Boyan Manchev

The other name of anthropotechnics, the becoming-human of the human, inasmuch as it is a fulfillment of its techniques, would be the becoming-soul of the instrument. The instrument was never merely a material apparatus, it has always been a transcendental apparatus – an apparatus of transcendental anthropotechnics, that is to say of the realm of the immaterial. The musical instrument in particular was vowed to the formation of sound matter in its capacity of pure spirit. But the music of noise (provided this formulation is not a contradictio in adjecto) is a radical questioning of musical organology, and consequently of anthropotechnical organology, of which music is no doubt exemplary. Noise music despiritualizes the very technai.

Yet, even if we set our minds to thinking the disorganization of noise music in opposition to traditional musical organology, we should be careful not to introduce these two terms – organology and disorganization – as a pair of opposites. For the transformation of organology, and consequently the system of music in general, presupposes several crucial mediations and transformations. Firstly, the radical transformation of music via sound recording and reproduction technologies (the novel possibilities for electric, analogue and numeric processing of sound), which likewise became technologies for music reproduction, thus transforming the ontological status of musical creation. In this perspective, the employment of a turntable (from its predecessors like Milan Knizak and innovators like Christian Marclay and Martin Tétrault to its radical representatives, the Japanese Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura) emerges as a symptom of noise music. Turntable artists propose probably the most radical version in the tendency of transforming the technical mediator into an instrument and, in a more general sense, of transforming traditional organology into inorganic dispositive. The technical mediator of reproduction itself becomes an instrument 1: the matter designed to preserve the trace of sound, to embody it – the yielding matter of the vinyl or the magnetic tape – becomes a productive matter. The vinyl disc is no more regarded as an ideal body, i.e. the body of an idea, but as an operative body 2.

In fact, this transformations is significative of the transformation of the very concept of matter in the period of ‘cognitive capitalism’: cognitive capitalism (which I for my part would also call perverse 3) not only imposes new structures in the domains of production, exchange and consumption, along with those of subjectivity and desire, but likewise that of matter, which proves to be transformed into inorganic matter. Matter is no longer a passive resource, awaiting its formation – it is a yielding material extracted from a type of matter that is reversible, recyclable and transformable via technological operations. Noise music, however, at least with turntable artists, is no doubt a form of recycling. For all that, it is a recycling not of matter, but of the pure spirit – or more precisely, of the reduction of matter to (its formation as) pure spirit. Therefore, the point is about rediscovering matter, so as to examine its plasticity as spirit without presupposing the immaterial purity of a pre-established convention (which could be not only the tonic or harmonic system, but also and above all its instrumental inscription). Re-cycling does not mean only repetition of a cycle, the one of anthropotechnical purification of matter and its re-materialization in its capacity of a new resource (newly recycled) of actual anthroptechniques – as we know, the cycle, i.e. the repetition, is in any case always governed by difference. Re-cycling much rather means inscribing oneself within an ecological practice that draws on the plasticity of sound matter: transforming the scraps of sound matter into a musical event, even exposing the matter ‘itself’ to the impact of the eventuating potentiality, without actualizing it by means of some energetic formation. Thus the technological residue, if not the technological operation itself, becomes raw material.

Music in its capacity of transcendental anthropotechnics is about the following: never touch the matter, the untouchable itself, but distill the sound that inheres it, i.e. the pure spirit; touching it is tantamount to extracting it with your fingers. The instrument is precisely an ideal body; one has to open up its voice; rendering it noisy would mean subjecting it to torture, if not inflicting damage upon it or corrupting its soul. Noise music counters transcendental anthropotechnics with a kind of surgery: operating – yet without processing, without doing work – with the hands (AG χειρουργέειν, ‘operate with the hands’, hence χειρουργία) directly into the sound flesh itself. Not with a view of torturing the soul, but to sense its expulsed body. One could note here the following double bind: it is precisely the dematerialization of the instrument that brings about the situation where the smallest gesture of the hand opens up an immanent difference within the sound flesh. The radical dematerialization is doubled by a restitution of the impacts of matter. In other words, the instrument becomes indistinguishable from the organ operated on 4. With this erasure of the difference between organ and instrument we assist the im/material production of the sound event.

