressive refusal to conform. This is the basis of websites like 8Chan, and of the appeal of Donald Trump, whose supporters love him precisely because he violates the norms of social and political propriety.
I am not really bothered by the loss of transgression as a gesture, or as a self-aggrandizing form of display. I am happy to get beyond that, to stop being impressed by that sort of grandiosity“
I believe a similar diagnosis is to be found in Acid Communism, in a passage like the previously quoted “(Marcuse’s) critique of capitalism’s total administration of life and subjectivity continued to resonate; whereas the claims Marcuse’s conviction that art constituted a ‘Great Refusal, the protest against that which is’ came to seem like outmoded Romanticism, quaintly irrelevant in the age of capitalist realism”, or in the analysis of The Temptations’ Psychedelic Shack, in which “love is collective, and orientated towards the outside.”. The Psychedelic Shack reference actually goes even deeper, later in the text, when Fisher is talking about the strike in Lordstown Plant in 1972:
“Lordstown was part of a wave of activism in which this “new breed of worker” struggled for democratic control of their own trade unions and of the places in which they worked. Seen in the light of such struggles, the egalitarian social space projected in “Psychedelic Shack” could not be dismissed as a passive pipe-dream or a distraction from actual political activity. Rather, music such as this was an active dreaming which arose out of real social and cultural compositions, and which fed back into potent new collectivities, and a new existential atmosphere, which rejected both drudgery and traditional resentments. “The young black and white workers dig each other”, said the Lordstown Local president Gary Bryner, “There’s an understanding. The guy with the Afro, the guy with the beads, the guy with the goatee, he doesn’t care if he’s black, white, green or yellow.” These new kinds of workers — who “smoked dope, socialised interracially, and dreamed of a world in which work had some meaning” 22 — wanted democratic control of both their workplace and their trade unions.”
It is not purely a denunciation of transgression, it is a transgression that only attacks our senses for coming from the outside, presenting a completely reasonable, efficient and beautiful mode of living, but one which we are taught to reject as a “pipe dream”. The brilliance of Acid Communism is something of a pragmatic shock to the senses. Things aren’t utopic, so why can’t we reach them?
Another point of artistic reference that feels useful to me is David Byrne’s Make Believe Mambo, from his 1989 album Rei Momo. Talking Heads in general seems like an invaluable sticking point, in her unbridled love of reggae, funk, disco, afrobeat and such genres (it is no surprise that people sometimes aren’t able to deal with their genuine appreciation for said music and prefer to believe that they are making fun of something like Disco in a song like Life During Wartime), but this song sticks out to me for what an unconventional attitude it takes towards its subject matter. It is a song about a young boy who cannot stop watching television as he goes through his life.
It was a pretty picture
It almost made me cry
He’s got Big imagination
It’s better than real lifeHe can be a macho man
And now he’s a game show host
Well one minute hilarious comedian
Now he’s an undercover cop
However, Byrne never during the song pulls a “kids these days” approach to the topic. In fact, with the hook of “Oh, let the poor boy dream”, he seems to (much like Fisher and Marcuse) see the power of the fictionscape, not as a means of pure escapism, but as a genuine window to another world. As the ending of the song sings :
I can be you and you can be me
(In my mundo, todo el mundo)
Everyone’s happy and everyone’s free
(Todo el mundo, mundo mambo)
Here in my mundo where nothing is wrong
(Todo el mundo, in my mundo)
I’m a lady and you are a man
(Mundo mambo, todo mundo)
I think this song is also a hilarious counterpart to (Nothing But) Flowers by Talking Heads, released the year before, a song totally concerned with a narrator’s growing frustration with a natural utopia of post-urban life. He keeps clamoring for the return of his old life in the hooks, saying :
This was a Pizza Hut
Now it’s all covered with daisies
You’ve got it, you’ve got it
I miss the honky tonks
Dairy Queens, and 7-Elevens
You’ve got it, you’ve got it
And as things fell apart
Nobody paid much attention
You’ve got it, you’ve got it
I don’t wanna go on an entire Talking Heads tangent, but needless to say, I believe they present a great technical showcase of this kind of pragmatic transgression : it does not offend you by attacking that which you love, it is not a cheap shot. It is transgressive in the positive, for they present you with an alternative mode of expression which causes you envy. It is that which is not, but could very well be. Outside’s messages to us.
And i believe this in many respects is the best endpoint to Fisher’s thought, and much like he diagnoses Marcuse’s decline of popularity as a symptom of capitalist realist apathy and melancholy, i believe that the most liberatory and genuinely thought provoking parts of his thought being so thoroughly unpopular is a similar symptom. I won’t be able to characterize this better than Rhett in his scathing critique :
“The most painful side of this marginality is certainly noting how a sad pseudocritical vulgate has been built on the idea of technically reproducible memory and, more particularly, around the corpse of Mark Fisher. It is easy to see, in fact, how a turbid mass has spontaneously assembled and is brandishing the remains of the British theorist to justify a resentful attitude towards the world mediated by our extended memory. Armed with Capitalist realism, exhibited as the Little Red Book of a pale and agonizing Cultural Revolution, and ready to accuse every enemy of being infected with the plague of theoretical vampirism, this group has transformed Fisher’s work into a sad invective against contemporary (cultural and economic) stagnation — a denunciation morally detached from this same stagnation and freed from all kinds of internal contradictions. With the tone of those who know far too much for someone like you, this congregation of exilic souls, relegated far from the promised land of the revolution, has hung its curses on the door of “neoliberalism” — an ultra-polysemic term, capable of encompassing everything in itself, freed from the rational need of all explanations, descriptions and clarifications — and has relegated itself to its black corner, where it can (un)collectively mourn the slow cancellation of the future (unaware of how the present constantly produces escape routes beneath majority time, of course).”
That is not to say that the sides of Fisher i dislike should be forgotten, or that they don’t matter when talking about him — but many people far more familiar with his body of work have also pointed out how much of the modern followers of Fisher are not doing justice to what made Fisher such an interesting thinker (see for example Xenogothics recurring jabs to the Mark Fisher Memes For Hauntological Teens facebook group). Adorno is a thinker that angers me because I take very little out of his material, but Fisher frustrates me because so much of what I dislike coexists with ideas I find integral moving forward.
What is Soul? I Don’t Know!
“This perspective, this laughter from the outside, runs through all Foucault’s work. For all its intricacy, its density and opacity, Foucault’s major work from The History of Madness at the beginning of the 1960s, in the… through to the books on sexuality he would publish after the Death Valley seem to revolve around and repeat a fundamental insight, or outsight. … the arbitrariness and contingency of any system, its plasticity.
If this outside vision was consonant with the psychedelic consciousness, in Foucault’s case it did not have its origins in drugs. Foucault wouldn’t consume LSD until nearly a decade later, when he headed out to Death Valley and took acid at Zabriskie Point, the site of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film about the counterculture.
Foucault, seldom comfortable in his own skin, was always looking for a way out of his own identity. He had memorably claimed that he wrote “in order not to have a face”, and his prodigious exercises in rogue scholarship and conceptual invention, the textual labyrinths he meticulously assembled from innumerable historical and philosophical sources, were one way out of the face. Another route was what he called the limit-experience, one version of which was his encounter with LSD. The limit-experience was paradoxical: it was an experience at and beyond the limits of “ordinary” experience, an experience of what cannot ordinarily be experienced at all. The limit-experience offered a kind of metaphysical hack. The conditions which made ordinary experience possible could now be encountered, transformed and escaped — at least temporarily. Yet, by definition, the entity which underwent this could not be the ordinary subject of experience — it would instead be some anonymous X, a faceless being.”