The death of the instrument: radical disorganization

Noise music emerges first and foremost as an attempt for immediate expression of sound matter – of noise before sound – and not as formation of sound matter or representation of a musical idea. Therefore, noise music could be conceptualized within the context of the grand project of radical modernity aimed at suspending the mediation of representation and achieving an immediate expression. Yet, if the transcendental mediator (or, to put it more strictly, the transcendental as pure mediation) is suspended, then is the case in point not about some pre-technical immediacy, the immanence of a primal organic life, which does not transcend itself by means of its own organs/instruments?

De-instrumentalization, is this not another name for disorganization? If it is possible to presuppose a partial isomorphism between two terms, in that case the radical disorganization would be equivalent to the destruction of the instrument. Yet, is it possible to have music without any instrumental mediator? Is this not the dream, as old as art itself, of an immediate art, of a direct operation into the flesh of the world, of an art without artificiality, without technè, therefore without art? An ancient and ultimate dream: the annihilation of art.

Let us above all consider an example of a ‘conceptual’ destruction of an instrument: ‘Piano Piece n°13 (Carpenter’s Piece)’ by George Maciunas (recently ‘interpreted’ by the American band ‘Sonic Youth’). The performance of the cofounder of ‘Fluxus’ consists in the hammering of nails onto the keys of a piano with the help of ‘assistants’. It is an act designed by a cold reflection and executed methodically, almost like an execution (or torture). An ‘analytical’ destruction, which does not disintegrate the entirety of the instrument’s body, but destructs its sound organs, ‘the instrument’s instruments’. For this reason the possibility of an allegorical transposition always transpires behind this violence, in transforming the image of the nailed piano into an anthropomorphic image, into a vision of a human body, whose organs of expression are destroyed: the perfect analogy of this would be a mouth stitched shut.

Let us then take for example the excesses of rock musicians on the stage – one of their obsessions in the period of their prime was precisely the destruction, somewhat religious and even sacrificial, of their instrument-fetish, the guitar. The uncontested innovator of this violent mode was the guitarist of ‘The Who’, Pete Townshend. The excess of his rage expresses a desire for immediate action; this ‘spontaneous’ violence, unleashed upon the corporeal entirety of the instrument, can thus be regarded as an expression of the immediacy of life. Let us reflect on noise music in precisely this fashion, from its early debuts in the violent experiments of New York guitarists during the No Wave period: Eugene Chadbourne, Elliott Sharp, Glenn Branca, Arto Lindsay or Thurston Moore from ‘Sonic Youth’. For example, Arto Lindsay, during the period of the legendary ‘DNA’ band, plays the guitar, according to his own testimony, without any knowledge of the instrument, with an immediate spontaneity, exceeding any technical limitations – such is at least the first impression, although the situation is doubtless a lot more complicated since the transgression of the norm (or ‘the immediate spontaneity’) ultimately forms its own technai, its own poetics, even its own genres and canons. Is it possible to manipulate the instrument in the same manner, in which the guitarist from ‘The Who’ destroys it? In fact, we can see the destruction is transposed or integrated on the level of the musical structure itself. The excess of the structure becomes the only musical matter, the thing that transforms instrumental organology into disorganized organology, in short – into organics.

The case of ‘Guitar Drag’

If we consider this ‘destructability’ along the line of a certain progression, its next phase would be the suspension of the musician – an inevitable mediator who would allow the instrument to participate into a complete (illusion of) immediacy. The specific example here presented, Christian Marclay’s video ‘Guitar Drag’, would not be in the least inappropriate. ‘Guitar Drag’ (2000, 14 min.) presents the violence inflicted on an electric Fender guitar attached with a rope to a pickup truck and dragged along the off-roads and ledges until the moment of its destruction. The execution of the guitar is simultaneously a musical execution: the guitar is connected to amplifiers and speakers put in the back of the truck and in such a way, dragged on the ground until its destruction, simultaneously produces noise music. The destruction of the guitar becomes a noise ‘piece’.