This is another passage of tremendous importance to me for a couple of reasons, and because of multiple connections I can make. Artistically, it reminds me of my favorite aspects from bands like Parliament-Funkadelic or Primus, or artists like MF DOOM. They were not satisfied with a simple “lyrical self”. They did not seek to create a pure analogous reality out of their art, their music are genuine “outsights” as Fisher calls them. The P-Funk extended universe has many twists and turns (Bootzilla, Doctor Funkenstein, Doctor Nose D.Void Of Funk, Starchild), but I’d like to take it back to the very first Funkadelic album, their most surreal work.
By the way, my name is Funk
I am not of your world
Hold still, baby, I won’t do you no harm
I think I’ll be good to you
Like I said, I won’t do you no harm
I am Funkadelic
Dedicated to the feeling of good
And baby, I’m good at being good
Let me play with your emotions
For nothing is good unless you play with it
“Nothing is good unless you play with it” is the quintessential ethos of Funkadelic and I think one of the most important phrases ever uttered in song. Schaeffer destroyed the average musical process by introducing the concept of the “jeu”, his philosophy of improvisation that combines play in the instrumental sense and play in the toy sense. Or, as Bootsy Collins put it, “I wanna be your toy/I wanna play for you…”. For that very moment in the early 70s, they mixed the psychedelia of Jimi Hendrix, the early funk of Sly & The Family Stone and the liberatory proto-punk of The Stooges (which George Clinton claims got a lot of their style from Funkadelic, both touring together a lot at the time), they completely dissolved things in the very way which acid communism meant to melt the world as is. After all, those funkateers are not from our world.
On The Stooges, Agnes Gayraud wrote:
“Beyond theatricality itself, everything that renders it legitimate because it is conventional has to be destroyed. Iggy Pop’s imbecility, as experienced and analysed by Lester Bangs, seeks to be even stupider than the posture of rock stars, which has become too neat and conformist. Iggy doesn’t want to prove that he’s not an impostor by exhibiting some kind of visibly authentic conduct. His relation to imposture is apotropaic: he doesn’t dispel suspicion but doubles down on it by becoming a kind of ostentatious impostor. Lester Bangs’s con- clusion: only this kind of impostor can defeat imposture.”
Of Sly Stone, in a passage quoted by Fisher, Greil Marcus says :
“Sly’s real triumph was that he had it both ways. Every nuance of his style, from the razzle dazzle of his threads to the originality of his music, made it clear that he was his own man. If the essence of his music was freedom, no one was more aggressively free than he. Yet there was also room for everyone in the America made up of blacks and whites, men and women, who sang out “different strokes for different folks” and were there on stage to show what such an idea of independence meant.”
And of Jimi, returning to Gayraud, we have :
“From an aesthetic standpoint it was Hendrix’s idiosyncrasy that was at work here above all: the avid sensuality of his playing, his organic treatment of the guitar and electricity, his origin, his skin colour, his family situation — in short, once again, his particular and singular embodiment. And here we come back to the requisites of the Kantian genius: the genius follows a set of rules heretofore unknown, in this case an expressivity on the guitar that had not existed until Hendrix made it audible, sensible, for the first time.”
I believe there is a thread that runs through these passages which basically juggle between the unique and the multiple that is important to grasp. I have associated Funkadelic to Jimi, The Stooges and Sly Stone, not to mention Schaeffer (and, unmentioned, there is of course James Brown), because I do not believe they were created ex nihilo. But also, I do not believe they lose any of their power over being derivative. Every single artist, I believe, sets the stage for the one following. That doesn’t mean that we keep evolving in quality, necessarily (have we never gone to a show where the opener was better than the main act?), but that artists walk hand in hand towards the future. There is no main act, just like there wasn’t a true Fertile Crescent from where the music came from. In fact, Gayraud’s mention of the Kantian genius is one of much interest for that very reason, for Kant believed that artistic genius came from that very outside. In that sense, the boring lines of heritage the cult of originality likes to draw are nothing much than the peak of the iceberg that is representatively visible, but that does not account for the outside’s cryptic rules and plans which the geniuses, the supposed “Originators” are merely following. And, if we follow Kant’s logic, he claims that “genius is the innate mental predisposition through which nature gives the rule to art”. Well, that “rule” to art came in the form of rule-breaking for Jimi and Iggy Pop for example. Thinking in a paradoxical, parallaxical (not just in optics, but also in the sense of the DC Villain, who for years possessed the body of Hal Jordan) can be our way of “Not having a face”, to following that original Foucault quote.