Is it possible to interpret this work without resorting to an allegorical reading, i.e. without reducing it to an anthropological reference (the violence inflicted on the guitar will take us back to the history of lynching in the USA, but also to the excesses of rock musicians on the stage) – in other words, without reference to human bodies seized with suffering or ecstasy? Indeed, ‘Guitar Drag’ offers a wonderful example for reflection on noise music. Marclay’s video involves us into an almost Heideggerian perspective: ‘Guitar Drag’ makes the noise go out into the open – into the open world or into the Openness of the world. And despite all, it is not simply about bringing out into the open the obscure immanence of noise (which seems to always imply some essential depth, even if we no longer have to deal with the depth of the organic body, but rather with the disembodied superficiality of electric signals), or, even less, about the noise of the Openness. It is precisely the collision of the solid body with the ground, or with the world’s surface, that produces the noise. This, however, is the noise of touching the ground, of the contact with the ground. The noise of this one-on-one combat with the earth is deafening: it is about the violence of representation that visualizes and actualizes the presence of a violated body, the presence of its heart-rending cry, of its resistance and the consumption of its ‘life’. A non-living, yet in no way inert body, an instrument, crying its death – death itself – with the force of life. In this case noise music is the music of life’s consumption.

It is therefore inevitable to consider ‘Guitar Drag’ from the viewpoint of the desire for immediate expression of life, paradoxically, in the absence of the living body of the musician and (as a result) beyond the functional mediation of the instrument. So does earth itself play the guitar, unaided by a mediator, in this violent one-on-one combat? Noise music as the art of earth? ‘Guitar Drag’ does not pose this question since it contains the immediate answer, a tragic answer: this immediacy is impossible to sustain, it is lacerating, destructive.

It is possible, however, to identify a transcendental tendency within it – that is to say to regard this image of violence as a radical reduction of the instrument to its instrumentality, to some pure function that goes beyond the ‘operative’ body of the instrument by sacrificing it, in order to purify it. The death of the guitar would therefore be the peak of its life, the sublime moment of its existence – the pure life of an organ without a body. And at the same time, the death of the instrument would be the climax of the radical protestation against the functional reduction of the organ-instrument. The instrument is destroyed, so as to liberate itself of all determinism, so as to invent its own substance beyond functionality that has been imposed upon it as the one and only substance.

Despite all this, this reading is only viable inasmuch as it is a reading, i.e. operating in the regime of allegory. The unthought, even the unthinkable, is in fact the irreducibility of the instrument to the totalized function (to ‘instrumentality’). The instrument, however, is already a body. Not because we consider it in the regime of allegory as anthropomorphic body, or more generally, as living body, as organism (such would be the viewpoint of the generalized organology), but because any given body – therefore ‘the’ body – is a ‘pure’ transformability, an irreducible technè. The death of the instrument does not testify to the irreducibility of immanence of a pure life (the transformable matter of vitalism), but reveals this transformability (which is also resistability) as the very name of life.

Therefore, noise music could ultimately be conceptualized as a disorganization of life 5 – that is to say as irreducibility of life to some substance: this consumption [épuisement], this incessant expenditure of life as it displays its unlimited potentiality. In opposition to pure immanence noise music expresses the transformability as the one and only immanence.