Kierkegaard claims in his Philosophical Fragments that the “one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow.”. I connect it to Kierkegaard not only because i think he can be useful (as previously stated), but in the case of the Philosophical Fragments, two things are of note: 1 — The Fact that he wrote it as a pseudonym (like many of the artists i mentioned) but also 2 — In the ending of the first chapter of the book, he is more than happy to admit he did not invent the concepts which he writes about, against an imagined critic. Another quote of note, this time from “repetition” is that “Repetition and recollection are the same movement, just in opposite directions, because what is recollected has already been and is thus repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards”.
If we want to go really into the deep-end (and here I will admit my own limitations, for this is not usually the area that I’d consider myself experienced in), we can even dabble in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics. From World as Will And Representation :
“[I]t is the Idea, the eternal form, the immediate objectivity of the will at this grade; and, therefore, he who is sunk in this perception is no longer individual, for in such perception the individual has lost himself; but he is pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge. . . . Whoever now, has, after the manner referred to, become so absorbed and lost in the perception of nature that he only continues to exist as the pure knowing subject, becomes in this way directly conscious that, as such, he is the condition, that is, the supporter, of the world and all objective existence; for this now shows itself as dependent upon his existence. Thus he draws nature into himself, so that he sees it to be merely an accident of his own being. In this sense Byron says,
‘Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part
Of me and of my soul, as I of them?’
But how shall he who feels this, regard himself as absolutely transitory, in contrast to imperishable nature? Such a man will rather be filled with the consciousness, which the [Hindu] Upanishad of the Veda expresses: “all these creatures are wholly I, and there is nothing else besides me”.
And here we can wrap it all back to Deleuze & Guattari’s multiples. Seriously, take your pick, Of The Rhizome, One Or Several Wolves, How To Make Yourself a Body Without Organs, there can be a myriad of quotes to choose from. Me, i think i will go with the Nijinski passage quoted in Anti-Oedipus :
“I am God I was not God I am a clown of God; I am Apis. I am an Egyptian. I am a red Indian. I am a Negro. I am a Chinaman. I am a Japanese. I am a foreigner, a stranger. I am a sea bird. I am a land bird. I am the tree of Tolstoy. I am the roots of Tolstoy…. I am husband and wife in one. I love my wife. I love my husband.”
I know at points my texts can be a bit like word salad, but much like Kierkegaard, I do not want to claim that I am inventing my ideas, I am merely stringing the words together for now (which also means i am not making any claim of authority coming from those quotes, i am not interested in justifying why the writers ive picked work together, or if they work together, but the brain is a messy place and i think id be dishonest to cull the references). I want to take D&G’s advice that “A book exists only through the outside and on the outside”, or George Didi-Huberman’s wonderful phrase “Images (in the mnemosyne) are considered less as monuments than as documents, and as less fecund as documents than as plateaus connected to each other by routes that are both ‘superficial’ (visible, historic) and ‘subterranean’(symptomal, archaeological)” (fun fact, that Huberman quote discusses the exact same passage from Foucault quoting Borges with which Fisher even brings Foucault into Acid Communism). If my project is to flatten, smash and melt art together, and my claim is that the same should be done socially and communitatively (as my love for sample heavy music, my defence of piracy and me calling myself an anarchist should indicate), i believe the way i use the language should work the same. I should be bridging one point to another, creating webs, labyrinths, pepe silvia rooms. Hell, if we really want to tie it back to Fisher in the first place, we should not forget the infamous Swarmachines from the CCRU, which mixed musical sound collages and meta-cryptic, unordered theoretical texts, which has this lovely little quote:
“Cut-Up romantic revolutionism and it leaves dark events. Autopropagated happenings,
Assembly lines taken below visibility and switched to intensity-production”