The alteration of the noise: the new world matter and the unthought of the political

In lieu of a conclusion I intend to lay out several general hypotheses:

1. The noise is the art of disorganization. As expression of a life that disorganizes itself, of a limitless transformability, the noise is situated beyond the opposition between organic and inorganic. The noise is the name of energeia without ergon, without functionality or reducibility to some work. Thus the noise would correspond not to an implemented ontology of substance, but to a modal ontology, an ontology of the transformation.
2. The noise is the art of alteration. In one of his 1930s reviews Georges Bataille speaks of the desire for altering objects (by children, by the ‘primitives’) - in the double sense of the term: a desire for destroying or transforming an object or matter – as the original creative impulse 6. Alteration in this sense designates a base attitude towards the ‘aesthetic’ matter, which is not dominated by the tension between immediacy (presence) and mediation (representation), constituting the framework of modern aesthetics. Therefore, this concept offers an alternative of the concept of representation, which is precisely the desire for destroying representation and achieving an immediate expression. The violent representation of ‘Guitar Drag’ is therefore nothing else than the exemplification of the alternating process.The practices of the noise, however, present the production of noise as an alteration of the object. We are no longer dealing with sonorous ‘found objects’ of concrete music that have been integrated into a new texture (the composition of concrete music), but with an interaction – often violent, alternating – with the object where the very gesture of alteration is the ‘musical’ gesture. Indeed, any given object could become an operational ground of this gesture (technical apparatuses like a ventilator, a drill, an electrical coffeemaker, but also appliances like a pincer, a toy etc.): any given object can become an instrument. It becomes an instrument by means of its defunctionalization-disorganization. Its functional modification opens up its technical modifiability, the potentiality of its plasticity. This potentiality expresses itself as music/noise: the production of noise is an alteration. Noise would therefore mean bringing the noise out of the object. We can mention the radical alternating practices of Yamatsuka Eye – one of the leading figures of Japanese noise, leader of paradigmatic bands like ‘Hanatarash’ and ‘Boredoms’ and an important collaborator of John Zorn – who treats in the same manner not only everyday objects or items of musical equipment, but also (and above all) his own body. His body disorganizes itself, surrenders to the alternating potentiality that possesses him, sometimes violently; he hurls himself into the crowd blindfolded as he strains his vocal cords to exhaustion in a manner, which could be commonly designated by means of a somewhat everyday term as ‘sacrificial’. Thus the body becomes an instrument.
3. The noise is the art of expression of the potentiality. The noise demonstrates the resistance of sound matter as the original condition for the actualization of sound. It designates the non-actualized sound, as well as its technai: the non-actualized, transformed instruments. The noise is the alternating expression of the potentiality of sound matter in its capacity of potentiality of the technè itself.
4. The noise is the art of transformability. The noise is not the opposite of music, its negative version or some ‘natural’ resource, raw material. The noise is the impact of a radical transformability of musical technology, of the musical technè itself. In fact, however, this transformation exemplifies the transformability inherent in the musical technè. The organ is disorganized, the body is disorganized, but only inasmuch as it is technè. The productive tension between the organic and the de-materialization, the ‘inorganization’ of sound, ultimately demonstrates the original technological condition of the body. The instrument is not merely an extension or a prosthesis of the body, but also the lieu of the technical transformation of the body, its irreducible exposure – to put it more appropriately: its exsonorisation. There will always be an instrument/organ as long as there is a body.
5. The noise is the art of the contemporary unthought of the political. The noise is not just an exemplary phenomenon of contemporaneity, it is their symptom. The noise is neither the residue of a profound substance, resisting the total grasp of the inorganic of cognitive capitalism (this is neither the noise of chained titans from the archaic world of immediate violence, nor the slaves imprisoned in earth’s bowels, nor the productive organic force of the proletarians who form the world’s matter by risking their lives), nor the tumult of its immaterial flux. It is the noise of transformation, which is irreducible to the fluidity of perverse capitalism: the noise of inventing new forms of distribution, of resistance, of life.

Such is the political condition of the noise: to render the organs noisy, in order to demonstrate their technicity that is irreducible to the imperatives of production/consumption (and to expose by means of the same gesture the organicity of instruments), thus expressing the plasticity of the singularization of life, the common matter, that is to say of the political. Thus the noise in its capacity of alteration and of energeia without ergon, of technè of the potentiality, of the yielding resistability of matter, is the art of the contemporary unthought of the political.

Translated into English: Philip Stoilov